“Your imposition into this event is not only extraordinary and rude, Detective Heat, but there will be consequences for your intrusion.”
She had only closed half the distance, and he kept talking. “I came to your precinct on my own volition to make a good faith effort to answer your questions and help you put your investigation on the right course. And now this?” They were close enough for him to drop the Widmark envelope at her feet when she stopped. “An extortion note with my eggs Benedict? Really?”
“I tried the front door. It was blocked.”
“I have an office.”
“You’re here. And so am I. And I want some answers.” She made sure to hold his gaze without flinching while he sized her up.
“Me, too. Like why are you on a such a holy mission to go after me? Is this aggressiveness your normal style? Or are you getting pressure? Is someone in city government rummaging for something so they can fire a preemptive strike at my candidacy?”
Of course Heat resented the implication that she would act as a partisan for anyone, but she was experienced enough to see it for what it was. A clever psychological attempt to put her on the defensive and dominate the interview. Well, maybe not so clever. Instead of rising to the bait, she calmly took out her notepad and said, “If you’re finished, we can proceed. Don’t want to make you late for your speech.”
In the semidarkness of the room, she could see his jaw muscle flexing. “There are a few inconsistencies I want to give you a chance to clear up. When I told you the other day that we’d found your Southampton address and phone number in the personal effects of Fabian Beauvais, you denied knowing him.”
“That’s right.”
“And you didn’t recognize him from his picture.”
“Stipulated.”
“You holding to that? Because I went to Beckett’s Neck yesterday and, from what I’ve learned since, I want to give you an opportunity to think and decide if that’s still your answer for the record.”
“The fuck you talking about? Speak English.”
“Your neighbor, Alicia Delamater, said Fabian Beauvais worked for her recently. Kind of a coincidence.” Heat raised her hand. “By the way? Not so big on coincidences. Except as red flags.”
“So maybe she gave him my phone number.”
“Why would she do that?”
“Ask her. See? You’re fishing and trying to hold both ends of the tackle. Are we done?”
Once again, Nikki took the pushback in stride. “Thank you, I will be asking her. But, in the meantime, you’re saying that Mr. Beauvais was across the lane from Cosmo this summer, and you never once saw or spoke to him?”
“That’s correct.”
“Even though he was supposedly in the employ of your mistress?” Her turn to poke at the defenses. Keith Gilbert was either a cool one or he could be taken at face value. All he gave up was a demi-smile.
“Sounds like you talked to some of the village gossips while you were out there, too.” And then the amusement left him. “I do not have a mistress. I have a strong, long-standing marriage and embrace the value of family. I’m also prepared for the unfounded smears that can rise in a political contest.” He shrugged to dismiss them.
Heat stayed on her facts. “What if I told you I had physical evidence placing Fabian Beauvais on your property?”
“What evidence?”
“Would you still hold to your statement that you didn’t know him?”
“I would. What evidence?”
For Heat, the shellac stains and dog-bite marks were a definite holdback. Instead of responding, she turned a page of her spiral. “The two men I showed you the sketches of.”
“Who I also don’t know.”
“An eyewitness in Flatbush identified them after they came into his diner asking around for Fabian Beauvais.”
“Sounds like they’re your lead.”
“You could be right. He wrote down their license plate. They were driving a car registered to the Port Authority, Commissioner.”
Finally, a reaction. Not a big one, but busy eyes while he processed the news. And how to answer it. He composed himself and chuckled. “Do you have any idea how many cars we have at Port Authority? Thousands. What’s that mean? If a Metropolitan Transportation Authority car was around, do you roust the MTA commissioner?”
“Maybe if his address and phone number turned up in a bloody envelope of cash hidden in a dead man’s closet.” And then she watched him keenly, adding, “Or if a text about him from the dead man warning his girlfriend to run was found on her cell phone.”
“What are you talking about?”
Nikki had achieved what she’d hoped for, putting him off balance. She continued to press. “Tell me about Jeanne Capois.”
“Who?”
“You don’t know her, either, I suppose.”
“You said my name was on some woman’s cell phone?”
“It was a warning text. We found it looking through her effects—after she’d been murdered.”
The commissioner found his calm again and said, “I still don’t see what this has to do with me.”
“You were mentioned in the text.”
He appeared stunned. “Me? By name?” Gilbert had her on thin ice there. His initials in that text message were not the same as naming him. He sensed her hesitation and leaped at the opening.
“Here.” He thrust out his arms, presenting his wrists to her. “If you have something solid, cuff me.” Then it became a taunt. “Come on. Slap ’em on, Detective.” His voice grew loud enough to echo among the stacked chairs and tables at the rim of the empty hall. “Come on, do it!” He came closer, leaning into her like a batter taunting an umpire for a called strike. “Ha ha, you won’t because you can’t. You smell blood but you don’t know whose. You got shit’s, what you got.”
But then his wildly manic performance jerked to a stop. Yet his face remained close to hers, and he spoke in a quiet, chilling tone. “This is no game, Detective. Do not try to browbeat me. Do not come to me with bullshit. Do not go further with this. Because you aren’t man enough, and I am not to be fucked with.”
