Lush Life: An Artie Deemer Mystery (8 page)

“Crystal Spivey, please. Room three thirty-eight.”

No answer. I explained to Marcia that Crystal was playing in the pool tournament held in the hotel ballroom. “Could you send a message to her?”

“Well, sir, my records show that she checked out at noon.”

“I see. Thank you.”

“Thank you for calling Liberty Bell, your gateway—”

The phone rang soon aft er. I snapped it up.

“Is he eating it?” Mr. Fleckton. I had forgotten entirely about the New & Improved problem. His voice had a panicky edge. “Don’t hold anything back, Artie. I can take it.”

“Well, actually, he showed considerable interest this morning,” I lied.

“You mean he ate it?”

“No, but he sniff ed it. I took that as a hopeful sign.”

“Jesus, that’s wonderful. He sniff ed it. Yes, that is a hopeful sign. Call me anytime day or night if he eats it. We can shoot at a moment’s notice.”

“Okay.”

Now what? I tuned in WBGO, the area jazz station, and listened nervously to a special on early Louis Armstrong. I heard
“Azalea” and “Weatherbird,” and they still seemed fresh and modern, but I wasn’t really concentrating. I was thinking about Trammell Weems. In law school, I had found his utter contempt for sacred cows attractive. Even though I had had an inkling back then that rebellion wouldn’t sustain one forever, I dug the stance of the outsider with a sense of the ridiculous. Now I began to feel sad, but not exactly for Trammell. Somehow, sitting there in my morris chair listening to Mr. Armstrong, I linked Trammell and my youth. Both were dead. Nothing is sadder in life than the tendency of time to pass. Let alone of humans to sink in deep water.

The phone rang.

“Hello, Artie. Did you hear? Can I come up?”

“Of course! Where are you?”

“Around the corner.”

She carried a plastic garment bag over her shoulder and her cue case in the other hand. Her eyes were red-rimmed, but whether from crying or driving, I couldn’t tell. We waited to speak until Jellyroll finished his effusive greeting. Meanwhile, I took her stuff, hung the garments in the hall closet and leaned the cue case against the wall.

Then we embraced.

“Who told you?” I asked.

“Uncle Billy called. He’s very upset. He loved Trammell.”

She sat at the dining-room table. I made her a BLT. She didn’t speak as I did so, just sat sadly petting Jellyroll. I wanted to know what exactly she felt.

“Something’s wrong, Artie,” she said finally.

“What do you mean?”

“I don’t know exactly…It doesn’t feel right.”

“What doesn’t?”

“Trammell’s death. I feel scared.”

“Scared? Why?”

“Artie, people are following me. I know they are. Sometimes I think they want me to know they’re back there, like they’re making it obvious.”

“Who?”

“I don’t know. Do you believe me?”

“Sure, if you say so.”

“I hoped you would.”

“I didn’t know he was a banker. Did you?”

“Yeah. He got indicted in Miami for fraud. We lived together then. Trammell and two other guys owned a bank. They loaned money to each other and skimmed off the interest.”

“What happened?”

“Nothing. All charges got dropped. Trammell knew they would. He was never worried. That was the first time I left him.”

“Because you didn’t want to be married to a white-collar criminal?”

“That, and other things I don’t feel like talking about right now. I’ve tried to feel sad that he’s dead, but I can’t. I feel sad for myself. I was just a girl when I married him.” She began to cry. She said something else, but it got lost. “You know what I was to him? I was a fuck-you gesture. Trammell Weems—of the great Weems family—married a pool player from Sheepshead Bay. That was a laugh. Even her name was a laugh! Crystal Spivey. Let’s take our clothes off and get into bed.”

“Sure.”

And so we did. But we didn’t make love, we just held each other. “Can he come up?”

“Sure.”

Jellyroll floated up onto the bed and began licking her face. I told her he’d keep doing that until her cheeks were gone, so she should call him off when she’d had enough. “Crystal—”

“Hmm?”

“Do you want to get out of town for a couple days?”

“What did you have in mind?”

“I have a neighbor upstairs who owns a place in Fire Island.”

“I went there once. A bunch of us rented a share in Kismet one summer.”

“Jerry’s place is in Lonelyville.”

“Sounds wonderful. Can I stop and see Uncle Billy on the way?”

“Sure.”

I phoned upstairs. A woman answered.

“Hello,” I said, “I’m with the Sierra Club.”

“Just a minute.”

“Hi, Artie, what’s up?”

