“That’s the general idea.”
We’d talked about his fee, but I hadn’t bargained hard. I wanted him motivated, and in any event it was David’s money I’d be spending. I’d heard a cigarette light when we settled things, and Monroe had seemed relieved and eager to get started.
“I’ll make my calls and we can touch base tomorrow, let’s say for late lunch.”
He’d picked Cousin Dupree’s, a new and much hyped bistro on the Upper East Side, and he’d kept me waiting for twenty minutes. He was talking on his cell and smoking a cigarette when he almost stepped through the door- a rounded, fortyish man in a gravely abused camel hair coat and wilted Gucci loafers. The hostess had stopped him at the threshold and pointed him and his cigarette at the sidewalk, but he’d taken it affably enough. I’d watched through the window as he puffed away and made more phone calls. His tangled hair was black and shiny, and so were his eyes. They sparkled above his ruddy cheeks and, along with his sly, puffy mouth, gave him the look of a seedy cherub.
Monroe drained his glass. “No dessert for you?” he asked. I shook my head and he looked suspicious and ordered a flan. He was looking over the list of Sauternes when I cleared my throat.
“How many of her videos have you seen?” I asked.
Monroe answered quickly. “Five: Interviews Two through Five and Interview Eight.”
“How many are there?”
“Twelve so far.”
“What are they like?”
He thought about this longer. “I won’t ruin things for you by trying to describe them,” he said finally, “and in any case I wouldn’t do them justice- but I will give you my opinion, which is that they’re fucking brilliant. Weird shit, definitely, strange enough to give a sick kind of thrill, but fucking brilliant. You’ll see.”
Monroe’s flan came and he was halfway through it when his cell phone burred. He raised his eyebrows and excused himself to the bar again. He wore a satisfied smile when he returned.
“Nine o’clock,” he said, “at Todd’s place.”
Which left me five hours to kill when I said goodbye to Monroe. I disposed of one of them with a cold, stiff- legged run along the Hudson, up into the twenties and down to TriBeCa. The phone was ringing as I came through the door. It was Clare.
“I was wondering if you wanted your key back,” she said. I heard street noise in the background.
“I was a little surprised you didn’t leave it behind on Saturday.”
“I thought about it. I thought about throwing it at you too. Do you want it back or not?”
“Not,” I said. “Where are you?”
She was quiet for a moment. “In the neighborhood,” she said eventually.
“You want to stop by?”
“I don’t know,” she said, and hung up. But she was there when I got out of the shower. She was perched in the sofa with her coat still on and blue dusk falling around her. She turned the key over in her hand.
“Still thinking about throwing it?” I asked. I belted my robe and sat at the table.
Clare’s gray eyes were clouded and her voice was low. “It’s too light,” she said. “It wouldn’t do any damage.”
I smiled. “I’m sorry about Saturday.”
“Sorry about what part?”
“About prying.”
“Was that prying? I’m sort of amazed you never asked before. Anyway, it wasn’t that.”
“Then what was it?”
She sighed massively and stood and paced slowly along my bookshelves. Her hair was white in the twilight and she swept it off her shoulders. “Timing. Your timing sucks.”
I nodded. “Then I’m sorry about the timing, and about being insensitive.”
Clare’s laugh was short and bitter. “Insensitive? A few years of therapy, some medication maybe- and maybe you can work your way up to insensitive.” She leaned against a cast-iron column and folded her arms across her chest. “Besides, ‘insensitive’ is boyfriend talk. Is that what you think you are?”
“A friend, anyway.”
Another small laugh. “A friend with privileges? A fuck buddy?”
“What do you call it, if not a friend?”
She said something I couldn’t make out and I crossed the room and stood in front of her. Her head was bent and her shoulders quivered in the shadows.
“What do you call it?” I asked again. My throat was tight and my voice sounded far away.
Clare leaned forward and rested her forehead on my shoulder. She tapped me lightly in the chest with my house key. “Hell if I know,” she murmured. “You’re the fucking detective, you figure it out.” Then she put the key in her pocket and turned her face up and kissed me.
Clare was sleeping when I got into the shower and gone when I got out. I dressed quickly in gray flannels and a black turtleneck and headed for the subway and Brooklyn.
Chaz Monroe was waiting on the corner of President and Hicks streets, smoking a cigarette, talking on his cell, and stamping his feet in the cold. The collar was up on his camel hair coat and his dark eyes glittered in the streetlight. He said his goodbyes and snapped his phone shut.
“Bring the popcorn and soda?” he said, smiling. He took my elbow and led me toward Henry Street and he talked the whole way to Todd Herring’s house.
“Todd’s a major music-biz lawyer,” Monroe said. “He bought this place two years ago- the same time he traded in his wife for a newer version- and he’s been renovating ever since. About the only thing he’s managed to finish is the home theater, which is lucky for us. He’ll be showing us Interview Two and Interview Four tonight.”
Herring’s place was a wide four-story brownstone, with a construction Dumpster parked outside and scaffolds climbing up the front. There were broad steps from the sidewalk to a pair of tall, deep-set black doors. Monroe leaned on the doorbell and smiled into the video intercom.
A lanky, red-haired man in jeans and a FUBU T-shirt ushered us into a high-ceilinged entrance hall that was decorated in dropcloths and plaster dust.
“Chaz, my brother,” the man said. He had a deep, radio voice, and he wrapped Monroe in a stiff-armed, stylized hug, and pounded him lightly on the back with a fist. Monroe endured it with amusement.
“Todd, my man,” he said, and kept nearly all the laughter from his voice. “This is John March.”
“Good to meet you, bro,” Todd said, and held a fist out to me. I tapped it lightly with my own.
Todd Herring was tall, skinny, and abundantly freckled. His carroty hair was expensively cut but salted with white, and despite the business with the fists and the “bro” talk I figured him for fifty.
“We’ll go downstairs,” he said, and he led us past a curving stairway and many paint cans to other, narrower stairs going down.
The brownstone’s garden floor was thickly carpeted, heavily paneled, and flush with recessed halogen lighting. We followed Todd down another hall, past a well-equipped kitchenette.
“Drinks for anybody?” he asked. I declined, but Monroe hit him up for a beer. Todd fetched a Carta Blanca and a frosted mug and led us to the theater. He flicked a switch and muted lights came up on the walls and from the ceiling. There were twenty thick, theater-style seats, arranged in four curving rows before a large screen. Todd went to a black cabinet at the back of the room and fiddled with some technology inside.
“Sit anywhere,” he said. He flicked a switch, and a large flat monitor swiveled quietly out of the ceiling at the front of the room.
Chaz took a seat in the second row center and put his beer bottle and glass into the slots built into the armrest. I wandered to the front of the room, and looked at a pair of glass-fronted wooden boxes leaning against the wall. They were the same size, about twelve inches by fifteen inches by four inches deep. One was made from cherry wood and one was bird’s-eye maple, and there were shelves and cubbyholes built inside of them, and little
