I took five minutes to look around for anything that might have bearing on the case. In the walk-in closet I found what I immediately realized must be Lydia’s overnight bag, the one in which Andrea had found the gun. It was dark blue, with a zipper. At first glance, it contained nothing of great interest—a pair of sneakers, some clothing, a couple of schoolbooks, current copies of Vogue and Harper’s. One of the books was a paperback of The Catcher in the Rye, and as I picked it up, a folded sheet of paper fell out. On it was a map or diagram of some kind, crudely sketched and accompanied by a key written in the same code or shorthand that I had found on the scrap of paper in the hippie’s wallet.
I put it in my pocket and began to pick out some clothes for Andrea, enjoying the task a little more than I should have. I packed my choices in a small suitcase and headed uptown, deliberately taking an indirect route that included the Port Authority Bus Terminal—a good place to shake anybody who might be following—a further detour through Peek-a-Boo Books on 42nd Street, then a taxi to the Park Central Hotel, where I exited by the rear entrance before finishing my journey to the Henry Hudson on foot.
The Henry Hudson Hotel began life as a residence for young women, since then it has gone through a number of transformations. In 1968, it had a mixed clientele that included a sizable number of African Americans, many with showbiz aspirations, and gay men of all races, including members of the Warhol crowd. I figured it was not the first place anyone would think of to look for me and Andrea. She seemed relieved to see me. I checked us in, asking for a room with two beds, which caused the clerk to raise an eyebrow.
“Do you think Mom will call tonight?” Andrea threw in casually. “Does she know we’re in town yet?”
The girl was catching on.
Our room was near the top of the building, with a window that overlooked 57th Street near the intersection with Broadway. It was hardly luxurious—funky even—but clean, there was a TV, and it was big enough to hole up in for a while without going stir crazy.
“Where do I sleep?” Andrea asked.
“I’ll take the bed closest to the door,” I said.
Andrea looked at me quizzically.
“Is that to stop me making a run for it,” she asked, “or to be ready when somebody bursts in with a gun in their hand?”
“A bit of both,” I told her.
She began to unpack the clothes I had brought for her, laying them out on the bed.
“I guess you do think I’m sexy.” She giggled.
I liked that giggle more every time I heard it. She asked me to turn my back. When she said it was okay to turn around again, she was dressed in a denim miniskirt and a T-shirt—pretty much the outfit she had had on that first evening.
“Was that true,” I asked, “that you’ve only slept with one guy?”
I should have left that alone, but my curiosity had gotten the better of me.
She just smiled and said she was hungry, so we looked at the room service menu and ordered a couple of sandwiches and some beer. While we were waiting, I told her what had happened since I had left her in the coffee shop. There didn’t seem to be any sense in hiding it from her, whichever side she was on. She liked the part about me ambushing the hippie.
“You actually mugged the guy? You kneed him in the balls and you mugged him?”
She was impressed.
“You are useful to have around,” she said.
I showed her the scrap of paper, with the scribbled code, that I’d taken from the hippie, and the schematic map that I’d found inside Lydia’s copy of The Catcher in the Rye.
“She must have read that book a hundred times,” said Andrea. “She says she reads it when she gets down on herself.”
“But what about this writing?” I asked. “Seems to be some kind of code. Does it mean anything to you?”
“You bet your ass,” said Andrea. “That’s Lydia’s writing. You may find this hard to believe, but her mother began life as a typist-stenographer. I’ve told you how smart Lydia is. She’s one of those people who can pick up languages and stuff just like that—French, Italian. She went to Sweden one summer and came back talking fluent Swedish. A few years ago, she figured out that she could do her homework much quicker if she learned shorthand, so she got her mother to teach her.”
“Can you read it?”
“Are you kidding? Not me! But Lydia’s a wiz.”
Something occurred to her, and her expression changed.
“Does this mean she’s in real trouble? I mean, you took that paper from the hippie who was following you with a gun in his pants.”
Just then there was a knock on the door and I let the room service waiter in. He set us up, I tipped him, and he left.
“It means,” I said, “that’s she’s gotten herself mixed up with something potentially dangerous, but I still don’t know what.”
I showed her the card with the rubber-stamped number on it.
“Do you know what that is?” I said.
“I know Lydia has one. She told me it’s a membership card for some kind of a club.”
“A place called the Tea Bag,” I said. “A very private club with music and a lot of potheads. That’s why they call it the Tea Bag.”
We ate our sandwiches, and as I finished my beer, I saw that Andrea was staring at my right ankle. Seated at the room service trolley, I had let the cuffs of my jeans ride up, revealing the automatic in its holster.
“Now you’re wearing a gun,” she said. “That means that this is all real. That car really did try to kill me!”
“Or at least scare you.”
“Yeah, well it did that, but I was just beginning to kid myself that I’d been jaywalking or daydreaming or something. But you don’t believe that, do you?”
“Jerry Pedrosian has a red car, an old Pontiac.”
“Jesus! So we’re not here in this hotel room for a cozy chat about the weather.”
“And now,” I said, “I’ve got to go out for a while, so be good and don’t leave this room under any circumstances.”
