Jimmy and Fay (27 page)

I rapped on the door of 624 with my stick. I was thinking that if nobody was there, I'd pay Tommy, the night man, for the use of a master key, but Honeybunch answered right away. She had a dazed smile plastered across her pretty little mug. It disappeared when she saw who I was.

“Oh shit,” she said. “I thought you were the guy with the food.”

She trotted back to her stack of pillows and dove onto them face-first. She was wearing the same kind of outfit she had on when we were there before, the loose vest and gauzy harem pants stretched tight across her ass. She wriggled around a bit, then rolled over onto her back and found her hash pipe.

“Bobby's not here,” she said as she fired it up and gave me a long look at her cooch. “He won't be back till late. You got anything to eat? Bobby left some ice cream and candy, but I ate it already. The guy's supposed to bring me something else, but he's late. Christ, I gotta get something to eat.”

“Where's Bobby?” I looked over and saw the blue-and-gold box where he kept the key to the workroom.

“Tonight's his big premiere, his
soirée cinématique intime
. You'd think it was the most important thing in the world the way he's been worrying about it. Say, you were here with that girl. He said he was going to get her to serve drinks and everything.”

So he was after Connie. Or he told her he was. Honeybunch went on, “I asked him if I could help with the drinks and the cocaine like I used to, but Bobby said I can't anymore, I like it too much, and that's why I gotta stay here. You got anything to eat?”

“No, I could call down to the desk, get Tommy to have something sent up.” The telephone was on the table next to the blue-and-gold box.

She wrinkled her brow like she didn't understand what I said. “You can do that? Just call and they bring you food? Can you get ice cream?”

“They've probably got some at the diner down the street. They deliver all the time.”

“Yeah, that would be great.”

It was pretty easy to fish the key ring out of the box while I called. Tommy didn't pick up until the sixth ring. I told him we needed a quart of chocolate in 624.

“And to whom should I charge that,” he said with a nasty edge on his voice, “Mr. Apollinaire or Mr. Quinn?”

“Mr. Apollinaire, and you know something, Tommy? You better bring it up personally.”

I let myself into 618 and snapped on the light. It didn't look like Bobby had done anything else since the night before. I thought there weren't as many closed boxes on the shelves, and I went through the ones that were left. They were filled with photo books.

I could recognize all the real actresses that Bobby's lookalikes were supposed to be, but I didn't know all the pictures that he was imitating. Not that it mattered. As long as you looked at a few features, the resemblance was there. The angular face of a girl who wasn't Joan Crawford and the black bobbed hair of the Louise Brooks type who costarred in
Two Lost Sinners
. The curly hair and big cheekbones of Norma Shearer in
The Divorce
. The plump platinum blonde Mae West in
Diamond Lou's Sex
, and the high-society blonde Madeleine Carroll in
The French Wife
. None of them would fool you if you knew what the real women looked like on-screen. But Bobby didn't lie about the quality of his photography. He really made those women look great. In all the books, Bobby started by holding things back, the same way the Ziegfeld girls were photographed with a lot of skin on display, but the key parts of tits and crotches covered up. The books sure didn't end that way, and each of them promised that you'd see a lot more in the movie.

But I wasn't after those. I wanted to know where the damn premiere was going to be.

The regular, not-crazy part of my brain knew that Connie wouldn't go there. But right then, I wasn't paying much attention to the regular not-crazy part. The crazy jealous part remembered how Bobby had snaked girls away from me and how easily he could pour on the charm and how Connie was mad at me already and how he might go after her out of spite just because I broke into his studio. Maybe he offered her a bundle of cash and she took it, not knowing what he wanted her to do.

I went through the rest of the boxes and the stuff that was stored on the shelves and the drawing desk and the clutter at the back of the workbench. Nothing and more nothing.

I found it when I went through the trash bin.

