Spiced to Death (22 page)

“I get plenty of acting opportunities still—like today, for instance.”

“Did you dye your hair?” I asked curiously.

“Of course not. This is a wig.”

“But what have you done with your own hair?”

“They make a very tight-fitting latex skullcap now, and the wig fits right over it.”

“Amazing,” I said and meant it. “But your eyes—they look different too.”

“Just different makeup,” she said offhandedly.

In fact, everything about her looked different but it had all been very subtly done. None of the changes were major but the sum total was the evolution of a new person.

One aspect was not subtle, though …

She caught me staring and smiled. “Like the outfit?”

She was wearing a skintight, flesh-colored blouse that was only one short step away from see-through. Over it was a minuscule garment like a waistcoat. It was in dark blue with a lacing of black running through it. The shiny black skirt was extremely short and so tight that it rode up her thighs as she drove, exposing enticing lengths of very shapely legs.

“Four inches longer and it would be a miniskirt,” I said weakly.

“Suits today’s purpose,” she said matter-of-factly.

“Just one question about the costume …”

“What’s that?”

“Makes it impossible to carry a gun.”

She shook her head. “Not at all. Beretta has a new model that is very flat and very small.”

I looked her over very carefully—several times in fact. I finally shook my head.

“I give up,” I said. She smiled but didn’t enlighten me.

“I used to think a disguise meant you needed to be inobtrusive, not readily noticeable, blend into the background sort of thing.”

“You’re right, that’s how it used to be. The latest advice from the police psychologists is to be noticeable. Once you’ve been registered in a memory, the automatic assumption is that you must be okay or you wouldn’t want to risk attracting attention.”

“Sounds as if you do this kind of thing often,” I said.

“You mean undercover work?”

I looked her over again, twice.

“I wouldn’t call it exactly undercover—but yes.”

“No, I don’t do it often, only when the occasion demands.”

“Okay. Now the next question is, what am I going to wear?”

“You’re wearing it.”

I glanced at my lightweight slacks and gray flannel jacket.

“This? This isn’t a disguise.”

“You’re not going in disguise. You’re going as you. The more people recognize you the better.”

“Isn’t that a little—well, dangerous?”

“Not very,” she said with a careless toss of blond locks.

“Let me get my position straight. You mean I’m sort of a Judas goat pegged out waiting for the big bad wolf to show up?”

She smiled wickedly. “No, I see you more as a pot of honey—and we’re going to wait for the flies to swarm all over you.”

“And you’re the girl with the fly swatter?”

“The Beretta.”

“In that outfit, you’re more of the honeypot. You’ll have men four deep around you.”

She neatly avoided a motorcyclist and speeded up through a yellow light.

“Impossible. I’m on duty.”

“But you’ll be too engrossed with all those men just when I need you to protect me.”

“In an emergency, you’ll find a way,” she said confidently.

“Speaking of duty and impossible—just what is today’s mission?

She settled down to a position in a stream of traffic. We were heading north and went past the massive stone edifice of the Cathedral of St. John the Divine.

“We’re going to the Bronx. This is the background. There’s a group of merchants who got together some years ago to have an annual sale of all the products they hadn’t been able to sell. I know that sales are not a novelty in New York—stores are having them all the time. But this was a bumper affair with tremendous bargains and it always resulted in a complete sellout.”

The car sputtered a couple of times. Gabriella expertly juggled the choke and it settled down to as smooth a rhythm as its aging engine would permit.

“A few of those merchants had a further idea,” she continued. “They had done so well putting on sales of goods they hadn’t been able to sell that they decided to step over the line and start selling goods they shouldn’t be selling.”

“In what way?” I asked.

“Electrical appliances that had been declared potentially dangerous, clothing that could be flammable, toys and games that were hazardous—that kind of thing.”

“Nice people,” I said. “And these are big companies, well-known merchants?”

“Oh, yes. They operate through several layers of other organizations so that we can’t get to them.”

“And you don’t know who they are?”

