I put the phone away, pissed off at Daly and at all the idiots out there who used guns to solve their problems, but mostly heartbroken because my rare quality time with my kids was ruined. At least Mary Catherine was here to take over, and they’d probably have more fun with her, anyway. I was the big loser.
I decided I’d better take a quick shower. I hadn’t washed off the sweat from my run, and I might not get another chance for a couple of days. Distracted by thoughts of the crime scene I was about to face, I stepped into the bathtub without looking—until my toes squished in the vomit-choked drain.
I’d failed at playing hooky from work, and I couldn’t even get away with it here at home, I thought, reaching for the toilet paper.
Chapter 13
STRADDLING HIS FREJUS ten-speed, the Teacher clung with one hand to the rear fender of a number 5 city bus barreling along Fifth Avenue. Just as it got to 52nd, he let go and peeled off down the side street. Legs already pumping, he was just able to thread the bike between a town car and the huge wooden wheels of a Central Park buggy.
After being dropped at the Port Authority, he had jogged back to his apartment and changed into another, entirely different outfit—frayed Bianchi bike shorts, faded Motta top, and bike helmet—and picked up the ten-speed. Now he looked like any other low-rent, imitation Lance Armstrong bike messenger.
Stick and move, he thought, wrenching the ten-speed high into the air to bunny-hop a construction plate.
And this disguise had another beauty of its own. It was bursting with irony and symbolism. Because he was delivering one mother of a message this morning.
To: World
From: The Teacher
Subject: Existence, the Universe, the Meaninglessness of Life
Like background music to his thoughts, a cacophony of car horns on full blast rose from the vehicles clogged motionless in the narrow trench of the street as a delivery truck tried to parallel-park.
“Shaddup, ya dirty scumbags!” the truck’s ape-faced driver was yelling out the window.
You have a nice day, too, the Teacher thought, lasering the bike through the mess.
The stink of garbage and piss assaulted his nostrils as he sailed past a waist-high line of black Hefty trash bags piled along the curb. Or was it coming from the hot dog cart beside them? Hard to tell. He spotted a parking sign with the pleasant greeting DON’T EVEN THINK OF PARKING HERE! Jesus—why not just cut to the chase and say, COMMIT SUICIDE?
He gaped in disbelief at the gutless herds of secretaries and businesspeople milling around on the corners, waiting like sheep for the stoplights that controlled their lives. How could they even pretend that this living hell they were zombie-shuffling through was acceptable? Legions of the walking dead, with a brainlessness that defied reason.
But wait. They weren’t necessarily brainless, or even stupid—that was a bit harsh. They were ignorant. Uninstructed.
And that was where he came in: to show them the way.
He brought the bike to a skidding, tire-squealing stop in front of a restaurant on the north side of the street.
This morning’s second lesson was going to be even more impressive than the first one.
The line of jockey statues on the 21 Club’s balcony looked down arrogantly as he slipped his OnGuard lock over his head and chained the Frejus to the wrought-iron railing. As he maneuvered through the throng of well-dressed businesspeople under the awning, a barrage of new scents wafted to him—this time, rich cigar smoke, succulent steak, and expensive perfume. Stepping inside the place was like entering another dimension, one of muted lighting and classy jazz, of fireplaces and draperies and wingback chairs.
For just a second, his will wavered. For the slightest of moments, he was tempted to keep on walking to the dark wood-paneled bar in the back—to order a cold, stiff, alcoholic drink, to lay down his burden at one of the plush red leather banquettes, to put aside the mighty cup of his destiny.
He steeled himself. The cup was heavy, yes—it would crush most men. Only an equally strong resolve, like his own, could bear it. That resolve would not fail.
“Excuse me! Whoa!” a voice said. The Teacher turned to see a tall maître d’ zeroing in on him like a smart bomb. “Jackets are required and restrooms are for customers only. If you’re making a delivery, use the service entrance.”
“This is the Twenty-one Club, right?” the Teacher said.
The mâitre d’s lips curved in an icy smile. “Very good. What company do you work for? I’ll be sure to use it next time I need a very clever delivery boy.”
