Chapter 2
THE GLOBAL BROADCASTING Network building, where Tommy and I have our office and where Love of My Life is taped Monday through Friday, is located on Central Park West between Sixty-fourth and Sixty-fifth streets in New York City, not far from one of our competitors, the American Broadcasting Company. As always during weekdays, there was a moderate amount of pedestrian traffic on the sidewalk, but vehicle traffic was heavy. When I have time, and Manhattan is not being pounded with rain or snow, I like to walk, but even though it was a fine day in mid-May, I didn’t have time to hike the five miles to my destination. I hailed an empty cab headed south, climbed in, and gave the driver an address on MacDougal Street in Greenwich Village.
During the ride downtown, I thought about the question Tommy had asked, whether I was going to meet Homicide Detective Matt Phoenix or writer Chet Thompson who was also a psychologist whose specialty was criminal behavior. I’d met both of them seven months ago as a result of the murder of Damon Radford, who was then the network’s head of Daytime. Many people detested Damon the Demon, and there were very few genuine mourners at his funeral, but I shot to the top of the long suspect list when I discovered—to my shock—that he had left me eight million dollars in his will. There was no way I could explain satisfactorily why a man I had continually rebuffed and insulted would leave me so much as a bus token, let alone what my friend Nancy Cummings called “F-you money.”
The first thing I did was repay Nancy what she had loaned me for the down payment on my third-floor co-op in the Dakota. Next, I paid off the mortgage so I would actually own the first real home I’d ever had. Now, this afternoon, I intended to put to use some more of my unexpected inheritance.
Familiar sights of Manhattan flashed by the taxi’s windows, but they barely registered. What I was about to do filled my stomach with the fluttering of nervous anticipation. And dread. By no means was I sure I was doing the right thing. A voice inside my head urged me to tell the cab driver to turn around and take me back to the office. But that was what I called “the voice of good sense,” and I had never listened to it.
ROBERT NOVELLO PRIVATE Investigations is located on the ground floor of a nineteenth-century, four-story apartment building on MacDougal Street. It’s half a block from the house in which Louisa May Alcott created Little Women, and a short walk to the club where Edgar Allan Poe wrote “The Raven.” I knew those sites, and others in what I called “Literary Old New York,” because I’d explored them eagerly when I first came to the city as an eighteen-year-old freshman at Columbia.
I pressed the bell labeled “Novello, 1B.” After identifying myself, and being buzzed in, I hurried down the hallway.
Bobby stood in his doorway, and greeted me with an exaggerated Groucho Marx leer. “Heh, heh, heh—come into my lair, young woman.”
I gave his extended hand a friendly squeeze. Although his grip was gentle, his arms and shoulders were corded with muscles. His hands were strong—toughened through years of martial arts. I’d seen Bobby in an exhibition a few weeks ago, when he split a cement block in half with a single blow from one of those hands.
With his lively hazel eyes and the rose-gold hair that cascaded over a high forehead to curl just above his eyebrows, Bobby was one of the best-looking men I knew. But his handsome face was not what most people noticed first. Bobby is a Little Person, a dwarf standing four feet tall. His torso is as broad as that of a man of so-called normal height, but his legs are abnormally short.
I liked coming downtown to Bobby’s home office. No matter what problem was worrying me, I always smiled with pleasure at the sight of Bobby’s beloved exotic birds in their huge, antique cages. The musical trills and cheeps of what poet James Thomson called these “merry minstrels of the morn” seemed to rise in greeting to me.
Stepping aside to let me enter, he said in his melodic tenor, “When are you going to ditch those other guys and fall for me?”
“There’s an insurmountable obstacle, Bobby.” I lowered my voice to a whisper. “I have a . . . c-a-t.”
Bobby performed the comic flinch he does at any mention of what he refers to as “the c word.”
I saluted Bobby’s feathered friends. “Hi, guys.” A flash of brilliant red caught my attention. It was mostly crimson, but with touches of yellow and blue: a magnificent macaw, uncaged, and shifting from one foot to the other on a T-bar stand behind Bobby’s desk.
“Well, there’s a new face,” I said. As though in response, the macaw squawked at me.
“I named him Archie, in honor of Nero Wolfe’s Archie Goodwin.”
Gesturing for me to sit in his red leather client’s chair, Bobby stepped on an antique footstool and from there settled into the wing chair behind his desk. With the lemon yellow couch to my left, and the red leather chair positioned next to a table that was perfect for writing a check, Bobby had replicated the home office of Nero Wolfe in those Rex Stout mystery novels. And, like Wolfe for his clients, Bobby had done excellent work for me when I’d hired him previously.
Watching me with studied casualness, Bobby asked, “What can I do for you this time, pretty lady?”
“I want you to find a missing child,” I said. “A girl. I don’t care how much you have to spend.”
Bobby grinned. “Music to my ears, but I’m on a case that’s going to take another two or three weeks to wrap up. Will that time frame be a problem for you?”
I was almost relieved. “No. Finish what you’re doing.”
“Good.” Bobby took a fresh notebook from the top drawer, opened it to the first page, and selected a pen from the collection standing in the red and white Love of My Life coffee mug I had given him a few months earlier, when I discovered he was a fan of our show. Pen in hand, Bobby asked, “What’s the child’s date of birth?”
“I don’t know precisely.”
Bobby shrugged. “No big deal. Where was she born?”
“I don’t know.”
“What’s her name?
I shook my head. “Sorry.”
Bobby laid the pen across the blank page in his notebook, planted his elbows on the desk, leaned forward, and asked, “Did you have a baby and give it up for adoption and now you want to find her?”
“No, that’s not it.” Until this moment, I hadn’t been entirely sure I’d be able to tell Bobby the truth. Making the appointment to see him was a big first step. Now I was about to take a bigger one. “The child is me. I want you to find out who I am.”