The Killer Sex Game (A Frank Boff Mystery)

by Nathan Gottlieb

“Why do you say that?”

  “This mutt was seriously broke and way behind on his bills.”

  “Okay. I’ll call the precinct.” As she started to take out her phone, he restrained her arm.

  “While you’re at it,” he said, “see if the mutt had any credit cards in his wallet with someone else’s name on them. And also get the address of Marla’s apartment.”

  “Anything else, boss?”

  He smiled. “That’ll do for now.”

  As soon as he released her arm, she dialed the precinct. “Bronko, this is Damiano. Can you dig up the report for me on the female vic who was raped and murdered in that alley off St. Marks Avenue? … Sure. I’ll hold.”

  When Bronko came back on line a couple minutes later, Damiano was ready for him with a pen and pad.

  “Here’s what I want to know,” she said. “First, how much money did the dirtball have in his wallet ... Uh huh … Were there any credit cards?” … Uh huh. Okay, one last thing. What was the address of the vic ...?” Damiano scribbled on her pad. “Got it. Thanks, buddy.”

  Putting her phone away, she turned to Boff. “The mutt had five Benjamins. Four singles. And no plastic.”

  “Well, that’s a nice piece of change for a guy who was supposed to be broke. Don’t you think? I’m betting the singles were all he had in his wallet until someone laid the hundreds on him.”

  “Not necessarily,” she replied. “The guy coulda robbed a store.”

  Boff smiled again. “Tell me something, Victoria. In your vast experience in law enforcement, did you ever hear of a mutt rifling a cash register and grabbing just the hundreds? And leaving the twenties?”

  Damiano frowned. “Okay, so maybe he mugged somebody.”

  “Who just happened to have five hundred-dollar bills, but no twenties, no plastic?”

  “Okay, genius. I’ll admit this sounds suspicious. But I need more convincing.”

  “No problem. Meanwhile, let’s check out Marla’s apartment.”

  “We’ll take my car. Yours looks like it’s gonna fall apart before we get there.”

  Marla had rented a condo in a pre-war building in upscale Brooklyn Heights. Damiano badged the doorman and told him they wanted to see the dead girl’s apartment.

  “Two detectives were already here to look at it,” the doorman said.

  Damiano looked at Boff, then back at the doorman. “What were their names?” she asked.

  “Let’s see….One was Jim Smith. That was easy to remember. The other….” He shook his head. “The other I can’t recall.”

  “Did they show you their badges?”

  “Yes, ma’am. I wouldn’t have let them in without seeing ID. Is there a problem?”

  “Not at all,” Damiano replied. “We’re just here to make sure nothing was overlooked.”

  The doorman let out a sigh. “Ms. Marla was such a nice lady,” he said. “Always friendly. And tipped generously. I felt really bad when I heard what had happened to her.”

  After the doorman had fetched the apartment key, Damiano and Boff rode the elevator to the tenth floor, where they got out, opened the apartment door, stepped in, and stopped dead in their tracks. The place had been tossed. Cushions were ripped open. Rugs rolled up. Desk drawers pulled out and the contents dumped on the floor.

  “Well,” Boff said, “this was a strange way for two detectives to search an apartment, don’t you think?” He looked around some more, then turned back to Damiano. “And is there a Jim Smith in your detective bureau?”

  “Nope.”

  “Can you find out if there’s one in the precinct that covers this neighborhood?”

  “That’d be the 84th.” Pulling out her phone, she called the local precinct.

  “This is detective Damiano from the 77th. Shield number six-three-three. I was wondering if you have a detective in your precinct named Jim Smith … Uh huh … I’m interested because a woman from your jurisdiction was recently raped and murdered in my neck of town. Her name was Marla Hoban or Marla Ramirez. She used both names. Did you guys send any detectives to her apartment … Sure, I’ll hold on.”

  She looked at Boff. “The desk sergeant is checking with their detective squad.”

  A few minutes later, the officer came back on the line.

