The Girl From Nowhere

Other Alex Novalis Novels:

Good Girl, Bad Girl

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organizations, places, events, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

Text copyright © 2014 Christopher Finch

All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.

Published by Thomas & Mercer, Seattle

www.apub.com

Amazon, the Amazon logo, and Thomas & Mercer are trademarks of
Amazon.com
, Inc., or its affiliates.

ISBN-13: 9781477824474

ISBN-10: 1477824472

Cover design by Salamander Hill Design Inc.

Interior layout: Greg Johnson/Textbook Perfect

Library of Congress Control Number: 2014933770

For JA

With gratitude

Contents

ONE

TWO

THREE

FOUR

FIVE

SIX

SEVEN

EIGHT

NINE

TEN

ELEVEN

TWELVE

THIRTEEN

FOURTEEN

FIFTEEN

SIXTEEN

SEVENTEEN

EIGHTEEN

NINETEEN

TWENTY

TWENTY-ONE

TWENTY-TWO

TWENTY-THREE

TWENTY-FOUR

About the Author

ONE

It was one
of those mixed blocks where Chinatown was beginning to encroach on Little Italy. I had just paid a call on Sunny Liu, the proprietor of the Good World Barber Shop who, when not shaving necks, was a gifted painter of traditional Chinese landscapes in the style of the revered Northern Song masters. The problem was that he had been passing them off as originals, which had upset a prominent uptown dealer who had been taken in by them. This gentleman had asked me to pay Sunny a visit. When I brought up the subject of the paintings, Sunny responded by shouting angrily in his native tongue and waving a cut-throat razor in my face. My Cantonese was in need of work, but I understood him to be promising to have my balls sliced, diced, thrice fried, and served with crab roe marinated in rice vinegar on a bed of fluffy white puppy dogs.

So it came to pass that I was just north of Canal Street, headed on foot toward my office and nervously meditating on the big issues of life, when someone slipped a hand into mine. It was a charming hand, soft and feminine, but, given my recent close-up encounter with tempered steel, it scared me half shitless. When my testicles descended again, I saw that it belonged to a young woman. She was extremely pretty, yet somehow ordinary at the same time. Medium-brown hair, not long, not short, and hazel eyes, dressed in a demure white cotton shirtwaist my mother would have called “a nice frock.”

“Okay,” she said, her voice panicky, “please understand this, mister—it’s important—we’re together—we’re a couple—you’ve got to kiss me—right now. Please.”

When I failed to respond instantly, the girl flung her arms around my neck and looked up at me.

“I’m begging you,” she said.

And then I saw the terror in those hazel eyes and I kissed her.

“Again,” she said.

I kissed her again, making it last longer and liking the taste. Then I asked what was going on.

“I don’t know,” she said. “I’m being followed. I think he wants to kill me.”

“Who?”

“A maniac.”

“Point him out.”

“I don’t even know if he’s still there. I might have given him the slip. Pretend to look in this window.”

She was petrified. Maybe nuts too, but her terror was palpable so I went along with the scenario and joined her in pretending to look into the window of the Montemaggiore Delicatessen—her ploy to take furtive glances back toward Canal Street. Meanwhile, I tried to get a fix on her. This was the year when half the women in New York had discovered the micromini. The other half were into tie-dye, granny glasses, and love beads. This specimen looked like she was fresh from a time warp that connected directly to the floor of
American Bandstand
, circa 1957.

“I think maybe we lost him,” she said. “Let’s duck in here.”

She seemed to take it for granted I would comply.

This girl—she looked to be in her early twenties, but “girl” was the word that came to mind—was really scared. I let her drag me into the deli. We pretended to be a bridge-and-tunnel couple from Mamaroneck, studying the plump hams and glistening salamis that hung from hooks everywhere you looked. There were no other customers, so no one was going to rush us.

“Okay,” I said. “So what’s this about?”

“He’s been following me,” she said. “I think he wants to kill me.”

