Hell Gate

by Linda Fairstein

  Rowdy Kitts dictated and I typed. He gave me no chance to insert any other message into the phone.

  “Hit Send. Now give me your cell. By the time Chapman finishes what he’s doing and reads this, he’ll think the park rangers got you out of his hair and locked up this tower. Buys us a little time together.”

  Then he let go of the phone, and I heard it clanging against the basement steps, echoing throughout the chamber as it bounced off one of them along the way and hit bottom. “So sorry, Alex. It just sort of slipped.”

  Here, only hundreds of feet away from Mike and Mercer, Kitts was cutting me off without a lifeline.

  “Start moving.”

  “I can’t do it, Rowdy.” I tipped my head back and looked to the crown of the tower. The endless parade of metal steps-hundreds of them-curved above me, tapering off at the very top in a dizzying swirl of wrought iron.

  “Climb, Alexandra. Step lively. Your life may depend on how fast you do it.”

  “You don’t understand,” I said, placing my foot on the first platform. “I get vertigo. I get sick from heights. I’ll never be able to climb this.”

  “You get queasy on my watch it could be fatal to you, girl,” Kitts said, wrapping his arm around my neck and pulling me back to him, whispering into my ear. “I just need to tuck you away up there so I can do what I’ve got to do. It’s not my plan to make you sick.”

  Did he only want me to mount the staircase so he could throw me over from the top? Make it look like I had fallen while trying to see the view?

  “Two suicides won’t work, Rowdy. No one will believe Anita went out on that bridge and jumped. You didn’t think about a note, did you?”

  “Sure I did,” he said. “She was so despondent about her girlfriend Salma being killed. Worried that she’d lose her baby once her story came to light. Give the kid a better life and all that. Got the saddest little note she wrote right here in my pocket. Now I just need to get it to her house.”

  Rowdy Kitts was half pushing, half lifting me up the steps. I gripped the banister tightly and paid attention to my footing.

  “Is it money? You want money?”

  “I’m drowning in money, Alex. Never knew what a grown man would pay to have sex with a beautiful girl.”

  “I’ve got a pretty good sense of that.”

  “Well, you should have told me a whole hell of a lot earlier, then. Could have quit this damn job ages ago,” Kitts said with a laugh. “You never took to me from the first time you met me, Ms. Cooper. You were always so high and mighty ’cause you didn’t like me sniffing around those girls in your office.”

  He kneed me in the back and I edged up. He kept talking. “Or maybe you were just jealous.”

  There were no landings along the staircase. It continued to wrap itself around the slick black pipes, the steps getting smaller and smaller and closer together. We had circled at least twenty feet up, maybe thirty. I couldn’t bear to bring myself to look down at the distance to the cement flooring.

  “I didn’t make you for a snakehead, Rowdy. I’ve seen the crimes committed by the lowliest bastards on earth. I’ve witnessed every kind of pain and torture that a man can inflict on a woman, but trading in human lives-there’s nothing more despicable.”

  “You don’t like to hear that some of those girls actually enjoy what they do.”

  “Maybe when you hold a gun to their heads like this, that’s what they tell you,” I said. “How many young women have you done this to, Rowdy? How many have you had to kill? Or is that all sub rosa, Detective Kitts? Is that all a big secret?”

  Rowdy cracked the gun against my shoulder blade. I dropped on one knee, banging it against the edge of the step. When I straightened up I briskly climbed away from my captor, closing my eyes and revolving around the spiral.

  “So you got the sub rosa bit, huh? Is that what Anita told Leighton last night? I had her all set up with a really high roller-”

  “At the Jumel Mansion?”

  “She threw away a good deal, Alex. She was still all spooky about Salma. Never gave the man a proper chance. I promised to help her. No need to call the fat cat with the Jaguar.”

  How many young women were there who’d been subjected to this treatment? It was impossible to guess the extent of his network, in the city and well beyond.

