No, they’re helping arriving hotel guests, an elderly couple with suitcases.
The kid checks his watch. “Made it.”
“Made what?”
“Inside. He’s at the bar. He’s waiting.”
The Parker House bar? I turn to face the entranceway. “Parker’s Bar?” But when I turn back, the kid is gone.
Take a breath, Reggie. A landmark public place, of course I’ll go inside, strange as it sounds that Alex wants his photo wallet delivered here. To help the police, however, I stroll to the corner of Tremont and School streets and pose for several minutes rooting in my bag, a woman searching her purse for keys, a phone, a lipstick. Traffic passes, and here on the sidewalk come two young men with short hair and a broad-shouldered woman in a trim navy suit. Undercover cops? Highly probable. Also likely: a hefty ponytailed man in a sport coat who enters the hotel. At last, a uniformed officer on foot passes and says, “Evening.” That has got to be my cue to proceed.
The lobby is hushed and bustling at once. The dark grooved paneling, coffered ceiling, sconces, thick carpeting—all are familiar though it’s been years since I was here. Parker’s Bar is toward the rear, its stained-glass windowpanes dull in this nighttime hour. Who’s in the bar? Business types in suits, a young couple, a threesome drinking chocolate martinis. Also the ponytailed man, my undercover cop—good.
Then I spot him, a dark-haired figure in black jeans and T-shirt and a tight jacket the color of honey. His compact body is all muscle, and his hair looks wet and spiked. He’s seated at the end of a roll-arm sofa near the glowing fireplace. His eyes dart left and right. He’s cleaning his nails with a small blade.
“Alex?”
“Ms. Cutter? Have a seat.”
I take the chair at a right angle to the sofa. Mineral water fizzes on the table at his elbow. His voice is just above a gravel whisper. “Yes, I’m Alex.”
“I have the pigskin wallet.” I reach toward my bag.
He stops me. The blade flashes. “Do you know who I am?”
“You’re Steven Damelin’s friend.”
“That’s all you know?”
“It’s enough. About the wallet—”
The server comes. I order water. It arrives. The ponytail man sits twenty feet away facing Alex and looks at his watch. Is this a signal to me? To a police partner?
“No, ‘Steven’s friend’ isn’t enough. Steve and I were together. Almost five years together.”
Then it’s certain: lovers.
“I didn’t kill him.” His Adam’s apple bobs. The tip of the blade reams the underside of his left thumbnail. “We had a huge fight in Chelmsley’s. The whole dining room heard us. And something else, I was upstairs on Tuesday night.”
“That Tuesday.” In Steven’s apartment on the murder night. My bloody door. Why does he tell me this? Ponytail man stands and strolls out while opening a package of cigarettes. A police signal? I’m ready to toss the wallet and run.
Then I realize maybe we’re not only watched but being recorded, even videotaped. Devices are microscopic. Maybe Maglia wants me to play this out. The blade isn’t a nail clipper but a pocketknife. “So you were in Steven’s apartment the night he was killed.” He nods. I say, “The police have spoken quite a lot to me.”
“You’re not their prime suspect. It’s not your ass they’re after.”
“Shall we get to the business at hand?” I pluck out the wallet, which is streaked with adhesive from the tape. Deliberately I hold it high for the cops to see, to record.
He asks, “Did you look inside?”
“Should I?” Are the photos like that Mapplethorpe art exhibit, naked men? I start to hand it toward him, and Alex reaches for the wallet. But no law enforcement officer steps forward, no plainclothes, no uniform. At this moment, something in my mind creases, fractures. Everyone in the bar… suppose they’re just patrons, guests. The ponytail man, suppose he simply stepped outside for a smoke.
Suppose the police detail didn’t make it to the Buttery before the kid showed up.
On my own. This means I’m on my own with a former lover of my murdered tenant. A suspect. Maybe the killer. A man with a knife. In this split second, he grabs for the wallet, and I pluck it back. “How do I know this is yours?” His eyes darken. “How do I know you’re Alex? Alex who?”
“What the f—?” That gravel voice.
“You think I’d come here without an escort?”
“You brought cops?”
“Let’s say private security.” I can guess what he’s thinking. “If you grab at the wallet, Alex, I’ll scream my head off. You won’t get past the doorman.”
