Antenna Syndrome (18 page)

I hoofed it up to the fifth floor, peeling off my
eMask as I went. I rang LeVeen’s doorbell. No answer. Rapped on his
door. Still no response. I tried the doorknob and found it
unlocked. I looked up and down the hallway but saw no one so I went
inside.

There was an acrid burning smell in the apartment so
I immediately pulled my eMask back on. You never know what you
might encounter in these buildings. Gas leak, meth lab, dead
bodies…

In the living room I saw LeVeen in a chair by the
window, wearing only a pair of jeans. He was kneeling in the seat
but draped over the back of it with his chin almost on the
windowsill.

A bird cage lay on its side near the window. Water
and birdseed were spilled all over the floor. Hermie the pigeon was
nowhere to be seen.

“
Did you lose your
pigeon?”

When I went closer I saw he’d lost more than that.
There was a hole in the back of his head, and a mass of blood had
drooled from his mouth onto the windowsill. One hand hung over the
window ledge but there was nothing in it. There was no exit wound
around his face, so he’d probably been killed with a small-caliber
weapon.

I drew my pistol, thumbed the safety off and racked
a load. I made a quick tour of the apartment to make sure that
whoever had shot LeVeen wasn’t waiting to clear my head the same
way. The two bedrooms and the kitchen were empty. Something was
burning on the stove so I turned the gas off. I returned to the
living room, locked the apartment door and pocketed my pistol.

A small padded USPS envelope addressed to Crabner
lay open on the coffee table. I looked inside and saw only a soggy
tissue in a baggie sealed with a twist tie. I felt the tissue
through the baggie. No flash drive in there. Where had it gone?

The envelope had originally been addressed to
Crabner, care of the Avatar Clinic on Laight Street. Postmarked a
month ago. Someone had written “Not resident here”, and written the
Delancey Street address below it, but no apartment number. Someone
had later added the zip code in red pen. Given the current state of
the US postal service, no wonder it’d taken a month to show up
here.

I pulled on latex gloves and checked LeVeen’s
pockets. In his wallet I found five hundred dollars and a bank slip
for three thousand dollars deposited just two hours ago. His wallet
also included business cards of several civic government officials.
His cell phone was in another pocket.

I looked around the room he used as an office. His
laptop stood open, the text of a script on the screen. I checked
the USB ports but found no flash drive. Beside his laptop was a bag
of weed and an empty beer can. The closet was empty except for
Crabner’s books I’d seen yesterday.

In his bedroom, the sheets were turned down and
rumpled. I noticed a woman’s slacks and blouse draped over a chair
in the corner. I opened the closet door and discovered a brunette
in only her underwear, ready to scream. I clapped a latex hand over
her mouth and shook my head.

“Police,” I said. “Detective-Sergeant Boyle. Put
your clothes on.” I rolled the eMask halfway down my face, just
enough to make her feel less threatened, not enough to make a
positive ID if this all went sideways and real police got
involved.

She came out of the closet and went to her clothes.
I retreated to the doorway, giving her a little privacy. She
stepped into her slacks and buttoned her blouse. She ran her
fingers through her hair and gave me a nervous look.

“You won’t put my name in the papers, will you?”

“Just tell me what happened.”

She took a breath and let it out in a quick recap.
“Ron and I were making out. Somebody started messing with his door.
He put his pants on and went to see who it was.

“A voice said, ‘Where’s the flash drive?’ and Ron
said he didn’t know what the guy was talking about and told him to
leave. They started shoving each other around. I heard Ron’s pigeon
squawk, and Ron swore and then there was a bang and everything was
quiet.

“I hid in the closet. The bedroom door opened and I
heard someone standing there breathing. It was creepy and I was
scared. Then the buzzer rang and the person left the room. I was
just thinking it was safe to come out when you showed up. Are you
sure someone’s not still here?”

“I’ve already searched the apartment. We’re
alone.”

“Good.” She took her purse from the chair. “I’ll
give you a thousand bucks to leave my name out of this.”

