The Hard Way (15 page)

Tuesday was the day
I'd set aside to look for Eddie, but for some strange reason, you rarely saw homeless people early in the day, usually not until the afternoon, as if they spent the morning under the covers, then had a late breakfast before venturing out. If I wanted to start out early, which I did, it meant looking for box cities, like the one on West Street that Eunice had visited, the one where Eddie wasn't but could be today. While some homeless people seemed to have territories, others didn't. I thought Eddie was one of the latter type.

Skirting around the edge of what was left of the meatpacking district, I tried the “city” near Fourteenth Street first. The wooden barricades were still there, the cardboard boxes, too, everything draped with filthy blankets, everything under the canopy that once protected butchers from the weather. The canopies with their hooks were also the method used by the larger markets for transporting the carcasses of dead animals from the refrigerated trucks into the processing areas where recognizable body parts would become acceptable-looking steaks and chops.

I listened for a moment, waiting to see if there was any conversation coming from behind the barricades, or if not conversation, perhaps the sound of snoring. Then I called out Eddie's name and waited, but this time there were no voices, no Eddie, not even some
stranger telling me to go away. Around the corner from this pathetic scene you could see the glitz of Jeffrey, Alexander McQueen, Stella McCartney, whose father had been a Beatle and whose designs sold for astronomical sums to young women who came from the Upper East Side, where the homeless were chased away before they got to find a semidry place in which to camp out. But I didn't go that way. I crossed the highway a block north and doubled back to check out the dogleg in the road, the place where I thought Eddie sometimes stayed and where Florida had found me, nothing there but a sheet of newspaper that had blown against the stone wall and frozen there, looking like a free-form papier mâché sculpture that hadn't yet been painted.

I walked to the middle of the Village, Dashiell speeding up when he saw where we were headed, and checked the south side of the park, where the homeless sat, rain or shine. Then I checked the soup kitchen, at least from the doorway, which is as far as they let me go with Dashiell.

I spoke to some men in the park, some women at the soup kitchen. No one had seen Eddie, but one of the men mentioned Penn Station and another one, after I gave him five dollars and assured him I wasn't a cop, mentioned a house on Charles Street that was being renovated.

“I ain't been,” he said. “I like the out-of-doors. But I hear some of them's found a way in.”

“You mean they get in at night to sleep out of the weather?”

“Nyuk,” he said, a small man with a face so wrinkled it looked pleated.

“What about the construction crew?” I asked. “Don't they chase them out in the morning?”

“No crew. Job got aborted. Maybe the paperwork was pending.” He folded the money and tucked it into a pocket. “Or a wall fell. What happens when people try to cut corners, avoid union help, skip the part where you check to make sure the plumber has a license, et cetera, et cetra, et cetera.”

“Where on Charles?” I asked him.

“Haven't been, but I hear tell it's pretty far west. This is my area. The pizza place on Third, they'll give me a cup of joe, even if I don't got two nickels to my name. The Japanese place, if I stop by late, they'll give me a bowl of rice. The guys in the garage, they let me use the bathroom, I ask nice. I cross Sixth Avenue, no one knows my name.”

“What is your name?”

“Sal. Salvatore.”

“Rachel,” I told him, ready to walk down Charles Street, look for a needle in a haystack. But then I didn't.

“What happened, Sal? What happened to your home, your job, your family?”

“You sure?”

I nodded.

He patted the bench, then remembered his manners, brushing off the snow with his torn glove. I sat. Dashiell did, too.

“Epilepsy's what happened.” He shook his head. “Everyone's got something. Don't think I don't know that. But this one, this falls on the downside. This one can lay you low, even if you've got a good attitude, you get my meaning?”

I did. I told him so.

“The boss, he said I missed too many days. He said, the medical coverage? He said it didn't.”

“Cover you?”

