Dangerous Women

by Otto Penzler (ed)

  Leonid had used that line before. There was no argument against it. The janitor couldn’t be held responsible.

  There was silence from the other side of the door. If the girl had an accomplice they’d be whispering about how to get around his ploy. Leonid put his ear against the wall but couldn’t hear a thing.

  “Karmen Brown,” the woman said. She added a number with the new 646 prefix. Probably a cell phone, Leonid thought.

  “Hold on. Let me get a pencil,” he complained. “Brown, you say?”

  “Karmen Brown,” she repeated. “Karmen with a K.” Then she gave the number again.

  “I’ll put it on his desk,” Leonid promised. “He’ll get it the minute he gets back to town.”

  “Thank you,” the young woman said.

  There was hesitation in her voice. If she was a thinking girl she might have wondered how a janitor would know the whereabouts of the private detective. But after a moment or two he could hear her heels clicking down the hall. He returned to his office to stay awhile just in case the girl, and her possible accomplice, decided to wait until he came out.

  He didn’t mind hanging around in the office. His sublet apartment wasn’t nearly as nice, or quiet, and at least he could be alone. Commercial rents took a nosedive after 9-11. He picked up the ESB workspace for a song.

  Not that he’d paid the rent in three months.

  But Leonid Trotter McGill didn’t worry about money that much. He knew that he could pull a hat trick if he had to. Too many people had too many secrets. And secrets were the most valuable commodity in New York City.

  At 5:39 the buzzer sounded again. But this time it was two long blasts followed by three short. Leonid made his way down the hall and opened the front door without asking who it was.

  The man standing there was short and white, balding and slim. He wore an expensive suit with real cuff links on a white shirt that had some starch in the collar and cuffs.

  “Leon,” the small white man said.

  “Lieutenant. Come on in.”

  Leonid led the dapper little man through the reception area, along the hallway (that had three doors down its length), and finally into his office.

  “Sit down, Lieutenant.”

  “Nice office. Where’s everybody else?” the visitor asked.

  “It’s just me right now. I’m in a transition phase. You know, trying to develop a new business plan.”

  “I see.”

  The slender white man took the chair in front of Leonid’s desk. From there he could see the long shadows across New Jersey. He shifted his gaze from the window to his host. L. T. McGill, P.I.

  Leonid was short, no taller than five seven, with a protruding gut and heavy jowls. His skin was the color of dirty bronze and covered with dark freckles. There was a toothpick jutting out from the right side of his mouth. He wore a tan suit that had been stained over time. His shirt was lime green and the thick gold band on his left pinky weighed two or three ounces.

  Leonid McGill had powerful hands and strong breath. His eyes were suspicious and he would always appear to be a decade over his actual age.

  “What can I do for you, Carson?” the detective asked the cop.

  “Joe Haller,” Carson Kitteridge said.

  “Come again?” Leonid let his face wrinkle up, feigning ignorance if not innocence.

  “Joe Haller.”

  “Never heard that name before. Who is he?”

  “He’s a gigolo and a batterer. Now they’re trying to tell me he’s a thief.”

  “You wanna hire me to find something on him?”

  “No,” the cop said. “No. He’s in the Tombs right now. We caught him red-handed. He had thirty thousand right there in his closet. In the briefcase that he carried to work every day.”

  “That makes it easy,” Leonid said. He concentrated on his breathing, something he had learned to do whenever he was being questioned by the law.

  “You’d think so, wouldn’t you?” Carson asked.

  “Is there a problem with the case?”

  “You were seen speaking to Nestor Bendix on January four.”

  “I was?”

  “Yeah. I know that because Nestor’s name came up in the robbery of a company called Amberson’s Financials two months ago.”

  “Really?” Leonid said. “What does all that have to do with Joe whatever?”

  “Haller,” Lieutenant Kitteridge said. “Joe Haller. The money he had in the bag was from the armored car that had just made a drop at Amberson’s.”

  “An armored car dropped thirty thousand dollars at the place?”