“We suspect one or two but it’s hard to get proof. Most of them, we don’t know who’s behind them.”

I knew where we were now. We were cutting across Harlem and heading for one of the bridges over to the Bronx. Our whereabouts was only registering on the back of my mind. My primary attention was on Gabriella’s story.

“So today we are going to one of these?”

“These people have got very specialized. A girl on Staten Island was electrocuted recently and it came out that the VCR she had bought at ninety percent off the regular price came from one of these sales.”

“Couldn’t you—I mean the police—do anything about that?”

“How? The sales are not advertised, it’s just word of mouth. The sale is one day only and the venue can be anywhere. A stadium, an empty theater, a church hall … Oh, once in a great while we manage to bust one of them but we never get to the people behind it.”

“I can see it’s a tough nut to crack. Which brings us to the present—”

“Yes, well, we’ve never heard of one of this type of sale before but whenever there’s a whisper on the street, it gets circulated through the department. There’s one today and”—she paused dramatically, probably her theatrical training—“this one is foodstuffs only.”

“I see. And you’re thinking that one of these dubious food items that will be on sale just might be Ko Feng?”

“It’s a long shot but when Hal heard about it, he suggested that I go.”

“And take me with you?”

“He had the idea that if any Ko Feng is offered for sale, you should be on hand to identify it.”

We were crossing the Harlem River, a sullen, slow-flowing mass of dark water. The Bronx was a sharp contrast to Manhattan and we hit the bottom of a big pothole, stretching the Ford’s suspension to the limit.

“It can’t be too dangerous then,” I said. “I mean, we’re talking about people who run department stores, chains of shops—they’re not gangsters, they don’t kill people.”

“No, no,” Gabriella said, curling past a truck carrying a heavy overload of gravel and spraying a goodly amount of it through the Bronx. “It’s not really dangerous.” I wished she hadn’t said it so quickly.

“Then why are you carrying a gun?” I asked.

“Routine.”

“I don’t believe you are carrying one.”

She threw me a smile and honked to warn a garbage collection vehicle not to pull out of an alley.

We reached our destination a few minutes later, a run-down neighborhood with derelict shops, empty storefronts and dirty windows. A liquor store was open and a man looking like a hobo came out with a large brown paper bag. Across the street, a fruit and vegetable stand was doing a small amount of trade. Two young men lounging by a fire hydrant turned to stare at Gabriella’s legs as we got out of the car.

“See what I mean about a honeypot?” I muttered.

“Ignore them. Come on.”

We walked briskly along the cracked and decaying pavement. A siren shrieked in the distance. The air smelled dusty and sour.

We had parked near a corner. We turned and ahead of us, past a shop selling “adult” videos, stood an enormous building, easily one of the ugliest I had seen in a long time. An uncomfortable blend of brick and old stone that looked more like concrete blocks, it had evidently gone through several building and rebuilding stages. It had been a church as I could see when we got close but not very recently. All the windows were gone, some boarded over, others covered with crisscrosses of barbed wire. Weeds had sprung up everywhere and were climbing the walls. A pile of garbage had grown higher than a man.

“Looks deserted,” I said. “Are you sure this is the place?”

“It’s the place, all right. Let’s find an entrance.”

That was harder than it sounded. The chipped stone steps led to what had been the main doors but they were now barricaded with planks. We walked along the outside looking for another way in, but the side doors were barred just as effectively.

“Those planks have been there a long time,” Gabriella said thoughtfully. “Let’s walk around again.”

We did but could find no other entrances. Then she pointed. “Look there!”

A large steel panel was set in the ground against one of the walls. We had missed it the first time as it had a sprinkling of soil and grass over it. Gabriella reached out with one shapely leg and rubbed the soil aside with her three-inch-spike-heel shoe. She tapped. It sounded hollow.

“There’s another,” she said, and sure enough another steel panel was set in the ground next to it.

“And another,” I added. A whole row of them stretched out in a line and Gabriella’s finger traced the line across the desolate ground to the ruin of a building about forty paces away. It had probably once been the church hall but only a corner of it was left.

