The Chelsea Girl Murders (12 page)

She left the number for the convent, adding that Phil had been coming by every day to visit her. “You should come by,” she said.

I didn't call her back. But she had given me an idea. I called Phil and asked if he could do me a favor and install one of his superb security systems at Tamayo's. If I'd had the time, I'd have set up my own system, which is cheap, easy, and yet innocent looking. But it takes time to grow the poison ivy. It takes time to fill the tin cans with marbles and string them together. It takes time to record the loud, insane laughter that greets an intruder who doesn't know to pull the little wire sticking out under the door that disables the system.

“Luv, you don't know how much I would like to leave New Jersey and come in to see you,” he said. In the background, I could hear Helen and her kin arguing politics, which is a subject Phil tries to avoid as much as possible.

After I hung up, I asked Rocky again where Plotzonia was.

“It won't help find Nadia if you know. It will only lead to trouble.”

“How?”

“You might tell someone.”

“You have to trust me,” I said. “I'm trying to help, goddammit.”

Unyielding, he responded by spooning another large ladle of chili into his mouth. He was trying to do it in a cool, defiant way, but some of the red-bean goo dribbled down the side of his mouth and onto his chin. He wiped it away angrily. I found this oddly endearing.

“Okay, okay,” I said. “Let's just relax awhile. Clear our heads. There's no beer, but we have some wine.”

Over goblets of a nice burgundy, I asked him a few questions—what kind of music did he like, what was the last movie he saw, coaxing him into more specific territory that might reveal the name of his homeland or some pertinent information. But it's a global village. His favorite music was hip hop and rock, the last movie he saw was
The Blair Witch Project.
We talked for a good hour, but I learned little.

“You grew up here in America?” I asked.

“Here and in my homeland.”

“Where did you meet Nadia?”

“At a party.”

“In America?”

“Yes.”

“Jeez, slow down, Rocky, I'm being buried under this blizzard of information,” I said, getting up to let Phil in.

Phil was good with the kid. When I'd told Rocky I wanted to bring a friend in to secure the joint, he had protested. But Phil disarmed him with his self-effacing charm and a few funny stories of Mrs. Ramirez among the Good Sisters. At the same time, Phil armed me, giving me Mrs. Ramirez's pearl-handled pistol and some bullets, which he'd insisted on taking from Mrs. R. before she went into the convent. I hate guns, especially illegal, unregistered weapons. But it wasn't the first time I'd had to break the law for a higher purpose, i.e., to prevent me from becoming a headless torso buried upside down in the Arthur Kill landfill. I calculated the risk this way: This was the age of
Titanic
and
Shakespeare in Love
, and no jury in the land would convict a woman for aiding and abetting so-called romance once this story came out (and was properly spun). As far as my professional reputation was concerned, I programmed a network aimed at women and girls and this kind of publicity couldn't hurt us, provided the story had a happy ending. That was the trick.

While Phil installed the security system with the help of the manboy, I called every friend of Tamayo's in New York who I could remember meeting. Most of these were comedians and none were home. I got a series of “disconnected number” recordings and answering machines, some with “funny” outgoing messages, and some with very quick, straightforward messages. It seemed the funnier the comic, the more straight the answering-machine message.

When I exhausted the New York friends, I started dialing the out-of-town Americans. After more answering machines, I got my friend Claire, a White House correspondent in Washington.

“Oh, you're talking about Tamayo's underground railroad,” Claire said.

“Underground railroad?”

“For runaway lovers.”

“Underground railroad for runaway lovers. Are you a part of it?”

“I haven't participated yet except financially,” Claire said. “But yes, I knew about it. You know, these young girls—and boys—from restricted cultures are attracted to her freedom and attitude. She's a magnet for them.”

“Yeah, I've seen that in Tokyo and New York too, the kids who come up to her with their tales of woe,” I said.

“She has been helping some of these kids she meets, here and there, for about a year.”

“Helping them how?”

“With money, contacts, and inspiration too I guess. She has helped a few escape with their lovers before arranged marriages could take place. She finagled college tuition for a girl she met in a refugee camp who wanted to go to school against her family's wishes,” Claire said. “In Thailand, she bought a young girl and her brother out of prostitution. Those are just the ones I know about, because I helped finance them.”

