The Apostrophe Thief (16 page)

Waltzing Brünnhilde segued into a second song; it was aggressive, challenging—what had Kevin Kirby said? A
more pissed-off sound than even speed metal
. One or more members of the group frequently emphasized the fuck-you attitude of the music by giving the audience the finger. The audience loved it.

A brief pause followed the second song while the lead singer and the audience exchanged a few insults. Gloria said into Marian's ear, “Do you know who that is? That's Rex Regent. He useta be with the Sumo Surfers. What's he doin' in a dump like this?”

“I really don't know,” Marian replied soberly.

The music started again. A strobe light was playing over the audience, while the stage went through a constantly changing play of colored light. Gloria gave Marian her bar stool as she herself started gyrating to the evening's rhythms. As Waltzing Brünnhilde moved from song to song to give-and-take with the audience, Marian began to think it was never going to end. At one point Rex Regent mooned the audience. A few members of the audience returned the compliment.

The act came to a premature close when five members of the audience, three women and two men, clambered up on the stage and jumped Waltzing Brünnhilde's lead singer. They tore his Jockey shorts off him and then fought among themselves for possession. Laughing, Rex Regent got to his feet and stood there a moment, making sure everyone got a good look, before turning and clomping off the stage, his army boots making hollow sounds in the wooden floor. The stage lights dimmed; the show was over.

Gloria looked at Marian in mock sorrow and said, “And you're goin' to resign a job that pays you to watch a dude get his underwear ripped off.”

Marian had to laugh. “True, there aren't many jobs like that. But we've got a problem. How do you get through
that
?”
That
was about half the audience climbing up on the stage and pushing its way toward the backstage area. “You'll never get to Vasquez through that mob.”

“They're after Rex Regent.” Gloria leaned over the bar and gestured to the bartender. “Is there another way to the dressin' rooms?”

“See the Exit sign?” He pointed. “Don't go up the stairs. Go down the hall, straight back.”

“Thanks, mon.” She and Marian exchanged a silent thumbs-up and Gloria headed for the Exit sign. Marian waited a few minutes and followed, but took the stairs up to the street instead of going backstage. She waited there, where they'd be coming out.

Once she was approached by a trio of young men looking for a lone woman to hassle, once by a man dressed as a clown who wanted to know how much she charged, and once by a uniformed officer who told her to move along. She got rid of all of them by flashing her badge.

It was nearly half an hour before Gloria and Vasquez appeared. Marian breathed a sigh of relief; the first hurdle was over. Keeping other people between them, she followed for about a block and a half, to a pizzeria; Vasquez was hungry after his gig. She peeked through the glass and saw Gloria doing the ordering for both of them. Marian checked the time: eleven minutes to two.

Gloria had twenty-four thousand dollars in her bag, twenty-four to avoid a too-pat round number. She was to tell Vasquez she could get her hands on three, maybe four more thousand. It was a nice piece of change for someone who played for scale in a rathole like The Esophagus and rented out his muscles to Ernie Nordstrom between gigs. Captain Murtaugh had had trouble getting the cash; the crime they were investigating was just too minor to risk that kind of money. But he had prevailed, somehow, and right now Gloria was doing her desperate-woman act, over pepperoni and anchovies. Thank god Xandria Priest had kept a diary.

Marian was stamping her feet to warm them when Vasquez finally came out—alone. He turned onto Bleecker Street; she fell in behind him and took a walkie-talkie out of her bag.

Before long it crackled. “Marian?”

“We're heading west on Bleecker.” Just then two black teenagers saw her coming and separated just enough to block her way. “Don't even
think
about it,” she snarled and plowed through. They let her go, contenting themselves with yelling a few obscenities after her. “Gloria? He's going into the subway. IRT uptown.”

“Shit.” The radios would be useless. “I'll get the car and stay on Third Avenue until I hear from you.”

“Right.”

It was what they'd planned, in case Vasquez took a subway or bus; but Marian had been hoping he'd feel flush enough to stop a cab. She followed him down into the subway. Past the turnstile, Vasquez looked around with studied casualness, his gaze passing over Marian to linger on a nondescript man reading a newspaper. Marian edged behind a vending machine.

