“You don’t tell me who comes in my building,” Boris said in the nastiest tone of voice I’d heard in a long time.
I whipped out my cell phone and flicked it open. “Now it’s gonna cost Mike some money,” I said, punching in some numbers. Boris made a lunge for my phone. I was expecting him to do something like that, and I sidestepped him. He almost fell face first down the steps. I grabbed him and pulled him back. “You’ve got a lot to learn about being an American, Boris,” I said, and shoved him at Mike who caught him by one arm and twisted. Hard. I started punching numbers on my phone again.
“Nigger! You let me go!”
Mike snatched Boris’ arm so hard and so far up his back the little Russian was standing on his toes, looking like he was dancing. “What did you say to me, you ugly piece of foreign dog shit?”
“Mike.”
He looked at me. “How do people like him get into this country?”
I looked at Boris. “Maybe he snuck across the border. Is that what you did, Boris? Made a midnight run across the Canadian border when the Mounties were looking for terrorists?”
The Russian groaned and shook his head, then he looked down at the sidewalk, at the all-but-forgotten reason we all were engaged in our little dance. “Okay! Okay! He can go visit friend. You! Go! Go!” The bewildered visitor, still holding the pharmacy bag aloft as evidence, ran up the steps, past Boris doing his tippy-toe dance, and into the building, without a backward glance. “You go, too,” Boris said to me. “And him,” gesturing with his head over his shoulder to Mike.
“Should I let him go, Phil, or throw him down the steps?”
Boris give a shrill squeal. “No, no! Let me go!”
Mike looked at me. I shrugged; I didn’t care whether he tossed the smarmy little bastard down the steps or not. Mike gave his arm another twist and let him go. Boris backed away, glowering.
“That’s my friend, Mike,” I said to Boris. Then I looked at the cell phone I still held. “And speaking of which, in all the excitement, I forgot to call the other Mike—your Mike.”
“Is not necessary to call my Mike. I understand now,” he said, rubbing his arm and smiling at me. I thought the smile was weird until I realized that someone was coming up the steps behind me. I stepped aside then turned to face the new arrival. I knew I’d be considered guilty of ageism in some quarters, but this was an old man. I heard Mike’s snort of disgust so I turned around and headed back down the steps to Mike, and we headed for the truck.
“Whatever those girls earn, it’s not enough for that.”
“If they’re slaves, Mike, they’re not earning anything.”
Yolanda was ready to call Shirley Golson to ask her to set up the meet with KLM’s Richard King as soon as we told her what we’d seen and heard. “With what we’ve already got, why do we need nighttime video, too?”
“Just to emphasize the point, Yo. To show King that it’s an around-the-clock enterprise.”
“I don’t think we’re going to need to show King anything other than proof that Mike Kallen, aka Mikhail Kalenski, is an international fugitive,” she said.
“Do we want him to fire Kallen for lying on his resume, or do we want him to hire us to prove that Kallen is running a sexual slavery ring, and to keep the shit off him and his company when it starts flying? ’Cause if it’s the latter, we need the nighttime video, too, Yo,” I said, feeding her back her own argument.
“You’re right,” she said, clenching and unclenching her fists at her sides. “I’m just so damn mad! But getting mad doesn’t get us paid, does it?”
“Where’s Abby?”
She rolled her eyes and shook her head as if I’d asked her about the latest antics of one of her many nieces or nephews. “He said he was going to pay a ‘courtesy’ visit to the Department of Homeland Security.” I was waiting for her to look angry, but she didn’t. I antagonize a DHS agent and she gets mad at me. Horowitz does the same thing and it’s a schoolboy prank? She must’ve known what I was thinking because she said, “I think he wants to play his tape recording of Kearney’s knowledge of a terrorist threat that nobody else seems to know anything about. Which brings up the matter, by the way, of our tenants: If they were targeted as terrorists, you could be right, they could have just walked away rather than endure the hassle.”
