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Authors: Gerald A. Browne

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BOOK: West 47th
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Mr. Kalali assessed Tracy: a young thick-built black with oily tendrils of hair hanging down and a fuzzy patch like a collection of black lint between his chin and prominent lower lip. He did, indeed, appear menacing but possibly that was only a purposeful demeanor he'd developed, something he'd practiced and perfected in front of a mirror.

This other black, the one apparently in charge, anyway, doing all the talking, might be even more of a pretender, Mr. Kalali thought. A cynical, dangerous, experienced black thief was the impression he was striving to make, and, admitted, he was convincing. However, it might very well be the only reality was the color of his skin. As for the girl, she was out of place. A juvenile, a skinny little show-off acting tough. That she was there validated his observations regarding the two others, Mr. Kalali thought.

He complimented himself for such insight. It had, he believed, always been one of his outstanding abilities.

The compliment acted like a restorative to his legs. He drew himself up, elevated his chin and told Floyd unequivocally: “You'll get nothing more from us.”

Floyd blinked thoughtfully. “That's a motherfucking shame,” he said with sardonic sympathy. He went to a niche that was built into the side wall. It had glass shelves and was lighted. Each shelf held artifacts of antique pottery and glass, evidently a collection.

He took up a small, lopsided, creamy-colored goblet. He nonchalantly tossed it into the air. It smashed to pieces on the hard floor.

Mr. Kalali grimaced.

Floyd had no idea that the goblet was a precious Persian piece that had miraculously survived six thousand years without a chip.

He enjoyed Mr. Kalali's reaction, so, next, he destroyed a pale blue faceted glass bowl that had been created in the holy city of Qom in the first century.

Mr. Kalali placed his hands over his eyes. If he'd had another pair they would have covered his ears.

Mrs. Kalali seemed somewhat amused.

Floyd swept shelves bare. He hurled tiny, two-thousand-year-old, museum-quality Sasanian bottles and urns at the far wall. Mr. Kalali had to duck.

He pleaded with Floyd to stop.

“Give it up.”

Mr. Kalali still refused.

“Okay, let me tell you how this is going down. Two ways it can go. One, you give up where you got jewelry, we take it and go. Nobody gets hurt. The other way we have to look for it. It'll take time and trouble but, sure as shit, we'll find what you say ain't there. For putting us through the time and trouble … we kill you.”

Mr. Kalali looked to his wife. He shook his head ever so slightly and hoped that she understood the message in his eyes, instructing her not to reveal anything. He wasn't going to melt down, especially not in front of her. For some reason she didn't appear to be the least bit frightened.

“What's it going to be?” Floyd asked.

“It's as I told you …”

“In the bank.”

“In the bank.”

“It's here in the house,” Mrs. Kalali contradicted. “I'll show you.”

Mr. Kalali spat at her.

She ignored him. She led Floyd and Peaches from the library and down a wide hall to the master bedroom area. In the adjacent dressing room she slid out one of the deep drawers of her vanity. It had a false bottom. She opened it for them.

The shallow compartment contained two sapphire rings, a crossover diamond ring, a tanzanite pendant, a tourmaline bracelet, a diamond tennis bracelet, several gold chains, a pair of one-carat diamond studs, and a pair of pavé diamond ear clips. Nothing major but all of good quality.

“My everyday things,” Mrs. Kalali explained, as Floyd transferred them from the compartment to his jacket pockets.

Peaches, meanwhile, was into the top drawer of Mr. Kalali's dresser. Confiscating cuff links and evening studs, and a ring set with a five-carat honey-colored cat's-eye chrysoberyl. The perfect, sharp, straight cat's-eye, what gemologists call chatoyancy, fascinated Peaches. She wished the ring wasn't so large. It was even too big for her thumb. Perhaps, she thought, she could wear it on her big toe, go bopping barefoot down some street with the cat's-eye winking at everyone. In that drawer she also found some gold wristwatches. It was like shoplifting without having to be sneaky.

