Bloody London (5 page)

“In the swimming pool? I don't think you believe that.”

“Don't I? I don't know.” She stretched, and the bare skin of her midriff showed. It was tan and tight and she saw me looking. She smiled and said, “I'm going inside.”

“You were on the co-op board along with your husband?”

“Not formally. I sometimes served drinks at the board meetings.” She started up the stairs towards the building. “Will you tell me what Madame Ulanova said to you in Russian?”

“It's your husband, lady. He's the dead guy and you want to trade with me?”

Her eyes dilated, and when she raised her hand to brush the hair from her eyes, her mohair sweater slid up to her elbow. No needle marks. Maybe she was popping pills, but I was betting it was booze. The inside of her arm was soft and a little fleshy. I wondered how it tasted.

I walked her to the door. “You have kids?”

“No.”

“So you get everything? The money, the apartment, all the goodies?”

“It was all mine to begin with.”

“You inherited it?”

“I earned it. Tell me what Ulanova said.”

Frances Pascoe assumed I was some schmuck detective who would do what she wanted, and she tipped her head inquisitively, locked the glistening eyes on me, said, “Will you?”

I looked in the expectant face and said, “No.”

She pulled her sweater tight.

I said, “You mentioned only one apartment came up for sale. Who got it?”

“We did,” Mrs Pascoe said. “It was next door to ours. Tommy and I. We bought it.”

“I'll tell you what. When you want to talk to me, give me a call, OK? I don't have anything personal invested in this, it's just a job.”

“Yes you do.”

“Do what?”

“Have something invested.”

“What's that?”

“Me.”

I was surprised and I said “What?” but she ignored me, so I took it as a come-on and tried to forget it. She was used to getting her way, she'd say what she figured would work. How the hell could I have anything invested in this case? I'd never met Frances Pascoe before in my life.

Before she finally went inside, she looked nervously around the piazza again and said, “Do you see the world as a frightening place?”

“Not frightening,” I said, walking away.
“Unpredictable. I usually sit with my back to the wall.”

From the piazza, through the lobby window, I saw the doorman escort Mrs Pascoe across the lobby like she might break. Before she got to the elevator, she looked back out at me. She was irritated. Then the doorman leaned down and said something and she smiled. He pulled out some cigarettes from an inside pocket, gave her one, lit it for her.

It was warm out, almost hot. I walked from Sutton Place over to First when I left Mrs Pascoe. In the streets, nannies shared a smoke; their babies snoozed in their strollers. At sidewalk tables old guys sat and shot the breeze. In the sultry weather the neighborhood had a lazy, old-fashioned feel, a snapshot from another time: the elderly men wore Sinatra-style snapbrims made of straw; some of the women wore thin flowery dresses.

I walked as far as 67th Street and the One Nine, a precinct where most of what they see is property crime. Jewellery theft. Lost dogs. Down a couple of blocks, where I passed the gothic façade of St Peter's School, then back to Sutton Place.

I dated a girl once who lived around here and was nuts for its history. Sutton Place was a tiny enclave, almost hidden from the city, seven blocks long, tucked between the eastern edge of the city and the river. Not so long ago – in the 1700s – there were rocky bluffs where the East 50s are now. Rich Dutchmen who worked in downtown Manhattan came to escape the crowds and disease in the summer, and built their
country mansions overlooking the river. Sloops sailed the East River on their way to Long Island Sound.

Later on there were inns and sightseers and then industry came: factories for making gun shot and cigars, breweries.

In 1900 the Queensboro Bridge, 59th Street Bridge, whatever you call it, opened, a dazzling, elaborate structure with stone piers, polished tiles, iron spires. The new rich drove their new cars across it en route to their palaces on Long Island. In the 1920s the rich built townhouses and apartment buildings here. Sutton Place always had a racy reputation. Scattered among the gentry were artists and actors and at least one famous porn star. It was a peculiar, insular place, even after they shoved the FDR Drive through and destroyed the riverfront. All that was left were the terraced walls, covered in ivy, that divided buildings like the Middlemarch from the highway below and the river beside it.

I looked up and down the street. There was something unreal about it in the hot, still evening.

