‘But you’ll try hard to fool yourself,’ I said. ‘Like the rest of us, you’ll want what you do to matter a lot.’
‘I’ll probably even succeed,’ she said, ‘but not all the time.’
She was still a colourless girl, without any snap, but I liked her better. Unless she was fooling herself, and me, all the way. She had something on her mind as the taxi dropped us at her brownstone. She climbed up to her bleak apartment as if pushing through some thick liquid.
Inside, she rummaged in her desk without taking her coat off. She handed me a slip of paper with an address on it: 422 East Eighty-third Street. There was a telephone number. I had no need for it, but I took it. I didn’t want her warning Foster. She might know the number but I didn’t think so.
‘Emory Foster couldn’t have done anything to Anne, could he?’ she said. ‘What good will it do to find him?
‘There’s Ted Marshall,’ I said. ‘I don’t know what Foster’s done. I know the police think Ricardo Vega got them both killed, and I’m not so sure anymore.’
‘The police think Vega did it all?’
‘At the moment.’
She held her coat tight around her, and her face was abstracted, thinking. I couldn’t tell if her thoughts were worried or happy. A new thought came to me.
‘Sarah, how did Boone Terrell know where you lived? Had he been here before?’
‘What?’ she said, blinked. ‘I don’t know. I suppose Anne told him. I’d never even met him. I told you that.’
‘So you did,’ I said.
‘Can’t you leave Boone and the children alone?’
I left her standing there angry. She didn’t hate her sister or Ted Marshall anymore. Hate was still a strong emotion in this world, and it was easy to stop hating the dead.
Chapter Nineteen
East Eighty-third Street, as far east as 422 is Yorkville-the big German section. Famous for sauerbraten and beer halls where you can dance cheap, the Bund was popular here just before the war, and a lot of the local citizenry still think we fought the wrong enemy in that war. (Not that right-wing Germans are the only ones who think that in this country.) There are sub-minorities, too, mostly Czech and Hungarian.
Number 422 was another old-law tenement with the fire escape in front, but built of grimy grey-stone without even the terra-cotta decoration. Instead of a bodega, the grocery store on the street level had a sign in Magyar. I paid off my cabbie and climbed the steps to the vestibule. There was no Emory Foster listed on the corroded mailboxes, but there was an Emory Foxx. The name was on an engraved business card, yellow with age, in the box for 4-B. A telephone number had been crossed out-a Los Angeles number, Hollywood.
The ‘B’ apartments on each floor were just at the top of the stairs to the left. I rang at 4-B. I waited. I was looking forward to the look on Emory Foster’s, or Emory Foxx’s face when he saw me. I was disappointed. At my second ring there was a shuffling inside, and the door opened on a thin, grey-haired woman in an old black dress. She wore jewellery everywhere-costume jewellery in gold and silver and stones of every colour. Her eyes were glazed, and her feet were in ragged slippers. She just stood.
‘Mrs Foxx?’ I asked. ‘Is Emory home?’
She looked at me.
‘Is Emory a heavy man, maybe fifty, has a tweed jacket with elbow patches? He’s a writer?’
‘Why?’
‘I’m looking for him. About Ricardo Vega.’
She nodded. ‘Emory should be back soon.’
She shuffled back into the apartment. I went in. It was a railroad flat, with those same thick-painted walls from the generations of painting by tenants who didn’t have the energy to strip the old paint before they put on the new. Paint, instead of scrubbing, to cover dirt. The furniture was like Emory Foster, or Foxx himself-good, but old, and out of place where it was. It was in Spanish style, heavy and velvet and had probably once graced more spacious rooms. The living room itself was a hothouse, with two electric heaters going. Plants hung and stood everywhere. There were bowls of goldfish by the dozens.
‘Emory knew Vega in Hollywood?’ I asked.
She didn’t answer. She had sat down in a plum velvet armchair, picked up a tumbler of thick, brown liquid that had to be sherry, and gone back to what she had been doing-reading a thick historical novel with voluptuous cover of a raunchy cavalier in padded tights, and a costumed lady with bursting breasts.
‘How long has he known Vega?’ I asked.
‘Too long.’
She didn’t look up. I didn’t really exist. Nothing did. Just her tumbler of sherry, and the broad-shouldered cavaliers, and perfumed breasts, of centuries ago.
‘Why does he want to pin murder on Vega?’
She looked up but not at me. ‘I hope Rey Vega dies in jail. Just dies. That much, at least. Dead and buried.’
She thought about that for a moment, then went back to her book. It was all unreal, like seeing a mental patient sitting alone in some sanitarium room, reading an imaginary book.
‘Dead and buried,’ I said, prompted.
Her eyes up again, still looking at something only in mind. ‘He buried us, but he forgot to kill us first. We’re dead, but we can’t lie down.’
‘How long, Mrs Foxx? Why?’
Back to her book. I wondered if she even knew when Foxx would be home? The hothouse room was making me sweat, or maybe it wasn’t the heat. I had to get out. Emory Fox, if he was framing Ricardo Vega, wasn’t doing it all alone. Boone Terrell had to be part of it, maybe Sarah Wiggen. Mrs Foxx didn’t even notice me leave, lost in the reality of Louis the Fourteenth.
In the hall it was like returning from the past, and going down the steps in the sun was like coming back to life. The apartment upstairs made me think of that tiny room in The Bronx where Leon Trotsky had sat alone and dreamed of murdering the Czar and living in the halls of the Kremlin. Trotsky had done it.
Once out, I crossed the street and headed for the avenue and the nearest subway to Queens. I saw the messenger out of the corner of my eye. In a messenger’s uniform, but there was something familiar despite the number 422. Another man went into the building behind the messenger. Together? I couldn’t tell. Two women went up the steps at almost the same time, all mixed together.
I waited across the street in front of a corset shop, its small signs in both German and Czech. I didn’t have to wait long, and I had my answer when my wait ended. Maybe five minutes. The second man, not the messenger, came out of number 422, and stood for a moment on the steps: George Lehman, the business manager of Ricardo Vega. The messenger had been Sean McBride. Lehman stood on the steps in a topcoat with a velvet collar, and looked up and down the street. Then he came down and started across the street to my side. I turned to study the display of corsets in the window. Out of the corner of my eye I saw Lehman take up a position in front of a German bookstore. He continued to look alertly in both directions. I saw his instant shock when he saw me. He stook rigid as if trying to decide whether I had seen him or not. I concentrated on the corsets. When I looked again, Lehman had crossed the street again, and was already half a block away.
I went after him. Ahead he went around the corner onto the avenue. When I reached the corner in a sprint, he was invisible among the throng of afternoon people. A taxi pulled away from the curb. He could have been in it, but it had green lights all the way. I went back to number 422. I went in, and climbed up to the fourth floor. I slowed, stepped softly as I reached the top of… lifted and flung like a feather…
… an illusion-the door of 4-B bent out like a bow, flying past to crash into the opposite wall…
… a giant hand crushed at my chest, lifted me, hurled me in midair backwards and flailing in empty space…
… Crump!.. Wooooosshh…
