French Pressed

Eighteen

The prescription bottle carried an Inwood address, which meant we had to go even farther uptown, way above 125th Street—the last road most tourist maps bothered to show as part of Manhattan Island.

The neighborhood was largely residential. Most of its structures were town houses, apartment buildings, and two- and three-family dwellings. It was probably the most suburban of Manhattan’s seventy-plus neighborhoods with three shopping districts, a hospital, and a public park.

Mike drove us up one quiet, tree-lined street and down another. When the car’s direction twisted and turned in a particularly odd way, I was a little confused whether we were heading east or west.

“The lay of the land’s different up here,” I remarked, leaning forward to peer at the passing street signs. “There’s no grid pattern.”

“Right,” Mike said. “Some of these streets are based on old Indian trails. They weren’t laid out by city planners like the rest of Manhattan.”

“Except not all of Manhattan has the grid,” I reminded him.

“True…”

The lanes in the West Village, for instance, were far from straight. This often confused people, but without the legal protection of historic preservation, my neighborhood’s one- and two-century-old town houses—including the four-story Federal that the Village Blend occupied—would have been razed by now and replaced with thirty-story apartment buildings, all lined up in the nice, neat pattern of the rest of the borough, with addresses that were standard, predictable, and all-conforming.

I leaned back against the car seat. “You know what? I’d rather have the Indian trails.”

Ironically, the address we were currently after was on a wild frontier, just beyond the invisible border of Inwood’s happy, middle-class Hispanic lives. Sherman Creek, a rundown subsection of Inwood, was located along a strip of the Harlem River. To get there we drove through a sprawling public housing project called the Dyckman Houses.

The Saturday afternoon weather was pleasant, bright, and only mildly chilly, yet the grounds around the project appeared close to deserted. Benches along the sidewalks were empty, and a children’s playground was lifeless. I wasn’t surprised, since I recognized the name of this housing development as the center of a recent crime wave that had been reported on the news.

Sherman Creek itself was mostly industrial. When we arrived in the neighborhood, Mike gave me a quick rundown on the place. He said it was mixed zoning, with warehouses and businesses existing next to apartments and lofts, some of which were now inhabited by urban pioneers, an adventurous and hearty breed of city dweller that I’d always admired since they paved the way for further residential development and eventual gentrification.

At the moment, gentrification was a moot point for Sherman Creek. The businesses we drove by—construction and demolition companies, air-conditioner installation and repair, and automotive garages—were branded with more gang tags than we’d noticed in Washington Heights. As Mike parked, I pointed out the graffiti.

“Yeah,” he said. “It’s pretty bad. Then again, you should have seen the Upper West Side fifteen years ago, when I was working anticrime.”

“You were in an anticrime unit?”

“Yeah, and I did some antigang work, too. Then I moved to OCCB-Narcotics—”

“What’s OCC—”

“Sorry. Organized Crime Control Bureau. It’s how I earned my gold shield, but I still attend antigang seminars twice a month.”

“So you’re an expert. Then what’s the deal with this one?” I pointed.

Most of the gang tags were a mess, aesthetically speaking. But the scarlet symbol I’d singled out had been done with admirable graphic flair: two stylized letter Rs spray-painted together, one drawn backward. The artist even added a drop shadow. All things considered, it could have worked as a corporate logo.

“Whoever painted it has a decent technique,” I said, tilting my head to check it out at another angle.

“That’s the Red Razors,” Mike replied, folding his arms and regarding me, regarding the tag. “Nothing but a pack of small-time punks peddling ganja. They wouldn’t last a week against the gangs we faced back in the day. Stone killers like the Wild Cowboys, the Red Top Crew. But the worst of the bunch was the Jheri Curls—”

“The what? You’re kidding me, right? There was not a gang named after Little Richard’s do?”

“It’s a real gang. I promise you. Funny name. Nothing funny about their methods.” Mike turned and began walking down the sidewalk. “The address we’re looking for is Rayburn Way,” he reminded me. “It should be a few more blocks this way.”

I caught up to his long strides. “So what did they do? The Jheri Curls?”

Mike continued to glance up and down the street, taking in our surroundings. “Rafael Martinez and his four brothers ran a major cocaine trafficking operation out of Washington Heights, committed several murders, including a gang-style hit of a witness.”

“What happened to them?”

Mike shrugged. “Some undercover guys got the goods on their cocaine operation from the inside, and they were taken down. Rafe and his hermanos are behind bars for good.”

There was something about the way Mike told me the story, the hint of pride in his voice. “You had something to do with that, didn’t you?”

“No comment,” he said, but the faintest upturn at the edges of his mouth told me that he was glad I’d guessed. A second later, however, the grim line was back. “That’s the trouble with police work. It’s always one step forward, two steps back.”

