by S. J. Rozan
“Why?”
“Come on.”
“To blackmail Sam?”
“No! Are you crazy? He’s my friend. I just—I thought it was safer with me than with him. He might go running to the cops with it or something.”
“If he’s a serial killer and these are the trophies, then he should go running to the cops. Or you should.”
“He’s not! He…” Cromley trailed off and shifted around as though she’d abruptly discovered the couch was as uncomfortable as it looked.
“If he’s not,” Lydia said, “why does he have the trophies?”
“We don’t even know that’s what they are!”
“No, you’re right, we don’t. And as long as the police don’t have them, we don’t ever have to know. We can just pretend they’re not.”
“Or,” I said, “we can pretend they are.”
Cromley snapped her head up and gave me the foreseeable sneer. “What the hell are you talking about?”
“I’m not as nice as Lydia, so I don’t even believe you were trying to help your friend Sam when you took the box in the first place. I think you realized what gold it was the minute you saw it. You grabbed it, called Sherron Konecki, and told her she’d better come over.”
Cromley’s face blazed. “That had nothing to do with anything.”
“Crap,” I said. “You showed it to Sherron, told her where you got it, and made some kind of deal based on it. The fact that it might be evidence that could get a crazy killer convicted—I mean, your friend Sam—and save other women’s lives didn’t bother you at all.”
“Bullshit. Who asked you? You’re an idiot. I don’t know why Sam ever thought you were any good.”
Lydia grinned. “Actually, Bill’s wrong a lot. That’s why he needs me. He’s screwing up again?”
“Damn right.”
“How?”
Cromley folded her arms. “You serious with that good cop bad cop bullshit? You think I’m stupid? Go to hell, both of you.”
“She wasn’t blackmailing Sam,” I said to Lydia. “For what? And why bother? He already adores her.” Hard to fathom, but demonstrably true. “He’d give her anything she wanted. But he doesn’t have what she wants. Sherron Konecki,” I said to Cromley. “You’d do pretty much anything to get into her world, wouldn’t you? What was the deal? Her gallery would take you on and you wouldn’t tell anyone about the earrings?”
Cromley rolled her eyes. “That’s the most idiotic thing I ever heard. You really don’t know how things work, do you? If I made her sign me, so what? Even if I made her give me a show. She could sell me or not sell me, whatever she wanted to do. She could just shake her head a tiny bit when people looked at my stuff, say I was overpriced right now and they should wait, or I passed my peak already, or I wasn’t developing along the lines she’d hoped—whatever bullshit. Gallerists do it all the time, fuck over an artist to make the collectors feel loved. It doesn’t cost her anything except storage space to sign an artist. Just her having me wouldn’t do me any good.”
“You could threaten to tell people about the box unless she made you big.”
“And she could say she can lead the collectors to water but she can’t make them buy.”
“True,” I conceded. Susan Tulis would’ve loved that one. “But you did have some kind of a deal. Something that evaporated once Sam got arrested.”
“What a pile of crap.”
“Oh, boy.” I looked at Lydia. “What do you think? I’m ready to go.”
She stood. “Yeah, me too. So long,” she said to Cromley.
“Where are you going?”
“Where we were going before,” I said. “To the cops.”
“You can’t!” Cromley jumped to her feet. “I told you where I got the box. We had a deal.”
I couldn’t resist: “What a pile of crap. Seriously, you want to be arrested for withholding evidence? In a multiple murder case? The NYPD doesn’t screw around with that kind of thing. Besides, there’s something else.”
“What? What else?”
“Sam was with me, or with me and the cops, or with his bartender, out in Brooklyn all morning. If this box was left in his studio when you heard the door close, Sam didn’t leave it.”
Cromley stared in stupefied silence.
“And if that’s true, someone else is killing women and trying to frame your friend Sam.”
Cromley frowned in what looked like genuine confusion. “But not the killer.”
“But not the killer, what?”
