Sonny looked up. “Where’d you get this?”
“I’ve got a few contacts. The point is, Mrs Pascoe told me they never advertise. She lied.”
“You’re sure it’s the Middlemarch?”
“Yeah. In which case, I’m thinking, top floor, studio apartment, it’s the old Russian advertised her own place.”
“But why, man?”
“Money. Spite. Say they’re giving her grief, she’s scared, she wants to sell, but the board makes it impossible for anyone who wants to buy her place.”
“Unless she sells to, lemme guess, Thomas Pascoe. Who maybe invites her for a swim to do some business.”
I said, “So she advertises to stick it to them, stir things up. I told you I talked to a janitor, right? Said the pool doesn’t open before seven. So when you showed at six, six-thirty, Pascoe was already dead. But what’s Ulanova doing there so early? Pascoe was the only one who swam off hours.”
Sonny stopped walking. “You’re thinking if she didn’t set him up, it was the other way around. He sees the ad, invites her for a chat. It’s her they intend to kill. They get him by mistake?”
“I don’t know.” I thought about the creep in the stairwell. “You think her being Russian’s an issue?”
He laughed. “You and me, we always think being Russian’s an issue, man, but she wasn’t that kind.”
For a few minutes, facing forward, walking his tread-mill again, Sonny Lippert ranted freeform. “I resent this, Art, I want it finished. Some teabag asshole named Thomas Pascoe had connections at Gracie Mansion. The Mayor’s office says, Get Sonny Lippert. I tell them I’m busy, I got the Russian mob in Brighton Beach lubricating property deals in the boroughs, I got Russian hoods moving into Manhattan too, investing with Paine Webber, buying art galleries and real estate, the money disappears into the system, it’s legit, we’re fucked. They got white shoe lawyers now, Art, the Russians. And I have to worry about some goddamn Brit gets offed. Any luck with that list of wannabes?”
“I’m working on it.”
I watched him dry his face, then Sonny drew breath and said, “We got Halloween coming up also. There’s a million people coming into the city in costumes. We’re looking at chaos. I want this stitched up before, otherwise it’s dead. Stay with the program, Artie, OK?”
“You have enough on your plate, man, you don’t have to take on Halloween,” I said.
“We’re all taking on Halloween, Art. Every single law enforcement officer in or out of uniform in this town is working it. Me included.” Sonny climbed off his treadmill and threw me a towel. I got off mine and wiped my face.
“This ain’t just the Russian. Is it? Sonny? What else you looking for from me?”
Sometimes Sonny Lippert catches me off guard and the old antagonisms get me like heartburn. The obligation, the requirements, the dues – he makes me feel I still owe him. When Sonny was a federal investigator in the Eastern District, he was in charge of nailing the Russian mob; he’s still obsessed.
After I got to New York – we left Moscow when I was sixteen, spent a few years in Israel – I tried to make a buck as an interpreter, I ended up in Sonny’s office. He helped me get my Green Card, then my citizenship, and a place in the academy. I was a kid, twenty-one, twenty-two. Sonny helped me, so I did stuff for him. He needed a cop who could speak languages; I can do Russian, Hebrew, some French. Everyone in my family’s real nimble at languages, but it’s just a knack, a gimmick.
So I was Sonny’s cop and we went a lot of rounds over the years, even after he left Brooklyn. For years I figured his ambition ate him from the inside like cancer and left a corrupted shell. But I had been wrong, and after the Chinatown job, we became friends. Still, I see Sonny Lippert wants something, I get a tight feeling in my chest.
I hung over Sonny; I’m a lot taller. “There’s something else.”
He said, “You saw the widow.”
“So?”
“Show her your baby blues, man, OK? Show them rich folk your dimples is what I want. It was always your thing, looking good, talking nice. You don’t hold your utensils like they’re weapons, you got nice suits, you read books. Help me out here, and I’ll see you get paid good.”
It was a job. I’d do the work, cash the check and walk away. Maybe find the asshole that tried to beat me up for a bonus.