She rose to her full height, unshaken. “I am getting to the bottom of this, no matter what.”
“You know, my father used to butt heads with a rival in the shipping business. A guy named George Steinbrenner. Steinbrenner had a way with words when people pushed him. Like, ‘Next time you drive me to the wall, I’ll throw you over it.’”
“Steinbrenner was always quotable. Are you borrowing his words to threaten me?”
He smiled. “Don’t take that as a threat. It’s just information.”
And then he left to make his speech.
Nikki discovered a voice mail from Rook on her way back to the car and cursed at missing his call. “Hey, it’s me. Sorry to be off the grid, but I’m in the work cave, you know how that goes. Hate to do this, but I don’t think that dinner’s going to happen tonight. I’ll explain later.” So damned…neutral sounding. No anger, no hurt. No warmth, either. Just the facts ma’am. She decided against calling him back and rolled with the Roach Coach back to the precinct motivated by a strong desire to fulfill Keith Gilbert’s wish and slap on those cuffs.
More out of habit than hunger, Heat sat at her desk picking at a turkey sandwich from Andy’s Deli while she worked the phones. One inquiry was spurred by Gilbert’s comment about the number of vehicles that populated the Port Authority motor pool. The Authority, a joint agency of the states of New York and New Jersey, not only oversaw the operation of area airports, air cargo, marine terminals, major bridges and tunnels, key bus terminals, cross-Hudson railroads, and the new World Trade Center, it also had its own highly respected police force of 1,700 officers—four of which Heat had the pleasure of dealing with that morning at the Widmark. Far from begrudging that detail for picket fencing her a
nd Roach, she saw them as police professionals doing their duty. Given reverse roles, she might have done the same. Certainly they had been effective, even somewhat polite.
PAPD also has a Criminal Investigation Bureau of a hundred detectives, and Nikki’s call was to one of the CIB supervisors.
“Inspector, just doing some I dotting and T crossing,” she began. “One of my detectives investigating a Haitian immigrant named Fabian Beauvais heard that another pair of men had also been working Flatbush looking for him recently. I’m not sure who these two are, but their description made me wonder if they could be plainclothes cops, so I’m making the rounds of other PDs to make sure we’re not stepping on brother detectives’ toes anywhere.”
Inspector Hugo said he appreciated the professional courtesy and that he’d check and get back to her. Heat didn’t mention the nature of her case or the commissioner. She also left out the fact that the men were linked to a Port Authority-registered car. But it struck her as due diligence to make this outreach in the event the Impala was a CIB undercover. If Beauvais was part of a PAPD investigation, that would be game-changing information. Their behavior and demeanor—especially knocking them over fleeing the rooming house—was not very coplike, but there was also something about the staging and precise execution of their dual car escape that smelled like training to her.
A half hour later, Heat convened a catch up at the Murder Board with Raley, Ochoa, and Rhymer to report that PAPD called back and said they have no investigation into a Fabian Beauvais.
“It still leaves the open question of, what was a Port Authority car doing there?” said Ochoa.
“Well, the link to Gilbert is pretty cozy.” Heat flicked a thumb to the plate number on the whiteboard under the sketches of the two men. “We’ve sent the plate out on the alert system, so if we get a ding, we may get our answer.”
Detective Rhymer had made contact with the staffer at Happy Hazels, the agency that placed Jeanne Capois as the housekeeper. “Nothing earth-shattering. Kinda sad, though. They loved her, and had all good things to say. Also Fabian was more than a boyfriend. The both of them apparently came from Haiti at the same time and were engaged. But they said the only thing Jeanne cared about was to somehow get back home for the wedding.”
“I found an anomaly of sorts on Jeanne Capois’s MetroCard,” said Raley. “Her pattern on days off was to take the Three line from the Seventy-second Street station to Saratoga Avenue in Brooklyn, which was the nearest station, I guess, to her fiancé’s place near Kings Highway in Flatbush. You could set your clock to that, twice a week, for half a year. But a few weeks ago, she started using the card to round trip it on the One train from Seventy-ninth and Broadway to the Fourteenth Street stop in Chelsea, then come back to the Upper West Side the same day.”
“Were these at repeating times and days?” Heat knew the value of breaks in habit. Big things like changes in lifestyle and income were key indicators to look for in an investigation, but you sometimes got the biggest breaks from the smallest things, like switching gyms or altering subway stops. “I’m wondering if she had some kind of appointment. Like maybe she was pregnant. Or had medical issues. Is there a clinic near there? Physical therapy, maybe?”
“The trips were all at different times, both day and night.”
“Tell you what I’d like to do,” said his partner. “I say we Roachify this.”
Heat cocked her head to Detective Ochoa. “Did you just say Roachify?”
“I did. As in getting all over this. I want us to go back through her purse, her room, everything, to see if something links up to Chelsea.”
“When you put it like that,” said Nikki, “I’d be foolish to say no.”
She had set her iPhone on her desktop and she caught the thing side-creeping across her blotter from the vibration when she came back from the restroom. Once again, not Rook. Detective Feller was calling in from Flatbush.
“Got one for you,” he began. “A detective goes into a bar.”
