Phantom Angel

by David Handler

  It was Rita.

  She was standing there in the doorway wearing a skintight silver minidress, high-heeled sandals and a shocked expression. I couldn’t blame her. I was standing there in my tighty whities pointing a loaded handgun at her.

  “Jesus, Benji! What are you doing?”

  “What are you doing? It’s the middle of the night!”

  She closed the door and flung her shoulder bag onto her desk. “I had some work to catch up on. Did the AC in your bedroom crap out again?”

  “No, we have an overnight guest. There’ve been some developments.” I noticed now that her smooth, lovely face was etched with strain. “What’s happened, Rita?”

  She ran her hands through her mane of flaming red hair, kicked off her sandals and padded barefoot into Mom’s office, where she flicked on the desk lamp and worked the combination on the big Wells Fargo safe. She opened it and pulled out the bottle of Courvoisier that a satisfied client gave us last Christmas. Found us a couple of glasses in the credenza next to Mom’s desk and poured us two stiff jolts while I put on my T-shirt and rumpled madras shorts.

  Rita took a sip of hers, then she sat down on my makeshift bed and stretched her incredibly long, incredibly shapely legs out on the coffee table.

  “Myron dumped me tonight,” she informed me quietly.

  “What do you mean, he dumped you?”

  “I mean we had a lovely dinner at a French restaurant on First Avenue. Drank a nice bottle of wine. Then strolled back to his place, where he sat me down on the sofa, poured me a large cognac and very politely told me that he didn’t see a future for us. He said he was sorry but that he can’t afford to invest any more time in a relationship that’s not going to yield long-term benefits.”

  “Is this guy looking for a soul mate or a dependable mutual fund?”

  She sipped her cognac in hurt silence, her eyes welling up with tears.

  “Would you like me to talk to Myron for you?”

  “And tell him what?”

  “That he’s making a huge mistake and he’s going to be sorry for the rest of his life.”

  Rita mustered a smile. “My little knight in shining armor. Thank you, but Myron is very decisive. If he says it’s over then it’s over.”

  “Then in that case, I say good riddance. He obviously didn’t cherish you enough to deserve you. Forget about him. Move on.”

  “Tell me something, will you, little lamb?” Her eyes locked on to mine. “You always know the right thing to say to me. You adore me just the way I am. No one has ever made me happier than you. So why on earth couldn’t you be a measly fifteen years older?”

  “You’d have to talk to Mom about that. I had no say in the matter.”

  We sipped our cognacs in guarded silence. Did I find myself staring at those beautiful legs of hers? Yes. Did she notice me staring at them? Oh, yes. Was anything going to happen between us right now on that makeshift bed? Oh, no. That was over and done.

  Rita took a deep breath, letting it out slowly. “I’ll be okay about Myron. I just really didn’t feel like going home. I thought if I came in and got some work done that maybe…” She trailed off, frowning at me. “What developments?”

  “A joint FBI-OCCB task force raided the Crown Towers tonight. They busted everyone in the place. Everyone, that is, except for the person who was our link to the Morrie Frankel case.”

  “Your little webcam hottie?”

  “Boso was conveniently AWOL when the place got raided. The Minettas have got to be thinking she cut a deal behind their back.”

  Rita peered at me over her glass. “So she’s asleep in your bed right now?”

  I nodded my head. “Unless she’s awake.”

  “Kindly explain something to me. She’s frightened. She’s alone. She has the most perfect bod you’re ever going to run across…”

  “Second most perfect.”

  “Seriously, Benji, what on earth are you doing down here?”

  “My job.”

  “‘Your job,’” she repeated doubtfully. “If you say so. Will I be bothering you if I work at my desk for a while?”

  “No more than usual. Mom was afraid we were going to lose you, you know.”

  “Not a chance. Golden Legal Services is stuck with me.”

  “Good, I’m glad.”

  “Are you sure about that?”

  “I couldn’t be more sure.”

  Rita put the bottle back in the safe, swung the door shut and spun the combination dial. “If anyone tries to get in I’ll hear them. I’ll lock up when I leave. Sleep tight, little lamb.”