  “I saw the tattoos on their thighs. I knew Salma had been trafficked. I just didn’t know whose property she was. I didn’t know where to look first to find the rose.” I was several steps higher than Kitts and had rotated my body a bit to face him, gripping the banister with all my strength. “You were standing next to me in that makeshift morgue on the beach when I spotted the tattoo on that girl from Ukraine. I never liked you, Rowdy. I just didn’t take you for that much of a lowlife.”

  He was coming toward me, and I backed myself up several steps. “I guess I got lucky, Alex. I was afraid you were more clever than that. I was actually afraid that morning that you and your first-grade dicks were going to figure it out about Jane Doe.”

  “Figure what?”

  “You’re all shaky, Alex. You got to hold on tight, ’cause these metal stairs can get slippery.”

  Kitts was reaching out to touch me again and I turned away from him. I turned away from his gun, his outstretched hand, and the sick leer on his face to climb higher, fighting my fear and my nausea.

  “Figure what?” I asked.

  “The girl you call Jane Doe. The one who washed up on the beach.”

  “Stabbed in the heart before she was thrown overboard to die,” I said, recalling the ugly circumstances of her death. “A knife, a sharp instrument-”

  “An ice pick, Alex.”

  How could he possibly know what had happened to her on the ship, unless some other snakeheads were on board?

  “How’d you wind up with her makeup, Rowdy?”

  He stopped in his tracks and I raced on ahead, daring to look back to see that I had surprised him.

  “She had nothing to do with the Golden Voyage, Alex. The girl was never on that ship. Tell that to Chapman next time you see him.”

  The entire disastrous seascape appeared in my mind’s eye like I was still standing on the windswept beach.

  Rowdy Kitts, rogue cop who had worked for the disgraced and indicted former police commissioner. Rowdy Kitts, who owned a piece of a small marina near the site of the wreck of the shipload of slaves. Rowdy Kitts, who’d killed a still-unnamed young prostitute with an ice pick, and thrown her in the ocean, hoping she’d be counted as one of the lost souls of the tragic accident. Rowdy Kitts, the mayor’s bodyguard who knew as much about Gracie Mansion-and City Hall-as anyone with that kind of daily exposure to those places could.

  “It was you who approached the ship in the middle of the night, flying the NYPD colors in your own speedboat so the authorities would leave you alone while you unloaded your cargo. Making the landing arrangements for your trafficked goods,” I said. The picture was coming together for me. “But you were late-”

  “The damn mayor doesn’t keep regular hours, Alex. Can’t please everybody.”

  “And some of the passengers went crazy when they finally saw your boat approach, ’cause they thought it really was the cops, coming to board them.”

  Rowdy Kitts had been right under our noses since the first hours we stood on the beach, watching the bodies come ashore.

  I flashed to the image of the Ukrainian interpreter who had been with me at the morgue when two male passengers viewed the body of the girl we called Jane Doe. I’d been annoyed when he injected his own opinion that she was too pretty to have been forgotten if those men had ever seen her. He’d been right, of course. She had never been on board the Golden Voyage.

  “Human gold, Alex. And it all went up in smoke.”

  “But that’s not why you killed the girl,” I said, clutching the banister to keep my balance as I tried to stare him down. “Who was she, Rowdy?”

  “She was nobody, Alex.”

  I star
ted to tremble uncontrollably at his coldness, his calculation, his utter disregard for human life.

  I was mad at myself for having missed the obvious. The girl on the beach had had a rose tattoo, like Salma and Anita Paz. But the others just coming to America-the girls like Olena, whose tattoo was a green dragon, her last owner’s mark-hadn’t yet been stamped with the small red rose. They wouldn’t become Rowdy Kitts’s property till he got them safely ashore, till he took control of their lives. Of course the beautiful young woman we called Jane Doe had not come on the Golden Voyage. She’d been Rowdy’s property long before last week.

  “The girl had a name, Rowdy. Give her that much.”

  “Now, don’t get all upset about it. She was just one more pitiful story, that’s who she was. I took her in with me too. Eugenia was her name. She was living on my boat, being treated pretty good the last six months,” he said. “But she was threatening to make trouble with the new girls. She was going to warn them off the life, before I even got them sorted out and signed up.”

  “So you killed her, just to shut her up?” I was frozen in place, practically halfway up the tower.

