by S. J. Rozan
I was following a gut feeling that what Oakhurst had sent Monroe was not one of the images I’d seen but something else, something he was particularly—and privately—proud of.
Monroe had caught the most important word. “Known?” he said.
“So far, only to me. That could change. I could tell the police, which I’ll probably do. I could also make sure everyone and his monkey knows you have it and wait and see what happens. We know what happened to Tony.”
“You’re a fucking SOB.”
“I’m guessing from you that’s a compliment. Show me the goddamn photo.”
Scowling, Monroe took his cell phone from his back pocket. I was aware of a slight tremble in his hands as he swiped through photographs. Apparently his private collection hadn’t prepared him for an encounter with the real thing. He turned the phone to me.
What was on his screen looked disappointingly like the photos I’d already seen of Kimberly Pike dead on the floor of the truck.
Maybe that’s all it was; maybe Oakhurst hadn’t sent Monroe anything from the hidden folder. It’s not like the ones I’d seen already weren’t plenty dark: dark enough for Monroe, too dark for Konecki.
But I had that gut feeling. “Send it to me.”
“Not on your life.”
“My life’s not the issue here.”
“Is that a threat?”
“Not from me, but probably, yes.”
“No. Get out.”
“You know withholding evidence in a murder investigation is a crime?” I smiled. “Actually, now that I think about it, you might have killed Tony yourself, to raise the value of your collection. Sure. And especially the price of his final work, which now only you have, since you erased the files on his studio computer.”
“You can’t be serious.”
“Well, no. You don’t have the balls for that. But just think what a pain in the ass it’s going to be for you once I lay that theory on the NYPD detective on the case. They’re dying to make an arrest. Sorry, bad choice of words.”
After a long glare, Monroe punched some numbers on his phone. I took my phone out and waited. When his text arrived, I opened it. “It’s full-size?” I said. “I want all the detail.”
“Yes. Now, get out.”
“I wouldn’t erase that,” I said as I pulled the door open. “The NYPD will want to see it.”
He slammed the door behind me as, a little anticlimactically, I walked down the carpeted hall to the elevator.
34
I took the subway heading downtown. Leaning against the door at the end of the car, I stared at the photo I’d gotten from Franklin Monroe. If my gut was right, something about it was worth erasing, maybe worth killing for.
I enlarged the photo, spreading its pixels apart as though the answer might be imprisoned between them. The image grew abstract. Shapes, tones, and lines replaced flesh and frightened eyes. The colors were soupier than I was used to seeing in Oakhurst’s images, and I began to develop a new respect for how much work he did to make a raw photo into art. I wondered if he knew from the moment he saw an image how he wanted it to turn out, or if he played with it until he discovered its potential. Or, he would have said, its naked-turtle truth.
I was no nearer understanding what was important about this photo when the train got to Grand Central. I decided to skip the shuttle and walk across to the West Side. Maybe the fresh air of Times Square would clear my head. I threaded the crowded blocks to Fifth Ave., then along 42nd Street past the library. I took a detour into Bryant Park to see if the bees in the hives at the Sixth Avenue end were working as hard as I was. I watched two guys playing pétanque in hopes that the clanking of metal balls would jar something loose in my head. It wasn’t until I got to Broadway, though, that anything clicked. It was Batman who did it.
It gets harder all the time for the Times Square costumed characters to make a living taking photos with tourists. It used to be all they had to do was stand there and wait. Now, there are so many of them that some have developed acts to attract attention. They juggle, they tap dance. I saw Spider-Man swinging on a streetlight. Superman was taking a breather outside the chalk-drawn ring where his tag-team partner, Batman, was wrestling with a New York icon: an alligator from the sewers.
I stared. An alligator. Damn.
I whipped out the phone and found the photo. I enlarged it, and there it was, the thing I’d seen—though not noticed—in this one and not the others, the thing that earmarked this image for the most private of Oakhurst’s private collectors, the thing that made it worth erasing, worth killing for.
