8 The Man Who Loved Women to Death Read online

Damn, it’s so good to be back in town.

  Your pal, T

  p.s. If you can get me that fifty I’d be much obliged

  I set the pages aside and drained my martini. I have to tell you, I was stunned. I almost never make it all the way through an unsolicited manuscript. Ninety-nine times out of a hundred, the talent’s just not there and that’s painfully obvious by page two and there’s no point in reading any further. This one was different. There was talent here. There was the germ of a major confessional novel. This guy had taken Lardner’s boastful bush-leaguer, Jack Keefe, and made him over into someone entirely new and predatory and of our time—someone living on the edge, someone with an edge, someone lean and mean and deeply disturbed. He certainly disturbed me. Oh, sure, I had some misgivings. I thought the ending was a bit over the top. But that was minor. That we could talk about. Because this guy was worth talking to. This guy was the real thing.

  Only, who the hell was he? Why hadn’t he shared his name and his address with me? Would I ever hear from him again? I hoped I would.

  For now, I had my life to lead. And E. B. White was right—no one should come to New York to live unless he is willing to be lucky. I showered and dressed—the double-breasted dinner jacket with peaked lapels, the matching trousers, ten-pleat bib-front shirt with wing collar. Black silk bow tie. Grandfather’s pearl cuff links and studs. I enjoyed Pam’s daube and a half bottle of a very nice Côtes du Rhone while I savored what Louis Armstrong did to “West End Blues” and what the candlelight did to Merilee’s big green eyes across the hexagonal dining table from me. After dessert, we bundled up and walked arm in arm through the park in the crisp cold night while Lulu paid dutiful visits to some of her favorite haunts. There was a sliver of moon out over the Sherry Netherlands, and it was so clear we could see stars. It has to be very clear for that. We stopped off at Café des Artistes for a calvados and were home, snug in our bed, by eleven. Merilee was reading Alan Bennett’s essays on his life in the theater. I was working my way through a collection of short stories by B. Traven, which is something I do every few years just to remind myself what good writing is. By twelve all lights were out and all were fast asleep, Merilee with her hip resting against mine, Lulu with her tail on my head, Tracy snoozing peacefully in her crib in the nursery next door to us. She had taken to sleeping all the way through the night without waking us. I had taken to being very grateful. Almost as grateful as Merilee.

  I slept late the next morning. Merilee had already left for rehearsal when I got up and padded into the bathroom and got busy stropping Grandfather’s razor. I turned on the radio so I could catch the weather forecast. I caught the news as well. That’s when I found out that the body of a young woman had been found early that morning by a jogger in Riverside Park. She had been strangled. The victim had worked as the manager of an organic pet food store on East Thirty-second. Her hair was blond, her eyes were blue. Her name was Diane Shavelson.

  Two

  I MET ROMAINE VERY at Barney Greengrass the Sturgeon King, that noted Amsterdam Avenue landmark where they’ve been purveying smoked fish since before the outbreak of the First World War. And where they haven’t changed the wallpaper in the restaurant since—well, I don’t think they’ve ever changed the wallpaper in the restaurant of Barney Greengrass. I drank coffee at a Formica table while I waited for Very to show. Lulu, who regards the place as her personal cathedral, mooched choice morsels of sturgeon from the countermen.

  Already, the murder was getting major play on the radio. Murders were supposed to be down in the city. The mayor did a lot of preening about this. A body found in the park, especially a young woman’s body, was big news. WINS news radio had a bit more detail as I was going out the door. Diane Shavelson was thirty-one and single and a native of Rhinebeck, New York. She had lived at 343 West Ninety-seventh Street. Her body had been found in the brush about fifty feet from Grant’s Tomb. A jogger had stumbled upon it shortly before dawn.

  They had a bit more, like I said. But they didn’t have much. They didn’t have cause of death. Or whether the police had a lead or a motive or any damned thing. My guess was they didn’t. My guess was I was the only one who did. That was why I’d called Very.

