The phone rang halfway into an interview with Christine Lagarde. Miri stirred awake and Lily picked up the phone. It was Captain McArdle.
“Sparr, I have good news,” he said, not sounding particularly cheerful.
“Kyle Klotzman is quitting journalism forever?”
McArdle grunted. “Not that good. Your suspension is ending, as of tomorrow.”
Lily didn’t allow herself to get excited. “You don’t sound happy about it.”
“Yeah. Well, you’re being moved.”
“What?”
“To Midtown South.”
Manhattan? That precinct was where the SparrMedia offices were. “I’m sorry, sir, I don’t understand.”
Miri sat up now, looking concerned at the slightly panicked note in Lily’s voice.
“You’re being moved to Midtown South, effective immediately.”
“Sir, if this is some kind of disciplinary action, I’d really just as soon deal with the suspension.”
“It’s not coming from me, Sparr. And it’s not about Klotzman, as far as I know. Someone wants you moved to Midtown South to work the biker case.”
She was vaguely aware of the fact that there had been this rash of incidents lately involving biker gangs, though none had hit the 104th. “But then who’s moving me? Sir, I don’t know anything about gang cases—”
“It’s not coming from me,” McArdle repeated. “Come clean out your desk if you have time tonight, and show up there tomorrow morning. Captain Ramirez is expecting you.”
And then it hit her. “Sir, what about my partner? Is she also getting moved?”
McArdle paused. “I’ll see what I can do, but I can’t promise anything. As of now, Schein’s assignment doesn’t change.” Another pause. “I’m sorry, Sparr.”
She hung up, stunned.
Miri’s brow furrowed. “What was that?”
“McArdle. I’m getting moved to Midtown South to work on the case with the biker gangs. I have no idea why. I have no idea who asked for me. And they’re just moving me, not both of us. McArdle said he’d try and see if he could move you with me, but he didn’t seem optimistic.”
Miri got up and hugged her for a long minute. “It’s okay, Lil. It’s not like we don’t have each others’ numbers.”
“I know, but spending all day with you is...” She stopped short. Is what? Comfortable? She didn’t know how to put it. “What if my new partner sucks?”
Miri hugged her again. As they stood there, she stopped and pulled back. “Hey. Midtown South. Isn’t that where your dad’s—?”
“Yeah,” Lily cut her off.
Miri nodded, looking at her carefully. “Well, here’s your chance. You could get a look at those case files.”
Detective Sparr’s face slowly relaxed into a smile. “Yeah. I could.”
Miri tugged on a lock of Lily’s copper hair. “See? There’s always a bright side.”
Not always, Lily thought. But the odds seemed in her favor this time.
6
The Flaming Cunts Get Liquidated
“In a car you’re always in a compartment, and because you’re used to it you don't realize that through that car window everything you see is just more TV. You’re a passive observer and it is all moving by you boringly in a frame.
On a cycle the frame is gone. You’re completely in contact with it all. You’re in the scene, not just watching it anymore, and the sense of presence is overwhelming.”
–Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
When Ainsley had first joined the motorcycle club, they’d been calling themselves the Flaming Cunts. Ainsley didn’t particularly like belonging to a club that sounded like it had a yeast infection, but it was a bunch of girls to ride with and help her learn about her bike. And besides, some of them were really cool. She never met girls like them at Westover, or in any of the many prep schools she’d been kicked out of.
Vea, the coolest of the lot, was from some small town outside of Kingston, Jamaica. She knew the most about how to fix and maintain her bike, she knew where to get the best riding gear (which always looked great on her), and even when she was laying a beatdown on someone, she seemed mellow and unbothered.
Nadia was a Puerto Rican girl from Bushwick. She lived with her social worker father and a brother who had, like Quin, gotten over a drug problem, but unlike Quin, had replaced it with Santeria. She had a quiet intelligence that reminded Ainsley of her sister a little, and was often reading books that Ainsley recognized as pretty serious literature.
