Killing Critics
Page 22
Riker’s cellular phone beeped. He extended the antenna, and as he listened attentively, he made a fist. When he ended the conversation and folded his phone away, he turned to Mallory. “That was an old friend of mine in Blakely’s office. I hope you got what you wanted off Koozeman’s computer last night. Blakely’s boys impounded it, and they got all of Koozeman’s books.”
“How’s the chief going to justify that?”
“He won’t have to. We’re officially off the case. Blakely’s turning it over to a third-rate dick, and the FBI offered to assist. They’re giving a joint press interview right now. Special Agent Cartland is playing it as a stranger kill.”
“A what?”
Riker drained his cup. “A random murder, Charles. The perp doesn’t know the victim. It’s the crime where the FBI really shines. Cartland’s a local PR jerk, but their team at Quantico is first-rate.”
“But it’s clearly not a stranger kill,” said Charles. “How could Coffey go along with that?”
“He didn’t, and that’s the worst of it,” said Riker. “Coffey wouldn’t play along with Blakely, and now he’s going down. The paperwork is in the machine for a demotion on grounds of insubordination and disobeying a direct order. There’s another list of bogus charges that might force him out of the department.”
“Blakely will never make the charges stick,” said Mallory. “Coffey goes by the book.” And by her tone, Charles knew she considered that one of Jack Coffey’s flaws.
“Blakely can do whatever he wants with Coffey.” Riker’s voice was all resignation. “Internal Affairs hasn’t gotten any smarter since the Dowd fiasco. Coffey’s going down, kid. Count on it.”
“No. I can fix this. A lot of the people on Koozeman’s A list were in city government, the mayor, the ex-commissioner, the lieutenant governor-”
“No you don’t, kid. You don’t go near any of those people. You think you’ve got more power than you have. You can’t blackmail the politicos to keep them in line, not even to save Coffey’s tail. The job is to keep the law, not to break it.”
“The ends don’t justify the means? You’re beginning to sound like Charles.”
Charles sat between them, sincerely not knowing whether or not to take offense.
“I was hoping one day you would sound more like Charles. I don’t expect that anymore.” Riker’s mood was darkening. “Don’t go near Blakely. He’ll get you. Don’t think of him as just one old bastard, think of the whole machine. It’s an ancient thing. You’ve got the talent, but you’re just not old enough to be that mean and dirty. Markowitz would tell you the same. You can’t save Coffey. He’s dead meat. Don’t go down with him.”
“Riker, I thought you liked Coffey in your own twisted way.”
“I got a lot of respect for the guy. But you’re the one who needs looking after. You think you’re such a hotshot. You don’t ever go after a cop-you got that?-and never a top cop. You think you’ve got your own power base, but you-”
“I do-in spades. Between the data off Koozeman’s computer and Markowitz’s old case notes, I can hurt Blakely.”
“Don’t ever tip your hand, Mallory. Don’t ever let on you’ve got those notes. What the old man put down in writing is court evidence. Don’t make Blakely feel threatened.”
“Markowitz would have covered Coffey’s tail.”
“Yeah, he would’ve. But you’re no Markowitz, kid. He used finesse-you use a hammer.”
Mallory did not stand at attention before the chief’s desk. Nor did she wait for an invitation to be seated, a courtesy Blakely rarely granted to those with the rank of sergeant. Uninvited, she settled deep in the chair opposite his desk and crossed her legs. He did not look up. The only clue that she had annoyed him was in the crumple of the paper in his hands.
“I want you to reconsider taking us off the Dean Starr case.” Her tone of voice did not frame this as a request.
The sheet of paper he had been reading was now a crushed ball flying into the wastebasket. “No deal. Now get out of here, or I might forget how much I liked your old man.”
She sat well back in the chair and gave no signs of going anywhere.
“Move your ass, Detective, or you’ll be going down with your boss.”
She was smiling when she said, “I don’t think so, Blakely.”