On the truck floor under Kimberly Pike’s right shoulder, a blue blob. When I enlarged it, I could see, even in its unretouched, soupy-color state, spots of yellow patterning the blue.
Alligators.
It was Sam’s tie.
I slid the phone into my pocket and quick-walked the few remaining blocks from Times Square to Sam’s studio. The ME’s car was gone from Oakhurst’s building, but the CSU and news vans were still in place. The gawker crowd had thinned, and no one paid any attention to me coming up the other side of the street.
I buzzed Sam and got no answer. I hit half a dozen other buzzers, not including Cromley’s. When I finally got a “Who’s there?” I answered, “FedEx,” got buzzed in, and took the stairs so I wouldn’t run into the expectant package recipient. On Sam’s floor the stair door opened onto an empty hallway. I knocked briefly at his studio and again got nothing, so I let myself in, to that squared-off orderliness of all the spaces Sam inhabited except his head. I was prepared to calm Sam down if he was there and my entrance scared him—though if he was working he might not even notice me—but I was hoping I hadn’t knocked loud enough that Cromley next door would be alerted to my presence. But Sam wasn’t there, and my strategy didn’t work. I had just closed the door behind me and pressed the speed dial for Lydia when the pounding started.
“Who’s in there? Let me in!”
“What’s up?” Lydia said in my ear. “Can you talk? What’s all that noise?”
“I can talk, I’m in Sam’s studio, and that’s Ellissa Cromley.”
“I heard you!” Cromley yelled. “Someone’s there!”
“What’s her problem?”
“I don’t know. But Tony Oakhurst’s is, he’s dead.”
“So you said. In his studio?”
“Yes.”
“Any idea who?”
“No. You still in Brooklyn?”
“Yes.”
Through the door came “Open up!”
“Did you find Sam?” I asked Lydia.
“No. Not at home—at least, no one answered when I rang and knocked and said it was me—and not at the bar. Victor hasn’t seen him. When did he get out?”
Pound, pound. “Goddamn it! I’m calling the cops!”
“Bailed out at midnight by Peter and Leslie. Okay, if you don’t find him, keep on that break-in thing. Let me go head off Cassandra here.”
I thumbed the phone off and went to the door, to face Ellissa Cromley. I found myself facing her gun.
“Shit,” I said. “Put that thing down.”
“Oh, yeah, big man?” Cromley gave me a nasty grin. “What the hell are you doing here?”
“Looking for Sam.”
“Sam doesn’t want to see you.”
“How do you know?”
“He doesn’t want to see anyone.”
“Ah. He’s in your studio.”
“Oh, the detective makes a deduction.”
“Move aside.”
“Hold it!” She waved the gun. “You broke in here. He doesn’t want to see you. Go away or I’m calling the cops.”
“I didn’t break in. I have Sam’s door code.” Which he’d given Lydia, not me, but still. “And I’m going to your studio to talk to him, so either put that thing down, or shoot me with it.” That might not have been the smartest thing to say under the circumstances, but I don’t like having guns waved at me, and this
was the second time for this one.
Cromley didn’t move.
I snapped my right arm out and a can of pencils clattered to the floor. When Cromley’s eyes flew to the sound I lunged left and brought my fist down on her gun arm.
“Ow!”
The gun hit the floor, but it didn’t discharge. I pulled my own gun out, leveled it at Cromley. She looked up from her bruised wrist. Her eyes grew wide.
“No! No.”
I held steady another moment and then slipped my gun back in its rig. “No. But you need to think a little harder before you start throwing threats around and backing them up with guns. People take that stuff seriously.”
Not surprisingly, Sam’s studio didn’t have a pile of rags lying around. I ripped a piece of paper off a drawing pad and used it to pick up Cromley’s gun. I checked the load. It was empty. I sniffed it, wrapped the paper around it, and put it in my pocket.
“Give that back!”
“It’s been fired recently.”
