A Cast of Killers (13 page)

Humiliated, T.S. paid the hefty tab,
suspecting it was at least five dollars over the regular charge. He
did not have time to think much about it, however, as his eye had
been caught by a small face whose expression was quite different
from those surrounding him. A skinny black boy, not more than
eleven or twelve years old, stood in the doorway staring at T.S.
His eyes were wide and suspicious, his features hardened into a
permanent accusatory stare. Yet, T.S. was sure that his unblinking
eyes were filling with tears and that the young boy's mouth was
trembling. The child stepped back in fright as T.S. opened the
door, and he watched T.S. hurry to the limo with undisguised
confusion before moving forward as if he had something to say. T.S.
stopped with his hand on the door handle and stared at the child.
Why had the photos upset him so much? Everyone else in the crowd
loved the macabre real-life postscript to the slasher movies they'd
probably just seen.

"Son?" he said to the young boy, who
responded by darting forward. T.S. thought he was being attacked
but the child veered at the last moment and took off down the
block, running as fast as he could. T.S. was so astonished he made
no move to get into the limousine until Lilah rolled down the
window and called out his name.

"Theodore. We're attracting quite a crowd.
Perhaps we should be on our way."

T.S. looked over at the picture window and
the crowd of teenagers stared back at him in mystified curiosity
and misdirected envy.

"Yo, pops. That's kinky!" someone called out.
A few people laughed and that was more than enough for T.S. He
quickly hopped into the back seat next to Lilah and thrust the bag
of photos into her hands.

"Remind me to kill Auntie Lil in the
morning," he told her. "And, Grady, for God's sake, get us out of
here."

He was awakened early the next morning from a
troubled dream in which he lay in a glass coffin, surrounded by
leering women in cheap outfits and garish makeup. They leaned over
him, grinning suggestively, their pink tongues licking at the glass
and their features distorted as they pressed against the sides of
the coffin. He woke suddenly, convinced that the tremendous
pounding he heard was really his heartbeat, until he finally
realized that someone was trying to break down his apartment door.
He stumbled to it, still half-asleep, and found an impatient Auntie
Lil waiting on the other side. She surveyed his pajamas with
energetic disapproval.

"Mahmoud let me in," she explained
cheerfully. "I've been up for hours. Here, I've brought you bagels.
It's time to get to work."

T.S. made a mental note to cut the doorman's
Christmas tip in half. He stared at the clock on the wall. It was
barely eight o'clock in the morning.

"You're certainly serious
about this thing," he told Auntie Lil grumpily, stepping aside to
let her through before he was mowed down. Auntie Lil hated to get
out of bed before 10:00
a.m
. She claimed the human body had
not been made to function before noon and customarily spent her
mornings reading tabloids and detective magazines while she drank
quarts of black coffee.

"We've got to find out who she was before we
can find out who killed her," Auntie Lil announced loudly as she
plopped her bag of goodies onto the immaculate surface of his
dining room table. T.S. winced. It was the single heirloom he'd
taken from his parents' house upstate and in the twenty-five years
of his ownership, it had hardly sustained a scratch, despite what
he considered flagrant abuse by Auntie Lil.

Brenda and Eddie wandered in belatedly,
hating to give up their warm spot at the foot of T.S.'s bed.
Letting them sleep there was his sole concession to affection when
it came to his pets. They eyed him with suspicious hope. Would they
get fed early? Would he come across with the chicken and cheese
dinner?

"Feed them so they leave me alone," Auntie
Lil ordered. She liked cats about as much as she liked the
NYPD.

"I thought you weren't a morning person." The
whirr of the can opener whipped Brenda and Eddie into their obese
version of a frenzy: their tails switched back and forth, perfectly
synchronized, and Brenda let out a ladylike meow.

"This morning, I am a morning person," Auntie
Lil replied calmly. "How did the photos turn out? Can you see her
face clearly?"

"I'll say. Our little photo exhibit made
quite a stir last night. Who says culture is dead in NYC?" He
slammed the refrigerator door and felt a little better. There was
just enough fresh orange juice left for a single glass.

