Bloody London (10 page)

In Thomas Pascoe's study I foraged in the papers, but Homicide had been all over the place already. There was a small sculpture on the desk, a pair of bronze hands. Begging hands, size of a child's. And lifelike. I picked them up and turned on the desk lamp. But the hands, in the light, were wrinkled, joints swollen. An old man's hands, and so alive I felt I'd touched real flesh.

Beer in one hand, the bronze in the other, I went back to the library.

She looked up. “You enjoyed the tour of my apartment?”

“Very nice, but what can I really do for you? What do you want?”

I sipped some beer, watched her curl up on the sofa; in the low light she could have been thirty. I sat on a chair. Put some distance between us.

“You tell me,” she said, but her attention was taken up with the picture of herself that suddenly appeared on the small TV she had placed on the coffee table. In it she wore a black velvet evening dress, low cut, big skirt, and looked stunning.

“The Met. I think. The Whitney. The opera.” She peered at the screen. “Some shit.” Frances Pascoe was pretty drunk. “I want to know what you know. What Ulanova said. What the others tell you.”

I could play her game. “It's privileged.”

“Bullshit. I gave you the names. It's your turn.”

I finished my drink. “You want my help, then you help me.”

“Can I call you Artie? Where are you from? Where were you born?”

“Does it matter?”

“Make some conversation with me, all right? Humor me. I'm a widow. I need a friend.”

“I was born in Moscow.”

“I liked Moscow.”

“Why?”

“I was happy there. Tommy was posted there once very briefly by his bank and I was happy. Are you homesick?”

“You must be kidding.”

She sipped her drink. “What do you hate now, then?”

“Nothing.”

She was drunk, we were going around in circles. I said, “It's your husband. Talk to me, don't talk to me, but it's me or else some detective from a local precinct who's angry because you've got so much dough, or a hot-dog homicide guy who will retail it all to the
Post
.”

“I told you. Tommy cared too much for this building. In a way, towards the end, it was his life.”

“That bored you?”

She shrugged. “I was much younger.”

“You said I had something invested in this case. You said it was you.”

She said, “Did I? I don't remember.”

All the time I sat in her library, Mrs Pascoe seemed to circle me, like an animal with potential prey, charming, then withdrawn, then coming on heavy. She could eat you alive, I figured, and I reached for the gin and
poured a shot for myself, then got up and went to the window, cooled my face against the glass. There wasn't much air in her hothouse of a co-op.

“Artie?”

“Yeah?”

“Help me, will you?”

“I'm trying. Your husband told you everything he did?”

“Obviously not. You've met Janey Cabot.”

“You knew.”

“Everyone knew, darling. Small town. He banged her a few times, so what? I suppose he met her at some charity thing. You were hoping perhaps that she applied for the apartment first and Tom took advantage. I mean, Tommy's philandering wasn't a real problem, if you'll forgive the old-fashioned word. Rather a good word, philandering, don't you think? He couldn't do much but he liked looking. It was nothing to do with me. It was a twitch, a neural itch. In fact, he had Janey after we rejected her. I suppose she kept on hoping.”

“I'm not getting this. You tell me your husband was a Christian guy, it turns out he's coming on to half the women who want apartments. He manipulates the board. He laughs at people who want to live here. He rejects them because he doesn't like the father-in-law.”

“You have all the answers. Can you do something for me?”

“What?”

“The police have sealed Ulanova's apartment. I'm not allowed in until the will goes to probate, I've got to
get in there and see it's cleaned out before the rest of the building's infested.”

“I can't help you with probate. You'll have to talk to your precinct. Talk to your lawyers.”

Frances Pascoe lay on the sofa now, legs crossed, smoking. I went to the door, then I turned around and said, “I think you're protecting someone.”

I'd put the bronze hands in my pocket. Now I put them on a table.

She looked at them. “Take that away.”

“Why?”

“I hate the bloody thing, I think it's repellent.”

“Who did it? The hands.”

