City of Fear (22 page)
Ellie had sucked down half of her grande peppermint mocha by the time she finished giving Donovan the play-by-play of the events at Leon Symanski’s house.
‘Unbelievable. When Susan Parker showed up at the courthouse this morning with Jaime Rodriguez, I really assumed it would all turn out to be b.s. Either Rodriguez was lying, or his friend was lying, or maybe Symanski was some insane criminal wannabe.’
‘Instead, he’s some insane criminal actually-be who says he killed Chelsea Hart. Although,’ she quickly added, ‘Rogan did float the possibility that Myers is still our man.’ As things stood, she had mixed feelings about meeting alone with Donovan. Until Rogan was around, the least she could do was to sound neutral.
‘Well, with Symanski’s confession, we’ve got enough to prosecute him, but whether we’d win at trial is another question.’ Donovan broke off a chunk of the banana bread they were sharing. ‘They’ll argue the confession’s coerced. And then even if we can use the confession, we need other evidence to corroborate it. At least we’ve got the earring. That would get the case to a jury, but convincing twelve people beyond a reasonable doubt wouldn’t be easy.’
‘Rogan thinks a good lawyer can argue the earring fell off while Chelsea was at the club and Symanski found it.’
‘It also doesn’t help that the guy who pointed us in Symanski’s direction was a drug dealer who runs with one of Jake Myers’s buddies. They’ll argue Rodriguez was sending us in the wrong direction as a favor to his pal.’
‘So it all comes down to Symanski’s confession in the alley. Either it’s real, or I forced it out of him at gunpoint. Terrific. Now I can see why Eckels sent me home.’
‘That’s why Knight wants to see you. Eckels thinks it looks bad if you’re working the case after what happened between you and Symanski in the alley, but Knight thinks it looks a lot worse if you get pulled. If the department treats you like a bad apple, a jury might be inclined to see it the same way. The key is to keep you on this. You and Rogan work well together, right?’
‘Yeah. No question.’
‘All right. So you work it side by side. Two good detectives, backing each other up. That way there’s not too much pressure on the word of either one of you. By benching you, Eckels is causing major problems for us at trial.’
‘Between me and you, Eckels doesn’t care if he causes problems for other people.’
‘Hey, stop worrying about it. Knight will work something out. You saw that the
Daily Post
broke the story about the victim’s hair being chopped off?’
‘Although I believe they said “shaved”. Salacious just the same, though.’ She’d seen the update on the paper’s Web site at her apartment. Byline: George Kittrie and Peter Morse. Ellie wondered if breaking the story had been worth it all to Peter.
‘So, come on, you haven’t given me your take yet. Is Symanski our guy or not?’
‘I don’t know.’ Neutral. Report the facts. Present both sides. Let Donovan make up his own mind.
‘Oh, come on. The guy told you he did it. What’s in your gut?’
I strangled her, and I cut her up, and I took her earring
. There were only two possible explanations for what happened in that alley. Either Ellie forced Symanski to speak those words, or he had murdered Chelsea Hart. And whether anyone accepted it or not, Ellie knew that Symanski hadn’t simply recited that sentence. He’d looked her in the eye. He’d spoken with a pleading desperation that was unambiguous: he had truly wanted her to believe him.
‘I know I didn’t coerce that confession, so, yeah, I think he did it.’ Ellie felt guilty that she might be biasing Donovan, but at least she was still keeping the cold cases to herself. She wanted to raise the subject once more with Rogan before she brought anyone else in on her theory.
‘And Jake Myers is totally innocent?’
‘It would follow. But are you really sure enough to drop the charges?’
Donovan shook his head. ‘What a mess. I’ve got law school friends who make four times my salary, and all they have to think about is which enormous company should get how large a pile of cash. Why do we do this to ourselves?’
‘Hey, speak for yourself, Mr. ADA. I get paid even less than you, but all I have to do is catch the perps and hand them over. You get to make all the decisions about charges and plea bargains and sentences and all that business.’
‘Yeah, but I don’t have to worry about getting stabbed in an alley.’
‘Well, at least not at work.’
‘Oh, and you’re funny too. That’s just great.’
‘You’ve got something against funny?’ she asked.
‘No, in fact I’m a very big fan of the sense of humor.’
‘So what’s the problem?’
‘It’s yet another reason to wish this coffee wasn’t just a coffee. But, that’s all right. I’m good at keeping it strictly professional.’
‘Is that what this is? A strictly professional coffee that’s just a coffee?’
‘I assumed so, what with the nondescript “plans” you had the other night and everything.’
‘Actually, I don’t think I’ll have any plans along those lines in the future.’
‘So, the extremely polite shutout from the other night –’
‘Consider it retracted. If I’m permitted to retract, that is.’
