“I don’t know,” I said. “In all the commotion I didn’t see Nadia leave.”
“And the gagged nuns were—” The phone rang, and he stopped to pick it up.
My face hurt like hell. In addition to the residual sting of the pepper spray, the duct tape hurt when it was ripped off, leaving a big red rectangle of irritated skin behind. Nuns, Living Statues, Swinging Miriams, the real Miriam Grundy, selected party guests, and a few of their lawyers were giving statements at other desks. The nuns all had red marks from the duct tape and were all rapidly fingering their rosaries.
After Burns got off the phone, he said, “That was the police station in Fowler, Long Island. Everyone at the convent is alive and well.”
Across the room, another detective called out, “State Department is here about the Plotzonians.”
“This one is going to put diplomatic immunity to the test,” Burns said. “You think one of these guys killed Woznik? I’d sure like a murder rap to help fight State on this one.”
“One of them probably, but I don’t know which one,” I said.
“We’ll be able to put the cohorts away, and the Knights, but the young man, this Rocky, he’s the son of a big guy in his homeland. The State Department wants him. Apparently, some USAID workers are being held hostage in South Plotzonia, and they want to trade for them.”
“So he’ll go unpunished?”
“We’ll see. Let’s go over what we have so far. Rocky showed up at the apartment where you were staying. You sent him away. Nadia showed up and you let her in …”
We went over it twice before he thanked me and said I could
go.
“So when will I get my rifle back?”
“I’ll get it to you as soon as I clear up a few other things,” he said.
At the next desk, Ben was saying, “Unfortunately, Miriam gave the girl the money for the icon tonight, at gunpoint, so she’s out quite a lot of money. A million, maybe more. Cash.”
Ah, good old Nadia. Still looking out for number one, even at the height of a crisis. She got the money from Miriam and now she was on her way to God knows where. What the hell. The rest of us were safe and sound now, and not inclined to worry about her welfare any longer.
On my way out, I ran into the Mother Superior, who had just finished up with the cops.
“I know this great after-hours joint. What do you say we grab the girls and go for a few belts,” I said to her. “It’s Miller time.”
She laughed and said, “Some other time, perhaps for lunch, if not for … belts. We come into the city every now and then to see shows and go to museums. Perhaps you can join us.”
“Yeah, that’d be fun. Hey, I’m sorry I got you into this.”
“Oh, it worked out all right,” she said. “It certainly won’t hurt the Sisters of the Wretched Souls.”
“It’s good publicity.”
“It is indeed, especially with Him.” She looked upward. “Do let us know if we can help again on the underground railroad.”
“Seriously? Even after all this?”
“Yes, of course. Though, perhaps next time you could do some research and make sure the people we’re helping deserve our help.”
“You are one cool nun.”
One of the younger nuns came to say a car was there to return them to Long Island. I grabbed a cab back to the Chelsea, dragging my beleaguered, weathered old ass past the Zenmaster, past Lucia, who patted my arm on the way to Tamayo’s door. I barely had the strength to punch in the security numbers. When I got inside, Louise Bryant jumped me, claws out.
She wanted to be fed.
Before I went to bed, I unplugged Tamayo’s phone. In the morning, I plugged it in again and called Maggie, to see if she’d made it home all right and wanted to swap escape stories. Phil, Maggie, and the nuns imprisoned in the chapel had simply waited until the man with the bushy mustache fell asleep. Then they took his gun, woke him up, and drove into Fowler, Long Island, and the cop shop. They got there shortly after events went down at Miriam Grundy’s party.
“Our escape wasn’t nearly as dramatic as yours,” Maggie said. “We got less than an inch in the newspapers. But there’s a huge picture of you and the nuns, tied up and gagged. Have you seen it?”
“I’ll read all the papers later,” I said.
“The News-Journal is calling the murders of Woznik and the Plotzonian man …”
“Pavli,” I provided. “Mr. Bad Toupee number one.”
“… the ‘Chelsea Girl Murders,’ because we were all involved, and it happened in the Chelsea Hotel. We helped solve the case,” Maggie said.
