The Other Man (Rose Gold Book 1)

by Nicole French

“Perhaps it’s because I’m not a good mother,” she said. “Did you ever think of that?”

  “I would if it were the slightest bit true.”

  She stopped. “How can you say that? You have no idea what I’m like with my daughter or what kind of person I even am at heart. The women in my family—they aren’t warm, Matthew. They are calculating and cold at best, vapid and neglectful at worst.”

  I turned, and immediately tossed my pretzel on the ground for the squirrels. The expression on Nina’s face told me she needed my full attention.

  “I don’t need to witness you with your daughter to know basic things about your personality, doll,” I told her. “I know you’re kind. I know you’re thoughtful. I know you’re the kind of person who cares enough to come all the way across the city just to say you’re sorry.”

  We stared at each other for a long time. But the pain I’d seen before had disappeared, or at least lessened. Something I said had landed, and that terrible sadness in her had lifted a bit.

  “Did it work?” Nina asked. “My apology?”

  I smirked. “Are you asking if I forgive you?”

  “It’s customary after you receive an apology to tell the person everything is all right.”

  I shook my head. “I don’t know. My feelings were pretty hurt, Ms. de Vries. I think I’m going to need some amends made.”

  “Amends? Like what?”

  “Well, I did invite you to dinner…”

  She examined me a moment more, then cracked another shy smile. “You are incorrigible.”

  “So I’ve been told. Is it working?”

  She shook her head, but her smile deepened. “I’ll think about it,” she relented. “I promise.”

  Chapter Twelve

  “You really don’t think your cover was blown?” I asked. “It just seems weird. Two weeks you’ve been hearing about these assholes coming and going on Thursday nights. First time you’re there, zip?”

  Derek tossed his Mets hat into the air, twirled it around his thumb, and tossed it back into the air. After nearly forty-eight hours in The Hole, my detective was beat and looked like he needed a six-pack of beer and a long shower. Instead, he had come to my house to debrief like a good soldier.

  Nearly a month of investigation of Jude Letour’s operation had helped us identify the house as a likely center for his trafficking operation. We had a few accounts of Letour and his associates, but we had designed the stakeout based on the comings and goings of the neighborhood in order to get some eye-witness corroboration. Planted the car. ID’d the suspects. Snuck Derek into the backseat of a rusted Chevy Nova with two days’ worth of food.

  All for nothing.

  Twenty-four hours sitting in a neighborhood that reeks of raw sewage, and my man saw jack fuckin’ shit. So he stayed another twenty-four. Still nothing.

  “I do not,” Derek argued for the tenth time. “No one even looked at the car. You know if someone recognized me, they would have at least glanced my way. Do you have any idea how many people squat in their cars up by The Hole, Zola? I was a chameleon, I’m telling you.”

  I groaned. As we had done countless times together, Derek and I were back at square one, sitting on my deck in the afternoon sun, reviewing the evidence and trying to determine our next step. People always think cops just run out and do whatever the fuck they want. Maybe the shitty ones, sure. But the good ones work with their prosecutors. Do things right from the start.

  “So, let me get this straight,” I said. “First witness, two weeks ago. The pawn broker across the street. He saw this Roscoe Jackson cat get into a cab and return with four girls in a car registered to an LLC owned by Letour. So we think he’s the point man in the neighborhood.”

  “That’s right,” Derek replied. “They go into the house. And the guy doesn’t see them come out.”

  “Doesn’t mean they didn’t,” I said.

  “Or maybe it does,” Derek countered. “The pawn broker never leaves, Zola. He lives in his shop. Sleeps there. And he’s a nosy motherfucker too. He would have seen them unless they’re still there or gone…some other way. It’s not like people don’t ‘disappear’ all the time in that part of town.”

  I frowned. Insinuating murder was a bit of a stretch, even for two people as suspicious as we were. The girls could still be down there. They were hostages, after all.

  The pictures of Jane flashed in my head, and I bit back the desire to run up to The Hole and knock on the door myself. It was hard sometimes not to get a white knight complex with this job. But suspecting and knowing were two different things. To do things right, you had to be careful.

