“Anytime, partner,” I said. “The problem is I don’t know how much it’s going to help. All he told you was that Spence scored some coke yesterday. I’m sure you must have figured that out this afternoon when you were standing ankle-deep in the wreckage at Silvercup.”
“It helps a lot more than you think,” she said. “Spence pulled five thousand dollars out of our bank account yesterday morning, which means he had enough cash to buy a quarter of a key.”
“I don’t get it,” I said. “If he had that much money, why did he pay Baby D for the drugs with his watch?”
“For the same reason he busted up those sets. He was sending me another message.”
“Which is…?”
“If it has anything to do with me, he’s going to destroy it or get rid of it.”
“Ouch,” I said. “That hurts.”
“It sure does,” she said. “That’s why he’s doing it.”
The light turned green, and we rolled south on Lexington. I pulled my phone out of my pocket. It was after nine. At this point calling Cheryl wouldn’t cut it. I put the phone in my lap and stared out the window.
Kylie must have read my body language. “Do you want me to call Cheryl and apologize for screwing up your dinner?”
“Absolutely not.”
“From the look on your face, I’m guessing she was pissed that you had to leave.”
“Let’s just say she wasn’t happy.”
“She better get used to it, Zach. She’s living with a cop now. It’s the nature of the beast. We get called out day and night.”
“She works for the department, Kylie. I’m pretty sure she knows what being a cop is all about.”
“So what’s her problem?”
“This wasn’t a cop call,” I said.
I could see Kylie connecting the dots in her head. Knowing her, this had been all about NYPD putting the squeeze on a bad guy. She’d completely forgotten that the entire operation was personal.
“Oh,” she said. “Right. It won’t happen again.”
I doubted it.
We were at 86th and Lexington, nine blocks from my apartment, when the phone in my lap went off.
“You see?” Kylie said. “She can’t be that mad if she’s calling you.”
I looked at the caller ID. Private caller.
“It’s not her,” I said. I answered the phone. “This is Detective Jordan.”
“My man, Zach,” a familiar voice on the other end said. “This is Q. You looking for a couple of scrubs who are holding a necklace so hot they’re almost ready to pay someone to take it?”
“Everybody is looking for them,” I said, “and I’m at the top of the pile.”
“That’s why I called you first. I’m upstairs at the Kim.”
My adrenaline was pumping. “We’re less than five minutes away,” I said.
“We’re less than five minutes away?” he said. “Does that mean you’re with that knockout partner of yours?”
“Yes, I’m with Kylie.”
“At this hour? Sounds like you two are pulling the night shift. I hope I’m not interrupting any undercover work,” he said, following up with a lecherous laugh just in case I didn’t get the joke.
“You’re a pig.”
“That’s funny, Zach,” he said, still chuckling. “First time a cop ever called me a pig. I’ll see you in five.”
He hung up, and I turned to Kylie. “Change of plans. We’re meeting Q Lavish at the Kimberly Hotel.”
She hit the gas, and we sped past a familiar brick building on 77th and Lex. My apartment is on the tenth floor.
I craned my neck, looking up, trying to see if the lights were still on, but we were going too fast.
“What are you doing?” Kylie said.
“Nothing. I’m just checking to see if Cheryl’s home.”
“Of course she’s home. Do you think she moved out because you bailed on one dinner?”
“No. I’m just antsy. We’re still working out this living together thing.”
“Zach, it’s going to work out just fine. And Cheryl’s not going anywhere. She’s a smart woman. She knows the score.”
“Yeah, she does,” I said.
Old girlfriend, one. New girlfriend, zero.
CHAPTER 19
Quentin LaTrelle, a.k.a. Q Lavish, is our best confidential informant. And our least expensive. I’ve worked with him for two years and have never paid him a dime. That’s because Q isn’t in it for the money.
Q is a pimp. But it’s a word he never uses. “It would be like calling Yo-Yo Ma a fiddle player,” he says. “I’m a purveyor of quality female companionship for gentlemen of breeding and taste.”