  She flicked off the desk lamp and closed the door. I got back into bed. Gus padded around until he’d settled himself on my hip again. I lay there. But I didn’t sleep. I never sleep.

  * * *

  BY 7:00 A.M. I was out prowling the street outside our office with my Chief’s Special tucked in the rear waistband of my madras shorts and a sense of profound uneasiness creeping its way through me. It was already 88 degrees out there, and the steamy morning air smelled like spoiled milk. The weather forecasters were predicting that Day Five of the Heat Wave of the Century would top the 100-degree mark yet again, with the added bonus of a slight chance of thunderstorms.

  But it wasn’t the weather that was making me uneasy.

  Our little stretch of Upper Broadway was already plenty busy. The downtown traffic was heavy and there was a whole lot of honking going on. There always is when it’s hot out. Bleary-eyed office workers were trudging their way to the subway. Hakeem, the corner grocer’s son, was hosing down the sidewalk. Stavros, the fishmonger, was taking a delivery from a refrigerated truck. Starbucks was hopping. Scotty’s diner had cabs lined up outside as drivers stopped to grab the famous breakfast special—a fried egg on a toasted onion bagel. I’d already had mine with two large coffees while I sat at Mom’s desk and scanned New York City’s three daily newspapers.

  Our overnight guest was right there on the front page of the New York Post wearing her black velvet thong and her most inviting smile. Semi-revealing photos of Boso and several of the other webcam girls had been assembled into a titillating collage underneath a banner headline that read: “YUM-YUM!” The Post’s chief competitor, the New York Daily News, had opted to go with a photo of Little Joe Minetta being led out of the Crown Towers in handcuffs with a sniveling expression on his weasely face—and a banner headline reading: “PUSSY GALORE!” The raid was juicy enough to bump the coverage of the great Morrie Frankel’s shocking midtown slaying to the inside pages, where I learned nothing I didn’t already know—other than that they had dimmed the marquee lights on Broadway last night in tribute to his passing. And a number of theatrical luminaries did step up and call him a “legend” and “the last of the great showmen.” Leah, I felt, would be pleased. Thanks to The New York Times, which had its story about the Crown Towers raid tucked inside on page A-18, I learned that the joint NYPD-FBI task force had also raided three different secure storage facilities not far from the Crown Towers where they’d seized an estimated $4.2 million worth of illegally purchased luxury goods.

  Big Joe Minetta, who was not personally targeted by Operation Yum-Yum, had issued a statement late last night through his celebrity lawyer blasting the operation as a “witch hunt” and a “cheap publicity stunt.” He vowed to “clear the good names of these honest, hardworking American businessmen and women.”

  Each and every one of those hardworking American businesswomen was mentioned by name in the news coverage, including Luze Santiago, age twenty, from Camden, New Jersey, and Eleanora Yelmas, age nineteen, from Altoona, Pennsylvania, whose professional name was Little Mutt. There was no mention that one of the webcam girls was still at large. No mention of Boso at all.

  Or at least not in the newspapers.

  The home page of crickoshea.com featured a full-frontal nude photo of Boso from that yacht gallery and a big fat question: “WHERE IS SHE?” “According to my sources,” wrote Cricket, “Jonquil Beauso
leil, the sweetest of the sweetgirls webcam babes, was not picked up with the others last night. Jonquil’s nickname is Boso. She’s eighteen and hails from Ruston, Louisiana. My sources believe she’s hiding out from both the law and the Minetta crime family. All I can say is: Lotsa luck, cutie.”

  I’d asked Cricket to forget about her. She hadn’t. She’d even managed to come up with Boso’s age and place of birth. I wondered how. Just as I wondered how long it would take before the Minettas came looking for her at the offices of Golden Legal Services. On the face of it, they had no reason to suspect she was connected to us in any way. Unless, that is, you stopped to think about the what ifs. As in what if Morrie had told Joe Minetta that it was us who he’d hired to look for her. As in what if the doorman at the Crown Towers, the one who Sue Herrera told me they’d turned, was playing for both sides and had given my license plate number to Joe. As in what if someone in our neighborhood had spotted her entering our building yesterday afternoon and recognized her picture in the papers this morning. As in what if … what if …

  And so I was uneasy.