“Jeez, Tamayo never told me about an underground railroad. But then, we've both been traveling a lot,” I said. Still, I was miffed at being left out of this. Did Tamayo not trust me?

“She probably forgot or didn't want to bother you. She has this railroad organized very loosely,” Claire said. “Information is given out on a need-to-know basis because of the danger these kids could be in. It was kind of inspired by those anarchist econuts you were mixed up with last year.”

“Do you know this girl named Nadia? I think she's from a former Soviet republic or eastern bloc country? She came through on this ‘railroad.'”

“No,” Claire said.

“Do you know who else is on this railroad?”

“No. I don't know much. I just write the checks. And I haven't heard from Tamayo in weeks. If I hear from her, I'll have her call you. I haven't heard from you in a while either. How are you?”

We chitchatted for a bit. Claire was just back from the road herself, having gone with the President to California for a fundraiser followed by a Pacific Rim economic summit in Vancouver, Canada. She was still seeing her guy, an attaché at the Chilean embassy.

“And you? Really sorry about the fire. But when God closes a door—”

“My foot is in it at the time,” I finished. “It's okay, actually. I haven't really had time to think about the fire because of the murder and the missing girl …”

“Are you seeing anyone?”

“Well, I met this guy in Paris, a friend of Tamayo's …”

“Pierre?” Claire said.

“Yes. You know him?”

“He's a dreamboat, isn't he? I met him there last year. If I wasn't so in love with Salvatore, I would have jumped him,” she said. “Did you?”

“None of your business.”

“Since when?”

“Someone is at the door, Claire. I've got to go,” I lied, and hung up. It made me so uncomfortable that she knew Pierre too, for some reason.

“Take a look at this, Robin,” Phil said. “This is a dandy system. I ran the wire around the balcony doors, right under the baseboards. You can't even see them. You'll have to punch in a code on the keyboard outside to get in, but it'll make you feel secure.”

He demonstrated how it worked, and how to program in the entry code. I picked my birthday, 0818, and made Rocky memorize it too.

I wanted to get Phil alone to find out what he had learned from Rocky, but it was almost suppertime. Rocky was hungry—again—and so was Phil. Phil offered to cook for us, but I owed him. I put on Tamayo's Escher print apron, hanging from a white mannequin hand on the wall by the refrigerator, and cooked for the menfolk. At Rocky's age, it wouldn't be long before he went back into the bathroom with
Cosmo
, leaving Phil and me alone to talk about him.

While I cooked, Phil talked about out East Village neighbors. Phil was worried about Mrs. Ramirez at the convent. Without her crime watch to keep her occupied, she was turning more and more to prayer and penance, and things were getting a bit competitive with some of the other nuns, vis-à-vis, “Who loves Jesus best?” Mrs. Ramirez had sniped a bit about one of the nuns in particular, Sister Teresa, who ran the convent bakery marketing department and spent four times as much time watching financial news on cable as she did on her knees in prayer. Mrs. Ramirez had kindly pointed this out to Sister Teresa at breakfast, prompting Sister Teresa to thank Mrs. Ramirez for her record-keeping and concern, and to point out kindly that she, Sister Teresa, had been in this nun business for sixteen years. Her devotion to the Savior was total, she assured Mrs. R., and her interest in financial matters was purely in service to the mission of the convent. At that point, the Mother Superior changed the subject to the work of an overseas mission, thereby preventing a really ugly slap-fight between an old, blue-haired lady and a nun.

“I was hoping you'd be able to go out and visit her, luv,” Phil said. “Tell her some news, get her mind on other things. But it looks like you're tied up.”

“Yeah, but give her my best when you see her,” I said. “Et cetera, et cetera.”

“I shall. Have they arrested anyone in that murder?”

“Not yet. But the consensus among people in the hotel is that it was a crime of passion,” I said. “What a shame. That happens all too often; people think they're in love, end up killing each other.”

If Rocky picked up the cleverly hidden moral of the story, he didn't show it.

