Night Watch (23 page)

“Very helpful,” I said. “Excuse me a minute, Joanie. Sir, there’s a driveway on the left halfway down the block that you can pull into.”

“You still there?”

“I’m almost home.”

“Someday I’m going to solve one of your cases and you’re not going to know how to thank me.”

“Driver—stop!” I called out as he raced past the entrance to my building. He braked to a stop fifty feet beyond and I handed him the money and waited for change.

“I’m home, Joanie. Call you tomorrow,” I said, and shut off my phone as I got out of the cab and stepped onto the sidewalk.

I walked toward the mouth of the driveway that cut through in front of my building. Three teenagers came running from the opposite direction. I pulled my bag up on my shoulder and hugged it close to my body. But they weren’t interested in me and continued running ahead, toward the better-lighted avenue.

As I turned onto the pavement beside the drive, a man came forward out of the shadows and tried to block my path. I stepped to my right but he grabbed the sleeve of my jacket and tugged me back toward him.

I clutched my bag even tighter as I yelled out the names of a
couple of the doormen, hoping that one of them would be on duty. “Oscar! Vinny!”

“Don’t scream, Ms. Cooper,” the man said as I wrenched my arm away and stumbled backward, almost falling to the ground. “Don’t scream.”

He was older than I and taller, unshaven, with dark, wavy hair and dressed in sweats. He didn’t look like a mugger and he didn’t have a weapon.

“You want money?” I asked. He started to extend his arm to me and I called out for the doormen again.

“Don’t be a fool, Ms. Cooper. I just want to talk to you.”

I took a step toward him and kicked him in the kneecap. I was aiming higher but was too tired and off-balance to lift my leg. He doubled over and I ran past him, grabbing the revolving door and spinning myself inside to the safety of the attended lobby.

“We didn’t hear you or we would have come out,” one of the evening doormen said, looking to the other for support. “We thought you knew that guy.”

I was out of breath and wanted to be out of sight, not in the glass-fronted facade of the apartment building. I went straight to the elevator and pressed the button. “What gave you that idea?”

“He came to the door to ask for you several hours ago. Then he went away and came back with coffee.” I had stepped into the elevator when the doorman said, “He told us he was a friend of Mr. Rouget’s.”

I held the door open, my head pounding as I tried to think why any friend of Luc’s would intercept me at the door to my home. “I don’t know the man. If he shows up again, call 911.”

“Certainly, Ms. Cooper.”

Once inside my apartment, I bolted the door behind me, turned on the lights, played the three messages on my answering machine—one from my mother and two from friends—and poured an inch of a single malt Scotch that was on my bar, to drink neat.

I dialed Mike’s cell.

“Yeah?”

“Where are you?” I asked.

“Still in the car. On my way to the canal. What’s up?”

“Some guy was waiting for me outside the apartment, like for hours.”

“Did he get lucky?”

“Very lucky. When I kicked him I missed my target. I’m serious, Mike. He came at me and tried to grab me. Knew my name and had been hanging around waiting for me. Told the doormen he was a friend of Luc’s.”

“So he probably was.”

“That’s crazy. Luc would have given him my number.”

“Maybe not. I told Luc today I didn’t want either of you calling each other so your numbers wouldn’t show up on phone records, in case things went far enough for a prosecutor to ask for those,” Mike said. “Did this guy scare you?”

“Not as much as what you just said does,” I said, sipping on the Scotch.

“Lock the door, pour yourself a double—”

“I’m ahead of you. Just wanted to make sure Luc didn’t mention anything about sending someone to talk to me.”

“Not a word. I’ll call you in the morning.”

I undressed and took a steaming hot shower, scrubbing the smells of the Gowanus off my skin and out of my hair. I slipped into an aqua silk nightshirt and set myself up on the bed with my laptop.

I punched Gina Varona’s name into the search engine, and dozens of stories queued up instantly. I clicked on the third one, which was a ten-month-old profile that ran in
The
Wall Street Journal
.

Forty-five years old, born and raised in Philadelphia, first in her family to go to college—Yale undergrad and Harvard Business School. It was totally a puff piece about Varona’s meteoric rise in the cosmetics and then fragrance industry. Brilliant, creative, consensus-building, outside-the-box thinker.

