The Chelsea Girl Murders (6 page)

“Did you get a suspect?” I asked.

“We're investigating,” he said. “But you'll be glad to hear we're not sealing the crime scene, and the hotel is sending a maid up to wash the floor.”

“I'm in the clear, right?”

“We haven't officially cleared you yet,” he said, but he was no longer looking at me as if I was a killer.

In all the commotion, I'd somehow lost track of my cat, who was nowhere to be seen after the cops left. After I called down to the front desk to ask them to keep an eye peeled for an old gray cat with a glow-in-the-dark collar, I took a walk down the hallway to see if I could find her. Louise always roamed pretty freely when we lived in the East Village, and always found her way home, but this wasn't our home, and I was worried she might wander all the way back to our burned-out building. She was nowhere to be seen on the seventh floor. I asked the tattooed bodybuilder, who stood in his doorway lifting hand weights, if he'd seen her, but he didn't answer. He just stared ahead, stone-faced.

When I got back to Tamayo's apartment, Louise was scratching at the balcony doors.

“How did you get out there?” I asked as she ran inside to the kitchen, howling for breakfast. After I started the coffee maker, I made Louise the special meal she likes—prescription cat food sautéed with bok choy and low-salt, low-fat oyster sauce, then let the poor maid in to clean up the blood.

“You must have drawn the short straw,” I said to her.

“I don't understand,” she said to me.

“To get the job of cleaning a crime scene.”

“Oh, I got the job because I've cleaned bloodstains before,” she said and told me she used to work at a fancy-schmancy four-star hotel uptown that was a popular spot for socialite suicides, “people who check in to check out,” she said, in a soft voice and with the sad acceptance that comes from seeing into people's bedrooms for three decades.

“You might want to open the windows. I'm going to apply the bleach solution and the fumes can be powerful,” she said.

I took her advice, poured myself a big European-size cup of coffee, and went out on the balcony with Louise. Ever since the homicide, the giant fingers had been squeezing my chest again. Homicide used to energize me, fill me with a sense that the guilty must be found and justice must be served. But I was getting older, and crime-fighting is a young girl's game. Relax, relax, relax, I told myself as I sat down in a molded white chair outside. You're on vacation. The cops are on the job. You don't have to get any more involved in this than the average good citizen doing their duty. Let it go, let it go, let it go.

A light breeze blew. The smell of hot fat and sugar wafted down the street from Krispy Kreme doughnuts. I closed my eyes and tried to block thoughts of the murder with a daydream about the day I met Pierre, the French genius, while I was in Paris for a Women in Media conference. When Tamayo heard I was going to Paris, she insisted I call him. Tamayo knows some pretty interesting people, so I did, arranging to meet him at his favorite cafe on rue Jacob.

Pierre was there when I arrived, reading a magazine called the
Journal of Recreational Mathematics.
I recognized him from a photograph of Tamayo
's.
He hadn't seen me
.

I sat down at the next table, leaned over, and said, “That's a much more fun magazine since Tina Brown took it over
.”

He smiled. Later I learned he didn't get the joke. Though he read and wrote English perfectly, he didn't speak it very well
.

I closed my eyes, did some deep breathing. A guitar wailed somewhere, a siren somewhere else. The wind changed, and the smell of hot sugar was blown away by the smell of hot soap and bleach in a bracing blast of air from the hotel laundry. At my feet, Louise was asleep and purring in a sliver of sunlight.

The balcony doors to the east of me opened, and the Hispanic woman I'd seen throwing shoes down the hallway came out, dragging a phone with her. She was dressed in a transparent blue-and-pink flowered dress, the buttons of the bodice undone to reveal the top of a white slip. She was smoking a Gauloise, exhaling twists of dark, tarry smoke into the air, looking very blowsy and louche, as if she had stepped right out of a Tennessee Williams play, or off the cover of one of those sex-and-crime pulp paperbacks of the 1940s and '50s.

“There are so many people who had motive to kill the bastard,” she said into the telephone.

On the other side of me, the balcony doors of the west apartment opened, and Maggie, the woman with masses of frizzy brown hair came out to water her flower boxes while talking into her telephone. She was wearing pale orange pedal pushers and a pink half T-shirt.