‘I think it can be managed.’ He looked at Ellie with a cool smile that made her suddenly aware of the unflattering overhead lights in Starbucks. ‘Unfortunately, with that, our coffee that wasn’t just coffee may have to end. Knight will kill me if we’re late.’
Thanks to caller ID, Rogan didn’t bother with a greeting.
‘Let me guess. You’re on your third drink and have pasted Eckels’s picture to a dartboard.’
‘One beer, one peppermint mocha. No dartboard, but an excellent suggestion nevertheless.’
‘Beer and peppermint mocha? Disgusting.’
‘Where are you?’
‘St. Vincent’s. Symanski’s finally awake.’
‘I’ll be right there.’ Ellie hung up before he could argue.
She found Rogan sitting in a wheelchair in the third floor hallway of St. Vincent’s Hospital. A uniform officer stood guard at the door across the hall.
‘You shouldn’t sit on that when your legs work,’ she said, kicking one of the wheels. ‘Bad karma.’
‘I’d lie in an empty casket right now. My ass is whooped tired.’
‘Is Symanski talking?’
‘Yeah, if “Get me a lawyer” counts as talking.’ He used his hand as a puppet to act out Symanski’s single sentence.
‘Fabulous.’ She used the wall next to Rogan as support and slid down into a crouch.
‘Speaking of karma,’ Rogan said, ‘Symanski’s in bad shape.’
‘He’s probably faking it. You didn’t hit him
that
hard.’
‘No, not from me. He’s got some kind of melanoma.’
‘Skin cancer?’
‘No, like lung cancer or something. The doctor said it was from asbestos?’
‘You mean mesothelioma?’
‘Yeah, that’s it. You’ve been attending med school on the side?’
‘No, like almost everything I know, I learned it from the television.’ She parodied a familiar ad for one of the city’s omnipresent personal injury law firms. ‘“
If
you’ve been diagnosed with mesothelioma, you know there
are hundreds of questions about what steps to take. Let
Datz and Grossman help you with your legal rights while
you deal with this difficult diagnosis
.”’
‘Damn, girl, you do watch too much TV. Now you better go and get your butt out of here. Eckels will go nuts if he finds out.’
‘That’s what we need to talk about. Simon Knight called me in and said he wants us both working on this – together. He’s worried that if a jury hears Eckels pulled me from the case, it will taint me as a witness.’
‘A witness against who?’
‘Pick one. It’s eventually going to be either Myers or Symanski. The whole point is, we’ve got to figure out which one of them killed Chelsea, and whoever it turns out to be, I’m already part of the picture of the case. They don’t want me to be a problem at trial.’
‘No, we couldn’t let that happen to the dream team, could we now?’
‘I know you’re not a big fan of Simon Knight.’
‘And you are? That guy doesn’t give a shit about anyone. He just wants to win his cases. And he’d sell either one of us out in a heartbeat if necessary. Casey had a trial about eight years ago where the defendant said Casey planted evidence. Instead of proving the fat fuck was a liar, Knight went in front of the jury and said, “So what?” Detective Casey might be a bad cop, but all the other evidence showed the guy was good for it.’
‘The rogue detective framed a guilty man,’ Ellie said.
‘Except Casey was a good, honest cop. And Knight didn’t care what he said about the man as long as he got his conviction.’
‘That’s a DA’s job.’
‘That’s bullshit.’
‘Well, Knight’s getting my back on this one. Big-time.’
‘As long as you realize that could all change, like that,’ he said, snapping his fingers.
‘I’m a big girl, Rogan.’
‘Did you tell him about those cold cases?’
‘No, not yet. I want to, though. It was different before we knew about Symanski. Now that he’s part of the picture –’
‘Okay.’
‘Okay, as in, you’re okay with it? Or okay, as in, you’re pissed at me and want me to stop justifying my position?’
‘Believe it or not, okay as in okay. I see the point. If we’re taking another look at the case against Myers anyway, we should at least make sure we do it right.’
Ellie wanted to jump on Rogan’s wheelchair and give him a big bear hug. Instead, she nodded. Nodding was always an acceptable way for cops to communicate with each other.
She was scooching her way out of her crouch when she spotted the woman in an orange coat step from the elevator. In the time it took Ellie to realize she looked familiar, the woman caught sight of the officer posted outside Symanski’s door and stepped back into the elevator.
‘Did you see that?’ Ellie asked.
‘What?’
‘The woman at Symanski’s house. The pregnant girl.’ Ellie was already running down the hall. ‘She got spooked and jumped into the elevator.’
Ellie pushed the call button, but the elevator was heading down. Slamming open the door to the stairwell, she took the stairs two at a time. She could hear Rogan’s footsteps behind her.
