The Girl From Nowhere Read Online Free PDF Page A

would be challenging to be the platonic roommate of a girl like this.
    “How long have you been at Jilly’s?” I asked.
    “Just over a week. She was there when I got back this afternoon, so she saw the blood and everything. I told her what happened and I told her about you, and she said I shouldn’t have dumped you like that after what you did for me. I mean, I’m really sorry about the way I behaved, but I didn’t know you knew nice people like Jilly. I was confused. She said I have to trust you.”
    “I wish you’d told me about Jilly this afternoon.”
    “I didn’t have any reason to.”
    I let that go, but the situation was getting harder by the second to buy into, if only because Sandy Smollett—in her present guise, at least—seemed like she should be wearing a label that said Untouched by Human Hand. Too good to be true but, if it was true—God help me—deep down, or maybe not so deep, I wanted to be the first to mess with that state of affairs. I forgave myself this lapse by assuring myself I was not alone in this ambition. And I reminded myself of Yari’s warning.
    “So tell me about these problems you’ve been having?”
    “Well, first there’s something else I must tell you.”
    She did that little trick of hers—biting her lip and coming on wide-eyed, as if she’d accidentally flushed her teddy bear down the toilet.
    “You mean that you’re a stripper?”
    She sat bolt upright.
    “How did you know?”
    “I’m a detective. I investigate things.”
    I didn’t want to introduce Yari Mendelssohn’s name at this point in the proceedings.
    “But what right did you have to investigate me? I didn’t ask you to.”
    She was mad. I played it softly.
    “I saw how scared you were this afternoon, and then you disappeared. That made me curious. And concerned too. Curious and concerned is what I do.”
    She calmed down.
    “I’m sorry,” she said. “I’m jumpy. You would be too if the things that have been happening to me had happened to you.”
    “So why don’t you tell me about them?”
    “Okay. To start with, you should know I’m not from New York.”
    “I’d never have guessed . . .”
    “I came here six months ago . . .”
    “From where?”
    “From Europe.”
    “What were you doing in Europe?”
    “This and that.”
    I didn’t pursue “this and that,” but would have placed a bet that it included stripping. No one just blew into New York and got a job as a stripper in a front-line house unless they had some serious experience.
    “So you arrived in the Apple and you got a job . . .”
    “At a place called Aladdin’s Alibi. Did you ever hear of it?”
    Aladdin’s Alibi was an overpriced T&A joint near the Port Authority Bus Terminal, the kind of flesh emporium that caters to sex-starved conventioneers with American Express Platinum Cards and nowhere to put their dicks. The fact that this was her place of employment confirmed my impression that Sandy Smollett had a background that was anything but tame, but the apparition that sat opposite me continued to seem mesmerizingly ordinary. Except for the fact that the more I looked at her the more ethereally beautiful she seemed. Put another way, she made me think of women painted by Leonardo da Vinci—from Ginevra de’ Benci to La Gioconda — ordinary mortals who were the wives of Italian dignitaries, artists’ models, or possibly boys, as some scholars would have us believe. Leonardo transformed them into beings possessed by a kind of transcendent beauty. Sandy Smollett had a touch of that kind of class. I hadn’t picked up on it earlier because of the frenetic circumstances, but here in the Cheyenne Diner it was plain to see. To me, anyway. I didn’t spot any of the nearby night owls gaping at her open-mouthed, but then how many night owls do you run into at the Louvre? And the more I gazed at her, the more I became aware of an inexplicable sexual magnetism that hovered a millimeter behind the veil—or was it a