The Big Dirt Nap (2 page)

“I doubt they’ll do that. Smarter to donate it and get the tax deduction. The University of Wisconsin has a few corpse flowers. I’m sure UConn would love to have it; theirs bloomed a few years ago.” He eyed me as if I’d just spoken in tongues or cracked the human genome. Okay, he wasn’t into plants . . . or big words. But the longer I looked at him, the less I cared. Brains weren’t everything, and anyway, we were just talking.

If I stuck to club soda and we stayed in safe territory conversationwise, he could stay. Besides, I’d enjoy the look on Lucy’s face when she rushed in breathlessly with stories and apologies and saw me sitting with a sexy beast like Nick Vigoriti. She and the rest of my friends had been after me to start dating again ever since I left New York City, and this little encounter might shut them up for a while. He might even contribute something interesting about the hotel that I could use for the article. Who knew?

“Who are the Mishkins?” I asked, surreptitiously keying that info into the laptop.

“Bernie Mishkin and his sister,” he said, watching me use the computer. “Are you writing this down now?”

“Yeah. Is that a problem?”

Vigoriti shrugged. “Same difference. The Mishkins own the place,” he said, waving the sad-eyed bartender over. “They and their numerous partners.”

The bartender had a heart-shaped face and lank hair that hung in a skinny braid halfway down her back.

“What’re you having, Nicky?” she asked, in an accent I couldn’t initially place, then decided was Russian. She wiped nonexistent spills from the bar and slipped a coaster in front of him, grazing his fingers.

“Dirty martini,” he said, pulling back his hand. “You?” he asked me.

Every stupid thing I’d done in my adult life had come after a few drinks, and I could imagine getting very stupid with Nick Vigoriti, so I stuck with club soda.

“Can you introduce me to them?” I asked. “The Mishkins?”

“You think that’s a good idea?”

“Why not?” I said. “I may have a lucrative proposition for them.”

“They’re always interested in money.” He laughed. “I haven’t talked to Bernie for a while, but that may change. His wife died a few months back. I haven’t seen much of him since then. . . . I was really friendlier with her.”

Why was I not surprised? What woman wouldn’t want to be friends with a handsome stud who hung on your every word and made you feel as if you were the only woman in the room worth talking to?

The bartender brought our drinks. Nick’s had six green olives on two plastic toothpicks. The bartender moved off to another customer but not before giving me a look that suggested she wouldn’t mind seeing my head on a sharpened stick.

“What did
I
do?”

“Oksana’s a good kid,” he said, swallowing hard and nodding in her direction.

“Adorable.”

“I used to work here,” Vigoriti continued. “Before Mishkin brought in the Malaysians, the Ukranians, let’s see . . .” He rattled off a laundry list of ethnic groups, then took a long pull on his drink. “Who is it now, Oksana?” he called out to the bartender.

“Chinese, I think,” she said, over her shoulder, already fixing him a second drink.

“Their board meetings must look like a Benetton ad,” I muttered.

“Most of them cut bait.”

“It doesn’t look like business is too bad; there are people here,” I said.

“We could go somewhere private to discuss this,” he said, signaling Oksana that he was ready for round two. He polished off his drink and slid all the olives into his mouth in a surprisingly suggestive move that made me rethink how friendly I wanted to appear.

“You know, I was just trying to be polite. Always dangerous at a bar. I’m sorry if I misled you, but I really am waiting for someone, and it isn’t you.” As if on cue, my phone beeped with a text message. Lucy was running late. Typical. She’d gotten a late start to begin with and one of the cheap Chinese New York-to-Boston shuttle buses had collided with a construction-materials truck. Gravel was spread all over I-95. The result was the same as if a load of ball bearings had spilled out on the highway; cars were drifting side to side as if they were in a Japanese video game. Lucy was stuck on the road, near Stamford, and wrote that she’d call when she got closer.

Locals were trickling into the bar for after-dinner drinks, working guys with puffy baseball caps. And businessmen who might have heard about the mess on 95 and preferred to sit here instead of in traffic. I debated the pros and cons of staying at the bar with Nick and possibly moving on to the harder stuff but decided against it. Life was complicated enough.

I chugged my drink and shut down the computer. “I’m gonna cut bait, to use your expression. I have to go. I was serious about meeting the Mishkins, though. I may have a buyer.” I whipped out my business card and handed it to Nick as I got up to leave. He looked puzzled and studied the card for longer than it took to read the six or eight words on it. Was it possible the guy couldn’t read? “For the greenhouse,” I said, “the glass enclosure?”

A smile crept over Nick’s handsome face.

“What’s so funny?”

“My mistake,” he said, flicking the card with his index finger. “Not the kind of dirt I thought you dug up.”

