by James Hayman
“How do you know his name at all if he paid cash?” asked McCabe.
James gave the two cops a shy smile. “I peeked.” He said it like a little kid who’d been caught stealing a cookie.
“You peeked?”
“Yeah. I peeked at his drivers’ license when he opened his wallet to pay for the drink. Saw his first name on the license. His thumb was covering up the last name so I couldn’t see that. But his first name is definitely Tyler.”
“Tyler not Taylor?”
“Yup. Tyler. T-Y-L-E-R.”
“Why did you peek?”
James shrugged. “I’m gay. And this guy was definitely a hunk. I was hoping he might be interested in hooking up.”
“Did he look like he might be gay?” asked Maggie.
“He was a good-looking dude. I got a sense he might be. And that he might be interested. Turned out not. I figure he could be one of those guys who can’t just admit their own sexual identity. Fight it their whole lives. Keep trying to be macho dudes. Tragic, if you ask me.”
“Did you notice if it was a New York state license?” asked McCabe.
James furrowed his brow and pressed his index finger against his cheek in an overly dramatic show of trying to remember. “I think it was a New York license. I know what they look like. I have a Missouri one myself. But I’m pretty sure his was New York. Why? Is he some kind of criminal?”
“That’s what we’re trying to find out. Thanks for your help.”
James smiled and shrugged. “No prob.”
The three of them left the small office. James returned to the bar.
Maggie and McCabe worked their way through the mass of bodies and the din of voices that filled the Laughing Toad and headed out through the glass doors and onto the relative quiet of Rivington Street.
He asked Maggie to call Luke Nichols and set up an interview. While she was doing that, he punched in the number for the head of the task force’s IT team.
A guy who was doing night duty, named Tom Delgado, answered. “What do you need?” he asked.
“We need to know how many men named Tyler . . .”
“First name or last?”
“First. How many Tylers live in New York State and hold New York driver’s licenses.”
“You just want numbers? Or names and addresses?”
“Not just numbers.” McCabe explained what they’d learned from the bartender James. “We’re gonna need facsimiles of all New York licenses belonging to guys named Tyler. Flag any that own black SUV’s. And when we get that info, we’re going to need a team to sit down and separate all the ones between ages of say twenty and forty and then cross-check the photos against a couple of photos and a sketch we have. Pick out all the ones that are even close to a likeness.”
“Jeesh. You don’t want much, do ya? There’s got to be thousands of them.”
“Gotta be done. Like now. This Tyler guy is likely our killer.”
“I get it. Don’t worry. We’ll get it done. Hopefully have what you need by tomorrow.”
Chapter 34
Maggie let Luke Nichols’s phone ring five times before a male voice came on. “Hey, this is Luke. Leave me a message.”
“Mr. Nichols. This is Detective Margaret Savage. I’m a police officer working with the New York Police Department. My partner and I need to ask you some questions about Zoe McCabe.” She finished her message and ended the call. Seconds later Luke Nichols called back.
“This is Luke Nichols. Couldn’t quite get to the phone in time. You said you were calling about Zoe?”
“Yes. We need to talk to you about her.”
“What about Zoe? Is anything wrong?”
“We’d rather talk to you about this in person.”
“Jesus. Something must be wrong. Where are you?”
“Outside the Laughing Toad, where you and Zoe had dinner last night.”
“How do you know about that?”
“Like I said, we’d rather talk in person. Can we come to your place?”
There were a few seconds of silence.
“It’s important,” said Maggie.
“I could meet you at the Toad. My place is kind of a slum.”
“The Toad’s too public. We need to talk to you in private. If you’d rather, we can talk at the Seventh Precinct.”
Luke Nichols sighed loudly. “No. That’s okay. We can talk here,” he said. “I’m at 139 Essex Street. It’s only a ten-minute walk from where you are now. Apartment 502. Buzz the buzzer and I’ll let you in. Then start climbing stairs.”
“Five flights?”
“You got it.”
“We’ll see you in ten.”
Luke Nichols’s “slum” was a studio apartment in one of the neighborhood’s unrenovated tenements. After climbing the five flights surrounded by assorted cooking and tobacco smells, McCabe and Maggie knocked on the door marked 502. Luke Nichols answered and the two detectives entered a room that was small, dark and dreary. A single window that looked like it hadn’t been washed in five years faced an airshaft, and the only place to sit was the queen-sized bed that had been squeezed in and took up about sixty percent of the available floor space. Most of the rest of the floor space was filled with a selection of guitars and a professional-looking set of drums.
“You’re a musician,” said Maggie.
Nichols grinned and said, “How could you tell?”
He was a good-looking young man, probably in his midtwenties, with a mop of dark curly hair.
“You play with a band?” asked Maggie after Nichols had ushered them in.
“When I can get gigs. I also play piano. Both jazz and classical. Piano’s really my thing. Obviously no room for one in here. But sometimes I play and sing in hotel lounges. Gershwin. Cole Porter. That sort of stuff.”
“Like Bobby Short at the Carlyle?” asked McCabe.
“I wish. But yeah. The same idea.”
