“So, you’re an actress?” I asked, sliding in beside Hopper.
She smiled, nodding.
“What have you acted in?” Hopper asked.
This caused her eyes to skid confusedly over to him, then swerve back to me. Even I knew that was one of the rudest questions to ask an actor.
“Nothing. Yet. I’ve only been an actress five weeks. That’s how long I’ve been in the city.”
“Where’d you move from?” I asked.
“Saint Cloud. Near Narcoossee.”
I could only nod, as I didn’t know what Narcoossee was. It sounded like an Indian reservation and casino where you could play craps and watch a Crystal Gayle lookalike sing “Brown Eyes Blue.” But Nora smiled without shame, closing the play, touching the cover like it was a sacred Bible — yet it was David Mamet’s Glengarry Glen Ross.
“Sorry I was so rude last night,” she said to me.
“Apology accepted,” I said.
With a tiny frown, she swept her hands officiously over the surface of the table, brushing a few toast crumbs onto the floor. She then turned and opened up the Whole Foods bag, peering inside as if there were something alive in there. She reached in with both hands and gently pulled out a bulky red-and-black bundle, placing it on the table and sliding it toward me.
I recognized it immediately.
It was a woman’s coat. And for a moment, the diner and everything in it dissolved. There was only that article of clothing, so ferociously red, staring me down. It looked like a costume, ornate, faintly Russian — red wool fabric, the cuffs black lamb, black cord embellishing the front.
The woman I’d encountered at the Central Park Reservoir, weeks ago, had been wearing it.
The soaked dark hair, the ambling in and out of lamplight, the coat lighting like a flare, alerting me to—what? Had she simply been toying with me? How the woman had managed to follow me down into the subway as quickly as she had defied logic. The incident had been so odd, when I came home that night I couldn’t sleep, infected by the strangeness of it. I climbed out of bed more than a few times to pull aside the curtains, half expecting her to be there, her slender form like a red incision in the sidewalk, her face turned up to me with hard black eyes. I’d actually questioned my sanity, wondered if this was it: the substandard past few years had finally led to a mental break with reality, and now, floodgates open, there’d be no limit to the fiends I’d encounter. They’d simply crawl out of my head, down into the world.
But the sidewalk had no red tear. The street, the night, remained flawless and still.
I’d actually started to forget the entire episode—until now.
It had been Ashley Cordova.
The realization was startling, and it was quickly followed by the paranoid feeling something was wrong, including this awkward coat-check girl. She had to be involved in some kind of setup. But the girl only smiled innocently back at me. Hopper, on the other hand, must have seen something on my face — complete shock — because he was squinting at me suspiciously.
“What is it?” he asked, nodding at the coat.
“Ashley’s coat,” she said. “She was wearing it when she came into the restaurant.” She picked up her knife and fork and cut into her French toast. “She left it with me. When the police came later, asking about her, I gave them a black coat from the lost and found and said that one was Ashley’s. If they found out I was lying, I was going to say I’d mixed up the tickets. But they never came back.”
Hopper slid the coat toward him, unfolded it, holding it up by the shoulders. For all its elaborate stitching, the coat looked worn, even seemed to smell of the city, the dirty wind, the sweat. The inside was lined with black silk, and I noticed, sewn into the back collar, a purple label. LARKIN, it read in black letters. Rita Larkin was Cordova’s longtime costume designer. I was about to mention this detail when I noticed there was actually a long dark hair stuck to the sleeve in an elongated S.
“Why’d you lie to the cops?” Hopper asked Nora.
“I’ll tell you guys. On one condition. I want to be part of the investigation.” She looked at me. “You said last night you were investigating Ashley.”
“It’s nothing that formal,” I said, clearing my throat, managing to look away from the coat and at Nora. “I’m really investigating her father. And Hopper’s just here today. We’re not partners.”
“Yeah, we are,” he countered, shooting me a look. “Absolutely. Welcome to the team. Be our friggin’ mascot. Why’d you lie to the police?”
Nora stared at him, taken aback by his intensity. Then she looked at me, awaiting my response.
I said nothing, because I was adjusting to what it meant, this encounter with Ashley. I took a deep breath, trying to at least pretend I was considering her request. For the record, it’d be over my dead body that I’d ever employ a sidekick — particularly one who’d just crawled out of the Florida boonies.
“This is not the adventure of a lifetime,” I said. “I’m not Starsky. He’s not Hutch.”
“If I’m not involved from beginning to end when we find out who or what made Ashley die before her time”—she articulated all of this decisively, as if she’d rehearsed it sixty times in front of the bathroom mirror—“then I’m not telling you what she was like or what she did, and you can both get lost.” She slid the coat back and began to mash it inside the bag.
Hopper looked at me expectantly.
“There’s no need to be so black-and-white about it,” I said.
She ignored me.
“Okay. You can work with us,” I said.
“You swear?” she asked, smiling.
“I swear.”
She extended her hand, and I shook it — mentally crossing my fingers.
“It was a quiet night,” she went on eagerly. “After ten. There wasn’t anyone in the lobby. She walked right in wearing that, so of course I noticed her. She was beautiful. But really thin, with eyes almost clear. She looked right at me and my first thought was, Oh wow, she’s pretty. Her face was more in focus than everything else in the room. But as she turned and started walking toward me, I felt scared.”
“Why?” I asked.
She bit her lip. “It was like, when you looked into her eyes the human part was detached and there was something else looking out.”
“Like what,” Hopper prompted.
“Don’t know,” she said, gazing down at her plate. “She didn’t seem to blink. Or breathe, even. Not when she pulled off that red coat, not when she handed it to me, not when I gave her the ticket. As I hung it up on the coat rack, I could feel her eyes on me. When I turned back, I thought she’d still be standing there, but she was already disappearing up the stairs.”
I’d witnessed the same startling movement when she’d suddenly appeared in the subway.
“At that point, other people came in. As I was checking their coats I noticed she was coming back down the stairs. Without looking at me she headed outside. I figured she’d gone out to smoke. I didn’t see her come back, so I figured I’d been so busy I missed her, but at the end of the night her red coat was still hanging there. The only one left.”