Chapter Twenty-Two

“Where’s Connie? What did you do to her?”

That’s the first thing Marie Therese said to me Sunday afternoon. She looked pissed off. I had just sat down at my table in the back with about half a dozen daily papers. I didn’t know what she was talking about and said so.

“She called right before you got here and told me she was taking the day off. She’s never done that before. What did you do to her?”

I told her I didn’t do anything. Just a few minutes before, I went up to Connie’s room on my way out of the Chelsea, knocked on her door, and she didn’t answer. Nothing unusual about that. I was a little late and figured she already left. I expected to see her at the speak, and at first, I didn’t know what to think about her not being there.

Marie Therese said, “She said she knew it was going to be a slow night and we wouldn’t really need her, so she was going to do something else.”

“She said that? She said she was going to do something else?” I didn’t like that.

“More or less. I don’t remember her exact words, but that’s what she meant. What did you do last night?”

“This is nuts,” I said. “I don’t know what the hell you’re talking about. If she don’t want to work, she don’t want to work.” And I opened the paper like that was the end of it. I didn’t fool her. She went back behind the bar. I sat there and worried.

At first, I told myself it was nothing. I wouldn’t even think about it at all. That didn’t last long. Then I decided Connie was just trying to make me mad. But I couldn’t buy that either. Maybe she was hurt. No, she would call Marie Therese. Maybe it had something to do with Bobby. No, I wasn’t going to think about that. When I realized that I didn’t understand the words I was looking at in the paper, I told Frenchy I’d be back soon and went back to the Chelsea.

I got Connie’s key from the front desk. Since everybody on the staff knew I was paying for the room, that was okay. As I unlocked the door, I had a bad feeling that I’d find her stuff packed up and gone. But no, the room looked like it always did.

Her place was smaller and neater than mine. Besides the bed, she had a chest of drawers, a wardrobe, and two armchairs. There was only one chair when she took the room, but I bought her another one that was more comfortable. We also got her a good lamp, and the bedside table was stacked with books. The bathroom was sweet with the smell of her perfume and soaps and such. Her makeup and stuff was still there, and she had left underwear and stockings hanging over the bathtub.

I looked over the top of the dresser where she always put her purse, hoping to find the card Bobby left the night before. It wasn’t there. I was tempted to go through the drawers but didn’t.

I was about to leave when I remembered something Bobby said the first night we were in his place, after he’d been giving her the eye. “Dress her up right and she could do very well for herself, a lot more if she was interested in it.”

Then I thought about this one dress she had. I thought of it as pale orange, but she told me it was called apricot. She bought it with one of her first pay envelopes, and it was a knockout. I checked the wardrobe. It wasn’t there.

I went up to the sixth floor and knocked on both of Bobby’s doors. No answer. I went back to the speak.

I took the papers up to my office, and for about an hour I tried to read again but couldn’t because I kept thinking about Bobby, and Connie, and what Arch had said, and Daphne, and King Kong, and Miss Wray and her husband, and where was Connie? Looking back on it now, I must have gone a little crazy. That would explain what I did, anyway.

I checked the load in the Banker’s Special, put on my topcoat, and caught a cab downtown to Grand Street. On a Sunday, it was busier in Chinatown than my neighborhood, but the streets weren’t as crowded as they’d been yesterday. It didn’t take me long to find the open air market.

I went to the back, just like we did the day before. Another Chinaman in a black suit leaned against the door. He was smoking a cigarette and paid no attention as I limped up on my stick. There was nobody else close, so I got right in front of him and punched him in the gut three times as hard and fast as I could with the knucks. He doubled over. I propped him up with my shoulder, reached around him, and pushed the door open and shoved him into the alley. He was a tough bastard. He pushed away from me and went for a knife. Another shot to the head with the knucks put him facedown on the cobblestones.

That brought the second Chinaman running from the other door. I pulled the .38. He turned and ran before I could cock it.

