The Girl From Nowhere (3 page)

When I hit the night air, I realized how tired I was, so I grabbed a taxi and rode home to 12th Street, stopping on the way to buy a copy of
Vamp
.

I looked up Yari Mendelssohn in my Rolodex and called his home number. No luck. I gave his studio a shot. Bingo. I told him I had something I wanted to talk about. He said he’d be there till at least midnight. After a beer, I fell asleep with the television on. As I slept, the Miracle Mets triumphed over and over onscreen, Tommie Agee and Ed Kranepool smacking the ball out of the park a hundred times. The Mets permeated my dreams till I began to believe that I’d been there at Shea instead of sitting in a bar with a woman with an incipient case of split personalities.

I was woken by the phone. It was her. She apologized for ditching me at the Band Box and sticking me with the tab. I told her it happened to me all the time. She said she needed to talk some more. After what I’d discovered since that afternoon, I wanted to talk some more too. I told her to name a time and a place.

“I don’t get off till two,” she said apologetically.

I said that would be fine.

“Do you know the Cheyenne Diner?” she asked. “The one by the big post office?”

I told her I did.

“I’ll be there at two thirty.”

I said I’d be waiting. I didn’t mention Danny’s painting or Yari’s photograph or anything else that might give cause for second thoughts.

Yari Mendelssohn was a serial victim of extortion schemes. I don’t know what drew blackmailers to him, but it was like house flies to
schmaltz
. I had helped him out with one such episode involving an intern named Lenny, who he had ostensibly picked up “to organize his slides.” Well, that was for starters. Mostly Yari fucked girls but, as he told me at the time, he enjoyed a varied diet.

“You know, man, as long as it doesn’t hurt anyone, right? Love the one you’re with, right, babe? You are who you eat, right? I mean, it’s not a crime, luv.”

The problem was that it
was
a crime at the time, and while Yari was enjoying his varied diet one evening, after doing a couple of lines of coke and who knows what else, Lenny snapped a batch of pictures that had the potential to land Yari in the slammer. But Lenny was not threatening to give the photographs to the cops or send them to the
Post
.
If Yari didn’t pay up, he warned, he was going to show them to Yari’s mother.

“Sami will kill me,” Yari had told me, almost in tears. “You can’t be both a
faigeleh
and a
mensch—
that’s her theory. It’s cool to hang out with fags, but not to be one.”

I suspected his real concern was that if it got out that he liked to get blown by boys in Y-fronts, it wouldn’t sit well with the dudes who bought his pictures of girls in Y-fronts. Things like that mattered back then.
I mean, you had to draw the line somewhere, right, luv? In any case, I paid Lenny a visit and painted a picture of what a nice-looking boy like him could expect in an upstate correctional facility where his undoubted talents would only take him so far. He laughed in my face. When I demanded the pictures, he told me I’d better talk to Sami Mendelssohn. It turned out Lenny had followed through on his threat and had already shown her the pictures. I guess he was playing both sides against the middle—someone was going to cough up the bread. Sami had paid him off on the condition that he would keep his mouth shut. I called Mrs. Mendelssohn to confirm Lenny’s story and she granted me a brief audience in her Park Avenue apartment. A regal figure in
schmatter
by Balenciaga, she gave me the photographs to return to Yari.

“Just don’t tell him I’m aware of these,” she said. “He’s always been very sensitive. This is strictly between you and me. You tell him you got the pictures back from that fellow Lenny any way you like and that’ll be the end of the story.”

That fiasco had put me on Yari’s OK list, so I was usually welcome at his studio—a deconsecrated church way west in Chelsea. A little after eleven o’clock I found him there, in a side room with Gothic windows, checking equipment for an upcoming shoot.

“Tomorrow morning we’re on a plane to Haiti,” he told me, “so here I am in the vestry getting vested.”

“This is where the choir boys come to get buggered?” I asked.

“We don’t talk about that anymore,” he said. “I’m seeing a lovely model from Ethiopia these days—Sharome.”

“Sami must be happy about that.”

