Revenge of the Cootie Girls (11 page)

If only we hadn't had so much to drink that second night …

“Are you Robin Hudson?”

I looked up. A woman in a green wig and Groucho-nose glasses was looking down at me. It wasn't Kathy.

“Yes.”

“Are you looking for Kathy?” she said, with a heavy New York accent.

“Yeah.”

“Come with me,” she said.

Contact.

“Where are we going?” I said.

“Up to the corner of LaGuardia Place,” she said. “This won't take long.”

“And who are you?” I said to the woman. “Are you a friend of Julie's?”

She just smiled at me.

When we got to LaGuardia and Bleecker, also known as the corner of Walk and Don't Walk because there used to be a tavern by that name on this corner, the green-haired woman said, “Cross over to that lot.”

She was pointing to a little parking area in front of a strip of shops. There was a black car parked there.

We crossed and she said, “Get in the car.”

A voice in my head said, “Never get into cars with strangers.” But I hesitated only for a moment because this was just so Julie-esque.

8

T
HE CAR DOOR OPENED,
and I slid into the back seat. In the shadowy car, there were three more women in green wigs and Groucho-nose glasses. The woman who had walked me over slid in behind me. The car was heavy with the smell of Shalimar.

The woman to my left, apparently the head woman, said, “Kathy is fine.”

“Thanks for letting me know. I was a bit worried. I'm very anxious to find her.”

“Good,” the woman said. She turned to the bewigged woman in the front and said, “Let's get out of here.”

The car pulled out into the street. About three feet later it stopped. Traffic was really bad.

“Did Julie dream up those outfits, or did you?” I said.

“Julie?” she said, with an odd, perplexed note in her voice. “No, I did.”

Yeah, I should have guessed that. Their costumes were strictly off the rack, cheap polymer wigs and the kind of nose glasses you can buy in any convenience store in New York on Halloween. If Julie had done the costumes, she would have made them bearded ladies or Jehovah's Witnesses. If Julie had done them as Groucho, who is one of my personal heroes, they would look like authentic, quality Grouchos. Or she would have made each of them a different Marx brother, and put them in dresses, made them the Marx Sisters. She had imagination.

“Are you actors she hired, or friends of Julie's?” I asked.

The head woman looked at me coldly. “Actors,” she fairly snapped at me.

Touchy, jeez. It's so easy to offend some people.

“Sorry, I didn't mean to block the action or ruin the fun or whatever,” I said. “Are you going to give me a clue?”

The car drove forward again, stopping after a block.

“Yeah, we've got a clue for you,” the woman to my left said. “This is the skill-testing question: When did you last speak to Julie Goomey?”

She lit a cigarette and exhaled in my direction.

Her accent was hard to place. I couldn't tell if she normally had an upper-class accent and was affecting the borough accent or vice versa, if she was trying to do either Marisa Tomei in
My Cousin Vinnie
or Bette Davis in
All About Eve
.

“Nineteen seventy-nine,” I said.

“What did the last clue say?”

“Wait for contact.”

“Contact. Uh-huh,” she said, and dragged on her cigarette. “The clue is to go to the next place, and don't quit until you find Granny.”

“Granny!” I laughed in spite of myself. “Then you're going to load up the truck and head to Beverleee? Look, you're probably a great actress and you'd rather be doing
Uncle Vanya
than this. But, you see, I'm tired. If you know where I'm supposed to go next, please tell me.”

There was silence, then she said, “We don't know where you're supposed to go next. We're just here to keep an eye on you.”

“All right. So, when I find Granny …”

“You just bring her to us, and we'll look after the rest,” she said, sounding kind of pissed. “You have until dawn. I have your cell-phone number, I'll be calling you, and we'll be watching you.”

“Did you call me about half an hour ago?”

“No. Someone else called you about this?”

“Possibly. I couldn't hear over the parade.”

“I'm not supposed to tell you this, but you're going to be … tested, like. Others may ask you about Julie Goomey,” the head woman said, exhaling cigarette smoke as she did. “Do not give them any information. If you do, you blow everything.”

