Deadly Dreams (24 page)

“Because of Vice’s plans for him?”

Glancing in the rearview mirror, he did a deft lane switch. “They’re definitely interested in what Crowley might be able to give them on him, yeah. I don’t envy them trying to hold Crowley in check, though. The first sign of trouble and he’s likely to shift loyalties.”

Again he got off the more congested street and began taking side streets to his destination. She had a vague sense of where the next address was. Unless city renovation had recently made its mark, the area was crime ridden, with dilapidated project housing and tired tenements hemming weary storefront vendors. “Used to be a great gym in the area of this address,” she recalled aloud. “A bit closer to Temple University, maybe. A bunch of us from the force used to work out there when I was a rookie.”

“The Ironhouse Gym. Yeah, I knew that place. I had a membership for a while. Got tired of having my hubcaps missing every time I got back to my car, though.”

Oddly, the remark made her nostalgic. “Yeah, we used to lay bets on whose car would get hit. I actually met my ex there.” The memory didn’t generate tender feelings, but the circumstances around the meet did. “Humiliated him on the court in front of his buddies.”

“He was a cop, you said.” His tone was carefully even. “Did you keep his name after the divorce?”

“Never took it.” She watched the general appearance of the buildings flanking the streets erode with each block. “Didn’t see the point.” She sometimes wondered if she’d known intuitively it wouldn’t last and had wanted to save herself the headache of switching back. The thought was vaguely depressing. She might have entered the marriage for all the wrong reasons, but she liked to think she’d gone into it with some level of commitment.

“What’s his name?” His tone was entirely too casual as he slowed the car for the members of the pickup baseball game to scatter from the street. “Maybe I’ve run into him.”

With well over six thousand police officers in the PPD ranks, it was doubtful, but she told him anyway. “Mac Langel.”

His expression was shocked. “You were married to Mac Langel?”

“Relatively briefly. Watch that kid.”

His attention switched back to the street, where a girl who couldn’t have been more than four was darting out in front of him. “Mac Langel. Wow.”

Pursuing the topic was a mistake. Intellectually, Risa knew it. But there was a load of disapproval layered over the disbelief in his voice. She blamed the poor choice she was about to make on hunger and lack of sleep. Not to mention, she never had gotten that coffee. “You know him?”

“A little.”

After that reaction, she’d expected a bit more detail. “Sounded like more than a little.”

He turned into a deeply rutted parking lot wedged against a Thai restaurant. “Enough to know you were way out of his league.”

The unexpected compliment softened something inside her. Just when she thought she had him pegged, he could take her unaware. “Thanks. And just so you realize I caught it, nice dodge.”

He hesitated long enough to put the vehicle in park. Turn off the ignition. Then he faced her. “Okay. He’s an idiot. Got a chip on his shoulder and a constant need to prove himself. I don’t like playing with him or against him on the court. I sure as hell wouldn’t want to be partnered with him. You had a lucky escape.”

Shrugging, she said only, “It was a long time ago. I was looking for . . . permanence, I guess.” Something that had always been sorely lacking when she was growing up. “We seemed to have a lot in common.” Oddly, she appreciated the rude sound he made at that. She’d come to realize that when it came to values, at least, she and Mac were continents apart. “What about you? Any former spouses you’d like me to rip on?”

One corner of his mouth quirked up. “Never been married. Had someone serious a few years ago. Then I had to take over guardianship of my nephew and she bolted.”

A nephew. All sorts of layers were exposing themselves in Nate McGuire today. “Your nephew lives with you?”

“My sister’s back now, too. It’s complicated.” He opened the car door and got out, leaving Risa to agree silently. She’d never had any siblings, but she could certainly attest that family was complicated.

The Thai restaurant didn’t match the address they were looking for, but the liquor store next to it did. Its flickering neon sign promising WINE, BEER, SPIRITS wasn’t a match for the one they sought, but she hadn’t expected it would be. The last telephone listing for Zena’s Place that Shroot had discovered was in the 1992 Yellow Pages.

What was even more disheartening was the fact there was no building at all directly across from it. An empty lot punctuated the street front like a gap-toothed grin, litter and rubbish piled in precarious heaps.