“Well, except for the murder of Gerald Woznik. We still don’t know who pulled the trigger on him,” I said.
“We may never know,” Maggie said.
“I hate it when murderers get away,” I said.
“Come by for coffee later,” Maggie said. “I have to go now. I have to call Paris.”
I didn’t bother to say good-bye. At that, I hung up the phone. I felt sick and sad, because now I didn’t believe in love anymore, not at all. Pierre had been the last chance for that misty-pink romance stuff. My instincts about love could no longer be trusted. I’d never been able to trust those instincts, but now I was aware of it. Even the few examples of true love I’d observed weren’t enough to give me faith, because if you look at them in the long term, all great love affairs end badly, if not in heartbreak, then in death.
After a shot of vodka—I earned it, dammit—I went online to see if there was any E-mail.
Someone was knocking on the door and shouting, “Miss Hudson? This is Belinda Jacobs from the All News Network. Will you come out and speak to us please?”
ANN is my alma mater, in a way, but there was no way I was going out there, even if I hadn’t looked through the peephole and seen two other news crews standing in the hallway.
Tamayo still hadn’t E-mailed. Pierre had, as had assorted friends and coworkers who had heard the news. I didn’t read his E-mail right away. I wrote Tamayo a long note with a link to an online news story about the latest adventure.
“If you see Nadia in your travels, have her give me a call,” I wrote.
Before I opened Pierre’s message, I poured myself a cup of coffee, and read through a few messages from other friends, my “real” friends.
“Robin, Robin, Robin. What am I going to do with you?” asked Louis Levin. “Did anyone videotape that by any chance? There’s a picture of you from the Fotofax this morning, up on Democracy Wall. You’re gagged with a bunch of nuns, and there’s a sheet underneath for a caption contest. When you’ve got your sea legs again, get in touch. There’s a lot brewing here.”
“CALL ME!” wrote Claire Thibodeaux.
“Your aunt Minnie and I dropped off the old oven at the Ecocenter today and then we went to Duluth to do some shopping. We had lunch with Marianne Hallett, who used to be Marianne Presslee when you went to school together. She sent her regards,” wrote my mother, who is now online but mercifully lives in a news-free zone of her own creation.
I left Jerry’s E-mail, and Solange’s, and a few others unopened, and opened Pierre’s.
He hadn’t heard the news either.
“Dear Robin,” he wrote. “Very busy here at the lab. Have hardly had a moment for anything but the experiment, but during those few moments I’ve had to myself, I’ve thought about our time in Paris. I hope all is well. When are you coming back to Paris? With a kiss, Pierre.”
It was painful. I hadn’t felt this much pain about a lover in a long, long time. How could he have written those sweet notes he’d left on my pillow each morning in Paris, those notes about rogue planets, empathic photons, astronomically inspired strange attractors? Or looked at me the way he did, kissed me the way he did? Heartless bastard! In a flash, my pain turned to raw anger.
Furious, I wrote back: “You have a lot of nerve sending me a kiss when you’re having an affair with Maggie Mason. Nice try, bud. Fool me once, shame
on you. Fool me twice, shame on me. You can kiss my hairy white derriere, you phony French fuck.”
I hesitated for a moment before I sent it. I couldn’t help imagining how crummy he’d feel when he found out that I knew Maggie Mason. How would it be, next time he and Maggie got together, with her not knowing about him and me? It kind of irritated me to think he might compensate by being extra sweet and loving to her. And as she did not know about Pierre and me, she would eventually bring up my name despite her rule about not discussing her girlfriends with her boyfriend and vice versa. If she couldn’t keep to the part about not discussing her beau, she was bound to mention me, maybe in connection with this adventure. How would that make him feel? Would he feel guilty? Would he bristle? Would Maggie wonder why he was reacting so? Unable to get an explanation that didn’t blow his cover, would she think it was because of something wrong with her, or with him? Would this toxic secret fester and explode and bring them both heartbreak?
That should have given me a little schadenfreude rush, but it didn’t. I was too sad and sick about it to enjoy even a moment of hard-earned shameful joy.
