“Andrea opened up to me because she trusts me and because Lydia has disappeared. She’s as worried as I am. Lydia came to town last weekend. She stopped here to drop off her bag. I wasn’t home and didn’t speak to her, but she told her mother that she was going downtown to what she described as a loft party on the Bowery. The Bowery, I ask you! They had a fight about it. Lydia actually struck her mother. Unbelievable! She said she’d be meeting Andrea at this party and sleeping over at her apartment, but Andrea says she never heard of any such event—didn’t even know Lydia was in town. Lydia left here in a huff, taking her bag with her. That was the last time anyone saw her. She didn’t return to school. None of her friends have heard from her, or so they claim. More disturbing still, no one seems to know where Pedrosian is. I confronted his dealer, a man named Gruen—”
“Norbert Gruen. I know him.”
“Who says that he believes Pedrosian has taken off on a cross-country car trip. Maybe headed for San Francisco, maybe for Los Angeles. No timetable, no route—a hippie odyssey. He may be stopping off in Chicago, or Denver. For all anyone knows, he may be joining one of those communes one reads about.”
“Not Pedrosian’s style. Whatever he is, he’s not a hippie. He’s been around too long to buy into that adolescent crap.”
“In any case, Lydia is presumably with him.”
“Or not.”
“Whatever. I want to know where she is, and I’m certain this man is at the root of her disappearance. I don’t want to go to the police—at least, not yet. And you’ll understand, I’m sure, that I don’t want the papers to get hold of the story. Are you prepared to take on the assignment of finding her and bringing her home—discreetly?”
“And what if she doesn’t want to come home? She’s eighteen years old. She can do what she likes.”
“You just find her. Leave that part to me.”
“And what if she’s in real trouble?”
“We’ll deal with that at the appropriate time.”
Kravitz finally offered me a drink, and we spent some time discussing terms of employment and going over a list of names of Lydia’s friends and other contacts that might be useful to me. Kravitz gave me a couple of photographs of his daughter. They showed a pretty, shy-looking girl, with straight blond hair, who looked younger than eighteen, and frighteningly innocent.
Before I left, I asked one final question.
“Would it be possible to talk to your wife while I’m here?”
“Are you deaf?” he said.
As he showed me out to the elevator, the sobbing continued.
TWO
By the time I got back downtown, it was getting dark. I made my way to Max’s Kansas City, the place where Jerry Pedrosian was most likely to be found if he was in the city. Located on a stretch of Park Avenue South where cab drivers parked and took naps, Max’s was the ultimate artists’ bar, a spot that had been colonized by the Warhol crowd. For that reason, it also attracted would-be superstars, run-of-the mill drag queens, poètes maudits, slumming society matrons hoping to catch a glimpse of Candy Darling, and hipper members of the showbiz crowd. You could even see a few politicos of liberal persuasion who weren’t shocked by the aroma of cannabis, or by an encounter with someone dressed for an S&M séance snorting coke in the men’s room. There were cheap red tablecloths on tables packed together like cans of Spam on a shelf at D’Agostino’s, but the art on the walls was as good as you’d see in any New York gallery. Artists like Bob Rauschenberg, John Chamberlain, and Dan Flavin had bartered with Mickey Ruskin, the owner, trading work in return for free food and bar tabs. Not that the food cost an arm and a leg to begin with. A steak dinner would set you back $3.25 and came with free chickpeas, or you could have a burger and fries for $1.10. Max’s was a place to see and be seen, and that went equally for the celebrities and the miniskirted waitresses who were part of the show. The jukebox was deafeningly loud and the house wine was crap, but no one complained. Not even the Duke and Duchess of Windsor, who, on at least one occasion, had been seen there in all their frozen splendor.
It was early for Max’s on a weeknight, and the place was only half full. I asked Sharon, who was working the door—keeping out undesirables—if she’d seen Jerry Pedrosian. Not for a few nights, she said. Mickey Ruskin was standing nearby, so I asked him the same question. Not since the weekend, he told me. I bought a drink and made my way to a booth near the bar, where one of the occupants was Doug Mills, a sculptor who had a studio a couple of buildings from Pedrosian on West Broadway.
