A Murder Too Close

by Penny Mickelbury

  I had really stepped in it this time. I struggled with what to tell her, knowing that I did, in fact, owe her some kind of explanation. Sam wasn’t officially and technically a client, so confidentiality wasn’t an issue. But I sure as hell wasn’t going to tell what he’d asked me to do, especially in light of what I’d just learned. I took a deep breath. “He was all worked up about some boy that Sasha’s dating.”

  “Frankie Patel? He bothered you with that?”

  “I told him I thought he was overreacting, that kids today fell in and out of infatuation just like we did, and I thought I’d gotten him calmed down,” I lied but it didn’t work. Ellie’s face changed again, horror this time taking center stage.

  “That fire last night at the restaurant. Sammy did that?”

  “I don’t know, Ellie. Please don’t jump to that conclusion. I don’t know and until there’s something solid to go on—”

  “Ellie, come to the front, please. Ellie, to the front.”

  I was saved by a voice from the intercom. Ellie glanced at the clock, swore, then turned and ran from the box. I followed her down the stairs and through the noise and the heat and the steam and the chemical smells, to the front of the store, being as amazed as the first time I did it how it could manage to be so much cooler and quieter out here. There were at least ten people in line in front of the counter; I could see why the harried woman behind the counter had called for help. I squeezed my way from behind the counter, got my coat, and squeezed my way out of the front door. I got into my coat and hat, then waited while three people exited the dry cleaning store, and three more entered, before I could stick my head in and tell Ellie that I’d call her later. And before I could leave, there was more entering and exiting Epstein’s establishment. I walked away thinking there’s no way Sam Epstein could or would walk away from this. I also almost convinced myself that for the same reason, there was no way he could have torched the Patel family’s means of livelihood.

  And it would be quite a while later in the day before I again had time to think about the Epsteins and the Patels because when I got to the office, Yolanda and Mike Kallen were waiting for me. Kallen, surprisingly, looked a little nervous. Yo looked ready to chew nails. “I would say good morning,” I said, “but it hasn’t been so far, and you two don’t look likely to change my luck for me. So, I’ll just say, Mr. Kallen, what brings you here so early in the morning?”

  To his credit, the man managed to look a combination of sheepish, guilty, and apologetic. He was holding a coffee cup that he put down on the table nearest him, as much for something to do as he collected himself as to get rid of it. “I, ah, that is we, ah, my partners, changed our minds. We don’t want to go forward with the contract.”

  To my credit, I neither laughed in his face nor threw him out on his ass. To my credit, I did as I’d been trained by my partner to do and kept my mouth shut where matters of money were concerned and looked over at her. “Ms. Aguierre?”

  “As I have explained to Mr. Kallen, we have a signed contract. Of course, we don’t want to force—” and she hit the word force with lots of it— “our services on anyone, but it would be a bad business practice to merely void a signed contract. So, as I also have explained, we’ll gladly terminate your contract in exchange for fifteen percent of the value of said contract, plus retention of the retainer.”

  “But that’s not fair! You haven’t done any work!”

  “I spent three hours of my time and shared a considerable amount of my knowledge with you yesterday, Mr. Kallen. But beyond that, nobody forced you into signing a contract, and please remember that you called us. We didn’t solicit your business.” I looked at my watch. “And now you’re wasting more of our time. So what’s it gonna be, Mr. Kallen?”

  He looked for a moment like he wanted to turn ugly but he got his face under control. Or most of it; his eyes remained narrow slits and ice blue glinted at me through them. “Don’t you even want to know why, Mr. Rodriquez?”

  I shook my head. I was halfway across the room, heading for the kitchen and my own cup of coffee. I turned back to face him. “I don’t care why, Mr. Kallen. And it’s none of my business, really. You made a decision and then you changed your mind about it. I do it all the time, and I don’t owe anybody an explanation when it happens. But I do realize that there often are consequences attached to a change of mind. So should you.” I was now officially sick and tired of Kallen and I shot Yolanda the look that told her if she wanted this thing to end on a polite note, she’d better handle it.

