Oh, great. Not only was she a brick of calcified bean protein, she was a chatty Patty.
Tofu switched sides to be next to Laura. "I was telling my dad all about Stu and how he went with you to Staten Island to meet a mobster. Pops looked at him differently after that."
Code: My family likes him.
She continued like a playing card clothes-pinned to bike spokes. "It was hard before, you know, because of the activism. We don"t have that in Greenwich. Dad takes it personally."
Code: I"m rich.
"He had someone all lined up for me. Not someone who cared about social justice, believe me, but I think, since Stu got the New Yorker job, he"s making some headway with Pops. Right, honey?"
Code: I have plenty of other men. They"re rich, too. But I chose Stu, and I have so much to offer him that you don"t.
Stu looked eager to change the subject. "I filled Tofu in on all the deets, and she feels like this might be somewhere where she can do some good."
"Yeah, okay, except that someone was already murdered, so it"s not a jaunt for Miss Polly Pocket." Oh, d.a.m.n. Too harsh. Too direct. "So," she said to Tofu, "you left her at home, right?"
Tofu smiled, which was unfortunate, because Laura was pretty sure she was down a couple of points after a called foul. Tofu was going to be hard to beat.
When they got on the train, there was only one available seat. Stu stood beside it in such a way as to make sure everyone knew it was his, but he wasn"t sitting in it. Then he motioned for Laura to sit. She knew better than to argue feminist politics with him. He"d been raised to be a gentleman with every ridiculous affectation that went with it. Stopping him would be like asking rain to come down, but be a little less wet, if you please. So she thanked him and motioned for Tofu to take it. Tofu wouldn"t. So they all stood, and a guy in a plaid biker jacket sat there.
"So," Tofu said with a fat smile and an arched brow, "who are we meeting?"
Laura wanted to kick her. "What I learned from last time is that if you want to find out why someone was killed, you have to find out what they were doing in their life."
"If you read more," Stu said, "you probably would"ve already known that." That might have been an insult if it didn"t simply prove they were close enough to tease each other.
"Experience is better than reading."
"Touche."
Big points. In a better mood, Laura turned back to Tofu. "This girl we"re meeting might be the only one who can, or will, tell me how a foundation for abused girls in Eastern Europe and a second rate modeling agency relate to each other. Because Thomasina was involved in both."
"Okay, I got it."
"This is going to be awesome," Laura said, "even if I end up having to throw a party for Ivanah."
When they got to Broadway Junction, most of the pa.s.sengers cleared out, so standing looked stupid. They sat together, with Stu and Tofu holding hands in the front-facing seats perpendicular to the window and Laura opposite them. The train trundled to an outside track, and the afternoon sun blasted in through the window.
"I never understood the window seats when I was little," Laura said, "because I"d only ever seen trains in tunnels. So when I was like twenty, I went to a boat excursion out of Sheepshead Bay, and on the train there, I could see the houses and backyards and streets out the window of the D train. It was better than television."
Code: I was born hipper than you.
Stu didn"t give Tofu a chance to retaliate, even if he saw what was going on between the women. "This is the second time I"m escorting you to an outer borough on a murder investigation."
"You"re supposed to demand full access and exclusive rights to the story."
"I demand it."
"You have it."
Code: You have nothing to offer, b.i.t.c.h.
Tofu rolled her eyes. "It"s all about work for you guys."
Code: Game. Set. Match, to the soaking brick of calcified vegetable protein.
Bad neighborhoods in New York could be identified by a few key factors. Laura didn"t know if those factors translated anywhere else in the world, but to her, they were starkly clear. Strip malls. Wide streets. Tall, matching apartment buildings spread far apart. There were other markers for the denser neighborhoods in the Bronx, but in Brooklyn and Queens, those were the rules.
East New York, which was in the southeastern-most part of Brooklyn, had all of the above and a landfill to the south. There was really nothing else that could have been done to make it worse except maybe a jail nearby or a training yard for roosters and pit bulls. Every street had a strip mall, and every strip mall had a check-cashing place, and every check-cashing place seemed pretty busy. Starrett City towers peeked over the low horizon like the few last teeth of a rotted-out jaw. The planned community for working cla.s.s tenants had turned into a low-rent housing project in spite of itself.
Like any war zone in the city, artists had found it by simply looking at a map and drawing lines of acceptability from Manhattan outward. The first affordable place they hit where generous s.p.a.ce could be had became a target for the bravest.
Since there were no warehouses or light industrial zoning, East New York had escaped the wedge of gentrification. Moving there would require more imagination than most people had, but it only took one person to have an idea and thousands to follow, and strip malls were the last big idea. They had s.p.a.ce, big windows up front, and small backyards where one could spray paint a sculpture or smoke a cigarette. The parking lot in front could be used as a loading dock for huge objects, or well, just to park the cars and pickups that had become more hip and acceptable since Manhattan had become inaccessible. That so many had been vacant after a few domino financial crises that hit the poor first and left the poor last made them cheap. Many were owned by foreign investors who would fix up the bathroom and floors but never check to make sure the tenants weren"t living illegally in the back room.
