by Cleo Coyle
“Why?”
“That’s the way we came in. It’s a straight shot right up Flatbush to the Manhattan Bridge crossing, and I’m betting Ellie’s destination is Manhattan. Here it comes . . .” I began to swerve the wheel, moving into the turning lane, and then—
Oh, crap . . . “They’re not turning!”
“Stay in the circle! Stay in the circle!” Madame cried, her wrinkled hands practically lunging for the wheel.
I swerved back to my original lane and an immense, white SUV behind me blew his horn. I glanced in my rear view. The man driving was cursing at me, one hand on the wheel, another holding a cell phone to his ear, which was completely illegal and reckless, thank you very much!
“Someone should tell that guy ‘hands free’ is the law of the land now!” I cried.
“Eyes ahead! Don’t try to turn before they do,” Madame warned.
“Okay, okay! I was just anticipating—”
“Don’t anticipate!”
The black SUV kept going. It was still following Ellie’s Town Car. A few seconds later, Madame started shouting. “She’s turning now! The Town Car’s turning!”
“So is the SUV!” I shouted back.
Both vehicles had left the Plaza and were heading for Union Street.
“Union Street?” I murmured, continuing to trail the sports utility vehicle. “Now why does that sound familiar?”
We drove a few blocks, then a red light up ahead halted our progress for a few minutes.
“I’m not too familiar with this borough,” Madame said, glancing at the rows of beautifully restored brownstones on both sides of us. “How often have you been here?”
“Quite a few times. Matt’s been renting a storage warehouse not far from here.”
“I remember coming to Brooklyn when Matt was very young,” Madame’s eyes took on that faraway look again. “Antonio took us to Coney Island. The park was a madhouse, of course, since we went on a sunny Saturday afternoon, Matt did so love the rides—”
My fingers tightened on the steering wheel. If Madame went down memory lane now, I’d lose Ellie for sure!
“Coney Island’s many miles away,” I pointedly interrupted. “It’s on the south end of the borough, on the Atlantic, probably over forty-five minutes away from where we are now.”
“And where are we now exactly?”
“Park Slope.”
Brooklyn was home to at least ninety different neighborhoods and two hundred nationalities, many of whom had created ethnic enclaves (not unlike Manhattan’s Chinatown or the nearly vanished Little Italy). Brooklyn’s more recent immigrants—from the Caribbean, Middle East, and former Soviet Union—had brought cultural color to many of the borough’s streets with native restaurants, festivals, and specialty groceries. In this upscale Brooklyn area, however, the overriding heritage appeared to be that of my own Village neighborhood: Transplanted Yuppie-Hipster (“Yupster” was the current pop-sociological term, Young Urban Professional Hipster). In fact, the area had so many relocated writers, editors, academics, and lawyers, Mike Quinn once joked to me that he’d blinked one day and realized Manhattan’s Upper West Side had teleported half its residents to his borough.
The red light changed to green, and we moved forward. We were now crossing Seventh Avenue, the main shopping area for the North Slope (the northern end of Park Slope), which boasted the sort of bistros, restaurants, and boutiques typically seen in Manhattan’s trendier neighborhoods.
“We’re still close to the city,” I mentioned for Madame, “certainly less than thirty minutes from the Manhattan crossings.”
“Well, you know what they say these days about real estate,” Madame noted, “anything within a half-hour commute to Manhattan, is Manhattan. I have an acquaintance in Brooklyn Heights, near the promenade—she tells me her brownstone’s been valued as high as a Chelsea townhouse.”
Brownstone . . . my memory kicked in, and I suddenly knew why Union Street sounded so familiar. It was Mike Quinn’s old street address. I’d never visited him in Brooklyn, but one slow afternoon while I was doing schedules in my office, I took a break and regressed into teenage crush mode to find his home by satellite on the Web.
