“Yeah, but I didn’t know that,” I told him.
I gave him a twenty. “Thanks for your help.”
He nodded several times rapidly. “Gracias, mister.” He was a small man with smooth movements and a friendly smile. I’d told him I was Laura’s brother-in-law and that I was worried because I hadn’t been able to contact her. It didn’t take much to persuade him I was telling the truth. Maybe he was just a newcomer to New York and hadn’t had time to develop that gimlet-eyed instinct that protects the city dweller.
I shoved open the door and stepped into the living room.
Nothing looked out of the ordinary. The apartment was cute, spotless and comfortable. It always smelled like lilacs. Only this time there was another smell and it wasn’t good. It was the stench of death. It was an odor as familiar in the triple-canopy jungle as the screech of the birds.
The words came back.
Man is conceived in sin and born in corruption. He passes from the stink of the didee to the stench of the shroud.
My stomach started to clench up. The super was a step behind me. He touched my sleeve in a tentative way. “Senor, something does not smell good.”
“I know.” I hoped he didn’t hear the tremor in my voice. “Wait here. I’ll take a look around.”
She was lying on her back on the bedroom floor next to a Chinese rug. There was a small bloodstain on her chest. She was wearing a sleeveless dress with a pattern of red flowers. If you looked quickly, you might have mistaken the bloodstain for one of the flowers except that it was a little larger and a little darker. That innocent face was twisted into a rictus of surprise and fear. There was a thin line of dried blood at the corner of her mouth.
I kneeled beside her and touched her cheek. It was cold. Colder than anything I’d ever touched.
I cleared my throat and got up and looked around the room. There was nothing unusual. The bed was neatly made and all the clothing was in the proper place. There was a night table next to the bed with a thin vase and a single rose, wilting.
I stepped back into the living room. The super stood there, looking out of place in his work clothes in the middle of this delicately furnished setting. He was trembling slightly.
“She’s dead,” I said in a low voice, not wanting to spook him. “You better call the police.”
“Yes, mister. I will call right now.” He rushed out of the apartment, leaving the door open.
There wouldn’t be much time before the cops got here. I did the standard search but didn’t turn up anything. The apartment was a junior one-bedroom with a cramped kitchen, a large living room and a bedroom half the size of what a bedroom should be. But it wasn’t out of line with the square footage allotment of a typical New York apartment. Every inch of space was put to good use.
The kitchen was clean. No dishes in the sink. I opened the dishwasher. It was empty. When had she put away the dishes? When was the last time she’d eaten? What was her last meal? The M.E. would know. But I would never know. Who did she have her last meal with? Did she laugh that sweet little laugh when she cocked her head to one side?
Laura knew the killer and had let him in. Three to one it was the same guy who killed her sister. And for the same reason. Whatever the reason was. I didn’t have the answer. I wasn’t any closer than I’d been when Alicia died.
I waved my hand at no one in particular. There was nothing in the kitchen that could help me. I went back into the living room. There was a wall unit with a bookcase. Her taste in reading matter ran to romance and biographies of show biz folk. You could forgive her for small weaknesses.
There was a magazine rack next to the sofa. In it was a large manila envelope with Laura’s name written on it. The handwriting was familiar. I recognized it immediately. It was Alicia’s.
I opened the envelope. It was empty.
I folded the envelope twice and put it in my inside breast pocket. I didn’t know what it meant. But it would mean more to me than it would to the cops.
***
“Listen, scumbag,” the seamstress said. “How do we know you don’t have another piece stashed away somewheres?” He ran his fingers over his mustache. “And you used it to whack these sisters for some reason for which we don’t have figured out yet.”
His partner winced. Maybe it was the tortured syntax. “Shut up,” Black said. “You make more noise than a cow pissing on a flat rock.”
The seamstress looked hurt. His fingers kept doing their twinkletoes dance in the air. “I still say this scumbag is the best lead we got. He knew both sisters. Had access to both of them. I say he killed both of them.”