“So that means you can steal it?” She rubbed her wrist. “Target practice. I’m a responsible gun owner. You shouldn’t own a gun if you don’t know how to use it.”
“You also shouldn’t wave one around if it’s empty. And if you were a responsible gun owner, you’d have cleaned it after target practice.”
I pushed past her, out of Sam’s studio, and through the open door into hers.
I found Sam on the couch in the clearing, stubble on his face, empty beer bottles on the floor by his stockinged feet. “Hey,” he said. “Where’ve you been?”
“Have you been looking for me?”
Sam looked confused. “No, I just wondered where you’ve been.”
Cromley was right on my heels, cradling her wrist. “You hurt me!”
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I hope that’s not your painting hand.”
“You hurt her?” Sam said.
“She pulled a goddamn gun on me.”
“Ellissa’s gun? It wasn’t loaded,” Sam said. “She just wanted to scare away whoever was in my studio. In case it was the same person who messed up my drawer.”
“Brilliant. And what if he’d had a gun?”
“You did have a fucking gun!” Cromley answered.
I said to Sam, “I need to talk to you.”
“You don’t have to, Sam,” Cromley said, rubbing her wrist.
“Don’t have to talk to him? Why wouldn’t I? I like him. Not like that lawyer. Lupe. Where’s my other lawyer? Susan. I liked her. Lupe was mean.”
“She was trying to protect you, Sam. It’s her job.” I dropped onto the couch beside him. Snarling, Cromley swept a stack of papers off a milk crate and settled on it.
“She told me to shut up,” Sam complained. “She said she’d get me drawing paper, but she didn’t.”
“She would’ve if you hadn’t been bailed out.”
“Why did they do that, Peter and Leslie?”
“Because you’re not guilty,” said Cromley.
“I wanted to stay. Everyone’s safer if I’m in jail.”
“I don’t think so,” I said. “But tell me. Where did you go last night after you got bailed out?”
“Peter wanted me to go home with them.”
“Did you?”
“I said I wanted to come here. Peter said no but Leslie told him she was too tired to fight about it. That was kind of funny, because the way she said it was like they were fighting about it already. She told the Uber guy to bring me here. Peter flopped back on the seat like he really was tired and told me he was sorry. I don’t know what for; they were doing what I wanted. They dropped me here and they went home.”
“You came up to your studio?”
“I tried to work. I got some ideas in jail. But every time I heard footsteps, I got nervous. So I came over here and had a drink. I got tired and took a nap on the couch.”
I turned to Cromley. “Were you here?”
“In the middle of the night? You think I have no life?”
“When did you get here?”
“Early this morning.”
“Where were you last night? When you were having your life?”
“Who the hell are you to ask me that?”
“Never mind.” I was pretty sure Grimaldi would get around to asking these same questions eventually. I had other things I wanted to ask these two. “I want to talk to each of you, and I want to do it separately.”
“Who cares?” Cromley said.
“Wait.” Sam looked at me. “This is really important, right? You said it like it was.”
“Yes.”
“Okay.”
“Sam—” Cromley began.
“No.” He stood up. “It’s okay. Come on,” he said to me. “We can go to my studio.”
“If you leave before you talk to me,” I said to Cromley as I followed Sam out, “you’ll be making a big mistake.”
“Sam didn’t kill anybody,” Cromley said.
In a voice more kind than I expected to hear from myself, I said, “I know.”
35
Sam pressed the code on his studio door. We walked in, and he turned to face me.
“Sit down, Sam.”
“No. That means bad news.”
“It’s bad news whether you sit or stand.”
He didn’t move.
“All right,” I said, “I wanted to be the one to tell you this. Sam, Tony’s dead.”
“What?” Sam tilted his head, as though I’d suddenly started speaking a foreign language. “No, he’s not. Tony? He’s right down there.” He turned and walked to the window. I followed, and we gazed across the street to the now-sparse crowd, the NYPD vans, Epstein still at his post at Oakhurst’s door. Sam grew very still. He stared, without moving, for a long time. “Oh,” he said. “Oh. Oh, shit. Smith, why are the police down there?”
