Andrea looked dejected.
“She’s still my friend. I don’t want to see something bad happening to her.”
“Would she be as worried if she thought something bad might happen to you?”
“Of course!”
I let her think about it for a while, then said, “Okay, I apologize. I thought for a while you were maybe the bad girl.”
Tears welled up in Andrea’s eyes again.
“If you’d taken advantage of my stupidity last night,” she said, “you’d have been only the second guy I ever had sex with.”
On that sobering thought, I changed the subject.
“So how are you supposed to report back to Pedrosian?” I asked.
“And what do I tell him?”
“Well, let’s take those one at a time. Is there a plan with Pedrosian?”
“He said he would get in touch with me when I had something to tell him. I asked him how he would know when that was. He said, ‘Don’t worry—I’ll know.’ He made it sound kind of threatening. I feel he could show up at any moment, and then what?”
“If he really cares about Lydia’s well-being, nothing bad is going to happen to you.”
I thought of some of the things that had happened to me in the previous couple of days, and hoped I was right. Probably Pedrosian had known Andrea was in my apartment, and someone—either Pedrosian or somebody he had assigned—could have followed her when she left, though I had seen nothing suspicious as I trailed her.
“When you came uptown to your parents’ apartment,” I asked, “did you call the service and give your whereabouts?”
She shook her head.
“I was getting too freaked out.”
That meant there was at least some chance Pedrosian did not know where Andrea was.
I laid it on the line for her.
“Do you really want to help Lydia?”
“Of course.”
“Even though you know she’s trouble—big trouble—and maybe in big trouble.”
Andrea looked frightened. The truth was, I didn’t know if Lydia really was big trouble, or in big trouble, or just a pain in the ass. And I still wasn’t totally sure about Andrea, but I needed to get her reaction. She was confused.
“I don’t want anything bad happening,” she said.
“So are you willing to help me?”
“Help you how?”
“I’ll have to figure that out, but remember you’re our one possible bridge to Lydia, so if she is in trouble…”
“What do you want me to do?”
I told her to go back to her parents’ apartment and stay put till I got in touch.
“Okay, but don’t call their phone. I still have my own line in my old room.”
She gave me the number.
“Who uses it now?” I asked. “Barbie and Ken?”
Andrea giggled. I liked that giggle a lot.
“Or call me at the office,” I said. “You can always leave a message there.”
THIRTEEN
So it was the good old good girl, bad girl scenario. The problem was that I wasn’t sure which was which. Sitting there in the coffee shop with Andrea, I had wanted to believe everything she was telling me. Even after she was no longer there, I was pretty sure that the story she had just laid on me had many elements of truth to it, but it would take only one deliberately embedded lie to throw the whole thing off.
I stopped at a phone booth and called the number she had given me for the message service. When a woman answered, I asked, “Does this account belong to Jerry Pedrosian?” The woman said, “I’m sorry, sir, we can’t give out that information.”
Then I had a moment of inspiration.
“Does this account belong to Michigan J. Frog?”
I could tell by the woman’s attempt to stifle a laugh that I had hit pay dirt. I was tempted to leave a message for Pedrosian, but that would compromise everything.
I took a subway downtown and went to my office to check my own messages. The third one was interesting. It was a male voice that I didn’t recognize. Definitely not Pedrosian’s, but I suspected the message had originated with him.
“We’ve been trying to warn you to mind your own business. Seems you’re a bit thick, so let me spell it out for you. Lay off, or else.”
My conversation with Andrea had made me curious about what kind of picture of Lydia I’d get if I contacted her school. I called Teddington and explained that I was the investigator who had been hired to look into Lydia’s disappearance and was bounced around between administrative flacks until I finally spoke to an assistant dean.
“Lydia is a lovely girl,” she said, “and extremely gifted. We thought she was rather quiet at first, but in fact, she’s just extraordinarily self-possessed. She doesn’t commit herself until she has something worth saying, if you understand me. If she has one failing, it’s perhaps that she’s a trifle over-confident.”
“In what way?” I asked.
“How shall I put it? She’s so determined to play a leadership role among her peers that she sometimes pushes a trifle too hard. But she’s great fun and everyone here loves her.”
“Does she have any special friends at Teddington?”
The woman paused.
“That’s a difficult question to answer. She’s been here just over one semester, and it takes time to forge those lifelong friendships that are among the cherished legacies of a school like Teddington. But Lydia’s an extremely popular girl.”
“What,” I asked, “is her major?”
“At Teddington, we don’t have majors. We believe in a broad, liberal education.”
“Does Lydia have any areas in which she excels?”
“Oh, many areas. She tends to be at her best in fields that involve participation—debate for example. Last semester she was quite the star of a weeklong experimental workshop devoted to the subject of the interplay among art, politics, and society, emphasizing the potential role the artistic impulse can play in the community at large.”
“That would have been Jerry Pedrosian’s course?”
“Why yes. Do you know Mr. Pedrosian?”
“Lydia’s father mentioned his course.”
“I imagine he told you how much Lydia enjoyed it.”
“He did say something of the sort. Could you tell me more about that course? What was Mr. Pedrosian’s point of view?”
