Dancer in the Flames (33 page)

‘Only when my receptionist’s not on vacation.’ Galligan made a wet sound in the back of his throat that might have been a laugh. ‘Besides, late is why God made answering machines.’

As he trailed Galligan to his office, Boots swallowed the blasphemy, his anger as well. He was consoled by the near certainty that one fine day he would have the exquisite pleasure of separating Galligan, if not from his teeth, at least from his business.

Too pleased with himself to recognize the threat, Galligan flopped into his chair. Business was booming, thanks to Joaquin.

‘Mack Corcoran,’ he told Boots. ‘You said he was trying to hide, right?’

‘That’s right.’

‘Well, he’s not tryin’ too hard.’ Galligan opened the middle drawer of his desk and took out a single sheet of paper. ‘Corcoran’s Visa card was used eleven times over the weekend. Breakfasts, lunches, dinners, a movie theater, two bars and a boutique.’

‘No debit card? No ATMs?’

‘No.’ A fringe of Galligan’s hair at the top of his forehead stood up in a little wave. He patted this fringe very gently with one hand as he passed the list to Boots with the other. ‘What difference does it make?’

‘Debit cards and ATMs require PIN numbers. With credit cards, nobody even checks the signature.’

Boots scanned the list for the vendors’ addresses: Orchard Street, Avenue A, Avenue B, Twelfth Street, Second Avenue, all on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. From Boots’s point of view, it couldn’t get any worse. He considered strangling the messenger, whose stoned smile never wavered.

‘You owe me one,’ Galligan reminded.

The Lower East Side of Manhattan, called the East Village by real estate agents, is home to hundreds of thousands of residents. A wall of low-income housing projects lines its eastern boundary, from Avenue D to the river, while four- and five-story tenements prevail to the west. The projects are dominated by Hispanics, mainly Puerto Ricans, the tenements by young professionals, mainly white. For the yuppies, the Lower East Side is the bottom rung on Manhattan’s ladder of success – the starting point.

The mix appears volatile on the surface – low-income Latinos and high-aspiration Gringos – but for the most part everybody gets along. The storefronts along First Avenue and Avenue A are dominated by trendy restaurants, those on Avenue D by bodegas, check-cashing stores and Pentecostal churches. Avenue C is the borderline.

Boots drove into this mix at noon and went to work. At three o’clock, he found the answer to the only relevant question at Azzollini, an upscale boutique that might have sat more comfortably in the affluent West Village. Azzollini marketed handbags designed by Renata Azzollini through stores in Paris, Milan and New York.

For a moment, as he gathered himself, Boots stared through the window at handbags displayed like works of art in a museum. A willowy blonde in a long skirt flowed through this exhibit, wielding a feather duster. Her movements were even more languid than Galligan’s.

Boots felt as though he’d wandered into somebody else’s house of worship when he opened the door and stepped inside. The bags at Azzollini began at five hundred dollars and climbed rapidly from there. Maybe it was the feathers, or the semi-precious stones, maybe the bags were actually some kind of investment, maybe they were cheap at the price. Still, Boots couldn’t see Mack Corcoran forking out seven hundred bucks for a handbag while he was on the run from Jill Kelly. But he couldn’t imagine Corcoran being stupid enough to use a credit card, either.

‘May I help you?’

Boots displayed his shield. ‘Detective Littlewood,’ he said. Up close, the blonde was stunning, right down to her professional smile. ‘I’m here about a handbag purchased on Saturday.’

‘Any particular bag?’

‘One that cost seven hundred and forty-one dollars and thirty-four cents and was paid for with a credit card.’

‘Oh, right.’

‘You know which one I’m talking about?’

‘Except at Christmas, we only sell a few bags a day, especially in the summer when people leave town. So, yes, I do remember.’

‘Does that mean you handled the transaction?’

‘I did.’

Boots held up Corcoran’s photograph. ‘Was this the man who made the buy?’

‘Uh-uh. The man who purchased the handbag was much younger.’ She brought a finger to her lips. ‘Do we have a problem here?’

No, the problem was Jill Kelly’s, unless Boots found her before she reached Mack Corcoran.

‘Please,’ he said, ‘describe the man who bought the handbag.’

