Neptune Avenue (16 page)

“
Simchas
?”

“Formal celebrations, such as weddings.” The clerk smiled, proud of his reasoning. “Someone wearing a
shtreimel
on any other day would stand out like a pork chop on a bar mitzvah buffet.”

Jack thought about this for a moment. It had been hard to imagine a young West Indian woman and a Hasid in full regalia meeting for a tryst in the dark community garden. But what if the perp had not actually been wearing the hat that night?

Yosi raised a hand. “I know what you’re thinking. Maybe the man had these hairs on his clothing, and they fell off at the time of the incident.”

Jack’s eyes widened further.

Yosi grinned, then glanced at his fellow Hasidic salesmen and lowered his voice. “Once or twice—and this must be our little secret—I may have watched
CSI
on the television. The fact is,” he concluded, “that these hairs would not have gotten on the man’s regular clothing because the
shtreimel
is only worn with the
kapote
.”

“The
who
?”

“It’s a long satin robe, also worn on these special occasions. So the hairs from the
shtreimel
would have fallen on the
kapote
, which your man would not have been wearing on a recent Saturday, Sunday, or Thursday. And surely he would have bathed between the Sabbath and those other days, so any hairs on his person would have washed away.”

Jack whistled. “Maybe we should start up a Hasidic Homicide auxiliary.” He looked off into the distance and mused aloud. “Where else would beaver fur come from, then? Ordinarily, I’d guess a fur coat, but that would be pretty unlikely in the middle of August.”

The clerk shrugged. “I’m afraid I don’t know the answer to that one. But if you would like to buy a car stereo, I’m your man.”

Another salesclerk cranked the volume. Jack thanked his technical adviser and stepped back out into the morning heat. He joined Kyle Driscoll in the front seat of his unmarked Crown Vic.

“How’d it go in there?” the young detective asked.

“It’s not looking good for the Hasid theory.”

Kyle frowned.

Jack was in the middle of relating Yosi Silberberg’s convoluted explanation when his cell phone trilled.

“Detective Leightner?”

“Yeah.”

“This is Anthony Rinzella, with security for the Fulton Fish Market. We’ve had a bit of a situation here.”

As soon as he got off the phone, Jack jumped out of Kyle’s car, got in his own, slapped a rotating beacon on the dash, and sped off, not toward the fish market, but toward Bellevue Hospital Center.

“L
ET ME GET THIS
straight,” Linda Vargas said to the manager of Daniel Lelo’s fish company. “A while back you had an accident where one of these big metal hooks went into the back of your hand. And now you’re saying that the same thing happened again, another accident in the exact same spot, and this time the hook just happened to dig around in there a bit?” The homicide task force detective stood next to the man’s hospital bed, arms crossed, frowning, and Jack was glad that he was not the subject of her interrogation.

Andrei Goguniv lay back, hooked up to I.V.s, and he nodded miserably. The man’s bald head gleamed under the fluorescent lights like a sickly white cue ball.

Jack sat in a plastic chair on the other side of the bed. He was keeping silent for the moment.

“That’s incredible!” Vargas said dryly. “What are the odds?” She looked up at Jack, as if sharing amazement at the coincidence.

“Not only that,” his colleague continued, “but this ‘accident’ just happened to take place in your
office
. Do a lot of fish processing up there, do you?”

The manager squirmed.

“As if all that wasn’t enough,” Vargas continued, “this happened after the market was closed for the morning. Interesting time for a work-related injury.”

The fish market security man had reported that the manager of one of the Seaport’s clothing boutiques was opening her store when she heard muffled screams coming through a wall that adjoined the market offices. By the time she alerted mall security and they discovered the source of the noise, Goguniv was sitting slumped over the desk in his office, soaked in blood, passed out, alone.

Jack stared at the manager. He thought of his own hospital stay, after he had gotten shot. He knew how belittling it felt to be lying there in an open-backed hospital gown, at the mercy of the doctors. His heart opened to the man, even though the poor bastard was still refusing to cooperate.

Vargas took out her notebook and slapped it impatiently against her palm. “Well? Are you planning on sharing how this miracle might have occurred?”

