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“I see.”
“Marty’s fifty-eight years old. He’s plenty old enough to have a daughter my age, but he doesn’t. He married late, and he and his wife didn’t have any kids.”
“So he’s like a father to you.”
“No.”
“I didn’t think so.”
“When I met him,” she said, “I was working at a midtown law firm called Haber, Haber & Crowell.”
“You mentioned them.”
“I know. I said I still worked there, but that’s not true.”
“Marty took you away from all that.”
She nodded. “He was a client. I was a theatrical wa
“And paralegals.”
“I was never a paralegal. I worked reception desk and switchboard. Until, as you said, Marty took me away from all that. He was very nice to me, he took an interest in my career, he took me to lunch at the Pretenders and introduced me to people. And he said it was hard enough for a young person to get a foot in the door of the New York theater without having to hold down a full-time job at the same time. Which is the absolute truth, believe me.”
“I’m sure you’re right.”
“And he said he’d like to pay my rent and give me enough money every month so that I could get by. It wouldn’t be the lap of luxury, but it would keep me going while I found out whether I had a chance to make it in the theater.”
“And all you had to do in return was go to bed with him.”
“I was already doing that.”
“Oh.”
“He’s an attractive man, Bernie. Tall and slender, flowing gray hair, very distinguished. Wonderful ma
“With Borden Stoppelgard,” I guessed.
“Ughhh,” she said. “Are you out of your mind?”
“Evidently.”
“Borden Stoppelgard is pond scum, Bernie. You get warts from touching people like Borden Stoppelgard.”
“I’m sorry I mentioned him.”
“So am I. Marty thinks Borden is a joke. He has to put up with him because he’s married to Borden’s big sister. I only met Borden once, and believe me, that was enough.”
“When was that?”
“Sometime in June. I was in a showcase presentation of an early P. J. Barry play. You know how that works, don’t you? Nobody gets paid, but you can try to get people to come and see your work. Agents and people like that. Of course, ninety percent of the audience consists of the friends and relatives of the different members of the cast. But it’s good experience, especially if the plays any good, and this one was excellent.”
“And Marty brought the whole family?”
“He brought his wife,” she said, “and he brought Borden and his wife. He gets a block of four patron tickets to every production at this particular theater, because he’s one of their angels.” She started to look away, then met my eyes. “That may have had something to do with my getting the part,” she said levelly.
“Oh.”
“I had di
“Pond scum, I think you said.”
“I was giving him the benefit of the doubt. It would be just my luck to sound off like this and then have him turn out to be your best friend, but of course he’s not, is he? He’s your landlord.”
“Right, and pond scum’s the nicest thing anybody ever said about him. You said you were involved with somebody besides Gilmartin.”
“I was,” she said. “But I broke it off.”
“When you started sleeping with Marty.”
“No.”
“When he started paying your rent.”
“A little later than that, actually.”
“When?”
“This past Monday.”
“Oh.”
“Or was it Tuesday? No, it was Monday night. I threw his keys at him and I stormed out the door. It was a great exit, but I should have held on to the keys. Bernie, can I ask you something?”
“Sure.”
“Did you take Marty’s cards? Look, in case you’re afraid I’m wearing a wire, don’t answer out loud. Blink once for yes and twice for no.”
“I don’t care if you’re wearing a wire,” I said. “The answer’s no. No one else has believed me, so I hardly expect you to, but that’s the answer.”
“I believe you.”
“You do?”
“I never thought you took them in the first place. I had a pretty good idea who took them the minute Marty mentioned they were gone, and before your name even came up. I think Luke took them.”
“Good old Luke.”
“I can’t believe this. You know Luke?”
“Nope. Never heard of him. But I can probably guess who he is. Your boyfriend, right?”
“Not since Monday.”
“That’s when you threw the keys in his face.”
“Actually I threw them across the room.”
“Tell me about Luke,” I suggested.
“I don’t know where to start. He’s an actor. He came to New York fresh out of high school and he’s spent the past fifteen years trying to get a break. He’s had some commercials and bit parts in a couple of soaps, and he had two lines in Sidney Lumet’s last film, and he toured for three months in the road company of Sour Grapes. He pays the rent by tending bar and working for a couple of unlicensed moving companies. Gypsy movers, they call them.” She frowned. “And he likes to see himself as a romantically shady character. One time he jumped out of bed in the middle of the afternoon and put on a suit and tie. I asked him where he was going. The supermarket, he told me. I said, you’re dressing like that for D’Agostino’s? You get more respect, he said, and he grabbed his attaché case and went out the door.
“Twenty minutes later he came back with a bag of groceries. A head of lettuce, a couple of potatoes, I forget what else. A couple of dollars’ worth of groceries. Then he goes, Duh-dah! and opens the attaché case, and inside he’s got two gorgeous strip sirloins an inch thick. You just have to know how to shop, he said.”
“Isn’t that how Jesse James used to do it?”
“At the time,” she said, “I have to admit I thought it was pretty cool. And then when I started seeing Marty, the contrast between the two of them was kind of interesting.”
“I can imagine.”
“He’s sort of a crook. I tried not to know very much about the various hustles he was working, but I know he’s been doing a little small-time drug dealing. He takes a lot of pills himself, uppers and downers, and he pays for them by selling some of them to people he knows.”
“Safer than selling to people you don’t know.”
“At first he thought it was really neat that Marty was paying my rent. He figured I had a hustle of my own going and that made us birds of a feather. He would refer to Marty as ‘the old guy’ or ‘your meal ticket.’ It started to bother him when he began to realize that I really cared for Marty, that the relationship was important to me emotionally.”
“So he was jealous.”
“Kind of, yeah.”
“And then you had a fight and broke up with him.”
“On Monday, and when Marty looked for his baseball cards Thursday night they were gone. I’m sure Luke took them. And it’s all my fault.”
“How do you figure that?”
“I told him about Marty’s apartment, and the things he had in it. Marty took me there one afternoon last month. He and his wife were spending the week with friends in East Hampton, and he had come in for the day, and we went out to lunch and then he said he’d like to show me where he lived. It’s not what you’re thinking.”
“Huh?”
“We didn’t…do anything,” she said. “I couldn’t, not in his wife’s house. I felt fu