“Maybe not. I guess you didn’t hear about my father’s taste for dark meat.”

Yari’s father had been a prominent lawyer who was gunned down one sunny Sabbath shortly after leaving the Millinery Center Synagogue on 6th Avenue. No shooter was ever caught, but Mendelssohn senior’s reputation for enjoying a connection to the mob was posthumously enhanced. The rumored link included a Havana angle, before Fidel
schmutzed
things up, so maybe that was where the dark meat came in. As for Yari, he enjoyed letting people imagine he might have retained a family link to organized crime. He was on schmoozing terms with known mobsters and, famously, had once shot a spread of revealing photographs of one capo’s
comare
, which led to the capo’s old lady arranging for a rattlesnake to be delivered to the girlfriend’s boudoir in a shoebox from Bendel’s.

Yari was costumed in the rich hippie drag that was his uniform of the moment—a thrift-store vest over a hand-embroidered Pierre Cardin shirt, vintage Wranglers spattered with paint and artfully ripped at the knee, and dopey red velvet slippers from somewhere east of Suez. There was a lot of jewelry in the mix too, including a heavy gold chain around his neck from which dangled a ceramic yin-yang medallion the size of a beer mat. If you could overlook the trendy threads, you would see that Yari was a striking dude in his forties, fashionably lean, with a Hamptons tan and a face that was all bone structure. His eyes were almost purple and he wore his prematurely silver hair in a ponytail. Think Hugh Hefner gone native in Nepal.

“What can I do for you, hon?” he asked, passing me a fatty that had been smoldering in an art deco ashtray on his desk.

“I just saw the spread you shot for
Vamp
.”

“Yeah? You like?”

He flashed the big, cosmetic smile that had fashion editors from Madison Avenue to the Faubourg Saint-Honoré peeing in their French-cut panties.

“It’s cool, but I wanted to ask you about one of the models.”

“Which one, luv?”

“The one in the armchair who’s been punched in the mouth by a makeup artist.”

“Sandy? She’s something, huh?”

“What’s her story?”

“Why do you want to know?”

He had suddenly clammed up.

“Curiosity,” I told him.

“I won’t go to the cliché,” he said, “but if you’re interested in Sandy the way I think you might be, then forget it. She’s forbidden fruit.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

He asked again. “Why do you want to know?”

I gave him a shorthand version of what had happened in Little Italy, and how I had come across Danny’s painting at St. Adrian’s. I carefully left out the fact that I had a date to meet Sandy Smollett in a couple of hours.

“I’ll tell you what I know,” he said.

I wished I could have believed him.

“As you seem to be aware,” he began, “her name is Sandy Smollett. She’s a stripper who works at one of Joey Garofolo’s joints. Aladdin’s Alibi.”

“That’s Joey ‘the Shiv’?”

“Yeah—but don’t be fooled by that nickname. He hasn’t sliced up anybody in years. He has other people to do it for him now.”

I’d had enough of blades for one day.

“The bottom line,” said Yari, “is that I was asked very nicely to use Sandy for this shoot. I don’t usually let people pick my models, but this was different, and it worked out one hundred percent cool.”

“And you’re not going to tell me who did the asking.”

“You’ve got it, luv. But I’m warning
you
that
I
was warned—no funny business.”

“But she worked out for the shoot?”

“You’ve seen the spread. She was great. Come on, I’ll show you some more pictures on your way out.”

The photographs were pinned to a wall in what had been the apse of the church. There were maybe a dozen prints of Sandy, in several different outfits, all of them revealing to a greater or lesser extent. None of the pictures hit quite the pitch of eroticism reached by the spread in the magazine, but they all made my mouth dry.

“When you did your knight-in-shining-armor bit,” said Yari, “you say she was wearing a white dress?”

I nodded. He opened the drawer of a print cabinet and took out another photograph.

“Anything like this?” he asked.

It was the Sandy Smollett I knew, dressed in the white shirtwaist dress—but how had I ever thought she was ordinary? In Yari’s photograph, she was ravishing.

