Bloody London (17 page)

She picked up a fresh pair of gloves, put them on, unscrewed a jar of peanut butter, then another one of grape jelly. She started making sandwiches. As she passed them out, she was sober, competent, helpful, smiling.

“You asked about St Pete's?”

“Yeah.”

She spotted a freckle-faced kid with sandy hair and called, “Harry!”

He hurried over. She said, “This is Harry Alden. He helps out here. He helped Mr Ramirez tonight.”

Harry shook my hand. I said, “So what's the deal here, Harry?”

Harry had a British accent. “Mr Pascoe said we needed a wake-up call, and he was right. He made us sleep rough. We put in time at the shelter here. You see, sir, I've got almost straight As, I've got ten years on violin, I play lacrosse, I'm deputy editor of the school paper, I worked on an Indian reservation one summer, last year I was in Madrid for my Spanish. The shelter was just perfect for me.”

I said, “Perfect for what?”

He looked up surprised and said, “To get into Harvard.” Then he went back to fixing sandwiches.

Frankie said, “You know what they say?”

“What do they say?”

“Charity's the new rock and roll.” She gave a small wry smile. “I need a drink.”

“I think people would understand if you left a little early.”

“What I'd really like is a swim. They've refilled the pool.”

“A swim. You swim a lot?”

“Yes,” she said. “I was an athlete once. Anything to keep from thinking. Swimming's especially good. Better than irony even.” She glanced at the long line of men waiting for food, for beds, for shelter. “It gets rid of the stink too.”

So Tommy Pascoe was a saint, I thought, as we walked a couple of blocks over to First and a bar where she sometimes drank. According to the homeless guys, he was Saint Tom, and who would kill a saint and make him a martyr, unless it was random? Who? Unless he invited the killer in. I'd scratched the idea he set Ulanova up and got it in the neck instead. So who? Leo Mishkin?

I'm not sure what the hell I was doing hanging out socially with Frankie late at night. It wasn't just that I was worried about Tolya and figured Frankie could shed some light on the business with Leo Mishkin and the Russians. I smelled Frankie walking beside me and I knew I was there because I wanted her. I wanted to be around Frankie Pascoe.

The door to the bar was propped open. Frankie looked around. Three women crammed in a booth, dressed to kill, shared a bottle of Dom Perignon and talked Russian. The Natashas had cornered the neighborhood.

Frankie crossed to the other side of the room. Settling
into a banquette, she grunted. Something she did whenever she sat down, I realized, like a release from the sheer effort of being upright. I sat down opposite and looked in the mirror over her head. I was always looking in mirrors now and over my shoulder, wondering who killed Pascoe, who beat me up and fucked with my loft, who shot Pindar Aguirre.

Around us, people drank their money, eyed each other and drawled their opinions. The owner was a Frenchie with a head of greasy hair and a smoke in the corner of his mouth, and he hovered over Frankie, who ordered steaks and dismissed him.

“The food here's lousy.”

“So why bother?”

Frankie ordered another vodka. “The tribal rites,” she said. “Habit, darling. Too much trouble to change. Also they let you smoke. Which is important, don't you think? I'm awfully tired, Artie.”

She looked unanimated, passive and beautiful, and I was thinking with my dick. I sat back in my chair, away from her.

“They read Tommy's will. It's a nightmare,” she said all of a sudden.

My mouth was dry. I picked up the water glass.

“I'm not allowed to know everything. We kept our affairs separate. But he wants the burial in England, for chrissake, and a headstone by his ghastly cousin, freaky Warren.”

“The bronze hands.”

“Yes. God, Artie, I don't know if I have the energy for it.”

A waiter slung a couple of plates of pâté on the table and a basket of bread. I asked for red wine. I was facing Frankie, my back to the room. She lifted her elegant shoulders slightly so the soft gray sweater slipped; a triangle of bare skin showed. The skin was lightly tanned.

She said, “I suppose they've got Tommy in a fridge somewhere downtown?” She seemed suddenly fragile.

I leaned across the table; her hand quivered like a soft animal caught in a trap.

“Sometimes I get the feeling you weren't all that crazy about your husband. Why's that?”

