The Fifth Avenue Series Boxed Set

by Christopher Smith

  “You assume correctly.”

  “And her john took off.”

  “Wouldn’t you?”

  “Who’s the hooker?”

  “LaWanda Jackson,” Patterson said. “Twenty-seven. Been on the streets since she was fifteen and is angry as hell because of it. Until last night, she lived behind that Dumpster. Had a mattress stained with blood and crawling with God-knows-what. Now I don’t know what’ll happen to her.”

  “What did she see?”

  “Plenty.”

  “Care to elaborate?”

  Linda shrugged. “I’ll give you your money’s worth. Jackson said she was giving some sleazoid suit the blowjob of a lifetime when Martinez and her daughter ran into the alley, followed by some man with a gun. Before Jackson could react, the man had Martinez against a wall and was pumping two bullets into her brain. He pushed her to the ground and snapped the little girl’s neck. Jackson said she’d never seen anything like it, which I doubt. In sixty seconds, the man murdered two people and tossed their bodies in a Dumpster. He never broke stride. The friggin’ end.”

  “What did he look like?”

  “Jackson didn’t get an ID,” Linda said. “Too dark.”

  “She saw nothing?” Marty said. “Oh, come on, Linda. She must have seen something. Even the color of the man’s hair.”

  “She didn’t see anything, Marty. Zero. I believe her.”

  And you’re a goddamn liar. “How can I get in touch with her?”

  Patterson laughed. “Are you serious, Spellman? Did you hear anything I just said? Jackson lives on the street, not in the sort of glitzy Park Avenue high-rise you’re used to. Do you get the distinction? She’s a homeless whore. I’d be lucky to find her again.”

  Suddenly impatient, she glanced at her watch. “Look,” she said. “I’ve given you your fifteen minutes. I’ve told you what I know about the Martinezes. You got something else you want to ask me? Because if you don’t, I’m out of here.”

  “Then let’s talk about Gerald Hayes.”

  Patterson leaned back in her chair as Roberta came through the door with a clutch of sage. She lit it on fire and walked past the table in great swirls of smoke. “Gets rid of the negative energy,” Roberta said. “I should be more thorough, but I don’t want to interrupt, so I’ll make this quick.”

  She said something beneath her breath and waved the sage near Linda. Then, with a final shake that released a plume of smoke, she left.

  “What the fuck is this place?” Linda said. “Now I smell like Thanksgiving dinner.”

  “Can we talk about Hayes, please?”

  Linda shook her head. “No, Marty, that’s something I’ll never give you. Did you really think I didn’t know where this was going? Did you really think I’d give you anything on Hayes after the way you screwed me over on Wilcox?”

  She smiled at him. “I had you pegged for an idiot, but this is ridiculous. You burned me once. I gave you everything I had on Wilcox and you went public with her murderer. You broke your promise. You said you’d give me the son of a bitch and you didn’t. I’m going all the way with this case. Hayes’ death was a high-profile blessing from God. I’m getting Detective First Grade out of it.”

  “I doubt that,” Marty said. “But I am curious. If you knew I was fishing all along for Hayes, why’d you give me anything on Martinez? Their deaths are obviously related. You’ve helped more than you know. So why talk?”

  Patterson patted her handbag. “Because I wanted the money,” she said lightly. “Pure and simple. And, besides, what I gave you wasn’t worth shit compared to what I know about Hayes. Certainly nothing you couldn’t have found out without me. So, it was an easy two grand. Lucky me.”

  She rose from her seat, all cool lines and silky curves. She reached for her handbag and looked down at him. “Here’s something else, Spellman, a little advice. If you interfere in any way with this case, if you cross me, I’ll bust your ass for obstruction. This case is NYPD property. Do you understand me?” Her voice was absolutely calm. “You’re not a cop. You have no authority. Screw with my case, and I’ll get a court order that’ll nail you to the wall.”

