Revenge of the Cootie Girls (19 page)

Lucky truffle.

Meanwhile, the booklet went on ominously, auspicious albino crocodiles appear in Cambodia, a thousand-mile column of migrating toads makes its way through provincial China, a green cat is born in Denmark, bunches of frogs shower down from the sky in several places in Scotland, and in Iowa a farmer reports a cow who tracks, captures, and eats chickens. Here in New York, coyotes roam the Bronx, wild boars had been sighted in Staten Island and Queens, and a large alligator was pulled from a pond in Brooklyn. Mother Nature is coming back, the booklet warned.

And, boy, is she pissed.

Just then someone said, “Hi, Robin, how are you?”

It was Sally, standing by my booth.

“Hi, Sally. I'm fine. You?”

“Well, the PMS medication I've been taking has caused a slight numbness in my left arm.…”

“So I've heard.”

“And I broke up with Joshua. Actually, he broke up with me.”

“Who is Joshua?”

“Oh, you didn't meet him. He was my most recent boyfriend. Robin, why can't I meet a nice guy?”

I wanted to tell her—Sally, get into therapy and grow your hair out to cover your baldness and your tattoo. You have a big scorpion up the back of your bald head! Some men, believe it or not, consider this a turnoff. But I didn't know how to tell her this without hurting her feelings and sending her off the deep end, and subtler expressions of this sentiment missed their mark. For a week in the spring, she'd worn a wig, and she looked very pretty with hair, which I mentioned to her. But that phase didn't last long.

The one time I was able to get her to talk about her appearance, she told me that the man of her dreams would see through to her soul and that's how she'd know he was the right one, which sounds lovely in theory, except a succession of right ones had come through her doorway and turned out to be wrong. Despite all my subtle and non-subtle hints, she refused to see a shrink, though she did consult with one of her nutty gurus, Sister Delia, a reader of past lives whose real name was Norma Finsecker.

“I dunno, Sal. I'm the wrong person to ask. What are you doing here?”

“I'm waiting for someone. And while I was waiting I was assisting the resident fortune-teller. It's been busy tonight—Halloween and all. Hey, you know what? I saw Louise Bryant about an hour ago. At the window here.”

“Oh,” I said. “No shit.”

“What are you doing here?”

“I'm waiting for someone too.”

“Who are you waiting for?”

“I don't know.” I suddenly got it. “Who are you waiting for?”

“Somebody to pick up an envelope for a murder mystery,” she said.

“Who hired you to do this?”

“I can't tell you.”

“Sally, this is a scam, and my intern Kathy has been sucked up into it, so you'd better tell me what you know.”

Sally chewed her lower lip. “Her name is Anne Winston. She's a client and had become a friend. Don't you remember? I mentioned her last week, the friend I wanted to bring along tonight. But she said she couldn't make it, and then she hired me to do this delivery.”

“I remember you mentioning a friend, the one who was having an affair with a guy who was going to jail, and the wife was on to them. But I don't remember you mentioning her name,” I said, as I opened the envelope.

“Psychic-client privilege,” she said. Ever since I chewed her out for telling people she advised me, she had been keeping client names confidential. It was her theory now that you could tell anything about someone as long as you didn't reveal who the person was.

“You've met her, this Anne?”

“Yes. She came by a few times. Mostly we talked on the phone, for two months, maybe a little more. She read about me in the newspaper.”

“She read about
me
,” I said. I was catching on. “She read that I was one of your ostensible clients. She was coming to you to get info about me.”

The envelope contained a key, a newspaper clipping, and a cryptic clue. The story, from summer 1991, was about the bones of a Perrugia-family thug, Frankie “the Fish” DeMarco, being found in the old Brooklyn dunes. The guy had been a numbers runner, a hijacker, a procurer, and was suspected of a couple of hits before he vanished. He'd been missing for over a decade. It jarred me. Was there really a murder? Or was this another red herring?

“Who the hell is Frankie the Fish?” I asked. Sally didn't know.

The clue was baffling. “Grand Four-Eyes cousin with leg braces.” At first I didn't get what Julie was trying to say with this gratuitously strange imagery. I wracked my brain trying to come up with associations or allusions that decoded it, but it made no sense. It sounded like something that was badly translated from English into a completely incompatible language like Hindi, and then translated (badly) back into English.

