Kalijero did not look optimistic.
“As a last resort,” I said, “tell Brookstone you’ll let him beat the shit out of me if I don’t deliver. That should get him to show up.”
—
A black-haired woman tongue-lashed the swing-shift doorman. She had long red nails, smudged lipstick, and a windswept face of barbed features. A pink handbag swung erratically from her leathery arm while she gesticulated wildly, as if performing an incantation. I maneuvered behind her then closed the space.
“…This is a luxury building. Do you understand what that means? We expect to get our packages delivered promptly….”
Lenny explained that the building was not staffed to guarantee same-day package delivery, which was why he had called her when the package arrived. But the woman was in no mood for excuses and suggested his age played a role in his inability to understand what the affluent expected from the help. I was impressed by how Lenny remained calm under her venomous glare. She walked away, convinced the barbarians had indeed arrived at the gate.
“Ouch,” I said. Lenny scribbled in a notepad. “You need a hug?”
He looked up, smiled. I sensed an appreciation for empathy. “Sore throat?”
“Just a little strained. Was that woman as painful as she appeared?”
“Nah.” Lenny dropped the notepad into his jacket pocket. “Just part of the job.”
“I hope your good attitude is making you prosperous.”
“Oh, I’m definitely prosperous.”
“Good tips?”
Lenny waved me off. “Manny’s the tip whore. For me, it’s more about material. I’m a writer.”
“What do you mean, ‘tip whore’?”
“He’s always selling himself. You think there’s a resident who doesn’t know about Manny’s sick kid? ‘Poor Manny has a sick kid, we better give him a good tip. He’s such a nice man and he supports his wife who has to stay home and take care of their sick child.’ He plays it up for every penny.”
I took a moment to walk a mile in Manny’s shoes. “You know what? I don’t blame him. You have any idea how hard it is for a working man to support a family? The cost of healthcare alone beats you into despair. Anyway, does his wife ever come in with the kids?”
“I’ve seen her, but not with kids. She should bring ’em in, though. Manny could probably seal the deal on a lot of fat Christmas bonuses with a kid wearing an oxygen mask.”
“Is she as nice as Manny?”
“She’s nice to look at, that’s for sure. I assumed you knew her by now, since she was friends with Jackie Whitney.”
I took a moment to process what Lenny just said. “Manny’s wife was friends with Jackie Whitney?”
“Yeah. She used to stop by during my shift, sit on the couch, and wait for Jackie to come down.”
“What makes you think the woman who stopped by was Manny’s wife?”
“I just assumed because I saw them so often driving away or getting into a cab after Manny’s shift.”
“Interesting. Anyway, what do you write?”
“Short stories. This place is a gold mine for tragic characters.”
I smiled. “I can totally see it. Probably helps you tolerate the job.”
“Stephen King was a janitor before he got published. The more the residents talk to me, the more material I get.”
“You told the cops Jackie Whitney arrived at the building between four and five on the day she returned from Palm Springs, right?”
“I did.”
“Did you interact with her on that day?”
“No choice. She had a ton of luggage.”
“Did she give you her usual witchiness?”
“Of course. But her shitty mood was well worth a twenty-buck tip.”
“Twenty bucks just for bringing up her luggage?”
“And unloading it in her bedroom.”
“By any chance, did you leave the luggage cart in her apartment?”
Lenny gave me his are you really that stupid? look. “Why would I do that?”
“I don’t know. Maybe you were in a hurry and forgot to take it?”
“That didn’t happen.”
“Does it ever happen? To any of the doormen?”
“It’s hard to picture ever happening.”
A short, plump man wearing a black suit and chauffeur’s cap approached Lenny and asked him where he could get a good hot dog. Lenny directed him to a Rush Street location a few blocks away.
“The old guy who works overnight, Marv. Have you gotten to know him at all?”
