212 LP: A Novel (6 page)

3:45 P.M.

R
ogan was waiting for Ellie at his desk when she emerged from the locker room, freshly showered, hair still damp.

“We cool with the Lou?”

“Icy. Did you get hold of our guy in Narcotics?”

“Yep. He wasn’t real happy about sticking around for a five o’clock arrival. I told him we’d do our best.”

Ellie looked at her watch. It was nearing four. “Our best will be five o’clock.”

“Are you going to bother telling me why?”

“We’ll have to work our way through traffic going uptown.”

“
Uptown?
The Fifth Precinct’s in Chinatown.”

“We’re making a pit stop. You’ll see.”

Twenty minutes later, Rogan peered through a glass storefront window on Eighty-ninth and Madison and flinched.

“Is that woman doing what I
think
she’s doing?”

“Um, that would depend on what exactly your imagination might be doing with the input being processed by your visual cortex.”

“I have no idea what you’re talking about, but I think if my
brain’s doing anything, it’s trying to forget what I just saw. That shit should be illegal.”

“It’s called threading,” Ellie said.

They watched as an Indian woman with smooth dark skin and burgundy-stained lips moved her head back and forth, using the grip of her teeth and the movement of her head to maneuver a thread across the face of a young blond woman seated on the other side of the glass window.

“She’s using a
thread
to pull that woman’s eyebrows out?”

“It’s called threading,” Ellie repeated.

“Should be called torture. What the fuck are we doing here?”

“You could use a little tidying up around there,” Ellie said, reaching for his brow line.

Rogan swatted her hand away.

“This is Perfect Arches,” she said. “It’s Thursday, ten after four. You don’t remember?”

“If you’ve some personal woman business to take care of, Hatcher, you really didn’t need to drag me along.”

“Perfect Arches? Thursday at four p.m.? Kristen Woods?”

“Kristen Woods is Sparks’s assistant.”

“The timeline, Rogan. When we first tried to track down Woods about the timeline, she was out of the office. She said she’s got a standing appointment every Thursday at four p.m. to have her eyebrows threaded. I asked her—”

Rogan snapped his fingers. “You asked her where. Then you went on and on about how perfect her eyebrows were. I was tempted to reach down and check my anatomy to make sure I was still a man, the two of you blathering like that in front of me.”

“I was
bonding.
Like the way you talk up sports to every doorman we ever need information out of? Pretending you’re a Mets fan? So I pretended to care about eyebrow plucking. Kristen loves me.”

“So if Kristen loves you so much, why are we bombarding her at this dungeon of torture?”

“If we want to see Kristen without popping into the Sparks building, this is the place to do it. Look, there she is.”

Rogan followed the line of Ellie’s fingertip and spotted a woman with straight strawberry-blond hair down to her shoulders, leaning back in a salon chair, another Indian woman working her magic with a string of thread above her.

“She dyed her hair,” he observed.

“Did she?”

“Yeah. It didn’t have any red in it before. It was more your color.”

Ellie dropped her gaze. “You might want to check that anatomy after all, girlfriend.”

Rogan flexed his bicep and gave it a little kiss. “One hundred percent Afro-American Manly Man, sweetheart. Don’t you forget it.”

He tapped her with the back of his hand. “Heads up,” he said, his tone more serious.

Inside the salon, Kristen Woods checked her eyebrows in a handheld mirror, nodded her approval, and then walked to the front desk to pay.

“You ask me, the money should be going the other direction,” Rogan muttered.

Woods nearly ran into them as she exited the salon, and then turned back as a glimmer of recognition crossed her face.

“Ellie Hatcher, from the NYPD. My partner, J. J. Rogan.”

“Yeah, sure, I remember. I hear you and my boss had quite the run-in yesterday in court.”

Ellie was glad to see that the rapport she’d previously developed with Kristen had not been affected. “Mr. Sparks shares those sorts of colorful details with you, does he?”

“Are you kidding? He doesn’t tell me squat. I heard him yelling about it in his office yesterday. I think I got the gist.”

“I’m sure your boss was heartbroken by my brief period of incarceration.”

“Uh, yeah, if what you mean is that it only lasted a day. Sorry, you probably aren’t laughing about this yet.”

“Would you be? I couldn’t even keep my own underwear with me.”

“Eeewww.”

Rogan tapped one heel, his gaze affixed upward.

They both took the hint, and Kristen changed the subject. “You’re wrong about him, you know.”