“A British sculptor.”

“Named?”

“Warren Pascoe.”

“Some kind of relative?”

“A distant cousin of Tommy's, I think. Gives me the creeps.”

“I think it's haunting.”

“Then for chrissake take the bloody thing if you like it so much. Take it out of here.”

She came down to the lobby with me. The bronze hands were in my pocket. “Let me show you something,” she said and we walked out into the street. It was late. The TV crews had given up for the night. Frances Pascoe pulled her sweater tight.

She gestured at Sutton Place. “It was our village,” she said. “Ours. When Tommy first came here during the war, before they put the Drive through, it was a
riverfront village. It's all over now,” she added.

The street was deserted except for the cop in his sentry box at the far end of Sutton Place, where the Secretary General lives in a townhouse.

We walked north. Mrs Pascoe looked up at the big buildings on the west side of the street. The lobby at Lulu Fine's building blazed with a million watts. Next to it, the unfinished building Castle had showed me loomed in the darkness, a massive hulk shrouded by the scaffold and metal nets.

She said, “I just wanted you to see. Ugly buildings that blot out the sunlight and destroy the city's environment. We feel them on our neck. Literally. The market got hotter, people built these monstrosities. Condos they pay for with funny money. They steal our air.”

“Yours? Your air?”

“Yes. Tommy tried to stop them.”

“The old woman hated your husband, you know. She said she was his ghost. She stayed upstairs so she could haunt him. She also believed in saints and gangsters. She was afraid to stay in the hospital because she figured he might steal her apartment.”

A breeze came up and I could feel Mrs Pascoe shaking. We had walked back to the Middlemarch and she said, “I'm in trouble here,” then wrapped herself with her arms. “I've never been frightened of anyone or anything in my whole bloody life. But we both know it wasn't Madame Ulanova who killed Tom. It wasn't Janey Cabot or Lulu Fine, either. Was it?” She held my arm. “Was it?”

“Probably not.”

She took the cigarette out of her mouth and tossed it on the street. The red ash flickered for a second and went out. She reached up and touched my face lightly. Tiny hairs stood up on the back of my neck. She said, “What's the bruise?”

“Someone didn't like my face the way it was.”

“What do you want from me, Artie?”

“A look at the building. A look at the pool.”

Frances Pascoe led me to the service door and pushed a key in my hand.

She said, “Promise me you'll finish this.”

“Finish what?”

“It won't end here.”

“Where will it end?”

“In London,” she whispered. “Tommy said we had to go to London. There was a phone call, he started packing. We were packed.” She held my arm, urgent now. “We were packed!”

“You said you were scared. Scared someone might come for you? What are you scared of ?”

“Being alone.”

The key slipped in easily. The lock on the service door, like everything else at the Middlemarch, was perfectly oiled. I reached for the light switch, but she pushed my hand away from it. “No one's supposed to be here at night except for security, you understand? Please.”

For a few seconds she held the door and we stood inside the vestibule, a faint light coming in from the street. I listened for footsteps. I could hear my own pulse in my ears.

It was late. From the river I could hear the hoot of a tug somewhere, from the street the grind and rattle of a garbage truck. Then she pulled the door shut, and we were alone in the dark.

I ignored her warning and reached for a switch; the overhead light cast a hard, dull glare on the gray paint walls. I got my bearings. Frances Pascoe looked old under the hard fluorescent beam.

There was a telephone control panel on the wall and I opened it easily and saw even the phone wires were neatly coiled. In my own building downtown, you go
in at night, you trip over stuff, ladders, stacks of newspaper, bags of empties, dead mice. This place had innards streamlined as an Olympic athlete.

The vestibule had an elevator on one side and a gray metal door on the other. I switched the light off and we stood in the dark one more time, then I pulled open the door to the stairs and we started down to the basement. I went first.

The building had a self-satisfied hum – the boiler, the generator, the central air, the pumps for the pool, the electricity meters, all running smooth.

