Home for me is a town house, number 2 Gramercy Park. The house is located on the western side of the park. The block is not altogether pristine, that is, not all the houses are original historic landmark buildings, but mine certainly is, built sometime around 1885. Walking there from my office, I stopped again outside to admire its lines. The front stoop that I’m sure once fronted the street has been replaced by a recessed entryway, but the rest of the façade remains as it originally was; I know this because I have seen early photographs. Like The Players, number 2 was designed by Stanford White of McKim, Mead & White fame. The façade is limestone, peach in color, with two large windows on the second floor, two on the third, and an oxeye on the top story, where there is also a small terrace. The roof I altered by adding a deck for sunbathing and for cocktails or brunch in fine weather. Despite the naysayers, there are glorious days in New York City. Someone once wrote that if it had not been such a superb natural seaport, consequently a center of trade and commerce, the climate might have made Manhattan Island a playground on the order of Hilton Head or Fire Island. Alas, there are days when it is windier than Chicago ever was, rendering my rooftop aerie unusable.
Inside, I also find much to admire, beginning with a long hallway covered with white-and-black-checked ceramic tile, a steep hardwood staircase, the original white brick wall on the left, and immediately on the right, a long, wide, high-ceilinged living room. This room I created when I bought the house, by having a wall knocked down between two nineteenth-century parlors, one no doubt for the gentlemen, in which they could smoke their cigars, sip their brandy, and talk politics, and the other for the ladies, to gossip and do needlepoint or whatever nineteenth-century ladies did. Two sliding doors led into a large formal dining room, which, like the living room, has a wood-burning fireplace. Then comes the kitchen—completely contemporary, of course, but with brass plumbing, a butcher-block carving table in the center, with copper pots hanging overhead, two deep ovens, and a microwave. Here my cook, Pepita, holds sway, her wonders to perform. Out back a walled-in formal garden with a fountain, a pool stocked with Japanese carp and goldfish, and a sundial. Upstairs… well, the upstairs rooms are what might be expected: bedrooms, a suite for Pepita and her husband, Oscar, a sitting room, bathrooms, the usual.
I realize that all this might sound pretentious, even ostentatious, but it is not, really. I have been in Manhattan town houses that are equipped with gymnasiums, movie theaters, and indoor swimming pools; me, I prefer a dwelling place that might have survived untouched from the Victorian period, fine antiques and all, except with all the modern conveniences.
Oscar, my houseman cum chauffeur, met me at the door and relieved me of my hat and stick. In a brass salver on a side table in the hallway were several messages Oscar or Pepita had collected for me. I pocketed them and headed upstairs.
Once I had changed into slacks and a sport shirt, I buzzed Oscar and asked him to bring me a vodka and tonic. When that had been safely placed on the coffee table in my sitting room, along with a wedge of Camembert and rice crackers, I leafed through the messages.
Neither Oscar nor Pepita is an adept of our mother tongue, and their interpretations of my callers’ names in particular were somewhat garbled; however, I was able to make out all but one; and for that one I would have to rely on the phone number. One of the messages was from Margo. I decided to call her first.
“Nick,” she said when I got her on the line, “are you all right?”
“Absolutely. After all, murder is an everyday affair around my office.”
“You must be serious, Nick.”
“When was I ever otherwise?”
I had not spoken to Margo since my call from Washington, and I suddenly felt a compelling need to see her again.
“Margo…”
“Yes?”
“I feel a compelling need to see you.”
“When?”
“Tonight.” Realizing that I might sound somewhat peremptory, I added: “If you’re not otherwise occupied, that is.”
“Well…”
“Yes?”
“Come on over, Nick. I’ll whip up something—an omelet and a salad, maybe. Bring something from your cellar, okay?”
“I’ll be there within the hour,” I said, and hung up.
The second message was from my brother, Tim, and his calls were infrequent and almost always important. He picked up his phone almost before it had started to ring.
“Nick,” he said. “Buddy. I thought you ought to know.
Mother has been carrying on something ferocious.”
“Oh?”
“Yeah, it’s your man Mandelbaum. He’s got Gertrude convinced that you’re on the verge of bankruptcy. Not you, I mean Barlow and Company.”
“Oh, beautiful. Just what I need. Shit! Sheeit.”
“I hope you’re planning a trip out to Weston this weekend.”
“I wasn’t, but—”
“You will.”
“I will indeed.”
“Some excitement, isn’t there?”
“I see you watch the five o’clock news,” I said.
“Faithfully. The outside of your office building is quite photogenic, you know, Nick?”
“So is the interior. Anyway, no matter what they say, I didn’t do it.”
“I want to hear all about it.”
I bet you do, I thought. Tim is the nearest thing I know to an armchair detective. In his case the armchair has wheels, it is true, but in it, he reigns like a monarch of the cerebral, seldom more than a few paces from his Macintosh and his modem, his library of several thousand volumes, his fax machine. I do believe that if Tim reads something once, he will remember it for at least a year, and if he reads it twice, he will remember it forever.
