Anonymous Rex (28 page)

She’s up again, pacing the courtyard. “Confession? What on earth would I confess to?”

“Murdering your husband is still a crime, Mrs. McBride.”

“I did no such thing!” Indignation streams out of Judith like sunbursts, and I’m nearly singed by the blast.

“Fine, then—do you have an alibi?”

“Some investigator you are—did you even check with the police? I was the first person they came after, of course I have an alibi. I was running a charity event that night in front of two hundred people. Most of them are here this evening—would you like me to have someone fetch them so that you may accuse them of murder, too?”

Confused now. Not the way this was supposed to go. “But why would you cover it all up …?”

Judith sighs and sits heavily on the bench. “Money. It’s always money.”

“You’ll have to do better than that.”

“I came back from my charity event, and there he was. On the floor, dead, just like I told you before. And I saw the wounds, I saw the bites, the slashes. And I knew that if word got out about it, the Council would be all over us.”

I think I’m getting it now. “Dino on dino murder.”

“Always brings up a Council investigation. They’d been looking for an excuse to bleed us dry for years—you know how the fines work. I don’t know who killed my husband, Mr. Rubio, but I did know that there was a chance that whoever it was had … illicit dealings with my husband. Dealings his estate could be held accountable for. So, in order to forestall any official Council inquiry …”

“You had Vallardo and Nadel conspire to fix the photos and the autopsies to be consistent with a human cause of death. No dino murderer, no investigation, no fines.”

“And now you know. Is that so horrible, wanting to protect my finances?”

I shake my head. “But what about Ernie? Why lie about him?”

“Who?”

“My partner. The one who came to see you—”

She brushes me off with a casual hand-flip. “That again. This time, I really don’t know what you’re talking about. Have you found some other imagined evidence to convict me?” Judith holds out her hands as if to be handcuffed, and I slap them away angrily, more because she’s right than anything else. I don’t have any proof that she was involved in Ernie’s death, and the dearth of information is needling me.

“Nadel’s dead,” I tell her roughly.

“I know that.”

“How?”

“Emil—Dr. Vallardo—found out earlier this evening, and he called me soon after. From what I gather, Nadel was found as a black woman in Central Park. Odd duck.”

“I was there. He was killed—it was a hit.”

“Are you accusing me again?”

“I’m not accusing anyone—”

“I’m sorry you seem to feel that I’m responsible for all deaths in Manhattan, but I’m just as nervous about this as you are. If you look on the other side of that door, you’ll see two of my bodyguards ready to burst out here at a moment’s notice.” I glance at the closed door, but choose not to press the issue. “I’m prepared, Mr. Rubio. Are you?”

With theatrical timing, the door slams open, and I see Glenda pressed between the two beefy bodyguards who had greeted me in Judith’s office yesterday morning. She’s flailing, kicking, screaming: “—the fuck off me—I’ll rip out your goddamned throats—” and inflicting as much damage as her legs and voice can muster.

“Friend of yours?” Judith asks, and I nod bashfully. “Let her go,” she tells the bodyguards, and they roughly bodycheck Glenda into the courtyard. I have to restrain her from following them back inside the ballroom, and it’s not easy to hold back a hundred and fifty pounds of squirming Hadrosaur. She eases up, and I let go.

“Brought you some cocktail wieners,” Glenda says, and dumps a heap of the appetizers into my hands. “Can we get outta here? I think the caterer’s pissed at me.”

“I think we’re about done here,” I say, and turn to Judith. “Unless there’s anything else you’d like to tell me.”

“Not unless there’s anything else you’d like to accuse me of.”

“Not right now, thanks. But I wouldn’t leave the city if I were you.”

Judith looks amused. “I’m not accustomed to taking orders.”

“And I don’t give suggestions.” I shove a weenie in my mouth and masticate, the hot meat scalding the insides of my mouth. I had planned a few more parting volleys in Mrs. McBride’s direction, but if I speak now, I just may spit up the wiener, and that wouldn’t be good for anybody.

