Westside Lights, page 3
“So I’ve never done it before,” I said. “That’s probably because it’s a good idea.”
I made my way down the hallway on a crimson carpet so thin I could feel every joint in the wood and stopped at the private office of Ida Greene. Neither of the voices that came from inside belonged to her.
“You’ve asked all the guardsmen?”
“Every one, once and twice and then a third time, just to make sure they all think I’m fully insane.”
“And none of them have seen anything?”
“I’d have told you if they did.”
“Ask them again. The cleaning people, too, and the office boys, and anyone else who might have been through here, and—”
“Cornelia.”
There was real concern in the man’s voice. It was a refreshing sound—I wasn’t used to hearing people who gave a damn about each other. There was a pause, and then the scritch of a match erupting into flame.
“I know. It’s ludicrous. It’s one of those things that doesn’t matter at all, except that if it doesn’t matter, why is it keeping me up at night? We have staked everything on this place. Every penny counts. If Mrs. Greene knew . . .”
“She never will. I’ll talk to the guards.”
“Thank you.”
Deep within my undertaxed brain, I felt the itch of curiosity. It was maddening and intoxicating all at once. I wondered what would happen if I gave it a scratch.
The door eased open. Out stalked a thick-necked man whose hair was smeared across his forehead in an unfortunate center part. His rimless spectacles showed red eyes sunk deep into his skull. He looked past me and then snapped his head back to look at me again. Disgust settled onto his face as he recognized me. His name was Marvin Howell.
I was thrilled to run into him, too.
I’d met him once before, at the end of a very long night, when Cherub and I were slumped against the Boardwalk railing, sharing a packet of greasy fries so hot they burned our throats. Howell spotted Cherub from across the street, shoved through the crowd, and smacked him across the face. The sound was a whip crack. The fries scattered across the ground.
“You know why,” Howell snarled, and then he spun away.
I let Cherub breathe. His cheek was cherry red. Once he was standing upright, I asked: “And who was that charming man?”
“Howell. Marvin Howell, a friend from my One-Eyed days. We called him Camembert, because whenever a fight started, he went all soft and tended to run. I wonder why he’d want to hit me.”
“Doesn’t everyone?”
“If they have sense. Watch this.”
He tilted his head back then and let loose a sickening yowl, loud enough to make my ears ring. The screech took me right back to my childhood, to the days of the Westside’s first wildness. It was the war cry of the One-Eyed Cats, a hideous, beautiful sound, and it cut through Howell like a straight razor. For a full minute he stood, shaking in terror, and then walked away.
“That’s the hell of having a past,” Cherub chuckled. “You can forget it, but it won’t forget you.”
That day at St. Abban’s, Howell pried off his spectacles and made a great show of cleaning the glass.
“You seem an inoffensive young woman,” he said. It was hard to tell if he meant this as a compliment, an insult, or some mixture of the two.
“I’ve been called many things, but never inoffensive. And I believe I’m older than you.”
“Even so. Why you waste your time on that lout Cherub, I shall never understand.”
“I’d explain it if I cared what you think. Do you mind getting out of the way? You’re blocking the door.”
He shook his head and walked away. I was about to knock when I remembered that knocking gets you nowhere, and so I opened the door.
In a classroom whose chalkboard was covered with the ghosts of diagrammed sentences, the woman who’d begged Howell for help sat behind a desk. Like Mrs. Greene, she was Black, precisely styled, and in no mood to waste time, but she was much younger—perhaps twenty-two. She wore a pale pink blouse whose scalloped frills curled around the lapels of a sharply tailored green suit. I had the strangest idea that her sleeves were hiding scars.
“I don’t believe you’re Ida Greene,” I said.
“I’m not that lucky.” She crossed her hands. “I’m Cornelia Prime, her assistant, overseeing things while she’s away from St. Abban’s. The office is shared. Perhaps you’d like a cup of tea?”