The Teacher ignored the sneer as if he didn’t notice it. “Package for a Mr. Joe Miller,” he said, opening the flap of his Chrome courier bag.
“I’m Joe Miller. You sure? I’m not expecting anything.”
“Maybe somebody wants to surprise you.” The Teacher winked as he lifted a large envelope from the pouch. “Maybe you impressed one of your lady customers more than you know.”
Miller obviously found that an interesting thought. “All right, thanks. But next time, the service entrance, got it?”
The Teacher nodded solemnly. “Without a doubt.” You bet, buddy. As if there was going to be a next time.
“Here you go,” Miller said, thumbing a couple of dollar bills out of his wallet.
“Oh, no, I can’t take tips,” the Teacher said. “But I’m supposed to wait for a response.” He winked again as he handed Miller the envelope. “You might not want to open this in front of all those people, if you know what I mean.”
The mâitre d’ glanced around. The crowd waiting to be seated was growing. But his curiosity won out. Impatiently, he stepped into a small anteroom beside the reservation desk. The Teacher followed him, waiting at the doorway.
He watched as Miller tore open the envelope and stared at the letter it held. The maître d’s haughty face looked puzzled.
“?‘Your blood is my paint’?” he said. “?‘Your flesh is my clay’? What the hell is this crap?” He looked up at the Teacher, getting angry now. “Who sent this?”
The Teacher stepped into the room with him.
“Actually,” he said, pulling a silenced .22-caliber Colt Woodsman pistol from his bag and placing the barrel against the sycophant’s empty heart, “I did.”
He waited the split second it took for comprehension to dawn in the other man’s eyes. Then, before Miller could so much as blink, the Teacher pulled the trigger twice.
Even in the small room, the sound was inconsequential, like someone clearing his throat.
As the maitre d’ collapsed in a heap of dead flesh, the Teacher eased him into a chair, then quickly righted a sheaf of menus that had started spilling off a shelf. He tucked the bloody missive between the man’s shoes. Anyone who glanced in would think that Miller had sat down for a moment to read.
Shielding the gun from sight, the Teacher turned to the open doorway and scanned the scene outside. He preferred stealth, but he was more than happy to shoot his way out if he had to.
But in both the crowded dining room and bar, people continued to laugh and drink, talk and eat, like the pointless animatronic jackasses they were. The carnival wheel continued to spin. Nobody had noticed a thing. What else was new?
He slipped the warm gun into his bag, and a few steps later he was back outside, straddling his ten-speed. There was still nobody paying any attention to him. He shrugged. Might as well update the list. He took out his Treo, brought up the Plan on its glowing screen, and deleted “-Self-satisfied Prick at 21.”
“Hey, is that the 750?” a man’s voice said. A sleek, dressed-to-the-nines Wall Street type, jawing a hundred-dollar Havana, pulled out his own smart phone from his pin-striped jacket. “Treos kick ass, boyeee,” he said.
Boyeee? Even Wall Street Journal–reading, Ivy League bond traders were talking like crack dealers these days. It was bad enough that society had become a bunch of amoral, money-grubbing shitheads, but how had it turned into gangsta wannabes, too?
“Yeah,
um, word to your moms, home slice,” the Teacher said, and gave the asshole a thumbs-up as he rolled the Frejus out into the street.
Chapter 14
MY OFFICIAL NYPD VEHICLE was in the shop for repairs, so I was reduced to using the family car. It was a sturdy, battle-tested Dodge van, bought used a few months ago, although the way my luck was running, the horn would go any second now, like on the VW in Little Miss Sunshine.
I was on my way to 72nd Street, steering with one hand and knotting my tie with the other, when Chief of Detectives McGinnis called my cell.
“Where the hell are you, Bennett?” His voice was forceful enough to burst a blood vessel.
“Moving as fast as I can, Chief,” I said. “I’ll be there within five. What’s up?”
“The maître d’ at the Twenty-one Club just got popped!”
I felt an all-too-familiar twisting in the pit of my stomach. The Polo store and now 21? Two murders, at two of the city’s highest-profile places, within an hour of each other? This was starting to look as bad as last night, and maybe worse.
