Bloody London (11 page)

“But you didn't evict her.”

“It was complicated.”

“She knew your secrets? You didn't want bad press.”

“We didn't want any press, good or bad.”

“Tell me about him.”

“Tommy? He had been a dashing chap, you know. An Englishman who was raised on Kipling and could
recite
If
and fought in the Second World War and came to New York on some mission for the OSS. He believed all that imperial bullshit,” she smiled. “Long time ago. And then Tommy was old. It goes so fast. People were polite, but the dazzle was gone. Give me a cigarette.”

I gave her the pack.

“It's why he went to London so often, I guess. Make believe people wanted to know him. People writing books, rewriting history, making television programs. He retailed his glorious exploits. The old days.”

“He kept his British passport?”

“Oh yes. Absolutely.”

“What about you?”

“I traded mine in as soon as I could. I hate England. I wanted to be an American for as long as I can remember. When I was still a little girl I wanted that.”

I said, “Me too.”

She finished the rest of her vodka and smiled.

“You didn't want to go to London with him?”

“No.”

“But you didn't want him dead.”

She got up. “I'm a rich woman. Why would I want him dead?”

“There's other stuff than money. Can we go over the alibi one more time, Frankie?”

Frankie Pascoe turned and smiled so sweetly I reached over and took her hand. She kissed me on the cheek and said, “Thank you. I wasn't home is the thing, Sunday night. I was out. I didn't come home all night is what I'm saying.”

“You weren't far away.”

“I wasn't far, and Mr Sweeney, the doorman, called me on my mobile phone to let me know it had happened, then slipped me upstairs. Tommy was already dead. Ryan Sweeney's my lifeline.”

“You were out all night?”

“You're jealous. I like that. Out being a euphemism. Yes, I was.”

“Do you want to tell me who you were with?”

“Not unless I have to.”

“You're protecting someone?”

“Yes.”

I put my hand on her arm. The skin was cold as ice. “You're not like rich people. Are you, Frankie?”

“What are rich people like, Artie? Is there some genetic coding? That we've haven't got problems, we're not allowed?”

“Someone else said that to me.”

She was suddenly alert, the eyes opened wide. “Who else?”

“It doesn't matter.”

“No,” she said. “I'm not like rich people. But I'm not like anyone. Do you want to come home with me?” She leaned heavily against me. “What were you looking for here? Why did you want to see the pool? Artie?”

“I figured whoever killed your husband knew his way around here,” I said.

Without any warning, Frankie stood up.

“What is it?”

She stood silently for a minute, as if listening for
something, someone. She fiddled with her sweater. Glanced around the pool, then locked her eyes on mine.

“What?”

“I thought I heard something.”

“There's nothing,” I said. To distract her, and because I wanted to know, I added, “Tell me some more about Stan Getz.”

“You're wrong. There is someone. I can hear them. There are police everywhere, swarming on us, they think I'll tamper with the evidence. I've seen them.” Her voice turned shrill. She grabbed hold of my arm. I could feel the panic.

Somewhere in the basement was the faint drip of water and Frankie said, “I want to go home.”

She walked rapidly now toward the door where we'd entered, past the columns, lockers, toilets. The sound of steps got louder. Louder. Someone running.

We got to the elevator. The doors opened. Behind us, the footsteps got closer, and I turned and squinted, peering into the dark basement.

When I turned back, Frances Pascoe was already in the elevator.

She raised her head. In the elevator's light, her eyes were wild lazy in their sockets, the lids half shut.

I put my hand out to hold the doors, but it was too late. She stared at me, threw up her hands in exasperation, fear, maybe both, and she said, “I'll call you.”

Then the doors shut.

It was Thursday, one in the morning, when I got to my car. I'd checked out the basement after Frankie got in
the elevator. She was right. There were a couple of cops making the rounds, guys doing security, keeping the scene clean. Why did it scare her so much, them being at the pool? It was her building after all.

I had been tempted pretty bad when she said, “Come home with me.” Then her mood changed. She was protecting someone, I thought again, as I got on the FDR and headed home.

