The Fifth Avenue Series Boxed Set (89 page)

New York City

One Month Later

At the Click Click Camera Shop on West 8th Street, Jo Jo Wilson cranked up the dial on the dented green oxygen tank between his legs and eyed the camera in Marty Spellman’s hands.
 
“Beauty, ain’t it?” he said through the mask covering his mouth.
 
“Just hit the market.
 
Knew you’d want it.
 
Called you first.
 
The strings I pulled.”

Marty looked over the camera.
 
It was the latest digital Nikon—the best and latest in their series—and it was impressive.
 
God only knew how Wilson got hold of it.
 
It had the sort of lens that was so powerful, it could capture a cheating husband’s contented look four football fields away.
 
Holding it made his heart melt.

The problem was that it had been used before.
 
There were hairline scratches on the black casing.
 
Oily smudges on the lens.
 
Marty gave it another once-over and shook his head.
 
There was no way he was paying twenty grand for this camera.
 

“Too bad it’s hot,” he said.

Wilson looked surprised, genuinely offended.
 
He sat back on the stool and blinked, his great round belly expanding before him like a comic strip balloon.
 
Seventy years old and he’d eaten himself into a three-hundred-fifty-pound birthday suit.
 
It was a medical wonder his heart continued to pump.
 
“What the fuck you talkin’ about?” he said.
 
“That camera ain’t hot.”

“Don’t lie to me,” Marty said.

“I’m not lyin’ to you.”

“Then show me the invoice.”

That silenced him.

“And where’s the box?”

Jo Jo looked away.

“You can’t keep lying to me, Jo Jo.
 
You’re no good at it.
 
I’ve been onto you from the first day we met, when you were stupid enough to try and sell me a directional microphone that had no direction.
 
Why haven’t you smartened up by now?”

Wilson snapped his fingers on either side of his head.
 
“Can’t hear you, Spellman.
 
Emphysema’s eatin’ away my ears, too.”

Marty removed fifty $100 bills from his pants pocket and fanned them out on the dirty glass counter that separated them.
 
“Five thousand and you pay to have it delivered to my apartment tomorrow.
 
That’s a fair price, Jo Jo.
 
We both know it.”

Wilson had no trouble hearing that and he looked at the cash as though it were a great pile of stinking shit.
 
He gulped air and shook his pale moon of a head.
 
“You got more money than God, and this is what you offer me?
 
Five fucking grand?”
 
He pushed the mask aside and spat imaginary spit.
 
“Ten grand or nothing.”

Marty put a finger on one of the $100 bills and dragged it to the left.
 
“And my offer dwindles.
 
Your call.”

“That camera’s worth twenty grand and you know it!”

“And you probably got it for two grand.”
 
He dragged another bill aside.
 
“Look at that.
 
It’s magic.
 
The money just disappears.”

“Look,” Wilson said.
 
“Give me a break.
 
Doris went to the doctor last week.
 
She’s gotta have an operation.
 
I need the cash.”

Even if this were true, Marty knew for a fact that Jo Jo Wilson was far too clever a man to have reached seventy without having secured health insurance.
 
This was just another ploy.
 

“Times are tough for all of us, Jo Jo.
 
Have you seen the economy?
 
It’s in the shitter. Just yesterday, I saw an elderly woman roasting a pigeon over a metal trash can in the South Bronx.”
 
He pulled another bill away, crumpled it in his fist.
 
“Imagine what she’d do with this money.”

“I can’t even imagine you in the South Bronx.”

Marty put a finger on another bill.

And Wilson caved.
 
He took the money and counted it twice before stuffing it in his shirt pocket.
 
“Generosity ain’t your middle name, Spellman, I’ll tell ya that.
 
What do you need a camera like that for, anyway?
 
You workin’ another case?”

“I’m always working another case, Jo Jo.”

“What’s this one about?
 
Another murder?”
 
He sucked air.
 
“Or are you hangin’ some society slick for cheatin’ on his wife?”

Marty didn’t know.
 
The call came yesterday morning from Maggie Cain, a best-selling novelist whose books were currently enjoying critical acclaim.
 
She was his ex-wife’s favorite writer.
 
In their brief conversation, Cain asked if they could meet today at six but offered nothing more.
 
“I’d rather speak to you in person,” she said.
 
“I have lots of reasons for not trusting telephones or cell phones.”

That interested Marty.
 
You got jaded at this job.
 
He got her address, said he’d be there and hung up the phone.

Six o’clock was forty minutes away.
 

