Hotel No Tell Page 8

“On the way to fuckin’ work!” He grinned and looked at his hand and seemed surprised to find it empty. “Anyone wanna go get coffee?”

  “What were you doing in a café, fancy pants?” Eric teased. “Thought you were a loyal Dunkin’ man.”

  “Oh, man,” Tommy gushed. “Cuz they got this soda bread in there, real homemade Irish soda bread. I think they dug up my grandma and she’s back there makin’ it.”

  “Wait!” I yelped incredulously. “What about the guy who killed his girlfriend?”

  Tommy squinted at me and shrugged. “Him? I collared ’im. What else was I gonna do? I brought him downtown and handed him over to Central. He’s their fuckin’ problem now.”

  The point of the story was the lisp and “Christmas,” not the apprehension of a freshly minted murderer. After nearly three years, I was still adjusting to the vastly different ways that punch lines were viewed around here.

  “Gentlemen,” I said, trying to clear my head, “it’s been real. But I need you to take your coffee klatch somewhere else.”

  “Ain’tcha gonna pick up yuh picture of Romeo?” Tommy said slyly, nodding at the downed photo of Gregory.

  “Didn’tcha hear? They’re ovah. Oh. Va.” Eric confirmed with a slicing motion of his hand.

  I dropped my head to my keyboard. I knew what was coming.

  “No way. No way!” Tommy exclaimed, rolling in a chair from Letitia Humphrey’s empty cubicle, plunking down, and putting his face right up in mine. “He was an awesome guy. You givin’ up an NYPD detective? You ain’t gonna do better than that, Zepha.”

  “He’s right,” Alex agreed, nodding grimly.

  “You think you’re Pippa?” Tommy said, so close I could see the rough and shiny texture of his jowls. He lowered his voice. “Listen, you don’t wanna end up like the commish. Smaht lady, great boss, but you don’t want that. She’s lonely, Zepha, I’m tellin’ ya.”

  “What makes you think she ditched him?” Eric teased.

  Tommy’s face grew stormy. He picked up the photo and flicked it as though drying a Polaroid. “Did that bastard leave you? Did he break up with you? Because I’ll go over theah—”

  “No, no, I ended it.” I took the picture from him, touched by the avuncular, if somewhat violent, sentiment.

  “Why? Why would you do somethin’ stupid like that?” Tommy chastised me. “You shoulda married him. And don’t tell me you ain’t ready. I’m sicka you kids in your twenties with your fancy college degrees shirking responsibility and refusin’ to grow up. I had four kids by the time I was thirty.” He leaned back and crossed his arms like a school principal awaiting an explanation for a playground transgression.

  “You do nothing but complain about your kids, Tommy!” I protested. “This one’s an idiot, that one’s gonna get himself killed, that one you’re gonna kill if she winds up pregnant—”

  Tommy tsked and waved his hand at me, a gesture that summed up the sea of differences in our approaches to family relationships.

  “Are these men bothering you, Zephyr?” Pippa materialized beside my colleagues, who immediately straightened up.

  “Morning, Commissioner,” Eric said politely. “Tommy was tellin’ us about his collar at the coffee shop this morning.”

  “Mmm.” Pippa raised her eyebrows. “Actually, the DA’s office just rang. His majesty Millenhaus took time out of his busy day calling press conferences to acknowledge the S.I.C.’s help. Not publicly, of course—we wouldn’t want to let on that agencies cooperate.” She turned to Tommy. “Your man wasn’t just anybody, O’Hara. You nabbed the Con Leche Lech. Thank goodness you just happened to be engaging in the rare act of purchasing coffee.”

  The four of us emitted a collective gasp. The “Con Leche Lech,” as the Post had christened him, or the “moLESter”—the preferred moniker of the Daily News—had been terrorizing the Lower East Side and dominating tabloid headlines for six weeks. On five different occasions, the cops had been called to the apartments of murdered young actresses and artists, all of whom were making ends meet by working as baristas in various coffee bars around the neighborhood. At the site of each strangling, stabbing, or smothering was a full mug of coffee with the women’s initials lacing the surface in spoiled milk.

