Lover Man: An Artie Deemer Mystery (8 page)

"I thought I had a key, but it didn't fit."

"Let's see it."

I went to the foyer and picked up what I knew to be a key to a neighbor's place down the hall. I handed it to Cobb, who examined it, but I figured that was phony.

"Why'd you go in the first place?"

"To get some photographs. I was feeling very low about Billie. I went to her studio to get some photographs as a remembrance. But the key wouldn't fit. Maybe it's the wrong key, or maybe Billie changed the lock."

"So you tried the key, then gave up and went home?"

"Yes."

Cobb lit a cigarette and peered at me through the blue smoke, a hot-browed gaze. He stood up and took a stroll around the living room. He looked at things, the stereo most intently; he even stuck his head in the bedroom. I figured it was a ploy to unnerve me, and it was working. But I wanted to keep those photographs for a while. Billie meant them for me. "I been seventeen years on the force, Deemer, and I developed this itch. Sal can tell you. I get this itch right here in the back of my neck when some mope's tryin' to bullshit me." Pretending to examine my preamp, his back to me, he made exaggerated scratching motions with both hands. "The lock was drilled out. Gone. Totally. So don't feed me that bullshit about the wrong key."

The answer to that seemed so obvious I was scared to try it. But my confidence was growing. He wasn't going to arrest me. If he were, I'd be down there right now, phoning my lawyer at Jerome's Billiard Academy. "Couldn't the lock have been drilled out
after
I left?"

Cobb stared at me for a long time, neck probably itching like impetigo, before he said, "Why did the deceased take pictures of bums?"

"She felt sorry for them. She was expressing compassion."

This, clearly, was a difficult notion for Cobb to grasp. "Renaissance Antiques. That ring any bells?"

"Isn't it across the street from Billie's studio?"

"Good. What else?"

"Nothing. Just a store. Isn't it?"

"Yeah, right. Just a store. Anybody else been around asking questions?"

"Like who?"

"Like who? Like anybody in the whole fucking country!"

"No."

"You must think we're a bunch of chuckleheads, Deemer. Sal, he must think we're both simple fucks."

It's true, I was beginning to think they'd missed Freddy altogether.

"Let's go, Sal. This guy's a liar." Then he turned back on me. "One day soon, Deemer, we'll find out how you're connected to this, and don't tell me you aren't, insult my intelligence. Then we'll be comin' for you."

But Sal (good cop?) changed the subject: "What do you know about Billie Burke's father?"

"Just that he's in the film business."

"You know that because she told you? You never met the man?"

"No, never."

"We don't find any Burkes with daughters at the major studios. We'll keep trying."

I said I was sorry, but I didn't know any more, and that was true.

"What about the name?" Loccatuchi continued. "Billie Burke was an old-time actress. It seems odd she should have the same name. Maybe that was a career name."

I said that it was the name I knew her by, and that, too, was true.

"Yeah, well, I still think you're bullshittin' us, Deemer, but I don't know why. Someone drills out the lock and ransacks her studio on the same night she's murdered. Blows to hell the theory of a random victim of an asshole who likes to watch women drown, wouldn't you say?"

"Yes." Palomino? What about Freddy?

"And why would someone ransack the studio of a photographer of bums? Because they were looking for something? Why kill that photographer? Because she had something the murderer wanted? You with me, Deemer?"

"Of course."

"Look how she died. Tied up and drowned. To force her to give up this thing the murderer wanted? Fits, right? Makes me
think she was into something besides bums. And so we come to ask you, her ex-lover."

"I don't know, Detective. Honest."

"Honest, huh? You didn't seem all that surprised to hear about the ransacking. What do you think about that, Sal?"

"He didn't seem very surprised."

"I was surprised. Look, I'm sort of in shock, I think."

"Yeah? Tell me again why you went to the studio on the same night it was ransacked and she was murdered."

"I don't know exactly. It was whim. I wanted something to remember her by, something that showed the two of us together." Every lie I told sucked me deeper into the mire. I knew that.

