And Sometimes I Wonder About You

42

I walked the captain all the way to my newly rebuilt front door, saw him out, and watched him until he disappeared around the corner. Only then did I close that door and throw its seven locks.

I was halfway back to my private office when the phone sounded again.

“Hello.”

“Paulie DeGeorges, Mr. McGill,” the scammer fop said.

“Mr. DeGeorges,” I hailed. “And how are you on this glorious fall morning?”

“Fine,” he said, a little breathless at receiving true etiquette. “I was just telling Violet that it’s warm enough that we could picnic in Central Park.”

I heard his ex-wife utter something in the background.

“What did she say?”

“Nothing. She was expecting you to give her that money, I guess,” he said to me, and then to her, “Quiet, honey, we’re doin’ some business.”

Violet was not about to be shushed and she said so. I heard her yelling and then a few other noises. Finally there came the sounds of open air and traffic.

“Sorry, Mr. McGill,” Paulie said. “Violet gets angry and the only thing that cures it is either time or martinis.”

“What you got for me, Mr. DeGeorges?”

“I talked to Coco and she said that she’d agree to meet you but she wanted me there too.”

“When?”

“As soon as you can.”

My knuckle and cheekbone were both throbbing to the beat of my heart. That’s life, said the Buddha and Sinatra.

“That Excellent Bean joint only had a front door, right?” I asked.

“Yeah?”

“I’ll get that seat in the back,” I said. “She and I can sit there and talk. You take a place near the front to make sure I don’t do anything hinky.”

“I don’t know if she’ll like that,” Paulie cautioned.

“That’s the only way I’ll do it. Tell her. Bring a gun if you need to. I don’t care. All I want is some private conversation with her.”

“I’ll ask.”

“See you there in forty-five minutes.”

Fifteen minutes later I was ensconced at the same table Paulie had claimed the day before. I could have made it in ten but first I took some money from the wall safe where Mardi was storing the deposits I’d given her. I put a certain amount in a brown envelope.

At the Excellent Bean I perused a monograph by an uneven writer I read sometimes. The title of the book was The Graphomaniac’s Primer: A Semi-Surrealist Memoir. The book was less than a hundred pages, printed but from a handwritten manuscript; mostly composed of entire pages of letters written in rows wedged so closely together that they morphed into various textures. The page of lowercase a’s enchanted me. It was reading without reading. There was a scattering of prose pages and a few drawings in between. The essays were about neuroses and how humans could not survive without them, and also brief analyses of memoir, art, and even a few possibly autobiographical sketches.

“Mr. McGill?”

I looked up to see Coco/Celia dressed in dark blue jeans and a light blue T-shirt. She wore no makeup or jewelry. Her eyelashes were her own and the blue and white tennis shoes on her feet could have been bought at any time over the last sixty years.

“Coco?” I said. “Celia?”

She glanced back toward the entrance. Paulie was sitting at the table closest to the door, trying to look like a bodyguard. His shirt was yellow, his jacket deep green, and his bow tie white with red polka dots.

“Paulie told me to tell you that he has a gun,” she said.

“Good for him,” I said brightly. “Have a seat, will you?”

She considered my request, looked back at Paulie, and then lowered to sit at the very edge of the walnut chair across from me.

She was thinner than in her photographs and there were dark patches under her eyes.

“What else did he tell you?” I asked.

“That you were a detective who specialized in cases like mine and, and that you could help me, maybe... I mean if you thought that it was in your best interest.”

“It’s like we were brothers,” I said.

“Who,” she said and then she swallowed. “Who sent you?”

“A man named Hiram Stent.”

The question lodged itself in her brow before making it to her lips.

“Who is that?”

“I’m told he’s a distant cousin of yours on his mother’s side.”

“But, but I don’t know him.”

“And neither did he know you,” I said. “But a lawyer in San Francisco sent a man of many names to ask Hiram if he knew about you. The lawyer offered a lot of money for knowledge of your whereabouts.”

Celia jerked her head around frantically, expecting to see men coming for her from every corner. She looked so frightened that Paulie stood up from his chair.

I held up a hand to assure both the popinjay and the stripper that there was nothing to worry about.

“Hiram never found out anything about you,” I said. “And I didn’t take his case anyway.”

“Then why are you here?” she said, almost shouting.

A few heads at surrounding tables turned our way.

“After I refused him somebody murdered Hiram; probably the man of many names. I’m willing to bet that Hiram told the man that he tried to engage me but that I had warned him, Hiram, that the whole thing was probably a scam. Most likely that’s what got him killed and my office door blown off its hinges.”

“I don’t understand anything you’re saying,” the petite young white girl said.

“I know,” I commiserated. “It’s very complex. But I can cut through the fog by saying that it all started when you stole a thirteenth-century edition of Herodotus’s Histories from a private library called the Enclave.”

The surprise on Celia’s face was gratifying. I always liked it when I had a fact by the nuts.

“You know about that?”

“Didn’t Paulie tell you?”

“He just said that you might be able to help.”

“He’s right about that. I might be able to help if you can answer some questions.”

She was trembling. Twenty feet away Paulie was still on his feet. I began to think that the scam artist was probably what he said — an anachronism of chivalry lost in the modern world; a fifth or maybe sixth Musketeer.

“Why is Evangeline Sidney-Gray after you, really?”

“She wants her book,” Celia said, looking down.