I knew he was melancholy over selling the place, which wasn’t here in Park Slope, but two neighborhoods over in Carroll Gardens. Since his wife wanted the divorce, and they jointly owned the property, he was stuck. Apparently, the building was worth so much now (easily five times the value of their original purchase price fifteen years before), he couldn’t afford to buy her out, but the good news was that he’d be getting a nice chunk of change from his share of the sale.
“Union is definitely a cross street,” I told Madame, thinking back to that Web satellite map I’d consulted. “I’m sure we’re heading West.”
“Toward the East River?”
“Yes.”
The black SUV was still rolling forward, right behind Ellie’s Town Car. And I followed them for a few more minutes. We were now leaving the restored brownstones of Park Slope and entering the far less upscale neighborhood of Gowanus.
Madame pursed her lips as she took in the blighted area of rundown clapboard row houses tucked between dead factories and a network of abandoned shipyard waterways.
“Are those canals?” she said, gawking down one of the channels of water as we crossed the narrow Union Street bridge.
“You’re kidding? You’ve never heard of the Gowanus canal debate?”
“Oh, yes, I’ve heard about that, but I didn’t realize they were actually canals . . .”
Gowanus, with its maze of narrow waterways, once served as a working extension of the nearby shipyard. When the ports shut down, the heavy industry left, and this neighborhood of factories and warehouses became an urban eyesore. Then artists started moving in, taking over and transforming the large spaces. A former soap factory, for instance, had been converted into a site for a community arts organization.
In more recent years, the area was “upzoned” to allow for the construction of residential buildings. Now two new towers were standing, overlooking the once stinky canals (which had since been cleaned up). A Whole Foods store was about to open, and major developers were buzzing about turning the entire area into a “Little Venice,” complete with the sort of Yupster restaurants and upscale rents we’d just left behind in the North Slope.
The debate right now was with residents who saw themselves being priced out of their homes. It was the same old song that had been sung so many times on Manhattan Island. Low rent immigrant and industrial areas, plagued with cracked sidewalks, graffiti, and crime, became havens for struggling artists who turned them trendy, making them gold mines for developers, who boosted rents, squeezing longtime residents and poor artists out.
“Uh-oh,” I mumbled.
“What?” Madame asked.
“This is the neighborhood where Matt’s renting a warehouse. Do you think Ellie’s on her way there for some reason?”
“For what reason?”
“I don’t know . . . Matt’s storing Ric’s decaffeinated green beans right now. They’re extremely valuable, and I have to tell you, at the moment, I don’t trust Ellie . . .”
“They’re not turning or stopping,” Madame noted. “Where is Matt’s warehouse exactly?”
“Just a few blocks away, I’m surprised he never took you to see it.”
“What’s to see? Bags of green coffee in a big building. I’ve seen them all my life, dear. Matt’s handling all that now.”
The buildings around us began to change again, from industrial to residential. The streets became cleaner, the graffiti disappeared, and well maintained brownstones now lined the blocks.
“We’ve entered Carroll Gardens,” I informed Madame.
But my focus was momentarily off the vehicles we were following. Mike Quinn’s brownstone was around here somewhere, and I was searching for a glimpse of it.
During my previous trips to Matt’s warehouse, my ex-husband had been driving
, and I wasn’t about to sound like a teenager asking her father to “please drive by Mike’s house. I want to see where he lives . . .” At the moment, Madame and I were still on Union. We passed the intersection with Hoyt, then Smith (ten blocks down was the famous Smith and Ninth subway station, the highest elevated platform in New York’s entire subway system). Suddenly, a woman in another SUV, a cherry red one, pulled out of her parking space, and jumped right in front of me, cutting me off.
I hit the brakes. “Damn!”
Now there were two SUVs between me and Ellie’s car. Court Street was just ahead, and the line of traffic had stopped for a red light. I found it interesting that the Asian man in the black SUV was still following Ellie.
Coincidence? I wondered. Mike Quinn always said that in his line of work there were no coincidences.