“Do your best to calm Mother down,” I said, “and I’ll see you on Friday evening.”
“D’accord.”
My last message was the one I couldn’t decipher, so I dialed the number.
“Seven eight seven four two hundred,” a voice chirped. If there’s one telephone practice I detest, it is hearing someone answer with a number instead of a name. I know the number I’m calling, damn it, I just don’t know whose number it is!
It was a struggle to keep my tone of voice civil, but I did my best. “Whom have I reached, please?”
“Kay McIntire and Associates.”
“This is Nicholas Barlow. I believe Ms. McIntire called and left a message for me.”
“Just a moment, Mr. Barlow.” I waited while vaguely symphonic music played tinnily in my ear. I continue to wonder why people resort to telephone music, which is merely elevator music of poorer sound quality, when silence is so much simpler and more soothing to the ear. I realize I sound like a curmudgeon, but then, that is precisely the reputation I have and must steadfastly uphold.
“Hello, Nick. Thanks for getting back so promptly.” The voice of Kay McIntire was the real telephone music: husky and warm.
“You’re working late, aren’t you, Kay?”
“An agent’s day is never done.”
“Or a publisher’s, either. You called.”
“Yes. I have pleasant news for you.”
“Oh? I’m glad. It’s been only unpleasant since yesterday evening.”
“I know. I heard about Parker on ‘Good Day, New York.’ What can we say, Nick?”
“Only that now he knows something we don’t know.”
Her laugh, like her voice, was throaty and soft. “You never liked him much, did you?”
“I liked his credits,” I said. “But it’s too soon to figure out what his epitaph ought to be, isn’t it?”
“The editor’s editor?”
“Surely,” I hastened to say, “you didn’t call to praise Parker?”
“No, you’re right. Nor to bury him, either. I called to tell you that Herbert Poole wants to talk book with you. Mystery novel.”
“That’s welcome news indeed, Kay. Like when?”
“Can you fit him in this week?”
“Lunch on Friday, perhaps? Just the three of us.”
“Let me look.” I waited with my own pocket diary at the ready. She was back almost immediately. “That’ll be fine. You say where.”
“The Century,” I suggested. “Twelve-thirty.” We murmured our goodbyes and rang off.
Herbert Poole, best-selling author, I said to myself. He had written three losers and then, with his fourth novel, Big Casino! Welcome to Barlow and Company, Herbert—I hope. My motto had proved out again, hadn’t it? “Something will turn up.”
With two bottles of 1990 Nuits-St.-Georges in a canvas book bag with the inscription “TEMPUS VITA LIBRI” on its flank—a souvenir of the recent ABA Convention—I cabbed to Margo’s apartment on the Upper East Side. The doorman greeted me by name, which startled me slightly, because I had not been there all that often; Margo cherishes her privacy rather more than I do mine. “Evening, Henry,” I said, and headed for the elevator.
The apartment is listed as a semi-duplex. The rent, which is stabilized, is somewhere in the neighborhood of two thousand dollars a month, I believe. It is almost, but not quite, on Sutton Place.
The door was slightly ajar when I arrived at her floor, so I walked in and down a flight of seven steps leading from the entrance gallery to the living room, which has high chalk-white walls and a powder-blue ceiling, a somewhat ecclesiastical window, leaded and fourteen feet high, and a lot of furniture covered with chintz, white with giant cabbage roses. A grand piano with the top slanted up made a splendid silhouette against the windows, which looked down on a fashionable, urban view of the Queensboro Bridge, with the wastes of Yorkville reaching northward and the white stone monolith of the Cornell Medical Center standing out in the night like a fresh bandage on dirty skin. Car lights flashed across the bridge and there were hundreds of golden squares of light on the sheer apartment-house walls. The stars, as always in Manhattan, were blotted out by the lights of the city, and there was no moon in the sky.
Margo called out from the kitchen. “Come on in, Nick. Fix yourself a drink.”
I went straight to Margo’s bar, switched on the fluorescent light, and proceeded to build myself a dry Absolut martini, straight up, with an olive—ice-cold, of course, and stirred, not shaken.
Margo joined me as I sat on a barstool, sipping away, contented as a pig in clover, though I would not wish anyone but me to apply that metaphor to myself. She was wearing a black silk cocktail dress, cut low and square in the bodice, and rustling slightly as she moved. There was an apron in her hand, which she tossed on a nearby chair, just before reaching up and kissing me.
“Nick,” she said, beaming at me with her cat-green eyes and flashing her tiny, perfectly shaped white teeth, “we have a lot to catch up on, starting with murder and working backward to the ABA.”