‘Try the second floor,’ she yelled. ‘I’m going to the lobby.’
On the first floor, she looked both ways, but there was no sign of the bright orange coat. She bolted out the hospital doors to Seventh Avenue in time to see the woman shut the passenger-side door of a gold Acura Legend.
And, once again, the day dealt Ellie a surprise. As the car drove off, she recognized Jaime Rodriguez behind the wheel.
Rogan was waiting for her when she emerged from the stairwell on the hospital’s third floor.
‘I asked the nurse whether a pregnant woman had been here earlier to see Symanski.’
‘And?’
‘No luck. But a guy delivering flowers from the gift shop overheard me. He says a pregnant lady in a bright orange coat was downstairs half an hour ago throwing a fit because her father had been taken here by the police.’
‘Her
father
?’
‘Yep. And for some reason Symanski didn’t want us knowing who she was when we asked about her at the house.’
Ellie thought about the bare dresser drawers in Symanski’s guest room. The empty hangers in the closet.
She removed her notebook from her bag. The most recent entry was Symanski’s confession, scrawled at her command by the EMT: ‘I strangled her, and I cut her up, and I took her earring.’ Just above the confession were two words in her own handwriting: ‘Pemetrexed’ and ‘Cisplatin,’ the two prescriptions she had discovered in Symanski’s medicine cabinet. She had no doubt they would turn out to be treatments for his mesothelioma. She recalled joking morbidly with Peter last night about the apparent ubiquity of cancer.
Symanski knew he was dying, but he hadn’t called the law firm of Datz & Grossman to solve his problems. He had tried to handle them on his own.
‘We need to look at Jake Myers’s banking records.’
‘Oh, come on, man. You have
got
to be kidding me.
Them
?’
The girl with the platinum blond hair and four-inch heels obviously wasn’t happy that the bouncer had waved two other women past the velvet rope at Tenjune without a wait. Implicit in the girl’s outrage was her belief that she was taller, thinner, and hotter than Rachel Peck and her friend Gina, a belief that was undoubtedly true, but which failed to take into account the network of friendships among the little people who kept the city’s biggest hot spots up and running.
Rachel high-fived the bouncer at the door. ‘Thanks, Rico. You’re the best.’
Two years earlier, before a very active gym membership and his discovery of tight black T-shirts, Rico the bouncer was Ricardo the Mesa Grill busboy. News to the blonde in the stripper shoes: to get into a club like Tenjune, you either have to
be
somebody or
know
somebody.
They made their way down the stairs, past a lounge area of velvet seating, to the crocodile-skin bar. An old Beastie Boys song blasted through the speakers, mixed and scratched together with a Madonna tune.
‘Two Bombay Sapphire martinis,’ Rachel asked once she finally got the bartender’s attention. ‘No vermouth. Up. Twists.’
The bartender looked annoyed when she handed him a credit card. Too bad for him. At thirty-five dollars a round, a splurge like tonight belonged on the Visa.
She tucked her card in the front pocket of her jeans and handed Gina her glass, then took a big sip from her own to bring the meniscus to a safer level. One good bump in the crowd could cost her half a cocktail. The gin was cold and smooth as it ran down her throat.
She followed Gina into the next room, where they found comfortable standing space not too far from the club’s horseshoe-shaped dance floor.
‘To girls’ night,’ Gina said, leaning forward to be heard.
Rachel clinked her glass against her friend’s and took another swallow. The toast was a subtle reference to Rachel’s recent breakup with a stockbroker she’d met three months earlier while she was bartending at the restaurant. She usually brushed off the advances of the drunken, overgrown frat boys knocking back tequila shots at the bar, but Hayden had seemed different. He’d flirted with her that night, no question, but he’d come back the next day at lunch, alone, to ask for her number. It seemed like a classy move on his part.
For a while, Rachel allowed herself to believe that she might have lucked in to one of those relationships girls somehow seemed to find in the city. Hayden was a decent guy with a good income. He was smart and fun and actually read her short stories and appeared to appreciate them. She even entertained the thought that if things worked out, she could quit bartending and focus on her writing full-time.
But like anything that seemed too good to be true, Hayden had an imperfection. A big one, too, unless you could look past an insatiable fondness for cocaine and the other women who started to look pretty attractive after a few lines. The first time Rachel found evidence of another woman at Hayden’s apartment – maraschino cherries and sour mix in the refrigerator for some girlie drink Hayden would never imbibe – she forgave him. It was the coke, he said. He’d stop using, he said. It wasn’t an addiction.
And then when she found his stash in the nightstand, she forgave him again. He had a bigger problem than he realized, he said. He’d get help.
