“I didn’t understand him that well. He had some kind of accent.”
“Russian?”
“I have to get back to work,” Diaz said.
The underground smells in the Armstrong basement, the noises from the floor above, the footsteps, the sound of a mouse, or a rat, made me edgy. In the basement you heard pipes clang; the ancient boiler roared. It was very cold. Before the signal went out on my phone, I tried Lily, left a message saying I was in the basement and I’d stop by Simonova’s storage room to get the Christmas ornaments she had asked me to find.
“I’ll be upstairs in a few minutes,” I said on Lily’s voice mail.
When I tried Lucille Bernard, she answered. Said she’d be over in an hour, two, tops. Just wait, she said. I’d wait. Anyway, I’d been itching to get into Simonova’s storage room since early that morning when Lily had given me the key.
From the laundry room came the sound of machines going around and around. Somebody in there was singing. I made a detour.
“Did I startle you?” said a voice.
I squinted into the room lit only by a couple of dim overhead bulbs. The voice belonged to a woman who looked about sixty-five, dark skin, carefully curled silvery hair, bright blue apron over her sweater and slacks. She was short, a little stout, and she was sitting on a plastic chair, arms resting on the washing machine. She removed the ear buds from her MP3 player. She got up slowly.
“Can I help?”
“I was looking for the storage rooms.”
“Turn to your left, then left again, you’ll find them fine,” she said. “Any room in particular?”
“Mrs. Simonova’s. You know her?”
“We live on the same floor,” she said. “You couldn’t say we were friends or nothing, I don’t think she liked my playing my music.”
“What were you listening to?”
“Ella Fitzgerald,” she said.
“Which song?”
“Are you a fan?”
“Big-time.”
“It’s a nice one for sure. Called ‘Skylark,’ Hoagy Carmichael and Johnny Mercer. I met Mr. Mercer several times,” she said with a smile that revealed a gap between her front teeth, then offered me one of the ear buds so I could listen with her.
The music flowed into my head. We stood in the dank laundry room, the washing machine vibrating, and listened. I remembered something my father told me.
He had been in America as a very young KGB agent, his assignment to learn his way around American culture, and he fell for the music. For jazz, most of all, and of all the jazz he loved, Ella Fitzgerald was his favorite, his saint, if he’d had a religion. He once said to me, very quietly, “In New York, I felt that my good Communist soul was being sucked out, Artyom. Not by material goods, or by the American way of life, but by the music, especially by Ella Fitzgerald.”
“Do you know this?” said the woman and fiddled with her MP3 player. “This is a nice old Decca one, just Ella and Ellis Larkins on the piano. I always did love it.”
“You knew her?”
She removed her earpiece.
“Oh, yes, sir. I grew up in Yonkers where Miss Ella, she was an orphan living with some relatives, my ma lived next door, I was just a girl. She grew up, then she began to sing, nobody ever did hear a voice like that, a pure instrument, you see, like God singing right into that girl’s head and out of her mouth. Never could find a man, though, after Ray Brown broke her heart.”
“Please, go on.”
“I met her in the nineteen fifties. There wasn’t no work around, so I offered to help her out. She liked to iron her own clothes, and I’d say to her, ‘That’s not right; you’re a star,’ and I went to help her out at her house in Queens, Murdock Avenue, Addisleigh Park, they were all there, all the musicians were there, and Count Basie, he was a fine, lovely man and we all liked him. Then Ella went to California. I did go out there for a little when she was so sick. We stayed in touch all of her life. After she died I wasn’t any good to anybody for a long time, I missed her so bad. But she made sure I had a nice place to live. My name is Regina McGee.”
I told her I was visiting Lily. “Good girl, that Lily. She is kind to everybody,” she said, as the washing machine finished its cycle and beeped. She opened the door and extracted a pile of wet towels. “Thank God I still got that little apartment.”
“You know the people here well?”
“Yes, sure do, I been here most of the time since nineteen fifty-seven. Come by my place if you want, and I’ll show my pictures of Ella. I have pictures from times we shared in New York when we were just lonely girls together around town.”
“I’d like that,” I said. “You must have been very young when you knew her.”
“Oh, not so young. I’m eighty years old today.”
I wished her happy birthday.
“Can I come see you a little later?” I asked.
“Not going anywhere,” she said. “Not even if that Mr. Lennox makes me an offer I can’t refuse.”
“What’s that?”
“Well, he wants my place, wants to break through the wall and connect it to some other apartment, make a big old space out of it, he says.”
“He pressures you?”
“Honey, I have been pressured by the best. I was born in North Carolina. Grew up by the tracks in Yonkers. I done slept on the New York City streets. Ain’t selling to nobody, ’specially not to Mr. Carver Lennox. You know, he puts me in mind of Stumpy Brown. You know who that was?”
I shook my head.
“Not the height, but the way he has. Stump was a little guy, big-time numbers runner up here, lived right next door at 409. Tiny little man, small like Chick Webb-you know, the band leader that gave Miss Ella her big break-and Stump, he lived in this building a while. He worked for Madame St. Clair at the end of her days. She ran that gang they called Forty Thieves. Extorted from everyone. Stump wore flashy clothes, and he would flash a wad of cash. He was arrogant and he was slick, and he always got what he wanted. Like these fellows, what you call them? Hedge fund? De-riv-i-tives. Yeah. Like Carver Lennox, only he ain’t so short. Just short in his soul.”
I nodded.
“You’re interested?”
“Yes.”
“You were up in Miss Marianna’s place?”
“You know that?”
“Honey! We all know everything. She was quite a person, that Russian lady. Her and Carver, always talking together. I was surprised to hear she passed.”
“Why’s that?”
“Don’t know, I saw her day before yesterday; she look all right to me,” said Regina McGee, pausing. I knew she was making up her mind about something. “You’re a detective, that right?”
“I’ve been one a long time,” I said.
“I like you,” she said. “My son was a detective, a good one, too. Got killed by some junkies down by 116th Street back when crack cocaine ruled these streets.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Maybe it’s time I told somebody,” she said finally, glancing in the direction of the door. “You want to keep this to yourself, but you ask if I was surprised about Mrs. Simonova passing, well, indeed I was, just like I was surprised when somebody else in the building passed a while back.”
“Who was that?”
McGee moved a little closer to me. “Mr. Amahl Washington,” she said.
