Dancer in the Flames (19 page)

Boots was about to check the profiler’s final prediction by examining Jules Cosyn’s statement when he heard a knock on the door.

‘Hey, Boots, open up. My hands are full.’

Libby Greenspan to the rescue. It was past seven and Boots hadn’t eaten since breakfast. He opened the door to find Libby holding a tray loaded with lasagna, mesclun salad and a small loaf of seeded Italian bread.

‘Your father says I’m supposed to stay with you until you eat.’

‘Does he?’ His mouth already filling with saliva, Boots took the tray and set it on his coffee table.

‘Myself, I don’t think you need a mother.’

Boots picked up the knife and fork on the tray. ‘What’re you saying, Libby?’

‘Your father and I have been talking about marriage. I think he already spoke to you.’

‘He did.’

‘Andy tells me you didn’t have much to say.’

‘My opinion wasn’t asked for.’

‘Well, I’m asking now.’

Boots carried a chunk of lasagna to his lips, pausing a moment to let the steam drift into his nostrils. ‘How old are you, Libby? Forty-four? Forty-five?’

‘Forty-seven.’

‘Well, my father’s sixty-seven.’ Boots looked directly into Libby’s hazel eyes. She was a good woman, quick to smile and full of energy. As far as he could tell, she didn’t have a mean bone in her body. ‘Right now, Dad’s healthy. In fact, I’d have to say he’s rejuvenated since he met you. But down the line, that’s all gonna change. I don’t know how long it’ll take – maybe five years, maybe ten. But however long it is, one morning you’ll wake up and realize that you’ve gone from wife to nurse. You’ll realize that the last of your good years will be spent caring for Andy in his bad years.’

Libby shook her head. Somehow, she hadn’t expected Boots to get right to the point, the one she’d been thinking about for the past two months. Stupid of her, to be sure.

‘I love Andy,’ she said. ‘Beyond that, I can only say this: I’ll never desert him, no matter how bad it gets. And I know Andy will never desert me. Remember, the difference in our ages doesn’t mean that he’ll go first, or be the first to get sick.’

As Boots returned to his dinner, he remembered that Libby, an only child and childless herself, had no close relatives. ‘You know it’s gonna be a church wedding, right? You’ll be married by a Catholic priest?’

‘Followed by a Jewish ceremony at home.’

‘Well, I can’t say I know much about Jewish ceremonies, but if you want, when you walk down the aisle at Mount Carmel, I’ll walk beside you.’

Libby’s eyes welled up, as Boots had known they would. She reached out to touch his hand.

‘Boots Littlewood,’ she said, ‘you are such a prick.’

The impending union of Andy Littlewood and Libby Greenspan fled Detective Littlewood’s mind before Libby reached the bottom of the stairs. He turned on the Yankee game, which was in the third inning, and muted the sound. Then he retrieved Jules Cosyn’s recorded statement, which ran to forty pages and was every bit as delusional as Khouri had predicted. Here, Boots was greatly aided by the efficiency of the task force. Passages that bolstered the state’s assertion that Jules had confessed were highlighted. Most of these involved references to the malevolent female deity who plagued Cosyn’s days. This deity, who bore many titles, including the Great Whore of the Seven Systems, generally lived on Venus, but had been recently kidnapped and taken to Saturn where the planet’s rings were actually her chains. For reasons unexplained, Jules Cosyn had facilitated the kidnapping and was now the target of the Great Whore’s minions. These lesser demons appeared to be ordinary human females but were actually soul-sucking vampires. Killing them was the only way Jules could secure his personal survival.

Satisfied, Boots returned the files to their appropriate boxes. Jules Cosyn fit Adam Khouri’s profile as if designed for no other purpose, virtually every element falling into place. Twenty-six years old, Cosyn had been diagnosed a paranoid schizophrenic at fourteen, been in and out of various institutions, lived on and off with his parents, been within a block of the last crime scene when first approached by investigators.

Bottom line, the Lipstick Killer investigation was righteous and there was no reason to suppose any connection between that investigation and the death of Patrick Kelly.

Boots glanced at the clock as he retrieved the Kelly files. It was now approaching eleven o’clock. He’d been at it for more than twelve hours and he had hours to go. He considered retreating to his bedroom, catching a few hours’ sleep, but decided to continue. He had plans for the following day and he would have to be out early. There wasn’t all that much to review anyway. The small task force assigned to the investigation had stuffed the file with paper, almost all of it interviews with relatives, friends and co-workers, none of whom had anything to contribute. The exceptions were three statements given by independent witnesses, and the statement given by Jill Kelly.

