Lady Vanishes (13 page)

Right outside of St. Vincent’s, Dashiell stopped to sniff the pants of some very patient man, carrying his groceries home from D’Agostino’s.

“He must smell my dog.”

“Knows his name, rank, and serial number by now,” I told him.

I stopped by the cottage, fed Dashiell, and packed my backpack with a towel, a change of clothes, a small tape recorder, and the pages I’d printed at Venus’s apartment. The staff meeting was at eight. I could work out for forty-five minutes, shower, and still get to Harbor View on time.

Walking over to Serge’s gym, I tried to piece together what started all this, what happened to Harry.

He’d turned south, planning to go to Venus’s apartment.

I wondered if the person on the bicycle had expected otherwise—that Harry would turn north, heading for the subway on Fourteenth Street, that he wouldn’t see what was
coming, a bicycle headed right for him, maybe someone he knew on that bicycle.

Maybe someone he knew?

Of course it was someone he knew. At least, that was the premise that made sense to me, looking at the world as I did, through a dirty window.

Someone he knew.

Coming down Bank Street, I looked into the Westbeth courtyard, a place I knew well, a place with lots of memories for me.

Across the street was the t’ai chi studio where I had studied late into the night so that I could better insert myself into the life of a young woman who had died there.

The courtyard, too, had been a place of death, and when I came here now, as I had always done, to play ball with Dashiell in the shade of the trees, I tried to erase those memories and replace them with the scenes of Dashiell running, his back legs hitching together like a rabbit’s, his ears flopping, his face alive, his mouth open in a grin, the world in his work, nothing more compelling than getting the ball and bringing it back, acting out the law of the jungle and the demands of genetics in the guise of a game. But even watching Dashiell’s joy, I’d been unable to forget what had happened here. It was foolish to try. The best I could do was add to the mix.

I detoured into the courtyard. The sun was almost ready to set now, the air still heavy and warm. Even now, so late in the day, delivery men were lying on adjacent walls, one on his back, arms crossed under his head, the other with his knees bent, lying on his side like a baby. Both were fast asleep.

Their bikes, beat-up one-speeds, one with a basket large enough to hold a couple of orders of Chinese takeout, the
other with no basket, the handlebars wrapped in silver tape, were leaning against one of the walls, unchained. Was that the way it worked in China, everyone getting around by bike, you could leave one just about anywhere and it wouldn’t get stolen?

Not here.

I wondered exactly how easy it would be to steal one.

And then what? After hitting Harry, just ditch the bike a block or two away?

Of course not.

Abandoning the bike in the street would only bring attention to it, the opposite of what the killer would want. A stolen bike, left near a crime scene, that would be a gift for the cops.

He might as well leave a red bow on it.

Or a confession.

No. The bike wouldn’t have been
stolen.
It would have been
borrowed.

And returned. That way it would disappear back into the crowd of indistinct, beat-up delivery bikes as soon as possible. Perfect.

But what kind of a murderer would take the time to return a stolen bicycle?

A smart one.

And what if one of the little men woke up before the bike was returned? What was he supposed to do about it, call the police?

Most of the delivery men spoke just enough English to make change, not a word more. Come from China and call the police? I didn’t think so.

The courtyard went all the way through to Bethune Street, one block north, Westbeth filling the entire block from Washington to West, from Bank to Bethune, a Godzilla
among buildings. Perhaps after Harry’s accident the bike was dropped off on the Bethune Street side, where the courtyard was dark and gray around the clock, no place for a nap in any season.

You wake up. Your bike is gone. You panic. Then what? You figure one of the kids took it to ride around the courtyard. You hope that’s what happened, so you look around. And there it is.

But the basket is bent.

Or there’s a flat.

Who would the delivery man tell?

Surely not his employer.

I was taking a nap, and someone borrowed my bike. See—the front wheel is bent now, the reflector broken. Kindly get it fixed.

Yeah, right.

The two bikes leaning on the wall were old, with clunky balloon tires, one painted blue, the other a rusty gray. The paint was chipped on both of them. One had a broken reflector. On the other one, only the frame of the front reflector remained, none of the plastic.

Who would even notice another dent or a set of handlebars out of line?

I’d heard years ago that most of the bikes used for delivery by the Chinese restaurants had been stolen, bikes the restaurants bought dirt cheap for cash and quickly repainted—some kid left without transportation, some old guy having to hoof it to the gym instead of pedaling there.

I wondered if the cops had gone around to all the restaurants and checked the bikes for blood stains.

But Harry had died from hitting his head on the sidewalk. The back of his head, like Venus’s wound. There wouldn’t have been blood on the bike.

What about fibers? Would there have been fibers from Harry’s jacket? Wouldn’t those come off on the street if the bike had been stolen and returned? Wouldn’t that be one of several excellent reasons to return it?