  “No shi—no kiddin’?” Tommy’s usual cloak of swagger dropped away for a moment and an innocent awe peeked through, a genuine pleasure in having made the world a microscopically safer place. This was why these guys put up with boredom, danger, red tape, insufficient recognition, and an inscrutable polka-dotted boss. Nearly every one of the two hundred men and women who roamed these flickering fluorescent halls with the standard-issue gray ceiling tiles genuinely wanted to make a difference in the city. The talented ones understood that it wasn’t as simple as good guys and bad guys.

  “Poor, sick schmuck,” Eric murmured.

  “Those girls. Their families,” said Alex.

  I had nothing to add, as I was suddenly awash in a dishonorable wave of frustrated envy. Dumb luck in the shape of a baked good had brought credibility and kudos to my colleague, and yet here I was scrolling futilely through the DMV database and coming up empty. I didn’t even know what I was looking for.

  Everyone was looking at me.

  “Good detective work, Tommy,” I finally said. “Lucky for Gotham you gotta have your soda bread,” I tossed at him.

  Tommy put me in a quick headlock and tousled my hair. “That’s what I’m tawwwwkin’ about!” I’d won a few points.

  “O’Hara,” Pippa said sternly, and I held my breath, wondering if she was going to chastise him. “Nice work. I doubt very much whether he would have confessed to just anybody.”

  Tommy waved her away, but I could see he was pleased.

  “All right, off you all go. Zephyr might want to work.” I watched as Pippa and the three men dispersed through the maze of cubicles, grateful that the secrecy of my case inhibited Pippa from asking me for an update on my unremarkable progress.

  I turned back to the gray screen of the DMV database, which had turned up exactly nothing on Samantha Kimiko Hodges. (Interestingly, though, I discovered that three of the four men I’d dated before Gregory had lied to me about their real heights.) I wasn’t surprised that Hodges didn’t have a driver’s license. She was in good company with the enormous population of nondriving New Yorkers who toted their passports to bars for identification.

  Just as I was trying to remember the last time I’d been carded at a bar, my desk phone rang. Lucy. Guiltily, I hesitated before I picked it up. I didn’t feel like listening to another depressed rant, but I wasn’t getting much done anyway.

  “Hi, Luce,” I said, preemptively sympathetic, my standard tone with her since she and Leonard had headed for the hills.

  “Do you know what she said to me?!” screeched a fruit bat. “Do you know what she actually fucking said to me!”

  I nudged out the bottom drawer of my corpse-gray filing cabinet and rested my feet on it.

  “Okay, so, mind you, this is after I’ve gone out of my way to find her this goddamn make-your-own-seltzer maker. She was complaining about how they go through so much in a week and they’re so heavy to carry up from their garage and she hates all the plastic bottles—like this woman really gives a flying fuck about the environment. Okay, maybe she does, I don’t know.…”

  “Luce?”

  “So I get her this really thoughtful gift, right?”

  “Extremely thoughtful,” I assured her.

  “And do you know what she says? She goes, ‘I went online and saw how much it cost. Is that really how you should be spending my son’s money?’ ”

  I let my feet drop to the floor and leaned forward in amazement. “No. No one really says things like that. Are you sure?”

  “Positive,” Lucy said triumphantly. “This is what I’m living with. Well, this plus two drooling, peeing, pooping, puking bundles of joy.” She spat the words.

  This was getting scary. It’s not that we didn’t take Lucy’s ra
nts seriously when she first moved upstate, but we took them with a grain of entertainment. Her stories of bad mommy-hood and miserable suburbanism seemed in line with the current zeitgeist of parenting one-downmanship and the ancient practice of equating cul-de-sac living with soullessness. But there was a hardness to her voice I’d never heard before, a desperation beneath the in-law outrage.

  “Macy and I are still coming up tomorrow night. Hang in there,” I cooed, unsure whether Macy was angry with me after this morning’s tiff about her dating philosophy. Once the dermatologist’s mother/advocate had trundled off along Hudson Street, Macy and I had exchanged flat goodbyes and headed in opposite directions.

  “You are? You’re still coming? You don’t hate being with me in my boring house with my hyperactive babies? My God, you’re the best.” She sounded dangerously close to tears.

