MANDARIN PLAID (Lydia Chin/Bill Smith series) (21 page)

In the cords in Bill’s neck I could see what it was costing him to keep still. I wasn’t sure how much longer he had in him, and I didn’t think his grabbing Krch by his thick throat and throwing him against the wall was going to be a good idea.

“Detective,” I said.

Krch straightened up. “What?” he snarled.

“When I got here,” I said, shifting to look at him, “you said you’d been planning to have me arrested, and Bill, too, but Bill had this other idea, so you asked me to come up here to ‘work something out.’ All you’ve done since I got here is threaten us. If you want something, tell me what it is. If you don’t, arrest me or I’m leaving.”

Krch stared at me angrily for a few moments. Then he brushed past me and slammed out of the room.

I watched his back, then turned to Francie. “Where’d he go?”

She shrugged. “Get a cup of coffee. That’s usually what he does instead of slugging someone.” She looked at Bill. “You really grind his cookie, don’t you?”

Bill drew a cigarette from his shirt pocket. “He has a right.”

“No smoking room,” Francie said, pointing to the sign on the wall. She took out a cigarette of her own, lit it and reached a cardboard coffee cup off the floor for them to share as an ashtray. “You really screw up his career, like he tells it?”

“No, he did,” Bill said. “I just let everybody know.”

“Why?”

“His career or a fifteen-year-old kid’s life,” Bill said. “Didn’t look like much of a choice to me.”

“Did you do the right thing?”

Bill didn’t answer.

I said to Francie, “What do you mean?”

“The kid,” she said. “He go on to be a brain surgeon or something?”

“I don’t know,” Bill said evenly.

“Krch could have been a good cop.”

Bill pulled on his cigarette. I looked into his eyes. They seemed troubled to me, but he wasn’t looking at me.

The door opened and the man who could have been a good cop came back into the room.

He had a steaming cup of burnt-smelling coffee in one hand and a cigarette in the other. Great, I thought. Three to one. Krch sat down again in the chair he’d been in before, the one across from Bill.

“Okay,” he said. He spoke through clenched teeth, growling out the words. “Here it is. Ed Everest don’t only run hookers. He deals drugs. Not in a big way, just some pissy little stuff. To his girls, to other models. Nothing the big drug boys would be interested in. But enough, maybe, you could put pressure on one of the girls, maybe she’d give you Everest.”

I looked to Francie. “A lot of people in that world do a lot of drugs,” she said, shrugging. “It’s how the models stay thin, for one thing.”

“Now, we figured this was good,” Krch said. “Me and Rossi.
Rossi was keeping her eyes open, and we were gonna choose our little informant and close in. Squeeze her a little, get something on Everest we could make stick. Everything was rosy.”

Next to me, Bill stubbed out his cigarette. He seemed to me like a pot whose flame had been turned down just before the pressure blew the lid off: still simmering, but for now under control.

“I don’t see what the problem is,” I said. “We haven’t done anything that should have any impact on that investigation.”

“Someone did. Someone had a big fucking impact on it.”

“Who?”

“Whatever son of a bitch killed Wayne Lewis. He was Everest’s connection.”

T
WENTY
-T
HREE

O
h,” I said.

“Don’t give me ‘oh’!” Krch barked. All three cigarettes were out now, but the whole room hung heavy with tension and smoke. “Don’t give me that shit!” He drained his coffee, then crumpled the cup and threw it across the room. It bounced off the wall behind my head. “You knew that. You knew about Everest, and you were at Lewis’s.”

“At the bar,” I said to Francie. “At Donna’s, when you told Andi Shechter that Wayne Lewis was dead. That’s what she meant, wasn’t it? ‘I won’t go to Ed.’ For drugs?”

Francie nodded. “Cocaine, she does. A little heroin. A lot of them do, like I said.”

“Uncooperative,” I muttered, half to myself. “Unreliable.”

“What?” asked Francie.

“An editor at
Vogue
said there was a note in her file. Uncooperative and unreliable lately.”