But it was Khady who had fascinated her the most. Nobody knew her whole story, but she was Palestinian, and had come to the States as a fairly young kid, after her parents died tragically; she’d grown up under the care of a psychotic and, it was suspected, abusive older brother. She was a couple of years older than Ainsley, and she was like a Russian nesting doll: every layer that you popped open revealed that there was another layer to pop open.
Ainsley first saw her pull into the warehouse on her bike; then she took off her helmet, and she was wearing a hijab underneath it. Then after looking around the room for a minute to make sure there weren’t any men around, she took the hijab off, and underneath that, her hair was bleached blond. Ainsley was hooked.
Khady showed up to mosque on her motorcycle and cleaned her apartment listening to Bikini Kill and Sleater-Kinney. She smoked pot, but wouldn’t drink wine. Her best friend Aatifah had mostly given up chastising her for her decidedly untraditional ways.
“You’re not very serious about the whole Muslim business, are you?” Ainsley had ribbed her.
Khady had shrugged, looking at her as if she’d said something really silly. “I take what I need and do what I can handle. Isn’t that what everyone does?”
The first time they’d slept together, as Khady was shoving her down onto the mattress and yanking her shirt over her head, Ainsley had half-playfully asked, “Isn’t this against your religion?”
Khady had paused, looked at her with a funny smirk, and said, “My religion believes in mercy and forgiveness. If Allah is mad at me for this, he’ll get over it.”
Ainsley made no argument: who wants to debate theology when there’s a goddess in bed with you, removing your pants with her teeth?
There were a few older white women in the group who seemed a little weird, and a few other girls her age from various parts of the city who Ainsley didn’t really connect with because they seemed phony in a way that Ainsley couldn’t pin down. But mostly, it was pleasant for a while, until it all went to shit.
Not things with Khady, that just kept getting better. But one day, after a Chinese place in Sunset Park wouldn’t seat them because of Khady’s hijab, Ainsley’s spikes came out. “Racist fuck. Nobody treats my girl like that,” she fumed. They came back later that night after it was closed, the lot of them. Ainsley took a pipe and smashed the plate glass window, and the bunch of them streamed inside with bats and pipes and started breaking whatever they could find.
The rush of it was like nothing she’d ever felt. It was almost better than sex.
After that, she started looking for excuses to bust shit up. It was years of barely repressed frustration coming out, in a way that even hitting people in the ring in tournaments didn’t give her. Any slight, real or perceived, was a reason to go destroy something. She didn’t get much argument from most of the girls in the club, either.
It went on for a while, until one night, about four weeks before the night they met Eilidh, they chose the wrong target.
It was alarmed. There were cameras. There were cops. The others got away, but Ainsley, Khady, Vea, and Nadia were stopped before they were able to get back on their bikes, cuffed before their helmets even came off. One cop tugged Khady’s helmet off and saw the hijab (she always wore it under the helmet, for pretty much this exact reason) and stopped, laughing. “You’ve gotta be fucking kidding me.”
And so, there they sat in a cell in South Brooklyn, April rains battering again
st the barred-up slit of a window near the ceiling. She was supposed to be going home early that night because she’d promised Quin she’d take her mom out riding and come out to her about Khady. So much for that plan.
It was late, and Quin would already have turned off his phone for the night. Her other brother… Well, he never picked up his phone anymore. She pleaded with the arresting officer: “My sister’s a cop; can’t you give us a break this time?”
He laughed at her. “What do you think this is, sweetheart, a speeding ticket?”
So it could only be her mother. She called, and Eleanor’s voicemail picked up, the outgoing message the same as it had been for years, her voice sounding brisk, yet warm. She left a pleading message explaining that she was in jail in Brooklyn, picked up for vandalism, it was just bullshit, please can you come bail me out, et cetera.