The reminder of Mike and coincidences together had me back checking the street addresses. His old home had to be on this block. I peered down the row of connected brownstones, and noticed a FOR SALE sign in front of one of them. Like the others on this quiet, tree-lined street, the house was set back from the sidewalk, giving it a nice little front yard, delineated by a wrought iron garden gate.
I counted three floors and knew, on sight, that it was a valuable building. An owner could comfortably live on one or two floors and rent out the third. Buildings like this one, in this quiet, lovely neighborhood, a close commute to Manhattan, easily sold for one million dollars or more.
I tried to remember some of the funny things Mike had said about living here . . . how the area was named after the only Roman Catholic to sign the Declaration of Independence (Charles Carroll), but the area was more famous for a more modern Brooklyn native, Al Capone. The gangster had ended up in Chicago, but he’d begun his criminal career near here and was married at St. Mary’s Star of the Sea church just around the corner.
I wondered in passing if Mike’s wife and two kids had moved out yet, and I automatically scanned the street for any sign of them (Mike had shown me photos). But the narrow block was empty, save for a young woman with short dark hair and trendy glasses, talking on a cell phone as she pushed along a baby carriage. She was clearly one of the newer transplants to what had once been a neighborhood of working class Italian immigrants.
“Clare!” Madame suddenly cried.
I jumped in my seat. “What?”
“The light’s changed! Look, the cars are turning onto Court.”
I didn’t have to ask what direction. It would have to be south, because down here Court was one way. I was about to make the turn when the tightly timed stoplight changed again. The woman in the cherry SUV in front of me hesitated on the yellow. She stopped, as if considering whether to go through it, then started up again, making the turn.
“Damn!”
The woman had left me stuck on a full blown red light, and traffic was starting to come through the intersection.
“Go through it,” Madame demanded.
“I can’t! There’s no ‘left on red’ allowed in New York State. I don’t think ‘left on red’ is allowed in any state!”
“Go through it anyway,” Madame demanded. “This is an emergency.”
“We don’t know that.”
“We’ll lose both Ellie and the man in the black SUV following her—and you said someone is after Ric. You said they could have killed him the night he was mugged, and he looks so much like Matt that you’re afraid someone might make a mistake. Am I wrong, dear?”
“No.”
“Then do as I say. Put your foot on the gas, sneak out carefully into the intersection, and go through that red light, tout de suite!”
I did. Pretending I was simply entering another traffic circle, I waited for the oncoming flow of cars to lighten up just enough for me to nose out there, then I burned rubber, made a screeching turn and headed down the street. Within three blocks, I spotted that cherry red SUV.
“Where’s the black SUV?!” I cried. “It should be in front of her!”
“It’s up ahead. Look!” Madame replied.
“But there are two of them now!”
A pair of the same model black SUVs were rolling side by side down Court. Each of the large, boxy vehicles had a dark-haired man driving, and I couldn’t tell which of them was the Asian man who’d been following Ellie.
“Oh, damn,” I murmured. “Why didn’t we get the license plate?!”
“Where’s the Town Car?” Madame asked.
“I don’t see it!” I cried.
Just then, the black SUV on the left, put on his left-turn signal. He was planning to turn soon, while the one on the right was obviously going to continue driving straight.
“Which way should I go?” I asked. “Should I turn with the guy on the left, or go straight with the guy on the right?!”
“I don’t know, dear!”
The burst of siren nearly sent me through the car roof. I checked my rear view mirror. A half a block back, a police cruiser was threading through the heavy traffic. “You in the red vehicle,” a loud voice suddenly boomed over a loudspeaker, “pull over.”
Crap!
An NYPD traffic cop had obviously witnessed my little lapse in judgment back at the intersection of Union and Court.
“But officer,” (I could say) “right on red is legal on Long Island.”
“You’re not on Long Island!” (The cop would probably bark.) “And you made a left. License and registration, and get out of the car, we’ll want to search the vehicle and give you a sobriety test.”
“Don’t, Clare! Don’t pull over!” Madame cried.