  “Okay,” I said. “Witness two.”

  “So, the next night, a lady says Roscoe came to her restaurant on Sutter strung out as fuck. He orders coffee and curried goat and starts bragging about all the girls coming through the neighborhood. And when someone told him to shut up, he went off, talking about how these big shots were backing him with as many guns as he wants for his trouble. Says that if anyone messes with him, they’re going to disappear too, just like the girls.”

  I wrinkled my nose. The guns thing—that had shades of arms deals about it, which could be connected to someone like John Carson. But it could be any number of low-level crime-ops in the area. At this particular intersection of Queens and Brooklyn, nearly every major criminal organization festered. The mafia. MCs. Gangs. You name it, The Hole had it.

  “Back to the broker,” I said. “What did he have to say then?”

  “He says three nights ago, Junkie Roscoe is waiting outside the house to meet another car. This one comes in threes. Two big black Escalades. And a tall white guy with a black chin-strap beard.”

  “Which matches the pictures we have of Letour,” I said with approval.

  “Exactly.”

  “But no plates,” I added.

  “No plates,” Derek confirmed.

  “Because the broker needs glasses.”

  “The broker needs glasses.”

  “Which is why he couldn’t ID anyone if we wanted,” I said.

  Derek snorted. “Everyone says that.”

  “Everyone wants to stay alive.” I leaned back in my chair and set my feet atop the table as I enjoyed the late afternoon sun. “We both know what’s going on here. Carson is feeding guns to the area, not just girls. There’s too much organized crime in New York for him not to get a piece. Every major manufacturer has things fall off their trucks, so to speak.”

  “Exactly,” Derek said. “Which is basically why Junkie Roscoe gave up the goods with his little rant when he said Jude’s first name.”

  I frowned. “Wait, he named him to the Jamaican food lady?”

  Derek nodded. “That’s right.”

  “Still. We don’t know he was talking about Carson with the gun thing. And we still have no one who can directly corroborate the fact that Jude Letour has been using a house in The Hole to stash girls and liquor, much less ammunitions from Chariot. Or any of John Carson’s other jockeys.”

  I tapped my finger on my notes, which bore a list of Janus society members provided by its once-golden son, Eric de Vries. Derek and I had started digging here, but these guys basically lived in vaults. And there was no point in giving the game away. Not when they would go straight to the kingpin and blow the whole thing.

  “You said it yourself, Zola: they’re like the mob,” Derek said. “They don’t do the dirty work themselves. They hire it out to the underlings. Street-level gangs. Hustlers. Sharks. Junkies.”

  “Roscoes.”

  “Bingo.”

  I tapped my finger on my mouth, considering. “What does the trafficking unit say?”

  “Zola, you know what they say. They don’t think Letour is involved in the operation beyond being a dirty landlord. But we both know he is. That’s three times now people have heard Letour mentioned in connection with these deals. With de Vries’s testimony, we can send this straight to the jury.”

  “So they can send it r
ight back?” I shook my head. “It’s solid, but not beyond a reasonable doubt, my friend. We need more than one source.”

  “Zola, the pawn broker isn’t a bad witness, and de Vries is foolproof!”

  It was a common refrain between Derek and me over the years, not to mention many DAs and the precincts they worked with. Sometimes I wanted to have “beyond reasonable doubt” printed on my undershirt.

  “The pawn broker is half blind, and Eric de Vries has a grudge, King. Jude Letour was part of a group that framed him for securities fraud, kidnapped his wife, and killed his unborn child. That’s hardly foolproof. Other than them, the diner lady will get cast as no better than hearsay. Especially since you and Cliff didn’t see any of it.” I clicked my tongue, thinking. “And we still don’t have any direct connection to John Carson. Sure, he owns a stake in that property along with Letour, but that doesn’t mean he’s culpable for what’s going on there.”

  “Zola, come on…”

  I shook my head. “Letour’s not the target; he’s just a liaison. We need the big fish. Ramirez only gave us leave to do this because he wants Carson, and so do I. If we can get a little more—something that will legitimately bring him down—then we might be able to take it to the grand jury before the gala.”

