Cold Hit (12 page)

“Thanks a million, Kim. I’ll call you in a day or two.”

There was enough to keep me busy at my desk until after six, so I successfully avoided contact with McKinney through the end of the day. I drove home, went upstairs, turned on all my air conditioners, and filled the ice bucket in anticipation of the arrival of Mercer and Mike. I called Lumi, who owned the wonderful Italian restaurant over on Lexington Avenue, and made a reservation for the three of us at eight o’clock, after confirming that she had Mercer’s favorite pasta on the menu tonight — cavatelli with peas and prosciutto. I settled in to watch the end of the evening news, knowing that very little would keep Mike from missing the Final Jeopardy question at seven twenty-five.

I had told the doormen that they didn’t need to announce either of the detectives, who were well known to the staff in the building. Mercer was the first to come through my front door, and we decided there was no reason at all to wait for Mike before we poured our first drink. I fixed him a Ketel One with two olives and lots of ice before filling my own glass with Dewar’s.

“What’d you find out in Brooklyn?”

“I found out that the last time anyone lived at the address given on Omar Sheffield’s automobile registration, he wasn’t even a glimmer in his momma’s eye. The whole block is a wreck. The Eight-four squad had some informants in the ’hood that they rousted for me, but nobody ever heard of Omar. I spent three hours pounding that hot pavement and every minute of it was wasted time. Hope Chapman did better than I did. Zip, zero, nada.”

He sipped on his vodka while I started to tell him about my phone calls from Marilyn Seven and Kim McFadden.

Mike came in minutes later and walked straight to the den, checking the screen and pouring himself a drink before he took over the conversation with the results of their search.

“I think I’m asking for a new partner. Gimme one of those four-legged sniffers any day. Man, I’ve worked with detectives so bad they couldn’t find dog shit at the pound.”

Mercer smiled over at me. “I guess this means Tego was on the money.”

“Emergency Services broke into the car. No question about it — there was definitely a body in there. Backseat is down, and there’s a big piece of sailcloth laid out full length, with a bloodstain on top. It was folded over, so we opened it up — you know what I mean? It was like the body had been sandwiched in between. Huge bloodstain, kinda matching the hole in Denise’s head. Even some hair. And a pair of lace panties — beige, size four.”

“What did you do with them?”

“Everything’s vouchered. Going directly over to the lab. They’ll run the DNA tests at the M.E.’s Office. We could have preliminary results within forty-eight hours.”

In the mid- 1980 s, when the lawyers in my office had first been introduced to DNA technology and the science of genetic fingerprinting, it took three or four months to obtain results from the private labs to which materials were sent for testing. Now the city had established its own laboratory, and the methodology had changed so dramatically that we could include or eliminate suspects and match samples to victims or defendants in a matter of several days.

“Tonight’s Final Jeopardy category is Bob Dylan’s Music,” announced Alex Trebek as he led into a commercial break and Mike
sssshush
ed us into silence.

“I’m out. I do not know anything about this one,” Mercer said, standing to freshen his drink.

“I’ll go twenty,” I offered, comfortable with the category.

“Let’s keep it at ten,” Mike said. That was a sure sign that he didn’t have a clue.

“Nope, it’s twenty or I’m not betting.”

He reluctantly put his money on the table.

“Let’s show our contestants the answer, ladies and gentlemen.” Trebek read along with the words that were revealed on the screen: “Famous rock musician who plays the organ on Dylan’s ‘Like a Rolling Stone.’ Ooh, that’s a tough one, folks.”

The theme music played as Chapman cursed, noticing the smile on my face. “Double or nothing?” I asked.

“Talk about obscure, how could you possibly know this? No way.”

The bioethics professor from Oregon shook his head and didn’t even attempt an answer. The mother of eleven from Nevada and the crab farmer from Delaware both guessed wrong, as Trebek was sorry to tell them.

Mike’s beeper gave off with a loud series of noises as I put my response in the appropriate question form. “Who is Al Kooper?” I asked. “Impossible for me to forget, right?”

“A Jewish organist, no doubt,” he said, squinting at the number after he took the device off his waistband. “Turn to Comedy Central. Let’s watch
Win Ben Stein’s Money
before we go eat.”