“Are you crazy?”
“I’m very serious. I bought a little something in the Garden.”
“Excuse me?”
“There was this nice Jamaican man. He and I hit it off— you know, I’ve been to his native island many times—and he offered to sell me some clove cigarettes. But I suspect they might have a little something more than cloves in them.”
“A little something more? What are you telling me? What something more?!”
“You know, something of that famous native crop from the man’s island home.”
“Coffee?”
“No.”
“Ganja?”
Madame nodded.
“You made a drug deal at the Brooklyn Botanic Gardens!”
“I have the cigarettes in my bag, and I’ll gladly throw them out the window, but you have to evade the police car well enough for me to get rid of them without those two nice-looking officers seeing me dispose of the evidence.”
“For the love of . . . !”
The burst of siren was louder now and longer. “Lady in Red! Pull over!”
Clearly, the cop had a case of agita, and I wasn’t helping. But I couldn’t pull over if Madame was carrying marijuana. I had no idea how much she had, or how much was enough to land her in Rikers Island Correctional Facility for the night.
“Look, the Town Car!” Madame cried.
I’d sped up enough to catch sight of it near the end of Court Street. We were also out of Carroll Gardens by now and entering Red Hook, a neck of land that jutted out into Upper New York Bay. Years ago, Red Hook had been a bustling working class enclave for dock workers, then it fell on hard times.
A little over a decade ago it was discovered by artists, who were inspired by (as a visual artist put it to me one day in the Blend) “stunning harbor views clashing with urban decay.” And now, the same old song was playing again: the area was on its way to gentrification, with waterfront development plans that included the largest Ikea in the world replacing a nineteenth-century dry dock.
The police siren wailed again, and I noticed in my mirror that cherry red SUV, driven by that lady who had stranded me back at the traffic light. She started pulling over, clearly misunderstanding that the cop was after me.
I took the opportunity to push the envelope—along with the gas pedal.
The cherry SUV moved between me and the police car to get to the side of
the street, and I punched forward, just making the end of a yellow light at the bottom of Court. I didn’t know where the black SUV was, but I saw Ellie’s Town Car. It had swerved right, and was now heading for Hamilton Avenue and the Brooklyn Battery Tunnel Plaza.
“Of course! They’re taking the tunnel!”
I always took one of the three bridges to and from Brooklyn, so I hadn’t recognized this route to the tunnel.
“Looks like Ellie’s going to Manhattan, after all,” Madame noted, turning in her seat. “And it also looks like you shook that traffic cop.”
“Yes, it seems I did,” I said, checking my rear view, as well.
Thank goodness, I thought with relief. For once, it appeared I’d dodged the bullet. It also appeared I was wrong about the Asian man in the silver-blue track suit. He and his black SUV were now nowhere in sight.
FOURTEEN
“SHE’S still sitting in that Town Car,” said Madame.
I nodded. “I think she’s paying the driver.”
We’d tailed Ellie’s car from Brooklyn, racing through the Battery Tunnel, and up Manhattan’s West Side Highway. After exiting on Canal, we drove north, snaked around some cross streets and came down Varick (the name for Seventh Avenue just south of the Village). Now we were sitting in my Honda, idling next to a curb in Soho. Ellie’s hired car had parked in front of a hotel half a block away.
“There she goes,” Madame said.
Showing a substantial amount of white leg, Ellie exited the parked Town Car. Her high-heeled sandals clicked their way into V. This chic Soho hotel was one my ex-husband had favored before his mother had offered him the rent free use of the duplex above the Blend.
“V’s a lot like W on Union Square,” Matt used to say, “only it’s a different letter.”
The V Hotel’s front lobby was on the ground floor. Its enormous plate glass windows easily allowed us to watch Ellie’s movements. After striding to the front desk, she began a conversation with one of the clerks.
“Is she checking in, do you think?” Madame asked.
“I doubt it. She has no luggage with her, and why would she change clothes in her van before coming here?”