by Konstantin
I made the pizza last, and the soda too, and the whole time I ate, I saw only one person pass through Werner’s door. She was a small, round woman, with a long, puffy coat and frizzy hair exploding from under a white knit cap, and she was inside the building before I could make a move. A minute later I saw a light go on on the top floor. I was throwing out my greasy napkins when the second person came along. He wore a red parka and he was tall, and underneath the snow on his head, there was dark hair. He had two sacks of groceries, and he set them on the sidewalk as he dug in his pockets. I ran out the door, zipping my coat as I went.
“Gene,” I called, as I crossed the street. He didn’t look. “Hey, Gene,” I said again, coming up beside him.
He pulled a heavy key ring from his pocket and stooped for his bags. He looked at me curiously.
“Huh?” he said.
Unless Werner had developed an overbite and bad acne scars since Terry Greer’s bar snapshots had been taken, this wasn’t him. “Sorry,” I said. “Wrong guy. I was supposed to meet Gene, but he hasn’t shown up yet. Gene Werner— you know him?”
A wrinkle of distaste crossed the man’s face. “I know who he is.”
“I was supposed to meet him here half an hour ago. Have you seen him around?”
“Not lately,” the man said. He slid his key into the lock and pushed the front door open. I followed behind him and stepped into the doorway. He turned and elbowed the door shut. I stopped it with my foot.
“You mind if I wait inside? It’s pretty cold out here.”
He shook his head. “No can do— building rules. Sorry, man.” He leaned against the door.
There was nothing to be gained from a shoving match; I moved my foot back. “Do you remember when you saw him last?” I asked as the door swung shut.
The man shrugged and shook his head. “Sorry,” he said again. He carried his bags to the elevator and watched me through the glass until I walked away.
It was full dark now and snowing harder. The wind was heavier too, swirling between buildings and spinning the snow in dizzying vortices. Spikes of icy air ran down my collar and up my sleeves. Across the street, lights were going out in the pizza parlor, and at the coffee shop the roller gates were already down. I headed east, toward the subway.
I spotted him in less than a block, when he stepped out from the shadow of the senior center and began trudging along behind me. He couldn’t have been worse at running a tail if he’d been pounding on a drum. And I recognized him right away too, from the gray parka and biker boots and big shoulders, and from the wide face with tiny features: Babyface, Holly’s new boyfriend.
I knew he hadn’t tailed me to 108th Street— it would’ve been impossible to miss him on my way there— which meant he’d picked me up at Werner’s place. Which meant he’d been staking it out. I’d have to remember to ask him why. I paused at the corner of 108th and Central Park West and made a show of checking my watch. Babyface ducked behind a van. He was nothing if not earnest.
There was little traffic on CPW: a few cabs cruising slowly south, slewing when their brake lights flared, a FedEx truck double parked at 106th Street, delivering God only knew what in the middle of a blizzard, a Number 10 bus lumbering uptown, and another headed back down. Across the street, Central Park was a landscape through static: bare trees, footpaths, streetlamps, and stone walls, all gray and grainy and dissolving in a whirl of snow. The northbound bus was still three car lengths away when I sprinted across the avenue, and its horn was still braying when I went into the park at a run.
The footpath was slick and I skated downhill and slid to a stop where the path forked north and south. I paused to make sure Babyface was with me. He was— standing by the entrance, backlit and steaming. I moved under a streetlamp, to make sure he could see me, and then I headed south. The path curved uphill and was sheltered from the sideways snow by rocky outcroppings to the left and by a canopy of branches overhead. I stepped off the path and into the gap between two large rocks, and I waited.
I heard Babyface— his fraying breath and scuffing boots— before I saw him, and then a broad expanse of gray nylon passed, like the side of a freighter. I let him go fifty feet up the path and then I stepped out.
“Gets cold, just waiting,” I called.
Babyface spun and his hands came up in a dishearteningly practiced way. “What the hell do you want?”
“Same thing you do, I guess: Gene Werner. You see him around?”
“All I see around is you, and I’m getting fucking sick of it.”
“You get sick of Holly too? Is that what happened to her?”
At the mention of her name, Babyface stiffened and took a step toward me— and stopped in his tracks when a Samoyed came around the corner behind him. The dog was dragging a well-bundled woman on a red nylon leash, and he froze when he saw Babyface and emitted a nasty growl.
Babyface looked at the dog and the woman and then back at me, and looked like he might growl too. Instead, he said, “Fuck it,” and turned and ran up the path, past the woman, and around the corner. The Samoyed barked and snapped, but Babyface never looked back. The woman reeled in her dog, and her mouth was a perfect “O” when I ran past.
