Who Killed Tiffany Jones? (4 page)

“Yeah, protecting your own ass,” Kees said. “But there’s one thing you both seem to forget—what I do on my own time is my business.

Nobody else’s. The Napolinis don’t own me. I work with them, not for them.”

Petris laughed and shook his head. “Kees, you’re a friend of mine.

I’ve known you for years, but I think you’ve misunderstood something.

Perhaps you don’t know who you’re dealing with. When you entered the deal with the Napolinis, agreed to handle their business and use their warehouse, you sold part of yourself. When you bring something else into their premises, they expect part of it. I wouldn’t try to squirm out of that deal if I were you.”

Frustrated and enraged, Kees stared at Petris for a moment, then stormed out the door. Without even thinking, he headed back toward The Den.

It was dark when Kees lurched unsteadily out of The Den. He tried to convince himself that his anxiety resulted from the drugs, but he still couldn’t shake the suspicion that someone had been watching him all 16470_ch01.qxd 7/12/02 4:33 PM Page 21

“ M a v i s K a y e ”

21

evening. And after what had happened earlier in the day, he wasn’t anxious to go home. As he walked down Oude Hoogstraat, he quick-ened his pace and glanced over his shoulder several times. Nothing seemed unusual. There didn’t appear to be anyone suspicious on the street. But it didn’t allay his fears. He was certain someone was watching him, waiting for him to slow down, to drop his guard. Struggling not to panic, he made a quick right turn onto OudeZijds Achterburg-wal, into the red-light district. As usual, the area was crowded with men ogling the working girls who sat behind large picture windows lit by red fluorescent lights.

Kees tried to blend into the crowds lingering around the sex shop doorways and the prostitutes’ windows, but he still felt conspicuous.

Sweating heavily, his anxiety building, he stared blankly into the sex shop near him and tried to compose himself. Someone tapped him on his shoulder, and he turned abruptly, instinctively reaching into his jacket for his gun.

“Hallo, mister. Would you like to come in, ya?” a beautiful young woman asked as she leaned out of the doorway next to him.

Kees sighed with relief.

She was dressed in a white lace teddy and white stiletto heels, and her long blond hair cascaded down below her waist. He stared at her silently for a moment and was about to turn and walk away, but her smile disarmed him. There was no trace of the empty, cold eyes or tell-tale haggard look that most often came with the territory. She seemed almost genuine, he thought, almost as if she had been waiting there just for him. And, even as he considered it, he had to laugh at himself.

I’m thinking like a trick, he said to himself. She smiled again and motioned for him to come inside. He paused only briefly before following her. The young woman locked the door behind them and closed the curtain over the window looking out on the street.

Nellica was her name, or so she said, and when her shift ended at four o’clock she suggested that they go to a nearby after-hours pub for 16470_ch01.qxd 7/12/02 4:33 PM Page 22

22

W H O K I L L E D T I F FA N Y J O N E S ?

drinks. Although he wasn’t up to more drinks, Kees considered it since he was still trying to decide if he should return to his own apartment.

She seemed harmless enough. She had told him that she was twenty and had been working as a prostitute for only six months. Her parents didn’t know. They thought she was paying her way through school by working as a receptionist.

As he dressed, Kees let it slip that he had had some problems at his flat so he couldn’t go back there until he found a way to clear everything up.

“Well, I’ve never, ever done this before,” Nellica said, after a pause,

“but you seem like you’re really having some serious troubles. If you’d like, after the pub you can come and sleep at my flat for the rest of the night. I’d like that.”

A half hour later, they climbed the four long, steep flights of stairs leading to her tiny attic room at the Hotel America.

“I don’t have a real flat,” Nellica explained. “I move from hotel to hotel every few weeks.”

“Why is that?” Kees panted, trying to catch his breath after the long climb.

Nellica gave a nervous shrug. “Boyfriend troubles. This way, he can’t find me.”

The nearly bare room was furnished only with an open-face wardrobe made out of plywood, a small table crammed with makeup bottles, and an unmade bed. One small window looked out onto the street. Both the toilet and the shower were down the hallway. Satin panties, lace garters, and leather camisoles were flung haphazardly around the room. Chained to one of the bars of the bed’s metal frame and half hidden under a black lace teddy was a pair of metal handcuffs. Kees sat down on the bed, pushed aside the teddy, and rattled the cuffs.

