The frustration and anticlimax made me realize how beat I was. I returned to my place and drank the scotch I had poured for myself while Andrea was there. I tried to come up with a plan for the next day, but my brain refused to cooperate. It was more interested in conjuring up the image of Andrea, sitting there naked on the edge of my bed. I tried watching TV to distract myself. Ethel Merman on Johnny Carson. A George O’Brien oater on Channel Eleven.
I undressed and got into bed. The smell of the sheets was intoxicating. Samba jumped up beside me and purred.
TWELVE
I had a feeling I should know much more about Andrea Marshall, so the next morning I decided to pay a surprise visit to her parents. I had found out from my pal Mike at the Post that they were both writers, so it was a safe bet they worked at home, but I called first to make sure someone was there. When a woman with a Seven Sisters accent answered, I said, “Sorry, wrong number.”
Seldon Marshall was an author of action yarns. Starting before Pearl Harbor, he had made his name churning out formulaic short stories and serials for the Saturday Evening Post and other weeklies, then in the 1950s, he had written The Last Sortie, which was considered a minor classic of World War II fiction. Since then, it had been mostly downhill but a couple of his stories had been made into movies. Alyson Marshall was responsible for a string of historical novels, typically set in eighteenth-century England or Colonial America, that were fixtures in the middle range of the New York Times best-sellers list. The Marshalls’ apartment was on West End Avenue in an ugly mansion block just above 72nd Street. The doorman was ugly, too, but looked like he might be amenable to a bribe. With that in mind, I had bought a bouquet of roses at a florist on Broadway. Now I waved a five-dollar bill in the doorman’s face and said, “I’m Mrs. Marshall’s agent. It’s her birthday and I want to surprise her.”
“I thought her birthday was last month,” said Wesley. His name was on a plastic tag pinned to his jacket.
“That’s right,” I said, “but this is her official birthday. Writers have real birthdays and official birthdays, like the Queen of England. It’s for publicity purposes.”
Wes said he wished he had two birthdays. I said, “Me, too. What was that apartment number again?”
I took the elevator to the eleventh floor, tossed the roses into the garbage chute, found the door marked F, and rang the bell. It was answered by Andrea, who did a double take worthy of Oliver Hardy.
I was kind of surprised to see her, too.
“You’re not going to tell them, are you?” she whispered.
“Don’t worry,” I assured her. “I’m not here to make waves.”
“Who is it, dear?” a woman called from somewhere inside the apartment.
“It’s the man I was telling you about,” Andrea called back. “Mr. Novalis. The investigator who’s looking for Lydia.”
It was another of those sprawling Upper West Side apartments, with mellow woodwork and a lot of rooms. Andrea, who was dressed in a demure shirtwaist dress, ushered me into a big, brightly lit sitting room, furnished with a mix of low-key British antiques and comfortable soft chairs upholstered in expensive-looking floral prints. It made me think of 1930s photographs—Ethel Barrymore at home, or Mr. and Mrs. Cole Porter in the sunroom of their rented villa at Antibes. Alyson Marshall sat in one of the easy chairs, a notebook resting on her lap. She wore a white silk blouse with a pleated cream-colored skirt, and it was easy to see where Andrea’s looks came from, though Mrs. Marshall’s demeanor in no way betrayed the fact that she was the author of bodice rippers tailored to the fantasies of pre-feminist housewives.
I guessed Mrs. Marshall was in her early forties. Her husband, who appeared to be close to twenty years her senior, sat to her right, in a motorized wheelchair. I later learned that he had suffered a serious back injury in the war while crash-landing an Avenger on the deck of a heaving escort carrier during the buildup to the Battle of Okinawa. He was a big man, in a tweed suit and a dark shirt, a polka-dot bow tie, and brown suede brogues. An artfully folded breast pocket handkerchief matched the bow tie. Seldon Marshall seemed somehow overdressed for a man in a wheelchair in his own home.