Without much hope, she followed Nate into the store and found him already speaking to the middle-aged eastern Indian clerk there. “We have been here nine years,” he was telling Nate. “Bad neighborhood. Very bad. I have been robbed thirteen times. My third insurance company is threatening to drop me. Maybe I will move the business. But to where? Other places sell liquor, too.”

Rather than aisles of product, he had his wares displayed from floor to ceiling behind the full-length counter. Obviously an attempt to prevent shoplifting.

“Was this place a liquor store when you bought it?” Nate asked him. A stooped, grizzled old man shuffled through the front door.

The owner shook his head. “A Laundromat. And the owner, he promised no trouble from the neighborhood. None, he said. Ha!” Without speaking to the newcomer, he went to the section that housed the vodka and unerringly plucked a bottle from the shelf. The older man withdrew an ancient wallet from his pants pocket and painstakingly counted out the appropriate amount while the storekeeper rang up the sale and placed the bottle in a sack.

“Was there a building in that lot across the street when you first opened up?” Risa asked.

“Nothing as long as I have been here.” The owner and his customer made their exchange silently.

“What about the Laundromat’s name?”

The storeowner was clearly losing interest in the conversation. “I do not remember.”

“Suds ’N’ Such,” a quavering voice put in.

Risa and Nate turned to the old man. He was trying unsuccessfully to replace his wallet in his pocket. After several attempts he finally succeeded. Looking up, he found their gazes on him.

“Didn’t last long, though.”

“Do you remember Zena’s Place being here?”

“Oh, yeah. Of course. Nice little lunch counter. Opened for dinner some nights, too.” He hadn’t bothered to put in his bottom partial plate. Or maybe he didn’t own one. “She’s been dead now . . .” He rubbed his grizzled chin reflectively. “Shoot. Since ’91 or so.”

“You’ve lived in the neighborhood a long time?” Risa thought he looked as if he could have been here when the buildings first sprang up. He wore a floor-length army green topcoat, hanging open, although the temperatures had turned much warmer in the last couple days. Baggy black pants with matching suspenders over a stained white T-shirt and boots completed his attire.

“Lived upstairs for nearly forty years. Back then this wasn’t a bad place to raise a family. Lots of poor folk but nones that’d do you no harm if you left them alone. Not like now.”

“Maybe you can tell us about what used to be in that empty lot across the street.”

“That’s been empty nearly fifteen years now,” he said in response to Risa’s question. “Was condemned long time before that. Thought the city never would get around to tearing that old place down. Were two buildings there at one time. A little shoe repair shop called Jimmy’s and a two-story building. Looked sorta like the one still standing over there.” He pointed a shaking finger to the boarded-up building on one side of the lot. “It was a nice little tavern by the name of Tory’s.” The words sounded wistful, as if he’d spent his share of time in it. “Tory and her boy lived in the apartment above.”

“Can you describe the exterior?” It was a sure thing, Risa thought, that he’d be able to describe the inside.

The old man’s shrug moved his whole body. “Nuthin’ special. Just a door to go in and a big front window. The bar was on the left when you got in, next to a storeroom where they kept the beer. Bunch of tables and a real nice jukebox. Tory liked to keep the music up-to-date, but she’d keep on some oldies for those of us who asked special.”

“What happened to it? Why was it condemned?” Nate asked.

“Fire gutted the place back in ’86. Burnt the repair shop, too. Cavanaugh’s there repaired and reopened for another dozen years or so. Tory and the boy weren’t hurt but never did see them after that, neither.”

A car went by outside, rap music blaring, the hind end bouncing on tricked-out hydraulics. A beer bottle went sailing out the window, landing squarely on the driver’s side of the Crown Vic before the car full of teens took off, hooting and catcalling.

The old man watched the scene, his mouth working silently. Then, “Nope. It wasn’t a bad place to raise a family. Not back then.”

When they returned to the vehicle, Risa observed, “This car should qualify for battle pay.”

“It’s not going to get better treatment where we’re headed next.”

