“He drinks Scotch,” Elaine said.
“Now there’s something right there. She just happened to mention it?”
“She offered him a drink, and he asked for Scotch and she didn’t have any. So he had something else, but the next day she went out and bought a bottle of what I guess was really good Scotch. And she evidently made a good choice, because the next time he was over he said it was really good, but he only had one small drink, and she was saying she wondered which would last longer, the relationship or the bottle.”
“The bottle,” Sussman said. “It’s still there, Glen Something-or-other.” He made a note. “Maybe he picked it up to pour a drink on a prior visit and forgot to wipe his prints off it last night. But I wouldn’t count on it. Still, that’s exactly the kind of thing to come up with. You know, I wouldn’t be surprised if she let something slip having to do with his name. Give it a chance and it might come to you.”
“Maybe,” she said.
“Strega,” he said suddenly. “Speaking of things coming to you. That’s the name of the bottle he brought along. That’s one way we might catch him. It’s not exactly Georgi Vodka. If you’re a clerk in a liquor store, how often does somebody pop in for a bottle of Strega?”
“So you’ll canvass stores in the neighborhood.”
“We’ll start in the neighborhood and keep going. She didn’t give you any indication at all of where he lived? You can’t put him in any particular part of the city? Well, somebody sold him the Strega, and maybe the guy who did will actually be in the store when somebody drops in to ask, and maybe he’ll not only remember but he’ll decide it’s okay to cooperate with the police, that he won’t be infringing on his customer’s inalienable right of privacy and making himself vulnerable to a lawsuit. Maybe Mr. Strega paid with a credit card, though that seems like too much to hope for. Maybe the store’s got security cameras installed, and maybe they actually work, and maybe we’ll actually get there before that night’s tapes are automatically recycled, though that’s a stretch. You don’t need to keep the tapes any length of time, because all you have to be able to do is ID the dirtbag who holds you up, not somebody who bought a bottle of high-priced booze from you a couple of nights ago.”
Monica’s apartment building was distinctive, which may have been why I’d recognized it right away when it showed up on New York One. It’s on Jane Street in the northwest corner of the Village, a seventeen-story Art Deco building with a facade of yellow-brown brick, and elaborately sculpted lintels and cornices. We walked uptown on Hudson Street without saying much, and when Monica’s building, taller than its neighbors, hove into view, Elaine’s hand tightened its grip on mine. By the time we were across the street from it she was crying.
She said, “If she ever did a bad thing I never knew it. She was never mean-spirited, she never hurt anybody. Never. She fucked some married men, big fucking deal, and she quit working once her parents died and left her enough money to live on. And sometimes she’d keep candy in her purse and eat it secretly, because she was ashamed and didn’t want you to know. And she probably gave more thought to her wardrobe than Mother Teresa ever did, which probably made her a more superficial person than Mother Teresa, and a lot more fun to hang out with. And those are the worst things I can think of to say about her, and they’re not so terrible, are they? They’re not bad enough to get you killed. Are they?”
“No.”
“I can’t look at her building. It makes me cry.”
“I’ll get us a cab.”
“No, let’s walk for a while. Can we walk for a while?”
We walked north on Hudson, which becomes Ninth Avenue north of Fourteenth Street. We passed a trendy restaurant called Markt, and she said, “René Magritte wasn’t French, he was Belgian.”
“But you still knew he was the painter Sussman was talking about.”
“Because I got the same image in my mind, that surreal dissonance. It’s daytime but the sky’s dark. Or that one with a picture of a pipe with a curved stem, and writing that says ‘This is not a pipe.’ Paradox. The reason I just thought of it now—”
“Is that Markt is a Belgian restaurant.”
“Yeah, and so’s the little place across the street on Fourteenth, La Petite Something-or-other. Monica liked it, they’ve got all these different ways to cook mussels, and she was always crazy about mussels. You know what they look like?”
“Mussels? Sort of like clams.”
“Up close,” she said, “after you take them out of the shell. They look like pussies.”
“Oh.”
“I told her it was her latent lesbianism shining through. We were going to have lunch there but we never got around to it. And now we never will.”
“You haven’t had anything to eat today,” I said.
“I don’t want to go there.”
“Not there,” I agreed. “But should we stop someplace?”
“I couldn’t eat.”
“Okay.”
“It wouldn’t stay down. But if you’re hungry…”
“I’m not.”
“Well, if you decide you want something, we can stop. But I’ve got no appetite.”
We walked a few blocks in silence, and then she said, “People die all the time.”
“Yes.”
“It’s what happens. The longer you live the more people you lose. That’s how the world works.”
I didn’t say anything.