The Girl From Nowhere (7 page)

“Sorry,” I told Sandy, “I’m not familiar with La Tourelle.”

“Maybe I’ll take you there someday,” said Sandy.

I seriously hoped nobody had overheard that. I couldn’t quite believe that I had heard it. What came next was worse. I changed the subject to movies, since that was part of my plan for the evening. Almost Sandy’s first utterance on the subject was, “I love
The Sound of Music
.
I’ve seen it twenty-seven times, sixteen times in French.”

Luckily, we were interrupted by the waiter. The Blue Mill had old-fashioned waiters in vests and aprons who might have stepped out of a painting by Degas. Sandy liked that.

“You look so French,” she said.

“I am French,” said the waiter, though the accent said Flatbush.

Sandy ordered a vodka sour and I ordered a Scotch and soda. As the waiter headed for the bar, the woman in the tinted glasses, whose name I had learned was Eva, began talking to Victoria Schlesinger in French. My heart sank into the sewers and I begged the alligators down there to put me out of my misery. The women’s group had heard everything. Victoria laughed at whatever it was that Eva had said, then glanced over at Sandy. I saw the smile disappear rather briskly from Sandy’s lips, and her eyes turned to frost. She got up from the booth, walked over to the women’s table, leaned in toward Eva, and snarled in a voice that would have stripped the paint from a crosstown bus,
“Salope!”
Then she turned to face Victoria and spat out another single word,
“Chienne!”
After which she turned to Janice and said very daintily, “I’m disappointed. I thought you’d have nicer friends.”

This was boss stuff. It compensated for the twenty-seven visits to
The Sound of Music
,
and made me pray that those lies Sandy had been telling me were of the little white variety
.
A couple of epithets were hurled her way, but only after the women had belatedly recovered from their initial shock, making their remarks toothless. By then Sandy was headed back to the booth with a fierce grin on her face, and I could almost see the insults bounce off her back and plop to the floor like stewed prunes. Janice and her friends gathered themselves together with bruised dignity and exited toward Commerce Street amid much-vexed muttering, to which Sandy responded by hissing,
“Ta gueule!”

“Which means?” I asked.

“It’s a way of telling someone to shut their face. Not in a nice way. I save it for special occasions.”

“And what did that bitch say that made this occasion special?”

“I wouldn’t pollute the atmosphere by repeating it. They didn’t think I understood French, did they? They thought they could make fun of me.”

She went on to deliver the opinion that I was probably well rid of Janice. Instinctively, I tried to come to my ex’s defense.

“She’s not so bad when you get to know her.”

“She told me you still sleep with her,” said Sandy.

“She did? I guess she was warning you off.”

“Do you? Sleep with her, I mean.”

“Occasionally. Once in a great while.”

“She’s quite attractive, in her way,” said Sandy, seeming happy to leave it at that.

EIGHT

During dinner, Sandy
did most of the talking. From time
to time I attempted to remind myself that she consorted with artists and gangsters, took her clothes off for a living, and had been known to pose for photographs that our sitting president’s favorite demographic group, Middle America, would probably condemn as pornographic. For all I knew she might even have voted for Nixon. Worse yet, she might be—knowingly or otherwise—an alluring strand in a web intended to entrap some unsuspecting cockroach. Namely me. For the moment, none of that made a monkey’s worth of difference.

Since her demolition of Janice’s pals, another side of Sandy had emerged—the
bonne vivante
.
We washed our lamb chops down with a Côtes de Bordeaux she pronounced “quite intriguing,” and she chatted about a working stiff’s brasserie in Paris—a
bo
î
te
as she called it—decorated with art nouveau murals, a place where for a few francs you could dine on venison or quail.

We skipped desert, but she suggested we share a cognac.

“I don’t drink liquor very often,” she said, “but it will remind me of the
rue Jacob
.”

After a couple of sips of Courvoisier I asked, “So what did you do while you were in Paris? Were you stripping?”

“Not all the time,” she said.

“And what took you there?”

“A big airplane.”

We were arriving at another of those impasses, but I persisted.

“And where were you coming from?”

“You have to promise me not to ask that kind of question—not now, anyway.”

“Unfortunately,” I said, “I can’t forget completely that someone out there wants to hurt you, maybe worse. If you won’t tell me about your past, how can I figure out who that might be? Are you by any chance married? Is there an angry hubby lurking in the shadows?”

She giggled and shook her head.

“I need to know these things,” I told her.

“Not now,” she said. “I’m having too nice a time. Can’t we just be boy and girl for a while?”