Margo and I have gotten along much better since we divorced than we did in the last year or so of our five-year marriage, and I still find her the most alluring woman I know. Unfortunately she does not necessarily find me always the pick of my gender. Ah well, I keep making the manly seductive effort. I lifted my glass in a silent toast.
“May I fix you something?” I said after a liquid pause.
“I’ll wait for the wine. I’m sure it’s superb.”
“It ought to be. The 1990 Bordeaux were the best vintages for red burgundy in over thirty years.”
“So you say.”
“So says Robert Parker. The wine authority, not the creator of Spenser and Hawk.”
“Shall we get more comfortable?” Margo led the way into the center of the living room, where she occupied a couch and I settled in an overstuffed chair. We sat for a while in a companionable silence, while I sipped my drink.
“I hope you aren’t expecting a three- or four-course dinner,” said Margo. “I have something left over to warm up—nothing fancy.”
“I have never gone hungry in your company,” I said.
What Margo had left over was a penne with fresh, uncooked tomato sauce, made from ripe red tomatoes, with lots of garlic, hot green chiles, pepper flakes, basil, and several kinds of cheese, along with hot Italian bread and a crisp Caesar salad, one of the few salads I eat with gusto.
“This wine is superb,” said she, holding a glass of it up to the flickering candles on the dining room table.
“I’ve often wondered,” I said, “which of several indulgences I would miss most if I were deprived of it.”
She drained her wineglass and held it out for me to fill.
“Such as?”
“Food, drink, and sex, in about that order, I believe.”
“But isn’t there something sexual about eating?” Margo said. “And drinking?”
I raised my own wineglass and stroked it, while I thought a moment. Only then did I sip it. “You’re thinking of Tom Jones,” I said. “But I’ve always believed that when a man and a woman sit down together to eat, it is almost as intimate an experience as making love.”
“Almost?”
“Well—not quite as intimate.”
Margo set her glass down on the table with a sharp click. “Nick Barlow,” she said, “are you attempting to seduce me?”
“Is that so unusual?”
“I thought you’d know better by now.”
At that instant, I did not know what to say, but I knew exactly what Margo meant. Our last romantic interlude—some weeks ago by now—and any others in recent years had all followed the same pattern. It was Margo who initiated them. Margo who had always been in complete control of the event. And it was I who had been the more than willing acolyte in the venereal ceremony. I had only thought I was seducing her; it was she who led me—every step of the way. Did I wish to continue to be he who must obey—or ought I to change partners and dance with somebody else? Maybe it was time to move on.
But I knew without any reservation—or any misgiving, either—that I would go to bed tonight alone. And chaste.
“Still,” I said, “there’s still food and drink. May I have some more of that bracing pasta?”
“Of course,” said Margo, smiling her Da Vinci smile, “if you’ll pour some more of that extraordinary wine.”
We finally did get around to discussing the ABA, which, in the way conventions have, was fast fading out of mind. She wanted to know if any of the parties had been fun, so I told her about the one I’d attended at the Library of Congress. The party was given in the huge and majestic foyer of the library. Marble underfoot and all around me, Italian mosaics on the floor, ornamental cornucopias, ribbons and vines galore. We were served plump oysters on the half shell, champagne, and sweet fresh strawberries on ice.
“I felt more at home in this building than in any other in the capital,” I told Margo. There was the world’s largest library, the home of all knowledge, and the home as well of the Copyright Office, a publisher’s best friend.
The contentment I exuded must have been visible to any of the partygoers in my vicinity, because one of them came up and said, “Nick, you look like you just swallowed an agent whole.”
It was Bernie Rath, the executive director of the American Booksellers Association, and the master of all its revels. Short, stocky, bearded Bernie is a transplanted Canadian, and a warm supporter of the written and printed word, as well as a sworn enemy of censorship. I have always liked him.
“What news on the Rialto, Bernie?” I said. “How’s the convention going?”
“Setting new records for attendance,” he said.
“What are people talking about?” Usually there is one book or author that sets everyone at the ABA to talking. I have always hoped it would be one of my books; it usually turns out to be the new Norman Mailer novel or the sequel to Gone with the Wind.
“As a matter of fact,” Bernie said, “they’re talking mostly about the new multimedia.”
The new electronic developments—they’re quite something. They are the specter haunting everyone in book publishing. In a world where a device held in one’s hand can communicate with a computer thousands of miles away, where databases containing hundreds of volumes of text, sound transcriptions, and color photographs can be accessed night and day within seconds, how is intellectual property to be protected? How are publishers to know what to charge for what they think they own, and who is to police the computer pirates? No wonder we are all trembling at the thought of these wondrous innovations in microchip storage, and reluctant to jump on the Japanese bandwagon; they threaten to put us all out of business.
Sober thoughts, but appropriate in the home of the Copyright Office. And just like that my mood altered, from euphoria in the presence of so much grandeur, to gloom at the prospect of becoming irrelevant, superfluous, a dinosaur of print in an electronic universe.