“A little bit. Sometimes I stay late and chat. He’s known some of these families for fifty years. Jackie Whitney’s death made him real sad. He likes to talk about his army days in the Korean War. He showed me his medals. A lot of his buddies died at a place called Outpost Harry. I’m surprised he’s still got the will to live considering how much death he’s seen.”
“Did he ever talk about the police questioning him?”
Lenny looked confused. “Oh, you mean about Jackie Whitney’s murder? Marv was in the hospital for all that.” Lenny’s words buzzed around my head, grazed my face and hair, tempted my reflex to swat at them. “What’s the matter?” Lenny said.
“Okay, bear with me. What happens when someone’s sick or takes vacation? You work overtime?”
“We’re offered the overtime and if nobody wants it, an agency covers for us.”
“Do you know the name of the agency?”
Lenny wrote down some information off a business card taped to the desk. “These idiots,” he said, handing me a piece of paper. “I think they just grab guys off the street and send them here.”
“The night Jackie Whitney returned from Palm Springs, the agency covered the graveyard shift?”
“Yeah, I assume that’s what happened.”
“What do you mean assume?”
“Because the dumbass showed up late and I wasn’t going to hang around waiting on a Saturday night.”
“You’re sure it was Saturday night, May sixteenth?”
“I’m sure, unless bringing up all that luggage and the twenty-buck tip was a hallucination. Oh, and I hallucinated Manny’s wife too.”
“Manny’s wife? Manny came in with his wife?”
“No. She came in alone, a few hours after Jackie got back.”
Chapter 29
Sharp hunger pangs reminded me I had skipped breakfast. I drove to Penguin House and ordered their special of the day, a dish of baked fries covered in a “cheesy, beefy,” allegedly vegan sauce. Whatever it was, my body welcomed it. Debbie called as I was getting ready to leave.
“The DNA results are in,” Debbie said. “The lab is southwest of the city. Where are you?”
I told Debbie I’d meet her at the courthouse. Fifteen minutes later, I parked in the sprawling lot and dialed Debbie’s number. Before the second ring, I heard several honks. A late nineties Ford F-150 with an extended cab roared toward me.
“Nice ride,” I said as I climbed in to the sounds of Melissa Etheridge’s raspy vocals coming through six-inch speakers and a powered subwoofer.
Debbie looked at my bruised neck, said nothing, then hit the gas. After we merged onto the interstate I asked if something was bothering her.
“Battle fatigue,” she said. “Sexual predators and mothers beating their babies take their toll.”
“Maybe you’ll get some good news for a change and get Kate out of prison.”
Debbie had no opinion on my optimism, but said, “Did you get strangled recently?”
“Twice yesterday.”
Untroubled by my disclosure, Debbie retreated back to her dark world. We rode in silence the rest of the way, stopping at a two-story modernist cinder-block structure with floor-to-ceiling glass and a cantilevered roof. The receptionist checked our IDs then picked up the phone. A minute later a skinny man smiling broadly and wearing a white lab coat appeared.
—
At five minutes before three, I
double-parked on East Lake Shore Drive near the entrance to Jackie Whitney’s building and watched guys in red vests park and retrieve vehicles. They were a mix of teenagers and mature adults and moved in a synchronized rhythm of commerce, climbing in and out of cars, eagerly anticipating the first gesture of an approaching gratuity. Manny showed up exactly at three, his doorman’s jacket draped over his arm. The valets surrounded him, smiling and laughing as if just hanging out on a street corner. They must’ve joked around for a good ten minutes before the youngest-looking valet ran off. His return was preceded by ten seconds of deep, throaty rumbling followed by a screeching halt in a fire-engine-red Mustang GT. Howls of laughter ensued as the kid revved the four-hundred horsepower a couple of times before surrendering the car to the doorman.
