Phantom Angel (15 page)

“Afraid not.”

“We just need to know what you bad boys are into,” Sue explained, her dark eyes gleaming at Legs. “We're all on the same side. We can play nice, can't we?”

Legs smiled at her. “I always play nice, Suzy Q.”

She smiled back at him. “That's true, you do.”

Cimoli glared at them. Dytman craned his itchy neck some more, fingering it gingerly. Me, I was starting to miss sitting in my parked car in the hot sun on Staten Island. I'd been alone with my thoughts. I could listen to Ethel Merman. Life was good then.

“Jonquil Beausoleil,” Cimoli barked at me. “Where is she?”

“How would I know?”

“You slipped your tail, Benji,” Sue said scoldingly.

“You're not going to slap me around again, are you?”

Legs' eyes widened. “She slapped you?”

“Where'd you take her?” Sue asked me.

“For a walk in Central Park. And I didn't tip your play, if that's what you're freaking out about.”

“What
did
you do?” Dytman asked me.

“Gave her the usual speech I give to eighteen-year-old runaways who find themselves in her position—get out of the business now or you'll end up becoming a prostitute.”

“
End up
becoming a prostitute?” Cimoli let out a harsh laugh. “What do you think she is now?”

“A high school cheerleader from Ruston, Louisiana,” I said to him.

“Then what happened?” Sue asked me.

“We parted company. She told me she'd have one of the Crown Towers boys come pick her up. That was the last I saw of her.”

“When was this?”

“Why are you so interested in her?”

“Because it so happens that everyone else is home,” Sue explained. “Every single one of the boys and girls is tucked in at the Crown Towers as we speak. Everyone except for Jonquil Beausoleil.”

“Where is she?” Cimoli demanded.

“I just told you. I left her in the park.”

“And when was this?” Sue asked me again.

“Early this afternoon.” It was now after five o'clock.

“Are you purposely being vague?” Dytman asked me.

“Who's being vague?” Legs demanded. “Isn't it about time you told us why we're here?”

Sue Herrera looked at Jack Dytman who looked at Gino Cimoli. He gave Dytman a brief nod.

Dytman cleared his throat and said, “For the past several months we've been conducting a joint FBI-NYPD investigation into illegal activities that are headquartered in the Crown Towers apartment building. Thousands of man-hours have been invested in this investigation, which has been dubbed Operation Yum-Yum for reasons that will soon become clear to you. We're now one hundred percent certain that we have the Minetta crime family nailed on a laundry list of RICO violations. We have all of our ducks in a row. And we have the green light. We're ready to move in and shut that whole criminal enterprise down. The manpower is literally on standby at this very minute.”

Legs tugged at his goatee. “You're planning to raid the building?”

“In exactly … sixty-seven minutes,” Dytman confirmed, glancing at his watch. “Unless you gentlemen give us a good reason not to.”

Sue gazed at me inquiringly. “Benji, why do we keep running into each other? This morning you were at the Crown Towers looking for Jonquil Beausoleil. And this afternoon you were less than fifty feet from Morrie Frankel when he was gunned down after he met with Joe Minetta in Bryant Park.”

“You were watching Joe Minetta? I didn't spot your people. Who…?”

“Two young mothers with stroller cams,” she replied. “Why were
you
there? We need to know why you were tailing Morrie Frankel. And why you were looking for Jonquil Beausoleil. And what the connection is, or I should say was, between her, Morrie Frankel and Joe Minetta. Legs, we know you've got a murder to investigate. What we don't know is whether our two cases have anything to do with each other.”

“We've
got
to know if your murder investigation is going to compromise our operation,” Cimoli huffed at him. “And I mean right fucking now.”

“How would I know?” Legs huffed right back. “I haven't got the slightest idea what's been going on at the Crown Towers. Everything so far has been about you and what you need. Let's talk about me for a change. My job is to catch two people who just murdered Broadway's most famous producer in front of a gazillion horrified tourists, quite a few of them children who will never forget what they saw today. My job is
not
to sit in a glorified broom closet while some fat clown cake from DOJ tries to swing his inch-long dick at me. I've got things to do. So tell me, tell
us,
what the fuck is going on or we are out the door. Got it?”