  My eyes took in everything as I waited for the good folks at Lucy Juicy to make Boso a breakfast smoothie. I saw no one watching our building. The street looked okay.

  So far.

  Smoothie in hand, I strolled back across the street, let myself into the building and grabbed my laptop. Then I rode our temperamental elevator up to the fifth floor, where I tapped on my door. I heard Boso’s light, quick footsteps at once. “It’s me,” I said.

  She undid the bolt and flung open the door, wearing her spare tank top and spandex shorts. She looked fresh-faced and healthy. And her mouth was working just fine: “Sweet Jesus, Benji, I’m starting to feel like a danged prisoner. I worked out for an hour and I showered and now I’ve got nowhere to go and I mean nothing to do.” She was playing music on my stereo—the digitally remastered original Broadway cast recording of West Side Story with Carol Lawrence and Larry Kert. “And, excuse me, but do you ever rock out to anything other than Broadway show tunes from the Fifties?”

  “Absolutely. I rock out to Broadway show tunes from the Forties. And good morning to you, too,” I said, bolting the door behind me. “Here’s your breakfast. It has mango, wheatgrass, coconut water and a bunch of other stuff that’s too horrible to say out loud.”

  Boso popped the lid and took a long, grateful drink. “This is tasty.”

  “As are you, sweet Cassia.” I opened my laptop on the dining table and showed her the nudie collage that was on the front page of the New York Post.

  She let out a gasp of horror. “That’s me! Did they mention me by name?”

  “They didn’t.” I tapped at the keyboard and brought up Cricket’s Web site. “But crickoshea.com has all of your particulars—including that the Minettas are looking for you.”

  Boso stared at the photo of her naked self on that yacht. “You told me I didn’t have to worry about her.”

  “No, I told you she was the least of your worries. And she is.”

  She sat down on a dining chair with a sick look on her face. “God, this is just awful. I never expected those photos to be splashed all over the danged Internet. Now everyone will see them.”

  “Hello, they already could.”

  “Yeah, but they had to go looking for them on a specific site. This is a whole different deal, Benji. It’s in your face. I’m in your face.”

  “You mean Farmer John’s face, don’t you?”

  “Well, how’d you like it if someone you knew saw your naked junk all over the Internet?”

  “I wouldn’t. But I’m not like you. No one pays thirty-nine dollars a month just to watch me take a shower. Speaking of which, I need to do that. My cop friend is coming to pick me up soon.”

  “Am I going with you?”

  “You’re not going anywhere. Not until I get you a deal. You can stay right here. Or you can hang downstairs in the office with Mom and Rita if you promise to stay away from the windows. You can’t go outside. Not for a walk. Not for any reason. And stay off the roof, got it?”

  “But I can see the sky from up there,” she protested.

  “Just stay off it.”

  “Benji, I hate this.”

  “I know you do. But you’ve gotten yourself into what’s known in my trade as a shitstorm. I’m trying to help you. Promise me you’ll do what I say.”

  “Sure, whatever,” she said miserably.

  I heard footsteps on the stairs now. Someone tapped on my door. I held a finger to my lips and went to it, pulling my Smith & Wesson from my waistband. I checked the peephole. It was Mom.

  “Everything good?” I called to her.

  “Good as Golden,” she replied. A quaint old family expression of ours.

  I unbolted the door and let her in. “I was just going to jump in the shower. Would you mind entertaining our guest?”

  “I’d be delighted.” Her dark eyes twinkled at Boso. “You, young lady, are quite the celebrity this morning. Why don’t you come down to the office with me? I’ll tell you all about the night Mickey Rourke tried to stuff seventeen one-hundred-dollar bills in my G-string.”

  “Okay, Abby.” Boso frowned at her. “Who’s Mickey Rourke?”

  Mom’s face dropped. “God, I’m old.”

