French Kiss (4 page)

The lobby of the
Auberge du Parc Hotel is somebody's idea of elegance. But it sure as hell is not mine.

“Pink marble on the walls
and
the floor
and
the ceiling. If Barbie owned a brothel it would look like this.” I share this observation with my new partner as I look out the floor-to-ceiling windows that face Park Avenue.

K. Burke either doesn't get the joke or doesn't like the joke. No laughter.

“We're not here to evaluate the decor,” she says. “You know better than I do that Auberge du Parc is right up there with the Plaza and the Carlyle when it comes to expensive hotels for rich people.”

“And it affords a magnificent view of the building where Maria Martinez was killed,” I say as I gesture to the tall windows.

Burke looks out to the corner of 68th Street and Park Avenue. She nods solemnly. “That's why we're starting the job here.”

“The job, you will agree, is fairly stupid?” I ask.

“The job is what Inspector Elliott has assigned us, and I'm not about to second-guess the command,” she says.

Elliott wants us to interview prostitutes, streetwalkers, anyone he defines as “high-class lowlife.” Enormously upscale hotels like the Auberge often have a lot of illegal sex stuff going on behind their pink marble walls. But asking the devils to tell us their sins? I don't think so.

This approach is ridiculous, to my way of thinking. Solutions come mostly by listening for small surprises—and yes, sometimes by looking for a few intelligent pieces of hard evidence. Looking in the
unlikely
places. Talking to the
least
likely observers.

Burke's theory, which is total NYPD style, is way more traditional: “You accumulate the information,” she had said. “You assemble the puzzle piece by piece.”

“Absolutely not,” I replied. “You sink into the case as if it were a warm bath. You
sense
the situation. You look for the fingerprint of the crime itself.” Then I added, “Here's what we'll do: you'll do it your way. I'll do it mine.”

“No, not
your
way or
my
way,” she had said. “We'll do it the NYPD way.”

That discussion was a half hour ago. Now I'm really too disgusted and frustrated to say anything else.

So I stand with my new partner in a pink marble lobby a few hundred yards from where my old partner was murdered.

Okay. I'll be the adult here. I will try to appear cooperative.

We review our plan. I am to go to the lobby bar and talk to the one or two high-priced hookers who are almost always on the prowl there. You've seen them—the girls with the perfect hair falling gently over their shoulders. The delicate pointy noses all supplied by the same plastic surgeon. The women who are drinking in the afternoon while they're dressed for the evening.

Burke will go up to the more elegant, more secluded rooftop bar, Auberge in the Clouds. But of course she'll first stop by the hotel manager's office and tell him what he already knows: the NYPD is here. Procedure, procedure, procedure.

If Maria Martinez is watching all this from some heavenly locale, she is falling on the floor laughing.

After agreeing to meet Burke back in the lobby in forty-five minutes, I walk into the bar. (I once visited Versailles on a high school class trip, and this place would have pleased Marie Antoinette.) The bar itself is a square-shaped ebony box with gold curlicues all over it. It looks like a huge birthday present for a god with no taste.

At the bar sit two pretty ladies, one in a red silk dress, the other in a kind of clingy Diane von Furstenberg green-and-white thing, which is very loose around the top. I don't think von Furstenberg designed it to be so erotic. It takes me about two seconds to realize what these women do for a living.

These girls are precisely the type that Nick Elliott wants us to speak to. Yes, a ridiculous waste of time. And I know just what to do about it.

I walk toward the exit and push through the revolving door.

I'm out. I'm on my own. This is more like it.

K. Burke thinks a
good New York cop solves a case by putting the pieces together. K. Burke is wrong.

You can't put the pieces together in New York because there are just too goddamn many of them.

One step out the revolving door onto East 68th Street proves my point. It's only midday, but everywhere I look there's chaos and color and confusion.

Bike messengers and homeless people and dowagers and grammar-school students. Two women wheeling a full-size gold harp and two guys pushing a wheelbarrow full of bricks. The Greenpeace recruiter with her clipboard and smile, the crazy half-naked lady waving a broken umbrella, and the teenager selling iPad cases. All this on one block.

The store next to the Auberge bar entrance is called Spa-Roe. According to the sign, it's a place you can visit for facials and massages (the “spa” part) while you sample various caviars (the “roe” part). Just what the world has been waiting for.