  Rowdy Kitts reached out with his left arm and grabbed my ankle. I started to kick but he clamped my foot down on the step and smiled. “It’s not the worst way to go, Alex. If I had a little better luck with the tides, Eugenia would have had a proper burial at sea.”

  FIFTY

  “May I make a suggestion, Alex?” Kitts asked with saccharine-like concern for my condition. I was sitting down, halfway up the tower, trying to quell the nausea that swept over me whenever I opened my eyes. “You can get the rest of the way a lot quicker if you just hold tight and put all those bad thoughts about me out of your head.”

  “Don’t you see I can’t move? Take off, Rowdy. I won’t do anything to stop you.”

  He stood in front of me, stroking the barrel of his Glock. “Me and my friend, we’d really like to get out of here. Just need to secure you up top.”

  “What’s there?” I asked.

  “Seems like I left my cuffs in the car last night. Wasn’t very smart of me, but we’ll just take off your socks and make a nice tight knot. Give you something to do for the next few hours.”

  Rowdy stuck the gun in his waistband, at the back of his slacks, and removed my moccasins. He pulled at the soft wool knee-highs that had kept my feet so warm, stroking my legs as he bared them.

  “You’ll have a hard time getting to your car,” I said, “with Mike and Mercer out on the bridge.”

  “How so?”

  “You left it in the Bronx, didn’t you? Save the Aqueduct Bridge and all that phony politicking that Kendall Reid did to give you money to traffic in the girls.”

  Before I could finish the sentence Rowdy Kitts had slapped me across the face. His whole mood changed. “Walk, you damn bitch.”

  “It’s way too big an operation for you to have pulled off alone, as good as you think you are.” My cheek stung and I was as angry as I was frightened. “You were in charge of the Eastern Europeans, I’d guess. Kendall Reid has what-the Mexicans, or the Asians? How many snakeheads does it take to feed the perversions of all your clients?”

  He pulled me to my feet and grabbed the hood of my jacket, pushing against my back to move me upward.

  “You’d be surprised at how efficiently we work, Alex. A few ex-cons, some of the friends Kendall left behind in the ghetto, a bunch of hungry guys willing to scratch their way out. You’d be surprised.”

  “Did Eugenia leave her makeup on your boat, Rowdy? Is that why you had to get rid of it? You were such a good Samaritan to let the cops use the boat that night, after you’d taken it out first and killed her. They didn’t know they were covering up most traces of both you and Eugenia.”

  “What do you know about her makeup?”

  “Let me stop,” I said. “Let me sit down.”

  I couldn’t tell whether he was poking me with his finger or the gun, but I got the point.

  “We found Eugenia’s makeup in the ditch in front of City Hall,” I said, pausing to steady myself. The spiral was so tight now that we were practically facing each other as the curve narrowed.

  “You’re lying.”

  “They got her print off the mascara. And they got yours off the plastic bag.” Maybe the second half of what I said would be proved true by the end of the day. Touch DNA might be the nail in his coffin, if we could shut that lid before he slammed mine. “Your best girls got Chanel makeup? Salma, Eugenia-how many others? Should have just thrown it overboard with the ice pick.”

  “Hard to do, Miss District Attorney. Eugenia left it in the glove compartment of my car. It wasn’t on my little boat. I didn’t remember that till I got to work the other morning. Just tossed it away with all those old bones.”

  “You were getting sloppy, Rowdy.” I was tired and light-headed and didn’t think I had much to lose.

  “You know what they say about the end of the tunnel, Alex. Look ahead and you can see the sun rise.”

  The dark interior of the tower opened onto a small platform about ten feet above me.

  “Were you part of Leighton’s Tontine Association?” I asked.

  “Another minute or two you’re going to be eating one of your socks, young lady,” Kitts said. “I’m going to stuff one right in that busy mouth.”

  “Is that where you got the idea for a gentlemen’s club?”

  “Those rich boys didn’t want me anywhere near their dinner parties. But when the operations they ran went to the dogs, when that all broke up, I had me an idea for a little something else.”

