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The Chelsea Girl Murders

A Robin Hudson Mystery

OPEN ROAD INTEGRATED MEDIA

Thanks to Mrs. Dulcinia Ramirez and her pathological love of Jesus, and thanks also to the Holy Toledo Religious Novelty Company of Toledo, Ohio, and Shanghai, China, my neighbors and I found ourselves out on the street in our pajamas one spring night, watching our building burn. Of course, we didn't yet know what was to blame. It took several weeks for the fire department to trace the blaze to Mrs. Ramirez's electric Ascension of Jesus display, or what was left of it after the immolation.

My name is Robin Hudson and at the time of the fire I was the programming head for the Worldwide Women's Network, a subsidiary of Jackson Broadcasting. I was forty going on forty-one, divorced and childless. Since college I had lived in Manhattan's East Village in a prewar walk-up on East Tenth Street between avenues B and C, a clean, quiet block populated largely by Hispanic working people and their families. Through many eras and transformations, I stuck it out on the Lower East Side, from its days as an anarchist slum to the current haute-bohemian paradise enjoyed by yuppies and affluent twenty-somethings from elsewhere who had seen a road show of Rent and been inspired to move here, dye their hair pink and blue, and taste la vie boheme. It was this last incarnation that got me thinking it might be time to leave the East Village and look for an apartment in a more authentic, grown-up New York neighborhood, one that was less at risk of being Disneyfied.

But it was just idle thinking, until Jesus short-circuited.

The fire alarm went off in the hallway with an unholy shriek after midnight, as I was falling asleep and into a gauzy, half dream, about Pierre, this French genius with whom I'd recently had a mad fling. So appealing was this dream, I didn't react right away to the alarm. Only when I smelled the smoke did I jump out of bed, open the window, and kick away the poison ivy planters so my cat, Louise Bryant, could escape. Before I followed her, I wildly grabbed stuff—my purse, my laptop, shopping bags full of mementoes and personal papers, and an old Enfield rifle, a present from a man I'd loved and lost. I threw a black coat over my antique peach nightgown and shoved my feet into slippers. Black smoke was starting to fill my apartment when I went clanging down the fire escape.

After me on the fire escape came my neighbors, old Mr. O'Brien and his latest "housekeeper," a widow he'd met through a mailorder bride magazine he subscribed to. The way they went down together, wrapped up in one big yellow blanket, made me think they weren't wearing much underneath.

Most of my neighbors were already out of the building, standing on the street in their pajamas. It's an odd thing to see your neighbors in their nightclothes. My neighbor Sally was standing in a flowing, iridescent white nightgown, a bag under one arm and her powder blue, circa 1962 Samsonite suitcase under the other, underwear and paper sticking out of it. Phil, our saintly super, a tweed coat over his striped pajamas, was holding his scrapbook of clippings and doing a head count with Helen Fitkis, unrepentant Communist and widow of a longshoreman. She wore a quilted orange-and-yellow housecoat over gray slippers, and was holding my cat. Mr. Burpus, a subway motorman and enthusiastic philatelist, wore green pajama bottoms and a brown houndstooth blazer, no shirt. He was clutching a stamp album. Three Japanese girls, NYU film students who were subletting the apartment above me, wore identical black leather jackets over flannel pajamas, in different pastel colors. Mr. O'Brien's bare, pale legs poked out from beneath the yellow blanket, next to the pale legs of the "housekeeper." He was barefoot, while she wore one red slipper.

At this point, only old Mrs. Ramirez was missing. Mrs. Ramirez's apartment, located conveniently below mine, was full of old wooden furniture, religious candles, scrapbooks, photographs, and other highly flammable stuff. As the biggest flames were coming from her window, we all assumed the worst: When that pile of tinder ignited, she went up like Joan of Arc.

"She was very dried out. She would have burned fast," said Mr. O'Brien, displaying the sensitivity of a man who orders his concubines from the backs of magazines and calls them "housekeepers."

"That's a great comfort," I said.

"It would have been a quick death," agreed his "housekeeper." "And now she's with Jesus."

"Who's with Jesus?" demanded a voice in the dark. "What's going on?"

Mrs. Ramirez stood there, in a trim black coat and matching hat, with her Chihuahua, Señor, just back from one of her one-woman Neighborhood Watch rounds.

"Who's with Jesus?" she demanded again. Maybe it was my imagination, but I thought I detected a note of jealousy.

"We thought you were, luv," Phil said. "Thank God you're okay. The building doesn't look very good though."

"A fire," Mrs. R. correctly identified. Mrs. Ramirez of course had a theory to share about the fire, that our neighbor Sally, "the witch," had caused the fire by burning herbs and had been inviting divine retribution for practicing "the black arts."

Sally began to weep, and protested: "I wasn't burning anything. I was asleep."

"Then who was it?" Mrs. R. asked, looking around for suspects.