“The doors open out into the stairwell,” she said. “It's a fire precaution.”

I didn't mention I already knew and she led the way down another flight, then unlocked a door. We were on the pool level. I could smell the chlorine.

I said, “I need some light.”

She said, “No light. There's a super who lives here, a night watchman. The doorman comes down here to eat his supper.”

“And the janitor named Pindar Aguirre?”

She looked startled. “He quit.”

“You've replaced him?”

“Not yet. Please leave the light off.”

“You're in charge now, aren't you? Now that your husband's dead, it's yours to run.”

“I imagine my presence in the swimming pool in the middle of the night would raise a few questions with your lot. Your Mr Lippert doesn't like me, does he? He'd be glad to hear I've been places I shouldn't be. I'm as good a suspect as any.”

“He won't hear. How much time have we got?”

She squinted at her watch. “About half an hour before the doorman eats his supper and the night watchman makes his rounds next. I don't know about the police.”

We whispered.

The basement was a warren of rooms and closets. I'd had a glimpse the morning of the murder, now I got a better look. Empty kitchens, once used for residents who ordered meals sent up through the dumbwaiters. A staff cafeteria, empty now too. A clubroom, a few chairs draped in musty sheets, and lockers where crates of illegal booze were once stored.

There were wine cellars, servants' rooms, even shops. There had been a pharmacy, a grocery, a hairdresser. All empty now, or stacked with boxes and trunks and bikes.

I leaned towards her. “No one wants all this space?”

She said, “Only the wrong people want it.”

A radiation symbol was painted on a gray steel door further along the hall. The fall-out shelter. I walked in. It was empty, too, except for some shaky wooden shelves with six cans of creamed corn. I picked one up and read a handwritten label stuck on it. It was dated 1953.

The smell of chlorine got stronger now, and we went through the locker rooms and past a row of wide fluted columns.

We were in the pool. The gold frieze on the blue tiles glittered dully.

She said, “They drained it.”

I walked carefully around the perimeter of the pool.
Lippert had warned me off the building. Dozens of specialists had crawled every inch of this place.

I took Frances Pascoe's arm and we made our way to the deep end. Our footsteps echoed with a hollow ping. There was a bench and we sat on it. I said, “He swam every day?”

She said, “Every day, same time.”

“And the Russian?”

“Most days. She went to the pool, sometimes she swam, sometimes not. Sometimes she just stood up to her waist in the shallow end.”

“How do you know that?”

“I saw her. I occasionally swam with Tommy.”

“Anyone else?”

“No, of course not. Can you do me a favor, please?”

“Sure.”

“Call me Frankie. It makes me feel less old.”

“So he swam every day and people knew it?”

“Of course.” She reached into the pocket of her sweater and took out four vodka miniatures and passed me a pair. We sat on the bench in the empty pool, breathing chlorine and drinking vodka.

“I need to know.”

She opened the second miniature. “What?”

“You knew the old woman advertised her apartment.”

The light-greenish eyes fluttered briefly, then she said, “Yes.”

“Do you want to tell me when she did it?”

“I don't know.”

“But your husband knew.”

“Yes.”

“It upset him.”

“Very much.”

“She had a right?”

“Only legally,” she said.

I said, “If you ask me, the old woman advertised her apartment, your husband got pissed off, he invited her to the pool for a chat and someone surprised them. You must be relieved she's dead.”

“Yes, I am. He was my husband, whatever else he was, and Ulanova was an evil old woman. She inherited shares in the building from her husband, who was a contact of Tommy's during the war.”

I thought of Sal Castle and said, “I know.”

She looked up. “How do you know?”

“What else?”

Mrs Pascoe reached for her drink. “Then she sold them. She made her bargain. She mistreated the help here, fancied herself some kind of aristocrat – it was all horseshit, actually. That lair she kept upstairs was filthy, roaches, mice, rubbish everywhere. All we wanted was to restore the building to its original integrity. We offered to get it cleaned for her, she turned her yapping disdain on all of us.”