Grabbing Glenda firmly by the hand, I lead her out of the courtyard, through the ballroom, past the throng of drunken revelers, and toward the nearest subway stop. I give the token booth operator the last three dollars in my wallet, and we head for the southbound train.

Glenda has gone back to her apartment, and I have gone back to the lion’s den. I stand outside the presidential suite, key card in hand, holding it just above the lock. Sarah is inside, maybe asleep, maybe not, and the stockpile of willpower I might have built up on the train ride over is ebbing out through some undiscovered leak. I’ve got people trying to kill me right and left, no money in my pocket, and no discernible future on the horizon, but it’s the next five minutes that could prove to be my true salvation or my downfall. I swipe the card.

No snoring, I notice as I enter the suite, and the bedroom light is on. Sarah is no longer asleep. I make a snap deal with myself: If Sarah is reading, watching television, or just hanging out, I will order her up a pot of coffee from room service, beg a few bucks from the check-in staff, and send her back home in a cab, no funny business. If, on the other hand, I enter the bedroom to find her long, lithe body tucked beneath the covers—above the covers—around the covers—nude and waiting for me to return, I will close the shutters on whatever strands of rectitude remain in me and allow whatever primal instincts are left to guide my body as I leap headfirst into that luscious den of sin.

A note on the pillow. And no Sarah.

The note reads:
Dearest Vincent, I’m sorry for making you say you were sorry. Please think of me fondly. Sarah
.

I drop into the bed, note clutched tightly to my chest, and count the tiles in the ceiling. There will be no sleep tonight.

A
s expected, I did not reach dreamland even once. My evening was spent in the bathtub, alternately splashing freezing and scalding water onto my guiseless body. After each half hour of this, I would lurch back into the bedroom, toss on my guise in case the maids should break and enter, and attempt to drift off into slumber, which never came. The sandman is a lazy shiftabout. I hate him.

At eight o’clock this morning, the phone rings. It’s Sally at TruTel back in LA, and she says that Teitelbaum would like to have a word with me.

“Put him through,” I tell Sally, and he’s there in an instant. I have a feeling he was there all along.

“You’re off the case!” is the first thing he yells in my ear, and I have this sinking feeling it won’t be the last.

“I’m—what the hell are you talking about?”

“Did we not have a discussion about Watson? Did we not have this goddamned discussion?”

“What discussion—you said don’t mess around with Ernie’s death, that’s all—”

“And that’s what you’ve been doing!” The tumbler in my hand vibrates with the shout, ripples spreading across the water’s surface. “You screwed me over, Rubio, and now I’m gonna screw you back.”

“Calm down,” I say, lowering my own voice so as to demonstrate. “I
asked a few questions, just to get perspective on the McBride thing—”

“I ain’t one of your suspects, Rubio. You can’t pull this on me. I know all about your little friend at J&T—we know what she’s been up to.”

“Glenda?” Oh, crap—he knows about the computer files.

“And we know you put her up to it. That’s industrial espionage, that’s breaking and entering, that’s theft, that’s—that’s way over the line. And that’s it, it’s over.” I can hear Teitelbaum pacing the room, trinkets falling, crashing off the desk, and though it’s amazing that he’s finally made it out of that chair, he’s winded, panting from the effort. “You’re off the case, I’m cutting off your credit card, you’re done. Finished.”

“So … what?” I sulk. “You want me to come back to LA?”

“I don’t give a fuck what you do any more, Rubio. I canceled your return flight back here, so stay in New York if you wanna, they got a nice homeless community under them subway tunnels. ’cause I’ve got phone calls out to every firm in town, and the only PI job you’re gonna get back here is tracking down where you left your last welfare check.”

“I’m onto something here, Mr. Teitelbaum,” I try to explain. “It’s not bullshit this time, it’s big, and I’m not gonna give it up just ’cause—”

But he’s hung up. I call back and casually ask Sally to reconnect me to her boss.

