The Man Who Loved Women to Death (25 page)

Most impressive, really. The entire staff of the paper must have worked all night on it. Not a surprise. About the only time print people show what they are capable of doing anymore is when they are handed a hurricane or a good, meaty serial killer. The rest of the time they just cruise on automatic pilot, living on handouts from the creeps, clowns and con men who pass for our leaders these days.

I was very interested in the name of the law firm where Bridget Healey had worked before she got laid off. The law firm where she had gotten herself involved with some older man. The
News
didn’t have it. The
Post
did. It was Ryan, Angelico and Parks—not Fine, Weinberger. So much for that theory. Still …

In case you’re wondering,
The New York Times
did run my personal ad at the bottom of page one in their usual tiny agate type. It was totally inconspicuous. I doubted anyone besides the answer man would even notice it.

I tossed the papers aside and said, “If you look out for him, Mal, then why did you give him his gun back?”

Malachi’s moist brown eyes widened with surprise. “Jeez, I didn’t. Left it under the bar with strict instructions to my backup, Tootie, not to give it to him.”

“And?”

“I guess Tootie give it to him. Why, did he shoot somebody?”

“He tried to. Took out the front door at Ten’s.”

“That’s my boy,” exclaimed Malachi, chuckling merrily. “Ready for coffee?”

“Desperately.”

He poured. We drank. There were Danish in the bakery bag. We helped ourselves. Malachi stayed on one side of the counter, I stayed on the other. He was a career bartender. It felt unnatural to talk to him any other way.

“You do this every morning, Mal?” I asked, glancing at the broom.

“Pretty much,” he replied, munching. “Man used to have a Puerto Rican woman came in a couple, two-three times a week, only she stopped coming when he stopped paying her.”

I sipped my coffee. “You must have to leave Queens before dawn to get here by seven.”

Malachi didn’t respond, unless you call blushing a response. The little man’s whole head turned the color of a ripe tomato.

“I understand you left the bar early last night.”

He stuck out his lower lip like a petulant child. “I didn’t think he noticed.”

“He didn’t. I did.”

“You was there? I didn’t see you.”

“Oddly enough, when I phoned your wife she said—”

“Muriel said what?” he demanded.

“Muriel said she didn’t know when you’d be home.” I hadn’t actually called his wife, of course. But I’m often at my most devious on little or no sleep. “She said that a lot of nights you don’t come home at all.”

“Okay, you win, Hoagy.” Malachi grinned at me sheepishly. “Got me a Filipino girl stashed in a place in the East Fifties. Nice, clean-cut young girl.”

“How young, Mal?”

“She’s twenty-three.”

I stared at him.

He caved. “Okay, she’s nineteen. At least, she
looks
nineteen. And Christ, Hoagy, when she sucks on my toes I just about—”

“I don’t need to hear this part.”

“I’m helping her get her green card,” he said.

“And your wife?”

“No problem there. Muriel was born in this country.”

“I meant—”

“Got that all covered. She thinks I’m sleeping over here with Tuttle. Y’know, keeping my eye on him. Which I am, as you can see. Only I’m also at my place with Coochie.”

“Coochie?”

It’s shockingly easy to make a middle-aged man blush when he’s gone gaga over a teenager. Malachi reddened again. “What I call her. Yolanda’s her real name.”

“I see. And where is this place you and Coochie have together?”

“The East Fifties, like I told ya.” He turned chilly on me. “Why are you asking me so many questions? What is all this?”

“I want to know where I can reach you if there’s an emergency.”

Now Malachi Medvedev got downright hostile. “Little bit late in the fourth quarter for this, isn’t it?”

“For what?”

“You feeling guilty.”

“Me feeling guilty for what?”

“Taking Tansy’s side over his.”

“I didn’t take anyone’s side, Mal.”

“Didn’t you?” he said angrily. Clearly, this had been on his mind for some time.

“No, I didn’t. And believe me, that wasn’t easy—
she’s
the one who needed all of those operations, not Tuttle.”

“If you didn’t take sides, then tell me this, Hoagy. Where the hell you been these past couple of years when he needed you?”

“Taking care of myself.”

We fell into sudden silence.

“Yeah, well, I guess that’s what we all do,” Malachi conceded. “Can’t blame you for that. But why don’t you do the man a favor now and butt out, huh? We’re doing okay.”

“If this is your idea of okay I’d sure hate to try on lousy for size.”

“Some days are better than others. Time’s all he needs.”