“You know the drill, Mallory. You will address me as sir or Chief, and those are all the choices you get.”
“Makes you wonder what I’ve got on you, doesn’t it? But I’m not here to talk about how you got your job.”
“Careful, Mallory.”
“I bet you’re wishing the old police commissioner had been more careful about the way he spent his payoff money-he’s a senator now, isn’t he? That must put a lot of pressure on you.”
“Mallory, don’t push your luck with me.”
“Milking the payoff from a mob bodega was really ballsy, Blakely. I liked that a lot. It made me wonder how much hard evidence you had on that operation to make them come across with the money.”
He was rising from his chair.
“I did a little digging in Markowitz’s personal notes,” she said. “I came across an interview with a dealer who did business out of that same bodega.”
He sat down again, slowly. She continued. “Quite a busy place, between the drug deals and the racketeering. Their delivery boys covered three states, didn’t they?”
His chair squeaked as he swiveled around to face the window. “So what’re you planning to do with all this crap, Mallory?” His fingers drummed softly on the red upholstery.
“Nothing. I’m sure the feds would like to know you shielded an interstate operation-but I don’t owe the FBI any favors, do I?” She looked down at her red fingernails. “So that’s old business. Right now, I’d rather discuss Lieutenant Coffey. You see, when you climb up his back, he climbs up mine. And I really hate that. So you will back off, won’t you? Sir? I think you can trust Coffey to assign his own detectives.”
“Anything else?”
She knew his voice was too calm. But he was not fighting back, so it was all going well, wasn’t it? “You attached a lot of charges and a bad review to Coffey’s record-you might want to rethink that. Markowitz always said, ‘What goes around comes around.’ ”
She could hear the old man saying that now, but Markowitz was saying it to her-a prickling warning from the back of her mind.
Blakely was silent. She wished she could see his face. He continued to stare out the window, and the only sound in the room was the soft drumming of his fat fingertips on the red leather arm of his chair.
Well, what had she expected, a signed contract? Their deal was concluded. There was nothing left to say. But she stood up with the uneasy feeling of unfinished business.
Mallory was across the room and through the door before she heard the squeak of Blakely’s chair swiveling around again.
Riker sat at the desk in Mallory’s private office, holding a telephone to his ear, and making an occasional scribble with his pen.
Charles sat down in the metal chair opposite the desk. He hated the decor of this room and wished Mallory would let him furnish her office with a few Oriental rugs and perhaps a desk from the last century. But he knew she was more comfortable in this atmosphere of stark simplicity.
Riker was speaking into the telephone. “What’s Blakely doing with the inventory sheet on Markowitz’s house?‘’ And now he listened and his face was clouding over with anger. ”Robin Duffy was the family lawyer. He got a ruling on the old man’s personal papers. All the personal papers belong to the estate and the estate belongs to Mallory. There’s no way he’s gonna get any of it.“ Now he covered the mouthpiece with one hand and spoke to Charles. ”You got a number for Duffy?“
“He’s on a fishing trip in Canada. He’s due back in a few days, but I suppose I could track him down if it’s important.”
Riker shook his head and spoke into the mouthpiece again. “Duffy’s out of town. I’ll hav
e him call Blakely’s office when he gets back… Right.”
Riker put the receiver back on the cradle of Mallory’s state-of-the-art phone center, which spread tentacles to a fax machine, a recording device, and other equipment Charles could not readily identify.
Riker was not a happy man. “That was Coffey. He says Blakely wants all of Markowitz’s personal notes, and he’s doing paperwork with the DA’s office right this minute. Claims they relate to an ongoing case. Now I’ve got a charge on my record because my name is on the inventory for the old house in Brooklyn. Blakely claims I improperly handled department property.”
“This sounds serious. Let me track down Robin. He can probably fix this with a phone call.”
“A phone call from God wouldn’t fix this-not unless He’s got some good dirt on Blakely.”
