Then there are the moments where I did not acquit myself as well as I would have liked. In plain language: the screwups. I’m human. Humans screw up. Back then I was still learning and flubbed things on a semiregular but hopefully diminishing basis. What follows is an instance where I tripped over my feet in a big way. I could probably find a way to cut it, but I respect you as a reader and I hope you’ll view it in a generous light.
I did just what I told Ms. P I would do and swung by some newsrooms. A lot of the journos saw me as part source, part cub reporter, which came in pretty handy. A certain portion of those also saw me as a young, single woman who sometimes bought them drinks, so they got ideas. I wasn’t above mixing pleasure with business, as long as they knew it was a casual thing and not to get attached. It’s not that I was averse to going steady, it’s just that I had rules: no cops, no clients, no reporters. Nothing that could get in the way of the work.
This time out, I limited myself to asking some roundabout questions and making a few oblique promises that I’d feed information when I had it. I confirmed that, yes, Ms. Pentecost was on the case but left it vague as to who was signing the checks. And to the perennial “Who does she think did it?” I gave the all-purpose “No comment.”
A few of the things I managed to squeeze out in return were, in no particular order:
Alistair Collins had underbid a lot of competing companies to get those military contracts, accumulating some powerful enemies in the process.
Money was definitely changing hands to tamp down the headlines.
And Becca Collins had had a reputation as a straitlaced schoolgirl until her father died. Now she was a borderline wild child. Though “wild” by the standards of her tax bracket might constitute using the salad fork on the entrée.
I said adieu to the inkmongers and made my way to the New York Public Library at Fifth Avenue and Forty-second, rubbing the foot of one of the lions for luck on the way in. My objective was Hollis Graham, who ran the library’s periodical archives. Before settling into that role, he’d been a world-class reporter. Hollis had tracked the ebb and flow of the city’s elite for the better part of three decades—first on the social-scene beat, then crime, then City Hall, before he was pushed out by a scandal of his own. During his heyday, not only could he tell you where the bodies were buried, but he knew who did the digging and what brand of shovel they used.
I was informed by an assistant that he was on a rare vacation and wouldn’t be back until the following week. I left a message for him to call me when he returned. Then I walked a block to grab a late lunch at a corner diner.
After doing away with an egg salad on rye and a slice of lemon meringue, I walked the forty blocks south to my destination. It was a clear, crisp day in New York, and I figured we wouldn’t get too many more like it before winter settled in.
On my way, I swung by a newsstand to buy a used twelve-cent mystery for a nickel, a bag of popcorn, and a cherry soda. Then I followed the street signs to a little neighborhood near Greenwich Village. I made my way down a block of identical brownstones broken only by a church on one side and a tiny park on the other.
I headed toward the park, careful to keep my face turned away from number 215. Out of the corner of my eye, I managed to make out the words etched into the glass of the door.
ARIEL BELESTRADE
SEEKERS INQUIRE WITHIN
The park was just big enough for a tree, a scrap of grass, and a bench on either side. I took the one empty bench. The other was weighted down by a pair of old women in black sack dresses and colorful babushkas. They each had a tiny bag of birdseed and were chatting quietly away in Russian while the pigeons danced and pecked at their feet.
I cracked open my soda and my book and munched popcorn while half paying attention to the hard-boiled hero and half to the front of number 215, which I had a decent enough view of through the bare, low-hanging branches of the lone tree. There was a light in the window, and at one point I thought I saw the shadow of someone moving inside. The spiritualist was in.
I rationalized that I wasn’t really disobeying Ms. P’s instructions. She said we weren’t ready to question Belestrade. I had no intention of questioning her. I just wanted a look at this maybe murderer. The papers didn’t have a good snapshot, and I wanted to get a glimpse of the woman who had my boss so on edge. She was suspect number one, after all. It was ridiculous to put her on the back burner.
That’s what I told myself, anyway.
Really, I was still sore from Lazenby’s jab. I wanted to prove something. To him, to Ms. P, to myself. Maybe to Becca, too.
I passed the time imagining scenarios straight out of Black Mask. In them, I’d hear a scream from inside Belestrade’s place. I’d kick down the door to find the crone with a knife to Becca’s throat.
“Move and she dies,” the witch would hiss.
Faster than the eye could follow, I’d draw my .38 from my shoulder holster, putting a bullet right between her eyes. Becca would collapse into my arms. Things progressed from there.
Eventually the sun began to set and the babushkas abandoned their post. I took up the slack, tossing popcorn to the pigeons, but eventually I ran out and the birds abandoned me as well. Between five and six, foot traffic on the little street picked up with men and women returning home from work. Then the rush died down, and the street was dark and quiet.
Night fell and the streetlights flickered on. The wind picked up and I began regretting I hadn’t brought a pair of gloves or grabbed my knit hat instead of my cap.
I kept up the ruse of reading but that cover was becoming less plausible now that I was turning pages by streetlight. The hard-boiled detective was debating whether to follow his brunette bombshell of a client into her bedroom and I was debating going home when the door of number 215 swung open and a woman stepped out.