Two TV vans were parked outside the Middlemarch and I went over to see what was up, when a young woman, Hispanic, Dominican maybe, emerged from the building and walked a few yards before she got out her smokes. I followed. We got to chatting. She was a maid at the Middlemarch. I asked if she knew a janitor named Pindar Aguirre. She said sure, but he was off that day. She knew that. She retailed some gossip: which maids stole; which nannies let their boyfriends in the service entrance; who tipped good.

After she finished her cigarette, she stubbed it out on the pavement and went back to the building, and I strolled across the piazza on the river side, leaned against the wrought-iron railing, watched the building. The lobby was empty now. Frances Pascoe was gone.

Sonny Lippert knows me; he knew what he was doing, putting me on this case. It wasn't just because I speak Russian. He wanted something.

I leaned against the piazza railing. My fingers touched the ornamental iron leaves entwined on the railing behind me. From where I stood, the fourteen-story building glowed. The light was fading and the evening sky made an almost visible frame for it. It was a pretty seductive picture. Rich people interest me.

I have this snapshot in my head, it's fading now, but I can still see the details, and in it I'm twelve years old. My Aunt Birdie takes me to a rich man's apartment in Moscow. He is a privileged foreigner and therefore fabulous. Exotic. An actual capitalist, a
bizinessman
, and we go up and a servant lets us in. There is beautiful light, rich wood panelling and furniture, some modern, some antique, but each piece is different, and there are soft Persian carpets and airy white curtains. Paintings unlike anything I can imagine, that Birdie says are by Marc Chagall, and lamps made of stained glass she tells me are from a place named Tiffany. There are American drinks, Jack Daniels for Birdie and Coca Cola for me, and chocolate chip cookies. I've never tasted such things. We were taught at school that Coca Cola tasted like shoe polish; it didn't. It tasted fine.

Most of all, I'm aware of the soft fabric of his sleeve when he shakes my hand, the great man, and of the smell. Moscow stinks of cabbage and the carbolic they use to clean up the drunks' vomit in buildings and on the street; you can always smell the vomit anyhow. Here the smells are good wood, wood polish, freshly washed linen and cookies baking. It smells clean and expensive.

In those days in Moscow, seeing the apartment was a kind of pornography: it turned me on. At twelve, I thought the light, the space, the smells were sexy.

Now, I stared at the lobby of the Middlemarch again. I wanted a look inside, but Frances Pascoe was gone. I stayed where I was, arms stretched out along the railing.

If someone from the outside murdered Thomas Pascoe, then the killer went in the side entrance and took the stairs up a flight and another set down to the pool. There were three elevators, one from the lobby with an operator, one for residents that went from the various floors straight to the pool and skipped the lobby, and a service elevator that went to the top floor where Ulanova lived but stopped on two. From two, you took the back stairs to the ground floor or the basement and the pool. God knows who dreamed up the arrangements, but I wanted a picture of the building in my mind, a cross section, like one of those kids' picture books that shows you how stuff works. I was betting whoever did Pascoe knew his way around.

I saw Sweeney go off duty at eight. A younger guy came on the door. I went around to the street side of the building and strolled inside in the wake of a guy walking
a pack of fancy hounds. Then I slipped into the service door, the vestibule, through a second door and into the Middlemarch stairwell. I was in. Through the rabbit hole.

It was dark inside. I started down, missed a step, skidded a couple more. I put my shoulder against a door and leaned on it. Nothing happened. I climbed up a flight, but the doors opened into the stairs. I was trapped. I was like a rabbit in a vertical cage. I hate closed spaces. I was stuck in an elevator once with a couple of nasty thugs and it changed me.

I was sweating bullets as I reached the roof. “Come on, fuck you.” I was screaming at the door. It was bolted. Then I remembered: there was access on Two. It was how the help travelled. I kept on moving, running back downstairs, when I heard it: a faint tap tap on the concrete steps, remote at first, then louder, coming closer, following me, up, down. The sound travelled in ways I couldn't follow. I had left the door propped open; someone had followed me in. The sound was closer now, behind me, on top of me. I turned and squinted.

