Lover Man: An Artie Deemer Mystery (5 page)

U
PPER BROADWAY SEEMED happy in the rain. Lights twinkled. Arm in arm under single umbrellas, happy white couples strolled from
The Stranger
, playing at the Thalia. Smiling Hispanic couples in party clothes gathered outside the Tropical Ballroom, from which floated purple light and salsa. A black couple waited at the stoplight in a gas-guzzler that shook with their laughter. Those of all races out for a good time. Even the Korean grocers giggled, hacking carrots. I pulled my hood up and hailed a southbound gypsy cab, told the driver Eleventh and Broadway, please.

Acappella Productions was on the third floor of the old Hotel St. Denis. Abraham Lincoln stayed there soon after John Brown seized the Federal Arsenal at Harpers Ferry. Lincoln walked from the hotel in a chill February rain to Cooper Union, where for the first time he addressed the big-city audience: "All they ask, we could readily grant, if we thought slavery right; all we ask, they could readily grant, if they thought it wrong." Except for a handsome, curving marble-and-wrought-iron stairway, nothing of the old St. Denis remained. The six floors were chopped up into tiny offices leased by therapists, raggedy-ass lawyers, mail-order book operations, and Central European emigre organizations maintaining a low profile. Billie was the only photographer.

I stepped from the cab into a four-inch gutter torrent bound for the sea. Two winos sheltering under the awning watched me wade up onto the sidewalk. One nodded gravely at the torrent and said, "We got a severe drainage problem here."

"Must report it to the proper authorities," said his associate.

I squelched up the steps and unlocked the street door with Billie's key. Was I being watched? I looked around. Only wet winos. There it was, Renaissance Antiques, across the street, a square four-story ex-warehouse or factory from the days of light industry in Lower Manhattan. Cages were drawn down over the new, incongruous plate-glass windows full of furniture, but I was supposed to be looking for people following me. I saw none.

I walked up to Billie's floor and stopped on the dark landing to listen. Somewhere water slowly dripped. ACAPELLA PRODUCTIONS, said the hand-carved wooden letters. Billie photographed bums exclusively, no smiling vacations, no puppies (not even Jellyroll), no sunsets or sailboats. She published a slim volume of horrific faces so stark and real, so diseased, one could feel the wet pus in their untended sores. Staunchly, admirably, noncommercial, that was my insightful view. I never said, "Look here, lover, why not a cuddly puppy on a sailboat in the fucking sunset every once in a while? You know, just for fun." I wonder if Billie resented my blindness.

The lock had been drilled out. I fumbled with her key in the dim light before I recognized that there was a hole the size of my thumb where the cylinder should have been. I pushed the door open. The light was still on.

The room had been ransacked, as if something had picked it up, given it a violent rattle, and put it back down. Photographs and contact sheets covered the floor ankle-deep. Stubbly, grimy, and damaged faces stared up at me without hope. All the photos on the wall, Billie's favorites, had been twisted from their frames and demolished. Two tall filing cabinets lay on their sides, empty. Stripped of drawers, Billie's desk had been flipped on its back. The darkroom door hung ajar. I looked in. Ransacked. Plastic developing trays, chemical bottles, drying racks, and all the other arcane apparatus hurled about. Even her enlarger had been torn apart.

I knelt down in front of Billie's little half refrigerator and opened the door. It was full of clothes. What an unusual place to store your laundry, in a refrigerator. Gradually, dimly I understood. There were clothes in there, all right, but not laundry.

A very dead man all curled up was wearing those clothes. Somebody must have levered him in with crowbars. You couldn't have fit a box of Arm & Hammer in there with him. His knees were drawn up tight under his chin, and his back and neck were bent in a way no living man could stand. His forehead was pressed hard against the freezer section, a little box mounted in the upper corner. That forehead, I only saw it for an instant, but I'll never forget that forehead frozen blue-black and frosted all the way down over his eyebrows. Where the black skin ended, a band of fire red began as if all the blood in his dead body had been somehow sucked by the cold into his face. Even the whites of his eyes were flaming red, like demon eyes in a slasher movie.

I ran in mindless terror. I slipped and skated over the downtrodden and, out of control, slammed into the door headfirst. I managed to get my hands up fast enough to protect my face but not my glasses. They struck the door a blow that bent them flat and bruised the bridge of my nose. Once out, I sprinted for the stairs.

