Kill Me If You Can (11 page)

Sooner or later
I figured Katherine would ask the one question I was hoping to avoid. It turned out to be sooner. We were still in the airport, and I had stopped at a currency-exchange window to trade dollars for euros. Katherine handed me some cash from her wallet.

“That’s okay,” I said. “I got it.”

She laughed. “What do you mean
you
got it? You’re not paying for both of us. Absolutely not. No way, Matthew.”

“Sure I am,” I said. “I invited you to join me in Paris. My treat.”

“Hey, Matt, I invited you to join me at Parsons,” she said. “I don’t remember springing for your tuition.”

“This is different. It’s a date. Happens to be in Paris. Guy pays.”

“Not if he’s a struggling artist.”

“Don’t worry about it,” I said, trying not to make this a macho thing, which it wasn’t. Well, maybe it was. “I recently came into some money.”

“Oh, Matt, I hope you’re not spending the money you got for your paintings,” she said.

“No,” I said, keeping it playful. “This is different. Trust me, okay?”

“You came into some money?” she said. “How come you never mentioned it before? What money is this?”

“It’s too crazy,” I said. “I figured you wouldn’t believe me.”

“Try me,” she said.

I shrugged. “Okay. I found a big bag of diamonds in a train station.”

“And I’m having tea with the queen of England,” she said.

“Hey, if you invite me along, I’ll pay.”

She wrapped both arms around me. “You are the most generous, lovable, adorable man I ever met,” she said. “But you’re a terrible liar. If you found a bag of diamonds, you’d give it back.”

She kissed me long and hard, and the subject of how I could afford the vacation was dropped. At least for now.

We breezed through customs—I guess the French don’t have diamond-sniffing dogs. We were both too tired to even think of hopping on a bus and saving money, so we headed for the taxi rank and got into a sleek, comfortable black Peugeot.

The driver was a robust man with a gray beard and a broad smile. “You are going to where?” he said.

“The Hotel Bac Saint-Germain,” I said. “You know where it is?”

“Oui, monsieur,”
he said. “You are very in luck. It is the only hotel in all of Paris I know where to find.”

Katherine and I both laughed.

“You speak English,
and
you’re funny,” I said.

“English is not so necessary. But to drive a taxi you must have big sense of humor,” he said as he guided the car toward a ramp that said A106.

“Where are we staying?” Katherine asked me.

“It’s a little hotel I found online. It’s on the Left Bank, in the Quartier Saint-Germain-des-Prés, which is the hippest, coolest section in all of Paris.”

“And about to get hipper and cooler,” she said.

The driver laughed. “You two cool hipsters are art lovers?” he said.

“Oui,”
Katherine said.

“The district where you are staying, there are art galleries on every street corner,” he said. “And many cafés, and beautiful shops, and crazy, wonderful people.”

“That’s why we’re here,” I said. “We heard you had room for two more crazies.”

“You like Aznavour?” he asked, sliding a CD into the sound system.

“Who doesn’t?” I said.

And then the seductive voice of Charles Aznavour filled the cab.

If you’re not in love when you get to Paris, you will be when you leave. If you’re already in love, it only gets better.

Katherine curled up in my arms, with her head on my chest, and for the rest of the ride, we were serenaded by the sexiest tenor in all of France, possibly in the world.

“Are your eyes open or closed?” Katherine whispered to me at one point.

“Open.”

“Mine, too,” she said.

Why would anyone close his eyes in Paris?
I thought. Wherever you look, everything is just so incredibly romantic. Even being stuck in traffic. With a woman like Katherine.

The hotel was
colorful, modern, and cheap—only 110 euros a night. Our room wasn’t ready when we checked in, so a bellman escorted us to a cozy little restaurant on the seventh-floor terrace, where we enjoyed steaming cups of frothy café au lait, flaky buttery croissants, strawberry jam, fresh fruit, yogurt, and a magnificent view of the entire district.

Forty minutes later the bellman returned and took us to our room. He set down the bags, and I tipped him, hung the
NE PAS DéRANGER
sign on the doorknob, and locked the door.

Katherine and I hadn’t been alone since she came by my apartment an eternity ago, and we couldn’t wait to get our hands on each other. Within seconds, our clothes were strewn on the floor and we were under smooth, cool sheets.

The sex was a little fast, but the afterglow lasted much longer. We talked, then drifted off to sleep. Katherine woke me three hours later, and again we made love, this time slowly and tenderly, then took a long, hot shower together and headed out to explore Paris.

