The Chelsea Girl Murders (21 page)

But naturally, to do so would give it away that I knew him. My God! What if I'd had a fling with her boyfriend? But no, it couldn't be. Maggie hardly seemed like Pierre's type, and he certainly wasn't the only Frenchman Tamayo knew.

“I can't talk about him, really. I know I'm right about this,” she said. “Talking about it would violate the privacy of this developing thing. Are you okay? You look pale.”

“I'm fine.”

“So where do we go now?”

“I don't know.”

“Let me think a moment. Grace is baby-sitting a gay artist …”

“With a drug counselor and a psychic …”

“Must be someone who has a show coming up soon at her gallery …”

“Drinks Dr Pepper,” I remembered.

“Ruck Urkfisk!”

“He's gay?”

“Bisexual, alternating current. Sometimes he's into men, sometimes he goes for women. Never both at the same time,” Maggie said. “Driver, take us to Ludlow Street.”

She began humming a song by a popular French singer. I didn't know his name, but I recognized the tune. It was Pierre's favorite song.

chapter thirteen

Grace Rouse and Ruck Urkfisk were getting into a cab when we arrived at Ludlow Street, which gave us the opportunity to say “Follow that cab.” We followed it all the way to Kafka's in the meat-packing district on Manhattan's Lower West Side. There was an arts fund-raiser, a “performance-artathon,” going on and admission was $100 per head, which I put on my corporate credit card. Proceeds were supposedly going to an arts program for homeless kids.

Inside, it was very dark, lit only by glowing pillars of blue neon, except for an elevated, spotlit circle in the center of the room, where a performance artist was cutting some guy's hair to punk-rock music. It sounded like Richard Hell and the Voidoids. Equipped with an electric razor in one hand while dipping with the other into several pots of hair goo in glowing fluorescent colors, the “artist” improvised on the heads of three models, taking out whole chunks of hair with dramatic swoops and molding hair still on the head into colorful shapes with the fluorescent goo.

“Where did Grace and Urkfisk go?” I whispered to Maggie.

“I don't know.”

“Let's get a drink,” I said. “I'm parched. Then we can split up and circle the room.”

The bar was pretty jammed, and it took a while to get to the front for our complimentary soda, beer, or cocktails made with Blavod, a black vodka colored with some tasteless herb. Black vodka was pretty good, and helped hide the dead cockroach embedded in the base of every Lucite glass used at Kafka's, but vodka and I are a bad combination. I got a 7-Up and began moving through the crowd looking for Grace Rouse.

Once my eyes adjusted to the weird lighting, I saw many familiar faces, a few of people I'd seen at the hotel, some friends of friends, but many more faces I recognized from celebrity news and the party pages in the back of
Paper
magazine. There was a guy there that I'd conscientiously avoided in the past, Howard Gollis, this incredibly sexy and completely insane guerrilla comic I had a brief thing with after my divorce was final and my transitional man had transited. Also, there was a guy avoiding me, Gus, an actor I'd neglected and abused emotionally while I was wrapped up in a homicide case. Between the Kafkaesque setting, the performance artists, and the old boyfriends, this was turning into a Fellini movie.

The hair artist was done and was replaced by a guy who hammered a nail in the floor. That was a quick act, and made everyone else laugh for some reason I couldn't figure out. After the nail guy came the Human Disco Ball, who wore a suit covered with tiny mirrors, rather like Tamayo's coffee table. Several other people held flashlights and/or foil reflectors, creating weird sprays and currents of lights that rotated around the room as he moved. That provided just enough light to pick out Grace Rouse in a knot of people near the back of the room.

She was standing with a tall artist who must have been Ruck Urkfisk. He was a strange-looking man, with very pale skin and rosy cheeks, and red-blond hair that had a lavender aura from the blue neon. Rouse's bright auburn hair had a deep purple glow. She was talking with Miriam Grundy. As I got closer to them, the Human Disco Ball took a bow, and Howard Gollis moved into the spotlight and began ranting loudly. His thing tonight was talking dirty in the voices of Donald Duck and Rudy Giuliani. There was no hope of speaking to Rouse or Grundy until he shut up, so I withdrew into the shadows until he had finished. When he was done, the emcee, a small, butch woman with big, round glasses, announced a fifteen-minute break before the second round of artists came up. This allowed the next performer to get his props in place and allowed me the chance to find and speak with Grace Rouse and Miriam Grundy.