“Do you know what this key fits?” I asked Sally.

“No.”

“What did she look like? Anne Winston.”

“Pretty, a blonde …”

“Dye job? Wig?”

“I don't know. Maybe.”

“Did she pay by credit card?”

“Cash.”

“Did she talk about me?”

“Not by name. I never identified you by name.”

Well, that was big of her. It would be so hard to figure out who Sally's unnamed redheaded friend who worked in twenty-four-hour news was.

“Whatever. She knew we were all going to go out tonight. She knew it was a Girls' Night Out.”

“Yeah,” she said.

“And this envelope came to you by FedEx today?”

“How did you know?”

I'm a fucking psychic, I thought, but didn't say. I filled Sally in on what had gone down, watching her expression grow sadder and more alarmed. When Sally's face grew sad, it was heartbreaking. I thought to myself, I bet she had super-cooties when she was a kid.

“Anne Winston is Julie Goomey,” I said. Julie might have had a co-conspirator named Anne who worked with her at this perverse charity, but Julie wouldn't send someone else to get info on me from Sally. She'd have too much fun doing it herself.

“I was so sure about her. I was so sure about what I saw for her. How could I be so wrong?”

“You're only human.”

“I fucked it up. I am so worthless.… I am such a fraud.”

“Sally, everyone makes mistakes.”

“Now I know what my orange dream means. It means I'm a fraud.”

“The orange dream?”

“I dreamed I invented the orange. I didn't have any money for the subway, so I gave the token clerk my orange, and he threw it onto the tracks. A big rat came and took it and it was gone. And it was the only orange in existence.” At this, she burst into tears.

Suddenly, I realized that, in some weird way, Sally was right to shave her head and have a scorpion up the back of it. It was right for her to express herself. She was weird and tough (scorpion), vulnerable and exposed (bald head). Now that I thought about it, this suited her. When Sally was completely insane in the spring, after her cat, Pie, died and her then True Love pulled a gun on her and took off with her life savings, she started wearing that wig, going without makeup, and wearing dull clothes. It was so nutty. For her, I mean. It was like she had slipped into another person's skin, kind of the way the actors in horror movies slipped into prosthetic faces and other body parts. Yet I knew this must have been how she looked, more or less, back when she was growing up in Darien, Connecticut, before she went to Princeton and fell in with a coven of witches there.

The wig and the clothes lasted about a week. Then I hired her to consult on our special report on the paranormal, and she reverted to herself.

“Sally, calm down. Don't jump to any conclusions. Everything will be fine,” I said, putting one arm around her.

“How do you know everything will be okay?”

“I have no choice but to believe that,” I said.

“Maybe if I burn some bladderwrack … Omigod, bladderwrack won't do it, will it? I really fucked up,” Sally said. “I'm a complete fraud. I knew it.”

“Sally, don't do anything drastic. Everything is going to be all right.”

“Yeah, that's what I told your friend, that everything would be all right, and I was wrong,” Sally bawled so the whole place could hear. I'm sure this instilled lots of confidence in people who were waiting to have their fortunes read. “Oh God, I just had a vision flash through my head … a terrible vision.…”

“It's all some kind of joke, Sally. Don't panic. You're only human. Can you tell me anything else about this Anne, whose name is really Julie?”

“She seemed so nice. I was helping her a lot with her problems.”

“What problems?”

“The married boss, the wife, and she had a bad childhood.”

Julie's childhood was bad, I had to admit. But lots of people had shittier childhoods. Sooner or later, you deal with it and move on, right?

Sally couldn't stop crying. I kept rubbing her back with one hand as I whipped out my notebook with the other and started playing with the name. Anne Winston. It wasn't up to Julie's regular standards. She'd always liked aliases like Carol Merrill, Terence J. Mahoney, or Putli Bai, Indian Bandit Queen.

I studied the clue again.

“Grand,” I read again. “Four Eyes cousin with leg braces.”

It took me a few minutes of brain strain and a few more passes over the clue to figure it all out. Grand was the name of the best hotel in Ferrous.

Four Eyes. There was a kid, a grade ahead, nicknamed Four Eyes. Come to think of it, he had a young cousin with leg braces who attended Camp Hapalot.… Victor? Vincent.

