Neptune Avenue (18 page)

Jack asked a number of innocuous questions about where Joral worked, what the job was like, how long he’d lived in Brooklyn. The man gave relaxed, ungrudging answers. Then Jack started getting a little more specific, asking what he did for fun in his spare time.

Finally, the man started to tighten up. “What’s goin’ on?” he said. “Is there some kind of problem?”

“No problem,” Jack said. “We’re just checking out a little situation.”

Joral frowned. “What kind of situation?”

Jack ignored the question. He reached into the manila folder and pulled out a blank monthly calendar. He pointed to the probable date of the first Crown Heights murder. “Do you remember what you did on August twenty-one?”

Joral shrugged. “I went to work, man. It was a Thursday.”

“Okay … what about after work? Where’d you have dinner?”

Joral threw his hands up. “How the hell should I know? I don’t remember what I ate every day!”

“All right, how about after dinnertime. Did you go out?”

Joral shook his head. “Naw, man. That was a weeknight. I stayed home. I save my money.”

“You sure?”

Joral nodded. “Yeah. I was at home. Watching TV. Then sleeping.”

Jack picked up the calendar and pointed to the date of the second murder.

The answers were equally unhelpful.

Jack picked up the manila folder and opened it, holding it just below the man’s line of sight. “All right. Now let’s talk about LaTanya Davidson.”

Joral shrugged. “Don’t know nobody by that name.”

There were two kinds of punks out on the street, the mutts and the mopes. The latter tried to act accommodating in interviews, even if they were lying through their teeth. The mutts were harder: they were cocky and wouldn’t voluntarily give an inch.

Jack’s eyebrows went up. “Really? She’s the young woman who had you picked up last December for sexual assault.” The young
African-American
woman.

Joral’s relaxed demeanor disappeared. “Nobody charged me with nuthin’.”

This was true: the woman had ultimately decided that she didn’t want to risk the additional trauma and publicity of a court case. She’d declined to press charges, and the case had never gone to trial, which was why it had not shown up in the databases Kyle had checked.

“She said you tried to strangle her.”

Joral rolled his eyes. “Man, that bitch was crazy. All into some kinky shit. She invites me over to her apartment, and we’re havin’ sex, right, and she
asks
me to choke her. I was like, ‘Hey—
whatever
.’”

Jack stared at the man. This was the same line the so-called Preppy Killer had used to justify his strangulation homicide in Central Park back in the eighties.

Joral didn’t stop there; he shook his head scornfully. “She said I was
trying
to strangle her? That’s bullshit. You think if I was trying to strangle somebody, I wouldn’t just do it?”

Jack’s pulse picked up at this oddly cocky comment, but he remained calm and nodded. “It’s funny you should mention that.” He reached for the manila folder, pulled out a couple of photos of the two Crown Heights strangulation victims, and spread them out on the table. The pix showed the women’s faces after their bodies had been laid out on the ground. “It doesn’t look like somebody had any problem strangling these two women at all.”

Joral stared down at the pictures and grew flushed. “You trying to pin this shit on me? Those were
suicides
.”

The air in the interview room went electric. Jack’s eyes and his colleague’s widened involuntarily, and they exchanged a stunned look.

Joral clearly realized what a stupid thing he had just said. “I want a lawyer” were the next words out of his mouth.

THE SUSPECT’S ATTORNEY WAS
a heavyset man with a yellowing white beard and a food-stained tie.
Nice,
Jack thought—he’d seen his share of incompetent public defenders. But even if the guy was a complete schlub, he’d have had to be criminally negligent to miss the weakness of the detectives’ position.

The P.D. clasped his hands in front of him, sitting next to his client in the little interview room. “The fact that these victims were found hanging was published in several city newspapers, gentlemen. My client read about them. So what?”

Kyle frowned. “There were no pictures of the victims in the papers. How would he know these were the same women?”

The lawyer shrugged. “It’s a pretty logical guess.”

Kyle shook his head. “The photos just show the faces of the women. How could he connect them to the stories in the paper?”

The lawyer pointed down at the table. “The photos clearly show the necks of the victims, Detective. It’s obvious they suffered some kind of trauma.”

