1
The guy who’d called me earlier had given the name Cohen. He hadn’t said what he wanted, just that he needed to speak urgently on a personal matter and could I meet him at the Orchard Street bookstore at six. I agreed to see him and got there a little after five forty-five.
I tried the door and found it open, despite that the sign said the place was closed. A coiled spring doorbell disturbed the dusty silence when I went in.
I closed the door behind me and waited on the welcome mat just inside. I waited there for a minute or so, but no one came to say welcome in person. I unbuttoned my coat and took stock of the surroundings.
It was a bookstore selling used and rare books and, just like every other old bookstore I’d been to, it was comforting in a grand-parents’ house-sort-of-a-way, but without the sepia photos and knitted shawls. The carpet was thin and had once been red, and the air was warm, and still, and smelled old.
Every scrap of wall-space was fitted with shelving that reached from floor to ceiling, and every shelf lined end-to-end with hard-bound books, almost all of them looking to be older than me and in no better condition. There were also a good many oversized volumes that were piled face down on the floor in the corners; I figured the store owner probably didn’t have the lifting gear needed to move them any place else.
I walked across and rang the bell on the polished oak serving desk and then idly flicked the pages of Post Impressionism, Volume Two, 1864-1900. The reverberations died away and no one came to answer. I rang the bell a second and third time and then followed up with a friendly, enquiring hello. No one came to be friendly, and no one called hello back.
I turned a couple more of the pages of the art book and looked over some van Gogh prints that showed landscapes with multi-coloured skies. I figured that the guy was either on some pretty strong medication or else was a man who’d liked his liquor. I closed the book and went in search of other sentient life.
I discovered that the store was L-shaped, with the leg of the L leading to a small office space that was partitioned from the main book display area by a long waist-high shelving unit topped with panels of rim-frosted glass. Inside the office area there was a three-drawer file cabinet, and a cabin desk with a green-shaded banker’s desk lamp, one closed and one open sales ledger, a sheaf of loose papers, and a telephone. Seated at the desk and staring out into nowhere there was a dead man.
***
The passing beat cop that I called from the street said the dead man was Reuben Sternberg. Said he’d been beat cop in this neighbourhood since thirty-four and that Sternberg had had the bookstore all that time and before. Really nice old guy, he said, friendly but quiet.
The cop had checked, and I’d checked, and we agreed that the guy seemed to have died naturally. There were no signs of a struggle, no marks on him that we could see, and no blood to be found anywhere. And there was nothing about his eyes, or lips, or complexion that suggested any sort of poison.
I’d told the cop that I’d been called to the bookstore to meet a potential client and had discovered Sternberg sat dead in the chair just as he was.
After rummaging through the papers on the desk, the cop looked up.
‘Van Buren?’ he checked, and I nodded and showed him my license to confirm it. ‘This seems to be for you then, miss,’ he said, and he handed me an envelope that had my name written on the address side.
‘Go ahead, open it,’ he said, ‘Although we might need to have it back and keep it a while, just depending on what the doc and my captain says.’
I took the envelope and opened the flap. There were two cheques inside and a single sheet of paper with neatly handwritten notes. The notes and the cheques were written in the same hand. One of the cheques was made out to me and the other to a Cordelia Baxter. My cheque was for two-hundred dollars, and Cordelia’s for five-thousand.
I had no notion as to who Cordelia Baxter was, and no sure idea as to why Sternberg was planning to pay me two-hundred dollars.
I stared at the letter paper and gave a little thought to these matters but mainly I got to wondering how Cohen figured in things, and why he hadn’t shown.
2
The doctor who’d called later said that from all he could tell, Sternberg had probably suffered a heart attack.
The beat cop’s captain looked over the envelope, the cheques, and the notes on the letter paper, and he asked if I knew what any of it meant and what I planned to do. I shrugged and shook my head and put on my best dumb face.
‘Way I see it,’ he said. ‘The dead guy was looking to hire you to find this Baxter woman.’
‘To pass her the cheque,’ he clarified.
And after chewing his lip a while – a man who clearly liked to show when he did any thinking – he added, ‘And I guess the two-hundred bucks was to pay you up-front for the leg work, and the notes to help you find her.’
‘I guess you’re right,’ I said.
He wished me luck, handed me back the papers, and then went to be other places with better things to do.
The beat cop stayed on a while and watched as I made a search of Sternberg’s desk and file cabinet. I found nothing to tell me who the Baxter woman was, and no files that cross-checked with the notes made on the letter paper. When the guys from the morgue came and took the body away, we left, and the beat cop locked up.
