“I can’t help it, I feel dead. You don’t sound so full of beans yourself.”
“I was down at the courthouse reading the trial transcript.”
“Yuck.”
“They’ve sealed the record of Scottie’s second trial.”
“Just as well. You don’t want to poke around in all that muck.”
“I want to know what happened.”
“It’s no secret what happened. Scottie got off with a week at that country club where they sent Martha Mitchell’s husband and now he’s playing the piano at the Winslow and he’s a great hit with all the ghouls in town.”
“How did he get off?”
“How do I know?”
“Come on, Ash, you always used to know everything.”
“I still know everything. I just don’t happen to have the details at my fingertips. But I can get them.”
“How soon?”
“Are you still attached to that wheelchair and nurse?”
“Just the wheelchair.”
“Meet me for lunch Friday at Archibald’s.”
“What’s Archibald’s?”
“A very posh, very in, dining spot on the Upper East Side. And the food’s half edible, too.”
27
THURSDAY NIGHT AT THE Inferno. pounding music hammered through Siegel’s skin. The smell of liquor and sweat seeped through her pores.
Her friend with the clone moustache was really letting her have it, his whole philosophy of living and loving. “Nothing beats good sex,” he said.
“Nothing,” Siegel agreed.
“I was married for eight years but it wasn’t good sex. Good sex is what it’s all about.”
Siegel’s ears were filled with the roar of the place. She excused herself, said she’d be right back. She found Richards on a bench monitoring the stream of members coming into the bar. Sound, fury, and movement poured by in a smellifluent cascade.
He slid her a glance, motioning her to look toward the bar. A blond, heavyset man with a droopy moustache was standing six feet away.
“The handyman,” she said. “Claude Loring.”
And then she saw something else.
A man was moving with a shambling gait away from the bar. He had two wings of black hair over his ears, and he had dark, haunted eyes. He was badly out of shape in his Jockey shorts.
Siegel sat there right on the brink of recognition and then a little memory popped out. “Lewis Monserat. The art dealer that handled the masks.”
Richards peered. “Think they’re together?”
“They’re sure not together tonight,” Siegel said.
“Loring knows me,” Richards said.
“Okay, I’ll take Loring. You take the king of the New York art world.”
Lewis Monserat prowled, and an aura of tension came off him like mist. His hands kept kneading one another. Whatever he was on, it seemed to Detective Sam Richards that it could not be one of the joy-making chemicals.
The art dealer looked unbelievably thin, his ribs standing out and his flesh sunken in except for the potbelly.
He found a corner that fascinated him. He hunched his shoulders and stared into the darkness as if trying to count how many shadows were writhing in it.
Siegel had to work hard to keep Loring in sight: he was moving in a sort of dance, weaving in and out, disappearing into the crowd, reappearing again. He paused to observe group action, scored coke, did coke, dealt coke.
Then he leaned silhouetted in barlight against a pillar, erect, solitary, like a pillar himself. His gaze moved smoothly from face to face, body to body, shadow to shadow. It stopped.
Siegel followed the direction of his eyes.
A group of dancers had taken over an area by the bondage poles. One of them was taller than the others, a lanky boy of twenty or so with fine, curly light hair. He exuded a scrubbed blond healthiness.
His coloring reminded Siegel of Jodie Downs.
Loring watched the boy dance and then he watched the boy go to the bar for a beer. The boy took his beer to one of the empty tables along the wall.
Loring followed. He planted himself before the table. He gave the boy a long steady gaze that was open and hungering.
The boy was staring at the label on his beer can. There was something about him that seemed unsoiled: his face was not yet calculating.
Loring said something. The boy brought his gaze up. Loring grinned lazily. Color stole slowly up the boy’s face.
Loring lit a joint. He moved forward and held it out. The boy accepted it and took a long drag.
Loring sat down. He looked at the boy. He asked something.
A little line of wariness ran from the boy’s eye down to the corner of his mouth.
Something stretched between them like a wire, alive with current, taut, ready to snap.
The boy shook his head.
Loring nodded and got up. He walked away without looking back at the boy, boring his way through the crowd and out into the clothescheck vestibule.
The boy was sitting there, eyes lost in the semidistance, sad, peering, as if he had no place in the whole world to go.
Siegel could see Loring on the bench in the vestibule, wrestling his foot into a boot. A moment later Loring was pushing his way up the stairs.
Suddenly the boy seemed to make up his mind. He was moving quickly through the crowd now to the clothescheck. Siegel saw him claiming an armload of denim.
She realized the next few moments were going to move very quickly. She pushed her way to the clothescheck, got her clothes back, and quickly dressed.
The boy was already halfway up the stairs, wearing some of his clothes, carrying the rest.
Siegel climbed the dimly lit stairwell, a fog of body heat pressing against her as she came out into the mugginess of the street. A thick robe of mist trailed through the parked cars. Footsteps echoed on the cracked pavement.
Loring was walking a jagged lane through the limousines and trucks. He passed through a cone of light from a streetlamp. Light pinged off the studs in his jacket.
The boy appeared in the gaps between parked trucks, trying to catch up.
Loring stopped at a parked van, a run-down Ford with a blue-jay logo on the side. He unlocked the cab door and hoisted himself up and in. He did not shut the door.
The boy was running now.
Siegel crossed the avenue, keeping the two in her sightline.
The boy reached the door of the truck. He looked up.
Loring made a bored face, slouching down deeper into the driver’s seat. He swung his boots up onto the dashboard.
The boy was standing there, looking at Loring, his eyes expectant and young. Loring turned and looked at him. He reached a hand down and helped the boy swing up into the truck.
Siegel came closer to the truck, close enough to see the license number on the Tennessee plate. She wrote it in her notebook. She circled around to the front of the truck, weaving like a junkie.
The jagged line of warehouse roofs bit up into the smoky sky.
She crouched against a wall as though she were a bag woman resting. An ambulance screamed through the night.
Loring took out another joint. His mouth smiled and his moustache smiled too. A cigarette lighter flicked. For an instant the cab filled with light, drawing out of the dark two faces huddled near the flame.
The faces stayed close. The joint went back and forth.
Loring put both hands on the boy’s head, turning it, and kissed him.
Then he bent forward to twist a key in the ignition. The engine made a sound like eight dozen winos hawking phlegm.
The van pulled away from the curb. Siegel shot up off the sidewalk into the street. She raised a hand and jumped into the headlight beams of a cruising yellow Checker cab, ready to flag it down by body block if necessary.
The cab jerked to a halt. Siegel jumped in, flipping her wallet open to the shield. “Follow that truck.”
The Iranian-looking driver nodded.
The van trundled east through the potholes of Fourteenth Street and then north through the potholes of Sixth Avenue. It parked at a hydrant on the corner of Thirty-third.
“Let me off around the corner.” Siegel tipped the driver an extra five.
As she came around onto Sixth Avenue she saw movement in the van. The boy was bending his nose down to Loring’s hand, taking a hit of coke.