“Whoever this was said something about having a hard time with people like Jerry Pedrosian giving workshops.”
Mark grinned.
“Gemma was at one of Pedrosian’s seminars. The topic was art as protest and protest as art. She loved it. Knowing Jerry, it was probably bullshit, but that’s the kind of stuff kids should be thinking about at that age. I don’t know who your friend is, but you can tell him that from me, if you like.”
I thanked him.
“I presume,” he said, “that you’re on a case?”
SIX
I stopped by the office to check my messages. There were a couple from J & V Air-Kool and one from Janice.
“Are you cradle-snatching now? I stayed at your place and made breakfast, and a dishy little blonde rang the doorbell. Not so little, actually, but very young and definitely dishy. She was surprised to see me—seemed nervous, almost frightened—and asked if you were home. When I said no she took off. Wouldn’t leave a message.”
Lydia? It looked like I was making a habit of being at the wrong place at the wrong time. If she—or whoever it was—knew where I lived and where I had my office, surely she must also know my phone number? Nothing tricky about the way I was listed.
I gave Andrea Marshall’s number a try. No reply, which didn’t surprise me, but still annoyed me. I wanted to hear her voice. Then I called downstairs for a sandwich, and while I was eating it, I heard the elevator arrive at my floor, and its door close as someone either left or entered. There were people up and down the corridor all day long, and if you had sat at my desk for as long as I had, you got a sense of where they were headed—Monica the psychotherapist in 3D, maybe, Dr. Joe the orthodontist in 3F, Olga the Swedish masseuse in 3G. I didn’t hear anything that fit any familiar scenario so, because everything that was going on was spooking me, I went to the door and opened it.
“Freeze!” someone screamed in my ear.
A hulking uniformed cop was pressed against the wall to my right, his Colt Police Special pointed at my head, knees bent, body taut in the Weaver handgun stance you’ve seen in several hundred bad movies and TV shows.
I put my hands above my head.
“Don’t fucking move!” he hissed.
Doors were being opened and people were peering out.
“Get back inside!” the cop yelled. The doors closed. Outside, sirens howled as police cruisers rushed to the scene, or maybe headed for a pizza pickup.
“Waiting for backup?” I asked, as politely as I could manage.
“Shut the fuck up!” he screamed.
I felt his spittle on my face. Cop spittle. He had a Joe Namath mustache. Mustaches were standard issue for the NYPD that year, and the Joe Namath was a popular model.
I heard the elevator ascend and open at my floor. The cop could not see who emerged from it because it was behind his back.
“Okay, you,” the cop yelled, “stay in that fucking elevator, press a button—any button—and get the fuck outta here.”
The man who had stepped from the elevator was a stubby individual in a seersucker jacket that looked a size too small. He had a faded blond crew cut and a rosy, clean-shaven face. It was okay for plainclothes officers to be clean-shaven. I was glad to see this one, Detective First Grade Campbell. I had had dealings with Campbell when I was with the DA’s office. We talked the same language, more or less.
“You can put it down, Pelacci,” he said.
The uniformed cop seemed to recognize the voice, which was low-pitched and raspy.
“There’s a report of a man with a firearm,” said the uniformed cop, keeping the revolver trained on my head. “I found this man here at the reported location.”
“I heard that shit, too,” said Campbell. “That’s why I’m here. I’m enjoying a nice veggie burger and macrobiotic rice when I get a call for backup—and it seems there’s not a uniformed officer in blocks thanks to this motherfucking slowdown. So I have to drag my sorry ass up here. There are umpteen thousand reports a day of someone with a firearm in New York City. I don’t know what makes this one special, but the man whose brains you are threatening to blow out—while he may very well have a firearm in his possession—also has a license to carry one. Now put yours away, officer.”