“Have you seen Pedrosian lately?” I asked.
“That asshole?” said Mills. “I stay clear.”
“I heard he might be away on a road trip.”
“Not unless he’s driving a rental car,” said Mills. “That big ol’ red Pontiac of his is parked in the lot next to the bodega. I saw it when I stopped there for cigarettes a couple of hours ago, right up against the chain-link fence where it usually is.”
I quizzed a few more people, but all that I came up with was that Pedrosian had been at an opening at the Castelli Gallery several days earlier. He had been with a girl, but no one seemed to know who she was, though the general description fit Lydia Kravitz. There was no point hanging around, so I went to the phone booth near the kitchen and dialed the number I had been given for Lydia’s girlfriend Andrea.
She picked up. I told her who I was and she said she’d been expecting to hear from me.
“Lydia’s dad called me an hour ago.”
I asked if I could stop by to see her. She said she’d rather meet somewhere more neutral, and we settled on the little triangular park—not much more than a traffic island with a couple of undernourished trees—where Bleecker Street intersects with 6th Avenue and Downing Street. I told her I’d be reading the Voice. I got there early and sat on the only bench that wasn’t occupied by elderly Italian women in widows’ weeds. The girl was fifteen minutes late. I don’t know why, but I was expecting a Haight-Ashbury waif—granny glasses and an ankle-length flower-power dress. Andrea Marshall didn’t fit that stereotype at all. If Lydia Kravitz, in her photographs at least, appeared the epitome of innocence, her best friend gave off a very different vibe. She was about five five and verged on the voluptuous, with short, sculpted, dark hair—École de Vidal Sassoon—white skin, and big chestnut-colored eyes. She wore a denim miniskirt, a white T-shirt with no bra underneath, and white vinyl boots. I would have paid attention even if she hadn’t had been carrying a Bloomingdale’s shopping bag with a gun in it.
It was a medium-caliber automatic, loosely wrapped in tissue paper. She opened the bag to show it to me. I told her to keep it out of sight for Christ’s sake, and ordered her to follow me.
We walked south on the west side of 6th Avenue, away from the Village action, and into a zone that was pretty quiet after dark. As soon as I thought it was safe to talk, I asked her where she’d got the damn thing.
“It was in Lydia’s overnight bag.”
“And Lydia left the bag with you?”
Andrea nodded.
“I thought you didn’t see her last weekend?”
“That’s what I told her dad.”
“Why?”
“I was scared, and her dad can be creepy. I didn’t want to get Lydia into trouble.”
“Creepy? Gabriel Kravitz seems to think you’re the cat’s pajamas,” I said.
“I know,” she said. “I told you he was creepy.”
I thought of the way Kravitz had spoken of Andrea’s “nice little place in the Village.”
“Has he ever been to your apartment?”
“Why would I let him come to my apartment?” she asked, apparently upset by the question.
“When I start out on an investigation like this,” I told her, “a lot of things don’t make sense, and I have to ask dumb questions to try to figure out what’s going on. Let’s try this—why did you tell Lydia’s dad she was sleeping with Jerry Pedrosian? Weren’t you afraid that that would get her in
to trouble?”
Patches of red appeared under her eyes.
“I thought he already knew.”
“And why are you telling me now that you saw Lydia last weekend, when you told him you didn’t know she’d been in town? You know I’m working for Mr. Kravitz. Surely you’d presume that I’m likely to go back to him and spill the beans?”
“Why am I telling you? Because I’m fucking scared!”
There was a long pause—tears glinted in Andrea’s eyes—before she continued.
“Lydia had a fight with her mom and came down to my place. I said she could sleep over. We went to a party on the Bowery—the studio of some painter. Lydia got very nervous waiting for Jerry. She was sure he was going to stand her up. Are you going to tell Mr. Kravitz all this—about me seeing her?”
I ignored the question.
“You know Jerry Pedrosian?”
