Dead Famous

by Carol O'Connell

Not so fast, Jo, not quite yet.

  “I won’t be coming back to work.” She avoided his eyes, and her voice became more formal, as if he were a stranger, just one more cop to deal with. “I left my resignation with Miss Byrd.”

  “Yeah, I heard. So you’ll want your suitcase back.”

  “Yes.” She walked about the room, bending low to pick up the cups and to empty the ashtrays into a plastic bag. “If you don’t mind, could you drop it off at my hotel?”

  “No, I don’t think so.” His voice was flat, giving away nothing, as he pulled one of Ned’s business cards from his wallet. “You’ll have to come and get it.” He scrawled his address on the back of the card, then left it on the metal chair. “My place, seven o’clock. I’ll cook. You bring the wine.”

  Jo walked everywhere in grace, and so the stumble gave her away. Knowing his preference for cheap bourbon and beer, she would probably bet her stock portfolio that he did not own a corkscrew, and now her thoughts must go to the wine in the bottom drawer of her armoire.

  Riker ambled across the floor, taking his own time. He paused at the far end of the room and turned around to stare at her. All the trappings of a cop fell away for a moment, and he was only a man, as easily killed as any other. And she could kill him—with words, a look. He wanted to say something to her, something—personal. Ducking his head a bare inch, as if expecting a hail of laughter for this foolish unspoken idea, he held her glance a moment longer before turning back to the door. These days he left every room with a bang—not so loud as a paralyzing gunshot—just a satisfying slam that rattled every door in its frame.

  9

  RIKER COULD NOT SAY HOW HE HAPPENED TO FIND himself so far uptown in the neighborhood of wealth. From long habit, his feet knew the route of subway stairs and side-walks leading to this Park Avenue apartment building. A liveried doorman greeted him with genuine affection, and another fiver traveled from Riker’s pocket to his, though there was nothing new to report. Even at this posh address, betrayal was cheap and affordable.

  Riker stepped back to the curb and looked up at one lighted window. A pale woman hovered there—expectant. This was the mother of the boy who had ambushed him. Her face was so much like her son’s, though she lacked that wild-eyed look of crazy all the time. Her eyes were only fearful—of him. That much detail could not be seen on such a high floor; he simply knew this to be true.

  And the woman knew.

  If her child came home again, Riker would kill him.

  As if reading his thoughts, the woman shrank back from the window, and Riker bowed his head in the manner of a shamed terrorist who has brought his bomb to the wrong door. He carried himself away from this innocent woman and walked on down the broad avenue—a man waiting to explode.

  Mallory’s small tan car pulled up in front of the Park Avenue building. The wealthy tenants, a man and a woman, withdrew to the safety of the lobby, preferring to communicate via the doorman, their conduit to the outside world. Over the past six months, they had grown skittish and shy of being waylaid by reporters, and they had come to fear police. Their faces were pale from infrequent forays into the sunlight.

  As Mallory left her car and approached the doorman, she glanced at the couple on the other side of the glass entryway. They were staring at her, discussing her. Then they caught her eye, and now they fled across the lobby toward the elevator. She wondered if they knew about the doorman’s profits and how easily he sold their private lives.

  “Mallory.” The doorman moved toward her, edging sideways like a crab, wanting no one from the building’s interior to see the folding money that he anticipated. “You told me Riker wouldn’t be back.” He feigned a sigh. “Ah, those poor people. I don’t think they can handle any more of this.”

  “I said I’d take care of it.” She handed him a bill much larger than any of Riker’s shabby bribes, instantly renewing this man’s friendship and allegiance. He pocketed his money, then gave her a broad smile that said, Screw those poor people. What can I do for you today?

  “What did Riker want?”

  “Same old thing. He asked if they’d left the building in the last few days. Oh, yeah, and did they have any new visitors.”

  “And you said?”

  “They don’t go nowhere. They don’t see nobody.” He looked over one shoulder to be sure that the lobby was clear of prying eyes. “The missus, she feels sorry for Riker. But the mister’s really steamed.”