The arm came from behind me and my head banged against the edge of the stairs. My adrenalin surged and I wanted to hit someone. I got my hand on my gun, wrapped it around the butt, got some momentum and hit out. Hard. Connected with hair and skull. A man whimpered in the dark and swore out loud in Russian. He couldn't stop himself; he cursed from the pain and cursed at me: keep your nose out of things, he said. I
knew the curse: they cut off your nose. The accent was crude. Brighton Beach, I thought, and let him go.

He ran downstairs. Jerk that I was, I had made it easy for him. I heard him run out of the door and into the street. I ran too, but he was gone. I wasn't bruised bad, but I was pissed off. If Sonny Lippert heard I got banged up, he'd pull me off the case. I didn't want off. Already there was something that tugged at me on this one. I pretended it was just a job, but I wanted in. I went home and ignored Sonny's messages.

I sat out on my roof that night, me looking through a telescope Lily got me for my birthday, Lily and Beth a few yards away. The end of October, but warm out. I didn't mention the Pascoe case, didn't tell her I was on it. It would upset Lily, me running into a creep.

On the barbecue, a butterflied leg of lamb sent up its delicious smoke. Through the telescope I could see a startling amount of stars. Space garbage drifted overhead too, in the spangled sky. From here, what was left of Mir looked glamorous, the last bright thing the Soviets ever made.

Around us, on low-lying roofs of warehouses, on fire escapes and balconies, in Chinatown and Soho, Tribeca and Nolita, people sat out late. There were colored lights, red, yellow, blue, green, strung up on makeshift clothesline. I saw some Chinese guys in their underwear playing cards. A half-naked couple rocked in a hammock. Somewhere a St Grapelli album played.

I heard something splash.

A few feet away, in the blue plastic pool I fixed up
on the roof, Beth paddled in the warm water and laughed. It had been warm all month and we ate out on the roof of the cast-iron building off Broadway where I have the loft. I got it early, when no one wanted rough spaces on the wrong side of Canal Street. Before I bought it, I lived in shitty rentals in Brooklyn and Alphabet City. It's the only place I've ever owned. I got real lucky. I can only tell Lily how I feel about my place, how I got it, fixed it up, scraped the floors myself, how it makes me physically happy to be in it. What I don't tell her is I'd kill anyone who messed with it.

I looked across the street. The windows were open in the building opposite mine. Girls on the nightshift in the sweatshop sewed and smoked and I could look in and see them work. Other windows had pumpkins in them, carved up into grinning faces. People in the street below were hanging out, making out, drinking beer.

No one could remember anything like it, weather so clear and warm for so long. A steady breeze blew pollution out to sea. Crime was down, the city was high. “Can't last,” cynics said. “The last good time.” People smiled. There was a blue moon that month.

I looked at Lily. She had on a pair of cut-offs and one of my shirts knotted up around her waist; she was barefoot and her long legs were still tan from the summer. She pushed her heavy red hair off her neck, fastened it on top of her head with a rubber band, then reached down, lifted Beth out of the pool and dried her with a yellow towel. Lily spread the towel on the roof and Beth sat on it for a while. She looked at Lily, then me, big black eyes wide, wondering what we wanted from
her. She got up, toddled around the roof looking for someone to charm, returned to the towel, yawned a lot and dozed off.

Beth spent her first six months in a Chinese orphanage; the ability to divine what people liked was a survival tactic; for a baby girl in that hellhole, charm kept you alive. I went over and picked her up.

I had carried Beth home from China for Lily, and I couldn't hold her without remembering the heavy, warm sensation when I first picked her up out of a crib in the orphanage and put her arms around my neck. Then she pissed all over me. I laughed at the memory. I went from being a guy who worried if I had the right brand virgin olive oil in my kitchen to a guy who shopped for the right baby formula at K-Mart on Astor Place.

Beth was almost three now, big, beautiful, smart, spoiled, funny, a regular New York kid. They spend weekends with me here a lot of times, but it was Monday night. I'd take them home later. Lily, who's a freelance writer, works from home now. She keeps regular hours during the week. I didn't mind. I like the ritual.

Lily gathered up the papers that lay scattered at her feet, and I saw the headline in the
Post
. It was the headline I would have written myself, so I looked at it and grinned:
HEAD OF CO-OP LOSES HEAD
.