I stared at Forgash across Black’s beaten-up desk. “Go stand in the corner with your thumb up your ass like little Jack Horner,” I said.
The seamstress started across the room toward me, but Black’s words stopped him. “Get the fuck out of here,” he yelled. “Get back to your desk.”
Forgash halted, torn between his desire to make a mark on me and his fear of disobeying his boss. Discretion won out. That, plus the risk of suffering some serious basic bodily injury. He shot me a dirty look as he left.
Black waited a couple of minutes before he spoke, as if he were running the facts of the case over in his mind. While he thought, he rubbed the back of his hand across his mouth, over and over. He closed his eyes.
Finally he spoke. “This is my last case before I retire.” He opened his red-rimmed eyes and studied me. “I don’t want to leave the game on a strikeout.”
I leaned back in my chair and looked out through the slits in the venetian blind into the squad room. The seamstress was sitting at his desk, his shoulders hunched forward, his chin in his hands. He looked like a kid who’d been caught by the principal pulling his pecker in the little boy’s room.
I looked back at Black. His face was one of those that tell you they’ve seen every crime in the book—and some that aren’t in the book. Every crime that can be committed will be committed. I felt sorry for the old bastard, but not sorry enough to give him Jergens. Black was telling me the cops hadn’t been able to crack two perfect murders. Neat and clean.
“I wish I could help you, Gene,” I said, “but I don’t have a goddam thing. Not even an angle. I can just tell you what you already know.”
He nodded. “OK. Same gun. Clean entry. No struggle. Killer was known to both girls,” he rattled off in his raspy voice.
He rose heavily, like a man old before his time. “Coffee?” he asked.
“Sure, if it’s strong.”
“Curl your toes,” he said. He walked around from behind his desk over to a hot plate sitting on a low file cabinet. He poured two cups black and steaming from one of those round glass pitchers restaurants use. This one had an orange top.
“Is that decaf?” I asked.
He glanced at me sheepishly and then looked down. “My wife says regular coffee makes me jumpy.”
“A cop’s supposed to be jumpy.”
He grunted. “Not if your wife’s twenty-five years younger than you.”
“You having troubles at home?”
“Nothing that a smaller prostate and a stiffer stick couldn’t cure.”
It was my turn to grunt. I took the coffee and drank some. It was hot but it was still decaf and it tasted bland.
“The angle of entry was different,” I said.
“Yeah.” Black nodded. “Your wife was sitting at the computer with her back to the shooter. She got it in the head. Her sister was standing, facing the guy. It was easier to hit her in the chest.”
“You think they both knew something and the guy was trying to shut them up?”
“That’s my guess,” he said. “Only I’ll be damned if I can figure out what it was they knew in common.”
“It could have been a grudge,” I said. I was thinking out loud, trying to probe what he knew. Maybe the cops had picked up something he wasn’t telling me.
“About what?”
I shrugged. “Who knows? Feminism, po
litical correctness, new age philosophy?”
He raised an eyebrow. “People kill over that?”
“Hell,” I said. “People kill over parking spaces.”
CHAPTER XXXIII
There was a message on my machine when I got back to the office. It was from McCormack.
“Mr. Rogan, it’s Friday afternoon about two forty-five,” said the neat clipped voice. “I’d like to meet with you as soon as possible. I just came across something in a filing cabinet I shared with Alicia that I think you’ll find interesting.”
I called him faster than a hooker could drop her panties.
“It’ll take me a half-hour to get uptown from Wall Street,” he said.
“OK, fine. Meet me by the information booth in Grand Central at four-thirty.”
He showed up on time, wearing his Armani suit and Gucci tie with the little stirrups and suspenders with little bulls and bears. His face was pale underneath his salon tan. He was carrying a brown manila envelope.
The huge waiting room was starting to fill up with homeward-bound commuters threading their way between the bums and the tourists. You could tell the commuters. They strode purposefully, always looking straight ahead, heading for the 4:35, the 4:41 or the 4:45…
I took the envelope. “What is it?”
