Fanatics (10 page)

“I see what you mean,” Flo said. “A very successful owner.”

“Ballz only knew successful people. He said failure was a disease and he didn't want to catch it. He hated failures. And he had no time for wannabes.”

“He made a lot of enemies that way?”

“Well, let's just say he didn't have any friends who were flops. None that I ever heard of anyway. Check this. Flops don't have this.” They paused to watch a workman installing a Jacuzzi next to its backup bath, a twenty-inch-deep Zuma soaking tub with Zucchetti shower wand and chrome controls, all in a bathroom corner facing a large window with a southerly view of the harbor and the Statue of Liberty. “Bathrooms like this,” Azalea said, “only belong to the biggest winners.”

As they mounted an interior staircase winding past another south-facing, harbor-view window, Azalea described the detailing with the pride of a designer coloring her voice. “You got carved stone arches here, all embellished with Corinthian Wheat Shaft terracotta apron work, and fitted with custom fabricated, solid oak sound-attenuated frames. As pricey as it gets.”

When they reached the top of the stairs, Flo popped the question. “You think anyone would've wanted him killed? And paid someone to do it?”

While mulling over this one, Azalea gave orders to a mason installing a slate wall in a tropical-garden shower-and-steam room meant to resemble a pool in the Amazon rain forest. Then to Flo she said, “Only a rich asshole would do something that stupid. And I don't know any assholes, Officer, not in my business. I don't employ them. And they don't employ me. Assholes don't get to buy apartments like this. They lose their money first.”

“Interesting observation,” Flo said, although she had no plans to exclude the rich from any list of suspects. She didn't feel beholden to them, not like Azalea.

They paused in the doorway of the third bathroom. “No window on this side,” Azalea said. “So we got that wall-sized flat screen displaying great art pieces, one at a time. All twentieth-century masters, Pollock drips, Picasso blue nudes, Klimt gold-draped beauties.” A television technician was adjusting the equipment. “We need some Warhols on this visuals wall here, some Johns, Koons, lots more pop to brighten the mood. Which reminds me. Time for tensies.” Azalea extracted a large bottle of pills from her shoulder satchel, meds of many hues. She selected a pale green capsule. “All prescription, Officer, so don't you worry. And no OxyContin either, no heroin in a pill, not for this girl. None of that stuff, no way. I don't do illegal drugs, believe it or not. Ballz did, but then that's the music business for you.”

“Did he deal?”

Azalea fell silent.

“Did he invest in drug deals?”

“I don't know, Officer. I didn't go poking my nose into coke or into any other business of his except real estate. Do I look like a jerk? I sure hope not.” She stopped to wash down the pale green capsule with a swig of mineral water.

“You have to take a lot of medications?”

“What's a lot? My kind of life, there's never enough. But Ballz. Poor Ballz, and I mean it, really. Ending up dead way before his time. Lying there middle of the night, head split open. My God, what a sick picture. His poor family. And I mean that. For all their millions, they're poorer now. I'm not like Maria Magdalena, and I know you talked to her already. She's tickled pink. Maybe her hair will turn red again, after all this. She's got herself a bar now, a steady business, and all I got is clients. But don't get me wrong, I'm not accusing that woman of anything. She's not the type, Maria, she's too holy, know what I mean? A spiritual person. No, without Ballz around, my clients could walk away, and I might not get any new ones. Maybe I ought to raise my fee and they'll think I'm worth more. That's what Ballz said I ought to do, never undersell yourself. I cared for that man, Officer, I really did, and I still do. So you got to understand this much, I admit it wasn't all just business between us. I met his wife, too. And don't look so surprised. She's got real class, Chrissy Smith does, and great children, which makes her way human in my opinion. Someday, I'll have kids, but not before I can support them all on my own. She's a good woman, Chrissy. Even if her taste in interior design is kind of stuffy. And her mother, you meet her mother? The island empress? Talk about stuffy. She ought to be in a museum for stuffed dinosaurs. What do you think of their house in Brooklyn?”

“Quite a place. What were you doing there?”