“That’s what she was wearing when she arrived for the shoot,” said Yari. “I couldn’t resist just one picture.”

I wanted to ask him for a print, but had an intuition that it was the wrong thing to do. Yari read my mind anyway.

“This is the only one I have,” he said. “I’ll make one for you when I get back.”

THREE

The Cheyenne Diner
was the real deal—an authentic, stainless-steel, streamlined dining car. It sat on a concrete pad at 9th Avenue and 33rd Street, directly behind the General Post Office Building. That’s the big one across from Penn Station, with the fairy tale about “neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night” carved into its entablature. Like the GPO, the Cheyenne operated 24/7 and even at two in the morning it was bustling with cabbies, railroad stiffs, guys and gals from the mail-sorting belts, ambulatory winos, plus a hooker or two recovering from the night’s exertions. I got there a little early and managed to grab a booth near the mural of the Indian brave riding a buffalo. Not having eaten a real meal since breakfast, I ordered a Ballantine and some scrambled eggs and toast. That was about all my stomach could handle.

Sandy Smollett arrived on the dot. I’d been wondering what to expect. Would it be the stripper or the girl next door? It turned out to be the latter, which was a relief. This outfit wasn’t quite as demure as the white frock, but there was nothing overtly sexy about it—a loose-knit sweater over a T-shirt, a black skirt cut a couple of inches above the knee, and heels just high enough to show me that her legs would stand up nicely to prurient scrutiny. But I already knew that. I tried to imagine her as a stripper. It just didn’t stack up. Her legs were perfect and I knew from Yari’s pictures that her ass was nothing to be ashamed of, but her boobs were small and she just didn’t give off the right vibe. Perhaps she was “the thinking man’s stripper.” Maybe she was working her way through college, like the hooker who lived across the hallway from my old apartment on Greenwich Avenue.

She thanked me for seeing her. I ordered her a coffee and asked what had made her decide to call so soon after skipping out on me.

“I talked to my roommate,” she said. “I showed her your card and she told me that you were a good guy.”

“Who is this roommate?”

“Jilly Poland.”

That was the first surprise. I knew Jilly Poland. She was an op art painter. Her works were compendiums of dazzling zig-zag patterns that seemed to leap off the canvas. A couple of years earlier, after she had a successful show, some schlock-rag trade house had tried to rip off her paintings as fabric designs for their spring collection. I’d been hired to poke my nose into things. The situation was resolved amicably, if you can call injunctions and such amicable. I liked Jilly. I also knew she was gay, which prompted my next question.

“So, are you and Jilly an item?”

“Oh no—nothing like that. She has a regular girlfriend.”

“She’s still with Carol?”

“Yep—Carol.”

“But
you
are Jilly’s roommate?”

“Just temporary. I met her because I was posing for a life class she teaches. She does those abstract paintings—which I don’t understand—but she draws real well. I had some problems where I was living—that’s where all this began—and I asked Jilly if she knew somewhere I could stay for a couple nights. She said I could crash in her loft till I found something. Have you been there? It’s pretty grungy around that part of town, but the loft is neat. Lots of space, and anyway most nights Jilly sleeps at Carol’s, so I don’t wake her up when I come home late.”

That might all be true, but I knew Jilly and couldn’t help imagining she was having a tough time keeping her hands off Sandy Smollett. It would be challenging to be the platonic roommate of a girl like this.

“How long have you been at Jilly’s?” I asked.

“Just over a week. She was there when I got back this afternoon, so she saw the blood and everything. I told her what happened and I told her about you, and she said I shouldn’t have dumped you like that after what you did for me. I mean, I’m really sorry about the way I behaved, but I didn’t know you knew nice people like Jilly. I was confused. She said I have to trust you.”

“I wish you’d told me about Jilly this afternoon.”

“I didn’t have any reason to.”

I let that go, but the situation was getting harder by the second to buy into, if only because Sandy Smollett—in her present guise, at least—seemed like she should be wearing a label that said Untouched by Human Hand. Too good to be true but, if it was true—God help me—deep down, or maybe not so deep, I wanted to be the first to mess with that state of affairs. I forgave myself this lapse by assuring myself I was not alone in this ambition. And I reminded myself of Yari’s warning.

