Night Watch (28 page)

“That would be great.”

“Sparkling water all around,” Mike said.

The waiter excused himself.

“Business first,” Mike said, observing my frown. “Then cocktails.”

“Now that we’re alone, Detective, what have you found out about this Gina Varona broad, and why do I have to have dinner with her?” I asked. “I’m sure I’ll need a drink.”

“You’ll need whatever is best for Luc, and that’s to let him and his partners put everything on the table for us.”

“Have you talked to this woman yet?”

“Not a word. Cool your jets till they get down here, okay?”

Mercer was studying the labels on several of the bottles of wine. “Château Lafite Rothschild. 1908. Domaines Barons de Rothschilds. What would that one fetch?”

“Probably seven, eight thousand dollars,” I said. “The owners buy wine at one price then charge whatever the traffic will bear at a place this classy. It accounts for a lot of a restaurant’s profit when they can sell the high-end labels.”

Mike was quick to shoot back. “And you wouldn’t know it from swill.”

“You’re right about that. I think I can tell the difference between a five-dollar bottle and a thirty-dollar bottle, but after that, I wouldn’t have a clue.” I followed the passageway into the next room, staggered by the size of the collection.

The door creaked open again, and although I couldn’t see him, I recognized the waiter’s voice as he spoke to Mike and Mercer.

Mike said something, but I couldn’t hear him.

“Were you talking to me?”

“Yeah. I told you not to wander too far away.”

“Don’t worry. I’m not going to smuggle any Romanée-Conti out of here.”

“You’ll get lost, girl. This whole place is booby-trapped,” Mike said, coming in my direction.

“Right,” I said, laughing at him. “That’s my idea of ‘21.’ Danger everywhere.”

“Sealed up forever in a wine cellar with me.”

“Haven’t you had enough of Poe’s entombing to last you a lifetime?”

“I’m not kidding you, Coop. There’s contraptions all over the place,” Mike said. “It’s ingenious. And it’s the only reason there was never an arrest made at ‘21’ all throughout Prohibition, despite the fact they were serving the best hooch in town.”

Mike was leaning against the wall, arms crossed, with Mercer coming along behind him, still fixated on the labels and plaques. “It all started at the front door. The agents looking to raid the place were stopped first by the huge iron gates. If they got past those, the doorman was a lookout, using the peephole to see who was outside.”

“But they still had to let the agents in, didn’t they?”

“Not before the doorman pressed a buzzer that went straight to the bartender, while three other alarms signaled clients on each floor. The waiters collected all the glasses, while the barkeep pulled a switch. Every liquor bottle behind the bar was on a collapsible shelf. One flip and all the whiskey in the whole place was flushed down into the basement, where it drained out below the building’s foundation. The place may have reeked of alcohol, but there wasn’t ever a trace of the stuff inside the restaurant that anybody could prove in court.”

“Are you making this up, Mike?”

“First heard it from my dad, and then found out it’s been a legend in law enforcement all this time. They teach the ‘21’ system of foolproof-design deception at the academy, for today’s sophisticated drug raids.”

“Mercer? Is he—?”

“Mike’s always right. You know that.”

“So what else?” I asked.

“All kinds of secret spaces. There were several closets with metal hooks for waiters’ uniforms. But if you took a table knife,” Mike said, pulling out his pen to represent the knife, “and placed it so that each end of the knife touched a hook—bam!—it completed an electric circuit, and the back of the closet swung open to reveal a narrow room lined with liquor.”

“Very clever.”

“But this cellar is the masterpiece. It had to be practically the size of a warehouse to hold all the wine—two thousand cases of it, at least—and the booze. So the architect created a secret door in the brick foundation of ‘21,’ which gave access to the vacant building next door—19 West 52nd Street. The door was made of exactly the same materials as the adjacent wall, so it seemed invisible. And it had to be thick enough so that when the cops tapped on it, it didn’t sound hollow. It had to mesh so tight to the other wall that if the feds blew cigarette smoke into it—looking for cracks with an air draft was the typical test—it wouldn’t be a giveaway.”

“So far so good,” I said.

“This door to the secret caves here must have weighed two tons. The main challenge was to make a locking mechanism that wouldn’t jam up, that could work from either side of the door—in case there was a siege and the owners took cover inside here—and that wouldn’t be visible to the raiding agents.”

