The lady in the silver c.., p.6
The Lady in the Silver Cloud, page 6
“Met fan. But with Muriel I t-talked Yankees.”
“Did she ever tell you about where her money came from?”
“No, never.”
“Hear any rumors?”
“Not a one.”
“How long had she owned the Silver Cloud?”
“Since it was b-brand new back in ’55, she told me.”
“Where did she keep it?”
“A twenty-four-hour g-garage on Columbus Avenue. Real high-class place. I’m talking white g-glove treatment.”
“That’s where Merilee keeps the Jag,” I said. “They have some major antique wheels there.”
Bullets blinked at me. “You talking about the red XK150?”
“That’s the one. Belongs to my ex-wife.”
“Nice car. Pretty car.”
“It must be pure pleasure to drive that Silver Cloud,” I said.
“You b-bet. Handles like a dream.” He fell into despondent silence. “Wonder what’ll happen to it.”
“For now, you can drive it back to the garage and call it a night,” Very told him. “You’re free to go. Do you usually take the subway home?”
“No, I park my own c-car there. An ’87 Buick LeSabre.”
“This is the part where I say don’t leave town. I’ll be wanting to talk to you some more.”
“You d-don’t have to worry about me, Lieutenant. I won’t go nowhere. I don’t need no more trouble, like I said. Besides, Muriel was g-good to me.” His eyes moistened again. “Sure will miss her.”
“I’m sorry for your loss,” Very said to him.
Lulu climbed out of his lap as the big guy got up off the sofa and made his way slowly out the front door of the building to Muriel’s Rolls-Royce Silver Cloud, which was parked at the foot of the awning as usual. He paused to gaze at it for a long moment before he climbed in and drove off.
“So he’s mobbed up?” I asked Very.
“Hell, yeah. Bullets Durmond was an enforcer for the Gambino crime family for most of his adult life.”
“I’m missing a little something here, Lieutenant. What was Muriel Cantrell’s connection with the Gambino crime family?”
“That’s what we have to figure out. It may take a day or two, but we’ll get there.” He joined Frank and George over at the reception desk. “Tell me, did Muriel have many guests?”
“Hardly any,” Frank said. “Just her late sister’s grandson, Trevor Ferraro. He’s maybe fifteen. Came by all the time to hit her up for money. Has himself a drug problem.”
“What kind of drug problem?”
“Crystal meth,” I said.
“You’ve seen him?” he asked me.
I nodded. “He’s a tweaker. Not a doubt in my mind.”
“Muriel told us not to let him into her place anymore when she wasn’t home,” Frank said. “He stole some of her jewels.”
“Did she report him?”
“Wasn’t necessary. Bullets got them back for her.”
“How did he manage that?” I asked.
“How do you think?” Very said to me. “He still has connections. What does this Trevor look like?”
“He’s a shrimp, barely five feet tall,” Frank said. “Stringy hair.”
“Did you see him this evening?”
“No, I didn’t.” Frank looked over at George. “You?”
George shook his head.
The door behind the reception desk opened and a grim-faced Raoul joined us, giving off a faint whiff of rum.
“Do the kids in this building invite their friends over here to trick-or-treat with them?” Very asked him.
“Sure thing, Lieutenant,” Raoul said. “Quite a few of them.”
“So if Trevor was dressed in, say, a Barney the Dinosaur costume, he could have sneaked his way in with a group of younger kids. Waited in the stairwell to talk to Muriel until after Alan’s party broke up and tried to hit her up for money. When she refused to give him any, he wrestled her pocketbook away from her and shoved her down the stairs.”
“Dressed in a Barney costume?” I said to him. “God, the tabloids will go nuts.”
Very mulled it over, his head nodding, nodding. “I’m liking him for it. In fact, Trevor sounds like our prime suspect. Any idea where he lives?” he asked Frank.
“He drifts from one East Village crack den to another, as far as I can tell. The kid’s a bum. Has a real nasty mouth on him, too.”
“We’ll start looking for him,” Very said. “And we’ll find him—especially if he has money in his pocket now.”