I hurried up the alley and got into the apartment house. Figuring I didn’t have a lot of time, I gimped up the dark stairs to the top floor. The door to the roof was heavy, but the strike plate wasn’t. I braced myself on the stick and it only took two kicks with the sole of my foot to bang it open. I went straight to the peaked skylight and looked down into Bobby’s studio.

It was cleared out. The big black hand was gone, and all the equipment, lights, and screens had been pushed against the walls. I hurried around all four sides of the skylight, leaning over it and looking down into the corners of the room. I was pretty sure I could see all of it, and there was enough light to see that nobody was inside.

I don’t think I really expected to find Connie there. I don’t know what I expected. Like I said, I was a little crazy.

I knew the Chinaman who ran away would be coming back with help, so I made my way down the stairs until I heard noises coming up from below. I opened a door on the second or third floor and got out of the stairwell. I figured another set of stairs led to the front of the building, and there they were, halfway down the hall. I heard noises from guys coming up those stairs, too, and went down them with the pistol in my mitt. Two Chinamen were waiting at the bottom. The vestibule wasn’t wide enough for them spread out, so they backed out the front door giving me hard looks.

I followed them and pocketed the pistol. We came out on a noisy crowded sidewalk where the sound of angry women’s voices cut through everything else. Four Chinese women were scolding the two guys. I saw that the women were in charge of a group of kids. They kept the kids in line with a long rope that had loops every few feet for the kids to hold onto. The women at the back end of the rope were giving the two guys hell for bumping into them. I fell in step with the kids and gimped along with them up the sidewalk.

I didn’t know where I was, but it looked like we were headed for an intersection with a larger street and that was fine with me. It felt like everybody was looking at me, especially the kids. They probably were. I was the only white guy on the street. All the storefronts and signs were in Chinese. I listened for sounds of the two guys trying to catch me and didn’t hear anything. Hell, I figured they didn’t want me that bad. I just roughed up a guy and kicked down a door. It wasn’t like I killed anybody. The bigger street was Doyers and when we got there, I looked back for the guys. It was getting dark then, and if anybody was still after me, I couldn’t see him.

I got a cab back to the speak.

Before I could take off my hat, Marie Therese asked me if I’d found her. I thought about lying, saying why would I be looking for Connie, but she wouldn’t buy it. So I said no and asked Marie Therese if she knew what was going on. “She’s been mad at me for a week. What gives?”

“It’s not my place,” she said. “Connie will tell you.”

“So you do know where she is.”

“I didn’t say that,” she said.

“What’s she doing? Is she all right?”

“I don’t know. The damn fool girl,” she said, and for the first time, she looked more worried than angry.

In my office I thought about having a drink but wasn’t really interested. Didn’t feel like eating anything either. You see, I really was a little crazy. I was puzzling over what I should do when I remembered something Bobby said that first night up in his workroom. I opened the safe and got the picture book. The number on the back would tell me whose book it was, he said. And there on the back at the bottom in pencil was “1/144.” Now, I didn’t know anything about books or art or collecting those things, but knowing what I did about Bobby’s business, it figured that this copy of the book was the first of one hundred and forty-four. That meant it was the best of the bunch, better than the fifty-third or the seventy-fourth. And if it was the best, it must belong to Peter Wilcox.

No, I thought, it used to belong to Peter Wilcox. Now it belongs to me.

But the important thing was the book. That’s what started all this. And Bobby made the book. He took the photographs. He printed the cover and the words on the page. He stapled the pages together. And he did all that up there in his workroom.

I locked the book in the safe and went back to the Chelsea.

I rapped on the door of 624 with my stick. I was thinking that if nobody was there, I’d pay Tommy, the night man, for the use of a master key, but Honeybunch answered right away. She had a dazed smile plastered across her pretty little mug. It disappeared when she saw who I was.

“Oh shit,” she said. “I thought you were the guy with the food.”

She trotted back to her stack of pillows and dove onto them face-first. She was wearing the same kind of outfit she had on when we were there before, the loose vest and gauzy harem pants stretched tight across her ass. She wriggled around a bit, then rolled over onto her back and found her hash pipe.

