Neptune Avenue (20 page)

And that’s what the latest report had to say by the time Jack got to Zhenya’s apartment.

“I AM JUST GETTING
home,” she said, after he kissed her in her foyer, under the chandelier. “Is no food here. Can we go to market?”

He shrugged. “Sure. Why not?” They didn’t go out to eat at local restaurants, but surely a little shopping expedition would look innocent enough.

She gathered her purse and her keys and they set out. An old woman, back twisted with scoliosis, was in the elevator when they got on, so Jack and Zhenya just stood in silence, not too close to each other. As they walked out through the lobby, he glanced at their reflection in a big wall-length mirror. They didn’t look like much of a couple. When they walked out into the evening heat and turned down a narrow side street toward Brighton Beach Avenue, he wondered how she would react if he stopped and kissed her. They walked beside a huge block-long brick apartment building.

“How was your day?” Jack asked, when what he really wanted to know was what she’d been doing the previous night. But he wasn’t going to play detective now that he was off duty, talking to someone he cared about.

“Busy,” she replied.

“That’s good, I guess. …”

They walked on, making only small talk as they turned onto the busy avenue, with its subway trains shuttling overhead on the elevated line, its colorful street stalls and sidewalks thronged with shoppers. It was the kind of old-fashioned neighborhood where people shopped each day for the dinner they would cook that night.

As Jack walked along, next to Zhenya but not touching her, he couldn’t help thinking how strange relationships were: you had to open up and put your trust in someone else, and that started to feel like something solid and substantial, but then some wind moved the curtains and you saw behind them: you realized that what you were counting on was just a fragile, tenuous, utterly voluntary agreement floating in the air between two people. At any moment, either one of them could snatch it back.

Zhenya took him to a local food market. Jack had heard about the shortages of the U.S.S.R., the endless lines and empty shelves. This place was a hungry Soviet’s wet dream. To the left stood display cases full of raw, smoked, and grilled fish. To the right, steaks, roasts, salamis, sausages … Deeper into the market, which turned out to be big and mazelike, more counters offered freshly baked bread, dumplings, potato pancakes, pickled salads, cheeses, stuffed chicken breasts. Even the aisles were jammed with mounds of canned goods. While Zhenya was ordering something from the bakery, Jack picked up a can: the label was covered in Cyrillic writing and bore a picture of a strange artichoke-like vegetable he couldn’t even recognize. Shoppers called out orders in Russian to the hair-netted women behind the counters, who wore white outfits like lab coats. Jack felt overwhelmed by the foreign language, the hubbub, his sense of being an interloper. He imagined that these people felt the same way when they ventured out into the rest of America—that must be why they clustered together so.

He was staring at another unfamiliar canned product when he felt a tug on his shoulder.

“Jackie?”

He turned to find a little old man staring up at him.

“How are you, Uncle Leon?”

The old man shrugged. “I can’t complain. Well, I
can
complain, but it doesn’t do any good.”

“What are you buying there?”

Leon lifted a couple of dark brown bottles. “Russian beer. Tastes like goat piss. But not worse than your American ‘light beer.’ The Germans make good beer, but will I buy it?” He made a face. “Never!”

Zhenya turned away from the bakery counter and rejoined Jack.

The old man’s bushy eyebrows went up.

“Uncle Leon, this is Zhenya,” Jack said. “She’s … a friend.”

Leon took off his sporty cap, bowed, and kissed Zhenya’s hand.
Here we go,
Jack thought.

“What a beautiful girl you are,” Leon said, turning up the charm to full wattage. “You remind me of the springtimes of my youth.”

Jack had to break down and grin at that one.

“Are you in a rush?” Leon said. “Can I buy you young people a nice cup tea?”

Jack stood there, uncertain, but Zhenya smiled, clearly taken by the old man. “Of course,” she said. “It is a pleasure.”

A stairway rose up to a second level, where Leon led them through a showroom piled with deluxe candies and chocolate assortments, on to the café. He bought them tea. They began to chat, and soon Zhenya and Leon slipped into Russian. They had an animated little conversation while Jack looked on, feeling like a fifth wheel. He was almost jealous of the old man.