He greeted me with the kind of curt nod often favored by strong silent types in his novels. Mrs. Marshall was more forthcoming.
“How nice of you to stop by,” she said. “Mr. Novalis, is it?”
“Alex Novalis. I was in the neighborhood.”
“I wonder why Wes didn’t announce you?” she wondered.
“He was having trouble with the intercom,” I told her.
“We’ll have to look into that,” she said. “Very annoying. Will you remind me to report it to the board, Sel?”
Her husband made a noise like a seal swallowing a mackerel tossed by a zookeeper.
I glanced at Andrea, who looked about as comfortable as a poodle in a cage full of pit bulls. Alyson Marshall looked at her, too, a tight smile on her lips, then turned back to me.
“Andrea has indeed mentioned you,” she said. “You are the person who the Kravitzes have hired?”
She managed to make “person” sound like a dirty word. “Hired” also had a less-than-savory ring to it.
“I’ve been engaged to find Lydia,” I said. “I’ve talked to Andrea, and she’s been very helpful.”
“I presume you mean that in a purely idiomatic way,” said Mrs. Marshall, “since, of course, she knows nothing about Lydia’s disappearance.”
“That’s precisely what she told me,” I said.
Mrs. Marshall looked at Andrea again.
“Why don’t you go to your room, dear?” she said.
She spoke to her daughter as if she were a four-year-old. Andrea disappeared, gratefully, as if she’d been let off with a ten-dollar fine and community service.
There was a transition. I was offered tea or coffee. I declined.
“I’m afraid this has been a bit of a wasted journey for you,” said Mrs. Marshall.
“I thought,” I said, “that you and your husband might be able to offer some perspective that could have escaped Andrea.”
Mrs. Marshall sighed. Mr. Marshall rolled his eyes.
“I’m afraid we have nothing to add,” she said.
“No idea where Lydia might be?”
“It’s been some time seen we’ve seen her.”
“But she and Andrea have remained in touch?”
“Until recently, unfortunately.”
“Why, unfortunately?”
“Andrea’s a good girl,” said Mrs. Marshall.
I had been waiting for that.
“When she and Lydia first became friends,” she continued, “we thought it was an appropriate relationship. We continued to think so until two—perhaps three—years ago. I hate to speak ill of people, but poor Lydia changed. Almost overnight she became a different person, what I can only call a bad influence. I know that adolescents go through these phases, but with Lydia it was something more. Again, I’m reluctant to say such a thing, but it was as if she had the mark of evil on her. You might find that novelistic, but then I am a novelist and I honor my craft. I don’t know if you believe in evil, but to me it is something very real, something tangible that curdles the soul. Lydia has that quality of curdling the soul. What makes it so much worse is that she appears to be such an innocent. An angel. It’s an illusion.”
“Can you be more specific?” I asked.
Mrs. Marshall shook her head.
“So many things,” she said, “but I don’t want this to be a case of j’accuse. Perhaps there are mitigating circumstances. Her mother, for example. Marion Kravitz. We liked her well enough at first. She appeared to be the model parent, elected to the school’s council, active in a variety of activities. But then…”
“Then?”
“It’s not appropriate for me to discuss. My problems with Marion are irrelevant to the matter at hand, except to the extent that they lead me to cite Lydia as an example of a bad seed. I’m sorry about the girl
’s disappearance, and I hope that nothing terrible has happened to her, such as you read about in the newspapers, but if she’s out of Andrea’s life—and Andrea assures me she is—then I can only give thanks to the Almighty. One thing you can be sure of, anything you hear from Andrea is the truth. She’s one of those people who is incapable of not telling the truth. And now, if you’ll excuse us, both my husband and I have strict work schedules that must be adhered to.”
“And let me add,” said Seldon Marshall in a hoarse whisper, “if you drag my daughter into this filthy mess, I will personally see to it that you never have children as long as you live. I may be in a wheelchair, but to a marine, that’s a minor inconvenience. I can still kill you with my bare hands. And when it’s over, you’ll thank me.”