“So tell me about these problems you’ve been having?”

“Well, first there’s something else I must tell you.”

She did that little trick of hers—biting her lip and coming on wide-eyed, as if she’d accidentally flushed her teddy bear down the toilet.

“You mean that you’re a stripper?”

She sat bolt upright.

“How did you know?”

“I’m a detective. I investigate things.”

I didn’t want to introduce Yari Mendelssohn’s name at this point in the proceedings.

“But what right did you have to investigate me? I didn’t ask you to.”

She was mad. I played it softly.

“I saw how scared you were this afternoon, and then you disappeared. That made me curious. And concerned too. Curious and concerned is what I do.”

She calmed down.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “I’m jumpy. You would be too if the things that have been happening to me had happened to you.”

“So why don’t you tell me about them?”

“Okay. To start with, you should know I’m not from New York.”

“I’d never have guessed . . .”

“I came here six months ago . . .”

“From where?”

“From Europe.”

“What were you doing in Europe?”

“This and that.”

I didn’t pursue “this and that,” but would have placed a bet that it included stripping. No one just blew into New York and got a job as a stripper in a front-line house unless they had some serious experience.

“So you arrived in the Apple and you got a job . . .”

“At a place called Aladdin’s Alibi. Did you ever hear of it?”

Aladdin’s Alibi was an overpriced T&A joint near the Port Authority Bus Terminal, the kind of flesh emporium that caters to sex-starved conventioneers with American Express Platinum Cards and nowhere to put their dicks. The fact that this was her place of employment confirmed my impression that Sandy Smollett had a background that was anything but tame, but the apparition that sat opposite me continued to seem mesmerizingly ordinary. Except for the fact that the more I looked at her the more ethereally beautiful she seemed. Put another way, she made me think of women painted by Leonardo da Vinci—from Ginevra de’ Benci
to La Gioconda
—
ordinary mortals who were the wives of Italian dignitaries, artists’ models, or possibly boys, as some scholars would have us believe. Leonardo transformed them into beings possessed by a kind of transcendent beauty. Sandy Smollett had a touch of that kind of class. I hadn’t picked up on it earlier because of the frenetic circumstances, but here in the Cheyenne Diner it was plain to see. To me, anyway. I didn’t spot any of the nearby night owls gaping at her open-mouthed, but then how many night owls do you run into at the Louvre? And the more I gazed at her, the more I became aware of an inexplicable sexual magnetism that hovered a millimeter behind the veil—or was it a mask—of innocence. The defiant, disheveled woman in Yari’s photograph was present in the Sandy Smollett who lifted her heavy restaurant coffee mug with a little finger delicately extended.

This girl had trouble written all over her in indelible ink, and part of me couldn’t wait to read the juicy bits. The sane part said it was time to take that trip to Patagonia I’d been putting off for so long.

“When I got to New York,” Sandy Smollett continued, “I sublet an apartment near Lincoln Center, and at first everything was okay. Then one day I got home from work and there was a dead rat in the apartment.”

“They say that you’re never more than ten feet away from a rat anywhere in New York. They have to die somewhere.”

“This one was in a fancy box tied up with pink ribbon. I would have been more upset, but the next morning I was leaving town for a month’s engagement at another of Joey’s clubs. Aladdin’s Alley, down in Fort Lauderdale. It was a relief to get away, but while I was down there I began to get letters . . .”

She hesitated, as if she didn’t want to continue.

“What kind of letters?”

“Dirty letters.”

“You mean obscene?”

“Yes, but threatening too. Whoever wrote them said something horrible was going to happen to me.”

“Horrible in what way?”

“Nothing specific. It was all pretty vague. The message was basically that I’d been a bad girl, so something bad was going to happen to me.”

“Do you have any of these letters?”

She shook her head.