Slowly, the uniformed cop did as he was told. Campbell instructed me to show my investigator’s license and my firearms license. I produced them and the uniformed cop scrutinized them, as if he was hoping to find something wrong. Campbell told him that he’d take care of things from there on, and indicated to me that we should step into my office. He sat down in the chair Mrs. Kravitz had occupied a few hours earlier, took out a pipe with a bowl carved in the shape of a devil’s head, filled it with evil-looking black tobacco from a plastic pouch, then lit up with one of those special lighters that pipe smokers use.
“I smell chickadee,” he said. “You’ve had a visitor?”
I ignored that.
“So what’s this all about?” I asked.
“Like Officer Pelacci said,” he told me, “there was a report of a person or persons with a gun in this building, in Suite 3B. That’s where we’re sitting now, I believe. Though whether I’d call it a suite…”
“Who called in this report?”
“Anonymous call to the emergency line. Any ideas?”
I shrugged.
“Could someone have seen that you were wearing a weapon—maybe spotted your holster under your jacket?”
“I’m not carrying a weapon. I don’t often do the kind of work that calls for that kind of thing. I have a Smith & Wesson thirty-eight at my apartment, locked up in a closet.”
I thought about the gun in the safe in my office, and felt for sure it was connected to the mysterious call, but I saw no way of bringing that into play without telling Campbell about a lot of things my employer would be unhappy to have the police know.
“So nobody,” he said, “would have any reason to suppose there was someone armed in here?”
“I don’t know when I last packed heat,” I said.
“Strange,” said Campbell, sucking on his pipe, which didn’t seem to be functioning to his satisfaction.
“You’ve got me,” I said.
“What are you working on these days?” he asked. “Anything that might tie in with this?”
“Bread-and-butter missing persons case. Teenage girl.”
“A runaway?”
“That’s what it looks like. She’s probably getting stoned on Bourbon Street or in the Haight.”
“Or streetwalking in Miami,” said Campbell, getting to his feet. He nodded good-bye and turned toward the door, then paused.
“Nothing you should be telling me?” he said. “Nothing slipped your mind?”
“Nothing,” I assured him.
Like many NYPD detective-investigators, Campbell had started in narcotics, then put in a spell in vice, but had spent most of his career in a citywide command assigned to high-profile theft and fraud, usually working undercover. Whether or not that was his current beat, I had no idea, but I knew he had a nose for anything bent, and I was pretty sure he hadn’t bought into me playing dumb. I had no idea whether he would be interested in what I might be hiding, but the fact that we had had this little encounter just added to the gumbo. I had been on this investigation for less than twenty-four hours, and I was beginning to feel that it was running me rather than the other way around.
I had to do something, and the only thing I could think of that made sense was to get back to tracking down Pedrosian. Somebody must know where he was. I called the gallery to see if Norbert Gruen was back from his studio visit. He was, but he didn’t add much to what I already knew.
“He just takes off once in a while. He’s a big boy. I’m his dealer, not his nursemaid. Anyway, why would I tell you? I know what line of business you’re in. For all I know, you want to nail him for something.”
My phone had a long cord, and as I spoke to Gruen, I walked over to the window to see if the rain had arrived. The clouds
were low and threatening, but the street below seemed to be dry. Then I saw her—a girl with long blond hair in jeans and a light-colored raincoat, standing on the far side of the road at the edge of the park, looking up at my window. She seemed to sense that I had spotted her, turned, and began to walk away, quickly, toward the George Washington statue. I hurried out of my office, ran down the stairs, and rushed out into the street—where Detective Campbell was standing, minding his own business, or maybe mine.
He removed his pipe from his mouth and twisted up his face.
“It’s not pulling today,” he confided. “Happens with weather like this.”
Ten minutes later, oversize raindrops were spattering down on the sidewalks, and then the skies unloaded. I had been searching, without much hope, for the girl I had seen from my window, who might have been Lydia Kravitz though I didn’t get a good enough look at her to be sure. Girls were ironing their hair as a fashion statement, so it was no surprise that I spotted several girls with straight blond hair, but none of them fit the profile. When the rain came down, I took shelter in the doorway of S. Klein and just waited there. After all, if she was looking for me—Lydia or whoever—it was probably a sensible idea just to stay put and let her find me. I must have stood there for half an hour but nothing happened, except that I held the door open for a lot of nice bargain-hunting ladies from the outer boroughs, loaded down with shopping bags and looking pretty damned pleased with themselves.