The first things I pulled out were rags, ink-stained pieces of cloth and crumpled newspapers. Underneath those, I found some printed pages out of the
Kong
book. He'd tossed them out because they were smeared or dog-eared. Among the bad pages I came across a square envelope, made of the same thick paper as the book pages. Somebody, Bobby I guess, had started typing an address on East Eighty-Seventh Street, but “New York” was “New Yrok.” I guess Bobby was as much a perfectionist as he made himself out to be.

After more digging, I found five invitations, printed with the same blue ink he used on his cards and the books. Three of them were smeared. Two were printed off center. The invitation read:

The World Premiere of
Kong

By Oscar Apollinaire

Will Be Presented

Sunday, March 5, at 11:00 p.m.

With a performance by the stars

Corlears Street

Chapter Twenty
-
Three

Back in my room, I stashed the invitations and found my notepad and pen. It was about 8:30. I got my coat and hat and was about to go downstairs but turned and went up to Connie's room. I knocked and waited. No answer.

A couple of blocks away on Ninth Avenue there was a garage. That's where I kept a nice little green Ford coupe that my friend Walter Spencer loaned me so I wouldn't have to steal it. It had to do with the business that brought Connie to work in my place, and I don't need to go into that again. Truth is, I had hardly driven it, but I picked it up that night and headed down to the Lower East Side.

You see, Corlears Street was just south of the Williamsburg Bridge, only a few blocks from a garage that Meyer Lansky owned. Back in the first days of Prohibition, Spence and I stole cars and trucks and sold them to Lansky. We also drove shipments of liquor for him in some of the same cars. It was a sweet racket. Corlears Street was close to the East River. I didn't really know the neighborhood, and it had been years since I'd been down there. I figured it wouldn't be a bad idea to take a look at it before the
soirée intime
got started.

I took a right off Grand Street onto Corlears and looked for a building that would suit Bobby's purposes. I thought I spotted one, and at the same time, I noticed four big headlights on a car parked on the other side of the street. Yeah, it was the big brown Oldsmobile. I could see that a guy in a chauffeur's cap was behind the wheel. I kept a slow steady speed on the cobblestones. As I passed the Olds, my lights cut across it, and I was able to see that the driver had gray hair and a jowly jaw. His eyes were fixed on the front of Bobby's building. He stared at it like he was trying to memorize every detail, that's how intense his expression was. I had a feeling I'd seen him somewhere, but that happened a lot with so many people coming into the speak, so I didn't think much about it. I had other things to do, anyway. I drove down a couple of streets, circled around a little park, and came back to park about thirty feet behind the Olds. It figured he was doing the same thing I was.

I cut the engine, took off my hat, slouched in the seat, and waited.

Bobby's place was a flat-roofed, two-story brick building with bars on the ground-floor windows, and big wooden doors that looked like they belonged on a barn. It was on the corner of Monroe Street. As my eyes got used to the dark, I saw that there was a big goon smoking a cigarette beside the doors. No light showed from any of the windows.

By and by, somebody trotted around the corner of the building at Monroe and made straight for the Olds. It was the kid who'd been watching my place. The back door of the Olds opened as he approached and he jumped in. Nothing happened for a few minutes until the goon stepped away from the building and started across the street. He wore a heavy overcoat and had his hat pulled down over his eyes. He hadn't gone more than a couple of steps before the Olds started up and pulled away from the curb. It headed toward Grand Street. I gave them a few seconds and then followed. I didn't try to stay close because I had a good idea about where they were going.

Yeah, the Olds pulled into the garage of the Wilcox place on Fifth Avenue.

I turned around and drove back down to Corlears Street. When I got there, they were unloading food from a truck. I did the same thing I'd done before, going past the place, coming back around and parking down the street where I could watch. Both of the front doors were open, and a second goon in an overcoat was standing around with the first one. I guess they were there to keep people out, but the street was quiet on a Sunday night. Bobby was talking with the guy who was in charge of the delivery. It looked like they were disagreeing, and both of them went inside. I got out and walked to Monroe Street. The two goons at the door paid no attention.

