Losers Live Longer (29 page)

So I headed back to the Bowery Plaza, on Third Avenue and St. Marks Place.

But I was too late. Parked in front of the hotel were an ambulance and a police cruiser, and just pulling up, one of the white and gold O.C.M.E. vans. Office of Chief Medical Examiner.

I kept my distance, not wanting to get involved, but needing to know what had happened. I saw a bearded young guy sitting cross-legged at the corner begging for spare change. He had a paper cup hanging by a string at the end of a short stick. He held it up to passersby as if it was a fishing pole. Up and down both arms, he had solid sleeves of tattoos, but whoever had done the work had used cheap ink. The interlocking images were hopelessly smudged, leaving his flesh muddied dark blue and purple as if with post-mortem lividity. I dug a quarter out of my pocket and dropped it in his cup.

“
How they biting?” I asked.

“
Not bad.” He reached into his cup and took out my quarter, and also a linty penny that was in there. He tossed the penny away on the sidewalk.

I said, “Gotta throw back the little ones.”

He grinned. One of his canines was chipped in half.

I asked, “You know what happened over there?” I pointed to the hotel with my thumb.

“
Yep. Some lady killed herself in one of the rooms. Shot herself in the head. Heard one of the cops talkin’ to the ambulance guys. S’pose to be someone famous, but I ain’t never heard of her.”

“
What was her name?”

“
I dunno. Don’t ’member. Why?”

I shrugged. “Just curious.” Then I walked away.

Suicide? I didn’t buy that. Which left what? And who? Law Addison maybe? Finally disposing of a junkie ex-girlfriend? Or her husband, Ethan Ore, for the same reason and maybe one more: he might get a good movie out of it. But who else?

I tried to put it together in my mind. I’d seen the old guy Gower entering the hotel lobby that morning as I was leaving. He must’ve been making a delivery to Michael Cassidy. If he’d known where she was, then so had whoever had tried to kill me, and long before I’d figured it out. Ahead of me the whole time. No wonder he hadn’t hunted harder for me in the park, I was no threat to him. Not as much as the kid FL!P had been or Michael Cassidy herself. They each knew his face and now they were both dead.

The kid’s last words to me echoed in my brain.

“
That’s easy. You must—”

I must…I must what?

Nothing came to me. And I felt like nothing ever would. My head was swimming and my soul was afraid. I walked back to my office in a daze. I hardly even noticed my favorite sight in the city, the brilliantly lit Art Deco spire of the Chrysler Building in the distance, looking so much like the kind of rocketships we once expected our fantastic future would hold. Now it might as well have been only a scale model.

Seated behind my desk again, I lit up a cigarette, and smoked. It didn’t help. But it didn’t hurt.

I opened my desk drawer and found where I’d tossed my gun. I also found the sealed envelope that contained the stuff I’d grabbed out of Owl’s pockets that morning.

Had it only been this morning? Felt like it’d all happened months ago.

I tore open the envelope and shook its contents onto my desk.

The receipt for George Rowell’s hotel dated 9/2/08. The broken plastic wristband from the wastebasket. The two sales leaflets for the men’s discount clothing store and the Persian rug wholesaler in Chelsea on West 21st. The pink pasteboard receipt for a parking garage.

Parking garage?

I looked at it like I’d never really seen it before. Maybe I hadn’t. I’d broken one of the rules—Matt would kill me—back at Metro, Matt had always tried to drum into me the golden rule:
When you look, see
.

Why in the world did Owl have a parking garage receipt in his pocket? He hadn’t driven into the city, I’d found his round-trip bus ticket from New Hampshire in his briefcase. So what the hell was this?

I looked.

And I saw.

It was one half of a parking garage claim check issued by E-Z Parking Garage at 446 East 10th Street. The same garage where Elena’s boyfriend Jeff worked.

A standard parking garage receipt, it listed alphabetically all the various makes and models of cars: Acura, Audi, BMW, Buick, Cady, Chev., Chrys., Corvet, Dodge, Ford, For’gn, Honda, Hyundai, Infiniti, Jaguar, Jeep, Lexus, Lincoln, Mazda, Mercury, M-Benz, Mitsubishi, Nissan, Olds., Peugeot, Plymouth, Pontiac, Porsche, Saab, Subaru, T-Bird, Toyota, Volks., and Volvo, as well as boxes for Convert., Sta’wgn, Van, and Compact. As well as a listing of colors: Black, Blue, Brown, Gold, Gray, Green, Orange, Red, Tan, White, and Yellow. Also included were spaces for the location of the vehicle, noting floor level and parking space.

This receipt had two holes punched in it: “Blue” and “M-Benz.”

A blue Mercedes-Benz.

Its location: third floor, space 17.

I turned over the receipt. Printed on the back was the date and time the car was checked in. May 10th, 1:51 pm.

Thinking back to the info I’d found on the web about Law Addison, it seemed to me I’d seen a mention of his driving a sky-blue Mercedes-Benz.

Even the date rang a bell. Addison had disappeared on May 11th, the day after the date on the receipt.

This wasn’t Owl’s parking garage receipt—it had belonged to Law Addison. Owl must’ve found it in the writing desk in Elena’s apartment. I’d seen a batch of stubs in there myself, but I’d figured they all belonged to

Jeff—he worked at a garage, after all. But one of them could certainly have been Addison’s, if he’d been in the habit of parking his car at the garage where Jeff worked; that explained how they might have known each other, the millionaire and the grease monkey. And they must have known each other, since Jeff had somehow wound up house-sitting for him while Addison made his run for the border.