The old Koozeman Gallery in the East Village was on a narrow street in Alphabet City, and just off a lettered avenue which had boasted ten predators to every taxpayer in the days when Koozeman ran this gallery. On foot, artists and hookers had passed through this neighborhood they called home. Yuppies had only come by cab and limo, reveling in dangerous chic. That trend had passed, and the galleries abandoned this section of town, moving to the safer chic of SoHo and its better class of criminals.
The storefronts had For Rent signs on the doors. Mallory stared at the dark windows, up and down the street. This was a good place to do murder with no witnesses. But even twelve years ago, the artist and the dancer could have screamed all through the night and no one would have come to their aid. Such sounds were common then-like crickets to country people.
She never turned to look directly at him, but she was aware of the thin man walking toward her at a cautious pace. As he slowed his steps, she realized she was his mark. The body movement she detected in peripheral was twitched and jazzed. A crackhead. Closer now. He must be thinking this was his lucky day-a woman alone on the street, and the nearest branch of authority was the Hell’s Angels clubhouse on the next block. Lucky day for the junkie-no waiting in line to pick off the suckers at the cash machines. Would he rush her? No. He would wait for the fear response, and then use it to his advantage. Closer now, all excited, he could probably taste her money, feel it gliding into his veins or up his nose in a cloud of white dust.
Mallory continued to stare at the building across the street, never even turning to look at him, and that made him a little crazy. He had to know she was aware of him. He circled around in front of her, and now she saw the perp in all his sick glory, eyes runny with infection, sores on his face. He smelled rank from soiling his clothes with his vomit and his bowels.
Did she want to touch that?
No way.
Hands behind her back, she worked on a pair of kid-skin gloves.
He was grinning at her, hovering. One hand was in the pocket of his jacket, and that would be where he kept the razor or the knife. There was not enough bulk for a gun.
The hand was pulling slowly from the jacket pocket. But now the junkie was all surprise as Mallory’s arm flashed out, and his straight razor went flying into the gutter. He was even more surprised to find himself kneeling on the sidewalk, feeling the pain in his testicles and staring at the hard steel of a large gun forced into his mouth. The gun barrel was set between an old man’s rotting rows of teeth, but he was just twenty-one, if that.
A car with NYPD markings was gliding silently to the curb alongside her. She never took her eyes off the terrified thin man, not even when she heard Heller’s deep voice.
“Mallory, you know the rules. If you can’t play nicely with the animals, you can’t play with them at all.”
After the backup unit arrived and the debris of the mugger was cleared off the street and shoved roughly into the back of the car, Mallory and Heller were alone again in front of the deserted gallery.
“Poor bastards,” said Heller, staring after the departing vehicle. “Their car is gonna smell like a junkie for the rest of their shift.”
He turned around now to see Mallory working a wire in the lock of the gallery door. It opened under her hand. Heller took her by one arm and pulled her away from the door. He reached around the wooden frame to depress the lock button in the knob, and then pulled the door shut. Mallory only stared at him as though he had lost his mind.
“Markowitz never taught you that,” said Heller. “I gather you don’t have a warrant.”
“I’m not supposed to be working the old case. How am I going to get a warrant?”
Heller said nothing. He only looked at her the way Markowitz did when he was waiting on a better explanation for what she’d done wrong this time.
“I’m not violating anybody’s civil rights. Before he died, Koozeman put the gallery up for sale. If you want, I’ll go find the real estate agent. But that will take time. This is-”
“Do that. I’ll wait.”
“Heller-”
“Get the key from the real estate agent. Do it right.”
He was a solid man, a large bear of a man. Bears did not back down. Why should they?
She returned to the gallery twenty minutes later, her wallet lighter by one fifty-dollar deposit, and she was holding the legal key. Heller was waiting by the door, comfortable in his slouch and his cigar.
“It was a sad business,” said Heller as they legally passed through the door and into the small reception area. He flicked on the wall switch. A panel of fluorescent bulbs made buzzing noises overhead as the lights flooded the main room of the deserted gallery.