“You got any take on it?” I said.
“Maybe Donald Trump finally went postal. Maybe there’s a roving shooter, maybe a couple of them and it’s a coincidence. We’ve mobilized the Counter-Terror Unit, just in case that’s involved. That’s your specialty, right—terrorism? No, I’m sorry, catastrophes.”
I shook my head. The cat was all the way out of the bag about my working for the CRU, wasn’t it? Pretty soon the whole NYPD would learn my dirty little secret. Michael Bennett had once been a Fed.
“I wouldn’t call it a specialty,” I said.
“I don’t care what you call it. You’re the commissioner’s handpicked expert. Now get your ass over here and figure it all out for me, huh?”
So that was why McGinnis’s britches were in a knot, I thought. I wasn’t his first choice to handle this, but he’d been overridden by Commissioner Daly.
“You think I volunteered for this, Chief?” I shot back. But he’d already hung up.
I stomped down on the Dodge’s gas pedal, sending a tangle of errant soccer cleats and Happy Meal castoffs rattling around in the passenger-seat footwell.
Chapter 15
THE FRONT OF THE MADISON AVENUE Polo store looked like a police vehicle sales auction. There were cop motorcycles, Emergency Service Unit heavy rescue trucks, dozens of blue-and-whites.
I’d seen hot crime scenes before, but this was way over the top. Then I realized it must have been part of the NYPD Counter-Terror Unit’s new surge tactic, which I’d heard about but hadn’t yet seen. At the first hint of a threat, as many as two hundred cops would be sent in to blanket an area with an overwhelming shock-and-awe presence.
Maybe Daly was right, I thought for a moment. The lights and cops and chaos, the adrenaline rush stiffening my spine. What I was seeing was definitely reminding me of the disaster scenes I once worked.
It was impressive, all right. As I badged my way past the Emergency Service Unit guys on the sidewalk, I blinked warily at the cut-down M16s they were strapping on. Those had been issued after 9/11, but I still couldn’t get used to them, and I probably never would. If we could just go back to the good old days when only the drug dealers had assault rifles, I thought.
The inside of Polo’s flagship store looked satanically plush, especially to a guy who did most of his shopping at Old Navy and the Children’s Place. A sandy-haired man at the top of the mahogany staircase came forward to meet me—Terry Lavery, a very competent Nineteenth Precinct detective. I was glad to see somebody who I knew I could get along with, and who was smart, to boot.
“What do you think of the army out there, Mikey?” he said. “I haven’t seen this much NYPD blue since the DC convention.”
I snapped my fingers, like a lightbulb in my head had just gone on.
“So that’s why I want to get naked and slide down this banister,” I said. “Hey, right off, I just want to let you know that it wasn’t my idea to come tromping on your turf. I actually called in for a personal today. But the PC insisted. He wants me out of the way, so I can’t be questioned about that debacle up in Harlem last night.”
“Sure, sure,” Lavery said, rolling his eyes. “Just tell the Commish I said hi, next time you meet him for lunch at Elaine’s.”
With the ritual chop-busting out of the way, Lavery flipped opened his notepad.
“Here’s what we got so far,” he said. “Victim’s name is Kyle Devens. He was forty-six, gay, lived in Brooklyn, been working here eleven years. There was one witness to the actual incident, another clerk. He managed to whisper about a dozen words to us, then he went catatonic, so we don’t have a description of the shooter yet.
“Near as we can put it all together, he walked in here before noon, pulled out a semiautomatic pistol, pumped a full clip into our boy, then walked back out.”
“That’s it?” I said. “No robbery, no struggle, nothing else?”
“If he was trying to hold the place up, he really botched it, because absolutely nothing’s missing. If there’s another reason, we don’t know it.”
“Did Devens have a boyfriend?” I said. Despite the antiterror response, we had to treat this as a regular murder until we knew otherwise.
“The manager said he lived with a guy a couple of years ago, but it didn’t work out, so he moved back in with his mother. We’re still trying to contact her. But there didn’t seem to be anything in the wind like a lovers’ quarrel, and he got along with his coworkers. No priors or indications that he might have hung out with bad guys.”