Manny eased the car into the street then peeled out to the stoplight, the squealing tires providing great joy to the valets. I pulled up behind him, confident he was unaware of being followed. As I observed him through the Mustang’s rear windshield, his fingers and palms struck the steering wheel in rhythm to the loud bass thumping through open windows. When the light changed, Manny turned right on Michigan then merged onto northbound Lake Shore Drive. He exited at Montrose, headed east to a side street near Damen, then stopped in front of a tiny clapboard house. It looked like one of those “relief cottages” slapped together after the Great Chicago Fire of 1871. I doubted the house was more than four hundred square feet.
I parked about thirty yards down the other side of the street, and watched from my car. Twenty minutes later, Manny reappeared in a black jacket, shirt, and slacks. He jumped into his car, pulled a tight U-turn, and roared away. I waited for him to turn back onto Montrose, then gunned my four-cylinder Civic to catch up. The red Mustang was easy to spot. Manny retraced his route back to southbound Lake Shore Drive, exited at North Avenue, then turned left on Clark, where I was disheartened to see him pull into the underground garage of a high-rise apartment building.
I thought it too risky to follow him in my car, so I circled the adjacent blocks until I found a place to park then walked back. The building would be considered luxury by some standards, but not Gold Coast caliber. The residents I observed appeared younger than forty, well groomed, and may or may not have been receiving monthly allowances from their parents.
What else could I do except scan the names on the building’s directory? I did so reluctantly, as one who followed through on any useless exercise, although Frownie’s voice scolded me for dismissing the yet-to-be-discovered payoff that mundane tasks often generated. Several times, a resident held the door open, waiting for me to enter. The fact I carried a gun offered a great learning opportunity regarding why buildings had security doors, but I chose to say, “That’s okay.”
Maybe Manny was divorced and his wife and kids lived in the building. Manny’s last name, Alvarez, did not appear in the directory but she may have remarried. Certainly she didn’t live there on a doorman’s income. Manny’s Rolex could’ve been a cheap knockoff and the gold chain around his neck could’ve been just stainless steel with gold plating. But it was hard to reconcile Manny driving his fancy muscle car while supporting a wife and two kids, unless he had something going on the side. And just as staring at the lobby on a computer screen had numbed my brain, so did the letters on the directory pass mindlessly through my vision, until a name stopped me cold, not only a name I recognized, but a name that proved Frownie’s praise of tedious chores to be self-evident.
Over the phone, the concierge transferred me to the doorman’s desk. “Lenny, it’s Jules Landau.”
“What’s up, Mr. Landau?”
“Do me a favor. Tell me what Manny’s wife looks like.”
—
Frownie tried to make me in his image, a PI with old-school gumshoe sensibility. If bad guys played by rules excluding the Fourth Amendment, then that’s how the game was played. From my knees, I examined the pin-and-tumbler lock on Manny’s back door, the same type of lock Frownie had forced me to spend a billion hours practicing on. Ten minutes earlier, I’d been sitting in my car, fiddling with a roll of masking tape, pondering why the thought of breaking into someone’s house induced such a distasteful feeling. The best investigators do what they have to do, would’ve been Frownie’s answer, followed by an unsympathetic suggestion to reevaluate my career choice. On the way over I had prayed for an unlocked window. Climbing through an open window sounded—for some reason—less unsavory.
Manny’s minuscule house was really a glorified dorm room with a kitchenette. Spices, cologne, and body odor battled for olfactory domination. A pork chop shared a frying pan with a pile of rice. A neat row of satin and velvet dress shirts hung in a metal-framed portable closet. Manny’s taste showed a bias for black collarless shirts with mesh panels, or white stand-up collared shirts with tuxedo ruffles. At the end of the row, a coat of arms with a red lion rampant caught my eye. I tore off a piece of masking tape, pushed it against the gray jacket’s vented backside, then pulled it off.
Chapter 30
Debbie leaned back in her chair, feet on desk, one leg crossed over the other. In front of her face she clutched a thick document held together with a giant binder clip. I took the guest chair and read a newspaper clipping about a man exonerated after serving thirty-five years of a life sentence. Halfway through the article, an airborne stack of papers landed on the desk. Debbie stared at me from her reclined posture, fingers interlaced behind her head, an ambiguously calm expression on her face. “What’s up?” she said. I put a plastic bag in front of her.