“I don’t do back-room stuff, Sonny. You know that. I don’t con bank clerks into telling me about their clients, I don’t break open people’s mail. I don’t listen in or wear a wire, or use computers, I don’t do your regular PI ruse, you know that, and I’m not going to start.” I felt in my pocket for gum and flashed him a smile. “Not even for you.”
He headed to the locker room. “I hear you. Uptown case like this, Art, there’s a wall of lawyers, a lot of people don’t feel compelled to talk to us. I can’t ask some cop makes fifty, sixty grand a year and puts himself in the way of a bullet to interest himself objectively in people that make a hundred times as much for doing nothing. I can’t trust Mrs Pascoe to some idiot out of a precinct. These people ain’t scared of some two-bit detective. You I can trust. Billy I can trust, but he’s in China on other business. You saw her. If it was me, I’d take Mrs Pascoe in right now. But I can’t do that. I want you on this.”
“How old you figure her for, Sonny?”
“I don’t know. Hard to read. Fifty? Forty-five? Why, you got a hard-on for her?”
“I want a look inside that building.”
Sonny leaned over a sink, put his head under a tap, gulped some water. “Art, man, listen to me. They got a division on the building, OK? Probably the FBI. For all I know, being as how Thomas Pascoe was a foreign national, they got the CIA, MI6, Scotland Yard and the British Prime Minister. Just find me who wanted a place up there at the Middlemarch, the wannabes, the hopeless, the desirous, OK, please.” He gave his version of a dirty chuckle. “Stay on the women.”
On his way to the showers, Sonny peered at me. “What’s that bruise on your forehead?”
“Nothing.”
“All right, man, but take it easy, OK. These co-op boards got huge power. There’s no oversight. One building I heard of, man, they threatened a guy with eviction if he did not stop his dog barking.”
“Yeah? So?”
“So he had the dog’s voice box surgically removed.”
5
The babe in black carried a dog the size and color of a corn muffin, and the doorman who held the door for her, hat and coat loaded with gold braid, resembled a footman in a Disney flick. I was surprised when he asked her in Russian if she wanted a cab. She shook her head, gave him a faint imperious smile, took the pup and left.
The building was on the west side of Sutton Place, up near the bridge. What I could see of it from the street, it was twenty-five stories of marble, brass and glass. A chandelier in the middle of the lobby dripped crystal.
Salvatore Castle leaned against the hood of his black Range Rover, watched the woman and dog cross the street and said, “I’ve something fabulous for you here.”
“You got a lot of Russians up here, Sal?”
“This building, this side of Sutton, yes, some.” He was uneasy. “Very nice people, of course, very high class, real aristocrats some of them. Is it a problem?” He was anxious to please. “Several princesses and at least one count!”
Castle was an uptown realtor, a chubby man, black hair, face shaved so close his skin was soft and naked, like fruit. He was all smooth accommodation in the gray Zegna suit, orange Sulka tie, tasselled loafers. I showed him the newspaper ad again; it featured a full-length photograph of Castle himself standing in front of the Manhattan skyline, as if he were its agent.
I said I was only interested in the Middlemarch. He looked uncomfortable. “There’s never anything there.”
“You advertised. You put your picture on the page, Sal.”
“It was a mistake. Let me show you this one.”
“No thanks.”
“How about ne
xt door?” He gestured at a half-finished building, scaffolding still in place.
Castle had an aspirant face. He looked up at the building like a man who always looks up. “Fabulous, this one, when it’s finished, like the old days on Sutton Place. Look at the detail on the limestone. Libraries, billiard rooms, wine cellars. Servants’ quarters too, for an extra four hundred grand. I’ve got a penthouse six thousand square feet, twelve million, including a swimming pool and wrap terraces. Or something smaller?”
“The Middlemarch. Level with me,” I said and showed him my old badge; he impressed easy.
“All right, look, like we figured, the apartment in the Times ad was withdrawn after a few days. I don’t know who listed it.”
“How could that happen?”
“Someone at my office. It happens. We never even viewed it. Brokers get set up in this market. Extortion. Collusion. False advertising, and most of the time we play hardball.”
“But not with the Middlemarch.”
“Exactly.”
“It was a blind alley?”
“Yes.”