  I almost didn’t recognize Detective Lieutenant Romaine Very, hip-hop cop, when he came in the door. He’d gone hep cat on me. Buzz-cut his thick, wavy black hair down to an early Jerry Lewis, lost the earring, added a narrow tuft of beard under his lower lip and a pair of Ray-Ban wraparounds, all of which made him look vaguely like someone who might have sat in on tenor sax with Miles, Diz and Bird. Of course, it was easy to be deceived by Very’s look. The first time I met him I thought this short, muscular street kid was a bicycle messenger, as opposed to a crack NYPD homicide detective with a degree in Romance Languages from Columbia. I’d also thought he was the single most wired individual I’d ever met. This was a man who couldn’t stop nodding to his own personal beat. This was a man who’d given himself an ulcer by the time he was twenty-six. This was a man whose middle name was Try the Decaf.

  Although this Romaine Very, the new Romaine Very, didn’t come strutting across the restaurant toward me, chin thrust defiantly in the air, like the old one would have. This Romaine Very oozed in slowly and sluggishly. There was a grayish pallor to his skin. And, when the shades came off, there were dark circles under his eyes. His fingers fumbled clumsily, endlessly, at the belt of his old, worn leather trench before he finally got it undone and shrugged himself out of it. He wore a baggy, shapeless avocado-green sweater underneath, a black T-shirt, jeans and Timberland boots. He motioned to the waiter for coffee, then slumped heavily into the chair across from me, groaning like an old man in serious need of disc surgery or an enema or both. Like I said, I almost didn’t recognize this Very.

  Lulu sure did. She’s always liked him. She thinks he’s cute. Plus he carries a gun, which I don’t. She whooped and thumped her tail until he patted her and said hello.

  I said, “No offense, Lieutenant, but you look like shit.”

  “No offense, dude, but I ain’t up for you right now,” he shot back, knuckling his bleary eyes. “So this better be good.”

  “Oh, I wouldn’t call it good, Lieutenant. Good is about the last thing I’d call it.”

  “Whatever.” He yawned deeply and poured some milk into his coffee, glancing over at the pages of the answer man’s letter and first chapter. I’d laid them out on the table next to us so Very could read them without having to touch them. No sense adding his fingerprints, too. He flicked a curious look at me, but didn’t bother to prod me. Just drank his coffee, loudly. The lieutenant was used to my ways by now, just as I was used to his. We’d been around the bases three times, most recently when Clethra Feingold ran off with Thor Gibbs, her famous stepfather. Maybe you read about it. I had grown rather fond of Very through the years. We would even have been friends except for one small detail—he believed I’d been brought into this world strictly so as to irritate, annoy and otherwise mess up his life.

  We all three ordered lox and onions and eggs. Our waiter refilled our cups.

  “How’s Tracy?” Very grunted. This was him being friendly.

  “Not terrible. But give her time—she’s young. And you, Lieutenant? How are you?” This was me being concerned. “What have you been doing, pulling a double shift?”

  Very made a face at me. “Pulling my pud is more like it. Night after night I’m out there, dude, doing what I gotta do, working at it, trying …” He sighed glumly. “Only, it just ain’t happening. Maybe I should just give up, y’know?”

  Lulu and I exchanged a look. I told her to let me handle it. “Give up what, Lieutenant?”

  He looked at me blankly. “Women, what else?”

  I winced. “Hold it. This sounds like a personal problem.”

  “Check it out; what I’ve decided is I focus way too much energy on my career and not enough on me,” Very went on, undeterred. “Which means I get my self-esteem from my job instead of from my
home life. Which, like, I don’t even have. Which is really fucked up. So—”

  “So you’re trying to meet someone,” I suggested, to hurry him up.

  “And it ain’t easy, let me tell ya.”

  “Lieutenant, I—”

  “The shift I’m on these days I don’t get off until midnight. So I’m out cruising the after-hours clubs until four, five o’clock in the morning. I get home at dawn, mondo wired. Takes me hours to chill. And then, just when my head hits the pillow …” he scowled at me “… the goddamned phone rings.”

  “I apologize for waking you, Lieutenant. But you won’t be sorry. Well, actually, you will be sorry. But you won’t be. Sorry that I called, I mean.”

  “Dude, don’t do this on me. I don’t get you on a clear head.” Very shook his head, as if to loosen the cobwebs. “Don’t know why I can’t hook up, either. Ain’t like I’m fronting ’em or nothing. I’m being me. But I’m just not getting anywhere.”

