“If I had to make a bet,” I said, “I’d bet on her running to him, and I remember her saying he works nights. I’m headed over there right now. I’ll call and let you know what I find out. Where are you?”
She hesitated, just a fraction, before she said, “My office. But don’t—I’ll call you. In an hour? Or I…I could come by your place?”
I didn’t hesitate, not a fraction. I’d had all the seduction I could handle.
“Call me in an hour.” I hung up.
It was past three am, but scattered in the streets were still the sounds of late-night revelry, street-corner drunks hooting and laughing. Somewhere blocks away a bottle smashed, thrown forcefully to the ground. Such a tiny sound, but universal; anywhere on the planet it expressed the same demand: Know I’m here!
The air was piss warm and, because of the orange glow of streetlamps, had a urinary hue, too. And not good piss, either, not clean piss, but that syrupy orange kind. Not even human. Cat piss. The kind you can’t get out, ever, no matter how much you scrub. Whatever’s marked by it has to be tossed out. Can’t be saved.
Only occasionally as I walked was the humidity relieved by sharp gusts of breeze that went as soon as they came.
Short windbursts like an engine revving, as if in the dead of morning a storm was on the way.
Chapter Twenty: BETWEEN C & D
The E-Z Parking garage was located on East Tenth between Avenues C and D, just across the street from a small lane called Szold Place, which ran along the side of one of the city’s outdoor public pools. All closed up for the season.
I stopped and surveyed the parking garage from the pool side of the street. Three floors of parking with a big elevator shaft in which cars were lifted to the upper floors. Each of the partitioned levels had gaps overlooking the street with heavy black netting to keep the birds out, heavy black netting covered in starbursts of white birdshit.
On the second level could be seen the fronts of cars facing out behind the netting. But at the third level, the spaces were all empty, no cars.
The garage was closed, its metal roll-down gate snug to the ground. Its cave-like interior seemed to be lit by nothing but emergency exit door lights, a dim red gloom bleeding around the rounded concrete pillars. This was no way to run a business. Supposin’ I needed my car in a hurry? Just supposin’.
But as my eyes became adjusted, I saw there was another light inside as well, on the ground floor. A pale light showing in a small glass-enclosed office just to the right of a closed metal door with a punch clock beside it.
I rattled the cage wall of the gate, producing a ripple.
A shadow crossed the light in the office and a black silhouette faced me, like those ghosts in Japanese horror flicks.
The ghost went away and a few seconds later I heard a noise far off to my left. A door had opened. I went over to it. Elena was holding it open.
Her eyes widened when she recognized me and she tried to shut the door again. But too late, I was inside. I closed the door behind me. The small areaway was lit by only a single bare 60 watt bulb dangling overhead from a cord.
I asked, “What are you so afraid of?”
“I…nothing, I thought—”
“That I was someone else? Who are you expecting?”
“I don’t expect, it’s just I no want trouble—”
“What sort of trouble are you afraid of?”
“Nothing. No one.”
“Is it Sayre Rauth? Because you’ve got nothing to be frightened of there. I’ve talked with her. She isn’t after you.”
Elena backed up a step, keeping me at arm’s length. Her expression was wary and more than a bit sad. “She get to you, this woman, and you believe her lies. Like all men.”
“She told me she wants to help you.”
“She help me before, when we’re in Ukraine. I know her help, I don’t want it.”
“Well, she’s not here now, I can tell you that. And I certainly won’t hurt you.”
She shook her head. “Go, please. I don’t want you here.”
“Sorry, Elena. I’m not going anywhere till I get some answers.”
“Then at least come to office, I need to be near phone.”
“Okay, I can do that.” I followed her, keeping my hand lightly on the gun butt in my waistband. She led me to the glass-enclosed office where only a desk lamp was lit, illuminating a blotter with a few pens on it and several pink parking receipt tickets like the one I had in my pocket.
Elena sat behind the desk and commenced to stare at the telephone, willing it to ring.
I shut the door and stood with my back to it, looking out through the glass walls like a fish in a tank, staring into the darkened vacant parking garage and its patches of red gloom.
I said, “Tell me something. What happened after I left your apartment this afternoon? I went back a few minutes later and you were gone.”
“I wake up in bathroom,” she said. “I hear loud crash outside, feel floor shake. I wait a minute, go out into hallway to look. Nothing. Then I look down in basement, and I see you, you and super, at bottom of stairs. You look like you are dead, both of you. So I run—I pack quick, a few things, and I run.”
“Yeh, well, I’m not dead. Luis is—but so is the guy who killed him. You don’t have to worry about him.”
She shook her head. “I will never go back to that apartment.”
“No, probably not,” I said, thinking of Sayre’s description of the building wrapped in crime-scene tape. Thinking, too, that if Addison was in town again he might want his pied à terre back. “Did you know the man you’re house-sitting for is a wanted fugitive?”
“What?” Her eyes shot up from the cradled phone receiver to my face.
“The police,” I said, “they want to arrest this man, along with anyone who’s been helping him. By house-sitting, say.”
“We don’t help him,” Elena said. “We don’t even house-sit for him—we sit, yes, but it is for Jeff’s boss, he give us the keys, say go live there free, just pick up mail, pay phone, electric, nobody will know. So we do. But we never once see Mr. Andrew. We don’t help him any. I don’t think he even know we are living there.”
“Jeff’s boss gave you the keys?”
“His new boss, yes. The man who buy parking garage, he give them to Jeff and tell him move in, watch over apartment, keep it safe.”
“When did this new boss buy the garage? Just recently?”
She nodded. “June. He come in, he fire all the workers, everyone but Jeff. So now Jeff works like dog, seven days, all day. I never see him. I don’t think it’s worth it, even with the extra money.”
“What extra money?”
She tilted her chin down and didn’t say anything.
“Look, Elena, honest, I’m trying to help you. But I can’t unless you answer my questions. What money?”
She peered at me from under her brows.
“He give Jeff special bonus, for all the extra work he gonna have to do. Seventy thousand dollars. Too much money, I think, like back home when they pay us extra for modeling because they need us also keep our mouth shut. But Jeff explain to me that things is different here, they sometimes pay you seventy thousand dollar to work in a garage. I don’t know. It’s not sound right to me, but he say, so…” Her English, never great, was getting worse as she became more agitated. I had to strain to make sense of what she was saying.
“This money,” I said. “The seventy thousand dollars. That’s what got Sayre worried. She discovered how much money the two of you had in the bank, and figured you had to be doing something illegal.”
“No, nothing illegal, we done nothing!”