by Alice Orr
“Pearlanne. Yeah, I know her.” The bartender’s long earrings swung and danced as she talked. “Where are you a friend of hers from?”
“We used to hang together.” Bennett did her best to duplicate the loose, laid-back speech she’d heard from the shelter kids.
“I don’t remember seeing you around,” the bartender said, looking skeptical.
“I been away for a while. I owe Pearlanne some money. I want to pay her back if I can find her.”
“Really?” The bartender looked more receptive. Bennett had hoped the mention of money would do that. “See that woman with the blond buzz? The one on her way into the john.”
Bennett looked where the bartender was pointing just in time to see a woman with a platinum brushcut disappear through the door marked Ladies.
“That’s Liddy,” the bartender said. “She and Pearlanne are pretty tight. She could tell you more than I can.”
“Thanks,” Bennett said, being careful not to smile too widely and look out of it. “Wait for me here,” she said to Memphis.
She could tell by the way the bartender was looking him over that he wouldn’t be lonely on his own. Bennett was tempted to drag him along with her. She knew how much men seemed to like dangling earrings, as if their movement put them into some kind of trance. She glanced back at the bar. The bartender was talking to Memphis. Bennett turned reluctantly toward her destination. She had a mission to accomplish. She couldn’t be worrying about who was hitting on Memphis. That shouldn’t be a concern of hers anyway. She pushed through the ladies’ room door knowing that, somehow, what Memphis Modine did and with whom he did it had become a concern of hers whether she wanted it to be or not.
Chapter Fifteen
Bennett had never seen a ladies’ room like this one. The purple-and-white theme continued here with wall surfaces alternating those two colors like a huge checkered tablecloth blanketing the room. The light was low, too low in fact to allow for any serious makeup repair in the wide mirrors, which were also tinted smoky purple. A video screen set into one wall played the scene from Singing in the Rain where Gene Kelly ruins his shiny dance shoes tromping in and out of puddles.
She checked herself over in the mirror while she waited for the blonde to come out of the stall area in the back. For a couple of seconds, Bennett wondered who belonged to that dark-haired image in the mirror. The connection to herself came with a sudden jolt. This is what everybody was seeing when they looked at her. First of all, that one bottle of hair dye and those crude scissors had made her appear about ten years younger. She’d gotten her body back, as well. She didn’t exactly dress in frumpy clothes ordinarily, but she didn’t let her figure show much, either. The tights and tank top she had on now left very little to the imagination. She might have been self-conscious had this not been a disguise that made her into somebody other than herself, at least for a while.
“I like your do.” The blonde had come up next to Bennett and was admiring her reflection in the mirror. “Where’d you have it done?”
“My hair?” Bennett asked, thrown off balance for a moment. “A place uptown,” she said. “It’s called the Bus Terminal.”
“Really? I’ve never heard of it. I’ll have to check it out. Very chic.” She pronounced it “chick.”
“You’re Liddy, aren’t you?” Bennett asked.
“How’d you know that? Have I run into you before?” The blonde turned to look directly at Bennett. “I don’t remember, if I did.”
“The bartender told me about you. She said you know an old friend of mine. Pearlanne Fellows.” Bennett did her best to sound offhand. “I been on the road for awhile, and I was hoping to hook up with her again.”
“You’re on the wrong end of town for doing that,” Liddy said. She’d pulled a small wide-toothed comb out of her small purse that hung from a long, thin strap over her shoulder and had an applique of Betty Boop on the front of it. “Pearlanne’s been catching some classy scenes lately. I don’t even see her much anymore.”
“Do you know where she’s been hanging out exactly? I’d like to look her up.”
Liddy waved her comb in a generally upward direction. “Way north of Fourteenth Street from what I hear. That’s all the way uptown to us downtown types. She’s supposed to be trailing with some guy who’s turning her on to the better things in life, if you know what I mean.”
“Have you ever seen this guy she’s been with?”
