“Here,” said Janna. “I know Masha had a dress that she got here.” She pointed at the rack of shiny clothes. The woman who ran the place glared at us. She figured me for Janna’s sugar daddy. Janna pushed the clothes along the rack. When she came to a short dress, pink with some kind of glitter on it, she stopped.
“It’s what I saw her in the last time. One, maybe two nights ago,” she said. “You want me to put it on?”
“It’s okay,” I said, but she had already disappeared into a dressing room.
She reappeared in the dress, plucked a platinum blonde wig off a rack of cheap wigs, the kind you get for Halloween. Imitating girls on a catwalk, in her high-heeled sandals and the wig and the pink dress, Janna strode up and down the room, admiring herself in a mirror.
“So she looked like this,” she said, as if she had cracked a big case. I realized now she was pretty wasted. I should have seen it earlier.
“It’s enough,” I said. “I have to go.”
“I could go with you.”
“Just get your clothes back on, and I’ll take you to the club,” I said and while she changed again, I saw the owner stare at me some more before she picked up her cellphone, dialed and began talking about me to someone at the other end. She was talking Russian. She probably figured me for a guy who came out to the Beach from the city to pick up little girls.
CHAPTER TEN
All the way back to the club, I felt somebody on my tail, somebody watching, following. I didn’t know who the owner of the clothing shop had called, didn’t know if she called local cops, or security people, to say there’s a creep from the city hanging around.
“Why can’t I stay with you?” said Janna. “It’s fun playing detective.”
I thanked her and told her to go back to her friends, realizing that I’d created a loose cannon. I didn’t know the girl. I didn’t know what she’d tell her friends, her parents.
I pulled up near the club, and got out with Janna and walked her back to Dacha where there was a long line at the velvet rope, the guy dressed as a Cossack standing at it.
“Thanks,” I said, and watched her go into the club, then come out again.
“Listen,” she said. “There’s this young guy, a cop, he’s here tonight, he comes a lot. He knew Masha, he could maybe help you.”
Dressed up, black linen shirt, cuffs turned back, white jeans, expensive loafers, hair freshly cut, a gold watch, bright against his tanned arm, Bobo Leven was greeting people everywhere in the club. He shook hands. He thumped them on the back, he gave guys hugs, he kissed girls. Then he saw me.
I cornered him, made him go into the bar.
“I thought you were working the case,” I said.
“I am working it, Artie, it’s okay, I know what I’m doing.” He greeted the bartender who brought him a Coke.
“So you’re a regular here, you must have known the dead girl.”
“I saw her a few times.”
“You already knew her name?”
“I wasn’t sure if it was Masha, not at first,” he said.
“You didn’t tell me?”
“You said you didn’t want to be bothered with this, so I didn’t bother you. You said you were on vacation.”
“That’s bullshit, Bobo.”
“You want to hear what I have?”
“Sure.”
“Masha had a husband named Zim Panchuk. From Lvov. Ukraine.”
“I know where it is.”
“They maybe met in London where they were both working, him as a truck driver, her as a maid. He took her to Alaska. He was legal. He had a job on the pipeline. Soon as they got there, and she was in America, she dumped him and probably came to New York right away.”
“Yeah, and the husband?”
“I called. He left his job two days ago. He went back to Russia.”
“You got a lot of stuff pretty fast.”
“I called around.”
“You didn’t think to call me?”
“I’m sorry, Artie. If you want I’ll keep you in the loop, I just thought you didn’t want in. But from now on, you’ll be my first call, man.”
“Yeah, well, I have to get back to the city. One more thing, Bobo.”
“What’s that?” he said.
“Where were you last night?”
CHAPTER ELEVEN
A girl I knew slightly was coming out of the building with her dog, a dachshund, and we exchanged views on the noise in the street the night before and cracked some jokes about the tourists. She was going up on the roof one night and shoot at them with a beebee gun, she said, and I laughed. We agreed to get coffee some day and I felt better. Coming home here to my place off Broadway where I’d lived for fifteen years made everything okay. I was home.
Upstairs in my loft, I switched on the news and got scores from the game last night-the Yankees were so lousy this summer only a faithful dog of a fan like me would care. I was thinking of switching to the Dodgers. At least they had Joe Torre.
Already there was a report on the girl on the swing. Speculation had begun on Masha Panchuk. It was a holiday weekend and the news cycle was hungry and everybody had an opinion: it was drug-related; the work of some nutjob seeking attention; a crazed terrorist. There was even an item about a Brooklyn artist who made human forms out of duct tape he had purchased after 9/11 when the city bought the stuff in bulk so we could all tape up our windows against some future nuke attack. I turned the TV off.
With Clifford Brown on my stereo, and listening to the incredible “Joy Spring” solo, I got into the shower, let it pour hot and hard over me, then switched to ice cold. When I got out I looked in the mirror.
I was looking okay. I’d been sleeping, I had quit smoking for the most part, I lost a few pounds.
Clean clothes on, I fixed some espresso. My place was looking good. I’d bought it cheap years earlier when nobody wanted a place down here, and I had scraped down the old wood floors myself until they shone. Got some nice mid-50s furniture. Put up shelves.
On the walls were framed photographs of the musicians I love-Stan Getz, Ella, Duke, Lester Young, Dizzy, Miles. Maybe I’d retire and take lessons. My father had loved the music. Even in Moscow, he had loved it.
I checked my messages. Tolya had called twice, reminding me I was due at his club to sample new wines. Another friend wanted to know if I’d go fishing the following day. It was okay. Everything was fine. I was okay.
On that night when I drove over to Tolya’s place, Manhattan felt like a cruise ship, an overcrowded pleasure boat, getting ready to sink, but full of people having a ball as it sailed through the lit-up streets. Any minute, though, it would hit bedrock and start to go down, too loaded up with ambition, real estate, money, talent, sex, drugs booze, work, and always money. It was ready. It was ripe. Something had to explode.
In the summer, New York lived in the streets. Restaurants and bars spilled their customers out onto the streets, along the big avenues, on the grid of streets running river to river, and in the winding alleys downtown.
The streets were jammed with tourists gorging on the city, the dollar cheap. Everywhere you heard foreign