“Wrong about what?” Ellie asked.

“About Sparks. He can be a prick in his own way, but he’s actually a decent person. There’s no way he’d kill anyone.”

Ellie smiled. Everyone was capable of killing someone. It was just a question of whom, and under what circumstances. But the last thing she wanted was to advertise their agenda to Sparks’s personal assistant.

“Really,” Ellie assured her, “he’s not a suspect. I tried explaining it to the judge. The whole thing got blown out of proportion.”

“‘What if Sparks did it?’ A cartoon showing him behind bars? It’s kind of funny, I guess, but you’re wrong. I swear.”

“It was just doodling. Totally unprofessional, but not at all a reflection of where we are in this investigation. Your boss is not a suspect.”

“Right. And that’s why you tracked me down here, where Sam wouldn’t know? But you know what? I don’t care. When cops ask questions, I answer. And if Sam asks me point-blank whether you came to me, I’m not going to lie to him either.”

“No one’s asking you to lie, Kristen.”

“Yeah, okay, but whatever. He’s not going to ask. I’m sure that was your intention in coming here instead of the office. I was just saying, there’s no way he’d hurt Robo, if that happens to be what you’re thinking. So go ahead and ask whatever you want. I’ve got no problems with you guys.”

She was about as straightforward a witness as two detectives could ask for. Loyal to her boss, but not so loyal that she’d want to lie.

“We’re going back to the very beginning,” Ellie said. “Making sure we didn’t miss anything. We wanted to talk to you again about Mancini reserving the apartment for that night.”

“Okay.”

“So the way you explained it to us, you keep a calendar for the 212?”

“Right. Sam offers the penthouse to various business associates when they come to town. More impressive than a hotel. I keep track of it all so I can make sure the maid service comes and cleans up after guests, changes the linens—that kind of thing. And that requires knowing when people are there and for how long.”

“And then Sparks lets employees use the place, too?”

“Yeah. Not a lot, but, you know, it’s the occasional little perk. I told you, he’s not the evil shit you think he is. Everyone knows not to take it for granted.”

“And who’s everyone?” Rogan asked.

“Not corporate employees, but more of just the personal staff. Me, the bodyguards—I mean,
protection specialists
,” she said, smiling. “I think he even lent it to his contractor once.”

“And none of these people has a key, right?” Ellie was pretending that she needed to hear all of this information again.

“No one keeps a key. There’s a coded key compartment that hangs from the apartment door. You flip the digits around to match the code. The box pops open, and the apartment key’s inside. One of my responsibilities after someone stays is to reset the code.”

The night of Mancini’s murder, they had found the door unlocked and the key inside on the kitchen counter. Mancini had not locked the door behind him.

“So when someone wants to use the apartment, they contact you to reserve their spot on the calendar and get the code.”

“Exactly.”

“Okay, and when did Mancini reserve the apartment for the night of May 27?”

“May 27 was the night of—the night he died, right?”

Ellie nodded.

“He called me that day. I think I told you before it was around two, but I wasn’t sure.”

In fact, Ellie and Rogan had pulled Kristen’s call records from the cellular phone company used by Sparks Industries. Mancini had placed a call to her at 2:32 that afternoon.

“And it was just for that night?” Ellie asked.

“Yeah. It’s always just one night when we’re using it. Like I said, we don’t want to take advantage.”

“And did you tell anyone that Mancini would be using the apartment?”

“No,” she said, shaking her head.

“Not even a housekeeper to get the place ready?”

“Nope. The apartment had been cleaned two weeks earlier. For the CEO of General Electric, I would have had a fresh cleaning. Robo could live with a little dust.”

“And where were you after two o’clock?”

“Me?”

“Like I said, we’re covering all the bases. Sorry,” Ellie said, offering her best supportive head-tilt.

Ellie had no interest in Kristen’s whereabouts, but focusing on the assistant’s schedule gave them a back door to talk about her boss’s timeline. And if Kristen was on the defensive, she might not notice the maneuver.

“I was in my office taking care of a ton of details for a party Sam was having the following week. Finalizing the bartenders, the catering menu—I swear I wish the man would get married so his wife could take over his social affairs.”

“Married?” Rogan interjected. “I’m surprised you even mentioned the possibility, given the rumors.”

“Which ones?” Kristen asked. “You listen to the local tabloids, and he’s either an irrepressible playboy or the most popular ride at Big Gay Al’s homosexual theme park.”

Ellie coughed. “We hadn’t heard it put in quite those terms.”

