Murder in Alphabet City (25 page)

“I might just sit in on this myself. How many are coming?”

“Defino, Officer Chen, and me.”

“That's enough. We don't want to outnumber them.”

Good thinking. Defino said he'd be there. They could get dinner and then walk over. It took a while to reach Bobby Chen, but she was agreeable even though she would miss a night of law school.

Tomorrow they would all sit down together and work out the script, as though they were talking to a head of government and didn't want to provoke a war. Wars were always disastrous.

36

J
ANE TOOK SPECIAL
pains on Wednesday morning to watch her back. In this part of New York, as in most others, finding a place to park was nearly impossible, even illegally. If someone wanted to tail you, he had to do it on foot or risk having his car ticketed or towed. On days when no street cleaning was scheduled or at night, cars lined both curbs, generally parked so close together that it took skill and patience to extricate them. Unless someone had found a spot last night and spent the night in the car, he would be on foot.

It was mild enough for her to walk and jog to Centre Street. When she arrived, her cheeks were pink and cold and she felt good health oozing out of her pores. McElroy had scheduled their conference for one
P.M.
and MacHovec had already put in a call to Bobby Chen to see if she could make it. She called back at twenty after nine and said she would be there.

McElroy also had a comment on the dead babies MacHovec had figuratively dug up. “I expect that happens more than you think, certainly more than gets reported. Girls give birth, strangle the baby and toss it, or just toss it. If we can get DNA from those remains, maybe we can make a case.”

“We'll need to go back to Jackie Warren and Maria Brusca's mother,” Defino said. “And maybe some of the others we've talked to.”

“A little spit'll do it,” McElroy said.

At nine-forty Jane's phone rang. “Can I see you tonight?”

“Sure.”

“I've got something to tell you. Don't wait dinner. I'll get there when I get there.”

“OK.”

MacHovec looked her way as she hung up. “You have the shortest phone calls in the history of the telephone.”

Jane laughed. “Shorthand between friends.”

She suspected he was going to tell her about his plans for Paris. They hadn't talked about it since he told her to get a passport, but she had daydreamed about it on her own. The more she thought about it, the better she liked the idea. She had planned to take accumulated vacation time in December but had ended up using medical leave, and the vacation was still there for the taking. The application was filled out, and all she needed now was a photo. She would stop in a camera shop on the way home and get them instantly. Instantly was starting to sound like a good idea.

Bobby Chen showed up a little before one. Jane and Defino had eaten early to be ready and they all went into the conference room. McElroy had said he would attend and he sat down at the table while they were talking about nothing in particular and introduced himself to Bobby.

“Glad to meet you, Lieutenant,” she said.

“What's your opinion of how successful this meeting will be tomorrow night?”

“Honestly? Unless something unforeseen happens, we'll end up with nothing. I talked to them a couple of weeks ago at the laundry and they're not going to give us anything. Maybe we can move in from left field and get them to say something before they know what they're doing.”

“Kinda the way I feel. But the less they tell us, the more I feel they know something we should know.”

“Like what?”

“Like how many babies they watched for the Rinzler woman and over what period of time. Like who picked them up from the laundry. Like did they deliver babies to some other location?”

“I'll do my best.”

They batted it around for two hours, Bobby suggesting polite ways to phrase questions and making notes in Chinese on a pad she had brought with her.

“I'll talk to my mother tonight,” she said, “and ask her advice. She's very sensible. And I'll bring them flowers.”

Before they left Centre Street, Defino made fresh copies of the sketches of Rinzler and Fletcher and MacHovec added color to the beads Rinzler was wearing. Defino laid the sketches in a file folder to keep them flat and left them on his desk. They would take them tomorrow night.

MacHovec's connection at the post office had no leads on Fletcher/Lefferts. When he left the Horatio Street address, nothing was forwarded. Junk mail was discarded and bills, if any had been sent, were held the required length of time and either picked up or sent back to the point of origin.

Before Jane left for the day, Rose called, sounding anxious. She wanted to know if everything was set for tomorrow night. Jane assured her they would be there on time and everything was fine.