"Is that orange juice?" Auntie Lil asked with
great interest. "If so, I'll take a glass."

"No, you won't." He was being rude, but he
didn't care. She knew better than to wake him up. She'd just have
to take her lumps.

"If you're going to be so
grouchy, why don't you just go back to bed?" She stopped her
scolding long enough to discover the package of photos lying on the
coffee table next to his precisely aligned rows of
The New Yorker
and
Cat Fancy.
She thumbed through the stack of images with approval. "Say,
these are very good, Theodore. You did a wonderful job." She looked
at him from over the reading glasses she seldom wore because of her
vanity. "I've been thinking about this. Our first step is to find
out who she was. Then we can find out why she was
killed."

"What do you want me to do?" He held up the
photos and flipped through them. It would be good to dive into the
puzzle and keep his mind off his personal confusion about
Lilah.

"I'm going to start canvassing the
neighborhood," she told him. "Show the photos around and find out
where she lived. Someone has to know, even if she was very, very
private. There's nothing else to go on. We need to question Adelle
and her friends again, then try to track down the funny old man who
saw Emily's pocketbook get stolen the day she died. We know so
little about her."

"We know she was an
understudy in the original
Our
Town,"
T.S. pointed out. "And that her
stage name was Emily Toujours. I could go to the Lincoln Center
library and check out the Playbill."

"All right. Of course, we don't know for sure
she really was the understudy… and that name likely came after the
show. But, I suppose we have no other choice. And it will keep you
out of my way."

T.S. was slightly offended that she had not
grasped the brilliance of his suggestion.

"You go this morning and then we'll meet back
at the soup kitchen in the afternoon and compare notes," she
decided.

"Do you really think the police will let the
kitchen open up today?" T.S. asked incredulously. "After all, now
it looks like someone was poisoned there."

"We don't know that for sure." Auntie Lil's
chin jutted out when she was feeling her most stubborn and at the
moment it looked like a Grand Canyon cliff. "They'll try to blame
it on my chili, but I'm having none of that. Besides, no one died
yesterday and people are as hungry as ever. They have to let us
open."

T.S. shook his head. "I'd be surprised. But
I'll meet you there at one.”

It felt good to have a mission again. T.S.
whistled a Broadway tune as he dressed carefully in slacks, a new
plaid shirt he'd prudently purchased on sale and his first sweater
of the new fall season. It was the perfect library outfit—a sort of
relaxed and quietly intellectual look. He selected a pair of Hush
Puppies from his customized shoe rack, and chose socks that were
whimsically embroidered with the logo from a Broadway show about
tap dancing. He loved Broadway and all there was to do about
Broadway. And now he even had a legitimate excuse to hang out at
the Performing Arts Library. Why, it was even better than going
into the office. In fact, he downright pitied those poor men and
women still chained to their desks, marching into work like
suited-up zombies each day, squabbling over petty office politics
disputes, making minor decisions about unimportant matters, sitting
behind their desks and accepting obsequious homage from underlings
out to protect their own interests… well, he'd better stop thinking
about it or he might start to miss it, after all.

By the time T.S. had emerged from the subway
near Lincoln Center, Auntie Lil was hard at work just twenty blocks
due south, the photos of Emily carefully stowed in her enormous
handbag. She began with the handful of people already in line for
the soup kitchen, but they were not regulars and claimed to never
have seen Emily before. Auntie Lil kept a careful eye out for the
strange man who had seen "The Eagle" breathe evil into Emily's
mouth, but she did not find him or even Franklin, his more coherent
tablemate. Using a list she had prepared the night before from a
booklet on volunteering, she visited seven separate shelters in the
vicinity of St. Barnabas but none of the workers or residents
recognized Emily. She even waylaid three postmen and one Federal
Express delivery woman, but none of them could help. Being New
Yorkers, not a single person so much as blinked at what was clearly
a photo of a dead woman.

Because it was mid-morning on a workday, few
people occupied the neighborhood stoops. She did show Emily's photo
to a family of plump Hispanic women who were fanning themselves
with large paper fans while they enjoyed the morning sunshine. They
passed the photos eagerly among themselves, then reluctantly
confessed that, so far as they were concerned, Emily was a
stranger.

