Authors: Reggie Nadelson
“But not with the Middlemarch.”
“Exactly.”
“It was a blind alley?”
“Yes.”
“Let's walk and talk, Sal,” I said and we strolled down Sutton Place. On the left was the row of townhouses, private gardens leading on to the river. In front of me were a pair of blue and whites, cop cars parked outside the Middlemarch.
I stopped and looked at the building. “What's so great about it anyhow?”
Castle took off his little glasses, tapped his nose with them. He craned his short neck. “Look at this street, the way it's set apart from the city, the river, the light, the history. It has the most desirable buildings in the best zip code in the country. Like the great buildings on Fifth and Park. The rooms are big, ceilings are high, the walls are thick, the service is gracious and this one has the pool. The rules are very very tough. Sweet Jesus, my grandmother in Cuba, and she was the old school, old Spanish blood, old Spanish manners, but when it comes to rules, she could have been a hippie compared with these people. I can't afford to offend this kind of people and they all know each other.” He saw the doorman watching us. It was Sweeney, the big Irish guy. Castle looked nervous. “Let's go.”
“What did you mean, you can't afford to offend them? How's that?”
“I can put an apartment on the market, I can find a
buyer, he has the money. Then he waits for an interview. Weeks. Months. The co-op board strings him along, then it rejects him. The deal's off. Rejection's the name of the game.” He laughed to himself. Not much humor in the noise he made.
I pulled a pack of cigarettes out of my pocket and held it out, but Castle shook his head.
“Manhattan is a very small island,” he said. “It's the world's most expensive piece of turf now that Hong Kong's finished, and Hong Kong only counted for the money. This is the club. Limited membership. People will kill to get a decent place.”
“Literally?”
“There's nothing left. I can get a couple mill for a classic six âfixer upper', as they call it, for which read an apartment that needs a ton of work on not the best street. In, you know, an area that's adjacent.”
“What about financial criteria?”
“Insane. Some buildings require the full purchase price in cash and two to three times that much in liquid assets, plus five years' maintenance, say half a mill, in escrow. The country house doesn't count as assets.” He shook his head. “That help you?”
A few Bloody Marys, and an early lunch at Billy's on First Avenue, loosened Sal's tongue even more. He ordered chopped steak. I watched him eat. I wasn't hungry.
“Do me a favor, Sal. Find out exactly which apartment it was.”
“I already did. It was a couple of lousy maids' rooms,
a piece of crap on the top floor. I checked around. Madame Ulanova was there a long long time. She came over during the war, there was a tremendous housing squeeze and they cut up the old apartments. Rent control came in to ease the squeeze. After World War Two Thomas Pascoe began assembling shares. He put together the big ten- and twelve-room apartments, but Madame Ulanova, who inherited her shares from her husband, wouldn't play his game.” Castle started on his third Bloody, sipped it, patted the tomato juice off his mouth with a napkin.
“And Pascoe was in charge?”
“Pascoe ruled by intimidation, but it was subtle. He put people on the board who had secrets, people he could control, Jews, queers, excuse me. Society was pretty anti-Semitic back then. The only legitimate basis for rejecting applicants to a co-op, and it's in the city codes, are insufficient financial ability and bad moral character.”
“Moral character's a pretty subjective area.”
“Right. Thomas Pascoe
was
the board.”
“So when was the ad withdrawn?”
“There was a fax waiting for me this morning.”
I said, “After Pascoe died. So it was probably spite. Now she's free to keep it or put it back on the market. It's hers to sell. With Pascoe dead, it frees her up. But who the hell sent you the message if she's stroking out?”
Castle clutched his drink and looked at me like I lost my marbles. “I guess you haven't heard.”
“Heard what?”
“I thought that's why you showed up. Madame Ulanova died this morning.”
I left Sal Castle, went over to First, walked a while, past the florist, dry cleaners, a Korean deli, a muffin store and nail parlor. The nail parlor had a sign in Russian in the window. I shut my eyes and put my mind back on the case.
Ulanova was dead. The Russian was Lippert's excuse to keep me on the case: he could get the dough to run me if there was a Russian speaker. Now he'd pull me off it. I didn't want off. I wanted to see Frances Pascoe again. I went back to the Middlemarch and leaned over the railing at the edge of the piazza. Out on the river, a green and yellow water taxi cruised under the bridge.