“Dreckorating.” They stopped at the elevator, and Azalea produced her key ring. “Ballz asked me to do the job but said everything had to be their tastes, not mine. So don't blame me for that old ugly shit. Blame Martha fucking Stewart, ex-con. Princess of chintzes.” They entered the elevator and rode back down. “You meet the kids, too? Should've. Show you another side of Ballz. Little sweethearts, all three of them, and he adored them. You know, he used to make their school lunches sometimes? He's barely back in the house, being out all night, and there he is in the kitchen, chop chop, slice slice. Imagine that? A king like him making tuna fish sandwiches and ham and Swiss and egg salad, and packing pears and bananas and apples, and a thermos with hot milk and Ovaltine. No sweet sodas for those kids, no junk food neither, no way. And that's the other angle of Ballz, part of the side I want to remember. But not an angle he showed much outside. If he had, he'd probably been killed even sooner.”

“By whom?”

“By whom? You kidding?” They stepped from the building out onto West Broadway, the sky still messy, wind whipping wet garbage along the gutters, pedestrians clutching at hats and collars. Azalea began waving for a taxi, any taxi. “Tell you what,” she said to Flo. “You got time to keep coming with me now? I mean, it can take all day to figure out that story, you know, by whom? I got my jobs, but you're welcome to string along. And I'll tell you what I can, Officer. And what I can't, I can't. What you pick up, you pick up. You just keep asking, but like I said, only an asshole would kill Ballz. And there's enough assholes in New York to fill Yankee Stadium a hundred times over. Not that I know any.” An empty cab whizzed by, ignoring Azalea's waving arms, and she flipped him the bird. “Like that cabbie driving blind. Ought to arrest him.” A second cab appeared and pulled over. They scrambled in. “Christ, that's better,” said Azalea. “Works up an appetite rushing around like this.” She dug down in her satchel and produced another pill, yellow.

“
More
meds?” Flo said.

Azalea shook her head as she gulped mineral water. “Vitamins. Got to watch my diet. Ever see a fat designer? I'll show you an unemployed designer.”

The cabbie, in a Pakistani accent, clipped tired tones, said: “Ladies? Ladies, where are we going?”

“Chelsea, please,” said Azalea. “West Twenty-Second, between Seventh and Eighth. I'll point out the building when we get there, the one with scaffolding all over it.”

12:31 P.M.

They emerged from the taxi at their next destination, a tall narrow brownstone, the home address of Mr. Edwin Duke Brooks, publisher.

The stone exterior of the building was being refinished, as were the ground and parlor floors, the offices of Manly Magazines, Edwin Duke Brooks, president.

“Muscle guy stuff,” said Azalea Butte. “Edwin is totally out of the closet. Tons of boyfriends, tons of bucks. And tons of books, this house is like the public library. And not just fag reads. Edwin is a real scholar, PhD from Princeton. But in what, don't ask me. He's down in his St. Barts place now, won't be back till after New Year's, when I got to be all finished up here. Ballz, in case you didn't know, was a switch hitter. Kind of opens things up some, doesn't it? Being acey-deucey?”

Flo released a long puff of air as they entered at the ground floor from under the stoop. “He must have been the busiest man in New York,” she said.

“Let's just say Ballz didn't cool his heels much. Definitely not your laid-back type. He spit on slackers. Literally. He and Edwin and me, we got to be real close, because…Well, one time I came over here to meet a new client, an investor in the BB Property Fund that Ballz started up, big-time fund, even Magic Johnson was one of the backers, and Ballz and Edwin were sick as dogs. They'd just heard that this friend of theirs, this investor guy who's supposed to be my new client, had killed himself that afternoon, intentionally, head in an oven, legs sprawled across a kitchen floor. You know, when you got nowhere to turn, you turn on the gas. Now, normally I don't hold with that, against all my beliefs. But this poor guy just found out he was HIV positive and saw no point in dragging it out more. Ballz and Edwin got knocked down flat, they couldn't move. They wouldn't ever, not in a million years, give up on life like that, they'd fight all the way, and me, too, I'd fight like hell. I got them some supper, chicken soup and meatloaf and mashed potatoes, comfort food. And yeah, I scored a big bag of Great Alaskan Thunderfuck for their dessert. But don't you ever quote me.”

Aside from bulging bookcases, Edwin Duke Brooks's ground-floor office was Danish modern spare, white and gleaming and straight lined, not a rough or rounded edge in sight.

“This is my kind of place,” Azalea said. “This is taste. Ballz took me to Copenhagen once for a long weekend, we saw all the modern art and the design collections, and it was a real eye-opener. He thought so, too. But his own home had to be different, of course…I'm meaning, his wife.”