The four of them were sitting around in the cell, for hours, looking morose. Khady was sleeping with her head on Ainsley’s shoulder. Vea had somehow chatted up the guard and talked him into giving Nadia her tattered copy of Siddhartha from out of her jacket, and she sat reading it. Vea was comparing notes with the guard on places to get ackee and saltfish along Eastern Parkway. Ainsley just sat there, quietly losing her mind.
Footsteps came down the hall and a voice called, “Sparr, you’re out.”
She looked up. “What?”
The cop came over with his big key and opened up the cell. “You’re out. You got bailed out. You other three, too.”
They all looked at each other. Shrugging, they got up, left the cell, and followed him out to the front.
The woman standing there waiting for them was…familiar, and yet not. She was leaning against the intake desk, wearing black motorcycle gear, her face almost completely expressionless. She looked them over appraisingly. “You four,” she said, shaking her head. “Clearly you’re the smart ones out of your group, but not so smart that you couldn’t work out not getting picked up.”
“Who the hell is this?” Khady asked, still rubbing her eyes.
“We’ll get to that,” their savior promised. “But let’s be clear about something. You’re done with that group. It’s liquidated. You’re out of trouble now, but this is a one-time rescue. You get pinched by being stupid again, I’m not helping you out.” She looked at Ainsley. “And you… If you’re going to be doing criminal shit, you might not want to do it on a highly distinctive, easily recognizable vintage bike.”
Ainsley looked at her, slack-jawed. “I don’t understand what’s going on right now,” she said after a moment.
“What’s going on is, we’re going to go across the street and get some burgers, and we’re going to talk about how you four are going to start doing something a little more useful with your violent, vandalistic tendencies.”
They looked at each other.
Vea addressed her. “And what do we call you?”
Ainsley watched those intense eyes drift over the four of them. “You can call me Empress, for now.”
“Are you joking?” Ainsley demanded.
“Are you?” Empress asked, fixing her with a stare that reminded her of every awful, stupid thing she’d ever done in her life. “Is getting your ass locked up funny?”
Ainsley shut her mouth and dialed her tone back ten clicks. “It’s just…that’s quite a nickname, that’s all.”
Empress shrugged. “Queen is overused.” She waved a hand, beckoning commandingly. They had no choice but to follow.
When Eleanor finally did get The Phone Call, it had come in late at night while she was asleep in a half-cold bath. She didn’t wake in time to answer it, only to hear the voicemail. She called Caroline. But it was two a.m., and hours ticked by before Caroline called her back. The sun was starting to come up, and Ainsley was already trudging in the front door when the phone rang.
“Sorry, El,” Caroline said, “I didn’t get your message till just now. Do you still need me to make some calls?”
“No,” Eleanor had sighed, “she’s home. God knows how.”
Caroline had taken Ainsley to lunch that day, to scare her straight or talk her off the ledge or whatever it was she thought she was going to do. As to the substance of their conversation, Caroline had been cagey and Ainsley taciturn, both of which were par for the course.
7
The District Attorney’s Two Phones
The District Attorney kept two phones in her black Kate Spade clutch bag.
One was a smartphone. It had her email, her other email, her Skype, her Facetime, her Facebook, her Twitter and, of course, her actual phone. It was the number that her family had, that everyone in the city government had, from the mayor to her secretary, Jeanne. It was the one that anyone who was anyone called when they wanted to get a hold of her.
The other was a junky red plastic flip phone that was four years old and lived on a pay-as-you-go plan purchased through a dodgy little shop in Brooklyn. There were only two people who had the number for that phone. And if it rang, she always knew she wanted to take it.
That phone rang on this particular afternoon as she was walking into City Hall for a meeting with the mayor. She felt her purse vibrate and skittered into a side doorway, pulled it out, and answered. “What do you have for me?”
“Oh, it’s pretty good,” answered the silky male voice from the other end.
“It always is, if it’s you,” she said.