She still believed I was Det-Sgt Boyle. But who else
but a hooker or drug dealer carried that much cash? I could let her
buy me off. Hard times brought out the worst in me. I could get her
name too and leverage that to squeeze even more out of her down the
road.

But she was genuinely scared. Maybe her being here
at the time of LeVeen’s murder was purely accidental. But if she
fell into the hands of Boyle and Mundt, they’d find a gun of the
right caliber and charge her with murder. If she had real money,
they’d make her pay and pay...

“Sit here and don’t move,” I said. “I need to look
at LeVeen again and then we’ll talk.”

I returned to the living room and found LeVeen’s
phone in his pocket. I checked his call log and saw dozens of
incoming and outgoing today, mine among them. Deleting it would
scarcely cover my tracks, since his call history would remain with
the service provider. If the police checked, my deleted record
might actually draw attention to me.

Meanwhile, there were all these other calls. Was the
killer’s number among them? I didn’t dare send his call log to my
anonymous account as I’d done with Jack’s. The police would examine
LeVeen’s phone, and they had the resources to scrutinize the
timeline during which anyone had accessed it. I couldn’t risk their
discovering I’d been here.

Instead, I tapped my goggles and turned on the video
recorder. I scrolled through his call log, copying the last few
days of activity for later review. I put his phone back in his
pocket where I’d found it.

I returned to the bedroom but the door was locked. I
banged on it and told her to open up. When she didn’t, I jimmied it
with a shim to get in. The room was empty, the window open. Outside
was a fire escape. I realized I hadn’t even got her name. Hopefully
she’d believed I was a cop, else Boyle and Mundt would come after
me with a vengeance. Now I had to scram too.

I took LeVeen’s bag of weed and the USPS envelope,
soggy tissue and all, and got out of there.

Chapter 32

En route to my office, I kept an eye out for pay
phones, a rare commodity
.
I found one at
Houston and Sixth, near a basketball court where kids played in the
evening smog. Conscious of CCTV cameras, I put on my eMask before I
left the car.

I made a quick 911 call. “There’s been a shooting at
113 Delancey, apartment 505.” I got back in my car and headed up
Sixth to 33rd.

I entered my office building via the rear. Major and
Werewolf were camped as usual in their command post. Major was
reading
The Economist
and Werewolf was gnawing on what
looked like a human thigh bone.

“The police are looking for you.”

“They were here?”

“Showed me a picture of a native American.
Dark-eyed, big-nosed, long-jawed mug. Chief Sitting Bull with a
good haircut. Wanted to know if I’d seen him with you.”

Shit. Walker’s description. How’d they make the
connection? Had Jenner filed a complaint about the beating he’d got
from Walker? Was I implicated by association?

“They still around?”

“Nope. One went upstairs to see if you were home
while the other quizzed me.”

“You gave them the key to my office?”

“No warrant, no way. But the dick that went upstairs
put a snake under your office door.” Major tapped his keyboard and
clicked his mouse.

One of his monitors replayed the feed from a
third-floor hall camera. I saw Mundt slide a mini-cam on a
flexi-cable under my office door and look around with a handheld
viewer attached to the camera snake.

“Is that legal?” I said.

Major shrugged. “Once they’d confirmed you weren’t
on-site, they scrambled out of here like they were late for happy
hour. I told them I thought you’d left town.”

“Nice touch. Where’d I go?”

“West Coast, I thought.” Major coughed to clear his
throat. “Anyway, cheap bastards didn’t even offer a cash incentive.
Otherwise, I might have given them a call next time you showed.” He
winked at me. “We all need a little help, right?”

That was a hint if I ever heard one, but I
appreciated loyalty even if I had to pay for it. “Please accept
this as a token of my gratitude.” I gave him the weed I’d lifted
from LeVeen’s place.

Major opened the baggie and gave it an appreciative
sniff. “Mm-hm. That’s the teen spirit.”

“The cops didn’t leave any bugs, did they?”

“Not that I saw. And I had eyes on them both all the
time they were here.”

“And they’re not still hanging in the ‘hood?”

“I saw them drive away. I’ve been checking the
perimeter, but they haven’t even returned for a drive-by.” He
clicked his mouse. All four monitors went to exterior views of the
street and alley.