The highway was empty. I needed sleep, but when I pulled up to my building, I saw the lights on in the restaurant on the ground floor. Ricky Tae, who lives upstairs from me, sat at a table in the window of his parents' restaurant on the ground floor. I figured he wanted to talk, and yawning, I climbed out of my car and waved and pointed at the front door, but Rick darted out into the street.

“Don't go upstairs, Artie. Don't go.”

“What's going on, Rick?” I reached for the front door.

I ran up the stairs. Rick was behind me. “Wait for me, please,” he yelled. “Don't go in there by yourself.”

The locks on the door were bust. Broken glass was scattered on the floor. I turned on the lights. The couch and chairs lay on their sides, stuffing pulled out. The barstools I had stripped down and painted myself were smashed and scattered like pickup sticks. Files, faxes, letters had been torn up and scattered.

They destroyed the paperwork, broke the glasses, smashed my laptop, took some cash I left on the kitchen counter. They never touched the CD player or the TV
set, the usual stuff creeps want if they're ripping you off. It was some kind of message.

Feathers drifted from the bedroom. I went in. The pillows had been ripped. Books I'd had since childhood, the only things left from Moscow, were torn up in thick, rough chunks.

In the living room I saw Rick staring at the floor. Something heavy, a gun, brass knuckles, had been used to rip scars in the polished wood floors. The floors had taken me and Rick weeks to make beautiful.

“Christ, Artie, I'm so sorry. Stay at my place until we figure this out,” Rick said.

“Go home,” I said to him. “Please.”

After Rick went, after I called an old friend who's a sergeant now at the First and got him focused on the situation, I swept up the glass, very careful, very methodical. If I'd caught them, I would have killed them. If I found out who did it, I would hurt them.

Someone wanted me off the Pascoe case enough to wreck my place. It had the opposite effect on me: I was in. I was in it for good.

Suddenly, I understood Thomas Pascoe and Mrs Ulanova and Frankie and Lulu Fine, their territorial sense of entitlement to their apartments. Their homes. Their piece of turf.

I wanted to call Lily bad, but it was the middle of the night. Maybe I would have called her anyhow if I didn't find the picture. It was stuck on the wall over my desk. It was a piece of newsprint. A picture of me from a case I worked in Brighton Beach a while back. The eyes were cut out.

I yanked it down. Then I got Sonny Lippert on the phone. He was still awake.

“What?”

“I already asked you, Sonny. Pascoe's eyes? Were they intact?”

“What's the matter with you, man, you sound crazy.”

“Just fucking tell me.”

“Yeah, sure, they left the eyes in. You there, man?” he yelled, but I hung up. I found a bottle of Scotch and drank enough to fall asleep with my clothes on.

The phone was ringing.

A couple hours, maybe three, after I went to sleep, I stumbled out of bed. The sun streamed in through the big windows, and when I saw the damage in the hard morning light I wanted to hit something. I grabbed the phone. It was Lily. I looked at the mess in my apartment. I didn't tell her.

She said she was leaving for London. The job, she said, furtive, nervy. The morning flight. I looked at my watch. It was six in the morning.

“When do you go?”

“Soon. In an hour.”

I grabbed a shower and coffee, got dressed, then went to Lily's and took her to the airport. We didn't talk much on the way.

After a while, Lily said, “You look like you didn't get much sleep. What's going on?”

“Nothing,” I lied and pulled up at the terminal.

She handed me a piece of paper. “Phone numbers,” she said. “I'll be back soon. Artie? You hear me?” She
kissed me and said, “I'm not angry about your case, I swear to God, OK? It's just I had the offer of some work and I owe someone and I want to do it. I told you.”

I was distracted by what happened the night before and I let her go. She had gone away like that before. She was restless. I watched her as she took Beth and they went through to the departure lounge.

Lily turned and grinned the rueful way she does that melts my heart, then, one hand in Beth's, she shrugged again, maybe by way of an apology for going without me or to say, What am I doing, me with a kid and a pink nylon backpack with Barbie on it? But she pushed her red hair on top of her head, fixed it with a rubber band, picked Beth up and held her high so I could see her and blow her a kiss. Then the two of them disappeared.

