Night Film(65)

“I’ll have someone look into it.”

“Thank you. Now, when am I taking you out for a drink?”

“When this city gets all warm and fuzzy inside.”

“So, never?”

“I keep hoping.” A phone bleated on her end. “I gotta take—”

She hung up.

It was after ten o’clock now, a Friday night. Groups of twentysomethings crowded the sidewalk, stumbling toward bars and hookups. Across the street, where the sloping redbrick wall surrounding Saint Patrick’s old cathedral cut sharply around the corner, I noticed a man in a black leather jacket talking on a cellphone, his hand cupped over the receiver.

He was staring at me and I couldn’t shake the feeling it was me he was speaking about.

He looked away, past the Ralph Lauren store on the corner, still muttering into his phone. I headed back into Gitane.

I was just being paranoid.





39


“I was just telling Hopper,” said Nora, as I sat down in the window seat beside her. “I found a receipt in Ashley’s trashcan.”

Hopper was inspecting the small piece of yellow paper, and with a doubtful look, he handed it to me.

It was a handwritten receipt from Rising Dragon Tattoos, located at 51 West 14th Street. Someone—I could only assume Ashley, though no name was listed—had paid $363.24 in cash for an “American flag / portrait tat” on October 5, 2011, at 8:21 P.M. I knew from the coroner’s photos that the tattoo Ashley had on her right foot predated this receipt. So it was a mystery what American flag / portrait tat referred to.

“We’ll go there tomorrow,” I said. “See if someone there recognizes her picture.”

“We’ll also have to find someone who can tell us what those circles are that she put under her bed,” said Nora, taking a bite of avocado toast.

“We don’t know she put them there,” interjected Hopper. “Any kook could have planted that.”

“I agree,” I said. “The landlord eavesdropping—she could have easily been lying about the key. There are also the two men Iona saw outside Ashley’s door. I wonder if she was hiding from somebody, possibly her family. Why else would she take the room under a pseudonym and change the locks?”

“It’s almost like there are two Ashleys,” said Nora thoughtfully.

“Meaning?” I asked.

She shoved her fork through the tower of couscous on her plate. “There’s the pianist. The woman who was fearless and wild. The girl Hopper met at Six Silver Lakes. Then there’s this other one people keep talking about. This creature with supernatural tendencies.”

“Supernatural tendencies,” I repeated.

She nodded, her face serious. “There’s what Guadalupe said at the Waldorf Towers. That she was marked.” She looked at Hopper. “In the coroner’s photo we saw a black dot in her left eye just like she said. Think of how she manipulated Morgan Devold without saying a word. She hypnotized him. And then Peter at Klavierhaus? He said she moved like an animal.”

“She was admitted against her will to a mental hospital,” said Hopper, sitting low in his seat. “Who knows what meds they gave her? I’ve seen people on that shit, trying to come off that shit. They don’t know what they’re doing half the time.”

“One other thing I noticed,” Nora continued in a subdued voice. “Ashley had some kind of weird interest in children.”

I was impressed. I’d noticed the same thread myself.

“Ashley read Morgan Devold’s daughter a bedtime story,” she went on. “She also babysat the landlord’s nephew. If she came to the city, hoping to meet someone at the Waldorf—and now this nightclub—why would she take the time to do that?”

“Maybe she liked kids,” said Hopper.

“That’s some serious interaction with children in a span of just a few days. Remember that doll Morgan Devold fished out of the pool? He told us it’d been missing for a few weeks.”

“So?” said Hopper.

“That’d be around the time Ashley was at his house.”

“You think Ashley hid the doll in the pool?”

“Maybe. Why would she put that dirt in circles under her bed? Or those roots over her door?”

“We already established she probably didn’t do that.” He said it so angrily, a couple of models at the table beside us stopped speaking to stare at him. He leaned in, lowering his voice. “I’m sure you love the idea that Ashley was some kind of Blair Witch, cooking up stews with puppy-dog tails and little kids’ toes or whatever the f*ck. But it’s a joke. Her family’s responsible. They’re the wackjobs who put her in Briarwood. She wanted to get away from them. Probably died trying.” He muttered these last words to himself, shoving his hair out of his eyes and stabbing his fork into his baked eggs, too irritated to eat.

Nora shot me a look and mutely resumed eating. I said nothing. The way she phrased it—Ashley had some kind of weird interest in children—reminded me of my anonymous caller from five years ago. John. There’s something he does to the children, he’d said, words that had haunted me.

What did it mean? That the entire family, or at least father and daughter, had a fixation on children? Why?