But Miriam Grundy was leaving and Grace Rouse turned toward the far corner of the room. When she did, she saw me. I had to choose between Grundy and Rouse, and I chose to follow Rouse and Urkfisk. They were heading up the staircase, which lead to the VIP room.

At the foot of the stairs, a bouncer stopped me.

“I have to speak to Grace Rouse. I have an important message from Miriam Grundy,” I said.

He was hesitant.

“Seriously. I have to speak with her.…”

“I know you from somewhere,” he said. “Are you a friend of Tamayo Scheinman's?”

“Yes!”

“Robin, right?”

“Yeah.”

“Go on up,” he said.

I haven't been in many VIP rooms, and when I have it was always because of famous friends, either Tamayo or Claire. Every hot club in New York has a VIP room, reportedly a place where the celebs can be around other celebs without being bothered by the attention, insecurities, and gushing of us riffraff. You can't blame them, and it was a courtesy to the performers to stay out of sight as much as possible, lest the celebs distract attention from the artists.

Sometimes, the only thing that seems to unite the people in celebrity purdah is celebrity. Claire and I were once in a VIP room with a rapper named Puffy, a reedy blond model with a weird Scandinavian name, and Salman Rushdie (who, incidentally, gets out more than I do).

This VIP room was very dark, with the same glowing-blue neon lighting. It was relatively empty. A young woman who looked a bit like that girl in the teen show about five orphans was canoodling in a corner with a boy who costarred in
American Pie.
Or was it one of the
Scream
movies? On another sofa, a guy in a suit was talking into a cell phone about “locking in that director.” I had no idea who he was.

But Rouse was not there, nor was the man I assumed to be Urkfisk. Then I saw the second set of stairs. This place had a back exit for celebrity escapes, which opened up on a concrete loading dock under a black-iron canopy. Five metal steps led down to the street, which smelled of rotting meat from the meat-packing place next door.

I looked both ways down the dark cobblestone street, but Rouse and the crazy artist she was minding were gone. Maggie came out the front way and saw me.

“Where did you go? Where is Grace Rouse?”

“She and Urkfisk got away.”

“They didn't stay long.”

“She saw me. Maybe she left because she saw me and wanted to avoid me,” I said. “Miriam Grundy didn't stay long either.”

“She never stays long at these things. She shows up so the papers will mention it. She likes the attention, and the charity likes the attention she brings to them.”

“Where would they go?”

“Back to Urkfisk's studio so he can paint some more.”

“At night?”

“He paints best at night,” Maggie said.

We hopped a cab back to Urkfisk's studio. Maggie waited inside it while I went to the big steel door in the front of the building and buzzed. A video camera in the gable above the door rotated and focused on me, but nothing happened. The intercom didn't speak and the door didn't open. I buzzed three more times, long and hard, but if anyone was there, they weren't answering.

I got back in the cab and said, “I think they're in there. The video camera turned right to me and focused.…”

“It's probably automatic. When someone buzzes, the camera turns to them.”

“If they're not up there, where are they?”

“Maybe they went to another party. They have to come back here sooner or later. We should wait.”

It was starting to rain. Waiting on the street in the shadows was out of the question, but Sunil, our cabbie, was happy to wait as long as we wanted, with the engine cut but the meter running. For him, it was an opportunity to read a chapter in his engineering textbook, and then take a nap.

“How did you like the performance-artathon?” Maggie asked.

“Some of it was interesting and provocative. But some … What was with the guy who hammered the nail in the floor?”

“Art joke,” she said. “He was parodying Mark Kostabi, who once got two hundred people to watch him hammer a nail into the floor at a gallery.”

“Why did Mark Kostabi hammer a nail in the floor originally?”

“I think the art in that was getting two hundred people to come watch him do it and call it art.” She looked out the window, through the blur of rain, and laughed.

“What?”

