‘Enemy Combatant.’
‘And who would that be, the enemy combatant?’
‘That would be you.’
‘And you’d be …’
‘The interrogator.’
Boots sighed. ‘I’ll bring the hood,’ he said.
FORTY-FIVE
As it turned out, Boots and Jill did not play Enemy Combatant, or any other game. When Boots came through the door, he reached out to stroke Jill’s cheek with the backs of his fingers and that was the end of that, the two of them doing everything at once, their own private orgy, unapologetic, taking with both hands, gimme, gimme, gimme. At one point, Boots held Jill against the wall, her feet off the ground, pinning her arms against her sides, but she continued to grind into him, lithe and slippery, no quarter asked or given.
Innocent as insects was how Boots explained it to himself, but then, afterward, Jill rose up to bestow that tender kiss once deemed unimaginable.
Boots was lying on the rug, his back beginning to itch, staring up into Jill Kelly’s eyes. In the dimly lit room, they were the color of visible light at the coldest end of the spectrum. Any darker and you couldn’t see them. Yet he felt somehow scorched when she finally glanced away.
‘Are you going to help me find Corcoran?’ she asked.
‘No.’
‘Why not?’
‘Lines.’
‘What?’
Boots answered her question with one of his own. ‘Do you draw lines? Anywhere? The reason I ask is because it seems to me that you put a citizen’s life at risk this morning. And I think you did it on purpose.’
‘Rick’s sister? That’s who you’re talking about?’
‘Yeah, Gladys Kohl.’
Jill hesitated, then grinned. ‘I wanted to find out what you’d do,’ she finally admitted. ‘Plus, I never liked Gladys to begin with.’
Boots had nothing to add. He got up and led Jill into the shower, let her scrub the rug fibers off his back, then watched her shampoo her hair, fascinated by the rise and fall of her breasts. When she spoke, he failed to catch the words over the rush of the water.
‘Gladys set me up.’
‘What?’
‘Gladys set me up.’ Jill turned to rinse the back of her head. ‘Max Kohl is a lawyer who’s about to be disbarred after pleading guilty to felony tax evasion. The Kohls have two mortgages on their Bayside property, both in arrears, and the banks are threatening to foreclose. Their only child, Adam, won’t be starting college in the fall because they can’t pay his tuition. Bottom line, Gladys knew her brother was in the house, she knew why, she expected to profit, she set me up. All I did was exploit a flaw in someone else’s tactics.’
There was nothing to do the following morning but go home. Jill Kelly was on a set course. Better not to ask questions, better not to invite the lie. Still, she surprised him. When he kissed her at the door, she pressed the side of her face against his chest. Suddenly, Boots imagined Jill at the kitchen table, late at night, pouring over a case file, going on that way year after year. Jill had made a big concession, explaining herself. Perhaps she was making another now. Or maybe she only wanted him to locate Corcoran. That would be even more flattering, Jill assuming that he could find the man. But she didn’t ask for his help, didn’t even say goodbye. She let him walk through the door and closed it behind him.
At home, he found his answering machine jammed with messages from reporters. Their enterprise impressed him. They knew very well that he couldn’t speak to them without permission from his superiors, but they were trying anyway. Well, at least he’d had the foresight to buy his cellphone minutes in bulk instead of signing with a big company. Boots’s home number was unlisted, but a dozen reporters had gotten it. They’d have his cellphone number too if it appeared on any registry.
Boots headed to the weight room at the Six-Four after lunch. By then, he’d had enough of Libby and his father and their maddening solicitude. He couldn’t sit still, either, not without Rick Bauer’s silhouette popping up.
At twenty-five, Rick had seemed a boy, handsome and fit, his dirty-blond hair long enough to violate regulations. Never mind that he was a drug smuggler, that he tried to murder Jill Kelly, that he had the conscience of a cockroach. Boots Littlewood had flipped Rick Bauer’s switch, from on to off, lights out, see you in hell. There was no way around the facts.
The weight room was crowded when Boots arrived. O’Malley and Velikov were present; Antoine Crudup, too. But there were no sympathetic looks, no penetrating glances from this crew. Boots needed their company and he needed room. They gave him both.