“Yeah. I been there eight years, then he says the condition was preexisting and they won't cover it. I told him they did. He said they won't in the future and he needs a mechanic who's in the garage every day, not four, four and a half days a week. I said I always got my work done. Good days I'd stay late. I never watched the clock, you know what I'm saying?”

I nodded. I already couldn't feel my toes. How did Sal sit out here all day? Where did he sleep?

“My wife, she went back to live with her mother. Took the kid.
A boy. Darrel. Never liked the name. The wife picked it. Loved the boy, my son.” He shook his head again. “But that was that. She acted like I'd been a sperm donor, not a father, not nothing to either one of them.”

“After you lost the job?”

“Nah. They bailed before. Maybe she seen it coming.”

“And you weren't able to get another job?”

“Not like I didn't try.”

“How long ago was that?”

Sal shrugged. “What year is it again?” he asked.

I just nodded. For a while we sat there. A man named Pete joined us and offered us each a smoke, only they were butts he'd picked up and they were pretty wet, you could tell by the color of the paper. Pete said he'd once stayed at the house on Charles Street. He said it wasn't too bad, a little on the cold side but not as cold as the park. He said there was no water, and no light. But by and large, it beat the shelters where you never knew, you might wake up dead one morning.

Sal told me that most days he was in the park, except when he had to go to the emergency room, which he usually did by ambulance after having a bad seizure. He told me to stop by again. I told him I would. I told them to ask Eddie to call me if they saw him.

When I got up to go, Pete asked, “Eddie who?”

“Perkins,” I said. “Young kid. Was in Iraq. Has some hearing problems.”

“I'll look out for him,” he said.

I thought he would, too. But it wasn't until I was on my way to the house on Charles Street that I realized I had something else to tell Eddie, something other than the information about his identity I'd gotten from Brody. Eddie had wanted me to understand what it was like to be homeless. And because of him, I now did. Getting it had nothing much to do with sleeping outside or eating from the trash. It had to do with the ability to see another human being as just that, as human, like yourself, despite their circumstances.
Sal and Pete knew I got it. That's why they talked to me instead of telling me to fuck off.

I walked over to Charles Street and turned west for want of a better idea, looking for the house where Eddie probably wasn't. But before I got there, my phone rang, the caller ID letting me know the call was from St. Vincent's Hospital.

“Is this Rachel Alexander?” a woman's voice asked, a high voice, like a child's.

“Yes. Who is this?”

“My name is Pamela Totino. I'm a nurse in the ER at St. Vincent's. Do you know a young man named Edward Perkins?”

“I do, yes. Is he there? What happened?”

“We found your card in his pocket.”

“Yes? What happened?”

“He was down and someone called 911.”

“Down?”

“Passed out. Lying on the sidewalk.”

“Is he hurt? What happened to him?”

“Are you a relative?”

“Yes,” I said. “We're cousins. Our mothers are sisters. Will you please tell me—”

“He's suffering from malnutrition and exposure,” she said. “And he has a mild concussion, probably from the fall. Or he might have been hit. The doctor's not sure.”

“Is he awake? Is he able to tell you what happened?”

“No, not at the moment.” She paused. “And he wasn't lucid when he was awake. But that's not unusual with a head injury.”

I walked to the curb and put my hand up for a taxi. “I'll be right there,” I said. But then I remembered Dashiell. A cab might stop for him, but the hospital wouldn't let him in, not unless he was part of their pet-therapy program, and he wasn't. I was only a few blocks from home and we covered those faster than I would have thought possible. I bent and hugged Dashiell to me before leaving, taking a cab this time to save a few minutes.

I was told that Eddie was in the cubicle in the corner, on the right-hand side, a small space surrounded by curtains, a place so cramped the curtains actually touched the stretcher he was lying on. There was an IV line feeding him glucose, a little band on his wrist with his name on it. He lay on his side, his back to me, his head swathed in a white bandage, but when I touched his arm, he turned.

His eyes fluttered open and studied me. Then he looked down at my hand on his sleeve.

“Who the hell are you supposed to be?” he said.