“Too many people had motive to kill him,” the Irish woman said into her phone.

“Maggie, did you kill him?” the blowsy blond woman asked, and laughed. “You had such good revenge plans for him last week.”

“I'd never kill anyone who owes me money, Lucia,” the frizzy-haired Maggie said into her telephone. “I have an alibi. And now I don't have to get revenge.”

I was caught in a crossfire. The two women were talking on the phone to each other on either side of me, but looking out into the street, not at each other.

Maggie went on. “A lot of people may have wanted him dead.”

“Oh, Carlos is awake,” blowsy Lucia said, going back into her apartment with the phone.

“Call me later,” Maggie said, hanging up.

She looked over at me.

“Hello,” she said.

“Hello.”

“You found the body, did you?”

“The body kinda found me …”

“I'm Maggie Mason,” she said. “Who are you?”

“A friend of Tamayo's, Robin—”

Before I could finish introducing myself, her phone rang in her hand and she said, “Excuse me,” and answered it. “Hello? Oh, hi. Can't. Busy that night. I have an art action. What? I can't tell you that.”

Maggie Mason. That sound familiar.

“Roger's the dealer who handles Blair's work? Yes, I've met him and I didn't like him. Something about him just sends a rat running up my trouser leg,” Maggie said into the phone.

Involuntarily, I jerked upright. My ex-boyfriend Mad Mike O'Reilly used to say that “it sent a rat running up my trouser leg.”

“I've got to find some money. Have you ever had a day when you had to choose between food and cigarettes? Yeah? Well, have you ever had a day when you had to choose between cigarettes and Tampax? Ah, I'm not going to worry yet. I've been on the bones of me bum before,” Maggie said. “What? No, the police know I didn't kill Gerald. I have an alibi, thank God. You know Grace Rouse would love to hang it on me.”

Rats running up trouser legs, bum bones … I suddenly knew where I'd heard of Maggie Mason, aka Mary Margaret Mason, the “scourge of Kilmerry, the only dry county in all of Ireland,” as my ex-boyfriend Mike put it. Don't bother looking Kilmerry up on a map. You can't find it. That was one of Mike's whimsical nicknames. It was a tiny county, naturally, in Ulster, populated by an ascetic Protestant sect, industrious like Mormons. Maggie was the local angry rebel bent on corrupting every male in her village before she left at age seventeen for Belfast. There she met Mike, who was shooting a story for ANN foreign correspondent Reb Ryan. Mike is a cameraman.

Mike was married at the time, but that didn't stop either him or Maggie from dating. They dated off and on for years before they finally split up, after his marriage ended and before he took up with me. He had told a lot of stories about her over the years, not all of them very flattering.

Maggie, according to Mad Michael O'Reilly, was a wild woman of extreme passions with a legendary bad temper, especially when it came to the men in her life and the other women in her men's lives. Mike and I had been nonmonogamous, EXCEPT while we were both in New York, so it wouldn't have been kosher for him to be carrying on with Margaret at the Chelsea Hotel and me in the East Village. Possible, even likely, come to think of it, but not kosher.

After what I'd heard about Maggie, she'd be a lot more upset about it than I would though. As I recall, when she caught Mike with another woman, she threw the woman's clothes out of the window, sprayed her and Mike with red paint, and broke a lot of glassware. She and Mike were “off” at the time, so she wasn't in a position to be jealous. Come to think of it, wasn't Maggie Mason the woman who forwarded an ex-lover's mail to NAMBLA, the North American Man-Boy Love Association? Granted, that was years ago, but you get my point. She was a vindictive woman, and not in a fun way.

What sick-humored twist of fate had brought me here, right next door to Maggie Mason? But of course, there was a logical explanation. Tamayo had found this place at the Chelsea Hotel through a friend of Mike's, though she'd declined to name that friend, who had to be Maggie Mason.

Maybe she did have an alibi in the Gerald Woznik death, but even if she did, she was someone to avoid, clearly. While Maggie was distracted on the phone, I went back inside.

