Killer Heat (5 page)

“What do you mean?”

"My sister's a dominatrix, Detective. She liked to hurt people-
took pleasure in it. I'll bet if that whip had anything to do with
Amber's murder, it belonged to her and not the killer.

Amber Bristol's studio apartment was on the
third floor of a walkup building on East Ninety-first Street, near
the corner of Lexington. The superintendent, Vargas Candera, had
admitted us with a spare key that he said she had given him,
reluctantly, after a kitchen blaze in one of the other units had
forced the fire department to break down a door. He waited for us
in the hallway.

Janet sat downstairs in a patrol car with two officers while
Mike and I put on plastic gloves for a first look around.

“I'd say Amber was either a meticulous housekeeper or somebody
else made a clean sweep around here,” Mike said, adjusting the
dimmer to its brightest position.

The kitchenette was to the left of the entrance door and the
bathroom to its right. A curtain of black wooden beads separated
the foyer from the king-size canopy bed just beyond. Mike held the
swinging beads aside and I followed him in.

“Early American brothel. I guess you can take the girl out of
Idaho, but you can't take the ho out of Ida.”

The trim on the bedstead was a simple calico pattern that
matched the cushions on the two armchairs. A hooked rug in the same
pastel shades covered most of the floor. The walls were decorated
with paintings of horses and mountains in cheap wooden frames meant
to look rustic and folksy.

“No sheets?” I asked.

The quilt-a modern reproduction of a classic wedding ring
pattern-was folded neatly in the center of the bed, which had been
stripped even of its mattress pad.

“Maybe she was abducted on her way to the Laundromat. That's a
route you've probably never taken, Coop.”

“It's not only that it's been sanitized, Mike. This room is
completely sterile. There's nothing personal on any surface.”

“Remember, it was Amber's office. I'd hardly expect her to have
photos of Ma and Pa on display. No pictures from the prom, no old
boyfriends.”

“I was counting on a computerized version of a little black
book.”

“You're a little late.” Mike moved one of the bedside tables.
The lamp and window air conditioner were plugged into a surge bar
on the floor. So was a six-foot-long cable connector that fed the
empty cradle of a PDA.

I looked around for a telephone and answering machine. There was
a space on the small table, between the lamp and a decorative
candle, and the line that fed the jack also snaked along the rug,
attached to nothing.

“Somebody's taken stuff out of here. Anything that could connect
Amber to her business,” Mike said.

He was opening drawers. First, next to the bed, where I could
see that she kept her supply of condoms, and then her dresser.
Underwear, sweaters, and three drawers of negligees below that.

I pulled open the closet door. Slacks hung with skirts in a
variety of lengths, everything black except for the blue jeans.
Shoes were lined neatly on the floor-flats in front, backless pumps
with high heels behind them, and six pairs of leather boots. There
were a bunch of empty hangers and lots of large hooks affixed to
the back of the door.

“Nothing unusual?” Mike asked. “No sex toys? No other obvious
equipment?”

“I'll confess ignorance. I wouldn't know what it's supposed to
look like.”

"Right. And you're the expert.

“Sex crimes, not games.”

“I love it when you play the dumb blond. Those are the rare
times I feel most connected to you,” Mike said.

“There's plenty of room to hold stuff-big hooks and lots of wire
hangers. But that would be just a guess 'cause there are normal
things that would fit right in.”

Mike scratched his head. “Maybe Janet's wrong. Or nuts.”

“Or Amber didn't work out of her home. Or she retired.” The
beads made a clicking noise as I brushed through the curtain to
look in the refrigerator. Vargas Candera leaned against the
doorjamb.

“No, señora,” he said laughing. “She not retired.
Amber, she's a very busy lady.”

Mike leaned his back against the wall and crossed his arms.
“Doing what?”

“No se. Plenty of men, they come and they go,” Vargas
said, playing his fingers in the air like they were climbing up and
down the stairs. “I'm not supposed to know nothing, right? I jus'
work here.”

“Must have been noisy,” Mike said.

The skim milk was ten days past its sale date and the butter
gave off a sour smell.

“Ms. Amber, she paid me to extra-soundproof the apartment when
she move in,” Vargas said, stroking his moustache. “She tell me she
likes to play her music loud. Paid me good to double Sheetrock.
Put in 'coustic tile.”

“Was noise a problem in the building?”

Vargas rubbed his grease-stained thumb and forefinger together,
suggesting that he had been well compensated for his ignorance. “I
never heard no music after that.”

“When's the last time you saw Amber?” Mike asked.

“Not for a week. Maybe more.”

Vargas started to walk into the foyer. “Stay right there,” Mike
said. “Don't put your hands on anything. I need to get some guys
here to dust for prints. When's the last time you were in this
apartment?”

“Me? She don't ask me in much,” Vargas said, one side of his
mouth pulling up in a smile. “I can't afford it.”

"Enough to know if anything is missing? If it looks the way
Ms.

Bristol always kept it?"