  Marty smiled up at her. “Sweet, Linda. Really, I’ll keep it in mind. But I’m a registered private investigator, and that also gives me rights. Before you leave, there’s something you should know. That check I gave you? It isn’t signed. I gave you an unsigned check. You did just what I knew you’d do. You only looked at the amount. You never even thought to look for a signature. Too greedy. Too predictable. Too much like the old Linda. So, unless you forge my name, which I wouldn’t suggest since it’s a crime, it looks like it’s you who’s just been nailed to the wall.”

  * * *

  “I don’t like that woman, Marty. She’s evil. She’s no good. And it’s not because she insulted my place. She’s got a darkness in her that even I won’t go near. Why do you hang around people like that? They sour your soul.”

  Marty reached in his pocket for his cell and tapped out Hines’ number at the 19th. Roberta, busy making tea for the party of five that had just stepped in, shot him a sideways glance. “And I’ll tell you something else,” she said. “My prediction is right. That woman will be dead by fifty. Just you wait and see.”

  “I wish you wouldn’t talk that way, Roberta. You’ve got me on the list, too.”

  “But you can do something about it,” Roberta said. “You can drop the case now, before it goes any further. You could listen to me.”

  “Roberta, if I listened to you, I’d be penniless. Do you realize that every time I take a new case you’re telling me I’ll be dead.”

  “This time you might be.”

  “Whatever happened to optimism?”

  “Oh, please,” she laughed. “Are you serious? When they legalize pot, I’ll be optimistic.”

  Hines answered. “Can’t talk,” he said. “Just busted the perp on another case. Son of a bitch drove stakes through his wife and kids. Thought they were vampires. Admitted to all of it. Said Stephanie Myers told him to do it. In there smiling at me, like he’d do it again if he had the chance. Call me back later.”

  “Two questions,” Marty said. “That’s it.”

  “Make ‘em fast.”

  “Where’s Wolfhagen?”

  “Not at The Plaza,” Hines said. “Checked out this afternoon. Said the place gives him the creeps.”

  “Where’s he staying?”

  “With his wife.”

  “With his wife?” Marty said. “Then his alibi checked? He was with her last night?”

  “He was at a party of hers last night,” Hines said. “A big deal that lasted until two in the morning. Thirty people can and will vouch for his presence. I talked to Carra Wolfhagen myself and she confirmed everything. She says he spent the night with her and there’s nothing I can do about that. Now, I gotta go. Call me later. You know, when you’ve got something.”

  The line went dead.

  Marty hung up the phone and caught Roberta’s concerned glance. She was standing beside him, slicing a lemon, adding the curving yellow wedges to the steaming pot of tea.

  Slice, slice, slice.

  “Everything’s going to be fine,” he said.

  But Roberta, whose face now reflected a sadness he had never seen in it before, shook her head. “No, Marty, this time it isn’t.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  Spocatti stood between the heat of two double-parked vans, looking across to the grimy brick building Maggie Cain had just entered. He was in the roughest part of the South Bronx—Hunts Point—where the haze of poverty and decay was so strong here, it clung to his clothes and cut off his breath.

  He knew this neighborhood.

  When he was a boy, several family members lived here. At that time, his father owned a successful restaurant in Little Italy, and so, because they had money, it was Spocatti’s family who drove here on Sundays to visit the relatives. Then, Spocatti would sit next to his father and listen to his two uncles d
iscuss their hopes and dreams to find better jobs and move their families out of this place.

  It didn’t happen. Though they wished for a better future, his uncles’ alcoholism and drug abuse prevented them from having it.

  That was thirty years ago. And while this place had seen a push in the ‘80s in an effort to revitalize it, the attempt failed. Looking around, Spocatti thought it looked worse than ever, particularly after the recession.

  Even now, on the cusp of sunset, transvestites and prostitutes were working the streets and street corners, drug deals were being made in backrooms, private clubs were thriving in shadowy basements—and disease was running rampant.

  With the Meatpacking District now bright with boutiques and trendy restaurants, the South Bronx, in a sense, had taken its place among those areas in the city where the fringe could thrive. Were you a trucker in need of a blowjob? Come to Hunts Point. Married businessman into a bit of kink? Come to Hunts Point. The area was morphing even deeper into the corrupt underworld some craved.