“Well, I have. And the rumors aren’t true. He dates a lot, but mostly to avoid the rumors that come about when a wealthy bachelor is by himself too often. Hasn’t done him much good, though.”

“So the party planning,” Ellie said, pulling Kristen back to the timeline. “That was enough to keep you busy the entire afternoon?”

“Pretty much. I’m sure I worked on other stuff as well, but I’d have to go back and try to reconstruct it all from my e-mails, and—”

“But you were in the office working? You didn’t have to leave, perhaps with Mr. Sparks?”

“No,” Kristen said, apparently not noticing the pointed direction of Ellie’s comment. “He was in the field with his architects that whole afternoon, touring the properties under construction. And after that he had to run straight to a fund-raiser for the Conservation Voters. I remember because I knew from his calendar that I had a big chunk of time to get some work done and then get out early for the day.”

“Did you speak to Mr. Sparks at any point that afternoon?”

Again, Kristen shook her head. “I even teased him the next day that he’d made remarkable progress in his independence. Not a single call, e-mail, or text message.”

Kristen’s recollection was consistent with the information she’d given them nearly four months earlier. And Ellie and Rogan had confirmed it against her phone records: there had been no contact between her and Sparks from the time Mancini booked the apartment to the time of his murder.

Ellie thanked Kristen for her time. “You want a ride somewhere?” she offered.

“No, thanks. Sam’s done with me for the day, so I’m meeting a friend up here.”

As Ellie led the way back to the Crown Vic, she ran through the timeline in her head again. If Sparks had known where Mancini was going to be that night, he had not learned it from Kristen Woods.

It would be three more days before Ellie realized her mistake.

5:15 P.M.

T
he Fifth Precinct of the NYPD is located on Elizabeth Street and Canal. Forty years ago, the spot would have been at the dividing line between Little Italy and Chinatown. But when the federal government changed its immigration laws in 1965, allowing more Asian immigrants into the country, the population of Chinatown exploded. Now Mulberry Street, with its tourist-trap restaurants and sidewalk vendors hawking Bada Bing and Fuggedaboutit T-shirts, was the last remaining enclave of what had once been a real Italian neighborhood. And the Fifth Precinct now stood at the epicenter of an ever-expanding Chinatown.

Rogan parked the car on Elizabeth, just south of Canal, and began making his way north to the precinct.

“Hold up,” Ellie called out as she pulled open a glass door stenciled with gold Chinese lettering. She emerged sixty seconds later with a roasted pork bun wrapped inside a napkin, the first real food she’d seen since shunning the slop masquerading as lunch at the jail.

“A buck twenty-five,” Ellie said, popping a piece of the doughy ball of marinated meat into her mouth. “You can’t beat Chinatown.”

By the time they turned the corner to reach the sky-blue door of
the white-brick building that housed the Fifth Precinct, Ellie had finished her makeshift lunch. A civilian aide with a round Charlie Brown head sat at the front service desk.

Rogan pulled back his jacket to reveal his detective’s badge. “Narcotics?”

The aide gestured toward a staircase just beyond the entrance. “Next floor up.”

A few years earlier, police assumed that all home invasions were drug-related. Teacher? Priest? Hero landing an airplane in the Hudson? Wouldn’t matter. Home invasion victims were always and automatically labeled as drug dealers. But in recent years, police had seen an increase in both home invasions and the number of tragic cases in which innocent people had found themselves targeted by the most predatory and violent offenders, simply because their address was one digit away from a reputed drug house.

On the second floor, Rogan asked a second civilian aide to see Sergeant Frank Boyle.

“The sergeant had to leave. Are you Detective Rogan?”

Rogan nodded. “And Hatcher. I called Boyle a little more than an hour ago. He was expecting us.”

“Something came up.”

“Like maybe five o’clock?” Rogan said, glancing at his watch.

The aide smiled politely. “Perhaps. He said to see Detective Carenza over there.” He pointed to a refrigerator-sized man standing over a desk toward the back of the squad room.

As they walked toward the man who was apparently called Carenza, Ellie noticed that his tanned, veiny biceps were challenging the seams of his fitted black T-shirt. The rest of the ensemble consisted of faded blue jeans, pointed alligator shoes, and a heavy gold chain.

“Ellie Hatcher,” she said, offering her hand. “Your sergeant left word to see you?”