Right next to it is a bistro…
pardon
…a bar. It's called Fitzgerald's, as in “F. Scott.” I stand in front of it for a few moments and look through the window. It's a re-creation of a 1920s speakeasy. I can see a huge poster that says
GOD BLESS JIMMY WALKER
. Only one person is seated at the bar, a pretty young blond girl. She's chatting with the much older bartender.

I walk about twenty feet and pass a pet-grooming store. A very unhappy cat is being shampooed. Next door is a “French” dry cleaner, a term I'd never heard before moving to New York. There's an optician who sells
discounted
Tom Ford eyeglass frames for four hundred dollars. There's a place to have your computer fixed and a place that sells nothing but brass buttons. I pause. I smoke a cigarette. The block is busy as hell, but nothing is happening for me.

Until I toss my cigarette on the sidewalk.

A man's voice isn't angry,
just loud. “What's with the littering, mister?”

Littering? That's a new word in my English vocabulary.

The speaker is a white-bearded old man wearing brown work pants and a brown T-shirt. It's the kind of outfit assembled to look like a uniform, but it isn't actually a uniform. The man is barely five feet tall. He holds an industrial-size water hose with a dripping nozzle.

“Littering?” I ask.

The old guy points to the dead cigarette at my feet.

“Your cigarette! They pay me to keep these sidewalks clean.”

“I apologize.”

“I was making a joke. It's only a joke. Get it? A joke, just a joke.”

This man was not completely, uh…mentally competent, but I had to follow one of my major rules: talk to anyone, anywhere, anytime.

“Yes, a joke. Good. Do you live here?” I ask.

“The Bronx,” he answers. “Mott Haven. They always call it the south Bronx, but it's not. I don't know why they can't get it right.”

“So you just work down here?”

“Yeah. I watch the three buildings. The button place, the animal place, and the eyeglasses place. They call me Danny with the Hose.”

“Understandably,” I say.

“Good, you understand. Now stand back.”

I do as I'm told until my back is up against the optician's doorway. Danny sprays the sidewalk with a fast hard surge of water. Scraps of paper, chunks of dog shit, empty beer cans—they all go flying into the gutter.

“Danny,” I say. “A lot of pretty girls around here, huh? What with the fancy hotel right here and the fancy neighborhood.”

He shuts off his hose. “Some are pretty. I mind my business.”

A young man, no more than twenty-five, comes out of the pet-grooming shop. He has a big dog—a boxer, I think—on a leash. Danny with the Hose and the man with the dog greet each other with a high five. The young man is tall, blond, good-looking. He wears long blue shorts and a pathetic red sleeveless shirt.

“Hey,” I say to him. “Danny and I have just been talking about the neighborhood. I'm moving to East 68th Street in a few weeks. With a roommate. A German shepherd.”

“Cool,” he says, suddenly a lot more interested in talking to me. “If you need a groomer, this place is the best. Take a look at Titan.” He pets his dog's shiny coat. “He's handsome enough to be in a
GQ
spread. I've been bringing him here ever since we moved into 655 Park five years ago.”

My ears prick up. I go into full acting-class mode now.

“Isn't 655 the place where that lady cop got killed?”

“They say she was a cop pretending to be a hooker. I don't know.”

“Luc…Luc Moncrief,” I say. We shake.

“Eric,” he says. No last name offered. “Well, welcome. I said ‘pretending,' but I don't know. Women are not my area of expertise, if you know what I mean. All my info on the local girls comes from one of the doormen in my building. He says all the hookers hang out at the Auberge.”

“That's where I'm staying now,” I say.

“Well, anyway, Carl—the doorman—says most of the girls who work out of the Auberge bar are clean. Bang, bang, pay your money, over and out. He says the ones to watch out for are the girls who work for the Russians. Younger and prettier, but they'll skin you alive. I dunno. I play on a whole other team.”

“Yet you seem to know a great deal about
mine,
” I say. “Nice meeting you.”

The guy and the dog take off. Danny with the Hose has disappeared, too.

I look at my watch. I should be meeting up with K. Burke.

But first I'll just go on a quick errand.

If you ever need
to get some information from a New York doorman, learn from my experience with Carl.

A ten-dollar bill will get you this: “Yeah, I think there's some foreign kind of operation going on at the Auberge. But I'm busy getting taxis for people and helping with packages. So I can't be sure.”

I give Carl another ten dollars.

“They got Russians in and outta there. At least I think they're Russian. I'm not that good with accents.”

I give him ten more. That's thirty so far, if you're keeping track.