“Let’s walk and talk, Sal,” I said and we strolled down Sutton Place. On the left was the row of townhouses, private gardens leading on to the river. In front of me were a pair of blue and whites, cop cars parked outside the Middlemarch.
I stopped and looked at the building. “What’s so great about it anyhow?”
Castle took off his little glasses, tapped his nose with them. He craned his short neck. “Look at this street, the way it’s set apart from the city, the river, the light, the history. It has the most desirable buildings in the best zip code in the country. Like the great buildings on Fifth and Park. The rooms are big, ceilings are high, the walls are thick, the service is gracious and this one has the pool. The rules are very very tough. Sweet Jesus, my grandmother in Cuba, and she was the old school, old Spanish blood, old Spanish manners, but when it comes to rules, she could have been a hippie compared with these people. I can’t afford to offend this kind of people and they all know each other.” He saw the doorman watching us. It was Sweeney, the big Irish guy. Castle looked nervous. “Let’s go.”
“What did you mean, you can’t afford to offend them? How’s that?”
“I can put an apartment on the market, I can find a buyer, he has the money. Then he waits for an interview. Weeks. Months. The co-op board strings him along, then it rejects him. The deal’s off. Rejection’s the name of the game.” He laughed to himself. Not much humor in the noise he made.
I pulled a pack of cigarettes out of my pocket and held it out, but Castle shook his head.
“Manhattan is a very small island,” he said. “It’s the world’s most expensive piece of turf now that Hong Kong’s finished, and Hong Kong only counted for the money. This is the club. Limited membership. People will kill to get a decent place.”
“Literally?”
“There’s nothing left. I can get a couple mill for a classic six ‘fixer upper’, as they call it, for which read an apartment that needs a ton of work on not the best street. In, you know, an area that’s adjacent.”
“What about financial criteria?”
“Insane. Some buildings require the full purchase price in cash and two to three times that much in liquid assets, plus five years’ maintenance, say half a mill, in escrow. The country house doesn’t count as assets.” He shook his head. “That help you?”
A few Bloody Marys, and an early lunch at Billy’s on First Avenue, loosened Sal’s tongue even more. He ordered chopped steak. I watched him eat. I wasn’t hungry.
“Do me a favor, Sal. Find out exactly which apartment it was.”
“I already did. It was a couple of lousy maids’ rooms, a piece of crap on the top floor. I checked around. Madame Ulanova was there a long long time. She came over during the war, there was a tremendous housing squeeze and they cut up the old apartments. Rent control came in to ease the squeeze. After World War Two Thomas Pascoe began assembling shares. He put together the big ten- and twelve-room apartments, but Madame Ulanova, who inherited her shares from her husband, wouldn’t play his game.” Castle started on his third Bloody, sipped it, patted the tomato juice off his mouth with a napkin.
“And Pascoe was in charge?”
“Pascoe ruled by intimidation, but it was subtle. He put people on the board who had secrets, people he could control, Jews, queers, excuse me. Society was pretty anti-Semitic back then. The only legitimate basis for rejecting applicants to a co-op, and it’s in the city codes, are insufficient financial ability and bad moral character.”
“Moral character’s a pretty subjective area.”
“Right. Thomas Pascoe was the board.”
“So when was the ad withdrawn?”
“There was a fax waiting for me this morning.”
I said, “After Pascoe died. So it was probably spite. Now she’s free to keep it or put it back on the market. It’s hers to sell. With Pascoe dead, it frees her up. But who the hell sent you the message if she’s stroking out?”
Castle clutched his drink and looked at me like I lost my marbles. “I guess you haven’t heard.”
“Heard what?”
“I thought that’s why you showed up. Madame Ulanova died this morning.”
I left Sal Castle, went over to First, walked a while, past the florist, dry cleaners, a Korean deli, a muffin store and nail parlor. The nail parlor had a sign in Russian in the window. I shut my eyes and put my mind back on the case.
Ulanova was dead. The Russian was Lippert’s excuse to keep me on the case: he could get the dough to run me if there was a Russian speaker. Now he’d pull me off it. I didn’t want off. I wanted to see Frances Pascoe again. I went back to the Middlemarch and leaned over the railing at the edge of the piazza. Out on the river, a green and yellow water taxi cruised under the bridge.