“I met him a couple of times. He didn’t give me the time of day. Once I went to the movies with them. It was embarrassing. They were necking like they were alone somewhere. His hands were all over her. Everywhere. It was like I wasn’t there.”
Knowing Pedrosian, I would have guessed that Andrea was more his type—more available looking—but where Lydia was concerned I only had snapshots to go by.
“When Jerry finally showed up at the party that night,” said Andrea, “Lydia got really upset because he ignored her and danced with another girl. Finally, he came over—barely looked at me, of course—and took Lydia away. And that was the last I saw of her.”
“He took her away?”
“They danced for a while. It was a mob scene. Have you ever been to a loft party? Then I didn’t see them again. I guess they just took off. I didn’t think anything of it. That was kind of what I’d expected to happen.”
“That was the last time you saw her?”
Andrea nodded.
“So, when did you go through her bag?”
“Not till today, after her dad called.”
“And what did you think when you found the gun?”
“What kind of question is that? I didn’t know what to think. I was terrified.”
She was getting very agitated.
“But you didn’t tell her dad?”
“Obviously not, okay? And now you’re going to ask me why not? I don’t know, okay? I was just fucking scared. It isn’t every day I find a gun in my best friend’s bag. Then, when Lydia’s dad called me again to say that he’d hired a private detective, I got scared all over again and I thought maybe I’d better give you the real story. Are you going to tell him?”
In a fraction of a second, she had gone from confrontational to contrite and vulnerable, which made her seem much prettier.
I thought for a moment.
“No, not until I have to,” I told her. “So long as you’re honest with me, I’ll try to keep things under wraps.”
We were under a lamppost and she gave me a Little Girl Lost look. It was a look that probably worked pretty well on NYU boys majoring in English Lit. Come to think of it, I always wanted to write a dissertation on the contemporary relevance of The Scarlet Letter.
“I haven’t eaten,” she said.
That was to the point. I took her to a little Italian place on MacDougal, and watched as she scarfed down a man-sized portion of spaghetti puttanesca, washed down with something the owner passed off as chianti. Meanwhile, I tried to figure out what I’d got myself into. Common sense told me I should head directly to the 6th Precinct a few blocks away, hand over the gun, and tell the cops the whole story. Maybe I should call Kravitz first, but either way, he wasn’t going to like the cops getting involved since that almost guaranteed that the press would have the story. Then there was Andrea to think about.
But why did I give a damn about Andrea? She meant nothing to me, but she was one of those girls who get under your skin from the moment you set eyes on them. I guess she brought out my fraternal instincts.
I told her to sit tight while I took the Bloomingdale’s bag with the automatic in it to the men’s room. My regular line of work sometimes involves inspecting delicate prints and drawings that can be compromised by greasy fingerprints, so I always carry a couple of pairs of cotton gloves for emergencies. I slipped a pair on and inspected the little pistol. It was a compact .38-caliber semiautomatic—a Ruger, the kind of lightweight pistol law enforcement officers sometimes carried as backup weapons, and that bad guys liked because they’re small and easily concealed. It held a full magazine, but as far as I could tell—firearms forensics is not my field—it had not been fired recently. The bag also had an ankle holster to fit the gun.
I sat on the toilet, staring at a chromolithograph of Monte Pellegrino and wondering what to do next. A cool head is useful in these situations, and for once, I made the smart decision. I would call Kravitz, tell him this was a police matter, then march over to the 6th Precinct with both Andrea and the gun. Kravitz wouldn’t like it, and neither would Andrea, but tough shit.
There was a snag. When I left the toilet, Andrea was nowhere to be seen.
I asked the guido behind the counter where she was. He grinned and jerked a thumb toward the door.
“Looks like she bailed on you, pal.”
“She just walked out?”
“Soon as you went to the bathroom, a guy showed up in the doorway and she took off with him.”
“What kind of a guy?”