  “More like three hundred thousand,” Kitteridge said. “It was for their ATM machines. Seems like Amberson’s had got heavy into the ATM business in that neighborhood. They run sixty machines around midtown.”

  “I’ll be damned. And you think Joe Haller and Nestor Bendix robbed them?”

  Lieutenant Carson Kitteridge stayed silent for a moment, his gray eyes taking in the rough-hewn detective.

  “What did you and Nestor have to say to each other?” the cop asked.

  “Nothing,” Leonid said, giving a one-shoulder shrug. “It was a pizza place down near the Seaport, if I remember right. I ducked in there for a calzone and saw Nestor. We used to be friends back when Hell’s Kitchen was still Hell’s Kitchen.”

  “What did he have to say?”

  “Not a thing. Really. It was just a chance meeting. I sat down long enough to eat too much and find out that he’s got two kids in college and two in jail.”

  “You talk about the heist?”

  “I never even heard about it until you just said.”

  “This Joe Haller,” the policeman said. “He practices what you call an alternative lifestyle. He likes married women. It’s what you might call his thing. He finds straight ladies and bends them. They say he’s hung like a horse.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Yeah. What he does is gets the ladies to meet him at hotels near where he works and goes in to teach them about how the other eight inches live.”

  “You’ve lost me, Lieutenant,” Leonid said. “I mean unless one of the she-guards at Amberson’s is Haller’s chicken.”

  The elegant policeman shook his head slightly.

  “No. No. This is how I see it, Leon,” the policeman said. He sat forward in his chair and laced his fingers. “Nestor pulled off the robbery but somebody let it slip and me and my crew got on his ass. So he calls on you to find him a pigeon and you give him Haller. Don’t ask me how. I don’t know. But you set up the Romeo and now he’s looking at twenty years in Attica.”

  “Me?” Leonid said, pressing all ten fingers against his breast. “How the hell you think I could do something like that?”

  “You could pluck an egg out from under a nesting eagle and she’d never even know it was gone,” Kitteridge said. “I got a man in jail and his alibi girlfriend saying that she never even heard his name. I got an armed robber laughing at me and a P.I. more crooked than any crook I ever arrested lyin’ in my face.”

  “Carson,” Leonid said. “Brother, you got me wrong. I did see Nestor for a few minutes. But that’s all, man. I’ve never been to this Amberson’s place and I never heard of Joe Haller or his girlfriend.”

  “Chris,” Kitteridge said. “Chris Small. Her husband has already left her. That’s what our investigation has accomplished so far.”

  “I wish I could help you, man, but you got me wrong. I wouldn’t even know how to set up some patsy for a crime after it was committed.”

  Carson Kitteridge stared mildly at the detective and the darkening neighbor state. He smiled and said, “You can’t get away with it, Leon. You can’t break the law like that and win.”

  “I don’t know nuthin’ about nuthin’, Lieutenant. Maybe the man you caught really is the thief.”

  Katrina McGill was a beauty in her day. Svelte and raven-haired, from Latvia or Lithuania-Leonid was never sure which one. They had three kids, of which at least two
were not Leonid’s. He’d never had them tested. Why bother? The east European beauty had left him early on for a finance lion. But she got fat and the sugar daddy went broke so now the whole crowd (minus the sugar daddy) lived on Leonid’s dime.

  “What’s for dinner, Kat?” he asked, breathing hard after scaling the five flights to their apartment door.

  “Mr. Barch called,” she answered. “He said that either you pay up by Friday or he’s going to start eviction.”

  It was the square shape of her face and the heaviness around her eyes that made her ugly. When she was young gravity was in suspense but he should have seen the curtain coming down.

  The kids were in the living room. The TV was on but no one was watching. The oldest boy, the red-headed Dimitri, was reading a book. He had ochre skin and green eyes. But he had Leonid’s mouth. Shelly, the girl, looked more Chinese than anything else. They used to have a Chinese neighbor when they lived on Staten Island. He worked at an Indian jewelers’ center in Queens. Shelly was sewing one of Leonid’s jackets. She loved her father and never questioned her mother or the face in the mirror.