Flashing lights from emergency vehicles strobed the street. It had rained earlier, leaving a wet, reflective sheen, making the darkness seem somehow brighter. Blurry ribbons of reflected light—red, white, yellow—bled into each other on the wet asphalt. Above us, burning pieces of paper and cloth came down in a rain of softly falling black ash, as though it were snowing in hell. More engines arrived. There was a lot of noise—the roar and crackle of the fire, firemen hollering to each other, the sound of the water hoses, and spectators chattering in various languages, but it quickly turned to white noise. I was stunned. How stunned? I only subconsciously noticed how incredibly manly and attractive the firefighters were. By now, the flames were coming out of my window and nearly two decades of my existence was going up in putrid black smoke.

"You're not going to be able to go back in there tonight," one of the fire guys said. "I don't know if or when you'll be going back. You'd better find other accommodation."

"Let's go have a drink," Phil the super suggested, taking control. In a motley procession of pajama-clad people and pets, we trooped down Avenue B to the Lucky 7 bar. After we took a couple of tables, we ordered a round of beverages. Even Mrs. Ramirez indulged, ordering a small sherry. The three of us with cell phones began making calls.

First we called the "management company" that ran our building, which is really just one miserly Greek guy, his indolent brother, and in the office a woman named Florence who couldn't find her ass with both her hands, and when they didn't respond to our page, we set about tracking down places for everyone to stay. Sally was going to stay with her friend Delia. Helen and Phil were going to stay with her sister and brother-in-law in Jersey, which did not seem to thrill Phil much. Mrs. Ramirez had no living relatives, and no friends, really, but she was a churchgoing Catholic and Phil was able to find an order of patient, long-suffering nuns on Long Island who could and would take her and Señor, no doubt earning themselves many indulgences in the kingdom of heaven.

As for me, my friend Tamayo Scheinman, a comedienne, keeps a place at the Chelsea Hotel. At the moment, she was traveling around the world with Buzzer, her new boyfriend. She could be anywhere from Outer Mongolia to Damascus, and was only reachable by native runner, high-psi telepathy, or irregular E-mail from an Internet cafe. But I had keys to the place in my purse and an open invitation to use the apartment whenever she was away—you know, for trysts and such, if my apartment was too messy or neutral ground was required. Until now, I'd had no need for it.

"Another round?" suggested Phil.

"Not for me. I have to work tomorrow," I said.

"I'll call you," he said to me, and we all said our good-byes.

Still in my nightclothes, I got a cab and rode uptown to Twenty-third Street between Seventh and Eighth avenues, and to the Chelsea Hotel. You may have heard of it. Maybe you've even stayed there, or walked past it on West Twenty-third Street. You can't miss it, a redbrick Victorian Gothic building, almost castle-like, looming over the staid, utilitarian buildings of Twenty-third. The front is lined with lacy, black wrought-iron balconies, the roof with turrets and pyramids. It looks like the kind of place the Addams family would check into when in New York. It is twelve stories high and was, when it was built in the 1880s, the tallest building in New York. Though it started out as cooperative apartments, it soon became a residential hotel for show people, artists, Negroes, homosexuals, and others who couldn't find lodging in more "respectable" hostelries. Over the years it has housed famous, infamous, and obscure artists, as well as nonartists and tourists drawn to its history or bohemian atmosphere.

Tamayo had put my name on her rental card at the Chelsea, giving me blanket permission to use her apartment. A bellman named Jerome helped me carry my few things up to Tamayo's floor. He smiled slightly when he saw me, in my bedclothes, carrying my cat and my haphazard belongings.

"Our apartment building burned down," I said, to explain, and he shrugged almost imperceptibly, completely unnonplussed. Probably not the first time someone in pajamas had moved into the Chelsea 'round midnight with nothing but a clutch of overflowing shopping bags, a rifle, and a cat.

The door of Tamayo's apartment, 711, opened into darkness. I turned on the light and looked around a largish studio partitioned by parchment screens into separate sleeping, eating, and sitting areas. One wall was curved. There were two sets of French doors onto the wrought iron-filigree balcony overlooking Twenty-third Street. The bed was a loft with a desk beneath it to save space. The decor was crazy Japanese minimalist. There wasn't a lot of it, but what was there was interesting. The paper screens, for example, were made of transparent parchment in disparate designs and colors—one was aqua-and-red checkerboard, another swirling green and purple, another concentric circles of alternating pink and orange. The walls were off-white. The asymmetrical furniture was shiny white and very simple, except for a coffee table Tamayo had made herself, white enamel inlaid with hundreds of small fragments of mirror that reflected the light through the screens into a spray of bright colors on the walls and the ceiling. It felt a little like being inside a Laugh-In sketch.

After fashioning a makeshift litter box for Louise Bryant using newspaper and a cardboard box, I fired up my laptop and sent an E-mail to Tamayo to let her know I was camping out in her apartment. Then I stripped to my underwear and flopped onto Tamayo's bed. I was pretty tired. I was still recovering from a long business trip for my company and what happens? My apartment burns down, and just one day before my much-needed vacation. My life is ruled by no law but Murphy's.