At least the bed was made and the apartment looked tidy. Rather than sit on the bed, Maggie and McCabe elected to stand. So did Nichols. “What’s this all about?” he asked. “Did something bad happen to Zoe?”
“That’s what we’re trying to find out,” said Maggie. “Where do you know her from?”
“We were at Juilliard together. She was in the theater school. I was in the piano program.”
“What’s your relationship with her?” asked McCabe.
Luke offered a sad smile. “As far as she’s concerned we’re just good friends.”
“But you’d like to be more than just good friends?”
“I would. We dated a few times right after college but then she got involved with another guy, a doctor, and that was that. Zoe was living with him up until a couple of weeks ago when he cheated on her and she kicked him out. I put in my application to be the doc’s replacement during dinner at the Toad last night. But she’s not buying what I’m selling. At least not yet. Still wants to be”—he made air quotes with his fingers—“just friends.”
“Good friends?”
“I think so. The dating thing aside, Zoe’s always been one of my favorite people.”
“So the two of you had dinner last night at the Laughing Toad?”
“That’s right. We were celebrating the final performance of Othello and how, judging by the reviews, it was going to give her career a big bump. In fact, she told me Randall Carter wanted to take the play uptown to Lincoln Center and maybe wanted to keep her as Desdemona. Which would be huge for her. What about it?”
Maggie showed Luke the police sketch and the photo. “Did you happen to see this guy there?”
Nichols only needed to glance at the picture. “Yeah, we saw him. He was standing near the bar staring at Zoe. Kind of freaked her out. I would have thought she’d be used to it. I mean guys are always looking at women who look like Zoe, but this guy seemed kind of screwed up.”
“Screwed up how?” Maggie asked.
“I’m not sure Zoe saw the screwed-up part. But maybe she did. Anyway
, while he was looking at her he seemed to have this . . . I don’t know what you’d call it . . . this episode. Or maybe seizure is a better word. Zoe noticed me looking over her shoulder at him. I guess I reacted because she turned back to look at him again, but whatever it was might have been over by that time. After he came out of it he just smiled at her and gave this little wave.”
“How long was he staring?” asked Maggie.
“Geez, I don’t know. A minute or so. Maybe a couple.”
“Can you describe the episode? The seizure?”
“Hard to describe. But sort of midway through the stare he seemed to go into some weird kind of trance for like ten or twenty seconds and when he came out of it he was more or less normal again. Just sort of smiled and nodded his head at her.
“Anything else?”
No. After that he disappeared into the crowd at the bar.”
“And Zoe didn’t indicate that she knew who he was?”
“She said she didn’t.”
“Did you see him again?” McCabe asked.
Nichols shook his head. “No.”
“What happened then?”
Luke shrugged. “Nothing. We finished our food and wine. Zoe insisted on paying. She just got cast for a TV spot for Match.com and she knows I haven’t had any good gigs in a while. I’m kind of hurting moneywise. After she got her card back we left.”
“You both went straight home?”
“Not immediately. We talked for a couple of minutes outside the Toad. I kissed her and asked for about the fifth time if we could start dating again now that Alex . . . the guy she’d been living with . . . now that Alex was toast. Like I told you, she blew me off with a same old can’t-we-just-be-friends line. I just said sure, we’ll always be friends, and asked her if she wanted me to walk her home. She said no. That she’d be fine. We both live nearby but in opposite directions. You people think the guy in that picture did something bad to her?”
Maggie figured it was okay to tell him. Zoe’s picture and the story of Annie Nakamura’s murder were already on TV and they’d be in all the papers in the morning. “We don’t know for sure. We think it’s possible.”
“Oh Jesus Christ. She’s not dead or anything? Like that other actress and the dancer?”
“At the moment we just don’t know where she is,” said Maggie. “But it doesn’t look good. A woman who lived on the same floor as Zoe was found murdered last night.”
Nichols looked stunned. Maggie handed him a card. “Please give me a call if you can think of something that might help us find the man in the picture.”
“Portland, Maine?”
“Yes. But at the moment my partner and I are on temporary assignment with the New York Police.”
Nichols was still staring at the number on the card when Maggie and McCabe left and started walking back down the five poorly lit flights of stairs to the ground floor. When they had exited the building, Maggie said, “It’s looking more and more like this ‘big weird dude’ is definitely our guy.”
“Yeah. Now all we have to do is find him. And hopefully her. The driver’s license should be a big help. Might lead us right to him,” said McCabe.
“Putting the sketch out there should also get us some answers. Somebody’s got to know who he is.”
To make that happen, McCabe called Astarita on his personal cell. “You still in the office?”
“Yeah. It’s looking like an all-nighter. What do you need?”
He told Art about the name Tyler and the search for the driver’s license.
“Good. Sounds like a solid lead.”
“It is, but we should also get the sketch Mooney gave us out to the media as soon as possible. Maybe somebody will recognize him and we’ll get a last name.”
“Yeah. We’ve already got it out there. But I’m not sure I want to call him a suspect yet.”
McCabe shrugged. “That’s fine. Let’s just go with a person of interest. At least for the time being. The techs pick up anything on seat A12?”
