Dead by Any Other Name (4 page)

nine

I headed up to
Phoenicia, parked in town and, trying to look inconspicuous, strolled up Natasha's street toward her little house. I'd called George's friend Tony to see if he knew anything more about the identity of the man he'd seen Natasha with; the only information he gave me was that “on a scale of one-to-ten, he's a twenty.” I was looking for something a little more concrete.

There was her small sad cabin, hidden in its jungle of evergreens and scrubs. I looked up and down the street before I walked up the path to the screened porch. I tried the door, it was open, I stepped inside. The porch had a wicker loveseat and a couple of vintage metal lawn chairs, felt like a place where Natasha hung out—there was a coffee table with a few mugs on it, a Larry McMurtry novel, an iPod dock, candles, incense. No sign of a struggle. I tried the front door of the house, locked. There was a window that opened into the living room, it was open a crack. I pushed it up and clambered inside. Was I breaking and entering? Nah, I didn't break anything.

The living room was bone quiet and looked just like it had two days, just forty-eight hours ago, when Natasha had filled it with her longing, her voice, her fear. Midday light filtered through the surrounding greenery poured into the room, emerald and eerie, the berry cake she had made for us was still sitting on the table. There was a small ashtray with a roach in it; I didn't remember that from Saturday. Maybe the gorgeous boyfriend was a pothead. No signs of a struggle. Just a palpable sense of emptiness, the room felt so much like Natasha—quirky, creative, soulful … and gone.

I walked into the bedroom. It was painted a warm rosy beige and was dominated by an enormous bed with an old wool blanket on it. Clothes and shoes spilled out of the closet, the dresser top was covered with jewelry, make-up, fring-frungs. The room was cozy, sexy, girly, haphazard. I opened the dresser drawers and rummaged through the clothes. I looked in the bedside table—just the usual random clutter. I walked over to the shallow closet. She had an amazing array of clothes, ranging from campy retro to exquisite vintage to tossed-off hip. I pushed the clothes aside. There, hanging on hooks on the back wall, was a black leather corset, long black leather gloves, three whips, on the floor in front of them were thigh-high black leather boots with stiletto heels.

It all looked well-used.

ten

“Toshy, tooshy, whooshy!” the
woman's voice cried as the screen door slammed. I pushed the clothes back to cover the S&M paraphernalia and tried to look nonchalant. “Where are you, honeybabe?” The owner of the voice appeared in the bedroom doorway, stopped short—“Oh, hey. Who're you?”

I pegged her for pushing sixty, wearing a long skirt with a zigzag hem, cowboy boots, a billowy blouse, leather belt with a big silver buckle, her hair was bottle blonde, her face lively but raggety and worn, with some serious black eyeliner and magenta lipstick—all-in-all she looked like Stevie Nicks if Stevie Nicks had been waiting tables, smoking Marlboros, and drinking cheap white wine for forty years.

“I'm Janet, a friend a Natasha's.”

Her eyes narrowed. “She never mentioned a girlfriend named Janet.”

“Um, we're recent friends. I have a store down in Sawyerville, I'm selling some of her jewelry.”

A smile spread across the woman's face and suddenly she radiated a hardbitten warmth, “Oh, shit yeah,
of course
. I'm the one's been telling her to sell that stuff, she needs to cash outta here, baby. Course I'm gonna miss the motherfuck out of her when she's gone, but ya gotta do what ya gotta do, right? I'm Billie, by the way, Tosh's best friend, older sister, country mama, whatever. Where is that girl?”

She didn't know. And I had to tell her.

“Why don't we go sit in the living room?” I said.

She could sense it in my tone. “What the fuck's up?”

“Let's sit.”

I led her into the living room and we both sat on the couch.

“Billie, I have some sad news.”

Her mouth opened, her head cocked. “What kinda sad news?”

“Very sad.” I gave her a moment. “Natasha is dead.”

Her expression froze, but tears welled in her eyes. “How?”

“She died up on Platte Clove, she fell off a cliff, right now they
think it was an accident or that she may have killed herself.”

“No fucking way she killed herself,” she spit out. Then she went absolutely still, except for her face, which slowly dissolved into a tear-riven blob.

You have to let people cry, give them space, especially if you've known them for under a minute. But the vehemence of her instinctive outburst—“No fucking way she killed herself”—bolstered my suspicions.

