French Pressed (18 page)

“Private’s private,” he insisted.

As I hit speed dial, Mike walked to the corner to check out the headlines at a small newsstand. I watched him affably engage the Hispanic vendor. He appeared to be speaking in fluent Spanish.

I put the phone to my ear, listened to Matt’s phone ring. My ex picked up right away. “Clare, I have some news from the lawyers—”

“Can I see Joy today?”

“No. Neither one of us can. She’s on Riker’s Island, and no one can see her but her lawyers.”

“What about tomorrow?” I asked, my tone a little desperate.

“Same deal. Neither one of us can see her until her arraignment Monday.”

“Monday?” My gaze fell from the bright windshield. I stared unseeingly at the Dodge’s dashboard. “Is that a normal amount of time?”

“There are complicating issues. The Vincent Buccelli murder might be tagged on, but it took place in Queens, and that’s another borough, so it’s another DA’s office.” He sighed. “They’re sorting it all out, I guess—a lot of law degrees are involved.”

I took a deep breath, released it. “She
will
get out on bail, right? What are the lawyers saying?”

“The judge will decide Monday downtown in criminal court.”

I closed my eyes, not able to comprehend my Joy sitting behind bars for months and months before her trial would even come up on the docket.

“Anyway, Clare, I’ll stay on the lawyers, keep you informed.”

“Thanks, Matt.”

“You should thank Breanne, too. This criminal defense firm is one of the best in the city. Bree has personal ties to the partner handling Joy’s case. She made all the calls from Milan.”

“I
will
thank her, Matt. I just pray we never have to
use
Bree’s lawyer friend. If I get lucky today, Joy’s case will never have to go to trial.”

“You think you can nail Keitel’s killer?”

“Vinny’s, too. I think Brigitte killed them both. She’s on the lam now, but Mike and I are on her trail.”

“Keep following it then.” Matt paused. “Look, I know I’ve been down on you in the past for butting in, for being a nose hound, but this is our daughter we’re talking about, so…anything you can do, Clare,
anything
…”

“I know, Matt. I’ve been doing the best I can—”

My eyes lifted up just then. I noticed Mike in his long overcoat, turning away from the newsstand. He glanced back at the Dodge, met my eyes.

“—now let me get back to work.”

T
HE
prescription bottle carried an Inwood address, which meant we had to go even farther uptown, way above 125th Street—the last road most tourist maps bothered to show as part of Manhattan Island.

The neighborhood was largely residential. Most of its structures were town houses, apartment buildings, and two- and three-family dwellings. It was probably the most suburban of Manhattan’s seventy-plus neighborhoods with three shopping districts, a hospital, and a public park.

Mike drove us up one quiet, tree-lined street and down another. When the car’s direction twisted and turned in a particularly odd way, I was a little confused whether we were heading east or west.

“The lay of the land’s different up here,” I remarked, leaning forward to peer at the passing street signs. “There’s no grid pattern.”

“Right,” Mike said. “Some of these streets are based on old Indian trails. They weren’t laid out by city planners like the rest of Manhattan.”

“Except not all of Manhattan has the grid,” I reminded him.

“True…”

The lanes in the West Village, for instance, were far from straight. This often confused people, but without the legal protection of historic preservation, my neighborhood’s one- and two-century-old town houses—including the four-story Federal that the Village Blend occupied—would have been razed by now and replaced with thirty-story apartment buildings, all lined up in the nice, neat pattern of the rest of the borough, with addresses that were standard, predictable, and all-conforming.

I leaned back against the car seat. “You know what? I’d rather have the Indian trails.”

Ironically, the address we were currently after was on a wild frontier, just beyond the invisible border of Inwood’s happy, middle-class Hispanic lives. Sherman Creek, a rundown subsection of Inwood, was located along a strip of the Harlem River. To get there we drove through a sprawling public housing project called the Dyckman Houses.

The Saturday afternoon weather was pleasant, bright, and only mildly chilly, yet the grounds around the project appeared close to deserted. Benches along the sidewalks were empty, and a children’s playground was lifeless. I wasn’t surprised, since I recognized the name of this housing development as the center of a recent crime wave that had been reported on the news.

Sherman Creek itself was mostly industrial. When we arrived in the neighborhood, Mike gave me a quick rundown on the place. He said it was mixed zoning, with warehouses and businesses existing next to apartments and lofts, some of which were now inhabited by urban pioneers, an adventurous and hearty breed of city dweller that I’d always admired since they paved the way for further residential development and eventual gentrification.

At the moment, gentrification was a moot point for Sherman Creek. The businesses we drove by—construction and demolition companies, air-conditioner installation and repair, and automotive garages—were branded with more gang tags than we’d noticed in Washington Heights. As Mike parked, I pointed out the graffiti.