We had a new quiz show favorite in the seven thirty time slot, so I switched channels and passed Mike the portable phone. “Who’s the beep from?”

“It’s the lieutenant’s line,” he said, dialing the number at the squad. “Hey, Loo, what’s up?”

“
What
? How certain are they?”

I muted the television sound while Mercer and I waited to hear what seemed so surprising to Mike.

“Mercer Wallace is with me. We’ll get over there right away. No, no — we’re just ten minutes away.” He hung up the phone and handed it back to me.

“I’ll start with the good news. They found Omar Sheffield.”

“Where?” Mercer and I spoke at once.

“In the culvert next to the railroad tracks, between Tenth and Eleventh near Thirty-sixth Street. Dead. Very, very dead. Run over by a freight train.”

“Death Avenue,” Chapman said flatly.

“Seems like an appropriate name after last night.”

Mike and I were standing on Eleventh Avenue at the edge of the Thirtieth Street rail yards at eight thirty in the morning. He had called to suggest that I meet him there on my way into the office so he could show me where Sheffield’s body had been found.

“Forget last night. That’s what this stretch was called a hundred years ago.” His sweeping arm gesture took in all the property north and south of the tracks that had once been owned by the New York Central Railroad. “My old man grew up here — Hell’s Kitchen. Used to tell us stories about this neighborhood all the time.”

After the Civil War, when a large area of Manhattan’s West Side was thick with slaughterhouses, factories, lumberyards, and tenements, it housed one of the worst slums in the city. Cops who covered its beat called it Hell’s Kitchen, from Thirtieth Street north to Fifty-ninth Street, and from Eighth Avenue west to the Hudson River.

“Freight trains rolled through here every day and night. The place was notorious — for its filth and for the dangerous gangs that controlled its everyday life. The kids who weren’t killed by disease or driven out by dust and noise were just as likely to be flattened by one of the trains. Big Mike was around long before they elevated the tracks, after nineteen thirty, to get them off the street.” Mike grinned as he thought of his father’s stories. “Used to fascinate me, ’cause he said that every time a train came through, there was a ‘cowboy’ — a guy who actually rode on a horse ahead of the engine, waving a flag to get people out of the way. Can you imagine that — in the middle of Manhattan, in the twentieth century? When he was four or five, my dad dreamed about being that cowboy when he grew up. By that time the trains were raised above street level. But Death Avenue is what they called it, even then.”

“Here’s Mercer,” I said, pointing to the corner of the next block, where I saw him parking his car. “What’s the plan?”

“We’re meeting Daughtry at the gallery in a few minutes. Thought you’d want to be along for the interview.”

Mercer greeted us with, “What’s the word from the morgue?”

“I was just telling Coop. Train messed up Sheffield’s body pretty well. But there’s no way he just happened to be crossing these tracks. Fleisher says it’ll take a few days for the toxicology reports to come in. My guess is somebody probably filled him up with dope or tranquilizers and left him here in the dark to make it look accidental. And by the way, it didn’t happen last night. Omar was lying here a couple of days — out of sight, out of mind.”

Mercer held up a roll of papers he was clutching in his left hand. “Let me tell you about Mr. Sheffield. Forty-six years old, three felony convictions — worked his way up from burglary to gun possession to armed robbery. Released on parole about eight months ago. Needless to say, he reported faithfully to his parole officer, who didn’t have a clue that Omar’s residential address simply didn’t exist.”

“You think Deni Caxton knew that when she hired him?” I asked.

“Let’s hope we’re about to find out. Daughtry returned my call late last night. He’s waiting for us at the downtown gallery. Ready for this?”

Mike and I left our cars parked near the rail yards and rode down to Twenty-second Street between Tenth and Eleventh Avenues in Mercer’s department car. I had never met Bryan Daughtry but knew well the story of his involvement in a murder in Westchester County almost ten years earlier, even though he had never been charged or prosecuted.

In the late eighties Daughtry had a gallery in the Fuller Building, where Lowell Caxton still maintained an upscale presence. Daughtry was forty years old at the time and had worked his way up quite rapidly from apprenticing with another successful dealer to owning his own business, once he became the personal business associate of the wealthy Japanese collector Yoshio Tsukamoto.