  “We are,” I said firmly. “We are coming.” I warded off the uncomfortable knowledge that part of why I was able to tolerate an overnight in the Hillsville House of Misery was anthropological fascination. Plus, and this made me feel even worse, it was very easy to win points for being a great friend. Lucy was so desperate for any kind of help that if I trailed the twins for an hour while they turned their thirty-second attention spans to everything from licking the refrigerator to unrolling the toilet paper, she was obscenely grateful. In truth, Alan and Amanda were extremely cute in small doses.

  “I do love them,” she assured me, her voice wavering.

  “I know.”

  “I mean, I think I love them. I can’t tell. Zephyr, I can’t tell!” The floodgates opened.

  Tommy walked by my cubicle.

  “Zepha, wanna go to the courthouse and see your streetlight guy get sentenced?”

  I pointed at the phone and looked at him like, Does this not mean the same thing in your country?

  He grinned. “Ya just tawkin’ to ya girlfriend. Get back to work!” He gave my cubicle wall a thump and left.

  “I know, you have to go,” Lucy whimpered.

  “I kind of do,” I said apologetically. I hated to hang up when she sounded so despondent. “Hey, Luce, I can cheer you up. Well, not cheer you up, but …” I searched for the right word.

  “Just tell me. Anything.”

  “Okay, give me the name of a guy you dated before Leonard.”

  “Are you trying to make me feel worse?”

  “C’mon, you know you love him. Just give me a name.”

  She sniffled. “Brian Peel.”

  “As in banana?” I rolled my chair up to my computer and started typing.

  “Yeah, and that’s exactly what he used to say when he spelled his name. ‘Peel, like banana, not like a bell.’ That might’ve been why we broke up.” Her voice trailed off.

  “Five foot ten, West Eighty-eighth Street.”

  Lucy snorted. “What are you doing?”

  “DMV records.”

  “Cool! Is that even legal?”

  I hadn’t thought about that. “Let’s not think about that. Another name?”

  “Wait, five ten? He always said he was six feet! Okay, how about Lamar Bodansky?”

  I typed and waited. “Five foot six—”

  “I knew it!” Lucy crowed. “Five eight, my tushy.” This was more like Lucy, coming down off the hardcore cursing and veering back into cute territory.

  “And, Luce, holy crap, he’s forty-two. Did you know that?”

  “NO! That makes him ten years older than me, not five! Biggest liar ever.”

  “He lives in Park Slope now.”

  “Must have gotten married. Bet he has kids.” She said this with dark satisfaction.

  “Feeling better?” I asked tentatively.

  “You’re the best, Zeph.” I heard a series of wails in the background. Lucy groaned. “They’re up. Now I must forge ahead through the wilds of three-thirty to five-thirty, until I jump on the dinner–bath–bed train to bliss.”

  “Indulge in some chemical assistance,” I joked, and immediately wished I hadn’t.

  “Actually, I’d love to try cocaine,” mused the social worker who’d once specialized in treating drug addicts.

  We hung up, with me only half certain she wouldn’t go in search of a dealer operating out of the garden aisle at Kohl’s, and I resumed staring blankly at the gray screen. Only now I began to ponder drugs.

  Illegal drugs. Legal drugs. Ambien.

  A moment for some mental self-flagellation.

  I picked up the phone and dialed Pippa’s extension.

  “Zepha,” she said by way of answering her phone. I reflected, not for the first time, on how both the British accent and the outer-borough accent dropped the “r” at the end of my name. I wondered if anyone in the entire office could pronounce it correctly.

  “Do we have access to the records of whatever agency monitors prescription-drug transactions in the state?”

  “That would be the Department of Health, Bureau of Narcotic Enforcement. And I don’t know what you mean by access, but health information is highly confidential.”

  She waited for me to prove I’d learned anything in the past three years.

  “So I would need a subpoena duces tecum to find out whether someone filled a particular prescription?” I tried to keep the pride out of my voice: Look at me, Commish, Latin at my fingertips!

  “Absolutely.”

  My triumph vanished. A subpoena based only on what was still a whiff of a whim of a suspicion. Not likely to fly with my boss.

  Pippa cleared her throat. “Zephyr, I’m all for tying up loose ends, and the cousin’s drug overdose was indeed rather diverting, but are you still, in fact, working on the case I’ve assigned you?”