Although provided by individuals unknown to each other, two of the statements were as similar as they were brief: somewhere between six twenty-five and six thirty, both witnesses heard ‘what might have been gunshots’ coming from the general direction of the Kelly home. The statement by the third witness, who lived around the corner, was more elaborate. She’d first observed a car, a Toyota, parked in front of her home at four o’clock in the afternoon. As her own car was in the driveway, she was hoping the Toyota would be moved before her husband came in at seven thirty. From time to time, she’d parted the curtains in her front window to check, but it wasn’t until the conclusion of the nightly news at seven o’clock that she’d looked out to watch two men drive away ‘in a big hurry’. One of these men, she’d added when pressed, ‘might have been’ wearing a ski mask.

‘Well, I know he had on a knitted cap, but it seemed like it was pulled down too far, like it was covering his neck and his ears.’

The times didn’t match up – the shots at six thirty, the getaway at seven. Not that it mattered all that much. The first two witnesses had gone about their business after hearing the shots. It was Jill Kelly who’d finally called the police.

Suddenly, Boots realized that he didn’t know the final score of the Yankee game. The TV had been on the whole time, but he’d been too absorbed in the files to even note the highlights. Jill Kelly’s statement in hand, he tuned his set to a cable sports channel, discovering, after a few minutes, that the Yankees had coasted to an easy victory over Toronto. A-Rod and Jeter had both gone deep, while Jeter had made a spectacular play on a foul ball that would be featured in highlight reels across the country. That left the Bronx Bombers in front of the Red Sox by two games, and Boots Littlewood up three hundred dollars for the week.

Triumphant, Boots dropped on to the couch and read the statement given by Jill Kelly, then a pre-law student at Fordham University. Amazingly brief, it could only have been the product of an intervention by one of her well-placed relatives. Otherwise, the simple possibility that she was the shooter would have led to a thorough grilling instead of the terse recitation she’d offered to Detective Lenny Olmeda.

My father picked me up at school and we drove directly home. We came into the house somewhere around a quarter to seven. I came in first. I heard my father lock the door, then I heard the shots. I knew what they were right away, but I couldn’t make myself turn around. I was crying and I kept calling, ‘Daddy, daddy?’ Then I finally ran into the kitchen and dialed nine-one-one.

B
oots didn’t know exactly what excuse he was going to make until he pulled to a stop before the Staten-Island home of Anita Parker, Chris Parker’s widow, and noticed a ‘For Sale’ sign on the front lawn. It was too good to be true, but he wasn’t complaining. Luck, good and bad, played a part, sometimes critical, in any investigation.

He got out, stretched and looked around. Except for a second-story addition over the garage, Parker’s small colonial was as nondescript as any of its neighbors. Nothing about the house spoke to his alleged corruption, and neither did the Toyota mini-van parked in the driveway or the above-ground pool in the back yard.

Boots climbed the few steps to the front porch, slid a tricycle off to one side and rang the bell. The woman who answered had done everything possible to disguise her grief. Anita Parker’s make-up was carefully applied, her dark hair tumbled evenly about her shoulders, her rose-pink blouse was freshly ironed. Nevertheless, her face was all bones and hollows, and the sooty pouches beneath her pale eyes were too dark to conceal. When Boots displayed his badge, she flinched, as if anticipating more bad news.

‘Hi, I’m Boots Littlewood. I was part of the task force. They used me to find Vinnie Palermo.’

‘Oh, I see. Lenny Olmeda mentioned you.’

Boots took a deep breath. ‘I’ve been wantin’ to pay my respects, but I had a little accident and I never got a chance. Then I heard you were putting your house up for sale and I figured now or never.’

As far as Boots could tell, Anita Parker’s smile was genuine. He watched her back through the door, then followed her into a living room cluttered with toys.

‘How many?’ He gestured to a playpen.

‘Three. And you?’

‘One. He’s in college.’

‘With what they charge for tuition, I don’t know whether to offer condolences or congratulations. Anyway, I’ve got a pot of coffee going. If you have time for a cup, I’d like to hear about what you did.’ She paused to brush her hair away from her face. ‘I don’t know why, but knowing about the investigation, about what happened, makes it better. At least for a while.’

