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Chapter 76
By the time I got back to the Blanchettes’ on Fifth Avenue, the party had amped up considerably. I heard dance music blaring as I got off the elevator. In the wood-paneled foyer, I was nearly blinded by flashbulbs as spit-shined executive types and their exotic-looking wives got their social register pics taken.
Was being a cop in this town unbelievable, or what? I thought. From an actual bowels-of-hell tenement fire to The Bonfire of the Vanities in ten minutes flat.
The butler had a
“Who is your dermatologist?” someone yelled near my ear as I pushed my way through the crush. “These white truffles are so complex yet so simple,” somebody else a
I turned as someone clapped me on the shoulder. It was a middle-aged man in a black suit with traces of a suspicious white powder under his nose.
“Hey, I haven’t seen you since the open,” he said. “How was Majorca?”
“Great,” I said, backing away toward the kitchen.
I even spotted one of the New York Times editors who I’d almost arrested, talking with some men in suits out by the pool. Probably deciding what tomorrow’s news would be.
When I finally made it back to my kitchen command corner, I sat for a moment with my forehead pressed against the cool, soothing granite of the counter.
The newest revelation, still ringing through my aching skull, didn’t make sense. How could Thomas Gladstone not be the man we were looking for?
No matter how I put it together, I couldn’t get it to add up. Gladstone gets divorced and loses his job, and then someone else kills his family? And what about the little fact that our eyewitness, the Air France stewardess, ID’d him from a photo lineup? Was she lying? If so, why? Did we need to reinterview her?
I took a break from being baffled to call in to the security detail. Everything seemed normal. No activity on the street. All of the building’s ground-level doors and windows had been checked and rechecked.
“We’ve got it all wired tight,” Steve Reno radioed up from the lobby.
“Like my nerves,” I radioed back.
“Go ahead and have a glass of Cristal, Mikey,” the SWAT lieutenant said. “Or maybe krunk with some of those debutantes. We won’t tell. You gotta do something to relax.”
“Busting a move is tempting,” I called in to my radio. “But fortunately, Steve, all I gotta do is retire.”
Chapter 77
At a different luxury apartment building, the Teacher knelt over the sidewalk grate and started working on it with a crowbar. There were no cops staking out this place, he’d made good and sure of that.
Within five minutes, he was able to swing the grate open. He hopped down inside and silently closed it back over his head. This was a filthy, squalid way of doing things, but if you wanted to get into one of Manhattan ’s Fort Knox-like, prewar buildings, you had to make some sacrifices.
The beam of his penlight, held in his mouth, played over the concrete where he squatted. The filth came up to the ankles of his three-hundred-dollar socks – mounds of cigarette butts and gum wrappers; sodden, unrecognizable garbage; an empty crack vial.
He shrugged off his jacket, wadded it up, and held it against the dust-caked basement window beneath the grate. He hit the window with a single sharp punch, breaking out the glass. He stilled, listening for an alarm or outcry. There was nothing. He reached in, found the window latch, and squirmed his way into the darkened basement.
He walked quickly down a corridor lined with dusty storage bins piled with beat-up luggage, old wooden skis, stationary bikes, eight-track tapes. High society kept the same crapola as most other idiots, he thought. He slowed as he approached a doorway with the sound of Spanish music behind it – no doubt the super’s apartment. But the door stayed closed as he silently moved along.
Past it, on the right, he came to an old-fashioned manual elevator. Inside that, he let the outer door slide quietly closed before easing shut the brass lattice of its i
That was when he noticed that his hand was bleeding. Crimson drops were rolling off his thumb, splashing on the worn linoleum.
Wincing, he pulled up his sleeve. Christ, he’d sliced the back of his arm wide open when he’d punched the window. How did you like that? He was so jacked up, he hadn’t even noticed.
Well, what was a little blood? he thought, clicking off the safeties of the Tec-9s. He pulled back the elevator switch and started to ascend.
There’d be a lot more of that soon.
Chapter 78
When the Teacher let go of the freight elevator lever, the car did a fu
The floating feeling of elation in the pit of his stomach was insane now, like he’d swallowed a Macy’s Thanksgiving Day parade balloon. How many years of his life had he wasted ru
Quick now, he thought, sliding the brass i
It opened onto a narrow back landing, a service entrance with two doors and some garbage cans. He put his ear to the closer of the doors. Inside, he heard water ru
He pressed the thumb of his injured hand to the doorbell. Footsteps approached. He was prepared with a ruse about delivering a package to the Be
But the lock tumblers clicked and it started swinging freely inward.
You’ve got to be kidding me, he thought. Not even a “Who’s there?” Hadn’t they heard about the crime wave?
His heart double-dribbled against his chest as the door opened all the way.
Chapter 79
When I ducked my head out of the kitchen about ten minutes later, I could see that the Blanchettes’ party had kicked into full tilt. The mayor was dancing to techno with somebody’s trophy wife, and she was laughing her head off like a hyena. All around them, others were behaving more like raucous teenagers than the dignified adults they no doubt were during their day jobs.
I exchanged perplexed looks with one of the Midtown North undercovers who was posing as a waiter.
“I guess it just ain’t a party until the guy in the bird costume is deejaying in front of your Pollock,” he said.
Then a voice spoke through my earpiece.
“Mike? Uh, Mike? Um, could you get in here?” It sounded like Jacobs, one of the Midtown North detectives.
“Where’s ‘here’?”
“The kitchen.”
“What’s up?”
“You, uh, just need to come, okay? I’ll show you when you get here. Over.”
What now? I thought, heading back to the Blanchettes’ kitchen. Jacobs had sounded weird, even upset. Well, things had been going so smoothly, maybe something had to give.
I hurried into the kitchen.
And stopped still.
Jacobs was beside the back door, standing over a young guy who was lying on the kitchen floor. I recognized him as another detective, Genelli, from the Nineteenth Precinct.