Baby Doll Games (20 page)

Oscar cupped her face between his strong hands and kissed her lips with infinite gentleness. “I wanted you so damned badly, Siga, that I had to make myself stay away. My doctor decided to go to Jamaica for the weekend and his idiot nurse wouldn’t give me the test results-”
“Doctor?” She twisted in his arms, stricken with sudden fear for him. “Tests? What’s wrong with you?”
“Nothing. That’s what I wanted to verify.”
“I don’t understand”
“Listen, sweet fool. Haven’t you been paying attention to what's happening? It’s a whole different game these days. I wanted to make sure it was safe for you”
He gave her his clean bill of health as a more conventional lover might present a diamond bracelet. The sleeve of her robe had slipped aside and he ran his finger lightly down the red scar of her knife wound. “They must have done blood tests on you when you were in the hospital,”
“
Me
?” She flung his gift back in his face, suddenly angry. “You have the nerve to ask that of me? I’m not the one out tomcatting with every titled Sue, Jane, and Nancy who jets into New York. I’m not sleeping with every oversexed stud who asks nicely. I’m not-”
He put his hand over her mouth. “I’m not either,” he said. “Not since April.”
That silenced her.
"Not since April. Not ever again until you shut me out of your life,” he promised. “And maybe not even then.”
She wanted to answer, to argue, to discuss, but she seemed to have no words, only nerve endings which responded to his lightest touch as one hand slid down the side of her neck and the other undid the fastening on her robe and slipped the heavy dark fabric away from her shoulders.
“Nauman-”
But his breathing had become as ragged as hers.
“No more talking,” he murmured as their lips met again.
She awoke sometime in the night when a gust of wind rattled the narrow clerestory windows above the bed and rain beat upon the glass.
Lying on his stomach beside her, his face half under the pillow, Nauman slept soundly. The room was too dark to see the laugh lines around his eyes or the deeper lines beside his mouth. Only the edge of his thick white hair.
It was enough. Sigrid was swept with momentary grief. Did all lovers feel this? she wondered. Lie in bed and count how few the years remaining?
Filled with a bittersweet tenderness, she pushed aside the pillow and smoothed his rumpled hair. His eyes opened at her touch. “Can’t sleep?”
“The rain woke me.”
They lay quietly for a few moments listening to the wind pound and batter the outer wall. It made Sigrid’s bedroom feel like a warm safe haven. Nauman put his arms around her and drew her closer.
Their breathing slowed toward sleep again as rain pelted heavily against the glass above them.
“Not exactly a small rain,” he said drowsily and though Sigrid was already half-asleep herself, she understood his allusion to that poignant scrap of sixteenth- century poetry and she fell asleep deeply content, with his hand cupped around her breast and those words drifting through her dreams.
“O
Western wind
, when wilt thou blow,
That the small rain down can rain?
Christy that my love were in my arms And I in my bed again!

Chapter 23

Tuesday morning dawned gray and cold. The rains had tapered off, Manhattan’s cloud cover seemed to be breaking up, and the weather bureau predicted partly sunny skies by noon.
Sigrid was not a morning person and seldom rose early by choice. The closer to dawn, the further under sleep seemed to take her. This morning she was drowsily aware of Oscar beside her but the pleasure of his hands and mouth upon her body were so much a continuation of the night that she was already half-aroused before she fully realized what was happening.
Afterwards she lay sleepily relaxed while Nauman showered and dressed.
Unfortunately, Nauman
was
a morning person and he sat on the edge of the bed, lifted the pillow from her face and said, “Breakfast?”
Sigrid peered past him to the clock on the bedside table. “What time is it?”
“Almost six. I have an eight o'clock appointment with a grad student. Omelet for you, or toast and coffee?” Sigrid seldom ate breakfast, but she didn’t want to send him away sooner than necessary. On the other hand, she suddenly remembered that breakfast would mean coping with Roman, that other early-morning enthusiast. She wasn’t quite prepared to watch Roman scramble eggs or butter toast while he acted scrupulously nonchalant about her newly altered relationship with Nauman.
As if he’d read her mind, Nauman picked her robe off the floor by his side of the bed and handed it to her. “There’s a coffee shop over on East Twenty-third that makes muffins with blueberries the size of marbles. I could go find my car and meet you out front in what? Ten minutes?”
“Make it fifteen and you’ve got a deal,” she said, relieved. She started to push back the covers, hesitated beneath an abrupt attack of shyness, then made herself follow through on her first impulse.
Oscar watched her jerky stop-and-go hesitation in wry amusement. Someday, he thought, they might laugh about this moment, but he knew that now was not the time. It was enough that she had come this far. Push for too much, too fast and it could all come undone; so before her self-consciousness could drive a new wedge between them, he dropped a kiss on her tousled hair and cleared out so that she could dress in privacy.