“I didn’t personally attend any of the sessions, but my understanding is that he took the viewpoint that art should play an essentially subversive role, so that the social contract does not ossify into a rigid set of rules.”
“And how does the school feel about that point of view?”
“You must understand,” said the vice-dean, “that Teddington embraces intellectual plurality. We appreciate that Mr. Pedrosian’s position is somewhat controversial, but we’re rather fond of him, if I may say so. He has been a regular visitor to our campus for several years now, and is the kind of hands-on person we like to bring our girls into contact with.”
There were more assurances of Lydia’s talents and popularity, then I thanked the vice-dean for her time. What she had told me between the lines was pretty much what I had expected to hear.
Lydia Kravitz was a handful.
Five minutes later, the phone rang. It was Janice.
“You know,” she said, “this is one reason why you were always so difficult to live with.”
I asked what I’d done now.
“Nutty things happen when you’re around,” she said. “I just got a phone call telling me to call you to tell you to look out your window. What kind of bullshit is that? If someone wants you to look out the window, fine, but why the hell call me?”
The same blond girl was standing in the park, in the same spot I had seen her before. Lydia? I still couldn’t be sure, but it certainly seemed probable. She was looking up at my window, but the moment she was sure I had seen her, she turned and walked slowly away. This time, though, I saw something else. As she drew along
side the pavilion that faces onto 17th Street, she passed very close to a guy with long hair. Maybe she said something to him, or maybe he just took note of her departure, because as soon as she had passed, he looked up at my window.
This time, I didn’t rush out, but instead let it go for a while, unobtrusively checking from time to time to make sure the guy was still there. After about half an hour, I went downstairs and left the building, crossed to the park, and walked toward the pavilion. I saw now that it was the hippie kid I had first seen at the Mafioso bar, arguing with Marty Wolfe—the same kid who had sat opposite me, with his girlfriends, when I took a subway downtown after being at the newspaper room. He was pretending to read Rolling Stone. I half-expected him to take off when he saw me, but he didn’t budge. I paid him no attention and kept going toward the southeast corner of the square. I stopped outside S. Klein, to light a cigarette and to check out if he was following me. He was still pretending to read the magazine, but now he was doing it outside the Union Square Savings Bank. I led him toward the grunge of the Lower East Side, went a couple of blocks south on 2nd Avenue then turned east, headed for Avenue A. When I got there, I rounded the corner and ducked behind a parked truck. As the kid pulled alongside, cursing himself for losing me, I stepped out, grabbed his denim jacket with both hands, put a knee in his groin, and butted him hard in the face with my head. I felt blood spurt from his nose and he went down on his knees, squealing in pain and holding his hands to his face. A semiautomatic—one of those little Rugers—had spilled out onto the sidewalk. I scooped it up and put it in my pocket. I could see there was a wallet in the back pocket of his jeans, so I grabbed that and ran.
Just another Tompkins Square mugging.
It wasn’t easy to find a taxi on the Lower East Side in those days, but I got lucky and rode back to my office. By now, I suspected, someone else was probably watching the building, but that was too bad.
I went through the wallet and discovered that it contained drivers’ licenses from three different states—New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and California—in three different names. There was also a selection of credit cards to match those licenses, and almost three hundred bucks in mixed bills—a lot of cash for a hippie to be carrying, unless he was dealing. There was a plastic sleeve containing snapshots taken at antiwar demonstrations and some kind of an SDS event. His two girlfriends were in a couple of these photos, but no Lydia, and no Pedrosian. There was a folded scrap of paper with what appeared to be some kind of code or shorthand scrawled on it, and a card, the size of a business card, to which the number 1151 had been applied in red with a rubber stamp. I knew what that was, and kept it aside for later use.
Next, I checked the pistol. It had a full clip and a round in the breech. I opened the safe and was about to put it in with its twin, then changed my mind and instead took out the ankle holster that had been in the Bloomingdale’s bag, strapped it to my leg, slipped the hippie’s gun into place, and adjusted my Wranglers. It felt strange. I hadn’t been fully dressed in a couple of years.
Next I paid a call on Olga. Today she was wearing white running shorts and an orange T-shirt cut off just below the breasts, displaying abs Lionel Hampton could have used for a set of vibes.
I asked her where she got her tan, and she told me I was free to use her sunlamp anytime. I said that what I needed to do right then was to borrow her window. Olga was not the type to ask dumb questions, and invited me to go right ahead. Nothing out there in the park seemed immediately suspicious.
Before I left, Olga mentioned, “Your friend Detective Campbell stopped by earlier.”
I asked if he’d inquired after me.
“Your name came up,” she said. “I asked him in for a spot of petrissage—told him he’d find it relaxing. He said he wasn’t permitted to relax while on duty, but he stuck around a while to look. He seemed especially interested in my shorts, or maybe he just didn’t want to look me in the eye. Anyway, there was some small talk of the kind that happens when someone is looking for an excuse to keep on looking, and your name came up. That was about it.”