A cab pulled up out front. Raoul hustled outside to pay the fare and escort Muriel’s cleaning girl, Rosalita, in the front door. And I do mean girl. She was sixteen—eighteen tops—slim and pretty with large brown eyes and shiny black hair.
Definitely one of Raoul’s yum-yums.
Definitely frightened.
“You’re not in any trouble, Rosalita,” Raoul assured her as she looked at him apprehensively. “But someone attacked Muriel and the police want to know if they took anything from her apartment. You’ve spent a lot of time there. You can tell them if anything’s missing, can’t you?”
“I think so,” she said softly. “I mean, maybe.”
“Let’s go take a look,” Very said.
Lulu and I joined Very as we rode the elevator up to the sixteenth floor with Raoul and Rosalita, who wore a down vest, sweater, and jeans. When we arrived at apartment 16D, we found a patrolman standing guard there. Very paused to examine whether the lock had been tampered with. It didn’t appear to have been. He asked Raoul for his key and used it to open the door. A small table lamp was on. Very put on a latex glove and turned on the ceiling light, then went around turning on the kitchen and bedroom lights.
Muriel’s apartment was very tastefully appointed. The living room had a dark brown velvet sofa and two matching armchairs set before a big-screen television set. She watched a lot of TV, apparently. There were copies of TV Guide and Soap Opera Digest on the glass coffee table. Candice Bergen, the star of Murphy Brown, was on the cover of TV Guide that week. Please don’t ask me who was on the cover of Soap Opera Digest. I don’t recognize any of those people. Muriel had collected lithographs of New York street scenes from the 1930s and 1940s. Very fine ones, beautifully framed. Her living room walls were lined with them. So were the walls of her small dining room. Clearly, she had loved the city of that era.
As Lulu began to carefully sniff her way around the living room, Rosalita wasted no time scurrying straight for Muriel’s bedroom to have a look in her closet.
“Whoa, hang on—I don’t want you to touch anything,” Very called out as followed her into the bedroom, which was plush bordering on frilly. He opened the closet door for her with his gloved hand.
Muriel had loved her Chanel suits. The closet was lined with them in every color imaginable. She’d also loved shoes. Must have had a hundred pairs.
“She had three fur coats,” Rosalita informed him. “Such beautiful ones. They’re all still here.” Then she made her way over to the jewelry box on Muriel’s dressing table and motioned for Very to open it. When he did, she examined the contents carefully. Necklaces, bracelets, rings, several wristwatches. “Her best pieces are still here, I think. But I cannot be positive.”
“That’s okay, you’re doing great,” Very assured her. “Anywhere else you want to look?”
“Her Cheerios.”
“I’m sorry, her what?”
She led him into the kitchen and motioned impatiently for him to open a cupboard over the sink and remove the box of Cheerios that was in there along with boxes of Grape-Nuts, All-Bran, and Wheaties. Muriel had liked her cereal, apparently.
“Open it,” she said to him. “And stick your hand down inside.”
Very glanced at me, slightly bewildered, before he opened the Cheerios box and plunged his hand in. He froze for a moment, his eyes widening slightly, before he pulled out first one, then two, bound stacks of crisp hundred-dollar bills. Each had a mustard-colored paper bank strap around it that was stamped “$10,000.”
Rosalita nodded with satisfaction. “Is all here.”
Very looked at her in amazement. “How did you . . . ?”
“She tol’ me about it in case I ever needed to buy toilet bowl cleaner or whatever.”
“Twenty thou would certainly buy you plenty of toilet bowl cleaner.” He turned to me and said, “Okay, this is getting weird.”
“Very,” I agreed.
“Yeah, what is it, dude?”
“It’s getting very weird.”
“You got that right. Who was this lady?”
“I have no idea,” I confessed. “But I sure am anxious to find out.”
“Seal this apartment,” he ordered the patrolman. “I want the crime scene people to do a thorough top-to-bottom search in the morning. God knows what else we’ll find stashed in here.”
“Right, Loo.”
He thanked Rosalita before he sent her down in the elevator with Raoul, staying there on the sixteenth floor with Lulu and me as we headed back toward Merilee’s apartment. It was getting late. I was bushed, plus I hadn’t eaten any dinner.