  “But no threats, right? They didn’t call in a complaint?”

  “Naw, they don’t want any more trouble with the cops. The truth, Mallory? They were more afraid of their own kid than Riker. Poor bastard. I told ’em the guy’s a little nuts, but not the dangerous kind of crazy. Not like that son of—” He stopped abruptly, correctly intuiting that she would do him some damage if he continued with this line of prattle.

  “He’s not crazy,” she said. “Don’t you put that idea in their heads one more time.”

  Mallory felt no compassion for the parents of Riker’s shooter. Those poor people had spent a million dollars on lawyers so their son would be free to ambush a cop. “You tell them I don’t want to hear about any harassment complaints. Make that real clear.”

  Had that sounded sufficiently menacing? Yes. The doorman was back-stepping.

  She wanted fear to be the strong point of his translation when he carried her message back to those millionaires with their psychotic genes and good lawyers. They had always known what kind of monster they had raised, yet they had not locked the boy away. And now they had no right to whine about the damaged man who sometimes haunted Park Avenue.

  In honor of Johanna’s visit, the dirty laundry had been stashed in his bedroom, where yesterday’s socks joined the pairs previously scattered about the front room. While Riker waited, he began to see his apartment through Mrs. Ortega’s eyes. He regretted tossing out the cleaning woman before she could do much more than leave her little footprints in the dust. A man could lose a corpse beneath the mound of black plastic garbage bags piling near the door. How much time had passed since he had last been inspired to carry out trash on collection night? Weeks? A month?

  He looked at his watch, then dismissed the idea that Mrs. Ortega might make an emergency house call. After closing the doors to the kitchen and bathroom, two problems were solved. And now he rationalized away the rest of the mess in the front room. The state of this litter pit would take the lady by surprise. She would never see the first shot coming.

  And the walls were thick. If she screamed, no one would hear it.

  Mallory passed through the stairwell door, and entered the squad room of Special Crimes Unit, a large space with a haphazard arrangement of desks and one wall banked with tall, grimy windows overlooking the narrow SoHo street. Six men were working overtime tonight, filling in the gap left by Riker’s forced departure and her own unauthorized sabbatical. The detectives sat amid the clutter and litter of their caseloads, files and notes and coffee cups, shouting questions at one another, barking deli orders to a police aide and holding telephone conversations.

  All noise and motion ceased.

  The men lifted their heads in the unison of chorus girls with shoulder holsters. Their eyes were trained on the squad’s lone female as she crossed the room to her desk, the only desk at perfect right angles to the wall. Three days ago, this had been the most fanatically neat work space on the planet. No more. The locks on the drawers had been pried open, leaving scratch marks on the metal. The contents had been pawed over and jumbled, some of it strewn across her blotter, and the rest was on the floor. Case files and notebooks lay open, and her penchant for compulsive neatness was exposed in the spill of a drawer stocked with cleaning supplies.

  But Mallory did not implode.

  And hope died all around the room, for the show was obviously over and hardly worth the wait. The frozen tableau came back to life as talking and shouting resumed and papers shuffled.

  Mallory turned to Detective Janos, a man with the
large and solid build of a refrigerator that could talk and quote Milton. He had a brutal face that appealed to parents and parole officers alike, one that could frighten their charges into good behavior, and his was the most compassionate face in the squad room tonight. But sympathy was not what Mallory wanted.

  He rose from his chair and slowly ambled toward her ruined desk, shaking his head to convey the commiserations of Ain’t it a shame? and What’s this world coming to? His voice was incongruously soft when he said, “I know what it looks like, kid, but nothing was taken.” He hunkered down to retrieve a can of metal polish that had rolled under her chair.

  “This is Coffey’s work,” said Mallory. Lieutenant Coffey might as well have gouged his name into the metal alongside all the other scratches. No one else would have dared to desecrate her personal space.

  Janos shot a glance at the window that ran the length of the lieutenant’s private office. The blinds were drawn, and the door was closed. “I wouldn’t go in there right now if I were you. The boss just got rid of two vultures from Internal Affairs. They found out that Riker was working full-time for his brother Ned.”