The sun was in my eyes, but when I put on some sunglasses, I saw the boys in the little park a level down from me. Two of them. In the little gazebo they sat side by side, backs to me, curls of smoke going up.
And then one of them stood up and turned around very slowly. His back was to the river now. He put his hand over his eyes to shade them, looked up at the building, saw me and lifted his hand. Very slowly, he raised it, like a young prince, in a little wave.
The light caught the blue-black hair, the tanned skin, the yellow jacket â he was a rich, handsome boy â and made him glitter. He waved again, then laughed, and tossed his cigarette into the water. I recognized the jacket. St Peter's School. My neighbor's kid goes to St Pete's.
Someone was watching me watch the kids. My
mouth went dry. I could feel someone on my back. On instinct my hand went to my gun. Very slowly, I turned around.
Frances Pascoe was standing behind me, looking. She held out a piece of paper with some names scrawled on it, handed it to me and said, “The names you wanted. I hope it helps. I'll call you when I can,” she added, then disappeared back into the building. I wondered why she gave me the list and who she was protecting.
I went home, checked out the names on the list as best I could, then drove over to Sullivan Street. At Pino's I picked up a pound of prosciutto and some Newport steaks. I got smoked mozzarella at Joe's Dairy along with a loaf of semolina, and I went by Lily's for a late lunch and maybe dinner later on, and to tell her Sonny Lippert threw me a piece of the Pascoe case. I had to tell her.
“A little piece,” I said. “Nothing much.” I poured us both a glass of wine.
She looked up from her computer in the corner of the living room. It was a big, square room, yellow walls covered with books, records, CDs, photographs and artefacts from jobs she'd done as a reporter â kitsch stuff mostly: a set of wooden Russian dolls featuring Stalin and Gorbachev; a Haile Selassie cigarette case; the mirror with Mao in it that lights up and plays “The East Is Red”. Old despots make Lily laugh.
Beth was asleep in the other room and Lily was working, glasses on, distracted. She wore old white tennis shorts and a sweatshirt with the sleeves cut off. She was barefoot. The floor was piled with newspapers,
the TV tuned to a local station, the sound muted. I turned up the volume and glanced at the news running on the TV. The Pascoe story was in its second day.
Lily grilled me about it lightly, joking, but her tone was brittle and her mood shifted as soon as I told her I was on the case. I flopped on her big white sofa, kicked off my shoes, stretched my legs.
“You heard the one about the guy who lost his head over an apartment?” I said and cracked up.
Lily didn't smile. I told her a couple more stupid jokes I'd heard on the phone. She kept working, then stopped, picked up her wine glass, drank off most of it. Finally she said, “You think it's a joke, don't you? Some kind of uptown
grand guignol
, Pascoe getting murdered in the pool, the withered old woman in the attic”
“It's pretty rich,” I said and went into the kitchen, put the steak in the fridge, sliced up the mozzarella and unwrapped the ham. I was starving. She followed me and stood in the door. She picked up a piece of mozzarella and ate it; the milk from it dripped down her chin. I reached over to wipe it away, grinning.
Lily backed off and said, “How involved are you?”
“It's nothing. A couple interviews is all, and I'm out of it. There was a witness, a Russian speaker. Sonny called me in.”
“Was?”
“She's dead.”
“So what's that leave for you, on the case I mean?”
“A few loose ends. And a nice piece of change for the work.”
She ate some prosciutto slowly. Then she said, “I
thought you gave up being Sonny Lippert's errand boy.”
I drank the wine and kept my mouth shut.
“Murder at the Middlemarch,” she said. “You think because it's rich people no one suffers? You think other people aren't involved?” Lily smiled, but her tone was forced.
I said, “Hey, there's nothing gonna happen on this one. It's a piece of cake. Nothing even near dangerous. I promised you, I meant it.”
Lily looked up at me. “That's not what I meant.” She stretched and kissed me, but she had turned in on herself. “I have some work to do.”
“I'll make lunch.”
