Skin Trade (4 page)

Over her head was a poster from
The Big Easy
with Dennis Quaid on it. The cop stared up at it, glanced at me and, flirting, said, “You look something like him.”

They ran Lily's case out of Gourad's precinct because it was the same area as the apartment where they found her. There was already talk about moving it to a special criminal brigade, but for now the paperwork was piling up on Momo Gourad's desk.

The station house had crumbling green walls, a holding cell with a plastic window in the gray metal
door, typewriters, a few computers on the steel desks. In the kitchen was a microwave, a stained coffee pot, half a stale sandwich on wax paper – cheese – and a handmade sign that read:
PUP FICTION
.

“Police Urbain de la Proximité,” Gourad spelled it out, laughing, as he suddenly came through the door. He gestured at the movie posters that were stuck up in the kitchen and the corridors.
The French Connection, Serpico, Lethal Weapon, Copland
“Most of our guys is a bit, how do you say, film buff. Maybe a cliché, but who cares, right? You like Popeye Doyle, Artie? You enjoy Tarantino?” He grinned.

A joker, I thought. A kid. I said, “Who else is on this case?”

“Why, you don't trust me?”

I kept my mouth shut.

“I may look young,” Gourad said. “But I'm very very good.”

There was the smell of stale coffee and cigarettes. Everyone smoked. Everyone shook hands. The cops shook hands with each other, except for some of the females who sometimes kissed the men on the cheek twice. I almost expected them to shake hands with a sad-ass suspect I saw them drag in. She was a black woman with stiff blonde hair who wore a cheap down coat.

“What did she do?”

Gourad snorted. “She had a box cutter. Vicious little weapon. She was holding some meds for her boyfriend. The usual shit. Nothing.” Except for a few weird locutions, Gourad spoke American like he was born there.

A detective in London once told me they were all racist bastards, the French police. They were a joke, he said, cops who couldn't cut it. But the guys at the Pup Fiction station house made me welcome, except for the chief, Gourad's boss, who had a balding sweaty head and a nervous twitch. He tapped his fingers on his desk like he couldn't wait for me to get the hell out.

He didn't part with any information. I asked him who owned the apartment where they found Lily but he couldn't say. I asked if I could see the file. He took a phone call. Like an amateur guitar player, his fingernails were too long.

And there was paper. I never saw so much paper in my life.

Gourad said to me, “Too much. We write everything down. You think Serpico was writing things so much like us?” He gave the thick files stuffed with paper a dirty look. Then he showed me Lily's file, offered me a chair and a cup of coffee.

Everything was written down in detail: the victim's history; the location; the cops on the case. It was all stuffed in a stiff, old-fashioned gray binder. Seeing the chief pass his office, Gourad waited until he was sure he'd left the station house, then said, “Come on.” He took me into a property room. He tossed me a pair of latex gloves and left me alone inside with Lily's things. I knew what Gourad wanted from me: he wanted me to see what was missing, what the creeps took off her.

I put on the gloves and worked my way through the items, each bagged in plastic. There was Lily's suitcase and the shopping bags that the cops seized from her
hotel. One of the shopping bags was stuffed with gifts for Beth. The other had guide books to Paris for me. She knew I had never been to Paris. Lily had said, “You'll love it. I'll make it nice for you.”

The suitcase contained a pair of black jeans, a narrow black skirt, a pale-gray suede jacket, an orange cashmere turtleneck, four white silk shirts, a green silk bathrobe I gave her one Christmas, underwear, some make-up, and three pairs of shoes. We were going to spend three days in Paris. Lily travels heavy. “What if it rains? What if I have to go somewhere big deal?” she always says, and it makes me laugh. Before she left for Paris, I'd said, “What if the President of France invites you to dinner? Maybe you should take an evening dress. What about a tiara?”

The clothes she was wearing were stored in a different bag. They found her at the apartment near the rue de Rivoli in her grey pants suit. Her black sheepskin jacket and her bag were on the floor next to her where she was left, beat up, like a rag doll. They took her good watch, the man's Rolex she'd bought herself once in Hong Kong, and a ring we bought on 47th Street from my friend Hillel. The earrings had been ripped out of her ears. I didn't think they were thieves, though. They took the jewelry for the hell of it, to cause her pain, make her hurt.

