Mystery Girl: A Novel (3 page)

“Is the door fastened?”

The old lady rolled her eyes at Mrs. Moon and yelled, “Yeah, Solly, it’s shut.”

“I can see that, Mother,” the shadow boomed, like Moses on the mountain. “Is it made fast?”

“Jesus, yes, it’s locked for crying out loud.”

“Very well,” he said, and came into the light. He was, to put it mildly, enormous. He was hugely, extravagantly, preposterously obese, with fingers like hot dogs and cheeks like rosy balloons and swaying, trembling, juggling triple-G breasts that wrestled like puppies in his shirt as he walked. But he was not one of those people who should, if they were healthy, be average size. He was huge on every level, in every dimension. He was very tall, over six feet, with shoulders wider than the door, and another four inches of black-and-gray hair rising from his high, wide carapace of forehead. Each massive hand was like a whole Easter ham. His head alone must have weighed fifty pounds, archaic and regal, like an unearthed chunk of marble. He was very pale, with a sharp chieftain’s nose, a prominent, densely planted eyebrow ridge, thick, tender lips like slices of rare roast beef, and huge wet black eyes that blinked and floated like sharks in their bowl of a head before retreating behind the heavy
lids. His ears were like conch shells, full of pink swirls and depths, and his neck was thicker and stronger than my leg. He was dressed in a cream-colored three-piece linen suit with pleated pants, a four-button jacket, a mauve shirt, a chocolate brown tie, and highly polished brown shoes. I was taken aback, but the shoes struck a plaintive note: they were pointy, bright, thin-soled, and delicate, and he moved toward me quickly, with surprising grace and lightness, as if instead of burdening him, his greatness uplifted, buoying him aloft, while my own spindly legs clung cravenly to the earth in their clunky boots.

“Mr. Kornberg, I presume,” he intoned.

“Mr. Lonsky, it’s a pleasure to meet you. I found this on the sidewalk.”

“Ah yes. The paper,” he said, tucking it under his arm and then taking my hand gently in his soft paw while looking me frankly in the eyes. Unlike the others, he didn’t flinch. He smiled. “I’m unable to retrieve it myself, you see. Allergies.”

Mrs. Lonsky snorted derisively at this but kept her eyes on her cards. She laid one down and Mrs. Moon drew it, impassively. Lonsky frowned.

“I see you’ve met my mother and our housekeeper. Let’s retire to my study for a chat. Tea, please, Mrs. Moon. I find green tea less nervous-making than coffee.”

Mrs. Moon smiled and started to stand, but the old lady waved her down. “Screw the tea. We’re playing here. Besides”—she looked up at me and winked—“Solly’s got an assistant now.” She started laughing richly, the long, tiny cigarette bouncing in her mouth. Mrs. Moon tittered behind her fan of cards. Lonsky gave them a dignified sneer.

“Follow me,” he said.

He led me down a hall full of old photos and into another room. Here there were floor-to-ceiling bookshelves crammed with old books and a huge leather-topped desk. I couldn’t look closely, but my
scavenger’s eye caught a complete Freud, a complete Shakespeare, a complete Sherlock Holmes, a complete Rousseau’s
Confessions,
and all twenty volumes of the Oxford English Dictionary. A completist. There was also a chessboard in mid-game, an upright piano stacked with sheet music, and a dusty violin, as well as assorted bones, rocks, animal skulls, small carved statues, and antique ceramic bowls. Lonsky sank into his chair, wide and deep like a leather throne. He went through the
Times,
pulled out a section and unfolded it, then folded it back again, revealing the crossword puzzle. He picked up a gold-and-onyx fountain pen.

“Time?” he asked me.

“Pardon? Oh”—I glanced at my watch—“a little after four.”

“Please be precise if you can.”

I looked at my watch again. Was this part of the interview? Had we started yet? I waited for the number to change.

“It is now exactly… 4:02.”

Lonsky began rapidly filling in the crossword puzzle, moving ceaselessly from left to right as if jotting down a grocery list. While he wrote, he spoke, without lifting his eyes from the page.

“So, you’d like to be a private investigator.”

“Yes, very much so,” I said, a little relieved now that the interview proper was under way, but still distracted by his writing. It looked as if he was doing all the across questions in order, one after the other. “I brought you a copy of my résumé.” I snapped open the briefcase and searched through the jumble.