“The killer didn’t leave the box. If it’s real. Though I guess, if it’s fake…”
“What are you talking about?”
A small smirk; Cromley’s inner know-it-all glowed momentarily through the dark clouds of anger. “The killer didn’t leave the box. If it’s real. He wouldn’t give up his trophies.”
“To throw the police off the scent, to frame someone else?”
“No way. Killers who take trophies do it so they can relive the crime. They’re as important as the crime itself; they bring it all back. He probably has ritual times he looks at them. Maybe he touches them, maybe he doesn’t, maybe he even puts them on if his ear is pierced. No way he’d give them up.”
“Now that’s interesting. If you’re right—”
“Of course I’m right.”
“If you’re right, it could mean these are fake. Or it could mean they’re real and they’re Sam’s, and he was just moving them from one hiding place to another. Which did you think when you took them?”
The smirk faded; the clouds closed over.
“Never mind,” I said. “Why did you go see Tony Oakhurst?”
“Asshole.”
“Me or Tony? Because I don’t care what you think about me, but I want to know why you went to see Tony. To make a deal with him, too?”
“What the hell kind of a deal?”
“Did you tell him you’d give the trophies to the police and his friend Sam would go to prison unless he paid up?”
“Are you kidding? What does Tony care? He’d go to the prison and photograph Sam behind bars and Sherron would sell the damn photos for a fortune.”
“I think you’re right about that,” Lydia said calmly. “But you went to see him and you came back angry.”
“He pissed me off.”
“How?”
“Never mind. Anyway, he’ll be sorry.”
“Why?”
“Because screw him. And screw you, too. Give me back that box and get out.”
“Why did you go see Tony?”
“Give me back the box.”
I looked at Lydia. “Stalemate?”
“Looks that way.”
“Anything else for us?” I asked Cromley.
She started to sputter. “You—I—”
Lydia and I left. The sputtering turned to shouted curses as we walked down the hall. The slamming of her studio door could be heard as the elevator opened.
25
“Boy,” Lydia said as we rode down in the elevator. “She really doesn’t like you, does she?”
“Why should I be different from the rest of the world? You might want to look into your heart and see what you’re doing wrong, that she likes you so much.”
“I think she changed her mind on that. Probably because of the company I keep. We’re really going to the cops with that box, right?”
“We sure as hell are. Even though every word of that story might have been a lie. She’s bragged more than once that she knows everything there is to know about serial killers. I think she’s capable of putting together that collection of earrings for the sole purpose of blackmailing Sherron Konecki into whatever their deal was. We don’t know that earrings are the trophies in this case, much less that these are them, but Konecki doesn’t, either. If they are, her golden goose heads back to prison and there go her eggs.”
“You’ll never change, will you?”
“You wouldn’t want me to.”
“So we’re
saying maybe it’s not as complicated—or as long term—as Cromley making Konecki represent her. Maybe she just wanted a big payout right now.”
“Could be. And Konecki agreed because if Sam’s actually doing these killings, eventually he’ll get caught—and because it’s him, it’ll be sooner rather than later. She needs to sell as much of his work as she can while he’s still worth a fortune.”
“Wow. That’s cold,” Lydia said as the elevator let us out in the lobby. “He’ll keep killing, but she’ll get rich?”
“They do call her the Ice Queen. But now it looks like he’s been caught, so there’s no point in this deal.”
“But Bill, Konecki aside, Cromley’s story might actually be true. That she found the box in Sam’s drawer after she heard his door close. But Sam came running out in a panic when he got here and saw the drawer open.”
“He sure did.”
“Which means someone planted it there.”
“Unless he did and he forgot.”
“I guess that could be. But if it wasn’t Sam and if Cromley’s right, it wasn’t the killer, it’s someone else, who knows who the killer is and wants to frame Sam.”
We walked out into the afternoon. “Before we go up to Sixty-Seventh Street,” I said, “I want to try Peter’s cell. It might be that Susan called him already and told him Sam’s been arrested, but if not, he should know.”