She rapped her pencil on her teapot, which was wreathed in a purple knitted cozy. It was the nicest greeting I’d received in some time, so nice that I wasn’t sure how to respond. I sat in the only available place—a tiny chair with an attached desk—and before I could say anything, she poured me a cup.
“This isn’t the same tea Van Alen drinks?” I asked, remembering the vile green muck I had once been served by the lord of light. Prime shook her head, smiling like we were sharing an embarrassing secret.
“That particular concoction is well out of my price range. This is an ordinary Assam. You can get it at the bazaar.”
I took a cautious sip. The tea was bracing, almost bitter. It puckered my lips but did nothing to clear my head.
“I’ve come to report a missing . . .”
“Yes?”
Her head tilted to the side, exactly parallel with her pencil, which hovered over her notebook, ready to take down my report.
“I’m sorry, I just—I couldn’t help overhearing. You’ve lost something?”
Her smile flicked off. She looked nothing but tired.
“Those doors are so horribly thin.”
“No. I’m just very good at listening. What is it?”
“It’s a minor matter, really. Certainly nothing to interest you.”
“You may be surprised.”
I pulled a card from my change purse and slid it across her desk. It was gray, creased, the ink starting to run. It was the last one I had.
G. CARR: TINY MYSTERIES SOLVED
“Ah. The detective. Mrs. Greene has mentioned you.”
“Only good things, I’m sure.”
“She said you’re irritating, unpredictable, badly groomed, and occasionally useful.”
“High praise, indeed. Now, what have you lost?”
“I really don’t think—”
“Please. Tell me what you’re missing. It may be hard to understand but, well, you’d be doing me a favor.”
I’d always hated client interviews. Securing work forced me to switch seamlessly between so many contradictory roles—the compassionate young woman, the icy professional, the eccentric Westsider—but I put up with it because I enjoyed the cases and I was generally desperate for cash. I wasn’t at the moment—the Misery Queen and mooching off Marka’s friends took care of that—but the itch was growing. Watching Cornelia Prime lean back in her chair and unburden herself, I remembered how pleasant it could be to sink into someone else’s problems. As long as she talked, I did not have to worry about me.
She held up her pencil like a nurse preparing a syringe.
“This is a Bishop’s Blue Streak,” she said. “Carved from Himalayan cedar, dyed with cobalt pulled from the Congo hills, and balanced like a rapier. In a stroke, it can fell an empire. Van Alen employees are permitted to use nothing else.”
She offered it to me, with a look like she was reluctant to let it go. The pencil was sky blue, as round as a drum, and oddly heavy, with C. P. etched in gold beneath the eraser.
“It’s blue all right,” I said.
“Mr. Van Alen swears they’re the finest pencil known to man.”
“You don’t agree?”
“The lead is soft. You have to sharpen them every twenty minutes, and even then it’s like writing with a fistful of mud. But we’re required to buy them, monogram and all, and told to guard them with our lives.”
She took a cigarette from the case on the desk, lit it, and let the smoke settle deep into her lungs. She must be very close to Ida Greene, I thought, if she’s allowed to smoke her tobacco.
“I am known for being careful with money. That’s how I caught Mrs. Greene’s eye. When the District became a reality and Van Alen asked her to oversee the legitimate wing of the enterprise, she brought me along. We are understaffed, underpaid, and working ourselves to the bone.”
“I didn’t realize the District had a legitimate wing.”
She laughed. It was deep, like her voice, and sounded like it belonged to someone who had lived a very long time.
“Food service, mostly,” she said. “The pleasure boats. Soft jazz and swimming and perhaps, someday, a velodrome.”
“Sober fun.”
“What Van Alen prefers. The illicit side of the District will not last forever. Until now, the authorities have turned a blind eye, but at some point, the specter of sin on the Hudson will become too much for them to bear. Some congressman’s wife will pick up a heroin addiction on Clarkson Street, or a muckraking journalist will begin asking questions about where the brothel girls go after they turn twenty-two. Mr. Van Alen has trusted St. Abban’s to ensure that when the criminal side of this experiment collapses, there is enough honest money left to keep the District alive.”