“Time’s running out, Mal. Which reminds me …” I went and got the gun out of my coat pocket and came back with it and laid it on the counter between us. It looked like a giant, dead bug there. “Like I said before, don’t let him play with this anymore.”

Malachi looked down at it, then back up at me. “He’s down but he’s not out, Hoagy. The King’s a survivor, if that makes you feel any better.”

“It doesn’t, Mal. It doesn’t make me feel any better at all.”

IT WAS CLEAR
and bright and frigid outside. The Land Rover was parked across the street in front of the Jag, Vic dozing behind the wheel. I unlocked the Jag and let Lulu in. Then I tapped on the Rover’s windshield gently. You never want to startle someone who has a metal plate in his head, especially someone who is six-feet-six and very likely armed.

Vic opened his eyes slowly, peering out at me dumbly through the windshield. He didn’t seem to remember where he was. Or even who he was. Briefly, this seemed to panic him. But then the panic subsided, and he rolled down the window, blinking at me. “All quiet, Hoag?”

“I don’t know if I’d go that far.” I filled him in on the night’s activities and told him what I’d found out about Malachi’s child concubine.

“I don’t know what it is with these middle-aged guys and their lollipops,” he droned at me disapprovingly. “Why would you want to spend your free time talking to some stupid teenager?”

“Call me crazy, Vic, but I don’t think they spend a lot of their time talking. He got a little vague when I asked him exactly where it is he keeps her. Might be worth looking into.”

Vic yawned. He rubbed his eyes. “I’ll nose around at the bar tonight while I’m keeping an eye on Cash. See what I can find out.”

“Good. You going to make it, Vic?”

“Sure, Hoag. You can count on me.” His eyes examined my face with concern. “Are
you
okay?”

“Why do you ask?”

“I guess you haven’t looked in a mirror lately.”

I climbed in the Jag and started it up and got a good look at myself in the rearview mirror. I didn’t look bad at all. I looked terrific for a guy who, say, had just been pulled out of a mine after having been buried alive for five days. I looked hollow-eyed and pasty, like my brains had been fried. I looked like I felt.

The apartment seemed uncommonly tranquil when I came in. The sounds of the morning traffic down on Central Park West were muted and far away. The loudest thing going on was the ticking of the tall clock in the entry hall. Pam wasn’t up and about yet. Tracy was still sound asleep in the nursery, safe and snug. As for Merilee, a hand-lettered sign was taped to our bedroom door: To
WHOM THIS MAY CONCERN
—
REHEARSED WITH LUKE UNTIL
5
A.M. AWAKEN ME BEFORE NOON UPON PENALTY OF
DEATH.

I opened the door quietly and carried Lulu in so that the scrabbling of paws on parquet wouldn’t awaken her. Of course, she was burrowed so deep under the down comforter you could barely tell she was even in there. This was not a positive sign. Merilee always sleeps like a mole when a show is going badly, her blond head rooted halfway down the bed—far, far away from her pillow, from her director, from her demanding public. Not to mention oxygen. I never could figure out how she breathed down there. Lulu curled up with a grateful grunt on her mommy’s hip, or maybe it was her mommy’s head. Poor girl was totally pooped from our latest, most excellent adventure. She wasn’t even up for Barney Greengrass. And for Lulu, that is serious.

I was rummaging through the closet for clean clothes when I heard a snarfle of the noncanine variety, followed by a deep, slow intake of breath. The mound of covers rose and fell. “You smell of cigar smoke,” intoned a voice from the great, muffled beyond. “Also beer. Gallons and gallons of beer.”

“Imported or domestic?”

“And
perfume.
Cheap perfume, cheaper perfume,
still
cheaper perfume … My Lord, where have you two been all night? Wait, don’t answer that.”

“I wasn’t planning to.”

She groped her way out from her hidey-hole of flannel and goosedown. First I saw a hand, then an entire arm, then out came the tousled blond hair. She squinted up at me, eyes puffy from sleep. “Isn’t it amazing, darling, how keen my other senses have grown?”

“Amazing.” I sat down on the bed and took her in my arms and hugged her tightly.

She hugged me back, all snuggly and warm. “You’ve learned something disturbing, haven’t you?”

“Have you also learned how to read minds, Miss Nash?”

“Yours is a snap. It’s your eyes.”

“What about them, are they hopeless?”

“Mournful is more like it. But that’s only natural, what with all these years you’ve spent around Lulu.”

One tuckered thump of the tail greeted this, nothing more.

Merilee gazed at me curiously, her forehead creasing. “What is it, darling?”

