even looking in my general direction. Clare was less circumspect.
“Jesus Christ, what happened to you?” She’d dropped her book and sat up on the sofa as I limped through the door.
“Slipped on some ice,” I said. I dropped my coat and eased into a chair and winced. Clare bit her lip. I fumbled with the laces of my boots and she’d brushed my hands away and untied them for me.
“Shouldn’t you say some shit like ‘You should see the other guy’?”
I stretched out my leg and winced again. “I am the other guy.”
Clare shook her head. “I don’t do the Florence Nightingale thing,” she’d said. But as it turned out, she did, carefully and with surprising tenderness.
I filled a mug and stared out the frost-framed window. The wind had died since last night, but snow was still falling in small, relentless flakes. The TV news said it was the calm before the secondthe worse- storm that was due to arrive that night. The anchormen read long lists of things that were closed, and likely to stay that way for a while, and field reporters trained their cameras on impassable roads and on the dazed and hapless at the airports. I looked down at Sixteenth Street. The only cars I saw were at the curbsides, buried until spring, and the only people were gray smudges, trudging- one snow-shoeing- down the middle of the road. I wondered what errand Clare was on.
A shower loosened my limbs, and three cups of coffee got my brain cells spinning, but still they found no purchase when it came to Babyface. He was Holly’s new boyfriend. He had a key to her place. He was looking for something or someone- maybe Gene Werner. He had a bad temper. And twice now my conversations with him had ended in bruises. I thought again about the crude green tattoos on his hands, and added some speculation to my paltry pile of facts: he’s maybe been inside recently. It was still adding up to nothing when the phone rang.
It was Mike Metz, who’d somehow made it to his office. I told him about my conversation with Herbert Deering, in Wilton, and about my livelier encounter with Babyface.
Mike was quiet for a while when I was done. “It’d be good to know his name,” he said eventually, “and whether he actually was insideand, if so, what for. It’d also be good to know where he was a week ago last Tuesday, or thereabouts. And the same goes for Werner.”
“Why a week ago Tuesday?”
“That’s when the ME thinks she went in the water, or so my lunch date told me. They think she was in about five days.”
“They have a time of death?”
“Sometime that day- Tuesday- but nothing more precise yet.”
“And the cause?”
“Shot in the face, four times.”
I took a deep breath. “Not your typical suicide, I guess.”
“Not really.”
“But it explains why no pictures.”
“Yep.”
I thought about the timing. David’s London trip did him no good, and I wondered if he had a story for Tuesday. I didn’t relish asking. “In the face is…”
Mike found the word for me. “Intimate.”
“Anger like that, you think lover-which doesn’t necessarily narrow the field with Holly.”
Mike made an affirmative noise. “According to my friend, the gunshots weren’t all of it. Sometime before she was shot, she was beaten, and pretty badly.”
“Jesus,” I sighed. “How long before?”
“Days, they think. Apparently the bruises had started to heal.”
“The cops think it was the same person that did both?”
“My guy says they’re still debating. Why- you have a theory?”
“Not even close,” I said. “Holly seemed to make a lot of people mad, or scared, or both.”
“I just wish we knew who some of those people were.”
“I’m working on it.” My voice was louder than I intended.
Mike’s voice was quiet. “I’ll let you get back to it, then,” he said, and hung up.
Four times, in the face. Jesus.
Getting back to work was dragging on a pair of jeans and a turtleneck, and making another call to Gene Werner. I got no answer and left no message, and afterward I called Orlando Krug’s gallery. The deep, faintly accented voice answered after five rings, and there was a long silence on the line when I told him who it was.
“Like most of the city, we are closed today, Mr. March.”
“I guess that leaves you time to talk.”
“We’ve already discussed Cassandra’s work; I don’t know that I have any more to say.”
“It’s not Cassandra’s work I want to talk about, Mr. Krug. It’s Holly.”
There was another long silence, and finally Krug spoke. “I will be in the gallery for another few hours.”
The walk to the West Village was slow going through stabbing cold on mostly empty streets. A few hardy shopkeepers shoveled their patches of pavement against the tireless snow, and were rewarded with the business of a few desperate souls- coffee and bagels and cigarettes, diapers and beer. I limped in the road, and moved aside now and then for the churning orange mass of a snowplow.
Orlando Krug hadn’t bothered to clear his piece of Perry Street, but the security gate was up on the door of his gallery. I rapped on the glass and he let me in. Krug was still neatly pressed, but he was pale under his dark tan, and his blue eyes were clouded. I followed him through the gallery and into his office, a snug, bright space with more beadboard, a red and green kilim on the floor, and a big cherry desk in front of a shuttered, deeply recessed window.
“You’ve come through the snow; I suppose the least I can do is offer you coffee.” Krug went to the windowsill and poured coffee from a steel carafe into a heavy mug. He handed the mug across and settled into a tan leather chair.
“I was surprised to find you here today,” I said.
“No more so than I. I’d planned to wake up in Palm Beach this morning.”
“I was surprised you agreed to see me too.”
Krug’s nut-brown face creased more deeply for a moment. “You piqued my curiosity, Mr. March, which I assume was your intention.”
“When’s the last time you saw Holly, Mr. Krug?”
Krug smiled thinly. “Who is this Holly you keep mentioning?”
I sighed. “You didn’t make me shlep over here for this, did you? Because it’s cold out there and my socks are wet, and if all we’re going to do is dance around, the coffee doesn’t cover it.” The little smile went away and Krug’s face fell again into tired folds, but he said nothing.
“I know that Cassandra Z is Holly Cade, and that Holly Cade is Wren,” I said. “I’ve seen two of her videos. You’re not violating any confidences.”
“What do you want with her?”
“I’m a private detective.” The news didn’t seem to shock him. “I’m trying to find Holly, but she hasn’t been home for a while now.”
“On whose behalf are you trying to find her?” I shook my head and Krug laughed harshly. “But I am supposed to trust you?”
“I promise you, I mean her no harm.”
“This from a man who has lied to me from the moment we met.”
I drank some more coffee and stretched my leg out and looked at Krug. “Did you invite me here out of curiosity, Mr. Krug, or out of worry?”
Krug pursed his lips. “It’s been nearly two weeks since I’ve heard from her.”
“Is that a long time for you two?” He nodded. “You’re close?”
“ ‘Close’ is difficult with Holly. There are things she discusses with me, and things she never mentions, and always she is jealous of her privacy. But I’m fond of her, Mr. March, and I’m not fond of many people.”
“Is there anything in particular that’s making you anxious?”
Impatience flitted across Krug’s face. “If you’ve seen her videos, you know the risks Holly takes for her art.