“Where to first?” I said. “I can think of a dozen places I want to go. Right off the top of my head.”

“Lunch,” Katherine said. “But you have to let me buy.”

“Lunch?” I said. “Okay, sure.”

“Good. We have a one-thirty reservation.”

“We do?”

“I decided to stick with the surprise theme of our vacation.”

We caught a taxi. “Le Jules Verne restaurant,” she told the driver. Ten minutes later he dropped us off at the base of the Eiffel Tower. We walked under the tower to a yellow awning, where we were greeted by a smiling maître d’.

“Sanborne,” Katherine said. “We have a reservation for two.”

“I called from New York,” Katherine told me as the maître d’ checked his book. “It’s kind of popular. I was hoping to get a dinner rez, but that was impossible.”

We took a private elevator to a magnificent room that was suspended from the steel latticework of the Eiffel Tower. It afforded us a spectacular panoramic view of the city below.

A tuxedoed host escorted us to a table near the center of the room.

“There’s a six-week wait for a window table,” Katherine explained.

“I hope that’s not an apology for this one. I’m floored.”

It was the most fantastic lunch I had ever had. And the most expensive. I almost choked when I looked at the prices on the menu.

“Don’t worry about it,” Katherine said. “If you can spend all your ‘newfound diamonds’ on everything else, the least I can do is buy lunch.”

We were sipping champagne when the waiter brought a small, intricately decorated chocolate cake with a single candle in the center to the couple sitting at the next table. White-haired, well-dressed, and from the way they held hands across the table, very much in love, they had to be in their eighties.

The woman blew out the candle.

“Happy birthday,” Katherine said.

“Merci, no,”
the old woman said. “It is our anniversary.”

“Congratulations,” I said. “How many years?”

The man smiled. “One-half,” he said. “Émilie and I have been dating for six months.”

The City of Love was living up to its reputation.

After lunch we went to the
École nationale supérieure des beaux-arts.
It was Katherine’s idea. It’s the French national art school, where we could wander the halls, looking at works in progress by students.

“It’s just like Parsons,” Katherine said.

“Almost,” I answered. “Except for the fact that Monet, Degas, Moreau, and Delacroix didn’t go to Parsons.”

“True,” she said. “But Jasper Johns, Edward Hopper, and Norman Rockwell did.”

I winced. “As they say in Paris,
touché, mademoiselle
.”

“As they say in New York, gotcha, dude.”

After that, we hit the Louvre, along with about fifteen thousand other people. We didn’t see them all, but that’s how many the guidebook said show up on a daily basis. It could take a week to see all four hundred thousand pieces of art that are in the Louvre. We decided to spend two hours focused on a handful of works by Michelangelo, Raphael, and other Italian masters.

Then we did a one-eighty and took another taxi to the Galerie Mona Lisa. The average tourist wouldn’t know about it, but the elderly couple in the restaurant had tipped us off to it. It was jam-packed with works by contemporary artists. There was no single medium, no unifying school of thought, just great art from people who were still very much alive.

“One day you could be hanging here,” Katherine said.

“And the best part is, I don’t have to be dead to get in.”

We left the Galerie and were strolling along the Boulevard Saint-Germain when we took a random left turn on Rue de Buci and stumbled on Cacao et Chocolat.

The store was a work of art in itself, and every bit of it was edible. We sat in a booth while a petite waitress served us the thickest, richest cocoa I’d ever tasted. Then we fed each other chocolate truffles from a silver tray.

“I’ll be in a sugar coma in about five minutes,” Katherine said as she licked a bit of
chocolat noir
from my fingertips. “But what a way to go.”

Leaving the chocolate shop, we found our way to Le Bon Marché, a French department store that makes Bloomingdale’s look like a flea market. Katherine insisted she didn’t want anything, so I bought myself some Christian Maquer lingerie in Katherine’s size.

We weren’t ready to call it a night yet, so we walked past our hotel and across the river to the Jardin des Tuileries. Then we strolled hand in hand back to our hotel, and Katherine tried on the incredibly sexy sheer black camisole, and minutes later I removed it.

We turned out the lights, opened the blinds, and let the moonlight pour into the room as we made sweet, sweet love.

