I sat at the counter and hung my coat on the back of the stool and ordered a hot chocolate. By the time I was halfway through it I’d discovered that the girls were only dimly aware of their customers, even the ones right in front of them, and in any event they had worked there only since November. It had been a long shot, and I was only slightly disappointed.
I checked my watch. I had nearly an hour until my meeting, and the dilettantes had abandoned their newspaper and their table. I carried my coat and my hot chocolate over and sat in a ragged patch of sunlight. One of the skinny girls put on a CD- Nellie McKay. I listened to the flex and twist of her clever voice, and scanned the front page, while the wind roiled the dust outside. The news was more of the same and all bad- a relentless slide backward and down, an inexorable slouching toward a new Dark Age. I was grateful to be following it with only half a mind. The other half was still reeling from what David had told me.
I suppose it shouldn’t have surprised me: as my brother himself had observed, secrets were my stock-in-trade. As a PI, and as a cop before that, nearly all the people I met had something to hide, and often very big things- a drug habit, an offshore bank account, a lover or two, a husband or a wife, a whole secret family sometimes, with kids and fish and a secret mortgage on the secret house. Why should David be any different? Just because he was my brother? Just because I knew him, or thought I did? Though, of course, I didn’t.
Before he leaned on my intercom button a day ago, I would have said differently. I would’ve looked into his pale blue eyes, so like our mother’s, and said that I knew all I cared to about David March, and certainly all the important stuff- the prickly outer shell of disdain and disapproval; the prickly inner shell of smug superiority; the deeper layers of barely clothed ambition, impatient intelligence, and rigid self-discipline; and the clenched and thwarted core, so quick to take offense, so certain that the rewards that came his way were overdue and never quite enough, never quite his fair share. And I would have said that Stephanie was his perfect match, her ambition and self-satisfaction and ready reproach so well suited to his own. They met the world with the same sharp elbows and bitter mouths and appraiser’s eyes: a united if unappealing front, or so I’d thought. But what the hell did I know?
David’s questions played over again in my head. Do you think I’m stupid? No, not stupid, David, not even close, but maybe a little crazy- maybe more than a little. What kind of person do you think I am? Twenty-four hours later I still had no answer. That too familiar face had become a mask, and those blue eyes had gone suddenly opaque.
By the time I finished my hot chocolate and my browse through the newspaper, it was time to meet Victor Sossa.
The wind had quickened a knot or two, and my coat might have been sewn from cheesecloth for all the good it did on my walk to Lispenard Street. My face was brittle when I stepped into the minimalist lobby of the building just off Church Street, and my eyes were full of grit. Victor Sossa was there, inspecting a tiny crack in the polished stone floor and waiting for me.
Victor was somewhere in his fifties, a compact, muscular man with skin the color of light coffee. His face was wrinkled as a tobacco leaf, and his bald head was covered by a green knit Jets cap. His eyes were black and bright and skeptical. He looked at his watch and at me.
“You March?” he said. I nodded. “You’re right on time.” Wherever his accent had originated, it was now mostly from the Bronx.
Victor Sossa was the building’s nonresident manager- the superand I’d gotten his name and number from the building’s managing agents. Victor and his crew tended to several properties in the neighborhood, all high-priced apartment houses converted a few decades ago from what had been warehouses and factories. Once upon a time, thirty or so years back, the building we were standing in had housed a textile company. More recently, on November 18- when Hendry’s was overflowing with rock stars- it was the spot where David and Wren had whiled away an afternoon. David could recall the address, and that the apartment was a large one-bedroom on the fourth floor, but he didn’t know the apartment number or its owner’s name. I was hoping Victor could help me out.
I had a little story for Victor about investigating an auto accident that had occurred on the eighteenth, and about trying to trace someone who might have witnessed the whole thing from the window of a fourth-floor apartment. He listened politely and nodded, but I’m not sure if it was my story he believed, or my fifty dollars. Either way, he smiled and told me what I wanted to know.
3
It wasn’t quite three when I returned home, but already light was draining from the sky. Gray bars of cloud were stacking in the west and the sun looked like a patch of old snow. I paused in my apartment doorway. There was a long black coat slung across the back of my sofa and an open bottle of tonic water on the kitchen counter, next to a bottle of vodka, a paring knife, and three-quarters of a neatly quartered lime. There was a midnight-blue Kelly bag on my long oak table. I smelled Chanel and heard the shower running. Clare.
I’d started seeing her again about six months back, after a long hiatus. Two years ago she’d decided that what passed for our relationship wasn’t particularly healthy, and that I wasn’t particularly fun, and I couldn’t argue with her. I hadn’t changed much since then, and certainly not for the better, so when Clare called me last July I could only assume that she’d revised her thinking on health and entertainment.
I’d given her a key in October. It made things more convenient, but I still wasn’t used to it. Not that she ever dropped by unannounced; Clare was nothing if not a considerate guest, always calling first and always bringing a little something- orange juice and croissants in the morning, cheese and grapes in the afternoon, and on those evenings when her husband was out of town, cut flowers, takeout Indian food, and an overnight bag. So it wasn’t surprise that unnerved me so much as a long habit of solitude. I was still unaccustomed to opening the door on anything other than silence and dust.
I hung my coat on the hook, and Clare’s as well, and checked my messages. There weren’t any, and hadn’t been for a while. David’s case was the first new work I’d taken on in a month, and besides him I hadn’t heard from any of my siblings in a year and a half. And the handful of acquaintances who used to call occasionally did so less frequently nowadays, maybe because I so rarely called back. I pressed my fingers to my temples. My headache had returned and I poured a glass of water and swallowed a couple of aspirin. I looked down the long line of windows and thought about running but had gotten no further than that when Clare came out of the bathroom.
She was wearing my terry robe, and her pale blond hair hung damp and heavy halfway down her back. She had a towel in one hand and an empty highball glass in the other. From across the room she was model pretty, with pointed chin, straight nose, sculpted cheeks, and a wicked widow’s peak, but on closer approach the impression changed. There was something skeptical in the arch of her brow, and something mocking in the curve of her lips, and altogether there was just too much irony and intelligence in her face to make her an effective shill.
“Your water pressure is great,” she said, “but you need some new shampoo. I used that green crap in seventh grade, and even then it smelled like funeral flowers.” Her voice was scratchy and intimate and always vaguely amused. Her laugh was single-malt. Clare kissed me on the mouth and barely stretched to do it. She left an odd mix of tastes behind- vodka, tonic, lime, and Crest.