Bloody London (6 page)

This being New York and a story about rich people uptown, it was big. Lily glanced at the papers and for a split second she looked worried, or maybe I imagined it. She took her glasses off. Then she crumpled up the
Post
into a ball, threw it across the roof, picked up a beer, drank, wiped the liquid off her upper lip and smiled at me. She makes me laugh. She's smart. She knows where I come from. Also, there's her legs. And the rest of her.

Lily Hanes opened a door I was looking for since I got to New York, an immigrant asshole, green, scared, desirous. I was looking for it for twenty years.

I knew I should tell her about the Pascoe thing. Tomorrow, I'd tell her. It might be over tomorrow and nothing to tell. There were a million guys on the Pascoe case already. I'd go back to the fish market. Back to a missing persons case I had for a bank in Austin, Texas. Nice safe stuff that pays fine.

For Lily I had finally quit the police department for good; it was our deal. Private stuff pays better, most of it's industrial so you don't get banged up. She didn't want the fear. I didn't blame her. Somewhere the music changed. Sinatra sang “Moonlight in Vermont” from a roof near by.

I could see 360 degrees over the city, the rivers and bridges, the buildings, the midtown towers, their tops gilded with light. I could see the shape of Manhattan, the small island in the center of the New York archipelago, people obsessively territorial, fighting for a piece of turf, Eastside, Westside, downtown. “My house,” New Yorkers always say, even when they live in a studio apartment the size of a dog kennel. I thought about the Middlemarch, people fighting to get a place in it, the board hanging on to the power.

We have a board down here too, but until a few years back we were just a bunch of people in an old
warehouse building who couldn't afford anything else. Sometimes we'd get together. Mostly at the meetings we drank a lot of beer and ignored the plumbing problems. We let in anyone who wanted a place if they had the dough. Then the yuppies arrived on the fourth floor. Soho overflowed into Chinatown. Tribeca squeezed us from the west. Prices soared. We upped the maintenance. We started making house rules.

Lily ambled over, put her long arms around my neck. She said, “Are you happy?”

I was happy. I was on the inside for the first time in my life, instead of looking in. It was the kind of domestic bliss I never figured for myself. The ambitious young cop trying to unload his past was gone. I could feel Lily's breasts against my back. I said, like I do around once a month, “Let's get married.”

She leaned against me, and I could smell some perfume I gave her. “Why tempt fate?” She laced her arms around my neck. “Let's go somewhere nice next weekend.”

“Let's go somewhere very nice. What time is it?” She said, “It doesn't matter. Does it? Why does it matter?”

“No. It doesn't. Nothing else matters.” I kissed her for a long time.

After I dropped them on 10th Street, where Lily's lived all her life, I finally returned Sonny's call. He said, “Where are you?” like he always does. He needs physical back-up for the elusive digital contact. Lippert can't do business by phone; he's a guy that needs to press your flesh, so to speak, and I said, “In the car. On my way.”

Most of the cops who work out at Sonny's gym, the guys with a gut slung over their belt, were outside on the front steps, gabbing, enjoying the warm night, drinking a can of beer.

“How's business?” I called to a guy I used to know, who waved back and grinned and said, “Lousy.”

Inside, the place smelled of sweat. It had breeze-block walls and basic equipment and a slick linoleum floor. A couple guys lifted weights on the other side of the room. Lippert was on the treadmill, reading Dickens. Sometimes he walks through the night.

Every year around this time Sonny does his annual criminology lecture. He tells the kids, you want to know law, crime, human nature? Read Dickens. Read Dostoevsky. Graham Greene. Updike. He draws a crowd. Now he broke out a smile and held up his paperback. “
Bleak House
. You read it?”

“I read it.”

“You saw her.”

“I saw her.”

“And?”

I got on the treadmill next to his and kept pace. “Ulanova hated Pascoe is all I got. Thought he was going to sell her place out from under her. She's stroking out, Sonny, I don't know how much time she has. One thing's sure.”

“One?”

“She hated Tom Pascoe like it was religion. She was devout. Zealous.”

“Enough to set up a murder?”