“Thanks,” I said. “I appreciate that. I'm not as young as I used to be. I can't keep up with Julie's byzantine games anymore.”

“I understand,” said the head woman.

She sounded older than me, but maybe it was just because she was tired too, or “acting.” She hadn't done a very good job, but what can you expect? What a sucky life that can be, being an actor in New York, having to support yourself temping or waitressing, doing singing telegrams and dressing up like a chicken to hand out brochures to people outside McDonald's. I knew lots of people who did it in college, some very successful now, and it was all just part of the adventure to them. But they were young then. Probably the adventure of it wears off by the time you hit forty and are still standing outside McDonald's on a sweltering day in a chicken suit.

How could they know that for her pranks Julie was legendary—in her mind, in mine, and in those of her other coconspirators and victims? You had to get up pretty early in the morning not to fall for Julie's stunts. This one reminded me of the time we enlisted the drama club to send the Valhalla High football team and pep squad on that wild-goose chase, while we, with the help of several boys and a van, stole the Valhalla mascot, the Iron Maiden. The Iron Maiden was a plaster-of-paris statue of a woman, kneeling, her mouth in a beseeching O. When she was found the next morning, she was placed facing our mascot, the god Vulcan, who was standing. The maiden's beseeching O was at Vulcan's crotch level, making it look from twenty feet away like she was giving him a blow job. Vulcan's Hummer. It was Julie who saw the Iron Maiden and envisioned the tableau, Julie who persuaded the drama club to take part. She gave participants only a piece of the puzzle, though, not the whole thing, so no one party could reveal the extent of the conspiracy. Oh, if only Richard Nixon had known Julie Goomey.

Finally, the car stopped, and I got out at Broadway and Broome Street, down in SoHo, and I waved goodbye to the green-wigged, mustachioed women.

Which way to go? If it hadn't been for Kathy, I would have canned the whole thing and gone home, figuring Julie could bloody well call me on the telephone like a sane person if she wanted to mend our fences. But, poor Kathy, she was probably sitting somewhere with Julie, waiting patiently for me, bored. If I was lucky she was bored. Possibly, she was being lavishly entertained by Julie's embarrassing stories about me. Julie knew some good ones, things even I don't care to admit to, like the time Julie made me laugh so hard in sixth-grade assembly that I peed in my pants, which everyone in the school saw. Or the time I was cheer-leading during an important high-school football game and I wiped out in a big mud puddle. Even the fact that I was a cheerleader was something I'd omitted in the c.v. I recited to Kathy. (I only became a cheerleader because it seemed to me that boys especially liked girls who stayed on the sidelines and cheered them on, and I liked boys a
lot
.)

Kathy looked up to me and I liked that. I wasn't used to it. There were so many ways Julie could shake the image of me I'd carefully constructed for Kathy, the efficient, mature, self-made executive image.

Okay, I admit, I had another reason to keep going, aside from Kathy. I wanted to solve this one. Julie was always so much better at this kind of thing than me. I'd never quite forgiven her for solving Rubik's Cube in ten tries.

On Broadway, I looked one way, then the next, but had no idea in which direction to go. Someone dressed as Munch's
The Scream
stopped me and asked me if I knew where West Broadway was. I felt like she looked. She was an out-of-towner, she said, thought West Broadway was just a particular side of Broadway, and didn't know it was a whole separate street. I pointed the way and watched her walk away, past a scavenger pushing a huge cart full of stuff down the middle of the street, looking like a World War II refugee. I don't think he was in costume. Ever since the city installed pinkish street lamps, the streets downtown have looked like one of those after-dark Brassaï photographs of 1930s Paris.

We weren't in SoHo that second night in New York, I was fairly certain of that. Little Italy? That struck enough of a chord that I headed in that direction.

Walking down Mulberry, I looked up and down every cross street. At Mulberry and Grand, and just down the street a little, I saw Funnicula, which struck a chord, the wrong chord. I'd gone there with Burke, when we were both young reporters covering the Lonnie Katz murder trial. Every night, after we filed our reports, we went there to soak up the atmosphere and fall in love. I thought about going in for a moment, but it would be too weird, now that Burke was in love with Gwen. Maybe they'll come here, I thought. Maybe not. They've found new places that belong just to them. They've started a new history. Funnicula was lost now to both of us.

