Buzz Killer

by Tom Straw

  C H A P T E R • 14

  * * *

  The rear-ended box truck still sat at the corner with its emergency flashers going when they got back to Allen and Delancey. But the white sedan had adiosed, and when Cody asked the truck driver about it he said the guy had some brass balls. “Just came walking back all casual like he’d parked it just to run in for a lottery ticket, backed it up, and wailed out of here.” He pointed to a skid patch beside some headlight glass as a visual aid. “Cops are on the way though. And I got his plate.”

  “Yeah, that’ll help.” Cody hitched Macie by the elbow and drew her to the van before they got mired in witness statements that would document them at the scene. Besides, they had a mission back at the flophouse. They both wanted to brace Fabio Mir about his camera-shy buddy. But, no surprise, he was long gone. Cody retrieved his d-CON cam and insisted Macie hop a ride with him back to her car, which she’d left at a pay lot near their lunch. “Anyway, it’s on my way to the Battery Tunnel,” he said, finishing up a text. “Just got a gig from Channel 2. A private plane hit the drink off Staten Island. Who you gonna call? RunAndGunn.” After tapping send he slid the phone in the cup holder and added, “Dot-com.”

  They traveled in a bubble of silent letdown after the adrenaline of the chase. Cody stopped at a red near the lighthouse marking the entrance to South Street Seaport and watched the crowd that had gathered around a trio of urban drummers beating on inverted hotel pans and five-gallon food tubs. He rolled down his window and the van filled with the complex beat, an amazingly tight call-and-response straight out of Drumline. A green light came a little too soon, and half a block later, the rhythm of the city’s found music faded behind them.

  But there was a thrumming that beat on inside Wild. “You didn’t tell me,” she said.

  “Tell you what?”

  “That you were armed.”

  Cody sniffed. “I’m not stupid. That ass-hat had a forty-four mag. Forget the chain he shot clean through, did you see the size of the holes that thing put in the upstairs door?” When they pulled up outside Felice 15, her Corolla was alone on the lot. The night attendant lounged beside it on a commandeered executive office chair, the CEO of easy in-out. Cody pulled the cargo van across the driveway. “By the way,” he said, “I am permitted.”

  “For concealed carry?”

  “Am I on the stand, counselor?”

  “Are you evading, Mr. Cody?”

  “I don’t know. Am I? Nothing wrong with a little mystery to shake things up, is there?”

  One dismissive wisecrack was all it took to churn up Wild’s garbage swirl of jagged feelings about the danger she’d been in, her anger over the moral lines she not only crossed but had all but pissed on, her frustration over the fragments of evidence she couldn’t use, his loose hold on legality—everything. Macie searched for words and couldn’t find them. So she crossed another line. She slugged him.

  “What the—?” He looked at her in disbelief and rubbed his upper arm.

  She shook the bee swarm out of her hand, muttering a low “Fuck-fuck-fuck . . .”

  “What the hell was that for?”

  “For . . .” Still at a loss, she settled on, “. . . not knowing what the hell it was for.”

  “You never hit anybody before, did you. Here, let me see, can you flex your fingers?” He reached for her hand, and she pulled away.

  “I’m fine. I’m . . .” She opened the door and got out. “Sorry. About the punch.”

  “Forgotten.”

  “It’s just, this has all been . . . I’m spent.”

  “I understand. And trust me, I won’t let the fact that you physically attacked me spoil an otherwise perfect evening.”

  That time she did laugh. “OK. . . . Yeah. We don’t need to work my stuff out here. You’ve got a plane waiting for you.”

  “I do.”

  “So . . .” She rested a hand on the door, hesitating.

  “. . . So.”

  As Wild watched him speed off, she began to calm and tried to create order out of the swirl. Not just what she had experienced since lunch, but what she had learned about the case. Taking her keys from the attendant, she felt a twinge, wondering, in spite of the ethical morass she had waded into, how she could keep up that kind of progress. Yeah, she told herself, that’s what the twinge was.