“Yeah?”
“And comes out with a clue.”
“I’m listening.” By reflex, she flipped to a clean page in her Clairefontaine notebook. Feller liked to clown around, but Heat knew he wouldn’t have called unless it mattered. Did it ever.
“There’s kind of a dive spot around the corner from Beauvais’s flophouse. I know it’s early in the day, and all, but I thought I’d go in and see what kicks. So the bartender doesn’t seem to want to talk but wants to at the same time; you’ve seen those types, right?” She had. “So I noticed there were some guys at the bar, chins over their beers, who he may not want to share in front of, so I ask him if he could come outside and give me directions to the BQE. When I get him alone, sure enough, he knows Beauvais from the neighborhood and says one night about a week ago he comes in about last call, acting like he’s drunk, but he’s not. He’s got blood on his shirt, and says he’s been shot.”
“Did you say shot, as in gunshot?”
“One and the same. Beauvais says no 911 call, refuses a trip to the ER, but remembers the barkeep has a friend who’s a doctor.”
“Did you get a name?”
“Already spoke to him. And guess what? He’ll cooperate,” said Randall Feller, keeping his record unassailable as Nikki Heat’s most-esteemed street cop. “I’m heading there to interview him now.”
“I want to be there when you do. I can be there in half an hour.”
“He’s on Cortelyou near East Sixteenth.” He gave her the street number, repeating it for clarity. “Look for the Klaus’s Auto Parts store.”
“The doctor’s next door?”
“Negative. That’s where he works. Ask for Ivan.”
En route to Brooklyn, Heat tried calling Alicia Delamater to give her a chance to clarify her statement that Fabian Beauvais had injured himself with hedge clippers. Or, more to the point, to present Gilbert’s neighbor-mistress an opportunity to recant it and come clean about her lie. She got no ring, just an insta-dump to voice mail: “This is Alicia. Away for a while. If it’s urgent, call this number…” Nikki called it and got her attorney.
Vance Hortense of Hortense, Kirkpatrick, and Young sounded like the male version of Siri when you asked your iPhone to do something off the menu. His tone was neutral, dispassionate, and unaccommodating—which, to Heat, might have been a better name for the law firm. “Ms. Delamater has left the country.”
“Where did she go?”
“Somewhere she is out of touch.”
“Did she leave a number where I can reach her?”
“I’m sorry, she didn’t.”
“Are you saying you wouldn’t know how to reach her if you had an emergency?”
“If she checks in, I’ll pass on your request.”
“Do you expect her back soon?”
“I can’t say.”
And won’t, she thought.
“Please, I am not in trouble, I hope,” said Ivan Gogol. His eyes, which were set in meaty lids under a constellation of moles, darted nervously from Heat to Feller. “A man need help, is all, so I help.” His palpable fear in a police interview reminded Nikki of every Cold War-era spy movie Rook addictively Netflixed where the KGB breaks a hapless citizen in two while he confesses to anything they want.
“Let me put you at ease,” Heat said in as reassuring a way as she could. “Your cooperation is quite appreciated. We are not here to investigate you, but simply to hear about your experience with this man.”
He took another look at the photo of Beauvais and nodded, relaxing only slightly in his chair. Under the fluorescent lighting of the cluttered office the auto parts manager had let them use, his beard seemed like a dark blue tattoo beneath his pasty white skin. He had told them he was thirty-eight, but his baldness added twenty years. Or maybe it was the toll of a life spent in paranoia.
Her first question felt obvious but, knowing it w
as an inherent stressor, she approached it offhandedly. “I was surprised when Detective Feller said to meet you here.”
“This is my work. How I pay my way,” he said. “In St. Petersburg, I left medical academy knowing to be doctor of medicine, yes? But when I come to United States, the, what is it…? The criteria…for doctor license not so easy. In Russia, I would have own clinic. Coming here to be with my wife, surprise. I drive cab or work this. Someday I take board exams and have practice in Brighton Beach.”
“So you aren’t technically a doctor,” said Feller, and Ivan’s eyes started darting again. She jumped in.
“Which makes your service to friends who can’t afford doctors so admirable.” She paused while he took out a cigarette and then put it back in his pocket. “Is that how the man in this picture came to you?”
Gogol recounted the late-night call from the bartender, all the details matching up with Feller’s source. “So I dress and get my satchel to drive to the bar where this man, Fabian, is in the back kitchen. He is in pain and not well.”
Heat asked, “How severe was the wound?” Feller had taken a cue and taken a seat beside the desk to observe.
“The wound itself not life threat. He had stopped own bleeding with compression like this.” Ivan held both palms to his rib cage and pressed. “But skin is very thin at ribs and many nerve endings radiate from spine. Very painful.”
“What kind of bullet was it?” And then she added with anticipation, “Did you keep it?”
“Was no bullet. The wound slice like a cut. Slice, not puncture, you see?” Feeling more in control of things, he tore a blank off a Klaus’s Auto gummed pad and drew an anterior outline of an upper torso. To her surprise, his sketch was precise and expert, neater than some drawings she had seen in autopsy files. He added a slash where the bullet struck Beauvais.