Gladyss of the Hunt (36 page)

“Yellow?” he answered.

In my most official tone, I asked him for Crispin's cell phone number.

“He doesn't have a cell phone.”

“How does he not have a cell phone?”

“Actually, someone else has it. Crispin got mugged.”

“Oh, right.” I suddenly remembered his black eye.

“He flew back to LA today to recuperate. He's coming back to New York in a few days. I'm sure he'll have a new phone by then.”

“Did he file a police report about the mugging?”

“He was too embarrassed.”

“I need to speak to him when he gets back.”

“Why?”

“Police business.”

“You don't trust me?”

“After the other morning, I'm not sure I even know who you are.”

“Look, I am really sorry about that. Will you meet me tomorrow night and I'll try and make it up to you. Miriam's throwing a dinner.”

“She's here right now. We're in the middle of an interview.”

“You're kidding.”

“The killer used her web site.”

“Oh right,” he remembered. “Well, she apparently discovered
some hot, young European
auteur
and brought him back with her. The dinner tomorrow is part of her attempt to woo him into directing her latest project. Please join me.”

Though I now felt I wanted to end whatever relationship I had with him, I just couldn't say no to the guy. He told me he'd pick me up outside my house at seven. Before he ran off, I asked him if he had ever heard of Sammy Wochenskil.

“Sure, Sammy is a living legend.”

“So he's definitely still alive?”

“Yeah, I'm pretty sure. But he's old.”

Since our killer drugged his victims, physical strength wasn't a major issue, so being old didn't automatically rule him out. And no one would think twice about trusting him.

“He lives in Chelsea somewhere,” Noel added.

Not that far where most of the murders had occurred.

“Did you know anything about him and Marilyn Monroe?” I asked.

“Oh,” Noel suddenly woke up. “Actually, yes. There was some story that he once attacked her.”

“He attacked her physically?” I asked in disbelief.

“Yeah. Something like that. At a party.”

When I got off the phone, Bernie was just finishing up too. He told me he'd confirmed that Sammy Wochenskil was still alive. What's more, he'd once had an assault charge filed against him, though it was dismissed for lack of evidence.

“You're not going to believe what I just heard,” I responded.

He didn't immediately ask so I told him. “I just heard that this guy once assaulted Marilyn Monroe!”

“Shit! He's
got
to be our man,” Bernie said, sounding excited for the first time.

“He must be freaking old.”

“
I'm
freaking old. But killers are ageless.”

When Miriam returned, Bernie took her over to the couch and turned on the charm. The two were nearly the same age, and they seemed almost playful. The chip that I'd always seen on Bernie's shoulder seemed to vanish completely. As he flirted with her, I got some idea of what he must've been like when he was young. I couldn't stop smiling. He was so much more of a guy than any of the
younger men I knew.

After a half hour of back-and-forth memory-jogging, Miriam came up with eight more names—all oddballs, most of them seniors—who at one time or another had expressed antagonism, or at least annoyance, with the blonde bombshell.

When we were done, I walked her downstairs, and as I saw her into a cab I told her that Noel had invited me as his guest to a dinner at her house tomorrow night.

“That's wonderful,” she replied. Then she pointed to my cheek. “You have some bruises . . .”

“I'll use a lot of foundation,” I said, instead of explaining what had happened.

“It's not a formal affair, so please dress casually. And please don't mention anything about today. Some investors are going to be there and I don't want to scare them off.”

She closed the door of the cab and it sped north to where the wealthy went.

Back upstairs, Annie had located the address of the only Sammy Wochenskil listed—in an apartment building on West 16th Street. Bernie told me to come with him. As we drove west toward the river, Bernie radioed for backup. If this was our killer, particularly if he was old, he might not want to be taken alive. We parked underneath the old train trestle and waited for the patrol cars to arrive.

“Is that one of the old El lines?” I asked him, pointing at the overhead track. I had heard that trains used to run on elevated tracks up and down some of Manhattan's avenues, as recently as the 1950s.

“That's the old High Line,” Bernie answered. “It was for moving freight, when they had warehouses along the river here.” Spotting some middle-aged tranny hooker skulking underneath it, he added, “I just read they're planning to turn the whole thing into some kind of park.”

“How do you turn an old train trestle into a park?”

“Maybe it'll be a big roller coaster ride, who knows?”

Suddenly two cop cars from the West Side Highway zoomed up behind them, sirens wailing. Bernie quickly got out of the car and waved at them to kill their sirens. We didn't want to give the killer any warning. The building had art galleries on the ground floor; the area was turning into the new SoHo. We rang the buzzer of one of
the galleries to get inside. While talking to one of the gallery staff, we located a fire escape at the rear that ran up outside Wochenskil's window. Two of the uniforms were instructed to climb up there and stay out of view until we radioed them.

In the elevator, Bernie reached discreetly into his jacket. I knew he was checking his gun. He was eager to believe this could be our guy. For the first time we finally had someone who seemed to have an inkling of a motive and opportunity.

We got off at the eighth floor. We waited for the backup to radio that they were just below his window before we knocked on the door. As soon as it started to open just a crack, Bernie rammed his way in, shoving a handsome, strapping blond guy against the hallway wall.

“Please don't kill me!” he said in a shrill voice. The young man was terrified.

“NYPD.” Bernie held up his badge while I searched him for a weapon.

“Are you Sam Wochenskil?” I asked as Bernie cuffed his hands behind him.

“No! Heavens, no. Sammy can't get out of bed. I'm her nurse.”

Bernie pushed the man forward, and we followed him, guns drawn, into a spacious apartment.