I am not sure how much of what I felt I was able to convey to Bernie Rath, who nodded sagely and drifted off—or to Margo, in her lamplit living room; it didn’t seem to matter too much.
The murder of Parker Foxcroft, however, was something else. That kept us going until my bedtime.
“What was it like finding him, Nick? How did you feel?”
I had no doubt that the memory of that moment would never leave me. How did I feel? I answered Margo’s first question first.
“There was the unmistakable odor of death in Parker’s office when I walked in,” I said. “The odors of blood and excretions. After a visit to the morgue, and a fleeting sojourn at one of our recent undeclared wars, I didn’t need to see his body to know. How did I feel? I was shocked, certainly, and rather frightened. The murder must have taken place shortly before I arrived—the murderer was still there, for God’s sake… and despite reports to the contrary, I still haven’t got used to being around corpses.”
“Who would want to kill Parker Foxcroft? Have you any ideas?”
“That’s what the police wanted to know. The answer is…”
She finished the sentence for me. “Anybody.”
“Precisely.”
I went home after dinner without complaint, feeling pleasantly satisfied—and not all that disappointed. After a day like this one, I wasn’t altogether sure that I would have been up to Margo, who at her best has more than once kept me awake and virile a good part of the night. And I was confident there would be other nights, somewhere along the way. And if not, well…
Since my divorce, I have found that there are substantial rewards in the single state. For example: curling up in bed with the cushions plumped up, the night-light on, a snifter of Courvoisier in hand, and the manuscript Sidney had given me on my bedside table.
I picked up the first few pages of the manuscript.
Iceman. Okay, nice title. “By Sarah Goodall.” Never heard of her, but it was probably a first effort. Where, I wondered, would the setting be? California? Sue Grafton had staked out the southern part of the state. Chicago? Sara Paretsky territory. Forget Richmond—Kay Scarpetta had central Virginia in her medical bag, thanks to Patricia D. Cornwell. It was getting hard these days to find a city that some P.I., male or female, hasn’t already laid claim to. There are at least two in Boston and half a dozen or more in New York City. And isn’t there one in San Francisco? A gay sleuth, I believe.
I read on.
St. Paul, Minnesota, on a cold December night is about as cheerful as the Ramsey County Morgue. Only a fool or a private investigator working a case, as I was, would be over on the South Side in weather like this. Even with the temperature at twelve above, I could still smell the stockyards. Sleet whipped against my cheeks, and stung my eyes until they watered, almost blinding me.
I’m P. V. Knudsen, and I’m a licensed freelance investigator. You can call me a private cop. The “P” stands for Paula, a name I don’t much like, and the “V” for Violet, which I like even less. I’m thirty-five and holding. I’ve been married twice. My first husband ran off with my best friend, and I threw the second one out when I caught him pushing PCP in the Grove-land Park schoolyard. As you might expect, after two Mr. Wrongs, I don’t have a lot of faith in the male of the species. I hear there are birds that manage to remain monogamous, however, and maybe they’re what the whole thing is for.
Although I was bundled up in my heaviest parka, the wind still whipped at my arms, and I could tell that the gloves I wore weren’t going to stave off frostbite. I slapped my right hand under my left shoulder, where I could feel the comforting bulge of my shoulder holster. I was packing a .380 Beretta. What I like about this gun is its grip, which feels perfect for my hand. Also, it takes a thirteen-round staggered magazine. I like to go with a friend of mine on the force to the target range in Minneapolis for practice, at least once a month. At thirty yards, I can group my shots perfectly, right in the center of the targets. You never know when the target is going to be a baddie aiming at you.
I wouldn’t have had the gun with me, except that I was on a tail, in the darkest, loneliest part of town. The case I was on this time was industrial espionage.
It all started when a man named Edgar Ayres came to see me. It was just after Thanksgiving and I couldn’t help but notice that my bank account was as weak as a busted flush.
So, when Ayres called me, I was ready to listen to any good offer, as long as it was legitimate…
I was intrigued enough to read on. I would love to have a good female P.I. series, and this one looked promising. Why is this genre popular? Ask the Sisters in Crime. All I know is that men and women readers both seem to like the idea of a woman packing a gun and getting off a karate chop with the best of them—the more hard-boiled, the better.
To paraphrase Raymond Chandler: “Down these mean streets a woman must go who is not herself mean, who is neither tarnished nor afraid. She must be a complete woman and a common woman and yet an unusual woman. She must be the best woman in her world, and a good enough woman for any world.” Anyway, that’s the general idea.
When at last I fell asleep, it was not because I had lost interest in the manuscript. It was simply “Nature’s soft nurse,” as Shakespeare put it, brushing my eyes with her healing touch.
In the morning… I’ll read some more… in the… morning…