Tick Tock (25 page)

The Carlyle was between East 75th and 76th on the east side of Madison Avenue. It was also right around the corner from Berger’s Fifth Avenue co-op building. Was Apt getting sloppier now? I wondered. Was he homesick? Or was he taunting us? If he was, it was working. I most definitely felt taunted.

We had to circle around the block in order to double park on 76th near Fifth behind a patrol car. As we approached the Carlyle, I saw that a section of the hotel was actually under renovation. There was a sidewalk shed and an exterior construction elevator connected to the pale limestone of its north face. Outside the construction entrance, about twenty hardhats, half of them shirtless, were enjoying coffee and cigarettes and the passing women. They immediately shifted their attention to my partner as we passed.

The Carlyle had one of those lobbies that immediately makes you check the shine on your shoes and look to see if there are any spots on your tie. A piano played from somewhere as chandeliers the size of minivans glittered between palace walls of pristine white marble. The black stone floor was so highly buffed, I looked for a “Slippery When Wet” sign.

An almost-as-buffed short black man in a tailored blue suit immediately button-holed us by the check-in desk. The man looked incapable of perspiring, like he’d long ago had the offensive glands removed.

“I’m Adrian Tottinger,” the manager said. “The um…
unfortunate person is actually downstairs, where they’re working.”

It was hot again once we entered the hotel’s drab concrete back stairwell. At the bottom of it, a uniform snapped his cell phone shut and led us along a stifling corridor past the hotel’s kitchen and a rumbling laundry room.

Beyond some hanging plastic and another door, the section of the hotel under construction smelled faintly of an open sewer. The sound of nail guns and shouts rang from above as we walked over gravel to a corner where three more uniforms were standing.

The “unfortunate person” was lying in a large tublike pan used for mixing concrete. The woman had actually been cemented into the tub with just her head and arms and lower legs exposed. As if perhaps she’d mistaken the pan of ready-mix for a Jacuzzi and had fallen asleep.

She was pale and had white-blond hair and a Marilyn Monroe or Madonna look. Even with most of her face beaten black and blue and her neck swollen and purple, she’d obviously been quite attractive. Now she was naked and dead and tossed like so much trash among the construction site’s drywall screws and spackle-flecked-compound buckets.

“Let me guess. This fits with the Joel Rifkin profile somehow,” I said.

Emily was already on one knee, reaching into her bag, flipping through her stacks of photocopied research.

She tore out a sheet.

“Rifkin’s second victim was beaten and strangled.”

“Check,” I said.

“The dismembered body parts hidden in buckets of concrete.”

“This isn’t technically a bucket, but a pretty reasonable facsimile.”

“Reasonable?” Emily said as the sound of hammers rained down from above.

THE HOTEL’S SECURITY CAMERAS turned out to be a gold mine.

Standing in a cramped, broiling basement security room, Emily and I watched a computer screen, where Apt, in living color, casually walked with the dead girl through the Carlyle’s lobby.

“You grinning son of a bitch!” I said, clinking the screen with my finger.

Apt was wearing an expensive-looking polo shirt and jeans, dressed elegant casual, summer suave. He had on a chunky gold wristwatch. We’d already spoken to the clerk, who said Apt had paid for his $2,000-a-night suite in cash. Watching him head for the check-in desk, I thought Apt’s overall demeanor seemed calm, self-confident, not out of place in the slightest in the insanely expensive hotel. The fucker.

The best video footage of all came from the camera in
the corridor outside his room. At three a.m., a difficult-to-make-out man carrying something large wrapped in a sheet walked toward the rear service elevator.

“So he did her in the room, then,” Emily said, nodding.

I nodded back.

“It still boggles my mind that he would take the time to prepare a batch of concrete in the basement and lay her in it. Imagine, you’re down in that pit in the middle of the night. He even took the time to trowel it smooth and seamless with a craftsman’s pride. I can see why this guy was a commando. He must have antifreeze for blood.”

After we obtained copies of the tapes, we went up to the eleventh-floor room Apt had rented out. There was lavish furniture everywhere, an antique rolltop desk, a cream-colored sectional, gilt-frame mirrors. The window of the sitting room had an incredible view to the south, the Met Life Building on Park and the Chrysler Building.