The creeps took her passport, but left her driver's license and her phone. They wanted her found. They wanted it known, what they'd done to her; this was a warning. She left London wearing the gray pants suit and a black turtleneck sweater, and that was how she was found, but the suit was torn, half ripped off her. I could
see where someone yanked off her aunt's silver pin that Lily always wore on her lapel.

I held onto the jacket and I could smell Lily, her soap, her perfume, her own scent. The smell would stick to the bastard who beat her up, the individual human odor, the distinct smell of a particular human being.

The East German Secret Police used to keep your smell in a jar. Everyone they spied on, whenever they could, the Stasi got hold of your smell on a piece of cloth and put it in a glass jar. When you got out of line, they let the attack dogs sniff your jar so they could hunt you down. The dogs didn't have vocal chords. They removed the vocal chords so the dogs were on you before you knew it. They could smell you, but you could never hear them. I never found out how they got your smell, but it kept me awake for years, imagining the rows of glass jars, like jars for pickles or jam, but with your smell in them instead, the lids screwed shut.

I went through her clothes. I tried to pretend this wasn't Lily, that I was just on the job. I took a silk scarf. It was a small, sky-blue silk scarf she'd had around her neck and I stole it from the room. Lily's clothes smelled odd to me. Her own smell was on them, but there was something else: was it his stink? His stink would be on them. On her.

Gourad was banging on the door. He put his head into the room. “You found anything missing?”

I shook my head.

In the pictures, Lily's hair was different. Gourad showed me the Polaroids from the scene, pictures of Lily the way
they found her at the apartment. We were at a bar, Gourad and me, where he took me. It was across the street from the station house, away from his chief.

Gourad was pretty forthcoming and it surprised me. I couldn't really place him. He seemed smart enough but he stumbled around with that little plaid umbrella like a jerk, so I wondered what his game was. He had on a good soft gray Italian shirt that looked like it cost plenty, a knitted tie and an expensive, battered tweed jacket. His face had a gray tinge like he drank too much. He looked in the mirror over the bar and fixed his collar every few minutes and I couldn't tell if he was nervous or vain. Probably both.

On the formica surface of the bar, he laid out the pictures one at a time: the apartment; Lily; two close-ups of her face. Her hair bothered me. I looked again and saw it was short. When she left London, it was to her shoulders; now it seemed short. The picture was lousy, though.

Sometimes when I look at pictures from a scene, I can put myself into it if I stare hard enough. I can imagine the room, the victim; sometimes I can get an idea of the assailant. Sometimes. So I stared and there was something about the angle, the way Lily lay on the floor, something apart from the bruises, the blood. It was the way her clothes had been torn, her naked legs half showing.

“Can I keep them?”

Gourad handed me a picture. “One. I can lose one of the pictures from the file.”

I put it in my pocket to remind me, if I needed
reminding, what I wanted to do to the creeps who hurt her.

“You should eat something,” Gourad said. He was holding back.

“I'm OK.”

“Take a beer,” he said.

“Give me her file.”

“I can't do that.”

“How come they left Lily's cell phone at the scene? What's your thought?”

“I thought about this, too.”

“Maybe the turds are thinking of calling us.”

Gourad grunted. “Maybe someone copied all the numbers, cloned the phone.”

“You checked?”

“Sure we checked.”

“Let me have it.”

“Why should I do that?”

“Because I know Lily better than anyone in the world.”

“I'll see what I can do.” His face was closed and sad.

“What's the matter with you?”

He hunched his shoulders. “Nothing.”

I said, “Who found her?”

He was silent.

“Who owns the apartment where you found her?”

“We're looking.”

“Take me there again.”

“I can't. I've already shown you too much. They've sealed it. I can't do that or my chief will be on me and on you like shit off a shovel. I'm sorry.”