When you don't do much besides listen to bop, you tend not to experience mortal terror. I had no idea what it does to the muscles. They get a squirt of juice that causes them to contract out of control. I could have run right up the wall, but I didn't. Instead, I stopped dead at the top of the stairs. I had heard a noise. Footsteps. The tap-tapping of hard heels. From where? Coming up the stairs, heading my way. I stood panting, waiting for rational thought to catch up. I dove through the men's room door. The footsteps reached the top of the stairs, then grew louder still. Right outside! I leaped into a stall and latched the door.

He entered the restroom after me. I sat on the seat so my feet would be positioned convincingly. Think! What would I do if he
tore the door off the stall? Kick him in the nuts? He ran water in the sink. Probably to cover the sound of my murder. I peeped cautiously under the stall.

What? Red stockings? Thin, shapely ankles and high-heels? She washed her hands, dried them on a paper towel, and walked out, heels tap-tapping, fading to silence. I unlatched and pushed open the door of the stall. For a quarter, I noticed, I could get reliable feminine protection from a vending machine on the wall.

I sat there for a long time, trembling. The right earpiece of my glasses stuck straight out to the side, and my nose hurt. I don't know how long I sat there before I was capable of reshaping my glasses and considering my next slick move.

I still didn't have what I'd come for, assuming it was still there. No, forget the whole thing. The only sane move was to find the nearest phone and call the cops. I couldn't go back into that office. No. Out of the question...Yet I had come a long way to get here—here in the women's john. It was the surprise that had devastated me. That only happens once; I knew now that in fact there was a curled up corpse in the fridge. If I were to return, I wouldn't feel that same mind-altering terror. Would I? Naw. Hell, I wouldn't even need to look at him. I could cover the fridge with my poncho and reach in for the ice tray. I could even call the cops after I'd done that. At least then I'd know what it was Billie had left for me. I
wanted
to know that.

The poncho slid off as I was reaching in for the ice tray, but I averted my eyes from the frozen face. The ice tray contained no cubes. Instead, the little molds held thirty-five-millimeter negatives, each individually cut to fit. I crouched beside the corpse and emptied the negatives onto the eight-by-ten glossy face of a clearly insane bag lady. There were about a dozen of them, but I didn't stop to count. I stacked them in a single pile and put them in my shirt pocket. I replaced the now empty ice tray and closed the refrigerator door.

Wait. There's a body in your murdered ex-lover's icebox. Can you close the door on it with no effort to determine its identity? I reopened the door and coldly studied the contorted form. He was sitting on his wallet, which meant I had to move him.

I grasped folds of his brown leather jacket and pulled. He didn't budge. I tried several sharp, short jerks to crack him loose, but that didn't do it either. I sat on the floor and braced my boots against the frame of his coffin to get my back into it like an oarsman. That dislodged him with a sickening rip.

When I was a dumb little kid about nine, an older boy whom I idolized because he had a paper route told me that to sled his hill with the other paperboys, I would first have to touch my tongue to the naked steel runner. When I withdrew my tongue, I heard the skin rip as if made of cloth, and seeing the little circle of it frozen to the runner made the pain seem doubly intense. I've never forgotten that ripping sound. And that's what happened to this poor dead man's forehead. A big pocky, bloody bowl of skin stuck fast to the aluminum side of the freezer box. I never did look square at this forehead, but I saw it peripherally—white bone from his hairline to his brow. He was nearly halfway out of the refrigerator.

His right cheek hung over the edge. If he was right-handed, that's where he'd carry his wallet. If he was left-handed, I decided, I'd forget the whole project. I removed his cold wallet and a black Ace pocket comb with flecks of dandruff in it. I searched his wallet in a kind of crazy compulsive haze. It held four tens and a five, a scuba diver's certification card, a membership to a Y in Queens, a condom in a foil packet, a poorly exposed photo of a kid on a tricycle, and a New York driver's license that said he lived at 2150 Woodlawn Avenue and that his name was Frederick Palomino. Billie's ex-lover. For whom she dropped Leon Palomino. For whom she dropped Sybel, for whom she dropped me. Now dead as a frozen claw hammer.

