Death Dance

19

"Can we stop for a hot dog? I'm starving."

"Sure. But I've got no appetite. I'd like to go by Lucy's apartment and see whether there's any contact information for her relatives there."

"I'll be quick," Mike said, watching as the street-cart vendor fished two boiled franks out of the murky water in his stand. "So how do you figure the swing?"

"I don't. Did you notice anything when you looked at it?" I said, taking the Diet Coke that Mike bought me.

"Yeah, but I can't tell whether it's just old rope or somebody intentionally hacked away at it. It gave out on one side and the wooden board-the seat holding Lucy-flapped back, dropping her on the stage like a rock. That analysis of the rope is a job for the lab."

"And if it was a setup, the question is whether it was meant for Talya. Might even have been a safety valve-to make sure she was dead by today-in case the killer missed her at the Met Friday night."

"Not a bad thought," Mike said, drowning the second dog in a mound of sauerkraut.

"No thanks," I said to a toothless man passing out cards advertising an Eighth Avenue strip club. While Mike enjoyed his late lunch, I gave directions to a group of high school kids looking for video arcades and waved away a Jehovah's Witness who was hoping to convert me in rapid fashion beneath an overhead neon sign that advertised girls! live! nude! girls!

"We stay here long enough, you could get lucky."

"And you could get ptomaine poisoning."

He wiped his mouth and we were ready to move on. "You got an address on Ninth?"

I looked at Lucy's identification again and read him the number. "That's close by. Should be in the forties."

We cruised west on 45 th Street, turning south when we came to Ninth Avenue, as we noted the descending numbers on the buildings. At the corner of 42nd Street, in front of the drab doorway of the four-story structure, bracketed by the graffiti on adjacent storefronts, Mike braked the car and pulled over to park in a loading zone.

"Jesus. I can't believe it. The Elk? That kid must be desperate."

The flashing red neon sign above the grim entrance just said the word hotel. Both Mike and I had handled scores of cases there in our careers, and knew the more appropriate label for the shabby little place was flophouse.

"This is about as far from the Broadway stage as you can get in three blocks," I said. "You want to check? Maybe it's a mistake."

Before the Disneyfication of 42nd Street, the area around Times Square had been full of joints like this. The Elk was the last one standing after a period of rapid development. It had a few permanent residents, and a dozen or so guestrooms in which a tourist might mistakenly show up in appreciation of the forty-dollar-a-night price for a mid-Manhattan accommodation.

But most of the rooms were rented by the hour to professionals of another sort who didn't mind that the only furniture in the cubicle was a bed and nightstand-no phone, no TV, no air conditioner- and that the communal bathrooms were down the hall, shared by the usual assortment of hustlers, hookers, pimps, and junkies.

We got out of the car and walked up the staircase that led to a locked glass door. I stepped around a couple of winos and a methadone addict nodding out, following as Mike forged a trail for me around discarded liquor bottles and empty crack vials.

The man on the desk buzzed us in and Mike flashed his badge.

"Somebody call about trouble? I got no trouble," the clerk said in his clipped Pakistani accent. "Somebody call you?"

"No, no. We're trying to help a young woman who's been hurt. She may be staying here."

"Hurt here? No, no," he said, shaking his head with great conviction.

"No, m'man. Hurt somewhere else. An accident. We need to find her family. Her name is Lucy DeVore."

"Ah. Miss Lucy. She get hurt? She going to be all right, detective?"

"I hope so. You want to tell me how long she's been here?"

"Of course. We don't want any trouble with police," the clerk said, looking through his box of index cards for the handwritten notes on his long-term residents.

Stabbings, shootings, rapes, homicides-the denizens of places like the Elk brought those crimes along with them the way ordinary travelers carried luggage. Generally speaking, the law-abiding clerks who manned the desk were cooperative with law enforcement, knowing they relied on the quick response of the local precinct when the bullets started flying and bodies fell.

Mike looked at the notes scribbled on the card. "Looks like she's been here about three weeks. Is that right?"

"Three weeks, sir. Very right. Very nice girl. No trouble."

The spaces for previous address were all blank. There was nothing except the date in March that Lucy had arrived and the room number assigned to her-noting that it had the extra feature of a hot plate. The rate was two hundred fifty dollars for the month, far less than most people in this part of town paid to park their cars.

"She paid in advance?"