I thought about the old woman, waxy claws, dead
eyes. “Where'd she get the dough? How'd she fix it? Why was she on the scene?” I pulled a crumpled fax out of my pocket and handed it to him.

It was a full-page ad from the
Times
for a real estate broker and I'd circled one of the offerings in red. “Best address on Sutton Place, unique building, river views, Deco pool, top floor studio flat.” The Deco pool was a giveaway.

Sonny looked up. “Where'd you get this?”

“I've got a few contacts. The point is, Mrs Pascoe told me they never advertise. She lied.”

“You're sure it's the Middlemarch?”

“Yeah. In which case, I'm thinking, top floor, studio apartment, it's the old Russian advertised her own place.”

“But why, man?”

“Money. Spite. Say they're giving her grief, she's scared, she wants to sell, but the board makes it impossible for anyone who wants to buy her place.”

“Unless she sells to, lemme guess, Thomas Pascoe. Who maybe invites her for a swim to do some business.”

I said, “So she advertises to stick it to them, stir things up. I told you I talked to a janitor, right? Said the pool doesn't open before seven. So when you showed at six, six-thirty, Pascoe was already dead. But what's Ulanova doing there so early? Pascoe was the only one who swam off hours.”

Sonny stopped walking. “You're thinking if she didn't set him up, it was the other way around. He sees the ad, invites her for a chat. It's her they intend to kill. They get him by mistake?”

“I don't know.” I thought about the creep in the stairwell. “You think her being Russian's an issue?”

He laughed. “You and me, we always think being Russian's an issue, man, but she wasn't that kind.”

For a few minutes, facing forward, walking his tread-mill again, Sonny Lippert ranted freeform. “I resent this, Art, I want it finished. Some teabag asshole named Thomas Pascoe had connections at Gracie Mansion. The Mayor's office says, Get Sonny Lippert. I tell them I'm busy, I got the Russian mob in Brighton Beach lubricating property deals in the boroughs, I got Russian hoods moving into Manhattan too, investing with Paine Webber, buying art galleries and real estate, the money disappears into the system, it's legit, we're fucked. They got white shoe lawyers now, Art, the Russians. And I have to worry about some goddamn Brit gets offed. Any luck with that list of wannabes?”

“I'm working on it.”

I watched him dry his face, then Sonny drew breath and said, “We got Halloween coming up also. There's a million people coming into the city in costumes. We're looking at chaos. I want this stitched up before, otherwise it's dead. Stay with the program, Artie, OK?”

“You have enough on your plate, man, you don't have to take on Halloween,” I said.

“We're all taking on Halloween, Art. Every single law enforcement officer in or out of uniform in this town is working it. Me included.” Sonny climbed off his treadmill and threw me a towel. I got off mine and wiped my face.

“This ain't just the Russian. Is it? Sonny? What else you looking for from me?”

Sometimes Sonny Lippert catches me off guard and the old antagonisms get me like heartburn. The obligation, the requirements, the dues – he makes me feel I still owe him. When Sonny was a federal investigator in the Eastern District, he was in charge of nailing the Russian mob; he's still obsessed.

After I got to New York – we left Moscow when I was sixteen, spent a few years in Israel – I tried to make a buck as an interpreter, I ended up in Sonny's office. He helped me get my Green Card, then my citizenship, and a place in the academy. I was a kid, twenty-one, twenty-two. Sonny helped me, so I did stuff for him. He needed a cop who could speak languages; I can do Russian, Hebrew, some French. Everyone in my family's real nimble at languages, but it's just a knack, a gimmick.

So I was Sonny's cop and we went a lot of rounds over the years, even after he left Brooklyn. For years I figured his ambition ate him from the inside like cancer and left a corrupted shell. But I had been wrong, and after the Chinatown job, we became friends. Still, I see Sonny Lippert wants something, I get a tight feeling in my chest.

I hung over Sonny; I'm a lot taller. “There's something else.”

He said, “You saw the widow.”

“So?”

“Show her your baby blues, man, OK? Show them rich folk your dimples is what I want. It was always your
thing, looking good, talking nice. You don't hold your utensils like they're weapons, you got nice suits, you read books. Help me out here, and I'll see you get paid good.”