The sun was in my eyes, but when I put on some sunglasses, I saw the boys in the little park a level down from me. Two of them. In the little gazebo they sat side by side, backs to me, curls of smoke going up.
And then one of them stood up and turned around very slowly. His back was to the river now. He put his hand over his eyes to shade them, looked up at the building, saw me and lifted his hand. Very slowly, he raised it, like a young prince, in a little wave.
The light caught the blue-black hair, the tanned skin, the yellow jacket – he was a rich, handsome boy – and made him glitter. He waved again, then laughed, and tossed his cigarette into the water. I recognized the jacket. St Peter’s School. My neighbor’s kid goes to St Pete’s.
Someone was watching me watch the kids. My mouth went dry. I could feel someone on my back. On instinct my hand went to my gun. Very slowly, I turned around.
Frances Pascoe was standing behind me, looking. She held out a piece of paper with some names scrawled on it, handed it to me and said, “The names you wanted. I hope it helps. I’ll call you when I can,” she added, then disappeared back into the building. I wondered why she gave me the list and who she was protecting.
I went home, checked out the names on the list as best I could, then drove over to Sullivan Street. At Pino’s I picked up a pound of prosciutto and some Newport steaks. I got smoked mozzarella at Joe’s Dairy along with a loaf of semolina, and I went by Lily’s for a late lunch and maybe dinner later on, and to tell her Sonny Lippert threw me a piece of the Pascoe case. I had to tell her.
“A little piece,” I said. “Nothing much.” I poured us both a glass of wine.
She looked up from her computer in the corner of the living room. It was a big, square room, yellow walls covered with books, records, CDs, photographs and artefacts from jobs she’d done as a reporter – kitsch stuff mostly: a set of wooden Russian dolls featuring Stalin and Gorbachev; a Haile Selassie cigarette case; the mirror with Mao in it that lights up and plays “The East Is Red”. Old despots make Lily laugh.
Beth was asleep in the other room and Lily was working, glasses on, distracted. She wore old whit
e tennis shorts and a sweatshirt with the sleeves cut off. She was barefoot. The floor was piled with newspapers, the TV tuned to a local station, the sound muted. I turned up the volume and glanced at the news running on the TV. The Pascoe story was in its second day.
Lily grilled me about it lightly, joking, but her tone was brittle and her mood shifted as soon as I told her I was on the case. I flopped on her big white sofa, kicked off my shoes, stretched my legs.
“You heard the one about the guy who lost his head over an apartment?” I said and cracked up.
Lily didn’t smile. I told her a couple more stupid jokes I’d heard on the phone. She kept working, then stopped, picked up her wine glass, drank off most of it. Finally she said, “You think it’s a joke, don’t you? Some kind of uptown grand guignol, Pascoe getting murdered in the pool, the withered old woman in the attic”
“It’s pretty rich,” I said and went into the kitchen, put the steak in the fridge, sliced up the mozzarella and unwrapped the ham. I was starving. She followed me and stood in the door. She picked up a piece of mozzarella and ate it; the milk from it dripped down her chin. I reached over to wipe it away, grinning.
Lily backed off and said, “How involved are you?”
“It’s nothing. A couple interviews is all, and I’m out of it. There was a witness, a Russian speaker. Sonny called me in.”
“Was?”
“She’s dead.”
“So what’s that leave for you, on the case I mean?”
“A few loose ends. And a nice piece of change for the work.”
She ate some prosciutto slowly. Then she said, “I thought you gave up being Sonny Lippert’s errand boy.”
I drank the wine and kept my mouth shut.
“Murder at the Middlemarch,” she said. “You think because it’s rich people no one suffers? You think other people aren’t involved?” Lily smiled, but her tone was forced.
I said, “Hey, there’s nothing gonna happen on this one. It’s a piece of cake. Nothing even near dangerous. I promised you, I meant it.”
Lily looked up at me. “That’s not what I meant.” She stretched and kissed me, but she had turned in on herself. “I have some work to do.”
Bloody London Page 5