Settled in a chair at the kitchen table, Boots went on for the next ten minutes. He was good at telling cop stories and Anita, a cop’s wife, seemed eager to listen. She even broke a smile when he described himself limping into the back yard to find Jill Kelly whomping on Vinnie Palermo.

‘You know,’ she said when Boots wound it up, ‘there’s a question I’ve asked Lenny Olmeda a number of times, but I can’t seem to get a straight answer. Do you mind if I ask you?’

‘Not at all.’

‘What was Chris doing by the Williamsburg Bridge at that hour of the morning?’

Boots sipped at his coffee as he weighed his response. He saw no reason, at this point, to add to Anita Parker’s misery. ‘My guess is that he was meeting a snitch, but nobody knows for sure.’

Anita’s response was quick. ‘My husband commanded a narcotics unit. He didn’t work in the field.’

‘Maybe the snitch would only talk to him, or maybe the snitch was so high-level he couldn’t be trusted to a subordinate. Anyway, you’re asking the wrong man. I’m a precinct detective and I was only assigned to the job for a couple of days. The task force used me to find Vinnie after he went to ground and that was it.’

‘But Palermo confessed to you first, isn’t that right?’

Though Vinnie’s statement was actually a claim of innocence, Boots nodded agreeably. ‘So, tell me, when are you planning to move?’

‘Tomorrow.’

‘Tomorrow?’ Boots glanced around the kitchen. Not a single item had been packed. ‘You’ve got a lot of work ahead of you.’

‘I’m going to let the movers pack me up. It’s expensive, I know, but . . .’ Her mouth curled into a sneer as she folded her hands and laid them on the table. ‘The ironies keep piling up. Chris and I were living on credit cards before he was killed. Now, between the insurance and his pension, you could even say that I’m wealthy. Anyhow, I was raised in Buffalo and I still have family there.’ She smiled and spread her hands apart. ‘Everybody tells me I have to get on with my life, but somehow New York doesn’t seem like the right place to start.’

Anita glanced at the clock on the wall. ‘I need to get busy. Movers or not, I have a lot of work to do. But thanks for stopping by.’

Boots raised a finger. ‘I had another reason for coming over this morning,’ he admitted.

‘And what’s that?’

‘Well, my father and I have a house in Greenpoint. We’ve been living there for a long time, but the neighborhood’s changing. Not only are the yuppies movin’ in, the Mayor wants to line the East River with high-rise condominiums. It’s gonna be like starin’ out through a row of teeth. Me and my dad, we think it’s time to make a change.’

Anita Parker smiled. ‘You want to buy the house? It’s a fine house.’

‘I don’t deny that for a minute, but I still have to check it out, maybe come back with my father. I already copied down your broker’s phone number.’

‘Sounds great.’ Anita rose. ‘Feel free to look wherever you want. I’ll be upstairs, packing the kids’ clothes. We’re driving.’

A few minutes later, Boots counted his blessings for the second time that morning when he discovered a double-hung window in a first-floor guest room. Concealed from outside observers by an overgrown lilac bush, the window was a burglar’s delight. Boots took a handkerchief from an inner pocket and covered his fingertips before parting the curtains to flip the window’s lock. He stood there for just a moment afterward, until he’d fashioned an internal map that led out to the street. Then he quickly retraced his steps, entering the front room to discover the unmistakable fragrance of a burning cigarette wafting down from the second floor. If this keeps up, he told himself as he climbed the stairs, I’m gonna have to stop on the way home, buy a lottery ticket. Because luck doesn’t get any better than this.

Two hours later, after a careful inspection of the Parker house that carried him from the attic to the basement, Boots finally drove away. He had a long trip ahead of him, out to the 111th Precinct in Bayside, an upscale neighborhood in eastern Queens. As expected, the ride was all metal, asphalt and soot, from the Verranzano Bridge to the Gowanus Expressway, to the Brooklyn–Queens Expressway, to the Long Island Expressway, to the Clearview Expressway. Although traffic was heavy from beginning to end, Boots remained patient, guiding his Chevy into the left lane, moving right only at the interchanges. He kept an eye on the rear-view mirror as he went, and made a series of maneuvers when he got off at Northern Boulevard, speeding up, slowing down, turning corners without signaling. When he was absolutely certain that he wasn’t being tailed, he double-parked in front of the One-Eleven.