Discouraged, Auntie Lil wandered up
Forty-Sixth Street between Eighth and Ninth Avenues. Called
Restaurant Row, the block was home to over a dozen eating
establishments, interspersed between largely middle-class apartment
brownstones. Restaurant Row was even more deserted than the
residential blocks around it. A few deliverymen hurried from their
trucks toward restaurants, pushing carts and supplies ahead of
them, and a couple of busboys were slowly sweeping their patches of
sidewalk clean.

The autumn day was growing warmer by the
moment and Auntie Lil began to regret wearing the heavy felt hat
she'd purchased on a recent visit to the Austrian Alps. As she
neared Eighth Avenue, she spotted a man sitting in a lawn chair in
front of a boarded-up hotel. From far away, he looked like just
another old soul, slumped and potbellied, tired and discouraged,
with nothing better to do but sit and watch life pass him by on a
dirty street corner in New York City. His hands were enormous and
hung to the sidewalk as he slouched low in the sagging chair. As
Auntie Lil grew closer, she perceived an oddity in his profile. His
face was unnaturally flattened and the silhouette marred by an
enormous lump of a nose that, on even closer inspection, resembled
a huge bulb of cauliflower intersected by blood vessels. Above this
monstrosity, his milky green eyes were large and placid, and his
white hair swept straight back from his broad forehead in carefully
combed strands. His clothes were clean and such innocuous shades of
brown and beige that he seemed to melt into the dirty concrete wall
behind him. Auntie Lil approached him politely and showed him
Emily's photos.

"I'm trying to locate a dear old friend of
mine," she told the man. He stared at her lips intently as she
spoke, then looked back down at the photo and nodded.

"You know her?" Auntie Lil asked in
excitement, touching his arm. He looked up and she repeated her
question. Again, he stared intently at her lips, then back down at
the photo. Slowly, he shook his head and shrugged
philosophically.

Auntie Lil could not mask her disappointment.
Her shoulders fell and her head sagged along with her hopes, adding
a good ten years to her frame. The old man nodded sympathetically
and patted her arm in reassurance. Then he smiled and pointed
across Eighth Avenue. He was indicating either a boarded-up
storefront peppered by half-torn posters and obscene graffiti, or a
small delicatessen with a bright yellow awning. The old man pointed
again to the deli and made a pushing gesture with his hands.

"I should go there?" Auntie Lil asked. "Will
they know her?"

The old man shrugged and spread his hands
wide. Maybe. Maybe not. But it was the best answer she'd gotten so
far.

Auntie Lil hurried across
the avenue, dodging unemployed actors, construction workers in
search of coffee, grumpy mothers and squalling children in baby
carriages. The deli was cheery and immaculate, its outside walls
painted a paler version of the bright yellow splashed across the
awning,
the delicious
deli
, promised a sign in the
window.
you won't believe our coffee, and
our he-man heroes are
the biggest bargain
in manhattan.

That decided it for Auntie Lil. She was
definitely going in. It was nearly noon, she was famished from
walking around and, worst of all, had not been able to enjoy her
customary five cups of coffee that morning. Whether they knew Emily
there or not, she was paying the Delicious Deli a visit.

A long counter ran down the right half of the
small store, stopping just short of the window. Two small cafe
tables had been squeezed into the tiny space left over. All were
empty, awaiting the lunch rush. Auntie Lil sank gratefully into a
small wrought-iron chair and eyed the man behind the counter. He
was of medium build, around thirty-five years of age, she judged,
with sandy hair and an open, cheery face. He had large round
cheeks, wide-set brown eyes and a perfectly chiseled nose. His hair
fell across his face and he brushed his unruly bangs aside
impatiently. He was leaning against an enormous coffee machine,
carefully hand-lettering the day's special on a portable
chalkboard. He wore a short-sleeved white restaurant shirt and an
apron smeared with chocolate. His enormous biceps were evidence
that he did most of the work around the deli. Indeed, there was no
one else in sight.