“What have you got against him?” she said.
“If you’d asked me that question a couple of days ago, I would have said we’re oil and water, and left it that. Now I can be more specific. I just found out he slept with my ex-wife—while I was still married to her.”
Mrs. Baldridge laughed—a truncated snort of a laugh. She somehow didn’t seem as appealing tonight.
“This is getting incestuous,” she said.
I agreed.
“When was the last time you saw Jerry?” I asked.
“Months ago,” she said. “I told you, we don’t get along. But he’s probably here tonight. He doesn’t like to miss these things.”
“I doubt it,” I told her. “Nobody’s seen him for days.”
“So maybe he took a trip. So what?”
“The reason I called you about the building on Ladies Lane is because there were some artists in there recently, even though your agent doesn’t know about it. I’d like to know if one of them was Jerry.”
“He’s got his own place,” she said. “Jerry has money.”
“Still—I have a feeling he might have been there. Does he have a key to that place?”
“Why would I give him a key?” she asked.
Then she paused.
“You know what, he might have a key. I don’t get along with Jerry, but strangely enough, Donald does. It’s weird. They have nothing in common, but for some perverse reason, they hit it off. Probably because they both have their brains below their belts. I remember now. When we bought those properties, Donald asked Jerry to keep an eye on them. It made sense, I guess, since he lives a couple of blocks away. Yeah, he might have a key.”
“But you’ve no reason to think he’s been using it?”
She shrugged.
“Hey, we’re talking about Jerry. He wouldn’t bother to tell me. Not that I could care less. But now tell me something, who is this missing person? Jerry?”
“It’s a girl.”
“So he’s shacked up with some tart. And who are you working for?”
“Her father.”
“Daddy’s little darling having it off with the big bad artist? How old?”
“Eighteen.”
“That’s young, even for Jerry, but at least it’s legal. I can see why the father would be pissed, though. Anyone I might know?”
I ignored the question and pulled out the newspaper photograph I had Xeroxed that afternoon—the one of Jerry with Jack Kennedy—and showed it to her.
She laughed.
“Where did you get that?”
“You’ve seen it before?”
“Sure, we were still talking in those days. Look at the expression on Jerry’s face. He was smitten. He’d been totally against Kennedy till that day—talked about Joe Kennedy and the mob planning to steal the election from the American people. I don’t remember who Jerry was for—probably some anarchist libertarian—but it sure wasn’t Kennedy. Being against everything is Jerry’s specialty. He was righteously pissed about Vietnam, about civil rights, about everything. Like I told you, he spent too much time with our aunt Ida, the crazy old woman. Jerry wanted to change the world, but then Kennedy shook his hand and gave him that big phony smile. Poof! Jerry was in love. He campaigned for Kennedy, went to Washington for the inauguration. And then came the Bay of Pigs, and the Missile Crisis. Jerry felt betrayed, poor baby. He actually tried to go to Havana. Of course there was no way he could get there, but Fidel became his new hero.”
“I had no idea Jerry was that serious about politics.”
“You call that serious? I call it naïve. He’s the type who talks a good game, but doesn’t bother to register to vote. Anyway, it’s all about having a hot line to pitch to girls. He votes with his testicles.”
At this point, Mrs. Baldridge was looking away from me, over my shoulder.
“There’s a woman staring at you,” she said.
I turned to look and saw Marion Kravitz. Given that she was a collector, her presence at the opening was hardly a surprise. She flashed me a nervous smile.
“Do I detect a rival?” asked Mrs. Baldridge.
“Someone I have some business with,” I said.
“And you don’t have business with me?”
“Look, I’m sorry. Can you hang around for a couple of minutes? I have to speak to this woman.”
“Why don’t you introduce us?” said Mrs. Baldridge, upping the sarcasm. “Maybe we can make it a threesome.”
I ignored this and crossed over to Marion Kravitz, who was wearing a black cocktail dress not unlike the one Mrs. Baldridge had worn the previous evening. She looked good, if it’s possible to look good and thoroughly stressed out at the same time.
“Who’s that?” she asked.
“A woman I know.”
“I have to talk to you,” she said.
“I’m right here.”
“Can we go somewhere else?” she said. “That woman is watching us.”
I led her out into the sculpture court.
“I want you to drop the case,” she said.
I hadn’t seen that coming.
“Did you hear me? I want you to drop the case,” she repeated.
“Lydia has been found?”
“No, but I’m sure she’s okay.”
“Because of that message you received?”
“Partly…”
“There’s something else?”
“Not exactly. It’s just a feeling. If she’s with Jerry Pedrosian, he’s not going to let her come to any harm.”
“Why are you so sure?”
“I know Jerry—at least I knew him. I told you that. I used to collect his work. We socialized occasionally. He’s wild, but he wouldn’t let anything happen to Lydia.”
Her earnestness was painful.
“And does your husband agree?”
“I haven’t spoken to him about it yet.”
“Is he here tonight?”
She shook her head.
“Do you mind telling me how I can get hold of him? Because you may be the girl’s mother, Mrs. Kravitz, but he’s the one who hired me for this gig. My contractual obligations are to him.”
