Masquerade for Murder

Chapter Nine

Velda and I caught an early dinner at P.J. Moriarty’s on Sixth and 52nd at Radio City before the mahogany-paneled steak-and-chophouse got really busy.

It wouldn’t take long for that endless parade of bar stools to fill up, and for the conversation to build to a friendly din, punctuated by the occasional popped cork or dropped dish or clatter of silverware. Soon the red-leather banquettes — one of which we’d easily snagged — would become prime real estate.

I had the corned beef and cabbage while Velda got a small chef’s salad with turkey, which is probably all you need to know about either of us. The only business we discussed had to do with an arson investigation for one of our best insurance clients. We didn’t go over the Colby job until the coffee had arrived and I was done with the cheesecake. Velda had two petite bites — the kind of cheesecake she embodied taking discipline.

I filled her in on the trip to the Solstice Fitness Center and my return visit to Colby, Daltree & Levine.

“Either Vincent is playing me,” I said, “or somebody is trying to frame him. We’ve got death by a forbidden martial arts move and young Colby studying with a tenth-degree black belt trainer. We’ve got a series of murders all connected in some way to our client’s son, with one of the victims a cop who was looking at Colby like Ahab eyeing that white whale.”

At the end of her workday, Velda still looked fresh, the arcs of her dark hair touching the wide shoulders of a lime silk blouse that needed no pads to be in fashion.

She frowned in thought over the rim of her coffee cup from which she’d just sipped. “Do you think Casey Shannon was convinced of Colby’s guilt?”

I shook my head. “Probably not. Casey was still investigating.”

“What kind of unofficial case file did your friend Shannon leave behind?”

“Nothing’s been found, and Pat and his crew — including the top forensics guys — gave Casey’s pad a thorough shake.”

“And?”

“And came up with bupkis... at least as far as I know. Pat is stingier with information than usual.”

“Any chance they missed it?”

I shrugged. “Always a chance of that. And if Casey had come up with something — either indicating Colby’s guilt, or someone else’s...”

She was nodding. “And hadn’t moved on it.”

“...it could still be somewhere in that apartment.”

She sipped coffee, her expression growing thoughtful. Then she said: “The police are finished with the place, aren’t they? Can’t you get in and have a look around yourself, Mike?”

I smirked. “It’s still a crime scene, baby. Closed off with good ol’ yellow tape with DO NOT CROSS in big black letters.”

“Why, don’t you have scissors?”

That deserved a smile and I gave her one. “Normally, Pat would let me in. But he’s only dealing me cards he thinks he can use my help on. He wants Casey’s killer himself. He doesn’t want me spoiling his fun.”

Half a smirk dug briefly into a pretty cheek. “Because you’d just kill the bastard, whereas Pat wants to prolong the agony.”

“Some people just aren’t nice.”

A waitress came by and refilled my coffee. I nodded thanks, then stirred in sugar and cream and said, “There won’t be any cop on the door or anything... but I could be seen by a neighbor, working my little lock-pick routine. Still, it might be worth the risk.”

She gestured with a tapered hand, its nails bright red. “Why not get some help? Call Shannon’s peach-fuzz partner, Chris Peters. You said he was pretty broken up about his mentor buying it. If they were that close, good chance he has a key.”

I sipped and smiled. “Doll, you could get by on looks alone... but you don’t. That is a damn good suggestion.”

“Thank you. Want my company?”

I shook my head. “If I can get hold of Chris... and he gave me his card, with his home number on the back, offering to help if I needed any on this thing... two will be company, and three a crowd.”

“Thank you very much.”

“Hey, honey, trust me — I have other things you can do for me.”

Both eyebrows went up. “I bet you do.”

I let that pass. “We are assuming this Roger Kraft character was the driver of the Ferrari.”

“A sound assumption, I think.”

“I agree. But why was he killed?”

Her eyes narrowed. “Maybe somebody hired the job and was tying off a loose end.”

I narrowed mine back at her. “Maybe. But what if Kraft had a grudge against young Colby himself? Clearly that was no accident outside Pete’s Chophouse, not when Roger Dodger was out driving a sports car that didn’t belong to him, while wearing a fake beard and pony tail.”