I took my hand off his arm and stepped back, the curtain draped over me like a cape.

He lifted his head and looked around.

“What the fuck!”

“You're in the Emergency Room,” I said, as if that wouldn't be obvious enough.

Scowling now. “And you are? Wait, don't tell me, Florence fucking Nightingale.”

“How did you get my card?” I asked him.

He moved his hand toward his face, pulling on the IV needle and wincing. “What card? What are you talking about?”

He was about forty, my age, the age when the wear and tear usually starts to show, and whoever he was, he had been worn and torn. He had brown hair sticking out of the bandage on the side that had been against the pillow, greasy-looking hair that covered part of his broad forehead. His skin was rough and dry, scaly, in fact, his teeth bad, his breath worse. If you just looked at his hands, you might have thought you'd come to visit Howard Hughes in the ER. But the plastic bracelet on his arm said, “Perkins, Edward.”

“What's your name?” I asked him, feeling leaden, as if my feet were glued to the ground, as if like whoever this was, I was trapped in the medical system and would not be allowed to leave. Leaving, in fact, was all I wanted to do at that moment. But instead, I stood there waiting for him to answer my question. Or not.

“Jimmy,” he said, closing his eyes again.

“The nurse called me because you had a card with my phone number in your pocket, Jimmy. How did you get my card?”

He scratched his dirty hair with his free hand. “Dunno nothing about no fucking card. My head hurts. You got something for it?”

“I'm not a nurse. I…”

But he'd turned away and, despite the glaring lights, the noise of machines and people shouting, the whoosh of the doors opening to let the paramedics in with yet another victim, and an old man crying somewhere in the middle of the room, Jimmy was asleep.

The paper shopping bag with his possessions was near his feet. I poked it open. Shoes without laces, gloves that didn't match, Eddie's jacket. I felt my heart banging around in my chest as if I was about to have a heart attack. At least I was in the right place for it.

I pulled the jacket out of the bag and checked the pockets. Thirty-five cents. Cigarettes. Gum. A rock. A small pocketknife. I was surprised they'd left the knife, which they must have seen if they'd found the card. Eddie's backpack wasn't in the bag. Neither was his hat. My hat, the one he'd taken for good luck the last time I saw him. Some good luck.

I moved the curtain away and found Pamela Totino standing at the counter near the entrance.

“That's not Eddie Perkins,” I told her.

“What do you mean?” taking her glasses off to see me better.

“He has Eddie's jacket, but that's not Eddie.”

“I'm sorry.” She put a hand on my shoulder and nodded, a small woman, as quick and nervous as a bird.

“He said his name was Jimmy,” I told her. “And then he passed out again.”

“It doesn't mean what you think it means,” she said, her squeaky voice kept down to a whisper. “It doesn't mean something happened to your cousin. We see homeless people here all the time with other people's IDs, other people's clothes. That's all they have, most often, some cast-off garment that—”

“Eddie wouldn't have cast off his coat in this weather. He was living on the street.”

“I see.” Looking at me now, waiting for an explanation, as if I had put him there.

“No, you don't see. I've been looking for him. I've been—”

“Then you're not his cousin?” Someone who'd heard too many stories, who could no longer take anything at face value.

“I'm not,” I said. “He fought in Iraq and now he's homeless.”

“How do you know this man?” she asked.

“It's a long story,” I said, “and you have other patients who need you.”

The ER looked full to capacity, and now someone else was crying, someone right across from the curtained cubicle where Jimmy was sleeping. The paramedics had just brought in what appeared to be another street person. He was shouting at them and waving his arms around. His face was bruised and bleeding. I noticed that the paramedics had latex gloves on. One of them was wearing goggles, too.

The snow was still falling when I stepped out onto Seventh Avenue. I walked to the corner and waited for the light to change, then headed toward home.

