Hotel No Tell Page 18

  “No. Casual conversation being your unparalleled strength.” She began spraying another one of her polymethyl methacrylate beloveds.

  “Oh, hi,” I said too brightly to the voice that answered the phone on the first ring. “Is this Ms. Herman?”

  “Yes.” She sounded suspicious, and I remembered the edgy beauty who’d thrown Hutchinson off his game and checked out just forty-eight-hours later. If she was already back in California, she was probably exhausted from her whirlwind trip.

  I tugged at my shirt. “This is Zephyr Zuckerman from the Greenwich Village Hotel.” Pippa and I had discussed the pros and cons of using an alias while I was at the hotel but agreed that I would have enough to worry about without having to remember to answer to a fake name, the benefits of which were minimal. “We found a red silk scarf in the corridor outside your room and were wondering if it was yours.”

  “Oh.” I heard her voice relax. “Nope, not mine. But thank you for call—”

  “May I ask how your stay was?” I chewed on my bottom lip, studying the pigeon that had landed on the air conditioner outside the window.

  “Uh, fine, fine. Nice place.” A truck horn sounded in the background. “Look, it’s hard to hear—”

  “Can I just ask you one sort of odd question, nothing to do with the hotel?”

  A pause. “Um …”

  I jumped in, grabbing on to nothing more than my brief exchange with the Summa receptionist.

  “I’m about to … do some business with the Summa Institute myself, and I’m a little … nervous. Could you tell me what to expect?” Pippa turned slowly, rag aloft, and stared at me. Apparently this was not her idea of a subtle approach. I squeezed my eyes shut.

  On a street in California, Zelda gave a hard laugh. “The anesthesia made me puke, but the money, well, you know, the money’s amazing.”

  My eyes flew open. Pippa sat down and watched, still holding the bottle of cleaner and the rag. She pressed speaker-phone.

  “What …” I squeaked, and then cleared my throat. “What else?”

  “Well, you’re taking the injections already, right?” she asked.

  Deep breath through the nose. “Of course.”

  “Are they making you nauseous? Bloated?”

  “Very,” I told her, suddenly so calm I almost laughed. Before Lucy had resorted to borrowing DNA, she’d tried every method under the sun to get pregnant, including harvesting her own recalcitrant eggs.

  Money + injections + nauseous + bloated = Alan and Amanda.

  “Well, then, you’ve survived the worst of it. They knock you out for the retrieval, so that part doesn’t hurt,” Zelda assured me.

  Pippa leaned forward, nearly knocking over her coffee mug, which read Don’t Lose Sight of Your Lucite.

  “Just some puking when you wake up,” I confirmed smoothly.

  “Not just some. But like I said, the money …”

  “Did you tell your family?”

  “God, no.”

  Pippa looked at me with downright admiration, and suddenly I felt comfortable in my button-down shirt and black linen pants. I imagined myself behind her desk one day, modestly downplaying my career highlights as I mentored another young colt, who would sit where I now sat. There would be no strange collection of women’s accessories on the shelves behind me. What would I put in their stead? What physical item defined me? Maybe that was why people collected and then displayed their collections, as a shortcut to making themselves better understood. What did it mean that I could think of nothing to exhibit on my imaginary shelves?

  “I couldn’t tell them I needed money,” Zelda confided. “It would break their hearts. They named me Zelda hoping I would be a great artist—minus, you know, the overshadowing husband and schizophrenia. My dad, especially, has this … this paradigm in his head about Eastern European immigrant generations in America.…” Pippa sat back, startled. Personal information, divulged under any circumstances, made her uncomfortable. “The immigrants come over and work their butts off. They own shops and do physical labor, work long hours. They send the next generation to law school and medical school. And then the third generation are supposed to be artists.”

  “And what’s the generation after the artists supposed to be?” I mused, forgetting my mission for a moment.

  “I’ve wondered that myself,” Zelda said agreeably. Pippa looked at me as though I were speaking another language. “So after I went to Oxford, they just figured I … I was …”

  “Done?” I suggested.

  “Exactly. Not in a goodbye way but in a great-she’s-all-set way.”

