Уолтер Мосли - And Sometimes I Wonder About You

“Back at ya,” I said.

That was it for the pleasantries. From there Z went into her spiel.

“It was really hard finding a Briscoe/Thyme anywhere. I finally located papers filed for them in the Denver offices of a large accounting firm named Feggers and Sons, Ltd. F and S, the name they do business under, was originally a London-based firm that was old enough to have done accounting for Charles Dickens. I followed the trail of ownership back to a Boston company named Braverman Enterprises. Braverman is a holding company that’s owned by a private investment bank controlled by a woman named Evangeline Sidney-Gray. The only law Briscoe/Thyme practices comes from her desk in downtown Boston.

“Finding Ms. Gray was difficult but Josh Farth took no time at all. He came up through the Boston gangs making a living on heists, robberies, and extortion. He’s been mentioned as a person of interest in three murders but no charges have been made. Now Farth works for Evangeline Sidney-Gray, or at least a company her bank owns.

“I only found a little on Coco Lombardi, mainly phone records when she had some kind of relationship with a guy named Alfred Carr. His nickname is Buster. The majority of her calls were either to Carr in New York or various numbers in the Boston area.

“Finally there’s the moniker ‘Twitcher.’ That was by far my biggest headache. I had to piggyback on an NSA program that Bug infected. His subroutine has been crafted so that the feds can’t see it and Bug has it running twenty-four hours a day. I had to drop a key word into the transitional chatter-box and watch it until and if anything came up. Once a key word hit had been made by the box I had ninety seconds to remove it or some bureaucrat in DC would be alerted to the name and the hack.”

“I don’t need the technical explanation right now, Z,” I said. The pink and blue-jeweled waitress was delivering my upmarket eggs. “Just the details will do.”

“The name popped up seventeen times,” she said. “Four of these were about a meeting on the Upper West Side near the river and One-oh-two.”

“I know the place,” I said. “Thanks for all that.”

“You’re welcome,” she said. “Will you be needing any more help within the next few days? Because if not I called Petipor and we’re going on what he calls a surfing expedition in South Africa for a week or so starting tomorrow night. He’s got his own private jet.”

“Wow,” I said. “That beats my dark green Pontiac.”

“I’d rather be in the backseat with you than at Mach two with him.”

Zephyra had never spoken a flirtatious word to me before. I wondered what was happening inside me.

“If you need help you have Bean’s number, right?” Bean was her backup in times of emergency.

“I do. Just a few more things I need,” I said.

“What’s that?”

“Make me a first-class Acela reservation for Boston tomorrow morning as much before ten as possible and e-mail all the information you have on Dame Evangeline Sidney-Gray and Coco. And don’t take any shit from some royal dude.”

“See ya, Mr. McGill. And thanks.”

The omelet was delicious. And Midge was an art student at the school across the street. Tiny as she was, she was a sculptor who liked to work in the double medium of iron and stone. I asked if she knew a teacher there named Fontu Belair.

“Oh him,” she said.

“Not such a good guy?” I asked, trying not to read too far into her tone.

“He taught me how to draw for sculpture,” she said. “Probably the best class I ever had. He said that drawing for a sculptor, filmmaker, or physicist was like dreams for somebody on a psychoanalyst’s couch. He was completely right.”

“That sounds pretty good,” I offered.

“I guess.”

“So what was wrong with him?”

“It’s the way he looked at women,” she said, a little color rising in her cheeks. “It’s like love. When he talks to you it’s almost like you’re dancing with him or something. But then there’s nothing to add. When he finishes he turns off completely and if you ask him to get together for coffee he’s too busy... talking to somebody else.”

Entering the great copper double doors of the Gotham Artists’ Society at 8:28, I went to the reception desk, which was in the northmost corner of a chamber with a high ceiling held up by a dozen marble pillars.

“May I help you?” a middle-aged black male receptionist asked. His nameplate read TITO PALMER. Despite his age he was the same size as Midge, and he held himself with a sense of youth that was unconscious in the waitress/sculptor and engineered by Tito.

“My name is McGill,” I said. “I’m supposed to meet a Mr. Belair.”

“And what is your business with Professor Belair?” Tito asked with equal parts suspicion and flirtation.

“I’m supposed to model for his new class using sportsmen that have been out of practice for a while.”

“What sport did you do?”

“Boxer.”

Tito’s raised eyebrows expressed mild interest. There was something going on with me; all of a sudden I had become a magnet for the usually hidden passions of humankind.

“Third floor, studio F,” Tito said as if the words were a loan that he expected a return on.

Studio F was occupied by four souls. Three of these were students who had come in early to work on very technical and equally uninteresting studies of a woman with sagging breasts with well-defined nipples and a small protruding tummy.

The fourth resident of the light and airy space was a burly man just a centimeter or two north of six feet. He was dressed in a brightly stained white artist’s smock, bald on top, and filled with the passion of his self-imposed importance. If I wasn’t a boxer I’d have been a little intimidated by his strength and the energy that crackled around him.

“Can I help you?” he asked, more as a threat than as a request.

“Leonid McGill,” I said, handing him a card that said the same. “I’m a PI looking for a woman named Coco Lombardi.”

“Do you see her?” he asked, gesturing at his students, two of which were women.

“I see you,” I replied easily.

Something changed in the art professor’s eyes just then. He looked at my big scarred mitts and at the powerful slope of my shoulders. I wasn’t a minion and he wasn’t a lord — not right then, not right there.

“What do I have to do with this, this... whatever her name is?”

“She was a model for your class.”

“I have dozens of models. Do you expect me to remember them all?”

“I expect, from all my fellow citizens, the same things,” I said. “Civility, respect, and honesty. It’s rare to receive any of those commodities but I keep hope alive.”

“Are you threatening me, Mr. McGill?”

“If I was, your jaw would already be broken,” I said.

One of the drawing students was glancing in our direction. She was middle-aged and looked it.

“Let’s go to my office,” Fantu offered when he saw his student studying us.

Behind a screen of very large canvases there was an institutional-green metal door that opened onto a good-sized office space. Inside, the twenty-foot-high walls supported dozens of drawings and paintings in cheap frames hung very close together. They were all rendered by the same hand. If I were to bet I’d’ve said that Professor Belair saw this office as a museum dedicated to his work.

The furniture was a green metal desk and chair, a pine visitor’s chair, and a daybed with a sponge-sized pillow and a gray army blanket.

The bed was made, military style, and the blue linoleum floor was spotless.

“Have a seat, Mr. McGill.”

“Thank you, Professor.”