She leaned across the table towards me again, knocked over the basket of bread, set it upright, helped herself to my drink. “I didn't like him much, you're right.”

“How come? I mean, tell me straight.”

“He didn't make the effort for me, you know? He was a lazy fuck.”

I ate some bread and looked at her. “Leo Mishkin installed the safe room in your apartment?”

“Yes.”

“Mr Mishkin was your husband's friend?”

“Yes.”

“A charitable guy.”

“Yes.”

“New money.”

“Yes.”

“He wanted to give the new money old veneer, so to speak, so he gave to your husband's causes?”

Frankie said, a little defensively, “Leo's not a bad
man. I met Leo Mishkin in Moscow. Tommy was on some fact-finding mission for the British and I went and I said, we ought to help him. Tommy helped him. They came to America, we lost touch. A few years later, he called us. He had done well. He's a good Russian,” she said. “Like you.”

I said, “And he moved into the Staircase to Nowhere Building.”

“Yes.”

“To be close to you.”

“That's right.”

“And Mr Mishkin sends his son to St Peter's.”

“I believe he does.”

“He had your husband's help with that?”

“I expect so.”

“I'd like to know where Leo Mishkin was the night before your husband died and you weren't home. Were you with him that night?”

“I was with Leo. He'll tell you he was with me.”

“Where?”

“Leo owns a number of places. If necessary I can testify we were in one of them, and there will be proof.”

“I'm not asking about you this time, Frankie, I'm asking about him. Your alibi was Leo Mishkin? He wasn't just a friend.” I grabbed her wrist.

“Yes,” she said. “But you knew that.”

“I knew when I saw you in Brighton Beach. You were in Brighton Beach, weren't you, Frankie? Last night.”

“Yes.”

“I saw the way he was with you. He'll make it good for you? The alibi.”

She smiled. “Leo always made it good for me.”

“It's not a joke, Frankie. He'll make it stick?”

“He will. He will make it good because he takes care of me, and I will swear the same, if that's what you're thinking, because it's true.”

“Someone else saw you together?”

She chuckled. “Yes, of course.”

“Who?”

“I don't know. Doormen. Waiters, skaters.”

“Skaters?”

“Yes. Sometimes we went ice skating. Ice dancing. We took lessons. We were quite good. The rink at Chelsea Piers. It was different. A time out of life.” She smiled. “We were learning to tango.”

“Skating.”

Frankie gave a husky laugh. “Leo was the nicest part of my life. The only part worth mentioning,” she said. She sat up straight, then reached in her bag and tossed some money on the table. “I've lost you, haven't I?”

“You didn't lose me. You didn't have me.”

As soon as I said it, I had an insane thought that I was in love with her. I told myself it was the dark bar, the wine, the warm night, that I was pretty hurt by Lily's sudden departure. Or the soft, slurred ooze of fear, a sort of dread over the case that made me feel I was hanging by my thumbs. Maybe I'm just a lumpen guy driven by the fear I'm going to die some day.

Suddenly Frankie said, “Take me home,” and I went with her. When we got to her building, not saying
anything, she went to the pool and like a dumb dog in heat, I followed.

Frankie pulled herself out of the pool. She grabbed the ledge and got out, tall, limber, naked, the water streaming off. The pool had been deserted when we got there and Frankie stripped off her clothes quickly, then dove in the water and surfaced, laughing with pleasure. She stood by the pool, naked, showing me her body.

Her nipples were hard. She touched them lightly. There was a terry cloth robe on the bench and I grabbed it and held it for her.

She laughed. “You think I'm a femme fatale, Artie, that if you touch me, you'll die?” she said and slipped into the robe and tied the belt tight.

“Something like that,” I said.

We went upstairs and sat on the floor of the library. She dried her hair with a towel and gave me a bottle of wine that I opened.

Frankie said, “They're not going to get whoever killed Tommy, are they?” she said.

“I don't know. I think there's a bigger picture that I'm not getting, I think there's Russians involved. You want to talk some about Leo Mishkin, his friends?”

She changed the subject. “Do you know what Tommy left me, Artie? Do you want to know?”

“Tell me.”