A short pause, but Sally’s soon back on the line. “He won’t come to the phone,” she explains. “I’m sorry, Vincent. Is there anything I can do?”

I consider using Sally as my agent provocateur, asking her to sneak into the files, reinstate my credit card, messenger me a new ticket to LA, but I’ve already gotten Glenda in trouble, and I don’t need to add another creature to my list of suffering friends. “Nothing,” I tell her. “I fucked up, that’s all.”

“It’s gonna be okay,” she says.

“Sure. Sure it is.” With no credit card and no cash of my own, I can’t possibly afford to spend another day in the city. The room darkens perceptibly.

“You want me to mail your messages back home?”

“What messages?” I ask.

“You got a bunch, sitting right here. Mr. Teitelbaum didn’t tell you?”

“Not exactly. Hell, I don’t care. Are they important?”

“I don’t know,” she says. “They’re all from some police sergeant, a Dan Patterson. Just wants you to call him. Says it’s urgent, and there’s four or five of them.”

I’m off with Sally in half a heartbeat and connected to the Rampart division of LAPD. A quick, “Vincent Rubio for Dan Patterson, please,” and he’s soon on the other end.

“Dan Patterson.”

“Dan, me. What’s going on?”

“Are you home?” he asks.

“I’m in New York.”

A pause, slightly stunned. “You’re not—not again—”

“I am. In a way. Don’t ask.”

“Fine,” he says, willing to drop the issue. Now that’s a friend. “There’s something we found in the back room of that nightclub—”

“The Evolution Club?”

“Yeah. Remember I told you I had some guys going through the place? And that one box wasn’t torched? Well, they found some mighty weird shit I thought you should know about, and it wasn’t illegal skin mags.”

“I assume this is something you can’t tell me about over the phone,” I say. A pattern has begun to emerge in my life, and it’s getting tiring following it around the globe.

“It’s more like a show-and-tell, and believe me, you wouldn’t believe it or understand it unless you saw the damn things in person. I had to turn it all over to the Council, and they’re having an emergency meeting right about now, but I made a photocopy of the paper goods for you.”

“What if I told you I was off the Evolution Club case?” I ask.

“Easy—I’d still have a photocopy for you.”

“And what if I told you that I had no money for a plane flight back to LA, that I’d just been officially banned from every firm in the city, that I don’t give a good goddamn about Teitelbaum or his cases, that I’m about four-fifths of the way to getting myself killed out here, and that I’d probably need a heap of extra cash to come back here to New York after I saw you?”

He takes longer to think this one over, but not as long as I’d expected. “Then I’d walk down the street and send you some cash Western Union.”

“It’s that big?” I ask.

“It’s that big,” he says, and two hours later I’m standing in line at the airport with my trusty garment bag in tow.

Dateline: Los Angeles, five hours later. I was not upgraded to first class on my flight. The counter agent told me to talk to the desk agent, the desk agent told me to talk to the flight staff, the flight staff told me to walk back across the terminal and take it up with the counter agent again, and by the time I finally learned that yes, they would love to upgrade me, there were no more first-class seats available because everyone else had already gotten themselves bumped up an hour earlier. So I spent the bulk of the flight crushed between a dyspeptic software designer whose laptop and accompanying accessories encompassed all the available space on my tray table as well as his, and a six-year-old boy whose parents, the lucky shits, had landed seats in first class. Every two hours, his mother would walk back to us untouchables in economy and tell the child not to bother the nice man—me—next to him, and Timmy (or Tommy, or Jimmy, I can’t remember) would solemnly swear upon all the cartoon characters he held holy to follow orders. Yet not ten seconds after his mother disappeared through the dividing curtain would he resume banging away on every surface possible, my body parts not excepted. He was a budding Buddy Rich, no doubt, but despite his talent, I was wholly prepared to risk life, limb, and the loss of a future jazz great by throwing him bodily out the nearest emergency exit.

When I could sleep, I dreamt about Sarah.