The coffee shop was attached to a once grander, now second-class hotel which clung forlornly to the shreds of its original beauty. The spacious lobby cried out for fresh paint and new carpets, for the banishment of the urethane couches which had replaced velvet, for live holly or aromatic pine boughs in its gracefully proportioned marble urns instead of dusty plastic poinsettias. The stuccoed columns were chipped, the murals over the desk were dingy and faded, and the beautiful central chandelier was missing several crystal drops. Those that remained were yellow with smoke and city grime.
The coffee shop itself needed a thorough scrubbing, the blue vinyl of its tinsel-draped booths had been mended with duct tape, and food arrived on ugly thick crockery; but the food was freshly prepared on the premises, portions were generous, and the two waitresses were cheerful and quick.
The older woman was a comfortable peroxide blonde who wore a sprig of artificial mistletoe on her blue-and- white cap, spoke familiarly to her regular customers, and called everyone “duckie.”
Serving Sigrid and Oscar was a short chunky waitress who looked young enough to be a high-school dropout and who wore her uniform cap at a belligerent says-who? angle atop orange-and-pink hair. Her eyebrows had been plucked into thin arches, her half-inch-long fingernails were filed to sharp points and painted black. On the limp white lapel of her tight blue nylon uniform, she wore a button that read “Anarch.”
When the young woman set their steaming-hot blueberry muffins down on the table, Sigrid noticed that her bracelet was a wide black leather band studded with steel spikes. (“It probably began life as a dog collar for a two hundred-pound mastiff,” said Nauman.) “Jam?” she chirped. “More butter? You could probably bathe in it and stay thin. I just look at butter and, honey, it flies straight to my hips.”
She bustled away to return in a few minutes with a tray of bacon and fried eggs for six Korean tourists who sat at a nearby table between the two rows of wall booths and who laughed and chattered merrily as they attacked their breakfast.
After her years of struggling with chopsticks, Sigrid was startled to see the flip side of East-West culture clash.
“You’re staring,” Nauman told her.
“I can’t help it,” she said and laughter bubbled in her voice.
“Aren’t they just the cutest things?” asked their waitress
sotto voce
as she refilled their coffee cups. “It’s their first trip to America and I think they’re having a blast.” She adjusted her spiked leather bracelet. “They don’t talk much English though and I don’t guess they’re used to knives and forks over there.”
The Koreans appeared oblivious to the covert glances of the other customers. Nor were they interested in copying the natives for the conventional application of western cutlery. Chattering and smiling, they moved food from plate to mouth with whichever utensil came to hand. One man had cut his fried egg into long narrow strips which he then draped over his knife and conveyed to his mouth. The woman beside him had balanced a crisp strip of bacon on the back of her fork, while an older man directly opposite dexterously buttered a piece of toast with his spoon.
“I’ll never feel as stupid with chopsticks again,” Sigrid told Oscar.
“Speaking of chopsticks,” he said, “there’s an exhibit of Chinese calligraphy opening at the Friedinger Museum tonight. Want to go?”
“Not really.” She delicately picked up several buttery muffin crumbs with the tip of her moistened finger and ate them one at a time. “I have a court appearance this morning and if it runs into the afternoon, that’ll put me behind on everything else. I’ll probably be in bed by ten since you woke me so early.”
“Early and often,” he said solemnly, then gave her a playfully rakish leer.
Feeling unexpectedly frisky, Sigrid leered right back and was amused by his surprised expression.
Despite the Assistant District Attorney’s assurances to the contrary, it was midafternoon before Sigrid escaped from the courtroom. As far as she was concerned the case was open-and-shut. The defendant, a successful podiatrist, had severely beaten his much-younger wife several times and threatened to kill her if she left. She had and he did-in front of three impartial eyewitnesses which included his own sister His lawyer seemed to be shaping a two-pronged defense: one based on the defendant’s battered childhood, the other on minute technicalities related to the way Sigrid and her homicide team had handled the initial investigation.
“What can I tell you?” said the A.D.A. during the recess called immediately after Sigrid had icily fended off all the attacks on her team’s competency. “He’s got to do something to justify billing a hundred-twenty an hour.”
“Starting to feel as if you’re standing on the wrong side of the courtroom?” Sigrid asked her.
“Nope, Somebody’s got to make it unprofitable for macho podiatrists to bash their wives and it might as well be me.” The A.D.A. crushed her cigarette in a sand urn, gave Sigrid a half-salute, and headed back inside.
Rather than return to the office, where the paperwork on other, more routine homicides piled up on her desk, Sigrid checked her notebook and remembered that she had planned to question the brother of a floater who had been pulled from the river yesterday with a bullet in his head and the fingers of his right hand chopped off. Early indications were that he had been a numbers runner with sticky fingers. The brother’s address was located close to the 8th-AV-8 Theater; so she would have plenty of time to interview him before the Pennewelf children were likely to be home from school.