I thought there might be an alley off Monroe going behind the building and I was right. There were dim gaslights on the street, and I could see an electric light some way down the alley, about where the back door ought to be. I didn't risk going into the alley. If Bobby had guys in the front, there was somebody in the back. I went on around the block and came down Corlears on the far side of the street.

Back in the coupe, I watched them moving the covered trays of food inside. Sometime after that, a taxi pulled up and three girls got out, laughing and talking to each other. I couldn't tell much about them. They were wearing coats and hats. One of them was shorter than the other two and what I could see of her hair was dark. I leaned forward to get a better look, but Bobby came out and hustled them inside.

The regular, not-crazy part of me was sure that the shorter girl didn't walk at all like Connie. The crazy jealous part wasn't satisfied, but there was nothing to be done then so I drove back uptown to get ready.

I parked in the alley behind the speak and let myself in the back. It was a slow night. The place was almost empty. Marie Therese hadn't heard anything more from Connie. Damn. I went down to the cellar and found Arch Malloy with his nose still in
The Story of Philosophy
. He might have made it to the second chapter.

I said, “Looks like you were right about the premiere of that stag movie I was telling you about. It's tonight.”

“Is it, then?” He put down the book.

I described the place and said, “The situation is a little more complicated than it was before. Maybe.” I didn't want to say anything about Connie, but since Malloy knew her, I had to.

“There's a chance Connie will be there. This guy I know, the one I told you about, who calls himself Apollinaire, he might have tried to get her to help serve food and drinks at this thing. Cocaine, too, maybe. At least, I know he wanted to ask her, and if he did, maybe she said yes. I don't know.”

Arch got that canny look of his. “You've found a way to get yourself into it, haven't you?”

I nodded. “If you've got black-tie, you can join me.”

He hopped out of his chair and said, “I'll be back in thirty minutes.”

“Bring your pistol.”

I went up to my office and called Detective Ellis at his precinct. It took a long time for the desk sergeant or whoever answered to find him, and when Ellis got on the line, he sounded tired, irritable, and not in the mood to hear what I had to say.

“What the hell is it now?”

“I know you said you want this to be over, but it's not. The stag movie I told you about, they're showing it tonight. And I've got reason to think the guys who were behind the business with the book are going to be there.”

“So? What's it to you?”

“They're up to something.” I hadn't told him about the goat, and I couldn't think of a way to bring it up then and not sound like I was nuts.

“I don't care,” he said. “You stay out of it. I've talked to Captain Boatwright. He's happy and he's going to talk to the commissioner, so you don't do anything else, you got that? Don't rock the boat.”

“Listen, goddammit, you got me into this when you told them to come to my place and volunteered me to be your go-between and then left me holding the fucking bag when it was time for the payoff, so you still owe me.”

“The hell you say. I—”

“Just listen. I said they're showing this picture tonight. I'm going to be there. You stay close to the phone. If it goes south and I can't handle it, I'm going to call. Make sure you're available.”

“Shit, you can't—”

“I'm not asking you to do anything. Just be ready if I need help. Last night you told me to say yes and shut up and that's what you're going to do now. You're going to say yes and you're going to stay by the damn telephone. Right?”

He didn't say anything.

I repeated, “Right?”

After a long pause, he said, “Yes.”

I told Frenchy and Marie Therese they could close up whenever they felt like it and that Arch and I had other business to take care of. Right off, Marie Therese asked if it had anything to do with Connie.

I said, “I don't think so and I hope not, but it's something I want to be sure about.”

She went into her mother-hen routine then and put her fists on her hips and narrowed her eyes. “If you did anything to hurt that girl, I will never forgive you.”

“I didn't do anything”—that I knew of—“If I knew why you and her were so honked off at me, maybe I'd have a better idea about what's going on.”

I waited for her answer and watched her anger fade away as she thought about it, but she just shook her head and didn't say anything.