“It happens,” Francie said. “They start doing drugs to keep themselves thin. Then the drugs get to them, and they begin missing
appointments and looking like hell when they do show up. Andi’s getting close to that point. She’s not doing drugs to help her career anymore. She’s working to support her habit.”

And her friends are helping, I thought, remembering a smoky evening at Donna’s and folded bills passing from John Ryan to Andi Shechter.

“So fucking what?” Krch finally broke in. I was surprised he’d let the conversation go on this long. “That’s not your damn case, Rossi.”

“I had the feeling Andi knew who Wayne’s connection was,” Francie defended herself. “I thought I could follow it one step further back.”

Krch scowled at Francie. She shrugged. “Only, Krch said to lay off.”

“Not your damn case, Rossi,” Krch said again. “We’re not Narcotics. That’s for the big boys.”

“The information was hot and the lead could have been good,” Francie retorted. “It was worth a try.”

Krch’s face disputed that, but he seemed to be saving that fight for a different time. He turned to me again. “Okay, so you knew about the connection, Everest and Lewis. I want to know how, and what you were doing at Lewis’s.”

“Until just now, we didn’t know,” I said.

“You expect me to believe that?”

“I don’t expect anything except rudeness from you, Detective. But I’m telling the truth.”

“Well, what do you know, Rossi, she’s telling the truth but she thinks I’m rude. Shit.”

“You are,” Francie replied.

“Go to hell. Look, Lydia, Smith: here’s my problem.” He was back to the exaggerated facade of reasonableness. “Now Lewis’s dead, other cops are interested. So far I don’t think they’ve turned up Everest yet, or Lewis’s other drug connections, but they will. There’s whole goddamn lists of them; they’ll figure it out. And in the middle of investigating Lewis’s murder, someone’ll lean on someone, and Everest’ll fall. And Harry’s big last chance will be fucked.”

He looked from one of us to the other, almost smiling. “Now,
that would be bad enough if it just sort of happened. But to have it happen with Smith in the middle of it?” Suddenly he lifted himself out of his chair and roared, “No way! You tell me what’s going on! You give me something I can use to break this Everest thing, or so help me the two of you are looking at new careers and the inside of a cell if there’s any little thing at all Harry can do about it!”

He loomed across the table, face purple and fists clenched, while the room echoed with his words and then with silence. Bill slowly stood.

“Sit down!” Krch ordered.

Bill shook his head. “There isn’t, Harry.”

“Isn’t what?”

“A fucking thing you can do about it,” Bill said deliberately. “All you have when you’re through yelling and screaming is a half-drunk witness who says we were at Lewis’s. That’s trespassing at best if you could make it stick. And you know you can’t. We’re leaving.”

“Bullshit!” Krch’s face spread in a sickly grin. “Here’s what I think: you’re working for some sleazeball lawyer. His client’s a drugged-up yuppie who knows something about Lewis’s murder—shit, he probably did it—and you broke into Lewis’s place to fuck up that investigation. How does that sound?”

“Like a load of crap,” Bill said.

“But crap I can sell to the D.A.,” Krch smiled. “I don’t know. You might wiggle off. But I can try.”

“But you don’t think it’s true, do you, Detective?” I asked.

“What the hell’s the difference? I can make it look like it is.” He smiled at Bill again. “What’d you do in Nebraska, Smith? Six months? I’d settle for that again. Three months for your partner, if she can convince anyone you were the brains—”

“Oh, knock it off,” I snapped. “You know, Detective, you might try ‘please.’ ”

Everyone looked at me. I kept my eyes steadily on Krch. He growled, “What the hell do you mean?”

“ ‘Please,’ ” I repeated. “It’s a word people use when they’re asking for help. Because we’re going to help you.”

The room was full of silence again. Bill melted back into his chair; Krch eventually did the same. Francie was hiding a small smile.

Bill lit another cigarette, and Krch did too. I toyed with the idea of asking if we could move this meeting to the park.

Krch, cigarette dangling from his lumpy lips, said to the room at large, “Would you look at this, she’s going to help me. You want me to kiss your feet, or what?”

I congratulated myself on passing up my chance to tell Harry Krch what he could kiss. “I know you don’t want to do it this way,” I said. “You’d like it better if we were so intimidated we’d do anything you said. But that’s not happening, Detective. This is the best offer you’re going to get.”

He grunted, then asked, “What’s the offer?”

I could feel Bill’s eyes on me. My case, my game, and he was playing it the way we always played, going along with what I was doing because I was doing it, the way I would have if the inspiration had been his; but I could see how tightly he was reining himself in, the effort it was taking to keep himself in that chair.

Well, this shouldn’t take long.

“Everest was getting something from Lewis besides drugs,” I told Krch.

“What?”

“Johns.”

Krch’s eyes narrowed. “What the hell do you mean?”

“They were in the same business. Not on the same scale, or the same level. And part of the deal that goes with this is that nothing you do goes any distance to bringing down the woman Lewis was working for.”

“Was working for him, you mean.”

“No, I don’t. And I want a promise.”

“I can’t promise that. She might come out in the investigation of Lewis’s murder. Hell, she might have done it. Who is she?”

“Do I look that stupid? And if she comes out in that investigation that’s her problem. But I don’t want her exposed because of anything
I
do, and that includes talking to you.”

“How do I know anything you say is worth a damn?”

“I don’t understand you,” I said. “First you try to intimidate us into talking to you, and now when I’m ready to talk for free you don’t want to hear it. Maybe we should leave after all.”

I looked at Bill and we both started to rise.

“Screw you!” Krch barked. “Sit down. What do you have?”

“Promise?”

He shrugged. “If I can.”

“Try,” I suggested. I sat, but only on the edge of my chair. “All right. It’s this: Lewis was working for this woman. He kept the books and arranged her dates.” It was harder than I’d thought it would be using Dawn Jing’s innocent-sounding words to describe her life. “She’s very high-class, very exclusive. She turns dates down a lot. For a fee, Wayne Lewis was sending those guys to Ed Everest.”

Krch and Francie looked at each other. “Same stock in trade?” Krch asked me.

“Maybe.”

“Okay,” Krch said. “So what good is this to me?”

“I can probably get you one or two names.”

“From?”

“From my source.” Assuming Dawn could remember one or two names of guys she’d washed her hands of. “Then instead of leaning on the girls who work for Ed, you can lean on the johns. I like it better that way anyway. It seems to me they’re the real creeps and criminals in this kind of thing.”

“Spare me the feminist crap, or whatever that is. I’ll lean on anybody I can to get to Everest, and I don’t really give a shit about him, either, between you and me. He’s just a job I want to do. But a name some shaky P.I. gives me from a source she won’t identify is no damn good, sweetheart. Thanks a lot anyway.”

“No good in court. But you can squeeze the guy, tell him you’ll expose him at home, at work, make him panic—you can’t tell me you haven’t done that kind of thing, Detective.”

“Yeah, and you’re just the bleeding-heart type to cry and whine when we do.” He stared at me silently. I stared back, forcing my eyes not to blink and the muscles in my face not to move at all. “Okay,” he said. “Feed me some names and we’ll try it.”

“I’ll call.” I nodded, and turned to Bill, ready to leave.

Bill was looking at Krch with a small, strange smile. “You know, Lydia,” he said to me, not taking his eyes off Krch, “you don’t have to do that.”

“Do what?”

“Feed him names. It’s a good idea, as a way to shut down Everest, going to the johns. But you don’t have to get names for him.”

“Why not?” I asked.

Krch, at the same time, said, “Why don’t she?”

“Because,” Bill said, “you have them.”

Krch scowled.

I said, “He has what?”

“He has everything he needs,” Bill said. “He has more than he needs, but he didn’t know until you told him that that’s what he had. Or maybe he didn’t know how to work it.”

Krch growled menacingly. “Shut up, Smith.”

“Shove it, Krch. But I’ll be glad to help you out. I have the manual at home. I’ll drop it over.”

I suddenly caught up. “He has that thing?” I asked Bill. “That Pocket Wizard thing?”

Francie’s look showed she wasn’t clear, either, maybe even less than I.

“What thing?” she asked. “What thing is that?” She shifted her look from Bill to Krch.

“I don’t know what he’s talking about,” Krch snapped.

“Lewis’s datebook,” Bill told Francie. “Address book, daily calendar. A little electronic thing. It looks like a calculator. It’s a relational database.”

I stared at Bill. “Who told you about relational databases?”

“Little birds. I read the damn manual, what do you think?”

That seemed reasonable. But the big question remained, so I asked it. “What makes you say he has it?”

“Lists,” Bill said. “He said there were lists of Lewis’s drug connections. Where, Krch?”

Krch’s face was dark with anger. “The fucking bastard had a computer! He had lists on disks. The detective on the case has them. Any interested cop can get a look. You just got to be smart enough to ask, and then smart enough to know what you’re looking at.”

Bill shook his head. “My partner’s pretty smart, and she didn’t see any lists.”

“What the fuck do you mean, she didn’t see?”

Bill just shrugged. I just sat there.

“Fuck the both of you!” Krch exploded. “Go to hell! Get the hell out of here before—!”

“Wait.” That was from Francie, looking hard at Krch. “I’m part of this investigation; I’m in this, too. If there’s some shit that’s going to land on me, I want to know about it.”

Krch stared at her, unbelieving.

She turned from him. “Tell me what you’re talking about. From the beginning,” she ordered Bill.

Good, Francie, I thought. Green, maybe, but I’ll bet you make it.

Of course, it helps to have a willing witness. Bill nodded agreeably at Francie. “We were there. At Lewis’s. Make whatever you want out of that. We looked around. We didn’t mess with anything and we didn’t take anything except a copy of Lewis’s computer files and the manual to this Pocket Wizard thing. The thing itself was missing when we got there. We figured that was what was stolen when the tape was broken.”

“And?” Francie’s voice was still hard.

“And Krch was the guy who stole it.”

“Smith, so help me—” Krch snarled.

“Krch, put a sock in it, huh?” Bill said. “I don’t know what your problem is, anyway. You’re the cops. Who am I going to go to with this, outside this room? I’m only laying it all out now because I think you always ought to share everything with your partner.”

Well, I thought, what a lovely testimonial.

Francie wasn’t impressed. “You’re accusing a police officer of breaking and entering. And theft,” she said.

“And concealing evidence,” Bill said. “That was the point.”

“Evidence of what?” Francie frowned at Bill.

“Not of something he’d done. Of Lewis’s drug trade. That’s what he thought he was doing, anyway. Because of what he just said, about other cops getting interested if they knew there were drugs involved.”

“Because Krch and Francie knew about that because of Everest, but no one else did?” I asked. “To keep it from the other cops. To keep Everest for himself.”

Krch rose, red-faced, sputtering. “You lying motherfucker!” His hands were thick, white-knuckled fists. “You son of a bitch! You’re fucking under arrest, right now—!”

“Sit down, Krch!” That was Francie. “Goddamn it! He’s right, isn’t he?”

Krch stopped in midroar. His face darkened to a deep maroon. With his mouth shut like that, I was afraid he might explode.

“Sure I am.” Bill kept his seat, and kept his eyes on Krch. “It was just routine, when you heard about Lewis, right, Harry? At your shift briefing, I’ll bet. A homicide in a neighboring precinct, just something to know about.” He glanced at Francie for confirmation of that, and he got it.

“And you knew it could ice your comeback. You knew the big boys would be interested, narcotics, if they connected it up. You and Rossi were close. You didn’t want them to know.”

Bill slid his hands into his pockets and tilted his chair back, just the way Krch had. He looked up at Krch, who was still standing, still purple. “You didn’t even know what you were looking for. You probably hoped there wasn’t anything. You checked the computer files, and there wasn’t, but then you thought. Rossi was right about you, Krch. You would’ve been a good cop. You saw how organized Lewis was, and you knew he’d have records. He was that kind of guy. So you hunted, and you found what the other cops missed. You can work a computer, which is more than I can do. You could work that thing, too. You knew what it was. What you didn’t know, until Lydia told you just now, was what’s in it. That’s what the lists are, Harry. Not just drug connections. Johns. And they’re yours now. They’re a gift.”