Inwardly, Jack groaned. It was true. He wished they had cropped the photos. “Why would your client say these were suicides, when the papers clearly labeled them homicides?”

The lawyer shrugged again. “Mr. Joral was merely offering a speculation.”

Jack’s hands clenched. The lawyer was sharper than he looked.

Kyle leaned down and placed his palms on the table. “Would your client be willing to take a lie detector test to prove that he had nothing to do with these cases?”

The P.D. shook his head, as if disappointed by this gambit. “Everybody knows how unreliable those are.”

Joseph Joral nodded smugly. “That’s
incontrusive
evidence.”

“All right,” Jack said. “How about a DNA test? If your client is innocent, I’m sure he’ll have no objection.” The NYPD farmed out its DNA testing to an independent lab, and he was still waiting to hear if they could recover any useful DNA from the two crime scene condoms. If they could, and Joral’s sample matched, he’d have a much stronger case—certainly grounds to arrest and charge the suspect.

The P.D. scoffed. “Show me your court order, and my client will be glad to submit a sample.”

Jack did his best to remain calm. “Would your client have any objection to our taking a look at his apartment?”

The lawyer rolled his eyes. “
Please
, Detective. You’re just fishing. Now, do you have any evidence at all against my client? If not, I’m going to have to demand that he be released.
Immediately
.”

OUTSIDE IN THE HALL
, Jack and Kyle held a quick powwow with the sergeant in charge of the precinct’s detective squad.

“What do you think?” the man asked.

Jack spoke up first. “This could be our guy. I know we’ve gotta let him go, but I think we should put him under surveillance, in case he tries to go off and destroy any evidence. Or kill another girl.”

Kyle added his agreement.

The sergeant crossed his arms. “I don’t know. The guy certainly seems hinky, but he could just be some kind of nutjob, offering his opinion to make himself seem like a big shot.” The detectives started to mutter in disagreement, but he held up a hand. “I’ll tell you what: I’ll assign a couple of people to tail him for a day or two, and we’ll see if we can get anything more definite.”

IT PAINED JACK DEEPLY
to watch Joral skate out of the precinct house, but there was nothing he could do about it. It was one of the worst parts of the job: every once in a while you had to let a guilty person walk.

Temporarily, anyhow.

The two precinct detectives assigned to the surveillance gave the man a few seconds’ lead, then followed. Jack would have given his eyeteeth to be part of their team, but he’d already spent too much time face-to-face with the suspect in the interview room.

Instead, he reviewed Joral’s file. Then he drove over to the suspect’s residence, hoping that—warrantless—he might at least be able to peer in a window. As it turned out, though, Joral lived on the third floor of a brick row house. Next, Jack and a couple of local uniforms spent an hour driving around the nearby blocks, looking for Joral’s car—maybe, he thought, they’d catch a break and find that it had fur seat covers. The DMV had the guy in a late-model Acura, but they couldn’t find the plate out on the streets.

Jack sighed: he’d already put in a couple of hours of O.T. Frustrated and tired, he called Zhenya to see what she wanted to do about dinner.

“I am sorry,” she said. “Tonight … I have made plans. We can have dinner tomorrow?”

He noted the hesitation in her voice but didn’t feel that he had a right to question or press her. They weren’t in a committed relationship yet—at least, they hadn’t talked about it. “No problem” was all he said, but he hung up feeling vaguely uneasy.

Had she gotten another call from Balakutis? No, she hadn’t sounded scared, and anyhow, she would have told him if she was. She had done so before. It occurred to him that maybe she had a date. They had known each other only a short time; he supposed she still had a right.

He shook his head. He was just chasing his own tail, getting paranoid over nothing. He pulled the morning’s crumpled note from his pocket and read it again.
I will mis you all day.

He wanted to kiss her something fierce.

He went over to Monsalvo’s and had a beer. He didn’t join in with the old-timers’ banter, though; he felt too restless. He sat by himself at the end of the bar. His lower back ached and his shoulders felt very tight. Ah well, it had been a long day. A long
week
. It wasn’t that he had too many investigations to deal with; he often had four or five open cases on his plate at one time. But there was something about these two. … He pictured Semyon Balakutis’s menacing face and Joseph Joral’s loutish one. Why was he letting them get under his skin?