That’s how my business card came to be in the breast pocket of his shirt, and that’s why the cops called on me hours later to identify his body.

I’m a gardener. Paula Holliday, sole proprietor of Dirty Business, garden design, container maintenance, and the occasional exhumation. Not really, although that was the way my last major landscaping job turned out, in Springfield, Connecticut, where I live, about seventy miles south of the Titans Hotel.

Titans had been built in the twenties, a place where businessmen parked their families for the summer and raced up to on Friday afternoons. Third-tier comics and wedding and bar mitzvah bands played there on the weekends. The men would bake themselves with sun reflectors, drink heavily, and have their conjugal visits. Then they’d wake up at the crack of dawn on Mondays, speeding back to Boston or New York and clocking themselves so they could compare travel times over drinks the following Friday.

By the sixties and seventies, kids didn’t want to vacation with their parents anymore, Mom was just as likely to be working as Dad, and lots of hotels like Titans fell to the wrecking ball. Somehow Titans had survived. That was as far as my online research had gotten me before Nick joined me at the bar.

I got to the elevator just as April, the white Maltese, and her redheaded owner were exiting, the larger of the two in a skintight tangerine outfit with hot-pink trim that accentuated her big frame. The woman looked away quickly, and I watched her make her way to the taxi line in front of the hotel, the scrawny dog hurrying to keep up.

Maybe some of Nick’s magnetism had rubbed off because, upstairs, this time my key card worked perfectly. The suite Lucy had reserved for us was large and benignly ugly. Nothing atrocious, just endless swathes of beige and dusty pink, from the synthetic bedspread and carpet, harboring god-knew-what kind of microorganisms, to the particleboard furniture. The only good news was that the furniture was from the sixties or seventies, so old there was an excellent chance that all of the formaldehyde had already been thrown off.

I hung the DO NOT DISTURB sign on the doorknob and automatically turned on the television, something I always do in hotel rooms, but rarely do at home. A hotel channel reminiscent of the cheap ads at movie theaters showed slides of the lobby and a kidney-shaped pool that must have been another vestige from Titans’s good old days. The local news featured repeated helicopter shots of the collision on 95 from the same two angles. I kept the news on to get an update as to when Lucy might arrive and unpacked the rest of my things.

After years of traveling for work, I was an expert at packing light. Now that I rarely needed to look like a grown-up, I was even better at it. The white shirt went everywhere with me, and black jeans and a black jacket could pass for business attire if I needed to look reasonably professional. That was my uniform. I’d thrown a pair of low-rise yoga pants and a thin hoodie into the bag and that was what I climbed into.

The Titans room-service menu was almost as limited as my wardrobe and my viewing options, but I settled on a turkey club, hoping that the tryptophan would counteract the caffeine in the diet sodas I’d guzzled on the drive to Titans. Then I curled up on the scratchy synthetic love seat and waited for food and Lucy.

I should have been at home fine-tuning this year’s plan for Caroline Sturgis’s garden. Dirty Business had a few customers in the high-rent district, and a handful of retailers whose seasonal planters I serviced, but Caroline was my biggest and favorite individual client. Four and a half rolling acres bordering the arboretum, money to burn, and always happy to see me. And she had so much lawn that her property was like a blank slate, like that chunky brick of loose-leaf paper the first week of school. Filled with possibilities.

No matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t entirely quash her enthusiasm for a green carpet and mass plantings of monochromatic annuals and bulbs. But I was chipping away at her, and her lawn, and had arranged to see her later that week. I wanted to be armed with sketches and some innovative ideas for her garden. That’s what I should have been doing, instead of sitting in a monastic room with mediocre food and no cable.

I must have dozed off on the love seat around nine P.M. and the knock came not long after. Still in my flip-flops, yoga pants, and hoodie, I opened my door and was then led downstairs and through the lobby by two uniformed cops and a hotel security guard who had introduced himself as Hector Ruiz. Hector was as short and wide as my first car, a vintage Volkswagen Rabbit. Remarkably, the shiny suit he wore was almost the same shade of Spanish olive green, not beautiful but very easy to spot in parking lots.

The cops marched, he waddled, and I followed, through a narrow service corridor, past a number of doors marked EMPLOYEES ONLY, the laundry room, and the kitchen, until we emerged at the back of the hotel onto the outside loading dock.

Off to one side was a tall, bearded guy in a stained down jacket. His Big Y shopping cart was crammed with bottles, bags, an American flag, and a padded moving blanket that, like him, had seen better days. Glassy eyes shone out of his dirty face and matted hair; was it drugs, psychosis, or fright?