“Can I rent your Fire Island place for a few days?”

“Cash?”

“Cash.”

“Come on up. But if you see any strangers on the stairs, don’t stop.” Jerry was holed up in his apartment to skip the process servers. He was wanted by the SEC to testify in the matter of something or other. I never ask. Nobody was lurking on the stairs.

Jerry answered my coded knock in a terry-cloth bathrobe. He was barefoot, tousled, and his eyes looked like burnt holes in a smallpox-infested Army blanket. The guy couldn’t have passed for fifty. He was twenty-six years old. He opened the door wide enough for me to sidle in. Two years ago, he was pulling down two hundred grand a year. I used to feed his cat while he jetted off to merger acquisitions and subordinate debentures. There were summer homes and boats, cars and fancy women in short black dresses, but then the bottom dropped out, and the Jerrys of the financial community plunged into a narrow pit.

His apartment was identical to mine, a one-bedroom in a prewar building undistinguished except for the view. From the western windows, Jerry and I could see all the way north to the George Washington Bridge and the bend in the river beyond. Looking south, we could see to the World Trade Center. But
Jerry had the shades drawn tightly against the view. Except for bars of daylight beneath the shades, the only light in his living room came from a flickering, muted TV. Until my eyes adjusted, I didn’t even see the young woman sprawling on the leather sofa. She, too, wore a frumpy robe and no shoes.

“Artie, this is Fritzi Kellior.”

She waved unenthusiastically. She was even more unkempt than Jerry, but gradually, in the TV light, I could see that her features were long and patrician. Her short, unwashed hair was expensively cut. Humphrey Bogart caught my eye.
fie Treasure of the Sierra Madre
.

Jerry and I quickly settled on a price for three days. Jerry asked me if I wanted to buy the place. I said no. “That’s right. You don’t own anything, do you? Except a dog.”

I just let that slide by. “Have you ever heard of Trammell Weems?” I asked.

“Yeah. Glub-glub,” Jerry said.

“What about before the glub-glub?”

“What about it?”

“What did he do? The paper said he was a banker.”

“Yeah, right,” said Fritzi.

“Ponzi banks. There probably used to be an honest man at VisionClear Bank and Trust, but he died in the last cholera epidemic. The interesting question is, who pulled the strings? How high did it go? You know?”

“No. How high did what go?”

“The cover- up.”

The intercom buzzed. Jerry went off to answer. Fritzi stared blank-eyed at the TV. Bogart staggered through the purgatorial thicket blabbering about gold. Jerry hustled back. “We gotta split. That was the super. I paid him a hundred bucks to tell me when they’re on the way up. Well, they’re on the way up.”

“Shit!” said Fritzi Kellior.

“Use my apartment.” I tossed him the keys. “I’ve got a friend staying there. I’ll try to deflect them.”

“You will?” said Jerry. “Jesus, thanks, Artie.”

“I’m sick of this,” muttered Fritzi as they beat it out the door. “I’m real sick of this as a way of life.”

I gathered up vodka bottles, glasses, and an empty orange-juice carton, dumped them in the sink, and hurried back to the living room to see what I’d missed—Fritzi’s panty hose and pumps. I had had a brief affair with a woman who had once worked for Salomon Brothers, long before they got busted. She told me that exposing toe cleavage was bad form for a woman on the fast track. It was simply not done. I tossed Fritzi’s shoes into the dark, cluttered bedroom. The banditos were slithering down the banks of the ravine after Bogart. He was finished.

The doorbell rang.

I peeped out the view hole. A little guy in a rumpled blue seersucker suit, no tie, stood in the hall. “Mr. Gerald Thwactman. I have a subpoena from Federal Court for the Southern District in the case of—”

I opened the door. “He’s not here.”

“When will he be back?”

I wondered how official this guy was. He didn’t look like he carried much clout, but you can’t always tell in New York. However, if he were a cop, he’d already be inside, and I’d have footprints on my face. He looked like an out-of-work actor, and I felt sorry for him standing there, snapping a manila envelope against his thigh. “I’m house-sitting for Jerry. He left this morning for Hawaii. His father had a stroke. Paralytic, apparently.”

He didn’t even pretend to believe me. He just sighed. “Tell him sooner or later they’ll send the cops.”

I told him.

SEVEN

“T
HEY WERE A cute couple,” said crystal as we crossed the Brooklyn Bridge. “Jerry and Fritzi.”

