Of the nine message slips Kiki had given me, eight required no immediate action. The ninth was from Rita Margolis, saying she’d made some drawings I should see.
I phoned her. She’d be at her apartment for another hour. I said I’d be there shortly. As soon as Kiki and A.W. filed back in, I told him we had to get moving.
But not before Kiki connected her laptop to the printer and ran off several copies of the Tuesday-morning schedule, one of which she presented to me. “Check the special note,” she said.
In addition to the highlighted Aharon interview, there was a cooking segment requiring me to wear a chef’s jacket and toque. The jacket I had no problem with. But the toque was another matter. “Whose idea was this?” I asked Kiki.
“Trina’s. It’s not smart to get in bad with your boss,” she said.
“Be good for you to keep that in mind,” I said.
The toque would not be a problem. Whatever happened that evening in Goyal Aharon’s suite, I wouldn’t be wearing one on tomorrow’s show.
“Let’s go, A.W.,” I said.
As we cleared the underground parking garage, he asked, “To the restaurant?”
“Eventually. There are a couple of stops before that,” I said, and gave him the first address.
“What’s the deal with the toque?” he asked.
“I don’t wear them.”
“Why not?”
“A matter of personal vanity,” I said. “I’ve been told that a toque makes me look like the guy on the Cream of Wheat box.”
“Oh,” he said. “Yeah. I guess I can see that.”
“Thanks for the confirmation,” I said.
It was not until he’d squeezed us into a parking space a block away from Melody Moon’s building that he asked the purpose of our visit. “To get a look at an artist’s concept of Felix,” I said.
“Who’s the artist?” he asked as we got out of the car.
I told him Rita’s name.
“Sure, Rita. She draws Funny Girls,” he said.
“You’ve read Funny Girls?”
“I’ve seen copies. Rita’s part of the Chelsea art scene.”
“You’re into art?” I asked as we entered the building.
“You have to ask, knowing my background?” he said.
My being with A.W., whom Rita called “the best part-time silk-screen artist in the city,” put me back in her good graces, at least temporarily. Enough for her to include me in her offer of soft drinks. I politely declined. A.W. accepted a Diet Dr Pepper.
“Melody not home?” I asked.
“Working today,” Rita said. “Modeling cosmetics. She needs to do more of that. She’s still moping around. Those disks are a mixed blessing.” She pointed to several of Rudy Gallagher’s DVDs resting beside the TV monitor. “Watching the guy seems to make her happy, but they just reinforce her memory of him, and when she turns the set off, she gets moody again.”
“I wouldn’t have brought them if I’d thought they’d cause her pain,” I said.
“I know,” Rita said. “Like I said, she’s happy when she’s watching them. I’ll go get the drawings.”
I strolled to the TV stand and glanced at the disks in their jewel boxes. USS Huckleberry, disk two and disk five. I wondered if Rudy had recorded the shows in chronological order. Of course he had, the anal-retentive jackass.
Rita returned from the general vicinity of the bedrooms with two sheets of art paper on which she’d sketched detailed full-figure drawings in colored pencils of the Cheetah.
“I did these more for myself than for you,” she said. “This one is the model in the costume that I saw getting out of the Hummer to stretch herself.”
A.W. moved behind me, lured by the drawing. “Solid work, Rita,” he said. “I bet this beats the original art.”
“Well, I’ll show you.”
She held up a much-less-complex comic-book version of the Cheetah. “They didn’t go in for shading in those days,” she said. “And with the other I was working from a model. I’d say they both reflected the subjects.”
The two drawings looked more or less the same, except that the comic-book Cheetah had gloves that looked like paws, while the dimensional, shaded Cheetah was wearing ordinary gloves. And more important, as I said to Rita, “The masks are different.”
“Exactly. That’s the thing that caught my eye,” she said. Both were wearing similar Cheetah cowls surrounding the face, but the original 1940s comic-book version was wearing the standard domino mask. And the model’s mask was more elaborate. The eye section was part of the cowl. And there was a lower mask of white with a slit for the mouth. It even covered the neck area.
“Curiouser and curiouser,” I said. “What do you think, A.W.?”
He studied the drawings. “Beautiful work, like I said.”
“The model remind you of anybody?”
“Not really,” he said. “Could be anybody under all that.”
“That’s what makes it so interesting,” I said.
I got out my cellular and dialed Arnie Epps.
The Wake Up! producer was still at the Glass Tower, putting together tomorrow’s show.
“Is Trina with you?” I asked.
“No. She said she had things to do before the meeting tonight with you and the Mossad guy.”
“Ex-Mossad,” I said.
“You’ve got her spitting nails, Billy. How the hell did you swing that interview, anyway?”
“I think it must have been that segment I did at the museum comic-book exhibit,” I lied. “Remember that?”
“Of course. That was a good job.”
“What did Trina think of it?”
“Trina?” He sounded puzzled. “I think she liked … No, wait a minute. She didn’t even see it. Yeah, that was the morning … She got a weird phone call. Guy said he was her super and there was smoke coming from her apartment. She left before we cut to your segment.”
“How bad was the damage?” I asked.
“No damage. It was a crank call. Her building’s super hadn’t phoned her. And her apartment was fine.”
“Glad to hear it,” I said. “Catch you later, Arnie.”
“Huh? Oh, sure. And Billy, try to be at the Ritz-Carlton by five. Don’t be late. Trina’s really on the warpath.”
“That the time and place of the meeting with Aharon?” I asked.
“Yeah. Didn’t Trina call you?”
“I imagine she will,” I said.