“You said that already—but who is he?”

“I don’t know.”

“You must have some idea.”

She shook her head. And then she screamed.

The cause of her terror was a lean, wiry man with a horribly burn-scarred face and a crazed look in his eyes. He was dressed in an approximation of Army combat gear—camouflage pants and jungle boots, a khaki T-shirt under a camouflage jacket with a Confederate flag on the right shoulder, and a red Ranger tab on the left. Stenciled across the front of the T-shirt was the phrase
Q COMPANY: THE ASSASSINS
, and on his head he had a peaked patrol cap with a badge that was stamped
NAM
.

He didn’t see anything but the girl in the white dress, yet instinctively he seemed to sense that there was a knife lying on the butcher-block counter—a wicked-looking piece of cutlery with a long, narrow blade every bit as deadly as the razor that had been waved in my face just minutes earlier—and as he advanced toward us he made a grab for it. The guy behind the counter—a big
goombah
with a bullet head—saw what was happening, yelled something in Italian, and reached for the knife at the same time as the intruder. He snatched at the handle and pulled the knife toward himself. Oblivious to everything but the girl, who was doing her best to become invisible behind me, the maniac slapped his hand down on top of the flashing blade, which sliced it open. Blood gushed onto the butcher block and onto the floor. The attacker screamed in rage but still continued moving toward us. His eyes, set deep in that hideously burned face, bored right through me to his intended victim.

With his good hand, he started to reach for another weapon inside his pants. I never saw what it was because before he could fish it out I got hold of him by the jacket and head-butted him. This produced another spurt of blood, from his nose. It soaked my shirtfront and my Madras cotton jacket. That didn’t slow him down much, so I kneed him in the groin. He just kept coming, hungrily reaching for the girl, his heart pumping blood all over the skirt and bodice of the white dress. I snatched a bottle of Pellegrino from a shelf and cracked the maniac over the head with it, repeatedly, as hard as I could. The counterman joined in, armed with a large cast-iron pan. After enough blows to crack a coconut the maniac dropped to his knees, his eyes rolled back into his head, and he toppled over onto his side. I gave him a parting kick in the gonads as the girl, sobbing loudly, rushed from the store.

I ran after her.

The counterman shouted for the cops. A crowd started to form, yawping excitedly in a variety of Sicilian, Cantonese, and New York dialects. I got through before anyone tried to stop me and chased the girl, who had a pretty good set of wheels. I yelled for her to stop. She paid no attention and sprinted out into traffic, almost colliding with a Lambretta and then with a station wagon. Dodging taxis and trucks myself, I chased her to Canal, then halfway to Broadway. When I finally caught up with her, I had to do my best Dick Butkus imitation to drag her to the ground. For perhaps half a minute we sat next to each other on the sidewalk, getting our breath back.

Then she said, “I need a drink.”

“That guy wanted to kill you,” I said. “Don’t you want to talk to the cops?”

She looked scared again.

“No, no—no police. Just find me a drink and I’ll be okay.”

I said, “Fine, but not around here. The cops will be looking for us whether you like it or not, and this blood makes us pretty conspicuous. You want to go to my place?”

“I don’t even know you,” she said.

I thought that was pretty funny.

“Maybe you should just go home,” I said. “Get cleaned up.”

“What if that creature follows me?”

“Not too likely—he’ll be out of commission for a while.”

“Well, I’m not going anywhere. I’m getting a drink, with you or without you.”

“Okay,” I said, “but let me take you someplace quiet—away from here.”

The girl remained on the sidewalk, legs splayed like a rag doll’s, while I tried to hail a cab. We must have looked like refugees from a Hammer Films horror flick. Several drivers pointedly ignored us before I got lucky with a Checker driven by an old-time, seen-it-all cabbie, probably on loan from the Museum of the City of New York. I asked him if he knew a bar called the Band Box down near Chambers Street.

“How about them Mets?” he said.