I didn’t get far. Babyface sprinted, arms pumping and shoulders bouncing, and took a sharp left where the path forked again. I did the same and I was gaining ground until the next turn, when I hit a wide crescent of ice. My boots flew up and my legs churned in the air like a cartoon, and I came down hard on my ass and elbows and on the back of my head.
Through the rush in my ears, I heard his footsteps fade in the distance, and I thought about hauling myself up and going after him. But my legs had emptied out and my head had filled with sand, and all I could manage was to lie there, while snow fell on my face and wind carried my breath away.
17
I took inventory in the morning, in the bathroom mirror. The worst was the purple egg on my left hip, followed by the cuts and bruises on my elbows and the knot on the back of my head. I was stiff and limping on my way to the kitchen, but there was coffee at the end of the road, and a note from Clare: “Back later. Coffee’s fresh.” I ran my fingers over the neat lines of tape and gauze on my elbow.
The people on the subway the night before had scrupulously ignored my wet and muddy clothing, and avoided even looking in my general direction. Clare was less circumspect.
“Jesus Christ, what happened to you?” She’d dropped her book and sat up on the sofa as I limped through the door.
“Slipped on some ice,” I said. I dropped my coat and eased into a chair and winced. Clare bit her lip. I fumbled with the laces of my boots and she’d brushed my hands away and untied them for me.
“Shouldn’t you say some shit like ‘You should see the other guy’?”
I stretched out my leg and winced again. “I am the other guy.”
Clare shook her head. “I don’t do the Florence Nightingale thing,” she’d said. But as it turned out, she did, carefully and with surprising tenderness.
I filled a mug and stared out the frost-framed window. The wind had died since last night, but snow was still falling in small, relentless flakes. The TV news said it was the calm before the second— the worse— storm that was due to arrive that night. The anchormen read long lists of things that were closed, and likely to stay that way for a while, and field reporters trained their cameras on impassable roads and on the dazed and hapless at the airports. I looked down at Sixteenth Street. The only cars I saw were at the curbsides, buried until spring, and the only people were gray smudges, trudging— one snow-shoeing— down the middle of the road. I wondered what errand Clare was on.
A shower loosened my limbs, and three cups of coffee got my brain cells spinning, but still they found no purchase when it came to Babyface. He was Holly’s new boyfriend. He had a key to her place. He was looking for something or someone— maybe Gene Werner. He had a bad temper. And twice now my conversations with him had ended in bruises. I thought again a
bout the crude green tattoos on his hands, and added some speculation to my paltry pile of facts: he’s maybe been inside recently. It was still adding up to nothing when the phone rang.
It was Mike Metz, who’d somehow made it to his office. I told him about my conversation with Herbert Deering, in Wilton, and about my livelier encounter with Babyface.
Mike was quiet for a while when I was done. “It’d be good to know his name,” he said eventually, “and whether he actually was inside— and, if so, what for. It’d also be good to know where he was a week ago last Tuesday, or thereabouts. And the same goes for Werner.”
“Why a week ago Tuesday?”
“That’s when the ME thinks she went in the water, or so my lunch date told me. They think she was in about five days.”
“They have a time of death?”
“Sometime that day— Tuesday— but nothing more precise yet.”
“And the cause?”
“Shot in the face, four times.”
I took a deep breath. “Not your typical suicide, I guess.”
“Not really.”
“But it explains why no pictures.”
“Yep.”
I thought about the timing. David’s London trip did him no good, and I wondered if he had a story for Tuesday. I didn’t relish asking. “In the face is…”
Mike found the word for me. “Intimate.”
“Anger like that, you think lover—which doesn’t necessarily narrow the field with Holly.”
Mike made an affirmative noise. “According to my friend, the gunshots weren’t all of it. Sometime before she was shot, she was beaten, and pretty badly.”
“Jesus,” I sighed. “How long before?”
“Days, they think. Apparently the bruises had started to heal.”
“The cops think it was the same person that did both?”
“My guy says they’re still debating. Why— you have a theory?”
“Not even close,” I said. “Holly seemed to make a lot of people mad, or scared, or both.”
“I just wish we knew who some of those people were.”
“I’m working on it.” My voice was louder than I intended.
Mike’s voice was quiet. “I’ll let you get back to it, then,” he said, and hung up.
Four times, in the face. Jesus.
Getting back to work was dragging on a pair of jeans and a turtleneck, and making another call to Gene Werner. I got no answer and left no message, and afterward I called Orlando Krug’s gallery. The deep, faintly accented voice answered after five rings, and there was a long silence on the line when I told him who it was.
“Like most of the city, we are closed today, Mr. March.”
“I guess that leaves you time to talk.”
“We’ve already discussed Cassandra’s work; I don’t know that I have any more to say.”
“It’s not Cassandra’s work I want to talk about, Mr. Krug. It’s Holly.”
