Losers Live Longer (25 page)

“
Then try this on for size,” I said. “Up until this past Spring, the Peer Group—like many of its clients—was heavily invested with a financial outfit called Isolde Enterprises, run by a man named Lawrence Addison. The problem is Addison turned out to be a con man and an embezzler and he did a disappearing act with all their money. The way I heard it, the business almost went under, until someone stepped in and bailed them out, becoming a new silent partner. Sound familiar? I make that new partner to be you, Gladimir.”

“
So?”

“
As ye reap. Ms. d’Loy had no choice in the matter, because it looked like she’d never be able to recoup those lost funds. All of Isolde’s assets are frozen pending Addison’s trial, a trial that will never take place unless Addison is apprehended. Which was an unlikely prospect until Michael Cassidy resurfaced yesterday. Now suddenly the chances aren’t so slim.”

Gladimir let go of my shirt entirely and sat back in his seat. “I don’t understand.”

“
What do you think is going to happen if the Peer Group gets all that money back? How important are you going to be to her business then, Glad? If she turns up Addison with Michael Cassidy’s help, how long’s it going to be before she sets out to sever her ties with you?”

I let the question hang there, and so did everyone else. It was a rhetorical question anyway.

What I was saying seemed to penetrate into Gladimir’s skull. He frowned so that the curve of his lips matched that of his downturned mustache.

He asked Coy d’Loy if this was true and she denied it too quickly to be convincing. He stood and towered over her. For a second, I thought he was going to hit her and I’d have to break the beer bottle across his face after all, so I chug-a-lugged what was left, down to the foam.

But he didn’t smack her, just turned and strode away.

She didn’t try to stop him, instead leveled her gaze on me.

“
Now that he’s gone,” she said, “maybe we can work out some sort of deal. A finder’s fee if things turn out the way they should. Say five thousand dollars?”

“
No thanks, Ms. d’Loy. I’ve already got a job. You happen to be part of it. But thank you for the beers all the same.” The ceiling lights dimmed, brightened, dimmed, and brightened. “I think it’s time to go to the movies.”

I stood up, turned and looked down at Moyena.

“
It was nice to have met you. Sorry we spent the whole time talking shop.”

“
No problem. I found it fascinating. Now if I ever need a private investigator, I’ll know who to call.”

“
Be good,” I said, then fell in with the crowd filing into the main screening room.

I was careful picking where I sat down inside, choosing a seat directly in front of two frumpy older women who appeared the least likely in that crowd to have murder in their hearts. But what did I know?

The houselights dimmed everywhere but directly in front of the translucent screen. A young man stepped onto the small stage and faced the crowd to a small round of applause.

He was slightly stoop-shouldered and had small lozenge-lensed eyeglasses and a mini Art Garfunkel afro. He introduced himself as Ethan Ore and said he hoped everyone would enjoy his effort. He bowed his head and stepped to one side as the little theater went to black and the movie began with the bold-lettered title, RENEG, emblazoned on the screen.

It wasn’t my kind of movie, but I followed it enough to tease out the story. The film centered around a young couple, a talented young actor/director married to a heroin addict, and their joint struggles with getting her off the drug and his to make it as a serious artist. A real flight of imagination, this one.

There was a funny sequence among the prevailing pathos in which one potential producer turns the husband down for an upcoming project because he finds out the wife is a notorious heroin addict, while a second producer turns him down for another project upon finding out the young man himself is not sufficiently tied into the underground drug culture—unable even to help the guy score a dime bag of weed.

In one scene, presented in a split screen, the husband tells a friend how much progress his wife is making kicking the habit; meanwhile she’s shown alongside, cooking up a spoon of smack under a highway underpass.

It was a drama full of long pauses and I couldn’t say I enjoyed it much. As the movie drew to a close, the wife—after experiencing a hallucination in which a stray feral cat spoke to her in the voice of her dead mother (provided by Olympia Dukakis)—checked herself into a rehab clinic to finally get clean. When she provided her medical history to the admissions nurse, it came out sounding like a penitent murmuring in a confessional.

It was a powerful scene, with a really moving performance by the young actress, and I thought it should have ended the film.

Instead there was an additional three minutes tacked on. That’s both how it looked and how it felt; even the medium was different, changing from film to digital. It jarred the senses and sensibility.

It was a one-camera shot, the scene focusing on the woman’s husband at the rehab clinic on visiting day. He’s seen sitting in the waiting room before switching to the office of the administrator, who tells the husband that the wife wants to discharge herself from care and return home.

“
Is she ready?” the man asks.

The administrator tells him, “My professional opinion is no. She’s made great strides, but it’s still too soon for her to be released. Falling back into her old patterns would be inevitable.”

But it turns out it’s not up to the administrator or to the doctor, the decision rests entirely with the husband. Because she checked herself in voluntarily with his help, unless he co-signs her release, she cannot leave.

The scene ends with the husband walking back to his car still carrying the magazines and candies he’d brought to give to his wife, and talking on his cell phone saying, “I think I can make that three o’clock meeting after all.” The End.

The houselights came up to applause and murmurs.

Ethan Ore stepped out on the stage once more to take a short bow and invite everyone to the afterparty.

