Peter Spiegelman - Death's little helpers

I walked up Lex and looked into the small handsome shops that lined the street. They were full of delicate wicked-looking shoes, and stationery made from butterfly wings, and French baby clothes that were hand-stitched by blue-eyed virgins. The window displays were intricately wrought and exhibited the merchandise with fetishistic devotion, and they all made me think of Joseph Cornell. I crossed Lex at 83rd Street and went west toward Park Avenue. I meandered slowly down Park, past big old buildings of the sort Danes’s building aspired to be, and went east again on 75th. And then I headed back.

Christopher gave me a relaxed nod as he pulled open the heavy door. The lobby was wide and deep, with a vaulted ceiling and Persian rugs on the polished stone floors, and it was empty but for us. We stood in a vestibule near the entrance and Christopher’s eyes scanned the sidewalk out front. I slipped him a twenty and he made it vanish.

“That prick should be out for twenty minutes at least,” he said. “What do you want to know?”

“You work here long?” I asked.

“About a year, part-time. I fill in for the regulars when they’re on vacation or out sick. I end up pulling eight, maybe ten, shifts a month.”

“All daytime shifts?”

Christopher snorted. “I wish. Usually they shuffle the duty so I work the overnights- midnight to six.” I nodded.

“How’d you get lucky with daylight hours today?”

Christopher gave a wry smile. “Super-Prick is short-staffed the next few weeks; he had no choice.”

“You know the tenants at all?”

He shook his head. “Not really. Working the late shift I don’t see much of them, plus a lot of them are real assholes- wouldn’t piss on ’em if they were on fire.” A bronze elevator door slid open at the back of the lobby. A fiftyish woman in a Burberry trench coat got out, trailed by a dachshund in matching outerwear. She glanced at the empty concierge station and sniffed. She eyed Christopher and sniffed more loudly. She looked at me. My hair was shorter, my clothes fit better, and I had no acne scars, but she was unimpressed. Christopher said hello and held the door and she sniffed once more as she went through.

“See what I mean?” he said. I nodded sympathetically and pulled out a photo of Danes.

“You know him?”

Christopher looked at the picture and looked at me. His small eyes got smaller. “Danes, right?”

I nodded. “Seen him around?”

He shook his head slowly. “Not for a while- I don’t remember when the last time was. I told this to the other guys.”

I looked at Christopher and took a deep breath. I slipped the photo back into my pocket. “What other guys?” I asked quietly.

Christopher shuffled his feet and looked away from me. His eyes were nervous when they finally came back to mine. “I guess you’re not with them, huh?” he said.

“What other guys, Christopher?”

“The two guys who asked about Danes before.”

“When before?”

He shrugged. “Ten days ago, maybe.”

“What did they ask?”

Christopher ran his eyes around the lobby. “The same as you. They showed me a picture, asked if I’d seen him around and when I’d seen him last. Asked if I knew his friends in the building.”

“And you told them…?”

“Same as I told you. I haven’t seen the guy, and I don’t know shit about the tenants.”

I nodded. “Who were they?” Christopher shook his head and looked confused. “Were they cops? Were they lawyers?”

“Not lawyers… not cops, either. They were private, like you.”

“These guys have names?”

Another headshake. “Not that I remember.” I stared at him, and he ran a stained hand over the back of his neck and said nothing.

“You remember what they looked like?” I asked.

“They just looked like… two guys.”

I sighed. “Were they short, tall, black, white?”

He shrugged. “I don’t know. They were… medium. They were white, the both of them, and I think they had brown hair. They were about the same height- maybe six feet, maybe a little shorter.”

I shook my head. “Did they say anything about calling if you happened to see Danes?” I asked. “Did they give you a phone number?”

Christopher tugged at his ear and rubbed the back of his neck again and looked around the lobby. “No, bro, they didn’t say anything about that. They just asked their questions and split.”

I looked at him some more. I was fairly sure that Christopher was not being entirely truthful with me. I was fairly sure, in fact, that he was lying through his teeth. But I still needed him, and there wasn’t a whole lot I could do about it. “And you haven’t heard from them since?” I asked.

“Nope,” Christopher said, and looked at his watch. He craned his neck to check the sidewalk, east and west. “Not to rush you or anything, but that prick’ll be back soon.”

“Sure,” I said. “We’re just about done. Anybody working here who knows the tenants well?”

“The guy I’m subbing for today: Paul Gargosian. He’s been here since they opened the place, and he knows everybody. He’s an okay guy, too- you grease him and he’ll talk to you.”

“When’s he back?”

“Couple weeks.”

“Know his number, or where he lives?”

“In the Bronx someplace- I don’t know.” Christopher looked at his watch again, more nervous now. “I don’t want to rush you, but… ”

I nodded. “No problem, Christopher, you’ve been a big help. How much to get into Danes’s apartment?”

Christopher looked at me and winced. “Shit, bro, you don’t want much, do you?” He shook his head and tugged on an ear. “That could be my job, for chrissakes.” I nodded and let him keep talking and thinking about it. “Oh, Christ, what the fuck are you going to do in there?”

“I’m just trying to find the guy, Christopher. I’m not interested in taking his stuff.”

“Shit… it’d need to be at least a hundred- no, two hundred.” I nodded.

“Two hundred’s fine,” I said. “When?” Christopher was looking paler.

“It’s got to be next week- Monday afternoon. Super-Prick will be out then.” I wasn’t happy with a six-day wait, but I didn’t have a lot of options. I nodded. Christopher checked the sidewalk again. “You’ve got to split.”

“Just one more question,” I said. “Where do the tenants garage their cars?”

“I know two places people use,” he said, and gave me their names. “Now get out of here, man.” I went.

The parking garages Christopher told me about were each within four blocks of the building, but in opposite directions. I went north and got lucky.

It was off Third Avenue, tucked between two worn apartment buildings, and its entrance was a narrow oil-stained ramp leading down. I found a small quiet man named Rafe in a glass booth at the bottom of the ramp. His hair was black and wavy and his dark eyes were set deeply in a weathered intelligent face. He recognized Danes’s picture and identified him as “black ’04 BMW Seven-fifty.” He told me the car wasn’t in and hadn’t been for a while, and for twenty bucks he looked through a stack of wrinkled papers and gave me its plate number and the date and time it had last gone out. It was five weeks ago, the day after Nina Sachs had last spoken with Danes, at nine-twenty in the morning. I asked Rafe where the nearest gas stations were. He told me, and I thanked him. I turned to leave and then turned back.

“Has anyone else come asking about this?” I said.

A look of calculation passed quickly across Rafe’s face and he nodded at me. “One guy, a week and a half back.”

“What did he ask about?”

“About the car and the customer- like you- and I told him the same things. I got twenty-five out of him, though.”