  “A bit more like an escort service,” I said. “Young girls, high prices, fancy settings. Who better to know when the mayor isn’t going to be at home?”

  “You’d be surprised how many gents fantasize about a night in the Lincoln bedroom,” Rowdy said, taking one of my socks in his hands and twisting it around. “Hell, what I had to offer here in Manhattan wasn’t so bad.”

  “You transformed the Tontine Association into another kind of club. And you renamed it Sub Rosa. Sleazy, Rowdy, and I should have been the first to figure you for something sleazy.”

  “It wasn’t such a bad idea. Archibald Gracie really did belong to a dining club called Sub Rosa. You ought to tell Chapman to bone up on his history. Maybe he would have brained it out by now,” Kitts said. “Sit yourself down and give me one of those hands, Alex.”

  We had made it to the top. Daylight poured in through the windows and the brightness hurt my eyes as we emerged from the dark climb.

  “Is there really a tontine, Rowdy? Somebody in line to get all the money in Salma’s shoe boxes?” My hands were deep in the pockets of my jacket.

  “That was just seed money to ship in the precious cargo.” He was motioning for me to give him my right hand. “It’s a small club, Alex. Last man standing’s going to be able to set himself up for a nice life anywhere he wants to go. Now, give it up, girl.”

  “The mayor?” I was trying to clear my head, sitting on the lacy metal fretwork and trying to meet Kitts in the eye, instead of looking all the way down.

  “Clean as a hound’s tooth. I don’t think Vin Statler likes the ladies.”

  “Donny Baynes?”

  “He might like to be a player, but he just doesn’t have the cash. It’s probably what keeps that boy honest. Same with that loser Spindlis.”

  “Ethan Leighton?”

  “Like father, like son. That gene pool must have been really screwed up.” Kitts liked the sound of his own voice. He clearly relished telling me about his ability to outsmart the richer, more powerful men who surrounded him. “Those boys play rough.”

  “Who tagged me, Rowdy? You do it yourself?”

  He frowned as he tugged at my hand. “I don’t usually have to do this kind of shit myself, Alex. I got men. I got people I pay to do things for me. You know how that is, don’t you? I need you to just hold out your hand.”

  Kitts wrapped one end of the
smooth cashmere sock around my wrist, doubling the knot until I winced in pain. I was trying to think of any word that applied except panic. That had consequences I didn’t want to accept.

  “I’m surprised you missed the signals, Alex.”

  I couldn’t make up my mind whether to look out at the bright blue sky, praying for a miracle, or watch Kitts tie the other end of the long sock to the banister.

  “You hear me?”

  “What signals?” I asked.

  “Jeannie Parcher. That paralegal I got messed up with. She wanted to talk to you so bad. She threatened me that she’d go see you for advice. What to do when I got nasty.”

  Mike had guessed right about that. Jeannie had tried to tell me about her experience-Mike had asked me if Rowdy had gotten rough with her-but I didn’t pick up on what terrified her about this hideously evil man.

  “What did you do to Jeannie?” I asked softly.

  “Nothing you want to hear right now,” he said, sneering at me. “You ought to give her a ring sometime.”

  The arm that Kitts was tying up jerked so badly that he grabbed my shoulders and started to shake me.

  When he let go, I realized for the first time that he had bound me securely to the iron rail. I’d been so fearful of falling throughout the entire climb that it was almost a relief to be anchored to something that wasn’t going to move.

  “It’s too tight, Rowdy.” I was still afraid of what he might do to me before he left.

  “I don’t really think you’re in a position to be calling the shots, Alex. Shit, there’s always the Civilian Complaint Review Board.” He was laughing as he balled up the other sock between his hands and leaned over to stuff it in my mouth. “You can take up all your problems with them.”

  I recoiled as he came at me. I clutched the banister as tightly as I could, almost chained to it as I was. Both of my knees came up between us, almost reflexively. I kicked my legs out in front of me with all the power I could muster and struck Rowdy Kitts squarely in the gut.

  I screamed as I watched him fly backward over the railing, shouting my name, falling through the middle of the spiral staircase until his body hit the floor of the water tower, several stories below me.