Although the brother appeared to be a fairly law- abiding citizen, he spoke knowledgeably and bitterly about the dead youth's criminal connections. Even more importantly, he was angry and grieved enough to name names.
The whole interview, including the phone call Sigrid made to send Peters and Eberstadt out to question those names, took less than fifteen minutes and she arrived at the hardware store owned by the Pennewelfs’ grandfather only to learn that the children weren't expected for almost an hour. The older man made it quite clear that he'd allow her to talk to them if she felt it necessary,, but not without himself present.
“I shall be glad for your help” Sigrid told him truthfully although she would much rather have Tillie. Mick Cluett’s interviewing skills were likely to remain unknown to her, since he had called in sick again this morning.
The theater appeared virtually deserted when Sigrid arrived. The front door was unlocked but no vigilant parent appeared to challenge her since there were no dance classes scheduled for that afternoon. Sigrid walked through the shadowy auditorium and found lights on in the office, Nate Richmond's workshop, and Helen Delgado's two workrooms-; but no one was there, not even in the green room.
As she mounted the wooden stairs, she heard voices from the women s dressing room. Inside, Nate Richmond and Helen Delgado were standing by the pipe clothing racks with a large cardboard box and appeared to have just begun sorting through the personal effects Emmy Mion had left behind.
"I got a phone call from California about an hour ago,” Helen Delgado told Sigrid. “Her family’s arranged for her to be buried in California and they asked if we’d go through her things, dispose of her clothes, and just send home the personal stuff.”
Today the designer wore her hair in loose swirls over an almost subdued purple shirt that was cinched at her thick waist with an intricately knotted belt of faux pearls and purple satin cords. Mauve mascara shadowed her eyes, but for the first time, her ears were bare.
As she spoke, she removed a heavy black wool coat from a hanger, checked the pockets, discarded a tissue left there since last winter, folded the coat neatly, and handed it to Nate Richmond, who placed it in the cardboard box.
“We thought we'd give her clothes to that shelter for the homeless over on Tenth Avenue,” he said. “Emmy was so small, there’s no one here can wear many of her things. The leg warmers perhaps. That’s about it.”
There was a pasty tone to his skin today that aged his elfin face even more than the crinkled lines already there.
He would probably look like this when he was ninety, thought Sigrid, watching as he shook out a thick woolen jacket of red plaid.
"Hey; this is mine,” Nate said. “I was wondering where it got to. I haven’t seen it since last winter.”
“Really?” Helen answered absently. “I think Emmy was wearing it Saturday morning. Remember? She was a little chilly and didn’t want to put on the heat. She probably had it hanging here all summer. Or Rikki. You know how they borrow everybody’s clothes.”
Nate put the jacket on over his blue turtleneck sweater, "At least it doesn’t smell of mothballs.”
“Yeah, I caught a whiff of David, too,” Helen laughed and, seeing Sigrid’s puzzled look, explained, “David Orland’s mother packs everything in mothballs. You could really tell that summer was over when he walked in Sunday.” She hesitated over a final winter garment, an outsized blue cable-knit cardigan. "Wonder if this is hers or Ginger’s?” Nate shrugged. "I think I’ve seen Rikki in it, but like you say-the way they borrow each other’s clothes…”
“I’ll leave it for now,” Helen decided and moved over to the dressing counter where she began to remove things from the two drawers Emmy Mion had used.
“There was a locket that belonged to her grandmother,” said Nate. “And an amethyst bracelet.” He looked around helplessly.
"They’re probably in her suitcases," Helen suggested. "Eric brought them over this morning.”
The two matched pieces of luggage were of sturdy brown leather and looked quite expensive.
“Her aunt gave her these for graduation,” Nate said sadly and Sigrid quietly watched him open the cases.
Inside the first were underthings, T-shirts, two pairs of sandals, a pair of red sequined pumps, an extra pair of sneakers, and some toilet articles. Inside the other were jeans, a couple of skirts and dresses, some knit shirts and sweaters, a manila envelope that appeared to be stuffed with letters and miscellaneous scraps of paper, and a small satin bag that held the locket and bracelet Nate had mentioned plus a thin gold chain and a silver ring.
Not very much for a six-month stay with one's lover, thought Sigrid, leafing through the folder but finding nothing that seemed to connect to Mion s death.
“She kept most of her papers downstairs,” said Helen. “Bills, bank records, stuff like that. I guess we'll have to go through those, too.”
Her plump hands had almost finished efficiently sorting Emmy’s things. Out of both drawers, Helen saved only a string of glass beads, a little heart-shaped brass box, a 35-mm camera (no film), a pearl-handled pocket knife, and a small hinged frame that held the pictures of an older man and woman.
“Her aunt and uncle,” said Nate. “They raised her.”
“We'll pack everything in the suitcases,” Helen decided and Nate carefully transferred all the clothes from the cases to the shelter box except for the red sequined pumps.