After she'd cried for a while she got up, walked into Natasha's kitchen, blew her nose on a paper towel, opened the fridge, took out a bottle of beer, twisted it open, took a long swig, and said, “I knew she was in trouble, I just didn't know …
oh fuck!
” She started crying again but this time it was over pretty quickly. “That kid was my best friend since the day she moved up here.”

“So you met her when she moved to Phoenicia?”

“Yeah, I'm a singer, too. Sorta. I used to be. You know, clubs around here. But I been waiting tables at Brio's for thirty years, she came in, I served her, it was instant, we clicked, she was easy to click with, what a sweet kid, but lonely, screwed up. She'd messed up big time in the city, you know, fucked up her career. She needed a friend. Who fuckin' doesn't?”

Billie walked into the living room, sat across from me, ran a finger around the rim of the beer bottle, and a terrible heavy sadness descended on her—she suddenly looked older, and broken.

“We sang together a few times, you know, just around in Woodstock and stuff, but that was such a gift she gave me. To appear with Natasha Wolfson, I mean she had
CDs
and reviews from hot-shit critics and shit. She had a lotta life in her, that kid.” This time the tears were quiet and slow.

“Billie?”

“Yeah?”

“Can I ask you something?”

“G'head.”

“If she didn't kill herself, how do you think she died?”

“I think somebody killed her.”

“Who would kill her, why?”

Billie's eyes narrowed again, she studied me for a moment, then said, “Pavel, that guy she's been seeing, he's fuckin'
weird
.” I sensed she was holding something back—I'd seen it a thousand times with clients: the pause, the tentative tone, evading eye contact. Maybe she wasn't lying, but she wasn't truthing either.

“Weird how?”

“Too quiet, like a fox, you don't know what's really going on.”

“Where did she meet him?”

“You tell me and we'll both know.”

“What's he like?”

“He's from Czechland or someplace like that, fuckin-a-
gorgeous and working it bigtime, but pretending he isn't, you know what I mean? He's catnip to the chicks, I mean look at Natasha, she was gone on him, it's that whole still-waters-run-deep thing, you look in those green eyes of his and it's like you're hypnotized.”

“Do you know where he is?”

“He lives down in Stone Ridge, on some big estate owned by two crazy English ladies, he lives above the garage or some shit, one of them is in love with him, I never trusted him. Yeah, he's hot, but shifty, Natasha got her head turned.”

I just let her words hang there. I flashed on the dominatrix garb in the closet.

“How was Natasha making a living these days?”

She downed the beer in a long swallow, went and got another one. Billie was hard, hard and soft, but mostly hard—you get kicked enough times, you get hard. The breezy Stevie Nicks who'd blown in here was a memory: she'd lost the friend who made her feel good about herself = more hard in her life.

“Her rich-ass parents weren't helping her, that's for sure. Those two are first-class creeps.”

“You met them?”

“Yeah, they came up here once, they're oh-so-motherfuckin'-charming if you can overlook the bullshit oozing out of their ears. Tosh said her Mom was trying to help her, but then why didn't they just cut her a check so she could move the fuck out to LA? She had
contacts
out there, big-time like.” She got quiet and something hardened around her mouth, the tears were over, she was already moving on to the next class at her personal school of hard knocks. “Poor Tosh. She's gone. … What's it to you, by the way?”

“I met her, I liked her.”

“She was a great kid, wasn't she?”

I nodded.

She scrutinized me, as if for the first time. “You look like a really nice person. You're pretty, too. I always wished I had green eyes.”

“Is there
anything
else you can tell me about Natasha's life?”

Her eyes went down, she bit her lower lip. Then she looked up
at me, almost innocent, and said, “No.”

eleven

I tooled down 212
toward Sawyerville in a less than a great mood
—I couldn't believe I was letting myself get sucked into another murder, or whatever it was. This was supposed to be
my
time, the years when I took it easy and pursued my long-ignored quasi-interest in things like painting, Asian history, joining a reading group, and just doing a whole lot of nothing. I did not want to get sucked into some swirling vortex of a lost girl, her narcissistic parents, shady boyfriend, kinky sex, and murder. No way, no how. I had paid my dues to the human race, my footprint was light, leave me be.