Bennett knew the minute she said it that she sounded too eager for somebody who was only casually checking out an old acquaintance. Liddy had been poking at what hair she had with the small comb. The way her eyes narrowed a little in the mirror suggested she’d picked up on Bennett’s eagerness.
“What did you say your name was?” Liddy asked.
Bennett almost gave her real name, then stopped. Whoever heard of anybody named Bennett barhopping on the Lower East Side?
“Vangie,” she said. That had been her nickname when she was a very little girl, short for Evangeline, the middle name she had inherited from her maternal grandmother. “I just need to find Pearlanne because I owe her some money and I want to pay her back.”
“Well, that’s a rare one. Somebody going out of their way to clean up a debt.”
Oh, no Bennett thought. She doesn’t believe that, either.
“You look like the kind who’d do that,” Liddy continued. “I can see it in your eyes.” She leaned closer to the mirror. “Check it out for yourself. See how your eyes round up on top. That means you’re a truth teller for sure. I’ve been studying up on it. The art of eye reading, it’s called. Goes back to the Tibetan monks, or maybe it’s the Native Americans. I don’t remember which.”
“So, can you tell me anything about Pearlanne?” Bennett hoped her truth-telling eyes might be worth some information.
“I can tell you I never saw her boyfriend. This place must be too heavy on the slum side for him, if you know what I mean. Though I heard they met each other at a Rave, if you can imagine that.”
Bennett tried not to let on that she really didn’t know what that meant. She seemed to remember something from a magazine about raves being wild parties that moved from place to place.
“Usually only young kids make those gigs,” Liddy was saying. “I can’t bear that techno stuff myself, too far off the planet for me. Pearlanne’s another story. Sort of can’t get where she fits in, if you know what I mean. Slippin’ around uptown, jumping into a mosh pit in some warehouse. Like she’s looking for a place to be.”
Bennett nodded, feeling suddenly sad that Pearlanne’s search had ended so tragically on the floor of the Stuyvesant Club. Maybe it was that tragedy and wanting somebody to pay for it that made Bennett take a chance with her next question.
“This guy Pearlanne’s been hanging with, would his name happen to be Falcone?
Liddy tapped her comb against the black marble veneer of the vanity and stared into the mirror for a moment. “You know, I did hear his name once, but it wasn’t a last name like that one you said. I remember. It was Stitch. She called him Stitch.”
“An unusual name,” Bennett said, feeling she’d just headed up another blind alley.
“Yeah, almost as weird as how he got it. Pearlanne said they called him Stitch because he used to smuggle stuff inside clothes being shipped from other countries.”
“He was a smuggler?”
“That’s what Pearlanne said. Of course, Pearlanne talks a lot, sometimes too much. Who knows if everything’s the God’s honest or not.”
Bennett wondered if talking too much might have been what brought Pearlanne to her bloody end on the billiard room floor.
“You know, now that your mention it, I think Pearlanne might have told me his last name once, and it just could have been what you said.”
“Falcone?”
“Yeah, that sounds about right. Well, good luck finding her,” Liddy said, jamming her comb into the tiny bag and pulling out a silver-cased lipstick. “What she
told me last time I saw her makes me guess we won’t be catching her act down this way soon.”
“What was that?” Bennett managed to sound casual this time. “What did she tell you?”
Liddy couldn’t answer at the moment. She was too busy bearing down hard with her lipstick so that the color came out very red. She worked her lips together to even out the tone, then surveyed the result in the smoky glass, where the purple tint turned the red almost black. Liddy smiled, as if pleased with what she saw, and returned the lipstick to her purse. She pulled her short, tight dress straight over her thin hips and settled the purse strap onto one narrow shoulder. She was obviously about to leave. Bennett was tempted to repeat her question but knew that sounding too pushy would be an unwise move. Liddy was at the ladies’ room door before she turned back to Bennett, who was following close behind.
