French Kiss

Chapter 11

The lobby of the Auberge du Parc Hotel is somebody’s idea of elegance. But it sure as hell is not mine.

“Pink marble on the walls and the floor and the ceiling. If Barbie owned a brothel it would look like this.” I share this observation with my new partner as I look out the floor-to-ceiling windows that face Park Avenue.

K. Burke either doesn’t get the joke or doesn’t like the joke. No laughter.

“We’re not here to evaluate the decor,” she says. “You know better than I do that Auberge du Parc is right up there with the Plaza and the Carlyle when it comes to expensive hotels for rich people.”

“And it affords a magnificent view of the building where Maria Martinez was killed,” I say as I gesture to the tall windows.

Burke looks out to the corner of 68th Street and Park Avenue. She nods solemnly. “That’s why we’re starting the job here.”

“The job, you will agree, is fairly stupid?” I ask.

“The job is what Inspector Elliott has assigned us, and I’m not about to second-guess the command,” she says.

Elliott wants us to interview prostitutes, streetwalkers, anyone he defines as “high-class lowlife.” Enormously upscale hotels like the Auberge often have a lot of illegal sex stuff going on behind their pink marble walls. But asking the devils to tell us their sins? I don’t think so.

This approach is ridiculous, to my way of thinking. Solutions come mostly by listening for small surprises-and yes, sometimes by looking for a few intelligent pieces of hard evidence. Looking in the unlikely places. Talking to the least likely observers.

Burke’s theory, which is total NYPD style, is way more traditional: “You accumulate the information,” she had said. “You assemble the puzzle piece by piece.”

“Absolutely not,” I replied. “You sink into the case as if it were a warm bath. You sense the situation. You look for the fingerprint of the crime itself.” Then I added, “Here’s what we’ll do: you’ll do it your way. I’ll do it mine.”

“No, not your way or my way,” she had said. “We’ll do it the NYPD way.”

That discussion was a half hour ago. Now I’m really too disgusted and frustrated to say anything else.

So I stand with my new partner in a pink marble lobby a few hundred yards from where my old partner was murdered.

Okay. I’ll be the adult here. I will try to appear cooperative.

We review our plan. I am to go to the lobby bar and talk to the one or two high-priced hookers who are almost always on the prowl there. You’ve seen them-the girls with the perfect hair falling gently over their shoulders. The delicate pointy noses all supplied by the same plastic surgeon. The women who are drinking in the afternoon while they’re dressed for the evening.

Burke will go up to the more elegant, more secluded rooftop bar, Auberge in the Clouds. But of course she’ll first stop by the hotel manager’s office and tell him what he already knows: the NYPD is here. Procedure, procedure, procedure.

If Maria Martinez is watching all this from some heavenly locale, she is falling on the floor laughing.

After agreeing to meet Burke back in the lobby in forty-five minutes, I walk into the bar. (I once visited Versailles on a high school class trip, and this place would have pleased Marie Antoinette.) The bar itself is a square-shaped ebony box with gold curlicues all over it. It looks like a huge birthday present for a god with no taste.

At the bar sit two pretty ladies, one in a red silk dress, the other in a kind of clingy Diane von Furstenberg green-and-white thing, which is very loose around the top. I don’t think von Furstenberg designed it to be so erotic. It takes me about two seconds to realize what these women do for a living.

These girls are precisely the type that Nick Elliott wants us to speak to. Yes, a ridiculous waste of time. And I know just what to do about it.

I walk toward the exit and push through the revolving door.

I’m out. I’m on my own. This is more like it.