Phantom Angel (20 page)

Rachel led us into a raw industrial space that had a soaring twenty-foot ceiling, exposed brick walls, rough plank flooring and cast-iron support columns. It was an enormous space. Dozens and dozens of tall windows let in the morning sunlight. And floor fans kept it reasonably cool. The décor was so spare that I'm not sure it even qualified as décor. There was an antique pool table. There was a huge Flying A Gasoline neon sign hanging from one wall. And out in the center of the loft space there was a seating area with two leather sofas and a pair of matching chairs grouped around a coffee table. That was where we found the 3-D screen's Tarzan and Jane waiting for us. Way off in another time zone I could make out what appeared to be a stainless-steel restaurant-grade kitchen and a doorway that led to what I imagined were at least a half-dozen bedrooms and baths and a bowling alley.

“Matthew…?! Hannah…?!” Rachel's voice was raised to a polite roar because “Tangled Up in Blue” from Bob Dylan's landmark 1975 album
Blood on the Tracks
was cranked up to 11 on the loft's sound system. “Meet Lieutenant Diamond of the NYPD and Ben Golden of Golden Legal Services!”

Matthew Puntigam reached for a remote and turned the music down. “Have a seat, why don't you?” he said off-handedly. “I was just listening to this fellow called Bob Dylan. Know him?”

“Not personally, no,” Legs said as we sat down.

Hannah Lane said nothing. Just smiled at us. She seemed to be in an ethereal daze. Or stoned. Possibly both.

“Know his music, I meant,” Matthew said. “I envy the way he sings. It just flows right out of him. So natural. So
him
. It's not a quote-unquote good voice. But
I
think the fucker actually pulls it off. Perhaps that's just me.”

“Not exactly,” I said. “Pretty much everyone on the planet who has ears has felt that way for the past fifty years.”

Matthew furrowed his heavy shelf of brow at me—his patented Me Tarzan frown. My response had thrown him. He was twenty-three. He had been a huge movie star for four years. He was accustomed to believing that every word that came rolling out of his piehole was a genuinely original pearl of wisdom. “You were at Zoot Alors the other night with that Cricket O'Shea person, weren't you?”

“Yes, I was.”

“Thought so. I'm very good with faces. It's a talent of mine.”

“Nice little place you have here,” Legs observed, gazing around.

“Isn't it? Used to be a shirt factory. They made actual shirts here.”

“I just like having the space,” Hannah said in her soft, trembly voice. “New York is so
crowded
.”

The coffee table consisted of a slab of glass set atop an old leather steamer trunk decorated with decals from bygone luxury liners and European hotels. Matthew reached over to it for a blue box of Gitanes, the French cigarettes. He lit one with a kitchen match and inhaled it deeply, letting the smoke out through his flaring nostrils. I was struck by how practiced his mannerisms seemed. Styling. The man was styling. And, once again, I was struck by how small he was. His brow and jaw gave him such a brutish look on the big screen. But seated here in his arena-sized loft Matthew Puntigam was just a shrimp in a torn T-shirt and linen lounge pants.

Rachel continued to hover there with all of her portable devices. “Can I get either of you a coffee?”

Legs and I both declined.

“There's no coffee in
my
coffee,” Matthew said pointedly. “Could you make me another?”

“Absolutely, Matthew,” she said, whisking a cup from the coffee table.

“And do you think you could get it
right
this time? Double espresso, two sugars. Is that so hard?”

“No, Matthew.” She went trekking off toward the kitchen.

“We can't go out for coffee like normal people do,” Hannah informed us morosely. “Can't walk down the street. Can't ride the subway. Those people out there won't let us. They follow us everywhere with their cameras. They're just so
mean
.” Hannah was from northern Minnesota and the words that passed between her plump, rosy lips had a slight Canadian lilt to them. “I wish they'd just leave us alone. Why can't they leave us alone?” she wondered, gazing at us with those huge, gorgeous green eyes of hers. Up close and in person, the twenty-two-year-old screen goddess was so slender that she resembled a starved, frail child. She wore a snug-fitting camisole and yoga pants. Her wild mane of strawberry blonde ringlets was piled atop her head, showing off her delicate, swanlike neck. Hannah's milk-white complexion was so flawless that it looked as if her skin had never been exposed to the elements. Not sun, not wind, not rain, not any of them. Nor to life itself. Had she ever fallen off her bike and skinned an elbow? Scratched her leg on a thorny rosebush? It was impossible to imagine.