I thanked her and returned to my office. The phone was ringing as I came through the door. It was Mrs. Kravitz. She told me she was worried. She hadn’t heard from her husband in more that twenty-four hours, and nobody at his New York office or his Cleveland office had any idea where he was.
I asked if he had a girlfriend. Mrs. Kravitz was predictably annoyed by the question.
“None of your business,” she said.
“You told me,” I reminded her, “that after you won the beauty contest you began to meet people with interesting tastes. Was Gabe one of them?”
“I don’t see what that’s got to do with the present situation.”
“Let’s not be silly. I think you do.”
There was a silence at the other end of the line, then she said, “Well, if you must know, Gabe does have a side that you might call kinky. I was able to keep him happy for a long time, but then—well, let’s say I grew out of it. I don’t know if he did. Probably not, but I imagine that if he gets the itch once in a while, he pays for someone’s services. There are places you can go for that sort of thing.”
“What sort of thing would that be?”
“C’mon,” she said. “Enough’s enough. I didn’t have to tell you that much and it doesn’t have any bearing. With Lydia missing, he’s not going to be whoring around.”
“So, do you still want me to call off the case?”
“Of course not. I was concerned that getting an investigator involved was stirring things up and making them worse. Now I’m beginning to think it’s time to call in the police.”
I told her not just yet.
“Why not? This is getting to be a big deal. My husband’s a very wealthy man. He could be subject to all kinds of extortion attempts. Kidnapping, blackmail…”
“And who would blackmail him?”
She said nothing.
“Someone familiar with his interesting tastes?” I asked.
“Listen,” she said, “I don’t even know if he’s into anything anymore.”
“But if he is, I can think of some situations that would be embarrassing all around.”
She thought about that.
“Okay, maybe it’s too soon to go to the police,” she said, “but I don’t know how much longer I can let this go. You don’t seem to be getting anywhere.”
“Investigations seldom travel in a straight line,” I said, “and there’s no point in encouraging exaggerated expectations before they’re justified.”
“Whatever that means,” she said. “Sounds like double-talk bullshit to me.”
Mrs. Kravitz was not a stupid woman. I told her to try to take it easy, and to let me know the moment she heard anything. I would do likewise.
She had barely hung up when the phone rang again. It was Andrea, and she was just one whiff short of hysterical.
“Someone tried to kill me!” she said.
“Calm down. What happened?”
“Calm down? Someone tried to run me over!”
“What were you doing out on the street?” I asked.
“My mother asked me to go to Gristedes to pick up some groceries. I could hardly refuse without making her suspicious. I headed up toward Broadway, and I was crossing the street when suddenly this car came straight at me.”
“Are you sure it wasn’t an accident?”
“It had pulled out from a parking space, and it came right at me—fast. I don’t know how it missed me. Either I just jumped out of the way in time, or he swerved away at the last moment—but he wanted to kill me, or at least to scare the shit out of me.”
“The driver was definitely a man?”
“I think so.”
“Jerry Pedrosian?”
“I didn’t get a good look at him. It all happened in a flash.”
“What kind of car?”
“Big old American car. Bright red.”
I wanted to believe her story, though I
had to admit to a shadow of doubt. The bright red car, though. If this was a story someone had fed her, would they include that detail, since it matched Pedrosian’s car? I decided I had to trust her.
“Where are you now?” I asked.
“The subway station at 72nd and Broadway.”
“Okay, take a train to Columbus Circle. Walk west on 58th Street and you’ll come to an entrance to the Henry Hudson Hotel. Wait for me there, near the desk. If anyone bothers you, tell them you’re waiting for your big brother, and clam up.”
“What should I do about my parents?”
“Let them stew for a while. It’ll be character-building for your mother. Maybe give her some ideas for her next book.”
“And what about clothes?” she asked. “Am I supposed to spend the rest of my life in this stupid Lord & Taylor shirtwaist thing?”
I nearly blew my stack at that. Here was a girl with a distorted sense of priorities. Then I found myself softening. I wanted to trust Andrea, and, on reflection, that outburst had helped me to do just that. After all, a preoccupation with clothes, however misguided, was not likely to be prominent in the thoughts of someone who was bent on helping to set up my downfall. That, at least, was what I told myself.
I asked if there was any way I could get into her apartment. She told me she would ring the doorman and tell him to let me in.
Fifteen minutes later, I was in Andrea’s apartment, or rather her great-aunt’s. It was small but comfortable, with minimal furniture. The bedroom contained a double bed and a chest of drawers, and there was a walk-in closet. On a bedside table were two framed photographs of Andrea and Lydia together. In one, they were about fourteen or fifteen, posing on the beach in the kind of bikinis only teenagers have the right to wear. The other had been taken at their high school graduation. In addition, there was a formal portrait of Lydia, backlit and moody.
The living room contained a small dining table, some straight-backed chairs, and a Corbusier recliner, as well as a bookcase filled with volumes that ranged from Beckett to “P. G.” Wodehouse. There was a kitchenette, provided with the bare minimum of pots and pans, and a file of take-out menus, plus a tiny bathroom with a shower stall. It was the kind of apartment that all great-aunts should have available to them when they visit New York.
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