The first thing I noticed was her height. She pushed six feet, and it wasn’t a willowy seventy-two inches either. She was broad shouldered and solid. She had on an ankle-length white fur draped over a formfitting black dress and matching heels. She sported a black bob that framed a soft, open face and large, dark eyes.
No burning gaze. No viper’s grin. Not that I could see, anyway.
I’d managed to get a description from one of my newspaper contacts. He’d told me she resembled a sized-up Myrna Loy, but with the sultry edges buffed away.
He nailed it.
Belestrade hit the sidewalk, took a right, and started hoofing it away from me. I decided on the fly that a look wasn’t enough. I gave her a respectable head start and followed.
As I walked, I conducted a mental inventory of the contents of my wallet. I expected her to grab a cab as soon as she hit a main drag, requiring me to find a cab of my own and play a game of “follow that car.” I had enough cash to take a loop around the island, but I was hoping it would be a short trip. Even if a cabby is up for playing a game of rabbit, they almost always botch the job.
Belestrade surprised me. Instead of hailing a cab, she went to the nearest subway entrance and headed down. I followed. She hopped on an uptown train and I did the same, staying one car back from her. With her height and that fur, it was a cinch keeping her in view.
A handful of stops later, she got off and headed west. After a couple blocks, she walked into a bookstore. This one didn’t have a lot of dime novels, but Ms. Pentecost sent me there monthly for her supply of European magazines.
I gave Belestrade half a minute, then went inside. There was no sign of her. I spent a breathless few minutes going up and down the aisles before I heard the bell above the door give a ring and looked out the store window to spot her heading back the way we came.
I darted out in time to see her descend into the subway again. I managed to catch up just as she boarded an uptown train. This time I ended up in the same car as her, but it was full and she didn’t spare m
e a glance. We only went a couple more stops before she got off near Times Square. While it wasn’t tourist season, that area is never vacant. I struggled to keep her in sight while not drawing attention. Tailing is one of the few places where my size can be an advantage, letting me slip between people without jostling too many elbows.
A few blocks down, she made a sharp turn into a theater. Now her outfit made sense, I thought.
I’d seen the show the week before. It was a new comedy that veered toward bawdy when it would have been better served keeping its skirts down. Luckily, the skirts in question belonged to one of my favorite actresses, so I’d led the applause.
I figured I’d better go in and make sure she was seeing the show and not meeting someone. Or bludgeoning somebody to death in the ladies’ room. I was following a cluster of theatergoers to the entrance when suddenly the door opened and Belestrade glided out.
She passed so close we brushed shoulders. After my heart dropped under two hundred beats a minute, I followed. Back into the subway we went.
For the next two hours I followed her on an aimless journey around the island. This included stops at a diner on Fifth Avenue that makes a killer Reuben; two other bookstores—one that has a great collection of mysteries and another that pads its bottom line with some back-room forgery work; a cop bar that’s a good place for station house gossip; and an after-hours club that doesn’t like to advertise. I didn’t follow her into the last two, since they knew me in both places and I didn’t want to chance someone yelling “Hey, Will Parker! How’s your boss, the famous lady detective?”
During our travels, I had time to consider what Belestrade was up to. At first I thought she was trying to lose a tail, or at least seeing if she had one. But if she was savvy enough to do that, she was savvy enough to have clocked me in the first half hour, in which case why keep bouncing from place to place?
Then I thought maybe she was checking sources. If she was a con artist, she’d need to finger likely marks. I could see all of those places being good spots to meet contacts and suss out information.
I was mulling over that possibility when I followed her down into the subway again. This time we took the IRT to Brooklyn and got off at the stop I was most familiar with. I followed her a couple of blocks, made a right, a left, a right again. When I realized where she was heading, the short hairs on my arms stood at attention.
I peeked around the final corner and saw her standing on the sidewalk looking up at a front door, the keys to which I had in my pocket. I slipped my hand into my coat and felt the comforting grip of my .38 stashed nice and tight in my shoulder holster.
No, I wasn’t trigger-happy as a habit. But this was a woman Ms. P seemed unusually wary of, and my boss isn’t someone who scares easy. And it wouldn’t have been the first time someone had taken a run at my employer.
After a couple minutes of looking up at our door, she turned on her heel and began to walk back in my direction. I ran to the other end of the block, ducked around a corner, and crouched behind a rowhouse stoop. A few breathless moments later, I heard the tapping of my quarry’s heels go past.
I picked up the tail again and followed her back to the subway, getting off at Greenwich Village. A traffic jam of bodies on the steps put me farther behind her than I liked. I lost sight of her a couple times, and by the time I turned the corner onto her block, the door to number 215 was closed and the lights were burning.
I glanced at the windows as I walked past, hoping for a peek inside. All I got was the back side of the curtains. As I continued sidling down the block, I wondered. What had all that been about? Had she spent the night meeting contacts, then planned a visit to Ms. Pentecost but chickened out? Or was it something more sinister?
As I passed the tiny park, a voice called to me.
“Do you have a light?”
I turned and there she was. All six feet of black dress and white fur lounging on the bench I’d sat on not two hours earlier. She had an unlit cigarette dangling from her long fingers.