She looked panicked.
“Where are you going?”
“I’m following up on a couple of leads.”
“What kind of leads?”
“I’ll tell you later.”
“Can’t I come with you?”
I told her no, and to avoid prolonging the scene I made for the door. She blocked my way, looked up into my eyes, and hugged me. As hugs go, this one got two thumbs up.
“Promise me,” she said, “that you’ll be careful.”
So why was it that I still didn’t completely trust the lovely Andrea? Maybe because I didn’t trust myself with the lovely Andrea, so I found it convenient to impute all kinds of sordid intentions to her. Or maybe because I couldn’t totally eradicate from my head the image of her picking up the house phone the moment I was out the door and calling Lydia or Pedrosian to check on her orders for the next few hours. For a moment, that image was so strong that I slipped the key back into the lock and silently opened the door. Andrea was on her bed, quietly crying. She sat up, with a look of pure happiness on her face.
“You changed your mind?”
“No,” I said, “I’ve got to go, but I wanted to say, make sure the door is locked and on the chain at all times.”
FOURTEEN
So I rode down in the elevator, feeling like a heel. I hung around the lobby for a while, to make sure that no one suspicious was getting his shoes shined, then walked to the Columbus Circle subway station and took a train down to the Village. The entrance to the Tea Bag was an anonymous-looking door next to a shoe store on 8th Street. To get in to the joint you had to go through the old Prohibition routine of knocking on the door and waiting for someone to check you out through a spy hole. I knocked and a voice from behind the door said, “Are you sure you’ve got the right place, brother?”
I held up the hippie’s card and said, “I’m here to see Otis.”
The guy behind the door still didn’t se
em sure, but he let me in. He was a big black guy in shades, a black T-shirt, black pants, black sneakers, and one brown glove.
“You sure you know Otis?” he said.
“Otis and I go way back,” I said.
That was true. I first met Otis in the holding cell when I was busted. We’d stayed in touch. I’d heard he was managing the Tea Bag, but hadn’t been there to see him till now. The bouncer directed me down a narrow flight of stairs, toward a lot of noise of the Stax variety, and a nimbus of aromatic smoke. At the bottom was a window with a reinforced glass panel that could be slid open. As I approached, the panel opened, a hand with a pink palm emerged, and we slapped some skin. Otis invited me into his office, offered me the choice between a joint the size of a baby’s forearm and a firkin of vodka, and asked why I hadn’t been around to see him before.
“I’m getting too old for these scenes,” I said. “Next birthday’s the big three-oh. Five years from now I won’t be able to trust myself.”
“I don’t trust myself now,” said Otis. “You should lay eyes on some of the good bait out there, man. And they’ll do anything you want for a nickel bag.”
We chatted for a couple of minutes and Otis said, “So you’re not here to buy, you’re not here to dance, and you’re not here to get laid. You must be working.”
I took out the rubber-stamped card and asked if there was any way of identifying who it had been issued to.
Otis shrugged.
“We just hand ’em out, man. A place like this, you don’t keep records.”
I showed him the snapshots of Lydia.
“Ever see this chick?”
He looked at the pictures, smiled, and nodded.
“Friend of yours?” he asked.
“I never met her.”
“Yeah, she’s been in here,” he said. “You don’t miss that chick. Comes in with an older guy who likes to hang out with cute young ass.”
“Who doesn’t,” I said, not without a pang of guilt. “What does this guy look like?”
“Reminds me some of that Steve McQueen dude. Thinks he’s hot shit.”
That sounded like Pedrosian.
“He comes here with other girls?”
“Yeah, but he’s been with this blond bitch the last few times. Man, she’s a wild one, and dishes out plenty sass. They were here last Friday or Saturday, and I had to have Mohommad throw them out. There were a couple of boys here in uniform that night. Fact is, they didn’t really belong here, but they told me they were off to ’Nam in a couple of days, and I thought why the fuck not let them have a good time if they’re going to get their ass napalmed before their next birthday. Your blond bitch here, and her dude, and a couple of other kids, really got on ’em—called them pigs, murderers, the whole sick-assed fuck the flag bit. And she was the worst, screaming her fuckin’ lungs out, man! They were flying on some heavy shit.”
When I got out of there, I called Andrea from an ice cream parlor on 6th. She said she was fine, and was watching The Flying Nun. Next I headed for 14th Street. In those days, you could get almost anything on 14th Street except a good latte. Since I walked to my office that way almost every day, I was familiar with most all of the businesses that had storefronts or signs visible from the street. Samantha Smart’s 24-Hour Secretarial School was above a discount cosmetics store between 6th and 7th Avenues, near the Salvation Army. Its sign featured a painting of a young woman with a Veronica Lake hairdo, ample boobs, and killer legs, poised in front of a typewriter that looked as if it might have been jiggered together by Dr. Frankenstein. The artist had evidently spent a great deal of time thinking about girls, but not much looking at typewriters.
I rang the doorbell and a voice with a Brooklyn accent crackled out of a small speaker attached to the doorframe. I saw that I was being spied on by a closed-circuit television camera.