“Getting a case of nerves?” Defino asked.

“Sounds like it. Bobby was pretty negative this afternoon. I hope we get something.”

“Well, Friday morning we can go back to the other clients and pick up spit.”

“Nice to know it's come down to that.”

MacHovec left. He had prettied up the time line and Jane Xeroxed it piece by piece. Like everything else in this case, she was tired of looking at it.

She started home just after Defino, stopping at the camera shop to have her picture taken. The results weren't bad. As the camera clicked, she had imagined holding Hack's hand and looking up at the Eiffel Tower. It worked. She looked happy.

She stood at the door of the shop and looked left and right. If Fletcher was tailing her, he wasn't visible. Her right hand grasped the Glock in her coat pocket. She had decided that if he touched her, she would shoot him and worry about a story afterward.

Safely in the apartment, she had begun putting dinner together when the phone rang.

“I'm in a foul mood,” Hack's voice said. “Let's cancel tonight.”

“Fine.”

“What does that mean?”

Shit. That was unlike him. “It means you're in a foul mood and you don't want to come over and whatever I say is wrong.”

“Right.” He hung up.

I don't need this, she thought. I'm in the middle of a case we're never going to close and the man I love is acting like a pigheaded boor. Even dinner wasn't going well. Salad, grapefruit, what was that thing in the freezer? She took it out and inspected it. Why didn't she label things? Why did she think she would remember two weeks later what she had bought and put away for a future meal?

I'm thinking the way he sounds, she thought, pigheaded. That's what happens when you love a man. You can't live with him, you can't live without him, and you can't change things. Let him go home and bitch to his wife. She put the steak under the broiler, knowing it would be raw in the middle no matter how long she cooked it. Why couldn't she remember to take it out the night before or even in the morning?

She was furious with him, not because he had canceled—that had happened before—but why and how he had done it. Paris would have to wait, or whatever he wanted to talk to her about. Maybe he would forget what it was.

She finished eating and found the passport application where she had left it on the table in the living room. Should she even bother now? She took the pictures out of her bag and looked at them. Shit. She dropped them on top of the application and left them there, picking up the book she was reading. As she opened it at the bookmark, the doorbell rang.

She got up and opened the door. Hack had his key in his hand.

“You open the door without checking?”

“You coming or going?” she said icily.

He walked inside and she locked the door. “I have some calls to make,” he said.

“Make them.”

He hung up his coat and sat on the sofa, spreading some papers from his briefcase on the table where she had left her book and the passport application, and taking his phone out of his pocket. He dialed a number and started talking without introduction.

“Here's the way it's going to be,” he said. “This is the second time and I want the guy's shield jerked so fast the wind will knock him over. This dummy is on a one-way track to the Trial Room.” The Trial Room was a courtlike room at One PP where members of the department were actually tried for rules and regulations violations. He listened briefly. “Fuck him. And fuck you too. There are no third chances, you got that? He shouldn't have had a second but he's your boy and you intervened. I want this taken care of tonight.”

Jane went into the second bedroom, her office, closed the door, and called her father. They talked for ten minutes and she answered all his questions about the case. When she hung up, she opened the door and heard the tirade continuing.

“Yeah? Well wait till it's on the front page tomorrow. Then tell me you can live with it.”

She got her coat, slipped the Glock into the pocket, and took her keys. A walk in the night air would calm her down and help her deal with him. For all she knew, he might be gone when she got back. He had been on the phone, one call or another, for half an hour.

As she passed the living room he said, “Hang on,” covered the mouthpiece, and said to her, “Don't go. I'm almost finished.”

She stopped and looked at him, undecided. He was back chewing out the guy at the other end. Shit. She dropped her keys next to her bag, put the Glock on top of the refrigerator, and hung up her coat. Five minutes, she thought. Then I find a good movie and sit there for two hours.

“I'm done.”

“Maybe this isn't the time for a conversation.”

“A shithead uniform in the office of the chief of personnel leaked a story to his buddy at the
Post
that we've been keeping under wraps for months and it landed on my desk. This bonehead did it once before and got away with it. He's not getting away with it this time.”

