Chapter Eleven #2
“This will be fine.” Noone has run a wet hand through his hair in the bathroom; damp strands spill over his forehead.
He wipes remaining dampness onto his waffle weave shirt, collects the notebook, eraser, examines and selects pencils.
Then he sits back in the lounge chair and opens the notebook on his knee.
He sticks one of the pencils behind his ear.
“He was stocky, wasn’t he? Pale, with a kind of blunt nose . . .”
“His face was sort of craggy,” Nomi offers.
“That’s right. He had those grooves either side of his mouth . . .”
Noone’s sketching hand moves with unhurried confidence—broad strokes, firm angles, making corrections with the eraser or smudging with the edge of his thumb.
He digs absently into his pants pocket for a cigarette, lights up.
She’s going to have to talk to him about smoking in her apartment, but not while he’s engaged like this.
“That’s it.” A face is taking shape on the paper, one she recognizes. “Bushier eyebrows, though.”
“You saw him close up.”
“Unfortunately, yes.” She glances between the image and Noone’s loose posture in the chair. “That’s really good. How are you so good at this?”
“From being in the village.” Smoke eddies up from the cigarette stuck in the corner of his mouth as he concentrates on some finer shading. “Before I learned enough Spanish and Maaya t’aan to communicate, I used to sketch the stuff I didn’t have words for. I think this is getting close, yes?”
“Yes. Holy shit, that’s him. You can really draw. Could you do this before?”
“No idea.” His expression is relaxed, guileless. “But it’s nice to have a skill that’s innocuous for a change.”
“All your weird skills . . .” Nomi chews her lip, thinking about it. “But maybe we can use that.”
He glances up. “What do you mean?”
She ticks off on her fingers. “Drawing, covert tracking, Italian speaking, even those dreams of yours . . . They’re all probably things you could do or were connected to before your head injury, right?
It’s got to be related to your amnesia. To who you were before.
We can add details like this to your missing person profile. It might help us get some hits.”
“Really?”
“I told you, I’m an opportunist.” She examines the sketch. “His sideburns came a little lower down . . .”
Noone works on the sketch some more, with Nomi providing suggestions or guidance on the details. After a few minutes, it’s done.
“There.” He stubs out his smoke and sets his pencil down. “That’s as close as I can get, I think.”
He tears out the page and hands it to her. Nomi holds it at arm’s length. “Goddamn, that’s him. The courier guy. Wild stuff. Like working with a police sketch artist. This is going to be incredibly useful, thank you.”
“No problem.”
“I can take this around and ask if anyone’s seen him.” She notices Noone scrubbing both hands over his face. “You okay?”
“Ah, yeah . . . Just a headache.” He sets down the notebook and pencils. “I might go upstairs and get some medication. Unless you need me for something?”
“No way,” she says. “I mean, don’t worry about it. You should go home, get some rest. You were up half the night with me—you must be exhausted.”
“A little exhausted, yes.” He laughs shortly, extricates himself from the chair, stiff limbed, and finds his stuff. “Okay, I’ll leave you to get your work done—I think I’m going to take my meds and get some more sleep. I’m really glad you’re feeling better. And thanks for the coffee.”
“Thanks for the sketch. And for staying on coma watch.” She can be more generous than that. “Actually, thanks for a lot of things.”
“You’re welcome. Watch out for strange men in courier jackets.”
Nomi tracks him as he heads for the door. Once he’s gone, the apartment feels oddly quiet. But the day has just started, and it’s not like she doesn’t have plenty of shit to do.
After a shower, back in her jeans and a fresh black T-shirt that has a picture of a hand making devil horns and the word Disobey scrawled across the front, she takes a couple Advil and moves to her office to start the grind.
The rubber band–bundled items from Ricki Cevolatti are in the tray on her desk: four business cards, two sticky notes, the bookie’s slip, three receipts scrawled with phone numbers.
For the next few hours, she uses her time-honored technique for cold-calling, which involves chewing gum while sounding bored and telling the person who answers the phone that they may be eligible for a refund on their car insurance.
Almost all the calls go nowhere. The bookie turns out to be one of the receipt numbers, and he informs her that the slip is only valid to cash out for a month after the date of issue, which turns out to have been in July.
One of the other receipt numbers is for an escort service in Crown Heights.
Another one rings out unanswered. A business card for a guy called Herschel Sebbitz has the same number as one of the sticky notes, and Sebbitz appears to have a legitimate business as a mechanic.
Two other business cards are for a care nurse for Cevolatti’s aunt and a pool hall in the Lower East Side.
