by Al Roker
That seemed to satisfy the detective. He anchored his butt on the arm of a plump green chair and asked, “So maybe if your associates here will give us some quality time alone, you can tell me about these threats you don’t believe I’ll take seriously.”
I told A.W. that I was in good hands. He helped Kiki gather her laptop and papers, and they left together. All that had taken about two or three minutes, which I used to remind myself about exactly which threats I should or should not mention. While I described the former, Solomon used a thin gold pen to scribble notes on a small pad that could have come from a hotel stationery kit.
“I don’t suppose you kept any of this stuff,” he said. “The napkin, or the message you got at the museum?”
“InterTec has ’em,” I said. “I think they checked them for prints, DNA, whatever.”
He seemed surprised. “Any results?”
“Not that I heard.”
“I’ll want to take a look at them.”
“I can probably arrange that,” I said. “You might want to check the Internet for a photo of my car being attacked in the Lincoln Tunnel. Just Google my name and hit Images.”
“Nothing I love more than cruising the Internet,” he said, “unless it’s getting my prostate checked.”
He put the pen and pad away, a gesture that was supposed to make me think the official part of his visit was over. “You mind telling me what that deal was at the hospital? The Hawk—er, Detective Hawkline—said she got the distinct feeling she was being played by everybody involved. Including you.”
I told him the same story I’d told Hawkline.
“You didn’t happen to mention to Hawkline that you and the dead guy, Parkhurst, were at that arson-murder scene together?”
“I don’t think I did.”
“Or the yarn you told me about him and Gallagher and a murdered Touchstone merc all having a night out together over in Afghanistan?”
“So you were paying attention,” I said.
“Oh, yeah. I pay attention. So when I hear that an ex–Touchstone employee got himself shot in the same basement as your bodyguard, I start wondering if there might not be some validity to that story of yours. Care to enlighten me further?”
“I’ve told you everything,” I said.
“Uh-huh,” he said. He pushed himself off the chair. “Lemme tell you something, Blessing, I’m not slow and I’m not stupid. I make mistakes, and when I do I try to correct ’em. In all the years I’ve worn the shield, I’ve put the arm on maybe three hundred perps. I can only think of four or five times when a subject looked good for a crime but didn’t do it. I don’t know about you yet. In spite of all the weird bullshit piling up around Gallagher’s death, I still think you might have killed him. But I’m not gonna put on blinders and ignore evidence to the contrary. And I fucking well resent your suggesting otherwise to a fellow officer.”
I didn’t think I’d told Hawkline that he ignored evidence, but I apologized to him all the same.
On his way out, he said, “Detective Hawkline wanted me to tell you she’ll be calling you shortly.”
“Why?”
“The case she’s investigating.”
“I thought that was closed when Ted Parkhurst died,” I said.
“That was the old case. Her new one is Parkhurst. His heart attack wasn’t what you’d call natural. The M.E. found a tiny puncture on his upper back and a drug called clar, claramycin—something like that—in his bloodstream. Looks like whoever did it ripped the stuff from the hospital’s supply room.
“According to Detective Hawkline, everybody at the hospital that night is on her list. Including you, of course.”
He was trying to make me feel uneasy. And he had succeeded beyond his wildest dreams. Not with talk about Ted being a murder victim. It was his use of the word “blinders” that did me in.
Chapter
SIXTY
Of the nine message slips Kiki had given me, eight required no immediate action. The ninth was from Rita Margolis, saying she’d made some drawings I should see.
I phoned her. She’d be at her apartment for another hour. I said I’d be there shortly. As soon as Kiki and A.W. filed back in, I told him we had to get moving.
But not before Kiki connected her laptop to the printer and ran off several copies of the Tuesday-morning schedule, one of which she presented to me. “Check the special note,” she said.
In addition to the highlighted Aharon interview, there was a cooking segment requiring me to wear a chef’s jacket and toque. The jacket I had no problem with. But the toque was another matter. “Whose idea was this?” I asked Kiki.
“Trina’s. It’s not smart to get in bad with your boss,” she said.
“Be good for you to keep that in mind,” I said.
The toque would not be a problem. Whatever happened that evening in Goyal Aharon’s suite, I wouldn’t be wearing one on tomorrow’s show.
“Let’s go, A.W.,” I said.
As we cleared the underground parking garage, he asked, “To the restaurant?”
“Eventually. There are a couple of stops before that,” I said, and gave him the first address.
“What’s the deal with the toque?” he asked.
“I don’t wear them.”
“Why not?”
“A matter of personal vanity,” I said. “I’ve been told that a toque makes me look like the guy on the Cream of Wheat box.”
“Oh,” he said. “Yeah. I guess I can see that.”
“Thanks for the confirmation,” I said.
It was not until he’d squeezed us into a parking space a block away from Melody Moon’s building that he asked the purpose of our visit. “To get a look at an artist’s concept of Felix,” I said.
“Who’s the artist?” he asked as we got out of the car.
I told him Rita’s name.
“Sure, Rita. She draws Funny Girls,” he said.
“You’ve read Funny Girls?”