His tone was tentative. “It’s a disk. I thought Alicia had cleaned out all her files and taken them with her. I was going through a file cabinet we shared. She had the top two drawers and I had the bottom two drawers. I needed some more space for my files and I found this disk in the back behind some empty folders. It must have been a back-up copy.”
“Did you run it?”
He bit his lip. “Just enough to know what was in it. I didn’t want to see any more than that.”
“And what was it?” I prodded to get his reaction.
He took half a step backwards. “I’d rather you answered that for yourself.” He took another half-step back.
I put my hand square on his shoulder. “Come upstairs to my office while I run it. You can explain it to me.”
He pulled his shoulder away from my grip. “You’ll understand it when you see it.” He widened the distance between us. “Besides it’s late and I have to run.” He glanced at his tank watch without noting the time.
Then I guess he had a sudden change of heart because he leaned in toward me and whispered, “I’m in this too deeply already. I don’t want to be part of it anymore. I’m scared. You’ll see why when you run the disk.”
He did a brisk half-turn and blended into the crowd of well-dressed yuppies on their way to their health clubs and juice bars.
I stopped off at the Roy Rogers to pick up a bacon cheeseburger and a cup of coffee with skim milk and took the elevator back up to my office.
I pulled off my jacket and tie and threw them over the back of a chair. Then I slipped the disk into the computer and started my dinner as the computer went through its opening routines.
What I saw was halfway to finding the Rosetta Stone. Page after goddam page of Jergen’s financials corrected for cash flow deficiencies and reconstituted statements showing fraudulent or non-existent cash flows. All of the financials combined indicated that Jergens had a negative net worth.
Alicia had done a masterful job. What a competent gal she was. She’d taken all of his financials and recast them using the figures she’d generated from her own investigations. This was the weapon that would bring Jergens down. Here was one of the biggest real estate operators in the country skewered like a shish kebab. No wonder he wanted to get her fired…or worse.
I didn’t waste any time. Jergens was probably still in his office. Maybe I should have waited and planned a strategy. But there was one thing I learned in the Corps and it was the only strategy they had—find the bastards and pile on.
I called Jergens’ office, got his fax number and faxed five of the most damaging pages together with a note asking him to give me a call at his earliest convenience, if it wasn’t too much of a bother.
The clock said 5:36. I finished my bacon cheeseburger and waited for his call.
It came in exactly seventeen minutes.
A female voice, free of regional inflections and well-modulated, said, “Mr. Jergens would like to speak to you, Mr. Rogan. Please hold the line.” She sounded like one of those computer ladies on the voice mail.
Ten seconds later Jergens got on. “Rogan, you fucking asshole scumbag.”
“Good evening, Mr. Jergens,” I said. “It’s always a pleasure to hear your voice.”
“Don’t fuck with me, Rogan.” His voice blasted out of the speakerphone and reverberated through my office. “Get your ass over here right away.”
“Is that an invitation?”
“Don’t mess with me. I’m warning you. Get over here or I’ll send my boys over with an engraved invitation. And it won’t say RSVP.”
“First I’ll have to consult Miss Manners on the etiquette of all this.”
“You watch your step, Rogan or…”
I had him. “Or I’ll end up like Alicia and Laura?”
His voice level dropped a couple of thousand decibels. “Listen, I’m asking you to come and see me. I’m asking you in a nice way, you fucking scumbag.”
“I accept your invitation. Where will I find you?”
He gave off a grunt that was a half-laugh. “I’ll be in the usual place. You know where it is. I think you were here before and tied up one of my men.”
“Oh, you mean the hotel. I’ll be there in fifteen.”
I grabbed a cab just off the ramp downstairs and told the cabby to drive up Park. He was an Indian or a Pakistani and the car smelled of chana batura with a hint of curry. When we hit Forty-ninth we got stuck in some kind of motorcade and slowed to a crawl. The cabby turned his head and motioned in the direction of Third.