Legs couldn't stop staring at her. He did keep trying to look away—at Matthew posing there like Belmondo with his cigarette, at the Flying A Gasoline sign, at me—but his eyes kept returning to her. I didn't blame him. It isn't often that you sit so close to a woman as breathtakingly beautiful as Hannah Lane. And yet Matthew was cheating on her. With a man who was old enough to be his father, no less.

“It would be so nice to just be able to go out to Starbucks like normal people do,” she said.

“But we can't,” Matthew said with a shake of his head. “Not without having our every fart being covered in the
Post.
So we have to do for ourselves.”

By “ourselves” he meant Rachel, who returned now with his double espresso, two sugars. She waited anxiously for his royal highness to sample it.

“That's more like it,” he said gruffly when he had.

“Can I get you folks anything else?”

“No, we're fine, Rachel,” Hannah said. “Thank you.”

Matthew didn't thank her. Rude. He was conspicuously rude.

“She's my cousin,” Hannah explained as Rachel headed back toward the kitchen. “We'd be lost without her, wouldn't we, Matthew?”

He said nothing to that. He was busy drinking his espresso, smoking his cigarette and studying Legs. “How may we help the NYPD?” he asked him. “You said something on the phone about some questions you have?”

Legs nodded his head. “Very informal ones.”

“Should a lawyer-type person be here?”

“That's up to you. If you want to involve your lawyer we can come back later.”

“Not necessary. Lawyer-type people are utter vermin.”

“Besides, we're happy to help,” Hannah assured Legs.

“Excellent,” he said, flashing her a smile. “Since the Morrie Frankel investigation is so high profile, I have to ask each and every person who knew Mr. Frankel the same exact thing. It's strictly routine. I've invited Ben to come along because it so happens that he was working for Mr. Frankel. Plus Ben has often been very helpful to the department in the past.”

All of which sounded like complete bullshit to me. But they accepted what he said without question.

“What would you like to know, Lieutenant?” Hannah asked.

“Where you were yesterday afternoon at, say, one o'clock.”

She blinked at him in surprise. “Is that all? That's easy. I was working with a dance instructor at a studio on Warren Street. I'm trying to get back in shape now that my ankle has fully healed.”

“What do you think will happen to
Wuthering Heights
?” I asked them. “Will it ever open?”

“Of course it will.” Matthew stubbed his cigarette out in an antique black ashtray from the Stork Club and promptly lit another. “Why wouldn't it?”

“Well, your producer is dead.”

“Producers grow on trees. They'll find us another one.”

“Who is ‘they'?”

Matthew drank down the last of his espresso. “Panorama, who else?”

“And what about Henderson Lebow? He and Morrie had a bitter falling out. Will he come back to direct it now that Morrie's no longer around?”

“Haven't the slightest idea,” Matthew said with a shrug.

“But I really hope he does,” Hannah said. “It's Henderson's vision that we're staging.”

“Not Morrie Frankel's?” I asked her.

“Morrie was just a money man,” Matthew sniffed. “Nothing more.”

I found myself looking at Matthew Puntigam in horror. I'd never heard anyone dismiss a man's entire life's work quite so thoughtlessly. Especially a man who'd accomplished as much with his life as Morrie Frankel had. Not that I for one second thought that Matthew had scripted his bilious little epitaph on his own. He was, I felt certain, merely parroting the scorn of the director whom he happened to be shtupping behind Hannah's back. “I paid a call on Mr. Frankel at his hotel shortly before he was murdered,” I said to him. “He was screaming at somebody on the phone. That somebody was you. He told me afterward that you were trying to back out of
Wuthering Heights
.”