Azalea turned to an electrician installing recessed ceiling lights. “Make sure each spot picks out a unique piece, where those tape Xs are on the floor. Aim for the Xs.”

And to Flo: “Only collectors' items here, one of each thing, like in a good museum. One desk, one armchair, one straight-back chair, one sofa, one table. But each one perfect, and nice crisp white linen covers on the upholstered stuff. And a carpet made specially in Turkey, double knot, silk on silk, twenty foot by twenty foot. This room alone will have way over a million dollars put into it. And in case you're wondering about all this money, yeah, Ballz owned a piece of Manly Magazines, too, but he was a silent partner. Very silent. Won't his wife be surprised when she finds out what she's inherited here.”

When it came time to leave the Edwin Duke Brooks residence and offices, the rain was resuming, and Azalea called a car service rather than risk hailing a cab again. “And I hate Uber, never know what you get for a driver. Or even the price. Once they charged me $650 to go over only to Beekman Place, and said it was the market-adjusted rate for that destination at a peak traffic hour. Can you believe that shit? Thieves, you ought to put Uber in prison, while you're at it, Officer.”

1:15 P.M.

Flo and Azalea Butte headed uptown and across Central Park to their next destination.

East Eighty-Fourth Street, between Park and Madison, an immodest, overly tall modern apartment building, with a uniformed doorman. The home address of Mr. and Mrs. Bloom, Leon and Doris, a prosperous pair in their late fifties, who ran a family hedge fund.

Azalea held forth: “Some kind of wheeling and dealing and gambling scam, you ask me. But Ballz was in on that, too, and he said he made bundles with the Blooms. They're a very health-conscious couple, open minded, open marriage, open doors. Doors always open, and neither's none too choosy about your sex neither, long's you're young and pretty. They meet their pickups over in those workout gyms on East Eighty-Sixth and bring them up here to their place. I know Ballz used to join them for parties. ‘Gotta go lift weights with the Blooms,' and you'd know what he was talking about. I think they're creeps.”

On her cell, Azalea called ahead and let it ring a long while before disconnecting.

“Not home. Be grateful, Officer, you sure wouldn't want to run into these two. If they'd been home, I wouldn't even take you up there. They'd be jumping out the windows, they find out you're a cop.”

“What have they got to hide?”

“Everything, you ask me. Their sneaky business, these kids they drag in from the gyms, you name it. Sleazeballs. And they got these old birds, a pair of mynahs that crap all over the place. Try and refurbish with those birds around always squawking and crapping, and they can even talk some. ‘Sweet ass, Sweet ass!' And, ‘Yo, big tits, Yo, big tits!' Every time you walk in the door, they start screeching, ‘Sweet ass! Sweet ass!
'
Drives the workers crazy, and me, too. Hey, it's past lunchtime, you must be hungry. I'm real sorry, Officer, but I never do lunch unless it's business.”

“That's okay, let's keep talking. I want to know more about Mr. Busta and his associates.”

“Oh, they associated all right, him and the Blooms. They associated every which way.”

“I arrested a killer near here once,” Flo said, looking out the car window as they turned onto East Eighty-Fourth Street. “A priest actually, a Jesuit who taught in this boys' high school across the street there. Thought he was the father almighty, always pestering the boys, including a kid who lived in Brooklyn. He had a big crush on this good-looking young kid. The boy kept putting him off, pushing him away, threatening to report him to the police. One night, he followed the boy home from a basketball game, got him coming up out of the subway and lured him off into Prospect Park, where he strangled the kid to death. He was a big guy, this priest, he'd been a football player for Boston College. Thought he could get away with anything.”

“An asshole. Just like our guy, the guy who killed Ballz. Same as him, I bet.”

“Well, this priest really did get away with it, in a fashion. He committed suicide in his cell before we even got to trial.”

“How'd he get away with
that
?”

“Pills. Little poison pills his sister smuggled in when she visited him. Digitalis. It can kill in sufficient dosage, twenty or thirty granules. Enough for a fatal dose can get smuggled past prison guards in the hem of a woman's blouse, say, and then passed unseen from palm to palm. Digitalis is available to a practicing nurse, and his sister was a nurse. It'll cause heart failure within thirty minutes after ingestion. Maybe the only choice this bent priest had left was to save a scrap of honor, a little bit of dignity in exchange for what remained of his rotten life.”