“The blush of youth…If you want to invite Billy to go with us, that would be fine with me.”

She stroked the back of my neck with one hand and drove with the other, and I felt intense desire for her. I wondered if we’d be able to make love with Billy there. Jerry’s walls were summerhouse thin. But she didn’t say any more about it until we stopped in front of a two-family house somewhere on Avenue X, near the Golden Hours. Crystal said it was her aunt Louise’s place. Billy was staying there.

I waited in the car. It seemed simpler that way, and besides, I didn’t want to see Billy sad. As I sat there I began to feel that I was being watched. I decided to forget it. This was a quiet street in south Brooklyn. What happens in Sheepshead Bay? Once a year an elderly lady slips on the ice and breaks her hip, but this was midsummer…The feeling didn’t abate. It intensified.

I slid into the driver’s seat so I could use the mirrors. I watched an old gas guzzler, a Buick, I think, double-parked across the street and several car lengths behind. There were two men in the front seat. The driver was black, and the passenger was white. They didn’t seem to be watching me, but then that would be part of their job—to watch without seeming to.

I started the engine. I waited to see what the Buick would do. Nothing. I leaned out the window and pretended to wave goodbye to a nonexistent person standing in Aunt Louise’s vestibule.
Then I pulled away, noting landmarks as I went. It would have been ludicrous to get lost.

I took the first right, drove two blocks toward the ocean, then took another right. There was no one on my tail. I made a few more random turns before I cruised slowly back down Aunt Louise’s block from the other direction. The Buick hadn’t moved, and its occupants paid no attention to me as I passed and parked in the spot I had vacated. What did that prove?…It dawned on me that if they were following Crystal, they would have remained right where they were, regardless of what fool’s errand I went on…

Crystal had tears in her eyes when she returned. I slid back to my side. “How is he?”

“He loved the asshole.”

“Did you invite him along?”

“No.”

I was glad to hear that, but I didn’t say so. I was busy vainly adjusting the mirror on my side to see the Buick.

“What’s the matter?”

“Check that big black car double-parked across the street.”

She looked in her mirror, pretending to straighten her hair. “Which one?”

I described it further.

“There’s no Buick.”

I spun in my seat. The Buick was gone. Crystal and I looked at each other.

The ferry ride from Bayshore, crossing the Great South Bay to Fire Island, seemed a voyage to a fresh, foreign shore. We sat topside in the open, where the wind blew urban grit from our brains. About halfway across the bay, gulls and cormorants crossing our stern, I began to relax. My shoulders dropped to the horizontal. Easing tension, fresh air, ocean breezes, cormorants made me randy. I whispered a moderately lewd proposal in Crystal’s ear. She giggled.

“Don’t make any promises you can’t keep.”

I sat there anticipating, and by the time the captain slowed his boat to approach the dock at Ocean Beach, I had again forgotten about Trammell Weems. But Crystal hadn’t—

“Maybe Trammell drowned accidentally, and that’s too bad, I’m sorry for him, but that’s the end of it.”

“What do you mean,
maybe
he drowned accidentally? Didn’t he?”

“…A lot of people drown in boating accidents each year, right? A guy I know named Arnold towed Billy’s boat in. I called him from Aunt Louise’s. He said there was forty feet of rope tangled around the propeller. He said they were lucky it didn’t pull the propeller shaft right out of the boat. It could have sunk. So that part checks.”

“What are you thinking?”

“Naw, nothing…Nothing really.”

Fire Island is a long, narrow barrier beach, cars prohibited, an utterly different world from the city, but it lies only an hour and a half from the Triborough Bridge. The residents and renters are New Yorkers. They travel here with that New Yorker don’t-hassle-me, self-involved mentality. It wears off after a day or two, but debarking the ferry at Ocean Beach still feels like changing trains at Times Square. Our fellow passengers didn’t even notice Jellyroll. They were absorbed in lugging their bags, groceries, bicycles, boogie boards, cats in crates, plants in pots, rubber trees, sand chairs, volleyball nets, stereo equipment, laptop computers, electric bug zappers off the boat, hefting the stuff aboard little red wagons. Traveling light, we beat it off the dock.

Ocean Beach, a block-long stretch of shops, noisy nightclubs, and restaurants, is the island’s major metropolis. I went with a woman briefly—the one who told me about toe cleavage—who owned a house there, so I knew the lay of the land. We bought our island-priced provisions and set off for Lonelyville, about a twenty-minute walk west.