It took him half an hour and two beers to remember the insight he’d gotten a couple of days ago, back there in the Cosmopolitan club: as a child, he had felt this same tightness in his back and his shoulders often—it was the tension his family had lived with every payday, waiting for his father to come home from the bars. He wondered what kind of parents Balakutis and Joral had grown up with—and he pondered why he had not turned out like them. Such angry and unhappy men …

Down on his hip, his cell phone buzzed. He flipped it open without checking the caller I.D.

“Hello?”

“Dad? Where are you? I’ve been waiting for twenty-five minutes!”

His son Ben’s peevish voice.

Jack smacked himself on the forehead, remembering their dinner plan. He had stood the kid up—too busy thinking about work, as usual.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “Are you still there? I swear, I’ll be over in just a few minutes.”

T
HEY MET, AS ALWAYS,
in a Greek coffee shop in Boerum Hill, a few blocks from Ben’s apartment. Their meals together were infrequent and were often rather tense affairs, but the twenty-four—no,
twenty-five
-year-old—was Jack’s only child.

He rushed in, breathless, and found Ben glowering in a back booth, with no food in front of him. “I’m sorry,” he repeated. “I had to park four blocks away.”

Ben was a gangly kid, taller than his old man, usually rather reserved and shy (he suffered from a case of acne). “You
forgot
,” he accused, sounding like he had as a child, back when his parents had first divorced.

Not that Jack could blame him; it seemed that no matter how old you got, when you thought about your parents, you always felt like just a kid. … He held up his hands in apology and slid into the booth. “I told you: I’m really sorry. I’m in the middle of a couple of really tough cases right now. I’ll make it up to you,” he said. “Order anything you want: a steak, some lobster, whatever. We’ll get a bottle of their finest champagne.”

His son started to say something, something angry, but Jack quickly held up a hand. “Hold on—don’t get pissed off. I remember: you don’t eat meat. So order all the vegetables you want.”

The waitress, a portly, kind-faced Polish woman who had been working there forever, glided over to take their order.

“I’ll have a cheeseburger deluxe,” Ben muttered, to his father’s great surprise.

After the waitress walked away, Jack bit his lip.
Whatever,
as the kids were so fond of saying these days.

Ben looked sheepish. “I guess I fell off the wagon.”

Jack smiled. The air between them felt a little less thick. He looked around: the coffee shop had not changed an iota in all the years they’d been coming here. The decor had a nautical theme: a deep-sea diver’s helmet, a plastic lobster and crab trapped in a fishnet, a giant swordfish shellacked and mounted on a board. That reminded Jack of Daniel’s fish company, but he blinked the thought away—he was going to forget about work for the next few minutes and concentrate all of his attention on his kid.

Ben was looking at him. “You jonesing for a cigarette?”

“Huh?”

His son nodded at Jack’s hands, and he realized that he’d been drumming his fingers on the tabletop. He shook his head. “I haven’t smoked since I left the hospital. Cold turkey.”

“Really?”

“Really. Michelle helped me quit.” As soon as the words were out of his mouth, he wished he could take them back. At first, his son had resented the new woman in Jack’s life, who had suddenly appeared there in the hospital, after the shooting, but the two had bonded in the visitors’ lounge, over watery coffee and sugary snacks.

Ben was silent for a moment. He picked up his fork and held it between fingers, as if testing its tensile strength. “Have you, ah … have you heard from her?”

“Nope,” Jack said. At first, he avoided his son’s eyes, but then he looked up. “Have you?”

“Why would she call
me
? After what happened between you two.” The edge was back in Ben’s voice. Jack loved the kid and wanted the boy to love him back, but it was often like trying to hug a cactus.

He thought for a moment. All he’d told his son at the time of the breakup was that he and Michelle had decided to part ways. He hadn’t gone into any details—there was no reason to disappoint the kid any further.

“She was really nice,” Ben added, with a mix of wistfulness and implication.
You screwed it up, just like you screwed things up with Mom.

Jack frowned. “She was having an affair, if you want to know the truth.”