Then I heard a faint echo: Natasha's voice singing
Love by Any Other Name
… the kindness in her eyes—and the fear. It was that fear—combined with everything I'd learned about suicide during my psychotherapy training and practice—that made me think somebody killed her. I couldn't let that sit. I just couldn't.

I hit the accelerator.

I dropped into Abba's. George was sitting at the counter, wearing jodhpurs. He stood up and modeled them for me.

“It's a hot look, don't you think?” he said.

“It's a look.”

“You know, Janet, you really are a wet dishrag in human form. You feel threatened by passion. Antonio is my lover and my life, his world is my world—I start my riding lessons today.”

“Hey, that's great, where?”

He sat on his stool, took a sip of coffee and said casually, “Emerson elementary.”

“You're starting your riding lessons at an elementary school? Do they have horses there?”

“You're so
literal
.”

“Well, you
do
need a horse to have a riding lesson, don't you?”

“I'm starting out on a playground horse because I suffer from severe
equinophobia
! I was profoundly traumatized by a horse as a child.”

“I'm sorry, I didn't know that. What happened?”

“I'm trying to remember … but I'm sure it had something to do with my father's penis.”

“How's the Van Wyck campaign going?”

“I spent an hour calling voters today. His wife, Alice, dropped into headquarters with a wicker basket of tea sandwiches and cookies, it was a bit
noblesse oblige
, but whatever. They were good.”

Abba came out from the kitchen and joined us. I filled them both in on my day.

“Do you know anything about two English sisters who live down in Stone Ridge?” When it came to the Hudson Valley, Abba was a font of history, the latest news and the juiciest gossip.

“Oh sure, the Bump sisters, Octavia and Lavinia, I'd say they're fiftyish, from some fancy British family,
a lot
of money, their dad was a lord or a knight or something, maybe minor royalty. Apparently they're pretty strange, so strange that the family basically pays them to stay on this side of the pond.”

“Have you met them?”

“Never have. They mostly stick to their estate, it's on Leggett Road, probably the fanciest address in the county.”

“Do you know anything about some beautiful young man who lives on their property?”

“I don't, but it sounds interesting.”

“It does
not
,” George said, “I haven't even
looked
at another man since I met Antonio. Are you going to head down there, Janet? Because I am in the mood for a little drive.”

“I may pay a courtesy visit. But it should probably be solo.”

“Their estate is right next to Collier Denton,” Abba said.

“That name sounds familiar.”

“He's an old actor, was on some soap opera for like thirty years, he's retired now.”

“Collier Denton is a mad old queen from hell,” George tossed in.

“Not sure I would phrase it like that,” Abba said. “But I catered a party for him a few years ago and he was pretty …
grand
. And cheap,
very
cheap. Anyway, he and the sisters have been
feuding for years, and I mean
seriously
feuding, lawsuits, the
police have been called, I think there may even have been an attempted murder charge.”

“Interesting. And now Natasha's beautiful boyfriend is in the mix,” I said. “Listen, I better get going, see you both later.”

I stepped outside and there was Mad John—tiny, hirsute, insane, the town's resident river rat—wearing his usual Oliver Twist outfit and sweeping down the sidewalks of Sawyerville, one of his favorite hobbies, the civic-minded little lunatic.

“Hey, Mad John.”

He gave me his big, tooth-challenged grin, dropped the broom
and hugged me—fragrant fella. “I love Jan-Jan.”

“How's things out on the river?” Mad John lived in the reeds down by the lighthouse and plied the Hudson on his handmade raft.

A cloud passed over his face and he looked down.

“What's wrong?”

“Some bad stuff on the river, on the island.”

“What do you mean bad? And what island?”

“Goat Island, old Indian island, boneyard, sacred island.”

“What's happening there?”

“Stealing from the dead. From the spirits. Beautiful things, sacred things.
Valuable
things. I try and protect the island, but they still come.”

Mad John may have been mad, but he was rock-solid reliable.

“Who's doing it?”

“I don't know, but I'll find out and they will pay. The Indian gods are angry and I am their avenger!”

“Be careful, Mad John.”

He was quiet for a moment and then suddenly his face broke into a huge grin and he started to jump up and down in place—his favorite expression of joy—and sing:

“Don't worry, be crazy!

Don't worry, be crazy!”

He stopped and thrust his face at mine, “
Like a fox!”