‘I can do better than describe him, detective. I have him on tape. Give me a day and I’ll give you his picture.’ She drew herself up. ‘At Azzollini, we’re serious about credit cards.’

Now what? Boots kept asking himself that question as he drove back and forth, from Houston Street to Fourteenth Street, while he sat on a bench in Tompkins Square Park, as he ate a quick dinner, while he walked the avenues, peering into showroom windows.

From the earliest days of the Republic, New York has been a magnet for the best, the brightest and the most ambitious. At first, they came from upstate and New England, the second and third sons of Yankee farmers. Today, having graduated from the right universities, they come to the Lower East Side of Manhattan from every state in the country, young professionals, men and women both, determined to bite off a chunk of the apple. None of this was news to Boots Littlewood, who was familiar with a smaller yuppie enclave in Williamsburg. But he was struck, as he made his way, by how attractive they were, these boys and the girls, and how young. When he stopped for a beer at eight o’clock, he felt entirely out of place. Conversations swirled around him, a continual buzz in a language that might have been Greek for all he understood the words. No one approached him, no one met his gaze, not even in the mirror. He was that far outside the orbit of their lives.

Boots didn’t mind. In his experience, these strivers were more insular than Albanian gangsters. They hung out together, married each other, eventually moved to the burbs where they lived side by side. And that was only if they didn’t scuttle back to Peoria, utter failures.

At one o’clock, Boots was still at it, driving back and forth, hoping against hope that he could head Jill off. But the area to be covered was large and there were traffic lights on every corner, so that when Boots finally located Jill’s midnight-green Chrysler on First Avenue, he knew it might have been sitting there for as long as thirty minutes.

Boots pulled to the curb in front of a fire hydrant and got out. The club scene was running full tilt, with knots of smokers on the sidewalk in front of every bar, including the one alongside Jill’s Chrysler. Boots approached the two men and three women, his gaze traveling from face to face as he flashed his tin. He reminded himself that he was dealing with the children of the middle class. Though they believed themselves daring, even revolutionary, respect for authority came as naturally to them as their BlackBerrys and iPods.

Boots pointed to the Chrysler, hoping, in part, to draw attention from his drooping eyelid. ‘Did any of you notice the woman who parked this car?’

They looked from Boots to each other, confused, as if Boots’s shield had scratched, but not penetrated, the bubble that surrounded them.

‘That Chrysler,’ Boots prompted. ‘Did any of you happen to notice the woman who parked it?’

‘I saw her.’

‘Ah.’ Smile firmly in place, Boots turned to a smallish girl in a tank-top and jeans. ‘What time was that?’ he asked.

‘Five minutes ago? Ten? I noticed her because she was wearing a jacket. The jacket was, like, red suede, and she had dark red hair, and I thought, you know, that it all, like, worked. Only the outfit definitely wasn’t club gear. So it was, like, very strange.’

‘Did you notice where she went?’

‘Is she a . . . a person of interest?’

Boots repressed a smile. ‘Please, did you notice where she went?’

‘She walked across the street. But, look, I don’t think I can identify her. Like in a line-up.’

‘You didn’t see where she went after that?’

‘No.’

Boots scanned the rest of the smokers. ‘Anybody else?’

‘I saw her, too.’ The man wore a Hawaiian shirt, red and gold, over carefully torn jeans. ‘I saw her get out of the car and walk across the street.’

‘Did you notice which way she went?’

‘No, but she did something strange.’

‘And what was that?’

‘Halfway across First Avenue, she stopped and looked up.’

‘At anything in particular?’

‘Well, I can’t be sure, of course, but I think she was checking the rooftops.’

B
oots walked to the curb and performed his own sweep. There were five apartment buildings on the east side of the block between Ninth and Tenth Streets. The height of their roofs varied by no more than a couple of yards, so that it was possible to traverse the entire block without coming down. This would give Jill access to the doors leading to the stairwells, or to the fire escapes in front and back if those doors were locked.

Boots didn’t think Jill had scanned the rooftops in search of a concealed shooter. Jill was looking for a way inside. But inside which building? Boots’s eye was drawn to the five-story tenement at the southern end of the block. Except for two apartments, on the second and third floors, all the windows were covered with sheets of plywood.