"Yes, sir. Cash. That's the red check mark on the card. Everybody does," the clerk said, pressing the buzzer to admit a hooker as she waved her room key against the glass. She blew a kiss at him and took the hand of the raggedy-looking man who accompanied her inside, wagging her spandex-covered ass at him as he stopped behind her to catch his breath on the next flight of stairs. They were on their way, no doubt, to the two-hours-for-twenty-five-dollars "short stay" rooms, from which so many of my cases had developed.

"Nobody bothered her here?" I asked.

"Oh, miss. Many people would like to bother her," he said, laughing. "She ignores everyone. Very nice to me. Very nice."

"Anyone visit her?"

He shook his finger in my face. "Not that way. No visitors. None at all."

"We need to go up to her room."

The clerk looked from Mike's face to mine. "For sure it's okay? Miss Lucy coming back soon?"

"Not too soon," Mike said, giving his card to the man. "Anybody looks for her, you call me. And don't let anyone touch anything in her room."

"But soon the next money she will owe."

Mike reached into his pocket and handed the clerk a bunch of twenties. "Nobody takes anything from Miss Lucy's room. That money goes toward the next month."

"Yes, sir," he said, putting the money in a locked drawer and handing Mike a key. "Room three seventeen. You would like me to take you?"

"We're okay." We walked up two flights of sagging wooden stairs and halfway down the long corridor. Mike unlocked the door and stepped inside. He flipped the switch and the bare overhead light-bulb turned on.

The life of the dazzling golden girl on the flying trapeze-Lucy DeVore, or whoever she really was-was entirely contained in a single wheeling bag that lay open in a corner on the floor and accessories scattered around the room. Most of her wardrobe was black-cheap cotton blouses and sweaters, jeans and slacks that were folded neatly on top of each other. Some dresses hung in the closet, short-skirted off-the-shoulder types that would have showed her off to great advantage. Three pairs of shoes and one pair of high-heeled boots were alongside the bed.

There was a table with two drawers that she had used as a dresser. On top of it was a plastic cosmetics kit-buy two lipsticks, get one free-that Lucy had probably used this morning to get ready for her walk-through. It was crammed with a variety of stage makeup- powders, mascara, liners and shadows, and a range of lip colors from palest pink to burgundy. Beside that were her toothpaste and tooth-brush and a dish with a bar of soap.

On the bedside table was a small folder with photographs in it. Lucy as Mother Courage, as Joan of Arc, as Blanche Dubois, as Dorothy on the Yellow Brick Road, and as Nellie Forbush, washing her man right out of her hair. In some of the pictures she looked like she was fifteen, while in others old enough to handle the mature roles. The stage was every high school or amateur community play-house in a small town in America, and if her family had attended her performances, there was no sign of it in this keepsake album. It probably wasn't meant to be sentimental, but rather to show her range of roles to the people in the business whose attention she tried to get.

The last photo seemed to be the most recent. In it, Lucy was dressed in a black leotard and tights, wearing a scarlet felt hat with white sequins and a long black tassel that fell onto her face, covering her right eye. It was a tarboosh, the Moroccan cap originally worn by students at the University of Fez that had long been regarded as a symbol of knowledge and integrity. I brought the picture closer and looked for any sign of where it had been taken. She was leaning against a door, bracing herself with her hand on the large steel knob. Around its hexagonal perimeter, engraved in the metal, was a word- perhaps the name of the theater or building in which the photo had been taken. Lucy's hand covered everything except the first letter, which was M.

I showed it to Mike. "See that M? Think this could have been taken at the Met?"

He studied the image of the unusual doorknob. "The design looks too stylized. From an older period, I'd guess. How many theater names are there in town that begin with the letter M?"

"The Music Box. The Majestic…"

"I'll get a list."

I put the small album in my pocket to take along, hoping some-thing in it would be a help in finding Lucy's home.

Mike picked up the pillow and ran his hand under the bed covers. "You live in a flophouse like this, you gotta have some place to keep a few valuables, no? Where could she have put them? People break into these rooms all the time. She would have looked like she had extra bucks to satisfy a night's habit for one of her neighbors."

"I've had prostitutes who worked out of places in this area. Some of them paid for lockers up the street at the bus terminal fast for that reason."

There was no flight tag attached to Lucy's suitcase. If she had arrived in New York by bus, she would have probably been familiar with the Port Authority station.

I went back through the clothing again, looking in every pocket for another key or an address book or any connection to a human being.

I picked up the faux snakeskin boots and turned them upside down, shaking them as I did. Something fluttered to the floor. I unfolded the tightly wrapped paper-a one-hundred-dollar bill. In neat handwriting, on the cream-colored border of the money, was a telephone number, and after it the name Joe Berk.