“I don’t follow…”

“Within a year, the Wild Cowboys and the Young Talented Children had taken the Curls’ turf and their business.”

I frowned. “But Dean Martin warned us, didn’t he?”

“Excuse me?”

“You never heard him sing, ‘You’re Nobody ’Til Somebody Loves You’?”

“The song?”

“Yes, Lieutenant. Most memorable line: ‘The world still is the same. You’ll never change it.’”

Mike thought it over, grunted. “Good line. Good song. I’ll grant you that. But if you want to talk Rat Pack, my guy’s Sinatra.”

“I should have guessed. You’ve both got that Ol’ Blue Eyes thing going.”

Mike smiled, then he stopped us on a corner. The green street sign read Rayburn Way. Under it, a bright yellow metal sign warned the alleyway was a dead end, and under that I spied another Red Razor gang tag. Mike pulled the brown prescription bottle out of his overcoat pocket.

“The address we’re looking for is seventy-nine,” he said, squinting to read the tiny letters.

I stayed close to Mike as we entered the dead-end alley.

On the left of us were cinder-block buildings; on the right was a sprawling junkyard, surrounded by an eight-foot chain-link fence topped with barbed wire. There was a fence at the end of the block, too. Beyond it, I could see the cold, uneasy waters of the Harlem River.

My attention returned to the stark gray buildings on our left. They seemed to be decaying before our eyes. The nearest building was topped by a faded sign that read Big C Plumbing. Under that, a smaller sign proclaimed the space For Rent. The building itself had high, broken windows. Its door was shuttered by a steel gate splattered with graffiti. The building next door had housed a Rapido Washing Machine Repair and Service business, which had also gone bust.

“Are you sure we’re going in the right direction?” I asked.

“Yeah,” Mike said, his eyes busy scanning the empty street. “Look for the numbers. Big C Plumbing was seventy-three. This repair place is seventy-five. The building at the end of the block should be seventy-nine.”

We continued down the dead-end street, and I noticed a gap between the buildings. Another structure had been here once, but it was torn down now, leaving a flat patch of dirt between the cinder block buildings. As we approached the empty lot, the bitter smell of woodsmoke floated lightly on the brisk wind. The second Mike smelled that aroma, he slowed his pace and rapidly unbuttoned his overcoat. But the sun was behind a cloud now, and the blustery temperature near the Harlem River was downright frigid.

“Are you warm?” I asked (naively, as it turned out).

Mike reached out, touched my shoulder, gently but insistently pushed me to his right side so that his body was now standing between me and the lot we were about to pass—shielding me, as I realized a moment later, when the loud clang woke me up to what Mike already knew.

Someone had whipped a beer can so hard it flew from deep inside the empty lot, all the way across the street, bouncing against the junkyard’s chain-link fence.

We took a few more steps forward, and I finally saw the bonfire blazing inside the steel drum, the half dozen Hispanic-looking youths in black hoodies and red sweatpants gathered around it.

“Stay to my right,” Mike whispered, continuing with easy strides, as if we were strolling through Times Square at noon.

One of the punks noticed me anyway and whistled. Other catcalls followed. I braced myself for some crude comments. These came in ugly succession. Then three youths broke off from the pack and approached us, the flunkies flanking their obvious leader.

The leader looked about seventeen. He had light cocoa skin, a wispy soul patch on his chin, long sideburns, and short black hair covered with a red knit cap. The punk on the leader’s right was clutching a can of Mexican beer. The one on the left spun a long chain that dangled from his pants. The leader’s hands were free, and he was clenching and unclenching his fists.

“Hey, papá,” he said. “You lost, man?”

“No, junior. I know where I’m going. Do you?” Mike said, staring the leader down. That’s when I noticed he’d carefully drawn back one side of his overcoat, making sure the punk saw the large-caliber handgun strapped to his shoulder.

The leader spied the weapon and stopped in his tracks.

The gangbanger with the beer stepped forward. “Screw you, man! You don’t scare us! How would you like—”

“Don’t do nothin’, hijo!” the leader shouted. He rolled his eyes. “Dude’s a cop.”

At their leader’s gestured command, the youths retreated back to their bonfire, where they eyed us warily as we approached the final building on the decrepit block.

Something in me still wanted to turn around, go back to those young men, ask them who was responsible for designing and painting that Red Razor gang tag. I wanted to tell the boy that he had potential, tell him he could have a life. But Mike would have strangled me if I’d tried anything close to a stunt like that.

I was naive sometimes, but I wasn’t an idiot. I stayed to Mike’s right, kept my eyes averted from the young men.