“No. Even a crazy billionaire like her would have to have a better reason than an old book to run a search like she has for you.”

There was no hair hanging down on Celia’s face but she pushed at phantom strands anyway.

“Tell me about it.”

“Why should I trust you, Mr. McGill?”

“Because I found you,” I said. “Because if I wanted to hurt you all I had to do was bring a little muscle to drag Paulie off and throw you in the back of a van. Because I knew all the players before we sat down.” I took out my PI’s license and put it on the table and said, “Because I’m a licensed private detective and if anybody ever needed somebody like me on their side it’s you.”

“I don’t have any money to pay your fee,” she said.

“I’m not working for you, darling,” I said, feeling as if I was in an old black-and-white movie. “That distant cousin you never met, Hiram Stent, asked me for help and I turned him down. He just needed somebody to believe in him and now he’s dead. I’m doing this for him.”

Celia was concentrating on my every word. In the past eleven months she’d learned to make decisions independent from family, friends, bosses, and even the law. She was on the run and dreamed every night about the life she had probably taken for granted.

She swallowed hard and said, “There was a letter pasted under the endpaper on the inside of the back cover. I noticed how puffy the page was and that made me curious. You know I studied antiquities at Yale. I knew that some of the royal families of old hid their secrets just like that.”

“And was it some kind of ancient secret?”

“No. It was a letter ten or eleven years old.”

“From whom?”

“Charles Sidney-Gray.”

“Her husband?”

“Son. He had gone on a killing spree in his youth. He killed homeless people, men and women, and buried their bodies under the family summer retreat in Cape Cod. Forty-nine bodies if the letter is accurate. He lured them there because he pretended to... pretended to work for a charity helping the homeless that his family ran.”

“Did you tell Paulie this?”

“No. My brother told me that I should only say that Dame Gray wanted her property back.”

“And what did you tell your brother?”

“I said the letter was about a crime but led him to believe it was like a theft. I don’t completely trust Donald either,” she said. “We love each other but he doesn’t have good sense. I only wanted a little money to get him a lawyer that might help get him out of prison. He’s dying down there.”

“And you somehow got in touch with Dame Gray and asked for the money in return for the letter.”

“Yes,” she said, looking down.

“What happened then?”

“Two men grabbed me in front of my apartment in Allston. I screamed and this vet from Afghanistan came out with a gun. He shot in the air and I ran. I ran. I didn’t pack or anything. I just went down to where the Chinese bus is and came to New York. I knew those men were working for Mrs. Gray. I was afraid.”

“Changed your name,” I said. “First you became an artist’s model for that fool Fantu Belair and then, after meeting Paulie, you became a stripper.”

“You know Fantu?”

“Met him. He wasn’t much help.”

“I started out modeling because no one wanted an ID and I got paid in cash,” she said. “Stripping was the same only it paid better.”

“Smart. But somehow they found out you came to New York. They sent the man of many names after you.”

“I called my boyfriend to tell him I was all right. I used a throwaway phone but somehow they traced it here.”

“Forty-nine dead bodies under her summer home,” I said. “Damn. Did you tell Evangeline that?”

“I think she already knew. The minute I said I had a letter from her son she was worried. I didn’t tell her about the storage space though.”

“What storage space?”

“Charles Gray killed himself soon after he wrote the letter. Before that he took a ninety-nine-year lease on a storage space in Wyoming. He says that there are forty-nine trophies there.”

“Forty-nine,” I said again. “The rich always go overboard.”

I had a storage space too, with my own variety of trophies. I hadn’t murdered anyone to get them but they were various pieces of evidence I had to prove that I had set up people for crimes they had not committed.

“I, I don’t think he expected anybody to find the letter for a long time. It was a mistake that the book came to the Enclave. The Gray family made a donation of less valuable books but somehow it got included. That’s why I studied it so closely. We don’t usually get such valuable gifts.”

“Do you have the book?”

“No.”

“No?”

“It’s too hard to bring things out of there. They search you with one of those machines they use at airport security. It can see if there’s a dime in your pocket.”

“So where is it?”

“There’s an old Bible that Indulf the Aggressor, an old Scottish king, used to hide his flask from his wife. It’s hollowed out and I put the book in there. I’m the only one who knows about it. It’s a part of the permanent collection and I, I don’t know. I kind of liked keeping it a secret... like I was helping the old king.”

“So it’s still in the Enclave?”

“Yes.”

“The letter, too?”

“Everything,” she said with a nod.

For some reason I thought of Marella. This made me smile. If she and I were working together this would be just another job. A few million dollars in the old suitcase and off to Argentina or maybe Monaco. Hell! This is the twenty-first century — we could go to Moscow or Beijing.

“I can get you out of this,” I said.

“How?”

“First we have to cut Paulie loose. He’s a good guy and he helped you but he’s not to be trusted when it comes to power and money like this.”

Not answering was her tacit approval.

I handed her the brown envelope with the money I’d taken from my office.

“There’s five thousand dollars in here. Go over there and give it to Paulie. Tell him that you’re working with me now and that if everything works out you’ll be giving him that much again.”

“This is too much,” she said. “I’ll never be able to pay you.”

“Don’t worry about it,” I said. “In for a penny...”

She took the envelope and went over to Paulie. They talked for maybe three minutes. He wrote down something and gave it to her, then he looked at me.

I smiled and waved.

When Celia came back to the table she was ready for business. Good. I was born ready.