“Got any plans for tomorrow?” Very asked me.
“It’s Monday. Up at dawn. Put on the espresso and the Ramones. Hit the typewriter. Why do you . . . ?”
“I’m driving out to Great Neck. I’ll pick you up at nine sharp.”
“Why do you need me?” On Lulu’s cough I added, “Us, I mean.”
“Because Bullets said Myrna Waldman lives in a castle. You know how to talk to rich people. I don’t. You hear things I don’t, see things I don’t. You’d be doing me a huge favor. Just come with me, will you?”
“Okay, but only on two conditions. One, we take the Jag. Your bucket of bolts doesn’t have even the slightest acquaintance with shock absorbers, springs, struts, tie rods, proper wheel alignment. The last time I rode in it, I had a backache for two weeks. Plus I chipped a tooth when you went spelunking through that pothole on Broadway and West Seventy-Second at fifty miles an hour.”
“Fine, you can drive. What’s the other condition?”
“That you won’t chew my ear off the whole way out there about Norma. Deal?”
“Deal.”
“Want to know the greatest thing about Norma? I’ve never met a woman who’s so totally self-reliant.”
“Which, I take it, means a lot to you,” I said as I steered the Jag down Lexington toward the Queens Midtown Tunnel. It was sunny and brisk out, being the first day of November, but I had the top down nonetheless with the windows rolled up so we could hear each other talk. I wore the gray cheviot tweed suit from Strickland & Sons with a cream-colored Italian flannel shirt, burgundy knit tie, and kid leather ankle boots. Very wore what he always wore—a black T-shirt under his black leather jacket, and tight jeans. Lulu rode happily in his lap, her tail thumping. She loves riding with Very. It means we’re on a case.
“Dude, it’s crucial. I’ve got a whacked-out job, not to mention my own nutsiness. I need a woman who’s wrapped up in her own thing. Norma doesn’t need me. It’s a totally nontraditional relationship.”
“So, bottom line, you were lying to me last night.”
“Who, me? About what?”
“You are planning to chew my ear off the whole way to Great Neck about her.”
“Cut a brother some slack, will you? I don’t have anyone else to talk to about her. The dudes on the job won’t talk about anything that remotely has to do with feelings. Besides, I’m starved for intelligent guy talk. ”
“This is your idea of intelligent guy talk?”
“So what’s the deal—are you going to annoy me the whole way out there?”
“Haven’t decided yet.” I cut over to Second Avenue at East Forty-Eighth Street and steered down to East Thirty-Sixth, where I wound us toward the entrance to the dimly lit tunnel underneath the East River. Trust me, it helps to not think about that. “But I do feel I should point out to you that Norma and I have a professional relationship. She’s my editor. I don’t necessarily want to know any details about her personal life. It’s inappropriate. Also icky.”
Very looked at me pleadingly.
I let out a sigh of resignation. “Okay, fine. If you want to do this, we’ll do this. Merilee’s the same way. Involved in her own career. Not dependent on me.”
“And you two have made it work, right?”
“Aside from the part where we didn’t speak to each other for ten years? We’re doing great. And, by the way, there is no such thing as a traditional relationship. That’s a myth, like Bigfoot and trickle-down economics.”
We emerged back into the sunlight in Queens and I got onto the Long Island Expressway, popularly known as the L.I.E. The morning outbound traffic wasn’t bad at all, which gave us a chance to savor some of the outer borough’s notable landmarks, such as the giant red-and-white-striped Elmhurst gas tanks and Flushing Meadows, site of the 1964 World’s Fair, where the Unisphere, a twelve-story stainless steel globe, still remained. Beyond that, the traffic thinned out and we started seeing green things such as trees. We crossed over from Queens into Nassau County—which is to say Long Island—at Douglaston, which produced John McEnroe, the obnoxious tennis brat, and still has a lot to answer for, as far as I’m concerned.
“I got the preliminary results from the medical examiner on Muriel,” Very finally got around to mentioning. “She had no abrasions or bruises on her knees or thighs.”
