And Sometimes I Wonder About You

25

“Excuse me, mister,” a woman called out from somewhere behind me.

I was almost to the broad marble stairway that led down to the first floor. Turning, I saw the late-middle-aged woman who had been watching me and Mr. Mulligan. She wore a knee-length khaki skirt and a loose red blouse that partially hid her large breasts. She’d let her hair go gray but her face still had the creamy complexion of youth.

“Yes?” I said.

“You’re looking for Coco?”

“Yes?” I said, wondering if Mulligan had confided in her. It didn’t seem likely.

“Professor Belair is a wonderful teacher,” she said. “It’s almost like he can inhabit your soul and bring art out of you that would never happen otherwise. He sees inside, you know what I mean?”

She was wearing simple white-plug earphones connected to some music device in a khaki pocket.

“What about Coco?” I said, feeling like a shepherd of conversation.

“They had an affair,” the elder art student said. “She spent afternoons and evenings on that cot in his office. After the first few modeling sessions he let her stay there the first three months she worked here. I think he paid her extra, too.”

“There’s a name for that,” I said.

“She was in trouble.”

“How do you know that?” I asked. “Did she talk about it?”

“It was the way she was always so jumpy. She’d actually flinch if anyone, I mean anyone, walked into the room. And when she’d walk with Fantu it looked kind of like she was using him as a shield, you know what I mean?”

I nodded and asked, “Was she a friend of yours?”

“No. We never spoke other than to say hello now and then.”

“So Fantu told you I was looking for her?”

“He doesn’t talk to gray-haired ladies unless it’s about their work. Don’t get me wrong, he does his job. He’s a good teacher and can’t help it that he’s a man.” These last few words had the ring of a deeply held conviction about the entire gender.

“Then how did you know I was asking about Coco?”

Smiling, the lady brought out a small white plastic box that was connected to her earphones. It didn’t look like any digital music player I’d ever seen.

The lady smiled, revealing two missing teeth; one upper and one lower.

“It’s what they called on the late-night TV informercial an omnidirectional listening device,” she said. “All I have to do is switch this knob on top and I can hear anything anybody says, in any direction within fifteen feet or so. I’m always eavesdropping; on the street, in classes, at church. You wouldn’t believe some of the things that people say and do. I heard this one guy say that he raped a woman. I called the police from a pay phone and told them, but they didn’t do anything. That’s why I decided to tell you what I know.”

“Why’s that exactly?”

“Because I think that girl’s in trouble and you’re already looking for her. I thought maybe if I told you I might be some help.”

“What kind of trouble was Coco in?” I asked.

“Somebody was after her. I heard her tell Fantu that there was somebody she needed to help her get out of trouble. I never learned why they were after her or what the trouble was.”

“If you think she’s in trouble, why wouldn’t you suppose that that trouble was me?”

“Is it?” she asked, innocent as a child.

“No.” I smiled, hoping there was somebody to keep her out of trouble. “I’m a PI working for her family like I said.”

I handed her my card and she glanced at it.

“I didn’t think so,” she said.

“Did you hear the name of the guy she needed to help her?”

“It could have been a woman,” the old-school feminist objected.

“But it wasn’t, was it?”

“No. I guess you’re a detective and can see things that maybe I don’t understand,” she allowed.

“You can really listen in on people’s conversations with that thing?” I asked.

“They think I’m an old lady listening to rock and roll or something.”

“Damn.”

“Paulie DeGeorges,” she said.

“The guy she was waiting for?”

The gray head bobbed and gave me her best serrated grin. “You could tell when Fantu was flirting with her that she was just mouthing her answers. She just needed a place to sleep and a few bucks in her pocket. Soon as she found something better she was gone.”

“How did you hear the name of the guy she was looking for?” I asked more from habit than anything else.

“He came into the class one day,” she said, triumphant. “He was short. Not so much as you, and skinny. He wore a silly suit and bow tie and his hair was too long for a man of his age. Fantu asked him what he was doing here and he said his name was Paulie DeGeorges and he was there to talk to Coco. He said something about her brother but somebody sneezed and I couldn’t make that part out.”

“Paulie DeGeorges,” I said aloud.

“That’s right.”

“And what’s your name?” I asked.

For a moment there was suspicion and fear in the matron’s round brown eyes. But then she came to some kind of internal resolve. “Irene Carnation. Carnation like the flower.”

“You have my card, Irene. If Coco comes back you should call me. And maybe if you get tired of classes and street corners one day, you might want to call a real detective. I might could give you some work from time to time.”

“This little jigger only cost forty-nine ninety-five,” she said. “You could buy one yourself.”

“It’s you that’s the jewel, Irene. Somebody sees me and they know to worry. You... that’s money in the bank right there.”

A look of wonder came over Irene Carnation’s face. A door was open and she was wondering if she had the courage to walk through.

Early afternoon found me uptown at a high park along the Hudson River looking down on a concrete wall. The barrier was a blank slate except for a door-sized hole thirty feet below, almost at the waterline. There’s a very official-looking iron ladder that leads down to the hole but neither that opening nor the ladder is supposed to be there.

I made my way down to the water, maybe two hundred yards from the wall. From there I could keep a watch on the portal and use the fishing pole I’d picked up from home to give anybody looking a reason for why I was there.

Clarence had left by the time I got home. He’d taken the keys and so I expected to see him in less than a year.

I threw my line pretty far out. My secret for fishing was learned from an old guy named Cranston. He taught me that you needed a heavy weight, at least eight ounces, on your line and that the best bait was a giant gutter cockroach. I had both bug and pyramid-shaped lead weight and so I sat down on a craggy concrete plank that had been dumped there to maintain the shoreline. After I had my hook in the water and the pole between my knees I took out the Canadian socialist paper The People’s Voice. Adam Clayton Powell, Jr., was once associated with a paper by the same name, and I think it was out of a soft spot I had for him that I kept up the subscription.

From time to time a young boy or girl climbed down the ladder to the hole and then scrambled inside; a few minutes later they’d clamber back up again. They looked like ants filled with a purpose laid down in their DNA millions of years ago. Watching them come and go, I remembered the man named Tusk who came from Australia and fabricated an underground pied-à-terre deep within the man-made wall.

Tusk was more of an artist than a survivalist. There was running water and electricity in the cave. I’d shown the place to Twill when he was no more than fourteen.

I sat there for hours reading about dreams that my father had taught me and then abandoned. I caught two good-sized flounder and an American eel that was more than a yard long. I cleaned the flounders and put them in a pink plastic bucket I’d brought along. I let the eel go.

At twilight Twill, replete in blue jeans and a stained T-shirt, came scrambling out of the hole. I picked up my bucket and pole and climbed to the street. From there I followed my wayward son until he was headed east from Broadway on Seventy-second.

“Twitcher! Hold up,” I called from maybe ten feet back.

Twilliam McGill, as usual, was unflappable. He turned and smiled as if to say, “What took you so long, old man?”