I lit a cigarette and made the call.
Peter answered his phone in a dull monotone. “What is it, Smith?” He must have been really ill if he couldn’t summon the strength to be irritated at me.
“Sorry, Peter,” I said. “I know you’re sick, but there’s bad news.”
“Tell me.” He sounded like a man whose bad news cup had run over long ago.
“Sam’s been arrested. For the murder last night at the Whitney.”
A pause. “Oh, Jesus.” In the silence, I could picture him wiping his hand down his face.
“They have some kind of physical evidence. I don’t know what it is, but someone from Susan Tulis’s office is there, so we’ll know soon.”
“Physical evidence,” Peter repeated, as though he didn’t quite get the meaning of the words. “They can’t. That he killed her? How can they? He didn’t.”
“I don’t think so, either, but we need to find out what the evidence is.” I didn’t tell him about the potential physical evidence wrapped in a rag in my pocket. “Call Susan and she’ll tell you whether he’s been booked and where he is.”
“Susan. Yes, okay. Jesus. Let me know what you hear.” He hung up.
“How did he take it?” Lydia wanted to know.
“He sounds like someone who’d have to get better just to die.”
“Well, it’s bad news to hear when you’re sick, that your brother’s been arrested for murder.”
“Or when you’re well. I wonder if there’s more to it.”
“To what?”
“He was fine yesterday, but now he really sounded like hell. I wonder if Michael Sanger ditched them or something. You up for one more stop before we go uptown?”
“You’re pushing the withholding-evidence envelope. Let me guess—Tony Oakhurst, right?”
“Everyone else seems to be doing it.”
Amara, the ennui-filled assistant, answered Oakhurst’s door. She gave us enough of a frown so we’d know who was in charge, but didn’t tell us outright to get lost. “Is Tony expecting you?”
“He’ll want to see us.”
Unconvinced, she raised a pierced eyebrow. “Hold on.” She left us between the outer and inner doors, but not for long. “Yeah, okay,” she said grudgingly when she returned. “You can come in.”
This time Oakhurst came striding right over. “Smith,” he said, and then, giving Lydia a quick appraising glance, said, “hi. Saw you at the Whitney, but I don’t think we’ve met. Tony Oakhurst.”
“Lydia Chin. Bill’s partner.”
“Lucky Bill.” Oakhurst let the glance linger, then turned to me. “So what the fuck is going on? Ellissa Cromley blew in here to say Sam’s been arrested.”
“For the murder at the Whitney last night. You heard about that?”
“On cable news this morning. You know—if it bleeds, it leads. Damn. I guess we left too early, huh?” He grinned.
“If you don’t mind, I’d like to ask you a couple of questions. Can we sit down?”
“Is that one of them? Sorry. Yeah, sure, come on.” He led the way to the benches. Lydia looked at the photos on the wall the way Oakhurst had looked at her.
“Anyone want a drink?”
Lydia and I both declined, Lydia because she rarely drinks, me because after this, we were going up to the 19th Precinct, though I didn’t mention my reason to Oakhurst.
“Seriously? Neither of you? Well, I do.” Oakhurst leaned to the cabinet and, I guess since I hadn’t asked for bourbon, took out the Macallan 18. “What can I do for you? Or for Sam, poor guy?”
“Tell me first, why did Cromley come over here?”
“Like I said, to tell me Sam had been arrested.”
“Not for nothing, but I got the feeling you two aren’t close. Why would she bother?”
“I think she wanted to gloat. That she knew something important about our pal Sam that I didn’t.”
“That was it?”
Oakhurst shrugged. “How the hell do I know? Maybe she wanted to case the joint for something to steal to pay the rent on that dismal gallery of hers.”
Lydia asked, “It’s dismal, Ellissa Cromley’s gallery?”
“Are you kidding? With her on the selection committee? You need a good siesta, go to one of their openings.”
I said, “She sure was pissed off when she left here.”