  “Well, you can humor me, Mr. Kallen,” Yo said, “and tell me why you don’t want to go forward. Did somebody give us a bad review?”

  “No. I’m . . . we’re just not comfortable with anybody but us having access to all of the background information on potential employees and tenants. Mr. Rodriquez said that your company keeps a copy for your own protection but I really don’t understand why you would need protecting.”

  “Suppose, Mr. Kallen, that you refuse to rent one of your units to a person because we report to you a bad credit history for that person. And suppose that person sues you for defamation. Or suppose you fire a building maintenance man because our background check reveals an arrest for theft. And suppose that person sues you for wrongful termination. And suppose in both cases your defense is that we supplied you with faulty information. And suppose that we don’t have any documentation to support our findings because you’re not comfortable with anybody but you having access to that information.” Yolanda was practically snarling by the time she finished all her suppositions. “I suppose you realize where that would leave us, don’t you? But then, you wouldn’t care.”

  Kallen didn’t have anything to say to that. Nor did I, for that matter. Yo had done a much better job of telling the man to go fuck himself than I would have. “I hope you have a better understanding now, Mr. Kallen, of why we retain certain records,” she said so sweetly it gave me a toothache.

  He didn’t say anything for a moment. He stood there, looking from one to the other of us. Yolanda made and kept eye contact with him; I didn’t. I hung up my coat and poured a long overdue cup of coffee. The caffeine was starting to work when Kallen said, “Okay.”

  That’s all he said and now I did look at him. Then I looked at Yolanda, but she was looking at Kallen, too.

  “Okay what?” I said, borrowing a little piece of Yo’s snarl.

  “Okay you’re right. I didn’t understand before but I understand now everything.” In an instant our cold, calculating, savvy Manhattan wheeler-dealer property manager had become a walking advertisement for the need of all those profitable ESL businesses all over town. Kallen must have heard himself because he quickly reverted to type. “I can see this situation from your perspective and you’re quite right not to leave yourselves vulnerable.”

  Now he sounded like an American actor trying to sound British in a 1940s-era movie, and I remembered hearing or reading that once upon a time, English as a second language classes relied on British films to teach diction. But that was in my grandparents’ day. “It’s nice to know you don’t think we’re being unreasonable,” I said, and could hear in my memory a friend of my grandmother’s, a Black woman, saying, “That’s mighty white of you.” I must have smirked a bit at the thought because Kallen gave us a smile and a little shrug, and raised his palms in a so-sue-me gesture.

  “When can you start?” he asked.

  “We can get you a written evaluation of the Avenue B property, complete with recommendations, in the next few days, and we’ll begin scheduling site visits for the other properties immediately,” I said, and told him we’d start background checks on prospective employees and tenants as soon as we had names. “And please make sure all the names include as much information as possible, Mr. Kallen—social security numbers, date and place of birth, current address—anything to prevent us from confusing one person with another and creating the kind of problem Yolanda mentioned.” And so we don’t waste time and m
oney spinning our wheels I thought, but didn’t say.

  He said that he’d have that information delivered by messenger immediately then nodded as if our commitment to get started immediately was what he’d come to get, wished us a pleasant day, and left, closing the door just a little harder than necessary.

  “If we’ve just signed on to do business with the Russian Mafia—no, demanded the right and the opportunity to do so—I’ll shoot myself,” Yolanda said.

  “I’ll shoot you and save you the trouble,” I said. “But of course you know better since you checked them out before we offered them a contract,” I added, making it a statement of fact and leaving no room for a question, because I knew that Yolanda ran checks on everybody and everything that was potential business for us. She hurried over to her desk and was back in a second with one of the brown accordion folders she uses for active cases. Sometimes these files got so thick and heavy she had to wheel them around on an office chair. This one was practically empty. Yolanda opened it and gave me several sheets of paper, then told me what was on them before I could even begin reading.