  “I see … Well, thanks for your time.” She hung up.

  “Negative,” she said. “Whoever these two yo-yos were, they weren’t sent here by the local precinct. Which begs the question: who the hell were these mutts?”

  “One possibility,” Boff said, “is they were the same two cops who killed the doer in the alley.”

  Nodding, the detective took out a two pairs of latex gloves, handed one to Boff, then slipped the other pair on. “Let’s sift through this crap,” she said.

  In the middle of their search, Boff paused to survey the apartment. “You know,” he said, “if you can get past the mess, this place looks like it’d been extensively renovated.”

  “So?”

  “Just an observation.”

  “Feed that line to somebody else,” Damiano said. “I know your little observations. What are you thinking?”

  “I’m not really thinking about anything,” he replied. “Just a feeling that’s starting to percolate in my brilliant brain.”

  He walked to a living room window, pulled lace curtains back, and looked out. “There’s a nice view of the Manhattan skyline,” he said. He turned around. “What does a view of New York from Brooklyn Heights go for these days?”

  “How do I know? I’m not a realtor.”

  “Take an educated guess.”

  “Well….I dunno….Say, maybe, three thousand a month? Or more.”

  “That’s certainly a big nut for a college girl to be carrying. Let’s check out her bedroom.”

  The bedroom was in the same shape as the living room. The mattress had been dragged onto the floor and gutted. Bureau draws had been emptied onto the floor. When Boff reached the two closets, he stopped a minute and studied them. Everything that’d been on a hangar or a shelf in both closets was now on the floor. What he found curious was that one closet was a deep walk-in, the other a lot shallower. He checked out the larger one.

  “This one was obviously Marla Hoban’s closet,” he said. “Nothing but designer clothes.”

  “And this one,” Damiano said, looking in the shallower closet, “was for Marla Ramirez. Lots of jeans. Shirts. Sneakers. A couple of inexpensive-looking jackets. What do you think these guys were looking for?”

  “My guess,” Boff said, “would be an address book. If Marla was a hooker, she’d have to keep her regular johns’ addresses.”

  “Most people in the modern age use computers to store addresses.”

  “True,” he conceded. “But, computers are not secure. They’re vulnerable to a hacker who knows what he’s looking for. And they can be confiscated and the information accessed. You or I would probably not be all that worried about somebody seeing our address files. A hooker, on the other hand, would feel differently.” Pausing, he looked around the bedroom again. “Speaking of computers,” he said. “Have you seen one anywhere in here?”

  “Now that you mention it, no. They must’ve taken it. I guess there’s really no point in us looking through this mess for the address book.”

  “Probably not. If it was here, they found it.”

  “Let’s head back.”

  But as they turned to go, Boff suddenly stopped. Something about the closets was nagging at him. Turning back, he looked from one closet to the other.

  “Do you see something?” Damiano asked.

  “It’s what I don’t see that I find curious.”

  “What do you mean?”

  He pointed to the closet Damiano had looked through. “The Ramirez closet is not nearly as deep as the other one.”

  “So what?”

  “So, detective, if you go through the expense and trouble to renovate an apartment, why would you make only one closet a walk-in?”

>   “Beats me.”

  Walking to the smaller closet, Boff stepped in and tapped his knuckles on the back wall.

  “Hollow,” he said. “Let’s look for a switch or a hinge.”

  They searched inside a few minutes.

  “Nada,” Damiano said.

  Boff backed out of the closet and looked back and forth from the big closet to the smaller one. Finally he noticed something.

  “The Hoban closet,” he said, “has just one light switch on the outside wall. The smaller one has switches on either side of it.”

  He flipped the switch on the left side of the smaller closet. A light went on inside. “Victoria, hit the other one.”

  As soon as she flipped the second switch, the back of the closet slid slowly aside, revealing a sizable hidden space behind it.

  “Oh, my,” Damiano said, looking inside. “This was one kinky lady.”