  ♢ ♢ ♢

  Lenard wasn’t at reception when Wild got off the elevator at the Manhattan Center for Public Defense the next morning, so she plopped her briefcase on a lobby guest chair to dig for her swipe card and cursed. Why had getting through locked doors suddenly become the theme of her life? Even though it wasn’t Lenard’s fault that she couldn’t sleep and came in early, it felt damn good to release some pent-up irritation. Macie swore again when she gave up on one compartment and unzipped another. Then luck broke her way. The office door opened and two maintenance workers stepped through, one holding a ladder, the other a tool bag. “Hold that, please!” She raced to them, offering thanks. They didn’t acknowledge her, except for the one with the ladder who took a dead-eyed measure of her from under a thicket of eyebrows as she scooted by.

  Coffeed-up, she hit her desk, clearing yesterday’s backlog of paperwork and her endless cascade of e-mails, enjoying the uninterrupted solitude of having the seventh floor to herself. A text chimed from her ex-fiancé. “Disappointed you blew off counseling so last minute. Let’s re-sked ASAP.” Macie hovered her thumbs over the screen, waiting for some response to Ouija. Something that wouldn’t inflame, but wouldn’t offer false hope either. Then she saw Paris. Dinner in Saint-Germain-des-Prés. Then the shocker. Then his tearful apology. Then her numb flight home alone. “Let’s not,” she said to her empty office, and set her phone aside.

  Tiger appeared just before eight with a Peanut Butter Split he got her from Juice Generation and an armful of dockets and motions to execute. Macie reimbursed him then inked and dated each signature line as her paralegal fed the flagged pages to her. “Let’s set a Jackson Hall team meeting for eight fifteen,” she said as she scrawled. “And have Lenard call the maintenance supervisor. Look at this.” Wild tapped her pen on pale waffle footprints, one on her desk and another on the cover of a deposition file.

  “Primitive, for sure,” said Tiger. “I hear they’re cleaning overhead AC ducts. On the plus side, that means summer’s coming.”

  “They had a ladder, did they have to stand on my paperwork too?”

  “Ooh, somebody’s cranky this morning. Was it last night’s counseling or has the whey protein not kicked in yet from the smoothie?”

  Instead of answering, she busied herself mindlessly signing the docs, unsure how much to tell Tiger or her other colleagues about the prior evening’s foray into legal gray areas. In an odd way, Macie felt like a superhero, out to do good but leading a dual life. But did superheroes ever wonder if they were doing the right thing? Wonder if it was wrong to keep dark secrets? Wonder if leading two lives actually subtracted from the whole? Maybe, she decided, wondering was how Wonder Woman got her name.

  Her desk phone rang. It was Lenard. “There’s a Gunnar Cody here to see you.”

  ♢ ♢ ♢

  Cody was seated in a guest chair next to a half-dozen clients filling out intakes and waiting to meet their lawyers. When she stepped out, he rose and grinned. “Hey, counselor.”

  Wild didn’t return the smile. Instead she drew him away from the waiting area and spoke in a low voice. “I have a phone, you know. You can’t just show up unannounced at my place of business.”

  “Interesting. Since isn’t that exactly what you did at my place of business?” He’d done it again. Tossing her own stuff back in her face, but with that half smile that made it kind of OK. Macie noticed that he was in the same clothes as the day before, which meant he had probably been up all night and come directly from his assignment on Staten Island. When she had turned on the Channel 2 news at five thirty that morning, anxious about any reports of gunshots at the Essex Station, the
newscast led with video of the Cessna crash a quarter mile off the Edgewater docks, including a close view of police divers plunging into The Narrows from a Harbor Unit vessel.

  “Your pants are wet,” she said, filling in the blank on how they got that close shot of the victim search.

  “From covering the ditched plane. Turns out there’s a Jet Ski business near the docks, and I borrowed a Sea-Doo to get out there for the close shots.” The way he said “borrowed” told her it was just another day at the office for him, unspoiled by any obsession with rules of trespass. “I came by to give you this. In all the excitement of your exit last night, you left it in my van.” He picked up a plastic milk crate from beside one of the guest chairs. “These are those files we stole from the crime scene.” Heads of the waiting clients turned toward them. Macie whisked him farther across the lobby, near the elevators.