Zhenya excused herself to go to the bathroom. Leon leaned forward. “
So
—who is this lovely girl?” Jack snorted. “She’s a woman, Leon. We don’t say ‘girl’ anymore.”

Leon rolled his eyes. “Please. You get to my age, and a girl is any female below sixty. You know her how?”

Jack restrained a wince. “We met through a friend.”

Leon nodded. “Very nice. You going to marry this one?”

Jack laughed. “For chrissakes—I just met her!”

His uncle shrugged. “Let me tell you, my friend: you could do a lot worse. … This one’s a keeper.”

Despite himself, Jack was pleased. He had probably had enough of marriage, but still … pleased.

Zhenya returned, they finished their tea, they bid Leon farewell. The old man insisted on kissing Zhenya’s hand again—his signature move.

DINNER WAS TOUGH FOR
Jack. Zhenya heated up some prepared food from the market, some salmon and very garlicky roasted potatoes and broccoli, and they took their plates out on the balcony and watched the sun set. Every few minutes Jack took out his cell phone, checking to see if the Joral surveillance team might have called, but his mind wasn’t really on the case.

He thought of how uncomfortable he had felt the first couple of times he had been in Zhenya’s apartment, and then how suddenly things had changed, opened up, grown intimate. For a few evenings he had felt profoundly comfortable here, but now things seemed to have somehow regressed a little, and that hurt. Love was a fishhook: the more you struggled, the deeper it set.

Zhenya went into the kitchen to prepare some dessert. When she returned, Jack announced that he had to leave shortly, to go deal with a work situation.

She looked surprised and a little hurt.

He didn’t go back to work, though—he just turned toward home. As he drove there, he felt like a fool. He had been jealous and wanted to teach her a little lesson, to show her that he still had his independence, but he had succeeded only in robbing both of them of another shared night.

BEFORE HE HIT THE
sack, he called one of the detectives on the surveillance team. A slow evening: their suspect had gone to a local video store, rented a couple of movies, and returned to his apartment.

Lying in bed, Jack tried to watch
The Tonight Show
, but he couldn’t stop thinking about Joseph Joral and about Zhenya Lelo. After a while, he turned off the lights. Surprisingly, he was asleep within minutes.

He was in some kind of dark warehouse, with narrow, constricting hallways. He was looking for something, or someone, but he didn’t know what. He climbed a couple of flights of stairs, then walked down another hall, stopping to peer into empty rooms that looked like abandoned classrooms. He opened several doors
—
offices
—
and then he opened another one: a janitor’s closet. He gasped
—
a young woman was hanging by her neck over the big metal sink, twisting slowly, and as her body swung around he saw that it was Zhenya.

He shot upright, breathing heavily. Over the years, he had learned not to bring the job home, even in his dreams, but every once in a while … He lay back and tried to calm his heart rate, but he was thinking of Joseph Joral again, hoping the creep was still in his apartment, far from any potential victims.

JACK WOKE LATE, SORE
and cranky from another bad night’s sleep. He didn’t have time to make himself breakfast; he stopped off at a deli on the way to work and picked up a cup of coffee and a fried egg on a bagel. He settled back into his car and was trying to eat the sandwich without dripping egg yolk on his tie when his cell phone trilled. A few seconds later he hung up, stuck his rotating beacon on the dash, and zoomed off toward Eastern Parkway.

Nine minutes later, after running several red lights, he careered onto Eastern Parkway and raced past the giant old classical façade of the Brooklyn Museum. At the next corner, he veered right. A block and a half down, on a side street outside the Brooklyn Botanic Garden, he spotted a Traffic Enforcement vehicle double-parked in the street. He pulled up behind it, got out, and jogged up to the driver’s window. The agent, a plump little woman with marcelled hair, nodded toward a silver car parked across the street.

“There you go,” she said matter-of-factly.

Jack wanted to kiss her. “You’re gonna get a gold medal for this,” he said.

She rolled her eyes. “I’d settle for a vacation day.”