This was exasperating, but I was having a pretty good time myself. I asked her if she still wanted to catch a movie.

“Of course. We’re on a date.”

I asked what kind of film she fancied, hoping that Julie Andrews wouldn’t figure in the answer.

“Do you think
Midnight Cowboy
is still playing?” she asked.

“You haven’t seen it yet?”

“Six or seven times.”

“I guess when you like a movie you really like it,” I said.

“If it wasn’t for movies,” she said, “I think I’d die.”

I borrowed a newspaper from the bartender and checked the listings.
Midnight Cowboy
was playing uptown at the Hauptman, a theater I’d never heard of. Outside, the evening had become a good deal cooler and as we walked east Sandy cuddled up to me. It felt nice. When I stepped off the sidewalk to hail a cab, she said, “No. Let’s take the subway. I love the subway.” I didn’t argue. After all, the purpose behind this pretend date was to see if Sandy Smollett attracted any unwanted attention. That was much more likely to happen on the street or on a subway platform than inside a cab. We reached the Lexington Avenue IRT and rode uptown without incident, Sandy still clinging to my arm and pressing up against me.

The Hauptman was a tiny movie theater in Yorkville, next to a German grocery store with bratwurst and blutwurst and Limburger cheese and big loaves of pumpernickel bread and bottles of Spaten beer in the window. Sandy could name them all—and seemed to have tried them all.

“So you were in Germany too?”

She nodded, and I fancied I saw a flicker of sadness in her eyes, but in a moment it was gone.

The theater looked like it had been built about the time Fritz Lang was making
Metropolis
. I imagined it playing
The Blue Angel
,
and maybe during the heyday of the German American Bund,
Triumph of the Will
.
I bought tickets from a little old lady in fluorescent-pink curlers, and we found ourselves in an almost empty auditorium with faded murals of castles on the Rhine just visible in the projector’s flickering light.

“Let’s sit in the back row,” said Sandy. “That’s what you’re supposed to do on a date.”

I went along with that. The movie had already started, but it didn’t seem to matter. In about ten seconds flat, Sandy was totally into the film, her eyes riveted to the screen like a child watching
Snow White
for the first time. At the point when Rizzo becomes ill she began to cry, and sobbed quietly till the conclusion of the film. As the end credits rolled and the lights came up, she just stared at the screen, tears still rolling down her cheeks.

“I have to sit through the credits,” she said, “because you never know when the name of somebody you went to school with will show up.”

I wanted to ask where that school had been, but instead I said, “Has that ever happened?”

She said, “No—but I’ve seen names that were very similar.”

The woman in the pink curlers appeared and began to sweep up spilled popcorn and cigarette butts. We stepped out into the night. Nobody opened fire with an assault weapon or attacked with a hatchet.

“Now we go dancing,” said Sandy.

My response must have lacked enthusiasm.

“Is this a date or not?” she demanded. “If it’s a date, that’s what we have to do.”

I was beginning to get freaked again, but I played along.

“What kind of dancing? Jazz? Rock? Salsa?”

“Cheek-to-cheek. Somewhere smoochy.”

I told myself that this was all part of the job, managing to overlook the fact that there was none. I racked my brains to think of someplace that would fit the bill. Not easy in the era of The Electric Circus and Fillmore East. Then it hit me. Not far from where we were, on Lexington Avenue, was a neighborhood bar with a glass brick facade. I’d been in there once when it was held up by a couple of kids in Halloween masks. I couldn’t remember the name of the place, but recalled that on Fridays and Saturdays it had dancing to a piano-bass-guitar trio—standards doled out
à
la
Nat King Cole. This wasn’t a weekend, but unless things had changed there was a jukebox in there with tracks by Sinatra, and Ella, and Tony Bennett, and smoothies like that. It was worth a try.

The place was called the Bunny Hutch. There was a neon bunny over the door, assorted porcelain bunnies behind the bar, and framed cartoons of copulating and urinating bunnies on the walls. Despite this artfully themed décor, business wasn’t booming. A couple of middle-aged guys in warm-up jackets were drinking at the bar. Two morose older couples ate something that resembled schnitzel and drank pale beer in a booth upholstered in faded turquoise Naugahyde while squabbling in some Central European language. That was it, except for a sallow-faced woman who both worked the bar and served tables. But the jukebox was there with its Coupe de Ville styling, and there was a Kleenex-sized dance floor.

Sandy pronounced it perfect—just like home. I told her it was as close to Nowhere as we could manage in Manhattan.