“What is it you want?”
“Start with your last name.”
“Ribideau. R-i-b-i-d-e-a-u.”
“Can you prove it?”
He digs in his jeans back pocket and flashes a photo ID from the Jeremiah Steele Dance Company. “You could get work as an airport screener, Ms. Cutter.”
“And if you didn’t kill Steven,” I say, “who did?”
“What’s it to you?”
Eyeing the knife, I lean his way. “Because I’m the one who scrubbed his blood off my floor.”
He blinks. From pain? Or guilt? “It’s that high school kid.”
“Who’s named—?”
“Diaz. Luis Diaz. I warned Steve. He wouldn’t listen. He got obsessed with that kid.” Alex sucks at his cheek. “Or maybe it was somebody from that bucket shop.”
“What bucket—?”
“Corsair, bunch of crooks. Ask Matt, he’ll tell you.”
“Matthew Kitchel? At the Apollo Club?”
“Or maybe some pickup date from modeling.”
“Steven modeled? For an agency?”
“In a damn department store window. Downtown Crossing on Valentine’s Day, he was Cupid. Last year he was Tarzan. Modeling gigs in store windows, every psycho in the city can go after you. Steve wouldn’t listen. We fought about it. Among other things. But he fixated on that kid, that dumb loser.” He spits the accusation. Is Alex jealous? He snaps the knife closed, then open. “I gotta go. How about my wallet?” He stands, looms over me. “If you think it’s evidence, you’re wrong. How about this, landlady? How about give me the wallet and one minute to get out the door before you make your frigging fuss? Sixty seconds, what do you say? My wallet and a minute’s time before they chase me down? Blood sport, how about it?”
The blade glints between his right thumb and forefinger. He’s about to lunge, I can feel it. I see it in the coil of his right shoulder, the torque of his hips. With my heels planted in the carpet, I knot both thighs and push off with everything I’ve got. Please, let this chair be on casters. Yes, the chair gives, rolls back as I feel his breath close to my skin and he reaches to yank the wallet from my fist.
In that second, I twist sideways in the chair, and it’s so fast I don’t at first see the little Swiss Army blade plunge and stick. Alex vanishes, but the chair is stabbed like a pincushion at the level of my neck. I pull the blade out, close it, squeeze the knife tight, and here comes that feeling again. In the Parker House bar, the shapes begin to form, the log to float in roiling water. And Steven begins to thrash as that twist runs the length of my body from my feet up into my shoulders. The knife, it’s cut an opening, a passage to the mind game I have to play to win with everything I’ve got.
Chapter Twenty-two
Where were you? Where the hell were you?” The voice from outside my front doorstep is pure tight rage. I’ve just parked and hurried down the walk on Barlow Square. “Where the hell did you go?”
“To get my car, Detective Maglia. At a loading zone. No thanks to you.”
“No games, Ms. Cutter, please, no games with me.” He steps my way in the darkness, his face hard as marble in the streetlight. It’s nearly ten. He’s been waiting for me. “A dozen officers were staked out up and down Franklin—they waited till the Buttery shut its doors at nine—”
We’re nose-to-nose on
my sidewalk. “I was there.”
“From Pearl to Arch, we had Franklin Street covered.”
“Street? But I was on Franklin Avenue, Mr. Maglia. I was at the Buttery that’s on Franklin Avenue.”
His curse is low and short. “Avenue, Christ, I owe Duffy a case of… okay, okay… we thought… we called in the blues. Sergeant Duffy remembered . . . Anyway, when our people got there, nobody was inside but an old guy with a railroad magazine. Now, what’s your story?”
So I tell him the whole thing.
“You decided the cabdriver across the street was an undercover cop, so you left the Buttery and followed the kid? Is that it?”
“And a man with a ponytail. And a few others too. Check your messages, you’ll hear me from the Parker House the second Alex Ribideau grabbed the wallet and raced outside. There was no police officer out front of the hotel. The doorman was busy.”
“But you think the guy tried to stab you?”
“Or to scare me. Here’s the knife, it’s in my bag… see.” I hold the bag open.
Handkerchief open, he plunges in with a big flourish and grabs it. “Probably useless. You messed up the prints.”