“Yeah,” he said. “It’s pretty bad. Then again, you should have seen the Upper West Side fifteen years ago, when I was working anticrime.”

“You were in an anticrime unit?”

“Yeah, and I did some antigang work, too. Then I moved to OCCB-Narcotics—”

“What’s OCC—”

“Sorry. Organized Crime Control Bureau. It’s how I earned my gold shield, but I still attend antigang seminars twice a month.”

“So you’re an expert. Then what’s the deal with this one?” I pointed.

Most of the gang tags were a mess, aesthetically speaking. But the scarlet symbol I’d singled out had been done with admirable graphic flair: two stylized letter
R
s spray-painted together, one drawn backward. The artist even added a drop shadow. All things considered, it could have worked as a corporate logo.

“Whoever painted it has a decent technique,” I said, tilting my head to check it out at another angle.

“That’s the Red Razors,” Mike replied, folding his arms and regarding me, regarding the tag. “Nothing but a pack of small-time punks peddling ganja. They wouldn’t last a week against the gangs we faced back in the day. Stone killers like the Wild Cowboys, the Red Top Crew. But the worst of the bunch was the Jheri Curls—”

“The
what
? You’re kidding me, right? There was
not
a gang named after Little Richard’s do?”

“It’s a real gang. I promise you. Funny name. Nothing funny about their methods.” Mike turned and began walking down the sidewalk. “The address we’re looking for is Rayburn Way,” he reminded me. “It should be a few more blocks this way.”

I caught up to his long strides. “So what did they do? The Jheri Curls?”

Mike continued to glance up and down the street, taking in our surroundings. “Rafael Martinez and his four brothers ran a major cocaine trafficking operation out of Washington Heights, committed several murders, including a gang-style hit of a witness.”

“What happened to them?”

Mike shrugged. “Some undercover guys got the goods on their cocaine operation from the inside, and they were taken down. Rafe and his
hermanos
are behind bars for good.”

There was something about the way Mike told me the story, the hint of pride in his voice. “You had something to do with that, didn’t you?”

“No comment,” he said, but the faintest upturn at the edges of his mouth told me that he was glad I’d guessed. A second later, however, the grim line was back. “That’s the trouble with police work. It’s always one step forward, two steps back.”

“I don’t follow…”

“Within a year, the Wild Cowboys and the Young Talented Children had taken the Curls’ turf and their business.”

I frowned. “But Dean Martin warned us, didn’t he?”

“Excuse me?”

“You never heard him sing, ‘You’re Nobody ’Til Somebody Loves You’?”

“The song?”

“Yes, Lieutenant. Most memorable line: ‘The world still is the same. You’ll never change it.’”

Mike thought it over, grunted. “Good line. Good song. I’ll grant you that. But if you want to talk Rat Pack, my guy’s Sinatra.”

“I should have guessed. You’ve both got that Ol’ Blue Eyes thing going.”

Mike smiled, then he stopped us on a corner. The green street sign read Rayburn Way. Under it, a bright yellow metal sign warned the alleyway was a dead end, and under that I spied another Red Razor gang tag. Mike pulled the brown prescription bottle out of his overcoat pocket.

“The address we’re looking for is seventy-nine,” he said, squinting to read the tiny letters.

I stayed close to Mike as we entered the dead-end alley.

On the left of us were cinder-block buildings; on the right was a sprawling junkyard, surrounded by an eight-foot chain-link fence topped with barbed wire. There was a fence at the end of the block, too. Beyond it, I could see the cold, uneasy waters of the Harlem River.

My attention returned to the stark gray buildings on our left. They seemed to be decaying before our eyes. The nearest building was topped by a faded sign that read Big C Plumbing. Under that, a smaller sign proclaimed the space For Rent. The building itself had high, broken windows. Its door was shuttered by a steel gate splattered with graffiti. The building next door had housed a Rapido Washing Machine Repair and Service business, which had also gone bust.

“Are you sure we’re going in the right direction?” I asked.

“Yeah,” Mike said, his eyes busy scanning the empty street. “Look for the numbers. Big C Plumbing was seventy-three. This repair place is seventy-five. The building at the end of the block should be seventy-nine.”

We continued down the dead-end street, and I noticed a gap between the buildings. Another structure had been here once, but it was torn down now, leaving a flat patch of dirt between the cinder block buildings. As we approached the empty lot, the bitter smell of woodsmoke floated lightly on the brisk wind. The second Mike smelled that aroma, he slowed his pace and rapidly unbuttoned his overcoat. But the sun was behind a cloud now, and the blustery temperature near the Harlem River was downright frigid.

“Are you
warm
?” I asked (naively, as it turned out).

Mike reached out, touched my shoulder, gently but insistently pushed me to his right side so that his body was now standing between me and the lot we were about to pass—
shielding
me, as I realized a moment later, when the loud
clang
woke me up to what Mike already knew.