Two things were missing from that piece. Balance—there simply
had to be some bad news about her somewhere—and a photograph. She was reading too good to be true and she was bound to be better-looking than I had hoped.

I opened a second article on a fashion blog. There she was—Gina Varona on the red carpet at the launch of a new perfume named in honor of Britain’s popular young princess. I enlarged the shot to full-screen size. Varona was a sexy brunette with wavy hair that swept her shoulders and a full figure that was attractive and well-toned.

The annual philanthropy issue of
Town & Country
blubbered over her, too. She’d been photographed in her SoHo loft—a stone’s throw from the rifle club—and at her Vero Beach oceanfront villa. Twice divorced, no kids, two large black standard poodles, and a staggering amount of money donated to hospitals, wildlife conservation, and the Boys and Girls Clubs of Italy.

I didn’t usually develop an immediate dislike for people other than child molesters and rapists. I knew it was jealousy that had me wound up about a woman I’d never met. I logged off and got comfortable in bed, organizing my notes and thoughts for the morning meeting with Battaglia while I finished my drink.

I turned off the light at midnight and slept fitfully until my alarm rang at six-thirty.

I worked out for half an hour before showering and dressing, brought the newspapers in from the hallway to see how the reporters were handicapping our progress in the MGD affair, and brewed a pot of coffee.

It was almost seven-thirty when the house phone rang. “Good morning, Ms. Cooper. You’ve got Mike Chapman coming up.”

I grabbed an extra mug and then met Mike at the door. He was wearing a hooded sweatshirt, which looked filthy, and carrying a large shopping bag, which seemed to be ripping off from its handles. “What’d you get?” I asked him.

“Breakfast, for starters.”

He came in and went straight to the dining room table, setting
down his load while I put out plates and poured the coffee. He took a smaller brown bag from within the top of the big one and unwrapped an enormous fried egg and bacon sandwich on a club roll with a side of home fries. Then he helped himself to a glass of juice from the refrigerator.

“You got something in there for me?”

“I didn’t want to tempt you out of your Raisin Bran routine. You always work better when you’re regular.”

I poured my cereal and sat down at the table with Mike, swiping a slice of crisp bacon from his sandwich. “Let’s go. What happened?”

“First of all, that little drone is amazing.”

“You found Luigi’s houseboat?”

“Absolutely.”

“And the girlfriend?”

“Nowhere to be seen. There were three houseboats in the same area.” Mike had half an egg and some bacon well into his mouth as he tried to describe things to me. “One of them belongs to this so-called environmentalist—you know, solar panels for electricity and a composting septic system—he’s trying to bring back the canal all by himself.”

“Environmentally insane, living there.”

“The other two are these artist hipster types, one of whom is Luigi’s girlfriend. Three hundred square feet of crab collages, covered with blood.”

“But you actually got in?”

“Had to,” Mike said, washing his mouthful down with juice.

“Please tell me the Brooklyn detectives stopped to get a warrant.”

“First of all, you could see the blood through the window. Second, the damn houseboats are illegal. They’d have to be permitted by the Building and Fire Departments, and that isn’t going to happen for any of these dumps. It’s like a mini–trailer park sitting on a sludge pond, into which city dwellers deliver a million pounds of
raw sewage a day. Third, the occupant of this particular shithouse has been murdered, and his roommate hasn’t been seen since the weekend, when she was sunbathing on the roof of the damn place.”

“Did you take anything out of there yet?”

“Not really.”

“That’s not the answer a prosecutor wants to hear, Mike.”

“I couldn’t find anything much to take. No weapon, nothing relating to Luigi that was laying around in plain sight. But there’s no question it’s where he got butchered. Crime Scene’s on the way over. They’ll do all the blood and print work and get it to the lab.”

“How about the drone?”

“Worth its weight in gold. Harbor moved its operation to this area off Bond Street and plopped the little ROV down again, and doesn’t she flash back some images from underneath the Squid’s hideaway.”

“You mean, something hidden on the outside of the boat?”

“Let’s just say that if Lisette Honfleur had a Bronx wallet loaded with coke, then Luigi had a Brooklyn suitcase, and he didn’t need to carry it on his person ’cause he had the most foolproof safe around—the most polluted waterway in America.”

