“So you just gonna leave me here?” Seema directed this question to me.
“For the time being, sugar. You need a place to get centered.”
“I thought you wanted me to be with you.”
“I never said that. I said I’d get you away from Brody. That meant I’d get you someplace safe, but I’m not a pimp or a gangster. I’m a detective, like the card says.”
“What if I don’t like it here?”
We were parked at the ornate gate of the temple grounds. Chrystal was sitting next to me, while Seema sat in the center of the backseat. I turned around to look her in the face.
“If you don’t like it, you can just leave, or call me and I’ll either come down myself or send somebody I trust to get you.”
“How’m I gonna call? Do they even have a phone in there?”
I reached into William Williams’ satchel and came out with a small black phone wrapped in a power cord, one of the throwaways that Bug kept me supplied with. This I handed to the girl.
“You still have my card?” I asked.
She nodded.
“Did Brody give you that black eye?”
Another nod.
“Then let Chrystal take you in there, and give it three days before you make up your mind what to do.”
It wasn’t what she wanted. It wasn’t what she expected. But Seema didn’t have much choice.
“Okay,” she said.
I waited in the car while my client escorted the girl through the gate and gardens and into the lavish domed building. I sat there for a quarter of an hour wondering at the odd connection between me and the solid-steel artist.
On the train, Chrystal and I sit side by side, mainly in silence. I used the time to consider the murder of my initial client; also Dimitri and Twill; also Gordo on his deathbed; and, to a lesser degree, the man William Williams.
An hour into the ride I called Seema.
“Hello?” she said after the sixth ring.
“Seema.”
“Mr. Mack-gill?”
“How are you?”
“Okay, I guess. They food taste funny but they nice.”
“You feel safe?”
“I guess. They give me this tiny little room and told me that I could work anywhere I want to for my rent — the kitchen or the laundry, whatevah.”
“I’ll call you at the end of the week to see how you’re doing.”
“If I get cleaned up, can I come down to you?”
“It’s not about that, girl. I’m just helping you.”
“Okay. But you gonna call, right?”
“Definitely.”
If Chrystal heard this conversation she gave no sign of it. She just stared out the window, blinking now and then like a camera on a very slow shutter release.
40
As we were pulling into the Newark train station I turned to gaze at her profile.
The train was pulling out again before she asked, “What?”
“You say that you and Cyril don’t have a very powerful erotic connection.”
I didn’t need to say anymore. She understood the implications.
“I know a man,” she said. “His name is Lod, he lives in Astoria. We... we get together sometimes.”
“Cyril know about him?”
“Maybe not his name, but he knows.”
“How about a big guy, dressed all in brown, maybe pretends that he’s Cyril sometimes.”
“Him and me? I don’t think so.”
“What’s his name?”
“That’s Cyril’s bastard stepbrother — Ira Lamont.”
There was a full stop at the end of her answers. I needed more information, but her tone told me to slow it down. I didn’t mind. I was just another lemming — standing on line.
“Aunt Chris!” a child yelled when we came into the door.
Then all the children mobbed the woman their mother had pretended to be. They hugged and kissed and finally got down on the floor, the whole gang of them.
The four-year-old, Dorian, moved away after a while. The copper-colored boy picked up a stuffed tiger and started a conversation with it.
“Dorian,” Chrystal said playfully.
“Yes?” he said in the same tone and timbre.
“Don’t you love me anymore?”
“Yes, I do,” he said, still looking at his doll.
“Then come here and give me some sugar.”
The boy laughed and ran back into the brood.
After a good while of playing and reconnecting, Theda took the kids to her room for the castle game that everyone liked to play. Aura, Chrystal, and I sat at an oval table that looked down on Gramercy Park, there to sip wine and discuss murder.
“So you don’t know what your sister was talking about when she came to my office?” I asked Chrystal.
“No,” she said, “not at all. I mean, I did feel pushed out by Cyril, and I was worried about his history with wives ending up dead, but he didn’t want to kill me. And even if he did I wouldn’t go to Shawnie about that. She could hardly hold her own life together.”
“But you gave her the money she paid me with.”
“I gave her fifty thousand dollars. Some of it was for her and some to give to Tally if he needed it. She said that she wanted to get out of that commune and get a job in a beauty shop.”
“And you just gave her that much money?” I asked.
“Yeah. Why?”
“That’s a lot of money.”
“So? My husband owns a farm in Brazil that would take you three weeks to hike across. My room in his house is worth a million dollars on the open market. And, anyway, I don’t really care about money.”
Aura was silent, listening to a conversation both spoken and unspoken.
“Fatima told me that they buried her mother in a garden near where they lived,” Chrystal said.
“I called the police. If they found her it should have been in the papers.”
“It was,” Aura said. “This morning. The police found her yesterday.”
Without being asked, Aura went into the kitchen and came back with the Post. The story was pushed to page eight because of a drug overdose in Hollywood, a has-been star who made the headlines one last time.
We were silent while Chrystal read her sister’s pop obituary.
The children’s laughter wafted in from down a hallway and through a door.
Chrystal put the paper down and looked at me.
“I have no idea what’s going on here,” she said. “But I want you to find out who did this.”
“She hired me to protect you,” I said.
“She can stay here, Leonid,” Aura said. “No one knows, and the children need her.”
“Thank you,” Chrystal said and the deal was sealed.
“I’m not the police,” I said to anyone who wanted to listen. “I don’t arrest people, or solve crimes for that matter. I will look into this deeply enough to make sure you and Shawna’s kids are safe. But when I get anywhere near the truth I’ll turn it over to the cops. Arresting people and bringing them to trial is what you pay your taxes for.”
“Okay. I just need to know.”
That was the end of our little tête-à-tête-à-tête. It was time for me to get out there and make the streets safe for artists and orphans. But sitting at that table, between those two women (either one of whom I loved more than my wife of twenty-odd years), I was frozen.
That’s when Chrystal reached across the table and touched my left wrist.
“Thank you.”
Aura took in this intimacy. I noticed her and she saw this regard in my eyes. It was the way Escher probably saw the world: an endless reflection of awareness advancing and receding.
“Aura,” I said.
“Yes, Leonid?”
“I might need a space to work this thing.”
“Office or apartment?”
“An apartment would do fine.”