Daughtry was buying and selling major works — Jackson Pollocks and Franz Klines — and living a lifestyle that matched his newfound ability to afford it. A town house in the east sixties and a grand Victorian country place south of the highway in East Hampton. He was intensely private about his personal relationships, but rumor had it that he preferred teenaged girls — young, lean, fond of drugs, and dressed in leather.

By 1992 his professional life seemed to be unraveling just as quickly as it had taken off. Creditors had trouble collecting money from him — even small amounts — and auction houses as well as other prominent dealers began to sue because of misrepresentations Daughtry had made about ownership of some of the works he sold. Then the IRS piled in after a disgruntled accountant whom Daughtry had fired reported that Daughtry had withheld tax payments on more than $ 5 million of income. Informants told the Feds that he was buying almost fifty grams of cocaine a week, at $ 100 a gram. His lawyers were working on a deal to get him out of his legal problems.

And then, the body of a fifteen-year-old Swedish girl, a would-be model, was found in a wooded area surrounded by enormous private estates in a suburban town north of Manhattan. The bird-watchers who stumbled on the carcass were stunned to find that the only part of the remains that had not been consumed by rodents was the stunning head of the child, her faded blue eyes staring out from a black leather mask that tightly covered her skull.

I reminded Mike and Mercer of the rest of the story. Posters of Ilse Lunen had been plastered all over the Village, where she had last been seen at a leather bar, one frequented by Daughtry and his crowd. Although no one had placed the dealer there the evening of the girl’s disappearance, his closest personal assistant, Bertrand Gloster, had been at the bar for hours and was known to pimp for his boss when Daughtry was too wrecked to appear on his own.

In fact, it was rare for Bryan to come on to his subjects face-to-face. His preferred mode of pickup was to sit in a private room on the third floor of the building in which Cuir de Russie (“Russian leather”), as the bar was called, was situated. He’d stare out the window for hours, doing an occasional line of coke. When he saw a girl who was young and nubile enough standing on the sidewalk for a chat with a friend or a smoke, he would call the number of the pay phone outside the bar, talk to his target, and invite her up to the owner’s lair.

Long after the death of the Lunen girl, people in the art world told stories of visiting Daughtry in his office, where he often had sex toys casually displayed on his desk and cabinet tops — handcuffs, collars, studded bands, and even leather masks like the one found on the corpse. In those same encounters he would refer to the ever-subservient Bertrand as “my executioner,” the enforcer who had been brought in to serve as a bodyguard against the rough characters Daughtry encountered in this underside of his life. No one took his words seriously at the time.

Also later, acquaintances admitted hearing stories of the sadomasochistic games that Bryan and his pals had favored, wild evenings of drugs and sex, complete with whips and chains, during which Daughtry increasingly lost his self-control.

Bertrand Gloster was picked up within days of the discovery of Ilse Lunen’s body. He had once been employed as a caretaker on one of the neighboring estates, and his borderline intelligence level made him an easy subject for police interrogators. He admitted killing the young girl, who had gingerly agreed to participate in the S&M activities in return for Daughtry’s promise of an airline ticket home to Sweden.

In Gloster’s chilling confession, he described Ilse Lunen putting on the leather mask and zipping its mouthpiece shut before Daughtry handcuffed her behind her back and directed her to kneel behind a large boulder in the woods. Then, Gloster said, the already floating art dealer snorted a few more lines and leaned over to whisper to Ilse, “You’ll be going home, all right — in a wooden box,” before he ordered Gloster to shoot her in the back of the head.

“End of story?” Chapman asked.

“Not exactly. Gloster’s doing twenty-five to life for murder, and the Westchester D.A. has never been able to nail Daughtry.” The testimony of an accomplice has to be corroborated by some other evidence — it’s not sufficient in and of itself to charge the coconspirator with the crime of murder. “There has never been a single other thing to link Daughtry to the child’s death.”

“So this friggin’ lunatic did eighteen months for tax evasion and now he’s back in business like he’s a normal guy, right? Man, I’d like just five minutes alone with him while you wait in the car. Whaddaya think, Coop? No loss to society, I promise.”