“Beekeeping. I’ve got friends in Connecticut who do it. How do you keep from eating all the profits?” I asked.
“That’s easy. There aren’t any profits yet. I haven’t been doing it that long, and the bees do the work. I just collect the honey every month.” She mumbled her answers and didn’t volunteer much, so I stopped trying to draw her out and we walked the rest of the way to the convention center in silence and at a funereal pace.
Every once in a while Cindy took a long, deep breath that I took to be a stifled sob. It was more emotion than I expected from her, given that Bleimeister was a total stranger. Maybe she had met him. Hell, I didn’t care if she’d answered the booty call—I wasn’t her mother. And I wasn’t so old that I didn’t remember my twenties. Cindy wiped her eyes with the cuff of her jacket, blackening the edges and smearing her liner into extreme cat eyes that Amy Winehouse would have been proud of.
Before we knew it, we’d arrived at the exhibitors’ entrance. Not so early that we’d need to bribe the guard, which was good since the liquor stores weren’t open yet.
I tried to cheer her up. “Hey, if you ever need to sneak in, you could try giving the security guard a few jars of honey. He’s flexible about the going rate.”
Cindy mumbled good-bye and made a beeline for the first floor ladies’ room to fix her face. I took the escalator and watched Cindy slip into the restroom as I rode upstairs.
David was already at his post, charm machine on and smile affixed, ready to take no prisoners. And I was delighted to see Nikki back on the job—instead of her sour-faced husband. She stood proudly by her sarcophagus, all cheery optimism, wearing a vintage hat with a mesh veil that attempted to cover the purple knob on her forehead.
“Welcome back,” I said. “Love the hat.”
“Isn’t it great? Russ brought it to the hospital for me. He’s a dear, isn’t he?” I agreed that Russ was a treasure and silently resolved to never, ever get caught up in disputes between married couples.
The story of their reconciliation was cut short by the approach of two men.
“I’m taking a wild stab that those men behind you are not interested in art,” David said. It was a good guess. As incongruous as they were, in these surroundings, they could only be cops.
The two men could have been sent by central casting—one was white, the other black. It was either enforced diversity or an unconscious homage to every buddy cop team from
“Ms. Holliday?”
John Stancik and Patrick Labidou flashed their credentials and David volunteered to cover the booth while the cops and I found a private place to talk along the wall, where folding chairs had been haphazardly placed for elderly or exhausted attendees. It wasn’t even nine thirty in the morning, but I now felt as if I qualified.
Stancik took the lead, while his partner looked around the convention center as if he’d never seen a flower or any kind of vegetation other than iceberg lettuce or confiscated marijuana before. Perhaps he hadn’t. There was nothing natural about him, from his beard to his clothing. And while I didn’t like to make snap judgments based on what people wore, I hoped Labidou had an undercover assignment later in the day, otherwise hadn’t had a closet makeover since 1976. Stancik was younger, better looking in a generic Secret Service man kind of way.
“Did you make a nine one one call this morning about the Garland Bleimeister case?”
“About forty-five minutes ago.” I didn’t mean it to, but it came out sounding as if I were complaining about their response time.
“Technically,” Labidou said, cracking his gum, “you should have called the precinct or the special tips number given on the news, not nine one one.”
“I’ll try to remember that next time I meet a guy who gets killed.”
Labidou let out a low whistle, but his partner kept to the business at hand. “What can you tell us?”
“I met Garland Bleimeister on Wednesday.”
“How?”
I recounted the no-badge incident and then with something of a flourish showed the cops Bleimeister’s note and the show directory with the dog-eared page.
“He asked me to give this note to someone. Most likely someone on one of these two pages. I never got to hear who the note was for. There was a disturbance on the floor and we all left to see what had happened. He must have sneaked in, so he didn’t need me to deliver the message anymore. That was the last I saw of him. I’d been holding his bag, so I brought it to my booth, thinking he’d come by for it, but he never did. Now I know why.”
Labidou couldn’t resist. “He left you holding the bag?”
“Okay,” his partner said, stifling a smile, which was too bad because he had a nice smile that lit up his whole face. “Where’s the bag?”
“Gone. Either he came back for it when I wasn’t at the booth or somebody else helped himself to it. I understand there have been a number of incidents at the show this year. It could have been stolen.”
“Oh, yeah. The Javits Curse,” Stancik said. He flipped through his notepad. “The precinct has gotten calls about that. Mostly some woman named Douglas. Looks like she called more than once. That also checks out with what Rolanda Knox told us.”
So she had talked to them. Did she tell them about Jamal? And me?
“Any idea what was in the bag?” Stancik asked.
“Nope. I didn’t look.”
“Not exactly burning with curiosity, are you?” Labidou said.
I was thinking up a suitably snarky reply when Lauryn Peete stormed over to us.
“Feisty little woman at eleven o’clock and, thank you lord, she’s coming our way,” Labidou said. “How do I look?” He ran a hand through his hair, but it must have been an involuntary reflex since he was nearly bald.
Every muscle in Lauryn’s body looked tense, and there was an angry vein pulsing in her otherwise smooth forehead.
“What did you tell them? You and that horrible Douglas woman. You’re all the same. You see a kid with baggy pants and unlaced shoes and right away he’s a criminal.”
Stancik looked from Lauryn’s face to mine. Labidou’s gum cracking slowed, then stopped. “Miss Holliday, are you acquainted with Jamal Harrington,
Lauryn took a deep breath and I thought I heard the word
“Why do you ask?” I was all innocence.
“Because he’s wanted for questioning in connection with the death of Garland Bleimeister. We also want to talk to him about the death of one Otis Rudolph—”
“Randolph,” Stancik said.
“Which we are now officially treating as suspicious.”
Forty
“His parents came in from some place in Pennsylvania to identify the body,” Stancik said.
“Some town like Smallville. The mother said Garland started hanging out with some rich kids. He always needed money to keep up with them, so he worked a lot. Especially for one professor who paid pretty well. But that was only during the summertime. The parents weren’t sure where Bleimeister had been staying in New York. It could have been anywhere—a friend’s place or a bench in the park.”
“Wait a minute. I saw him once before Wednesday.” I told them about jogging on Tuesday morning and seeing Bleimeister at the small private museum near Lucy’s apartment. “He looked as if he might have spent the night huddled in the doorway. I thought he might have been a runaway until I saw him here the next day.”
“See, people never think they know anything and then, wham, they do. The Sterling Forsyte Museum—that the one? Transitional neighborhood,” Stancik said. “Was that near where you’re staying?” I nodded.
“We think Bleimeister might have hooked up with Jamal sometime in the last six months, and the two of them went into business. Kid like Bleimeister could open up a whole new line of distribution for a street operator like Jamal.”