Eleanor met me
at the door to GR Leather, immediately locking it behind us as if hordes of Upper East Side residents were standing in line outside, anxious to come in and max out their credit cards even before the posted hours began. It was four days before Christmas, after all, and West Fourteenth Street, once home to carcasses of dead animals, was now
the
place to shop.

Without a word, she reached for my coat, appraised my outfit, my very best turtleneck sweater to cover the bruises Florida had left on my neck, wool trousers, pale gray for the sweater, a deeper gray with a chalk stripe for the slacks. Then, again without speaking, she pulled a jacket from the rack, checked the size and handed it to me. It was a pale blue, pearlized so that it had an ethereal sheen, the skins soft, supple and amazingly fine. I slipped it on and immediately felt rich. Eleanor nodded.

Then she picked up another jacket, this one without sleeves. This one held together with snaps at the chest and a belt around the middle. She bent and put it on Dashiell, the dog motorcycle jacket that I'd seen in the window, the perfect Christmas gift for the dog whose owner has everything. Both jackets were a perfect fit.

I followed her up the stairs for the second time, but this time we didn't go into her office. We went into one of the small offices
that faced the rear of the building, no view, but light filtering down from the space between this building and the one behind it, a kind of no-nonsense space designed for efficiency rather than show.

“I'd like the dog—”

“Dash,” I told her. He looked up and wagged his tail.

“I'd like Dash on the selling floor when we open. That would explain his presence here.”

“Selling?”

“You've got to admit, he looks good in it.”

I thought he looked a lot more rakish in his own coat—short white fur, a black patch over his right eye—but I kept my mouth shut. I hadn't come here to argue matters of taste, and I thought the people who shopped here would agree with Eleanor and not with me. What was the point, after all, of having truckloads of money if you didn't show off with it every chance you got?

“You're here as a temp,” she said. “That was the explanation I gave the others.”

I nodded. “I'd like access to the books first, employee records, anything and everything.”

She held out her hand, indicating the wall of file cabinets. “They're all marked. You shouldn't have any trouble.”

“Good. I'd like to be able to schmooze with the rest of the staff as well,” I said. “I don't want to interview them. I'd like to talk to them as a fellow employee.”

“I figured as much. That's why I told them there was a good possibility you'd be permanent, after this trial period.”

“You couldn't have made it easier for me. Thank you.”

“No. Thank you, Rachel. As for the schmoozing, I thought I'd have you on the floor during the busiest time of the day so that you could spend some time with Ricardo and Meredith. I'll be across the hall if you need me.”

“Would your assistant be in the shop selling?”

“This time of year, we're
all
in the shop selling,” she told me, “even me. But I won't be there while you are. I'd only be an im
pediment to your investigation.” Once she was gone, Dashiell began his own investigation of the room as I began mine, reading the cards on the file cabinets in order to get an overall picture of the business before looking at employee records and checking to see if there had been any mergers, acquisitions, buyouts, anything I could find that might have made Gardner Redstone enemies.

But before I had the chance to do much of anything, there was a knock on the door, a little scratching sound so soft a mouse could have made it.

I opened the door and had to look down because the woman standing there couldn't have been more than five feet tall, five one at the most. She was wearing leather—weren't we all—a chocolate brown short jacket over a cream-colored silk blouse and tweed skirt.

“I don't want to disturb you. I just wanted to say welcome. I'm Nina, the buyer. I have the office next to yours, when I'm here.”

“Rachel,” I said, offering her my hand. “And when you're not here?”

Nina laughed. More of an embarrassed giggle, as if her height had to do with her age rather than her genetics. “Italy, France, Spain. I select the leathers skin by skin. We don't use anything that hasn't been seen first, not even from our oldest suppliers. Everything is designed here,” pointing to the ceiling, “up on three, but manufactured where we purchase the skins.” She brushed the sleeve of my jacket with the balls of her fingers. “Spanish leather. My personal favorite.”

“Mr. Redstone was that fussy?”

Nina's hand flew up to her mouth, as if she'd said something wrong, something rude. “Ms. Redstone,” she said.

