Free A Pinchbeck Bride by Stephen Anable Page B

Valley. She’s getting a promotion.”
    “So were you a regular at Tank?”
    “Once in a while. It wasn’t my scene. Too much Ecstacy, a little too fast. I was just becoming…self-aware.”
    “Does Rudy have any suspicions as to why Genevieve Courson was killed at Mingo House?”
    “No, I’m sure he’s as baffled as the rest of us. She was a bright, promising young girl—so I’ve heard.” At that moment, he found his fog-gray Audi, parked in front of Chill on Charles Street. I almost asked him to have a gelato and talk further. Now that he was leaving, he again became his formal, corporate self: “It was great to speak with you, Mark.”
    I never use the expression, but it came out anyway: “Take care.”

Chapter Twelve
    That evening, I was trying out some new material at a Chinese restaurant that, like so many in the area, doubled as a comedy club on certain nights. The Soong Dynasty was located just down the street from our condominium in a block that, a hundred years ago, had housed businesses selling sheet music and pianos; it was directly across from a colonial-era graveyard, a perpetual bit of Halloween abutting Boston Common. The restaurant’s décor was a combination of Bali Hai and the Forbidden City: its walls were bristling with bamboo paneling, which gave way to a jungle of plastic bird-of-paradise plants and then a plaster volcano with a painted lava eruption calling to mind a project from a science fair. A wishing well collected pennies for children with asthma, and a yellow Styrofoam dragon writhed across the ceiling from the cash register all the way to the rest rooms.
    Tonight, the audience seemed composed of all of the college students spending the summer in Boston. Portions of my routine were political humor focusing on the mayor and the Big Dig, the billion-dollar project to replace a crowded elevated expressway with a series of tunnels, still incomplete in the early 2000s. I worried how this would play with young people originally from Illinois or Virginia.
    In the midst of this audience, it was all the more startling to spy Nadia Gulbenkian in her lilac tweed suit, sitting all alone by the entrance to the rest rooms, just below the dragon’s spiky tail. She was sipping a cup of tea and smiling wanly while some backslapping frat boys laughed over their Scorpion Bowls at the next table. When she saw me, she waved her hand with the authority of a traffic cop.
    I had to squeeze past the college boys, who were evidently football players, judging by their jerseys. “Hey, you almost spilled our bowl, man. Are you the comedian? Are you funny? Because the drinks here suck. They’re like fruit punch.”
    “I’ll do my best.”
    Nadia had actually aged since the last time I’d encountered her. “I’m not really in the mood for comedy, but it’s very urgent that I speak with you. And I think you’re…a potential voice of reason about Mingo House.”
    The frat boys were laughing at photos one of them was brandishing on his cell phone. “And that’s
before
she got drunk, before the concert.”
    “I’ve been out of town, in New Hampshire,” Nadia said. “I left just after the funeral.”
    “I saw you there.”
    “Oh, certainly. Genevieve was a little full of herself, but she knew the score, if you know what I mean.”
    “I don’t. Tell me.”
    “I’d like to speak with you in private. I wasn’t sure where you lived and I didn’t want people to know I was contacting you. I saw this show listed in the
Phoenix
.”
    Nadia wasn’t in the demographic for the formerly “alternative” but now vaguely mainstream weekly paper. I noticed that one of her customarily flawless scarlet fingernails had chipped. “What I have to say is most urgent. And most confidential…” The frat boys drowned out the rest of her sentences. I could see a pair of breasts on the screen of the cell phone they were trading around.
    The owner of the Soong Dynasty, Ray Leung, was near the stage entrance,