  Spocatti was amused to find how comfortable he was here.

  He looked at his watch. Cain had been inside three minutes. Whoever had dropped her here was gone. He looked across to the two scantily clad transvestites clicking toward the building and watched them walk down the narrow cement steps. They rapped on a door he couldn’t see, screamed something above the sudden roar of music, and were let inside.

  Private party.

  Password protected.

  He’d seen it before. The people who threw these parties gave every queen and whore working these streets a password that allowed them entrance. If business was slow, they could come to a party, perform for the guests, earn that night’s dinner. Maybe even a taste of whatever drug was circulating that day.

  So, why had Maggie Cain come here?

  He left his shiny metal enclave and stepped into the street. Trucks rumbled past. At the street corner, four transvestites were leaning against a black Mercedes. They tapped on its hood, shook their asses in front of the darkened windows, bent down to blow kisses, circled and posed. One of them looked up at him and smiled.

  Spocatti smiled back.

  The easiest way inside that building was on her arm.

  * * *

  She said her name was Diva Divine.

  She was taller than him and black, her platinum blonde hair worn in a teased flip. The long white gloves that stretched up her emaciated arms hid the veins she’d ruined with needles, but her makeup—heavy and smeared in the moist August heat—couldn’t conceal the day’s growth of beard that shadowed her face in a dusting of black. Spocatti thought she had the exhausted, sunken look of someone who had seen every rotten thing twice—and remembered it.

  He led her behind a large truck and listened as she spoke.

  “You got the fiercest queen in the city, baby. Fiercest. Diva’s gonna rock your world.”

  Her drag was a tight white tube dress that was fraying at the hem, stained with food, blotched with sweat. Her four-inch heels—red as her lipstick but more even in color—were badly in need of repair. She snapped her fingers above her head and swayed slightly, as if she were drunk. But she wasn’t drunk. She was coming off a high. Her eyes were the same as his brother’s had been just before the high left him—bright brown panes of glass.

  He pointed to the building Maggie Cain had entered. “I need to get inside that building,” he said. “As in now. Can you do it?”

  Divine fluffed her wig with long, chipped-black nails. “You got enough cash, Diva D. can take your beautiful ass anywhere you want to go.”

  “How much?” he said.

  “Lots.”

  “Be specific.”

  She sank against the truck and reached up inside her tube dress, eyelids fluttering as she scratched something he couldn’t see.

  A limousine swung in front of the building. Spocatti turned and watched a well-dressed couple leave the car and hurry down the cement steps. A rap on the door, a firestorm of music, silence.

  Ten minutes had passed. Maggie Cain could be anywhere.

  He gripped Divine’s arm. “How much?”

  Startled, she reared back.

  “How much?”

  Real fear in her eyes. She shrank away from him. “I don’t know. Let go of me. You’re hurting me!”

  He gave her a hundred.

  * * *

  The door was large and solid, painted black, windowless. Spocatti could see strobes of red light pressing through the cracks around the edges. In the space beyond, he could hear the driving, crashing beat of industrial music. Here, the air smelled of something spoiled, as if the building itself, along with its inhabitants, were failing in the searing summer heat.

  Divine knocked twice, waited, knocked again, and the door parted on its heavy metal chain. Music and light blasted the stairwell. Divine stuck her face into the two-inch crack and shouted: “It’s me, Frankie! I gotta guest!”

  “Private party, Divine. No guests.”

  “Don’t play that shit with me, Frankie. Let me in!”

  “No guests.”

  “Oh, for Christ’s sake, he ain’t a cop!”

  “You know the rules.”

  “You want the damned password?”

  “It ain’t gonna help.”

  “Then what I really know is you.” She turned to Spocatti, eyes suddenly focused, alert. “The greedy mothafucka wants some money. Gimme another hundred.”

  Spocatti moved right, looked at Frankie’s profile through the four-inch crack. He was tall and muscular; bulging, black leather pants; black leather vest; black leather head mask with an open zippered mouth. His nipples were pierced with shiny silver lightning rods. His torso and arms were a colorful palette of bold tattoos. He leaned down to pull on his boots.