I’d forgotten about them Mets. This was 1969, the year of them Miracle Mets. It was October and them Miracle Mets were in the World Series. I had liked them much better when they were losers. A city needs a soul, and that’s a hard thing to instill unless it has a team that can be relied upon to boot infield grounders and blow a three-run lead in the bottom of the ninth. On a normal weekday the Band Box would have been close to deserted at this time of day, its autographed eight-by-ten glossies of soap opera stars gazing down at empty barstools. But today, game three of the Series was in progress and one end of the bar—where there was a black-and-white TV that gave off a greenish glow—was packed. Nobody paid any attention to our bloody condition because they were busy cheering on Tommie Agee, Ed Kranepool, Jerry Grote, and the rest.

I led the girl to a booth in the back dining area, where we were waited on by an alluring grandmother in a Peter Pan outfit with a little flared skirt that was cantilevered away from her pelvis on stiff layers of lace, like those fancy collars you see in portraits by Frans Hals and Rembrandt. Tottering on six-inch heels, she scrutinized the girl’s white dress with its bloody stains. In a throaty Betty Bacall drawl she whispered, “Okay, sweetheart, what am I supposed to say? ‘Welcome to the emergency room’? or ‘My first time was messy too’?”

I ordered a Scotch, and the girl ordered a vodka sour. I asked her name. She said it was Sandy.

“Just Sandy?”

“Sandy Smollett.”

“Like the Smollett who wrote
Peregrine Pickle
?”

She didn’t answer. Okay, so she didn’t major in English Lit.

“Where are you from?” I asked.

“I’m the Girl from Nowhere.”

Then again, maybe she did major in English Lit.

She thanked me for helping her out and rather stiffly said she hoped I hadn’t been inconvenienced. I told her it was all in a day’s work. She knocked back the vodka sour and called for another one.

“I don’t normally drink,” she said. “Not anymore. Only beer. And maybe a little wine.”

I told her the hard stuff would do her good for once, and asked if she was going to be okay.

She shrugged.

“You handled yourself very well,” she said earnestly and with a nervous smile that ended with her biting her lip in a provocative way, incisors nipping just a little off center. Under other circumstances it could have been a signal that she wasn’t totally averse to spending the night.

I thanked her. My intuition was telling me to get out of there—I didn’t need to get mixed up with a girl who bit her lip that eloquently, not to mention one who had a knack for attracting the attention of murderous strangers—but curiosity ordered me to stay put. So I stayed.

“Okay,” I said. “Now let’s try to get something straight. What were you doing in that part of town? The usual tourist bit?”

“I’m staying with a friend near there—in a loft off Church Street.”

That surprised me. She didn’t look like the type of girl who would have a friend with a loft downtown. Back then, “downtown” was a dirty word. Anyway, it was no business of mine.

“You’re here on a visit?”

She shook her head.

“You live here?”

“Sort of.”

Okay. Try another tack.

“So you have no idea why this guy was following you?”

Another shake of the head.

“You’ve no idea who he was?”

“Maybe someone who’s seen me at work,” she said.

I asked where she worked.

“You wouldn’t know the place,” she said.

“I guess you’re not feeling talkative,” I ventured.

“Not really,” she said, nervously teasing the cherry in her drink with a swizzle stick.

I tried to place her accent. If she was the Girl from Nowhere, my guess was that Nowhere was somewhere with grain elevators and snowmobiles.

“It was really nice of you to help me out,” she said.

There it was again, that habit she had of biting her lip when she was unsure of herself, or wanted to seem that way. It was a little-girl mannerism that was dangerously fetching. Then she began to cry, soundlessly, like a kid who has mislaid her parents at Coney Island. That always gets me, or at least it did this time.

I gave her my card. She opened her eyes wide.

“Are you really a private detective?”

“Thirsty work, but somebody has to do it. If you’re in trouble, you can give me a call.”

“I don’t know if I could afford a private detective.”