But the detectives would have checked the delivery bikes anyway. Bike rental places, too, leaving no stone unturned, keeping it close to the vest for now.

No news, the fax had said.

Right.

Homicide with a bicycle, I thought, leaving the courtyard. Pretty hokey. Must have been unplanned, something that happened at the last minute, something improvised, born out of incredible rage, something hot, not something cold, plotted, mulled over, rolled around, and examined. Not something played out over and over again before the fact, enjoyed not once but many times. No, this was a compulsive act, a last-minute thing.

So what had happened at Harbor View that afternoon?

Would Venus know? And would she wake up and remember?

There was a side entrance to Serge’s gym on Bank Street. I walked past two chunky guys spotting for each other, an old guy with a headband to catch his perspiration reading the
Times
on an ex bike, and a pumped-up Hispanic man with thick, dark hair moving his torso from side to side, counting as he did.

I settled Dash and took the treadmill in the corner, the one I’d always used when I talked to Venus here. Turning on the power, punching the start button, I warmed up slowly, watching the river and letting my mind drift. When I got up to speed, I pulled the folded papers out of my waistband and began to read.

I’d printed the batch of e-mail correspondence without
paying any attention to the dates. The stuff I had was written early on, not exactly in the beginning, but soon after Harry had told Venus he was married and that his wife was ill and dying.

“Lady,” Harry had written,

Venus’s answer was short.

I folded the pages and put them back under my waistband, looking at the sun setting on the Hudson, the ball dropping behind the half-built buildings across the way in Jersey City and Hoboken, the light so fierce at one point that even with the amber shades to cut down glare, I had to raise one hand to shield my eyes.

It was fascinating to read the letters, this one-sided conversation—he says, she says, but not at the same rime. There were no interruptions, no changes in the direction of the conversation because of what you perceived in the other person’s facial expression or body language. The phone didn’t ring; you were using the phone line, especially since providers started offering a flat rate and you no longer had to watch the clock.

There was a heightened intensity to the exchanges, everything made more intimate by the speed with which you could send your thoughts and feelings across space and time and onto the small screen in someone else’s home, where he would read your words without the interference of normal life. No one ever interrupting an e-mail “conversation” by saying, “Hey, did you remember to take out the garbage after dinner?”

They were good friends, listening to each other’s concerns, offering support. The intimacy was strange, disembodied, verbal intimacy that had nothing to do with age, race, physical characteristics of any kind. Harry, remembering when he was young, seeming younger than Venus sometimes. On-line, he was unencumbered by a seventy-four-
year-old body: no stenosis, no arthritis, no enlarged prostates in cyberspace.

Venus was the supportive one, the nurturer. Venus was sensible and caring.

So what was
she
getting from all this? The chance to do what she did all day at work, only this time there was someone on the receiving end who could express appreciation? I thought about that for a while, wondering if it had been enough for her, wondering how soon after Harry’s wife died did things change.

“I’m here for you, S,” she wrote, the sexual charge beginning to appear early on. Even without scents and pheromones, you could feel the charge coming off the words.

But was it real? Would it last? Would it stand the test of a virtual meeting?

Often it didn’t.

In this case it did.

I had too little here. But I still had Venus’s keys, so I punched up the machine, walking as fast as I could without breaking into a trot, hoping the workout would give me more than it took away so that I would be able to get back to Venus’s computer and track the meeting of two minds, a love affair that never would have happened the old-fashioned way.

Out the window, there were three lanes of traffic moving north, the newly built median filled with dirt, waiting for the trees and flowers that would partially block the view of three lanes moving south. Everyone moving, I thought, no one content to stay where he was.

A bus was passing, blocking my view of the runners—an odd-looking caravan, painted over, even the windows. It
stopped where I could see it, caught by a red light at Eleventh Street. In the shade my hand created, I read the words painted on the side:
FORESIGHT IS THE BEST ARMOR AGAINST THE UNKNOWN
.

Where was this bus when it was needed? I wondered. Where the hell was it when Venus was here?

When the light changed, the bus disappeared.

Beyond the traffic moving toward the tip of Manhattan, the John Deere equipment sat, parked and still at this hour, the men in their hard hats long gone.

Beyond that was the “park” where I took Dashiell to run off leash, a concrete strip adjacent to the Hudson, a place for walkers, runners, skaters. Bike riders, too.

What if someone skating or walking there
had
seen the accident? So what? It wasn’t a car that struck Harry. There was no license plate. From across West Street, or from a moving car heading north, no one would be able to identify the person riding, more than likely hunched forward, as if to make the bike go faster. What good would that sort of witness be?

Or another sort, Cora or any of the other “kids”? The possibility tantalized, but in the end, whatever they were able to offer, in words or pictures, was worse than useless.