“We go up Third, Boss? Faster that way. Less traffic.”
I waved toward Madison. “Naw, go up Madison. It’s closer.”
He nodded vigorously three or four times. “Your city, Boss. You know better. Not my city, you know.”
It took a half hour to get to Jergens’ hotel. This time I walked straight through the lobby like I owned the first mortgage on the place and headed for his private elevator. The guy on duty saw me coming and his eyes widened in recognition. It was the sumo wrestler, only this time he was wearing a wrinkled light blue suit that was two sizes too small for him and looked like it came from the bargain basement at Wal-Mart.
“Back for some more golf?” he grinned.
“Not till you improve your stroke. You’re supposed to hit the ball, remember?”
“I kinda forgot. Your head looked so tempting.”
I smiled at him. “Enough of this pleasant repartee. Take me to see your master.”
“I want to see you again, fuckface. I enjoyed beating up on you.” He opened the elevator door and motioned me inside. He followed me into the car and stood facing me as the door slid shut behind him. It wasn’t a big elevator and he took up ninety-five percent of the available space. His BO expanded to fill about ninety-nine percent of the available air.
“Ever think about going on a quick-weight-loss diet?” I asked him.
He glared at me. “Listen, wiseguy…” he started.
“Well at least suck up your gut and hold your breath until we get to the penthouse. There’s no air left in here for me to breathe.”
His blood pressure looked like it was ready to go off the chart. His cheeks, which were ruddy to begin with, were starting to turn the color of overripe plums. It was a good thing we got to the top floor before his blood vessels ruptured.
Two guys stood there blocking the view as the door slid open. One was the second golfing buddy. I didn’t recognize the other. He was a big guy too, but more muscular than Mr. Sumo. His shoulders looked like the flight deck of an aircraft carrier.
“Shakedown time, Rogan,” he said unpleasantly.
“Pleased to meet you, Tiny. This i
s my Filipino houseboy, Kato,” I said as I jerked my thumb back at Mr. Sumo.
“Never mind the fucking jokes, Rogan,” he said. “Assume the position.”
I sighed, stepped out of the elevator and raised my arms over my head. My bad arm hurt when I held it up. They patted me down and then grunted as a sign of satisfaction. Tiny motioned to me to follow him and started down the corridor. The golf player walked behind me. Mr. Sumo got into the elevator and went back down.
The corridor was furnished more expensively than most mansions. The furniture pieces were antiques in Louis XIV style. The floor was inlaid hardwood patterns covered by Persian carpets that were worth approximately the budget of the Occupational Safety and Health Administration. It was incongruous to see these low-life thugs in such an opulent setting. The place could have been an exhibition gallery in the Morgan museum.
Two heavy wooden doors stood at the end of the corridor. Above the doors were two security cameras. Tiny pressed a buzzer. The right door opened. Tiny grabbed my arm and pulled me into a large anteroom. It was furnished as expensively as the corridor, but there was no daylight. The windows were covered with thick damask drapes and behind the drapes were heavy gauge opaque sheets of plastic blocking any outside light from filtering in.
Three men sat in the room. Two were playing gin and the third was the turkey I’d left tied up the last time I was here. He was still reading the same X-Men comic book, or maybe I’d give him the benefit of the doubt and say he was re-reading it.
The men looked like figures in a wax museum. They didn’t move, didn’t look up, except for my friend, who shot a dirty look in my direction and went back to scrutinizing his literature.
Across the room was another set of heavy wooden doors with another set of security cameras. The golf player came around from behind me and pressed the buzzer next to the doors.
There was a loud click and Tiny shoved both doors open, then pointed his finger for me to go in.
It was a big room and it looked like a combination office and living room. It was decorated even more elegantly than the other room. There were four medieval unicorn tapestries covering the walls and I didn’t have to look long to know that they were originals. The drapes, tapestries and carpets combined to give the room a real somber air. The lighting was dim and came mostly from a huge chandelier.
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