  Shelly and Dimitri were eighteen and nineteen. They went to City College and lived at home. Katrina would not hear of them moving out. And Leonid liked having them around. He felt that they were keeping him anchored to something, keeping him from floating away down Forty-second Street and into the Hudson.

  Twill was the youngest boy. Sixteen and self-named. He’d just come home after a three-month stay at a youth detention center near Wingdale, New York. The only reason he was still in high school was that that was part of his release agreement.

  Twill was the only one who smiled when Leonid entered the room.

  “Hey, pop,” he said. “Guess what? Mr. Tortolli wants to hire me at his store.”

  “Hey. Good.” Leonid would have to call the hardware man and tell him that Twill would open his back door and empty out the storeroom in three weeks’ time.

  Leonid loved him but Twill was a thief.

  “What about Mr. Barch?” Katrina said.

  “What about my dinner?”

  Katrina knew how to cook. She served chicken with white wine sauce and the flakiest dumplings he had ever eaten. There was also broccoli and almond bread, grilled pineapples, and a dark fish sauce that you could eat with a spoon.

  Cooking was difficult for Katrina since her left hand had become partially paralyzed. The specialist said that it was probably due to a slight stroke. She worried all the time. Her boyfriends had stopped calling years before.

  But Leonid took care of her and her kids. He even asked to have sex with her now and then because he knew how much she hated it.

  “Did anybody else call?” he asked when the college kids were in their rooms and Twill was back out in the street.

  “A man called Arman.”

  “What he say?”

  “There’s a little French diner on Tenth and Seventeenth. He wants to see you there at ten. I told him I didn’t know if you could make it.”

  When Leonid moved to kiss Katrina she leaned away and he laughed.

  “Why don’t you leave me?” he asked.

  “Who would raise our children if I did that?”

  This caused Leonid to laugh even harder.

  He reached Babette’s Feast at nine-fifteen. He ordered a double espresso and stared at the legs of a mature woman seated at the bar. She was at least forty but dressed as if she were fifteen. Leonid felt the stirrings of the first erection he’d had in over a week.

  Maybe that’s why he called Karmen Brown on his cell phone. Her voice had sounded as if it should be clad in a dress like that.

  When the call was answered Leonid could tell that she was outside.

  “Hello?”

  “Miss Brown?”

  “Yes.”

  “This is Leo McGill. You left a message for me?”

  “Mr. McGill. I thought you were in Florida.” The roar of an engine almost drowned out her words.

  “I’m sorry if it’s hard to hear me,” she said. “There was a motorcycle going down the street.”

  “That’s okay. How can I help you?”

  “I’m having a problem and, and, well it’s rather personal.”

  “I’m a detective, Miss Brown. I hear personal stuff all the time. If you want me to meet with you then you’ll have to tell me what it’s about.”

  “Richard,” she said, “Mallory. He’s my fiance and I think he’s cheating on me.”

  “And you want me to prove it?”

  “Yes,” she said. “I don’t want to marry a man who will treat me like that.”

  “How did you get my name, Miss Brown?”

  “I looked you up in the book. When I saw where your office was I thought that you must be good.”

  “I can meet you sometime tomorrow.”

  “I’d rather meet tonight. I don’t think I’ll get any sleep until this thing is settled.”

  “Well,” the detective hesitated. “I have a meeting at ten and then I’m going to see my girlfriend.” It was a private joke, one that the young Miss Brown would never understand.

  “Maybe I can meet you before you see your girlfriend,” Karmen suggested. “It should only take a few minutes.”

  They agreed on a pub on Houston two blocks east of Elizabeth Street, where Gert Longman lived.

  Just as Leonid was removing the hooked earphone from his ear Craig Arman entered the bistro. He was a large white man with a broad, kind face. Even the broken nose made him seem more vulnerable than dangerous. He wore faded blue jeans and a T-shirt under a large loose knit sweater. There was a pistol hidden somewhere in all that fabric, Leonid knew that. Nestor Bendix’s street accountant never went unarmed.