The maid was still scrubbing. Watching her scrub a dead man's bloodstains wasn't very appealing either, so I went out to get newspapers and check out the neighborhood. Just in case my mug and my name were in the morning papers, I put on sunglasses and a scarf so I wouldn't be recognized. Funny, when I was a young reporter I couldn't wait to become famous. But unfortunately, most of the recognition I got as a reporter had come mainly because of homicide, and fame brought unwanted attention for a while from a fervent coterie of hard-core masochists, all of whom had since moved on to worship more powerful women. In fact, some of my masochistic former fans were more famous than me now. Remember a story a year or so ago about a man arrested in England for stalking Margaret Thatcher? He had her face tattooed over his heart. He was my fan for a while, though I never inspired him to a tattoo. And that guy who pulled out his toenails and sent them to the perky blond cohost of a popular entertainment TV show? That guy is Elroy Vern, who stalked and kidnapped me several years ago, begging me to beat him. He's in a maximum-security psychiatric hospital now for murder and attempted murder; his correspondence is being more closely monitored.

Down at the front desk, the dark-haired, well-tailored tourist lady I'd seen before was asking questions while another of her flock stood nearby. There were still cops about and I saw one of the detectives from the night before coming out of the office of the manager, Stanley Bard.

“There could be a murderer running around this place,” the tourist lady said, alarmed.

“Madam, we'll do our utmost to ensure your security,” said the desk clerk. “These things happen everywhere, but they rarely happen here.”

The woman turned in a huff, pushing past me. Her friend followed. “A man shot in our hotel, the horrible insane man outside the convention center, and those frightening teenagers fighting in Times Square last night? I don't know if I can make it through a week of this,” she said. “On the news this morning, they said there was a slasher on the subway, on the E train, the same subway we took two days ago.”

I thought, How easy it is to tune into the things that confirm our prejudices, and tune out those things that challenge them. New York City was safer than most big cities these days. The odds of being killed by a stranger were way down; the odds of being killed by someone who was supposed to love you, however, were way up. Statistically, she was more likely to be harmed by the women she was keeping company with than by a subway slasher or a homicidal maniac.

The city was cleaner than it used to be too, but this woman, who no doubt came from a gentle, sweet-smelling place where people only die from natural causes and gun-cleaning accidents, saw just the slashers and the murderers, the lack of small amenities. I felt bad for her, that she'd seen the dead guy on the floor. Probably, she'd never seen a murder victim before, and it can be quite a shock the first time, even if you've seen it a thousand times on TV shows or on the news. I felt bad in a more general way too, that she wasn't enjoying New York, a city I came to as a tourist and fell deeply in love with.

It seemed a shame that she couldn't see everything that this city, or even just this particular street, had to offer. Twenty-third Street between Seventh and Eighth avenues is one of the city's more eclectic blocks and I walked slowly down it, trying to chill out, looking in the windows of the stores. There were two hotels—the Chelsea and the Chelsea Savoy—a YMCA, a library, a fishing-tackle store, a synagogue, a secondhand guitar store, a comic-book store, S&M cafe, two banks, a Radio Shack, three hairdressers, three holistic healers, a record store, a tax attorney, an art-supply store, a health-food store, two delis, two boutiques, an optometrist, a dentist, a stationery store, a movieplex, two subway stations, the headquarters of the Communist Party of the United States of America (CPUSA), plus its bookstore. There was a place called The 99 Cent Palace (“A Kingdom for Under a Buck”), where cheap sundry items were sold—brands of cereal and cleaning products I'd never heard of, Mexican toothpaste, cheap plastic bowls.

There were eight or nine eating places, two of them in the Chelsea Hotel, and two doughnut places, a Krispy Kreme and a place on the corner of Eighth and Twenty-Third known simply as “Donuts,” which had two horseshoe-shaped lunch counters and looked like something right out of an old
Life
magazine, as if it hadn't changed since 1945, except for the ten different flavors of Snapple in the cooler. I went inside Donuts. It was a funny little place. Its motto was proudly emblazoned on the menu signs on the wall: “Open 24 Hours. We stay open to serve you when you need us, not when we need you.”

There was just one other customer in the place, a white guy with a gray ponytail, wearing a red flannel shirt and some sort of New Age rainbow medallion around his neck. I imagined he fancied himself some kind of cross between Hemingway and Timothy Leary. An old waiter in a big white apron approached me timidly and said, in a voice barely above a whisper, “What can I get for you?”