“Mr. Maglia, the blade punctured the upholstery of the chair I sat in. I pulled it out. I didn’t think about a police lab at the time. I had self-defense in mind.”
“Skip the dramatics, Ms. Cutter. That’s the problem with a civilian.”
“Civilian” is a double slur on “amateur” and “psychic.” A surge of hot fury fills my chest, my temples. Reggie, keep your head. Let Maglia vent. Do not embarrass or blame him for tonight’s royal screwup. A killer is loose. You need the police.
“So a murder upstairs, blood on your door, extra patrols for your block here. And now this: you turn over the wallet and he escapes. Where’s the learning curve, Ms. Cutter? Tell me, where’s the curve?”
I slump a little, play the hangdog.
“Tell me about the pictures in the wallet.”
“I didn’t look at them.”
“I’m supposed to believe that? Try again.”
“It’s true. I thought it’d be tampering.”
“Tampering with evidence? Isn’t the knife evidence? Where’s the common sense, Ms. Cutter? On vacation? At the beach?” Seconds crawl.
“Can you trace his phone?” I’m trying to be helpful. “The 917 number, did your electronic surveillance equipment—?”
“The phone’s stolen. It belongs to a college student in Brooklyn, New York.”
I keep quiet so he doesn’t feel needled. I am wrecked.
“Let’s use our heads on this, Ms. Cutter. Ribideau shows up again, you call me right away. Not a minute later. Immediately. You understand?”
He slams into an SUV. I expect a burst of speed, but his engine idles while I dig out my key and go inside. Even then he lingers, ten, twenty minutes. From the window I check. An hour later, he’s finally gone.
The next morning, 10:36 a.m., I’m in StyleSmart sorting jackets. After Maglia left last night, I went straight to the basement, felt under every drawer of the blue chest—and got one ferocious splinter in my thumb. Period.
I’m now in the countdown to today’s lunch with Knox Baker. Weeks ago, a budding romance shimmered in my future. Now it’s more like a mirage. A murder changes everything. Already my rose cashmere blend is wrinkled, and I don’t really care. I’m desperate to ask Nicole whether Jo ever spoke of Alex Ribideau or knows anything about Steven’s modeling, but we’ve been too busy with customers. Still nothing from sculptor Tom Chou about the blood marks on my door.
Nicole calls to the fitting room. “How’re you doin’ in there, Ms. Jackson?”
“Fine. Just fine.”
“You take your time.” She turns to me. “What a morning.”
“Nicole, when the store empties out, I’d like to ask you a few questions.”
“Here’s one for you, Reggie: are you still holding out against window bars?”
I reply that my Biscuit is a first-rate watchdog.
“What’s that beagle weigh, about twenty pounds?”
“Twenty pounds of dynamite.” Nicole rolls her eyes, and we continue sorting cow-pattern jackets, relics of a bygone fashion fad.
“Bless their hearts, they think they’re doin’ us a big favor, sending this old stuff. Let’s count ’em up, send ’em to the Salvation Army.”
From the fitting room comes a grunt. Ms. Jackson is trying on a suit at least two sizes too small, but Nicole smiles like Mother Teresa. If she’d hustle the woman out, I could ask about Alex. And about Steven and Jo. Will she think harder about their “deal” if I describe the blood marks on my door—or will she only nag about welded window bars?
More grunts from the dressing room, which is off-limits unless we’re invited in, a StyleSmart rule. I tried to guide Marva Jackson to the new big-size boutique. No luck. She’s been in the fitting room for over half an hour. I’m timing her. My guess: a stuck zipper.
At last, Nicole pipes up. “Ms. J., can we help you out?”
The store is silent, then comes a whimper, then a muffled gasp. Nicole marches into the fitting room with a pair of shears. I hear moans, murmurs, and the sound of scissors cutting cloth. Then, “Don’t you worry, Ms. J., we all of us make a size mistake from time to time. No, you don’t owe us a thing, not one thing.” In minutes, Marva Jackson flees, a customer cut free of a suit into which she shrink-wrapped herself and couldn’t budge.
“It happens now and then, Reggie. Pride goeth before the scissors.”