It was a job. I'd do the work, cash the check and walk away. Maybe find the asshole that tried to beat me up for a bonus.

“I don't do back-room stuff, Sonny. You know that. I don't con bank clerks into telling me about their clients, I don't break open people's mail. I don't listen in or wear a wire, or use computers, I don't do your regular PI ruse, you know that, and I'm not going to start.” I felt in my pocket for gum and flashed him a smile. “Not even for you.”

He headed to the locker room. “I hear you. Uptown case like this, Art, there's a wall of lawyers, a lot of people don't feel compelled to talk to us. I can't ask some cop makes fifty, sixty grand a year and puts himself in the way of a bullet to interest himself objectively in people that make a hundred times as much for doing nothing. I can't trust Mrs Pascoe to some idiot out of a precinct. These people ain't scared of some two-bit detective. You I can trust. Billy I can trust, but he's in China on other business. You saw her. If it was me, I'd take Mrs Pascoe in right now. But I can't do that. I want you on this.”

“How old you figure her for, Sonny?”

“I don't know. Hard to read. Fifty? Forty-five? Why, you got a hard-on for her?”

“I want a look inside that building.”

Sonny leaned over a sink, put his head under a tap,
gulped some water. “Art, man, listen to me. They got a division on the building, OK? Probably the FBI. For all I know, being as how Thomas Pascoe was a foreign national, they got the CIA, MI6, Scotland Yard and the British Prime Minister. Just find me who wanted a place up there at the Middlemarch, the wannabes, the hopeless, the desirous, OK, please.” He gave his version of a dirty chuckle. “Stay on the women.”

On his way to the showers, Sonny peered at me. “What's that bruise on your forehead?”

“Nothing.”

“All right, man, but take it easy, OK. These co-op boards got huge power. There's no oversight. One building I heard of, man, they threatened a guy with eviction if he did not stop his dog barking.”

“Yeah? So?”

“So he had the dog's voice box surgically removed.”

The babe in black carried a dog the size and color of a corn muffin, and the doorman who held the door for her, hat and coat loaded with gold braid, resembled a footman in a Disney flick. I was surprised when he asked her in Russian if she wanted a cab. She shook her head, gave him a faint imperious smile, took the pup and left.

The building was on the west side of Sutton Place, up near the bridge. What I could see of it from the street, it was twenty-five stories of marble, brass and glass. A chandelier in the middle of the lobby dripped crystal.

Salvatore Castle leaned against the hood of his black Range Rover, watched the woman and dog cross the street and said, “I've something fabulous for you here.”

“You got a lot of Russians up here, Sal?”

“This building, this side of Sutton, yes, some.” He was uneasy. “Very nice people, of course, very high class, real aristocrats some of them. Is it a problem?” He was anxious to please. “Several princesses and at least one count!”

Castle was an uptown realtor, a chubby man, black
hair, face shaved so close his skin was soft and naked, like fruit. He was all smooth accommodation in the gray Zegna suit, orange Sulka tie, tasselled loafers. I showed him the newspaper ad again; it featured a full-length photograph of Castle himself standing in front of the Manhattan skyline, as if he were its agent.

I said I was only interested in the Middlemarch. He looked uncomfortable. “There's never anything there.”

“You advertised. You put your picture on the page, Sal.”

“It was a mistake. Let me show you this one.”

“No thanks.”

“How about next door?” He gestured at a half-finished building, scaffolding still in place.

Castle had an aspirant face. He looked up at the building like a man who always looks up. “Fabulous, this one, when it's finished, like the old days on Sutton Place. Look at the detail on the limestone. Libraries, billiard rooms, wine cellars. Servants' quarters too, for an extra four hundred grand. I've got a penthouse six thousand square feet, twelve million, including a swimming pool and wrap terraces. Or something smaller?”

“The Middlemarch. Level with me,” I said and showed him my old badge; he impressed easy.

“All right, look, like we figured, the apartment in the
Times
ad was withdrawn after a few days. I don't know who listed it.”

“How could that happen?”

“Someone at my office. It happens. We never even viewed it. Brokers get set up in this market. Extortion.
Collusion. False advertising, and most of the time we play hardball.”