Why didn't I feel worse about this? I wondered. My home and almost all my belongings were gone. Under normal circumstances, this would have been cause for self-pity and an excuse to drink vodka, but for some reason I didn't feel too badly about it yet. Maybe it was because I was still in a state of shock. Maybe it was those two months on four continents, which made me harder to surprise, and made me realize that sanity and reality are relative concepts, relative to the patch of land you're standing on and the people you're with. What I was now in was just another alternate reality. Roll with the punches when you have to, right? And if that last trip had taught me nothing else, it was the value of traveling light, in every sense of the word, whenever possible.

Or maybe I was just too fucking tired for angst. I dropped off to sleep pretty quickly and slept until around four A.M., when I was roused by a terrible pounding and a hollering at the door.

"Hey! You in there?" a man called out.

Before I went to the door, I looked around for something to use to defend myself and that's when I felt the first twinge of real loss from the fire. I'd lost my entire arsenal of innocuous-looking self-defense weaponry—all my poison ivy, my various glue guns, my pepper spray, my cordless, gas-canister curling iron. I still had the nineteenth-century Enfield rifle, though, which I'd taken with me for its sentimental value. It had no bullets in it, probably didn't work anyway, but it was pretty scary looking.

"Hey, baby, let me in!" he said. "Baby, come on!"

As quietly as I could, I climbed down from the loft bed, picked up the rifle from the desk, and crept in the dark toward the kitchen, where I grabbed my cell phone and took it with me so I could call for help quickly if I needed to.

"You've got the wrong apartment," I shouted back, my eye to the peephole. Through the fish-eye lens, he looked like a white man/boy with a very small body and a very large head. He had brown hair, brown eyes, and a day or two's growth of peach fuzz.

"I know she's in there. Let me in!" He was surly and antagonistic.

"She's not here," I said. "Who lives here? Do you know?"

"Uh, I don't know. Or I forget. Nadia knows you."

"You've got the wrong apartment," I said. "Go away!"

"Let me in!"

"You've got the wrong apartment! Go away or I'll call the police."

He swore in some other language. I didn't speak that language but after you've traveled in enough countries and stepped on enough toes, you can recognize the curse words just by tone.

I watched until he was out of view, waited a moment longer, and went back to bed. Barely an hour had passed when, around five A.M. I was awakened by more racket.

"Hey! Who put the chain on?" a woman called out. "Hello? HELLO! Tamayo? Are you home already?"

The door was ajar, the chain on it. The woman kept pounding on the door. I stood in the shadows, away from the light coming in from the hall, so I could see her but so she couldn't see me. It was a young woman with bleached-blond hair and big, dark glasses, wearing jeans and a big T-shirt. She had a suitcase and a small backpack. Behind her across the hall and down a couple of doors, a bald man was standing in his doorway, watching us and lifting hand weights.

"I hear you in there, TaMAYo!"

"Who is it?" I asked, in a low, clear voice. "I've got a gun."

"Uh, er, uh. Is this TaMAYo Scheinman's apartment?"

"It is. How did you unlock the door?"

"TaMAYo sent me the keys. See?"

She stuck a padded envelope under the door chain.

I grabbed it and said, "Don't move," then slammed the door shut, and turned on the light.

"Dear Nadia," it said. "Here are the keys. Hope all goes well with your fiancé. Be very careful. E-mail me when you're grounded. If you need any help, call Maggie in 709. Good luck and good sex."

It was a note from Tamayo all right. I recognized the handwriting and the style.

I opened the door.

"I'm sorry, I didn't know Tamayo had other guests coming. Come in," I said.

"Who the fuck are you?" she asked, with just a trace of an accent.

It sounded foreign, but I couldn't put my finger on what it was. In the kitchen light, she looked like a teenager, but that may have been because she had the kind of baby-face cutes that tend to make a woman look younger than her years all her life.

"Robin Hudson, a friend of Tamayo's."

"What are you doing here?" she demanded.

"My apartment burned down. I had keys, so I came to stay here. You were expecting Tamayo to be here?"

"No. But when I saw the chain was on the door I assumed she had come back to New York. How do I know you're a friend of Tamayo's?" she asked.

"Don't be paranoid. What is it with kids today? You're so suspicious," I said, but held back all sarcasm and hostility, a little trick I'd had to learn and use a lot while on the road.

"I need to know if you're telling the truth about being Tamayo's friend," she said imperiously. "Otherwise, you'll have to leave."

"I'll have to leave? My apartment burned down. It's after five in the morning. I was here first."

"I have a written invitation to be here," she said.

"I have a blanket invitation. Look, I am so tired I can't think straight—"

"How do I know you know Tamayo? I need to know."

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Excerpted from The Chelsea Girl Murders by Sparkle Hayter. Copyright © 2000 Sparkle Hayter. Excerpted by permission of OPEN ROAD INTEGRATED MEDIA.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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