She had a slow nod going. “Did that second-in-command guy at the brokerage, Owens, hire Kraft maybe? Owens and Colby were arguing about something, you said, and it got heated.”

“True,” I admitted.

“Also, Kraft was working on Owens’s car, which happens to be the red Ferrari that almost got a lot redder. Could that be the reason for the office dust-up — Colby learned Owens tried to have him killed...?”

She shook her head and her hair went wild, then tamed itself.

“No,” she said firmly, answering her own question. “That’s dumb. Colby would’ve called the cops on his ‘friend.’”

“Probably.”

She cocked her head. “Just probably?”

I gestured with an open hand. “As irrational as Don’t-Call-Me-Vince has been lately, who knows? But more likely it’s some work thing and just demonstrates what a loose cannon that concussion’s made out of our client’s baby boy.”

Her nod was in slow motion. “I can buy that.”

“But, again, doll — why was Kraft killed, and who did it...? If Pat has any ideas about that, he’s sure not sharing them.”

The waitress stopped by again and Velda held up a hand, preferring not to have her coffee cup refilled. We’d both had enough caffeine already to fuel the evening ahead.

Velda said, “All we know about Kraft is that he was part of a heist crew, and after this new heat, with their driver turning up dead? The accomplices will be in the wind.”

“Most likely. And if Kraft hadn’t been killed the same chest-crushing way as Shannon and that call girl? I would think tracking that end of things might pay off.”

“But we’re obviously dealing with one killer.”

“Right again. This doesn’t seem to have anything to do with smash-and-grab bank jobs.”

Her eyebrows rose contemplatively. “I have my own police contacts. You want me to dig into the late Mr. Kraft and his life and times?”

“Damn straight. You still know some of the undercover girls in Vice, right?”

Her dark hair bounced as she nodded. “Yeah. Nobody’s around from when I worked there, a million years ago, but yes, I have contacts. And I know some of the working girls, from that undercover job a couple of years back. Let me guess — that dead upscale hooker, what was her name?”

“Jasmine Jordan. But you’re ahead of me on this.”

“I am. I’ll see what I can find out about her and maybe we can get a line on her patrons. If one of them is Vincent Colby, we could be getting close to an answer his father — our client — won’t like.”

My grin was nasty. “I warned him this afternoon — told him I intend to follow this wherever it leads. The old man had his chance to bail.”

She raised a forefinger. “Something else.”

“Shoot. You should pardon the expression.”

“We’re assuming one killer because of the distinctive method of murder.”

“Yes we are.”

“But we’re leaving out the first two kills — the raped, strangled secretary from the Colby firm, and the suspicious-as-hell hit-and-run in that parking ramp of all places, taking down a broker from Colby, Who’s It and What’s It. Let’s call them murders, too.”

“Let’s.”

She leaned forward, keeping her voice down. The restaurant was starting to fill up and murder talk required a little discretion.

“Obviously,” she said, “the first two homicides are related to Colby and his business. But they lack the signature kills of the other victims. Those could be the work of someone else. They don’t even have to be the acts of a single perpetrator. It’s even possible we are looking for three murderers.”

I winced. “You’re giving me heartburn, baby.”

“It’s the corned beef and cabbage.” She shook her head again and the dark locks shimmered. “This is going to bleed into tomorrow, Mike.”

“I know it will.”

The check came.

I said, “Call the temp agency and get somebody in to fill in for you. Maybe that little Asian cutie is available.”

She arched a single eyebrow this time. “Fill in for me how?”

I smiled and raised both palms in surrender. “Honey, nobody could ever really fill in for you, not even on a temporary basis.”

“Right answer.”

Chris Peters was on board almost immediately. He and his wife and baby girl lived in Brooklyn, so I had to wait for him a while, but it would be worth it. Turned out he did have a key to his late partner’s pad, and — like me — he didn’t want to leave this thing to Pat.