I saw some pedestrian and vehicular traffic, but
nothing that suggested stakeout activity.

“I’m not sure they bought my story, though,” Major
said. “They might be back.”

I went up to my office. Nothing was disturbed.
Equally important, there was nothing incriminating lying around for
the camera snake to have seen.

I took the bagged tissue from the USPS envelope,
pulled on a pair of latex gloves and opened it on my desk. I used a
pair of chopsticks to partially unfold the tissue. When I saw
something that looked like mucus with a smear of blood, I stopped
and sealed it up again.

I put the baggie in the fridge. I didn’t know what
it was, but someone had taken the trouble to mail it to Crabner,
and I didn’t think it was a prank. Maybe the missing flash drive
could explain it, but until then I’d leave it in cold storage.

I booted up my office laptop and opened the
anonymous email account to which I’d sent Jack’s phone activity
log. I dumped the whole thing into a spreadsheet and saved it onto
the cloud.

I sorted the data, first by time of call, then by
number. Mid-morning Jack had received a call from someone called
Tatiana, a call lasting a few minutes. Just before noon, he’d made
a return call, a few seconds. Shortly after he’d returned to East
Massapequa, while I was still there, he’d texted her.

I saw a story there: Tatiana had invited Jack for a
visit; later he’d announced his arrival at her place; end of day
he’d warned her I’d asked about their relationship. Not so much a
story as a shaky hypothesis.

Tracking LeVeen’s phone calls took more time. I
transferred my video of his activity log from iFocals to cloud,
then used character recognition to convert it to data.

I looked for repeats in LeVeen’s phone activity.
There were a handful of calls between him and CBX-TV, with whom
he’d had an appointment today. There were also a couple between him
and someone called Dale. The rest were all one-of-a-kind.

None of those unique numbers rang a bell with anyone
I knew – my client, the Randalls, nor anyone else I’d dealt with in
this case. But I didn’t dare call any of them. The police might
eventually match phone records and tag me as a potential suspect
for LeVeen’s murder
.

But one number turned up in both files. In Jack’s
call log, it was “Tatiana”, but on LeVeen’s, the caller was “T.
Borodin”. Late afternoon, one call from Tatiana to LeVeen. When I
compared timelines, it was just minutes after Jack had texted
her.

I could think of no possible story line to make
sense of that. But there was some kind of connection. Marielle knew
Crabner, and Crabner had been LeVeen’s roommate. Tatiana knew both
Jack and LeVeen, which meant she
might
have known Crabner,
and known
about
Marielle. I needed to find out who Tatiana
Borodin was...

I locked up and went back downstairs. In his
smoke-filled office, Major was rolling a joint. “That shit is
really good. I’m higher’n a satellite.” He offered the fresh joint
to me. “Want a taste?”

What the hell. I was stymied on how Jack and LeVeen
were connected though Tatiana. Maybe a little rearrangement of my
logical neurons would illuminate something. I lit the joint, took
one good draught and handed it back to Major. After a moment, I
released it in a slow plume of smoke that seemed to take all my
tension with it.

Major took two more hits and stubbed the joint to
save for later.

I stared absently at Werewolf as he gnawed his bone.
His eyes were closed and drool hung from his lower lip. He and that
bone were one. I was starting to drool a little myself. Maybe I
needed a bone to chew on. Or maybe I just needed something to eat.
I decided to head home to scare up some dinner.

Chapter 33

Since I had nothing in my fridge but food whose
best-before date was months old, I stopped at a supermarket on my
way home. I filled a small cart with all the basics a bachelor
required. I wasn’t eating as well as when Gwen and I lived
together, but much better than a year ago when I subsisted on beer
and pizza.

I was scanning my purchases in the checkout line
when I got a call from Nick Walker.

“What’s up, chief?”

“You tell me, motherfucker. I just spent two hours
in interrogation with an electrical skullcap strapped to my head.
What did you tell the cops?”

“I heard they’re looking for me. What’d they want
with you?”

“Nothing, except as a way to find you.”

“Don’t say any more. Where are you?”