He gazed hard into my eyes for a long time, then began scratching his neck. "On the other hand, maybe you're just a sentimental weirdo eccentric. No furniture, smoke dope all day, live off your dog. Maybe. My neck tells me different. My guess is we'll be back here, wouldn't you say, Sal?"

Sal nodded slowly, solemnly.

And then they headed for my front door. Was that
it?
No Palomino?

Cobb snapped his card down on the half-round table in my foyer. "You think it over, Deemer. Look at it like this. Maybe the killer still doesn't have what he killed for. Maybe he thinks you do. If the super saw you at her building, who else did? Follow?"

I followed. After the door closed behind them, I smoked the other half a gasper to quell the twitching hands. I put Eric Dolphy on the box, playing exquisite pain. I focused on the notes, finding refuge. I sat in my Morris chair, put my feet on the sill, and watched the river. All I needed to do was to give myself over to the music and there would be harmony between reality and imagination. Jazz could turn the world into a tranquil place. Jellyroll
sensed the potential. He stretched his spine with a long sigh, circled, and flopped on the Spruce Bough.

But I got up even though the music was working. I drew the envelope out from under the stove with a mop handle and studied the "new" photographs.

EIGHT

I
 DON'T OWN a suit. I had one, but i donated it to a thrift shop when bell-bottoms passed from style. So next morning I helped myself to one of Jerry's. He's a master-blaster mergers and acquisitions lawyer who lives next door to Mrs. Fishbein. His was the key I showed Cobb. Jerry's always flying off to the Sunbelt with a litigation bag-full of gibberish to undermine the Securities Exchange Act of 1934, As Amended, and he hits me up to feed his cat.

After Cobb and his sidekick left, I'd spent two hours over Billie's photographs, staring at them, trying to make some sense of them separately and as a group. I also brooded over those I might have lost in the sooty mud under that tree. I was in an ugly mood when I changed into one of Jerry's four blue pinstriped suits and headed downtown. I stopped at the Strand Book Store to acquire some antiques jargon.

Renaissance Antiques seemed larger in the daylight. I stood under my umbrella on the opposite side of Broadway and watched the building as if close scrutiny might reveal its secrets. It occupied the corner of Broadway and Eleventh and nearly half the block in either direction. It was a lovely Depression-era building with a lot of masonry detail. The ground floor served as a showroom, with large plate-glass windows in which were displayed chests of drawers. There must have been twenty of them. I walked around to the entrance on Eleventh and peered in through the glass door. Antiques of every time and kind were stacked helter-skelter, one atop the other. It looked like the last Xanadu scene
in
Citizen Kane
. I rang the bell beneath which an elegant brass plaque said "Dealers to the Trade."

I waited a long time before I saw a man approaching the door, winding his way through a tunnel of furniture. He opened the door a crack no wider than his face, which was narrow and hawky with an Ichabod Crane nose, and he said, "I'm sorry, we only deal to the trade."

I recognized the face—I had been staring at it in two of Billie's photographs—but I covered my surprise with a big grin. "Hi," I said, "I'm Seth Klimple. Klimple's of Sausalito. Perhaps you didn't receive my wire?"

"Mr. Klimple? No, I don't believe I did."

"I'm not surprised. It's been that kind of trip thus far. May I come in nonetheless?"

He held the door for me and said with a warmthless smile, "I'm Mr. Jones. Manager." You wouldn't buy a subway token from this guy. The air inside was musty and damp, like a grandmother's cedar chest. Jones watched me with little black eyes as I surveyed the stock.

"I specialize, Mr. Jones, in art nouveau.
Fin de siècle
is very big on the Coast."

..."I believe we have a rosewood settee."

"Is it a Selmershein or a Plumet?"

"I'll have to check."

"May I browse? I'm eclectic."

"Certainly. Excuse me, I'll check on the settee."

"Take your time."