I was already working my way to the aisle so I could intercept him on his way out.

“
Mr. Ore?”

“
Yes?”

He was looking past me, searching faces, probably for financial backers and prospective distributors for his film.

“
It’s about your wife.”

That got him looking right at me, and looking a little afraid.

“
Michael? What about her? Who are you?”

I told him who I was, that I’d been in touch with his wife, and that I needed to talk with him in private.

“
I can’t right now, I have to…I can’t right now. Are you going to the afterparty?”

I said yes. He said he’d speak with me there, then eased himself around like someone performing a vertical limbo.

Outside, some people were climbing into limos while others were competing for taxicabs. I decided to walk.

I stopped at a newsstand and bought a pack of American Spirit cigarettes with the last ten bucks in my wallet; I was living large. I lit up and smoked.

I’d learned a lot, but there was still a lot left to learn, and I was getting a creepy feeling I wasn’t even asking the right questions—been asking the wrong ones all day—and that I was running out of time. It was silly. What deadline was I trying to beat?

It was half-past seven, dusk. The setting sun in the hazy western sky was the same salmon color as the end of my cigarette.

I turned away from it and walked east, following my shadow, a long narrow stain spilling out in front of me.

Chapter Seventeen: THE WIGGLE ROOM

I decided on the way to stop by the office first.

When I walked in, Sayre Rauth was gone. I sat down behind my desk to check messages (none) and discovered that the printed pages of the Excel spreadsheet were gone, too. My first thought was that Sayre had probably taken them in order to destroy them, but then I realized something I probably should’ve hit on sooner.

If Owl had taken the data from her computer in order to pressure her in some way, it wouldn’t have been enough just to copy the files. How much good was a copy, after all? Some—but the thing that would’ve made it really worth a lot as leverage was if after copying them he’d purged the originals, deleted the files from her hard drive. That way, assuming she hadn’t backed up her files, his copy would be the only copy. If she ever wanted her hands on the files again, she’d have to do whatever she was told. When you consider the risk Owl had taken by staging a break-in, you had to figure he’d have taken this extra step to ensure it had been worth it.

So now Sayre Rauth had her files again—the spreadsheet anyway, not the videos. But the spreadsheet was the key to the kingdom.

I sat and smoked another cigarette. It started my stomach working and I went into the bathroom to take a dump. But before I even sat down, I noticed I was out of toilet paper. I went into the kitchen, but I was out of paper towels as well. The best I could manage was a stack of coffee filters. I brought them with me into the bathroom and sat down to empty out.

The funny thing was…

The rising stink stunk sweetly of Sayre Rauth.

I’d ingested her, her saliva, her slick sweat, her warm and tangy effluvia. Savoring her flesh; inhaling her exhaled breaths; absorbing her through my pores. More than just the scent of her perfume was left on me and in me.

In all likelihood I’d never see her again. She’d gotten what she wanted.

Did I care? Did I ever.

I stubbed my cigarette, quickly rinsed off in the shower, then dressed to go out.

Before heading over to the Wiggle Room, there was a stop I had to make.

It was balmy outside, the air hazy as if seen through gummy eyes. The sun had dropped below the rooflines and evening was pooling in the valley of buildings, but the streetlights hadn’t come on yet. Getting dark earlier now; in three weeks, it would be autumn. But some of the thrill of summer still remained.

Though it wasn’t the weekend yet, the city was already festive. Thursday was the new Friday night, the night that native New Yorkers went out to party, a day before the out-of-towners and tourists congested the streets and the club lines.

Car horns bayed like penned-in dogs calling to each other in the night, one horn triggering off four others.

I walked down Second and turned left onto Tenth Street, then right onto First Avenue, making an Etch-a-Sketch-style diagonal line toward my destination in Alphabet City.

Walking by Coyote Ugly, I was accosted by a pint-size girl in a black leather halter top and miniskirt who was standing out front delivering a “step right up” spiel, trying to drum up business for the bar. I guess the sign declaring FREE SHOTS WITH EVERY PITCHER wasn’t getting it done. I was in a hurry, I had things to do, so I tried to slip by her quickly. But she wouldn’t be denied her fun, and I was too damn polite to just ignore her.

She yelled out to me, “Spell cop!”

“
C-O-P.”

“
Spell shop!”

“
S-H-O-P.”

“
What do you do at a green light?”

“
Stop.”

“
GO!” she shouted and laughed and waved me away like a traffic cop gesturing,
Move it along, bub
.

Only it made me stop after a few strides and think about just how easily I’d been fooled. Some glitch in my brain, I guess. I wondered what other blind spots I wasn’t seeing.

The streetlamps flickered to life as I crossed the avenue and turned down Ninth toward Tompkins Square Park.

The road, black during day, was now lit stark orange by the city lights, and the surrounding buildings were darker silhouettes, looming shadows of various sizes.

I walked around the park instead of going through it. On Seventh Street, I passed three old Latin gentleman on the sidewalk seated on lawn chairs in front of a color TV attached to a power cord coming out of a ground floor window. They were watching the baseball game, Yankees at Tampa Bay. The cheerful announcer rattled off the balls and strikes of a behind-in-the-count batter. “One away.”