On the ground, to the homeless guy’s right, surrounded by a knot of people, was a muscular body in black jeans and a gray-and-black-striped shirt, legs askew, face covered by an opened and now bloodied copy of yesterday’s
Connecticut Post
.

Not far from us two men donned paper jumpsuits and prepared to climb into a giant Dumpster. “Why do we always have to do the wet work?” I heard the younger one mutter. “Because we’re the new guys,” the other one said.

I followed my escorts down the few sticky steps at the right of the dock to where the body was. From the center of the crowd someone barked, “She the one?” The men stepped aside. Hidden behind a cluster of uniformed cops, plainclothesmen, and hotel security was a slight woman who appeared to be in charge.

“I’m Detective Winters. This you?” she asked, holding up my business card. Not too cute, not too boring, tasteful colors. I recognized it immediately, having agonized over it for weeks. I nodded yes.

“Dirty Business. You wanna explain that?”

“It’s a gardening business. Dirt. It’s a joke,” I said lamely. “Get it?” Obviously the woman had no sense of humor.

“You know this guy?”

I’d seen dead bodies before, and steeled myself for the shock. Winters used two gloved fingers to lift the tented newspaper. She kept her eyes glued to my face as she peeled back the paper and showed me Nick Vigoriti’s rugged face, which now had a gaping two-inch hole in the forehead.

I fought the urge to puke . . . then quickly lost the fight, turning and narrowly missing my own bare toes and the dead guy’s Italian shoes.

“Whoa, that’s what we call contaminating the crime scene.” She snickered, stepping aside to avoid any backsplash. I swung around, unsteady on my feet, bumping into Hector and bouncing off his barrel chest. He grabbed me with both hands so I wouldn’t fall back onto the body or slip on the remains of my club sandwich.

“What’s the problem?” Winters said. “This should be right up your alley. You’re in a dirty business and he’s taking the big dirt nap.”

I was retching again, bent over, hands on knees, and couldn’t answer.

“It’s a joke,” she said. “Get it?”

Two

It was a safe bet that Detective Stacy Winters and I wouldn’t be going shopping together anytime soon. After making the cheap joke at my expense, she realized I
had
contaminated her crime scene and, annoyed, she continued to interrogate me without so much as missing a beat or offering me a tissue or a glass of water.

She was about my height, five foot six, but, unlike me, had no hips or breasts to speak of. Her closely cropped hair was bleached white and stuck out in little spikes all around her face, making her look more like an android or the lead singer in an eighties girl band than a cop in small-town Connecticut. She wore a dark blue suit and a plain white shirt, a sexless version of the outfit I’d been wearing a few hours earlier. Clumpy black mascara was her one concession to femininity and against her pale skin and watery blue eyes it made her look faintly psychotic. She shook some Tic Tacs into her hand and popped them into her mouth, but pointedly didn’t offer me any, even though I could have used one.

“I don’t think it’s suicide,” she said. “What do you think?” She looked me over, and took her time before saying anything else. I searched for the good cop since she was obviously the bad one.

“You’re not Nicky’s usual type,” she said. “He likes—liked—blondes. And generally a little older, more seasoned, he’d say.”

“I don’t know what he liked. I just met him tonight. He helped me into my room.” That elicited muffled laughs from the group until she ordered them to settle down.

Suddenly, I was conscious of standing, in thin pants and a threadbare top, in the cool night air, in a sea of cops and security guards. I struggled to maintain my dignity and cover my chest, which was threatening to reveal just how cold I was. The homeless guy and I were in this together; he must have found the body. In a show of solidarity I made eye contact with him and folded my arms in an attempt to stay warm but also to hide my shaking, both from the cold and from the experience.

“Nick Vigoriti,” Winters recited. “Low-level hood, lucky in love, unlucky in everything else.”

I wiped my mouth with the back of my hand, too polite to spit, but desperately wanting to. “If you knew who he was, why did you need to call me?” I asked. She wasn’t used to being challenged and, not surprisingly, didn’t like it.

“’Cause you were seen with the deceased,” she said, flipping through a small blue notepad, “interviewing him, apparently, a few hours ago.” She looked at me as if she’d caught me in a lie.

“I wasn’t interviewing him. He just happened to sit down next to me. I’m not sure it’s germane to your investigation, but I’m writing an article. On gardening.”

She seemed to find that amusing. And under the circumstances, it did sound pretty lame. “Right. And all those other girls at the bar are writing their theses on the sex lives of the Arapaho Indians.” This drew howls from her captive audience of subordinates, who, I had the feeling, knew they’d better laugh at the boss’s jokes. It only confirmed my earlier notion that the woman and I didn’t have the same sense of humor.