Jack approached Joseph Joral’s car slowly. He didn’t have any legal authority to search the trunk or to get the doors opened, but that didn’t mean he couldn’t peer in the goddamn windows. From the outside, from thirty feet away, there was nothing suspicious about the car, but after he walked just a few feet closer, his face opened up in a big smile and he sang himself a little song:
Boom, boom, boom, another one bites the dust. …

A Playboy air freshener hung from the rearview mirror.

And the steering wheel was wrapped in luxurious brown fur.

I
T TOOK THE REST
of the day to get a search warrant, open the car, run the steering wheel cover down to the lab, and get the results, but Joseph Joral was back at the Seven-one Precinct House by 6
P.M.

Jack, Kyle, and the sergeant held another powwow out in the squad room. They’d have to wait several days for DNA testing of the fur but were confident that the results would tie Joral to both crime scenes. The problem was that this was all the new evidence might accomplish—it wouldn’t prove that he had actually committed either murder.

To accomplish that goal, the detectives had two different tools. The first was simply their skill at drawing out a confession. The second was more technical: they would provide Joseph Joral with a beverage at the start of the interview, whether he asked for one or not. At the end of the interview, after he abandoned the container, they’d have it tested for DNA. (The courts had ruled that such “surreptitiously sampled” material—discarded coffee cups, cigarette butts, even spit—was legally up for grabs, with no need for a court order.) The problem was that the results on the two condoms had still not come in. If they didn’t provide any analyzable DNA, this whole line of inquiry would be shot.

Before Joral’s lawyer showed up, Jack and Kyle joined their suspect in the little interview room while the sergeant and some other precinct detectives looked on via closed-circuit TV. The two lead detectives came in sipping from cans of Coke. They “casually” set a fresh can down before their suspect and did their best to distract him with small talk. Joral wouldn’t answer any questions. “I want my goddamn lawyer” is all he’d say. The detectives shrugged, left the room, and then watched on the monitor, waiting to see if their suspect would open the soda.

After a minute or two, Joral started looking very bored. He got up and paced around, but the room was so small that he soon gave up and sat again. After another minute, he picked up his Coke can.

Next door, the detectives made pumping motions with their fists. “Yessss!” Kyle said.

But Joral just rolled the can between his palms for a few seconds. Then he set it down. He got up and paced again, waiting for his lawyer.

The detectives groaned. It was like watching a baseball game. Two outs, bottom of the ninth …

Finally, Joral picked up the can again, cracked it open, and took a couple of sips.

Five minutes later, his lawyer arrived. “What the hell is going on?” he said to the detectives as they followed him into the interview room. “What grounds do you have for bothering my client again?”

Jack and Kyle just sat calmly on the other side of the table, their chairs squeaking on the old linoleum as they moved as close as possible to their prime suspect.

“We’ll get to that in a minute,” Jack said. “First we have a few questions for Mr. Joral here. We’d like to know where you were on the evenings of August sixteen, seventeen, and twenty-one.”

The lawyer shook his head. “My client has already answered those questions, Detective.”

Jack stared at Joral. “You’re sticking by your story?”

“You’re damn right he is,” the lawyer replied.

“Is that what you say, Joseph?”

Joral nodded. “Damn straight.”

Jack opened a manila folder. “Were you at the Sandalwood Lounge at any point on the evening of August twenty-one?”

The lawyer started to say something, but Jack held up a hand. “Joseph?”

Joral stared at him, wary.

Things were starting to get interesting. If the man stuck by his original alibi, then he could be caught out in a lie here. If he said that he
had
been at the bar, he’d be placing himself at the scene of Shantel Williams’s last known public appearance.

Joral opted for the lie. “I was home, man. Watching
Law and Order
.”

The lawyer sat up in his seat. “Now, are you going to—”

Jack held up a hand again. “One minute. Now, Joseph: was your car, a 2000 Acura with license plate number GFC-237, in your possession on the evenings of August sixteen, seventeen, and twenty-one?”

Joral frowned. “What do you mean?”

“I mean, did you lend it to anyone? Or maybe it was in the shop?”

He watched Joral mull over this new question; another opportunity to get trapped in a lie. He could practically see the gears turning in the perp’s head. If he said that it was in his possession, it might somehow tie him to the murders. If he said that it wasn’t, he’d be stuck trying to back up another lie.