He started slowly, with the stretching exercises he usually avoided, but once he got going found that he couldn’t stop. He wanted a cigarette, too. This would get better, he told himself, but then couldn’t decide which ‘this’ he was talking about – Rick Bauer, Jill Kelly or just the nicotine. He wanted to be with Jill, sitting next to her while she filled the car with smoke.
The room gradually thinned as the four o’clock shift change drew near. Only Velikov approached Boots, and he waited until O’Malley was in the shower.
‘You OK, Boots?’
‘No, I’m fucked.’
The Bulgarian nodded slowly, then patted Boots on the shoulder. ‘Don’t worry,’ he advised, ‘one time I shot this asshole, I took a whole week to get over it.’
An hour later, Boots climbed to the squad room two floors above and had a civilian tech print out the photograph on Mack Corcoran’s driver’s license. As he watched the tech’s fingers whip across the computer’s keyboard, he suddenly put his own finger on a small item bobbing at the edge of his awareness. Last night, in the shower, Jill had rattled off an up-to-date list of the Kohl family’s misfortunes. How did she know?
Boots made it through the weekend before he broke down and called Tommy Galligan on Monday morning. He escorted his father to church and watched the Yankees beat Kansas City, one of those games where the Bombers scored early and often.
The players seemed to grow younger as the innings piled up, kids again. Boots knew that everybody on the field had been a superstar in Little League and high school, back when the game was still fun, when you believed your talent would carry you to the Hall of Fame, believed it with all your heart. When you lived in a world free of doubt.
Those days were long gone, even for superstars like Derek Jeter and Mariano Rivera. Now, when the boys of summer stepped into the batter’s box, their expressions were grim, each turn at the plate another challenge, the fans ready to jump down your throat whenever you failed. And you failed a lot, the greatest hitters who ever played the game unable to get on base more than four of every ten trips to the plate. For the average player, professional baseball was about futility.
After dinner, still restless, Boots headed off to Silky’s, a bar named after the racehorse Silky Sullivan, who’d once come from forty lengths back to win a stakes race. Inside, except for a stamped-tin ceiling, Silky’s was all wood: bar, floor, walls and booths. Cheaply framed photos covered every vertical surface, most of race horses in full flight. Silky’s had been owned and operated by several generations of the Peck family. One and all, they fancied themselves horsemen, the Pecks, though the horses owned by the family were cheap claimers who finished up the track with astonishing regularity.
Frankie Drago was sitting in a booth at the end of the room when Boots walked in, across from an up-and-coming gangster named Sam Golibek. Boots nodded to Frankie, then went to the bar and ordered a Jack Daniels, neat. Silky’s was a neighborhood joint, still undiscovered by the swelling population of young professionals. Most of the other patrons knew him, knew also that an attempt had been made on his life and that he’d killed a man. They knew about his role in liberating Vinnie Palermo as well. That was made apparent when Sam Golibek approached him.
Golibek reminded Boots of Rick Bauer. He was young, handsome and prepared to do violence. ‘What you did for Vinnie,’ he said, ‘it was the right thing.’
A rare moment of
camaraderie between warriors from opposing camps – that was undoubtedly Golibek’s intention. Call him a romantic, but he was totally unprepared for the flame that shot up into Boots’s eyes, or the flush that rose into his cheeks, or the words that dropped from his mouth, one at a time, heavy as stones.
‘If I’m still lookin’ at your face ten seconds from now, you repulsive mutt, I’m gonna slam your nose through the back of your fuckin’ head.’
FORTY-SIX
Boots did not sleep well that night and was not in a good mood when he approached the door to Galligan’s offices. Nor was his disposition improved by finding the door locked, or by the hour-long wait before Galligan popped out of the elevator at eleven o’clock.
‘Hey, Boots.’ Galligan’s watery eyes swam behind his wire-rimmed glasses like fish in an aquarium. If he was any higher, he wouldn’t be able to walk. ‘I was gonna call you.’
‘And that’s it? You don’t even say you’re sorry?’
Galligan unlocked the door, slithered inside, threw a light switch. ‘Sorry about what?’
