The Chelsea Girl Murders (8 page)

Rounding the corner to Twenty-third Street, I noticed that the man in the bad toupee was behind me. I speeded up because I was getting a vaguely menacing vibe from him, and not just because I've been menaced by wig-wearing people more than once. Something else about him spooked me.

Speed-walking, and half-looking behind me as I did, I headed toward the hotel, and ran smack dab into a young man who was lurking in the grainy shadows between streetlights, next to the Capitol Fishing Tackle Store.

It was the manboy. He had looked more impressive through the distorted fish-eye peephole than he did now. He looked about sixteen and kind of pathetic.

“Where have you been?” I asked. “Where's Nadia? I thought she met up with you and you two had eloped.”

“We didn't meet up. Do you know where she is?” He had the same accent as Nadia, which sounded kind of Slavic and kind of Central Asian. Couldn't put my finger on it, but it landed somewhere between Pakistan and Germany.

Meanwhile, the man in the bad toupee had walked past and vanished.

“Well, obviously I haven't heard from her, if I thought she was with you. You'd better come upstairs,” I said.

He came in with me, looking around himself in a fearful manner. He was a nervous young man.

“You didn't hook up with Nadia at all?” I asked.

“No,” he snarled.

“Well, she's gone. No sign of her anywhere. Where would she go?”

“I don't know. I thought you might know,” he said. He was acting very resentful and suspicious of me for some reason.

“I don't know her at all and we didn't talk much,” I said. “I've had my own shit to look after. Someone was killed here last night.”

He didn't seem to hear this. “When did she leave?”

“Early evening, six, seven
P.M
. What happened to you? I saw you come into the hotel yesterday, but you never showed at the apartment.”

“I didn't know this was the right apartment, because you told me the night before it was the wrong apartment …”

“So you just wandered the hotel hoping to run into her?”

He looked at me angrily.

“Look, I'm sorry I sent you away the other night,” I said. “I didn't know who you were or why you were here,” I said.

“Yes, and you made a lot of trouble for me and for Nadia,” he said. “You have no idea.”

“Well, as I said, I'm sorry I sent you away. But no one in their right mind would let a strange man into their apartment, especially at four
A.M
. Don't lay a guilt trip on me.”

In Tamayo's apartment, I offered him a seat at the kitchen table and a beer. I got one for me too, and sat down across from him.

“You got a name?”

“Nadia may have given you my code name …”

“She didn't give you any name.”

“Rocky.”

“Rocky, would you feel better if we called the cops? You could file a missing persons report …”

“Not yet.”

“Why?”

“It'll ruin everything,” he said. He took a Marlboro out of a slightly crumpled soft pack and said, “Do you have a match?”

“No,” I said. “And yes, I mind if you smoke.”

“No matches?” he said.

“No.”

“Oh damn,” he said, and muttered something, low, in some other language as he patted his pockets looking for a match. He was so nervous and fidgety. I had a feeling that his nic fit would end up being more annoying than his smoking, so I relented and said, “Wait … Nadia left some behind.”

“Nadia left matches? Nadia doesn't smoke.”

“She was using them as a bookmark.”

I found the book,
Man Trap
, on the loft bed and brought the matches to Rocky.

As he lit the cigarette, I said, “Why will the cops ruin everything?”

He exhaled his smoke but said nothing.

“Because of the arranged marriage thing, and her family making trouble?” I asked.

“It is a dangerous situation.”

“Yeah, I understand. I've heard about things like this, girls from closed cultures who marry against the family's wishes and bring dishonor on the clan, et cetera, and their families hunt them down. Is this the case here?”

“Something like that.”

That was a problem. There'd been a lot of stories in the last few years about women running away to western countries, seeking asylum to avoid arranged marriages or charming cultural practices like genital mutilation, only to be deported and returned to their homelands. There, they were either married off against their will or, on occasion, killed by their responsible male relatives for bringing dishonor on them. The cops might just give Nadia away to Immigration, and I didn't want to be responsible for that. On the other hand, a man was dead.