  Derek groaned. I didn’t blame him. It was obvious to us both what was going on—one of the gangs in The Hole was running the door on a house trading drugs, prostitutes, and a number of other illicit items through the neighborhood. Rings like this usually had several different safe houses, but Derek had obviously identified one of the main hubs. Still, we needed more.

  “I say we raid the joint. We’re not going to get the evidence we need following junkies like Roscoe around Brooklyn,” Derek said. “And if Carson’s potential pickup is in only four weeks, we need evidence. Fast.”

  “Too fast, and he doesn’t show at all.”

  I was hesitant to request a warrant for a full raid before we had the goods on the rest of the people running it. We had one shot at the element of surprise. We needed to make the most of it.

  “Junkie Roscoe,” I said. “When he was with the girls, how did he look?”

  Derek raised a brow. “How do you think he looked? He’s running girls for drug money and smoking that shit around the next corner. Roscoe Jackson is a grade A crackhead. What are you thinking? Raid his apartment instead?”

  I twisted my mouth around. “We could make it look like something less…suspicious. He would be a bad witness though. If he’s so wasted he can’t even keep his mouth shut, the defense will tear him apart.”

  “So we get him sober,” Derek chimed in. “Dry him out for a few days. Get the names we really need.”

  I frowned, weighing the pros and cons. It didn’t take long. We were backed into a corner, and with barely a month until the gala, I was under pressure from both Ramirez and the de Vrieses to make some meaningful progress.

  “Write it up,” I said. “And keep watching him. I’ll get a warrant for a raid on his place next week. We’ll make the fucker talk. I want to be present during the interrogation, all right?”

  Derek rolled his eyes. I knew as well as he did that a lot of cops didn’t appreciate prosecutors in the interrogation room. But this was my case as much as his. I wasn’t going to be sidelined.

  “All right,” Derek said. “I need to go home and clean up before I go back there. It’s a motherfuckin’ wasteland, that part of the borough. Sewage and horse shit all over the street. Actual horse shit, man. Fuckin’ nas—”

  “Ziiiiiiiooooooo!” Behind us, the front door banged open, and before Derek could continue his rant, my niece’s cartoonish voice filtered through the house and out the back door screen.

  Derek smiled. “Sounds like responsibility.”

  “Sounds like trouble,” I said as Sofia bulleted out onto the deck and into my arms. “Hey, peanut, you’re back!”

  “Mommy said you’d be home today,” she squealed.

  “Sure, I am, bean. It’s Saturday.” I squeezed her tight.

  “Princess Sofia,” Derek greeted her, having met her and Frankie a few other times.

  “I missed you!” Sofia smacked a loud kiss on my cheek. Might have embarrassed some guys, but

  Derek just watched with familiarity.

  “It was just two days with your cousins, Sofs,” I said.

  “Two rotten days.” My niece screwed up her face like a pug’s. “Those boys is no good.”

  I raised a brow. That sounded like her mother talking.

  “Sofia.” Frankie’s voice was sharp as she appeared at the door, arms crossed.

  “But that’s what you said! When they pulled on my braids and called me a girl!”

  “You are a girl, Sofs,” I told her. “Next time they do that, just say, ‘Lucky me. Otherwise I’d look like you bozos.’”

  That produced a giggle, and immediately the little girl started rehearsing the retort under her breath.

  “Mattie, don’t teach her that,” Frankie said. “She’s going to start calling all her friends clowns now.”

  I shrugged. “Lea’s kids are clowns, and those animals deserve a taste of their own medicine. Just wait until I get up there on Sunday. Then they’ll really get it.”

  “I can’t wait until you have kids. You’re going to have three little girls, and they’re going to call you names all day long the second you try to discipline them.”

  Beside me, Derek straightened in his chair. “Ah, hey, Frankie. How’re you doin’?”

  Frankie’s sharp gaze softened on the detective. “Oh, hey, Derek. Anything new?”

