Good Girl, Bad Girl (An Alex Novalis Novel)

by Christopher Finch

  I reported that the explosion near Gramercy Park had been caused by a bomb. I told him that the headquarters of the Barnes Institute for Military Strategy was probably under threat of attack. I recommended that Crufts Academy should be evacuated as a precaution, and I gave him the names that I knew, including Lydia Kravitz. I also mentioned Pedrosian’s red Pontiac, and warned that it might contain explosives (though I doubted that anyone would be using such a conspicuous car at this stage of the game). Then I cleaned my prints from the receiver and got out of there, trying not to draw attention to myself as the sirens of patrol cars converged on the area.

  I walked to my office, which wasn’t that far. I had to presume that it was all too probable that someone—either Pedrosian’s mob, or the police, or both—would be watching the building, but there was nothing I could do about that. As I walked, I tried to figure out what would be going through the minds of Pedrosian and Lydia—assuming they were still alive. Andrea, too. What the hell was she up to? Did she know where to find them? Or how to contact them? Or was she on some personal mission? Part of me still refused to believe that she was in league with the crazies.

  As I walked through Union Square, I saw a police car parked directly outside my building. Detective Campbell was leaning on it, talking to a couple of uniformed cops inside. After a minute or two, he got into the back of the car and it drove off. I had no reason to suppose that the cops were on to me, except for the fact that Campbell had been hanging around an awful lot lately. I decided to take some elementary precautions. There was a way of getting to the back stairs by going through the kitchen of the Chinese restaurant on the ground floor, and out into the little courtyard where they kept their garbage cans. I reached my office without encountering anyone who spoke English, and let myself in.

  There were messages on my Ansaphone. The first was from Janice who said she thought Samba had colic. The second was from Gabriel Kravitz. He apologized for having been out of touch, but said that he had decided to call off the investigation.

  “It’s 6:35 a.m.,” he said. “I suspect that I rather overreacted to the unfortunate situation between Lydia and Mr. Pedrosian. As you pointed out, Lydia is not a minor, and therefore is legally responsible for her own decisions. I have spoken to Mrs. Kravitz about this, and she fully concurs. You will, of course, be properly compensated for your time, and a bonus will be included since I remain concerned that none of this should find its way into the media.”

  Next came a message from Mrs. Kravitz.

  “I wanted to let you know that I’ve heard from Gabe. It seems he’s been in Canada, but he’s back in town, and he called me from the airport when he flew in. I think you’ve probably heard from him by now and have been told that we’ve decided to call off the search for Lydia—definitively this time. Thank you for your efforts.”

  These two calls had all the spontaneity of an Academy Awards acceptance speech. Something had happened that had brought the Kravitzes down to earth with a bump. By now, it could be assumed, they’d received another rude shock, thanks to my 911 call. For the hell of it, I called the number that Mrs. Kravitz had given me—her boudoir number. It was answered by a male voice with a generic tristate accent that informed me that Mrs. Kravitz was unable to come to the phone.

  “Is that Sergeant Sardotti?” I asked, pulling a name out of the air.

  “No. This is Officer Chevinsky.”

  So the cops were already there. Good to know.

  There were a couple more messages, one of them from Mrs. Baldridge.

  “For what it’s worth,” she said, “you were right about Jerry using that building on Ladies Lane. Donald had given him permission, so there was nothing underhanded about it. I don’t know quite why you were so interested, but my advice is you might as well drop it, whatever it is. Even if Jerry was schtupping his little bimbo there, it’s academic because the building’s empty now, and will stay that way. We’ll just have to let Jerry get on with his life, won’t we?”

  A touching display of disinterested sisterly concern. Given what had happened at the Gramercy Park townhouse, I suspected that by now Mrs. Baldridge, like Mrs. Kravitz, would find herself covered in NYPD fuzz.

  I turned on the radio to see if I could catch a bulletin updating the explosion. The story was all over the airwaves. The police were refusing to confirm rumors that the explosion had been caused by a bomb, but an unnamed source “close to a federal agency” suggested that it had been the result of an accidental detonation caused by “radical extremists” in the process of manufacturing some kind of an explosive device. A rescue worker had reported seeing what appeared to be body parts. It was reiterated that neighbors had observed people fleeing the house, though a police spokesman warned that these might have been bystanders reacting to the explosion.

  I walked to my window, and looked down into the park. She was there, the ethereal blond girl, standing in the spot where she always stood, dressed in jeans and a white shirt. This time, she didn’t look away when she saw me.

  SIXTEEN

  I fetched the other pistol from my wall safe, slipped it in my jacket pocket, then hurried down the stairs and out into the street, not even thinking of the possibility that the cops might be staked out for me.

  She was still there, waiting, and now I was close enough to see that it definitely was Lydia. As I crossed the street, she turned and walked away from me, but slowly, not attempting to lose me. My first thought was that she could be leading me into a trap, but it didn’t feel like that, and Union Square in broad daylight didn’t seem a likely place for an ambush. So I followed, closing to within maybe twenty feet, till she sat down on a bench. I sat down next to her, but left space between us. She didn’t look at me, just stared straight ahead. I did the same.