They followed Mrs. Kalali into the bedroom. She kicked aside an antique silk Isfahan prayer rug. At first Floyd thought what he was seeing was just bare floor, but then, Mrs. Kalali pressed a certain place on the nearby baseboard and a small section of the floor sprung up. Lifting that aside disclosed a compartment. Protruding from the bottom of the compartment was the face of a safe. Floyd would never have found it. A highly rated safe. What's more, it was inset in the concrete foundation.

The sight of it evoked a little glee from Peaches. “You can get into that, can't you baby?” she said to Floyd.

As good and experienced a swift as Floyd was he'd never done safes. He knew swifts who did, had met a few who'd offered to impart the basics and finer points, but he just hadn't had the ambition.

So, understandably, he was grateful when Mrs. Kalali reached down in and performed the combination.

The guns and the badass nigger talk had gotten to her, Floyd thought. No other reason for her to be so cooperative.

The safe was open.

Its contents there for the taking.

First thing out, because it happened to be there on top of everything else, was a red Cartier ring box containing a six-carat cushion-cut diamond of superb quality.

Mrs. Kalali provided a blue Fendi valise for them to carry the jewelry away in.

They returned to the library.

Mr. Kalali was on the couch, groaning and holding his right foot up. His black silk sock was soaked red, dripping blood.

“I told the pussy motherfucker to stay where he was,” Tracy said.

“I'm badly cut,” Mr. Kalali said. In stocking feet he'd stepped on some shards of his antique Persian glass. Some of the same were now crunching noisily beneath the thick soles of Peaches' boots, aggressive black leather boots with shiny steel toeplates. She went so directly to Mr. Kalali that for a moment he thought she had taken pity and intended to administer to his foot.

She stopped in front of him.

She extended the Mach 10 pistol to within inches of his face.

His eyes fixed on the little opening of its muzzle. The miniature tunnel from which his death could come. He didn't dare move his head, just raised his eyes.

There was her blonde, frizzy hair, the slight upturn of her nose between the childish rounds of her cheeks, the inexperience of her mouth, lips slicked like they were coated with baby drool.

Having taken such close stock of her, Mr. Kalali believed he had determined her innocence. Never mind the gun, disregard it, he told himself. Children play. She was merely playing. Her innocence was definitely in his favor.

Peaches was sure she had this guy scared shitless. It was payback for all those times since she was thirteen, even before, when older guys had made her afraid. She didn't intend to pull the trigger. It was like her finger was on its own.

A five-round burst.

The last two rounds went wild. The first three tore off much of Mr. Kalali's head.

Mrs. Kalali screamed. Her composure left her, as did her compliance. She made a dash for the security alarm pad in the entry hall, for the panic button that would summon help.

Floyd had to shoot her.

Chapter 3

The flow from La Guardia was coagulated.

An eighteen-wheeler, like some behemoth suddenly intent on suicide, had swerved across the median, ended the lives of five and now lay there on the Grand Central Parkway with its exposed underside looking rigored.

Mitchell Laughton was the passenger in a much abused fleet taxi sixty-four lengths back from the collisions. In fatalistic measure, death had missed him by, at most, half a minute.

The taxi meter was ticking away voraciously. Each time it went
gu-luckit
to register a greater amount Mitch was made to think how this was another of those wastes of life time. A more equitable arrangement could have been created, he thought. For instance, when forced to wait like this, why shouldn't a person be allowed to call time-out or perhaps even receive a credit on the other end?

He'd certainly done more than a fair share of unfair waiting this day. The flight to Boston had been delayed a half hour because of air traffic; then his eleven o'clock appointment with Grayson at Fidelity Eastern Insurance had to be pushed ahead to one because Grayson was having a root canal emergency.

And now this tie-up.

Already it had cost Mitch nearly forty minutes.

For what must have been the hundredth time he told himself to relax, take it in stride, do what Maddie advised to cope with such unavoidable irritating instances. Turn mentally inside out was the way she put it. Think flowers, for example, not a mere bouquet but a whole skyful, or think of finding a downy bird-belly feather that could be kept mid-air by the slightest breath for miles and miles over an ideal endless meadow. Think of a happy home run, a bases-loaded, tenth-inning game winner. Whatever it took to transcend, Maddie prescribed.

At times Mitch had been able to perform her inside-out trick. Not often and not easily, but he had.