“I hope they get the guilty party,” Phil said.

“Me too. Dinner's ready.”

While we ate, Phil and I tried to wheedle something out of Rocky about his homeland, about Nadia's friends, where they were planning to be married and honeymoon, in case Nadia had gone there. He assured me she had not. It was hopeless. The boy would not talk. After two plates of food, a beer, and a big bowl of ice cream, he excused himself, saying he wanted to take a bath, and left me and Phil alone.

“Let's take our coffee out to the balcony,” Phil said, acting as though he was the host and I was the guest.

It was just nightfall. The pale pink streetlights gave a surreal, romantic cast to the street, a kind of noirish elegance that reminded me of Paris. The Chelsea Hotel sign, an old-fashioned neon sign suspended vertically from the middle of the building, started to buzz, flickered, and then lit up. Some of the letters were orange neon, some pink, all mixed up together. Across the street, the orange YMCA sign was on too. The moon hung in the sky exactly between these two signs. From Lucia's apartment came the strains of that spooky, sad carnival music she liked so much.

“So where's Rocky from?” I asked.

“I'd say somewhere between Central Asia and Eastern Europe. I haven't spent much time in that part of the world and I wasn't able to pinpoint it any better than that. He doesn't speak Arabic, so he probably isn't a Muslim, and he isn't Turkish—I've been to Turkey and he doesn't have a Turkish accent,” he said. “How did these kids end up here to begin with? I'm not clear on that,” Phil said.

“Tamayo is apparently running, or part of, some underground railroad for runaway brides and/or star-crossed lovers,” I said.

“Star-crossed lovers. Nadia and Rocky came all this way, with all this subterfuge, all for love,” Phil said admiringly, though he really should have known better, having been married “twice in the Church of England and once in the church of Dolly and Phil.”

“The fools,” I said.

“Oh, you're so cynical. And why? Didn't you meet a man during your travels?”

“Who? Pierre? That was just a fling,” I said.

“Flings can lead to real things.”

“Not in this case. We're wildly incompatible. He's classy, I'm rough; he speaks French, I speak English; I work in television, he doesn't even watch television unless one of his pals from the Sorbonne is on some egghead program. The Sorbonne—is that class or what, Phil? This guy has class out the wazoo.”

“Look at me and Helen. I'm a libertarian. She's a Communist. She's a homebody. I'm a traveling man. We worked it out.”

“Yeah, but you both speak the same language,” I said, then corrected it to “languages,” as Phil and Helen both spoke Esperanto, in addition to English.

“You should be spending your vacation in Paris,” he said.

“It was just a fling, Phil,” I said. “Besides, he's off with his Sorbonne scientist pals conducting some big particle experiment for the next month. He's busy.”

“Well, keep the faith, luv. Now, I'd better get back to Helen before her right-wing relatives tear her apart,” he said. “Or tear each other apart. There's an object lesson. Helen's brother and sister-in-law speak the same language, value the same things, vote the same way, pray to the same God, and they're as mean as starving dogs to each other.”

“Go figure.”

“You call me if you need anything else.”

“Thanks, Phil,” I said.

When we turned to go back into the apartment, I noticed that Maggie's balcony door was slightly ajar. Figuring she was home, I gave her a call as soon as Phil left. Her machine answered. I parked myself in the kitchen, by the front door, so when Maggie Mason came home, I'd be able to corner her. To pass the time, I read from
Man Trap
, chapter three. Chapters one and two had dealt with how to bait the trap to lure the man in. Chapter three dealt with ways to cripple the man so he wouldn't run away before the trap snapped fully shut, somewhere around chapter ten: These were tricks to undermine his self-esteem. Whatever his vulnerability, one was to go for it. Did he worry about his weight or his looks? Don't reassure him that he looks great to you. Too easy. A missed opportunity! Instead, the book advised, comment that while you've never found “chubby” men attractive in the past, you like him. When you go for dinner, suggest he try the heart-healthy low-cal entrée instead of the steak. Comment favorably but obliquely on other men's physiques—“Joe is looking very trim these days, isn't he?”