“A fuckin’ guy, okay? Nobody told me shit to check out what kind of fuckin’ guy. Not big, not fuckin’ small, A kid in jeans and a T-shirt—long fuckin’ hair, a Mets cap, and a gray fuckin’ T-shirt that said property of something or other…”
“Did he force her to go with him?”
The guido shrugged.
“He just gave her a fuckin’ nod and she went.”
“She didn’t say anything?”
“Yeah—she said you’d take care of the fuckin’ check.”
THREE
It was a good bet that the dude Andrea had taken off with had been shading us the whole time, and that she knew it all along. Maybe just a boyfriend she’d asked to keep an eye on things. Or maybe something else. My immediate plan was to get the gun to my office, where there was a safe, but since there was a significant possibility that somebody might still be following me, I decided to play the private-eye game. I took a subway to Times Square, changing cars a couple of times, bought a ticket for a movie called Bikers in Bikinis, sat through half a reel of soft-core sleaze, then exited through a side door and took a cab to Union Square. The night doorman on duty was Walter, who had once been a porter on the Pennsylvania Railroad. He told me that someone had been there looking for me about an hour earlier.
“Pretty little white girl. She seemed upset about something. Kinda nervous.”
“Did she give a name?”
Walter shook his head. I took out the snapshots of Lydia.
“Is this her?”
“Sure could be her. Yeah, I guess so. Maybe…”
“Did she leave any message? Say how I could reach her?”
“No. I just told her you’re not here at this time of night and she went away. Was that okay, chief? If I knew you’d be here tonight…”
I thanked Walter and took the elevator up to my floor. There was a light showing under the door of my office. I was pretty sure I hadn’t left it on—it’s the kind of thing I’m anal about. I stared at it for a while. The light under the door was mocking me. “You’ve seen too many B movies,” it said. “You’re getting paranoid. Too much of that righteous Costa Rican shit. There’s no one in there, no one pressed up against the wall, holding his breath with a big blue gun held flat against the lapels of a double-breasted suit, ready to crack the muzzle down against the back of your skull the moment you open the door. And anyway, you’ve got a piece, too, snug in that nice Bloomie’s bag you’re carrying. If you feel nervous—and maybe you should—put on those fancy cotton gloves, take the pretty little heater out of the bag, and come on in…”<
br />
It hit me that I was going a little bit crazy, but that can happen when you’re a couple of hours into a missing persons investigation and you find yourself in possession of someone else’s fully loaded automatic. That wasn’t supposed to happen in the kind of cases I got involved in. Things like that can change the way you think about little surprises like a light under a door.
Then I remembered. Mrs. Wilcox, the cleaning lady, had been there that afternoon. Mystery solved.
Just for the hell of it, though, I kicked the door open. I don’t know what I expected to achieve by that, but it was something I’d wanted to do ever since I’d seen Victor Mature do it in some black-and-white flick when I was a kid. The room was empty except for the ghosts of all the losers who had occupied it before me. I opened the wall safe, which, like all good wall safes, was hidden behind a painting—a framed reproduction of Edward Hopper’s Office at Night—and deposited the gun and the holster there. They joined my emergency money, a few contracts, and some personal papers. I closed the safe, scrambled the combination, then sat down at my desk to check my messages on the brand new Ansaphone my ex-wife had given me for my birthday.
The first message was from her. She said she was feeling sad. The second was from T & G Air-Conditioning, a company I had placed a call to earlier in the day. The third was from Gimbels, my department store of choice, reminding me that my monthly ounce of flesh was two months overdue. The last one was more interesting. I heard the machine pick up, but there was nothing else except the sound of breathing and a sigh of frustration that was unmistakably female.
Lydia?
It was still only ten thirty and I was in no mood to go home and watch Johnny Carson. I could stroll back to Max’s, have a drink, and see if anyone had shown up who might have a lead on Pedrosian. Or I could check out Andrea’s apartment, though after the way she’d behaved, it seemed unlikely that she’d be hanging out anywhere I could track her down. Or I could head down to SoHo where Pedrosian had his loft.
Good Girl, Bad Girl (An Alex Novalis Novel) Page 2
