“Where did he hang out besides here?” Barbara asked. “Did he sleep in one of the shelters?”
“They wouldn’t stay in shelters,” several of them chorused. “Neither of them.”
“So where did they sleep?” I asked. “In the park?”
“Why do you want to know?” This was a young woman of the pierced and tattooed generation who hadn’t been born when Lennon died. I wondered what drew her to his memorial. She frowned, setting the tiny bells on the rings through her eyebrows tinkling.
“We liked their music, same as you,” Barbara said. “I was thinking if he had a special spot — if a friend wanted to warn him how bad his disappearing looked—”
The young woman blushed red under her blue tattoos.
“I don’t know. But if I did — he has to come back!”
“She has it bad for Homeless,” the Woodstock guy murmured in my ear. “But he never saw anyone but Lady Lost.”
“It’s not safe to have one spot,” someone said. “Not that I’m saying they slept out here at all!”
“They said they did,” someone else said, “but I never saw them.”
We looked around. A few people shook their heads. One or two looked cagey. I could see how if you’d found a safe, warm hiding place inside the park you wouldn’t want to share.
“Where else might they have gone?” I asked.
“Here, there, and everywhere,” the Woodstock guy said.
It took me a moment to remember that was a Beatles song.
“Maybe he took a taxi,” the Dollar a Joke Man said.
“You ask too many questions,” Tattoo Girl said. “But I’ll tell you one thing: the Homeless Troubadour is not a derelict. He’s an artist!”
After that, I would have given up, but Barbara kept going back, taking Sunshine and a supply of dollar bills and sticking with it till a couple of them were willing to talk to her one on one. It seemed Lady Lost had always brushed off questions. Homeless had confided a few details of her past, but the story changed every time he told it. He told one person that she was bipolar and had been institutionalized as a teen. To another, he said she was a runaway from Minnesota who got snapped up by a pimp at Port Authority and spent two nightmare years as a sex slave before getting away. We passed these stories on to the NYPD, but they remained unconfirmed. Natali followed up on the whereabouts of the Dylan wannabe and Tattoo Girl at the time of the murder. Neither of them was homeless or unidentified. Neither had an alibi. The Dylan guy lived in Queens with his wife and kids but had been riding the subway all night after a fight with his wife. Tattoo Girl, a student at Borough of Manhattan Community College, had attended an all-night party and gone home with a guy whose name she didn’t know at an address to which she had paid no attention.
Cindy was spending every hour she could at work, as if she could shorten the eighteen months she had to carry a white shield before making detective by spending them on the job. I was still temping. I had bookmarked the website of the John Jay College of Criminal Justice on my computer, but I hadn’t done anything about it yet. I certainly hadn’t told my girlfriend or my two best friends I was thinking of bettering myself. I wasn’t ready for their opinions. Whenever I wasn’t at work, I could be found at Jimmy and Barbara’s apartment, hanging out with Ms. Sunshine, who could now raise herself on her hands, beam like a beauty queen, and drool all at the same time — a regular multitasker like her dad. She’d be thumbing an iPhone in no time.
“Have you noticed,” Jimmy asked, “that Homeless told different stories to different people about Lady Lost, but none about himself?”
“He’s a man of mystery, all right,” I said. “He’s never used the shelters, and no one’s ever seen him sleeping in the park either. Where do you suppose he’s hiding?”
“I have no patience with that,” Barbara said.
“With what, pumpkin?” Jimmy asked. “Look, she’s trying to roll over. Come on, Sunshine! Sunny side up. Do it for Daddy.”
“Romanticizing homeless people who won’t use social services,” she said. “Or mentally ill people who refuse to take meds. As if it’s a triumph of individualism.”
“What do we know about Homeless, anyway?” I asked.
“He’s got a beautiful voice,” Barbara said. “He’s a good guitar player, but he’d probably be better if he didn’t have arthritis in his hands.”
“He loved Lady Lost,” Jimmy said. “He liked to dress up. What else do you want? He’s homeless.”
“Is he?” I asked. “We only have his word for it. And we know he’s a liar.”
“He’s not homeless?” Barbara asked. “Then who is he?”
“If we can figure that out,” I said, “I bet we can find him.”
We started with the premise that we would find the Homeless Troubadour’s face in some other context than busking in medieval garb, arrest records, or social services. Since cyberspace was Jimmy’s briar patch, he got to do the virtual legwork.
“Look for Lady Lost too,” Barbara said. “If he wasn’t homeless, maybe she wasn’t either. Maybe none of his hard-luck stories about her were true.”
“Or maybe they were,” I said, “but that might have been only part of their story. People do go down the scale.”
Jimmy and I exchanged a glance. We both knew all about hitting bottom.
Barbara caught it. She still watches us like a hawk. It’s her residual codependency. She’s afraid she might miss something interesting.
“Do you think they might have been alcoholics?” she asked.
“I can’t say I’ve never seen anyone dressed like it’s the fourteenth century at a meeting,” Jimmy said, “but not them. I would have noticed.” His fingers sashayed up and down the keyboard. “I’m not getting any hits on the two of them together except performing in the park. Let me play with her image some and try her on her own.”
Barbara put Sunshine down for a nap and I drank a couple of Diet Cokes, which were a lousy substitute for cigarets, while Jimmy searched. Then Barbara napped on the couch and I read Forensics for Dummies on my newly acquired Kindle until Jimmy looked up.
“Do you remember Lily Vidalia?” he asked.
“Sure,” Barbara said. “Are you saying Lady Lost was Lily Vidalia?”
“Who?” I asked.
“They called her the Lily of the West,” Barbara said. “I loved her music. She was a late-blooming folk singer who had a huge success as a crossover artist. But then she dropped out of sight. Are you sure, Jimmy?”
“Come and see for yourself.”
We looked over his shoulder. He had two photos side by side on the screen. One showed Lady Lost in Strawberry Fields, with her flowing hair and her head thrown back as she sang. I recognized the long, swanlike neck that I’d last seen pinched by a strangler’s wire. The other showed Lily Vidalia on the stage at Carnegie Hall in the exact same posture. She wore a shimmering silver evening gown. We all gazed at the screen in silence for a while.
“I want to hear her voice,” Barbara said. “Find ‘Lily of the West.’ Joan Baez and Bob Dylan recorded it, but Lily made it her own. It was her signature song.”
“The Chieftains did it too,” Jimmy said.
Barbara smacked him lightly upside the head.
“TMI, bro,” I said.
“Here she is,” he said, “it’s on YouTube.”
It was the same voice. There was no mistaking it. She looked heartbreakingly young and alive.
“She changed the lyrics,” Barbara said, “because she was the Lily. In the original, it was ‘I courted lovely Flora/ the Lily of the West.’ ”
“Look at the band,” I said. “On the right.”
“It’s him,” she said. “He was her lead guitar. I was right about him. Look at his fingers fly.”