There was another long silence, and finally Krug spoke. “I will be in the gallery for another few hours.”
The walk to the West Village was slow going through stabbing cold on mostly empty streets. A few hardy shopkeepers shoveled their patches of pavement against the tireless snow, and were rewarded with the business of a few desperate souls— coffee and bagels and cigarettes, diapers and beer. I limped in the road, and moved aside now and then for the churning orange mass of a snowplow.
Orlando Krug hadn’t bothered to clear his piece of Perry Street, but the security gate was up on the door of his gallery. I rapped on the glass and he let me in. Krug was still neatly pressed, but he was pale under his dark tan, and his blue eyes were clouded. I followed him through the gallery and into his office, a snug, bright space with more beadboard, a red and green kilim on the floor, and a big cherry desk in front of a shuttered, deeply recessed window.
“You’ve come through the snow; I suppose the least I can do is offer you coffee.” Krug went to the windowsill and poured coffee from a steel carafe into a heavy mug. He handed the mug across and settled into a tan leather chair.
“I was surprised to find you here today,” I said.
“No more so than I. I’d planned to wake up in Palm Beach this morning.”
“I was surprised you agreed to see me too.”
Krug’s nut-brown face creased more deeply for a moment. “You piqued my curiosity, Mr. March, which I assume was your intention.”
“When’s the last time you saw Holly, Mr. Krug?”
Krug smiled thinly. “Who is this Holly you keep mentioning?”
I sighed. “You didn’t make me shlep over here for this, did you? Because it’s cold out there and my socks are wet, and if all we’re going to do is dance around, the coffee doesn’t cover it.” The little smile went away and Krug’s face fell again into tired folds, but he said nothing.
“I know that Cassandra Z is Holly Cade, and that Holly Cade is Wren,” I said. “I’ve seen two of her videos. You’re not violating any confidences.”
“What do you want with her?”
“I’m a private detective.” The news didn’t seem to shock him. “I’m trying to find Holly, but she hasn’t been home for a while now.”
“On whose behalf are you trying to find her?” I shook my head and Krug laughed harshly. “But I am supposed to trust you?”
“I promise you, I mean her no harm.”
“This from a man who has lied to me from the moment we met.”
I drank some more coffee and stretched my leg out and looked at Krug. “Did you invite me here out of curiosity, Mr. Krug, or out of worry?”
Krug pursed his lips. “It’s been nearly two weeks since I’ve heard from her.”
“Is that a long time for you two?” He nodded. “You’re close?”
“ ‘Close’ is difficult with Holly. There are things she discusses with me, and things she never mentions, and always she is jealous of her privacy. But I’m fond of her, Mr. March, and I’m not fond of many people.”
“Is there anything in particular that’s making you anxious?”
Impatience flitted across Krug’s face. “If you’ve seen her videos, you know the risks Holly takes for her art. They’re reason enough to worry.”
I nodded. “How long have you known her?”
“Since that group show at my upstate gallery, two years ago now. She came to see me several months later, to discuss Cassandra’s work, and I must confess I was surprised.”
“Surprised how?”
“When we first met, I’d pigeonholed her as a girl of a certain type. A beautiful girl, unquestionably, but just one of many, I’d thought, who come to the city with expensive educations, vague artistic aspirations and precious little in the way of talent. You must know the kind. They float around town for a few years, and play at painting, or acting, or what have you, and fill space in the clubs until they settle down with their pudgy little bankers. But then I saw the early edits of Interview One, and I knew I’d been wrong about her.”
“She has talent.”
“Talents—plural— and a remarkable vision as well, and there’s nothing dilettantish or lazy about her.”
I nodded some more. “Have you tried to reach her?”
“At her apartment. As you said, no one’s been home for some time. I don’t know where else to look.”
“How about friends or family?”
“I don’t know Holly’s friends, Mr. March, and all I know of her family is that she’s not in contact with them.” Krug’s eyes narrowed. “I assume you have tried them yourself.”
“Only her family, who know next to nothing about her. As far as friends go, I haven’t found many, at least none who’ve been in touch lately. I’m trying to locate her boyfriend.”
His eyes narrowed some more and his brown face hardened. “You’re referring to Gene?”
“Gene Werner— he’s one of the men I’m looking for, though I understand they stopped seeing each other several months ago.”
&nb
sp; “That is my understanding as well,” he said. He looked unsure of whether to say more.
“Do you know Werner?”
“I saw him once, waiting for Holly when she left here one day, but we were never introduced.” There was distaste in Krug’s voice.
“You have any idea why they broke up?” Krug gave me a speculative look but didn’t speak. “I’ve been trying to reach Werner for days now,” I said, “and he seems to be missing too. Frankly, it makes me a little nervous.”