‘About me havin’ to stand in the hall for an hour. You’re supposed to be running a business.’
‘Only when my receptionist’s not on vacation.’ Galligan made a wet sound in the back of his throat that might have been a laugh. ‘Besides, late is why God made answering machines.’
As he trailed Galligan to his office, Boots swallowed the blasphemy, his anger as well. He was consoled by the near certainty that one fine day he would have the exquisite pleasure of separating Galligan, if not from his teeth, at least from his business.
Too pleased with himself to recognize the threat, Galligan flopped into his chair. Business was booming, thanks to Joaquin.
‘Mack Corcoran,’ he told Boots. ‘You said he was trying to hide, right?’
‘That’s right.’
‘Well, he’s not tryin’ too hard.’ Galligan opened the middle drawer of his desk and took out a single sheet of paper. ‘Corcoran’s Visa card was used eleven times over the weekend. Breakfasts, lunches, dinners, a movie theater, two bars and a boutique.’
‘No debit card? No ATMs?’
‘No.’ A fringe of Galligan’s hair at the top of his forehead stood up in a little wave. He patted this fringe very gently with one hand as he passed the list to Boots with the other. ‘What difference does it make?’
‘Debit cards and ATMs require PIN numbers. With credit cards, nobody even checks the signature.’
Boots scanned the list for the vendors’ addresses: Orchard Street, Avenue A, Avenue B, Twelfth Street, Second Avenue, all on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. From Boots’s point of view, it couldn’t get any worse. He considered strangling the messenger, whose stoned smile never wavered.
‘You owe me one,’ Galligan reminded.
The Lower East Side of Manhattan, called the East Village by real estate agents, is home to hundreds of thousands of residents. A wall of low-income housing projects lines its eastern boundary, from Avenue D to the river, while four-and five-story tenements prevail to the west. The projects are dominated by Hispanics, mainly Puerto Ricans, the tenements by young professionals, mainly white. For the yuppies, the Lower East Side is the bottom rung on Manhattan’s ladder of success – the starting point.
The mix appears volatile on the surface – low-income Latinos and high-aspiration Gringos – but for the most part everybody gets along. The storefronts along First Avenue and Avenue A are dominated by trendy restaurants, those on Avenue D by bodegas, check-cashing stores and Pentecostal churches. Avenue C is the borderline.
Boots drove into this mix at noon and went to work. At three o’clock, he found the answer to the only relevant question at Azzollini, an upscale boutique that might have sat more comfortably in the affluent West Village. Azzollini marketed handbags designed by Renata Azzollini through stores in Paris, Milan and New York.
For a moment, as he gathered himself, Boots stared through the window at handbags displayed like works of art in a museum. A willowy blonde in a long skirt flowed through this exhibit, wielding a feather duster. Her movements were even more languid than Galligan’s.
Boots felt as though he’d wandered into somebody else’s house of worship when he opened the door and stepped inside. The bags at Azzollini began at five hundred dollars and climbed rapidly from there. Maybe it was the feathers, or the semi-precious stones, maybe the bags were actually some kind of investment, maybe they were cheap at the price. Still, Boots couldn’t see Mack Corcoran forking out seven hundred bucks for a handbag while he was on the run from Jill Kelly. But he couldn’t imagine Corcoran being stupid enough to use a credit card, either.
‘May I help you?’
Boots displayed his shield. ‘Detective Littlewood,’ he said. Up close, the blonde was stunning, right down to her professional smile. ‘I’m here about a handbag purchased on Saturday.’
‘Any particular bag?’
‘One that cost seven hundred and forty-one dollars and thirty-four cents and was paid for with a credit card.’
‘Oh, right.’
‘You know which one I’m talking about?’
‘Except at Christmas, we only sell a few bags a day, especially in the summer when people leave town. So, yes, I do remember.’
‘Does that mean you handled the transaction?’
‘I did.’
Boots held up Corcoran’s photograph. ‘Was this the man who made the buy?’
‘Uh-uh. The man who purchased the handbag was much younger.’ She brought a finger to her lips. ‘Do we have a problem here?’
