Lover Man: An Artie Deemer Mystery

by Dallas Murphy

  You entered Billie's little apartment through the kitchen, which meant that the front door and the light switch were to my left. I wormed out of the dumbwaiter and half crawled to the door. I rubbed at the wall on either side, but no light switch. Maybe it wasn't a wall switch at all. I hadn't been here for over a year. Maybe it was an overhead light with a string pull. I realized as I waved the air like a deranged traffic cop that I was beginning to panic. I felt little-boy fears. What would I find when I finally got the light on? Who would be there with me, sitting on the couch grinning at me? Maybe Cobb. Or the killer. Maybe Billie.

  I stopped waving for the light pull and stood still, panting. The stove! I knew where the stove was in relation to the door, next to the refrigerator, and that was to my left with my back to the door. I touched the refrigerator, reached out from there, and found the stove. I turned two dials, and bright blue flame danced in circles. I was alone. At the scene of Billie's murder. I turned on the light by pulling the string that hung near the tip of my nose. I almost forgot to turn off the burners.

  There were only three little rooms, the cramped kitchen, a living room, and bathroom. A sleeping loft that Billie and I built from scratch covered a portion of the living room and the entrance to the bathroom. I always liked this apartment. Seemingly separate from the city, it had the feel of a little mountain cottage. But there was none of that feeling left. This was how I'd remember her apartment, not cozy and warm and vaguely sexual but this way, stale and grim.

  The spare keys to her studio hung on the nail by the door. I pocketed them. Now get out. The floor was still wet. Did he drown her in cold water? I squished into the living room, and her red carpet bled over my boots. A pair of shiny blue spandex tights lay draped over the sofa. I picked them up and pressed them to my face, but her scent was gone. Still I rolled them up and stuffed them into my Con Ed pocket. Then I walked into the bathroom.

  The tub was still full, and everything was smeared with gray-black grease. Had he smeared her body with it, too? Was that part of the fun? Tiles, tub, sink, toilet, even her shampoo, lotions, and things were all caked with grease. Congealed islands of it floated on the surface of the water. My knees unlocked, and I caught myself on the greasy towel rack, leaving a perfect handprint. Fingerprints. That's what the grease was for. The police had left her bathroom this way. I wiped my fingerprints off with a towel. I had seen enough.

  I stuck my ear to the door. Hearing no one, I quietly turned the lock, then opened the door a crack, stretching, not breaking, the crime-scene tape. I squeezed out and hurried down the stairs and out into the drizzle. I walked dizzily south to Houston and hailed a cab for home. I'd do the studio tomorrow. Or the next day.

  I saw her as I unlocked my apartment door. A long-legged woman in jeans and a yellow nylon jacket was sitting on the fire stairs.

  "Are you Jellyroll?" she asked.

  FOUR

  "JELLYROLL IS A dog."

  "Jesus Christ! A dog?" She stood up. She was about thirty-five or so. Black curly hair sprang from her head like an Afro. She wore those half-rubber, half-leather boots you see in outdoor catalogs. "Fucking typical. So who are you? Do you own this dog?"

  "Yes. What's this about?"

  "Wait a minute. You're Artie Deemer, aren't you? Your picture's on her dresser." She looked me up and down with faint disapproval. "Look, this is from Billie." She drew from her back pocket a white business envelope that maintained the curve of her ass when she handed it to me. She turned abruptly and made for the elevator.

  Across the front of the envelope in her unmistakable back-slanting hand, Billie had written: "To Jellyroll." But the envelope had already been opened. Inside was a single sheet of paper folded twice. A key fell out and dropped on my boot. I picked it up and then quickly read the note. "I'm dead, darling. Get out of your chair, look in the ice tray at Acappella. Always loved you both." What?

  I turned to the messenger.

  The elevator door opened. She got in. I yanked her out, much more roughly than I'd intended. She kicked me hard in the shin with those damn L.L. Bean boots, and I went down on one knee. She pulled something from her handbag, something black and cylindrical, and pointed it at me. "Keep your distance or I hose you down." Mace. It fit her hand in a sure and practiced way, like a compact in the hand of a seventeen-year-old cheerleader.