“Drugs?”

“How about twenty pounds of pure cocaine—street value at least three million hot dollars.”

“But where?”

“In a few lengths of PVC piping attached to—”

“Whoa. PVC?”

“Polyvinyl chloride. It’s a synthetic resin, Coop. Looks kind of like a thick rubberized tubing.”

“What would that do?”

“Cocaine and heroin come from halfway around the world wrapped in PVC all the time, clipped under the keel of cargo ships or freighters. The team recognized the packing right away. They’ve confiscated tons of piping like that from foreign vessels, filled up
with every illegal substance you can smoke or stick up your nose. It’s the perfect protective material for drugs underwater or just about anywhere in the universe.”

“So they sent divers down?”

“Yup,” Mike said, adding more ketchup to his fries. “I expect Commissioner Scully will have to give them combat pay for that kind of work. They were submerged for a couple of hours unbolting the PVC from the houseboat.”

“There’s more coffee if you want,” I said. “I’ve got to get downtown and be ready for Battaglia.”

“I’m outta here,” Mike said, dropping his plate in the sink. He walked back to the dining room and reached into his shopping bag.

I was rinsing the dishes when I turned my head to check what he was lifting out onto the table.

“I didn’t want you to eyeball this on an empty stomach,” Mike said.

I was curious why Mike had turned his back to me and gloved up. When he stepped out of the way, I could see the yellowed human skull that he had set down on the newspaper where my plate had been.

“I didn’t think anyone would miss this old guy for an hour or two. Is he speaking to you, Coop, or what? ’Cause your mouth is wide open, like you’re gonna talk back.”

I had no words for this. Not only was it like the others I had seen in France, but now there was a stain—dried blood as red as wine—that had dripped down the hollowed cheekbones of the ancient skull.

“Any chance I can have five minutes alone with the Boss?” I asked Rose Malone when I reached her desk at eight-forty-five on Wednesday morning. I had to tell Battaglia about the murder in Mougins and its connections to the Brooklyn homicide investigation, since the latter would now be ramped up with the identification of Luigi’s body and the findings on the houseboat. He’d crucify me for keeping this news to myself.

“Pat McKinney’s already in there with him. Ellen Gunsher, too.” Rose knew me well enough to read my expression. I didn’t even want to mention in their presence that Baby Mo had been a customer in Luc’s restaurant and a social acquaintance for many years.

“Why don’t you stay on when this session is finished? I’ll hold off his next meeting.”

“Thanks. Mercer and Ryan are in my office. I’ll be back with them in two minutes.”

I crossed the hall to get the two people I trusted most in this mix to brainstorm with us. Rose waved us right in when we returned.

Paul Battaglia was standing at the head of the conference table
at the rear of his enormous office. He was talking on the phone with a cigar dangling from the side of his mouth. He was shouting at one of the reporters in the press room about the coverage in this morning’s tabloids.

On one side of the table, closer to Pat McKinney, was the
Post
with its snappy
FRENCH WHINE
headline, remarking on the complaints of the European press about the American criminal justice system. Nearer to Ellen Gunsher was the
Daily News
with
THE MAID OR THE MO?
caption, painting Battaglia’s dilemma, like the Lady or the Tiger, in choosing which of the parties to champion.

The district attorney slammed the phone back in the cradle. “I guess it’s open season on me. It’s MGD’s sperm that’s all over the Eurotel, and it’s the housekeeper who can’t keep her facts straight, but somehow I think this whole fiasco winds up blackening
my
eye. Where’s your victim? Is Oprah coming back to TV to do a morning special featuring the maid who couldn’t keep her mouth shut?”

“I spent half of last evening bargaining with Byron Peaser,” McKinney said. “He’s producing Blanca here this morning, with a million conditions that we’re still—”

“Conditions?” Battaglia said, walking across the room, flapping his wings like an ostrich trying to get airborne. “What the fuck is he thinking, that he can impose conditions on us? When she walks in the door, slap a bright green grand jury subpoena in her hand.”

“I’m trying to mollify the old sleazebag, Boss. The only issue left to decide is whether we try to make our 180.80 deadline,” McKinney said, referring to the Criminal Procedure Law section that mandated a grand jury vote within this week to keep bail conditions the same.