He looked at Wilson, who was turning off the oxygen.
 
“Well, at least leave yourself a trickle,” Marty said.
 
“I want you alive so that camera is delivered tomorrow.”

“Yeah, yeah.”

“Love ya, buddy.”

“Bullshit.”

“It’s true.”

“Then recommend a movie for me.
 
The wife wants a heartwarmer.”

“In your condition?
 
It better be ‘Cocoon’.”

“Fuck you, Spellman.”

With a grin, Marty left his camera sitting on the countertop, stepped out of the store and took a right on Fifth.

*
  
*
  
*

Maggie Cain lived on West 19th Street.
 

When Marty arrived at the narrow brownstone, he noted at a glance the boxed summer flowers at each window, the bronze knocker on the carved mahogany door and what must have been a freshly swept walk.

He knocked.

When she met him at the door, he was faced with a mere slip of a woman in her early thirties with shoulder-length brown hair.
 
She wore clothes that suggested someone too busy to care about frills—faded jeans and a white T-shirt.
 
She wore no make-up, which Marty thought was unusual because if she had, it would have helped to conceal the faint scar that stretched from the corner of her left eye to the side of her mouth.

She extended her hand, which Marty shook.
 
“It’s nice of you to come,” she said.

Her grip was strong and firm, as self-assured as her voice.
 
“It’s a pleasure,” Marty said.
 
“I’ve been looking forward to this.”

“So have I.”
 
She stepped aside and revealed an entryway that stretched before them in varying degrees of light and darkness.
 
“I know you’re busy,” she said.
 
“Come in and let’s talk.”

He followed her down a hallway lined with bookcases, paintings, drawings that caught his eye, and into the living room, which smelled of roses in their prime.
 
He noted a grand piano in the corner of the room, photographs framed in silver on its lowered lid.
 
On the windowsill behind it, a black cat sat poised and alert, gazing out at the city.

“That’s Baby Jane,” Maggie said, indicating the cat with a nod.
 
“Rescued her from the street years ago.
 
She’s the real woman of the house.”

“So, I should be talking to her?”

Maggie laughed.
 
“Actually, she’d probably answer back, but I’m afraid you’ll have to settle for me.
 
Would you like something to drink?
 
I have just about everything, but if you’d prefer something cool, I just made a pitcher of iced tea.”

“That would be perfect.”

In her absence, he took the opportunity to look around.
 
While he knew she was a successful writer, he also knew enough about the publishing business that few writers, regardless of their success, could afford the drawing by Matisse he glimpsed in the entryway.
 

He crossed to the piano and looked at the photographs.
 
A little girl with blonde hair; an older couple posing in front of a tropical sunset; a handsome man stacking wood beside a snow-covered cottage.
 
The rest were of Maggie Cain.
 

In each photo, she was younger, perhaps in her late twenties at best, and as Marty studied them, he saw that in none of these photographs was her left cheek scarred.

He wondered again why she made this appointment.

Her voice came from behind him:
 
“How much do you know about Maximilian Wolfhagen?”

She was walking toward him, the light from the surrounding windows catching the red highlights in her hair.
 
He took the glass of iced tea she held out to him.
 
“The arbitrageur?”

“You know another Maximilian Wolfhagen?”

Marty smiled.
 
Wolfhagen wasn’t exactly an unknown, and his name certainly wasn’t common.
 
“As a matter of fact, I don’t.”

Maggie leaned against the piano, her narrow frame fitting neatly in its gleaming curve.
 
“I remember a time when everyone wanted to be him,” she said.
 
“People dressed like him, wore their hair like him, went to the same restaurants as him.
 
You couldn’t turn on a TV or open a newspaper without seeing those crowded teeth of his.
 
You know what happened to him?”

“He was indicted by the SEC for insider trading.”

“That’s right,” Maggie said.
 
“And five years ago, he spent three years in Lompoc because of it.”
 
She nodded across the room.
 
“Would you like to sit down?”
 

“I’d rather stand.” He watched her step to the gold brocade sofa in the center of the room, where she put her glass down on the table beside her.
 
“When we spoke on the phone, I think I told you I’m a writer.”

Marty nodded.
 
He’d stayed up late the night before skimming through two of her four novels, remembering those characters Gloria had loved and hated, cheered for and despised, recalling those times he’d fallen asleep with his head on her stomach while she turned the pages.
 
It wasn’t something he wanted to think about now.
 
“My ex-wife’s a big fan.”

“Just your ex-wife?”