Manhattan Is My Beat (25 page)

Rune, debating furious—what should she do?

A man who wanted to ask her out versus the quest.

This was totally unfair.

“Rune?” Amanda said. “I don’t think she going to stay too long.”

Eyes on Dixon.

Eyes on the Brooklyn Yellow Pages.

Oh, shit.

Into the phone she blurted out, “I’ll be right over.”

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

“You had the baby?”

Rune looked up from the building directory, so thick with graffiti she couldn’t find the number of Amanda LeClerc’s apartment.

Her surprised eyes rested on the surprised face of the young man who’d let her into the apartment building two days before—when she’d been extremely pregnant. Now, she let him open the door for her again and she walked inside.

“I did, thanks,” Rune said. “Courtney Madonna Brittany. Six pounds, four ounces.”

“Congratulations,” he said. He couldn’t help but stare down at her belly. “You, uh, feeling okay?”

“Feeling great,” Rune assured him. “I just ran out for a minute and forgot my keys.”

“Where’s your little girl?” he asked.

When you lie, lie with confidence. “She’s upstairs. Watching TV.”

“Watching TV?”

“Well, she’s with her father and
he’s
watching TV. They both like sitcoms…. Say, which apartment is Amanda LeClerc in again?”

“Oh, Amanda? On the second floor?”

“Yeah.”

“I think 2F.”

“Right, right, right.” Rune started up the stairs two at a time.

“Don’t you think you should take it a little easy?”

“Peasant stock,” she called back cheerily.

On the second-floor landing she noticed that there was a piece of plywood over the hole in Mr. Kelly’s door. There was also a large padlock on it. The police tape had been replaced. She walked past it.

It’d been hard to turn down Phillip Dixon (
he
, unlike Richard, was somebody who had no problem with either the word or the concept of “date”).

“Rain check?” he’d asked.

“You bet. Hey, you like junkyards?” she’d asked him on her way out the door of the video store.

He hadn’t missed a beat. “Love ‘em.”

Rune now knocked on Amanda’s door and the woman called, “Who’s there?”

“Me, Rune.”

The door opened. “Good. She’s upstairs. I talk her inta staying to see you. Didn’t want to but she is.”

“Has she heard anything from her father?”

“I don’t know. I didn’t ask her. I just said you were looking for him and it was important.”

“What apartment is he in again?”

“Three B.”

Rune remembered that Symington lived directly above Mr. Kelly.

Rune climbed the stairs. Amanda’s and Mr. Kelly’s floor had smelled like onions; this one smelled like bacon.
She paused in the hallway. The door to 3B was six inches open.

Rune eased forward, seeing first the hem of a skirt, then two thin legs in dark stockings. They were crossed in a way that suggested confidence. Rune started to knock but then just pushed the door open all the way. The woman on the bed turned to her. She was looking through a stack of papers.

She had high cheekbones, a face glossy with makeup, frosted hair forced into place with a ton of spray. She looks like my mother, Rune thought, and guessed she was in her early forties. The woman wore a plaid suit and she smoked a long, dark brown cigarette. She gazed at Rune then said, “That woman downstairs … she said somebody was looking for my father. Is that you?”

“Yes.”

The woman turned away slowly, stubbed out the cigarette, pressing it into an ashtray. It died with a faint crushing sound. She looked Rune up and down. “My, they’re getting younger and younger.”

“Like, excuse me?”

“How old are you?”

“Twenty. What’s that got to do with anything? I just want to ask you a few—”

“What did he promise you? A car? He did that a lot. He was
always
giving away cars. Or saying he would. Porsches, Mercedes, Cadillacs. Of course then there’d be problems with the dealer. Or the registration. Or something.”

“Cars? I don’t even—”

“And then it came down to money. But that’s life, isn’t it? He’d promise a thousand and end up giving them a couple of hundred.”

“What are you talking about?” Rune asked.

Another examination. The woman got as far as Rune’s striped stockings and clunky red shoes before her
face revealed her dismay. She shook her head. “You couldn’t … forgive me, but you couldn’t’ve charged all that much. What
was
your price? For the night?”

“You think I’m a hooker?”

“My father called them girlfriends. He actually brought one to Thanksgiving dinner once. At my house! In Westchester. Lynda with a y. You can imagine
that
scene. With my husband and children?”

“I don’t even know your father.”

The woman frowned, wondering if Rune might be telling the truth. “Maybe there’s some misunderstanding here.”

“I’ll say there is.”

“You’re not …”

“No,” Rune said. “I’m not.”

A faint laugh. “I’m sorry …” The woman extended her hand. “My name’s Emily Richter.”

“I’m Rune.” She reluctantly shook it.

“First name?”

“And last.”

“Actress?”

“Sometimes.”

“So, Rune, you really don’t know my father?”

“No.”

“And you’re not here for any money?”

Not exactly, she thought. She shook her head.

Emily continued. “What do you want to see me about?”

“Do you know where he is?”

“That’s what I’m trying to find out. He just vanished.”

“I know he did.”

Emily examined Rune’s face carefully. The woman had probing eyes and Rune looked away. Emily said, “And I have a feeling you know
why
.”

“Maybe.”

“Which is?”

“I think he witnessed a murder.”

“That man who was killed in the building?” Emily asked. “I heard about that. It was downstairs, wasn’t it?”

“Right.”

“And you think Father saw it happen?”

