“You’re the one who saw the listing, not me.”
“Yearsago, Seb,” Aubrey protested. “I don’t remember the details. Besides, you’d have a better shot at tracking down provenance. I do my museum purchasing throughyou, after all.”
“Not all of it, though.”
“Don’t give me that shit again. You don’t specialize in furniture. I needed a chaise lounge appropriate to the 1870s. I couldn’t ignore the parlor revamp simply because my bestie doesn’t like dealing in practical goods.”
“Microscope slides decorated in lithograph are perfectly practical to the period. By the late nineteenth century, plenty of households owned microscopes and curiosity cabinets.”
“You tried to sell me a box of nearly a hundred slides, which included bugs and human tissue.”
“It’s interesting!” I argued.
“I can’t furnish a museum with that!” Aubrey cried. “I’m hanging up now.”
“You’re such a diva.”
“You’re a bitch.”
“If you happen to remember anything, give me a ring?”
“If I remember—about the spiritoscope?”
“No, I’d like to know how your patrons are enjoying that chaise lounge.”
Aubrey scoffed, but agreed, then asked, “Are we still doing brunch this Sunday?”
“I guess.”
“Remind me to punch you in the dick before the first round of mimosas.” He hung up.
Aubrey could have been a touch more helpful, but itwascurious that at least one version of the spiritoscope had been sold through legitimate channels, and not too long ago, when you take into account the passage of time in the arts and antique industry being decidedly slower than the rest of the world’s perception. If it indeed sold at one of the big houses, as Aubrey claimed, then it’d very likely fetched a pretty penny too. And based on my own experience with auction clientele, this told me we were looking at a suspect who had money to burn and probably liked collecting. After all, your average Joe wasn’t withdrawing hard-earned savings to go shopping at Sotheby’s.
This made Marie, and possibly Rose, problematic persons of interest. Cleaning storefronts didn’t strike me as a job that allowed for any sort of frivolous spending, and while Rose might have been making bank a few years ago, by her own words, business was way down as of late. Of course, I didn’t know either of their financial situations years ago when that spiritoscope had been up for auction, or that it hadn’t possibly exchanged hands in private since the initial sale and found its way into either of those women’s lives. Rose was certainly the right personality—someone who would have a genuine interest in a Spiritualism antique, and there was also the fact that she refused to disclose details as to her whereabouts earlier in the week, which presented a suspicious dead end.
So I circled back to Marie—the quiet observer who’d finagled her way into a guarded community. Perhaps being around Sandra had developed an interest in spirits or the occult for Marie. Just because she dusted trinkets and took out the trash for a living didn’t mean she couldn’t have her mind on more thought-provoking things. I mean, I was a great example: I collected oddities for a living, yet here I was, trying to solve a murder instead.
No, scratch that. I wasnotsleuthing into a murder. I was looking into the purchase and ownership history of the spiritoscope.
I opened a web browser on my phone, held it close, and carefully pecked out,Marie YangandWhitepages. I wasn’t sure of any other method in which to find her, and I really, really wanted to talk with Marie. It was like a compulsive tick in the back of my brain, a buzzing that kept getting louder by the minute. There was something there—something that’d turn out to be the missing piece in this tragedy. Finding it would allow Calvin to close this investigation and also do away with any further attempts Sinclair made at publishing an article along the lines of “Then and Now: The Cases of a Gay Sleuthhound,” or something as equally trite.
I found three Marie Yangs listed in the city. One address was in Brooklyn Heights and another in Lenox Hill. I didn’t think the dollar signs associated with those neighborhoods would be welcoming to a decidedly blue-collar woman like the Marie I was on the hunt for. But the third address—way the fuck uptown in Inwood—was more in line with what I was expecting. If Marie was, in fact, even listed in the online Whitepages.
Expelling a breath that was cooler than the air around me, I pocketed my phone, turned east, and started walking toward the Uptown 1.
CHAPTER EIGHT
It took nearly an hour to reach 207th Street.
The 1 train rumbled overhead toward 215th Street as I made my way down the steps from the elevated platform, walking stick extended because I was cranky and wanted the distance inherently provided by the cane. I was swimming in my own juices, had a headache from the shitty, strobing lights of the train, and was so hungry that even the fried chicken joint on the corner of 207th and Post Avenue seemed like a good idea, despite the deep fryers likely making that place inhospitable to humans. Breakfast with Neil had felt like a lifetime ago, and I’d been so preoccupied with work, followed by Sinclair’s unwanted visit, and then the “polite inquiries”—that’s what I was calling sleuthing now—I’d been making into Rose and Marie that the fact that it was past lunchtime hadn’t really hit until I’d had nothing to do but sit on the train and watch the guy across from me eat his way through four paper bags of churros bought from the Blessed Churro Ladies of the subway.
I checked my phone again to confirm the address of the most likely Marie Yang, and found it within a few minutes—a three-story multiuse, the ground floor taken up by a mom-and-pop grocery and flower shop. I collapsed my cane, shoved it into my bag, and wove around a herd of unsupervised school-aged kids racing up and down the block, screaming and laughing as they soaked each other with water guns. I read the names on the door buzzer and was relieved to see M. Yang, 2R—rear apartment. I pressed, let go, and waited.
No reply.
I tried again.
Nada.
