audible.
I got there five minutes early, sat at a table and ordered a Perrier. She arrived ten minutes late, entering from the lobby, standing just inside the archway and trying to scan the room. I stood up to make it easier for her and she walked without hesitation to my table. 'I hope you haven't been waiting long,' she said. 'I'm Olga Stettner.'
'Matthew Scudder.'
She held out her hand and I took it. Her hand was smooth and cool to the touch, her grip strong. I thought of an iron hand in a velvet glove. Her fingernails were long, and the scarlet polish matched her lipstick.
In the video she'd had the same color on the tips of her breasts.
We both sat down, and almost immediately the waiter was at our table. She called him by name and asked for a glass of white wine. I told him he could bring me another Perrier. Neither of us said a word until he had brought the drinks and gone away again. Then she said, 'I've seen you before.'
'I told you we'd met.'
'Where?' She frowned, then said, 'Of course. At the arena. Downstairs. You were skulking around.'
'I was looking for the men's room.'
'So you said.' She lifted her wine glass and took a small sip, really just wetting her tongue. She was wearing a dark silk blouse and a patterned silk scarf, fastened at her throat with a jeweled pin. The stone looked like lapis and her eyes looked blue, but it was hard to tell colors in the dimly lit lounge.
'Tell me what you want,' she said.
'Why don't I tell you what I have first.'
'All right.'
I started by saying that I was an ex-cop, which didn't seem to astonish her. I guess I have the look. I had met a man named Arnold Leveque when we'd pulled him in on a sweep designed to clean up Times Square. Leveque had been a clerk in an adult bookstore, I said, and we'd arrested him for possession and sale of obscene materials.
'Later on,' I said, 'something came up and I had occasion to leave the NYPD. Last year I heard from Leveque, who got the word I was working private. Well, I hadn't seen Arnie in years. He was the same. Fatter, but pretty much the same.'
'I never knew the man.'
'Suit yourself. We got together, and he was being cagey. He told me a story about making a film in somebody's basement, a home movie with a professional touch in that they hired him to be the cameraman. Personally I don't think I could get into the mood with a creepy guy like Arnie watching, but I guess it didn't put you off stride, did it?'
'I don't know what you're talking about.'
I wasn't wearing a wire, but I could have been miked like a soundstage and it wouldn't have made any difference. She wasn't giving away a thing. Her eyes made it very clear she was following everything I was saying, but she was very careful not to get caught speaking for the record.
'Like I said,' I went on, 'Arnie was cagey. He had a copy of the tape and he was making arrangements to sell it for a lot of money, but of course he was careful not to say how much. At the same time he was afraid the buyer might pull a fast one, and that was where I came in. I was supposed to back him up, make sure the buyer didn't take him out.'
'And did you do this?'
'That's where Arnie outsmarted himself,' I said. 'See, he wanted a backup man but he didn't want a partner. He wanted it all for himself. Maybe he'd give me a grand for my troubles. So he kept me in the dark to protect himself from me, and in the meantime he forgot to protect himself from his buyer, because he got knifed to death in an alley in Hell's Kitchen.'
'How sad for him.'
'Well, these things happen. You know what they say, sometimes it's a dog-eat-dog world and the rest of the time it's the other way around. Soon as I heard what happened I went over to his apartment, flashed some tin at the super and had a look around. I didn't expect to find much because the cops had already been there, and I don't think they were the first ones in, either, because Arnie's keys were missing when they found his corpse. So I don't think I even got sloppy seconds, if you'll pardon the sexual innuendo, Mrs. Stettner.'
She looked at me.
'The thing is,' I said, 'I knew Arnie kept a copy of the tape, because he already told me as much. So I gathered up every cassette in his place. There must have been forty of them, all these old movies that you'd turn off if they were on television. He ate that stuff up. What I did, I sat in front of my set and cranked up my VCR and went through the lot of them. And surprise, one of 'em wasn't what it was supposed to be. I was zooming through it with the Fast Forward, same as all the others, when all of a sudden the regular picture's gone and we're in a room with a teenage boy all hooked up to a metal frame like something out of the Spanish Inquisition, and there's a beautiful woman in leather pants and gloves and high heels and nothing else. I notice you're wearing leather pants again today but I don't suppose they're the same ones, because the ones on the tape were crotchless.'
'Tell me about the film.'
I recounted enough of it to make it clear I'd seen it. 'It wasn't much on plot,' I said, 'but the ending was a pip, and there was this symbolic last shot of blood flowing across the floor and down the drain. That was Arnie at his most creative, you have to give him that, and the black-and-white checkerboard floor was the same as the basement of the arena in Maspeth, and isn't that a hell of a coincidence?'
She pursed her lips and blew out a stream of air in a soundless whistle. She had half a glass of wine left but she didn't touch it, reaching instead for my glass of Perrier. She took a sip and put the glass back where she'd found it. The act managed to be curiously intimate.
'You mentioned Richard Thurman,' she said.
'Well, that's the thing,' I said. 'See, I had Arnie's tape, but what was I going to do with it? The devious bastard never got to the point of saying who the people were. Here I got a tape the principals would be happy to get back, and it would be very much worth my while to perform them the valuable service of recovering it, but how do I find them? I went around with my eyes and ears open, but short of bumping into a man walking down the street in a rubber suit with his dick hanging out, how was I going to get anywhere?'
I picked up my Perrier and turned the glass so that I was sipping from where her lips had touched the glass. A kiss by proxy, you could call it.
'Then Thurman turns up,' I said. 'With a dead wife, and public opinion pretty much divided as to whether or not he had anything to do with it. I run into him in a ginmill and because he's in television we get on the subject of Arnie, who worked for one of the nets before I ever knew him. And strangely enough your name came up.'
'My name?'
'You and your husband. Very distinctive names, easy to remember even after a long night in a saloon. Thurman put away more booze than I did, but he got very cute, lots of hints, lots of innuendo. I figured we'd talk more, but the next thing you knew he was dead. They say he killed himself.'
'It's very sad.'
'And tragic, like you said over the phone. The same day he got killed I was out in Maspeth. I was going to meet him at the fights and he was going to point out your husband. Thurman didn't make it, I guess he was already dead by then, but I didn't need him to point out your husband, because I recognized the two of you. Then I went downstairs and recognized the floor. I couldn't find the room where you made the movie, but maybe it was one of the locked ones. Or maybe you redecorated since the taping session.' I shrugged. 'Doesn't matter. Doesn't matter what Thurman was getting at, either, and it doesn't matter what kind of help he might have had going out the window. What matters is I'm in the fortunate position of being able to do something useful for someone in a position to make it all worth my while.'
'What do you want?'
'What do I want? That's easy. I want basically the same thing Arnie wanted. Isn't that pretty much what everybody wants?' Her hand was on the table, inches from mine. I extended a finger and reached to touch the back of her hand. 'But I don't want to get what he got,' I said. 'That's all.'
FOR a long moment she sat looking down at our hands on the tabletop. Then she covered my hand with hers and fastened her eyes on mine. I could see the blue of her eyes now, and the intensity of her gaze held me.