I did have a thought, though. Those ladies made me think about parents. Unless they were dead, Jerry Pedrosian must have parents somewhere, and it occurred to me that I knew someone nearby who might have a bead on them. When the rain let up a bit, I bought a folding umbrella from a guy on the street and headed downtown on 4th Avenue, which in those days was still home to half a dozen secondhand bookstores. My destination was Marquis Rare Books and Manuscripts, a store that was not quite as high-toned as the name implied, though it was a good place to browse if you had a couple of hours to kill.
Used bookstores smell great in the rain. The books seem to come alive—more alive, in fact, than the elderly assistant who sat behind the desk with a Mickey Spillane paperback in front of him. I think I woke him and he resented it.
I asked for Steve, the owner, and the assistant jerked his thumb toward the rear of the building. I found Steve Schuller in the back room, sorting through cartons of books, putting them into different piles. I knew Steve because I often came to him when I was looking for out-of-print art books that I needed for research. What I had remembered was that Steve had grown up in the same Bronx neighborhood as Pedrosian. They didn’t much like each other, but their parents had been friends who played gin rummy and pinochle together. I told Steve that I was looking for Pedrosian in connection with a case.
“You gonna send him away for a while?” he asked hopefully.
“I’m looking for him for information about somebody else,” I said, trying to be as vague as possible. “He’s out of town and I haven’t been able to track him down. Are his parents still alive?”
“His father passed away, but his mother’s still hanging on—just. She’s down in Florida, near my folks—Lauderdale Lakes, a place called Hawaiian Gardens. My mother still sees her—bakes her cookies—but she says Millie’s mind is slipping.”
That was a blow.
“I tell you what, though,” said Steve. “Jerry’s got an aunt Ida who’s still up in the Bronx, on West Tremont. Refuses to leave. They were all in that same building once, and since Jerry’s mother had a part-time job—his father was always sickly, something with the lungs—Jerry and his sister spent as much time with Aunt Ida as in their own apartment.”
I asked if he knew how to reach her.
“I think she’s still in the same place, but my mom will know for sure.”
He picked up the phone and soon had the phone number and address.
“Keep your eye on your wallet while you’re up there. And anything else you hold dear. I was up in the old neighborhood recently, and it’s scary. The whole area is run by gangs—Black Spades, Ghetto Brothers, Savage Nomads. Fort Apache is just down the street.”
“What about Jerry’s sister?” I asked.
“Shirley? I heard she married some kind of public figure. Can’t think who. She was something though—the local sweater girl. We thought she was Lana Turner incarnate.”
I used Steve’s phone to call Aunt Ida. She swore at me and told me to leave her alone. That was before I had said a word. I told her I was a friend of her nephew Jerry. She said that was my problem, not hers. I asked if she knew how I could get hold of Jerry. She asked how much he owed me, adding that she had no intention of helping him out. I told her it wasn’t about money.
“So is it your wife or your daughter?” she asked.
Then she cackled with laughter and coughed—a hacking, three-pack-a-day-cough—told me to go to hell, and hung up on me.
“Nice lady,” I said to Steve. “Old school.”
“I should have warned you,” he said. “She always was kind of cantankerous. We used to call her and her hubby the commies, because they were always ranting about how America has betrayed the People. Ranting is her style.”
“At least I know she’s at home,” I said.
“In that neighborhood,” he replied, “she probably never leaves the house.”