Fifteen years earlier, when Boots first put on the uniform, he would have assumed the structure to be abandoned. But times had changed. Once the last tenants were out, the landlord would reconfigure the cramped apartments, then market them as luxury condominiums. Even in this weak housing market, the units would likely be sold before the contractor finished working.

Boots crossed the street and walked down the block. The metal door to the nearly emptied building was jammed between two shuttered businesses, a laundromat and a copy shop. Boots tried the door, found it locked, then peered through a window scribbled over with graffiti. The darkened hall inside was narrow, barely arms’ width, the stairs leading to the second floor narrower still. It was the perfect spot for a set-up.

Impulsively, Boots rang the buzzers to every unit, all twenty, in the hope that somebody in one of the still-occupied apartments would let him in. But there was no response and he finally backed off to lean against a car parked at the curb.

‘Hey, get the fuck off the car.’

The author of this request was a smallish man, no more than five-eight. Clearly drunk, his arms were splotched with fading tattoos, from shoulders to wrists.

As Boots stared at the man, he was reminded of a late-night conversation he’d had with Jill Kelly. Boots had asked her about an encounter with a Russian pimp on a rooftop in Brooklyn, an encounter that left the pimp dead. Jill’s initial response, which she offered without a trace of apology, went to the heart of the matter: ‘I was in a foul mood that day.’

‘Did you hear what I fuckin’ said?’

Boots Littlewood was in a foul mood, too, and while he didn’t consider shooting the drunk, he was keenly aware of a desire to beat the crap out of him. Like most cops, Boots detested belligerent drunks.

‘I’m a cop,’ Boots said.

The drunk took a step forward. ‘And?’

Sighing, Boots produced his shield. ‘You want to move the car, say so. Otherwise, be on your way. I’m not gonna tell you again.’

Boots didn’t have to. An instant later, before the drunk’s alcohol-befuddled mind registered the underlying threat, the top corner of the building exploded, showering First Avenue and Ninth Street with broken glass. Boots looked up to see a tongue of orange flame leap through the window, pause for an instant, then turn upward to lick at the side of the building. A cloud of oily-black smoke followed, pouring into the night sky.

‘Holy shit.’

The drunk staggered toward Boots. His face had been cut by the falling glass and there was blood running from his cheek. Boots pushed him aside, ignoring a cut that ran for several inches along his own bicep.

The screams of a woman just a few yards away seemed more compelling and Boots raked her with his eyes. When he failed to observe any injury beyond the one to her psyche, he ran to the corner, grabbed a wire trash can and carried it to the door. He could hear the fire crackling overhead, along with a steady hiss that might have signaled an eruption of steam. The flames in the windows were now white-hot.

Boots slammed the trash barrel’s weighted bottom into the door’s window. Made of high-impact plastic and designed to resist an assault, the window bent, but did not break. Boots retrieved the barrel and raised it again just as the door opened and an old man ran out, shortly followed by a younger man carrying an elderly woman over his shoulder. The woman looked at Boots as she came past, blinked once, then smiled.

‘Thank you, sonny,’ she said.

Boots pushed his way inside and started up the stairs. On the second floor, he passed a man and a woman, each cradling a young child.

‘Is there anyone else in the building?’ he asked.

Barely pausing in his headlong flight, the man called out, ‘No.’

Boots continued on, climbing the last flight of stairs to find the apartment at the corner of the building fully engulfed. Even from twenty feet away, the heat was intense. But the fire was drawing oxygen up the stairwell and through the apartment, pushing the smoke out the windows, so that he was able to see the dancing man well enough. Suspended between floor and ceiling, the man twisted back and forth as if in agony. Then the rope around his neck gave way and he plunged to the floor.

Boots took several steps toward the flames, the hiss of the fire now a steady roar. His eyes swept the landing in search of another body and he peered into the apartment through the flames. Much as he wished it was different, he couldn’t reject the evidence right in front of him. The door to the apartment would be lying in the hallway if it had been dislodged by the explosion. Instead, the door was inside the apartment, still on its hinges. Someone had been here to open it, but not the man on the rope. The man on the rope was Mack Corcoran. He’d been dead for at least a day, probably longer.