  “He doesn’t work there anymore. I took care of that.”

  “But he did work there.” Janos, the quintessential gentleman, was on his knees, picking up the case files and notes strewn at her feet. “And the whole time Riker was working, he collected checks for full disability.”

  “He never cashed those checks.” Mallory snatched the papers from his hands before he could put them into the wrong drawer. “And Riker only took a job after the department stopped his payroll deposits.”

  “Oh, the lieutenant knows that,” said Janos, gathering pens and paper clips into his large meaty hands. “And that’s what he told IA. Then he told ’em Riker was railroaded into a pension and showed ’em a copy of the appeal forms. And then he says, ‘Where do you bastards get off harassing a decorated cop, a wounded cop?’ So the boss holds up four fingers, and I’m thinkin’, naw, that’s three too many. But then he yells, ‘Four bullet wounds! Count my fingers, you morons!’ I thought that was a real nice touch. And then the bastards left—real fast. Case closed.”

  Mallory stared at her violated desk. “But that’s got nothing to do with why Coffey popped all these locks. Right?”

  “I’m getting to that.”

  Janos dumped his collection of small objects into her top drawer with no regard for the correct compartments of the plastic desk organizer. Mallory bit back a rebuke and quickly slotted the paper clips, pens and pencils into the proper square and rectangular wells.

  “The district attorney sent one of his twits over here to hassle you,” said Janos. “He wanted the package you promised. The trial’s tomorrow, and he’s a little antsy about it.”

  And that would be all the evidence she had been asked to develop for a pending court case. It had taken only a few hours to gather it, and she had done that three days ago but never turned it in.

  “Coffey tried to reach you.” The large detective rose to a stand, holding her feather duster delicately between his thumb and forefinger. “But you don’t answer your beeper anymore.”

  “I’m on comp time.” She snatched the feather duster and dropped it into its proper place. She planned to close this lower drawer quietly, not wanting to give the other men the satisfaction of a slam.

  “But, Mallory, you never actually did the paperwork for time off.”

  She slammed the drawer, causing heads to turn, and she never bothered to lower her voice. “If I put in for all the extra hours I’ve racked up since Riker’s been gone—”

  “The city would go broke paying you off. I know. But the boss thinks you spent the last three days attached to the DA’s office. Now he finds out they’ve never seen your face, not once.”

  “So you sat there and watched him bust my desk open.”

  “What could I do? I already told him I hadn’t heard from you this week. How was I gonna explain all your evidence wrapped up nice and neat in my top drawer? So I had a patrol cop run your package downtown. Record time, sirens all the way. The assistant DA was still in the squad room when his office called to tell him they had everything they needed for court. Well, now this jerk has to apologize to Lieutenant Coffey. The boss loved that. So that’s one point on your side.”

  “But it’s not the real reason he broke all my locks.”

  “I’m guessing . . . no.” Janos waved one hand, as if hoping to pluck just the right words from the air. And now he frowned—preparing her for the worst. It was his style to break all bad news in a slow and maddeningly gentle fashion. “You see, right before the DA’s man showed up, the boss got this phone call. You know an ex-cop named Rawlins? He works for Highland Security. Maybe the lieutenant thinks you’re working a second job on the side?”

  “He knows better,” said Mallory. Jack Coffey understood that her only illegal sideline was Butler and Company. “What else?”

  “It has something to do with that shock-jock, Ian Zachary.” Janos threw up his hands. “That’s all I got.” He looked up at the ceiling. “Well, almost. I know it’s tied to that private dick, Rawlins. The guy’s phone call really irritated the boss.”

  The translation of that soft-sold comment was Mallory’s vision of Jack Coffey going ballistic with a crowbar. She could see him ripping into her desk, venting all his animosity with vandalism.

  “I got an idea this is serious trouble.” Janos nodded toward the lieutenant’s private office. “So act real polite when you go in there. Don’t say anything to get on his bad side, okay?”