“How did it work?”

“The builders put a plate on the inside of the door. It could only be activated by inserting a long thin metal rod through a tiny hole in the brick wall. When the rod hit the plate, it all clicked and the lock was released by a rolling mechanism.”

“But wasn’t the hole obvious to everyone?” I asked.

“Nope. The genius who designed it had them cut dozens of holes in the wall, even though none of the others went through to
the plate. They just looked like defects in the brick. The door to the wine cellar is impenetrable,” Mike said. “If the lock ever broke, they’d have had to tear down the entire building—or dynamite the wall—just to get inside here.”

I started to retrace my steps to the first room. “Then it seems a doubly odd place to plan a dinner party.”

“It turned out to be a very useful location for married men to tryst with their lovers after Prohibition ended. A private dinner at ‘21,’ when this space was furnished a bit more cozily, was the perfect alibi for anyone who could afford it—including Mayor Walker, back in the day—who liked to entertain showgirls down here while his wife covered the home front.”

“Just when I thought I was learning a lot about the restaurant business,” I said to Mercer.

“There’s a dark underbelly to this city, no matter where you go, Alex.”

Mike must have heard the same noise I did—footsteps in the hallway. He moved toward the door just as Luc entered, followed closely by a woman and man.

“Sorry to keep you,” he said. He held out his hand to Gina as she came into the room. “This is Gina Varona. Gina, I’d like you to meet Mike Chapman and Mercer Wallace—they’re both detectives. And you’ve heard me talk about my fian—my dear friend, Alexandra Cooper.”

Luc almost tripped over the word “fiancée,” but he managed to catch himself. Gina lifted her hand and waved at the three of us. I hoped that the smile I returned was not as cheesy and forced as it felt to me.

Varona was a bit shorter than I am. I regretted not having stopped to change out of my courthouse clothes and put on some makeup. She was carefully coiffed and painted, in a cream-colored knit dress that accented her dark hair and petite waist.

“And this is our third partner,” Luc said. “Peter Danton.”

Danton nodded his head and said hello. I guessed him to be in
his mid-forties, about my height, and he was dressed—like Gina Varona—to kill. His tailored suit fitted the sleek lines of the body he’d so obviously been sculpting with his personal trainer.

“Pleased to meet you,” Danton said. “Especially you, Alexandra. Luc talks about you all the time.”

He extended his arm to shake with Mike and with Mercer. That’s when I noticed he was missing the top half of the first two fingers of his right hand.

We faced off on opposite sides of the long table. Mike in the middle—flanked by Mercer and me, and Luc between his two partners.

“I’m sorry it took so long,” Luc said to Mike. “If you were hoping people would see me, they did. There were five or six clients—old friends—in the room. I made the rounds, and Gina introduced me to a man named David Columbia.”

“
You might as well have invited Liz Smith to join us for dinner,” I said to Mike. “David writes The ‘New York Social Diary.’ The news that Luc is here will be viral in David’s column by midday. Are you sure that’s what you want?”

“Yeah. Let everyone in town know that you’re here on business, Luc. Takes the heat off the cops—and you.”

I was more worried about the killer or killers being drawn to Luc by the announcement of his arrival in New York. Surely Mike had considered that angle.

“What’s happening here right now isn’t official,” Mike said. “You don’t have to talk to us. You don’t have to answer our questions.”

Peter Danton laughed. “I know. We have the right to remain silent.”

“Actually, you don’t have any friggin’ rights at all on my watch. You wanna help us, you talk. You want the body count to climb and the Health Department to put a
PLAGUE
sign over your about-to-be-brand-new front door, stay mum,” Mike said. “Mercer and me—we got a thing about Coop. Personally, most of the time she makes decisions with her head up her ass. Professionally, both of us would rather work our cases with than without her.”

“Could I just—?”

Mike put his hand on my arm to tell me he wasn’t finished. “She says Luc’s the real deal, that’s all I need to know. You in? Tell me something about yourselves, then about where this business operation stands. Ladies first.”

Gina Varona had no shortage of self-confidence. She leaned forward and clasped her hands together on the tabletop. She wore no rings of any kind, but her diamond studs matched the large, round diamond necklace that showed off her décolletage. She looked Mike directly in the eye and began to speak.

