The Chelsea Girl Murders by Sparkle Hayter Page B

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    It seemed a shame that she couldn’t see everything that this city, or even just this particular street, had to offer. Twenty-third Street between Seventh and Eighth avenues is one of the city’s more eclectic blocks and I walked slowly down it, trying to chill out, looking in the windows of the stores. There were two hotels—the Chelsea and the Chelsea Savoy—a YMCA, a library, a fishing-tackle store, a synagogue, a secondhand guitar store, a comic-book store, S&M cafe, two banks, a Radio Shack, three hairdressers, three holistic healers, a record store, a tax attorney, an art-supply store, a health-food store, two delis, two boutiques, an optometrist, a dentist, a stationery store, a movieplex, two subway stations, the headquarters of the Communist Party of the United States of America (CPUSA), plus its bookstore. There was a place called The 99 Cent Palace (“A Kingdom for Under a Buck”), where cheap sundry items were sold—brands of cereal and cleaning products I’d never heard of, Mexican toothpaste, cheap plastic bowls.
    There were eight or nine eating places, two of them in the Chelsea Hotel, and two doughnut places, a Krispy Kreme and a place on the corner of Eighth and Twenty-Third known simply as “Donuts,” which had two horseshoe-shaped lunch counters and looked like something right out of an old Life magazine, as if it hadn’t changed since 1945, except for the ten different flavors of Snapple in the cooler. I went inside Donuts. It was a funny little place. Its motto was proudly emblazoned on the menu signs on the wall: “Open 24 Hours. We stay open to serve you when you need us, not when we need you.”
    There was just one other customer in the place, a white guy with a gray ponytail, wearing a red flannel shirt and some sort of New Age rainbow medallion around his neck. I imagined he fancied himself some kind of cross between Hemingway and Timothy Leary. An old waiter in a big white apron approached me timidly and said, in a voice barely above a whisper, “What can I get for you?”
    â€œA chocolate chunk muffin,” I said. “And coffee, light, please.”
    He mumbled something and backed away from me.
    The murder had happened late, and only one paper, the News-Journal , had the story in time to make its deadline. To my great relief, the News-Journal reported the body had fallen on “an unidentified tenant.” Thank you, June Fairchild, I thought. She’d kept my name out of it … for the moment.
    â€œWho Shot Controversial Art Dealer?” The News-Journal asked. “Troubled art dealer Gerald Woznik was found dead in the notorious Chelsea Hotel last night. Police say he’d been shot in the back.”
    It went on to say that in recent months, Woznik reportedly had had financial and personal troubles, and quoted Woznik’s ex-wife, Naomi Wise Woznik, who issued a brief statement from the surrealist commune in Tuscany where she was living: “The world has lost a great art connoisseur and a real bastard.”
    That word, “bastard,” came up a lot in quotes from “friends,” fellow art dealers, and artists who claimed the dead had ripped them off. Gerald Woznik was also “arrogant,” “manipulative,” and “a liar and a thief.”
    Only heiress and art dealer Grace Rouse, the woman Woznik had been living with, defended him.
    â€œHe was a misunderstood genius,” she said.
    My cell phone rang, startling the timid waiter and drawing looks from the short-order cook and the guy who looked like Timothy Leary. I felt like a traveler from the future, whipping out the phone in this anachronistic joint.
    â€œRobin, it’s June Fairchild,” said the caller. “I wanted you to know, one of your neighbors at the Chelsea had been watching through the peephole, and saw the man slam, bleeding, against the door, before you opened it.”
    â€œGreat, so I’m