“Not true at all,” Matthew responded calmly. “It was nothing like that. Morrie immediately jumped to the worst possible conclusion and then went totally ballistic. The man could be quite impossible to deal with, you know. I simply told him we're contractually obligated to begin filming
The Son of Tarzan
next May in Tanzania. And that if we don't open
Wuthering Heights
pretty damned soon—say, by the first of October—then we won't be able to stay with it long enough for him to turn a profit.”

“So you didn't threaten to back out?”

“Not at all. I was just trying to convey the reality of our situation.”

“And whose idea was it for you to convey this reality to him?”

“I don't know what you mean by that, little man.”

“My name is Ben.”

“Of course it is.”

“Did Henderson Lebow suggest you call him? Or was it Ira Gottfried?”

“They both did,” Hannah answered.

Matthew shot her an angry scowl.

“Well, they
did,
” she said defensively. “At Zoot Alors. They said that Matthew and I needed to … what did Henderson call it? ‘Stick a firecracker up Morrie's ass.' The show has been stalled for weeks and weeks. Partly because of me and my stupid ankle. But mostly because of money.”

“Or lack thereof,” Matthew said. “Which is utterly stupid. Ira has been offering to put up the bucks for months. And Henderson desperately wants back in as director. The only reason he's out is because Morrie and he had a personal issue of some sort.”

“My thing,” Hannah said to us, “was why can't all of you men just set aside your ego bullshit and get along? Morrie was
so
territorial about
Wuthering Heights
that it made no sense. I mean, if Ira's going to make the movie then why not let him help out now so we can get on with it? What's the big deal?”

“You didn't know Mr. Frankel very well, did you?” I said to her.

“As well as I wanted to,” she replied. “He was kind of a pig.”

Matthew was peering at me. “What are you getting at, little man?”

“The name is still Ben.”

“Of course it is.”

“He was old school. He believed that a Morrie Frankel Production was his and no one else's.”

Matthew continued to peer at me. “You say you worked for him?”

“Briefly.”

“As what?”

“My firm provided him with legal services.”

“So you're a lawyer-type person?”

“No, I'm a private investigator-type person.”

He let out a laugh. “You're joking.”

“No, I'm not.”

“But you don't look anything like a private detective.”

“Who were you expecting, Sam Spade in a torn trench coat?”

“Ben, I have been wanting to play a detective for as long as I can remember. I would love to follow you around some time, see what you do all day. What do you say?”

“Not interested.”

“I'd pay you for your time.”

“Still not interested.”

He stared at me in disbelief. He was Matthew Puntigam. People never said no to him. “Why not?”

“Because I'm liable to lose my temper and mess up your face.”

He glanced over at Legs, his brow furrowing. “Is he kidding?”

“Who, Ben? No, he never kids. Doesn't know how to.” Legs turned back to Hannah. “How did you get there?”

She looked at him blankly. “Get where?”

“To the dance studio on Warren Street.”

“Rachel called a car service for me.”

“And you?” he asked Matthew.

Matthew reached for another of his Gitanes and lit it. “What about me?”

“Where were you yesterday at one o'clock?”

“Right here,” he said, nodding to himself.

“Was Rachel here?”

“No, she was out running errands or something,” he said, nodding to himself again. It was a definite tell. He did it every time he told a lie. And Matthew Puntigam was a truly terrible liar—especially when you considered that he was one of the three or four most successful actors on the planet. “I was doing my vocal exercises.”

“How are your voice lessons going?” I asked him.

“Voice lessons?”
He was offended. “I'm not taking
voice lessons
. I'm working with a coach so that I'll have the vocal stamina to carry off eight performances a week,” he explained, dragging on his cigarette.

“Is smoking a good idea? If you're concerned about keeping your voice strong, I mean.”

“Smoking's a great idea,” he assured me. “I want the raspy quality that Dylan has. Because Heathcliff is no public school gent, let me tell you. He's a scruff. He needs to sing like one.”

“And does he?”

Matthew gave me his Me Tarzan frown. “What are you getting at?”