However, this afternoon it was impossible.

The taxi seat was one reason. The foam rubber within it had given up ten thousand passengers ago. What the rump got now was practically all inflicting springs. What's more, the seat refused to stay in place, kept shifting forward from its proper slot beneath the back cushion. The ashtrays stunk, were stuffed with stubs and used tissues. No air conditioning, the uncloseable windows were cross-ventilating exhaust fumes.

Then there was the driver of the next car over. Emaciated, brittle-looking woman with a mass of hair an impossible red. She had her dough-white, crepey arm out the window, hung down lifelessly except for her fingers doing nervous flicks at a cigarette. She brought the cigarette to her sparse lips, took a long, ugly drag, exhaled from her nostrils.

Mitch imagined she had tusks.

She noticed him noticing and shot him a scrinched-up, superior look that called him a creep.

Ordinarily Mitch would have chalked her up as one of those inconsequential frays in the fabric of life. However, right there as she was, hardly more than a spit away, he was stuck with her.

He got out of the cab. The concrete surface of the parkway felt slippery underfoot. He stretched his back and limbs thoroughly, craned up, hoping to see movement ahead.

The taxi driver had gotten out earlier. He was on his haunches near the left front door, reading a tired copy of the
Daily News
that one of his morning passengers had left behind. The driver was a West Indian. His especially dark skin had a gloss to it. He stood, folded the newspaper and tossed it onto the front seat. Then he went back five or so lengths to a taxi that belonged to the same fleet, driven by someone he knew.

Mitch reached in and helped himself to the newspaper. He placed it on the left section of the taxi's hot, yellow hood, smoothed it out and stood over it.

During his wait in Boston he'd read most of that day's
Globe
and there'd been not a single line about what the
News
had chosen to front-page: the late-night frolic of an already notorious rock star who'd roller-bladed bare-ass around and around the Plaza Fountain so elusively it had taken six policemen to grab hold of her. The photo showed her looking stoned and gleeful, wrapped in a police jacket that had precisely slipped.

The Kalali murder.

It was on page seven. Just one of a dozen murders that had occurred in the tri-state area over the weekend. It did not involve anyone well-known, so page seven was generous positioning. Half a column bordering an ad for a Macy's sale of bras and girdles.

Mitch more or less read the Kalali item; anyway, got the gist of it:

A guy named Kalali had been slain night before last at his home out in Jersey. His wife was in a bad way. It looked to be robbery. They were Iranian people.

Mitch continued on through the paper several pages at a time, all the way to and past the sports section. A page just beyond sports offered a daily horoscope. Mitch put no stock in astrology, never had. He reasoned it was something thought up thousands of years ago when our solar system was considered the vast end-all. Now that we've had a look at Mars and Venus and so on and seen how arid, lifeless, hot or cold they were, and now that we know how huge the universe is and how this solar system is comparatively no more than a few motes in it, what basis was there for such beliefs?

Still, there on the page for contemporary consumption was the sign-characters of the Zodiac along with a bit of advice or prediction for each.

Purely for diversion Mitch read the horoscopes for Aries and Taurus and then skipped down the sign-by-sign listing for what might be said for Sagittarius.

It wasn't there. The list went from Scorpio to Capricorn. Why had they left out Sagittarius, his sign?

Mitch was amused at himself for feeling slighted.

He wouldn't mention the omission to Maddie, though. She'd make something of it.

The afternoon was practically shot by the time Mitch got into the city. The stingily filled egg salad, mostly chopped celery, sandwich he'd had at the Fidelity Eastern employees' lunch room and the packets of salted peanuts the airline had distributed weren't holding him. However, he'd persevere. In fact, it would be best if he did, because Maddie had said that morning, with a coating of promise, she'd be doing a cassoulet that night. He'd come close to telling her it was too warm for such a heavy meal.

Maddie had a fairly extensive kitchen repertoire, considering, but rarely was Mitch able to honestly compliment her on what she prepared. Cassoulet was her incessant nemesis. It never came out the same and never right. Too much thyme, or vermouth, or garlic, or cloves, one thing or another.

BOOK: West 47th
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