“You’re a bad girl now, aren’t you,” he chuckled.

16470_ch01.qxd 7/12/02 4:33 PM Page 23

“ M a v i s K a y e ”

23

“No, not really,” she snapped. Then, feeling guilty for raising her voice, she explained, “They were here before I got here.

“Whoever left them didn’t bother to leave the key. It was probably some sort of prank or something. But it really doesn’t matter. I don’t do stuff like that during off hours anyway. Doesn’t appeal to me.”

Kees was silent as Nellica undressed and put on an old T-shirt.

She hadn’t meant to snap at him, but she felt terrible, as if she had a horrible hangover even though she’d had only one drink during the evening. When Nellica switched off the light and lay down, Kees lay down next to her, fully dressed.

“Are you comfortable? Don’t you at least want to take off your jacket or your pants or something?”

“No. I’m fine, thanks.”

Nellica started to say something else, but she was so tired she couldn’t seem to form the words. She heard Kees’s voice, but it seemed distant, as if it were coming from the end of a long, dark tunnel. Gradually the sound diminished, and she fell into a deep sleep.

When Nellica woke up later that morning, her head was throbbing and her face was sticky with sweat. She tried to sit up and focus, but it was all she could do to keep from throwing up. She turned to her side and suddenly drew back when she realized that someone else was in bed with her. He lay on top of the sheet with his back to her, fully dressed except for shoes and a jacket. Then, remembering she had brought someone home with her last night, she relaxed. A moment later she nudged him softly in the back trying to wake him.

“Hey, hey, mister! Time to get up. I’ve got to go out.”

When Kees didn’t respond, Nellica reached around him and began turning him over on his back.

It was then that she felt the viscous moisture on her hand. Frightened, she pulled him over on his back, and gasped when she saw that his neck and the front of his shirt were covered with blood. Nellica 16470_ch01.qxd 7/12/02 4:33 PM Page 24

24

W H O K I L L E D T I F FA N Y J O N E S ?

scrambled from the bed and slowly backed toward the door. In shock, she stared at the lifeless figure. His left arm was stretched above his head, his wrist locked tightly into one end of the handcuffs, the other end of which was still attached to the bed frame. His eyes were open in a dead man’s stare.

When Nellica saw the raw, open gash on his neck, she began screaming and pounding her fists against the door. Kees’s throat had been slit from ear to ear.

The police inspectors immediately cordoned off the building after the hotel manager took them to Nellica’s room. Her screams had brought hotel staff members as well as a crowd of guests to the hallway outside the room. The police had been called immediately.

They meticulously gathered personal information from everyone who was still inside the hotel. No one escaped the lengthy and methodical questioning.

Some of the forensics experts who combed the room complained that there was evidence of too many people having been on the premises. A preliminary sweep of the place uncovered hair and skin samples of at least two dozen individuals. And none of it was fresh. The Hotel America was a high traffic, transient place. It would take much more time and effort to even attempt narrowing the field down to a likely suspect. The inspector, a middle-aged veteran of the department named Philippe Sally, told them to keep trying.

“Every criminal makes a mistake,” he insisted. “There is no such thing as a perfect crime.”

16470_ch01.qxd 7/12/02 4:33 PM Page 25

,

<

<

,

THREE

Baltimore/New York/Atlanta—Monday, July 16

Baltimore

Ed wa rd “ R uff D a ddy ” S h e l t o n —
dressed casually in a flowing white linen shirt opened to his navel, matching linen trousers, and Bill Blass sandals—shifted his weight anxiously as he stood near the ticket counter at Baltimore/Washington International Airport. The heavy 24-carat gold chain that hung from his neck glistened in the bright sunlight streaming through the floor-to-ceiling window across from the counters. He was a stocky, camel-colored twenty-eight-year-old whose face was set in a cold, fierce expression. Even his smile was intense. Now he waited impatiently for Wardell Bransford, the skinny young gofer who was waiting in line to purchase his tickets to Atlanta.

There were four people ahead of Wardell.