“And if you can’t keep track of your pencils, what hope do you have?”
“Precisely.”
I set the pencil on her desk. She opened the drawer, a scarred hulk that had probably been sitting in that room since before I was born. Two dozen pencils were lined up there, soldiers waiting to die.
“I keep mine here,” she said. “Locked. Every few days, one has gone.”
A locked drawer mystery. What fun it would be, I thought, to take this case, to spend a few weeks—or months!—staking out this office, collecting pencil shavings, tearing the masks off the polite people who worked for Van Alen to find the monsters that lurked beneath. I could earn a bit of money, a few favors with the powers at St. Abban’s.
I could have some fun.
“Do you have any suspects?”
“Every person here, I trust with my life. Surely I can trust them with a pencil as well.”
“What about Howell?”
Her eyebrows arched. She shook her head.
“I’d rather not. That boy’s had a difficult time. He was one of Barbarossa’s gangsters, a Dead Barrow Tough. Enlisted when he was seven years old. Given bad liquor and a sharp knife and taught to kill. Can you imagine what that would do to a young man?”
“I’ve seen it, yes.”
His eyes had sparkled when he hit Cherub. He hadn’t looked angry. It was as if he enjoyed it. I decided not to mention it—not to protect Howell, about whom I did not care, but because it would do Cherub no favors for those in power to know his name.
“He’d be dead if it weren’t for Ida Greene,” she said. “Van Alen prefers not to employ Barbarossa’s people, but Mrs. Greene convinced him to make an exception for Marvin. She considers him a project. She once saw me the same way. But of course . . .”
Another wave. Another twist of smoke.
“Is this your sort of case?”
Electricity hummed in my chest. I’d come here to discard a case and was on the verge of taking on a second. It would be so easy to say yes, to lose myself in this utterly unimportant problem that just happened to be ruining a kind woman’s life. I’d need to do nothing more complicated than betray Cherub and myself and the Queen and Grover Hartley and every piece of driftwood we’d lashed together to form our new lives. How tempting it was, in that moment, to throw it all away.
I picked the pencil up again and reached for Prime’s notepad.
“May I?”
She nodded, and I tore the top sheet free. I drew a line across the page and saw that she was right. The lead was butter soft. As soon as it smeared across the paper, my spark went out.
“I’m sorry. I can’t take this case.”
Her brow creased. She was surprised, I think, at how disappointed that news made her feel.
“Why not?”
“For one thing, I’m not working cases at the moment. I made the decision to take the summer off, and I’m trying to stick to it.”
“Trying to?”
“I’ve never quite known how to relax.”
“It’s the hardest thing in the world for a woman who likes to work. Take a moment to breathe, and you’ll find Marvin Howell sitting in your chair. What’s the other thing?”
“I already know who’s taking them.”
Her eyes went wide. It felt nice. It had been so long since I’d seen anyone so impressed.
I leaned across her desk and poised the pencil above the curling cuffs of her blouse.
“Do you mind?” I said.
“The Casino handles all our laundry—a rare perk of this job. Do your worst.”
I smeared a line across her cuff. She inspected it, smiling, waiting for me to explain.
“Only Van Alen people have these pencils?”
“No one else could stand the expense.”
“Then the person you’re looking for is Oliver Lee. I saw a smudge on his cuff that looked just like that. I bet he’s got a whole cupboard full of your Blue Streaks.”
“That doesn’t seem possible.”
“And yet.”
“Really, though. When Roebling men break protocol, they die. He wouldn’t risk his life for a pencil.”
“You’ve misunderstood the Gray Boys. They don’t steal from each other, but they take from everyone else. He probably doesn’t even know he’s doing it. Men like that go through life unprepared, picking up whatever they need and assuming it’s theirs.”
She leaned back, eyeing the mark on her sleeve.