  “KLM is a very respectable property management company with twenty years . . .”

  I cut her off. “Is Kallen the K and are they Russians? That’s all I want to know.”

  She shook her head. “The K is, or was, Richard King, Senior, who died a few years back, and nobody in those three letter’s a Russian. Richard King Jr. is the boss these days and Kallen’s an employee, been with the company about three years, place of birth listed as Brooklyn, New York.”

  We looked at each other, not needing to speak the obvious, but I said it anyway: “He’s from Brooklyn like I’m from Beijing.”

  “He lied,” Yo said.

  “That song and dance about the contract was a lie, too,” I said, though I didn’t have the documentation to back it up.

  “Let’s do this job and be done with it, Phil. Take the money and run.”

  I wanted to be out from under whatever it was Kallen was peddling in the worst way, but I needed to know what “it” was; you couldn’t dodge the ball if you didn’t see it coming. We did security evaluations and background checks for several institutions, public and private, and thanks to our discovery of a serial rapist employed as a weekend porter in a neighborhood apartment building, we’d been hired by other building management companies to vet their employees and tenants, too. At the time we got the business from the Golson sisters, I’d felt bad for the company we replaced, at least until I realized that their failure to discover a discrepancy in the rapist’s employment application gave him access to a building and a neighborhood full of vulnerable little girls. So, I wasn’t worried about being able to do the work for Kallen, and try as I might, I couldn’t see a crooked angle ready to be played in this scenario: We tell KLM Management how to improve the security of their apartment buildings; we tell where they’re specifically in violation of any laws or building codes; we run background checks on the names they supply us and supply information without prejudice. We don’t say to KLM Management, don’t rent an apartment to Mary Doe because she’s got bad credit, or don’t hire John Doe as maintenance man because he said he was a high school graduate and he’s not. That’s not our job. It’s our job to gather and supply the information. But like we told Kallen, if we provide information that a prospective employee or tenant did time for rape, and KLM hires or rents to that person, and that person commits a rape, that’s going to be KLM’s problem, not ours.

  That’s why I’d first thought that Kallen didn’t want us to retain copies of the background reports, but that didn’t make sense. And he backed off that demand too quickly for that to be a reason, and I couldn’t find a reason or rationale for his bizarre behavior. So, we’d do what Yo suggested: Get in, get out, and cash the check before Kallen had a chance to change his mind again.

  We spent the remainder of the morning finishing up the paperwork on two very lucrative jobs, and the paperwork on two others that had barely paid for themselves. But that was why we did business on the Lower East Side. We knew that the people in this part of Manhattan—the lower part, east of Fifth Avenue, south of 14th Street, and north of the Brooklyn Bridge—lived interesting and complex and challenging lives, they just lived them on smaller budgets in smaller spaces than the people on television and in the movies who hire private investigators and don’t flinch at the retainer and the daily rate. I’d known I wanted to a private cop since reading my first Spenser and Hawk book when I was about thirteen. But I didn’t want to be just a private cop; oh, no. I wanted to be both Spenser and Hawk, both tough and smart. So, I got a Sociology degree from City College, where I met Yolanda who was getting a business degree, then I spent four years as a New York City cop walking a beat. Now I was back home, in my own neighborhood, a private cop in the service of people who very often didn’t think much of the public ones but who had sufficient complexity and challenge in their lives that Yo and I hadn’t had a really slow week since we opened.

  One of the lucrative jobs that we just finished was an on-going security check for the various departments at New York University. The head of security there liked and trusted us and the more satisfactory work we did for them, the more work they gave us. One of the bare bones jobs that we just finished was for two Nigerian men, brothers, newly arrived in the U.S., working to earn enough money to support the wives and children who were waiting for visas to enter the country. The brothers had a small deli and grocery store on a raggedy, run-down street close to the East River, under the tracks of the J train. Gentrification hadn’t found that block yet, and the paint had long since faded and cracked and peeled off every building in the vicinity. The old-timers had either died out or moved on. The newcomers, mostly Spanish-speaking with a few Eastern Europeans and Middle Easterners thrown in, were a volatile, surly group who didn’t seem to have sense enough to appreciate having a grocer in the neighborhood. Especially one that stayed open around the clock: The brothers worked twelve-hour shifts. The only day they closed was Sunday. And they were getting robbed at least once a week and sometimes twice. They couldn’t afford to close the store and walk away from their investment, and even if they could, they couldn’t afford to rent better space in a better neighborhood. So, what they needed was for the robberies to stop.