  “Maybe it’s the haircut. Have you thought about the haircut?”

  “I’ve chatted up some dope ladies, too. I’m talking phat—beautiful, smart, nice. I buy ’em a drink. They buy me a drink. It’s decent. And then, phhtt.”

  I tried to resist. Really, I did. But I couldn’t. “Phhtt?”

  “I don’t finish off the play. Ain’t up for it. I ain’t buggin’ or nothing. Only, there’s no spark. And if there’s no spark, I walk—home to another chorus of ‘Randy Rides Alone.’” He drank some more of his coffee. “Sure wish I could meet someone like Merilee.”

  “There’s only one Merilee, that’s for sure.”

  Our food arrived. We dug in.

  “She have any friends?”

  “None that are sane.”

  “How about you, dude?”

  “Me, Lieutenant?”

  “You must know a shitload of interesting women. Writers, editors—”

  “I thought you wanted to meet someone interesting.”

  “Would you fix me up with one of ’em?”

  “No.”

  He stared across the table at me, startled and offended. “Why not?”

  I bit into my bagel and said, “I have my reasons.”

  “Because I’m a cop, is that it? Not good enough for them?”

  “I have my reasons,” I repeated. “And they have nothing to do with you. Let’s just leave it at that, okay? Now can we please talk about me?”

  “All right, all right. What you got, dude?”

  “You tell me,” I said, gesturing to the pages. “Don’t touch. Just read.”

  He read. I ate, watching the people go by on Amsterdam through the window. Most of them in that neighborhood at that time of day are elderly, the city’s survivors, still sharp, still tough, still New York. Lulu ate, too, though she had eyes only for her plate. When she had sanded it clean with her tongue she curled up on my foot with a satisfied grunt and went to sleep. Her world is a lot simpler than the one I live in.

  I could tell when the lieutenant got to the first mention of the organic pet food store. He froze, his face hardening. He looked up at me. I looked back at him. He shifted his chair in closer to the table. He read on.

  When he was done reading he said, “Yo, when did you get this?”

  “Yesterday.”

  “Who else has touched it?”

  “Merilee, by the upper left-hand corner of the envelope. No one else.”

  “Any idea who he is?”

  “None.”

  “Any idea how to reach him?”

  “None.”

  “Why’d he pick you?”

  “You know as much as I do.”

  He tugged thoughtfully at his little tuft of chin spinach. “We may need a sample of your prints.”

  “You already have them on file.”

  “What, we busted you?”

  “During my black hole days.”

  Lulu let out a low growl. She remembered those days only too well.

  “For what, dude?”

  “I’ll let that come as a surprise to you.”

  The waiter took away our empty plates. He came back and refilled our cups. Very sat there staring at the pages. His head had started nodding to his own personal beat. He was not sleepy anymore.

  “Well, Lieutenant? Is he for real? Do I have myself a killer?”

  “You know as much as I do.” He got to his feet. “Stay with me.”

  He went and used the phone. When he returned he was slapping a small notepad against his thigh. He sat, staring down at the notepad. He cleared his throat uneasily. “Dude, it’s my unhappy duty to inform you that the answer is yes, the man’s for real.”

  My stomach muscles tightened. “How do you know?”

  “Because of what he knows. She was strangled. Side of her head was bashed in with a heavy object. Plus,” he added darkly, “she was branded.”

  “Branded how?”

  “He put a question mark on her forehead with lipstick. Orange lipstick.”

  I frowned. “Why would he do that?”

  “He’s the answer man. Maybe it’s about that.” Very puffed out his cheeks. “Fuck, I don’t know.”

  “When was she killed?”

  “Two, three days ago. They’re not sure yet.”

  “How come the body wasn’t found until this morning?

  “Most likely on account of he didn’t dump it there until last night.”

  “Today’s Thursday. I got this in the mail yesterday. It’s a local letter, mailed from somewhere in Manhattan, postmarked on Tuesday. So let’s say he killed Diane Monday night … Christ, that means he held on to the body for two whole days. Why would he do that?”