Mrs. Marshall gave me another of her tight smiles, and called out, “Andrea, your guest is leaving.”
“Guest” seemed like an odd choice of words.
Andrea appeared, looking shell-shocked.
“I’ll see you out,” she said.
I said my polite farewells to her parents, and followed her to the apartment’s front door.
“Give me an hour,” she whispered. “I can’t run out immediately or they’ll be suspicious. There’s a coffee shop on Broadway called Benny’s. Meet me there.”
I spotted her as she crossed the northbound lanes from Broadway’s center divider where old ladies out of a Sholem Aleichem story sat on benches dreaming of their final destination, which for the time being was probably Zabar’s. Even in that demure shirtwaist number, Andrea looked delectable—one of those girls who can’t help projecting sensuality.
I had been sitting near the window so I would see her, but now we moved to a booth in the back with more privacy. Andrea ordered chamomile tea and a muffin.
“God, you gave me a scare,” she said. “Do you know what they’d have done to me if you had mentioned a word about last night?”
I told her I could imagine.
“I presume they gave you the Andrea’s-a-good-girl routine?”
“Incapable of telling a lie.”
“They’re kind of old school.”
“I’m amazed they let you have your own apartment.”
“It’s my great-aunt’s. She lives in Mexico and only uses the place a couple of weeks a year. She specifically made it available to me—a graduation gift. It would have been hard for them to refuse.”
I asked what she wanted from me now, while wondering why I somehow felt empathy for this girl who had given me the runaround and then pulled a Lolita stunt. I also wondered if empathy was the right word.
“Well, first of all,” she said, “let me apologize for last night. What I did was really dumb.”
“Let’s not get into the apologies again,” I told her.
She blushed.
“I’ll tell you what really happened,” she said.
Her tone was down-to-earth. I wanted to think it was believable.
“Most of what I told you that first evening was true. Lydia came to my apartment last weekend, we went to a party, she went off with Jerry, I found the gun in her bag. All that’s the way it happened, and it’s also true that I haven’t seen her since. The part about Jonathon being jealous and dragging me away from the restaurant, that was true, too. He said he’d seen the way I looked at you and he knew that something was going on. Anyway, I spent most of the next day at his place because I was scared and didn’t know what to do or where to go. I didn’t go back to my apartment until yesterday, early afternoon. Jerry Pedrosian was waiting for me.”
“In your apartment?”
“No. He was waiting on a stoop nearby.”
“How did he know you’d be there at that time?”
“Okay, I told you I haven’t seen Lydia, and that’s true. And I haven’t spoken to her, but she gave me a number where I could leave messages for her. She wanted me to keep calling in to leave word of where I would be. I called in when I was going to meet you that first time. I called to let her know I was at Jonny’s, and I told her you had the gun. I called to tell her I was headed back to my own apartment. You get the picture. If Lydia was with Pedrosian, or if he was in touch with her, he had the means of knowing where I would be pretty much all the time.”
“Can I have that number?”
She fished it out of her purse and I copied it into my notebook.
“It’s an answering service,” she said. “When you call, you can hear a bunch of women taking calls in the background.”
“So Jerry waylaid you…”
“Yeah. We sat on a bench near the Women’s House of Detention, with all the whores screaming at us out of the windows. Jerry had a guy with him, like a bodyguard—red hair, army fatigues—walking up and down on the sidewalk like he was some kind of a lookout. Jerry told me what he wanted me to do. He said that Lydia was in danger because of the investigation that her father had started. He wouldn’t tell me what kind of danger, but he said that you had to be neutralized. That was the word he used—neutralized. If I was truly Lydia’s friend, he said, and if I really wanted to help her, I would worm my way into your confidence and find out what you knew.”
“So he suggested you seduce me for starters?”
Andrea blushed again.