I smile, then ask, did Jo ever mention Alex Ribideau? Nicole shakes her head. Definitely not. Or a male dancer, any dancer? No. She’s quite sure. “How about pineapple?”
“The fruit?”
“A connection between pineapple and Chinese?”
She shrugs. “Sweet-and-sour?”
“About Steven, Nicole… the part about Jo’s ship coming in? Did she use those actual words?”
“Sure. It’s just a figure of speech, Reggie.”
“Did she say anything else? Anything about a business named Corsair Financial? Anything?”
“No, nothing like that, nothing concrete.” She pauses. “I do remember she said something about a helping hand.”
“A helping hand?” The heart sinks at the cliché.
“Like he was gonna give her a helping hand, or maybe she gave him a helping hand. Something like that.”
A helping hand, a ship coming in… what’s next, a lucky day, the sun will shine, and the cow jumped over the moon? “I’ll finish the cows.”
“You have a lunch date today, don’t you, Reggie? Why not leave a few minutes early, take your time, lower the stress? And the candy-pink chiffon scarf on the accessories table—try it with your rose linen. Tie it loose and low, see what you think. And have yourself a real good time. Unwind. Enjoy yourself.”
Enjoy myself? Maybe, maybe not. The scarf, I admit, looks terrific. Nicole’s a fashion fairy godmother, but it’s Alex Ribideau and Steven’s body on my mind when I reach the café on Newbury and ask for Mr. Baker’s table.
It’s high noon, and suddenly I’m standing face-to-face with the man who’s rising to greet me—in his later forties, with quick, deep brown eyes, high cheekbones, short salt-and-pepper hair with a little front wave. He’s wearing charcoal slacks, a sage polo shirt, and loafers. A certain feeling of quiet intensity comes back to me, and he’s taller than I’d remembered.
“Knox?”
“Regina… Reggie.”
One quick air kiss, and we soon sit over a white burgundy and warm seafood plates. From reflex, I scan the scene for Alex Ribideau in case he’s here for lunch. It’s a long shot but not impossible. You never know. “I’ve enjoyed your cards, Knox,” I say. “Sphinx and pyramids.”
“With that phony postcard-blue sky?” We chuckle.
“So you’ve been to Egypt and Kuwait.”
“And Saudi Arabia and the Emirates. Have you been to the Middle East? No?”
<
br /> It’s my cue to ask him what it’s like there, hold up my end of the conversation. “You go often on business?” He nods. “It sounds intriguing.”
“I’ve been all over the world. There’s no place more interesting.”
As for interesting, I’d bet on Knox Baker. If I could. If I weren’t bound to a murder case. Two cops walk by outside on Newbury. Were they on the Franklin detail last night?
Knox’s hand brushes mine as he raises his glass. “Here’s to the day. Tell me, Reggie, how are you?”
“Fine. I’m fine.” Our lunches are barely touched.
“I really want to know.”
What can I say? To tell of Steven’s death, the police, my vision, Alex… I can’t even begin. “I have some things on my mind.”
“I thought so. I sense it.” He swirls his wine. “Reggie, it’s brutal to drop in and out this way, but I wanted to see you.” He looks into my eyes. “The postcards, they’re meant to say that you’re on my mind.”
It’s an overture. And flattering. And also my cue to reciprocate. My romantic future, is it here across this table? Maybe in the next months or year, but not at the moment, not when Steven’s death fills my days and nights. Knox Baker… any number of women would flock to his table, his arms, his bed. And yes, if my mind and spirit were free, I’d imagine running my fingers through this man’s hair. Or let myself think of the strong, tanned arms. Or look into his eyes and feel the yearning that spans years and wakens something I have thought to be gone forever.
Yet the force field that holds me in its grip for now is homicide.
Knox taps the crystal of his watch. “Someday I’ll be back here for good. Right now my schedule isn’t my own. That’s all I can say for now. Will you… will you hold a space for me? Will you try?”
I try to hear him. Is it a request? A challenge? An invitation? My pulse is up, but I can’t pretend it’s for Knox. Not now. The pull is strong, but the drive to find Steven’s killer dictates everything. A moment passes. I murmur yes, that I’ll try, but the warmth that fills my body is the fevered urge to solve this murder.
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