Neptune Avenue (25 page)

Jack sighed. “You told him I was here, didn’t you? When he came back in, after the woman left …”

“You didn’t have a warrant,” the clerk muttered halfheartedly.

Jack looked away for a moment. There was no percentage in getting angry now. He turned back. “Did you tell him I was looking for him?”

The clerk shook his head. “How would I know that? I just thought you were looking for the broad. Besides, the guy barely even spoke English.”

“What name did he give when he signed in?”

The clerk shook his head. “He didn’t. It was the woman.”

“Did you get his name at all?”

“Nope. All we care about is making sure the room is paid for.”

Jack stood there for another moment, marinating in the frustration and embarrassment of it all, as the ESU squad tromped out of the lobby behind him.

He turned back to the clerk. “What day did she book the room?”

The clerk consulted his paperwork and gave the date. Jack thought for a minute. Zhenya had taken the room on the same day she had received the early morning phone call—and he had just rolled over and gone back to sleep.

He sank into one of the lobby’s greasy old armchairs.
What a day.
The whole world seemed to have turned upside down.

Linda Vargas came hurrying in.

“What’s going on?” she said, breathless. “My husband and I were out on a date. I got here as soon as I could.”

As Jack filled her in, his mind was working double-time. How much should he tell? He decided to go with a bare minimum—he’d try not to lie, but he wasn’t going to volunteer details of his affair with Zhenya. Not until he was sure that the blond guy was really their suspect. “I’ve been putting in a little overtime on this case,” he admitted. “Because I knew the vic.”

Vargas frowned. “And you didn’t tell me?”

He tried not to squirm. “I just wanted to follow up a few loose ends. Like the doughnut shop thing.” He started to tell more about his morning visit, hoping that might distract her from other questions.

But Vargas was sharp as ever. “How did you find out about this guy with the tattoo?”

“The kid at the McDonald’s told me. Tyrese Vincent.”

She brushed this away. “I know that. I mean, how did you know he was here today?”

“I just found out,” Jack said. “And I called you right away.”

Vargas frowned. “Come on, Jack. Tell me
how
you found out.”

Miserable inside, he kept up a poker face. He was known for being a very honest cop, a real straight shooter, and it pained him to behave otherwise. “When I interviewed Lelo’s wife, I got a kind of weird vibe. I didn’t say anything at the time ’cause it was just a hunch. But I was thinking about that today, after I got off work, and I decided to follow her.” He loosened his collar; he’d sweated right through his shirt, under the Kevlar.

Linda Vargas considered him gravely. He sensed that she had more questions, but she turned away instead. Giving him the benefit of the doubt, perhaps—for which he was deeply grateful.

“Let’s go scoop this guy up” was all she said.

THE NEXT MORNING, SERGEANT
Tanney said that he wanted to bring in Eugenia Lelo right away.

Jack let Vargas do the talking, to explain the game plan they’d worked out the night before.

“If we bring her in now and she doesn’t talk, then she’ll just alert this guy that we’re after him.”

Tanney crossed his arms. “He already knows.”

“Not necessarily. He knows that someone was asking about Eugenia Lelo at the hotel. But that’s all.”

Tanney scoffed. “The guy bolted.”

Vargas shrugged. “Okay, so he was nervous. But he might still be close by. If we get him seriously spooked, he’s liable to leave the state. Or even the country. With surveillance on her, maybe we can find him the easy way.”

Tanney tapped a pen against his desk blotter and turned to Jack. “Now what about the fish company manager? Do you think the wife and her lover might have offed him too?”

Jack rubbed his chin. He had lost considerable sleep last night, wondering about that very question. For once, he didn’t have some clear argument to make to his boss. He could only shrug. “I doubt it, but at this point I have to say that I don’t know.”

Tanney frowned—probably seeing his visions of a headline drug bust go up in smoke. He leaned forward. “So what do you suggest?”

Jack sat up straight. “First of all, I think we should tell Narcotics to go ahead with checking out the doughnut shop and the fish company. And second, we’ve got to make sure that this blond guy is the one who did the McDonald’s shooting. I went to a sketch artist last night, right after we left the hotel.” He produced the drawing. Inwardly, he was still cursing himself: he should have snapped a cell phone photo, but he’d been too stunned by the sudden proof of Zhenya’s infidelity.