  "I'm sorry," I said. "I didn't mean to grab you. Okay? I'm going to stand up now. Don't hose me."

  The elevator door closed behind her, but she pushed the button, and it opened again.

  "Please don't go," I said. "I loved Billie. I didn't hurt her."

  "Just stay right there." She had a twangy accent.

  "I'm sorry. I won't touch you. I was surprised too. That's why I grabbed you. I won't do it again. Put that thing away."

  Just then Mrs. Fishbein came out of 12C. The frizzy-haired messenger dropped the Mace down the open flap of her handbag and stepped into the elevator. I quickly followed.

  "Ar-tee!" screeched Mrs. Fishbein. "Hol' zat car!"

  I held it. What else could I do? Mrs. Fishbein dragged her stroke-warped legs into the tiny elevator with the messenger and me. Mrs. Fishbein wore a yellow poncho that made her look like a crumpled bumper car from Rye Playland. "Zo, Ar-tee, hoz's my Jellyroll?"

  "Fine."

  "I lof zat animal," she said to the messenger, as if she'd offered any indication that she gave a shit. She glanced coldly at Mrs. Fishbein and looked away. Mrs. Fishbein didn't care. She never noticed the response or lack of it from those she talked at. You could be dragging yourself along the sidewalk with two broken tibias and she'd tell you how, when he finally died, her husband's brain was the size of a valnut. "I jus' hope one zing, is all I hope. I hope you younk people nefer get olt. If it ain't za colon, it's za limpfiss glans." That elevator ride seemed to take two days.

  When we finally reached the lobby, the messenger pulled her hood over her hair and bolted.

  "Gotta run, Mrs. F.," I said. Ordinarily I'd have walked her to the store or at least as far as Broadway, but not today.

  "Yes, you younk people run alonk."

  The messenger turned east, and I strode carefully up behind her, but I hung back when I saw her hand burrow into her shoulder bag.

  "Just give me an explanation, that's all," I pleaded, but she kept walking, shoulders hunched against the rain. I quickened my pace and came up beside her without making any sudden moves. We walked silently to the comer.

  "Billie and I were lovers," she said.

  "You were?" I said stupidly. "I didn't know she—"

  "Yeah." She scurried across Broadway against the light. "I didn't either."

  "What does this letter mean?"

  "What it says, I guess."

  "What's in the ice tray?"

  "I don't know."

  "You didn't look?"

  "No."

  "But you opened the letter."

  "What would you have done?"

  "Why did Billie think she might die?"

  "Look, what do I know? I just deliver messages to dogs."

  "There's a place on Broadway, just a block up. Let's get out of the rain and talk. Please."

  "Yeah, okay."

  The River Liffey used to be a grotty sports bar with a serious poker game in the back room, but Jim was a man of foresight. He recognized the neighborhood trend toward gentrification and changed his image. "Class, hoss," he told me. "That's how you suck in the young upscale master-blasters." I liked it better before. Billies ex-lover and I took a booth away from the bar and ordered coffee.

  "How did you get this note?" I asked.

  "It came by bike messenger."

  "When?"

  "Yesterday. There was another note that said if she should die, I should deliver the other note to Jellyroll."

  "Where is your note now?"

  "I threw it away...Is she really dead?"

  "I saw her body at the morgue."

  She began to cry silently.

  "Did you really
think she wasn't?"

  "No. I saw the headlines." She wiped her eyes on a paper napkin. "I just hoped."

  "I don't understand why she thought she'd be killed."

  "I don't either. I told you." She was squeezing back tears by sheer force of will.

  "What's your name?" I asked.

  "Sybel."

  "Where did you know Billie from?"

  "Work."

  "You're a photographer?"

  "No. I work in the neighborhood. Near her studio. I work for an antiques dealer across the street. She came in about a year ago looking for chairs, but we only sell to dealers. Wholesale. I told her that. We got to talking."

  "What's the name of the antiques store?"

  "Renaissance."

  "She left me about a year ago."

  "Yeah, well, she left me six months later."

  "For a man or woman?"

  "For a man named Leon Palomino."