I didn’t really feel like schlepping up to the Bronx, so I tried Andrea Marshall’s number again. Still no reply, which was still annoying. I wanted to talk to her again. There seemed to be no good alternative to paying Aunt Ida a call, but I decided to forego the pleasures of a subway ride to the Bronx, followed by a hike through tribal territory, and instead walked over to University Place where there was a parking garage that rented used cars as a sideline. I negotiated with Frankie, who I’d dealt with many times, and got a good rate on a Datsun with a bushel of miles on the clock, faded paintwork, and a jagged dent in the left rear fender. It was the kind of vehicle that would fit right in where I was going.
The rain was over for the time being, and as I headed north, sunlight was flashing off the Hudson River, where a cruise liner was setting out for somewhere romantic with palm trees and daiquiris. My destination was free of such distractions. Even before I left Manhattan, I passed plenty of burned-out buildings. In the Bronx, whole blocks had been torched and entire neighborhoods were deserted, except for the street corners that were home to clusters of junkies selling or nodding off. I made it to West Tremont without incident, and found a parking place between a battered Firebird and a rust-pitted Imperial. I was wrong about the Datsun fitting in. In this company, it passed for near mint condition.
Aunt Ida’s building had once had pretensions of class. A flight of curving steps led to an entrance topped with an ogee arch. The roofline was interrupted by a decorative turret equipped with vertical slots like the ones archers fired arrows through when a castle was under siege. I couldn’t help thinking they might come in handy. The windows of at least one apartment were boarded up, the steps were littered with broken glass and discarded needles, and the walls were disfigured by early modern graffiti tags, Taki 183 vintage. I picked my way up the steps and entered the unlit lobby, which smelled of piss and vomit. A group of hoods was hanging there, some sitting on the stairs, some lounging around in their Converse Chuckie Ts, passing a can of Bud, and waiting for someone in Osaka to invent the boom box. They sized me up from under their baseball caps with expressions that rated minus on the Emily Post gracious welcome scale. I figured they had me pegged as the Man, and I didn’t aim to disabuse them of the idea, though in that neighborhood, cops usually traveled in pairs.
“I’m looking for an old woman—Mrs. Pedrosian,” I said.
Everybody looked to a kid in a T-shirt that had “Friendly Freddie” printed across the chest. He was skinny as a thin dime, but in this crowd, he was Mister Phat. He looked through me for awhile, then said, “Bitch gotta mouth on her.”
I wasn’t sure if he was refe
rring to Mrs. Pedrosian or to me.
“5C,” said Friendly Freddie, looking through me some more.
There was an elevator, but no one in his right mind would have taken it, so I walked up the stairs, past piles of garbage, past the smell of something greasy being cremated on a hotplate, past a man kissing the shoulder of a girl who was half hanging out of a torn nightdress, past an old dude in rags asleep on a cot on a landing, till I came to 5C. I rapped on the door. Nothing happened for a couple of minutes. I knocked again, and a voice I recognized from the phone yelled, “Hold your horses!”
I yelled, “Police!”
There’s a law against impersonating a police officer, but it only applies where the term “law abiding” has some kind of currency.
Through the door, I could hear the tap tap of someone walking with a cane—very slowly.
“How do I know you’re cops? I didn’t call the cops.”
“Ma’am—I’m a police officer who needs to ask a few questions. Nothing to be afraid of.”
“Why would I be afraid of the cops? And don’t call me ma’am. A ma’am is a cheap broad who runs a whorehouse.”
She had, at last, begun to unfasten locks—a lot of them.
“Why is it,” she said, “that when I call the police, nobody comes? But when I don’t call…”
The door opened about six inches, but the chain was still on. Fierce gray eyes stared up at me through bottle-glass lenses. Aunt Ida was about two hands taller than a mule, and looked twice as ornery. She removed an un-tipped cigarette from between parched lips.
“At least you’re better looking than the last ones they sent,” she said, “and you look like you could probably chase down a purse-snatcher without having a coronary. That’s our taxes they’re padding their guts with. Who told them to do that?”
I admitted I had no idea.
“Now,” she said, “what do you want?”
She made no move to release the chain that held the door.
“Could I come in, please?” I asked.
Good Girl, Bad Girl (An Alex Novalis Novel) Page 5