“We’re going over to the McDonald’s now,” Vargas said. “We’ll see if our witness there can confirm the I.D.”

“Where do you think the suspect might have gone?” Tanney asked.

“To Brighton Beach,” Jack answered. “Or one of the other Russian communities around. Bensonhurst, maybe. Or Rego Park or Forest Hills. These people tend to stick together, and I think he’ll go somewhere where people speak his language.”

“We should get ahold of the wife’s phone records.”

Jack tried not to wince. “I’ll get right on that,” he volunteered. Christ, his own numbers would be all over those records.

His stomach clenched. This whole business was just getting worse and worse. What were his options? He could be totally honest and up-front. For the fiftieth time in the past few hours, he considered spilling the beans about his affair with Zhenya. But what if it turned out that the blond man wasn’t actually the perp? He would have jeopardized his career for nothing. … For a second, he wondered if he should have just kept his mouth shut.

And let Daniel’s killer go? No, that was out of the question …

He frowned. He was going to have to walk this tightrope for a while longer, but the ground seemed to be getting farther and farther away.

S
TEAM ROSE UP INSIDE
the car as Linda Vargas bit into a pineapple knish. “Well, I gotta admit that I’m totally out of ideas. What do you wanna do?”

The two detectives sat double-parked on Brighton Beach Avenue next to Mrs. Stahl’s Knishes, one of the few local businesses that dated back to Jack’s childhood. The store had become dumpy, but the knishes were still great. Jack took a bite of his traditional potato version, a small pleasure in the middle of such a wretched time. He watched out the window as a beautiful, unhappy-looking blond woman pushed a baby stroller across the intersection.

The past forty-eight hours had been damned busy ones.

Acting on Jack’s tips, Narcotics squads had set up surveillance on Semyon Balakutis’s doughnut shop and Daniel’s fish company.

Tyrese Vincent had called the sketch of the blond man a definite match, as did another McDonald’s employee who had witnessed the original shooting.

Jack had gotten hold of Zhenya’s phone records (and managed to keep them to himself); he’d found that several calls had come in from pay phones in Brighton Beach. The times matched his memory of when Zhenya had suddenly canceled their dinner plans.

Other memories assaulted him: their happy times out on the balcony; the occasions when she had asked him how the investigation was going; nights when they had hardly slept at all, for the very best of reasons. Times when he had watched her staring off into the distance, and wondered what she might be brooding about.

Well, now he knew. She had just been using him.

All that remained was to find out how directly she had been involved in her husband’s murder. Whose idea had it been? Had she been there on that dark, lonely night out on Neptune Avenue? Had she pulled the trigger herself?

The detectives had roamed all over the neighborhood. They’d showed the sketch to countermen in delis and coffee shops. They buttonholed passersby on the streets. They tried the old ladies on the benches and the old men playing chess. They asked local patrol cops to question their snitches.

Nada.

Jack turned to his partner. “The word is out that we’re searching for the guy here, so I don’t think he’s gonna stick around. I think we oughta look a little farther afield.”

Vargas frowned. “New York is a big place.”

“Not for him. He won’t hide far from where people can speak Russian. Why don’t we poke around Coney a bit?”

His cell phone trilled. He looked down and saw Zhenya’s name in the little window. Thankfully, Vargas wasn’t paying much attention; she was wiping crumbs off her lap.

She looked up casually. “Aren’t you gonna get that?”

Jack picked up his phone, pretended to look at the caller I.D., then set it down again, facedown. “Nah. It’s not important.”

He had phoned Zhenya from a pay phone the morning after the hotel incident. It had been a hell of a call to make. He hadn’t said anything about what he’d seen; he’d just told her that he wouldn’t be able to get together for a few days, that he was working on a very big case. He had neglected to mention that she seemed to be at the center of it. He had also neglected to mention that she was now under twenty-four-hour surveillance. One small mercy for both of them: Sergeant Tanney had applied for a tap on her phones, but a federal judge had turned it down due to lack of evidence.

He wrapped up the remains of his knish; he just wasn’t hungry. He felt as if he was getting an ulcer. It was too much to contend with all at once: his worries over his own involvement in the case and how he could possibly emerge unscathed; the struggle to find their suspect; his bitter disappointment over Zhenya’s betrayal.