I figured she was pissed off I was on the Pascoe case, scared maybe. I was still in the kitchen when the phone rang. Through the swing door, I heard her talking. Someone in London. Lily had worked in London; it still has a lot of allure for her, and she was animated now, gossiping about people I don't know, laughing at jokes I didn't hear. Even her inflection changed.
Half listening, I fixed salad and sandwiches.
“Hi.” Lily appeared in the door, a bottle of her best wine in her hand like an offering.
We ate a late lunch with the TV on. Frances Pascoe appeared on the news in old pictures in an evening dress. Eventually I said, “Who was it? On the phone.”
Lily said, “There's some kind of job going in London.” She was a little shifty, fussing with her glass, smiling too hard. “A sort of charity thing, you know, Lily-does-good kind of thing.” She laughed.
“You want to do it?”
Suddenly the glass slipped from her hand and shattered on the hardwood floor. Lily crouched down, picked up the pieces of glass, cut herself. A bubble of blood appeared, and I pulled her on to the couch, took her hand, put her thumb in my mouth. I tasted the blood.
I said, “It's OK. Go to London if you want to.”
She slumped against me, head on my shoulder, as if she was suddenly heavy with fatigue. She closed her eyes.
“What is it, sweetheart? Tell me.” I held her. People think I'm a fool for putting up with her moods. I don't listen to them. It's not rational, this stuff, how I feel.
She said, “I don't want to go, I don't, I'd rather stay here with you, it's just maybe something I owe, something I ought to do. I don't know.”
I held on to her. She pushed her red hair away, looked at me, light gray-blue eyes transparent, troubled. “Bloody London,” she said. “It sucks you in.”
I said, “Owe who?”, but Lily had closed her eyes. All she said was, “Turn off the TV.”
A picture of Thomas Pascoe came up on the TV screen. He had the right face for the job: long patrician forehead, aquiline nose, white hair, thin lips.
The TV was over the bar and I stood drinking a beer, watching it, waiting for Lulu Fine in the pub off York Avenue. Fine was top of Mrs Pascoe's list. Pictures of soccer stars lined the wall. I pulled some obits out of a file folder and put them on the bar.
Thomas Pascoe was born in New York, 1920, he had English parents who took him home before he could talk. He looked good for going on eighty. He looked great. He came back to New York during the war, some kind of hot shot in the OSS. By the time he was twenty-five he was a hero. He stayed on, joined an investment bank. There was a brief first marriage, no kids. Then, later, Frances. They met on one of his trips to London, he brought her back to New York.
She was a lot younger, but there were no birth dates. She'd covered her tracks that way. She'd been an athlete as a kid, played around as a journalist, decorator, hippie.
The background bio was brief, but it read like she came from money. The money was hers, she said, when I asked her about it. “It was mine,” she said. “I earned it.” I didn't know if marrying Pascoe was that job that earned her the dough or it was really hers. But even as a kid she looked rich.
Later there were radical causes. In the file was a picture of her at a party for the Black Panthers in the late Sixties. In a fringed suede jacket, she looked very young.
I'd checked with Sonny Lippert. Forty-four apartments in the Middlemarch, not counting the Pascoes' and Ulanova's. A dozen guys had been on it around the clock. Owners had been interviewed; no one knew anything. I called the board members. All of them talked up Thomas Pascoe like he was a dead saint. The house employees I got to were also quiet. I got an address for Pindar Aguirre; he lived in Astoria; it could wait. Two wannabes on Mrs Pascoe's list were out of town, one permanently; a third was dead.
The story was like the geoplastic phase of those volcanoes you see on
National Geographic
on TV, like molten earth, the lava that keeps on coming at you, getting bigger, moving faster, eating everything in its path. The Pascoe affair, it was mayhem with parameters, so people lapped it up. It was fun. Papers loved it,
Post, News, Observer
, the magazines, the TV. The
Times
packaged the gossip as financial news and retailed it big in the business section because Pascoe was director of a bunch of companies. A very rich guy was dead in a midnight-blue Art Deco swimming pool with a gold
frieze around the tiles; it was the fanciest building in the most exclusive neighborhood in town. A building that didn't take Jews, blacks, nobody from Jersey. They didn't say so; everyone knew.