My lousy luck was holding. It was already clear that this wasn’t going to be an easy case.
My gaze moved to the scattered cuff links in a crime scene cop’s camera FlashPack, sparkling like ornaments on the expensive rug—except that mixed in with them were several fat .45-caliber brass shell casings.
The Crime Scene Unit tech, an old friend named John Cleary, caught me eyeing them. “Don’t get your hopes up, Mike,” he said. “We already dusted them. No prints. And if that’s not good enough news, no exit wounds, from a .45 at point-blank range. I’m not the ME, but my guess is that means hollow points.”
More good news, all right. Not just a murderous psycho, but one who was locked and loaded with especially lethal ammo.
Kyle Devens’s body was still lying on the fancy rug, too. He’d fallen in such a way that he was reflected in the ten-foot-high corner try-on mirror—a composition of blood, death, and broken glass, multiplied by three. I stared down at the gaping wounds in his chest.
“Yeah, when you’re up against unarmed tie salesmen, everyone knows it’s all about stopping power.”
But almost more unsettling than the degree of violence was the shooter’s meticulousness. Not only had he been quick and efficient, he’d used gloves when he loaded his gun.
I thought of the 21 Club killing and I started to get the vague, uneasy hunch that we were dealing with the same man.
There was nothing vague about my feeling that this was going to be one heck of a long day. That settled down on me like a soggy raincoat.
Chapter 16
A MINOR COMMOTION at the store’s ground-floor entrance signaled the arrival of the medical examiner. I got out of his way and put in a call to Midtown South to find out if any more information had come to light about the other assaults that Commissioner Daly had mentioned.
The detective who’d caught the case was a newly promoted woman named Beth Peters, whom I’d never met before.
“The girl in the subway says somebody shoved her. She wasn’t paying attention, so she didn’t see who. But a dozen witnesses saw a man standing right beside her. One elderly lady swears he bumped her deliberately with his hip, and several others think he might have.”
“Description of the guy?” I said.
“Not anything like you’d think. A businessman, very well groomed, wearing a quote unquote ‘gorgeous’ tailored gray suit. White male, around thirty. Black hair, si
x two, two hundred pounds. In other words, a metrosexual sociopath. Very twenty-first-century, right?”
Detective Peters was crisp, clear, and sardonic. I decided I was going to get along fine with her.
“Just right, unfortunately,” I said. “Anything on video, like which direction he headed?”
“We collected surveillance tapes from Macy’s and a few other places around Herald Square. The witnesses are viewing them as we speak, but I’m not holding my breath. Thirty-fourth and Seventh at morning rush, it looks like outside Yankee Stadium after a play-off game.”
A possible correspondence ticked in my brain— between a man who was beautifully dressed and groomed, and the ultra-high-fashion men’s store where I was standing. Was there some kind of upper-class angle?
“At least we’ll have your witnesses to ID this maniac once we catch him,” I said. “Thanks, Beth. Let’s keep each other posted.”
When I finished the call, I granted myself a sixty-second time-out to take a leak. The manager’s men’s room, though small, was almost as luxurious as the rest of the store. And it didn’t smell like puke. I gave it four stars.
I took the opportunity to phone back home.
“I’m really sorry,” I told Mary Catherine when she answered. “You know I wanted to take today off to give you a hand, but there’s this wacko—or maybe wackos— running around and . . . anyway, suffice it to say, I’m not going to be home for a while.”
“I’m doing fine, Mike. Truth is, I’m glad to get you out from underneath me feet,” she said.
I wasn’t sure that was a compliment, but I was damn sure that the lass was a trouper.
“Thanks a million, Mary,” I said. “I’ll check in again when I get a chance.”
“Wait, someone here wants to talk to you,” she said.
“Daddy?” It was Chrissy, my youngest. Her “sore froath,” as she called it, actually sounded a little better. Thank God for small mercies.
“Daddy, please tell Ricky to stop bothering me,” she said. “It’s my turn to watch TV.”