I was
aware
that I was leafing through a dead man's life, that I'd ripped off his forehead to get at it, but my brain wasn't making
any judgments about it. I was brewing up a pot of coffee, toasting an English muffin, tasks, nothing more.

I returned the chilled black leather to his pocket, and with my feet I shoved him back into the tiny crypt. His head went in crooked, protruding, but I forced the door closed and gave it a sharp rap with my boot, then another, until I beat Palomino's skull in far enough for the latch to catch.

After you toast the coffee and brew the bread, then what you do is wipe your fingerprints off the appliances. Daily life. Get the fingerprints off the light switch and the doorknob. With the back of my hand I pushed the studio door open a crack and listened. I stepped out into the empty hall and realized I was soaking wet, but I was out of that charnel house with what I came for in my shirt pocket. Now I was just a guy walking down the hall on the way home after a long but rewarding day spent in the furtherance of his career in refrigeration. Then I heard footsteps. I stopped. Another fresh jolt of seemingly inexhaustible adrenaline shot through my body, but I walked on innocently toward the stairs. The footsteps came closer.

He was a shrimp of a guy about sixty with horn-rimmed glasses and two comical tufts of hair above each ear but nowhere else. He looked like a tall midget. He passed me and turned down Billie's hall. As he did so, our eyes met for an instant. I saw a flash of surprise or fear. Whatever it was, it was plainly not the intentional disinterest of strangers passing in a hallway late at night. I looked back. So did he. Then he turned around and accelerated. I watched him go. He stopped in front of Billie's door and turned to me.

"Where is Barnett Osley?" he demanded of me.

"Who?"

"Are you part of this photography crowd?"

"Photography crowd? No."

"I beg your pardon." He turned and headed for the back stairs.

What?
I stood rooted stupidly in my spot as he turned out of sight.

I ran down the central stairs and reached the lobby in time to see Stretch hurry out the front door into the street. He turned right. I hurried to the door and looked out. He crossed Eleventh, and for a moment I thought he was heading for the front door of Renaissance Antiques, but he turned left onto Broadway.

I crossed Broadway to follow from the other side.

Was I part of the photography crowd?

He scurried across Thirteenth and continued north without looking back. But then suddenly he stopped dead in his tracks and turned to survey the street behind him. I ducked down in a crouch behind a parked car. Walking arm in arm, two fellows under a giant golf umbrella turned from Thirteenth onto my side of Broadway. When they saw me, their conversation ceased in mid-sentence, and they hugged the building to give me, clearly a ruthless hubcap thief, a wide berth. I pretended to be very concerned with my wheel well, but Stretch had spotted me. He ran north toward Union Square. Tiny arms and legs churning in a wet blur, he made it across Fourteenth against the light and vanished into Union Square Park, a menacing patch of darkness in the middle of the traffic.

Picture books of old New York show Union Square Park as an elegant, sunny refuge from one of the city's busiest intersections. Couples, now dead, stroll arm in arm in dapper suits and frilly ankle-length gowns, big hats. Vestiges of its former state—mature English planes and elms, a bronze statue of George Washington astride a huge horse, and a monument to the Union with the entire text of the Declaration of Independence printed in noble bronze letters—still remain, but at night it's no place to be. Bands of small-time dopers, dealers, and chain snatchers own the place after sundown, and the Declaration of Independence is graffitied into nonsense.

The park and most of the surrounding square were slated for restoration. Several of the old buildings you see in the picture
books already lay in confused piles of rubble. Two hulking, dirty bulldozers sat near the park entrance like great yellow crustaceans feeding on muddy chunks of sidewalk, and rolls of chain-link fence were stacked like firewood nearby, ready to encircle the park once the modern denizens were driven out. I walked into the darkness.

You're a damn fool, I told myself. I had no clear idea what I was doing or what I would do. Tackle Stretch and sit on him until he told me what the hell was going on? I stopped ten yards in, waiting for my eyes to adjust. I listened. I watched Cobb draw a chalk line around my spread-eagled dead body. It didn't mean a thing to him, routine. I saw movement, a dark shape, darker than the background.

"Help!" It was Stretch, the same squeaky voice that asked if I was part of the photography crowd. "Help me! Please!"