Goguniv looked as if he was about to pass out all over again. Weakly, he flapped his uninjured hand in protest. “
Please
. I don’t feel so good. I need to sleep.”

Vargas’s cell phone trilled. She answered, then stepped out into the hall to talk.

As soon as she left, Jack sat down, pulling his chair closer to the manager’s bed. He spoke softly and earnestly.

“Andrei, listen: I’m here to help you. Really. You’re not gonna get in any more trouble by talking to me. The way things have been going, this can only get worse for you—unless you help me put a stop to it. All you have to do is tell me who did this to you.”

Goguniv remained silent.

“Was it Semyon Balakutis? Just nod your head if it was.”

The manager turned his face toward the wall.

Jack groaned and sank back into his chair. The task force detectives hated mob-related cases for this same reason: nobody ever saw anything, heard anything, or knew anything, and the investigations tended to drag on forever.

He leaned forward again, preparing to come at the fish company manager from a new angle, but the man’s head had sunk down on his chest. Zonked out on painkillers? Jack was tempted to scratch the bare sole of his foot with a pen, to see if he might be faking, but a nurse chose that moment to bustle in.

He got up—reluctantly—to leave.

THE FISH COMPANY MANAGER’S
second “accident” sure seemed like a bogus miracle, but Jack still had a real one in his life. Standing in Zhenya Lelo’s brightly lit little foyer, he drew her into his arms, kissed her sweet lips, and all his troubles melted away.

“Are you hungry?” she asked.

“I’m hungry for you,” he replied, and he led her down the hallway to the bedroom. He lay back on her comfortable bed and decided that this was his favorite moment in all the world, watching her stand there and gracefully pull her blouse over her head, revealing her lovely rose-tipped breasts. A few minutes later, he changed his mind;
this
was his favorite moment, when he first moved inside her, and she wrapped her arms around him, drawing him deeper, and they both gasped with the utter rightness of it:
home
.

He realized, lying next to her after, that he usually just thought of his body as a hollow shell, a vehicle for moving his mind from one place to another as he worked. He fed it, he slept, he felt himself slowly age, yet his flesh was of little importance to him. But this woman had the power to return him to himself, to help him feel a richness of sensation again, a powerful connection to the living world. He almost shivered with a realization: it was more than that—he was not just passionate about the sex. Something seemed to be happening that he had given up hope of ever experiencing again.

T
HE NEXT DAY, JACK
left Linda Vargas to her pursuit of the Lelo case, while he spent another fruitless morning pursuing his Crown Heights murder. (The thought of Semyon Balakutis messing with the fish company manager riled him up, but the possibility of another dead girl turning up seemed more urgent.)

The average murder was committed within a social network. There were dis murders (homeboys who shot each other over some stupid slight); turf murders (drug dealers fighting over corner sales spots); and the increasingly popular “I loved her so much I had to kill her” crimes. In most of these cases, the victims knew the perps, and the vics often had criminal records themselves, and there was often someone involved with a powerful motivation to snitch. There were witnesses, or the killers were dumb enough to brag about their deeds. The problem in this case was that no one would go around bragging that he had killed due to his own sexual inadequacy. The Crown Heights killer had chosen private crime scenes, and his victims might be totally outside his normal circles.

Jack’s discussions with Kyle kept popping into his mind, and he couldn’t help wondering if the Crown Heights assailant was Jewish, and how the answer would play out on the streets and in the press. He shook his head: this was a pointless line of thought—he just needed to follow the evidence and make sure he nailed the right guy.

A great deal of work had already been expended. All of the neighbors near the crack house and the community garden had been canvassed, without a single witness coming forward. No common thread had been found in the lives of the two victims. Jack had even had someone at the DMV look up recent traffic-enforcement activity near the crime scenes. (He was thinking about how, back in 1977, the Son of Sam had been caught due to a traffic ticket.)

