“No idea.” His expression is relaxed, guileless. “But it’s nice to have a skill that’s innocuous for a change.”
“All your weird skills ...” Nomi chews her lip, thinking about it. “But maybe we can use that.”
He glances up. “What do you mean?”
She ticks off on her fingers. “Drawing, covert tracking, Italian speaking, even those dreams of yours ... They’re all probably things you could do or were connected to before your head injury, right? It’s got to be related to your amnesia. To who you were before. We can add details like this to your missing person profile. It might help us get some hits.”
“Really?”
“I told you, I’m an opportunist.” She examines the sketch. “His sideburns came a little lower down ...”
Noone works on the sketch some more, with Nomi providing suggestions or guidance on the details. After a few minutes, it’s done.
“There.” He stubs out his smoke and sets his pencil down. “That’s as close as I can get, I think.”
He tears out the page and hands it to her. Nomi holds it at arm’s length. “Goddamn, that’s him. The courier guy. Wild stuff. Like working with a police sketch artist. This is going to be incredibly useful, thank you.”
“No problem.”
“I can take this around and ask if anyone’s seen him.” She notices Noone scrubbing both hands over his face. “You okay?”
“Ah, yeah ... Just a headache.” He sets down the notebook and pencils. “I might go upstairs and get some medication. Unless you need me for something?”
“No way,” she says. “I mean, don’t worry about it. You should go home, get some rest. You were up half the night with me—you must be exhausted.”
“A little exhausted, yes.” He laughs shortly, extricates himself from the chair, stiff limbed, and finds his stuff. “Okay, I’ll leave you to get your work done—I think I’m going to take my meds and get some more sleep. I’m really glad you’re feeling better. And thanks for the coffee.”
“Thanks for the sketch. And for staying on coma watch.” She can be more generous than that. “Actually, thanks for a lot of things.”
“You’re welcome. Watch out for strange men in courier jackets.”
Nomi tracks him as he heads for the door. Once he’s gone, the apartment feels oddly quiet. But the day has just started, and it’s not like she doesn’t have plenty of shit to do.
After a shower, back in her jeans and a fresh black T-shirt that has a picture of a hand making devil horns and the wordDisobeyscrawled across the front, she takes a couple Advil and moves to her office to start the grind. The rubber band–bundled items from Ricki Cevolatti are in the tray on her desk: four business cards, two sticky notes, the bookie’s slip, three receipts scrawled with phone numbers. For the next few hours, she uses her time-honored technique for cold-calling, which involves chewing gum while sounding bored and telling the person who answers the phone that they may be eligible for a refund on their car insurance.
Almost all the calls go nowhere. The bookie turns out to be one of the receipt numbers, and he informs her that the slip is only valid to cash out for a month after the date of issue, which turns out to have been in July. One of the other receipt numbers is for an escort service in Crown Heights. Another one rings out unanswered. A business card for a guy called Herschel Sebbitz has the same number as one of the sticky notes, and Sebbitz appears to have a legitimate business as a mechanic. Two other business cards are for a care nurse for Cevolatti’s aunt and a pool hall in the Lower East Side. The final sticky note number has been disconnected. Either the disconnected number or the unanswered number could belong to Janice D’Addario—impossible to know.
Nomi puts her gum in the trash, takes a break, makes fresh coffee. As she’s waiting for the brew to perk, her eyes are drawn by a sharp,bright edge: The shiny silver key from Cevolatti’s wallet is still on her desk. The number202is stamped on one side.
It could be a key to any post office box anywhere in the city, and the idea of chasing around for the right box doesn’t hold a lot of appeal. But she can at least try the most obvious places: the Flatbush Station post office on Church Avenue, and the Farley Building in Midtown.
On the off chance, she calls Flatbush and discovers that the key, as she describes it over the phone, is definitely for a post box, and—more importantly—that they only have 180 post office boxes at the Flatbush location.Interesting.That just leaves the Farley Building.
First, though, she wants to see if one of her hunches is correct. It’s just gone noon, which means Teresa will finally be awake; Nomi gives her a call. Teresa is a fifty-three-year-old New Jersey native who used to be a madam; she now functions as a kind of den mother to a lot of the women—hookers and bar staff alike—who work at Chachi’s. She’s a tough old bird, and Nomi helped her recover some money from a scam artist about eighteen months ago, so she sometimes gives Nomi a line on what’s happening at the club.
When Teresa confirms that Janice D’Addario is usually behind the bar at Chachi’s three nights a week, Nomi does a fist pump right there in her office.
Bingo.“Teri, I need to go see her. Have you got an address?”
“Hold on, honey; I’m still in my pajamas ...” Teresa makes a rattling cough, sips something that Nomi can only assume is coffee, but who knows. “Okay, I got it for ya. Janice D.—I got her in my Rolodex as that, so I don’t get her mixed up with the other Janice, with the auburn hair. Now listen, Janice D. hasn’t shown for work the last few days, so I don’t know if you’ll find her, but here’s the address. Are you ready? You got a pencil or something?”
“I’ve got a pencil,” Nomi confirms. “Go for it.”
When she hangs up from the call, she fist-pumps again for good measure because hell yeah, she was due a win. Then she takes another two Advil, shoves on her boots, gathers her tote and jacket and sunglasses.Before she leaves the apartment, she tucks both Noone’s sketch of the courier guy and Cevolatti’s silver key into her jeans pockets.
The third floor is, once again, slightly warmer and sunnier, because of the skylight. Nomi raps on Noone’s door—no answer. Dammit. Yesterday, she was wondering how to get rid of him, and now when she needs him, he’s not around.
She clomps down the stairs to the foyer, slips on her sunglasses before spilling out the narrow door into the noonday heat. There’s not much traffic on Gansevoort, just a smattering of delivery trucks and pedestrians; the district meat workers have mostly finished their shifts and gone home. The street smells of bleach and beef fat.