“You can't be who Lily Hanes wants, man, you know? A cop is who you are, the air you breathe.”

“Yeah I can. I'm crazy about her.”

“I'm sorry about that.” Rick poured out some coffee and slid the mug across the green marble counter that separates his kitchen from his living room. He lives in the penthouse. The terrace doors were open. It was warm again.

I shifted my weight on the high leather stool and drank the bitter liquid. I'd come back from the airport, we'd fixed my place as best we could. I didn't tell Lippert the thugs wrecked my place.

What's the point, I thought. Some Brighton Beach crumb wants me off the case, enough so he comes after
me in the stairs at the Middlemarch, enough to fuck with my house. But there's a lot of low-level creeps out there that I offended one time or another. I couldn't see the connection to Pascoe's murder. Except for me.

“Artie, you hear me?” Rick leaned forward. “You can't be somebody else.”

“She'll be back. She just has this thing for London, OK? You think I'm an asshole, don't you?”

“We all got our sorrows,” he said, but he smiled. “You don't think Lily's reacting to the case?”

“Sure she's reacting. She's mad as hell I'm on it.”

“I didn't mean that. I meant the case itself.”

“Don't be an idiot.”

I took him through it: how Lulu Fine's alibi stuck to her like her leather pants; about Janey Cabot's fury. Rick, who looks smooth and slim as a young Noël Coward – Coward's his idol – dabbles in Cabot's world.

He listened carefully, then he said, “What about your loft, man? I want to fix those floors for you.”

“I don't want to think about it now,” I said. “Talk to me about Janey Cabot, about real estate, about what's going on in this city.”

He helped himself to coffee. “There's still so much money swilling around this town. How do you get to show your status?” Rick said. “Clothes don't matter, no one's making clothes for people over twenty – I mean, you ever try a pair of those flat-front Gucci pants? I can't get my arm in the pants leg. Also, the old rich don't do clothes, never did, the new rich wanna look old. Ask yourself: what's selling?” He got up, went to the coffee table, came back with a stack of magazines, held them
up one at a time. He laughed. “Magazines, on the box, Martha Stewart,
This Old House, House and Home, Wallpaper, Kitchen Sink, Nest
, fantasy houses, real houses, houses for Barbie, gardens, cooking shows, the lifestyles of anyone you'd like to be.”

He stopped and picked up his coffee. “It's where the dough is, sweetheart, it's where we put our money. Also, you don't want only a place in the city. You need something in the Hamptons for the summer, and Bedford for weekends, maybe the ski house in Montana or Jackson. You got family values now you're past thirty, right? You're not out in clubs. You gave up booze and smokes and coke and dope. Where you gonna put your dough if you can't buy a great co-op?”

I told him about the building, about Frankie Pascoe mainly. Rick's a guy that never judges; he has his own dark places. He stretched his legs now, and drank the coffee. “You're telling me you wanted to fuck her because she once slept with Stan Getz?”

I didn't answer.

“I met Frankie Pascoe once, you know. Him too.”

I put down my glass. “You met them?”

“Yeah. No big deal. I mean, half New York met these people, you know? Some charity affair. The sick, the homeless, the aimless, I can't remember. I was helping out on the food. All I remember is the outfits on those X-ray babes uptown who run these gigs, the high-heel ankle straps, the stick legs like they've been in the death camps. Frankie Pascoe stood out.”

“In what way?”

“Most of them you wouldn't touch with a ten-foot pole. She was very sexy.”

“Sexy.”

“Yeah. Hot. Dangerous. Like she wanted to take you into the toilet and put you up against the wall and fuck you, even while she was wearing her ballgown and the jewels. I remember the dress. Black velvet. Vintage Givenchy.”

“The one on TV. Jesus.”

“Eat you alive, babe, I thought. Gave even me a hard-on right there in the Metropolitan Museum, and I don't do it with girls if there's a choice. I thought, here's a woman that does everyone, men, women.”

“You ought to know.”

He smiled. “Fuck you. Look, the thing is, I got the feeling she couldn't stand the husband. The appearance of upper-crust perfection was pretty spectacular, though. You want to get some dumplings or something? I'm starving.”