We followed the line of panels. The ruin looked like a junction of two crumbling walls at first but it had a rough wooden structure about the size of a normal room. There was a door with peeling brown paint. I turned the knob and it opened. We went in.

A
MAN SAT AT
a desk reading a newspaper and smoking a cigarette. The walls were the same rough wood as outside and a bare electric bulb hung from a fraying wire. A wide flight of wooden stairs led down and out of sight.

The man had scrubby black hair and hadn’t shaved recently. He glanced at us over the top of his paper but didn’t put it down.

“Something?” he asked, without moving the cigarette.

“Whistler sent us,” said Gabriella.

He looked her up and down, then again more slowly. I think he knew I was there but he said to Gabriella, “Whistler?” as if he had never heard of him.

She nodded coolly. “Whistler.”

He looked at her without speaking for a long time. Then he nodded toward the stairs. “Go ahead.”

We went down the stairs. At the bottom, a long tunnel was ahead of us. A trench just deep enough to walk in and wide enough to accommodate only two people at a time had been dug and covered over with the steel panels we had seen from outside. A dim light at the far end shed just enough illumination for us to walk on the hard-packed soil.

When we arrived at the end of the tunnel, we encountered a heavy steel door with no handle and no lock visible from this side. I banged on it with a fist and the booms echoed down the tunnel.

A “boy” in his late teens opened it. He looked aged beyond his years, with a thin face and hair pulled back in a ponytail. He opened the door only partway and looked questioningly at us.

“Whistler sent us.”

He looked at Gabriella as if he had never heard of Whistler. “Who?” he asked.

“Whistler,” she said, cool as ice.

He eyed her a while, gave me a hundredth of a second glance, then swung the door open. We went up another flight of stairs that curved, then led into the main body of the church.

It was a huge place, vast and cavernous as an Italian railway station. The ceiling was out of sight with the dim lighting of haphazardly strung wires and bare bulbs. The walls were in fairly good shape and columns soared up to be lost in the darkness. The concrete floor was patterned with cracks but serviceable.

And there were a lot of people.

That was the most striking thing of all. After the barren approach and the gloomy tunnel, it was a shock to find so many people but after the initial surprise had worn off”, it was like being in Macy’s at Christmastime.

Well, almost … Counters and tables had been set up and bare wood shelving erected against the wall in several places. These gave the place more the air of a hastily conceived charity sale in a village, raising money to send boys and girls to summer camp. Boxes and crates were piled high everywhere, cans and packets were in untidy heaps, confusion was prevalent, but the people were intent on getting bargains and trade was brisk.

Gabriella and I stood for a few minutes, absorbing the scene. Then she said to me, “See any supervisors, bosses, that kind of person?”

I didn’t. The hard-working sales staff were a mixed crew. Mostly young, some even teenagers, but a fair number of older people, probably retirees making a few extra—if illegal—dollars. About half and half male and female, and a mix of races and ethnic backgrounds. As they called out the quality of their wares and the irresistible bargains to be had, a bewildering array of accents could be heard. But nobody was in sight who looked to be in any position of responsibility.

A young Hispanic with slick black hair and a trim mustache stood behind a pile of cans. We moved closer. They were five-pound cans of ham. A couple had been opened and it looked fine. Cut pieces with toothpicks in them were spread on a dish as samples and they were going fast. The young man was taking orders as fast as he could scribble. Each time, he handed the buyer a slip of paper and money changed hands. Gabriella picked up one of the cans and studied it critically. I did the same.

“Can’t see anything wrong with it,” I murmured.

“Looks all right to me,” Gabriella said.

“Then how can they make any money?” I asked her. “Even at a good wholesale price, they can’t make enough to cover expenses.”

“He isn’t selling these cans individually. The orders he’s taking are for crates.”

“Even so, there isn’t enough markup, surely …”

Gabriella made a motion with her head and we edged out of the crowd around the table. When we were out of earshot, she said, “He has a terrific markup. Everything he gets is profit.”