“Do you have any proof?”
“That’s what I love about my work—I don’t need it. Tiny mysteries rarely end up in front of a judge.”
“If you’re right, there’s nothing I can do to stop it. Relations between St. Abban’s and the Roeblings are never simple, and with the season ending, well . . . the fewer customers we have, the more tense things will be. I can hardly risk an incident over something like this.”
“But you don’t think I’m right.”
“I just can’t believe Oliver Lee would be so stupid. Even so, thank you for letting me talk about it. Perhaps now I can let this go.”
She drained her tea. I looked down and saw, to my surprise, that I had emptied my cup. She raised the teapot, offering more. I shook my head.
“I almost forgot,” she said. “You came in here to report a missing . . . what was it?”
“It’s silly. A small thing. I think . . .”
“Yes?”
“I think I’d rather take care of it myself.”
I extracted myself from the undersized desk and strolled out of the room, enjoying the warmth of the tea, the feeling of having solved a pointless problem, and the sensation that, deep inside me, old machinery was humming again. I wondered if Cherub would hear.
Each Friday, Marka gifted us ten crisp dollar bills—“a touch of spending money”—for use in the rare moments when she was not around. I broke a dollar buying a fried oyster sandwich and walked to the end of Pier 34 to eat. A line of yachts bobbed in the water, waiting to unload a herd of people in spotless whites whose skin was just beginning to scorch. Downriver, pairs of Peacekeepers patrolled the Long Pier, a ramshackle structure where men and women who had welshed on their tabs or gotten caught counting cards awaited deportation to the Eastside.
I dropped a hunk of bread into the water. Before it sank, a family of gulls tore it apart. None of them were missing a leg. For the millionth time, I wondered if the twisting in my stomach was really due to the absence of work. If it was something else—if it was Cherub, or the boat, or my friends, or this entire hideous place—then fixing it would take courage I no longer had. If I dove headfirst into a case, perhaps it would fix everything, and life would be easy again. If it didn’t, well, then I would have harder questions to answer.
I had made a promise to Cherub, a promise to myself, but this was Labor Day weekend. My oath had only a few days left to run. There would be no harm in getting an early start on a little field research—following the gulls, getting to know their habits. A long weekend boozing with Marka and her gang would be tolerable if I knew I had a secret, a purpose, a life.
I shredded what remained of the sandwich. With each rip, the knot in my stomach loosened just a little bit. When I hurled the mess of food into the water, I felt suddenly so light, so unencumbered, that there was nothing to do but taunt them.
“Gorge, you flying rats, and enjoy it, because Gilda Carr is—”
Before I could finish my threat, a dignified old woman bashed an umbrella into my skull.
“That’s a noble bird!” she barked. She hit me again. I took the blow on my wrists. It hurt. “You’d feed it filth?”
Her skin was as gray as charcoal; her hair was as white as the clouds above. She wore it twisted behind her head in a tight bun, beneath a hat weighed down with enough flowers to make two or three bouquets. She reared back for a third strike, but when I went to dodge it, she jabbed me in the belly instead. A fencer, I thought, as I sank to my knees, trying not to vomit on her shoes.
“A bully,” she said, “that’s you. Picking on the poor defenseless gulls, but when Lady Birdlady comes along, you fall down to nothing. Women these days are made out of cardboard. When I was a girl—”
“What should I feed them?”
“Huh?”
“I mean, what does a gull like to eat?”
She squatted, close enough that I could see the wisps of her moustache, and sprayed spittle into my face.
“Like to eat? Like to eat? Well, they like to eat almost anything, same way the human body likes getting stuffed with Irish whiskey and cocaine and cheap sex and fried food. A gull’ll eat trash or French fries or human waste, given the chance, and it won’t pay no mind to the way it rots from the inside out.”
I was fully aware that if I said the wrong thing, she would start hitting me again. The yachting crowd was already staring. I did not need to give them any more reason to laugh.