“The article is for the
Springfield Bulletin
. It’s on the titan arum in the hotel’s lobby.” My illustrious press credentials and the Latin name failed to dazzle her. “The common name is the corpse flower—” my voice trailed off.

“This is the only corpse I’m interested in right now,” she said, pointing to Vigoriti with her pen. She read me the high points, or low points, of Nick’s career from her notepad, but something told me she knew them by heart. Only in his thirties, Nick had been an old-timer at Titans, hanging around the place and running errands since he was fourteen and the hottest action at the hotel was Monday night’s mah-jongg and Thursday’s amateur night.

“In and out of trouble, in and out of beds,” she said, staring at me to see if she’d gotten a reaction, “at least on weekdays when the husbands weren’t around.” She shared Nick’s penchant for stating the obvious.

The way Winters told it made me think she and Nick had some history, but I couldn’t tell if it was business or pleasure. Since she hadn’t asked me a question, I kept silent. It ticked her off.

“So why’d he have your card? Were you two planning to tiptoe through the tulips together?” Another chuckle from the troops.

“Of course not.” I told her about the glass enclosure and how I’d suggested to Nick that I might have a buyer for it.

“Everything’s for sale at Titans,” she muttered. “Where is Bernie, anyway?” she asked, looking around at her crew. “Didn’t I tell someone to drag his sorry butt down here?”

Just then, the loading-dock doors flew open and a big man in a cream-colored suit, with Brillo-pad hair, bleached teeth, and a tan to rival George Hamilton’s, powered toward us, arms out to his sides.

Bernie Mishkin took up a lot of psychic space. A big man to begin with, he seemed intent on expanding his territory with sweeping arm gestures and a cloak of cigar smoke that I suspected was permanent, like that
Peanuts
character who was always surrounded by dirt.

“What the . . .” He stared down at Nick’s body and bit his left knuckle. His hands flew to his chest operatically, as if he was having a heart attack. “Nicky, Nicky, Nicky.” He looked around plaintively. “I’m glad Fran isn’t here to see this. She’d be inconsulate. He was like a son to us.” The group didn’t offer much sympathy, neither did I. I stood there wondering if
inconsulate
was really a word.

“What happened, Stacy, I mean, Detective?”

“Who knows, Bernie? Nick stepped on some toes. Always did. Who knows that better than you? And he had some questionable friends.” She switched from comforting to faintly confrontational in a heartbeat and a look passed between them that suggested she thought Mishkin was one of them.

“Anything
you
can tell us?” she asked.

Mishkin could have had a career in overblown amateur theatricals. He threw his hands in the air; if he could have torn out little tufts of hair, I think he would have.

“We weren’t close these days.” He sighed, finally clasping his hands. “I’ll admit it. He . . . we . . . had words.”

Winters pulled Mishkin away and continued questioning him about three yards from me. With Mishkin’s back to me, I couldn’t hear what they were saying. The homeless guy was leaning on his cart and haltingly giving his statement for the second time since I’d arrived. He sipped a clear liquid from a two-liter bottle, and rearranged his bag collection, tucking in a thin black leather strap. I nearly asked him for a swig of water to clean my mouth before coming to my senses.

More interested in Mishkin now, Winters seemed to have forgotten about me; I was left with Hector, the deceased, and the stinky puddle I’d made. After fifteen minutes, which seemed longer given the stench and the chilly night air, I challenged her again. “Are we finished, Stacy, I mean, Detective? Much as I’d like to help you, I don’t think there’s anything I can add to your investigation since I didn’t know the victim,” I said. I mustered all of my nerve, refolded my arms tightly across my chest, and tried to look tough. Easy in Doc Martens, not so easy in flip-flops.

“Just when we were getting on so well,” she said.

“I’m sorry,” Mishkin said, as if noticing me for the first time. “Have we met? Were you a friend of Nicky’s?”

“She was seen with the victim a few hours ago,” Winters said.

Mishkin stepped toward me and stared, trying to recall if he’d seen me before.

Winters gave me her card and lapsed into cop speak, telling me to call her if I remembered anything else that might have a bearing on the case.
Fat chance I’d get in touch with her again of my own free will.
As soon as Lucy checked in, we were checking out.

A news van arrived and Winters motioned for Hector to get me out of there; I was more than happy to leave. I followed his squat body and knocked knees, retracing our steps back to the loading-dock doors; then I remembered about the greenhouse.

“Mr. Mishkin,” I said, turning, “could I possibly have fifteen minutes of your time tomorrow?”

Mishkin looked at me, then Winters, bewildered and almost nervous. “Sure,” he said, “call my assistant, Rachel, to set up a time.” He seemed to be waiting for an explanation. I let him stew for a few seconds.

“It’s about the corpse flower.”