Someone had whipped a beer can so hard it flew from deep inside the empty lot, all the way across the street, bouncing against the junkyard’s chain-link fence.

We took a few more steps forward, and I finally saw the bonfire blazing inside the steel drum, the half dozen Hispanic-looking youths in black hoodies and red sweatpants gathered around it.

“Stay to my right,” Mike whispered, continuing with easy strides, as if we were strolling through Times Square at noon.

One of the punks noticed me anyway and whistled. Other catcalls followed. I braced myself for some crude comments. These came in ugly succession. Then three youths broke off from the pack and approached us, the flunkies flanking their obvious leader.

The leader looked about seventeen. He had light cocoa skin, a wispy soul patch on his chin, long sideburns, and short black hair covered with a red knit cap. The punk on the leader’s right was clutching a can of Mexican beer. The one on the left spun a long chain that dangled from his pants. The leader’s hands were free, and he was clenching and unclenching his fists.

“Hey,
papá
,” he said. “You lost, man?”

“No,
junior
. I know where I’m going. Do you?” Mike said, staring the leader down. That’s when I noticed he’d carefully drawn back one side of his overcoat, making sure the punk saw the large-caliber handgun strapped to his shoulder.

The leader spied the weapon and stopped in his tracks.

The gangbanger with the beer stepped forward. “Screw you, man! You don’t scare us! How would you like—”

“Don’t do nothin’,
hijo
!” the leader shouted. He rolled his eyes. “Dude’s a cop.”

At their leader’s gestured command, the youths retreated back to their bonfire, where they eyed us warily as we approached the final building on the decrepit block.

Something in me still wanted to turn around, go back to those young men, ask them who was responsible for designing and painting that Red Razor gang tag. I wanted to tell the boy that he had potential, tell him he could have a life. But Mike would have strangled me if I’d tried anything close to a stunt like that.

I was naive sometimes, but I wasn’t an idiot. I stayed to Mike’s right, kept my eyes averted from the young men.

We finally reached the end part of this dead end. The building marked 79 was a three-story brick structure covered in soot. There were cracked windows on the ground floor that had long ago been painted over. Two of the upstairs windows were covered with cardboard; dirty curtains dangled from a brass pole in the third. The building itself had once been part of the electric company’s massive holdings. This I knew because of the words set in stone above the front entrance:

RAYBURN WAY CONSOLIDATED EDISON MAINTENANCE STATION
116

Another sign had been added to the black steel door, painted in gleaming silver letters in a delicate, flowing script:

THE SHERMAN CREEK ART COLLECTIVE

The door itself was rusty and pitted, and looked like it hadn’t been opened in decades. Mike tried the handle, pulled as hard as he could, but it was locked.

We both spotted the mail slot beside the door and read the names scribbled in no particular order on white tape: Saul Maxwell, Dexter Ward, Maryanne Vhong, T. De Longe, Nancy Roth.

Mike looked for a doorbell or an intercom, but there was none, so he pounded on the metal door with his fist. He was about to knock again when we heard muffled sounds from the other side, then the door opened.

A tall, rail-thin young man appeared, wearing a black T-shirt and faded, paint-spattered overalls. His long brown hair was stringy and dirty; the scraggly King Tut beard hanging from his chin was decorated with blue plastic rings. He clutched a paintbrush in one soiled hand, a dirty rag in the other. His ears were pierced and decorated with tiny silver earrings that looked like skulls. When he spoke, I noticed his tongue was pierced, too.

“You knocked?”

“Are you Toby De Longe?” Mike asked.

The youth shook his head. “I’m Saul Maxwell. Haven’t seen Tobe in a couple of days. I reckon he’s upstairs, sleeping it off.”

“Sleeping
what
off?”

Maxwell shrugged.

“Do you
reckon
he’s alone?” Mike asked.

The kid’s eyes flashed. “You ask a lot of questions for some asshole who came knocking on my door.”

Mike displayed his shield. “Let’s talk, you and me. Asshole to asshole.”

“Frenchy’s with him,” Saul Maxwell said, frowning.

“Who’s Frenchy?”

“Toby’s girlfriend, Brigitte. She’s French Canadian, so we call her—”

“Step aside,” Mike said, muscling past the man. I followed him through the door.

The layout of the first floor was still one large industrial space, illuminated by fluorescent ceiling lights, half of them burned out. There were visible holes in the concrete floor where factory machines had once been bolted. I noticed another steel door in the corner, beside a concrete staircase with steel tube railings.

The walls were gray and unpainted, except for one massive section that had been turned into an impressive mural depicting the Manhattan skyline as seen from the middle of the George Washington Bridge. The central image was the figure of a man clutching his head and wailing in despair—an impressive pastiche of
The Scream
, Edvard Munch’s most famous painting.