The store that owned the address Laura had been given used to be a photocopy-slash-fax joint. The one next to it rented little bra.s.s mailboxes, which if you looked through the fogged window, still resided there. Walls had been broken down between the stores, making a huge s.p.a.ce.
Stu yanked on the front door, and it opened with the violent creak of metal on concrete. Laura entered first, while Stu and Tofu followed. The room probably hadn"t looked as big when filled with copy machines. From her quick count of the clean spots on the industrial carpet, there had been twelve in all. She felt a slap of sadness as she thought of a once-thriving business unable to keep up with technology, or the neighborhood, or the rent, or whatever it was that had killed it, then shooed the feeling away with the idea that the owners might have expanded and moved to a better location.
"h.e.l.lo? Susannah?" she called out, walking deeper into the abandoned store.
"Maybe she went to lunch," Tofu said.
"Laura," Stu said, "this doesn"t seem right."
The smell of a thick Turkish cigarette came from an open back door. The yard out back was wide, and she could see a little crabgra.s.s patch where a few dandelions had found a home. Laura figured Meatball Eyes must be getting a smoke, so she picked up the pace. "Susannah?"
No answer. Probably on the phone.
When Laura got outside, she thought a store mannequin had been thrown on the ground. But mannequins didn"t smoke thick Turkish cigarettes or drop lit ones nearby, and they didn"t bleed from holes in the chest.
In the second before she fell apart, she saw that the one eye that hadn"t been beaten closed was brown and as big as a meatball.
Falling apart was too kind a term for what happened. Complete emotional collapse would have been a better term, except that the description didn"t encompa.s.s the physical. Stu practically caught her with one hand on her way to the gla.s.s-dusted ground, missing the opportunity to help Tofu, who screamed like Laura had the first time she"d tripped over a murder scene.
Three dead people in six months. All women. Who did that happen to? Didn"t most people live their whole lives without seeing a murder? The details of all three marched across Laura"s mind"s field of vision, and she was attacked by grief emanating outward from her sternum. It was too much. Too much death. Too much hurt. Too many people on the floor with physical harm done to them. She knew she was crying, maybe for the women, none of whom she"d liked or known very well, maybe for herself and her foul luck. Maybe she was just crying because she could. Stu was somewhere far away, asking her to get hold of herself, though without an ounce of impatience, and she wanted to answer, but her grief had turned into colors that appeared before her eyes. A salty taste that couldn"t have been anything but tears dropped into her mouth.
Bright, angled light came from the horizon, which must have been from the setting sun in the front parking lot. There was a little cool breeze because even c.r.a.ppy neighborhoods got the benefit of good weather. She then saw flashing lights. She was getting cold, but didn"t have much else on her mind, even as the water she found she was drinking made its way down her throat, into the wrong pipe, making her cough.
When she came back to herself, the sun was gone, and the sky was graded shades of teal and cyan. She sat on the back b.u.mper of a police car with a bottle of water in her hand. Stu was talking to a guy in a jacket that had bulges all around the waistline. A cop. Not Cangemi. Weird. He seemed like the only cop in the world until Stu stood there, talking with another as if they were compatriots or college roommates.
The cop, a super young guy of no less than six-four, wearing a bulletproof vest under his jacket, looked like a gargantuan monster, but when he came closer and she saw the proportion of his head to his shoulders, she knew he was just a normal size under all that gear. She figured she could make a fortune custom tailoring suits for plainclothes cops.
"I"m Detective Yarisi, with the sixty-ninth. Are you okay?"
Her eyes hurt, and her mouth was fighting a coating of phlegm and spit, but she nodded anyway.
"Your friend tells me you"re Laura Carnegie? You got the sister all over the news?"
She shot a look at Stu. They hadn"t looked at a TV or a phone in hours. "We p.i.s.sed off a reporter." She pointed at the ambulance with the closed back doors. "Her name was Susannah," she said, then had to fight back a crying jag. She held out the catalog for the White Rose foundation. "And you have to figure it out. Because I can"t do two at the same time, okay?" The overwhelmed feeling made her want to fall down, and she was relieved to find Stu right there to hold her up. "I can"t keep finding people and then trying to find out what happened because it"s making me upset. Do you understand me?"
"Sure."
"You have to do this yourself, okay? You have to call Ivanah and explain to her and you have to find out how Susannah got here and you have to do all that stuff because if I try to find another killer, I"m going to find more bodies. And what I"m saying is, if I"m not being clear, just in case, that I am going home and not making any stops, and I"m not asking any questions, and I"m not even going to crack a single joke with you because I am cursed to find dead people, and I"m afraid the next person I find is going to be someone I care about, and then I"m really going to have to ask questions. Are you understanding? Because I see you nodding, but I don"t know what that means."
"It means I understand. The paramedics are here. They can give you something to help you calm down."