“You're new, too?” I asked.

“Oh, no, not as…” She covered her mouth again. “Not as new as you are. I've been here since April, but I've always reported to Ms. Redstone, to Eleanor.”

“Mr. Redstone wasn't here much?”

“Oh, he was. Every day. It's just that I didn't get to talk to him all that much. Eleanor made all the arrangements for me. But I'm sure he was at least as fussy as she is. She even said it was the family tradition, the way the skins were selected. And the first few trips, she went along, to introduce me.” She paused, then lowered her voice. “And to make absolutely sure I knew what it was she wanted.”

I nodded. Then I whispered, too. “Is it a good place to work?”

“Oh, very.” Then she stepped back and pointed toward the door to her office. “Will you be on the floor at noon?”

“Yes,” I said. “We both will.”

That's when Nina noticed Dashiell. “Now that's a heavier skin, for obvious reasons. The jacket comes smooth, like the one the dog is wearing—is he yours?”

I nodded. “Conscripted for the season.”

Nina smiled. “Aren't we all. It comes pebbled, too. I like the smooth, the one he's wearing. It's a more classic look.”

“What do they go for?”

“Five twenty-five,” she said. “The ones with the fur collars are five ninety-five.”

“Fur collars? For dogs?”

Nina laughed her little-girl laugh. “You've seen our clientele?”

“Not really.”

Nina frowned, perhaps wondering what I was doing here, what Eleanor had been thinking when she took me on.

“Everyone has to start somewhere,” I said, giving her my most ingratiating smile.

“Just think filthy rich,” she said, checking her watch. “Think three-hundred-dollar underpants.”

“What are they made of?”

Nina just smiled. “I'll stop and pick you up on my way down.” She took a step closer to me. “One woman,” she whispered, “she ordered one of the Poochi jackets for her Yorkie and she wanted a button with pavé diamonds, to match the one on her leather coat.”

“Seriously?”

“Oh, fashion is dead serious to these people. They must get things first. They must have the hottest designs. The more the item costs, the more they want it.”

When I shook my head, Nina held up her hand.

“It's worth it to them. It makes them feel secure. Do you have any idea how long the wait is for a Kelly bag?” She didn't wait for an answer, her face flushed now as she spoke. “I mean, the real ones, not the knockoffs.” She stopped and sighed. “Too much for your first day, right? Anyway, we don't
do
Hermés here. We
outdo
Hermés.” Another giggle. “Have you been in retail long?”

I shook my head. “But I hope to—”

Nina waved a hand at me. “You'll catch on. Just pay attention to Eleanor. She's…”

“Brilliant?”

Nina nodded. “And the best teacher you could possibly have.”

I glanced at Dashiell. “Have the motorcycle jackets been selling well?”

Nina looked at Dashiell and then back up at me. “Not as well as they will today.”

It had taken Eleanor no time at all to figure out how she could market the jacket by having Dashiell wear it in the shop, the kind of quick, clever thinking that just might be the secret to her success.

Nina wiggled her fingers at Dashiell, nodded at me and headed next door.

I pulled out the personnel files and put them on the desk, and with my back to the window, that soft light coming over my shoulders, I began to make my own list of employees so that I could write any relevant notes next to each name as I learned things.

It would take a while to get the lay of the land, but not nearly as long as it might have taken had I been introduced as a private investigator, effectively signaling everyone to shut up. So technically, this was undercover work, too, but I didn't think I needed to han
dle it the way I handled being Eunice. Compared to going undercover as a homeless person, this was undercover lite—still serious, but I could use my own walk, my own vocabulary, my own name. I could even use my own history with only one exception. I'd leave out my occupation and say I was trying to get into marketing. And although it was certainly possible I'd find myself working side by side with the person who'd killed Gardner Redstone, it didn't seem likely to me. For one thing, Mr. Redstone would have known the people who worked for him. There's no way he would have been oblivious to their presence near him in the station that day.