  Yeah, right.

  Riker parted his curtains to look down at the street. Jo was walking alone, coming from the direction of the subway, and there were no feds in sight. Mallory was right. Jo could lose her federal watchers at will. That would also explain why she traveled on trains when she could afford cabs and limousines. It was harder to track someone underground, so many ways to lose a subject in a string of cars and all the station stops.

  The intercom buzzed.

  He pressed the talk button, not waiting to hear her voice. “Hey, Jo, come on up.” He tapped the next button to admit her to the building, then opened his front door by a crack and listened for the rising elevator. He watched her step out into the hallway. It was a cold evening, and she wore a down jacket shaped like a dark blue hand grenade riding above her long blue-jeaned legs. In less than fifteen minutes, he would look back on this moment and recognize it as a warning.

  He opened the door a little wider, then backed up to the wall. She entered slowly, head turning from side to side, so suspicious of an unlocked apartment, but she never looked behind her. He stepped out from the wall and punched her arm.

  “So, Jo—did that hurt?”

  “What?” She whirled around, stunned, as one hand covered her upper arm where he had hit her with a closed fist. “You know it hurt. Why would—”

  “Good. Every civilian should take a body blow just once in their lives. Then they wouldn’t freeze up, always anticipating the first punch, first pain.” He stepped toward her, and educable Jo stepped back. “Let me take your jacket,” he said. “It’ll hurt more without all that padding.”

  “You jerk.”

  “Oh, all the women say that.” And this was actually true. “So what are your physical limitations, Jo?”

  “My what?”

  “If you take a punch to the back, would that cause permanent damage?” He raised his fists, and her eyes rounded, but this time she did not back away from him. “All right, Jo, use your hands to deflect the shots. Stay alert. Here comes another one.” His fist feinted toward her face, missing it by a bare inch. “Feel the air? Now imagine a bloody nose.”

  “Why, Riker?” She only stood there, so exposed, making no move to protect herself. Jo had disabled him with nothing more than large brown eyes full of absolute trust. “You’ve never hit a woman in your life, have you? This is not who you are.”

  “And who are you, Jo? You’re a
refugee from a witness protection program, and you keep shaking off your bodyguards.” He had no more heart for this, and she knew it. His arms fell to his sides, and his voice had lost its edge. He was all but pleading now. “I only want you to have a sporting chance to stay alive.”

  Who else would teach her how to break a man’s nose with the palm of her hand? Without guidance, how would she ever learn to pluck out the jelly of an eyeball with one finger? His resolve returned. This was the only way to keep her alive. His hands were rising.

  “I won’t do this, Riker. Not with you.”

  “I’m not giving you a choice, Jo. But I’ll make it easy.” He opened his arms wide to expose his chest as an easy target. “Your turn. Take your best shot.”

  She walked toward him, slow and deliberate, smiling to tell him that all was forgiven. And then—

  Lieutenant Coffey was a man of average height, and even his hair and eyes were in that middling range of brown. He was young for a command position, only thirty-six, but he had compensated for that by prematurely aging to fit the job, acquiring worry lines that gave his otherwise bland face more character.

  He glanced at his watch. It was just after seven o’clock, and he had no hope of escaping his office anytime soon. Two of his key people were missing; how was he going to fill that hole without more budget-breaking overtime? In his desk drawer was a letter from the commissioner asking why he had not yet replaced Detective Sergeant Riker. How long could he ignore that instruction? When would Riker sign the appeal forms? And was Internal Affairs planning another assault? Would Highland Security keep silent about the latest fiasco? Would the acid eventually eat through his stomach lining, and when, God, when was this ugly day going to end?

  Jack Coffey’s eyes rolled up to the ceiling, but no answers were written there.

  The door was opening. There had been no knock, and that always irritated him. But could his mood be worse? Ah, and now he was graced with a visit from his only female detective. If not for Mallory, he might look years younger. If he fired her today, he might keep the hair that was left around the bald spot at the back of his head, and the tension headaches would go away.