I hit the Send button and watched the message vanish into the ether before I logged off.
As soon as I did, a key turned in the lock, the door opened, and the alarm went off with a shriek.
Tamayo was standing there, news crews behind her trying to see in.
After I turned off the alarm, she said, “Robin, what the hell is going on?”
“GEE, NADIA WAS ALWAYS a riot when I was with her,” Tamayo said after I filled her in. “Spoiled, but fun.”
“I guess I missed her fun side,” I said.
“But, Robin, I don’t understand. Why were you staying here in the first place?”
“My apartment burned down,” I said.
“Wow. You’ve had a bad week.”
“No shit. What are you doing back in America?”
“Buzzer and I broke up,” she said. “I felt like coming home to recuperate. Also, I was running out of money.”
“Sorry about you and Buzzer,” I said. “Oh, and by the way, thanks for telling me to look up your pal Pierre in Paris.”
“Oh, you saw Pierre! Isn’t he wonderful? I knew you’d like each other.”
“Wonderful? Tamayo, you are far too liberal in your friendships. He’s a jerk! Didn’t you also introduce him to Maggie Mason?”
“Oh. Maggie. I forgot to tell you about Maggie …”
“You forgot to tell me about Maggie and Pierre?”
“No, about Maggie and Mike O’Reilly. They had an on-and-off thing for quite a while and … Maggie and Pierre?”
“Her boyfriend, who happens to be my last fling, Pierre.”
“Pierre is not her boyfriend. Pierre only met Maggie a few times. He didn’t like her, and she didn’t like him. She’s involved with some actor who is off on location somewhere.”
As tired as I was, it took a full ten seconds to put this together.
“That bitch!” I said. “I just sent Pierre an E-mail asking him to kiss my hairy white derriere for having an affair with me and with her at the same time.”
“Oh, she’s wicked,” Tamayo said, somewhere between sympathy for me and admiration for Maggie’s revenge. “Unfortunately, Maggie knew about you and Mike. I should have warned you.”
“She didn’t let on that she knew,” I said. “That bitch.”
The next sound Tamayo heard was me slamming the balcony doors. Furiously, I pounded on Maggie’s balcony doors, and when she opened them, I stormed in screaming.
“How did you know about Pierre?”
Maggie turned and looked at me coolly. “When I spoke with Nadia, just after she arrived, I asked her all about you. In retrospect, I should have been trying to get more information about her but I was more interested in getting something on you. I picked up a little more information eavesdropping on you and Phil when you were on the balcony one evening.”
The nerve of this woman. She was proud of herself.
“Who did you call when you were supposedly calling Paris?”
“Who knows? Some bewildered stranger in a foreign country speaking a language I didn’t understand. Check your phone bill when it comes in. It should say.”
I let loose with a blizzard of cussing. When I was done, she said, very calmly, “Well, that’s what you get for sleeping with Michael O’Reilly. I loved that rat bastard and he dumped me to start going out with you.”
“You know, I was unaware that you were involved with Mike while I was. I didn’t hurt you on purpose,” I said. “You hurt me on purpose.”
“You must have known. How could you not know? Didn’t you wonder who had listed you in the pen pal pages of Prison Life Magazine?” she asked.
“That was you too?” I asked.
“Now we’re even,” she said. “Now we can be friends.”
“Friends?” I said, heading to the balcony doors to leave. “We can never be friends, Maggie.”
I slammed the balcony doors behind me, and went back into Tamayo’s to write an apologetic, explanatory note to Pierre. I had a feeling that if he accepted my apology and gave me another chance, I’d be kissing his hairy white derriere for some time to come.
chapter eighteen
There are always some unanswered questions in these matters, but there was one that I just couldn’t let go of. Who had actually fired the gun that killed Gerald Woznik?
There was only one way to find out. I went back to the Zen-master and asked him if he wouldn’t like to give up his enlightened isolation and rejoin the human race, if he wouldn’t like to dance with someone, or share stories, or maybe even hug someone again. He didn’t respond. I said, “Think about this: Your efforts not to have an effect have had an effect. You’ve had a damaging effect by trying not to have an effect. You can’t escape it.” At the time, he’d stepped backward into his room and slammed the door again. But that must have got him thinking.