  “Leo,” Arman said.

  “Craig.”

  The small table that Leonid had chosen was behind a pillar, removed from the rest of the crowd in the popular bistro.

  “Cops got their package,” Arman said. “Our guy was in and out of his place in ten minutes. A quick call downtown and now he’s in the Tombs. Just like you said.”

  “That means I can pay the rent,” Leonid replied.

  Arman smiled and Leonid felt a few ounces being placed on his thigh under the table.

  “Well, I got to go,” Arman said then. “Early to bed, you know.”

  “Yeah,” Leonid agreed.

  Most of Nestor’s boys didn’t have much truck with the darker races. The only reason Nestor ever called was that Leonid was the best at his trade.

  Leonid caught a cab on Seventh Avenue that took him to Barney’s Clover on Houston.

  The girl sitting at the far end of the bar was everything Katrina had once been except she was blonde and her looks would never fade. She had a porcelain face with small, lovely features. No makeup except for a hint of pale lip gloss.

  “Mr. McGill?”

  “Leo.”

  “I’m so relieved that you came to meet me,” she said.

  She was wearing tan riding pants and a coral blouse. There was a white raincoat folded over her lap. Her eyes were the kind of brown that some artist might call red. Her hair was cut short-boyish but sexy. Her tinted lips were ready to kiss babies’ butts and laugh.

  Leonid took a deep breath and said, “I charge five hundred a day-plus expenses. That’s mileage, equipment rentals, and food after eight hours on the job.”

  He had just received twelve thousand dollars from Craig Arman but business was business.

  The girl handed him a large manila envelope.

  “This is his full name and address. I have also included a photograph and the address of the office where he works. There’s also eight hundred dollars in it. You probably won’t need more than that because I’m almost sure that he’ll be seeing her tomorrow evening.”

  “What you drinkin’, guy?” the bartender, a lovely faced Asian boy, asked.

  “Seltzer,” the detective asked. “Hold the rocks.”

  The bartender smiled or sneered,
Leonid wasn’t sure which. He wanted a scotch with his fizzy water but the ulcer in his stomach would keep him up half the night if he had it.

  “Why?” Leonid asked the beautiful girl.

  “Why do I want to know?”

  “No. Why do you think he’s going to see her tomorrow night?”

  “Because he told me that he had to go with his boss to see The Magic Flute at Carnegie Hall. But there is no opera scheduled.”

  “You seem to have it all worked out yourself. Why would you need a detective?”

  “Because of Dick’s mother,” Karmen Brown said. “She told me that I wasn’t worthy of her son. She said that I was common and coarse and that I was just using him.”

  The anger twisted Karmen’s face until even her ethereal beauty turned into something ugly.

  “And you want to rub her face in it?” Leonid asked. “Why wouldn’t she be happy that her boy found another girl?”

  “I think that the woman he’s seeing is married and older, way older. If I could get pictures of them then when I leave at least she won’t be so smug.”

  Leonid wondered if that would be enough to hurt Dick’s mother. He also wondered why Karmen suspected that Dick was seeing an older married woman. He had a lot of questions but didn’t ask them. Why question a cash cow? After all, he had two rents to pay.

  The detective looked over the information and glanced at the cash, held together by an oversized paper clip, while the young bartender placed the water by his elbow.

  The photograph was of a man whom he took to be Richard Mallory. He was a young white man whose face seemed unfinished. There was a mustache that wasn’t quite thick enough and a mop of brown hair that would always defy a comb. He seemed uncomfortable standing there in front of the Rockefeller Center skating rink.

  “Okay, Miss Brown,” Leonid said. “I’ll take it on. Maybe we’ll both get lucky and it’ll be over by tomorrow night.”

  “Karma,” she said. “Call me Karma. Everybody does.”

  Leonid got down to Elizabeth Street a little after ten-thirty. He rang Gert’s bell and shouted his name into the security microphone. He had to raise his voice to be heard over the roar of a passing motorcycle.