In the bedroom watching daytime TV, wearing eyeliner and a badly balanced toupee, was a living skeleton of a man. Outside the window, the two patrolmen peeked in from the fire escape, looking bewildered.

“Pardon us,” I said, as Bernie unlocked the window to let them in.

“Dear God! What the hell is going on?” Wochenskil asked, putting a hand over his heart.

It was clear that the only thing this old boy could hope to assault these days was an aluminum potty. The two uniforms climbed in through the window and quickly exited by the front door.

Bernie was unable to repress an embarrassed smile as he asked the bedridden man, “Did you by chance ever assault Marilyn Monroe?”

“The actress?”

Bernie nodded yes. Looking over at his attendant, Wochenskil rolled his eyes and the two of them snickered a little nervously. Bernie uncuffed the young man.

“Actually, we shouldn't laugh,” the old man said. “I did once have an altercation with the late Miss Baker DiMaggio Miller Kennedy.”

“You physically assaulted her?” I asked.

“Oh yes. About fifty years ago, at a party thrown by that pint-size monster Truman Capote. Before he did his big white-on-white bashes. She made some insipid remark about one of my fashions, don't you know. So I flicked a pimento at her when she wasn't looking. It landed in the top of her bouffant do. Everyone laughed.”

“Is it true that you assaulted another lady?” Bernie asked sternly, trying to retain a sense of purpose to our visit.

“That was no lady,” Sam replied. “That she-devil was my sister. We got into a vicious fight after my mother died. The bitch was talking trash, don't you know. Well, next thing I know she slaps me, so let me tell you, I slapped her right back. And she filed charges.” Looking slyly over at his attendant, he ran his knuckles over his fingertips like an emery board and said, “I only filed my nails.”

“The woman had a different last name than yours,” Bernie said, reading from his notepad.

“It's her . . . mar . . .” Suddenly he started gasping. “It's her marr . . . married name.” He continued gasping. The attendant, who turned out to be a licensed nurse, moved quickly and gave him an injection via a central IV line.

Bernie looked up at me. It was obvious we were interrogating a dying man. I apologized for the intrusion and we left.

“My last murder,” he said almost fondly as we were waiting for the elevator, “some guy rips off his buddy, so the dude, who he'd known since high school, grabs a lead pipe and clobbers him three times over the head. Four people see the whole thing and two of them squealed. No overtime, no techies, no labs, no profiler. Not even a trial. Just sentencing. The whole event was wrapped up by lunchtime.”

“Maybe the NYPD should give incentives to blunt trauma murderers with witnesses.”

“They do. They call them plea bargains.”

The elevator doors popped open and we stepped inside.

“What's worse is that we got seven more of these nutcases to track down—and this guy was our best shot.”

It was five o'clock when we arrived back at the precinct. After a good laugh over the story of our geriatric suspect, we split the other
seven names Miriam had given us with Alex and Annie, and planned to check them out the next day.

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

That morning Bernie showed up with a five-o'clock shadow and another of his thousand yard stares. It turned out his wife had finally served him divorce papers. Alex tried to convince him to take the day off and relax, but Bernie said that all he really wanted was to catch this cocksucker before he sliced and diced another girl. Annie said it would be a relatively easy day, since our next task was to check out Miriam's uptown suspects.

“No way,” Bernie said tiredly. “Her list is a fucking joke. It's only been a few days since Caty's death, so I want to go back to the King's Court and see if we can find any witnesses.”

“We already canvassed the hotel,” Annie pointed out. “And we looked at all the surveillance footage.”

“Somebody must've seen something,” he insisted.

“Why don't you two go ahead and do that,” Annie said. “Alex and I can finish up the Williams list ourselves.”

Bernie and I spent the day interviewing staff and tracking down the guests who were still occupying rooms on the floor where Caty stayed, but it was all a big bust.

As we were walking down a street back to the precinct, I caught Bernie staring at an older homeless man sitting in a doorway.

“The older you get the less desirable, more avoidable you become,” he announced. All the little systems in your life start breaking down like you're an old appliance—the emotions, the love, the ability to socialize . . . And don't get me started on the failures of the body.”

“Hey, they've got drugs for all those things.” I tried to lighten his mood. At that moment, a sexy girl walked by and the comment assumed a connotation I hadn't intended.

“Sex went from being ten times a day to maybe once a year, if I
begged my wife enough. But even that one night made me feel like a million bucks,” he said as he eyed her. “All gone forever.”

I gave him a sympathetic smile, then headed to yoga class to process my own stress. Much to my chagrin, the Renunciate was away on some Buddhist retreat in the Catskills. even though his life seemed like one big vacation to me. A wide-eyed yogarexic named Penrose conducted the class. Apparently she was not fluent in Sanskrit, because she used boring animal names for the old positions—pigeon pose, crow pose, camel pose, dolphin pose. Although I worked up a good sweat, I sort of felt spiritually cheated by her American narrative.

Before going home, I stopped at the Rite Aid to pick up some more concealer, so I could cover my bruises before Miriam's party that night.

When I entered my place, on the floor I found the same page from the
Post
that Bernie had waved at me. Maggie must've slipped it under my door. The headline read COPS OUT ON SEX SOCIALITE. The quarter-page article loosely described my near-arrest of Venezia at the Rocmarni show. I didn't so much mind the unflattering photo of me trying to keep Venezia's slippery arm pinned behind her fat back. What pissed me off most was that we were described as rivals for Noel Holden's affections. I guess at least I hadn't received any visits from Internal Affairs.