“When I first saw the man in the bad toupee, I thought he was making an artistic statement of some kind,” she said. “Challenging aesthetic prejudices.”

“It's getting hard to tell the difference between what is art and what is life,” I said.

“I remember more about you now,” Maggie said. “You're Tamayo's friend who was involved in some other homicide cases.”

“Uh-huh,” I said.

“She never used your name. She always called you her friend who got involved in murder cases. You're also her friend who works in television.”

“Uh-huh,” I said.

“I thought those were two different friends,” she said. “But I don't follow the news much, and I don't own a TV anymore.”

“You don't own a TV anymore?”

“I gave it away one day.”

“Why?”

“I was recovering from a relationship, with that mad homeboy Michael O'Reilly,” she said. “I was depressed, drinking too much, addicted to TV. One day, I heard the announcer say, ‘This
Brady Bunch
marathon was brought to you by Cortaid Ointment and Rice-A-Roni.' And I thought, This is not how I want to be spending my time.”

“That's willpower,” I said. Pierre was antitelevision too.

“Yes,” she said, and began to hum that French song again.

It was too much of a coincidence. Her beau and Pierre had to be the same guy. How could Pierre like Maggie better than he liked me? I'd been pretty sweet the whole time I was with him—he just brought that out in me. We seemed to be simpatico, there seemed to be a bond … But Maggie and Pierre could communicate. She had studied art in Paris and modeled there when younger, she knew the city, and she spoke French.

Right then, I had a Feminist Moment, where I thought of blurting out that I knew him too, that he'd seduced me and charmed me in Paris, because she deserved to know. The person we should be mad at was HIM, dammit. But that isn't the way it works when tender little hearts are involved. I was angry with him, angry with Tamayo for being his unwitting pimp, and with myself for being such a fool, but I was angriest with Maggie for falling in love with a man I just that moment realized I was in love with, and for making him fall in love with her too, through her tricks and wiles, her
Man Trap
plot. I was hurt, embarrassed, and very afraid of the wrath of Maggie Mason if she ever found this out.

What a dishonest jerk Pierre was. Or was he? For all I knew, given my lousy command of the French language, he had told me about her, right off the bat, but in French or Inspector Clouseau English. And maybe he thought I'd accepted that, because I responded in English.

Maggie kept humming that stupid song, and finally I said, “Don't you know any other songs?”

She shut up.

We waited for a long time. Maggie fell asleep, and then I fell asleep. In the morning, Sunil the cabbie awoke first, and woke us up. It was daybreak and the rain had stopped. If Rouse and Urkfisk had gone in or out of the building, it was while we were sleeping. The cab fare by now was probably more than the per capita income in the village Sunil had come from. More miscellaneous promotional expenses.

“She's dodging you,” Maggie said.

“Why? Unless she killed Gerald after all.”

“Brilliant! You figured it out,” she said.

“That still doesn't explain where Nadia is, or why Grace called her.”

“Unless … she thought Nadia was Gerald's lover with the ‘baby,' and she came to the hotel, killed Gerald, and killed Nadia by mistake. Then she cooked up that story about me to throw you and the cops off.”

“We have to get to her. I'll call Roo in about an hour when he's up. How will we get to Miriam Grundy?”

“I'll get to her through Ben,” she said. “He owes me a favor. I was saving that favor for a desperate occasion but …”

“I must go home,” Sunil said. “I could drop you here.”

“Drop me,” I said. “Take Maggie back to the hotel.”

As they drove off, I sat down on the stoop of the building next to Urkfisk's building.

Ten minutes later, Sunil and Maggie were back. She jumped out of the cab, handed me a bag, hopped back in the cab, and they sped off. It was coffee and a raspberry cheese muffin.

Jesus, that was sweet of her, I thought. My feelings about her were all mixed up. I was afraid of her because of the stories Mike had told about her, I was jealous of her because of Pierre, but she'd been a real pal on this Nadia case.

The storm had blown in from the sea and there was a crisp salt tang left in the air. It was about six
A.M
. and people were starting to appear on the street. I sat on the stoop, drinking take-out coffee and watching Urkfisk's door and was about to give up and go back to the hotel when the door opened. I jumped up.