  “Where’s Andrea?” she asked.

  “I was going to ask you the same thing,” I told her. “Where’s Pedrosian?”

  “I don’t know. He might be dead, for all I know. I hope so.”

  “Didn’t he get out of the building with you?”

  “I wasn’t there. All I know is what I saw on TV in a coffee shop.”

  This was getting more confusing by the minute.

  “Whether he’s alive or dead,” she said, “I’m through with Jerry Pedrosian. There’ve been too many shocks, and when I found out what he did to Andrea yesterday, that was the end.”

  “So that was real? He was trying to kill her?”

  “Or maim her, or scare her. Just make sure she was out of the picture one way or the other.”

  I finally looked at her, and she at me, but only for a second.

  “Why,” I asked, “did he want her out of the picture so badly?”

  “Because he thought she knew too much.”

  “What did she know that was so terrible?”

  “You’ll find out. In time.”

  A police cruiser paused, a few feet away, then moved on.

  “And don’t even think about calling down the cops,” said Lydia. “When this is resolved maybe I’ll give myself up. But not till then. And don’t imagine you can make me do anything I don’t want to do.”

  Her fist was in her bag, and she showed me that it was clutching the butt of a Ruger semiautomatic, just like the one I had in my jacket pocket. It would probably have been easy enough to disarm her, but it was too soon to exercise that option. There was a lot more I needed to know before I showed my hand.

  “Now that we understand one another,” she said, “let’s start again. Where’s Andrea?”

  “Same answer. I wish I knew. I had her holed up at the Henry Hudson Hotel, if you know where that is. This morning, we found out about the explosion in the townhouse on the TV news. All she could think of was that something bad might have happened to you. The first chance she got, she took off—to find you, I presume—and, for what it’s worth, she took my gun.”

  “Great!” said Lydia. “I’m looking for Andrea, and she’s looking for me, and she’s carrying a gun, which she doesn
’t know one end of from the other. And Pedrosian—if he’s alive—is looking for both of us, and he does know how to use a gun. And anyway, what made Andrea think I had anything to do with that townhouse?”

  I ignored that last question.

  “Who was in the house when it blew?” I asked.

  “Like I told you, I wasn’t there. When I did my disappearing act yesterday, Jerry was there with Homer—that’s the kid you bushwhacked—and his two sisters, Lucy and Crystal. At least, he claims they’re his sisters. They’ve dropped so much acid they don’t know who they are, but the bottom line is they’ll do anything Jerry tells them to. Then there was Lanny and Rick, Jerry’s ex-army buddies. Have you run into those creeps?”

  “I didn’t even know Jerry was in the army.”

  “Oh, yeah. End of World War II—a demolitions expert. When they got out of the service, Lanny, Rick, and Jerry all got GI Bill scholarships, hung out together at the clubs on 52nd Street, and called themselves hipsters. Lanny plays some guitar, and later he got into the Village folk scene—hanging out with Dylan and Dave Van Ronk and the political crowd—and he was in with a bunch of Trotskyites. I don’t know Rick’s story. Just went along for the ride, I guess, but these guys know a shitload about bombs and that kind of crap. They talk about crafting explosives like it’s some kind of folk art, and that’s the way Jerry sees things, too. The world needs to be rearranged, he likes to say, and there’s nothing like a stick of dynamite to move things around.”

  “Is that what he was teaching at Teddington?”

  “Well, he watered it down a bit for the course, but that’s what he told me after he fucked me down by the lake one night.”

  “So Lanny and Rick were at the house?”

  “Maybe yes, maybe no. I have no way of knowing. They came and went. They were in on everything, but they operated in a more freelance way. They share an apartment somewhere in Queens.”

  “And when did you become disenchanted?” I prompted.

  Finally, she looked me in the eye.

  “You ask too many questions,” she said. “You’ll get answers, but only after we’ve found Andrea.”

  “What about Pedrosian? What’s he going to do next? Was he planning a hit on the Barnes Institute?”

  Lydia hadn’t expected that.

  “How did you know?”

  “I figured it out with some help from Andrea.”

  “Well, now help me figure out where to find her. You can worry about the other stuff later.”

  “Did you and Andrea have any special places?” I asked. “Places she might go to look for you? When she ran out on me at the hotel, she didn’t know if you were alive or dead, but she would assume that if you were alive you were on the run—maybe with Pedrosian, maybe on your own. Is there anywhere you would go to hide out that she might know about?” Lydia thought about that for a moment. She showed me the gun again.

  “Let’s go,” she said. “Don’t ask questions and don’t get cute. We’re just going a couple of blocks.”

  It may have been just a couple of blocks, but I had plenty to chew on. What had happened between Lydia and Pedrosian? I could understand that she was enraged about the attempted rundown, but I was sure that there was more to the falling out than that. And if she had been looking to me for help before, why didn’t she say so? Perhaps she saw her own situation as being beyond help at this point. Now she was solely focused on keeping Andrea out of trouble. These girls were crazy, but their devotion to one another was impressive.

  We crossed 14th Street and headed south on University Place. Two blocks later, Lydia said, “Take a right here,” and as we turned west she nodded toward Cinema Village, a repertory movie theater.