Speaking of which…if this receipt was for Addison’s Benz, that meant Addison had never claimed his car before going on the run. Why? Because the car was too hot, too recognizable for him to flee in? Or was there some other reason?

I got out of my chair and start pacing the office, coming back to my desk every other turn to stare down at the pink receipt.

This meant something, I knew it. I didn’t know what, but it meant something.

Goose-pimples rose on my arms. Excitement tingled in my nostrils.

I took my gun out of my desk drawer and slid it into the waistband at the back of my pants.

Suddenly I wasn’t tired anymore. I didn’t need a nap or a drink. No longer fatigued, I was electric.

I was at the office door with one foot outside when my phone rang and yanked me back.

I picked up the receiver. It was Sayre Rauth. She didn’t sound happy.

“
Payton, I need your help.”

I laughed.

“
You don’t need anybody’s help. You’re too damn good.”

“
Please, listen.”

“
If it’s the rest of your files you want, you’re out of luck. They were destroyed. All that’s left are the papers you took off my desk. You’ve got it all.”

“
That’s not why I’m calling.”

“
Don’t tell me it’s to say that you love me and can’t live without me.”

Apparently not, as she didn’t say anything for a long time. It reminded me why I hated talking on the telephone. You were never able to see the other person’s face, as if the words were all that mattered.

“
No, Payton,” she said. “It’s Elena. I’m worried about her. She left me a message that she wanted to see me. I went to her apartment. She wasn’t there, but in the hallway…I saw yellow tape, police tape, all around. Someone there told me a man was murdered this afternoon. Payton, do you know where she is?”

I thought about it. “I might. You remember her boyfriend Jeff? The one I told you followed you from Yaffa?”

“
Sure.”

“
You know where he works?”

“
The garage, right? Over on Tenth Street? Is that where she is?”

“
If I had to make a bet,” I said, “I’d bet on her running to him, and I remember her saying he works nights. I’m headed over there right now. I’ll call and let you know what I find out. Where are you?”

She hesitated, just a fraction, before she said, “My office. But don’t—I’ll call you. In an hour? Or I…I could come by your place?”

I didn’t hesitate, not a fraction. I’d had all the seduction I could handle.

“
Call me in an hour.” I hung up.

It was past three am, but scattered in the streets were still the sounds of late-night revelry, street-corner drunks hooting and laughing. Somewhere blocks away a bottle smashed, thrown forcefully to the ground. Such a tiny sound, but universal; anywhere on the planet it expressed the same demand:
Know I’m here!

The air was piss warm and, because of the orange glow of streetlamps, had a urinary hue, too. And not good piss, either, not clean piss, but that syrupy orange kind. Not even human. Cat piss. The kind you can’t get out, ever, no matter how much you scrub. Whatever’s marked by it has to be tossed out. Can’t be saved.

Only occasionally as I walked was the humidity relieved by sharp gusts of breeze that went as soon as they came.

Short windbursts like an engine revving, as if in the dead of morning a storm was on the way.

Chapter Twenty: BETWEEN C & D

The E-Z Parking garage was located on East Tenth between Avenues C and D, just across the street from a small lane called Szold Place, which ran along the side of one of the city’s outdoor public pools. All closed up for the season.

I stopped and surveyed the parking garage from the pool side of the street. Three floors of parking with a big elevator shaft in which cars were lifted to the upper floors. Each of the partitioned levels had gaps overlooking the street with heavy black netting to keep the birds out, heavy black netting covered in starbursts of white birdshit.

On the second level could be seen the fronts of cars facing out behind the netting. But at the third level, the spaces were all empty, no cars.

The garage was closed, its metal roll-down gate snug to the ground. Its cave-like interior seemed to be lit by nothing but emergency exit door lights, a dim red gloom bleeding around the rounded concrete pillars. This was no way to run a business. Supposin’ I needed my car in a hurry? Just supposin’.

But as my eyes became adjusted, I saw there was another light inside as well, on the ground floor. A pale light showing in a small glass-enclosed office just to the right of a closed metal door with a punch clock beside it.

I rattled the cage wall of the gate, producing a ripple.

A shadow crossed the light in the office and a black silhouette faced me, like those ghosts in Japanese horror flicks.

The ghost went away and a few seconds later I heard a noise far off to my left. A door had opened. I went over to it. Elena was holding it open.

Her eyes widened when she recognized me and she tried to shut the door again. But too late, I was inside. I closed the door behind me. The small areaway was lit by only a single bare 60 watt bulb dangling overhead from a cord.

I asked, “What are you so afraid of?”

“
I…nothing, I thought—”

“
That I was someone else? Who are you expecting?”

“
I don’t
expect
, it’s just I no want trouble—”

“
What sort of trouble are you afraid of?”

“
Nothing. No one.”

“
Is it Sayre Rauth? Because you’ve got nothing to be frightened of there. I’ve talked with her. She isn’t after you.”

Elena backed up a step, keeping me at arm’s length. Her expression was wary and more than a bit sad. “She get to you, this woman, and you believe her lies. Like all men.”