  It had taken the better part of a month and some very creative undercover and sting work by Eddie Ortiz and Mike Smith, two retired NYC cops who worked for us, but we had made it happen. After several arrests and a couple of major ass whippings laid on the thieves by Eddie and Mike to serve as a deterrent against future bad behavior, the robberies had stopped. The Nigerians were so pleased that they sang the praises of Phillip Rodriquez Investigations throughout the community of their countrymen. As a consequence, we had appointments scheduled not only with Nigerian small-business owners in each of the five boroughs, but at the Nigerian Embassy as well. I had asked Yolanda what she thought an embassy would want with us and she’d said she didn’t care as long as I got a haircut and wore a suit to the interview. “If we start getting work at embassies and another of the universities, Phil, we’ll be able to help more of the little guys. You know, like the lawyers do? Pro bono.”

  “We do any more work for the rates we gave the Egwim brothers and Mrs. McInerney, we might as well call it pro bono.” I’d sounded a little grumpy at the time, but I secretly agreed one hundred percent. To be able to help Ma Mac, as everybody in the neighborhood called her, and not have to worry about expenses, would make us both very happy. Ma Mac’s brother, Aloysius McKinney, was eighty years old and still built like the longshoreman he was for more than fifty years, but his mind was gone. She’d been trying to take care of him since her husband and his wife died, but he was too much for her. He’d get out of the house and start to roam—always headed for places that still existed only in his fractured memory. We’d found him this time in a biker bar in Hell’s Kitchen, and I was still sore from wrestling that tough old bastard into a taxi for the ride h
ome. He’d punched and kicked and cursed me, calling me a stupid, stinking Spic and mumbling about how he told me he’d get even. Crazy old bastard. I stood up, stretched, and sauntered back to Yolanda’s hide-out behind the screens.

  “I hope you’re coming to talk to me about food.”

  “I heard your stomach growling. Soup and a salad okay?”

  She stopped what she was doing and turned all the way around to look at me over the tops of her glasses. Then she let go a big, deep belly laugh, like I haven’t heard from her in a while. “Connie de Leon gets the gold medal, Brother Man! In a matter of just a few months, she’s converted you from a double death burger with cheese, a large order of fries, and a triple shake to soup and a salad?” She jumped to her feet and did a little dance that involved lots of booty wiggling. “Yes, Phil, and thank you. I’d love soup and a salad. What kind of soup do you recommend? And what dressing for my salad?”

  She was still laughing when I stalked away from her en route to get my hat and coat. I made a detour to the bathroom and therefore didn’t hear our version of the tinkling bell over the entry door—a discreet though definite buzz that sounds in the back of the room, everywhere but in the bathroom. So, when I emerged, I heard voices—not Yolanda on the telephone but her talking to someone in the office. It was a voice I recognized and though I hadn’t heard it in many, many years, the sharpness of the memories it evoked made it feel like yesterday.

  “Ah, Phil Rodriquez,” he said. “You’re a dead ringer for your Grandpa. The Vega one, not the Rodriquez one.”

  I walked toward him, hand extended. “Hello, Mr. Epstein,” I said. He ignored my hand and pulled me into a bear hug. I hugged him back and felt the bony body of an old person. Like my abuelitos and abuelitas. No matter how strong and powerful they once had been, old age reduced them all to these vessels that merely stored their fragile bones. All except for that damn Aloysius McKinney. “You sure got here quick.”