JM02 - Death's Little Helpers aka No Way Home (25 page)

I sighed again. “I don’t give a shit about her ethics or her sex life. I just want to know where Danes is.”

Lefcourt tossed the remote on the desk and came back to the sofa and stood behind it. “She can’t tell you anything.”

“You’re sure about that?”

“A husband knows things,” he said, and there was a grim little smile on his little mouth.

“Things like where Danes might be, maybe?”

“That’s not something I keep track of.”

“Not now,” I asked, “or not ever?”

Lefcourt smirked. “What’s got you so convinced that something was going on between them anyway? What’ve you seen?”

He was relentless in his fishing, and I decided to tug a little on the line. “She left stuff at his place,” I said.

Lefcourt’s face got tight. His tanned forehead was shiny. “What stuff? And what proof do you have that it’s hers?”

I shook my head. “I’m not interested in proving it.”

Lefcourt paced behind the sofa and pointed at me, trotting out the anger again. “You’d better be prepared to, if you’re going to go around talking like that. You’re a deep enough pocket, March. You screw up Linda’s earning capacity, and I promise I’ll fucking empty you out.” I stood up and Lefcourt seemed startled. “Where are you going?”

“It seems a safe bet that your wife isn’t showing up anytime soon, and we’re going round and round here and getting nowhere, so I figured it was time to leave.”

Lefcourt stared at me for a few seconds. “Have you heard a word that I’ve said?” he asked.

“You know, I was about to ask you the same thing.”

I was at the door when Lefcourt called to me. “I meant it, March, about leaving her alone. Any more crap like your chat-room stunt, and there’ll be a flock of lawyers picking on your bones.” I looked back at him but said nothing. “I meant it about Danes, too. Neither one of us knows where he is, and neither one of us gives a shit.”

17

“Sure, I remember the guy,” Phyllis said. “A few more customers like him, I’ll burn the place down and go back to being a parole officer.” It was late afternoon, and I was calling the hotels that had appeared on Danes’s credit card statement. The Copper Beech Inn, in Lenox, Massachusetts, was first on my list. Phyllis was the owner, and her voice was rough and friendly through the telephone.

“He was a real piece of work,” she continued, laughing. “Had something to say about everything, from the pillows, to the coffee, to the water pressure, and none of it was good. We love guests like that— they make it all worthwhile.”

“Was he there with anyone?”

“Nope, it was just him and his sunny disposition.”

“Had he ever been there before?”

“Not before or since, thank God.”

“Any idea what he was doing up there? That time of year isn’t ideal for leaf-peeping.”

Phyllis laughed again. “Back in January, it would’ve been more like snow-peeping. But folks do come up then, for cross-country skiing or just to get away. I have no idea what Chuckles was doing, though. Can’t say he seemed real relaxed.”

I thanked Phyllis and made my next call, to the Maidstone Tavern in East Hampton. A guy named Tim answered. He was arch and breathy and kept putting me on hold, and it took him a long while to tell me very little. Eventually, he confirmed that Danes had been a guest there about three months earlier and that he’d not been back since, but he had only vague memories of Danes himself and couldn’t say if he had been alone during his stay. I got off the line before a headache took hold.

I sat back from my long oak table and looked at the TV screen. Linda Sovitch’s muted image appeared. Her mouth moved, her white teeth flashed, and then she was gone, replaced by an ad for a German car. I thought— again— about my morning visit with her husband.

Aaron Lefcourt hadn’t registered much shock at the notion of his wife carrying on with Gregory Danes; the closest he’d come was an imitation of indignity. He was much more interested in how I knew about the affair and in how much noise I planned to make. Which, when I considered it, made a kind of pragmatic sense: the fact that she’d been sleeping with one of her regular guests— especially one as tainted as Danes— wouldn’t do Sovitch’s career any good. An imaginative plaintiff’s lawyer could even use it to turn her— and her network— into collateral damage in one of the investor suits still floating around. Reason enough, I supposed, for a practical man like Lefcourt to want things kept quiet. But was it also the reason Danes hadn’t come home?

That theory might go down easier if Lefcourt had been just plain jealous— though I knew just plain greed was at least as popular a motive for murder. Hell, maybe he was greedy and jealous, both.