Rune walked farther into the apartment. She sat down on a cheap dining room chair. She glanced around the place. It was very different from Mr. Kelly’s. She couldn’t figure out why at first. Then she realized. This was like a hotel room, furnished by one phone call to a store that sold everything: pictures, furniture, carpet. A lot of light wood and metallic colors and laminate. Coordinated. Suburban tack.

What did it remind her of? Ohmygod, Richard’s place …

Emily lit another cigarette.

Rune glanced into the kitchen. She saw enough food to last through a siege. Like her mother’s pantry, she thought. With its provisions of flour, yellowing boxes of raisins and oatmeal and cornstarch. The colored cans. Green, Del Monte. Red, Campbell’s. Only here, the difference was that everything was new. Just like the furniture.

Emily’s voice was softer as she said, “I didn’t mean to suggest anything. What I said before. Ever since our mother died, Father’s been, well, a little unstable. He’s had a series of young friends. At least he waited until she died to turn adolescent again.” She shook her head. “But a murder … So maybe he’s in danger.” The cigarette paused halfway to her mouth, then lowered.

Rune told her, “I guess he’s okay. I mean, I don’t know that he isn’t. He sure didn’t hang around for very long after the man downstairs was killed.”

“What happened?”

Rune told her about Robert Kelly’s death.

“Why do you think my father saw it happen?”

“What it was, I came back here to pick up something after Mr. Kelly was killed. And I was in the apartment downstairs—”

“How did you know him, this Mr. Kelly?”

“He was a customer at the store where I work. We were sorta friends. Anyway, I saw your father. And he saw me in the apartment. He was terrified. That was weird—
me
scaring anybody.” She laughed. “But the way I figure it, the day Mr. Kelly was killed your father was hanging out on his fire escape. He saw the killer come out of the apartment after he killed Mr. Kelly. I think your father got a look at the killer.”

Emily shook her head. “But why would he run, just seeing you?”

“I don’t know. Maybe he couldn’t see me too clearly and thought I was the killer who’d come back to destroy some evidence or something.”

Emily was looking down at the fake Oriental carpet. “But the police haven’t called me”—she nodded again— “which must mean you haven’t told them about him.”

“No.”

“Why not?”

Rune’s eyes drifted away. “The thing is, I don’t like police.”

Emily watched her carefully for a moment more. Then said probingly, “But that’s not exactly
the
thing, is it? There’s something else.”

Rune looked away. Trying to be cool and poised. It wasn’t taking.

“Well, all I know is that I’m worried about my father,” Emily said. “He can be exasperating at times but I still love him. I want to find him. And it sounds like you do too. Why won’t you tell me?”

Then, from somewhere, Rune managed to find an adult gaze. She slapped it on her face and gave Emily a
woman-to-woman smile. “I have this feeling you’re not telling me everything either.”

The woman hesitated. She inhaled and blew a fat stream of smoke away from them. “Maybe I’m not.”

“I’ll show you mine if you …”

Emily didn’t want to smile. But she did. “Okay, the truth?” She looked around the apartment. “I’ve never been here before. This is the first time. I haven’t been in
any
of his apartments for the past year…. Isn’t that an awful thing to say?”

Rune said nothing. Emily sighed. She was looking much
less
adult than she had. “We had a fight. Last summer. A bad one.”

There was silence.

Then she smiled at Rune. A bleak lifting of her mouth. Trying to make light. The smile faded. “He ran away from home. Isn’t that silly?”

“Your father ran away from home? Like, that’s radical.”

Emily asked, “Are your parents still alive?”

“My mother is. She’s in Ohio. My father died a few years ago.”

“Did you get along with them when you were at home?”

“Pretty good, I guess. My mom is a sweetheart. My dad … I was sort of his favorite. But don’t tell my sister I said that. He was really, really cool.”

Emily looked at her with a cocked head. “You’re lucky. My father and I fought a lot. We always have. Even when I was young. I’d have a boyfriend and Dad wouldn’t like him. He wasn’t from the right kind of family, he didn’t make enough money, he was Jewish, he was Catholic … I fought back some but he was my father and fathers have authority. But then I grew up and after my mother died a few years ago, something odd happened. The roles switched.
He
became the child. He’d
retired, didn’t have much money. I’d married a businessman and I was rich. He needed a place to stay and he moved in with us.

“But I didn’t do it right. Suddenly
I
had the power,
I
could dictate. Just the opposite of the way it was when I lived at home. I handled it badly. Last summer we were arguing and I said some terrible things. I didn’t mean them, I really didn’t. They weren’t even true. I thought Dad’d just fight back or ignore them. Well, he didn’t. What he did was he took some things and disappeared.” Her voice quaked.

Emily fell silent. She held her cigarette in an unsteady hand. “I’ve been trying to find him ever since. He stayed at the Y for a while, he stayed at a hotel in Queens. He had an apartment in the West Village. I don’t know when he moved here. I’ve been calling people he knows—some of his old co-workers, his doctors—trying to find him. Finally a receptionist at his doctor’s office broke down and gave me this address.”

Emily smoothed her skirt. It was a long skirt, expensive silk. Slinky was the only way to describe it, Rune decided. “Now I’ve missed him again,” Emily told her.

“Didn’t you just call and apologize?”

“I tried a few months ago. But he hung up on me.”

“Why don’t you just give it time? Maybe he’ll calm down. He’s not that old, is he? In his sixties.”

A look at the carpet again. “The thing is, he’s sick. He doesn’t have much longer. That’s why the doctor’s receptionist agreed to tell me where he was. He has cancer. Terminal.”