I told him a little bit about Ray, and pointed to a framed drawing he’d done. It showed the profile of a middle- aged man sitting in a chair with a book. He was an uncle of Bitsy’s who was finishing out his days in a nursing home in Santurce. This was how she remembered him, but she’d told Ray to sell the drawing if anyone wanted to buy it. “We don’t need my whole damn family all over the walls,” she’d said. “You know how many cousins I got?”
“Guy’s very good,” Sussman said. “What would something like that go for, you happen to know?”
“I’d have to ask Elaine.”
“When this is over,” he said, “I might be interested. The more you look at it, the more you see. I could definitely find wall space for something like that. Plus the fact that he’s a former cop adds something to it for me. I don’t know why it should but it does. She have other work of his?”
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“In back, but—”
“No, don’t drag ’em out now, just for future reference. I really like that one.” He turned to the sketch Ray had done a couple of hours ago.
“This one too,” he said, “but not to hang on the wall. This one I’d like to hang by the balls. I’ll take this along, call in the other sketch, get this one out there. Even without seeing the original I can tell this one’s a better likeness. You know how? Because you get a sense of the guy.”
22
After they left I checked Elaine’s appointment book. I started to copy down the name and number of a Mrs. Federenko, then simplified things by calling the woman myself. I told her I was calling for Mrs.
Scudder, who wouldn’t be able to look at the icons tomorrow because the shop was closed until further notice.
That’s what it said, too, on the sheet of paper she’d given me, which I taped to the inside of the window. I left a new message on the shop’s answering machine: “Thank you for calling Elaine Scudder Art and Antiques. The shop is closed until further notice.” I pulled the gates shut and headed uptown. When I got to Fifty-seventh Street I called TJ and said I wanted to talk to him. He offered to come down, and I said to stay where he was, that I’d be right up. I crossed the street and went into the lobby of the old hotel. Vinnie was still working there, he’d had that job for thirty years that I knew about, and he just gave me a nod and didn’t even bother calling to let TJ
know I was coming. For all I know, he may have been under the impression that I still lived there. God knows I’d put in enough time in that little room.
“You didn’t have to come up,” TJ told me. A game of computer soli-taire filled the screen, and he saw what I was looking at and turned it off. “Wall Street’s been closed since four o’clock,” he said, “and I dumped everything before three. Had a wild ride.” 182
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“Oh?”
“When did I get up here this morning? Whenever it was, there’s this stock I been watching, an’ it made a move, you know, it broke through this particular price point, so I bought some. An’ it went up.”
“Isn’t that what it was supposed to do?”
“Yeah, well, they don’t always be doin’ what they supposed to do. So it’s movin’ up an’ movin’ up, an’ I pop in this trailing stop-loss order, so if it goes down I’ll be out of it, but each time it goes up a notch the stop-loss order goes up a notch with it, an’ you don’t know what the hell I’m talking about, do you?”
“I get a general idea.”
“Well, it kept runnin’ up like that for, I don’t know, two hours? An’
then it came back down a bit, an’ when it hit my stop-loss order I didn’t have to do nothin’, I was out of it automatically. They already had my order an’ they sold me out. An’ then of course the stock turns around an’ heads back up, an’ I’m like, wha’d I do that for? An’ then I’m like, should I buy more?”
“You’re talking like a Valley Girl.”
“I am?” He frowned. “Don’t want to do that. What I did, I told myself to be cool, and it was a good thing, because it turned around and went all the way back down, an’ it finished the day two whole points below where I bought it at in the first place.”
“So you did all right.”
“I did real good. They want to print up a list of contented stock-holders, they can put my name on it.”
“What’s the company?”
“I dunno. Trading symbol’s NFI. I never did find out the name of it.”
“Do you know what they do?”
“No.”
“Doesn’t any of that matter?”
“Not if you ain’t gonna own it for more’n two hours. But we can have a look.” He picked up a newspaper, ran his eyes down the stock table. “Name’s Novastar. Pays a nice dividend, must be a REIT or a MLP. Course you got to own it a little longer’n I did to collect the dividend. Who’s that there? That ain’t Louise’s boyfriend, is it?” All the Flowers Are Dying
183
“You don’t think it’s a good likeness?”
“Don’t look like the man I saw.”
“This is someone else,” I said. “This is the man who killed Monica.” After I’d brought him up to speed, the two of us went across the street.