  "You're kidding."

  "That's his name."

  "What is he, an actor?"

  "He's a trucker. He moves valuable antiques."

  A scuffle broke out near the bar. A woman squealed, and two upscalers dressed out of the Land's End catalog shoved at each other's chests, Reeboks shuffling for traction.

  "Quit that fightin', hoss," Jim shouted, but they didn't. Jim produced a Louisville Slugger and rapped the bar with it. "Quit fightin' or I slap you shitless." The upscalers quit shoving each other, and the woman stomped out.

  "Nice place," said Sybel.

  "It used to be. Do you know what this means? It means somebody killed Billie for a reason. I mean, as opposed to some freak who killed her for kicks."

  "No kidding?"

  "Pardon me. I'm slow. You're way ahead. You already surmised that."

  "Look, if somebody gets killed after leaving a note saying they expected it, then it's likely not random. For all I know, you killed her."

  "Same here."

  "Right. We've got the basis for a beautiful relationship."

  "Do you want to look in that ice tray?"

  "No, I do not. I did my part. I delivered the letter. I don't want to hear about it again. I should have taken it straight to the police, but instead I did what Billie wanted. What else is new? Anyway, you're on your own."

  "Maybe we could be a little less hostile for now."

  "I'm not hostile. I'm angry."

  "At Billie?"

  "Sure, wouldn't you be?"

  I hadn't even thought of that. "This Palomino person, was Billie still seeing him?"

  "She dumped him, too."

  "Man or woman?"

  "For his twin brother."

  "What?"

  "You don't know about Billie's exploits?"

  "No." And I didn't want to hear about them.

  "You lived with her, right?" Sybel asked. "Oh, well, maybe she changed since then."

  "What do you think's in the ice tray?"

  "Listen to me: I don't know anything. I've got to go." She picked a dollar bill from her purse. I saw the Mace next to a fluffy stuffed whale. She laid the money beside her coffee cup.

  "What kind of guys are these Palominos?"

  "Freddy's okay. Leon's a dolt. Freddy's wife left him, took the kids and moved to Latin America somewhere. Freddy was always kind of mopey most of the time. Vulnerable. Leon's got these two plastic nudes standing in the back window of his Camaro. Their boobs rotate as the car moves." She stood up.

  "How can I get in touch with you?" I asked.

  "Why would you want to do that?"

  "In case I think of something."

  "Think fast."

  "Can I call you at Renaissance?"

  "No, stay away from there."

  "Why?"

  "It ties up the lines."

  "How about at home?"

  She peered at my eyes, looking for angles, then rummaged in her purse for a broken Bic and a crumpled cash-register receipt. She scrawled her number. "So long, Jellyroll," she said. Two horny yuppies at the bar discussed her ass as she walked out.

  Go home, I told myself. Listen to something with Dexter Gordon in it.

  FIVE

  UPPER BROADWAY SEEMED happy in the rain. Lights twinkled. Arm in arm under single umbrellas, happy white couples strolled from The Stranger, playing at the Thalia. Smiling Hispanic couples in party clothes gathered outside the Tropical Ballroom, from which floated purple light and salsa. A black couple waited at the stoplight in a gas-guzzler that shook with their laughter. Those of all races out for a good time. Even the Korean grocers giggled, hacking carrots. I pulled my hood up and hailed a southbound gypsy cab, told the driver Eleventh and Broadway, please.

  Acappella Productions was on the third floor of the old Hotel St. Denis. Abraham Lincoln stayed there soon after John Brown seized the Federal Arsenal at Harpers Ferry. Lincoln walked from the hotel in a chill February rain to Cooper Union, where for the first time he addressed the big-city audience: "All they ask, we could readily grant, if we thought slavery right; all we ask, they could readily grant, if they thought it wrong." Except for a handsome, curving marble-and-wrought-iron stairway, nothing of the old St. Denis remained. The six floors were chopped up into tiny offices leased by therapists, raggedy-ass lawyers, mail-order book operations, and Central European emigre organizations maintaining a low profile. Billie was the only photographer.

  I stepped from the cab into a four-inch gutter torrent bound for the sea. Two winos sheltering under the awning watched me wade up onto the sidewalk. One nodded gravely at the torrent and said, "We got a severe drainage problem here."

  "Must report it to the proper authorities," said his associate.

  I squelched up the steps and unlocked the street door with Billie's key. Was I being watched? I looked around. Only wet winos. There it was, Renaissance Antiques, across the street, a square four-story ex-warehouse or factory from the days of light industry in Lower Manhattan. Cages were drawn down over the new, incongruous plate-glass windows full of furniture, but I was supposed to be looking for people following me. I saw none.

  I walked up to Billie's floor and stopped on the dark landing to listen. Somewhere water slowly dripped. ACAPELLA PRODUCTIONS, said the hand-carved wooden letters. Billie photographed bums exclusively, no smiling vacations, no puppies (not even Jellyroll), no sunsets or sailboats. She published a slim volume of horrific faces so stark and real, so diseased, one could feel the wet pus in their untended sores. Staunchly, admirably, noncommercial, that was my insightful view. I never said, "Look here, lover, why not a cuddly puppy on a sailboat in the fucking sunset every once in a while? You know, just for fun." I wonder if Billie resented my blindness.

  The lock had been drilled out. I fumbled with her key in the dim light before I recognized that there was a hole the size of my thumb where the cylinder should have been. I pushed the door open. The light was still on.

  The room had been ransacked, as if something had picked it up, given it a violent rattle, and put it back down. Photographs and contact sheets covered the floor ankle-deep. Stubbly, grimy, and damaged faces stared up at me without hope. All the photos on the wall, Billie's favorites, had been twisted from their frames and demolished. Two tall filing cabinets lay on their sides, empty. Stripped of drawers, Billie's desk had been flipped on its back. The darkroom door hung ajar. I looked in. Ransacked. Plastic developing trays, chemical bottles, drying racks, and all the other arcane apparatus hurled about. Even her enlarger had been torn apart.

  I knelt down in front of Billie's little half refrigerator and opened the door. It was full of clothes. What an unusual place to store your laundry, in a refrigerator. Gradually, dimly I understood. There were clothes in there, all right, but not laundry.

  A very dead man all curled up was wearing those clothes. Somebody must have levered him in with crowbars. You couldn't have fit a box of Arm & Hammer in there with him. His knees were drawn up tight under his chin, and his back and neck were bent in a way no living man could stand. His forehead wa
s pressed hard against the freezer section, a little box mounted in the upper corner. That forehead, I only saw it for an instant, but I'll never forget that forehead frozen blue-black and frosted all the way down over his eyebrows. Where the black skin ended, a band of fire red began as if all the blood in his dead body had been somehow sucked by the cold into his face. Even the whites of his eyes were flaming red, like demon eyes in a slasher movie.

  I ran in mindless terror. I slipped and skated over the downtrodden and, out of control, slammed into the door headfirst. I managed to get my hands up fast enough to protect my face but not my glasses. They struck the door a blow that bent them flat and bruised the bridge of my nose. Once out, I sprinted for the stairs.

  When you don't do much besides listen to bop, you tend not to experience mortal terror. I had no idea what it does to the muscles. They get a squirt of juice that causes them to contract out of control. I could have run right up the wall, but I didn't. Instead, I stopped dead at the top of the stairs. I had heard a noise. Footsteps. The tap-tapping of hard heels. From where? Coming up the stairs, heading my way. I stood panting, waiting for rational thought to catch up. I dove through the men's room door. The footsteps reached the top of the stairs, then grew louder still. Right outside! I leaped into a stall and latched the door.

  He entered the restroom after me. I sat on the seat so my feet would be positioned convincingly. Think! What would I do if he tore the door off the stall? Kick him in the nuts? He ran water in the sink. Probably to cover the sound of my murder. I peeped cautiously under the stall.

  What? Red stockings? Thin, shapely ankles and high-heels? She washed her hands, dried them on a paper towel, and walked out, heels tap-tapping, fading to silence. I unlatched and pushed open the door of the stall. For a quarter, I noticed, I could get reliable feminine protection from a vending machine on the wall.