The next day I actually saw him leave his apartment, go down to the deli, and come back with newspapers. He looked as if he had tears in his eyes. For a few days he didn’t leave his apartment and didn’t stand in his doorway. Then, one day, I was walking by in the hallway and he stopped me and very quietly told me who it was.
Rocky.
Rocky had fired the gun that killed Gerald.
Later that day, the Zenmaster gave his statement to Detective Burns.
Bit by bit, other gaps were filled. Rocky and his henchmen had tracked Nadia to the Chelsea and planned to spring a surprise on her and drag her back to Plotzonia. Rocky thought the manly thing to do was to go to New York himself, knock off his rival, and take Nadia and the baby Jesus icon back to Plotzonia. And the cynics say romance is dead.
FOR SEVERAL DAYS, I avoided Maggie Mason. On one of the last mornings of my vacation, Tamayo woke me up, shouting, “Rise and shine,” while kicking the sofa bed to make sure I rattled awake.
“Come to class with me. I already fed your cat. Just throw on some crappy clothes and let’s go,” she said.
“What class?” I asked.
“Nude male figure drawing. It’s a drop-in class. You can use my supplies. But hurry, we have to get there early or the pensioners will get the good seats.”
“I don’t want to go to a class,” I said. “I want to enjoy the rest of my vacation.”
“You must come to class with me,” she said. “I insist.”
I don’t know why I’m so weak in the face of Tamayo’s whims, but she has a way of convincing me and legions of other people to do things they might not normally do, like shelter runaway brides. After I threw on some clothes, she handed me a pair of binoculars.
“What are these for?”
“In case the pensioners get all the good seats,” she said. “So we can see the model.”
The class was drop-in for Art League members, who were allowed to bring one guest with the payment of the guest fee, supplies extra. The model wasn’t there yet. As Tamayo had predict
ed, most of the seats were taken by elderly women.
“What did I tell you?” she said. “Back of the class.”
We took seats at easels beside each other. Tamayo gave me some charcoal, and put her bag on the empty seat on the other side.
“Who are you saving that seat for?” I asked.
“Another friend,” she said.
Far at the front of the room, the model appeared, dropped his towel, and took his place reclining on a mat. He was a chiseled, Chippendale type, not my type personally but who seemed the ideal for drawing musculature and so forth.
That’s when Tamayo’s friend, Mary Margaret Mason, came rushing in.
“Sorry I’m late, Tamayo,” she said, stopping short when she saw me. “What are you …”
“I’m leaving,” I said, standing up.
“Sit down,” Tamayo said. “I’ve been thinking that if peace can’t be made between Maggie Mason and Robin Hudson, what hope is there for the Middle East, or the Balkans? I’m having a big … party soon, and I want you both to be there, and I don’t want you bringing this hatred and tension to my big event.”
“Ssssh!” hissed the instructor.
We sat down, slowly, warily, not wanting to be the first to sit. Just as Maggie’s “bum” touched the seat, I held back, squeezing a childish victory from the fact that she sat down first. Then I sat down.
“Okay, this is the deal,” Tamayo said. “Maggie was wrong to pretend she was sleeping with Pierre. Very wrong. Right, Maggie?”
Maggie hesitated.
“Maggie, this is very important to me. You know that was wrong,” Tamayo said. “Unnecessarily mean. Right?”
Neither Maggie nor I would give any quarter.
The instructor came by and made a disapproving noise when she saw my sketch. I’d made a stab at something vaguely resembling the naked man far at the front of the room, then tried a stick figure, then gave up and drew a horse head, the only thing I can draw with any skill. No doubt she thought I was some kind of perv who took this class just to stare at naked men.
“You’re in a benevolent mood,” I said to Tamayo. “If she’d played this childish girl game with you, you’d feel differently. Why is it so damned important Maggie and I—”
The Chelsea Girl Murders Page 21