  I broke out in an embarrassed sweat, sitting there alone in my cubicle. “Yes,” I practically whispered. “I’m still on it. Never mind. Forget I called.”

  “Forget you called?” she said archly.

  Not really the thing to say to a boss.

  “I mean,” I choked out, “thank you, I’m fine.”

  I hung up, and my eyes fell on the picture of Gregory and me. It had been taken more than a year ago, at Point Reyes in Northern California, at my friend Abigail’s wedding. I remembered thinking that I had never been happier in my entire life. My dearest friends were all together and I had never known I could love someone I wasn’t related to as much as I loved Gregory. I shoved the photo under my keyboard, grabbed my backpack, and hurtled out of the office and the building.

  I had to make some progress. On something. With or without a subpoena.

  Chapter 5

  That evening, for perhaps the thousandth time in six years, I found myself sitting in my parents’ whirlwind of a living room and wondering whether I should move. Not move spots on the sofa—the growing pile of mohair blankets my mother had taken to knitting during the rare seconds her hands were unoccupied prohibited that—but move apartments. I didn’t live with Bella and Ollie Zuckerman, not technically, but I did live two floors below them, in the four-story building they owned in Greenwich Village. Usually, I loved it, loved them and their self-described zest for life, but there were times, like tonight, when I wondered how much more I might be accomplishing with my own life were I not diverting energy and attention to them and their sustained chaos.

  The return of my lanky, floppy-haired brother to the mix three years earlier had only dialed up the disorder, arriving as he did in a cloud of cinematic success bestowed upon him by the gods of the Tribeca Film Festival. At around the same time, my mother decided to take on a sultry forty-five-year-old former madam as a business partner, a turn of events that also did nothing to tone down the daily proceedings at 287 West 12th Street. And now my brother appeared to be taking a romantic interest in the self-same former prostitute. All of this, combined with a low-level desire to leave the apartment I’d shared with Gregory, had me thumbing through real estate listings with more fervor than the average New Yorker’s daily EIK, HWF, square-footage gawking.

  I had co
me that evening in search of some parental fawning and reassurance in the wake of what had been a demoralizing and fruitless day. After getting off the phone with Pippa, I’d charged uptown to the hotel with blind determination and a false sense of imminent conquest, ready to confront an elderly woman with an outrageous and utterly unprovable accusation of attempted murder. I’d blown past Asa, who was on the phone with Hershey’s, suggesting a new shape for the Kiss.

  Fortunately for everyone, Mrs. Hodges had not been in her room, or the restaurant, or the bar, and so I’d snuck out as quickly as I’d arrived, before Hutchinson McKenzie could spot me and grill me about my appearance on what was supposed to be a day off from the hotel. With considerably less energy than had spurred my arrival, I trudged up Sixth Avenue, dodging the incense-burning booksellers hawking reading material ranging from ancient Playboys to pristine copies of Dianetics. I turned left on 12th Street and began to relax as I imagined a quiet evening with my parents, ordering in Korean food from DoSirak or maybe going out to Café Asean while I basked in their abundant, undivided attention. Basically, I was looking for a quick visit back to the womb, a balm I’d been pursuing more and more since Gregory’s departure.

  Instead, here I was, lying on their worn couch, my feet shoved under a teetering pile of baby-sized blankets, listening to my mother and Roxana Boureau put the final touches on a presentation they were to give the following day to the senior buyers at Banana Republic. My father was loudly humming Mozart as he unpacked groceries in the kitchen, announcing each item as he stashed them, while my brother tried to incite a conversation about Gregory as a vehicle for showing off to Roxana, erstwhile whore.

  “Zeph, it was a case of failed syncretism between you and Gregory. Different philosophies. It’s nobody’s fault,” Gideon said soothingly, as though we’d been on the subject. He plopped down on the blankets, nearly breaking my foot in two. I shrieked, but he barely flinched. He was too busy glancing at Roxana to see whether she’d noticed his impressive vocabulary. I considered reminding him that the Frenchwoman had what could best be described as a creative grasp of our native language but decided it would be wasted breath. Let him have his stupid, unrequited, puerile crush.