The thought made me sad. I didn’t know them well, didn’t see them very often, but they were kind, gentle people, and they seemed to be building a good business for themselves. I really would like a hand-to-hand combat session with Kearney or Casey or McQueen or Epstein or whoever was responsible if their actions had frightened my tenants into leaving the country. My fist smashing into one of their faces probably wouldn’t make Ravi Patel or Nehru or the Buddhist monk or my Sikh tenants feel one bit better, but it would do wonders for me. “Did you call about the window glass?”
“Installation first thing tomorrow morning.”
“Good,” I said. “That’s good.” I still wanted to hit something, somebody. The person selling women into slavery, the person turning American citizens into terrorist suspects, the person torching and stealing businesses from hardworking men and women: Any or all of the above would do.
“You got the paperwork for your carry permit?” Mike asked.
“You’ve already got a carry permit. Don’t you?” Yo asked.
“Yeah,” I said. “But Delaney has my weapon and I’ll be damned if I’ll get on my knees and ask for it back. So I’m going to a get a new weapon and ask my new friend, Deputy Police Chief Ace Spade, to rush through a carry permit for it.”
“Brilliant, huh?” Mike said.
“If you say so,” Yolanda said, and retreated to the back.
“What?” Mike said.
I shrugged. “I gotta get outta here, Mike, gotta go do something.”
“Something like what?”
I’d been thinking of something, trying not to think of it, but not able to stop myself. “I’m wondering if Jackie’s journal is still in his apartment.” I was also wondering whether Carmine had had his little chat with Joey Mottola, but I wasn’t going to tell Mike that. I wasn’t going to tell anybody about my private Carmine conversations, including his feelings about Eastern Europeans.
“It probably wouldn’t be tough to get into the building, but if the apartment is still sealed . . .” He shrugged and raised his palms. He didn’t say we couldn’t get into the place, though.
“Let’s go see,” I said. We told Yolanda we’d be back in a couple of hours, then left before she could ask where we were going. I didn’t want to lie to her about what I was doing, and I didn’t want her worrying, which she would be doing if she knew where we were going.
“I’m not walking,” Mike said, and we hopped a taxi, then made the driver stop to let us out after a couple of blocks of him seeming to go out of his way to splatter slush on pedestrians. The light caught the cabbie at the corner and one of guys he’d splashed just before we got out ran up to the taxi and threw a brick through the window, then ran off down the street.
“You can fuck with some of the people some of the time,” I said.
“But you can’t fuck with all the people all the time and get away with it,” Mike said, and we walked the rest of the way to Jackie Marchand’s building, keeping an eye out for drivers who got their kicks making pedestrians dodge cold, filthy water.
We stopped two blocks away from Jackie’s building and eyeballed it from across the street, looking for signs that anybody was watching the building or guarding it. Nobody entered or exited for the few minutes we watched it; no cars stopped in front of the building; no cars left parking spaces near the building. “I’ll take the first recon,” Mike said, and moved off down the sidewalk toward the building. I watched to see if anybody was watching him. He passed the building and turned the corner. I gave him a couple of minutes, then I walked past the building going in the opposite direction. I didn’t know exactly where Mike was but I knew he’d positioned himself to see if there
was any reaction to my movement past the building. Nothing on both counts.
We reconnected at the corner. “I’m going in,” Mike said, and walked off before I could argue with him, so I crossed the street and stood directly in front of the building so I could see inside. Not that seeing inside the front door would help much if Mike got into trouble inside Jackie Marchand’s apartment, but I felt better for making the effort. I was thinking that this wouldn’t take long because apartments are at a premium in this city; always have been, probably always will be. There was nothing special about this building—it wasn’t luxurious or historic or architecturally interesting—but it was far from being a dump and it was in a decent neighborhood, the subway a block away. A one-bedroom unit would rent quickly and the manager would want to get it back on the market as quickly as possible.
I looked at my watch. Mike should have been back by now . . . if he hadn’t been able to get in. My pulse quickened. He was inside Jackie’s apartment. My pulse quickened again. Either that or he was laid out in the hallway, bleeding to death. “Stop that!” I made myself get rid of that thought, that image, and replaced it with a much more pleasant one—celebrating with Connie tonight. I looked at my watch again, wondered if I’d find Carmine at the pastry shop this time of day, saw Mike coming through the building lobby and willed my pulse to return to normal.