  I closed the door behind them. Boso was a tidy guest, I’ll give her that. She’d made the bed. Stowed her things away in her gym bag. Left the kitchen spotless. But there were traces of her all over my bathroom. She’d used my hairbrush—several of her long blond hairs were caught in it. Her wet towel was draped over the shower curtain rod. She’d found a new toothbrush in the medicine chest and used it. When I went to brush my own teeth I discovered an unexpected touch of domesticity—she’d already put toothpaste on my brush for me.

  I showered and shaved and put on an unpressed blue oxford button-down, my very best pair of four-year-old madras shorts from the Gap and my white Jack Purcells. It was nearly nine o’clock by the time I got downstairs. Mom and Boso were yucking it up in Mom’s office with the AC making a racket and the Ramones, another of Mom’s favorite bands, rock-rock-rocking away.

  “Ah, here’s my boy,” Mom exclaimed. “Doesn’t he clean up nicely?”

  “He does,” Boso agreed. “He’s kind of cute, you know.”

  “Believe me, I do.”

  “Mom, where’s Rita?”

  “On her way. She just phoned.”

  “Listen, I want you to hold on to this.” I handed her my Smith & Wesson.

  Mom studied my face carefully. She doesn’t like guns, but she knows when I’m not fooling around. “All right,” she said, tucking it into the top drawer of her desk.

  “I’ll let you know just as soon as I have some news,” I said to Boso. “Stay put and stay away from those windows, okay?”

  “Sweet Jesus, would you please stop saying that? You’re scaring me!”

  “Good.”

  * * *

  “OKAY, WHERE IS SHE?”

  “Where is who?”

  “Jonquil Beausoleil,” Legs said as we tore our way down Broadway in his Crown Vic. “The Feds have a warrant out for her arrest. They’re looking everywhere for her. Where is she?”

  “How would I know?”

  He shot a narrow look at me from across the seat. “So you’re going to sit here in my automobile and lie to me?”

  “Legs, I don’t know where she is.”

  “Damn, you really are going to sit here and lie to me.”

  “What makes you think I’m lying?”

  “Because I know you, little bud. And if you don’t tell me where she is I swear I’ll arrest you.”

  “For what?”

  “Aiding, abetting, and being a total pain in the ass.”

  “And here I thought we were going to have fun working this case together.”

  “We’re not working this case together.”

  “Where are we headed anyhow?”

  “Tarzan and Jane’s place in Soho. Ar
e you going to tell me where that girl is or do I have to throw you in jail?”

  “Don’t be silly. You won’t do that.”

  “Yeah, I will.”

  “No, you won’t. You can’t. Mom would never forgive you.” I gazed out the window at all of the limp, sweaty people who were plodding slowly along in the suffocating heat. They looked as if they were ready to melt into puddles right there on the sidewalk. “Cricket blasted Boso all over her Web site this morning. She knows her particulars. Knows that she’s on the lam from the Minettas. How does she know that? Who’s her source?”

  “Not me.” Legs veered around a cab that had stopped to pick up a fare. “I didn’t talk to her.”

  “So who did?”

  “You want me to guess?”

  “Go for it.”

  “Cimoli.”

  “Cimoli.” I nodded my head. “He’s a pub slut. He has a big mouth. And he’s a fat boy.”

  “What’s his weight got to do with it?”

  “Cricket’s an amazing flirt when she needs to be.”

  “Still, the fat boy pulled it off,” Legs said grudgingly. “That was one major-league bust. Little Joe and his crew are being arraigned this morning. Big Joe’s lawyers arranged bail for everyone.”

  “Including the girls?”

  “Hell, yeah. They don’t want those girls getting resentful and talkative.”

  “Hmm…”

  “Hmm what?”

  “The Minettas have to be thinking Boso ratted them out. That girl’s in real trouble, Legs. It wouldn’t surprise me if I do hear from her. She and I have a bond, after all.”

  “Bond? What bond?”

  “It’s personal. What would you tell her if you were me? Speaking hypothetically.”

  “Speaking hypothetically? I’d tell her to cut a deal with the Feds. They can put her in protective custody so she’ll be safe from the Minettas. Out there on her own she hasn’t got a chance.”

  “Makes sense. Except I don’t trust Cimoli.”