  In the hidden space were dominatrix costumes, whips, and chains. All neatly arranged and undisturbed. Damiano picked a foot-long dildo off a shelf.

  “I sure hope she didn’t use this on Danny,” she said.

  “I think we can safely assume this kinky stuff was for business. And we can also safely assume the two guys who trashed this place did not find the hidden space because nothing in here was touched. Let’s look for the address book.”

  After searching everywhere in the closet, they still came up empty.

  “Damn,” Damiano said, sounding deflated. “Where the hell is it?”

  As he often did, Boff stood still, cleared his mind, and tried to let things come to him, the same way he had done in the alley. After a minute, he glanced up at a bowl-shaped light fixture.

  “There’s a light switch on the interior wall of this closet,” he said. “Flip it.”

  She did, but the light didn’t go on. “Bulb’s probably out,” she said.

  Boff was tall enough to reach up and put his hand inside the bowl. Although there was no bulb, the bowl wasn’t empty. He pulled out a palm-sized black book.

  Damiano grinned. “Nice work, hotshot.”

  “You expected less of the Great Boffer? Okay, let’s take a look at this thing.”

  After Boff closed the hidden space, they returned to the living room, picked up a couple of ripped cushions, put them on the couch, and sat down. Damiano moved close so she could see the pages of the address book for herself.

  Boff read the entries out loud. “First one: Merrill Lynch. Two-twenty-nine 18th Street…. Naughty Dr. Dave. At 144 Henry Street.…Goldman Sachs, 39 Beekman Place.” He looked at Damiano. “There are quite a few stock brokers in here.”

  She pointed to another page. “And here’s a judge. He’s only identified as Judge M. With no address. What do you make of that?”

  Boff shrugged. “It’s possible she and the judge used a hotel.”

  As they continued to leaf through the pages and read the contents, he recognized an address he had been to recently. It was Emilio Benvenuti’s house, though he neglected to mention that fact to Damiano. He was about to turn a page, when she pulled his hand away.

  “Wait!” she said, laying a finger on a name. “Here’s a state senator.”

  Boff closed the address book and thought about what else was probably in it for a minute. “If someone had these addresses,” he said, “the identities of the johns could easily be learned.”

  “So? At worst, the john would be guilty of a misdemeanor or might have to attend a first offenders prostitute program.”

  “No. The worst would be that some of these people with high profile jobs and families would be open to extortion.” He pointed the book at her. “This little baby would be worth quite a bit to a blackmailer.”

  At this, the detective tried to grab the book, but he closed his fist over it and stuffed it into a pants pocket.

  “Hey!” she protested. “You can’t take that. It’s evidence.”

  He shook his head. “No, it’s not. Your case is officially closed.”

  “So I’ll get it reopened!”

  “Do you really want to do that?” he said. “It’d mean that you’d have to share credit in the end with your fellow detectives. Working alone with the Boffer, however, you’d not only have a much better chance at cracking this case, but you could also get a solo collar.”

  Damiano pondered this for about a minute. “Okay,” she said. “For now, I’ll let you keep it.”

  “Thank you so much, detective.”

  Chapter 24

  When Boff and Damiano reached the lobby and exited the elevator, the doorman was on his cell phone. Seeing them approaching, he quickly hung up.

  “How’d it go?” he asked.

  “Not so good,” Damiano said. She explained what had been done to Marla’s apartment and told him not to go inside because detectives from the 84th Precinct would be by to look.

  Boff stepped closer to the doorman. “You said you saw their badges, right?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “What color were the badges?”

  “I don’t remember.”

  Damiano showed the doorman her gold shield again. “Did they look like this?” she asked.

  The doorman shook his head. “No. I think they might have been silver. And shaped a little different.”

  She described what a patrolman’s badge looked like.

  “Yes, that’s what they showed me,” the doorman said. “What does that mean? That they weren’t detectives?”

  “Yes, they were,” Damiano said. “Thanks for the help.”

  They left before the doorman could ask more questions.