What was Jones to Billie that he should show up in her photographs? Her killer? There was no reason to think so, except that he had the eyes for it. I struck off through the maze in search of Sybel, and suddenly I had a vision. Heart pounding, I stood apart and watched myself kill Jones, a total stranger. Perhaps it had something to do with all that old furniture looming over me like the walls of a dreadful canyon. I killed Jones with an ax. Night before
last I was lounging in my Morris chair relatively free of stress, and today I struck Billie's killer, chosen on appearance alone, a terrible two-handed blow that split his head from crown to chin like an overripe honeydew. Both halves rolled sideways over his shoulders and bounced on the floor at his feet. Only when the two halves came to rest on their ears did his body crumple in a pile. Jesus.

"Get out of here!" hissed a female voice, and every muscle in my neck contracted about two inches. For a mad moment I was terrified that she'd witnessed my lethal clout to Jones. I couldn't see all of her, only her face. She had hissed at me through a hole in a stack of matching chairs. Her dark, curly hair was drawn dramatically away from her face and tied behind her head. Sybel wore a simple gold chain wrapped tightly around her throat.

"You gave me a phony phone number," I squeaked. "Why did you do that?"

"Because I didn't want to talk to you. I thought you'd get the message."

"Not good enough." I was beginning to collect myself. "Some things have happened. You talk to me or I go straight to Cobb and sic him on you."

"Cobb? Who the hell's Cobb?"

"Cobb's a hard-ass cop. You'll like him."

"Are you crazy? I can't talk now!"

"When do you get off?"

"Five."

"Meet me somewhere."

"Nowhere private."

"How about the public library?" I wanted to go there anyway.

"Which one?"

"The one with the lions. Do you know where the Map Room is?"

"No."

"Ask. I'll see you there at five-thirty. If you're not there by six, I go to the cops."

"All right. I'll be there, but you cut this Klimple bullshit and get out of here." Sybel vanished.

"Mr. Klimple?" It was Jones calling me. I made two left turns around a fifteen-foot-high stack of dining tables, and there he was. "I found the settee, Mr. Klimple. Right this way." He indicated a forking tunnel and led the way.

It was a monstrosity. "Oh, it's marvelous!" It had gaudy carved lion's paws for legs, and up near the seat the lion's head appeared growling from a jungle of vines that coiled up the arms and over the back. You wouldn't want to sit in the lumpy thing without one of those suits they wear when training attack dogs. "My partner adores jungles. How much are you asking?"

"Seven hundred."

"I'll bring her in to see it. May I have your card, Mr. Jones?" He didn't seem to care a bit about my Klimple act. I was relieved at that and sorry I had killed him on such short evidence. His card said, "Walter Jones. Manager, Renaissance Antiques."

"May I have your card, Mr. Klimple?"

"Sorry, I can't oblige. My hotel room was burglarized last night. Took everything."

"I'm sorry."

"However, I don't blame it on NYC. Could happen in Sausalito. Could happen in Anytown, USA. Let's face it, the traditional values are on the skids today. Sad but true." I was getting a little overconfident. "I'll be back first thing in the a.m. with my partner."

Jones nodded. He didn't give a shit whether I lived or died.

I didn't see Sybel on the way out. It was raining steadily as I walked up Broadway to Union Square Park, where I began to root around in the mud at the base of the tree. I clawed and sifted earth like a crazed archeologist, and once I thought I'd found a negative, but it turned out to be one of those glassine packets street dealers call nickel bags. I was being watched, I realized, by a downtrodden throng of loiterers. They seemed nervous,
skittish and wary, like a flock of shore birds. When I rose up on my knees, they cringed and shrank back in silence at the sight of this obsessed antiquer from Sausalito groveling in the mud in a pinstriped suit. I stood, trembling, and they faded back a few more steps. "Did anybody find any negatives under this tree?" I asked. "You know, like photographs." But they disappeared. It was time to get out of this business.

There was a single piece of mail for me at home. "Bright Bay Nursing Home," said the return address. I give away a lot of Jellyroll's money because we don't need it all, so I'm on everybody's list. But this wasn't a request for money. It was a bill: