“I’m trying to get in touch with Holly Cade,” I said. “You know how I might do that?”
“I don’t know nothing, except I’m tired of all the noise and shouts and comings and goings, and the next time this shit happens I’m calling the cops.”
“I can understand that,” I said. “Do you know who that guy was?”
“I know nine-one-one, and unless you leave now, I’m calling it.”
I took a card from my wallet. “I’m going,” I said, “but do me a favor, will you: give me a call the next time you see Holly around.” I slipped the card under the door and almost instantly it came sliding back.
“Get away from me with this- I don’t want anything to do with it or you.”
“You don’t have to be involved in anything,” I said. “Just give me a call. I can make it worth your while.”
“Nine-one-one, mister. I’m not telling you again.”
I held up my hands. “All right, all right, I’m going.”
“Then go.”
I took my time down the stairs and saw no sign of Babyface. I stopped in the vestibule and buzzed 3-G again, and again got no answer. The name next to the button for 3-F was Arrua; I copied it down and left. It was still cold outside but not as windy, and the burnt-garbage smell had subsided under a blanket of new snow.
6
The cold air tasted good after the reek of Holly Cade’s building, and the snow helped numb my aching face, and so I walked over to Broadway and kept on walking, north and west, deep into the hipster heart of Williamsburg. Block by block the neighborhood changed, from mostly Latino to Hasidic to well-heeled bohemian. By the time I got to Bedford Avenue my hair was white with snow and I might as well have been in TriBeCa.
I found a coffee bar with Citizen Cope playing at low volume and some fat chairs by a window and a pretty Asian girl with a gold ring through her nose behind the counter. I brushed myself off and ordered a double espresso and sipped at it slowly while I scratched down some notes about my visit to Holly’s place.
I got a good description of Babyface on paper and some questions about him too: Who was he? What was he doing in Holly’s apartment? What was his relationship to her? But I had no answers for any of them. All I knew for certain was that he was strong and fast, and that if I ran into him again I would watch out for his right and for his very short fuse. I finished writing and drank some more coffee and flipped back through the pages of my notepad.
Holly Cade was so far my only line on the mysterious Wren, but I still knew precious little about the woman, and I had yet to actually lay eyes on her. Knowing where she lived was progress, but until I had a photograph and a positive ID from David, she would remain just my best guess. I could, if I had to, hire some freelancers to set up outside her building and wait until she came home, but I hadn’t quite gotten to that point yet. That approach was neither cheap nor subtle, and I still had a bread crumb or two left to work with. I read through another few pages of notes and wondered if I might eke something more out of my trip to Brooklyn than a shot in the head and a pricey cup of coffee.
Null Space was south and west of the coffee bar, off Bedford Avenue, in a gray brick building that long ago had been a tea warehouse. It shared the ground floor with an art gallery and a Chinese fusion restaurant, and it was the venue, three years back, where the Gimlet Players had staged a production of Holly Cade’s play, Liars Club. It was a large, chilly space with black walls and a dense array of lights and speakers hanging from the high ceiling. Any lingering fragrance of tea was obscured by the odors of paint and cement, and by the smell of lemongrass from next door.
The manager was a sturdy, fortyish woman with dark, messy hair, a pleasant gap between her teeth, and a plaid flannel shirt. Her voice was flat and Midwestern and her name was Lisa. Besides a squad of underfed guys stacking chairs, she was the only one at home when I knocked on the big metal doors. She’d worked at Null Space for six years, remembered the Gimlets well enough, and didn’t ask what business it was of mine. It made for a near-perfect interview.
“They did three or four one-acts here, over the course of eighteen months or so,” she said. “Liars Club was the last of them.” We walked into what passed for the office, a gray, square room that almost had a view of an alley through a window black with dirt. The furniture was mismatched metal, too ugly for government work. Lisa took a seat behind the desk and placed her can of Diet Coke before her. I sat in a banged-up beige guest chair that was even less comfortable than it looked.
“Were they any good?” I asked.
She shrugged. “I remember the plays being very heavy, in a theater-class kind of way. A lot of disjointed dialogue and fucked-up families. And I remember the Gimlets being kind of a pain in the ass.”
“How so?” I asked.
Lisa drank some soda and ran a hand through her hair. “They were always complaining about something- the seating, the lights, publicity, the audience or lack thereof. And they were always in the midst of some crisis or another.”
“Such as?”
“Amateurish crap, like actors not showing up on time, or at all, or losing props, or just bickering.”
“Any idea about what?”
“Who knows; stars on the dressing room door, maybe. I tried not to pay attention. Whatever it was, it seemed like they could never get their shit together.”
“I’d guess you get a fair amount of that in this line of work.”
“Like you wouldn’t believe,” Lisa said, smiling. “And the bands are usually the worst. But it gives you an idea of how whiny the Gimlets were that they stand out three years later.”
I smiled back. “How many of them were there?”
She thought for a moment. “Four or five, maybe.”
“And all of them complainers?”
“Not all of them; it was mainly the two who kind of ran things.”
“Was Holly Cade one of them?”
She nodded again. “Holly, yeah, the redhead, a very pretty girl. Her boyfriend was the director and she was the writer.”
“What was the boyfriend’s name?”
Lisa drained her soda can and dropped it in the trash basket with a bang. “Now you’re asking the hard questions,” she said. “For that I need to dig.”
The digging was done in a closet stacked almost to the ceiling with cardboard file boxes. There was evidently some method to their stacking and Lisa knew what it was. With only a modicum of shifting and shoving she brought out a box and heaved it onto the desk. A cloud of dust swirled up and Lisa coughed. She took off the lid, flicked through some files at the back of the box, and came out with a green folder.
She shuffled through the contents and pulled out some paper. “Ta-dah! It’s the program we did for The Nest-another of their one-acts.” She read the sheet and looked up at me. “Gene Werner, that was his name. Truth be told, he was the bigger pain in the ass.”
“Can I see that?” I asked. She passed it over.
I scanned down the short list of cast and crew. Besides being director and playwright respectively, Gene Werner and Holly Cade were also in the cast. Gene played someone named Fredrick; Holly played a character named Wren. I read it twice more to be sure, and heard blood pounding in my ears. Wren.
“You mind if I keep this?” I asked.
Lisa shrugged. “Okay.”
I looked at the program and thought some more. “You remember what Gene Werner looked like?”
She chewed her lower lip and thought it over. “Not that well. Dark hair and tall, good-looking- a male model type.”
“A bodybuilder?”
“You mean all bulked up?” she asked. I nodded. “No, he was more like you- kind of lean.”
Not Babyface. I pointed at the file box. “Any photos of the Gimlets in there?”
“I can check,” she said, but my luck went only so far. Lisa rifled through the files from back to front and found no pictures- but she didn’t come up empty-handed. She pulled out programs for the other two plays the Gimlets had performed at Null Space, and scripts for The Nest and Liars Club. She let me take them along when I stepped out into the snow and headed back to Manhattan.