NY1 ran Bagboy’s
picture a dozen times. They’d have run it a lot more except for the crane collapse on 57th Street. One entire section came crashing down on a crosstown bus, killing three and injuring fourteen, including a pregnant woman. In keeping with the age-old tradition “if it bleeds, it leads,” the station abandoned Bagboy and focused on the crane disaster around the clock.

Even so, there were ninety-one tips waiting for Rice and Benzetti in the morning. They separated them into three batches. Solids, Possibles, and Nut Jobs.

Leonard Karns sounded like a Solid until they got to the part of the message where he said the guy he wanted to turn in was a “total fraud as an artist.” He sounded like someone with an ax to grind, which dropped his tip to a Possible. Then, just before Karns hung up, Benzetti could hear him cackling hysterically, as though he’d just escaped from the flight deck at Bellevue.

Nut Job, he decided.

It took the two detectives a full day to track down and question all the callers in the Solid and Possible folders.

“So far I got squat,” Rice said. “What have you got?”

Benzetti looked at his call sheet. “I got one lonely old lady who was angling to get me to come over for tea, three angry chicks hoping to pin a robbery on their ex-boyfriends, and a whole bunch of bullshit artists and hustlers trying to peddle bogus information to score the reward.”

“We might as well start calling the crazies,” Rice said.

He dialed Leonard Karns’s number.

“It’s about time,” Karns said as soon as Rice identified himself. “I called in the tip a day and a half ago.”

“You and a lot of other people,” Rice said. “You said something on your message about this guy being an artist.”

“He’d like to think so,” Karns said. “I was in one of his art classes at Parsons and his paintings are shit, but he’s banging the professor, so he’s getting a straight A all the way.”

Rice was only half listening. He was about to write this numbskull off when he heard the one word that sparked his adrenaline.

Parsons.

“Mr. Karns, sir, please refresh my memory,” Rice said, his tone now reeking of respect and deference. “Where exactly is Parsons?”

“West Thirteenth Street.”

A block from where Bagboy took the taxi from Grand Central.
Bingo!

“So, then, what’s this lousy artist’s name?” Rice asked.

“Not so fast,” Karns said. “First let’s talk about the reward.”

The reward, of course, was pure fiction, but Rice and Benzetti had decided that without it, no one would even bother calling.

“Like it said on TV, the reward is twenty-five grand. And you get to remain anonymous.”

“Screw anonymous,” Karns said. “I want credit for turning the cops onto this phony.”

“No problem,” Rice said. “We’ll invite you to the press conference.”

Press conference. NY1. “Now you’re talking,” Karns said.

“Do you know where he is?” Rice asked casually. “His name would be helpful, but if you tell us exactly where he is, the reward can go even higher.”

“I know who he’s with, and she’s easy to find,” Karns said.

“Who would that be?”

“Like they say in the movies, Detective,” Karns said, “show me the money. You’re not getting my valuable information over the phone. You show up with some kind of NYPD legal document that says I get paid if I help you catch him. Then I’ll tell you his name and how to find him.”

“Fair enough, sir,” Rice said. “We’ll send over our person in charge of rewards.”

“And what’s his name?” Karns asked.

“It’s a female,” Rice said. “Her name is Detective Krall.”

“I got him,”
Rice told Benzetti as soon as he hung up. “I think this total asshole Leonard Karns actually knows where our Bagboy is.”

“Let’s go pay him a visit,” Benzetti said. “Right now.”

“Not us,” Rice said. “Did you forget about the butch German who shoved the gun in your mouth?”

“She caught me by surprise. You thought she was
butch?
”

“Marta Krall is a pro, and she’s expensive. She’d whack two cops like us and not even break a sweat. We found Karns. Now he’s her problem.”

“Fine,” Benzetti said. “You deal with Marta. I hope I never see her again.”

Rice called Krall’s cell. “We’ve got a lead on the guy with the diamonds,” he said.

“You know who he is?” Krall said, and sounded absolutely astonished.

“No.”

“You know where he lives?”

“No.”

“I know his name, and I’ve been staking out his apartment for two and a half days,” she said. “So much for your police work, your vaunted NYPD protocols.”

“Listen,” Rice said. “My partner and I are just trying to hold up our end of the deal. But if you’ve got the guy, you don’t need us. So good-bye.”

“Wait. I don’t actually
have
the guy,” Krall said. “Not yet. But he’ll be back sooner or later.”

“Well, if you don’t feel like waiting for later, I’ve got the name and address of someone who knows how to find him.”