“We found the artist and the dancer over there.” He pointed toward the center of the back wall.
Mallory reached into her tote and pulled out a floor plan. According to the crime-scene diagram, this part of the gallery was sixty feet in length, and twenty-five feet wide. Beyond the side wall was another five feet of storage space running the length of the room.
“We were a long time recovering the body parts,” said Heller. “The heads were spiked on the rods, and the bodies were wrapped with wire.” Heller opened his briefcase and folded back papers until he found the plastic slide sheet. He pointed at the first slide pocket. “Now this is what Ariel’s work looked like before he died and became part of it. That hunk of metal used to be a car.”
She held the slide sheet up to the ceiling light and looked at the rusted metal sculpture with two iron rods shooting straight up from the center of the car, which had been crushed and compressed to the size and shape of a steamer trunk.
Now she walked the length of the side wall, until she found the gouge in the baseboard. She beckoned Heller to join her. “Wait here. I’ll be right back.” She walked to the rear storage area door, counting her paces, and passed into the narrow hallway which ran alongside the gallery space. Just as Charles had done, she entered the gallery through the hidden door in the wall behind Heller’s back. She tapped him on the shoulder, and he whirled around to face her.
“Jesus! Don’t you ever-” Suddenly dumbstruck, Heller stared at the open door. His eyes traveled over the interior side of wood slats. “I can’t believe this. I checked out the storage area. I must have taken this for part of the wall.”
“Not your fault. The door is a perfect job. No seams, no knobs.” She closed it again, and pushed on the edge. It popped open. “Pressure lock. You’d have to know just where to press. See the nick in the baseboard? Koozeman has the same door in his new gallery in SoHo.”
Heller bent down to see the small gouge in the board at the base of the wall. “So, the killer might have hidden back there-”
“And come out of the wall to join the crowd before the uniforms showed up to chase them out.”
“Shit, it could’ve happened that way. Markowitz figured the perp cleaned himself up and left the gallery. We found blood in the bathroom-sink traps. But I guess he could have stayed.”
Mallory pressed her floor plan to the wall and penciled in the site of the door. “That night, did Markowitz figure the girl for the primary target?”
“You did a reconstruction?” Damn Markowitz and his tabloid paranoia. How many pieces of this case was she going to find squirreled away in someone else’s mind, someone else’s notes? “I thought the reporters botched all the physical evidence.”
“Oh, those bastards.” Heller’s words were hard, his head was shaking-unforgiving after all these years. “They tracked blood everywhere. The reconstruction took days, and days-and then the jerk confesses. All that work for nothing.”
“Did you work up any of the hair and fiber evidence? I’ve got all these bags and no-”
“No. The money for the case dried up after Watt confessed. There was no budget to do any tests. It would have been a waste of time anyway. This was a public place-people coming and going. There’s no way to tell when materials were left on the scene. So hair and fiber evidence wouldn’t have held up in court, even if we could’ve sorted out what belonged to the reporters. Same problem with latent prints.”
“But Markowitz the detail freak, he talked you into running tests off the books, right?”
“Sorry, Mallory, it didn’t happen that way. I gave him what I could on a cursory examination of the bodies- colors of stray hairs and some speculation on the clothing fibers. That was it. It’s no more good to you now than it was to the old man.”
“Go back to the early part of the night.” Mallory was looking at the entrance to the gallery. “Watt delivered the pizza and went back to the restaurant to collect his check. After he left the gallery, Peter Ariel would’ve locked up behind him. Didn’t you figure the next one through that door had a key?”
“No. Dr. Slope said the Ariel kid was really flying on dope. I don’t know that he would’ve bothered to lock the door.”
Mallory pulled out a notebook and flipped through the pages of her father’s scrawl. “Slope says the killer did the artist first, then spent some time torturing the girl.” She found the page she was looking for. Markowitz had underscored the word “torture” and added three question marks. “Did Markowitz have a problem with that?”