We found the hooker’s bag behind the chic sectional. Among a plethora of interesting trade equipment was a wallet with a New Jersey State driver’s license. Wendy Shackleton.

“Do you think Jersey Girl Wendy here crossed Berger somehow, too?” I said. “Or is Apt maybe starting his own Dead People Club now? Branching out?”

“My money’s on Berger,” Emily said.

The CSU team was already in the bedroom. They’d found a bloody chair leg and blood spatter on the sheets and headboard of the bed. One of the techs told us they’d also found textbook-quality fingerprints on the chair leg.

“He’s getting sloppy?” I said.

“No,” Emily said, staring at the blood on the graphic canvas over the California King sleigh bed. “I’d say it’s more that he just doesn’t care if he leaves evidence. His main concern and number-one priority was staging the body, turning it into a copy of Rifkin’s second victim. The girl was just his project material, modeling clay, oak tag.”

We stared out the window as the techs clicked their cases shut, getting ready to leave. As we watched, the sun came out from behind a passing cloud and turned the Chrysler Building’s iconic spire to molten silver.

“Not bad digs for a boy from coal mine country,” Emily said.

“Berger transformed the lad,” I said. “It’s your classic rags-to-riches-to-mass-murderer story.”

“What now?” Emily said as we kept standing there.

“How about we both resign, and I call room service for a bottle of champagne?”

“Don’t tempt me,” Emily said as she headed for the door.

AFTER A HOT, frustrating ride back downtown, we headed directly up to my boss’s office on the eleventh floor of HQ to show her the hotel’s security tapes.

“The stones on this guy,” I said as we watched. “This place makes the Plaza look like a Days Inn, Miriam. And look at him. He’s walking around like he owns it. He even paid for his room with a sheaf of hundred-dollar bills.”

“What’s the progress on getting Berger’s assets frozen?” Emily said.

“The wheels of justice move slowly. Actually, in the summer in this city, they come to a grinding halt,” Miriam said, frowning. “Last I heard we’ll have the warrants by the end of the day, but that’s what they said yesterday. Berger’s lawyer, Duques, is the executor of the estate. Why don’t you swing by and appeal to his civic responsibility. It’s a long shot, but maybe it’ll get him to shut his damn mouth to the press for five minutes.”

We took another leisurely roll in the baking midday gridlock back up to midtown. Allen Duques’s office was in a glass pagoda-shaped building on Lexington Avenue across from Grand Central Terminal. I parked my unmarked in the middle of a bus stop across the insanely congested street and threw down the NYPD placard on the visor so it would still be there when we returned.

Duques’s firm was on thirty-three. The outfit had the entire floor. Right out of the elevator, the name of his firm, Hunt, Block & Bally, stood in yard-high stainless-steel letters on the Brazilian Cherry wall.

“Mr. Duques?” said the brunette waif of a receptionist behind the glass door after we asked to see him. Her fine-boned model’s face looked amazed, as if we’d just asked her to tell us the meaning of life.

“I’m sorry, but Mr. Duques is booked all day,” she informed us.

“Yeah, well, this is important,” I said showing her my shield.

“Really, really important,” Emily said, flipping her Feds creds for good measure.

Even with all our magic badge power, we had to wait another ten minutes before another attractive flunky, who looked like she ate maybe every other day, showed up.

I trailed a finger along one of the exotic-wood-paneled hallways she led us down.

“So this is what the corridors of power look like,” I said, nodding thoughtfully.

Around a corner, Duques stood in his office doorway, smiling pleasantly. The preppy bespectacled gent shook our hands before getting us seated in his plush office. He reminded me of the fancy hotel manager, polished and perfect, not a damn wrinkle in his white shirt even when he sat down. I, on the other hand, was sweating like a pig in a hot tub, despite the A/C. How did these rich guys do it?

“Now, what can I do for the NYPD and the FBI?” he said after we declined his coffee offer. The trim, middle-aged lawyer seemed affable and down-to-earth, which most likely wasn’t easy for him, considering his socks had probably cost more than my shoes.

“We were wondering if you could help us,” I said.

“I can try,” he said, eyeing us carefully. “What’s the problem?”