  He was alone.

  Spocatti dipped his hand into the pouch at his waist and gripped the gun. “I don’t have another hundred,” he said.

  “Then gimme what you got.”

  He checked the silencer, flicked off the guard, looked around him. Nobody. But Divine, who missed nothing on these streets, saw the gun and put her hand over his. She shook her head at him, reached inside her bra, removed the hundred he’d given to her, stuck it through the crack. Frankie snagged it.

  “You satisfied now, Frankie?” she called. Her eyes never left Spocatti’s. “You happy now, darlin’? That’ll buy you a week’s worth of meds and God knows your infected ass probably needs it. Bigger tramp than me.”

  She forced the gun back into its pouch. “No,” she said to Spocatti. “No.”

  Spocatti lifted an eyebrow at her. “You’re telling me what to do?”

  “This is how I eat, baby. This is what I do. I don’t need no trouble here. Just be cool. I’ll get you inside.”

  And she did.

  The door closed, swung open again and Frankie stood there, folding the bill into a neat square. He smiled at Spocatti, reached out to slap Divine’s ass. “Welcome to Heaven,” he said.

  * * *

  Heaven was straight down a staircase that leaned left.

  Lights flashed and skidded up the black walls, giving the illusion of movement within shadows too dark to judge depth. The floor thudded with the driving beat of industrial music. The air was cooler here, and it smelled of sweat and rotting wood. At the top of the staircase, Divine turned to him. “I got friends here,” she shouted above the music, backing down the stairs, white gloved fingers tiptoeing along the rail. Itching to get away from him. “I gotta see them. You’ll be okay alone? Just a few minutes?”

  Spocatti moved down the staircase after her. “Is this the only way out of here?”

  She nodded.

  “You’re sure?”

  “Yes, baby. Why?”

  He looked over her shoulder and saw in the sudden ricochet of light the moons and planets of six faces peering up at him from the darkness of the stairwell, only to disappear and reappear again in different order. It was as if this universe was realigning i
tself, unraveling. He took Divine’s arm and led her down the stairs. “Tall woman,” he said in her ear. “Early thirties. Shoulder-length dark hair. Scar on her left cheek. Striking. Name’s Maggie Cain. Find her and you’ll get your money back, plus another grand.”

  “Plus another grand?”

  They paused at the bottom of the stairs and looked left. The basement was as cavernous as it was captivating. Low ceilings were strung with spinning lights, thick rotting beams jutted at odd angles from the dirt floor, crowds of naked people were twirling to the music.

  In one of the twelve metal cages lining the walls, someone in a Bush mask was sucking face with Obama’s twin. In front of them, a train of men trotted past, their identities smeared and distorted by the plastic wrap wound around their grinning faces. In the moment before he left her, Spocatti looked at Divine and saw on her face the wall she’d been building since childhood. Anger. Despair. Resentment. A surprising vulnerability. Never had she suspected that this would become her life, yet here it was.

  Her tough luck.

  He moved through the shifting wall of bodies and saw Maggie Cain almost immediately. She was across the room, her face pressed between the bars of a metal cage. Inside the cage, a heavy-set woman with nothing but a ball gag in her mouth and a pink ribbon in her hair was circling an elderly man lying naked on his back, his Tinker Toy legs lifted and parted in stirrups. Cain was talking to the man, who seemed disinterested in what she was saying.

  Spocatti was interested.

  He pushed forward and stepped within earshot, but he was too late—Maggie Cain was already pulling away. “You’re a fool, Alan, just like the rest of them.”

  As she turned, Spocatti turned with her, showing her his back as she slipped into the crowd. He waited to make sure she wasn’t moving toward the exit before turning to glance at the man in the cage. He pressed a coke inhaler against his nostril and made kissing noises to the woman while he snorted the drug. He giggled and he laughed, and Spocatti, who never forgot a face, recognized him from the photographs Wolfhagen sent months ago, when the job was initially proposed and accepted.