The Cold Moon

Chapter 8

He came here?

Amelia Sachs, standing beside a planter that smelled of urine and sported a dead yellow stalk, glanced through the grimy window.

She suspected the place would be bad, knowing the address, but not this bad. Sachs was standing outside the St. James Tavern, on a wedge of broken concrete rising from the sidewalk. The bar was on East Ninth Street, in Alphabet City, the nickname referring to the north-south avenues that ran through it: A, B, C and D. The place had been a terror some years ago, a remnant of the gang wastelands on the Lower East Side. It had improved somewhat (crack houses were morphing into expensive fix-'em-uppers w/ vu) but it was still a rough-and-tumble 'hood; sitting in the snow at Sachs's feet was a discarded hypodermic needle, and a spent 9-millimeter shell casing rested on the window ledge six inches from her face.

What the hell had accountant/venture capitalist, two-home-owning, Beemer-driving Benjamin Creeley been doing in a place like this the day before he died?

At the moment, the large, shabby tavern wasn't too crowded. Through the greasy window she spotted aging locals at the bar or tables: spongy women and scrawny men who'd get a lot, or most, of their daily calories from the bottle. In a small room in the back were some white men in jeans, dungarees, work shirts. Four of them, all loud-even through the window she could hear their crude voices and laughter. She thought immediately of the punks who'd spend hour after hour in the Mafia social clubs, some slow, some lazy-but all of them dangerous. One glance told her these were men who'd hurt people.

Entering the place, Sachs found a stool at the small end of the bar's L, where she was less visible. The bartender was a woman of around fifty, with a narrow face, red fingers, hair teased up like a country-western singer's. There was a weariness about her. Sachs thought, It's not that she's seen it all; it's that everything she has seen has been in places just like this.

The detective ordered a Diet Coke.

"Hey, Sonja," called a voice from the back room. In the filthy mirror behind the bar Sachs could see it belonged to a blond man in extremely tight blue jeans and a leather jacket. He had a weasely face and appeared to have been drinking for some time. "Dickey here wants you. He's a shy boy. Come on over here. Come on and visit the shy boy."

"Fuck you," somebody else shouted. Presumably Dickey.

"Come 'ere, Sonja, sweetheart! Sit on shy boy's lap. It'll be comfy. Real smooth. No bumps."

Some guffaws.

Sonja knew that she too was the butt of their mean humor but she called back gamely, "Dickey? He's younger'n my son."

"That's okay-everybody knows he's a motherfucker!"

Huge laughter.

Sonja's eyes met Sachs's and then looked away quickly, as if she'd been caught aiding and abetting the enemy. But one advantage of drunks is that they can't sustain anything-cruelty or euphoria-for very long and soon they were on to sports and rude jokes. Sachs sipped her soda, asked Sonja, "So. How's it going?"

The woman offered an unbreakable smile. "Just fine." She had no interest in sympathy, especially from a woman who was younger and prettier and didn't tend bar in a place like this.

Fair enough. Sachs got down to business. She flashed her badge, subtly, and then showed her a picture of Benjamin Creeley. "Do you remember seeing him in here?"

"Him? Yeah, a few times. What's this about?"

"Did you know him?"

"Not really. Just sold him some drinks. Wine, I remember. He wanted red wine. We got shitty wine but he drank it. He was pretty decent. Not like some people." No need to glance into the back room to indicate whom she meant. "But I haven't seen him for a while. Maybe a month. Last time he came in he got into a big argument. So I figured he wouldn't be coming back."

"What happened?"

"I don't know. Just heard some shouting and then he was storming out the door."

"Who was he arguing with?"

"I didn't see it. I just heard."

"He ever do drugs that you saw?"

"No."

"Were you aware that he killed himself?"

Sonja blinked. "No shit."

"We're following up on his death… I'd appreciate keeping it to yourself, my asking you about it."

"Yeah, sure."

"Can you tell me anything about him?"

"God, I don't even know his name. I guess he was in here maybe three times. He have a family?"

"Yes, he did."

"Oh, that's tough. That's harsh."

"Wife and a teenage boy."

Sonja shook her head. Then she said, "Gerte might've known him better. She's the other bartender. She works more'n me."

"Is she here now?"

"Naw, should be here in a while. You want I should have her call you?"

"Give me her number."

The woman jotted it down. Sachs leaned forward and nodded toward the picture of Creeley and said, "Did he meet anybody in particular here that you can remember?"

"All I know is it was in there. Where they usually hang." She nodded at the back room.

A millionaire businessman and that crowd? Had two of them been the ones who'd broken into the Creeleys' Westchester house and had the marshmallow roast in his fireplace?

Sachs looked into the mirror, studying the men's table, littered with beer bottles, ashtrays and gnawed chicken wing bones. These guys had to be in a crew. Maybe young capos in an organized crime outfit. There were a lot of Sopranos franchises around the city. They were usually petty criminals but often it was the smaller crews who were more dangerous than the traditional Mafia, which avoided hurting civilians and steered clear of crack and meth and the seamier side of the underworld. She tried to get her head around a Benjamin Creeley' gang co

"You see them with pot, coke-any drugs?"

Sonja shook her head. "Nope."

Sachs leaned forward and whispered to Sonja, "You know what crew're they co

"Crew?"

"A gang. Who's their boss, who they report to? Anything?"

Sonja didn't speak for a moment. She glanced at Sachs to see if she was serious and then gave a laugh. "They're not in a gang. I thought you knew. They're cops."

At last the clocks-the Watchmaker's calling cards-arrived from the bomb squad with a clean bill of health.

"Oh, you mean they didn't find any really tiny weapons of mass destruction inside?" Rhyme asked caustically. He was irritated that they'd been out of his possession-more risk of contamination-and at the delay in their arrival.

Pulaski signed the chain-of-custody cards and the patrolman who'd delivered the clocks left.

"Let's see what we've got." Rhyme moved his wheelchair to the examination table as Cooper unpacked the clocks from plastic bags.

They were identical, the only difference being the blood crusted on the base of the clock that had been left on the pier. They seemed old-they weren't electric; you wound them by hand. But the components were modern. The works inside were in a sealed box, which had been opened by the bomb squad, but both clocks were still ru

The most unusual feature was a large window in the top half of the face that displayed a disk on which were painted the phases of the moon. Centered in the window now was the full moon, depicted with an eerie human face, staring outward with ominous eyes and thin lips.

The full Cold Moon is in the sky…