“No, just plain Duane,” said Harry. “There’s half a dozen others live in there. Men. Plus girls. Everybody else has been chased out. They use a couple of the apartments as a garage for their bikes.” He pointed at four gleaming, chopped Harleys lined up against the curb.
“And these guys did it for sure?”
“When the girl was beaten, the yells were coming from that house. Also the bites. Forensics says the wound are consistent with the same set of teeth. But.”
“Yeah, we can’t tie them positively to the roof job. Get me a witness, Harry.”
Bello didn’t answer, but stared out the driver’s side window at the three men on the stoop. After a few minutes they appeared to become aware of his inspection. The big one, Vinnie, stood up. Marlene measured his size against the doorway and gasped. “Harry, he’s a monster! What is he, six-eight?”
“Six-nine, three hundred ten pounds the last time he was in jail. I think he put on a little weight since then. Got a sheet on him: assault, disorderly, car theft, burglary-”
A green quart bottle glinted in the streetlight as it arced toward them and shattered on the pavement inches short of their car. Harry Bello had the door handle jacked and was halfway out the door before Marlene put a restraining hand on his arm.
“Harry, no!”
He resisted her pull for a moment and then relaxed and closed the door. “Do it right, Harry,” she said.
He nodded, started the car, gunned the motor, and sent the vehicle roaring off in a sweeping half circle that knocked over the four Harleys in a racket of bonging chrome and tinkling glass.
“That must have felt good,” said Marlene as they drove at a sedate pace up Avenue B. And then she snapped her head back, looking over her shoulder. “There’s that little girl again.”
“Hm?”
“A little girl I met in the park, the fairy princess. She was just there.” Marlene had caught just a glimpse, but the thin child was unmistakable. She was wearing a long bridal veil of white tulle as she skipped between the cars.
Bello checked the rearview mirror but saw nothing.
“What about her?”
“Oh, nothing, just a funny little kid. I was worried about her-she thought she could really fly.”
Morning, a week has passed. Marlene in her lonely bed was awakened by a call from Lillian Dillard at the day-care center. Dillard was down with a bad cold and neuritis, and the care group was canceled for the day.
Marlene cursed vividly, her cries joining the chorus of the thousands of working women to whom this very thing was happening at this very moment all across the City.
Lucy wailed from her crib, and Marlene struggled to suppress the sour juices of resentment, so as not to present a harridan’s face to her child, who in fact she dearly loved. She threw on her tattered blue robe, cleaned, diapered, and ate with the baby, watching Sesame Street, and placed Lucy in her playpen. Then she cleaned and dressed herself and called her office.
Luisa Beckett, Marlene’s deputy, responded competently to the procedural disaster that Marlene’s absence represented. The other attorneys would have to be shuffled to fill the places where the People had to be represented, motions would have to be filed or opposed, meetings would have to be canceled and rescheduled. Competent but not all that sympathetic, Luisa had no children, nor did the other female attorneys on the rape bureau staff. Marlene hung up the phone, depressed and irritated, and with no human being in range to unload on but a tiny child.
Not to be tolerated. She swept up the baby and clumped one flight down the stairs to Stuart Franciosa’s loft. There she found the proprietor, a small, elegant bearded sculptor, and his mate, still smaller and more elegant, a Creole from Louisiana named Larry Bou-dreau, at ease in their dressing gowns, sipping coffee and watching All My Children on a small color television.
Marlene breezed in, deposited Lucy on Larry Boudreau’s lap, and went to the kitchen, where she poured herself a cup of coffee. Stuart’s loft, unlike her own, consisted of a formal two-bedroom apartment, constructed of dry wall, and a large studio equipped with workbenches and a disreputable orangish sofa, on which the roommates now reclined.
“No work today?” asked Stuart.
“Day-care conked out on me. And I had a million things to do. I’m heading into a ferocious depression.”
“And so you dropped down here, where fun ever reigns supreme, in hopes of a cheerful word?”
“Not for nothing are we called gay, Stuart,” said Boudreau, holding Lucy’s hands and goggling at her as she tried to walk up his belly. He was a nurse. He had delivered Lucy Karp in an adjoining bedroom, Marlene having been caught short by an emergency involving a pair of Mafia gunmen. Larry doted on Lucy; this was not surprising, given his current position as chief nurse in the children’s ward at Columbia-Presby: she was cute, affectionate, and not dying from fulminating meningococcemia.
“What about you, Larry?” Marlene asked. “Vacation?”
“Not at all, mah dear child. Ahm night-shiftin’ it this week. Stuart heah will be rambling through wicked SoHo, breakin’ hearts while Ah attend the sick.”
Franciosa rolled his eyes. “We’re having a spat. It’s too tawdry and boring. He’s being the martyr, and I’m the heel.”
Boudreau sniffed and leveled a hooded and disdainful look at his lover over Lucy’s bouncing dark head.
“Meanwhile,” said Stuart brightly, “I have two passes to a tony reception, uptown. Shrimp and champagne. Are we interested?”
Larry said, “Ah’d love to, deah, but Ah have to wash mah hay-uh,” in a tone that could have etched bronze.
“God, I haven’t been uptown in months,” sighed Marlene.
“Why don’t you take Marlene, Stuart?” said Boudreau silkily. “She’d love it. Ah’ll watch ouah little darlin’ heah. Mind, y’all have to be back by two-thirty …”
Franciosa hesitated, neatly trapped. Marlene would insure that he behaved himself, while Larry would get to sulk nobly at home. “Want to?” he asked, after a moment’s pause.
“Since you ask …” she said. “Just twist my arm a little harder.”
Forty-five minutes later, Marlene sat in a cab with Stuart Franciosa, wearing a yellow 1950s sundress bought at a thrift shop, thong sandals, and a Panama hat with the brim turned up. She was working hard, fighting guilt, trying to bring her mood up to match her sprightly appearance. Around 14th Street, guilt retreated snarling into its cave, and Marlene turned her attention to the prospect of a delightful afternoon consuming elegant viands in the company of lovely people, none of whom spent much time examining mutilated women.
“So, what’s with this gallery? Are you in it?”
Franciosa, who had been doing some sulking of his own, shone a weak smile at her. “No, Sokoloff handles nothing but the old: antiquities, plus Byzantine and other Eastern stuff. They’re one of the main houses in the City for that.”
“So why did you get an invite?”
“They’ve used me to make copies. Lost-wax jobs, in precious metals. Scythian bracelets, Egyptian rings, that sort of stuff. Little statuettes. It’s a nice little business for them, and I get some good contacts out of it.”
“Wow, treasures of the mysterious East. It sounds deliciously romantic and decadent.”
“You got it, sister,” said Stuart, brightening.
They arrived. Sokoloff’s occupied a corner at Madison in the fifties. Inside were three spacious rooms, painted white, with track lights on the ceiling and oriental carpets on the floor. The treasures were arranged in glass cases on the walls and on pillars. Glomming the artifacts and loading up on canapés, shrimp, and Moët were perhaps fifty people, the men prosperous-looking, the women dressed in the sort of clothes one needs an appointment to buy. Marlene was introduced to the proprietor, Stephan Sokoloff, a portly old rake who lingered a tad too long over the continental kiss he placed on Marlene’s hand. Stuart ushered her away before she could object.