The train roared into the station. She got into the car next to the one Vasquez took and stood at the rear, where she could keep an eye on him through the double windows. The man with the newspaper had boarded the same car as Vasquez.

They rode only three stops. Marian stepped behind a pillar as Vasquez waited to make sure the newspaper man was not getting off. Only when the train doors slid shut did he turn toward the exit stairs.

Up on the street, Marian pulled out the walkie-talkie. “Gloria? We're heading east on Twenty-third, south side of the street.”

“Gotcha.”

Vasquez was turning right onto Second Avenue just as Gloria pulled up to the curb. Quickly she and Marian changed places, Gloria now following on foot. But Vasquez went only half a block farther, crossing the street to a white-stone apartment building. A doorman let him in.

So he's known there
, Marian thought, pulling up by a fire hydrant. She locked the car and met Gloria in the middle of the street, her heart beginning to pound as they got closer to their target. They ran up to the glass door of the building and banged on it with their fists, holding up their badges when the elderly doorman came to see what they wanted. He let them in.

“The man who just came in here,” Marian said. “You know him?”

The doorman nodded. “Mr. Norris's nephew. He comes here a lot.”

So he wasn't
“
Ernie Nordstrom
”
at home
. “Which apartment?”

“Seven-oh-four. What's going on?”

Neither Marian nor Gloria answered as they hurried to the one elevator and hit the button. The elevator was already on its way down, so they didn't have long to wait. The doors opened … and Vasquez erupted from the elevator car like a sprinter training for the Olympics. “Stop!” Marian yelled.

He didn't stop. Gloria was hard on his heels, though, and brought him down with a flying tackle just as he reached the door. Then Marian was on top of both of them, struggling to get a pair of cuffs on Vasquez. When she'd finally succeeded, all three of them sat panting on the floor. The elderly doorman shuffled as close as he dared. “
What's
going on?” he complained.

Gloria pulled out her badge and held it in front of Vasquez's face. He sighed in resignation … and then did a double take as he recognized Gloria. “Yeah, it's me,” she said. “Come on—get up.”

“What were you running from?” Marian asked him.

“He can't understand you.” Gloria repeated the question in Spanish, to be answered by a stream of words that seemed to involve a great deal of repetition. “He keeps saying he didn't do it.” She and Marian exchanged a look of apprehension. “Oh-oh.”

They got Vasquez to his feet and steered him toward the elevator. He hung back, until both women spoke to him in their tough-cop voices. He kept repeating that he didn't do it.

“I wish someone would tell me what's going on,” the doorman said waspishly as the elevator doors closed.

All the way up, Vasquez kept up a steady stream of protest until Gloria finally told him to shut up. The seventh floor consisted of one narrow hallway with apartments opening off both sides. The door to 704 was standing ajar.

The apartment was cold. Although she already had a good idea of what to expect, Marian felt her heart sink when they walked in and found the dead man on the floor. He'd been strangled with a fancy tasseled pull rope, the kind that was used to summon servants in Victorian homes. His tongue protruded from one side of his mouth and both eyes were open. The dead man was short, stocky, and middle-aged, and he was surrounded by movie and theater memorabilia. Ernie Nordstrom.

An agitated Vasquez was still protesting his innocence. Marian bent over and laid her palm alongside the dead man's neck. “Rigor's started,” she said. “Tell him we know he didn't do it. Nordstrom's been dead at least an hour, probably longer, since the room's so chilly. And we know where Vasquez has been the past …”—she looked at her watch—“three hours and seven minutes. Tell him we're his alibi.”

Gloria spoke to Vasquez at some length, and gradually he began to calm down. Marian motioned them out into the hallway and used a handkerchief to pull the door to after her. “I'll go look for a phone and call it in,” she said. “Will you be all right here with him?”

“Oh sure,” Gloria said. “This boy ain't goin' nowhere.”

Marian nodded and stepped back into the elevator. As the doors closed, she leaned tiredly against the side of the car. Whoever would have thought that her nice, easy,
friendly
little case was going to turn into a full-fledged homicide.