“Damn, who woulda thought we’d end up in Baltimore on a damn Saturday,” Ruff Daddy said to Morris Humphreys, the tall, athletic-16470_ch01.qxd 7/12/02 4:33 PM Page 26

26

W H O K I L L E D T I F FA N Y J O N E S ?

looking thirty-five-year-old who stood beside him. Mo, as he was called, was his personal bodyguard and head of personnel and corpo-rate security for RuffRoad Records. Despite the heat, he was wearing jeans and a multicolored, designer leather bomber jacket. He wore nothing under the jacket, which was left open to reveal his bulging pecs, the sculpted six pack beneath them, and an array of gold and silver chains that would have made Mister T envious.

“We be out of here directly,” Mo said, grinning and flexing his muscular upper body.

“I know that’s right.” Ruff Daddy laughed, then abruptly cut off his laughter. He and his posse had been on the way to Atlanta when the jet he had leased mysteriously developed engine trouble and had to make an emergency landing in Baltimore. “Yo, son, what’s the deal with the Asian bitch in sunglasses over by the courtesy phone?” Ruff Daddy mumbled to Mo. “You checking her out? She’s makin’ me nervous.

Look like she tryin’ to signal the Hispanic cat over by the baggage check-in. I’m sayin’, what’s up with that?”

“You buggin’ man. You gettin’ par-a-noid. They just checking each other out ’cause they both outta pocket down here with these country hicks. They ain’t got nothin’ but crackers and pure black folk up in here. Ain’t no shades in between. Corny businessmen, farmers, and housewives! That’s it. I mean, damn! Whoa-a-a! Look at the haircuts and hairdos. These people still got those old-time 1975-Florida-Evans-Good-Times-Fros.”

Mo laughed at his own joke, then sang, “Don’t laugh, hos . . . I’m down with the Afros.”

“Man, you ain’t no MC. Why you frontin’ like you got some skills?

Now pay attention. You suppose to keep us from getting involved in crossfire of any kind whatsoever, dawg.”

Mo Hump put on his dark glasses so no one could follow his eyes.

He glanced back and forth between the slim Asian woman in dark 16470_ch01.qxd 7/12/02 4:33 PM Page 27

“ M a v i s K a y e ”

27

glasses and the Hispanic near the baggage check-in. Except for the icy scowl on the Asian’s face, they seemed harmless enough, and neither one appeared to be packin’.

“I don’t think they wit each other,” he said. “Look like Chico tryin’

to make a play to me. And she ain’t goin’ for it.”

“Anyway, keep an eye out. How’d it be to get blind-sided in Baltimore? Ah, hell naw.”

“Don’t worry. I feel you.”

“No doubt.”

Ruff Daddy was a millionaire, but more than a few people suspected that he hadn’t accumulated all of his fortune in his chosen profession, the record business. Nobody, not even Mo, knew for sure.

“The source of my income is a subject upon which we need not elaborate,” Ruff Daddy had once told Mo, and the tone of his voice suggested that the subject was best left alone.

The profession that Ruff Daddy had chosen was rap music. He was rising fast toward the top of the heap as a rapper, MC, vibe-giver, producer, and, now, record-label owner and icon like P-Diddy, aka, Puff Daddy, from whom he had taken his name, and Master P, whom he had met once but didn’t like. And, like Russell Simmons, he wanted to jump mainstream and put hip-hop culture dead at the center of the action.

Ruff and Mo were joking and laughing at the Baltimore locals when Ruff’s cellphone rang. “Shelton?” the voice on the other end of the line inquired. It was Kim Carlyle, his agent—she was the only one who called him that—checking to see if he was still going to Los Angeles for the bash being thrown by Cheeno, another of her clients.

“Yeah, I’ll be there, soon as I finish the business down here,” he said.

“Where are you?” Kim asked.

“You won’t believe it, but I’m stuck in Baltimore right now.”

He explained that he’d been on his way to hook up with Brixton, a 16470_ch01.qxd 7/12/02 4:33 PM Page 28

28

W H O K I L L E D T I F FA N Y J O N E S ?

hot new British performer that a London contact had turned him on to. As he spoke, he remembered the last time he’d seen Kim, sitting in the backseat of her limo, dressed in a hot designer outfit, sipping cognac, and taking care of business. She was the one who had jump-started his career, helping to move him from an opening act to a headliner, but he wasn’t quite sure if he could trust her completely. First off, she was a little too controlling and assertive for his taste. That’s why he had never moved on her. He was absolutely certain about one thing—he had to be in charge, of his business and his woman.