  “Nah, Frankie,” I said after Derek stared at her for a moment too long. “Just sorting out the usual things. Same day, different case.”

  “All right. I’ll try to keep this one out of your way, then. Come on, Sof, you can play with your Legos while I get dinner started.”

  Sofia slid off my lap like a wet noodle, but stopped at the door before going inside. “Zio, can we play Barbies tomorrow?”

  I cocked my head. “Barbies? How about I be the G.I. Joe instead?”

  “No!” Sofia shrieked. “She don’t need a man to rescue her, you bozo!” And then she rocketed inside.

  Derek just chuckled.

  I eyed Frankie. “She got all of that from me, did she?”

  Frankie’s cheeks reddened. “She’s a smart girl.”

  I hid a smile. “That she is.”

  Frankie ducked in after Sofia. Derek watched her go while I went back to studying my notes.

  “Yo, man. Your sister. You, um, you think she’d take my number?”

  I looked up. “What, like for a date?”

  Derek shrugged. “Yeah, why not?”

  I frowned. “I mean, she’s my sister. If you’re looking for some easy fun, I’m not the person to be asking.”

  “No, no,” Derek said. “I…she just seems cool. If you’re not okay with it, I’ll step back. No harm, no foul.”

  I eyed him for a moment, taking note of the way he followed Frankie’s movements through the house. But before I could answer, the buzz of my phone on the glass tabletop interrupted us. I took another drink of my beer and swiped it open.

  Doll: I thought about it. And I’m hungry.

  I stared at the message for a long time. Part of me wanted to ask where and when. Another part wanted to ignore it completely.

  Because being Nina’s friend was hard. Her texts, her voice, her whole presence just reminded me of what I was missing. I’d never felt it more keenly than yesterday. The bruising around her wrist, horse or no horse…I couldn’t stop thinking about that either.

  I looked up to where Derek was still watching Frankie through the screen door. Well, no sense in two people I cared about missing out too.

  “Frankie!” I yelled. “Can you set another place? Derek’s staying for lunch.”

  Frankie popped back onto the deck. “Big brother, I am right inside. You don’t need to shriek at me like a heathen.”


  “I never shriek.” I grinned. “Will there be enough for Derek?”

  My sister shrugged. “I’m just heating up a lasagna. We have enough to feed the whole block.” Without waiting for an answer, she ducked back inside.

  Derek immediately turned to me. “Yo, man, I didn’t mean right now! I look like a hobo.”

  He pointed at his undercover wear, which included baggy pants, a t-shirt, and a hoodie, along with the hat he’d been tossing around—things that kept him from sticking out in The Hole. He looked a far cry from the neatly dressed detective I generally knew.

  “Relax,” I said. “She’s met you before. Plus, Frankie works with little kids who eat glue all day. Her standards for menswear are not particularly high.”

  “She grew up with you,” Derek retorted. “Somehow, I doubt she thinks ENYCE knockoffs are acceptable for dinner company.”

  I shrugged. “Honestly, the fact that I like a good tailor probably works in your favor. She’s not in a hurry to date her brother.”

  “But—”

  “Don’t worry, man. It’ll be casual. I’ll be around—”

  Just as the words escaped my mouth, however, my phone buzzed with the last message I was expecting tonight.

  Doll: Are you busy? You may have convinced me to come over for pasta after all…

  “Oh, shit,” I murmured.

  I eyed the message like I thought it was going to jump off the screen and run away. Texting and coffee was one thing. A walk in the park. But despite the fact that I’d already invited her, suddenly dinner…at my house…for an unnamed period of time? It seemed like something different entirely.

  I peered inside, where Sofia was jabbering away while Frankie moved around the small kitchen. Yeah, there was no way I could bring Nina here, much as I might want to. Not if Frankie was around. Not if my coworker, a career investigator, was too. They would both see right through me, and I was not ready for that particular third degree. I had a solid masochistic streak, but even I had limits.

  With that in mind, I sent a response.

  Me: Bad timing, doll. My sister has company. House is off-limits today.