Juicy’s address, she recalled. At the rate they were going, they’d be lucky to have a vehicle to get them back to the station house. “It works, what the old man told us.”

“Tarrants.”

She nodded. They’d gotten his name and address before letting him leave; he’d been visibly anxious to get back to his apartment. “The rest of the places Shroot found will have to be checked out to be sure . . . but a bar could easily have been the scene of that video clip featuring Johnny and Roland Parker.” The table had looked to be large. Littered with beer bottles. And a neon
z
and
p
reflected in the front window.

“Not to mention the way it was destroyed.”

Exactly what she was thinking. “Too many coincidences to be entirely comfortable with,” she agreed pensively. And far too many threads in the investigation, none of which could be tied up nicely yet.

The area didn’t improve in the seven blocks or so to Juicy’s address. The curbs had cars lined up along them. Rather than searching for a spot, Nate reached beneath the seat for a portable LED dash light and put it on the dash, setting it to strobe, and double-parked. The group of youths on the stoop of the building in front of them stopped talking and stared as they got out of the vehicle.

“It’s the po-po.”

“Back to the cop shop, man, we ain’t doing nuthin’.”

“Yo, where’d you get your car door detailed? I want me some of that.” Raucous laughter accompanied the words.

“We’re looking for Javon Emmons,” Nate said evenly. “Juicy. He live here?”

“Never heard of him.”

“Juicy? You looking for Juicy?” One of the young men with his baseball cap twisted backward nudged his neighbor. “Juicy is that fine thing you got with ya. Can’t get juicier than that. Mm-mm.” He licked his lips suggestively.

“Unless you want your tongue ripped out and handed to you, you’ll answer the question,” Risa told him. “Or get out of the way so we can go in and look for ourselves.”

“Ooh-hoo, you got dissed!” A chorus of jeers bombarded the speaker. But they moved aside for Nate and Risa to move up the middle of the steps and push open the door to the apartment building.

Nate flipped the light switch inside the darkened hallway, to no avail.

“Two eighteen is upstairs,” he murmured, and they turned to the littered stairway to begin the climb.

“If Juicy is as high on the feeding chain as Randolph indicated, why’s he living in a place like this?” she muttered. A man was curled up on the first landing, snoring softly. Risa decided he must be sleeping off the effects of something. The noise inside the building should make sleep impossible. The cries of babies, shouts of children, and a shrill argument melded together for a near-deafening din.

“It’s his territory. He’ll live in the center to exact his control over it. No absentee businessmen in his line of work.”

Two eighteen was at the end of the hallway, to the left of the lone window. Nate knocked at the door. Once. Again, this time harder. “Javon Emmons,” he called.

Someone was moving inside the apartment. After several minutes the door swung open and a young woman stood there, one hand on her hip and the other clutching the edge of the door. After one quick glance, she dismissed Risa and focused all her attention on Nate. “Why you yelling at my door?”

“We’re looking for Juicy,” he replied, and tilted his head to look inside the apartment. “Tell him we’d like to talk to him.”

“Everyone looking for Juicy.” She sighed, skating one hand over her waist, which was left bare between her lowriding shorts and short top. “He ain’t here. You can look. That’s what the rest of them do.”

A quick scan of the rooms in the apartment ascertained that the woman was telling the truth. Nate handed her his card. “Give him this and ask him to come in to see me. I’d like to ask him a couple questions.”

“Mm-hmm. People all the time wanting to ask Juicy questions.” She ran the card through her long fire engine red nails and gave him a smile from lips slicked in the same color. “I’ll tell him you was here.”

Back outside Risa gave a silent sigh of relief to discover the car where they left it, looking untouched. The same guys sat out front and immediately started messing with them when they came outside.

“Hey, there was someone gonna steal your po-lice car and I run ’em off. I should get a reward.”

“Shut it, that was you, man.”

“You don’t have to leave with him, sugar. You want to set your fine self down and let me show you ’nother use for your handcuffs.”

Risa didn’t bother to point out that she wasn’t carrying cuffs and that the suggestion wasn’t especially original. The young men found it hilarious, though, as she and Nate picked their way down the narrow path allowed through the bodies.