“I’ve seen copies. Rita’s part of the Chelsea art scene.”
“You’re into art?” I asked as we entered the building.
“You have to ask, knowing my background?” he said.
My being with A.W., whom Rita called “the best part-time silk-screen artist in the city,” put me back in her good graces, at least temporarily. Enough for her to include me in her offer of soft drinks. I politely declined. A.W. accepted a Diet Dr Pepper.
“Melody not home?” I asked.
“Working today,” Rita said. “Modeling cosmetics. She needs to do more of that. She’s still moping around. Those disks are a mixed blessing.” She pointed to several of Rudy Gallagher’s DVDs resting beside the TV monitor. “Watching the guy seems to make her happy, but they just reinforce her memory of him, and when she turns the set off, she gets moody again.”
“I wouldn’t have brought them if I’d thought they’d cause her pain,” I said.
“I know,” Rita said. “Like I said, she’s happy when she’s watching them. I’ll go get the drawings.”
I strolled to the TV stand and glanced at the disks in their jewel boxes. USS Huckleberry, disk two and disk five. I wondered if Rudy had recorded the shows in chronological order. Of course he had, the anal-retentive jackass.
Rita returned from the general vicinity of the bedrooms with two sheets of art paper on which she’d sketched detailed full-figure drawings in colored pencils of the Cheetah.
“I did these more for myself than for you,” she said. “This one is the model in the costume that I saw getting out of the Hummer to stretch herself.”
A.W. moved behind me, lured by the drawing. “Solid work, Rita,” he said. “I bet this beats the original art.”
“Well, I’ll show you.”
She held up a much-less-complex comic-book version of the Cheetah. “They didn’t go in for shading in those days,” she said. “And with the other I was working from a model. I’d say they both reflected the subjects.”
The two d
rawings looked more or less the same, except that the comic-book Cheetah had gloves that looked like paws, while the dimensional, shaded Cheetah was wearing ordinary gloves. And more important, as I said to Rita, “The masks are different.”
“Exactly. That’s the thing that caught my eye,” she said. Both were wearing similar Cheetah cowls surrounding the face, but the original 1940s comic-book version was wearing the standard domino mask. And the model’s mask was more elaborate. The eye section was part of the cowl. And there was a lower mask of white with a slit for the mouth. It even covered the neck area.
“Curiouser and curiouser,” I said. “What do you think, A.W.?”
He studied the drawings. “Beautiful work, like I said.”
“The model remind you of anybody?”
“Not really,” he said. “Could be anybody under all that.”
“That’s what makes it so interesting,” I said.
I got out my cellular and dialed Arnie Epps.
The Wake Up! producer was still at the Glass Tower, putting together tomorrow’s show.
“Is Trina with you?” I asked.
“No. She said she had things to do before the meeting tonight with you and the Mossad guy.”
“Ex-Mossad,” I said.
“You’ve got her spitting nails, Billy. How the hell did you swing that interview, anyway?”
“I think it must have been that segment I did at the museum comic-book exhibit,” I lied. “Remember that?”
“Of course. That was a good job.”
“What did Trina think of it?”
“Trina?” He sounded puzzled. “I think she liked … No, wait a minute. She didn’t even see it. Yeah, that was the morning … She got a weird phone call. Guy said he was her super and there was smoke coming from her apartment. She left before we cut to your segment.”
“How bad was the damage?” I asked.
“No damage. It was a crank call. Her building’s super hadn’t phoned her. And her apartment was fine.”
“Glad to hear it,” I said. “Catch you later, Arnie.”
“Huh? Oh, sure. And Billy, try to be at the Ritz-Carlton by five. Don’t be late. Trina’s really on the warpath.”
“That the time and place of the meeting with Aharon?” I asked.
“Yeah. Didn’t Trina call you?”
“I imagine she will,” I said.
Chapter
SIXTY-ONE
“Miss Noor is feeling a bit groggy and not too talkative,” Detective Hawkline told A.W. and me when we arrived at the hospital. “The doctor says it might be good for her to see some familiar faces.”
We’d been driving back to the Bistro building when A.W. checked in on Bettina and discovered she’d awakened in the early morning. Her nurse was concerned that she had refused to eat. Detective Hawkline was annoyed that she had also refused to talk.
They both thought we might help.
Bettina was sitting up in bed when we walked in. If the bandage on her head had been made of gold, she’d have resembled a Hindu priestess. “Hi, Bet,” A.W. said. “We thought these might brighten the room a little.” He placed the yellow tulips we’d brought on a bedside table.
“Lovely,” she said.
She seemed neither happy nor sad to see us. But when Detective Hawkline followed us into the room, she frowned.
“Feeling better, Miss Noor?” the detective asked.
“Until a moment ago, yes.”
“I was hoping you might be able to tell me a little more about what happened at the old house.”
“There is nothing more to tell,” Bettina said.
“Miss Noor says she didn’t see anything in that basement,” Detective Hawkline said.
“Too dark,” Bettina said.
“But not too dark for you to shoot and kill a man.” To us, the detective said, “The bullet we recovered from Mr. Gault came from Miss Noor’s weapon.”