We ordered drinks and the barmaid asked to see Sandy’s ID. She flashed a driver’s license in a way that kept me from catching where it had been issued, but I could see it wasn’t New York. We took our drinks over to the jukebox and Sandy called up some tracks. The first was Rodgers and Hart’s “Isn’t it Romantic”—a version by Peggy Lee. I wondered if that was a statement of intent. At first, Sandy just gazed into the jukebox’s fluorescent interior and danced with the changing patterns of light for a partner, shifting her weight in time with the music, letting her hips and shoulders do the talking. She wasn’t just Sandy anymore, but Sandra Dee and every American teenager who had ever put on saddle shoes and bobby socks.

“How old did you say you were?” I asked.

“I didn’t,” she said. “I’m twenty-four.”

“And this girl-next-door look—what’s that about?”

“Is that what you call it?”

“What else would you call it?”

“I don’t know. Is it important?”

“It just doesn’t fit with the miserable pittance I know about your life,” I said.

“You know even less than you think,” she told me.

“Why are you teasing me?” I asked.

“Are you calling me a tease?” she said flirtatiously. “Where I come from, that’s fighting talk.”

We danced, though it was hardly Fred and Ginger. Our moves were more a matter of rocking to and fro and shuffling a couple of steps this way and that—but all with Sandy pressed up against me. I’m as professional as the next PI, but I won’t pretend I even tried to keep the billy goat in the stable.

“You’re right,” she whispered. “I wasn’t always the girl next door—but I always wanted to be.”

She pressed even harder against me, then suddenly pulled away.

“This is scary,” she said. “I don’t want to put a target on your back. We’d better get out of here.”

We took a taxi downtown, Sandy clutching my hand all the way and looking very tense. I asked the cabbie to drop us by St. Vincent’s and we walked west on 12th Street, still holding hands, but I had the feeling I had been demoted to the status of security blanket. As we stepped off the sidewalk to cross the roadway near West 4th, a battered Firebird pulled out of a nearby parking space, tires squealing. For a moment the car seemed to be lurching directly at us. As I dragged Sandy back toward the sidewalk, I got a glimpse of Jersey plates and a kid in a Rastafarian knitted hat, his eyes popped wide open like he’d just taken a hit of whatever they give race horses to make them run faster.

“Get out of my town, honkeys,” he screamed through the open window, skidding and careening toward 6th Avenue.

“Was he trying to kill is?” asked Sandy.

“Just a stoner,” I tried to assure her, though there was no way of knowing.

As we reached Abingdon Square I saw two police cruisers outside my apartment, their emergency lights flashing. Sandy looked at me, frightened, and I did my impersonation of a man who has everything under control, telling myself that this might be someone else’s headache—Ricky from upstairs, who had a habit of getting beaten up, or Mrs. Lukis next door, who suffered from delusions about hippie anarchists hiding in her basement.

“Any reason the cops might be looking for you?” I asked.

“I don’t think so,” said Sandy. “Anyhow, how would they know I’m staying with you?”

Plenty of people seemed to, but I let that go.

“So we better check out what’s happening,” I said. “You sure you don’t want to opt out? If they’re looking for me, it might mean trouble.”

“I’ll stick with you. I don’t want to be on my own.”

We walked past the playground and the little park and I presented myself to a uniformed cop standing alongside one of the cars.

“You the guy on the parlor floor?” he asked. “Someone tried to break in.”

I led Sandy inside, where we found two plainclothes men, one black and one white. I knew the white one, Detective Campbell, who was a decent enough guy as heat goes. He had on a Sinatra-style fedora and a raincoat and he was sucking on his trademark pipe.

“Figured it was you, Novalis,” he said, “on account of that picture of you over the fireplace—the one where you’re looking debonair in cuffs outside night court on Centre Street.”

“I’m sentimental,” I told him.

“I noticed that photo when I was cleaning,” said Sandy. “I wondered what that was about.”

“So what’s the story?” I asked.

“Just doing our job,” said Campbell. “You know anyone who might want to harm you?’

“Me? You’ve got to be joking. I don’t have an enemy in the world. Anyway, the officer outside said it was an attempted break-in.”

“That’s about right, as far as it goes,” said Campbell, leading me toward the kitchen. A door that gave onto a little concrete deck overlooking the garden was open. It had been opened by the cops, but Campbell pointed to marks on the door and door frame that showed someone had tried to force it with something like a crowbar.

“A dishwasher at the restaurant on Hudson saw him through the kitchen window and raised the alarm. He thought the guy was holding something that could have been a gun. He yelled at him and the guy took off, though we haven’t figured out how he got access from the street in the first place.”