“Don’t you need a license to do detective work in this state?” Matt shot back. “I have an idea. Why don’t you follow him, and I’ll go talk to his wife.”
“No!” I cried, dragging my ex-husband across the street. “There’s plenty of time to corner Monika later. Anyway, I’m too nervous to follow Van Doorn alone. In that disguise, who knows what kind of dive or dump he’s heading for.”
Matt rolled his eyes. “Clare. This is gentrified Manhattan in the twenty-first century. There are very few dives or dumps left.”
Twenty-Four
“There’s no way I’m going in there.” Matt folded his arms over his chest and stood his ground.
“I don’t want you to go in now,” I said. “Wait until after Van Doorn leaves. Otherwise he’ll see you.”
But Matt shook his head. “Not now. Not ever,” he replied.
Here we go again.
My ex would—and did—travel through the most primitive underbelly of the Third World in search of specialty coffee beans. But a few years back, during another crisis, he’d refused to enter the men’s room in a gay bar that we had staked out. Now he refused to enter an admittedly seedy pawnshop on Manhattan’s West Side.
We’d followed Neils Van Doorn on a long trek to this disreputable looking shop on the ground floor of a decrepit warehouse, a half block away from the Hudson River.
“What do you think he’s doing in there?” I asked.
“Why don’t you go in and find out,” Matt replied. “Van Doorn doesn’t even know who you are. You might pull it off.”
“Maybe I will,” I declared.
From the recessed service door we’d ducked into, Matt watched with disbelief as I approached the pawnshop’s front window. I paused, perusing the array of stuff on the other side of the grimy glass.
While pretending to examine the old microwave ovens, cheap stereo systems, and kitsch jewelry from the 1960s, ’70s, and ’80s, I watched Neil Van Doorn inside the shop. He spoke with a three-hundred-pound bald man sitting on a tall stool behind steel bars. Neils slipped the watch off his left wrist, handed it up to the fat man, who examined it closely. I moved to the next window, still pretending to shop. I found myself gazing at old military gear—web belts, rusty helmets, bayonets, a compass, and an old, olive green box with U.S. ARMY stenciled on its side in bold white letters.
It started to drizzle and I pulled my collar up. Meanwhile Neils and the fat man haggled. Finally the man behind the bars opened the cash register and counted out money, slipped the bills through a hole in the bars. I hurried back to Matt.
“I think he’s pawning his watch,” I said incredulously.
“That’s ridiculous,” Matt replied. “The Van Doorns are rich. He’s been living at the Waldorf=Astoria for over a month. Do you realize what that costs?”
“I know what I saw. Anyway, his wife has all the money. Maybe she has him on a tight leash—wait, he’s coming out.”
I ducked into the doorway with Matt, but we were on the same side of the street. If Neils walked in our direction, there was no way he would miss seeing us. Fortunately, he paused under the shelter of the doorway.
He reached into his jacket, pulled a New York Yankee cap out of his pocket, and slipped it over his head to protect himself from the rain. Then he stepped onto the sidewalk and moved toward us.
Remembering the cap I saw on the night Ric was mugged, I was about to say something, when Matt’s hands closed around my waist. He turned me completely around and pushed my spine against the door. Then he pressed his heavy form against me, bent low and covered my mouth with his before I could say a word.
With Matt’s back turned to Van Doorn, and our faces pressed together, there was no way the man would recognize either of us. Through eyelashes dampened by the light rain, I watched Neils Van Doorn pass us by without a second glance.
I gently pushed Matt’s chest. He kept kissing me. “Matt,” I murmured against his gently moving lips—and pushed harder.
“Sorry,” Matt mumbled sheepishly as he finally broke off. “I saw it in a Hitchcock movie once, thought it was a nice ploy.”
“Well, the last time I checked, I wasn’t Ingrid Bergman, not even close. And you aren’t Cary Grant, either.”
“It was a nice kiss, though.” His eyebrow arched. “Don’t you think?”
I had no time to be annoyed. I’d recognized that Yankee cap, and I told Matt about the night Ric was mugged. The attacker had knocked me down, too, and dropped the headgear. I told Matt about catching a glimpse of it.
“Come on, Clare. There are a lot of Yankee caps in New York City. Probably a million.” But even as he said it, I could tell Matt was wavering.
“It’s too much of a coincidence,” I insisted.
He gazed up the block, in the direction Neils had disappeared. “Maybe.”
“What should we do now?” I asked.
Matt frowned, glanced over his shoulder. “I guess I’m going inside that damn pawnshop.”
As I followed Matt through the door, a buzzer went off beside my ear. Loud and piercing, the sound startled me. I heard the fat man behind the caged counter chuckle at my reaction.
Inside the pawnshop, the air was warm and close. A radiator hissed somewhere nearby, and the place smelled of mildew and old paper. With each step we took, the warped hardwood floor bumped hollowly.
The shop itself had a strange layout. There was merchandise in the window, but nothing at all in the front of the store, not even shelves. Instead, all the items were piled onto aluminum racks on the other side of the cage. The items were identified by cardboard tickets attached with strings. Prices were scrawled with black magic marker on the tags. The prices seemed absurdly low, but how did one gauge the value of a used and dented microwave oven, anyway?
The wall on the right of the room was the building’s original exposed brick—highly desirable in a SoHo or NoHo loft. Oddly, the wall on the opposite side of the room was covered floor-to-ceiling by sheets of plywood painted a faded and dirty white.
There was a large square hole cut into the wood close to the ornamental tin ceiling. I would have thought it was some kind of ductwork for the heating system, but Matt warned me before we came in here to be careful—there could be a man with a loaded gun watching us through that hole right now.
“Need any help?” asked the fat man behind the cage.
He was either smiling or sneering, I couldn’t tell which. But as Matt approached the steel bars, I could see the man sizing up my ex. From Matt’s wardrobe (he still wore the formalwear from the Beekman party) the clerk could guess Matt wasn’t from the neighborhood.
Matt smiled through the bars at the fat man, who stared with close-set eyes over a pug nose.
“I believe a man came in here a few minutes ago,” Matt began. “Blond guy. Track suit. Sneakers. Yankee cap...”
The fat man nodded, bored.
“So you know him?” Matt asked.
“He’s been in and out for the past couple of days,” the fat man replied, regarding Matt with rising interest. “Why do you want to know? Are you a cop or something?”
I sensed no hostility in the man’s response, only wariness.
“Nothing like that,” Matt said quickly. “Van Doorn is a friend of mine, that’s all.”
“That’s his name? Von Doom?”
“Van Doorn,” Matt corrected. “Didn’t you know?”
The clerk shook his bald head. “We don’t ask for names around here. Not his. Not yours. We respect our customer’s privacy.”
“I see. Very commendable,” Matt said, humoring the man. “I appreciate your discretion in this matter, as well. You see, Van Doorn is a friend of mine. Lately I’ve become concerned. He seems to have fallen in with a bad crowd. He’s been gambling, and I’m rather afraid Mr. Van Doorn might have accrued some debt with a local gangster.”
The fat man snorted. “Do tell.”
“If you could answer a few questions, I would be very appreciative.” While Matt spoke, he laid a fifty-dollar bill on the counter. The fat man’s meaty hand slammed down on the bill like he was swatting a fly. When he lifted his hand again the money was gone.