  “Because he’s a sick fuck, that’s why.”

  “Didn’t anyone notice she was missing?”

  “If they did they didn’t contact us.”

  “She lived alone?”

  “Unless you count two cats as roommates.”

  “What about the kid who worked at the store with her? Didn’t he notice when she didn’t show up for work?”

  “Good question. I don’t know the answer.”

  “Was she sexually assaulted?”

  “Good question. I don’t know the answer to that one either.”

  “You’re starting to sound like a politician, Lieutenant.”

  “Fuck you, too, dude,” he snapped. “We haven’t got that information yet, okay? All I know is she was found fully clothed and stuffed inside a large, zippered canvas wardrobe bag.” He glanced down at his notepad. “Garment bag was blue, to go with the color of her face.”

  “I didn’t need to hear that, Lieutenant.”

  “Sorry. Sometimes I forget you’re a civilian.”

  “I’ll do my best to remind you from now on. How was she identified?”

  “Pocketbook. It was right there in the garment bag with her. Contained her driver’s license, credit cards, a hundred and twenty dollars in cash.”

  I tugged at my left ear. “Somewhat odd, isn’t it?”

  “Mucho odd. It was like he wanted her to be identified. Could say the same about where he dumped her—it was like he wanted her to be found. Dig, it’s not like nobody happens by Grant’s Tomb.”

  That gave me a thought. “Grant’s Tomb, Lieutenant. G. T. He says, ‘Found myself a semi-decent jack rack in the shadow of G.T.’ He could be referring to Grant’s Tomb.”

  “Could be,” he agreed.

  “She didn’t live that far from there, did she?”

  “She lived next to the river on Ninety-seventh. The tomb’s at Riverside and One-hundred-and-twenty-second. Not mondo far. But not walking distance either, not carrying a body.” He hesitated, thumbing his chin thoughtfully. “I, uh, schooled ’em to our thing. So I’m on this case. I wasn’t but now I am.”

  “I’m glad you are, Lieutenant. I feel a lot better with you on my side.”

  “Save it, dude. I ain’t up for your sarcasm.”

  “Okay, fine. I tried for a warm moment. It didn’t happen. W
e’ll move on.”

  “Who else knows about this?” he asked. “Who have you spoken to?”

  “Well, I called Geraldo first thing, naturally.”

  He glowered at me.

  “No one, Lieutenant. Not a soul.”

  “Good. I want this kept under wraps until we got all the facts. In the immortal words of Rickey Henderson, I don’t need no pub right now. That means you talk to me and to nobody else. None of your grandstanding to the press. Keep that shit off my wave. Last thing I want is someone like Cassandra Dee breathing down the back of my neck.”

  “She’s much better at breathing down the fronts of trousers, actually.”

  He sat back in his chair, a dreamy smile on his face. “Woo.”

  “Woo?”

  “She’s someone I wouldn’t mind getting with. Most bonus babe on television, except for maybe Cokie Roberts.”

  “I don’t think I want to hear any more about this, Lieutenant.”

  “Dig, you know her, am I right?”

  “Cokie Roberts?”

  “Cassandra Dee.”

  “We’ve tangled,” I said, groaning inwardly. Because she was the sleaziest of the sleazy. We ghosted dueling memoirs back when Cassandra was fresh from the Enquirer. She wasn’t ghosting anymore. Now she had her own red-hot nightly tabloid news show, Face to Face or Cheek to Jowl or whatever the hell it was called. Now she was a megastar. “And I never grandstand, Lieutenant. At least, not without a celebrity.”

  “You got one, dude. You just haven’t met him yet.”

  That one I left alone. Didn’t want to go anywhere near it.

  He peered at the letter again, frowning, “Weird how retro this all is, don’t you think? I mean, we are talking serious low-tech here—manual typewriter, snail mail, paper …

  “Oh, God, you’re not going to bring up the I-word, are you?”

  “Well, yeah. Everyone’s on it,” he said, meaning the Internet. “They’re using E-mail, voice mail, faxes … Nobody uses the U.S. Postal Service anymore.”

  “I do.”

  “That’s not the point, dude.”

  “On the contrary, Lieutenant, it most definitely is the point.”