Damn, that made me feel sad, even though there were good reasons why our marriage broke up and I couldn't see us together again. As they say, nothing finalizes divorce like remarriage. I kept walking down Mulberry, passing festive strangers who were a little drunk and laughing. If you're not in the right mood, the laughter of strangers can be a tad depressing, so I looked away. My eye caught on a little clump of red, green, and white tinsel stuck in a chain-link fence, glittering in the streetlight, left over from the Feast of San Gennaro, in September. For some reason, that pathetic piece of tinsel made me feel even sadder.

A little farther along Mulberry, I looked down Hester Street and saw Fonsecci's. Immediately, I recognized the name and the sign, a vertical green neon sign, like a down word in a crossword puzzle. Against the dark sky, you couldn't see the supports anchoring the sign to the building, so it looked like it was floating in the night air. This was the place.

This time when I walked in, I felt a chill. Unlike so many stops on this route, Fonsecci's hadn't changed much, and for some reason, I found that even more disorienting than Chez Biftek and Joy II. It was a dark place, redolent of cigars and floozy perfume, with a bar, a small empty stage, and a dozen round tables surrounded by deep armchairs, about half of them empty.

“I'm here to pick up the clue left for me in the charity murder mystery,” I said to the man standing behind the bar.

“Huh?” he said. He went to find someone who would know what the hell I was talking about. When he came back, he said, “If something was left, nobody on this shift knows anything about it. Maybe the evening shift, but I doubt any of them are reachable tonight.”

“Shit,” I said. “I mean, thanks anyway.”

I gave him my card and, just for the hell of it, I ordered a wine spritzer and silently toasted Julie for managing to screw up my night completely.

Was I remembering wrong? We'd been in Little Italy twice, the second night we were in New York, and the last night, when we came down here with George and Gabriel, the guy he'd coerced into being my escort. Gabriel was a male model, or so he said, with what I believe are now called Jeri curls. I didn't remember much about Gabriel, except that he and I didn't click and he split his tight black silk pants on the dance floor later while doing an unintentional Tony Manero imitation.

Maybe we'd been here the last night. No, I thought, the last night we'd come down here for dinner at Angelo's. We were definitely at Fonsecci's the second night.

So lost in thought was I that I barely noticed a man had sat down on the stool next to me.

“Excuse me,” he whispered. “Are you looking for Julie Goomey?”

Contact.

“Yes.”

“So am I,” he said, still whispering, flashing his badge, which identified him as a special agent, “Jeff Walter,” with the FBI. A friend of mine has authentic-looking FBI ID from working as an extra on “The X-Files,” and this looked a lot less authentic. The picture was ever so slightly crooked and there was a tiny air bubble between his picture and the lamination.

This guy was straight from Central Casting, a tall, clean-cut-looking white guy who kinda reminded me of this poor Mormon missionary who did his service in Five Towns and was unwittingly involved in a few of Julie's high-school pranks.

Guess he doesn't know it's against the law to impersonate an FBI agent, I thought. “I wouldn't flash that badge around here too much if I were you,” I said.

He was about to say something and I said, “Look, if you know where she is, I hope you'll tell me. I'm tired. My night is completely fucked up, I have a big problem in my personal life. My intern is no doubt hearing all sorts of terribly embarrassing stories about me and will never respect me again and I have a report due Monday morning.”

“So you haven't seen Julie.…”

“I haven't seen her since 1979,” I said, then remembered what the wig-wearing women had said about not giving information, about being tested.

“Can you tell me what you know about Julie, how you came to be involved?”

“I don't know a damn thing. I bet you know more than I do,” I said.

“Why did she send me here to meet you? I've been waiting here for three hours. I finally called your place of employment, and your assignment desk gave me your cellular number, but I don't think your phone is working, because you couldn't hear me.”