“He left me his debts. He gave away so much, there were so many bequests, all he left me were his debts. And a letter of instruction to support his shelter, his
work. He commended me to it. Here in New York. In London. Sanctimonious prick.”

“I don't get it.”

“He gave it away. He left huge amounts in trusts I can't touch. Blind trusts, some of them. He was obsessed with the charities, and I'm not even certain he wasn't taking a little off the top of the building fund.”

“What for?”

“Give to the shelters. It was always the shelters. They had his picture on the wall, after all. There are debts, as well. I'm his wife. I feel obliged to pay.”

I thought of Aguirre the janitor in Queens that morning. The empty rooms in the basement. “But it wasn't you, though, Frankie. You didn't kill him. You told me you had money, that the money was yours.”

“To begin with. In the beginning. My dowry was his stake in the building. My father's money is what he used to buy property.” She snorted. “I always thought, when he goes, it will be mine again.” She held on to my arm. “It was mine. Is mine. What's left, that is.”

“I'm sorry for you.”

She was brisk. “Don't be. I'm not. Let's not talk for a bit. Can I play something for you?”

I sat on her zillion-dollar rug and she played me a version of “Stella by Starlight” I never heard, that Stan Getz recorded on an old eight-track special for her when they were an item. No one ever heard it before, she said. She'd never played it for anyone.

“You like it?”

“Oh yeah. Imagine if you could do that,” I said, and leaned my head against the sofa. Frankie sat down beside
me and grunted. She leaned her head against me and we sat for a while like that.

Frankie said, “I wish.”

“What do you wish?”

She put an arm around my shoulders and her smell made me drunk. “I wish, Artie, that I could put the genie back in the bottle.” She added, “But it's too late.”

I left Frankie's around five Saturday morning. Halloween the next day, a week almost gone since Pascoe's murder, nothing from Tolya Sverdloff since Thursday night in Brighton Beach. I was standing on Sutton Place near my car. There was a cop on duty and I saw a garbage man hand him a bag then lean over the gutter and puke his guts out. The cop was from the local station house and he recognized me. I'd been around a lot that week.

He was a short black guy, near retirement. He held the bag tight and said “Jesus Christ” over and over and shoved the shitty little plastic deli bag at me. I could smell the rancid coffee it once contained. The cop looked sick. I looked inside.

Inside the bag was someone's nose.

I yelled over to the garbage guy. “Where'd you find this?”

“By that building with the scaffold,” he said. “It was wrapped up in a nice box. Barneys. I figured I'd see if there was anything worthwhile.”

I didn't hear him. I was thinking about Sverdloff. Christ. Jesus Christ. Tolya. Oh, man, I thought, I'm sorry. I should have stuck to you. With you. Taken care. I was screwing around with Frankie Pascoe and you were over here two blocks away and dying.

I was talking to him in my head, yelling his address at the cop, running so my lungs hurt. Maybe they left him alive. Maybe they took a piece, then left him. I was yelling.

I got hold of the super, we broke into the keysafe, got the spares. Already I heard the sirens; the black cop was right behind me.

The apartment was empty.

A worker on the floor said he'd seen Sverdloff leave the night before.

“He was OK?”

“Looked OK, yeah. Why?”

“I hope to God they killed her before they did it.” Lippert showed up at the building with the staircase to nowhere, so did Homicide and Forensics. “I could nose around for you,” she'd said. Nose around. I'd liked Lulu Fine a lot; I dragged her into it. Now they were putting her in a body bag.

Someone had forged her signature, got her extra keys out of the keysafe, gone upstairs. They took some cash, nothing else. She had been found naked, except for her blonde fur coat. A female cop let me see her. She was wrapped in the coat. Fisher. It was a Canadian fisher coat, a female cop said, and touched it furtively.

Gary, Lulu's ex, was there. He was a big man,
balding, his face sorry as a faithful dog. “We just got back together,” he said. “We were out together last night. She wanted to walk home alone,” Gary added, his face wet. “I said, ‘I'll walk you,' but she said, ‘Come on, Gar, the city's so safe now, it's a gorgeous night, I want to walk by myself a little, think about us. I'll see you tomorrow.'”