“Probably still working on it,” said Art. After a pause he added, “There is one other thing. Ralston found the homeless guy he thought he saw last night.”
“By 121 Clinton?”
“No. Curled up near a tenement on the next block. Stanton Street. All the police activity scared him away from Zoe’s place. Ralston brought him in for questioning. Name’s Jamil Harris. Sad case. Used to be in the army. Lost both legs in Iraq. Then lost all interest in life. Except for booze where and when he can get it. Tells an odd story.”
“Such as?”
“First off, he did see our guy carry the rug out to a black SUV. Saw him stuff it in the back. Then the guy came back and checked out Jamil. Kicked him a couple of times to see if he was awake. Jamil pretended to be out cold. But when he felt a knife blade slide against his throat, he opened his eyes. Guy was staring at him. Mean look. Harris thought for sure he was a dead man. But then instead of killing him the guy put the knife away and get this . . . he takes out a bunch of cash and slips Jamil a twenty. Which naturally he spent on booze.”
McCabe thought about that. Thoughts of murder. Followed by a random act of charity. An odd story indeed.
Chapter 35
“Would you like more wine?” asked Tyler, pouring himself a healthy measure. “Or are you hungry? Would you rather have something to eat?”
“I’d really would like to go outside and get some air,” said Zoe.
“Why?”
“I’d just like to get a look at where I’m apparently going to be living for a while,” Zoe lied. “If you think I’m going to make a run for it, you could always put a leash on me and let me explore the place like your favorite retriever. You can pet me all you want, scratch my ears, and if you do I just may wag my tail.”
Zoe smiled at the thought and extended an open palm toward his face.
He leapt back, grabbed her wrist, stopping the movement.
“Don’t be so jumpy, Tyler. I was only going to stroke your cheek. Do you know why? Because I actually like you. I may even be beginning to feel the same way about you as you say you do about me. You’re one of the best-looking and most unusual men I’ve ever met. And I was truly upset when you told me how your father mistreated your mother and how terribly he injured you.”
“You’re lying,” he said. Still, there was a touch of uncertainty in his voice as he spoke those words.
“No, I’m not lying, Tyler. I promise you I’m not. Would I have let you make love to me in the shower like you did if I didn’t find you both handsome and desirable? You’re a very interesting and complex man. And a sexy one as well.”
“I could have raped you.”
“But you didn’t have to. I wanted you.”
“Are you saying that you love me?”
“No. Too soon for that. But I am saying that given enough time to, I might learn to love you. But only if you let me get close enough to who you really are.”
“Even though I kidnapped you and brought you here against your will?”
Zoe allowed a deep chuckle to escape from her throat. “I would have preferred getting to know you without that happening. But given time, I think we can get past that. Put it behind us. After all, I have just broken off a previous long-term relationship. So in that regard your timing couldn’t have been better.”
Bradshaw studied Zoe’s face, as if trying hard to figure out if there was any truth to the things she was saying or if she was just screwing with his mind. “All right. Let’s go outside,” he said. “I’ll show you the property and maybe even my workshop.” He went to the hall closet and grabbed his army field jacket off a hanger and put it on. He rummaged among other garments and found a black leather jacket more or less her size. “Here, put this on. It’s a little cold out.”
Zoe did. It was little big but it would do for her purposes. She wondered who the original owner might have been. Jacobs? Wingfield? “This feels cozy.”
“I bought it just for you.”
/> Zoe put her hands out. “Do you want me to wear handcuffs? Or a dog collar?”
“No. I think we’ll forgo those for the moment. I’m pretty sure I can catch you if it comes to that.”
“I’m very fast.”
“So I’ve noticed. But then so am I.”
Bradshaw grabbed a flashlight from the closet shelf, flicked a light switch, and a set of outdoor floods came on illuminating everything within fifty yards of the house. He punched in the lock code, applied his thumb and opened the door.
“Where do you want to go?”
“Just around the property.” Zoe started walking, sucking in deep breaths of fresh, cool night air. Just being able to breathe like that and not being forced to wear the flex cuffs felt liberating. “Ummm. The air smells wonderful. I love October. Where are we?”
“What do you mean?”
“What town? What state?”
“In Connecticut.”
“Where in Connecticut?”
“Why does it matter? Are you planning to signal for help?”
Zoe smiled. “The thought crossed my mind.”
Bradshaw took her hand and held it as he led her to the left toward the tennis court and swimming pool. She let her thumb gently stroke the top of his hand and her eyes examine the top of the tree line, hoping to see if there were lights from any other houses. Sadly, she saw none.
“No neighbors?” she asked.
“No one very close. We have over a hundred acres here. And most of the houses nearby are just weekend places for people who live in the city.”
“Did you play on this court?” she asked.
“Not since I was a kid.”
“Did you play with friends?”
“I didn’t have many friends. Mostly played with my father. But only until I got to the point where I could beat him. Then he didn’t want to play anymore.”
“Were you telling the truth about being an entertainment lawyer?”
“Why are you asking?”
“I’d just like to know a little more about you. It’s not every day a man I barely know tells me he loves me.”