It was absolute conjecture, but it was irresistible, too. I knew Danes wanted to restore his reputation, and I knew he wanted Sovitch to help him do it. I also knew— because Sovitch had told me— that he was pissed off at her for not giving him airtime on her show. What if their lunch conversation had been a little different from what Sovitch had described? What if Danes had threatened to go public with their affair? From what I knew of him, Danes wasn’t above that kind of threat; it might even be his style. And if he had done that, would Sovitch have run to Lefcourt, as she had when I’d come sniffing around? And what might Lefcourt have done?

“Speculative bullshit,” I said aloud, and of course it was. But Danes had checked his messages every three days for nearly three weeks, and then he had stopped. There was nothing theoretical about that.

I picked up the phone again. The woman in Bermuda had a lovely voice and an odd, mid-ocean accent, and she was so pleasant in her refusal to answer any of my questions about Danes’s stay at her hotel that I was nonetheless glad I called. When I hung up, it was time to go to Brooklyn.

I don’t often sit down to dinner with families— not my own or anye else’s— and I wasn’t sure what to expect at Nina Sachs’s place. Certainly not Ozzie and Harriet, but not, I hoped, something out of Eugene O’Neill either. As it happened, it was an entirely pleasant evening. Right up until the end.

I bought a bunch of irises at a market near the Clark Street subway station, and I walked over to Willow Street and down toward the water. The western sky was drenched in impossible color and the breeze was warm and full of blossoms and the smells of supper on the stove. Laughter and scraps of conversation drifted out of open windows into the darkening air, and the evening streets seemed intimate and somehow full of promise. I took my time walking down.

The I-2 Gallery was closed, and white shades covered its big windows. I looked up and saw that Nina’s windows were opened wide. I pressed the intercom button and the lock buzzed right away. Music tumbled down to meet me as I climbed the stairs: Motown. Nina’s door was ajar.

Billy was sitting cross-legged by the windows, between two stacks of comic books and in front of a pile of plastic bags and cardboard backing sheets. He wore camo pants cut off into shorts and a green T-shirt. His feet were bare and his legs were bony and white. He was bagging comics and bopping to the music, and he waved when I came in. Nina and Ines were in the kitchen, and they put me to work right away.

Ines was at the fancy stove, chopping peppers and onions and fixing them on skewers with cubes of beef. She smiled at me. Her black hair was up in a loose shiny pile, and she wore a long apron over a fuchsia linen shift. Her feet were bare, and her fingers and toes were nicely manicured and painted to match her dress. There was a small silver band on the second toe of her right foot.

“Detective,” she said, and she surprised me by kissing my cheek. “The flowers are lovely.” Her face was warm and she smelled of lavender.

Nina was at one of the steel-topped counters. Her hair was loose and she was wearing gray shorts and a sleeveless black T-shirt. Her legs were pale but firm and nicely shaped. She stood before a cutting board and the mangled remains of a tomato. She had a paring knife in one hand and a stem glass in the other. There was something red and slushy in the glass, and she took a drink of it.

“Can you chop?” she asked me.

“More or less.”

“That’s better than me,” she said. “I’ll trade you.” She handed me the knife, hilt first, and took the flowers. “Do I have something to put these in, Nes?” she asked.

Ines chuckled. “In the cabinet, above the glasses, there is a tall

vase.”

I held up the paring knife. “Got something a little bigger?” I asked Ines. She smiled and pulled an eight-inch knife from a wooden block on the counter.

“This should do, detective.”

Nina made a mock scowl. “Everybody’s a fucking critic,” she said. “I’ll stick to driving the blender. It’s better for all concerned. You want a strawberry daiquiri?” I shook my head. “Come on, it’s our Memorial Day warm-up— you’ve got to have one.”

I shook my head again. “I don’t drink.”

Nina tilted an eyebrow at me. “I’ll fix you a virgin, then.”

“That’s all she lets me have,” Billy called from the living room. “They’re not bad.”

“With that kind of testimonial, how can I refuse?” I said. Nina dumped strawberries, sugar, and ice into the blender, capped the steel pitcher, and hit the button. I leaned toward Ines and spoke over the din.

“What am I chopping for?”

“Tomato and onion salad, so not too fine.” I nodded and started slicing. Nina shut down the blender and handed me a drink.

“We’re out of umbrellas,” she said. “I figured we could talk after dinner, and since you two have everything covered, I’m going to sneak into the studio for a while.” Ines nodded and Nina carried her drink away. I watched as she crossed the room and ruffled Billy’s hair as she passed. He looked up at her and smiled.