Many of those gentlemen traveled in the same social circles that Red was created to protect and serve. That’s where Kylie and I came in. Q knew that if any of his elite clientele got arrested in flagrante delicto, he had someone on his speed dial who could make the unfortunate incident go away.
If that sounds like the wealthy horndogs have an unfair advantage over the average johns, they do. But if Q could help us find the perps who murdered Elena Travers, I’d be happy to help out some Wall Street power broker who got caught with his pants down.
The Kimberly, on 50th between Lexington and Third, is an upmarket hotel that manages to combine traditional European elegance with trendy New York nightlife. Q was waiting for us at Upstairs, the Kim’s opulent-to-the-max rooftop bar with a spectacular 360-degree view of Midtown.
Fluent in the language of fashion, Q knew how to dress whether he was having dinner at a four-star restaurant or hanging at a dive bar. Tonight he was wearing a pearl-gray suit and an open-collar navy shirt. Not very clubby, but perfect for the business-casual code at the Kim. Bottom line: he fit right in.
We sat down at his table, declined a drink, skipped the foreplay, and told him to get straight to business.
“Teddy Ryder and Raymond Davis,” he said. “They were cellies at Otisville, and they’ve been bunking together ever since. Not gay, just a couple of underdogs who threw their lot in together, hoping that the whole would be greater than the sum of its parts.”
“And is it?” I asked.
“If they were remotely competent, would I be here?” he said. “I’ll start with Teddy. He’s white, midthirties, comes from a family of grifters. His mom and dad sold swampland in Florida back in the eighties, and over the years they’ve probably run every scam in the con man’s bible. They were good, Annie and Buddy Ryder. He died a few years ago, and Annie’s about seventy, so she’s basically out of the game, but I wouldn’t be surprised if she still kept her hand in by bilking the blue-haired granny crowd out of their bingo winnings.
“Sadly for Annie and Buddy, whatever criminal acumen was in their DNA skipped a generation. Their only progeny, Teddy, has zero street charisma. The poor boy couldn’t sell a five-dollar cure for the clap if it came with a four-dollar coupon. Also, he’s never been arrested for carrying a piece. Jacking a limo at gunpoint is so far out of his league I’m surprised he didn’t shoot himself.”
“How about the other one?” I said.
“Raymond Davis is fortysomething, biracial—mom was white, father was African American, both long gone. He’s about as smart as a turkey sandwich, and to prove it he was scouting the bars uptown looking for a buyer for some hot jewelry. He tried to keep it vague, but that lasted until he was pressed for a description, and he all but held up a picture of that diamond necklace that was on the front page of the morning paper. Raymond’s done two stretches for armed robbery, so if I were a betting man, I’d say he was your shooter.”
“Do you know where we can find these two?” Kylie said.
“No, but I bet you’ve got someone down at One P P who can help you out.”
That got a laugh. “Wiseass,” she said. “We can take it from here. Thanks. You got anything else?”
“Not for NYPD. But I might have something for you. Something more…personal.”
Q Lavish might
joke with me about working the night shift with Kylie, but he’d never get smarmy with her. He was too much of a gentleman. Plus, the look in his eyes said he was dead serious.
“Go ahead,” Kylie said.
“I heard you’re looking for your husband.”
“Jesus, Q,” she said. “I know you’re wired, but how did you—”
“I have clients in the TV business. They talk. I listen. I don’t know where he is right now, but I know he’s been over the edge. It’s not my place, but if you need an extra pair of eyes and ears…”
“Oh God, yes. Thank you.”
“Don’t thank me yet. Just tell me whatever you think might help.”
She recapped the last few days since Spence went missing. Q didn’t say anything until she told him about our run-in with Baby D.
“Drug dealers are the worst,” he said. “And that pretty boy is as bad as the rest of them. He wouldn’t call you if Spence came over to his house and shot his mother. Giving him your card was just a waste of paper. But now that I know he’s one of your husband’s contacts, I’ll keep him on my radar.”