“Bobby’s not here,” she said as she fired it up and gave me a long look at her cooch. “He won’t be back till late. You got anything to eat? Bobby left some ice cream and candy, but I ate it already. The guy’s supposed to bring me something else, but he’s late. Christ, I gotta get something to eat.”

“Where’s Bobby?” I looked over and saw the blue-and-gold box where he kept the key to the workroom.

“Tonight’s his big premiere, his soirée cinématique intime. You’d think it was the most important thing in the world the way he’s been worrying about it. Say, you were here with that girl. He said he was going to get her to serve drinks and everything.”

So he was after Connie. Or he told her he was. Honeybunch went on, “I asked him if I could help with the drinks and the cocaine like I used to, but Bobby said I can’t anymore, I like it too much, and that’s why I gotta stay here. You got anything to eat?”

“No, I could call down to the desk, get Tommy to have something sent up.” The telephone was on the table next to the blue-and-gold box.

She wrinkled her brow like she didn’t understand what I said. “You can do that? Just call and they bring you food? Can you get ice cream?”

“They’ve probably got some at the diner down the street. They deliver all the time.”

“Yeah, that would be great.”

It was pretty easy to fish the key ring out of the box while I called. Tommy didn’t pick up until the sixth ring. I told him we needed a quart of chocolate in 624.

“And to whom should I charge that,” he said with a nasty edge on his voice, “Mr. Apollinaire or Mr. Quinn?”

“Mr. Apollinaire, and you know something, Tommy? You better bring it up personally.”

I let myself into 618 and snapped on the light. It didn’t look like Bobby had done anything else since the night before. I thought there weren’t as many closed boxes on the shelves, and I went through the ones that were left. They were filled with photo books.

I could recognize all the real actresses that Bobby’s lookalikes were supposed to be, but I didn’t know all the pictures that he was imitating. Not that it mattered. As long as you looked at a few features, the resemblance was there. The angular face of a girl who wasn’t Joan Crawford and the black bobbed hair of the Louise Brooks type who costarred in Two Lost Sinners. The curly hair and big cheekbones of Norma Shearer in The Divorce. The plump platinum blonde Mae West in Diamond Lou’s Sex, and the high-society blonde Madeleine Carroll in The French Wife. None of them would fool you if you knew what the real women looked like on-screen. But Bobby didn’t lie about the quality of his photography. He really made those women look great. In all the books, Bobby started by holding things back, the same way the Ziegfeld girls were photographed with a lot of skin on display, but the key parts of tits and crotches covered up. The books sure didn’t end that way, and each of them promised that you’d see a lot more in the movie.

But I wasn’t after those. I wanted to know where the damn premiere was going to be.

The regular, not-crazy part of my brain knew that Connie wouldn’t go there. But right then, I wasn’t paying much attention to the regular not-crazy part. The crazy jealous part remembered how Bobby had snaked girls away from me and how easily he could pour on the charm and how Connie was mad at me already and how he might go after her out of spite just because I broke into his studio. Maybe he offered her a bundle of cash and she took it, not knowing what he wanted her to do.

I went through the rest of the boxes and the stuff that was stored on the shelves and the drawing desk and the clutter at the back of the workbench. Nothing and more nothing.

I found it when I went through the trash bin.

The first things I pulled out were rags, ink-stained pieces of cloth and crumpled newspapers. Underneath those, I found some printed pages out of the Kong book. He’d tossed them out because they were smeared or dog-eared. Among the bad pages I came across a square envelope, made of the same thick paper as the book pages. Somebody, Bobby I guess, had started typing an address on East Eighty-Seventh Street, but “New York” was “New Yrok.” I guess Bobby was as much a perfectionist as he made himself out to be.

After more digging, I found five invitations, printed with the same blue ink he used on his cards and the books. Three of them were smeared. Two were printed off center. The invitation read:

The World Premiere of Kong

By Oscar Apollinaire

Will Be Presented

Sunday, March 5, at 11:00 p.m.

With a performance by the stars

Corlears Street