  “The most obvious answer,” Boff said once they were in Damiano’s car, “is whoever hired the two cops to kill the doer sent the same mutts here to look for the address book. Just to be sure, can you pull photos of the two cops and show them to the doorman?”

  “Yes. And if it was these guys, I’m obligated to report them to IA.”

  “Fine. But don’t mention what we’re pursuing. Just tell Internal Affairs you were doing a routine follow-up on the vic and stumbled onto this. We don’t want them meddling in what we’re doing.”

  As they arrived at the gym, Damiano said, “What are you going to do with that little book you rifled from my crime scene?”

  “Have a friend put some names next to the addresses.”

  “Then what?”

  “Pay a visit to one or two of the johns.”

  “You want me to come along?”

  “No. The presence of a cop would kill any chances I have of getting information from them.”

  When Boff walked into Wright’s back room, the information broker was lying, fully clothed, on a portable massage table being worked on by a slender, olive-skinned woman. But what was happening didn’t appear to be a massage. All the woman was doing was pressing her hands against the top of his skull.

  Wright turned his head. “Hi, Frank,” Wright said. “Take a seat. I’ll be done in a minute. This is Chana. She’s from Israel.”

  Sitting down on the couch, Boff watched as the woman slid her hands down across his cheeks to the sides of his rib cage, where she rested them for several minutes. This still didn’t look like a massage. It didn’t look like she was applying any real pressure to the body.

  Mildly curious, Boff said, “Can I ask what you’re doing?”

  “It’s craniosacral therapy,” Wright replied. “The energy flowing from Chana’s fingers is tuning into my craniosacral system.”

  Boff pretended to be interested. “Really? What does that do?”

  Chana looked at him for the first time. “It helps in the movement of cerebrospinal fluid through the spinal cord. In the process, it also rids the mind and body of the residual effects of lesions caused by trauma. Both emotional and physical.”

  “Chana’s helping me release suppressed emotions,” Wright further explained. “Usually I end up crying, but I always feel better after. Frank, you should try it.”

  “How much do you charge?” Boff
asked in a serious voice.

  “Ninety dollars a session,” Chana replied. “Which is anywhere from an hour to an hour and a half, depending on how much work is needed.”

  With a nod, Boff walked over and opened Wright’s mini-refrigerator, grabbed a can of Diet Coke, popped the cap, and took a long sip. “When you leave, give me your card.”

  “Frank, Chana believes the garbage the government puts in the chemtrails is penetrating our spinal cords and disrupting the flow of cerebrospinal fluid.”

  Before Boff could comment, however, Wright suddenly burst out crying.

  Chana’s eyes lit up. “What is it, Billy?”

  “I can’t tell you.”

  “Yes, you can. It’s part of your healing.”

  “Uh…okay. My, uh, father…when I was little, he locked me in a dark closet once. For a long time to punish me. I was so scared I pissed my pants. Almost lost my mind. I only remembered it just now.”

  Boff brought a box of tissues to Wright, who pulled one out, rubbed his eyes, then blew his nose.

  About ten minutes later the session was over. Chana folded up her portable table, hugged her patient, gave Boff her card, hugged her patient a second time, and left with his ninety dollars in cash.

  “Frank, you’re really gonna call her?” Wright asked.

  “Are you out of your fucking mind? She’s a joke. A con artist. I think those chemtrails really have affected your brain.”

  Wright laughed. “Not my brain. My dick. I’m trying to get laid. I’m not making much progress, though, because Chana’s got some ethical issue with me porking her. Who can understand women?”

  Boff shrugged. He always understood women. “Did you really just remember about your father locking you in the closet?”

  “Shit, no. My dad never did that. I make up stuff like that and then cry so she thinks I’m a vulnerable, sensitive man. Women go for guys like that, ya know.”

  Boff shook his head. “For the money you’re paying her, it’d be cheaper to hire a hooker. Speaking of which….”

  After crumbling Chana’s card and tossing it in the waste basket, he pulled out Marla’s address book and gave it to his information broker.