Marcie called out, and the evening headed down a track I would never have expected. For a start, she was a superb cook, and if excellent food doesn’t put you in a good mood you’ve probably been supersized one time too many. In addition, they didn’t mention the seminar and I had to admit that signing me up didn’t appear to be on their minds. I started to relax, and the idea occurred to me that they knew so much about my background that, for them at least, it was like having dinner with an old friend.
Bradley had scores of questions about the book and the cases it dealt with and Marcie took obvious delight in watching her clever husband try to pin me down on details I was forbidden to talk about. During one particularly torrid session she laughed and said she had never seen him so pissed off in her life. I looked at her and couldn’t resist joining in.
When someone makes you laugh, when they’ve invited you into their home and tried their hardest to make you welcome, when they’ve given you boxes of material that just might save your life, when they’ve hauled them down into the street and helped you load them into a cab, when you’re standing under a street light in Manhattan and all that’s waiting for you is an apartment so cold you call it Camp NoHo, when you’re lost in your own country and the world’s promises haven’t amounted to very much, when you have the inescapable sense you are waiting for some future which might not be very pleasant, when they smile and shake your hand and thank you for coming and say they have no way of contacting you, you’ve got a hard choice to make.
I paused, all my tradecraft and experience telling me to write down a fake phone number and drive away with their research. What did I need them for now? But I thought of the warmth with which they had greeted me, Bradley’s joy in the music he had chosen for the evening and, I’m sorry, I couldn’t do it. I took out my cellphone, pulled its number up on the screen and watched Marcie write it down.
In the weeks that followed they would call, and we would catch a movie or go to a club and listen to the old blues-men that Bradley loved, jam the night away – always just the three of us. Thank God they never tried to set me up on a date or went off piste and mentioned Bradley’s seminar.
During that time Bradley underwent a battery of physical and psychological tests and, much to his relief, was passed fit to return to work. He still limped a little and, because of that, he was on lighter duties than normal but sometimes, usually late at night, he would get hold of me and ask if I wanted to drop by a crime scene where he thought there was some element which might interest me. On one particular evening he left a message while I was attending one of my regular twelve-step meetings. By this stage, I had switched my patronage to AA – as Tolstoy might have said, drug addicts are all alike, whereas every alcoholic is crazy in his own way. This led to far more interesting meetings, and I had decided that, if you were going to spend your life on the wagon, you might as well be entertained.
The meeting – held in a decaying church hall on the Upper West Side – came to an end, and I left my fellow outcasts milling about the foyer. I walked east, enjoying the unseasonably warm evening, and it wasn’t until I saw the Gothic towers of the Dakota that I thought to check my phone for messages. I saw Bradley’s number and figured he must have turned up another one of his rock ’n’ roll ghosts, so I was surprised when I clicked play and heard him, for the first time since we had met, ask for help.
‘I’ve got a murder case that’s very strange,’ he said on the message. Explaining nothing more than the fact that it concerned a young woman, he then gave me the address of a sleazy hotel where he wanted me to meet him.
It was called the Eastside Inn.
Chapter Twenty-five
THE WOMAN RESPONSIBLE for the killing in room 89 had used my knowledge, my experience, my brain to commit the murder, and that made me – at least by my count – an accessory to the crime.
I wasn’t going to let something like that ride, so once the coroner’s assistants had zipped up the bag containing Eleanor’s body I walked out of the room – angrier than I had been for a long time – and headed down the stairs.
I found what I was looking for – the door to the manager’s office – in a small alcove near the reception desk. Alvarez, or one of the other young cops, had locked it when they left, so I stepped back and smashed the sole of my shoe hard into the wood just below the handle.
The sound of splintering wood brought a uniformed cop. ‘I’m with Bradley,’ I said, with an air of complete authority. He shrugged, I finished kicking and stepped into the scumbag’s lair – rank with the smell of body odour and cigarettes.