“I tore them up, but then unpleasant things started to happen. I got to work one day and found someone had slashed my costume. That was the first thing. Next, one night while I was at the club, the room I had rented in a bed-and-breakfast at the beach was broken into. The place was ransacked. Someone had gone through my drawers and taken stuff.”

“What kind of stuff?”

“Underwear. I moved to a different hotel for my last couple of days down there, then when I came back to the Alibi I discovered someone was stalking me.”

“The guy who attacked you this afternoon?”

She shook her head.

“A very different kind of guy. Youngish, tall, long dirty-blond hair.”

“Like a hippie?”

“Not really. Just a regular guy who’s grown his hair out. I noticed him on the train one morning after work. I was sure I’d seen him before somewhere, though I couldn’t place him. A few days later he was on the platform as I waited for the train, and he kept looking at me in a way that gave me the creeps. He got into a different car, but when I left the train at Columbus Circle he got off too, and he was right behind me when I went up the stairs. But then he disappeared. Starting the next night, and for three nights in a row, he was on the same train as me again. In the same car. This was at two in the morning—how likely is that? The trains are almost deserted. The first two times he got off at my stop, then disappeared, though for all I know he may have still been following me. The third night he sat right opposite me, even though the car was empty, and stared at me the whole way. By then I was really scared—praying that a transit cop or someone would come through the car. I was sure the man would get off when I did, but this time he didn’t. As I stood up he said, ‘Excuse me, miss.’ I had been trying to ignore him, but I couldn’t help responding. When I looked his way he lifted the newspaper that had been on his lap . . .”

“He flashed you?”

“He exposed himself. After that I took taxis home from work, but a few nights later I woke up at about four in the morning and there was a man in the room.”

“What was he doing?”

“Masturbating.”

She blushed and bit her lip.

“Using my panties,” she added.

“Nice. Was it the same man?”

“I think so, but I couldn’t be sure. It was dark. I screamed and he ran.”

“Any sign of a break-in?”

“When I checked, the door was unlocked. I’m sure I had locked it.”

“Did you call the police?”

She shook her head vigorously.

“I didn’t want them sticking their noses in.”

“Did you tell anyone at the Alibi?”

“I told Shirley—the woman who looks after the girls. She brushed it off.”

“Had you ever seen this man at the club?”

“I don’t think so.”

“You see where I’m headed?”

“Yes. Some creep who saw me at the Alibi got a bit obsessed with me and started stalking me. It doesn’t take a detective to think of that—but even if it’s true, how did he get into my apartment?”

“Was this when you spoke to Jilly?”

“Well, sure—I didn’t want to stay in that place. I’d posed for Jilly’s class a few times and she seemed nice.”

“Why were you modeling for a bunch of students? They don’t pay you well enough at the Alibi?”

“I just like doing it. It’s showing off my body in a nice way.”

“As opposed to . . .”

“You know, it’s just a group of nice kids, and a couple of older guys—not like a bunch of dirty old men.”

“So, what about the maniac we had our little encounter with this afternoon? When did you first see him?”

“Three weeks ago—near the apartment uptown. At first I thought he was just some sort of a vagrant hanging out on the corner, but he was there almost every day, and a couple of times I saw him near the Alibi.”

“Did he ever speak to you—threaten you?”

“Not then, but sometimes he would walk right by me, very close, and stare at me with those creepy eyes. There was something incredibly scary about the way he looked at me. You know how they say men undress girls with their eyes? Well, that’s the way he was looking at me, except that there was something more. He was raping me with his eyes and he wanted to kill me and mutilate me too, I was sure of it. He was like one of those sex murderers you read about—the ones who get their kicks by doing horrible things to girls and then killing them and cutting them up. You saw how crazy he looked—and with those horrible scars on his face, the burns or whatever. What would do that? Napalm? I suppose I ought to feel sorry for someone who looks like that, but . . . Anyway, he was another reason I moved down to Jilly’s. I thought I’d gotten away from him, but a couple of days ago he was outside her building when I left, dressed in that fake military gear. That’s the only time he ever said anything.”