“Tuttle took nude pictures of Tansy. It was raw stuff, Merilee. Ugly stuff.”

She looked away. “Yes, I know. She told me about them.”

“She did? When?”

“Years ago. When they were doing it.”

“What did she tell you?”

“That she found it
different.”
Merilee reached over and stroked Lulu thoughtfully. “Tansy was always the one to try new things, darling. She was the wild child at Miss Porter’s. The first to take drugs, the first to go all the way with a boy. Anything for a laugh.”

“She wasn’t laughing in these pictures.”

“I’ve always wondered …” Merilee hesitated, coloring slightly. “What I mean is, how does Tansy
look
in them, darling? Does she look pretty?”

“She looks like a sad little girl.”

“She
is
a sad little girl. And he’s a mean, sick, dirty man. He enjoyed hurting her.”

“Did she enjoy being hurt?”

“No woman enjoys that. Some of us merely delude ourselves into believing we somehow deserve it.” She yawned and plumped her pillows and sat back against them. “I assumed Tuttle would have bragged to you about them.”

“Well, he didn’t.” I sat there on the edge of the bed, feeling used and lousy. “We really don’t know them at all, do we?”

“Darling, no one knows anyone. Look at us. I’m an actress, you’re a writer. We like to believe we understand other people, that we can shed light on them, ennoble them. It’s how we earn our livings. But we’re total frauds, Hoagy. The truth is that no one understands anyone. We are all strangers to one another, each of us frightened and alone, groping blindly in the darkness.”

I tugged at my left ear. “Trouble with the play, Merilee?”

She sighed grandly, tragically. “It’s the absolute berries, Hoagy. I keep hoping and praying that we’re getting closer. But every time it seems as if we are—
kerchunk
—it slips right through our fingers.”

“Sounds familiar.”

“It’s somethin’ arful.”

“Want breakfast?”

“Sleep.” She burrowed back into her warm, comfy cave. “I want
sleep.”

I showered and stropped Grandfather’s razor and used it. Dressed in the dark brown wide-wale corduroy suit over an ivory cashmere turtleneck. By now Pam had put on the coffee and started making her scones. Pam’s always raring to go in the morning. I hope I’m that way when I get to be her age. Actually, I just hope I get to be her age.

I had a fistful of phone messages from the night before. Cassandra had called to double her offer to me. The other toxic tabloid shows called to see her offer and raise it by however many zeroes I chose. Each of the New York daily newspapers called. So had each of the network news shows, CNN,
Time
and
Newsweek.
My agent called twice. First to tell me that no less than five reputable publishers were interested in seeing the answer man’s novel in progress. Then to tell me that one of those editors whom I’d had lunch with, the one with the ponytail, was also keenly interested in my idea for that submarine novel.

I stuffed them all in my pocket and poured myself some coffee.

“Wherever did Victor go off to so early?” Pam asked me.

“I have him on a job. Surveillance work.”

“Yes, yes, I see. This would explain why he was out until two last night, I suppose.”

“It would.”

“It’s not dangerous work, is it?”

“Not on his part, no.”

“Good. Victor’s no youngster anymore, Hoagy. He needs his rest.”

I glanced at her. She seemed unduly concerned about him. “Pam, he’s not sick or something, is he?”

“Why, no. Why do you ask that?”

“He wanted to talk to me about something personal. And now here you are acting all motherly.”

“I am not acting motherly,” she said frostily.

“What’s wrong with him, Pam?”

“Nothing, dear boy. Not a thing.” Abruptly, she changed the subject. “Can I get you anything? Stewed fruit, perhaps?”

“Never touch it.”

“You might wish to reconsider.” She raised an eyebrow at me tartly. “You look as if you could use it.”

What I could use was a one-hour rubdown followed by ten solid hours in Merilee’s burrow with her. What I got was a brisk walk over to Barney Greengrass all by my damned self. Although first I had to lose the media, who by now were crowded onto the sidewalk outside of our building, starved for their morning fix. Not a problem. I took the elevator down to the basement and ducked out by way of the service entrance. I was not spotted. A stiff wind had picked up, the kind that seems to blow in directly from wherever it is in Northern Canada that all of that pure bottled spring water and crystal-clear beer are supposed to come from. Me, I think they come from Weehawken, New Jersey. I turned up the collar of my greatcoat, turned down the brim of my hat, buried my chin in my scarf. I walked, people staring at me as I passed by them. I may have been muttering to myself. I can’t be sure.