“Not my job.” He held his hands up, palms outward, the strong,
thick fingers in front of his face. “I don't go in there since I
fix her toilet last summer.”

“Do you know any of her friends? Any of the people who came to
see her regularly?”

I thought of the doormen in my high-rent high-rise building,
only twenty blocks away. The sharpest ones held dozens of
secrets-infidelities and betrayals by neighbors-thirty floors'
worth of them. “I not a busybody, lady.”

“You live in the basement here?” Mike asked.

“Si. I got my television, my girlfriend, and my
six-pack. I do my work and I keep to myself.”

“Anybody else have a key to her apartment?”

“How would I know? If a key work, nobody bother me.” Mike's
frustration was growing. “Dylan. There's a bar around the corner
called Dylan's. You ever seen that guy visiting here-the guy who
owns the joint?”

“I got no idea who you mean. Dylan what?”

“Men pay you to forget they were here, Vargas? Is that how it
goes?”

“They don't have to do nothing, Detective. Ms. Amber takes care
of me very good not to hear nothing, not to see anybody,” Vargas
said, cracking the knuckles of his left hand in his powerful right
fist. "That girl and trouble, they was always together.

Isat on a bar stool at Primola, sipping my sparkling water like
it was aged Scotch. Mike was next to me, stirring the ice cubes in
the vodka with his finger. Every table in the chic East Side
restaurant was full of people escaping the August heat with a good
meal. “Is the air-conditioning blowing on you, Alessandra?”
Giuliano asked. “I'll have a table for you in five minutes.”

“We're fine right here.”

The owner had been my friend for many years. He was used to
seeing me with Mike or Mercer and kept us well fed through many
long nights of highly charged casework.

“Fenton,” he said to the bartender. "Give Signora Cooper a
drink.

On me."

“She's like Ali before a big fight, Giuliano. Can't be flirting
with a hangover when she faces the jury in the morning.”

“I'll take a raincheck,” I said, nibbling on a bread stick as
thin as a straw.

Mike turned to me and rested his feet on the rungs of my stool.
We made an odd couple, from backgrounds as different as anyone
could imagine, but had forged a real intimacy over a decade of
working on some of the grisliest cases the city had seen.

“Have some pasta, Coop. You need the carbs.”

“I just want a bowl of gazpacho. It's too hot for anything
else.” He turned back to Fenton. “I'll start with linguine. White
clam sauce. Then I'll have a veal chop, thick as they come.”

Murder never got in the way of Mike's appetite. His father,
Brian, had been one of the most decorated cops in the NYPD's
history, retiring after twenty-six years on the job. Mike had been
weaned on investigative skills and instincts, but he was also the
first in his family to attend college. When Brian died of a
massive coronary less than fortyeight hours after turning in his
gun and shield, his only son became even more determined to follow
in his footsteps. Immediately on graduation from Fordham, where he
had waited tables to supplement his student loans, he, too, joined
the department.

“Have you ever been to Dylan's?” I asked.

There weren't many watering holes in Manhattan that Mike had
missed, between his personal barhopping and the complex directions
of many of his cases.

“Too preppy for a blue-collar guy like me.”

“How did an Irish pub get to be so preppy?”

“When I was in college, the place had more of a neighborhood
feel.” He had turned thirty-seven the previous fall, six months
before me. “Jimmy Dylan was good to the cops. Happy to have guys
from the precinct going off duty drop in when he was trying to get
the drunks out at the end of a long night.”

I chewed another bread stick and leaned closer to Mike, trying
to hear over the laughter of the patrons at the closest table.
Mike's eyes were almost as dark as his hair, and I was pleased to
see that they had regained some of the sparkle that had
disappeared for the better part of a year after the accidental
death of his fiancée, Valerie. “Dylan started to make some
money for himself, so he began to send his kids-the oldest three
are sons-to private schools. Junior- that's what they call the
eldest son-he must be almost thirty now. All his high school pals
hung out at the joint, 'cause Jimmy served them liquor when they
were too young to get it anywhere else. He didn't really give a
damn what anybody thought. Once you had all that teenage
testosterone mixed in with a little alcohol, Dylan's became a
magnet for the prep school girls, too. Fancy broads like you,
looking to get lucky.”

“I didn't-”

“Yeah, sorry. You were too busy memorizing Shakespeare sonnets
and sublimating your sexual desires swimming laps to hang out at
pubs,” Mike said, opening one of the linen napkins on the bar and
spreading it across my knees as he saw our waiter, Adolfo,
approaching with my chilled soup.

I had been raised in Harrison, an affluent suburb of New York
City.

My mother was a registered nurse who stopped working to raise
her three children-my two older brothers and me. My father's
medical career took a radical upturn when he and his partner
designed and patented an innovative device that became a staple of
cardiac surgery.

The Cooper-Hoffman valve moved us to northern Westchester, where
much of my adolescence was spent training for swim team
competition, and paid for my superb education at Wellesley College
and then the University of Virginia School of Law.

Mike tucked his napkin into his open shirt collar and started
twirling his linguine-filled fork against a large spoon, even as
steam still rose from the clam-covered pasta.