Kylie stood up, shook his hand, and thanked him again. Even if Q didn’t come up with a single lead toward helping us find Spence, she knew that his offer was genuine. And if he ever reached out to her for help getting one of his overprivileged clients out of a jam, she’d reciprocate in a nanosecond.
In the New York criminal justice system, it’s all part of the circle of life.
CHAPTER 20
As reliable an asset as Q Lavish might have been, the State of New York didn’t think he was reliable enough. We couldn’t arrest Davis and Ryder solely on the word of an informant. We needed an arrest warrant, and finding a judge to sign one at this hour of the night would take time. Time we didn’t want to waste.
Parole officers, on the other hand, had a lot more latitude than cops. They could show up at a parolee’s house anytime. No warrant. No warning.
“Call RTC and find Davis’s PO,” Kylie said as she barreled up Third toward the One Nine.
The Real Time Crime unit worked out of One Police Plaza, and they could tell you in a heartbeat just about anything you needed to know about anyone in their databases. I called them, and in under a minute, I had Davis’s address and the cell number of Brian Sandusky, his parole officer.
My next call was to Sandusky. “Brian,” I said, “this is Detective Zach Jordan. One of your boys, Raymond Davis, was fingered as the shooter in the robbery-homicide at the Ziegfeld Theater last night, and I need you on scene to get me inside so I can bypass a warrant.”
“Davis? Elena Travers?” Sandusky said. “Holy shit, count me in.”
Some POs hate being dragged out at night to make a house call, but Sandusky was young and eager to help out on a high-profile case. I told him to meet us at the precinct.
Then I called Cates, gave her a top line, and asked her to call in an ESU team to help us bring in Davis and Ryder.
Seventy minutes after we left the Kimberly Hotel, Kylie and I were in our car, followed by two Lenco armored trucks from Emergency Service Squad 1, in lower Manhattan. PO Sandusky was in the backseat.
“Fourteen heavily armed cops in full body armor ready to take down two bungling low-level criminals,” he said as Kylie led the convoy across town, toward the FDR Drive. “Your average taxpayer might think that’s excessive.”
She looked over her shoulder at him. “That’s because your average taxpayer’s never been shot at,” she said.
Davis and Ryder lived downtown, on Rivington Street. We parked our vehicles around the corner on Suffolk and met up with one of the cops from the three units we’d dispatched as soon as we had the address.
“That’s the building, over there,” he said, pointing to a five-story gray-brick building. The facade from the second floor to the roof was covered with a cluster of metal fire escapes that probably dated back to the first half of the twentieth century. There was a storefront at street level, but it was boarded up, and the window had become a canvas for a graffiti artist who had done a remarkably good likeness of the Notorious B.I.G.
“Nobody in or out since we got here,” the cop said.
I gave a hand signal, and a dozen cops poured out into the street, weapons at the ready. The team leader opened the front door and stopped.
“Blood,” he whispered. He threw a light on the floor, and I could see it. A trail of blood leading to the inside door. He turned the knob. It didn’t give.
One of his men took a Hooligan Tool and cracked the lock like it was an egg.
There were more bloodstains on the stairs. We followed the trail to Davis’s apartment door, on the third floor.
“We’ve got probable cause to enter,” I whispered to Sandusky, pointing at the bloody floor. “Leave the building. Now.”
He looked both relieved and disappointed, but he didn’t argue. He left.
“Open it,” I said to the team leader.
One of his men had a universal skeleton key: a thirty-five-pound steel battering ram. One swing and the wooden door splintered.
There was a man sprawled facedown on the floor, and I held a gun on him as the team stormed the apartment. They checked the bedroom and the closets, and within seconds I heard a volley of “Clear, clear, clear.”
I holstered my gun. The man on the floor was unmistakably dead.
