“Yeah. My old partner. Freddy DeLancy.”
“As I remember, he got tangled up with a woman from Socrates’s Cavern. Broke enough regulations they had to make up new ones to cover what he was doing. He left the NYPD and moved out to California.”
“Became a nudist,” Fedderman said. “The club must have influenced him.”
“That’s not really the same thing,” Pearl said. “Socrates’s Cavern and a nudist colony.”
“Oh, DeLancy didn’t belong to any kinda colony. He was what you’d call a lone nudist, and in public places where it wasn’t a good idea. Like on buses.”
“Back to the point,” Pearl said, “we’ve got what might be a modern version of Socrates’s Cavern, or we got a nut operating on his own who knows about the club and is imitating it.”
“Or he’s not so nuts and wants us to think there’s a new Socrates’s Cavern,” Quinn said.
Fedderman said, “I’m thinking there is a new one.”
“You’re hoping,” Pearl said.
“So what if I am? Detective work can be interesting sometimes, right?”
“You’re easily led.”
“Me and DeLancy,” Fedderman said.
Pearl said. “I don’t like to think about it. Or maybe I do.”
9
Nora Noon stood near her booth inside the brick school building on the West Side, where the weekly flea market was held. It was warm and drizzling beyond the door at the end of the long corridor, slightly cooler but dry inside the school.
The rain was bad for the market in general, where most of the antique and specialty booths were lined up out in the schoolyard. But for Nora it wasn’t bad at all. The small woman with the big, good-looking guy had strolled past her booth three times, the woman eyeing a one-of-a-kind cotton wrap designed and created by Nora. She knew what the woman was thinking: She and Nora were about the same size, and both of them quite shapely, so if Nora sewed something that looked good on her, Nora, it would look good on most women Nora’s size and build.
The woman and the good-looking guy slowed and approached the booth. The guy gave Nora the up-and-down glance she knew so well, but she didn’t mind. Hell, she was used to it and kind of liked it, now that she was pushing thirty. A silent compliment.
Standing at Nora’s display of light coats, the good-looking guy kept his distance while the small woman reached out and stroked a light gray cashmere and cotton creation with a matching sash and scarf that doubled as a collar. She was quite pretty up close, with blond hair and dark roots, like Nora’s hair, and almost startlingly beautiful dark eyes, unlike Nora’s blue eyes. The woman fondled the label.
“This is you?” she asked. “ ‘Nora N.?’ ”
Nora smiled and nodded.
“You have a shop?” the good-looking guy asked, having moved a few steps closer. He was broad-shouldered and had a neatly trimmed gray beard.
“I have places where I display,” Nora said. “Sometimes I’m my own model.”
The good-looking guy smiled. He was something for as old as he must be. His wife, or whatever she was, looked twenty years younger.
“I work in a space near where I live in the Village, and I sell at places like this and over the Internet. Everything is one of a kind, and I design for real people, not six-foot, onehundred-twenty-pound models.”
“With eating disorders,” the good-looking guy said.
Nora smiled. “Sometimes.”
“I sure like this,” the small woman with the dark eyes said, slipping into the coat. And she should, Nora thought. It looked great on her.
“Made for you,” Nora said, “even though we haven’t met until today.”
They played out the familiar scene then, the small woman being reassured by Nora and the good-looking guy that yes, she looked terrific in the coat.
And you do look great, Nora thought. It would be a pleasure to sell to this woman. She thought back over the work that went into the coat’s design, and then the hours getting the cut and stitching just right. She knew the woman was going to buy the coat. Right now, Nora felt so good about what she was doing. She was in the right business and would make a major go of it. Someday the Nora N. brand would sell to the major buyers, be in the finest stores. No doubt about it, if she just kept working. And she would keep working; she was getting better and better at the design end of the business, and developing an accurate sense of what would sell.
“How much is it?” the good-looking guy asked. He asked it like a man ready to be generous to his lady.
“Three hundred dollars,” Nora said.
The shapely dark-eyed woman, looking sexy as hell in the soon-to-be hers coat, gave him a look calculated to melt. The good-looking guy shook his head and smiled in a way that made Nora like him. “Okay by me, if it’s what you want.”
That was it. The guy had too much class to try to talk her down; he knew the coat was a bargain at three hundred.
Nora gave him a smile. You’ve got faith in the Nora N. brand, too.
The good-looking guy paid with Visa, and Nora watched the happy couple walk away, the small, shapely woman clutching the coat in its plastic bag tight to her side.
It might be raining outside, but Nora was inside where the sun was shining.
By the time the antique and flea market closed, the rain had stopped. Mark Drucker, who sold furniture he repaired and refinished at the flea market, used his dented white panel truck to drive Nora and her merchandise to where she rented space in a former produce warehouse near her Village apartment. When they were finished unloading clothing, they used part of the day’s proceeds to buy a pizza at K’Noodles and then parted. Drucker drove back to Chelsea, where he lived alone, as Nora did, and Nora sat for a while and sipped a second Diet Coke.
She watched people passing on the other side of the window, the men, mostly. Nora thought about Mark Drucker and the good-looking guy. She knew Drucker, though not a matinee idol, was a quality man, and she could sense the same gentleness in the good-looking guy. Men aren’t all bad, she thought, even though they’re all men.
Nora thought about her father, and her brother Tenn, before Tenn was killed in that auto accident. The car that rammed into Tenn’s had been stolen and driven by a black man who’d had too much to drink.
A black man.
Maybe that had been part of the problem, the man’s color. Nora had many black friends. It was wrong to see them all in a different way because of what had happened. It had nothing to do with political correctness. Racism simply didn’t make sense. It wasn’t logical and belonged in the last century. She wasn’t a racist. She knew she wasn’t.
Or maybe she was. It would explain a few things.
She suddenly didn’t feel as optimistic as she had a few minutes ago, before Mark had left the restaurant and driven away in his rattletrap panel truck.
Nora moved her glass aside on the tiny table and stopped staring out the window at the people who were not like her, who did not have her kind of problem. Instead she rested her head in her hands and closed her eyes, almost but not quite crying. She was sure she wouldn’t cry. That, at least, was one thing she could control.
I really screwed up!
I was so sure.
My God, how could it have happened?
Whether she understood it or not, it had happened. And there was nothing Nora could do to change the past. Nothing she could somehow alter to escape what she’d done.
The past was like a goddamned trap.
If only it all happened some other time, before Tenn was killed. ..
She pulled her hands away from her face and stared at the glistening wetness of her palms.