Or was there?

For a while, I thought about that. There had been people on the platform who said they'd seen nothing. But that, I thought, was mostly because they didn't want to get involved. Not getting involved was enough of a motivation for people to peer out the window and watch someone get stabbed to death and not even call 911 from the privacy and safety of their own apartments. At least that's what Kitty Genovese's thirty-eight neighbors had done back in 1964 the night she was murdered.

Perhaps each one assumed someone else had called for help. Perhaps, watching a stranger stab and assault the twenty-eight-year-old young woman for over half an hour, they were too mesmerized by the horror of the crime to leave their windows, as if they were watching TV instead of seeing an innocent girl die before their eyes. All these years later, Kitty's murder, while her neighbors stood by doing nothing, was still symbolic of what was wrong with living in a big city.

But not wanting to get involved is not the same as not seeing anything. It didn't mean that people didn't see more than they admitted they did when Gardner Redstone was killed, or that Mr. Redstone himself, a lifelong New Yorker, had not checked out who was near him on the platform that day as any normally paranoid New Yorker would have.

While I didn't expect that Nina would turn out to be the guilty
party, it was possible that she, or Ricardo or Meredith or one of the other employees might know of something, perhaps something they themselves didn't know was significant, that might point me in the direction of the killer. At least that was my hope.

Sitting at the desk, before opening the file folder I'd placed there, I imagined someone whose life had been ruined, or someone who perceived that it had. But of course that didn't have to be the case. Florida could be lying through his rotten teeth, and even though I didn't think so, I was pretty sure I'd have the minority opinion on the matter.

People killed for the most trivial reasons imaginable, an insult, a shove, the desire for someone else's jacket, sneakers, watch, money, even if that amount turned out to be $6.50, as it sometimes did. People killed for any reason, all reasons, more reasons than you could shake a gun, a baseball bat or a wrench at, and, in the end, when you had those questions answered, who did this and why, you might end up shaking your head over a tragedy that had traveled through generations of a family, poisoning the blood of each and every person it touched. Or you might shake your head in wonder at the stupidity, the waste, the misery caused by something that should and would have been forgotten, given a little time, given the chance for the heat to cool down. Trying to find out who and why, you never knew what you were going to come up with. You had to examine every possibility, even the ones with the slimmest chance of being true.

I opened the personnel folder and began to understand how GR Leather worked. The other shops, Soho and Madison Avenue, had employees on the floor, managers, guards and salespeople, but the business was run from the West Fourteenth Street location, the shop on the main floor, offices on the second and design above. I slipped off my jacket and checked the label. The skins had not only been hand-selected in Spain, the jacket had been made there as well. But according to Nina, it had been designed in-house. I imagined that all the designer shops worked the same way, that
Ralph Lauren and Calvin Klein had designers here in the States but had their clothes manufactured elsewhere, in a country where they would be more likely to find appropriate craftspeople; for leather that would be the same places where Nina hand-picked the skins—Spain, France and Italy—or where people would work for far less than Americans would, countries like China, Korea, Thailand or the Philippines. That meant frequent trips to the factories to oversee work in progress, to make sure the quality was precisely what had been promised and that deadlines and deliveries would be met, as if things ever worked that smoothly.

Was all that part of Nina's job? She was such a nervous little mouse, or was that just the result of too much jet lag, too much haggling, too many containers missing at the port and too much time away from home? The serenity of the shop—the marble floors, the perfect clothes, the stainless-steel counters—that had nothing at all to do with the chaos that went on behind the scenes, the pressure the business put on Eleanor and the pressure she in turn put on the staff.

I wrote down the names of all the employees, seven at Madison Avenue, eight in the Soho store, eight here on Fourteenth Street. I had Sylvia Greene's name on the list, too. While I was at it, I looked her up in the phone book, writing down her address and phone number, hoping I could visit Gardner Redstone's ex that evening and that she'd have something telling to say.