“You look like you didn’t think I’d make it back out, bro.”
“Get outta my head, Mike.”
He grinned his shark grin, then waved his big hand in my face. I almost missed what was in it. “Am I good or what?” He dangled the brown leather book in my face.
“Better than an ice cream sundae in August, bro. Where was it?”
“In the same boot as the other stuff, but laying flat, all the way down in the toe part. That’s why I missed it the first time. Second time’s the charm, though.”
Maybe not. “Is it really all in French?”
Mike sobered, too, then nodded. “Every word of it. Read it and weep.”
I took the small book, opened it, and flipped through the pages of small, neat handwriting, line after line, page after of page, of words in a language I didn’t speak or read. Half the people I knew spoke Spanish. For reasons I still didn’t understand but which, Yolanda said, had something to do with not wanting to be predictable, Sandra spoke fluent German. Then there were Mike Kallen and Boris and the Russians. Why didn’t I know anybody who spoke French? I had a thought, whipped out my phone, found my address book, and punched a number. I identified myself, offered a polite greeting, and asked her receptionist (whose name I never remembered) if Dr. Mason had a moment. She did, coming on the line almost immediately, happy to hear from me, thrilled about my engagement, wondering why I was calling. I told her. She laughed, said the way my brain worked was amazing, and yes, she spoke and read French and would be happy to help with a translation. She’d see me tonight after her last patient. I’d agreed and closed the phone before I remembered that I was to shoot video at the Avenue B building tonight.
“No sweat. I’ll take care of that, meet you back at the office, and we’ll all go to Eddie’s.”
Shit. I’d forgotten about going to Eddie’s, too. I flipped open the phone again and called Connie. She said she’d be happy to help us welcome Eddie home tonight. I took a moment to wonder if there was anything else I’d forgotten to do. Then Mike and I split up, him going back to the office to review the video we’d shot and to help prepare the presentation for Richard King of KLM Property Management, me to the midtown gun dealer to pick out a new weapon, then, perhaps, to the gym for a much needed and way overdue workout. It wouldn’t do to get engaged and get flabby.
Unlike a lot of cops, I’d never been a gun nut. I didn’t hate them the way Yolanda did, I just didn’t love ’em. I didn’t necessarily want them banned unless somebody could guarantee that no bad guy would ever be able to get his hands on one, and since I had no hope of that ever happening, the good guys needed to be able to keep the bad guys at bay. I wished I could be like Harry Potter and wave a wand and turn murdering, racist creeps into something—anything—but what they were. Since I couldn’t, I’d do the next best thing, which was to buy myself a new gun.
Choices, choices. Who knew there were so many different kinds of guns, so many different gun manufacturers? When I left the cops, I’d bought a Glock 9mm because that’s what I knew, what I knew how to use. I suppose I’d had choices back then; I just hadn’t known I did. Now, wow. A guy I was certain was a former cop came over to help me. I admitted up front my ignorance, told him I’d just as soon buy another Glock since that’s what I knew. He patted me on the back in a fatherly way, which didn’t rankle because he was probably old enough to be my father—I put him late fifties to sixty—and asked if I minded a few suggestions. I told him I didn’t mind at all. He asked, politely, if he could see my PI ID, and I politely showed it to him. Then he went back behind a display counter, looked at several shelves, made some selections, and came back to me with a box of handguns. A box of them. He saw my reaction, gave me another pat on the back, and told me to follow him down to the basement shooting range. Prepared to be bored and just wanting to get it over with, I followed.