He thought about Shantel Williams’s last minutes, that night in the garden. The girl had been seriously intoxicated; he hoped, for her sake, that she had not known that anything bad was going to happen until the last possible minute. It had been a moonlit night. He imagined her stumbling down the garden path, past plants shining in the silvery light, with someone at her side. Someone who didn’t inspire fear or a wish to flee … Someone she knew? Someone she felt comfortable with? There had been no eyewitness reports about her entry into the garden; he needed another angle.

The beaver fur still seemed like it might provide the answer. He could have easily imagined the perp wearing a fur coat or jacket if it had been winter, but the temperature had been in the seventies or eighties every night for the past couple of weeks, and such attire would have stood out to even the most casual passersby. The fur seemed to suggest a sort of bravado; it made sense, maybe, as a symptom of the man’s overcompensation for his sexual inadequacies. What could it have come off of, though? Jack smiled, sitting at his desk and thinking of seventies exploitation flicks, pimps strutting around wearing crazy outfits, fur-trimmed capes or fur hatbands or big hats trailing fur tassels. … Such attire wouldn’t play too well in today’s Crown Heights, though, especially in the solidly respectable neighborhood near the community garden.

He ran “uses for beaver fur” through an Internet search engine and found some interesting commercial Web sites. One advertised beaver fur bedspreads and throws—again, not likely for summer use. Another offered a variety of other products made from the fur: a belt buckle, a saddle blanket, a fur-covered pen, car seat covers … He sat for a moment examining the accompanying photos. It was hard to imagine someone using the car-related product in hot weather—unless the car was always air-conditioned. He thought about vinyl car seats and how they could be brutally hot to the touch after sitting in direct summer sun. Would a fur cover make them feel hotter or cooler? He smiled again: Hell,
beavers
still wore the damn stuff during the summertime. He sat thinking about it for a few more minutes, and then he circulated a computer memo to patrol officers and traffic-enforcement agents working in the area, briefing them on the case and asking them to keep an eye out for anything unusual.

BY THE TIME HE
ended up in Zhenya’s apartment again, in the early evening, he was doubly grateful to be off duty.

It didn’t matter if he was coming off an afternoon shift or an evening one; they were already settling into a routine. First, a kiss in the foyer, which usually led them straight back to the bedroom, followed by a cocktail out on the balcony, savoring the view of beach and sea, and then dinner, either prepared in her small kitchen or ordered in. (Normally, he would have enjoyed taking her out, but both had their reasons not to be seen together in Brighton Beach, and by the time he got to her place, he didn’t feel like driving elsewhere.) It didn’t matter; there was something magical about this bubble they had created together, and neither wanted to leave it. He had not invited her to his place yet; it was still haunted by his memories of Michelle. He supposed her place felt odd to her too, with Daniel’s clothes still in the closet and his shaving things in the bathroom cabinet, but she didn’t comment on it.

Tonight she had convinced him to try sushi for the first time. She had ordered in, not from a Japanese restaurant, but a Russian place on Brighton Beach Avenue. (It made sense: these Russians were used to living in seaside towns, and they had always had a taste for fish, whether pickled, smoked, or fresh. Jack couldn’t help thinking of Daniel’s company in the Fulton Market, but the adventure and ritual of the meal—the pink scraps of ginger, the blast of green wasabi—distracted him.

“Would you like another drink?” Zhenya asked, on the balcony, after. She sat with her bare feet up, arms around her knees.

Jack set his glass on the little side table. “I’m good. In fact, I’m great. Thank you.”

The beach and boardwalk were crowded below. Zhenya was staring at something way off and up. He followed her gaze out and found a kite hovering in the late day sky, its beribboned tail whipping in a stiff shore breeze.

He watched Zhenya watch the kite. She didn’t say anything. She didn’t say much in general. In fact, he had never met a less talkative woman. It wasn’t just the language barrier. She didn’t seem to feel any need to tell him about the events of her day or ask him when his next day off was or anything. She was self-sufficient, like a cat that did as it pleased, that didn’t bother to try to ingratiate or assert itself. Sometimes he wished she would talk. The sex was great, but it occurred to him that it could also act as a substitute for conversation. He didn’t really want to discuss Daniel, but the topic was always there, lurking beneath the surface, and eventually they’d have to bring it up.