But by then, Hayden had a read on her. She was a sucker and a doormat. She was the kind of woman who could be confronted with evidence that she’d been lied to and cheated on, and then simply forgive. She shouldn’t have been surprised when she smelled Fendi perfume in his sheets four days ago.
But at least she hadn’t bought Hayden’s most recent round of apologies. He even cried.
I don’t know what’s
wrong with me. I don’t know why I can’t just appreciate
what I have with you
. As if she were supposed to feel sorry for him.
She’d seen another side of him when she walked out. His tears had turned to anger. It wasn’t what Rachel would call violence, but he did try to stop her. Physically. She had some fingerprint-sized bruises on her left bicep, but nothing major.
So now here she was with Gina, back out on the scene from which she had hoped Hayden might save her. The men in these clubs were rich. The women were pretty. For most, there was an implicit trade-off in light of the gender preferences that drove Manhattan dating life. Men got the advantage on age and looks; women on finances.
‘Shit,’ Gina said. ‘One martini and I have to pee already.’
They both knew that a pit stop to the ladies room could be a fifteen-minute wait, depending on the length of the line and the number of girls using the stalls to get high. Rachel held her index and middle fingers to her lips and puffed, indicating she’d use the time to smoke one of the cigarettes that Gina was always trying to get her to toss.
Outside, Rachel’s ears felt cloudy from the sudden drop in volume. The blonde with the high heels was not happy to see her.
‘Seriously? You waltz in, and now you’re back out here
already
?’
‘Rico, cut the girl some slack.’ Rachel protected her lighter from the wind and sparked up a Newport. ‘Poor thing’s half naked and perched on top of some hardcore spikes.’
The bouncer formerly known as Ricardo gave the girl the cursory and disapproving look that kept a certain kind of clientele coming back for more. ‘I didn’t tell her how to dress.’
Rachel took a second, longer puff. ‘I’m going to tell Carlita on you.’
Carlita was Rico’s mother. Even when Ricardo had just begun his transformation into Rico, Rachel had overheard Carlita complaining at the restaurant about how ‘fancy’ her son had become.
Rico rolled his eyes and unhooked the velvet rope for the now jubilant blonde and her friends. ‘Guilt trip much?’ he said in Rachel’s direction.
‘Just keeping it real,’ Rachel said with a smile. The optimistic eyes of the other expectant people in line now firmly on her, she walked east on Little Twelfth Street, then watched the bustle of Ninth Avenue while she enjoyed her smoke on the corner.
A blue Ford Taurus approached from Greenwich Street and pulled to the curb in front of her. The driver rolled down his window. ‘You know where a club called P.M. is?’
‘Yeah, you just passed your turn.’ Rachel pointed to Gansevoort Street.
‘I get so turned around down here,’ the man said.
Rachel could see why. Greenwich, Gansevoort, Little Twelfth (not the same as Twelfth), and Ninth Avenue all merged together at this humble intersection.
‘No offense,’ Rachel said, ‘but you don’t exactly look like a P.M. kind of guy.’
‘I’m not. It’s a long story.’
‘Sounds interesting.’ Rachel liked hearing stories. It was one of the reasons she’d learned how to tend bar. Overheard conversations morphed into ideas that transformed into written words.
‘Not really. Hey, don’t I know you from somewhere? You look familiar.’
‘Wow,’ she said. ‘You’re really going to need better material if you’re going for P.M.’
‘Look at me. I’m in a Ford Taurus, for God’s sake. I’m in no position to try a line. You really do look familiar.’ He snapped his finger at the recognition. ‘You make an excellent margarita. Mesa Grill.’
‘Mesa Grill,’ she confirmed, rubbing her arms for warmth.
‘That smoking ban’s harsh in winter. Here, hop in.’ The man nodded toward the passenger seat.
‘Do I look like the kind of girl who jumps into cars with strangers?’
The man shifted his weight to the left, pulled out a wallet with his right hand, and flipped it open. She took a close look at it.
‘See? I’m legit. That long story behind my going to P.M.? I’m out here checking out the clubs on official duty. I’m dreading it. You’re freezing. The least I can do for a woman who made me such a memorable margarita is to let you finish your smoke in my warm car. Then we’ll both get on with our lives.’
She had a good half of a cigarette to go, and she was freezing.
When she got into the car, she nearly hit her head on the flipped-down sun visor.
‘Here, let me get that for you.’ When the man reached across the car with his left arm, she saw the blur of a piece of fabric in his hand, then immediately felt a wet towel pressed hard against her face. She felt her seat recline abruptly. As she lost consciousness, she wondered who would call her father. She wondered if she would ever get a chance to finish that scene she was working on – the one in which she had hoped he would find the secret meaning.
The man flicked Rachel’s cigarette out the window and pulled into traffic on Ninth Avenue.