“Meaning . . . ?”
“Meaning she was shoved so hard from the top of the sixteenth-floor stairs that she practically did a swan dive before she hit that fifteenth-floor landing. She suffered displaced fractures to her top three cervical vertebrae, as I suspected. Death was instantaneous.” He pulled his notepad from his jacket pocket and glanced at it. “In addition to her cheekbone, she also had shattered elbows, wrists, hands, and fingers. She was a fragile little lady.”
“Was there any sign of a struggle?”
“The only thing that he could find was a faint redness around her right upper arm. My guess? Someone was waiting in the corridor for her when she left Alan Levin’s party, grabbed her by the arm, and pulled her into the stairwell.”
“Could the ME tell anything about the size of that someone’s hand? Or how strong or tall he was?”
“Afraid not. It was just a faint redness, like I said. Nothing distinct.”
“I’m sure you get asked this all of the time, but do you think a dinosaur could have done it?”
“I take it you mean Trevor the tweaker, dressed in a Barney costume.”
“Correct.”
“Do those Barney costumes have hands?”
“Of a sort.”
“Then he’s a definite suspect, you bet. Grabbed her pocketbook filled with cash and took off.”
“How would he have gotten away?”
“Easily. He could have taken the stairs down to the fourteenth floor and caught the elevator there.” Very leafed through his notepad some more. “I ran a criminal background check on Bullets Durmond. He took those two falls just like he told us. And a pal of mine on the Organized Crime Control Bureau told me the big guy was definitely an enforcer for the Gambino family. They’re positive he’s personally responsible for rubbing out eight rival gang members. Those are just the ones they know about. By the time Bullets turned fifty, he was getting to be too heavy and slow to be of much use to them. But he’d been a good, reliable soldier who’d served his two stints and kept his mouth shut. So they gave him a brass knuckle handshake. Put him in touch with Muriel’s lawyer, Max Panisch, and got him the job as her chauffeur. Max died in ’86 and was succeeded by his son, Sandy, just like Bullets told us.”
“How much do you know about Sandy?”
“Not as much as I’d like to, but we have an appointment to see him later. If you still want to pursue this with me, that is.”
“Try and stop me,” I said as we neared Great Neck. “Which exit do I want?”
“Hang on a sec . . .” he said, grappling with the fold-up AAA road map.
Great Neck is one of the oldest and classiest of the Long Island burbs. But it wasn’t until we got there and I needed concrete directions to Myrna Waldman’s castle that I discovered something about Romaine Very that I’d never known before—the man didn’t know how to read a map. Although, in fairness to him, it’s not the easiest thing to do when you’re zipping along at sixty-five miles per hour in a ragtop with a basset hound mouth-breathing in your lap.
“Um, hello, where do I get off?”
“I’m looking, will ya?” he answered irritably as he continued wrestling with it.
“I don’t mean to rush you, Lieutenant, but if you don’t give me an answer very soon, as in now, we’re going to end up in Ronkonkoma.”
“Okay, okay, I got it. In another mile you get off at Lakeville Road. I think.”
“You think?”
“It looks like it’ll get us there.”
“You’re not filling me with confidence.”
“Myrna lives on King’s Neck Road, and the Lakeville Road exit will get us there,” he said, stabbing at the map with his finger. “We want this peninsula north of the expressway, see?”
“I can look at the map or I can drive. I can’t do both.”
“So get off at Lakeville Road, will you?”
So I got off at Lakeville Road, which became South Middle Neck Road even though we were heading north, not south, then became just plain Middle Neck Road. It was a commercial district, quite affluent.
Very said, “Okay, slow down . . . you want to stop here. No, wait, it’s the next intersection. Check that, it’s this one right here. Redbrook Road.”
“Sure about that, Lieutenant?”
“Just shut up and hang a left.”
I made a left at Redbrook Road, where the houses dated back to the 1920s, were set way back from the road, and were very impressive. It circled its way around a vast green park—Kings Point Park, according to the signage—and eventually led us to Kings Point Road, where Very told me to make a right.
The houses on Kings Point Road were, well, not exactly houses. They were more like royal country estates.