“Roll him,” I said.
Two of the cops flipped the body over.
It was Raymond Davis, his face ashy gray, his eyes bugged open in wide surprise, a single bullet hole in the middle of his forehead.
PART TWO
BEST. MOM. EVER.
CHAPTER 21
It was the kind of crime scene that nerds like Chuck Dryden live for. A dead murder suspect with a bullet in his brain, a second bullet embedded in the pockmarked plaster on the opposite side of the room, and a wall covered with bright red high-velocity blood spatters that were the clues to the dirty little details of Raymond Davis’s last moments on earth. For Chuck it was the equivalent of forensic porn.
Kylie and I left him to his fun and went out to canvass the area.
We went back to the bloody trail that had led us to the apartment and followed it down the stairs, out the front door, and onto the street. A half block from the building it ended abruptly.
“He must have figured out he was leaving bread crumbs,” Kylie said. “You think Teddy Ryder is our bleeder?”
“I doubt if he’s our shooter,” I said. “These guys were BFFs.”
“It wouldn’t be the first relationship that was dissolved by a bullet.”
“But Teddy is gun-shy. His parents were con artists. In their line of work the only reason to carry a piece is if you’re hoping for a stiffer sentence when you get busted. Besides, we know that Raymond was trolling the bars, looking for a buyer.”
“I guess he found one,” Kylie said. “So, two shots fired in apartment 3A. How many of the tenants do you think heard anything?”
I laughed. New Yorkers in general are reluctant to come forward and get involved—especially in a crime of violence. And I was willing to bet that Raymond Davis’s neighbors would be even less inclined to talk to the cops. With twelve apartments in the building, at least somebody would have to have heard the two gunshots. And yet no one had called 911. We went through the motions anyway and knocked on every door in the building. As expected, nobody heard a thing.
We went back to the apartment, where Chuck was waiting to give us his top line impressions.
“Be careful where you sit,” he said as soon as we got through the door.
“Gosh, thanks, Dr. Dryden,” Kylie said, “but they taught us crime scene etiquette back at the academy.”
“I’m sorry, Detective MacDonald,” Dryden said. “Let me rephrase that. This place is riddled with bedbugs. Be careful where you sit.”
We stood.
Dryden went through his usual series of disclaimers reminding us that some of his conclusions were not yet
scientifically chiseled in stone. Then he launched into the scenario the way he saw it.
“If you two are correct, and Davis and his partner killed Elena Travers and stole an eight-million-dollar necklace, then this is where they tried to unload it. But, as you well know, there is no honor among thieves. Davis was dropped where he stood, but his partner managed to get out with what is most likely a flesh wound. The slug that caught him was in the wall. It’s a .38.”
“And where’s the necklace?” Kylie asked.
Dryden smiled. “Where indeed?”
“But you searched the place.”
“Top to bottom.”
“Did you find anything?”
“Yes, I did,” he said, his expression totally deadpan. “Bedbugs.”
Kylie rewarded him with a smile. “Let me rephrase that,” she said. “Did you find anything that might help us in our investigation?”
“Possibly,” he said. “Mr. Davis had a gun. He didn’t get to use it tonight, but it’s a 9mm—the same caliber as the murder weapon that killed Elena Travers. I’ll run it through ballistics and get back to you tomorrow.”
I looked at my watch. “It’s already tomorrow,” I said.
“Oh, good. In that case, I’ll have it for you today.”
“Last question,” Kylie said. “Do you have anything on the shooter? A partial print? Hairs? Fibers? Anything?”
“Sorry. He was either very good or very lucky, but I’ve got nothing except for the two .38 slugs he left behind.”
“Then there’s only one way we’re going to catch him,” Kylie said, looking at me.
“What’s that?” I said.
“Find Teddy Ryder.”
CHAPTER 22
I called the office and asked the desk sergeant to get out a BOLO on Teddy Ryder. “And I need a hospital check,” I said. “He took a bullet.”