Back in my office, I made black coffee, took a city directory, and looked under Baxter. I figured it was as good a place to start as any. I found five of them listed and worked my way through. The first three picked up and answered as a Charles, a Henry, and a Jackson, with none of the three married, and none of them having any relative called Cordelia that they knew.
The remaining two on the list didn’t pick up. I noted down the addresses for these, figuring that I might drop by in the morning if they still didn’t answer. I re-read Sternberg’s notes while I finished up my coffee.
There were two addresses he’d given, one of them for a convent hospital over Newark way, and the other for a fancy-sounding place over on Riverside Boulevard in Manhattan. There was also a name and a date. The date was the third of June, twenty-two years back, and the name was Maria Petronello.
There were no Petronellos listed in the city directory, so I called it a day, drove back to my apartment, and took an early night.
***
In the morning, I called the two Baxters remaining from the night before, and this time got both on the line. My first call was answered by a hundred-year-old woman whose hearing was about as good as a wet-eared white cat’s. She said she was Sarah and repeatedly called me Judy. She asked could I pick up some bagels and milk on my way over and wanted to know who Cordelia was. The conversation ended with neither of us any the wiser.
The other call was answered by an old guy named Tony who had better hearing and was married to Jane. They had two young kids, called Sam and Shirley, and no other living relatives.
I chalked the calls up to experience, put on a hat and coat, and took the stairs down to the back parking lot. When the Chrysler coughed to life, I drove across to Manhattan to see who lived in apartment two-twenty, at one-sixty-one Riverside Boulevard. I parked up on West 66th Street and walked back round.
The blue-eyed, bleached blonde who was sat at the marble-topped reception desk took my card and called up to the apartment from her polished white phone. We put on smiles and stared at one another while we waited.
There was a guy weighing in at two-eighty pounds in a freshly pressed white shirt and burgundy suit sat in the back. He had the nose and ears of a boxer, and eyes that said he liked that he was wearing the suit.
‘There’s a Miss van Buren wishes to see you,’ the blonde said when her call was answered. ‘She’s a private investigator … apparently … Making enquiries about a Miss Cordelia Baxter.’
There was a lengthy reply, and the blonde then said she’d ask, covered the mouthpiece, and passed on the message, ‘Mr Madison says he’s busy until eleven, but if you’d like to wait in the lobby, he says he’ll come down and speak with you then.’ I said I’d wait, and she indicated as much to Mr. Madison. She cradled the handset, put on a wider smile, and offered for me to take a seat in the lobby.
The one I took was wide enough and plump enough for two of me. It was white leather, stylish and expensive, and had matching white leather, stylish and expensive cushions. Alongside the left arm, there was a chrome and glass side table, with magazines and newspapers arranged fan-like to provide decoration. To my right, there was a floor-standing white marble statuette depicting a long and gracefully limbed woman standing proudly naked and having perfectly fashioned breasts and buttocks but no face nor feet.
It was eleven on the button when the arrowed hand on the dial above the elevator doors arced slowly anticlockwise from five toward zero. A bell sounded as the elevator arrived and the doors opened to reveal a man who looked to be sixty or more. He was wearing a dark blue suit with a powder blue cravat. He had thick grey hair, a short grey beard, and blue-framed spectacles. He limped in my direction, aided by a silver-topped cane.
‘Felix Madison,’ he said when I rose to greet him, and we exchanged smiles and shook hands and I told him again who I was and why I’d called.
‘Cordelia Baxter,’ he repeated.
‘That’s right,’ I said. ‘And her name is all I know of her.’
‘Well, I don’t recall the name,’ he said, and he paused and gave it a few more seconds thought. ‘But then, as you can see,’ he said, lifting his cane to show proof, ‘the years are starting to take their toll now, and I’m afraid my memory isn’t what it used to be.’
I smiled and nodded sympathetically.
‘You live alone here, Mr Madison?’ I asked, and he said yes, he did.
‘Right,’ I said. ‘Don’t suppose you know a Reuben Sternberg?’ And again, he said no.
I apologised for wasting his time, thanked him, turned to leave, and then had a last thought.
‘What about a Maria Petronello?’ I asked.
‘Maria?’ he said, with his brow furrowing to a frown. ‘Yes, I knew Maria. But she’s dead now. Died years ago, back in the summer of ’31.’
‘Do you know how she died, where she died?’ I asked.
‘Sadly, yes,’ he said. ‘She was killed in a fire. In her father’s restaurant over on the west side. The whole place was razed to the ground. They found hers and Ira’s bodies down in the cellar. Burned black and crushed under the rubble.’
‘Ira?’ I checked.
‘Yeh, Ira,’ he said, ‘Ira Cohen. He was the guy who was walking out with Maria.’