“I assume you’ve done enough homework to know who I am,” she said. “I live downtown, when I’m not traveling, in SoHo. Two dogs, Detective, which I find much easier to keep than my men. I was the CEO of a company called the American Fragrance Design for the last twelve years.”

“Was?”

“That’s right. There was a buyout by a larger European conglomerate. I stepped down at the end of last year.”

“Fired?” Mike asked.

“Hardly, Mr. Chapman,” Gina said, sneering ever so slightly. “An irresistible golden parachute. It’s still airborne.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“It means all my benefits and a fifteen-million-dollar bonus for moving on,” she said, flipping her hair off her shoulders. “I was restless, ready to try something new. Luc was looking for backers and it sounded interesting to me.”

“Why’s that? Can you cook?”

“Kibbles ’n Bits, Detective. That’s my entire repertoire.”

“How long have you known Luc?” I asked.

She turned her head to look at him. “My goodness, what would you say? Almost twenty years?”

I resisted the temptation to ask if they had ever been intimate, and whether that was why he hadn’t ever mentioned her name.

“Twenty years? Really? How did—?”

Now Gina was talking directly to me. “I met Luc through Brigitte, originally. When I first worked in the cosmetics business, she’d done some modeling for my company. She and I hit it off, got along well. So we spent a lot of time together hanging out in France on some shoots and business trips. Got to be very good friends.”

Of course, Brigitte would have been the perfect model—elegant, serene, almost anorexically thin, and beautiful. La Belle Brigitte—an aperitif that Luc had named in her honor—was still on the menu in Mougins, though his ex-wife was no longer around.

“See, if you knew Coop a little better, you’d realize she’s probably stuck on whether or not you and Luc ever hooked up,” Mike said, like he had been reading my mind.

“That’s ridiculous. That’s not even—” I tried to protest, but Luc talked over me.

“Alex, darling, you should have just asked me. I’d have told you all about Gina.”

Gina Varona leaned back, tilted her head, and looked down at me as though I were a child. Perhaps I’d been acting like one.

“Ask what? I’d never heard of Gina until last night. Now I find out you’ve been having dinner with her right here in New York. What was I supposed to ask?”

“Business meetings. Certainly dinners. But you knew that. You knew I was lining up partners and trying to get backers for Lutèce, Alex. I would have told you their names if you’d asked me. What difference would that have made?”

I shrugged my shoulders. The waiter reappeared with several large bottles of sparkling water and poured a glass for each of us.

Mike waited until he left the room. “You gotta excuse her, Ms. Varona. Coop would go nine rounds in the ring with Muhammad Ali if something dear to her was at stake. She’d come out bloody and bruised with her tail whipped, but she’d never walk away from a good fight.”

I waved Mike off. “Back to you,” I said.

“So, how’d you get together with Luc on this plan?” he asked.

“I’m in the South of France quite often, actually.”

“Visiting Brigitte?”

“I do that, too. I’m the godmother of their older son, so I see her and the boys as often as I can. But also, Detective, there’s a small town called Grasse. It’s the perfume capital of the world. I’m there on business several times a year. And it’s just a few kilometers from Luc’s restaurant.”

I knew that was true. Exotic, expensive perfumes and the home of Papa Mo, Gil-Darsin’s father.

“Luc told me that he was going to try to open Lutèce here in New York. I didn’t know the restaurant in his father’s day, but I was a regular when the great Soltner ran it. I already had word that I’d be transitioning out of my job with this big financial windfall, so what better than to shift gears and back my friend in his venture?”

“He’s a lucky man,” Mike said. “Do most restaurant owners have backers?”

“If you’re not talking about a mom-and-pop operation or a corner pizzeria,” Luc said, “the model these days is to have help on the business side. It’s prohibitively expensive to start up a serious place like ours. It’s a total crapshoot.”

“How much cash are we talking about, to get something like Lutèce going?” Mercer asked.

Peter Danton and Gina Varona both looked at Luc. He thought for a minute before answering. “For us?” He cleared his throat with a cough. “The real estate alone was four million dollars. The build-out has cost another three million. That’s before we talk about staffing and salaries and all the licensing.”