“I asked him how I was supposed to go about that. He looked me over and grinned and said he was sure I’d think of something. He said that with someone like you it was the best way. Said it was surefire. The problem was I’ve never done anything like that. I asked myself, how do things like that happen in the movies? I mean, maybe like that scene in The Graduate, but flip-flopped? You know? Younger girl, older guy. Not that you’re as old as Mrs. Robinson, of course…”
“Thanks a lot.”
“But I guess I couldn’t cut it,” she said. “Lydia would have known what to do. She always had a thing about older guys, like Jerry. She says they’re more interesting. I see guys like that looking at me on the street. I know what those looks mean, but…”
Again, the irresistible blush.
“I just didn’t know what to do next,” she said.
“No need to apologize,” I said, which made her giggle. I had a sense that there had been a useful hookup of neurons inside her brain since this conversation had started. I would have liked to dwell on the consequences down the road, but it was time to get back to business.
“Did Pedrosian tell you what he wanted you to find out about me?”
“He wanted to know how much you knew about him and Lydia.”
I didn’t buy that. Much too vague.
“Do you have any idea what’s going on between them—Lydia and Jerry Pedrosian?”
She shook her head.
“Why are they in hiding?”
“I wish I knew. I don’t like it that Lydia’s disappeared.”
“And what’s the deal with the gun?” I asked. “Why did she have a gun in her bag?”
“I haven’t the faintest,” said Andrea. “All I can tell you is that ever since she met Jerry Pedrosian, she’s been different. It’s not that we stopped being friends, but it hasn’t been the same. She’s been very secretive. It used to be that we told each other about everything. And I mean everything. When she slept with a guy, she would give me so much detail I would almost feel like I’d slept with him myself. But not Jerry.”
“So she was a bad girl, just like your mother says?”
“I guess we both were a little naughty, but she was naughtier.”
I decided to try something from out of left field.
“And how did she get pregnant?”
Andrea was shocked.
“How do you know about that?”
“Lydia’s mother told me.”
“Marion fucking Kravitz is a bitch, but I didn’t think she was that big a bitch! About her own daughter! Lydia would kill her!”
A waitress with glasses on a silver chain asked Andrea to keep her voice down. Andrea glared into space.
“You don’t have to te
ll me if you don’t want to,” I said.
“What’s the difference,” said Andrea. “Lydia told her mother that it was some French kid she’d met at the beach, but she told me it was a friend of her father’s. Her mother took her to Aruba for an abortion.”
“What did she tell her father?”
“Her father never knew about it.”
“And Mrs. Kravitz said there was some problem with drugs.”
Andrea hit the ceiling again.
“I’ll strangle that woman! She had no right to tell you! Miss Ashley found one measly joint in my locker at school—half a joint, really—that Lydia and I had been sharing. Half a joint was how much was left after three days, smoking it one puff at a time. But it was a big scandal. Lydia owned up, but I got most of the blame. I nearly got thrown out of school.”
“Which does help explain why Mrs. Kravitz doesn’t see you as a steadying influence.”
“Marion Kravitz doesn’t like me. Ever since I started—uh—filling out, she’s had it in for me.”
“And what about Mr. Kravitz? You said once he was creepy.”
“Did I say that?”
“That’s what you said—a bit creepy.”
She thought about it.
“He tries too hard to be helpful,” she said. “He was always taking me and Lydia on trips. He would take us sailing, horseback riding. Once, when I was having problems with calculus, he offered to coach me. Mrs. Kravitz shot that idea down.”
“I thought he wore the pants in the household?”
“Depends which pants you’re talking about. There are pants for every occasion. Some of them come with lacey bits around the edges.”
She said this with a certain tartness that I found odd.
“So how do you feel about Lydia now?” I asked.
“What do you mean? Lydia’s my best friend.”
“Yes, but she’s the one who’s getting you into all kinds of trouble. At least it seems that way to me.”
Good Girl, Bad Girl (An Alex Novalis Novel) Page 10