“The particles attached to this piece of tape came off Manny the doorman’s jacket. It looks like the stuff we had tested.”
Her eyes bounced between the bag and me. She cleared her throat. “Who collected this stuff using this piece of tape?”
“I did.”
“And where was the jacket at the time you applied the tape?”
“In his house, on a chair.”
Debbie was not pleased. I knew why. “And under what circumstances did you enter the house?”
“Okay, I know—”
“Are you familiar with the first ten amendments to the Constitution?”
“Don’t kill, don’t steal, don’t covet your neighbor’s wife….” Debbie was not amused. I said, “Let’s just get it tested with the other items and see if it matches the fur at Linda Napier’s house or anything found at Jackie Whitney’s apartment.”
“The evidence was illegally obtained.”
“But at least we’ll know—”
“It doesn’t matter what we know! Not only did you illegally enter someone’s house, DNA evidence has to be collected by a forensic investigator, someone who’s trained to follow the guidelines. That piece of tape is the most worthless fucking evidence I’ve ever seen!”
Debbie stared somewhere over my head. I said, “What if we can get a warrant to search his house? I’m sure we can find more particles.”
“What’s your probable cause? The evidence you obtained illegally?”
“I know a retired police detective. If I show him that the particles on Manny’s coat match the particles at both murder scenes, then I’m sure he can convince Brookstone to find probable cause to get a warrant.”
Debbie laughed. “Sure. Brookstone drives by the doorman’s house, says he smells a meth lab, then kicks in the guy’s door. You’d stoop that low, Jules?”
“You got me, Debbie. I’m desecrating the memory of everyone who fought, died, and suffered so the Constitution could live.”
“I’m getting pretty sick of your smart-ass comments.”
“You’re testing the particles from Linda Napier’s home next, right? Just include this in a separate bag, give me the results, and I’ll take it from there. You won’t know anything about it.”
Debbie straightened up in her chair, leaned forward over her desk, then rested her face in her hands. Defending the Fourth Amendment deserved respect, but her sanctimonious delivery challenged my sympathy. She
uncovered her face, reached for the plastic bag, then said, “Get the hell away from me.”
—
Tamar sat on the couch, Punim stretched across her lap. I stood in the doorway reliving the memory of handing Tamar a key, then her words, You may regret this.
“You look so serious,” Tamar said as she caressed Punim’s back. “You want your key back?”
I looked at my watch. “Not just yet.” Tamar kicked my shoe. I sat down next to her and started scratching Punim behind the ears.
“I know,” Tamar said. “You’re not allowed to talk about it.”
Two days ago, Tamar noticed the time stamp discrepancy on the CCTV video. Yesterday, she inspired me to discover DeWeldt’s corporate-greed motive for his nursing-home scheme.
“Imagine if there was a genetic database of every dog and cat somebody owned.”
Tamar didn’t say anything, just ran Punim’s tail through her partially closed fist. She looked at me. “Is that the whole setup?”
“What do you mean?”
“The first part of a joke is called the ‘setup.’ ”
We locked eyes a moment. I struggled not to laugh. “No, really,” I said. “This guy was convicted of murder because he stepped in a pile of dog poop that was traced to the scene of the crime.”
Tamar contemplated my remark. “In other words, the police matched the poop with the perp?”
Tamar kept a straight face when she spoke those words, which made my laugh impossible to suppress. “That’s true.”
“Does this have something to do with your investigation?”
“It does, but I collected evidence illegally.”
“Without the dog’s permission?”
This time we both laughed, startling Punim. She leaped off Tamar’s lap then streaked down the hall. “I entered someone’s property illegally. The evidence is no longer admissible in court.”
Doubt in the 2nd Degree Page 20