  “This is a place we used to meet,” said Lydia. “When one of us got in trouble at school, and they would try to keep us apart, we would come here and find each other in the back row. We’d hang out and neck like we were on a date.”

  She walked up to the box office, took a snapshot out of her purse, and showed it to the woman behind the glass partition.

  “Have you seen this girl?”

  The woman squinted at it then said, “Sure, she was the first person in today, twenty minutes before the program began. She’s been here before. I’ve seen you, too.”

  “Is she still here?” Lydia asked.

  The woman shrugged. “I just got back from my break, but talk to him, he’s the one who sees all the action.”

  She indicated the kid who took the tickets, and Lydia showed him the same snapshot.

  “Have you seen this girl?”

  The kid looked and blinked and nodded his head.

  “Yeah, she was here. She must have been here for a couple of hours, maybe longer. She stayed through the feature, and through intermission, and must have been well into the trailers for the second show when some guy in a big hurry came in and took her away.”

  “What did he look like?” asked Lydia, excited and nervous.

  “Early forties. At first, I thought he was her dad, but he didn’t look like a dad. Red hair, squinty eyes. She didn’t seem happy to see him, and he was dragging her by the arm.”

  “Shit!” said Lydia. “That’s Ricky! That means they’ve got her!”

  “But that wasn’t quite the end of it,” said the kid. “When she got out into the street, she started screaming blue bloody murder. The guy was trying to manhandle her into a car that was double-parked—a red one—but there were some hardhats out there and they stepped in and broke it up. The guy cursed at them but the girl kept yelling and said that he’d tried to assault her. One of the hardhats waved to a police car that was coming crosstown, and the guy hightailed out of here in his vehicle. The first cop car took off after him, then another one came and the cops in that one spoke to the girl and took her away. She didn’t want to go, but they were pretty insistent.”

  Out on the street, Lydia was both relieved and angry.

  “She’s finally getting some street smarts,” she said. “Okay, Mr. Detective, where would the cops take her?”

  “From here, they’d take her to the 6th Precinct.”

  “And how do we find out what’s happened to her?”

  “By going there.”

  “Give me a break. How can I go there?”

  “You can’t. You’re going to have to trust me.”

  “Are you joking? You’re sticking with me. You’re my insurance policy.”

  I remembered her mother talking about how winning the beauty contest had been her insurance policy. Had Marion Kravitz once looked like Lydia? It was hard to believe. But then it was hard to believe that Lydia, who had the face of a Piero della Francesca angel, could be mixed up in bomb making and God knows what else, and could have the sheer cojones to behave the way she was behaving right then.

  But it was time for me to take over.

  “If you really want to help Andrea,” I said, “this is your only chance. They know me at the 6th Precinct, they’ll talk to me. If Andrea’s there, I can probably get to see her. If she was still carrying the gun, she’ll have a lot of questions to answer. I don’t know what I’ll be able to do with any of that, but you’ll have to let me try it. You have no other choice. I’m not going to promise you I’ll never tell the cops what I know about you, but you have my word I won’t squeal on you for the next couple of hours, and I’ll stretch that out as long as I can.”

  As I spoke, Lydia reminded me, by tapping the side of her bag, that she had the gun trained on me.

  “I don’t trust you,” she said.

  I decided to test her, and reached for my cigarettes.

  “Do I look like a dummy?” she asked. “I know you have a gun in there. Lucky you reached for the other pocket. And give me one of those while you’re at it.”

  I did the time-honored Paul Henreid routine, and passed a lit Gauloise to Lydia.

  “So how do I know I can trust you to take care of Andrea?” she asked.

  “The other night,” I said, “Andrea tri
ed to seduce me. She did it for you. I didn’t touch her, which wasn’t easy.”

  Lydia actually smiled.

  “I wouldn’t do anything to hurt Andrea,” I said. “I’m suggesting you let me walk away from here and go straight to the 6th Precinct to see what I can find out, and I’m also suggesting that you get as far away from here as you can. Though that may not be easy because by now I’m sure they’ve got people watching every train station and bus station in the city.”

  “Okay,” she said. “I guess I have to trust you. But if you screw me, I swear I’ll get you, from beyond the grave if necessary. But I’m not running away, because there’s nowhere to go. In return for trusting me, you are going to get news to me, to let me know that Andrea is okay. That’s the deal. Do you know that abandoned pier near the end of Bethune Street? Okay. I’ll be there and I’ll be expecting to hear from you. If you find her, bring her with you.”

  There was no way I was going to do that, but I wasn’t about to argue about it either.

  “I’ll need that photo of Andrea,” I said.

  Lydia hesitated, took the snapshot from her purse, kissed it, and gave it to me.

  At the 6th Precinct, Sergeant Morello was on desk duty. I showed him the picture.

  “What’s she to you, Novalis?” he asked.

  “A straightforward missing persons case,” I said.

  “And she’s the missing person?”

  “No, she’s a friend of the missing girl but I’ve reason to think she may know something about the latter’s whereabouts.”

  (There’s something about dealing with cops that makes me say things like “the latter’s whereabouts.”)