"No! I don"t want anything." She turned to Stu. "Where"s Tofu?" She said the name with her thick New York accent that had no time for mediation and made his girlfriend sound like bland, greyish food.
"She went home."
"I want to go home, too."
Alas, she had found another body, which meant another round of questions. She already knew what they were going to ask before they did, so she answered clearly, thoughtfully, and in great detail, careful to explain any contradictions. She and Stu were in a gypsy cab an hour later.
Their driver, by his own admission, was from a village in southern Sudan, and Laura steeled herself for another horrifying childhood story, which could put her right over the edge. But he talked to himself, and then into his headset in a constant musical patois. He didn"t expect answers or validation. He was just doing his own thing, man, and if she was okay with it, he was too.
"I don"t have a lead," Laura said. "I know that sounds heartless."
"Why don"t you ask her boss?" Stu asked.
She glanced out the window. She recognized nothing in the blackness, but could smell the salt of the ocean, which reminded her of Jeremy.
"Because I think she might have done it."
"You think she beat and stabbed her a.s.sistant?"
"No, poisoned Thomasina. I don"t know what happened to Meatb-Susannah. I almost hope it was just the neighborhood. But Thomasina, that was premeditated and done so the killer wouldn"t be near her when she died. And also to mimic a popular diet pill the girls are taking. So it was a practical matter. Not some crime of pa.s.sion."
"Pa.s.sion can be very cold."
She huffed, then hoped he wouldn"t ask her what she was huffing about because she didn"t want to tell him the statement made her think of their short-lived relationship. "Whatever killed her was given in the morning. She saw my sister in the morning is all we know, and I think she saw Roquelle Rik at Marlene X. Roquelle was involved; she had Susannah"s scarf right there in her office, even if she denies it. So yeah, there could have been some conflict. Like Thomasina was signing the girls into an exclusive thing with Pandora instead of putting them with Mermaid, which would have made Roquelle bare her teeth. But kill her? No way. She wouldn"t harm a hair on that woman"s head. Thomasina was a cash cow, so to speak. The Mermaid Agency was built on her skinny back, and yeah, they"ll survive without her, but she brought in serious bank." Laura turned fully toward Stu. "But Ivanah? Now think about this. She"s a real business shark. Her business manager talks about her like she c.r.a.ps Krugerrands. So listen to my theory."
"This is going to be awesome."
"Thomasina approaches Ivanah about getting involved in White Rose because she knows the drill over there in the former East Germany, and she"s a closet tyc.o.o.n, which is important because either Thomasina just felt comfortable around her own kind or needed money."
Stu gave her a quizzical look.
She held up her hand. "Yeah, I know Thomasina has a b.u.t.tload of money, but go with me here, because for some reason rich people never use their own money to do anything. They always have to tap someone richer or just someone else. I don"t know why."
"I think it"s a tax thing."
"Whatever." She rubbed her eye and noticed how much it hurt. It was incredible how quickly she"d put the pile of bodies out of her mind. "So anyway, Ivanah"s like, all right, I"ll help the people. Young girls? Sure, I was one once, and she gets involved, and her husband flies out there to check out the deal and make sure it"s clean. But it isn"t."
"Like how?"
"Use your imagination. They"re selling babies. Or they"re just shipping out random women. Or the government isn"t getting their kickbacks. Or the girls have swine flu. Or they"re addicts. I have no idea. Let"s just say Bob calls Ivanah and says, "This thing is a no-go. It stinks to high heaven, and we need to bail immediately.""
"You better wrap this up before we get to Williamsburg."
She had him, body and soul, leaning forward at full attention. "They can"t bail."
"They can"t bail?"
"Nope."
"Why the h.e.l.l not?"
"Thomasina"s dead."
"You"re twisting this into a knot, Carnegie. Murder is rarely this complicated."
"Ivanah and Bob are involved with White Rose and possibly Pandora, and they"re not saying a word, Stu. Don"t you think something"s wrong with that?"
They pulled up to his row house on North Seventh. He flipped her two twenties. She didn"t take them, and he didn"t open the door. Tofu was upstairs, and Laura was in the cab. She had a few hours left in her, and in a moment of honesty with herself, she wanted to be with him.
She looked at the twenties and slid the gla.s.s back on the cab. "How much to 48th and Park?"
Manolo shrugged. "Another twenty-five."
"What are you doing?" Stu asked. "You said you wanted to go right home before someone else died."
"Go home to your girlfriend. I"m wide awake and chasing geese."
"What"s the name of the goose on Park Avenue?"
"What about your girlfriend?"
"What about the goose?"
"The White Rose Foundation."
He looked down, sharpening the crease in his twenties. "You"re a world of trouble, you know that?"
"I have to work tonight, so either you"re coming or not, but I have to go."
Stu rapped on the gla.s.s. "Go ahead. Wherever the lady says."
"Okay!" Manolo took off for the Williamsburg Bridge.
CHAPTER 18.