11

Captain Murtaugh looked as tired as Marian felt. Two uniformed officers had taken Vasquez in to be held for questioning, and the men from the Medical Examiner's office had removed the body. But the Crime Scene Unit was taking longer than usual to finish up; all the
stuff
Ernie Nordstrom had accumulated made their job difficult. Gloria Sanchez was standing straight up with her eyes closed; Marian was convinced she was sound asleep. None of them could sit down, because there was no place
to
sit.

Ernie Nordstrom had lived in a one-bedroom apartment, if living was what it was. The bedroom held a narrow cot and a chest of drawers; in the living room was a desk and a chair; on the desk was a six-inch TV of the brand taken from the Broadhurst. And except for a narrow pathway, every other inch of floor space was taken up with memorabilia. Clothes racks holding costumes, cardboard cartons marked with some cryptic code the dead man had devised, stacks of paper items, props, personal articles—Nordstrom had covered the spectrum of show biz collectibles. The kitchen cabinets were full of memorabilia, more costumes hung from the shower curtain rod and were draped across the foot of the cot, and the chair by the desk was stacked high with lobby cards. What little wall space there was, was filled with framed theater posters and photographs of actors and entertainers. Dealing was Ernie Nordstrom's entire life.

“Cold in here,” Captain Murtaugh said. “Sanchez?” Gloria opened one eye. “The doorman claims Vasquez was Ernie Nordstrom's nephew. Anything to that?”

“Nope, that was just Nordstrom's cover story,” she said in accent-free English, “to explain Vasquez's appearances here at all hours of the night.” She managed to get the other eye open. “Vasquez told me about it while we were waiting for the CSU to get here. The two didn't look anything alike—it was a dumb cover. But Marian was right about Vasquez. He was just hired muscle. I don't think he even knew what was going down half the time. He just lifted and carried whatever he was told.”

“Then Nordstrom must have spoken Spanish,” Murtaugh pointed out.

“Must have.”

Marian studied Gloria closely. Gone were the big earrings, the jangly bracelets, the bright yellow tee of earlier in the evening. The wild hairdo had been tucked under a black cap, and the safari jacket had been reversed to show a dark green corduroy—which she now wore over a black sweater. No wonder Vasquez hadn't recognized her at first; she was a different woman. She was neither Whoopi Goldberg nor Chita Rivera.

“Gloria,” Marian said, bemused, “you look like … yourself.”

“Yeah. I figured nobody'd know me this way.”

Gloria and Vasquez had hit it off right from the start, backstage at The Esophagus. Everyone else was crowding around Rex Regent; so when Gloria made a beeline for Vasquez, he'd felt puffed up and receptive. He told her she looked like Elizabeth Peña; she told him he had better pecs than Ahnold. Matters were progressing nicely until the subject of the diary came up. It had taken Gloria a long time to get Vasquez to overcome his initial suspicion; but when they were in the pizza parlor, she'd shown him the cash she was carrying and promised to get more. That had started the wheels turning in Vasquez's head. If that diary was worth twenty-four-thousand-plus to this woman who'd appeared out of nowhere, might it not be worth even more to somebody else? In fact, couldn't there be dozens of people whose dirty secrets were recorded in the diary? The trouble was, Vasquez couldn't read much English.

Gloria had hit upon the strategy of saying all she wanted from the diary was one page or possibly two. She'd pay him all the money if he'd just let her destroy a couple of pages; then he could do whatever he damn well pleased with the rest of the diary. She even offered to translate for him. That appealed to him; he liked the idea of being on to something that even Ernie Nordstrom didn't know about. So he'd gone for the deal. He'd told Gloria to order another pizza and wait until he got back. But finding Nordstrom dead had scared him so much he'd not even stopped to look for the diary.

“Okay, Captain, we're finished.” The three men and one woman from the Crime Scene Unit packed up their gear and left.

“Quick sweep,” Captain Murtaugh said to Marian and Gloria. “Just get an idea of what we've got here. Leave a detailed examination until after we've had some sleep. I'll take the desk.”

Gloria went into the bedroom to look through Ernie Nordstrom's chest of drawers, and Marian started a quick sort through the stacks of papers everywhere. After a while she found what she was looking for. “Captain. The
Apostrophe Thief
scripts.”