“We have reason to believe that Carl Apt still has access to Lawrence Berger’s money,” Emily said. “To be frank, we’re working on a warrant to have Berger’s assets frozen, but it won’t happen until tomorrow at the earliest. We know you’re the executor of Mr. Berger’s estate, and we’re here to ask you to freeze action on all accounts before anyone else is killed.”

“Hmm. That’s a tall order,” the lawyer said, leaning slowly back in his chair. “You’re assuming a lot. I’m not even sure I should admit that my client had a relationship with Mr. Apt.”

“Crazy assumption, I know,” I said, “considering your
client admitted to it and to his guilt in his signed confession before he killed himself.”

Duques took off his glasses and chewed on an endpiece.

“A signed confession that I’m going to fight to have expunged,” he said.

“We’re not here to bicker, Mr. Duques,” Emily said.

She placed a sheet of paper on the lawyer’s desk. It was a printout of Apt and the hooker at the Carlyle from the security tape.

“This morning, we found this woman dead at the Carlyle Hotel,” Emily said, tapping the paper. “Apt paid two thousand dollars in cash for the room that he killed her in. We know Apt isn’t independently wealthy. Berger took him in off the street.”

“Allegedly,” Duques said, raising an eyebrow.

“Right,” I said, going into our folder and showing him a crime scene close-up of Wendy Shackleton’s beat-in face. “And see, this is where Apt allegedly bashed in this young lady’s alleged face with an alleged chair leg.”

That’s when I stood.

“I told you we’re wasting our time,” I said to Emily. “I told you we should have gotten the warrant first.”

Duques stood himself as we were leaving.

“Wait, I’m sorry,” he said, rubbing his eyes. “Of course, I’ll help. We actually have a team working on the audit right now. I’ll tell them to put blocks on all transactions. Also, if I find any discrepancies, I will let you know first thing. Though in all honesty, it might take a little while.
Mr. Berger’s estate is in excess of eight hundred million dollars.”

“What’s your cut?” I said, still in pissed-off bad-cop mode.

“Thank you, Mr. Duques,” Emily said, getting me out of there. “I knew you’d do the right thing.”

DESPITE THE CHARMING Mr. Duques’s assertions to do everything humanly possible, for the rest of the day, we put full-court pressure on the city DA’s Office to speed things up on a warrant. Emily even placed a call to the FBI’s New York Office White Collar Squad for any guidance they could give in cutting off Apt’s money supply.

By 7:30, we hadn’t heard back from anyone, but at least it seemed we were barking up the right money tree now. Also, no one else had been ritualistically killed—at least that we knew of. I love progress.

I was going to give Emily a ride back to her hotel, but she begged off, saying she needed to get some shopping done for her daughter.

“Get some sleep, partner,” she said as we departed in the parking lot. “You’re going to need it.”

I turned down the police radio as I began my drive home and slid in a Gov’t Mule CD that I kept in the glove
box. A machine-gun roll of skull-whomping drums started up, followed by a soul-piercing electric guitar. The hard-wailing Southern rock turned out to be just what I needed to reduce my about-to-pop blood pressure. I turned it up as high as it would go as I punched my Impala toward the FDR.

My stress felt purged as I pulled into my beach bungalow’s driveway an hour later.

“Finally. There you are. I was getting worried,” Mary Catherine said as I crossed the porch and opened the front door.

“What’s up?” I said.

“Did your phone battery die or something? The phone’s been ringing off the hook. Your FBI agent friend said something urgent just came up and to call her right away.”

I quickly checked my phone. Emily had left three messages. I must have missed it over my head-banging.

I called her back.

“Emily?”

“You need to come back to the city right away, Mike. Karen from the CIA just called me again with new info that she said might lead us straight to Apt. She’s coming to my hotel room. You need to get here as soon as you can.”

“On my way,” I said before hanging up.

“I take it you’re not staying for dinner,” Mary said.

I nodded and then glanced beyond the kitchen doorway at all the kids seated at the dining room table. Beside a cauldron-size metal pot, Juliana was passing out plates
of pasta. That’s when I inhaled the scent of garlic and olive oil.

Sweet glory of angels!

Mary had made a massive batch of her world-famous meatballs and sauce.

I glanced at my phone.

Too bad I was going to have mine for tomorrow’s breakfast.