We finally reached the end part of this dead end. The building marked 79 was a three-story brick structure covered in soot. There were cracked windows on the ground floor that had long ago been painted over. Two of the upstairs windows were covered with cardboard; dirty curtains dangled from a brass pole in the third. The building itself had once been part of the electric company’s massive holdings. This I knew because of the words set in stone above the front entrance:

RAYBURN WAY CONSOLIDATED EDISON MAINTENANCE STATION 116

Another sign had been added to the black steel door, painted in gleaming silver letters in a delicate, flowing script:

THE SHERMAN CREEK ART COLLECTIVE

The door itself was rusty and pitted, and looked like it hadn’t been opened in decades. Mike tried the handle, pulled as hard as he could, but it was locked.

We both spotted the mail slot beside the door and read the names scribbled in no particular order on white tape: Saul Maxwell, Dexter Ward, Maryanne Vhong, T. De Longe, Nancy Roth.

Mike looked for a doorbell or an intercom, but there was none, so he pounded on the metal door with his fist. He was about to knock again when we heard muffled sounds from the other side, then the door opened.

A tall, rail-thin young man appeared, wearing a black T-shirt and faded, paint-spattered overalls. His long brown hair was stringy and dirty; the scraggly King Tut beard hanging from his chin was decorated with blue plastic rings. He clutched a paintbrush in one soiled hand, a dirty rag in the other. His ears were pierced and decorated with tiny silver earrings that looked like skulls. When he spoke, I noticed his tongue was pierced, too.

“You knocked?”

“Are you Toby De Longe?” Mike asked.

The youth shook his head. “I’m Saul Maxwell. Haven’t seen Tobe in a couple of days. I reckon he’s upstairs, sleeping it off.”

“Sleeping what off?”

Maxwell shrugged.

“Do you reckon he’s alone?” Mike asked.

The kid’s eyes flashed. “You ask a lot of questions for some asshole who came knocking on my door.”

Mike displayed his shield. “Let’s talk, you and me. Asshole to asshole.”

“Frenchy’s with him,” Saul Maxwell said, frowning.

“Who’s Frenchy?”

“Toby’s girlfriend, Brigitte. She’s French Canadian, so we call her—”

“Step aside,” Mike said, muscling past the man. I followed him through the door.

The layout of the first floor was still one large industrial space, illuminated by fluorescent ceiling lights, half of them burned out. There were visible holes in the concrete floor where factory machines had once been bolted. I noticed another steel door in the corner, beside a concrete staircase with steel tube railings.

The walls were gray and unpainted, except for one massive section that had been turned into an impressive mural depicting the Manhattan skyline as seen from the middle of the George Washington Bridge. The central image was the figure of a man clutching his head and wailing in despair—an impressive pastiche of The Scream, Edvard Munch’s most famous painting.

In a corner I saw an ancient, avocado-hued refrigerator, beside it a card table with a hot plate, a roll of paper towels, plastic plates, and a Mr. Coffee machine with a badly stained carafe. A six-foot folding ladder, several easels, all of them covered, and another card table laden with bottles and jars of paint dominated the space under the mural.

I smelled something like burning roses and a perfumed tobacco before I noticed there was another person in the room. A diminutive Asian woman with short, bottle-bleached hair was sunk so deep into a beanbag chair that all I could see were her head and her legs. She wore bell-bottom Levi’s decorated with embroidered flowers, boots, and a black sweater.

The young woman was attached to an iPod, head bobbing to the beat pounding in her brain. She clutched a thin black cigarette between two ebony-manicured fingers. Sitting next to her on the floor was a mason jar with three long sticks of incense burned halfway down. Her eyes seemed glazed, and she didn’t appear to even register our presence.

“Where can I find De Longe?” Mike asked the young man.

Maxwell pointed to the stairs. “Second floor. Last door at the end of the hall.”

The kid dipped his brush in a cup filled with vermilion paint, faced the mural again. Mike took my arm and led me to the staircase.

“Be a gentleman and knock first, Officer Asshole,” Saul Maxwell called over his shoulder.

I felt Mike tense. I tugged his arm. “Forget it,” I whispered. “Let’s find Brigitte.”

The stairway was cracked concrete and lit by what little sunlight penetrated an insulated glass wall streaked with soot. The second-floor hallway was dark, and musty, too. Mike found a light switch and another bank of fluorescent lights sprang to life. Two rooms flanked the main corridor, one filled with art supplies, the other with a pile of assorted junk, which I realized after a moment’s viewing was meant to be a sculpture.

The door we wanted was at the end of the hall. The aromas of burning incense and tobacco, which had been so strong downstairs, were now dissipating, and I began to pick up another smell, a vague putrid odor.

“Mike, be careful,” I warned. “I don’t know a thing about this Toby person. But I know Brigitte has knife skills.”

Mike stepped up to the door and listened for a moment, then knocked gently. “Toby De Longe? My name’s Quinn. I need to have a few words with you.”

Silence.

Mike knocked again, harder. Then again, hard enough to shake the wooden door in its frame. Finally he grabbed the doorknob and twisted it. The door opened a few inches then caught on the security chain.

