The front door opened, the bustle of domesticity, the soft yapping cry of a baby, and then a woman came into the kitchen. She was tall, blond, with a thin, pretty face and a baby held at her hip. She leaned over and gave Sylvia a long kiss on the lips.
Sylvia made the introductions. I was Victor Carl, the lawyer asking about Tommy Greeley. The blond woman, whose nose wrinkled with distaste at Tommy’s name, was Louise. The baby, their baby, was Donna.
“Isn’t she cute?” said Sylvia. “Isn’t she just the cutest?”
“Yes she is,” I said, thinking it true so long as they kept the slobbering little bundle away from my suit.
“She’s been fussy,” said Louise.
“She’s just hungry,” said Sylvia, reaching out for the baby. “Aren’t you, sweetie pie. You’re just hungry, yes you are. But not for long. You don’t mind, do you, Victor?” she said as she unbuttoned her shirt.
“Not at all.”
The shirt opened, Sylvia flopped out her right breast. I got a good look before the baby latched on and began moving her tiny jaw in time with her desperate swallows.
“Is Sylvia being helpful, Mr. Carl?” said Louise.
“Very.”
“What is this all about?”
“I’m trying to find out why Tommy Greeley disappeared.”
“It will come to you, I’m sure,” said Louise. “It’s not so hard to figure out. I’m taking a bath.”
“Nice meeting you,” I said to her back as she walked out of the kitchen.
“What did she mean?” I asked Sylvia.
“She doesn’t think much of Tommy. The drug dealing, the parties in Atlantic City, the way he cheated on everyone. From all she’s heard she assumes he was asking for it a hundred different ways. But she never met him. There was a sweetness there, and an energy, and a brash confidence that was infectious. He seemed freer than other people.”
“Who was the girl?” I said. “The girl with the candle.”
“One of the people in Tommy’s other life. Her name was Chelsea. Ah, Chelsea. So pretty. I have to admit I fancied myself in love with her. I followed her around like a puppy for a while, which is sort of usual when you break through. Nothing came of it, of course, just a few nights without Tommy, which were very nice, lovely, yes, but nothing more. It would still be a number of years before I was ready to handle something serious.”
“Like Louise.”
“Yes, or like a few before her. But with Chelsea, a strange thing happened. Right in the middle of it, a man came to my apartment, rough-looking, with all this hair, his beard, wild eyes. He came to tell me, and this is what was so peculiar, he came to tell me that Tommy was cheating on me. Cheating on me with his wife. He wanted me to get all angry and to do something about it. But it turned out he was married to Chelsea. Which put me in a funny situation, since I had been with her too and wanted, desperately, to be with her again. The man seemed upset at my failure to react, when what I was really trying to do was hide my reaction at learning that my Chelsea was married to him.”
“Was he angry?”
“Oh yes. Quite. It was frightening, really. I tried to tell him he needn’t worry about Tommy, that Tommy was already infatuated with someone else, but he wouldn’t listen. Left very agitated.”
I leaned forward. “Who?”
“The man? I think his name was Donnie. Could that be it? I’m not sure.”
“No. Who was Tommy infatuated with?”
She pulled the baby from her breast, laid the infant on her lap as she placed her right breast back in her shirt and pulled out the left. By then I wasn’t so interested in the sight, by then I had seen what I needed to see, her right areola without a blemish or mark of any kind, to know that Sylvia Steinberg was not the woman in Tommy Greeley’s photographs. So who was? It seemed she was ready to give me the answer.
When the baby was happily sucking at the left breast, the baby’s jaw now moving more for comfort than hunger, Sylvia said, “I don’t know. By then we weren’t confiding in each other.”
“So how did you know there was someone?”
“We were still pretending to be together – it was easier not to talk about the things we were going through with each other, easier to playact, you see – but I could tell. He was distant, distracted, he took a lot of showers, and then he picked up a new hobby which was so unlike him.”
“A new hobby?” I said.
“Tommy was never one for introspection, so his new little pastime was very surprising.”
“What was his new hobby?” I said.
And then she told me, and that’s when I knew.
Lincoln Drive emptied onto Kelley Drive, which swept along with the Schuylkill River until it raced past the great brown art museum, sitting high and imperious, and spilled into the Benjamin Franklin Parkway. The afternoon was getting late, rush hour was on, but I was driving against the main flow of traffic, slipping into the city, so the drive wasn’t an ordeal. Just a little stop and go, just enough time for me to put it all together. And I was, yes indeed, putting it all together. The luminous Chelsea. The furious Lonnie. The mysterious love interest that had given Tommy Greeley his new hobby. Somewhere in that matrix lay the root cause of Tommy Greeley’s murder twenty years before, and most likely the killer of Joey Parma. Wasn’t it exactly Joey’s luck to somehow fall into the middle of that crew? And at the epicenter of it all, I could tell now with utter certainty, was the woman in the photographs, my photographs, that woman.
I found a place to park with time on the meter. How lucky was that? Half an hour, I wouldn’t need much more, a couple quarters doubled it, and then I was on my way. I knew where she was, she had said a smart cracker like me could find it, and I was and I did. Skink had given me the address, an old rehabbed factory building, Skink had given me the security code to the front door, a pair of binoculars was all it took, he said, to snag that. No need to use the intercom, 53351 and I was in. Up the threadbare stairs, one flight, two flights, there was only one door on the third floor, large, metal, rusted around the edges and at the seams, the entrance to an old sweatshop of some sort. I gave it a bang.
“What was his new hobby,” I had asked. I thought it would be photography, I had the damn photographs, it had to be photography, but that wasn’t what Sylvia was referring to.
“What was his new hobby?”
“He started keeping a journal,” she said. “A diary. Wouldn’t let me peek, it was all very serious, very secret, but I could see him working all through the night, scribbling away, scribbling, scribbling.
‘What are you doing all that for?’ I asked him once. And what he said I thought was so terribly pretentious, so unlike him, that I knew it had come from someone else.”
“What did he say?”
“Only this. He said, ‘I’m turning my life into art.’ ”
I knocked again.
Footsteps. The door creaked open wide and there it was, smiling at me, the face I had been wondering about from the first time I had spied her naked body on those photographs.