“I heard all this from a friend who works catering at the Auberge. The Russians keep a permanent three-room suite there…where they pimp out the hookers.”

Carl gives me a sly smile. It would seem my reaction has given away my motives.

“Oh, I see where you're headed. You wanna know if the Russians had anything to do with the murder on seven. The cops talked to me, like, twenty times. But I wasn't on the door that day. And how the girl got in? No clue.”

Perhaps that's true. But I have a feeling Carl might be leading me to some other clues. I give him ten bucks more.

“Strange, though. Those Russians specialize in young, pretty, all-American blondes. You know. Fresh, clean, sort of look like innocent little virgins. Nothing like the woman who got iced. But…there is something else.”

I wait for Carl to keep talking, but he doesn't. Instead, he hustles outside the building just as a yellow cab pulls up. He opens the door, and a weary-looking gray-haired man in a gray pin-striped suit emerges. Carl takes the man's briefcase and follows him down a long hallway that leads to an elevator. The old man might as well be
crawling,
he's going so slowly. Finally Carl returns.

“Sorry. Now, what was I saying?”

Damn this sneaky doorman. I know he's playing me, but I'm hoping it's worth it. Because all I've got left is a fifty. I give it to Carl with a soft warning: “This better be worth fifty bucks.”

“Well, it's a little thing, and it's from my buddy at the Auberge, and you never know when he's telling the truth, and…”

“Come on. What is it?”

“He says that the girls never wait in the lobby or the suite or the back hallways. The Russian guys keep 'em in the neighborhood somewhere. I don't know where. Like a coffee shop or a private house. Then the girl gets a phone call and a few minutes later one of the blondies is taking the elevator up to the special private suite.”

Bingo. I'm ready to roll. And—if you're keeping track—it cost me ninety bucks.

But it was
definitely
worth it.

I walk into the
lobby of the Auberge. Standing there is K. Burke. She's easily identifiable by the smoke coming out of her ears.

“Where have you been?” she demands. “I checked the bar, then the restaurants, then…anyway. What did you find out?”

“Nothing,” I say. “And you?”

“Wait a minute. Nothing? How many people did you talk to?”

“Beaucoup.”

“And nothing?”

“Oui. Rien.”

She shakes her head, but I'm not sure she believes me.

“Well,” she says as she gestures me out the front door, “while I was standing around, waiting for a certain someone I won't name, I texted a contact in Vice, who gave me access to some of their files. And I have a theory.” Detective Burke begins to speak more quickly now, but she still sounds like a first-grade teacher explaining simple arithmetic to the class.

“There have been three call-girl murders in the past three months, including Maria Martinez. All Vice cops posing as call girls. The first was…”

I cannot keep quiet. We've already looked into this.

“I know,” I say. “Valerie Delvecchio. Murdered at a construction site. A
rénovation
of a hotel. The Hotel Chelsea, on 23rd Street and Seventh Avenue. The second cop was Dana Morgan-Schwarz. She was offed in a hotel on 155th and Riverside. A drug-den SRO so bad I wouldn't go there to take a piss.”

This does nothing to dampen Burke's enthusiasm for her theory.

“Don't you see, Moncrief? You're not putting the pieces together. This is a pattern. Three Vice cops posing as call girls. All of them murdered. This is—”

“This is ridiculous,” I say. “This is
not
a
pattern.
It is at best a
coincidence.
The Chelsea murder is unsolved, yes. But the detective's body was dumped there
after
she was murdered. And Morgan-Schwarz was probably involved in an inside drug deal. No high-class hooker would go to that hotel.”

But Burke is simply not listening.

“I set up a meeting for us with Vice this afternoon at four. We're going to get the names, numbers, and websites of
every
expensive call-girl service in New York.”

“Good luck with that,” I say. “That should only take a few weeks.”

“Then we're going to meet all the people who run them. I don't care if it's the Mafia, Brazilian drug lords, Colombian cartels, or other cops. We're going to see every last one.”

“Great. That should only take a few
months.
”

“You've got a bad goddamn attitude, Moncrief.”

I'm not going to explode. I'm not going to explode. I'm not going to explode.

“I will see you at four o'clock for our meeting with Vice,” I say calmly.

“Where are you going till then? We've got work to do.”

“I'm going to work right now. Want to come along?”

Burke folds her arms and frowns. “You lied to me, didn't you? You did find out something.”

“Come with me and see for yourself.”