“I still think you should call the cops. I can give you the name of a very understanding woman who will do her best to keep it on the QT,” I said. “A man has been murdered already. Murdered. There could be a connection. Maybe Nadia saw something and the killer or killers know that. I … I don't want to alarm you, but what if they kidnapped her? Even if they didn't, what if her family found her and grabbed her? The police might be able to help.”

“Too much risk. I know in my heart Nadia is okay. She may have seen the police here after this person was killed, and decided to stay away until things calmed down,” he said.

“Maybe you're right,” I said. “She's probably just hiding out until things cool down.”

“But where?” he asked. “You are quite sure you don't know where she has gone?”

“We didn't talk much. It's an accident that we both ended up in Tamayo's apartment at the same time. You see, my apartment burned down—”

“Did she talk about me?”

“Not much, but what she said was very flattering.”

Love isn't just blind, I thought, it's been sniffing glue! Nadia saw him as a poetic, romantic, yearning, soulful man, whereas I saw a low-wattage half man with all the physical charm of John Gotti, Jr. Obviously, Nadia had projected some false romantic illusions onto this boy while in the grip of her hormones.

“Where were you while Nadia was here? Maybe she's gone there, and you're just missing each other.”

“I slept in … a park.”

“A park? In New York City? At night? Rocky, that's dangerous,” I said.

“I can look after myself. I'm tough,” he shot back.

“Don't get me wrong. I'm impressed you'd take that risk for a girl. You really love this girl?” I asked.

“Yes.”

Because he smiled bashfully and looked at the floor when he said that, I decided to cut him some slack. He was surly and dim, but he was just a kid in love. His attitude was probably just macho bluster and youthful suspicion of a member of an older generation, me.

“She's the one for you, is she?”

“The only one,” he said.

“How can you be sure?” I asked.

Now it was his turn to sing the praises of his Juliet, as she had sung his praises.

“She is so beautiful, with such a sunny disposition and a sweet nature,” he told me. “A good girl, but easily led and too trusting.”

“Nadia? Sunny and sweet?”

“Yes.”

“Are we talking about the same girl?” The vulnerable waif he described was not the same girl I'd met. “Do you have a photograph of her?”

He pulled out a billfold and several pictures of him and Nadia. At first, I thought we were speaking of a different girl, because the girl in the first few pictures was a brunette. One photo looked like it was taken in New York, in front of a brownstone, when they were a couple years younger than they were now. Another showed him and the same girl dressed up as a gangster and his moll, surrounded by other teenagers in costumes. But in a more recent photo, a head shot of her, she had blond hair, and I saw that we were indeed speaking of the same Nadia.

“Who are these other kids in the costume picture? Maybe Nadia is with them?”

“I don't know where they are. I don't remember their names.”

“Does she have any other friends in New York? Or New Jersey? Connecticut?”

“I don't know.”

“Well, I don't know what else to do. Maybe she'll come back here. Or she'll call,” I said.

“I'll stay here until she does.”

“Oh. Good,” I said. “While we're waiting, you wanna tell me about this country you come from?”

“I do not think I will,” he said. “You might tell the police, or you might tell someone, and they might tell the police. Nadia could get deported. Her family could do something terrible to me or my family.”

I tried to guess, but it was hard to pin down his ethnicity. He was pale with dark hair, soft features, small eyes a little too close together, and a hint of dark fuzz on his face.

“Aw, come on, Rocky,” I said. “I won't tell anyone.”

“What did Nadia tell you?”

“She calls it Plotzonia,” I said. “I only ask because maybe it will provide some clue to where she is.”

“It won't!” He was surly again, and changed the subject, demanding in a princely way, “I need to eat. Do you have anything to eat?”

“Yes, but first can you give me a little more information—”

“I need to eat now. I'm hypoglycemic.”

“Keep it in your pants, kid. I'll feed you,” I said.

I gave him some cold cuts and potato salad, and he ate like he still had a growth spurt ahead of him. They were so obviously doomed, these two bad-tempered brats, heading down lust-slicked rails to a shattering heartbreak, the kind of disillusionment that scars you for life. There was so much I wanted to tell him. I could have quoted some insightful poetry and homespun wisdom, told him about good hangings and bad marriages. I could have provided a few vivid real-life examples of young love gone wrong, crimes of passion and other homicides that involved people stuffing the dismembered bits of their “true” lovers into trash bags.