She considered her response. “You acted like a pig.”

“I was angry.”

“Not at me you weren't.” She was surprised at her own anger.

“I expect you to understand.”

Son of a bitch. He wasn't going to apologize.

“Jane—”

She backed away a step. If he touched her, she wasn't sure whether she would melt in his arms or slap him, and she thought it might be the latter.

“I've had a hard day,” he said. “I don't need—”

“Don't need what?”

“A fight with you.”

“That's all you can say?”

“I love you. You know I love you. Isn't that enough?”

“No.” She wished she had gone out the door when she had the chance. This was ridiculous; it was awful. She was standing in her goddamn kitchen, fighting with the person she loved more than anyone else on earth, and they were at a standoff. Worse, he wasn't going to budge. All he would do was justify himself. He deserved a pummeling, anything to get him to accept responsibility for his words.

Abruptly, he left the kitchen, returning in a few seconds with his briefcase, which he put on the table. “I came here to— I wanted to tell you something. You. First.”

Apologize, her inner voice shouted, but he was done. It had passed. He was on to something new. She watched him as he reached to the bottom of the briefcase and hauled out a tall, thin bag that held a bottle. He took it out. There was no mistaking champagne. She moved her eyes from the bottle to his face.

“I got the word this morning. I'm trading in my eagle for a star.” An eagle was inspector; a star was deputy chief.

“Hack. That's wonderful.”

“I forgot to put it on ice.”

“Give it half an hour in the freezer.” She took it from him and stashed it near an unopened quart of ice cream she kept there in case he showed up without any. Deputy chief. It couldn't have been better news.

“May I touch you?”

“I don't know.”

“I've never seen you so angry.”

“You're a son of a bitch, Hackett.”

He touched her arm, so tentatively she hardly felt it. “You're the only one on the job who didn't know it.”

He stayed till morning, his wife still away. His cell phone rang several times at inconvenient moments and he dealt with the calls irritably. “Yeah,” he said at one point, “I believe in freedom of the press. I just don't want traitors in my units. If he gave it away for a meal in midtown, what would he do for real money? Sell his shield?”

She was worried about a tail in the street seeing him leave her building and she told him how to go out the delivery door and through an alley to the next street. He had corked the remainder of the champagne, a good French label, and left it for her to finish. The spare ice cream was gone. He had not apologized.

Ten minutes after he left, she set off on foot, thinking more of Hack's news than anything else. The highest civil service rank in the department was captain, two gold bars, and after that, every promotion was an appointment. He had reached deputy inspector in his mid-forties, the gold leaf, and inspector, the eagle, only two years ago. His career had given him a wide range of experience. He had started the job fresh out of NYU. Not long after he got his gold shield, the detective's shield, he had passed the sergeant's test and begun studying for the lieutenant's test while he was in law school. He had been a lieutenant when he met her and moved on to captain not long after. As lieutenant, he had worked as a second whip, McElroy's job at Centre Street, in a detective squad; she forgot where.

When he became captain, he moved over to the Intelligence Division on Hudson Street. He had liked Intel, he told her, in one of a thousand conversations over the last ten years. That had gotten him the gold leaf. He had moved in and out of Uniformed Police Commands and Headquarters units, giving him good exposure. Roughly twenty-five thousand people were on the job; if you wanted to move up, you had to be visible. Cops his age were walking beats and sitting behind counters in station houses, where they would spend the rest of their days on the job. Hack had had most of his tickets punched and had earned this recognition. To achieve a top position, chief, he had to move carefully now. Not a single mistake would be tolerated. His sensitivity for department politics would be his best weapon.

This appointment had not come as a complete surprise. He had been interviewed at the commissioner's office several weeks ago, and he knew what slot was opening up, but he hadn't been the only candidate and he hadn't told her anything further. He must have known for the last week or two that he was on the short list, but he wasn't a man to talk about what was possible until it was a sure thing. And if it hadn't happened, he wouldn't have moaned and groaned or spent hours trying to second-guess what went wrong. He was a realist in all aspects of his life.