“I don’t know where he is. He was called out of town.”
“That’s what his minions told me. Has he been in touch?”
Again, she shook her head.
“Is that unusual?”
“Well, a little. But he’s a businessman. Sometimes he just jumps on a plane and flies to Seattle, or Munich, or wherever.”
“Without letting you know?”
She seemed to have no answer to that.
“Do you suspect he’s in some kind of trouble?”
I was playing a hunch.
“Not exactly.”
“What does ‘not exactly’ mean?”
Again, no answer.
“What do you think is going on, Mrs. Kravitz?”
“To tell you the truth, I have no idea.”
Tears welled up in her eyes and she looked faint. I helped her to a bench.
“Stay here,” I told her. “I have to let my friend know that I’ll be tied up for a while, then we’ll get out of here and we’ll go somewhere quiet where we can talk. I’ll be right back.”
Mrs. Baldridge was nowhere to be seen. I figured that at this point in the proceedings Mrs. Kravitz was my primary concern anyway, so I hurried back to the sculpture court. The bench was empty. Feeling frustrated and foolish, I went back inside and scanned the crowd. There was no sign of either of them, but near the top of the escalator, ascending to the upper floors, was an ethereal-looking girl in a white dress, with long blond hair. She looked back in my direction, then disappeared.
ELEVEN
I hung around at the opening for a while, hoping that the blond girl, or one of the women might materialize out of the crowd. No such luck. I took a taxi to my office in the hope that one of them might have called in with an explanation. Bubkes. I walked to Max’s and had a drink at the bar. Be
ing there jogged my memory. When I had spoken to Doug Mills at Max’s a couple of evenings earlier, he had told me that Jerry Pedrosian’s red Pontiac was parked in the lot next to the bodega on West Broadway. I should have followed up on that before. I took a cab down to SoHo and checked out the parking lot through the chain-link fence. No red Pontiac. I went into the bodega and talked to Hector, the patrón.
Did he know Jerry Pedrosian? Hector said he knew a lot of people, but he didn’t always know their names. Did he know the guy who drove the red Pontiac that parked in the lot next door? Oh, that Jerry? Sure he knew that Jerry. That Jerry bought cigarettes and coffee and Heinekens and Milky Way bars, and sometimes he cashed a check for five or ten dollars. They never bounced. That Jerry was an okay guy. Had that Jerry been around lately? Hector hadn’t seen that Jerry lately, but he had seen the car. Someone—not Jerry—was driving it toward Canal Street. When had that been? Hector couldn’t say. Maybe earlier that day, maybe the day before.
I walked home on Bleecker Street. As soon as I opened the door to my apartment, I had a feeling that something was out of whack. I turned on the overhead light and discovered Andrea Marshall in my bed. The sheets were pulled up to her chin, but I was pretty sure that underneath them she wasn’t decked out in a whole lot of livery, a notion that was borne out by the little pile of female clothing on the floor alongside the bed. She smiled at me, fetchingly, and petted Samba, who was curled up on her chest, purring.
I decided to take the laid-back option, sat down on the rocker where I threw my threads at night, and lit a cigarette.
“How did you get in?” I asked.
“Easy,” she said. “I rang all the front door bells and a nice little queer with glasses came down and opened the door.”
That would have been Ethan, who lived on the floor above me.
“I explained how I was your niece from Poughkeepsie, and that I was staying with you while I did college interviews, but I had locked myself out. So he let me in.”
I could have called Ethan to check the story, but it sounded plausible. Everyone in the building had keys to everyone else’s apartment.
“He didn’t have any questions about your story?”
“I told him I’d tried to reach you at your office on Union Square. I think that convinced him.”
“How did you know I have an office on Union Square?”
“You told me the other night. You said I could always leave a message there because there’s a machine. You gave me a number.”
“And to what do I owe this unexpected pleasure?”
“I came to apologize for running out on you the other night. My boyfriend Jonathon dragged me away. He’s not really my boyfriend, but he likes to think he is. I’d asked him to keep an eye on me because I didn’t know what was going to happen. I didn’t tell him anything about Lydia, of course. I told him it was about buying some grass, and I told him to stay out of sight. While you were in the bathroom with the gun, he came to the door of the restaurant, and he was kind of mad. He said he knew that something was going on between you and me and he was going to confront you. I told him not to be stupid, but he wouldn’t listen. I didn’t want any trouble, especially with the gun and all, so I went with him to keep him quiet. That’s how it happened. Honest…”
This was all said in a girlish rush, quite unlike her more confrontational manner on the earlier occasion. Except, come to think of it, that moment when she had turned on the Little Girl Lost look under the lamppost. If the boyfriend had seen that, he might have thought he had cause for alarm. Now, having protested her innocence, Andrea looked at me as if eagerly anticipating my next contribution to the dialogue.
“And while you were waiting for me tonight,” I said, “you got tired, took off all your clothes, and crawled into my bed—just like Snow White and Goldilocks and Little Red Riding Hood and all that fairy-tale jailbait.”