Instead, I said, “You want dessert?”

“Do you have any ice cream?”

“There's some Ben and Jerry's in the freezer,” I said.

He looked around the room, seemingly baffled.

“It's the compartment on top of the refrigerator.”

He still looked baffled, so I got the ice cream for him. He ate straight out of the tub, digging his way to China through a half-gallon of Ben & Jerry's Wavy Gravy.

“What's the other guy like?” I asked. “The man you're stealing her from?”

“He's an old man,” he said. “An ugly, disgusting old man.”

“That's a shame. Well, let me take this head shot of Nadia, show it to some of the neighbors tomorrow,” I said. “Maybe you can track down some of her old friends, see if they've heard from her.”

“How would I do that?” he asked.

I couldn't decide if he was a complete moron, an only child, or an eldest son accustomed to being waited upon, who played dumb in order to get others to do his bidding.

“Have you heard of the telephone? It's this newfangled invention …” I said, and stopped myself. I sounded like every snarky grown-up who'd ever burned my butt when I was a teenager. “Make some calls. You must know someone who knows something.”

I showed him where to sleep, and pointed him to the bathroom so he could shower and wash up. When he thought I wasn't looking, he took a copy of
Cosmo
into the bathroom.

I logged on to my laptop to see if Tamayo had E-mailed. She hadn't, nor had Pierre, not that I expected him to. The only E-mail was from someone E-named MrsKisses. Turned out it was from Phil, using his sister-in-law's E-mail address. He was sending along a wire story he'd pulled off Drudge about the Woznik murder.

DEAD ART DEALER'S LOVER ARRESTED

Socialite art patron Grace Rouse was arrested tonight on suspicion of murder in the death of bad-boy art dealer Gerald Woznik, police sources say. Woznik, 44, was shot and killed Friday night in the notorious Chelsea Hotel on West Twenty-third Street. An eyewitness claims to have seen Rouse, 43, escaping down a fire escape on the west side of the hotel around the time of the murder. Rouse claims she was at home meditating when Woznik was killed. Woznik and Rouse, who is heiress to the Rouse shipping and securities fortunes, had been an item on the New York art scene for about a year, and had been living together for almost as long. Friends say they had a tempestuous relationship and often fought over Woznik's womanizing ways.

There was a sidebar story about some of Rouse's previous dalliances with bad boys, something I can identify with in concept, though not on the same level. Rouse had been involved with a paranoid film auteur, had “canoodled” at Moomba with an aging actor before he went into rehab for sex addiction, and was named as a corespondent in the divorce cases of an elderly, desiccated rock star and an obscenely wealthy European art dealer whose horse-loving wife had had massive plastic surgery to make herself look more equine. After Rouse was dumped by an evil New Zealand media mogul for a leggy Indian film star, she rebounded with Woznik. Said a “friend,” “She developed an unhealthy obsession with Gerald, was insanely jealous, and tried to control him with money.”

Love. Ain't it grand?

chapter six

It's a small world. It turned out that Grace Rouse was being represented by the famous Spencer Roo. This might even seem a tad cosmic to me, if Roo wasn't the obvious legal choice in a high-profile murder case. The man was known for taking on famous open-and-shut cases, and somehow getting his clients off. When I called him the next morning, he was out “conferring with a client”—Rouse, I figured. But no sweat. He was a pal, would call me back as soon as he could, and do everything he could to get me a meeting with the accused heiress, just in case she knew something about Nadia's whereabouts.

After I called Roo and fed the manboy a healthy breakfast, I went out to talk to the neighbors within the hotel. As much as I wanted to avoid Maggie, I wanted to get rid of Rocky much, much more. Maggie's name had been in the note Tamayo wrote to Nadia and in the
Man Trap
book, so she was likely to know something about the girl. When I called I got her voice mail, and there was no answer when I knocked on her door. I wrote a note and shoved it under the door, asking her to call because I needed to talk to her about “a sensitive matter.”