“Tony Carenza.” The detective gave her a firm handshake and then turned to Rogan to offer the same. “Then you must be Rogan, because Boyle told me some guy from Homicide was coming.”

“You heading out on an undercover?” Rogan asked, eyeing the wardrobe.

Carenza glanced down at his own clothing and shrugged. “Nah, man. Just wrapping up some paperwork here, and then I’m audi.”

Rogan was nodding politely when Carenza broke out laughing. “Gotcha nervous there, didn’t I? Nah, my stuff might not be quite up to what you got going on here,” he said, pointing at Rogan’s three-button Canali suit, “but this getup’s definitely for the job. The mod’s running some buy-and-busts tonight at some of the clubs.” In addition to the teams of stop-and-frisk uniform cops that had made New York’s zero-tolerance policing famous, the narcotics division used so-called investigatory modules to run undercover operations.

Carenza pulled at the diamond-encrusted dollar sign dangling from his gold chain, most likely a trophy seized during a prior bust. “Too much?”

“Fierce,” Ellie said.

“Yeah, I thought so. So what can I do you for? My sergeant made a point of instructing me to be helpful, so consider me your most helpful helper.”

Rogan scratched his cheek while he spoke. “We’re still chasing a case from May—dead body left behind in a home invasion on Kenmare and Lafayette.”

“Yeah, I know that case. The 212. Should be called the 646. Last time I checked, no one could get a 212 number anymore. The place belonged to Sam Sparks, right?”

Rogan nodded, and it struck Ellie that Sparks might be better known to the general public than she had realized, even without the assistance of a reality show.

“We checked with Boyle at the time to see if we might be looking at a case of mistaken identity. He came up with nothing. Now Sparks’s lawyer says he hears otherwise. He claims you’re running an operation on one of Sparks’s neighbors.”

“I wouldn’t call it an operation,” Carenza said, handing Ellie a DD5, the departmental form used to report on ongoing investigations. This one related to for Apartment 702 at 212 Lafayette.

“It’s directly next door,” she said.

Rogan glanced at the sheet of paper over her shoulder. “The only other apartment on that floor, as I recall.”

The DD5 contained entries for three events—two in March, one in June.

“Two neighbors came to our front service desk in March, complaining about a drug dealer who had just moved into one of the luxury condos on the top of the building. You’ve seen that building?”

They both nodded.

“Okay, so you know the deal. It’s this old building, been there forever. Most of the tenants are rent-stabilized. Also been there forever. Then Sam Sparks buys up the roof space, stacks a few multimillion-dollar apartments on top, and calls the place 212. Two totally different kinds of tenants, now sharing one elevator and one lobby. You get your culture clashes.”

Ellie felt her cell vibrate against her waist but let the call go to voice mail.

“And where did these two neighbors fit into the clash?” she asked.

“The old ladies who eat dinner at four thirty at the corner-diner side. They’d lived a good century and a half between them. And I’m telling you, they were a hoot. Watched
Law and Order
and
CSI
reruns all day long on ‘the cable,’ as they called it. They had the lingo down: skels, perps, mary jane, CIs, gun run. I mean, you name it, and they knew it. They were ready to sign up as CIs themselves. But let’s say that as confidential informants go, they weren’t the most reliable profilers when it comes to detecting drug dealing. Dirty old men? Not pushing the garbage all the way down the chute? That, I would trust them on. But they were the kind of sweet innocent citizens who think anyone who’s got friends coming and going at all hours of the night must be up to no good. Let’s call it a generational divide.”

“So why do you have a DD5 on the apartment?”

“Because the sweet biddies wouldn’t go away. God love ’em, they
kept coming in and harping to the front desk with all their cop slang, cracking up everyone in the house but also being a major pain in the ass. So eventually the poor sacks in the community policing unit got dragged in to calm them down. You know what those guys are all about—it’s appeasement. So finally they put the old birds to work on a citizen-driven search warrant.”

“How come Boyle didn’t tell us about this when we called you guys at the end of May?”

“Because half the time when we start a citizen-driven warrant, the oh-so-concerned citizens get lazy and let it drop. We don’t bother logging anything onto a DD5 until they come back with all their paperwork. In this case, that didn’t happen until June.”

“What exactly is a citizen-driven warrant?” Rogan asked.

“No time in Narcotics, huh?” He said it as if no qualified cop could make it into Homicide without pulling duty in the drug squad. Given that Ellie made it to her current position after only five years in uniform and one as a detective in general crimes, she was thankful the question hadn’t been aimed at her.

