Phantom Angel (19 page)

“I'd be delighted.” Her dark eyes twinkled at Boso. “You, young lady, are quite the celebrity this morning. Why don't you come down to the office with me? I'll tell you all about the night Mickey Rourke tried to stuff
seventeen
one-hundred-dollar bills in my G-string.”

“Okay, Abby.” Boso frowned at her. “Who's Mickey Rourke?”

Mom's face dropped. “God, I'm old.”

I closed the door behind them. Boso was a tidy guest, I'll give her that. She'd made the bed. Stowed her things away in her gym bag. Left the kitchen spotless. But there were traces of her all over my bathroom. She'd used my hairbrush—several of her long blond hairs were caught in it. Her wet towel was draped over the shower curtain rod. She'd found a new toothbrush in the medicine chest and used it. When I went to brush my own teeth I discovered an unexpected touch of domesticity—she'd already put toothpaste on my brush for me.

I showered and shaved and put on an unpressed blue oxford button-down, my very best pair of four-year-old madras shorts from the Gap and my white Jack Purcells. It was nearly nine o'clock by the time I got downstairs. Mom and Boso were yucking it up in Mom's office with the AC making a racket and the Ramones, another of Mom's favorite bands, rock-rock-rocking away.

“Ah, here's my boy,” Mom exclaimed. “Doesn't he clean up nicely?”

“He does,” Boso agreed. “He's kind of cute, you know.”

“Believe me, I do.”

“Mom, where's Rita?”

“On her way. She just phoned.”

“Listen, I want you to hold on to this.” I handed her my Smith & Wesson.

Mom studied my face carefully. She doesn't like guns, but she knows when I'm not fooling around. “All right,” she said, tucking it into the top drawer of her desk.

“I'll let you know just as soon as I have some news,” I said to Boso. “Stay put and stay away from those windows, okay?”

“Sweet Jesus, would you
please
stop saying that? You're scaring me!”

“Good.”

*   *   *

“OKAY, WHERE IS SHE?”

“Where is who?”

“Jonquil Beausoleil,” Legs said as we tore our way down Broadway in his Crown Vic. “The Feds have a warrant out for her arrest. They're looking everywhere for her. Where is she?”

“How would I know?”

He shot a narrow look at me from across the seat. “So you're going to sit here in my automobile and lie to me?”

“Legs, I don't know where she is.”

“Damn, you really are going to sit here and lie to me.”

“What makes you think I'm lying?”

“Because I know you, little bud. And if you don't tell me where she is I swear I'll arrest you.”

“For what?”

“Aiding, abetting, and being a total pain in the ass.”

“And here I thought we were going to have fun working this case together.”

“We're
not
working this case together.”

“Where are we headed anyhow?”

“Tarzan and Jane's place in Soho. Are you going to tell me where that girl is or do I have to throw you in jail?”

“Don't be silly. You won't do that.”

“Yeah, I will.”

“No, you won't. You can't. Mom would never forgive you.” I gazed out the window at all of the limp, sweaty people who were plodding slowly along in the suffocating heat. They looked as if they were ready to melt into puddles right there on the sidewalk. “Cricket blasted Boso all over her Web site this morning. She knows her particulars. Knows that she's on the lam from the Minettas. How does she know that? Who's her source?”

“Not me.” Legs veered around a cab that had stopped to pick up a fare. “I didn't talk to her.”

“So who did?”

“You want me to guess?”

“Go for it.”

“Cimoli.”

“Cimoli.” I nodded my head. “He's a pub slut. He has a big mouth. And he's a fat boy.”

“What's his weight got to do with it?”

“Cricket's an amazing flirt when she needs to be.”

“Still, the fat boy pulled it off,” Legs said grudgingly. “That was one major-league bust. Little Joe and his crew are being arraigned this morning. Big Joe's lawyers arranged bail for everyone.”

“Including the girls?”

“Hell, yeah. They don't want those girls getting resentful and talkative.”

“Hmm…”

“Hmm what?”

“The Minettas have to be thinking Boso ratted them out. That girl's in real trouble, Legs. It wouldn't surprise me if I do hear from her. She and I have a bond, after all.”

“Bond? What bond?”

“It's personal. What would you tell her if you were me? Speaking hypothetically.”

“Speaking hypothetically? I'd tell her to cut a deal with the Feds. They can put her in protective custody so she'll be safe from the Minettas. Out there on her own she hasn't got a chance.”

“Makes sense. Except I don't trust Cimoli.”

“I don't either,” he conceded as he steered us around Columbus Circle and down Broadway toward Times Square. “And Dytman I don't know. But Sue's okay. And she's got their ear. Do you want me to feel her out? I can find out what they're in a position to offer if the girl turns herself in. You can relay their offer to her.”

“If I hear from her, you mean.”

“Right. If you hear from her.” He glanced over at me. “What's this ‘bond' you two share?”

“It's personal, like I said. Just leave it alone, okay?”

“Not okay. Tell me. Or I won't talk to Sue.”

“Fine, if you insist. We're both rape victims.”

His face fell. “Oh…”

“Are you happy now?”

“Not so much.”

“I told you to leave it alone.” I looked over at him. He had dark circles under his eyes. Probably worked straight through the night. “Did you get anything off the Navigator?”

Legs shook his head. “It was wiped a hundred percent clean of prints—doors, windows, steering wheel, everything. And nothing was left behind. We're still searching the carpet fibers but so far it's a big zero. And the murder weapon's a virgin. The rifling patterns on the bullets that killed Frankel don't match any we've seen before.” He honked impatiently at a delivery van in front of us. “We've studied every piece of 42nd Street camera footage we could get our hands on. The Homeland Security CCTV footage, the security cams from the College of Optometry and Banco do Brasil across the street. Also anything and everything that the tourists and bystanders have handed in. We must have images from fifty different angles.”

“And…?”

“Those damned tinted windows shielded the wheelman completely,” Legs answered wearily. “We don't have so much as one good look at him. He could be anybody.”

“What about the shooter?”

“The best picture we have is this…” He pulled a scanner shot out of a folder on the seat between us. “A tourist from Clinton, Iowa, took it.”

It was a photo of the shooter getting back into the Navigator after pumping three shots into Morrie. The shooter wore a pair of latex gloves over what appeared to be fairly small hands. No facial features were revealed at all, not with those big sunglasses and that hoody pulled down low. The hoody was baggy and oversized. So were the sweatpants. At the time of the shooting I'd gotten the impression that the shooter was slimly built. But it was hard to tell anything definitive from the photo.

“Not much to go on, is it?”

“No, it's not,” Legs grunted, his jaw muscles clenching as he maneuvered us through Times Square traffic.

I studied the picture some more. “Your techies can estimate a person's height based on the height of the vehicle, can't they?”

“They're working on it, but the shooter's crouched. They can only ballpark it within two or three inches.”

“Did the CCTV cameras follow the Navigator after it fled the scene?”

Legs nodded. “It went down Fifth Avenue until it made a right onto West 37th Street.”

“A right? I thought you said you flagged it going through the Queens-Midtown Tunnel a half hour after the shooting.”

“We did.”

“But the tunnel's in the other direction. He should have made a left on West 38th.”

“I know.”

“So why did he make a right on West 37th?”

“I don't know. And, guess what, there are no CCTV cameras on West 37th. It's not heavily populated. Mostly fashion wholesalers. We're fanned out all over the block at this very minute looking for security cams, but we haven't found any yet.”

“What about Sixth Avenue? Did the CCTV cameras pick it up there?”

“Still looking,” he answered, getting an edge to his voice.

I thought this over as we went barreling past Macy's and Herald Square. “Let's see, so far you have no way to ID the perps, you have no trace evidence, nothing from ballistics and you lost track of the Navigator after it turned off Fifth Avenue in the
opposite
direction of the tunnel. Sounds to me like you've got shit.”

“I've got shit,” he conceded sourly. “Thanks for pointing that out.”

“No prob. That's what I'm here for, partner.”

“And I'm
not
your damned partner.”

 

CHAPTER NINE

THE WORLD'S MOST FAMOUS
loincloth boy and his fairy princess lived in a loft on West Broadway. Their building wasn't hard to find. It was the one that had all of the TV camera crews, paparazzi and celebrity gawkers crowded on the sidewalk outside waiting for the golden twosome to poke their precious noses out. A cop in uniform was trying to keep the sidewalk clear so that shoppers could make it inside of the high-end designer lighting store that was downstairs.

Legs parked his sedan in a no parking zone directly across the street. Legs can leave his car wherever he chooses. It's really fun to drive around town with a homicide detective.

As we were getting out of the car my cell rang. I glanced at the screen. I took the call. “Hello, Leah. How may I help you?”

“I don't think anyone can do that, Benji,” she answered forlornly.

Legs leaned against the car and made a call of his own. To Sue Herrera, I was hoping.

“They dimmed the lights for Morrie last evening,” I pointed out. “And that was very respectful coverage in this morning's
Times,
didn't you think?”

Leah didn't seem to hear that. “I got up. I made myself some toast. I rode the bus here same as I do every day. But I'm all by myself, Benji. And the manager gave me the fish eye in the lobby when I got here. Morrie was a deadbeat tenant, you know. I'll bet that man knocks on our door today and tells me I've got seventy-two hours to pay up or clear out. I—I'll have to figure out what to do with Morrie's collection.”

“What collection, Leah?”

“His memorabilia. Morrie had thousands of backstage photographs and Playbills. He had files on every show he produced. He saved everything. Someone will want to preserve it, don't you think?”

“Yes, I do. I still know some folks at the NYU drama school. Let me know if you want me to call them for you.”

“Thank you, I will. I'm sorry if I'm bothering you.…”

“You're not.”

“But I was sitting here and I suddenly realized that the phone had stopped ringing. The obituary writers are done, and now no one else is calling.”

“Like who?”

“Like Morrie's friends. Like his fellow producers. Like any of the hundreds and hundreds of people who he personally gave successful careers to over the years. Not one of them has called me to offer their condolences or to ask me if there's going to be a memorial service. You'd think there would be one, wouldn't you? With performers singing his favorite songs from his biggest hit shows? A Broadway giant has passed, Benji, and
no one
has called. I knew he wasn't exactly liked, but that man gave his life to the theater and it turns out that not one person gave a damn about him.”

“That's not true, Leah. You did.”

“You're right, I did,” she said. “And I feel awful about this mess that he left behind. I saw the way that poor girl got blasted all over
crickoshea.com
this morning. She's just a young actress who got sucked into one of Morrie's crazy scams. And now it sounds like Joe Minetta's gorillas are out to get her.”

“They won't. She's in safe hands.”

“You know this for a fact, Benji?”

“I do. You have my personal assurance that she's okay.”

She let out a sigh of relief. “Well, I'm glad to at least hear that.”

Legs had finished with his call and stood there waiting for me now, his right knee jiggling, jiggling.

“Leah, I'm sorry but I have to go now.”

“Yes, of course.”

“Call me any time. And take care of yourself, okay?” I rang off and Legs and I started across the street. “That was Morrie's assistant. She's feeling kind of lost.”

“And so she called you? I swear, little bud, sometimes I think you missed your true calling. You should have gone to Yeshiva and been a rabbi. Or, better yet, converted and become a priest.”

“Bite me.”

“Hey, that's no way for a man of the cloth to talk, padre.”

We elbowed our way through the media horde and buzzed Matthew and Hannah's loft. Legs had phoned ahead. They were expecting us. We were buzzed in. Climbed a cast-iron staircase to the second floor, where a big steel door opened and a tall, slim young woman in a Roadrunner T-shirt and jeans waited to greet us, juggling two cell phones, an iPad and a clipboard. Both cells were ringing.

“I'm Rachel, Matthew and Hannah's personal assistant,” she informed us in a rushed voice. “Please follow me.”