“That won’t be necessary,” he said without looking up. “You’re from New Jersey. You attended a good college, probably in New York. You worked with books, perhaps in publishing, but more likely in a used bookshop, although business has fallen off. Someone close to you, a woman, works in the fashion industry. You’re married. But, I’m afraid, you’re currently having some difficulties in that area as well.”

I laughed nervously. I admit I was even a little frightened.

“How did you know all that? The Internet?”

He laughed, still scribbling away. Now he was filling in the down clues.

“I merely observed you, Mr. Kornberg. That you’re from the garden state I gathered from your accent. However, the more nasal features of the dialect have been smoothed over, indicating some advanced education. Also, the books in your briefcase are of a varied and refined nature, suggesting a much larger collection. I assume you grabbed them at random to fill the case?”

I nodded guiltily. He went on: “Hence, you are clearly a serious reader and perhaps professionally involved with literature. But the books themselves are old, well-worn editions, and I observed too that you immediately noted some of the better items in my own collection, suggesting perhaps a used bookshop. You’re wearing a Dries Van Noten suit from last year’s fall collection. Although I wear only bespoke suits myself, residing outside the commercially available dimensions, I know that Mr. Van Noten is both an expensive and somewhat rarified designer, far too sophisticated a choice for an average bookish fellow to make without guidance. That indicates some rather esoteric knowledge of clothes. Nevertheless, it is last year’s and not a summer suit at all, which suggests you purchased it at a discount, perhaps at one of the private sales to which industry insiders are invited. Also, your watch is inexpensive, your shoes are unpolished, and the sunglasses in your shirt pocket are repaired with tape, all suggesting that you are frugal and not generally given to outlandish personal spending. That you are married is obvious from the ring. I assume therefore it was your wife who bought you the suit. But you missed a spot under your nose shaving this morning and there’s also a coffee stain on your tie, both things that a loving wife, especially one who favors Dries, would have most certainly noticed. Of course, it’s possible that your wife is simply out of town. But I regret to say that I believe the trouble to be more serious than that.”

“How can you tell?” I asked, trying for a casual smile.

“From your eyes,” he said. He slammed down the paper and pen. “Time!”

I blinked at him, in shock.

“Time,” he said again, louder. I looked at my watch.

“4:05.”

“Not bad for a Friday,” he said, then pointed a heavy finger at me. “And you hesitated a bit on the timekeeping.”

“Sorry.”

He rose majestically, straightening his pleats. “Well, I’m satisfied, and if you are as well then I’d like you to start straight off. The case, which for reference purposes I call The Case of the Mystery Girl, is under way and mounting toward its crisis.” He stopped and stared at me. “Shouldn’t you be writing this down?”

“Oh, sorry,” I blurted, patting my pockets as if there might be a notebook in one of them. I hadn’t even realized I’d been hired. I found an old pen in the lining of my suit coat and, while Lonsky watched, wrote “Mystery Girl” on the back of my résumé. Satisfied, he went on.

“Her name is Ramona Doon. She resides at the Coconut Court Apartments on Spaulding. Number five. She should be back there by six. At that time of day, take Fountain. I want you to wait outside, follow her if she leaves, keep detailed notes, and report back to me in person once you are convinced that she is home safe for the night. Don’t worry about the hour.”

“Right,” I said, still a little shocked that I actually had the job, and not entirely sure that I wanted it.

“And please make sure you are not observed by the lady or anyone else.” He gazed down at me like a statue of a general on a horse. “This is important.”

“Right.” I nodded and wrote “NOT observed,” then underlined it.

He nodded approvingly. “Unfortunately the state of my health won’t allow me to take this in hand myself. Therefore I am taking the risk of trusting you instead. Trusting your bravery, your fidelity, and your discretion.”

“Is it your allergies?” I asked.

“What? Oh yes, among other things.” He gazed at me thoughtfully. “Perhaps it would be prudent for you to don a disguise.”

“Disguise?”

“Can you walk in heels? Speak any foreign tongues?”

“No, I don’t think so.”

“Well, at least try to keep your wits about you. Lives may depend on it.” Before I could take this in, he pulled a hundred dollar bill from his pocket and pressed it into my palm. “Take this as an advance, since you’re short of funds.” He steered me rapidly out of the room and down the hall, where his mother and Mrs. Moon were now side by side, poring over a long adding machine tape. “Don’t forget to keep track of your mileage,” Lonsky continued. “Mrs. Moon, please. My tea.”