  “What do you do, if you don’t mind me asking?”

  “I write. Articles, essays, ghostwrite op-eds. Whatever pays. But it never pays enough, so I found Summa. It’s the fastest way to make a buck besides prostitution.”

  I waited.

  “Not that I’ve ever done that,” Zelda added breathlessly. She had apparently resumed walking. “I’m just saying. Summa pays really well.”

  “So you’ve donated your eggs before?”

  “This was my third time,” she admitted after a moment. “I hope it was my last. I’ve got a shot at doing a speed bio on Lady Gaga’s new girlfriend, and that would be great money.”

  “Is that what you want to be writing?”

  Pippa frowned at me and made a circular motion with her finger: Wrap it up. She thought this wasn’t necessary. I thought the more information the better.

  Zelda snorted. “Are you kidding? I’d rather be working on my biography of Deborah Garrison.”

  “The poet? Did she die?”

  “God, no! She’s only in her forties. I’m trying to get in on her early.”

  Pippa snapped her fingers at me.

  “Okay, listen, Zelda,” I said, watching the pigeon on the air conditioner flap its wings and resettle. “Thanks so much for telling me all this. I feel better knowing what to expect.”

  “Good luck,” she said generously. “It’ll be fine. Paulina is a little weird but fine.”

  I hung up, and Pippa and I regarded each other.

  “So Summa is an egg-donation business,” I concluded. I felt reassured by how much sense it made for a genetics researcher to go this commercial route. “I’ll pose as an egg donor, find this Paulina person or whoever hired Samantha. And if she’s really the payer of the half mill …” Then I could wrap up this case before the end of next week. The thought of being done with Hutchinson McKenzie forever was extremely appealing.

  Pippa stowed her cleaning supplies in a cabinet that bore the SIC’s shield and slogan: Getting Graft Out of Gotham.

  “First do a dry run elsewhere. Some other clinic.”

  I raised a corner of my mouth. Why waste our time? Why risk another hour that Jeremy or Samantha might flee?

  “We just don’t know enough yet, Zephyr, and we are talking about attempted murder. Unpredictable suspects, one of which, I hasten to remind you, we haven’t actually ID’d. I’d prefer that you go in there playing the role well.”

  As opposed to hotel concierge, which had been a flop. I wasn’t in a position to argue. I stood to go.

  “I have a friend who used donor eggs. I could go to her place.”

  Pippa crossed her arms and tilted her head.

  I sighed and dropped my shoulders. I would never be the commissioner. Not that I really wanted to be, but it had been an appealing minute-long ambition.

  “Right, unwise to bring a friend into this,” I said, heading for the door, fueled by irritation with myself. “I’ll cold-call somewhere else.”

  “And, Zephyr? Meet me downstairs in fifteen minutes. There’s a revolver at One Police Plaza with your name on it.”

  Chapter 15

  All of which is how I came to be sitting in an overstuffed armchair in the offices of Ova Easy, decked in apathetic black with a brand-new Glock strapped to my belly, trying to persuade an adenoidal gatekeeper to give me more information about her business for my pretend younger s
ister, the producer of fictionally fresher eggs.

  Reluctantly, St. Peter of Noho had wasted two more minutes of her precious time on me, during which she allowed that a donor could expect pain and money.

  “And the joy of giving life to a barren couple?” I couldn’t resist adding.

  “Well, obviously,” she growled as the elevator door glided closed between us.

  This blooper-filled meeting was a fitting conclusion to a workday that had begun with a call to Zelda the tattoo-eyed lady of California and proceeded to an oath-taking in lower Manhattan, during which I had managed to drop my gun in front of forty other newly armed colleagues—all while trying to put Gregory out of my mind. By the time I hauled myself up my stoop that evening, I was mud-in-my-veins exhausted.

  Certainly the last place I expected to wind up was in the tattered lounge of Engine Company 14, shoulder-to-shoulder with the rock-climbing, Melville-reading firefighter, he of the baby face and obscenely long eyelashes.