“You ever see the bodies on the guys who swim the thousand-meter
crawl?” I asked, reaching out to pinch Mike's side. “Totally buff.
No NYPD doughnuts. No chips.”

“They're always soaking wet and they wear bathing caps. Nothing
sexy about it. Soup cold enough for you?”

“Very refreshing. Does Jimmy Dylan know you?”

“Nope. He knew my pop,” Mike said. “Brian worked on a case back
when I was twelve or thirteen. Two kids who met at the Brazen Head,
drinking at the bar. Girl wound up dead in Gracie Square Park,
just south of where the mayor lives.”

“And what did Dylan have to do with it?”

“Nothing. And everything. The boy was nineteen years old, just
off the boat from Ireland. Brought a mean cocaine habit with him.
Both he and the girl were underage, but Jimmy's crew made them
welcome at the bar. Three parts cocaine, two parts tequila shots,
and one part homicidal rage when the girl tried to say ”no“
transformed the perp into a cold-blooded killer-alcohol courtesy
of Jimmy Dylan.”

“So you'd think the SLA would have shut the place down,” I
said.

The State Liquor Authority licensed every drinking
establishment. “All the publicity just gave Dylan's more cachet.
Jimmy paid a big fine, I think, and by then kids from Connecticut
and Jersey were queuing up around the block, fake IDs and all, just
'cause the place had its fifteen minutes of fame.”

“Are you going to try to find him tonight?” I asked, wiping some
sauce off Mike's cheek with my napkin while he sliced into his
chop. “Yeah. Spoils it a bit, though, that Janet gave him a
heads-up.”

“I guess I'll be paying you back on that one for a while.” My
cell phone vibrated on the smooth varnished surface of the bar.

I picked it up and noted the district attorney's home number in
the illuminated display before I answered.

“Good evening, Paul.” I plugged a finger in my left ear and
walked out to the vestibule, through the crowd waiting for tables,
so Battaglia wouldn't hear the background noise.

“How come you're not home yet? I tried you there first. Don't
you have a big day tomorrow?”

“I'm on my way. Just having a bite to eat.”

“Don't let Chapman's appetite run up your bill. You'll go broke
feeding him.”

Someday, if I lived long enough, I might get to tell Paul
Battaglia something he didn't already know. The longtime
prosecutor had developed an incredible array of sources in the
unlikeliest of places, and he delighted in putting the information
he gathered to good use-to solve crimes, respond to critics,
engage reporters, or simply amuse himself. “I'll cut him off at
dessert.”

“Why didn't you come by to tell me about the case Mike brought
you in on last night?”

“I didn't think it was going anywhere, Paul. I was in court all
day on Floyd Warren. We never expected to get a name on the woman
so fast.”

Now I was sweating again. There was no fan in the hallway and
the hot air coming in from Second Avenue was stifling. So was the
thought that I had done to Battaglia what he liked least-let him
be the last to know.

“This Amber Bristol, how was she killed? ”Bludgeoned to
death."

“With what?”

“Don't know yet.” Never a good answer to give the district
attorney. “Figure it out, will you? The story's already out on the
wire services,” Battaglia said, pausing between sentences. “I'm
going to tell you something that has to be held in strictest
confidence.”

“Of course.” I walked to the sidewalk and seated myself at one
of Giuliano's café tables. It was too oppressive for any
customers to have eaten outside.

“Have you ever met Herb Ackerman?”

“No. I've seen him at a few of your press conferences.” Damn,
the last thing Mike needed was one of the city's best
investigative reporters breathing down his neck so early in the
process.

“He's going to be in your office first thing tomorrow morning.
You need to talk to him.”

Battaglia knew all about the Floyd Warren trial. It was the most
dramatic cold case we had solved, with national consequences, and
he had used it as the best example of his leadership in the
recently completed drive to eliminate the New York State statute of
limitation for rape.

“It's the main testimony in my case in chief, Paul. I'm meeting
with our victim at seven thirty.”

I was close enough to know that Ackerman had been one of
Battaglia's earliest supporters on the editorial board of the Tribune, the most important local weekly news magazine.
And I was keenly aware that their relationship had taken a bad
turn two years ago, when the coverage of a vigilante subway
shooter in Ackerman's influential column had resulted in a series
of critical pieces about the DA's office Major Felony Project.

“I'll tell him to be there at eight. I'd like you to keep him
waiting,”

Battaglia said. "Just give him fifteen minutes before you go up
to court.

And don't forget that he screwed me on the Metz case."

The district attorney's memory was infallible. And payback was
one of his strongest motivators.

“I've got nothing to tell him, Paul.” It was uncharacteristic of
Battaglia to let his prosecutors meet with the media before a
trial. He was the master of the well-timed leak, but I had no
information to give away. “He's not coming to get a story, Alex.
We're in the driver's seat this time.”

“Why? What's he got?” I asked.

"What Herb Ackerman's got is a problem. He tells me he was a
client of Amber Bristol's.