Cimoli flushed a deep shade of red. I forgot to mention that you don't ever want to play the bully card with Legs. That's even more heinous than calling him Larry.

“Not one word we say here leaves this room,” Sue cautioned me. “Do I have your word?”

“You do.”

“How do we know he can be trusted?” Cimoli demanded.

“You don't have to know,” Legs replied. “
I
know.”

“Sure, that's fine,” Dytman said placatingly. “Totally fine. Here's the deal, okay? We've been wiretapping the Crown Towers twenty-four/seven for some time now. The building's owned by the Minettas through a legitimate subsidiary known as—”

“Top Hat Property Management,” I said. “I already know that.”

“What you may not know,” Dytman said, his nostrils flaring at me slightly, “is that Joe Minetta, Jr., better known as Little Joe, has put together an incredibly sophisticated and lucrative operation with his cousin Petey. These boys are college graduates with cutting-edge computer skills and loads of ingenuity. Just for starters, they're running an Internet porn empire out of the Crown Towers—or Little Joe's Yum-Yum Tree as we call it. Sixteen webcam girls are living there at all times. The boys have units there, too. The whole setup is like a frat boy's wet dream. And the porn sites are nice, solid earners. But they're strictly window dressing. The big money comes from something a whole lot nastier. Day in and day out they manage to convince hundreds of lonely, horny rubes out there to pony up thirty-nine bucks a month for extra-special membership in—”

“Their extra-special Gold Club or Premiere Club or whatever the hell they're calling it,” I said, nodding my head.

Dytman flared his nostrils at me again. “Supposedly, this buys them exclusive access to all sorts of earthly delights. But do you know what it really means?”

“Let me take a wild guess,” Legs said. “Do these lonely, horny rubes happen to pay by credit card?”

“Bingo,” Sue said. “Two entire floors of the Crown Towers are devoted to a high-tech identity theft operation. We're talking state-of-the-art computers, scanners, encoders, embossing machines, the works. The instant they have access to a guy's credit card info they steal his ID and clean the sucker out. They move so fast and hard that they've maxed out his line of credit and moved on before the slob even knows what's hit him.”

“They buy fancy merchandise,” Dytman went on. “Rolex watches, Hermès handbags, Armani leather jackets. They've got a climate-controlled storage warehouse with seventeen thousand bottles of wine in it. They've got antique furniture. They've got paintings. I'm talking about mountains and mountains of loot that's stashed in Top Hat buildings all over Staten Island.”

“And it's the girls who do a lot of the buying,” Sue said. “The boys send them on shopping sprees to fancy stores with their wallets stuffed full of credit cards and driver's licenses. The girls love it. Makes them feel rich and sophisticated.”

“It also makes them accessories to credit card fraud,” Cimoli spoke up. “On top of whatever else they're already doing that's illegal, by which I mean high-end prostitution. A lot of those girls are on drugs, too.”

“We don't know each other very well,” I said to him. “So I'll try to put this to you tactfully. Please don't lump all of ‘those girls' together, okay? Because they're not all the same, dickwad.”

“It looks like a boy but it's a man,” marveled Sue, who was amused.

Cimoli was not. “How would
you
know anything about it?”

“I have a family history.”

“Meaning what?”

“Meaning let's move on,” Legs growled impatiently.

“These boys are clever,” Dytman continued. “They use the stolen credit cards and fake IDs to rent luxury cars, then they steal the cars and ship them out of state. They buy up tickets by the thousands and scalp them. You want front row seats to see Bruce Springsteen at Madison Square Garden? They've got them. We are talking about a highly organized, multimillion-dollar criminal enterprise. That, in a nutshell, is Operation Yum-Yum. Got it, Lieutenant?”

“Got it,” Legs said. “And big ups for the catchy name.”

Dytman ignored that remark, steering his attention back to me. “The ball's in your court now. Do you know where Jonquil Beausoleil is?”

“No.”

“Would you tell us if you did?”

“I don't know. I don't like you people very much.”

“Benji, what's her connection to Morrie Frankel?” Sue asked.

“He hired me to find her.”

“Why?”

“That's a long story.”