  Tired as I was, I hadn’t been able to sit still at home—being there only made me miss Gregory more. So after a quick confab with Macy, who required some cheerleading before her date with the maternally pimped dermatologist, I left my apartment again. Outside, it was a breath-seeing night, a steep drop in temperature from that afternoon, and I pulled my gray fleece jacket tighter around me as I headed south on Seventh Avenue. I was clad in old running shoes, yoga pants, and a ratty NYPD T-shirt that I had stealthily appropriated over years of cohabitating with Gregory. I planned to walk for a long time.

  I headed past the chipped September 11 memorial tiles that hung where many believed the diner in Edward Hopper’s Nighthawks once stood, a juxtaposition that turned Mulry Square into a palimpsest of two wartimes. I kept going, past fortune-tellers that, mysteriously, could afford expensive storefronts and past Chinese massage parlors that couldn’t and so were inevitably relegated to basements or second floors. I kept my head down along the tourist stretch south of Bleecker Street, home to restaurants that advertised by driving skeletons around the city in a retrofitted hearse.

  I turned at Houston, hoping something engrossing was playing at Film Forum. Shaft, part of the Subtle Seventies retrospective, had already started, so I continued east. I paused briefly by Billy’s, the outdoor furniture explosion that might be mistaken for a shantytown, before selecting First Avenue as my conduit north: excellent serendipitous food possibilities.

  I began to enjoy the snippets of conversation that surrounded me, relaxing as other people’s lives and thoughts supplanted mine. I halted for a moment to marvel at a woman in a suit and sneakers who was walking while also reading by streetlamp. Read/walk, scan a few yards ahead, resume read/walking. Read, scan, read.

  Behind me, a conversation approached, too loud and too close, violating the unwritten rules that governed ATM lines, bus queues, and sidewalk etiquette.

  “Are you disappointed you have to wear it?” the distaff half of a stooped couple asked her bald mate. They were arm in arm, their careful pace blissfully out of sync with the plowing crowds.

  The man rubbed her hand and shrugged. “I have brown things on my head. So now I have a brown thing in my ear.”

  On I went, past fruit vendors packing up for the day, when, at 18th Street I suddenly turned left, succumbing to a powerful desire for City Bakery’s mac and cheese and a shot of their viscous hot chocolate.

  Officer, I swear, that’s how it happened.

  The door to the fire station was wide open at Engine 14, the gleaming truck encircled by pairs of boots with pants dropped around their ankles, as if lewd ghosts were haunting the place. Thick-muscled men roamed and smoked and leaned, and one of the leaners was Delta. I saw him before he saw me, and my first thought was that there was no way he’d believe this was a chance encounter. Even I didn’t believe it.

  I considered hurrying past, but if he caught me, this would become even more awkward than it already was.

  “Delta,” I said weakly. I grabbed the attention of nearly everyone but him.

  “Hey, Delt!” one of his colleagues yelled helpfully.

  It was absurd how sexy he was, how sexy all of them were, just because of the firehouse. I tried to picture Delta sitting behind a desk, a pocket protector tucked into his shirt, saggy with leaky pens, no helmet in sight. In a million years, I wouldn’t have kissed him. At least I was admitting to myself that I was being jobist—attracted to him for his career. When Gregory and I met, he’d been posing undercover as an exterminator, and he accused me of caring what his profession was; now that the accusation was true, I suspected this guy couldn’t have cared less. In fact, I wouldn’t have been surprised to learn that many of the men there went into the business of saving people from flaming buildings precisely because the ladies loved it.

  “Zephyr. It’s Zephyr. Zephyr whose last name I still don’t know,” Delta said, a genuine smile spreading across his bright face. “You missed dinner, but we’ve got leftovers.” He didn’t leave his leaning post by the office door. He was going to make me sweat.

  “Oh, that’s okay. I was out walking and …” I gestured weakly in the direction I’d been heading.

  “You just happened to pass by.”

  “That’s what I thought, but my subconscious probably had other plans,” I conceded.

  “Hey, she’s funny,” one of the men proclaimed. I did a double take. The guy had to be close to seven feet tall. He was clutching a paperback that seemed to disappear inside his palm. He probably didn’t even need to slide down the pole, just put his feet out and he was down.