“Mike, don’t quote me,” he said, when I picked him up in my souped-up black Ford heap near the subway station in Tudor City on East 42nd. “But I’m not in sync with Captain Chambers on this one.”

“How so, Chris?”

“Let’s just say I’m less anxious to bring Casey’s killer in alive.”

The slender blond cop was dressed for work — a tailored suit jacket with room around the waist to hide bulges of gun and gear. The unofficial NYPD policy was, “Dressed for a meeting, ready for mayhem.” I was garbed similarly, though my ensemble was set off by my porkpie fedora; Batman doesn’t go out without his cowl, does he? A kid like Chris, even on detective duty, went bareheaded.

I parked on a cross street a couple of blocks from Shannon’s apartment building. Our breaths were smoking. As we walked quickly along, nudged by the chill, I mulled what the young cop had said.

We’d just paused before heading behind the place, where Chris knew of a rear door adjacent to the service elevator. Luckily the building was on a corner and the doorman wouldn’t get wise to us.

I said, “You leave the vigilante shit to me, kid. You got a career going on the PD. Me, I got asked to leave a long time ago.”

“You were a cop once, Mike?”

“Most PIs were. I was making too much noise on the street when I was your age, and they stuck me on a desk. Which was the same as firing me, far as I was concerned.”

“I hear you.”

I put a hand on his shoulder. “If we’re approached in there, you show your badge and make the trouble go away. I have a badge too, if it comes to that, but it says ‘Private Investigator’ on it.”

He was nodding, breath pluming. “But either way, if we’re caught at this, I play the cop card.”

“Damn skippy. You have a key given to you by your late partner. You have a right to cross a police crime scene barricade. You’ll get your ass chewed if it gets back to Captain Chambers, but he won’t pursue it.”

“Okay.”

“And if he does, I’ll convince him I talked you into this.”

In well under five minutes, we were on Shannon’s floor. The expected crime scene tape was there, in a dramatic X, which we ducked under, after Chris unlocked the door.

The forensics team had left the place in good shape. Beyond the taped outline of where Shannon had fallen near and against the couch, no sign of their work remained. Even the dust of the black-graphite fingerprint powder had been cleaned away, which isn’t easy.

“God,” Chris said, looking pale. “It’s like nothing ever happened. It’s like Casey might just walk in on us.”

The bizarre outline on the floor and up onto the front of the couch said otherwise. Because Shannon had been slumped with his head forward, the outline had a ghastly decapitated look.

“Chris,” I said, “I don’t want to toss the place. Pros have gone over it. We won’t be gutting cushions or dumping out bureau drawers onto the floor.”

“No need,” his partner said. “I know Casey’s ways. He kept private files on open cases, even when the rest of us had moved on. Photocopied stuff he shouldn’t have. Made his own notes. Took his own pictures.”

I nodded. “And Pat and the forensics bunch weren’t necessarily looking for any such file. They were processing a murder scene. But if our assumptions are right, the file on that pair of unsolved homicides, and any notes on Vincent Colby, could be here.”

Chris held his hands out, palms up. “Worth a look. Worth a damn good look.”

The corner with the roll-top desk seemed a good place to start.

“I’ll go over this thing,” I said, opening it up, “and see if I can find any hidden compartments. These old behemoths have more secrets than a haunted house.”

The remark lingered oddly. We were, in a way, in a haunted house right now.

The nearby file cabinet was a dark-stained oak vertical four-drawer affair. Supervising above were three framed items — two commendations for valor on either side of the color framed 8” by 10” of President Reagan, signed to Casey.

“Take a look at those,” I said.

Chris took them down; all three were sealed in with brown paper, nothing taped to the backs. I told him to hang ’em back up, and he did.

“You go through the file cabinet,” I said. “I’m sure they checked everything, but maybe Casey had a system where he filed things under names that didn’t match their contents.”

He checked each drawer. Every one was empty.

I said, “Damn. Pat must have confiscated them.”

“I’ll out take the drawers and see if anything’s taped in back, in the cabinet itself.”

That seemed a little desperate to me. Casey would have wanted easy access to that particular file and that made for a lot of trouble getting to it. