The Morning Show Murders (1) (16 page)

"What?" I was thunderstruck.

"Some merc in Afghanistan, who's hated by ninety-eight percent of the population and barely tolerated by the rest, gets his throat cut," Solomon said. "Wow, what a surprise! A TV asshole in New York pisses off one of his business associates and is poisoned. A third guy dies in a fire, and, for all we know, he may have been trapped trying to burn down the place for the insurance. But everything's connected. Mystery solved by Sherlock Homey here."

"You don't find it odd that three men who had drinks together in Kabul just a few weeks ago have been murdered?" I asked Solomon.

"Maybe odd," Solomon said. "If it really happened."

"Of course it happened," I said. "Ask Ted Parkhurst. He was there."

"That being the case, I imagine he'd be a little spooked right now," Solomon said. "He didn't sound spooked when I talked to him on the phone. He didn't mention any drinks with the dead guys, either."

"Why would I make up something like that?"

"Oh, I don't know. Why would he do that, Butker?"

"To get the pressure off him," Butker drawled. "Divert us from the real situation."

"I'm just a simple working detective," Solomon said. "I look at evidence. I look at facts. I look at motives. You know a Franz Paska, Blessing?"

"Of course. He's one of the great young chefs. He's at Saint Julienne."

"Well, it seems that Gallagher talked with him a couple of hours before he was murdered," Solomon said. "Told him he was dropping your cable show and offered Paska the time slot. I'd been thinking jealousy was your motive, Gallagher busting up your romance with Ms. Di Voss. Now I've got a double motive. I've got the means, the poisoned food from your eatery. And I'm moving closer every day to the opportunity.

"So excuse me if I don't just go running off to check on some secret bullshit over in the Middle East when I should be here concentrating on the plain and simple fact that you hated the victim's guts."

He gave me a fake smile, turned, and sauntered from the room with Butker at his heels like a good dog. "Enjoy your freedom, chef," Solomon threw over his shoulder. "It's not gonna last much longer."

"Whoo-eee," Kiki said when they'd left. "That gent's mind isn't just closed, it's locked up tighter than a Flatbush bank. And you've got three minutes to get ready with the joke of the day."

I took out my cellular phone and pulled up the snapshot I'd taken last night, the drawing in front of Phil's destroyed building. I'd assumed it would be the piece de resistance that would move Solomon to look into the whereabouts of the hit man known as Felix.

That optimistic assumption was my own personal joke of the day.

"See, this the reason I don't wash car," my driver Joe was saying as we bounced along a potholed section of Brooklyn far from the borough's pockets of yuppie gentrification. The parked cars had broken headlamps or were missing wheels. Trash littered the street and the sidewalks. Young brothers and a few sisters sat unmoving as statues on the steps of mottled brownstone apartment buildings, following us with their eyes.

"Even with the dirt camo, we're still not exactly blending in, Joe."

"Maybe not. But we not making anybody mad enough to throw rocks, neither."

One block farther, the atmosphere did a 180. The street was clean, the buildings well tended and slacker-free. It was like finding a model-neighborhood color photo in the middle of a black-and-white panorama of life's defeat.

The reason was Glory's Doughnut Shoppe, a freshly painted storefront with a bright-red awning that was on the ground floor of a well-cared-for building in the middle of the block. I told Joe to park directly in front.

"You not be long, right?" he asked.

"Relax," I said. "This is the safest place in all of Crooklyn."

I pointed to a bicycle with a large front basket that rested on its kickstand near the door. A metal sign attached to the basket read:
GLORY'S
--
FOR THE BEST BREAKFASTS AND LUNCHES IN BROOKLYN
.

"Do you see a lock and chain on that bicycle?" I asked Joe.

"No."

"That's because it, the shop, and the building are owned by a friend of mine, Henry Julian. You know the name?"

"Maybe. Old gangsta. Scary."

"More or less," I said, getting out of the car. "Glory's was his mother's place. It's run now by Henry's sister and her daughter, Ramona. Nobody in their right mind is going to be stealing anything that belongs to Henry or bothering anyone who's visiting Henry's shop."

Joe blinked and said, "Okay. But you still not be long, right?"

Henry spent most of his mornings at Glory's, arriving just after the breakfast customers and leaving just before the lunchtime crowd. He sat at "his" table at the rear of the shop, dressed in suit and tie, shoes polished to a sheen, sipping coffee, reading newspapers and magazines, and, on occasion, sharing some time with a friend who dropped by.

"This glazed doughnut hits the spot," I said.

"It better," Henry said. "Call your place a doughnut shop, better have some damn fine doughnuts."

"And the coffee's excellent."

"Robusta brew," he said. "Six dollars a pound wholesale, not that the poor brothers in the Congo who do the harvestin' get more than a few pennies of that. But you didn't drive all the way to Brooklyn to talk about pastry and fair trade."

"I wanted to show you this," I said, handing him my cellular with the photo of the cat drawing.

"My, my, my," he said. "Felix's calling card. These new boys got more vanity than opera singers. My man sent me a fax of a drawing that was found near the Nigerian general's dissected corpse. This looks like the real deal. When d'you take this?"

"Last night in the Meatpacking District," I said. "In front of a building that caught fire and killed a man."

"Just read about it," Henry said, pointing to the pile of papers. "They ID the victim?"

"Not officially. But every news source except the papers thinks it must've been the guy who lived there, a friend of mine named Phil Bruno, who worked for the network."

Henry took one more look at the photo and returned the phone. "Yeah, well, that's what I'd been told. Felix's interest was somebody in the media."

"Might have been a double," I said, and reminded him of Rudy Gallagher.

"Any idea who sicced Felix on 'em?" Henry asked.

"Not who but why, maybe." I told him about the night at the pub in Kabul and the mysterious object that seemed to link three deaths.

Henry nodded. "Probably something political at the heart of it," he said. "From what I unnerstand, Felix's early success kicked him up into the bigs, where the real money is. Political assassinations. He hopscotches the world for his clients." He smiled. "You're much too young to remember, but there used to be a TV newsman. Dapper little white dude. Always began his show with, 'This is John Cameron Swayze, hopscotching the world for headlines.'

"But I digress. Mos' likely there was a cat drawing somewhere in that Irish barroom that ever'body ignored."

"I don't see how Felix could have had anything to do with the death of the Touchstone mercenary in Kabul," I said. "Witnesses saw the killers. Two Afghanis."

Henry smiled at me as if I were a naive child. "Billy, you ever hear the term 'murder by proxy'? The way it used to be done, back in the sixties, you sent some hop head at your vic with a speedball full of death. How hard it be to talk some Afginnie crazies into cutting the throat of an American who was bein' paid a fortune to mess up their country?"

"The two killers were definitely focused on that particular target," I said.

"Hell, probably a cat drawing at the apartment of the news guy who got poisoned," Henry said. "Could be restin' in a police evidence room."

"The guys they've got investigating the murder might have thrown it away," I said.

Henry chuckled. "Take it from me, Billy. No matter how stupid, cops never throw nothin' away."

"What else can you tell me about Felix, Henry?"

"Jus' one thing: Leave him be."

"I'm not sure I can."

"Oh?" He was sitting upright now, frowning. "Why's that?"

"Because right now I'm still the main suspect in Rudy Gallagher's murder."

"And you're doing what?" Henry said. "Tryin' to solve the murder yourself? Son, that's about as smart as carrying a hair-trigger piece stuck down your pants. Didn't work so well for that dumb shit played for the Giants, and it won't turn out any better for you. My lawyers got excellent investigators who do that kind of stuff."

"I'm not planning on hunting the guy down," I said. "I just want to gather enough evidence to turn over to the cops. Let them take it from there."

He reached out and placed a large hand on my arm. "I always figured you as bein' bright, a man who knows the way the world works. You're not seeing this situation clearly. If you do succeed in pointing the cops in Felix's direction, it'll be like poking a bear with a stick. A big-ass, dangerous bear. You think you got trouble now. Imagine what it'll be like if you attract that bad boy's full attention."

"Point made and taken," I said.

"I sincerely hope so, Billy," the old man said. "Because of my profession and my age, I have become accustomed to losing friends. But I sure wouldn't want to lose a good restaurant."

"This seem like not long to you?" Joe asked when I returned to the car.

"I couldn't have been more than twenty minutes."

"An eternity," he said, "waiting here like lamb tied to tree with tigers all around."

"I'm sorry," I said. "Fear's no fun." I was feeling the effect of Henry's warning.

"Where you want to go now? Flatbush? Iraq? Camden, New Jersey?"

"Let's try someplace a little safer," I said. "The Glass Tower."

"Okay," Joe said. "But I park underground, not on street."

My first errand at the WBC building took me to a no-frills, windowless section at the rear of the nineteenth floor, where the editors worked their digital magic. It was like entering a workplace for low-ranking city-government employees. Gray carpet. Gray metal cubicles where the editors slouched on gray metal chairs, working at monitors resting on gray metal desks.

The walls were painted an ashlike smudge, their dullness unrelieved
by any hanging art, even the color portraits of the network's performers that graced many a wall in the rest of the building.

Judy Alridge, whose elevated position of senior editor merited a cubicle a few square feet bigger than the others and her very own ficus tree, was focused on her monitor, mixing and matching footage from a collapsed-bridge disaster in the Midwest. She was a full-figured woman, dressed casually in denim pants and a plaid woolen shirt cut large enough to hide the result of her fast-food addiction.

In response to her name, she spun around in her gray chair, saw it was me, frowned, and said, "Hey, Blessing. Fess up now. Did you poison that prick Gallagher?"

"No way," I said. "I'm a live-and-let-live advocate."

"And I was all set to reward you with a big wet one."

"My loss," I said. "Judy, I'm looking for some DVDs of Gallagher's that you guys used in putting together his obit doc. Specifically a show he hosted called
USS Huckleberry
."

"I did the obit myself," Judy said. "I used a minute or two from that show. The son of a bitch actually seemed charming dealing with those kids. He shoulda stuck to his on-camera work. Then I wouldn't have had to put up with his obnoxious real personality, not to mention his constant bitching and moaning."

"And the disks are ...?"

"We tossed all of his crap into a big cardboard box in the storeroom. Right down the hall on the left. Knock yourself out."

The room was where she said it would be. Ditto the cardboard box and DVDs. There were about seventy-five of the silver disks in neatly labeled slim jewel cases. I shuffled through them and came up with a half-dozen labeled
USS HUCKLEBERRY.
Twelve full hours of stone-age TV animation interspersed with young Rudy Gallagher making nice with tots. Quite a treasure trove.

I jammed the six jewel cases into my coat pockets and moved on to the main reason I'd returned to the Glass Tower. For that I had to ascend much higher, to the sixty-fourth floor that pre-9/11 had been the exclusive aerie of the network's top executives. Now it was a windows-to-the-world nesting place for publicists, promotion copywriters, some advertising salespersons, researchers, the editors and maintainers of the company's Internet websites, and an elderly coot known simply as Marvin.

"Yo, Billy, what's the hap?" Marvin asked from behind his desk,
staring out of the always-open door to his spacious office. He was wearing his usual sea-green warm-up togs and white cap with a flying dolphin logo, leaning back in his executive chair, long fingers interlocked across his flat tummy, huge feet snug in New Balance runners resting on top of his big, bare desk.

"Nothing much to report, Marvin," I said, before moving on to a large room filled with a long U-shaped table on which rested computer monitors, keyboards, and mice. The room was empty. I backtracked to Marvin. "Any idea where the research people are?" I asked.

"Taking an early lunch," he said, scratching his gray whiskers. "Violet--you know, the cute brunette with the ring stuck in her eyebrow--it's her twenty-second birthday, and they all went to this new place opened on East Fifty-ninth. Nanu."

"Any idea when they'll be back?"

"They're young," he said. "Sometimes they don't bother to come back. What do you need, Billy? Maybe I can help."

Maybe. I was never quite sure what Marvin did at WBC, only that he'd been employed there long enough to have been hired by the commander's father, Harold Di Voss. Marvin once told me he'd started in the business at NBC in the early 1950s, during the reign of Sylvester "Pat" Weaver, the genius who created the
Today
show and
The Tonight Show
and still had found the time to inaugurate the unique news and entertainment radio program
Monitor
.