“I seem to have left my lighter in the house,” she said.
Trying to keep my breaths coming in even increments, I pulled a lighter out of my pocket. I don’t indulge, but I keep a lighter on hand for such occasions.
I walked up and lit her smoke. She inhaled and the ember glowed like an eye in the dark. She crossed her legs and pulled the fur tight around her.
“It’s a cold night,” she said in a voice like spiced honey—rich with a little bite to it. “November is a tricky month. That slow turn from autumn to winter. You think you’ve made yourself comfortable and then a gust comes along and cuts you to the bone.”
She looked up and smiled.
There it was. Just a little bit of the viper around her lips. And more than a little fire lighting up those big, dark eyes. I thought of about twenty things to say in reply, but none of them made it to my tongue. She reached down and pulled off her heels.
“These will cut you, too. One of the many things men don’t have to worry about. I applaud your choice. A nice pair of oxfords. But I so enjoy the click-clack of heels against the concrete. Like you’re tapping out a secret code only the initiated can decipher. You understand, don’t you, Miss Parker?”
That fight-or-flight instinct I’d learned about in one of Ms. P’s lecture-hall field trips should have been kicking in about then. But her voice—rich and thick and rhythmic—was like an elixir. Gentle and calming.
She stood up and brushed by me for the second time that night. Heels dangling from one hand, she padded barefoot across the street, trailing a line of cigarette smoke behind her. As she walked up her front step and opened the door, her free hand caressed the message etched into her glass.
SEEKERS INQUIRE WITHIN
She disappeared inside. I waited for the door to click shut, but it didn’t. It stayed open a couple of inches. A beam of yellow light fell out and spread across the street like an invitation.
I thought about it. I had questions, and the answers were on the other side of that door. I took a step, then another. I was standing at the bottom of the steps when somewhere down the block I heard the squeal of brakes and a horn screaming in protest.
The music of the city snapped me out of my trance. I decided I’d proved myself enough for one night and hurried back to Sixth Avenue and the storefronts and still-bustling sidewalks.
I flagged down a cab. On the way back to Brooklyn, I thought about the questions I’d left in front of that door. When did she know I was on her tail? How did she know my name? How’d she find out we were on the case? Did somebody tip her off? What would have happened if I’d gone through that door?
As I pondered, the cab passed the after-hours club, where the night would just be starting. As we drove by, a quartet of women disappeared inside, their heels tapping out a secret code.
You understand, don’t you, Miss Parker?
In a flash, I did understand. The whole night rushed back and slammed into me like a wave at Rockaway Beach. I muttered a few choice expletives. The cabdriver gave me a nervous glance.
The theater, the bookshops, the bars. Some I knew well enough that you could call them haunts, others I visited only occasionally. But I did visit them. Some would take work to link me to, the after-hours club especially. But she’d done it.
The night was a map of my life in New York City. That last gesture and the open door? That was the message: I know you. You want to know me, all you have to do is knock.
The whole night had been one long tent show. And I had been the mark.
CHAPTER 10
The dead play a key role in every civilized culture, from the tribes of the Amazon to the deserts of Arabia, to right here in New York City. We venerate them. We speak to them. We ask them for guidance. They are present in every action of our waking lives, whether we are conscious of it or not. In many ways, we are ruled b
y the dead.”
I stifled a yawn.
Not because the woman holding forth on the university lecture-hall stage was boring. I’d spent too many hours lying awake replaying every move Belestrade had made, every word she’d said.
I should have caught on to her game earlier. I’d let her lead me around like a show pony. Putting me through my paces.
What’s worse, she knew things about me I preferred not to advertise. I’d only been to that particular after-hours club a handful of times, and not in half a year. But if it hit the grapevine that I spent time in places like that—and who I spent time with—I wasn’t sure how far the news would spread.
Ms. P and I had made enemies. Some of them wore badges. And there were plenty of laws on the books they could leverage if they wanted to get back at us.
I hadn’t told my boss about my evening adventure. How could I? I’d gone out to show I had what it took to be called a detective and ended up putting on a much different kind of display.
I was ashamed.
But she knew something was bothering me. She’d asked three times at lunch if I wanted more of Mrs. Campbell’s seafood stew. For her, that was practically fawning.
Now we were settled in the back row watching Dr. Olivia Waterhouse kick off her last class of the afternoon. A petite, almost child-size woman, Waterhouse looked more like one of her undergraduates than a respected fortysomething professor. She had an unruly mass of curly brown hair that looked like it chronically resisted a brush and wire-rim cheaters over a pair of dark eyes. She was sporting a brown wool skirt and jacket that had seen better days, and were probably bought off the rack in the junior’s section.
“I know what you’re thinking,” she told the half-filled lecture hall. “You’re thinking, ‘I am a rational citizen of the twentieth century. I am not beholden to a fallacy. The idea that the dead speak, that we are controlled by our long-dead ancestors, is something we left behind in the Old World. It has no place in the New. We are free to pursue our destiny. There are no chains of superstition on me.’ I’m here to tell you you’re wrong.”
Fortune Favors the Dead Page 10