There was a Hotel Vincent, near Gramercy Park, and we had stopped there, very, very briefly, that night in New York, on the ride back to our hotel.

My phone rang in my hand, startling me and scaring Sally into a more energetic round of sobbing.

“Robin? Claire. Still can't find anything on Anne Winston.”

“I wonder if she's a real person, and Julie's just been using her name tonight. Hmmm. What about George the rich guy?”

Sally got up and went to the bar. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw her order and pound back a shot of something.

“Nothing yet,” Claire said. “Nobody on the night shift has a fucking clue, so I'm sitting here between two computers, one doing a slow search through last week's scripts for the words ‘fugitive' and ‘George,' and another flashing all the newsphotos we used last week during my shows. I'll know it when I see the photo. I've only got a few dozen more to go through. Where are you going now?”

“The Hotel Vincent. I don't know why yet, but I guess I'll find out when I get there.”

“I'll call you when I find out who this guy is and why he's news,” Claire said. “Have you heard from Tamayo?”

“No. Wasn't she with you?”

“She went to check out the apartment building Julie Goomey lived in before 1990.”

“I was just about to call her.…”

“I just called her, Rob. There was no answer. I'm worried. Very worried.”

“She may have gone to talk to someone and left the phone somewhere. You know how absent-minded she can be.”

“Robin, I have a very bad feeling about all this. Be careful, okay?”

“Sure.”

Sally was at the bar talking to Greg the “warlock.” I saw her put back another shot of something.

“Sally, I gotta go,” I said. “Take it easy, sweetie.”

“I'll go with you,” she said, already slurring her words.

“No, you can't go with me. I'll call you tomorrow,” I said.

“Have another drink,” said the warlock.

I wanted to stay and look after Sally, but I couldn't, and I couldn't take her with me either, not in her state. Jeez, this good-friend stuff was tricky. Before I left, I called a car service to get a car to take her home. Even though it was just a few long blocks from here back to our apartment building, and traffic was going to be a pain because of all the people on the streets, I felt better having professionals take her home. There was a long wait for a car, so I took the bartender aside and asked her to keep an eye out for Sally in the interim, try to get her away from the warlock. I also left a message with the bartender for Tamayo, in case she showed up here, that I was going to the Hotel Vincent, and she should call me or Claire.

When I left the Neon Hand on Avenue A, that Yma Sumac song I'd heard at Joy II, “Virgenes del Sol,” started playing in an endless loop somewhere at the back of my head—beating drums, chanting men, Yma's desperate, ethereal shriek. My heart was beating to the drums. I couldn't even feel my legs.

The megavitamin was finally kicking in.

16

O
N
A
VENUE
A, I made my way through the sea of garish masks and painted faces—two people in big Babar heads, a couple of skeletons, some ghosts, vampires, aliens—as well as people not in costumes. I saw Munch's
The Scream
walking behind me, and that gave me a start. Maybe it was a different
The Scream
. Maybe it was an amazing coincidence.

I looked down 10th Street, my street. Beams of artificial light glanced off the dark street, sharp as knives, from the bright lights along the basketball-court fence. I was just a block and a half from my bed, from safety, and it was with a heavy heart I kept on walking towards Gramercy.

There were too many voices in my head. I felt like the guy with the tinfoil earmuffs, trying to tune in a clear signal. I couldn't hear the voice in my own head. I heard Julie's voice, Claire's, Old Hobnail's, Sally's, Tamayo's, Yma Sumac's, Mary MacCosham's.…

I was within sight of the Vincent now. Julie and I had stopped outside the Hotel Vincent for, maybe, five minutes that night in 1979. Because of an unexpected detour, caused by a minor car accident, we'd turned west in the Gramercy Park area and gone past it. Julie, struck by it, asked the driver to stop. It is a very impressive-looking building, a Victorian Gothic red brick building with wrought-iron balconies and a lot of interesting turrets and gargoyles. We spent all of five minutes looking at it and then, as I recall, I got cranky because I was tired and drunk and needed some sleep. After that, I know we went back to the Abbey Victoria. The next day, we'd looked up the Vincent in a guidebook and learned it was a historic artists' hotel, home to a lot of famous painters over the years.