I wouldn’t admit it to another living soul, but I hadn’t had so much fun in a really long time. I felt like a kid, loading one gun after the other and emptying it at the target. It also felt pretty good that I was a pretty good marksman, something I’d never given much thought to. It was a requirement at the training academy, and like the other requirements, I’d done my best to succeed, finishing near the top of my class. That’s something I hadn’t given much thought to, either, probably because it hadn’t mattered in my family where I’d finished in my training academy class: Nobody related to me was proud that I was a cop. They’d learned to be proud that I was a college student, then a college graduate, but they couldn’t figure out going to college to be a cop. In my neighborhood, cops weren’t considered great intellectuals or worthy role models. No matter how hard I tried to explain the long term plan, they didn’t get it. Or didn’t want to, though all four of my grandparents offered major prayers of thanks that I didn’t turn out to be a hoodlum. Better a cop than a hoodlum.
I surprised myself by purchasing two guns, neither of them a Glock. I bought a SIG Sauer 9mm and a smaller Sauer 25mm which I’d probably never use, though the salesman made a convincing argument for possessing a smaller, concealable weapon. I had no intention of ever wearing a gun strapped to my ankle. Okay, truth? I bought it with Yolanda in mind. Though she professed to hate them, she never let me go out on a job without mine, which meant that she knew and understood their usefulness. I thought that perhaps now, in the wake of the Tank’s minor rampage in our office, and the fire, that perhaps she’d reconsider. And if not, should Bill Delaney ever have cause to relieve me of the SIG, I’d already have a backup.
I paid for my guns, filled out the necessary paperwork, said I understood about the mandatory thirty day waiting period, and left the gun shop fully intending to go to the gym, not realizing that I’d spent more than three hours shooting at moving targets. No time for the gym; barely time to grab a bite to eat before heading over to Jill Mason’s office. I called Yolanda, told her where I was, what I’d been doing, and where I was going. She told me, gleefully, that Big Apple Insurers had had a messenger deliver a check. Then, something between worry and pique replacing glee, she said she hadn’t heard from Abby and didn’t know where he was, that all calls to his cell phone went directly to voice mail. Before I could decide whether or not to worry, though, she told me not to worry about it, told me she’d see me later at Linda and Eddie’s, and disconnected the call.
The sidewalks and streets were even more of a watery, slushy mess than they had been earlier in the day. It had gotten warmer during the day than the forecasters thought it would and the snow melt run-off was moving faster than the gutters could handle all that water, and most drivers didn’t seem to realize the connection bet
ween speed and a horde of attack-pedestrians: Reminiscent of the taxi driver earlier in the day, a guy driving a Subaru who had just sped down the block, drenching half a dozen pedestrians, got caught at the light at 4th Street and Avenue A. He was truly shocked when his car was pelted with ice and snowballs, but he wasn’t angry enough to roll down his window to hear the curses thrown his way, too.
I wolfed down a sirloin burger and fries at a gourmet hamburger restaurant on Fifth Avenue, and bought a carton of chili and a French roll to take to Jill. If this had been a normal day, she would have worked right through lunch and wouldn’t realize how hungry she was until confronted with food. Still healing from the loss of her husband and children, still adjusting to the move back downtown to her Lower East Side roots from the privileged existence of the Upper East Side, she tended to push herself beyond most reasonable bounds, tended to give more of herself than was wise. Like agreeing to meet me tonight to translate Jackie Marchand’s journal: She’d have said yes to my request no matter how tired or hungry she was.
“Oh, bless, you, Phillip!” she said when she saw the bag with the food in it. “How did you know I was starving?”
“Anybody who’s known you longer than fifteen minutes knows you forget to eat lunch most days,” I said, following her through the now empty reception area, back to the warmly elegant office where she saw her patients.
“So, you’ve piqued my interest. What am I translating?”
“Nothing until you eat,” I said.
She tried to shoot me a threatening look but it failed miserably, and as I often did, I ached for her and for the two little girls whose tragic deaths robbed her of years of mothering, which is probably why she gave so much to her patients. “Fine,” she said primly. “If you insist.”
“I do,” I said.
She changed in an instant, rushing to wrap me in a bear hug, which would have been really funny if it hadn’t been so endearing, given that she’s barely a couple of inches over five feet and couple of pounds over a hundred. “Congratulations, Phillip! I am so very happy for you and Connie! You must tell me everything!”
A Murder Too Close Page 25