“Christ, Ellissa was born pissed off.” He sipped. “I took the news about Sam pretty well. I mean, it’s not completely unexpected, right? Maybe it bothered her that I didn’t clutch my pearls and faint.” He winked at Lydia.
“Maybe,” I said. “Okay, what about Sherron Konecki? Why was she here?”
Oakhurst’s laugh held a sharp edge. “You have me under surveillance or something?”
“We happened to be in Sam’s studio.”
“Just staring out the window, watching the comings and goings?”
“Something like that.”
“Sherron’s my dealer. I called and asked her to drop by. I have new work I wanted to show her.”
“She looked pissed off when she left, too.”
“She didn’t like it.”
“Enough to leave here furious?”
“I can only hope. What are you getting at?”
“I’m not sure.”
“Well,” Lydia took over smoothly, “it’s been a very strange day. Someone broke into Sam’s apartment in Brooklyn, did you know that?”
Oakhurst shifted to give her his full attention. “No, I did not. Did they take anything?”
“Doesn’t look like it. Broke into his studio here, too.”
“You’re shitting me.”
“No. And they don’t seem to have taken anything there, either. Ellissa Cromley didn’t tell you that?”
“Goddamn it, no, she didn’t. She knows?”
I said, “Maybe she thought her big news was more important. Or maybe she was keeping something in reserve so she could come back and gloat again.”
“That would be like her. Anything else ‘strange’?” Oakhurst asked Lydia.
“When Sherron Konecki left here, she went over to talk to Cromley.”
“The two of them aren’t close either, are they?” I said.
“They can’t stand each other. Ellissa thinks Sherron is a frigid-ass bitch, and Sherron thinks Ellissa is a talentless suck-up. They’re both right.”
“Well, she went over there. And then Cromley came storming over here. And of course, in between, Sam got arrested.”
“Holy shit.” Oakhurst finished his drink. “Yeah.” He rolled the glass between his palms. “So, why did S
herron go to Ellissa’s?”
Lydia gave him innocent eyes. “We were hoping you’d know.”
“I don’t, and, God, would I like to. Right after she was here?”
“Directly from here. What did you say to her that would have sent her charging over there like a mad bull?”
Oakhurst laughed. “Let me get this straight. You think my new work pissed her off so much she went right away to see someone she generally crosses the street to avoid?”
“We’re just trying to get at the answers here,” Lydia said with a smile.
“Why don’t you call Sherron and ask? Or Ellissa? I’m sure Ellissa would be happy to talk at you for hours.”
“Call” must have been the magic word, because Oakhurst’s phone started to ring. He pulled it from the back pocket of his jeans and said, “Franklin… Yes, I did, I have something I think you’ll like… Now? Well, okay, if you are. Yeah, actually, ten minutes works for me. Great, see you then.” He clicked off, slid the phone back in his pocket, finished his scotch.
“Okay,” he said. “Tell you what. I’ll call Sherron and find out about this little love affair between her and Ellissa. But I can guarantee you, asking her while she’s still fuming will just get me reamed out. She needs time to calm down. I’ll let you know what I find out. And call me if anything else ‘strange’ happens, okay?” He clunked his empty glass on the glass cube and stood. “Sorry, but I have a collector coming over. Your pal Franklin.” He nodded at me. “Amara, could you let these guys out? Thanks.” He shook my hand, then Lydia’s. For her, he used both of his, plus a lopsided smile. “Talk soon.”
Oakhurst strode to the back while Amara drifted over and unlocked the inner door, waiting in bored silence for us to leave.
26
As Lydia and I headed for the subway, she said, “He’ll call her after she calms down? And he’ll let us know?”
“Yeah. And the hoot owls are flirting with the chickens.”
Lydia rolled her eyes.
“But it’s interesting how interested he is in what went on between Konecki and Cromley,” I said. “Personally, I’m more interested in what went on between Konecki and him. And Cromley and him. By the way, I feel compelled to mention that you flat out lied to him. We know why Konecki went to see Cromley.”
