Chapter Sixteen #2
Nomi hears her own footsteps echo strangely in the quiet. She glances back over her shoulder. Seeing Lamonte and Ameche at Big Mouth last night shouldn’t have been a shock, yet somehow it was. Now she’s letting Irma’s warning spook her.
“Fuck it,” Nomi mutters. But when a cab passes, she flags it down.
Back home, she hangs her jacket, dumps her keys, pulls on her warm black sweatshirt.
Going through the mug sheets from Irma, she adds the info to her files: She can dig a little into Dinkins and Hart, find more connections and, hopefully, locations.
When she’s done updating her Jackson file, she pulls out the sheets with the East Coast missing person info.
It takes all of two minutes to establish that none of the cases Irma’s highlighted have anything to do with Simon Noone.
She goes to the kitchen and washes out the coffeepot, replaces the filter, refills the machine, turns it on.
Waiting for it to brew, she does a little tour of the apartment, wiping leaves here, spritzing with water there, pinching off brown tendrils and petioles.
Mainly thinking about Irma’s info, but occasionally allowing herself to consider why she handed over Noone’s prints.
At least three things changed her mind. First, he seems desperate to find out who he really is, and her foremost responsibility is to Noone as a client. She said she’d help him find out his real identity, and that’s what she’s going to do.
Secondly, he flipped from normal guy to satanic sex god at the club last night, and it threw her.
Maybe he was just putting on a show for Janice—but if Noone is that good an actor, how can she tell which parts of him are real and which are faked?
Does he even know the difference? She needs some understanding of his actual personality.
Third was the main event: the way he’d gone for Ameche.
Noone’s movements had had an almost robotic efficiency: fluid, spontaneous, instinctual.
Ruthless. Nomi has seen some shit, but she’s never seen anyone use a paring knife to stab someone so hard their body part got stuck to the surface underneath.
She can make allowances for Noone being under the influence, sure.
And she’s no wide-eyed innocent; she’s familiar with violence—perpetrated it, on a number of occasions.
But even in her angriest, most off-the-leash moments, she’s known when she’s taken things too far.
Noone doesn’t seem to have those guardrails.
He hadn’t even seemed particularly angry.
He’d been completely cold about it. And she’d seen his look of confusion as she’d bawled him out in the cab: He really did not get it.
Not only had he ignored her explicit instruction—a prohibition she’d set down, that he’d trampled over without thinking of the consequences to herself or Brittany Jackson or anybody else—but he’d seemed oblivious as to why physically attacking someone at a nightclub was a bad idea.
Her fury was insulating in the cab last night, but now, in the cold gray light of day, Nomi finds herself even more unsettled. Yes, she told Noone that he should stop worrying about the man he’d been. But for her own peace of mind, she’d like as much information on that man as she can get.
There’s a knock at the door, and she startles.
Before she takes off the chain, she remembers Irma’s words: Maybe you want to put some thought into an exit plan. She stops her hand, steps to the side of the door. “Who is it?”
“It’s just me, Nomi.”
Noone’s clipped consonants bring instant recall—and Nomi discovers the worst thing about all this.
Because it’s not only the confusing, infuriating, frightening parts of last night that are coming back.
She’s also remembering unbuttoning Noone’s shirt in the lobby .
. . His lean dark figure at the bar, like a demon on shore leave .
. . His breath on her neck, and the way he looked at her, greedy and sensuous . . .
The way he plunged that knife into Claude Ameche’s hand, the blade piercing skin and sliding right through, the sight of it exploding inside her mind like an atom bomb—
Simon Noone scares the shit out of her. But being around him also makes her vibrate at some deep, restless frequency. She thinks of his thumb stroking the skin of her inner thigh, like the rough lick of a cat’s tongue.
Goddammit, she really needs to get laid.
Nomi sighs, leaves the chain on, opens the door. “What’s up?”
Noone is standing in the hallway. Black peacoat, black shirt, navy sweater, blue jeans, boots—entirely normal clothes for a supremely normal person. Rain glitters on the shoulders of his coat and at the ends of his damp hair, and he’s got a small spiral-bound notepad in one hand.
He sees the chain on the door, and his posture becomes awkward. “I, um, thought about buying you a plant.”