For the past two days, his mouth had been full of a sour taste, and he wanted to smash his fist through a wall.

HE DIDN’T HAVE ANY
snitches in Brighton Beach, but Coney Island was a different story. First they paid a visit to a hooker who hung out in front of a fast-food joint on Stillwell Avenue. (He admired the owner’s gall: the place was called Kantacky Fried Chicken.)

No luck.

They talked to the owner of a liquor store on Mermaid Avenue.

Zip.

They drove on. Scraps of trash blew along Surf Avenue, swirling outside storefronts selling crappy fried seafood. The new baseball stadium (on the site of the old Steeplechase Park) was supposed to help revive the neighborhood, and maybe it would, but Coney seemed especially desolate that afternoon.

They dropped in on an employee of Astroland Amusement Park, a bandy-legged old ticket taker. Instead of the cheery carnival music from Jack’s childhood, this ride now blasted rap music, and homeboys with gold-capped teeth held on to their shrieking girlfriends as the little cars whipped around. Jack stood twenty yards away and gave his informant the nod.

Five minutes later the man joined the detectives in an alley behind Nathan’s. A hard life with too much sun had given him a reddish hide like shriveled leather.

“You recognize this guy?” Jack asked, holding up the sketch.

The old-timer frowned. “I think I might’a saw him. About a week ago. Over on the boardwalk where they got that salsa dance thing goin’.”

“You know where he hangs out?”

The man shook his head. “Nope. You talk to Little Danny?”

Jack patted the man on his shoulder. “That’s our next stop.”

Across from the Cyclone roller coaster, Surf Avenue was home to a strange blocklong flea market, a row of run-down stalls filled to overflowing with an incredible assortment of junk: broken eight-track players, belted nylon slacks in various pastel colors, scratched LPs by no-hit wonders. Little Danny Vletko had managed to keep his business going for years, though he rarely displayed anything any sane person might want to buy. It was rumored that his true business was fencing stolen goods, but Jack didn’t look too hard—the man’s information had proved valuable more than once.

Danny was small in stature but not in weight; his potbelly alone must have weighed a hundred pounds. He looked—and smelled—as if he bathed maybe twice a season. “Not here,” he muttered when Jack and Vargas approached him. “In the back.” Jack sighed. This was one of the hazards of getting information from the man. You had to squeeze down a narrow aisle, risking avalanche from the ceiling-high heaps of old clothes and bric-a-brac. In the tiny back room Danny’s body odor became almost intolerable. That afternoon, though, the visit proved worth the trouble.

ACTING ON LITTLE DANNY’S
tip, the two detectives took up positions on the Coney boardwalk, just downwind of a scruffy, open-fronted bar that sold cans of Coors Light for a buck. Toothless women in bleached jeans paraded in and out with scraggly men sporting biker vests and wallet chains.

“I’m going to the ladies’ room again,” Linda Vargas said.

Jack shook his head. “I told you ya shouldn’t have eaten those clams. Hey, can you buy me a ginger—” He stopped. A blond man was skulking along the edge of the boardwalk. He wore track pants and an oversize red and black jersey. He stopped under the bar’s awning, took off his backpack, lodged it between his feet, and pulled out a CD player. He inserted the earphones and stood scanning the beach through blue wraparound sunglasses.

“That’s our guy,” Jack murmured. “Don’t spook him. Why don’t you call in some troops?”

Vargas took out her cell phone and made the call. Jack sat watching the Russian over the top of a newspaper. He was tempted to hurl himself forward and start throttling the bastard, but he waited instead, muttering, “Come on, come on,” afraid their quarry would slip away.

Finally, a hundred yards to the east, a patrol car drove up and blocked off the boardwalk. A few seconds later, from the west, a dark blue Crown Vic came cruising up the boardwalk itself. The car stopped a good ways off, but seeing as how most vehicles were prohibited from driving there, it was hardly inconspicuous. As the doors opened, the suspect’s head snapped up. He turned the other way and saw the patrol car blocking his escape. He bent down to pick up his backpack and then he took off, sprinting across the boardwalk toward the beach. He cleared the railing with a flying leap. Down on the beach, he picked himself up and ran as best he could. Speeding across loose sand was hard enough, but he staggered, trailing one leg. Jack came to the railing and looked down: a bunch of broken bottles littered the sand.