  “I am not going to accept those here.”

  “Really? After all the trouble you went through to get them?”

  She checked to make sure they weren’t being heard, but lowered her voice anyway. “This is a law office. I don’t want to accept or store anything of a . . . questionable nature.”

  He bobbled his head. “I get that. But I’d think you’d want to examine these files. There could be a lead in there, you never know. Tell you what. I’ll keep them safe with me. Come by my place after work, and we’ll have a sorting and sifting party.” After Wild made a quick mental scan of her calendar, she agreed and pressed the down button for him.

  “This is good. I’ll order in.” As he stepped into the elevator, he couldn’t resist a parting shot. “Call first!” Cody was still laughing when the doors closed.

  ♢ ♢ ♢

  To be honest, Macie found the confines of the office tame after the night she’d had. As her MCPD team gathered in their little war room she felt a mix of comfort and captivity. Wild convened the session by reporting she had just made a call to the Twentieth Precinct, inquiring about new information about her attacker. Detectives had a BOLO on him, but no hits. She had nearly mentioned to the sergeant that she “happened to be out” on the Lower East Side the night before and believed she saw the man. Neither the detective nor her team would buy that. Uncapping a marker, she circled “At Large” on the whiteboard and left it at that.

  Jonathan Monheit led off, asking about her cop companion at Jackson Hall’s apartment. Anticipating this, Macie made it clear, mostly for the others, that Gunnar Cody was an ex-cop, now a freelance journalist, working another angle of the case. “We crisscrossed, and it happened to be at Mr. Hall’s apartment.” Tiger, of course, knew there was more overlap than that, but was too tactful to do anything but listen. To keep Jonny Midnight from pressing further, she questioned him. “Did you find anything in the apartment after I left?”

  “I went through Hall’s clothes, like you said. Nothing with visible bloodstains. Although one of the dresser drawers was completely empty. Probably the crime scene unit cleared it.”

  “One theory,” said Macie. “We’ll come back to that.”

  “Mind if I ask why you’re keen on finding blood on our client’s wardrobe?” said Tiger.

  “Not at all.” Here, too, she parsed her answer, leaving out the gory crime scene she and Cody had broken into. Wild didn’t like lying by omission but this was a high-wire act for her: needing to share enough information so they could do their jobs, but not sharing the parts that would make them accessories to her transgressions or compromise the case. “Theresa Fontanelli flashed me some crime scene photos of Pinto. Very bloody. I also managed to speak to one of her witnesses, a retired dentist who is—was—one of Rúben Pinto’s neighbors. She confirmed hearing Mr. Hall threaten Mr. Pinto’s life. Checking for residue is strictly prudent.” Macie wrote Dr. McBlaine’s name on the Case Board and turned to the intern. “Chip, what’s the latest from Bellevue?”

  “Still comatose. The only change is they’ve gradually brought him off the hypothermia therapy and discontinued potassium infusions.”

  “What about visitors?” Macie was asking both Chip and Soledad. “Anyone coming to ask for him? I’m thinking about Pilar Fuentes.”

  The social worker shook no. “And you’d think his girlfriend would at least inquire.”

  “Definite red flag. This brings me back to the empty dresser drawer, Jonathan. What if CSU hadn’t taken those clothes?”

  Chip called out, “They could be hers. She could be hiding somewhere.”

  “The question would be why?” said Macie. “Soledad, you’ve been working up Hall’s mitigation file, right? Follow up with any of Pilar Fuentes’s relatives in the area. And wherever she works. Pay a visit. See if you can get a line on her. Jonathan, what’s your progress on locating Pinto and Hall’s crew chief?”

  “NG.”

  “NG?”

  “That means no good.”

  “We all know what it means,” she said. “I want to know why.”

  Jonny Midnight’s face pinked. “Because it’s a dead end.”