“Major Case Squad, then SVU,” Rogan said.

“Okay, so a citizen-driven warrant is this thing we came up with, but it’s really a community policing tool. You know, after nine-eleven, we’ve got these ads all up and down the MTA, telling people, ‘If you see something, say something.’”

“But we’re not always talking about the next Zacarias Moussaoui.”

“No, knock on wood, not in most cases. Instead, we get these nosy neighbors convinced that someone’s up to something. So the citizen-driven warrant puts them to work. They write down every suspicious thing they see. They turn in the pages to us. If it adds up to probable cause, we ask for a warrant. If not—”

“You assure them you did everything you could, and then tell ’em to pound sand.”

“Pretty much. So that’s what we’ve got here on the DD5. The two ladies walk in to the help desk in March. A couple weeks later, after a few more streetwise Laurel and Hardy routines downstairs, they hook up with the community policing liaison, who tells them
about the citizen-driven warrants. We take a look at it after a couple months, and there’s nothing there.”

“You’re sure?” Ellie asked.

“No doubt. You work drugs a little while, and you get super-honed spidey senses. Homeboy’s getting his party on like any other single man with that kind of money in Manhattan. And so we could say we did everything we could, my partner and I even did a little knock and talk with the guy. That’s the entry in June there. Truth be told, I just wanted to score a peek at the place.”

“And?” Rogan nudged.

“The condo was sweet. Marble floors. Floor-to-ceiling windows—”

“The
resident
. Drugs? Dealing?”

“Nah. Dude’s Eurotrash, buying up Manhattan real estate while the dollar’s in the toilet. Goes clubbing every night. Picks up bridge-and-tunnel skanks looking for a short-term sugar daddy, a place to party for the night. Had no problem letting me search. The place was clean but for some personal-use marijuana in the nightstand. He didn’t seem fazed that I found it, and I really didn’t want to process him for it, so he flushed it. No hard stuff. No paraphernalia. No packaging materials. No cash or books.”

“No dealing.”

“No dealing.”

“You got a cell number in case we need you to nail this down for court?” Ellie asked. “Sparks’s lawyer made it sound like Pablo Escobar lived next door.”

She jotted down the number in her notebook, and they began to make their way out of the squad room. Guerrero had been blowing smoke with his claims of a drug operation going down across the hall at the 212, but she still wondered how the lawyer had even known about it. Then she realized the likely source.

She turned toward Carenza. “Hey, you don’t happen to know Nick Dillon, do you?”

“Sure. My brother’s on the job, too. He and Dillon were in the Major Case Squad before Dillon sold out to the man. We play cards sometimes. Takes my money big-time.”

“Any chance you mentioned this whole citizen-driven warrant thing to him?”

“Yeah. He used to work Narcotics, too, you know? I thought he’d get a kick out of his boss’s neighbors practicing their slang over mah-jongg. Hey, that didn’t cause any problems for you, did it? I mean, there was nothing to it, so—”

Rogan waved him off. “Don’t sweat it, man.”

Rogan caught Ellie’s eye on their way out of the precinct. “The man’s got ears, right? That guy makes a friend, he keeps a friend.”

“Well, being his pal didn’t save me from a jail cell. Maybe next time you can be the one who does our time.”

“Would never happen,” he said, holding open the precinct door for her to exit. “I’m way too pretty for central holding on some chippy contempt rap. Someone like me goes down, it’s got to be major. I would need some serious federal corrections facility—golf course, croquet…”

“Rogan, you were raised in Brooklyn. Do you even know what croquet is?”

“I know it involves a round thing called a ball, which means it’s yet another sport a brother could dominate if we only gave it a shot.”

“When you’re done, you think you might get around to letting me in?” Ellie tugged on the Crown Vic’s locked passenger handle to make her point.

Inside the car, she flipped open her phone and saw a new voice mail from Max Donovan. Opting to wait for some privacy, she clipped the cell back to her waist.

The drive from Chinatown was slowed by end-of-day traffic. Even with the assistance of wigwag lights, they didn’t pull up in front of the Thirteenth Precinct until nearly six o’clock.

Ellie was about to log onto her computer when she caught sight of Max Donovan through the open slats of the blinds that covered
Lieutenant Robin Tucker’s office. Tucker stood, walked to her office door, and poked her head into the squad room.

“Good timing, you two. A quick word?”

Rogan shot Ellie a look that made her wish she’d checked Max’s message in the car. “This can’t be good.”