A smart lawyer knows that you can’t always rely on the cops for your investigations, and that sometimes you need someone a little shadier to get at the information you really need. Of the small number of such shady characters she kept in her circle of acquaintances, Barstow was her favorite. His information was always good, his methods always discreet.
Maggie and Barstow had never met, and they were both very happy to keep it that way. He had a strangely smooth, almost effete way of speaking that had unsettled her when she had first started using him; she couldn’t help thinking of Silence of the Lambs. But after a few years of getting to know his work, nothing made her happier than the mince-y sound of his voice and his heavily mannered way of speaking.
She always pictured him as a bald guy in a room somewhere wearing a silk dressing gown and those marabou slippers with the poofy feathers on the toes, stroking an angora cat by the light of an old tiffany lamp. It was absurd, and probably completely wrong, but it entertained her.
“You’re too kind, you dear creature,” he responded.
“Not at all,” she said. And that was true. “So?”
“Well, there’s an illegitimate son.”
“Whose?”
“Not the mayor’s, unfortunately.”
“His father’s?” she prodded.
“Mmm-hmm. The young gentleman in question is currently residing in the thriving metropolis of Newark, where he gets arrested and/or ticketed frequently for terribly mundane things like turnstile jumping and possession of small quantities of marijuana.”
Maggie smiled. “And I know you’re thorough, so I’m sure there’s an answer for this, but how do we know that he is who he is?”
“Apparently the young gentleman’s mother took a blood and DNA test because she intended to sue for child support. Roberto gave her hush money, rather than see it go to court. I can get you the test results as well as the bank records indicating that the young man’s mother received regular transfers from a fund attached to Roberto León’s estate.”
Maggie was pleased. It wasn’t what she’d been looking for, but she was sure it would be useful.
“Would you like copies of the paperwork, darling?” Barstow inquired.
“Not right now,” she decided. “Hang onto it. I’ll arrange for a courier to stop by and meet you with my thank you package.”
“A pleasure as always,” he said, and hung up.
She strolled inside.
Brenda, the mayor’s secretary, knew Maggie by sight when she stepped out of the elevator and greeted her with a warm smile and some breezy small talk abo
ut Maggie’s handsome brother Lawrence. Everything about the mayor’s office was a reflection of his personality: warm, relaxed, and at least marginally competent.
Meetings with Tommy León were always pleasant. He was an easygoing, handsome guy who wanted to make everyone happy. It was what had gotten him elected. But the tendencies that get one elected don’t always make for good governance, so she often found herself struggling through conversations with him, trying to explain why she thought something was a bad idea.
He wasn’t stupid, not by any stretch; he’d attended the same prep schools and whatnot as any other guy from the social stratum they both hailed from. His temperament and desire to please people, though, often led him to intellectually justify decisions that made him feel good, rather than making difficult choices. Maggie supposed that was what his deputy mayor was around for; if she gave one tinker’s damn about anyone else’s happiness apart from hers and those in her inner circle, she had an extraordinary gift for hiding it.
“So, I’m going to talk to Corey about this business with the bikers,” he was saying. “I know he’s got people on it, but I hate that it’s getting so much press.”
She nodded. “I’m hoping we can get something airtight on it soon. Honestly, I really don’t think it’s that important a case in the grand scheme of public safety, but you’re right, Tommy, the press has been all over it.”
“How many gang incidents in the outer boroughs where brown people live,” he sighed ruefully, “and nobody cares. But you start beating up rich white boys in Midtown, and it’s a big story.”
Maggie actually agreed with him. Tommy León may have been the son of a South American media mogul, and enjoyed all the privileges that came along with that, but at the end of the day, he was still a biracial guy living in New York City, and that meant that probably, at some point in his life, he had been hassled by cops for wearing clothes that were too nice, or being in the wrong part of town while appearing too brown. The city had certainly had its share of embarrassing practices under some of its administrations over the last few decades. Even her grandmother’s administration didn’t escape completely unblemished and had to change some of the NYPD's brass.
Loud Pipes Save Lives Page 4