Shyly, Gourad invited me home for dinner. Any evening, he said. I got up to leave, zipped my leather jacket, then I turned back. He was watching me.

I said, “What else? What is it?”

He fumbled with his cigarettes. “You want some counseling? You want to talk to some shrink?”

“Don't be an asshole. I want information, not a shrink.”

“It can help.”

I grabbed Gourad's arm. “She was raped.”

He put his hands out, palms up, a gesture of despair, and said, “Yes.”

The hotel where Lily had checked in when she got to Paris had a pompous little manager who shook my hand as if there was something sticky on it. Very polite, but oily, he had a phalanx of lawyers in pinstripes by the time I got there from Gourad's station house. All the lawyers were clutching fancy briefcases, speaking French in modulated tones through pursed-up little lips, all of them peering out at me from behind their wire-rim glasses like I was some specimen. I should have left it to the French cops, maybe, but I couldn't sit still.

The manager showed me her room. It had heavy striped drapes on the windows and a king-size bed; Lily had planned on my being there the next day. The bed had been stripped. The police had taken away her suitcase, there was nothing left of her.

For a while I hung around the front door, watching people come and go, tourists, businessmen, ducking in and out of cabs and limos. It was freezing outside and a pretty, skinny woman in jeans and a mink coat, hurrying
through the door, caught my eye. “Brrr,” she laughed, then added in English, “Too cold.”

I got lucky when I heard the doorman speak Russian to a taxi driver. I made some conversation. He knew about Lily. He read the papers and he remembered her.

“The tall redhead?”

“Yes.”

“Sure I remember,” he said. “She went out Tuesday evening. She didn't speak French. She asked me to get her a taxi and I said we had a car service we use and there was a driver available. So she took the car. You want me to get the driver?”

I gave him some money. He extracted a whistle from his overcoat, blew it, waved a car over. The driver got out and thumbed through his receipts.

“I can take you,” he said.

Since I was a kid, I always wanted a look at Paris. Outside the car window, as the driver sped across town, it was white and chilly, the freezing rain still falling. I tried to lose the feeling that someone was following me, that I was like a rat in a lab cage and I didn't know what the test was.

On the other side of the river, in a nondescript area, the car pulled up in front of a modern five-story apartment building.

“I dropped her here,” the driver said. “Your friend. This is where I left her. She was a nice lady. Shall I wait?”

“No,” I said, paid him, got out and checked the street sign: Boulevard Pasteur.

On the building's intercom were numbers but no names. I didn't know who the hell I was looking for. I
huddled under a bus shelter close by, away from the sleet that came down in sheets. I waited.

I was bone cold by the time a woman came down the street towards the building, carrying a bag of groceries in one hand and a pile of books in the other arm. She stopped at the building, fumbled with her keys, got the heavy door open, and held it with her foot. There was a picture of Lily in my wallet – Lily before she was beaten and bruised – and I ran at the woman with the groceries and stuck it in her face. I said I was looking for the woman in the picture. I was pretty incoherent and I figured she'd slam the door in my face. But she only put her bag down on the sidewalk and said in a southern drawl, “I know her. Yes. Who are you?”

In a café down the street from Martha Burnham's place, she ordered soup and chicken and a glass of red wine.

“I'm sorry. I missed lunch. I want to eat something before I go to work and I've only got an hour.”

She had dark hair, a nice, placid face, wide hips, no makeup. About Lily's age. She was wearing a sleeveless down vest, a black turtleneck, black skirt and boots. She picked up the wine glass when the waiter brought it and drank the wine greedily. A red stain appeared on her mouth.

“Is she all right, Lily, I mean?” she said.

“How come you're asking? You've seen the papers?”

She shook her head. “I don't read the papers. I hate the news. I was so upset not to see her again, you know. I've waited twenty years to see Lily and we had a drink Tuesday and she told me about you, so I knew your name.
So we make another date, she never shows up. I didn't know where she was staying. I tried a number I had in New York and got a machine. So I figured something happened.” She put her wine glass down and cracked her knuckles. “Then I decided she forgot. But something did happen, right? You said the papers.”