She went to stand but Mrs. Lonsky stopped her.

“We’re busy, Sol. She’s helping me add up the day’s tally.”

Impatient, he leaned over them and ran his eyes along the tape.

“Ten thousand six hundred and forty two,” he announced.

Mrs. Moon tapped a calculator and smiled.

“Wow,” I said, barely able to keep from bursting into applause. But Mrs. Lonsky scowled.

“Solar,” she said. “I need to speak to you alone in the kitchen.”

“In a moment, Mother,” Lonsky declared, turning to me. “Go, Kornberg, go. And do your best.”

“Sure,” I said. “But how did you do that trick?”

“Trick?” he asked.

“You know, with the numbers.”

Lonsky smiled.

“Why, Kornberg,” he said, “it’s called addition.”

I left the Lonsky home confused but exhilarated. A job! True, the job was perhaps the oddest in an odd-job life, resulting in a CV that looked like the résumé of a maniac with ADD, unless you added, in invisible ink,
Secret Novelist.
But it was a job, at least, a nonwriting
job with a paycheck, just what the wife had ordered. I decided to hang on to it for now, so I had something to bring to the table at therapy. I could always call later and back out, if a better offer came in. And then there was that fresh hundred, sharply folded in my pocket.

Still, as I headed toward the couple’s therapist in West Hollywood, swerving and stalling through the traffic on Beverly Boulevard, occasionally racing a few feet forward to the next red light, I could feel my sore heart begin to throb anew: I was meeting my wife in an office to renegotiate our love, pledged to last forever. It seemed that eternity was up for renewal, today.

7

I ARRIVED EARLY, PATROLLED
the sector in widening circles until I found free legal parking five blocks away, and then entered the building at a flustered jog. Sweating through my thick wool suit (Lonsky had been right), I wiped my face with my tie and opened the office door. Lala was waiting. My wife is Mexican—she has that fierce beauty, half native, half Spanish, long black hair and green eyes set in an oval face, her little body, narrow shoulders, tiny hands and feet that make her round breasts and ass seem almost overripe, bubbling and bouncing as she moves, her soft, smooth, coyly curved belly peeking between jeans and top, showing a deep navel still slightly scarred from a misguided piercing that got infected and, if you peer very closely, a few tiny golden hairs—and her real name is Eulalia Natalia Santoya de Marías de Montes. That sounds like she stole it off the tomb of an ancient nun, so she generally goes by Natalia Montes, or even less musical but more married, Natalie Kornberg. But once I learned her real name, I began calling her Eulalia and its many diminutives—Lali, Lalia, Yuli—until the perfect pet name stuck: my little Lala.

Lala works in a high-fashion clothing shop (displaying artifacts
that to me are either too complicated to be wearable or too simple to be buyable at that shocking price) and she always looks elaborately right. Today she had on high leather boots, tight tucked jeans, a thin lacey blouse, a clingy cashmere cardigan, and a woolen shawl. Her bracelets and earrings jingled. Her red lips smiled. Her eyes gleamed. She looked infuriatingly beautiful.

“Wow, you look great,” she said.

“Thanks.” I scowled. “How are you?” I sat on the couch beside her. We were in a miniaturized waiting room, really a foyer between inner and outer doors, containing the couch, a chair, and a table with magazines.

“I’m excellent, thank you,” she said. “Actually I’m going on a buying trip to New York tomorrow for the weekend. Isn’t that exciting?”

“Definitely.” I tried to smile back.

“I’m very excited.” She leaned forward, solicitously. “How are you doing?” This was the Lala I’d grown to hate. The phony. Of course, even in my state, I understood she probably wasn’t really all that excellent. She was nervous and that was a defense. Still, her choice of defense was an offense to me: a bullshit Hollywood warmth and smarmy positivity that enabled her to speak to me, the man she’d slept with (almost) every night for (almost) five years, as if I were an acquaintance. Not to mention the patronizing question, asking how I felt, as if I were an invalid she had come here to visit, and not the man whose heart she had skewered.

“Pretty good,” I said. “I found free parking. On the other hand, my wife left me.” Lala made a sour face and glared at her red nails, baby gems on her stubby childlike fingers. Now I felt bad. This was not the way to win her back. “Sorry,” I said. “I’m just sad and upset.” That cheered her up.