“She said she was coming into a load of dough. I almost fell out when she told me. Pearlanne never has two pennies to rub together.” Liddy had pushed the door partway open. Now she stopped in her tracks. “Come to think of it, I’m surprised she had any to loan you.”
She pouted her red mouth in puzzlement for a moment while Bennett held her breath. “Oh, well,” Liddy said at last, pushing the door farther open and exiting against a group of women on their way in. “You never know what to expect from some people and Pearlanne’s one of those, if you know what I mean.”
“Maybe her smuggler friend was coming through for her after all.”
“Maybe,” Liddy shouted back. “Oh, do you want to hear the wildest part of all? Pearlanne said this guy was doing his smuggling thing on sailboats. Can you imagine that?”
Liddy didn’t wait for an answer to that as she shoved her way out into the crowd that looked even more dense now in the bar area. She lifted one hand and flicked her very red tipped fingers in a wave without turning around toward Bennett. Then she was gone as if drawn into the press of bodies by a magnet of excitement and music in the back room.
Bennett allowed herself to be prodded and elbowed the rest of the way out of the ladies’ room. Once outside, she leaned against the wall for a moment, trying to sort things out in her mind. Had Pearlanne been at the Stuyvesant for the same reason Memphis said he was there? To get a payoff from Falcone? Could that be the windfall she told Liddy about? Did that money have something to do with Pearlanne’s murder? Most important, who was Falcone anyway?
The part she didn’t want to think about had to do with the smuggling Liddy had mentioned. She’d said that Stitch and Falcone might be the same person, and that he was involved in illegal smuggling aboard sailboats. Memphis crewed just such a craft. Bennett didn’t believe in coincidences, certainly not enough to avoid the possibility that there could be a connection between Falcone’s illegal activities and Memphis. Maybe he hadn’t murdered Pearlanne Fellows, but maybe his hands weren’t perfectly clean, either. Bennett could hardly believe how desperately she wished that wouldn’t turn out to be true.
She pressed back against the wall. The confusion of so many unanswered questions, the music, the noisy crowd seemed as if they were about to smother her. She took a deep breath and assured herself she wasn’t going to suffocate no matter how scarce the air seemed to have become. Suddenly she had the urge to get to Memphis as fast as she could. With him next to her, maybe this panic would pass. She would feel safe again. At the edge of what remained unconfused in her consciousness, she knew how crazy it was to equate safety with her kidnapper. She also knew that Memphis was more than that to her now.
She scanned the room, slightly disoriented for the moment as to which direction the bar was from here. All that was truly visible through the purple haze was the beams of white light from the ceiling. What Bennett glimpsed in the bright pool from one of those beams made her heart stop dead still in her chest.
His face was turned away from her for the moment. The cocky way he held his head was familiar, but it was the flash of his unmistakably red hair that stopped her heart. Nick was here in the DownTown Lounge, and he was headed straight in what she now remembered to be the direction of the bar—and Memphis.
Bennett threw aside any thought of caution. Whatever confusion she’d been feeling was left behind at the ladies’ room door as she shoved her way through the crowd. Bodies got in her way. She used her own to bulldoze past. She had to get across this room before Nick, and she didn’t care how she did it. A spray of beer wet her arm from a tilted glass as she barreled on.
“Keep on slammin’, girl,” a male voice called out after her.
She guessed, again from her magazine reading, that he was referring to another dance craze that had something to do with the mosh pits Liddy had mentioned. Right now, Bennett knew she was capable of slamming and moshing with the best of them.
She looked around for Nick and caught a glimpse of his red head still in the same spotlight. He’d stopped to talk to somebody. Bennett felt a surge of relief and hope. It also occurred to her that, if he knew people here, this might be proof he also knew Pearlanne and could possibly be connected to her death. She forced that thought, however interesting it might be, out of her mind and pushed harder than ever toward the bar. She saw Memphis and grabbed his hand almost in the same instant.
“Come with me and don’t look back,” she said tersely.
Memphis took one look at her face and followed her at once without a word, into the crowd and in search of the rear exit. Before this moment, Bennett would never have thought of a back alley on the Lower East Side as sanctuary. That’s exactly what she was thinking now.
NICK LOVED BEING in the spotlight. Everybody could see him then, and that was just how it should be. They see him, and they know he’s nobody to be messed around with. The babes could see him, too, how he stood out from the rest of these creeps. They liked the cut of his threads, and the cut of the rest of him, too. Like this one who’d stopped to ask where he’d been and held on to his arm till he had to shake her off.
“Later, baby,” he said.
He couldn’t remember her name or where he’d run into her before. He hardly ever knew one dame from the other. Maybe that was because while he was chatting up the first, he was almost always looking over her shoulder for the next. That’s how it was with him and babes.
There was another one of them waving at him now. The bartender. Nick couldn’t remember her name, either. Maybe he’d never known it. He’d go over there and give her a thrill anyway. That was why he’d ditched Rudy for a while. The action made Rudy jumpy, got him talkin’ that happilymarried-man crap. What a drag. He was better off out there trolling for Modine and the chick. Needle and haystack. That’s how much of a shot there was at finding them two tonight. In case anything did turn out to be shakin’, Rudy could give a jingle on the cellular. For now, it was long past midnight, burnin’ toward daylight with no time to lose. Nick waved back at the bartender and gave her a look that said I know what you want, babe, and I’ve got it.
“Have you seen Pearlanne?” the bartender asked before he hardly had time to elbow his way through the crowd that was three-deep at the rail.
“Not tonight.” That wasn’t true, but Nick didn’t worry much about telling the truth.
“An old friend was in here asking for her. Something about owing her some cash.”
“You don’t say.” That got his attention. Maybe the cops were nosing around already. How’d they figure her so soon for a regular at this dive? He didn’t like it. “So what’d you tell this friend?”
“I told her to talk to Liddy.”
“This friend was a chick.”
“Definitely. Maybe even your type, hotshot.” The bartender smiled as if she might be trying to come on to him, at least that’s how it appeared to Nick.
“Maybe. Give me the details.”
“On the tall side. Black hair shagged out on top. Dressed kind of street easy. Cool looking, but you can forget it if you’re thinking about trying to score. The dude she was with is one hundred percent stud. If she h
adn’t come back for him, I’d have glommed onto him myself.”
“Did either of these two glamour girls have a name?” Nick didn’t like being compared to some Bowery bum rocker, but he had to put up with it till he got what he needed here.
“He was named after some city in the South,” she said while drawing a beer for a customer. “I don’t remember what her name was. I don’t think it was mentioned.”
Had to be the St. Simon woman. She might have changed her look the way chicks can do, but she wasn’t putting nothing over on him.
“I know what her name was.”
Nick caught the flash of platinum out of the corner of his eye. He’d known Liddy for about as long as he’d known Pearlanne. He’d even thought about making it with Liddy before she went and damn near snatched herself baldheaded. He liked his women with a little more hair.
“You into eavesdropping now?” he asked.
“I wouldn’t think you’d have anything to say I’d be that interested in. I just happened to catch the drift of what you two were going on about.”
“So how’d you find out this chick’s name, and what is it, anyway?”
“We got to swapping stories in the ladies’ room,” Liddy said.
Nick could tell she was angling for him to buy her a drink. He didn’t think he’d bother.
“What’s her name then?” he asked.
“How come you’re so interested?”
Nick was having a hard time holding on to his temper. He didn’t like getting the runaround from anybody, especially not from some nowhere, nobody, bald-headed blonde. He had to keep the clamps on, though, or she might decide to keep quiet about what he needed to know.
“She’s asking about Pearlanne, and I’m wondering why,” he said.
“According to her, she owes Pearlanne some money and wants to look her up and pay her back.”
“Believe that and I got a bridge to sell you,” he scoffed. “So, what’s this nosy broad’s name anyway?”