The final sticky note number has been disconnected.
Either the disconnected number or the unanswered number could belong to Janice D’Addario—impossible to know.
Nomi puts her gum in the trash, takes a break, makes fresh coffee. As she’s waiting for the brew to perk, her eyes are drawn by a sharp, bright edge: The shiny silver key from Cevolatti’s wallet is still on her desk. The number 202 is stamped on one side.
It could be a key to any post office box anywhere in the city, and the idea of chasing around for the right box doesn’t hold a lot of appeal. But she can at least try the most obvious places: the Flatbush Station post office on Church Avenue, and the Farley Building in Midtown.
On the off chance, she calls Flatbush and discovers that the key, as she describes it over the phone, is definitely for a post box, and—more importantly—that they only have 180 post office boxes at the Flatbush location. Interesting. That just leaves the Farley Building.
First, though, she wants to see if one of her hunches is correct.
It’s just gone noon, which means Teresa will finally be awake; Nomi gives her a call.
Teresa is a fifty-three-year-old New Jersey native who used to be a madam; she now functions as a kind of den mother to a lot of the women—hookers and bar staff alike—who work at Chachi’s.
She’s a tough old bird, and Nomi helped her recover some money from a scam artist about eighteen months ago, so she sometimes gives Nomi a line on what’s happening at the club.
When Teresa confirms that Janice D’Addario is usually behind the bar at Chachi’s three nights a week, Nomi does a fist pump right there in her office.
Bingo. “Teri, I need to go see her. Have you got an address?”
“Hold on, honey; I’m still in my pajamas .
. .” Teresa makes a rattling cough, sips something that Nomi can only assume is coffee, but who knows.
“Okay, I got it for ya. Janice D.—I got her in my Rolodex as that, so I don’t get her mixed up with the other Janice, with the auburn hair.
Now listen, Janice D. hasn’t shown for work the last few days, so I don’t know if you’ll find her, but here’s the address.
Are you ready? You got a pencil or something? ”
“I’ve got a pencil,” Nomi confirms. “Go for it.”
When she hangs up from the call, she fist-pumps again for good measure because hell yeah, she was due a win.
Then she takes another two Advil, shoves on her boots, gathers her tote and jacket and sunglasses.
Before she leaves the apartment, she tucks both Noone’s sketch of the courier guy and Cevolatti’s silver key into her jeans pockets.
The third floor is, once again, slightly warmer and sunnier, because of the skylight. Nomi raps on Noone’s door—no answer. Dammit. Yesterday, she was wondering how to get rid of him, and now when she needs him, he’s not around.
She clomps down the stairs to the foyer, slips on her sunglasses before spilling out the narrow door into the noonday heat.
There’s not much traffic on Gansevoort, just a smattering of delivery trucks and pedestrians; the district meat workers have mostly finished their shifts and gone home.
The street smells of bleach and beef fat.
She’s about to turn for Greenwich Street when she sees the black metal folding chairs outside Florent, the familiar posture of the guy smoking and reading a newspaper behind gold-framed sunglasses.
Shaking her head, Nomi walks straight over. “Holy shit, you’re here. I knocked at your place, but I figured you’d gone to see Hellraiser or something.”
As she pulls out a chair, Simon folds up his newspaper. “Hello again. What’s a hellraiser?”
“Your cultural gaps are showing again, my friend—I’ll explain it to you later.
” He has an espresso demitasse and a small bowl of green grapes on the table beside him.
She steals a grape, pops it into her mouth, talks while she chews.
“Right now, I got a lead on Janice D’Addario, and I was hoping you might want to come check it out with me.
Unless—I don’t know—do you still have a headache? ”
“Yes.” He pushes up his sunglasses, blue eyes scrunched against the glare. “But if I stopped all activity whenever I got a headache, I’d never come out of my apartment, so I’ve just taken a bunch of drugs.”
“Fair.”
“You really want me to come along? I seem to remember something you said about us not being partners.”
“I changed my mind.” She shrugs, eats another grape. “You’re growing on me.”
“Like mold.”
“Exactly. Plus, I told Leo yesterday that I’ve hired personal security, which is basically like announcing it to the whole neighborhood.”
“So now you’ve got to keep that up.”
“You got it.”
He snorts, reaches forward and slides down her Wayfarers so he can examine her eyes. “You still have a concussion. How are you so bouncy?”
“Because that’s my secret, Noone—every time I take a hit, I come back stronger.” Nomi pops another grape and grins. “Come on, have you got anything better to do?”