“They didn’t take off their clothes, did they?” she said.
“That’s what their attorneys would like you to believe,” I told her. “Anyway, what are you doing in my bed?”
“I wanted to surprise you,” she said.
“Congratulations. You managed that.”
“And I wanted to show you I was sorry for what happened.”
Now the look was contrite, in a kittenish kind of way that wouldn’t have fooled Samba.
“It looks to me like the apology you have in mind doesn’t exactly fit the crime.”
She giggled.
Deep down, a little voice told me, “Get her out of here before you start telling her about your collection of Buddy Holly 78s.” The fact remained, though, that this tantalizing bundle of enzymes, X chromosomes, and hormonal signifiers undoubtedly had answers to questions that had a bearing on the case I had been hired to solve. Another voice from somewhere in the left side of the brain argued, “Take it easy. You’re supposed to be a man of the universe, able to handle any kind of situation a little bimbo like this can throw at you. Make her sing. Just don’t lay a finger on her.”
Easy for the left side of the brain to say.
“So that’s all you’re here for?” I said. “To apologize?”
“That’s right,” she said, kittenish again, though there was something counterfeit about her come-and-get-me purr. I had the feeling that she hadn’t done anything remotely like this before. Still, she kept trying.
“Why don’t you sit over here?” she said, patting the edge of the bed.
“First, a couple of questions. Have you heard from Lydia, or seen her, since we last talked?”
She shook her head.
“Where have you been since you disappeared from the restaurant the other night?”
“Well, I had to go back to Jonny’s place. I had to show him—you know…”
“You had to apologize?”
She giggled.
“You’ve got a dirty mind,” she said.
“So you apologized to Jonny,” I said, “and where have you been since then?”
“Mostly in my apartment.”
“I tried you there several times. You never picked up.”
“Well, a girl doesn’t just sit by the phone all day long waiting for Prince Charming. I’m in school. I had classes.”
I took a gamble.
“I checked with school. You haven’t attended class in two days.”
She was clearly unnerved by this.
“You don’t even know where I go to school,” she said, petulant now.
“Sure I do. I know that Lydia tried to get you to apply to Teddington, but you chose NYU.”
“The school doesn’t give out private information,” she said.
“Depends who you know,” I told her. “In my line of work, you get to know a lot of people in useful positions at places like NYU.”
“So what if I took time off?” she said, rattled.
“What did you do with your time off?”
“None of your business,” she said.
Now the expression was wounded pride.
“Maybe it is my business. You’ve lied to me at least once, so how can I be sure you weren’t hanging out with Lydia?”
“I don’t know where she is.”
“Did Jerry Pedrosian send you here tonight?”
Now she mimed exasperation.
“I don’t know Jerry Pedrosian. You know that. I’ve only met him a couple of times.”
“So who sent you?”
“Nobody sent me. I came because I wanted to see you.”
“Oh, yeah—I forgot. You wanted to apologize.”
“Not anymore,” she said angrily.
With that, she threw off the covers and sat up.
“Good idea,” I said, trying not to appear too interested in what was now revealed. In reality, despite my display of self-restraint, I had not been able to suppress the instinct to fantasize about what I would find if I had crawled under the sheets with her, and had not been far off the mark.
“Get dressed and get out of he
re,” I told her.
I thought there was a better chance of that happening if I wasn’t hanging around pretending not to be a voyeur, so I went to the kitchen and poured myself a drink. When I came back, Andrea was seated on the edge of the bed. She was still stark naked except for cotton panties.
“I am legal, you know,” she said.
“You’re what?”
“I’m eighteen years old. Nineteen next week. You wouldn’t get into trouble.”
She looked down at her body, coyly, as if asking me to agree that it was not entirely unpalatable. Again, I had the feeling that there was something a shade counterfeit about this. It was like being at a rehearsal of a show in which the lead actress hasn’t quite got under the skin of the character yet. Andrea had the physical attributes to become a seductress, but the experience wasn’t there, though under other circumstances it would have been easy to overlook that little detail.
“That’s it,” I said. “I’m getting out of here right now. I’m going to walk around a couple of blocks, and when I get back, if you’re still here, I’m going to throw you out onto the street, even if you don’t have a stitch on.”
I left and walked to Abingdon Square Park, from where I had a view of my front door. Andrea emerged after about ten minutes and headed east on 12th Street. I followed at a discreet distance. At Bleecker she turned south, then headed east again on Christopher. She stopped at Village Cigars, probably to buy cigarettes, then crossed 7th Avenue to the Sheridan Square newsstand, where she bought a magazine. I waited to see if she would head down into the subway, and she did just that. I ran down the steps at another entrance, on the west side of 7th Avenue, just in time to see her push through the turnstile and head for the uptown platform. I felt in my pocket and found I was out of tokens. I would have vaulted the turnstile, but there was a traffic cop right there. People have been shot for less. By the time I had purchased a token, I could hear an uptown train pulling into the station, and by the time I reached the platform it was just a pattern of lights disappearing into the tunnel.
Good Girl, Bad Girl (An Alex Novalis Novel) Page 9