“Someone fired at me,” Bettina said. “I fired back.”
Detective Hawkline looked skeptical. She knew, as did I, that Gault had been shot in the back of his head.
“Any sense of how many people were in the basement?” the detective asked.
This would be the time that Bettina might be tempted to mention the kidnapping, not knowing that we all would prefer to forget that particular element. But she said, “As I told you, I just saw the one man while I was driving by. He was entering the grounds through a broken section of the fence. The way he did it made me think he was trespassing. I parked and followed him in because I thought he might be up to no good.”
“Can you describe the man?” the detective asked.
“Big.”
“That’s it? Big? How about height, age, body type, race? Wearing what? A tux? A swimsuit? How about a clown costume?”
With each question, Bettina seemed to be withdrawing a bit, physically sliding down under the covers, turning away from Hawkline.
“Could we talk for a minute, Detective?” I said.
Hawkline stared at me, then turned her attention back to Bettina, who had closed her eyes. “Sure,” the detective said. “Talk? Why not?”
“We’ll be right back, Bettina,” I said, and held the door open for the detective. “Care for a cup of coffee?” I asked her.
“Sounds great. My nerves are still asleep, because I’ve only had five or six cups today.”
Her partner, Seestrunk, was at the nurses’ station, chatting up a busty administering angel. Just as Hawkline opened her mouth to call out to him, he leaned in close to the nurse and said something, causing her to draw back in disgust. Hawkline mumbled the words “What a dick” and led me away in the opposite direction.
In a nearly empty waiting room, we sipped bitter machine-dispensed coffee and I explained that Detective Solomon had suggested I inform her of a few things I knew that might help her investigation of Ted Parkhurst’s murder.
“Yes,” she said, “he mentioned something you told him about a mysterious gathering in Afghanistan.”
So once again I described the infamous meeting of the toe-tag gang in Kabul, embellishing it a bit to give A.W. as much time as possible with Bettina, which was my purpose in distracting the detective. I ended by asking her about the man shot in the old mansion’s basement. “You said his name was Gault. Steve Gault?”
“Stephen. You knew him?”
“No. But he was at the Irish pub in Kabul, too.”
She smiled. She had that Spencer Tracy rueful grin down cold. “You make my head swim, Chef Blessing,” she said. “So let’s see what we’ve got. Six men shared a table in a bar in Kabul about a month ago. Now all of ’em are dead. And what should I deduce from that fact? That a serial murderer is at work? That’d be interesting. I’ve never investigated a serial-killer case. Probably because we don’t get many serial killers in real life. Certainly not any with IQs higher than Stephen Hawking’s who like to play tricky games with us.”
“What about Zodiac?” I said.
“Well, that’s the West Coast,” she said. “They live the fiction out there. Here, we’re a little more down to earth. We get Son of Sam. No criminal genius. Just a homicidal nutjob with a talking dog who had a lucky streak that eventually ran out.”
“I’m not suggesting all those guys were killed by the same person,” I said. “But now that we know that Ted Parkhurst was capable of murder, I think it’s possible he did away with one or two of them.”
“Not to put too fine a line to it, chef, I really don’t give a rat’s ass who he killed, unless it helps me find out who killed him. That’s my assignment.”
“I’d be looking for a partner in crime,” I said.
“Well, thanks for that suggestion, chef. I’ve been thinking along those lines, too. What I need help with is figuring out who the partner is.”
“And how Parkhurst was injected with the stuff that killed him.”
“That I know. A hospital is a great place to commit murder with a hypodermic needle and get away with
it. How hard would it have been for somebody in a white or green uniform to brush up against Parkhurst as he was being taken out? Maybe standing behind him in the elevator? And the beauty part is, you toss the needle in a hazmat bag, and no cop I know of is going to go rooting around in there looking for a weapon. No. I’m not concerned with the how. Just the who. I don’t suppose you might have been Parkhurst’s partner?”
“If that’s a serious question, the answer is no.”
“Solomon thinks you killed Gallagher,” she said. “Why shouldn’t we add Parkhurst to your bill? You were here last night. You had opportunity.”
“But no motive.”
“Unless you were his partner and you didn’t want to risk him giving you up.”
“You’re just playing with my head, aren’t you, Detective? You don’t really think I killed anybody.”
“I’d be a fool if I went by what I thought,” she said.
“If you seriously suspected me of anything, you’d have invited Detective Seestrunk along and read me my rights.”
“Has Detective Solomon read you your rights?”
“No.”
“That’s because he doesn’t have enough evidence. I have even less.”
She looked at her watch. It was a big, silver retro Swatch. “We’ve been chatting for about fifteen minutes. Anything else you feel compelled to tell me?”
I shook my head.
“Well,” she said, “I think your friends have had enough time to compare notes, don’t you?”
I told her I did.
“I like the story about the Irish pub,” she said.
“It’s true,” I said.
“That’s why I like it,” she said.
Chapter
SIXTY-TWO
“How did Bettina know not to mention the kidnapping to Detective Hawkline before you clued her in?” I asked A.W. as we drove away from the hospital.