  Wild struggled to keep the exasperation out of her voice. “Jonathan. We are so far from a dead end on anything. We’re just getting started. Here’s what I want you to do. Go back to your parole board pals. Get cozy with them. Get some names. Because names are funny. They lead to other names.” She scanned the board and saw one: Pinto’s former cellmate, the man she was going to visit when she got attacked. “Like Amador Spatone.”

  “I keep leaving him messages. And when I dropped by, he wasn’t there.”

  “Then we repeat as needed.” Macie consulted the Case Board again for unresolved items and came to the one apartment building Jackson Hall would admit burglarizing. “I’m going to assume you still haven’t interviewed the victim in The Barksdale.”

  “Correct!” Monheit announced as if the firmness of his reply made up for a trail littered with excuses. “But we now have a name. Gregory Eichenthal.”

  Taken aback, Macie said, “Well . . . that’s . . .”

  “Different?” muttered Tiger.

  “Good for you, Jonathan. Did you get hold of the police report?”

  “The police won’t tell me shit. It was in Page Six this morning.” He slid his copy of the Post to Soledad, who passed it to Macie. Midcolumn there was a blurb about the recent theft of priceless artworks from The Barksdale penthouse of the CEO of pharmaceutical giant EichenAll. Not exactly the result of ace detection, but she’d take it. She posted Eichenthal’s name on the Case Board then directed the business major to run a financial workup on EichenAll. “And Tiger, I want you to book a meeting with this CEO.”

  “Right. And if he doesn’t want to meet with you?”

  Maybe a bit of Gunnar Cody had rubbed off on her. Macie smiled and said, “Ask him if he wants to see his paintings again.”

  C H A P T E R • 15

  * * *

  Macie Wild and Jonathan Monheit stood on East Fifty-Third across from The Barksdale. The pre-war gem was a sight to savor: beige stone ornamented by sculpted grotesques and scrollworks of vines and grapes topping the window frames on each of its fifteen floors. A muted residential low-rise that might have been called stately when it was constructed, it rested in serene contrast to the surrounding structures that were newer, taller, more modern, and, to Macie’s taste, character-devoid. Its neighbors reflected a dormitory sensibility that New York embraced in various development booms of the mid- to late-twentieth century and now seemed dated like blazers with shoulder pads. The Barksdale, an exclusive luxury address off Sutton Place South, sat dwarfed yet dignified, a quiet piece of art framed between precast brick facing on the left and tempered glass stacked twenty-five and thirty stories skyward on the right. To her it held fast as a lonely sentinel against the changes surrounding it. And an inviting target for thieves.

  After they were announced, a plainclothes security man met Wild and Monheit in the lobby and rode up in the elevator with them. For fourteen chimes the bodyguard took their measure with a disinterested air. S
he did the same, noting he gave off the same violent potential as the thug who attacked her, although with better grooming and a custom suit cut to almost hide the bulge on his hip.

  Instead of opening into a hallway, the elevator doors parted in the foyer of the penthouse. Gregory Eichenthal stood in his vast living room, far enough away that he had to shout—or, more likely, he just wanted to. “Where are my fucking paintings?”

  Wild approached him across an expanse of glossy hardwood to where he waited in stocking feet on the edge of a thick oriental. At forty-two, Eichenthal not only looked younger than his corporate photo, he looked like he should be working his way out of the mailroom, not running one of the country’s major pharmaceutical companies. “Thank you for seeing us. I’m Macie Wild and this is Jonathan Monheit, my lead investigator.”

  The CEO gave Monheit a fast appraisal and returned his attention to her. “I’m here because you said your client stole my paintings. I don’t see them. If this is a shakedown, I want you to know I’m recording this.”

  “This is not a shakedown,” she said, “and I have no problem speaking with you on or off the record. Further, I never said that I had the paintings or even know where they are.”

  “Then what the fuck?” He spread his arms in appeal to his bodyguard, who had taken position on Macie’s blind side, holding both hands relaxed at the middle button of his open coat—the textbook draw-ready stance. Eichenthal’s shirtsleeves smacked against his sides and he said, “You have thirty seconds to tell me why I should continue this meeting before I have Henry throw you out.”

  Monheit cleared his throat. “Sir, I don’t think threats are necess—”