“I told you, Sam. Tony’s dead.”
“No. No, no. Oh my God, are you right? Tony’s dead? What happened? Oh, shit, Smith, did I kill him? Did I kill Tony, too?” By the end he was yelling, staring wide-eyed at me.
“You didn’t kill anyone,” I said. “Except Amy, years ago. Okay? Someone killed Tony. But it wasn’t you.”
“How do you know? How do you know?”
I didn’t know. But I was getting more and more sure.
I told him, “I need to ask you something important. From the night of the opening.”
“Tony was there. Tony was there, and now he’s dead?”
“Sam. I know it’s hard. But I need you to answer this, okay?”
“Answer what?” He scrunched his forehead, as though I’d already asked him something and he couldn’t remember what it was.
“At the Whitney, when we were leaving. What happened to your tie? The blue one with the alligators.”
“My tie?” He frowned.
I thought back to the cab ride, the drinking he did in his apartment. “You didn’t have it on when we got home. It wasn’t in the pile of clothes you left by your bed. You took it off at the Whitney and waved it around. Then what happened to it?”
“Oh. Right. That made Leslie mad.” He grinned, then the grin faded. “She took it away and stuffed it in the trash can. I didn’t like that because it was mine, but I didn’t really care because I hate ties.”
“So you didn’t have it when Tony found you at the bar? You didn’t give it to him?”
“Why would I give it to Tony? He never wears ties, just T-shirts. Anyway, I think he’s dead.”
“So, by the time we all got downstairs and left by that rear door, you didn’t have it?”
“Well,” he said, “well, actually, I have no fucking idea! Who cares about a fucking tie?”
That was it; he was gone. He dropped onto the folding chair by his drawing table, and he started to cry. “Go away,” he said. “Get the hell out of here. Leave me alone.”
“All right. But, Sam? Don’t leave. Promise me you won’t leave.”
“Oh, sure. Why not? I’ll stay here
forever. Maybe Tony’s ghost will come visit me. Just go away!”
I walked out into the hallway. Before I went to Cromley’s studio I called Lydia.
“I was just about to call you,” she said. “Two things. One, Sam’s not around here anywhere.”
“I know that. I was just with him in his studio. I told him the news about Oakhurst and he fell apart.”
“Oh. Poor Sam. Will he be okay?”
“I don’t know. He threw me out. I made him promise to stay there, but I don’t know if he will.”
“Should I call him?”
“I’m not sure he’ll answer the phone, but you can try.”
“Okay. Meanwhile, I found a witness who saw someone at Sam’s building when Sam was in Victor’s.”
I’d almost forgotten that that was the point of Lydia’s going to Brooklyn this morning. “Great. Who?”
“All I have is the description she gave me. I didn’t have a photo to show her. But from what she said, I’m ready to put money it was Ike Cavanaugh.”
36
Yet again, the angel on my right shoulder told me to call Grimaldi, and the guy on the other side said I’d get more accomplished on my own. The right-side guy wanted to know if this was about getting things accomplished, or if it was personal. The left-side guy told him to guess.
I called Queens North Homicide, asked for Cavanaugh, was instructed to leave my phone number, which I did. Then I went down the hall and knocked on Cromley’s door. Nothing, so I pounded, and still nothing, so I pounded and yelled, until a dreadlocked black guy with white smears on his arms stuck his head out of a door farther down the hall and said in a heavy Jamaican accent, “Yo! Ellissa not here. She leave as I come. Now shut all de noise, leave people to work.”
“Sorry.” I lifted my hands and retreated to the elevator. On the sidewalk, I lit a cigarette and waited for my phone to ring, for Lydia to show up, or for a cup of coffee to come skateboarding down the street. None of those things happened, so, still waiting for the first two, I headed for the diner on the corner to see what I could do about the third.