“What?” Nomi frowns.
“But then I thought you might appreciate this more.” He raises the notepad, begins reading. “Gloria Axedale, fifty-two years old, born in Queens, attended public high school, graduated valedictorian 1953—”
“Noone . . .”
“Attended Radcliffe College, Harvard Law School, married to Bill Axedale since 1961, three kids. After practicing as a litigator with McMahon, Segal & Holtzman, served as Democratic member of the New York State Senate from 1971 to 1978. Appointed by the mayor to the New York City Planning Commission in 1980—”
“Okay, stop.” Nomi takes off the chain and opens the door wider. “Just . . . stop reciting Gloria Axedale’s curriculum vitae outside my apartment.”
“Are you still angry?”
“I’m not answering that. Where did you get all this information?”
“Public library.”
“You caught the subway?”
“Yes.”
Nomi considers the significance of that. “Right. Well.”
He brings his other hand out from behind his back. He’s holding a small soggy potting tube with waxy green leaves spilling over the side. “I . . . also bought you a plant.”
She touches her tongue to the scratch inside her lip as she looks between him and the plant. “You’re really trying hard, aren’t you?”
“I’ve never bought a plant before.”
She waits a beat before relenting. “Fine, come in. Stop cluttering up the corridor.”
He looks so grateful, she wants to laugh, but that wouldn’t really be appropriate.
In the hallway, he sniffs the air as they get closer to the kitchen. “You made coffee?”
“You don’t have to pretend to like my coffee, Noone. You’ve done enough.” She pours them both mugs, but when she hands his over, she pauses. “I’m still angry.”
“Okay,” he says cautiously.
“But I don’t want to rehash it right now.”
“Okay.” He’s more relieved.
“Sit down and show me your Axedale notes.”
Once they’re situated in their respective spots—Noone on the lounge chair and herself on the sofa—Nomi gestures “gimme” and he hands her the notepad.
She sips from her mug and scans through his spiky scrawl.
He hasn’t done a terrible job as her quote-unquote “research assistant,” although there are some gaps she’d like to fill.
“This is a good start, but we might need a little more detail.” She sits back and crosses her legs, examining the notes. “I’d like to know who she hangs out with. We should see if she pops up on the society pages.”
“Axedale seems very conservative.” Noone leans forward with his mug, forearms on his knees. “Very proper etiquette.”
“Twinset-and-pearls type, right. Well, she did go to Harvard.” Nomi grimaces. She waves the notepad, making the pages flutter. “So what has Galetti got on her that’s made her bend over?”
“Maybe he doesn’t have anything. Maybe it’s a direct threat.”
“She’s a lawyer and a former senator—I imagine she’s been exposed to threats before.”
“She’s got three kids in their twenties.”
Could that be a possibility? “What are their names?”
“Charles, Marion, and David.” Noone settles back, finally looking more relaxed. “No Jeremy, sorry. But maybe it’s the husband—an affair, a business scandal.”
“You bought me a hoya,” Nomi says suddenly.
The plant is sitting on the coffee table, where Noone placed it before he sat down.
It’s a small specimen, clearly propagated from a cutting, but it’s already got some nice leaf growth, variegated and glossy.
The tube is sitting in a little puddle of Saran wrap, which appears to have been wreathed around the base so Noone could transport it.
“You were upset last night. I’m sorry I upset you.
I’m sorry I screwed up.” Noone scratches the bridge of his nose.
She wouldn’t say he looks penitent, but his eyes have gone softer.
“I don’t know what a hoya is. I don’t know anything about houseplants.
You want a plant in Piedras Negras, you just step outside the door and—”
“You freak me out.” Nomi clutches her mug.
“Okay.” He seems to be mentally debating how to phrase his response. His words come out halting. “I don’t . . . always have great control over how my condition manifests. But I didn’t exactly cover myself in glory last night. Again, I apologize.”
“I put you on the spot at the club.” Her admission is a peace offering. “And it was really good to have backup—I wouldn’t have gotten the information from Janice or Max without you.”
He opens out his hand. “I’ll try to do better?”
Nomi sighs, stands up. “Okay, come on. I got some more stuff from my ex-partner today about Lamonte’s guys—let’s see if we can figure out which dots connect.”