  “No, I believe you,” Delta said. “Look at what you’re wearing. That’s not what we usually get around here.”

  I glanced down at my baggy pants, fleece, and sneakers.

  “The women who hang around firehouses usually dress to kill,” he explained.

  “Women who hang around firehouses?” I repeated dumbly. “What, like groupies?”

  “Exactly. Like groupies. Except they’re not here for the music.”

  To look shocked would have been to expose myself to merciless mockery. I did my best to hide my surprise.

  Delta finally took pity and gestured me inside. “Come on, Zeph. I’ll give you the grand tour.” A tiny part of me twinged with discomfort at the familiarity implied by “Zeph.” Names of endearment were earned. But, as I approached, he flung his arm around me easily, and it felt good. Warm, solid, good.

  As I joined Delta by the office, the giant guffawed, and it sounded like a foghorn, but the rest of the men returned to their leaning, talking, smoking. I noticed that most of them wore wedding rings, and I wondered how that fit in with the female groupies.

  “I really don’t know what I’m doing here,” I told Delta as he led me up a narrow flight of stairs. The walls were cement, painted a dingy red.

  “Decided you didn’t need to wait two weeks?” We stepped into a small kitchen. A fireman with his suspenders hanging down so that they outlined his plum-firm butt was carefully crimping tinfoil over Pyrex dishes. It was a discordant image, like a prizefighter arranging a dollhouse.

  “Pretty much,” I hedged. We passed through the kitchen and into an adjacent black-ceilinged lounge containing three lumpy sofas, a battered coffee table, and an enormous, gleaming flat-screen TV.

  “Taxpayers foot the bill for that?” I asked.

  He gestured for me to sit down. “Can I get you something? Soda, water, juice?”

  “Water would be great. Is it from a hydrant?” I added lamely.

  He grabbed a bottle of Evian from the refrigerator and flopped down beside me.

  “Are you always this charming? The sweatpants, the smart remarks. I really do believe you came here by accident.”

  I grimaced in apology.

  “But now you’re here,” he said.

  “Now I’m here.” I took a sip of water, then realized how thirsty I was and guzzled the rest. I came up for air to find him grinning, and before anyone said anything else, he was kiss
ing me. Our first contact had been hands-off as we hovered over Brooklyn. Now he ran his fingers through my hair—as best he could. It was pulled into a knot on top of my head, and an hour and a half of street escape had turned it into a tangled, sweaty nest. He cupped a hand around my neck—also sweaty, I now realized—and pulled me tighter. I squirmed.

  “What’s wrong?” he said, pulling back enough to look at me without going cross-eyed.

  “I’m just … this is not how I’d want to start something.” I fanned my fingers toward my gymlike state.

  “Are we starting something? You still have two weeks to decide.”

  “Well, so, what would you call this?” I asked.

  “Fun.”

  Sweet nothings could not have been more persuasive. I lunged at him, reminding myself that he was used to contact with people who were not at their best. At least I wasn’t covered in soot.

  I kissed him hard, determined to forget everything—Gregory, my mother, unproduced children, unhappy friends, death threats, unwanted guns, unsolved cases. He wore a peppery cologne, a scent that made him even more of a stranger than he already was. Straddling him, I savored the outside of his hard thighs pressed against the soft insides of mine. My hands wandered to the back of his smooth neck and then his face, my thumbs tracing his cheeks.

  “So,” he said, catching my hand as it started to explore what lay beneath me. “Am I part of a revenge plan?”

  “You make that sound bad.”

  “No. I just want to know where we stand. I’d like more from you, but I’ll take this for a couple of weeks. Thirteen days to be exact.”

  I wished I could shut him up. Talk was not what I wanted.

  “Why?” I said, letting myself fall off him and onto the lumpy cushion beside me. A button dug into my elbow. “Why do you want more from me? You don’t even know me. How do you know I’m any better than the women who usually come in here?”

  “I didn’t say you were better. But I think you’re different.”

  “Well, of course I’m different,” I snapped. “Everyone’s different.” I watched the steam of our encounter evaporate into the dim light.