“Damn…” Mike muttered. He leaned close to the door, peered through it.

That putrid odor was a lot stronger now. “Can you see anything?”

Mike shook his head.

“What do we do?”

“This.” Mike reared back a foot and slammed his broad shoulder against the wood. The chain broke loose from the frame with a splintered crack. The momentum sent him across the threshold, and he quickly caught his balance.

I hurried into the room after him, but he’d already turned around on me. Before I could see anything, he was pushing me back into the hall.

“Back, Clare. Get back!”

“What? Why?!”

As he continued to dance me backward, I struggled to peer around his tall body. We’d come this far; I wasn’t giving up now!

The room looked stark and miserable from what I could glimpse around Mike’s stubborn form. There were frayed beach towels on the floor in lieu of furniture, cardboard boxes for dressers and drawers, a futon against the wall. The rumpled bed was occupied—and that’s when it hit me. The person lying on that mattress wasn’t sleeping.

“Mike, stop it! Let me go in!”

“She’s dead, Clare. They’re both dead.”

Hands on hips, I stared up at the man. “Are you forgetting I found two stabbing victims in two days? I can handle this. Now let me go!”

Mike released me abruptly, showing me his palms. “Fine, Clare. Go in, if that’s what you want.”

“Yes. That’s what I want. I may not have a gun or a license, Mike, but I’ve brought more than one murderer to justice, and you know it.”

Mike held my gaze for a long moment. He nodded. “You’re right, Clare. You are.” His tone was respectful if not apologetic. “Okay then. If you say you can handle it, then you can.”

“I can.”

I stepped through the doorway and began to cross the small room. The smell was pretty bad as I moved toward the futon. I tried my best to cut off air to my nose, breathe only through my mouth.

“Don’t disturb the scene,” he reminded me.

Toby De Longe and Brigitte Rouille were side by side on the floor mattress. Tongue lolling and black, face greenish red, Toby De Longe had obviously died first. A rubber ribbon had been tied around his biceps, and his forearm was black below the compressed flesh. A hypodermic needle was still sticking out of his arm; a singed spoon and a melted candle lay next to the bed. There were several small squares of creased blue paper, too.

“Some very bad heroin has come to town,” I heard Mike say, rubbing a hand over his face. “It comes in those blue wrappers. We’ve been trying to get the word out, but…”

His voice trailed off.

I shifted my gaze to Brigitte. Compared to her boyfriend, she looked positively placid. One arm was thrown over her head, the other stretched out on the bed. Her long, black hair was loose now and splayed all over the sheets. She could have been asleep, except for the greenish cast to her face and neck and the purple marks where gravity pulled her blood toward the floor. I leaned close to see her face, trying not to inhale, but a whiff of something sharply sour passed the receptor cells in my mouth. I gagged, and the odors of the room rushed into my nose.

“What’s that sour smell?”

“You mean other than the putrid rot of the decaying bodies? Looks like Brigitte vomited while unconscious. See how blue her lips are? She suffocated before the pills she ingested killed her.”

I hadn’t noticed the bottle clutched in her hand. “What did she take?”

“We’ll let the medical examiner tell us that.”

Mike knelt down on one knee, gently touched Brigitte’s pale arm. “Cold.” He hung his head for a moment. “She’s been dead for a long time.”

I continued to stare at the lifeless woman. “Why did this happen?”

Mike rose, placed a hand on my shoulder. “My guess, from the look of the scene: De Longe was a junkie who tried to kick his habit and failed. He took the bad heroin, died, and Brigitte killed herself in grief.”

“Damn!” a voice cried behind us.

Mike and I both turned. Saul Maxwell was standing in the doorway.

“Call 911,” Mike commanded.

Maxwell shook his head. “Sorry, dude. Our phone service has been interrupted. Someone forgot to pay the bill.”

“I’ll call it in,” Mike told him, reaching for the radio in his overcoat. Saul Maxwell retreated down the stairs.

“Maybe Brigitte was feeling remorseful,” I said hopefully. “Maybe she was feeling guilty about killing Vinny and Tommy, and that’s why she chose to kill herself.”

Mike shook his head. “Sorry, Clare. I’ve seen enough corpses to know that Brigitte Rouille and her boyfriend here have both been dead for at least twenty-four hours, probably longer.”

I stepped back; the nausea came over me then. I covered my mouth, swallowing hard, forcing my lunch back down. Mike’s words blew away any chance I saw to clear my daughter of murder.

“You could be wrong…” I challenged weakly.

“Sweetheart…” Mike sighed, eyes full of sympathy. “It’s remotely possible Brigitte killed Vincent Buccelli. But there is no way in hell she murdered Tommy Keitel. I’m sorry, Clare. By then your prime suspect was already dead.”