“We like long stories,” she assured me.

“Love them,” Dytman agreed, craning his itchy neck.

Cimoli just stood there with his foot on his chair, glowering at me. Possibly it had to do with my use of the word “dickwad.”

“
Wuthering Heights
has been in serious financial trouble for months,” I told them. “Morrie Frankel informed me that a British hedge fund billionaire named R. J. Farnell had promised to bail him out to the tune of twelve mil, but that Farnell had disappeared. The best lead he had on Farnell was the guy's girlfriend, an aspiring young actress named Jonquil Beausoleil. My associates and I were able to track her to the Crown Towers, where I approached her this morning and she informed me that there was, in fact, no such person as R. J. Farnell. He was a phantom angel, which is an old-time scam that Broadway showmen resort to when they're on the ropes. They invent a shadowy, deep-pocketed moneyman and use him as bait to draw in other investors. Morrie was hoping the ruse would buy him a couple of weeks to raise more money. All it bought him was twenty-four hours. That's how long it took us to find her.”

“He shouldn't have hired the best,” Legs said to me.

“He shouldn't have done a lot of things,” I said. “Like tell Jonquil Beausoleil he'd cast her as an understudy in
Wuthering Heights
if she'd pretend to be Farnell's girlfriend. Which she was more than happy to do. She thought Morrie had just handed her the biggest break of her career.”

“How did he come to choose her?” Sue asked me.

“He didn't. Joe Minetta put the two of them together.”

“Why would Minetta do that?” Cimoli asked.

“Joe Minetta is the biggest loan shark on Broadway. You know that, right?”

They didn't respond. Just stared at me.

“Well, Morrie was in deep to him. Morrie's assistant, Leah Shimmel, told me that some knuckle draggers even came looking for Morrie at his hotel a couple of weeks ago. This phantom angel scam wasn't just Morrie's last, best hope of bringing
Wuthering Heights
to the stage. It was his way of trying to square things with Minetta.”

Sue Herrera thought this over. “So you figure they were talking money in Bryant Park?”

“You tell us,” Legs said. “You're the ones who had Minetta under surveillance.”

“We're reviewing our stroller cams,” she said. “But we generally don't learn a whole lot when it comes to that man. He's incredibly careful.”

“He had two bodyguards parked at a nearby table,” I said. “Did one of them use his cell phone after he and Morrie separated? Or signal anyone?”

Sue shook her head. “Not that we observed. But if Minetta arranged the hit then it's possible that it was already set up. No signal required. I can buy that.”

“I can't,” I said. “Every single day that Morrie was alive Minetta was gobbling up a bigger piece of
Wuthering Heights
. Now that Morrie's dead he gets nothing. Somebody else will take over the show. Somebody like Ira Gottfried of Panorama Studios, who couldn't care less about what Morrie owed Minetta—especially because there's nothing on paper. They did everything by handshake. Nope, I don't buy it. Minetta wanted Morrie alive.”

“So who wanted him dead?” Dytman wondered.

“Awesome question,” Legs snapped. “I'd like to know that myself. Are you people going to let me start my investigation?”

“Hey, our clock's ticking,” Dytman reminded him, glancing at his watch. “We're down to forty-two minutes.”

“And we've got to make sure we're all on the same page,” Sue said. “Benji, why were you tailing Morrie Frankel in Bryant Park?”

“Because he hosed me.”

“And are you sticking to this story that you don't know where Jonquil Beausoleil is?” Cimoli demanded.

“It's not a story. I don't know where she is.”

“We need her in the house,” he said, stabbing at the table with his blunt index finger. “If she's not home when we raid the Crown Towers then she's a loose end. And loose ends always come back to bite you in the ass.”

“Let's say I can find her…”

“Let's,” Sue said eagerly.

“What'll you offer her in exchange for her cooperation?”

“Are you suggesting immunity from prosecution?” Cimoli shook his head at me. “No way. We've got her dead to rights for credit card fraud. That's a federal crime. She'll have to plead out just like the other girls.” He paused, running a hand over his chrome dome. “Unless she's got gold for us. And by that I mean game-changing information. If she has something like that we'd listen. Does she?”