No, the problem was Jill Kelly’s, unless Boots found her before she reached Mack Corcoran.
‘Please,’ he said, ‘describe the man who bought the handbag.’
‘I can do better than describe him, detective. I have him on tape. Give me a day and I’ll give you his picture.’ She drew herself up. ‘At Azzollini, we’re serious about credit cards.’
Now what? Boots kept asking himself that question as he drove back and forth, from Houston Street to Fourteenth Street, while he sat on a bench in Tompkins Square Park, as he ate a quick dinner, while he walked the avenues, peering into showroom windows.
From the earliest days of the Republic, New York has been a magnet for the best, the brightest and the most ambitious. At first, they came from upstate and New England, the second and third sons of Yankee farmers. Today, having graduated from the right universities, they come to the Lower East Side of Manhattan from every state in the country, young professionals, men and women both, determined to bite off a chunk of the apple. None of this was news to Boots Littlewood, who was familiar with a smaller yuppie enclave in Williamsburg. But he was struck, as he made his way, by how attractive they were, these boys and the girls, and how young. When he stopped for a beer at eight o’clock, he felt entirely out of place. Conversations swirled around him, a continual buzz in a language that might have been Greek for all he understood the words. No one approached him, no one met his gaze, not even in the mirror. He was that far outside the orbit of their lives.
Boots didn’t mind. In his experience, these strivers were more insular than Albanian gangsters. They hung out together, married each other, eventually moved to the burbs where they lived side by side. And that was only if they didn’t scuttle back to Peoria, utter failures.
At one o’clock, Boots was still at it, driving back and forth, hoping against hope that he could head Jill off. But the area to be covered was large and there were traffic lights on every corner, so that when Boots finally located Jill’s midnight-green Chrysler on First Avenue, he knew it might have been sitting there for as long as thirty minutes.
Boots pulled to the curb in front of a fire hydrant and got out. The club scene was running full tilt, with knots of smokers on the sidewalk in front of every bar, including the one alongside Jill’s Chrysler. Boots approached the two men and three women, his gaze traveling from face to face as he flashed his tin. He reminded himself that he was de
aling with the children of the middle class. Though they believed themselves daring, even revolutionary, respect for authority came as naturally to them as their BlackBerrys and iPods.
Boots pointed to the Chrysler, hoping, in part, to draw attention from his drooping eyelid. ‘Did any of you notice the woman who parked this car?’
They looked from Boots to each other, confused, as if Boots’s shield had scratched, but not penetrated, the bubble that surrounded them.
‘That Chrysler,’ Boots prompted. ‘Did any of you happen to notice the woman who parked it?’
‘I saw her.’
‘Ah.’ Smile firmly in place, Boots turned to a smallish girl in a tank-top and jeans. ‘What time was that?’ he asked.
‘Five minutes ago? Ten? I noticed her because she was wearing a jacket. The jacket was, like, red suede, and she had dark red hair, and I thought, you know, that it all, like, worked. Only the outfit definitely wasn’t club gear. So it was, like, very strange.’
‘Did you notice where she went?’
‘Is she a … a person of interest?’
Boots repressed a smile. ‘Please, did you notice where she went?’
‘She walked across the street. But, look, I don’t think I can identify her. Like in a line-up.’
‘You didn’t see where she went after that?’
‘No.’
Boots scanned the rest of the smokers. ‘Anybody else?’
‘I saw her, too.’ The man wore a Hawaiian shirt, red and gold, over carefully torn jeans. ‘I saw her get out of the car and walk across the street.’
‘Did you notice which way she went?’
‘No, but she did something strange.’
‘And what was that?’
‘Halfway across First Avenue, she stopped and looked up.’
‘At anything in particular?’
‘Well, I can’t be sure, of course, but I think she was checking the rooftops.’
FORTY-SEVEN
Boots walked to the curb and performed his own sweep. There were five apartment buildings on the east side of the block between Ninth and Tenth Streets. The height of their roofs varied by no more than a couple of yards, so that it was possible to traverse the entire block without coming down. This would give Jill access to the doors leading to the stairwells, or to the fire escapes in front and back if those doors were locked.
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