And Sometimes I Wonder About You

23

I told Clarence he could sleep in my daughter’s bed. She wouldn’t mind. Shelly was away at college living with a man thrice her age.

It was early morning when I awoke in the emperor-sized bed that I’d shared with a woman who hadn’t needed love when anyone wanted it with her. But that didn’t mean we didn’t make a durable team. Katrina and I worked together like a machine constructed from indestructible parts and supplied with an infinite power source. We’d never stop functioning but we were terribly out of alignment. We clattered and struggled, twirled and fell down — but we never stopped working and we couldn’t turn off.

I missed Katrina, loved Aura, and wanted Marella so badly that I could taste her in my sleep.

So there I was at 5:47 with the father that had abandoned me down the hall, the women I needed jostling around in my mind, and a cognac hangover from my head to my gut and through every nerve of my body. It wasn’t until I made it to the bathroom, standing next to the tub where I had found Katrina in bloody suicide-water, that I remembered Hiram Stent.

As bad as I felt, he had got it worse.

When ice-cold water from the shower hit my skin I wanted to scream; three minutes later the shiver had made it to the bone; from that point I counted to a hundred and then came out of the glass box shower stripped of fear, lust, love, self-pity, and most importantly my hangover.

Leaving a key, automatic lock-release, and note for my father, I began the long walk down to Fifty-seventh Street and the first stop of my investigation.

There was a fancy diner across the street from the art school where Fontu Belair taught life drawing at a late morning class from 10:00 to 12:00. My watch read 7:14 and so I ordered an omelet with jalapeños, goat cheese, and merguez sausage. The fancy young waitress wore a pink miniskirt and a white silk T-shirt so short that it revealed her sapphire navel ring. Her nametag read MIDGE and her lips were painted apricot. When Midge went to deliver my order to the kitchen I took out my phone and made a call.

“Good morning, Mr. McGill,” Zephyra Ximenez said, answering before I could hear the first ring.

“Back at ya,” I said.

That was it for the pleasantries. From there Z went into her spiel.

“It was really hard finding a Briscoe/Thyme anywhere. I finally located papers filed for them in the Denver offices of a large accounting firm named Feggers and Sons, Ltd. F and S, the name they do business under, was originally a London-based firm that was old enough to have done accounting for Charles Dickens. I followed the trail of ownership back to a Boston company named Braverman Enterprises. Braverman is a holding company that’s owned by a private investment bank controlled by a woman named Evangeline Sidney-Gray. The only law Briscoe/Thyme practices comes from her desk in downtown Boston.

“Finding Ms. Gray was difficult but Josh Farth took no time at all. He came up through the Boston gangs making a living on heists, robberies, and extortion. He’s been mentioned as a person of interest in three murders but no charges have been made. Now Farth works for Evangeline Sidney-Gray, or at least a company her bank owns.

“I only found a little on Coco Lombardi, mainly phone records when she had some kind of relationship with a guy named Alfred Carr. His nickname is Buster. The majority of her calls were either to Carr in New York or various numbers in the Boston area.

“Finally there’s the moniker ‘Twitcher.’ That was by far my biggest headache. I had to piggyback on an NSA program that Bug infected. His subroutine has been crafted so that the feds can’t see it and Bug has it running twenty-four hours a day. I had to drop a key word into the transitional chatter-box and watch it until and if anything came up. Once a key word hit had been made by the box I had ninety seconds to remove it or some bureaucrat in DC would be alerted to the name and the hack.”

“I don’t need the technical explanation right now, Z,” I said. The pink and blue-jeweled waitress was delivering my upmarket eggs. “Just the details will do.”

“The name popped up seventeen times,” she said. “Four of these were about a meeting on the Upper West Side near the river and One-oh-two.”

“I know the place,” I said. “Thanks for all that.”

“You’re welcome,” she said. “Will you be needing any more help within the next few days? Because if not I called Petipor and we’re going on what he calls a surfing expedition in South Africa for a week or so starting tomorrow night. He’s got his own private jet.”

“Wow,” I said. “That beats my dark green Pontiac.”

“I’d rather be in the backseat with you than at Mach two with him.”

Zephyra had never spoken a flirtatious word to me before. I wondered what was happening inside me.

“If you need help you have Bean’s number, right?” Bean was her backup in times of emergency.

“I do. Just a few more things I need,” I said.

“What’s that?”

“Make me a first-class Acela reservation for Boston tomorrow morning as much before ten as possible and e-mail all the information you have on Dame Evangeline Sidney-Gray and Coco. And don’t take any shit from some royal dude.”

“See ya, Mr. McGill. And thanks.”

The omelet was delicious. And Midge was an art student at the school across the street. Tiny as she was, she was a sculptor who liked to work in the double medium of iron and stone. I asked if she knew a teacher there named Fontu Belair.

“Oh him,” she said.

“Not such a good guy?” I asked, trying not to read too far into her tone.

“He taught me how to draw for sculpture,” she said. “Probably the best class I ever had. He said that drawing for a sculptor, filmmaker, or physicist was like dreams for somebody on a psychoanalyst’s couch. He was completely right.”

“That sounds pretty good,” I offered.

“I guess.”

“So what was wrong with him?”

“It’s the way he looked at women,” she said, a little color rising in her cheeks. “It’s like love. When he talks to you it’s almost like you’re dancing with him or something. But then there’s nothing to add. When he finishes he turns off completely and if you ask him to get together for coffee he’s too busy... talking to somebody else.”