“What can I do for you, darling?” the voice asked.
I told it I had some questions about shorthand.
“We can teach you Pitman in three weeks, six hours a day, or six weeks, three hours a day,” said the voice.
“Unfortunately, I don’t have time for that,” I said.
“Then I can’t help you,” said the voice, “unless you want to take our crash course in turning paper clips into costume jewelry.”
I showed the closed circuit camera my license.
“I don’t have my reading glasses,” said the voice, disinterested.
“I’m a detective,” I said, trying to be helpful.
“A detective?” yawned the voice. “How very exciting. I never thought in my whole life I’d ever get to meet another real live detective. On 14th Street, yet.”
She buzzed me in and I walked up a flight of stairs to find a bleached blonde, in the early stages of finding out that it was too late. She was wrapped in a pink, hand-knitted jacket and peering at me through jeweled harlequin glasses. She sat behind a Formica desk with a white Princess phone, an open book, and a vase of artificial tulips.
I asked if she was Samantha Smart. She said she was Darleen, dumb enough to be working the graveyard shift. Samantha Smart, God bless her, had joined the great typing pool in the sky. I told her I’d heard they were retraining people up there to carve stone tablets. She said, “That’s right, make fun of my religion.”
I showed her the pieces of paper with Lydia’s shorthand on them.
“Sloppy,” she said, “but confident. You can tell a lot about someone from their shorthand, just like you can from their handwriting. This is someone in a big hurry to make their mark. Look at those loops. Very assertive. I like the calligraphy. Shows an impetuous temperament.”
“But what does it say?” I prompted.
She studied the diagram first.
“There’s not much to go by here. There are words like high window and escape route. Is this something about a prison break or something? This down here says clock tower, and these signs on the right stand for upper house and lower house. That’s about all I can tell you about that one.”
Upper house and lower house? Something to do with Congress? Or some state legislature? That seemed ominous.
Darleen looked at the other scrap of paper and screwed up her face.
“This one’s even worse,” she said. “There’s something about putty, and this word is aromatic. But then there are words that don’t mean anything to me—semtex, cyclonite. Seems kind of scientific.”
I made notes and thanked her. She returned to her novel. The title was The Lady and the Scoundrel. The author was Alyson Marshall.
From the street, I called Janice to ask her to feed Samba. She wasn’t happy about that. I told her I’d take her to see Rosencrantz and Guildenstern.
As I left the booth, I saw someone staring at me. Another skinny kid with long hair. He wasn’t even pretending to be invisible. That pissed me off. I walked over to him and said, “This is getting on my fucking nerves.”
He told me to fuck off, and bunched his fists as if he was going to hit me, which wasn’t a smart thing to do. I grabbed his wrist and twisted his arm behind his back, jerking it hard so that it hurt.
“Bastard!” he said, which I thought was pretty polite under the circumstances.
“Why don’t you go back to Pedrosian,” I said, “and tell him to go fuck himself?”
This didn’t seem to register.
“Huh?” was all he said.
“I’m fed up of being followed everywhere,” I said.
“I wasn’t following you,” he said.
“Then why were you staring at me?”
“Because I recognized you, and it was the second time tonight I’d seen you.”
Now I was confused.
“I saw you come out of Andrea’s building,” he said, “carrying a suitcase.”
Now the penny dropped.
“Is your name Jonathon?”
He said it was and I let him go.
“Bastard,” he said again. “People like you should be shot. She’s too good for
you and you’re old enough to be her father.”
That hurt.
“You want to get technical,” I said, “I’m old enough to be her big brother.”
“Fuck you,” he said. “What have you done with her?”
“First, you tell me why you were spying on Andrea’s building.”
“I wasn’t. I just went there to see if she was home. Then I saw you come out of the building with a suitcase.”
He spat in the gutter.
“We need to get something straight,” I told him. “First of all, there’s nothing going on between me and Andrea. I haven’t touched her.”
Saying that reminded me of that two-thumbs-up hug.
“Why should I believe that?” the boy said.
“Because I say so.”
“So where is she? I want to see her.”
“You’re going to take this the wrong way, but I can’t tell you.”
The boy sneered.
“What did Andrea tell you about me?” I asked.
“That you’re some kind of a detective, something to do with that slut Lydia. Not that I really bought that shit.”
“You know Lydia?”
“Not really, but I know she’s a slut. Andrea gets excited when she talks about her. It’s like Lydia’s slutty affairs turn her on. I hate it.”
“You remember that bag Andrea was carrying the other night, when you were keeping an eye on us? Do you know what was in it?”
“How would I know? It was none of my business. She’d told me that meeting you had something to do with buying dope. I offered to go for her. She wouldn’t let me, but she said I could keep an eye on things. I wasn’t happy about any of it, especially when the two of you went into the restaurant. She hadn’t told me about anything like that, and she didn’t tell me about the detective business until we were back in my room. I thought she was making it up, but, hey, I wanted to believe her story because it was Andrea.”
I could dig that feeling, and I figured he was being straight with me. A little wet behind the ears, maybe, but that wasn’t a crime.
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