Ines and I worked side by side. She swayed gently to the music as she chopped and skewered, and she sang along softly and sipped at her daiquiri. Her knife work was fast and precise, and there was something almost hypnotic in the movements of her long, strong fingers. Even with the windows open and the fan running it was warm in the kitchen, and there was a faint sheen on Ines’s forehead. The broad, flat scar on her arm looked slick. Her perfume and the delicate aroma of her sweat mingled pleasantly with the smells of cooking food.

I was slow but managed not to make too much of a mess. I finished with the tomatoes and moved on to the onions, and when I’d hacked those up sufficiently, Ines swept them into a big glass bowl and tossed them with oil and vinegar and some basil leaves.

“What else can I do?”

“Just relax, detective.”

I took my drink to the living room and sat on the edge of the sofa. Billy was just finishing his bagging.

“New stuff?” I asked.

He nodded. “Yeah. I’ve got the complete run of House of Anxiety now— all mint— and I’m only missing five issues for the full set of Perturbed. I got something that’s up your alley, too.” Billy sorted through the pile and handed me a stack of seven comics. I looked them over. “Detective Comics, issues 437 through 443, from 1974, when DC brought back the Manhunter and brought your buddy Batman into it. All very fine or near-mint condition. Be careful with them; I got them to trade with a guy, for the first three issues of Dreadful Landscape.”

Billy watched me closely as I studied the comics, and I must have shown the right degree of reverence, as he was soon talking me through his whole stack. He expounded on the artists and writers of nearly every issue in the pile and went on at length about the fine points of quality grades— what separated a near-mint-minus, for example, from a very-fine-plus. He had a vast array of facts at his disposal, and he was pleased with his esoteric knowledge. He was as finicky and proud as any collector of stamps or fine wines, but his sense of humor— sarcastic and self-deprecating— saved him from pedantry. I thought about Gregory Danes’s record collection and wondered if monomania ran in families. Whatever its source, Billy reveled in it. His thin face lost its usual dour cast, and his blue eyes were lively and sharp. Words tumbled out of him, and his hands danced around. The Motown disc ended and Billy interrupted a pronouncement on pricing to change CDs.

“Can we at least hear something close to this century?” he said. Billy went to one of the tall shelf units, to a messy heap of discs next to the CD player. He picked through it, passing cruel but amusing judgments on his mother’s taste in music, and eventually found something he liked. He loaded the disc and fell into a deep slouch at the other end of the sofa. The music was funky and jazzy, with plenty of horns, a twanging electric guitar, and beefy keyboards. It sounded familiar.

“I know this,” I said. “Who is it?” Billy looked pleased.

“Band’s called Galactic, the album is—”

“Crazyhorse Mongoose,” I interrupted. “I haven’t heard this for a while.” Billy was taken aback, and maybe a little impressed. And that got us onto a whole other topic.

Billy’s taste in music was not the typical twelve-year-old’s, and it was catholic, to say the least. It ranged from sixties and seventies soul to jazz fusion to ska to old-school punk and hip-hop, and he talked about musicians and bands with a fervor that surpassed even his comic book discourses. Many of his favorites were obscure, but I knew a few of them, which surprised Billy some more.

“Do you play anything?” I asked.

Billy shrugged. “A little bass, but I don’t spend enough time with it.” He looked at me and hesitated. “My dad’s always trying to get me going on the piano.”

“That’s what he plays, right?”

Billy nodded. “Shit, yes. He’s been playing since he was five or something, and he’s amazing. He’s into classical stuff. I told him he should listen to some jazz, but he thinks it’s bullshit. I told him to check out Monk, but he doesn’t want to know.”

He looked down and thought about something and laughed to himself.

“Check this,” he said, and he sprang off the sofa and trotted down the hall toward his room. From the kitchen, Ines watched him go. Then she looked at me and brushed a strand of damp hair away from her face. Billy was back in under two minutes, holding a glossy photograph.

“This is what my dad knows about jazz,” he said, and handed me the photo. It was a picture of three men in black tie, standing side by side. On the right was Gregory Danes, and in the center was a world-renowned bassist, an aging jazz icon and darling of the NPR set. On the left was a white-haired man with hollow cheeks whose name I didn’t know, but whose face I recognized from a similar photo I’d seen in Danes’s apartment. The famous bassist had autographed the picture in black marker: To my buddy, Bill— keep swingin’, man. Billy laughed.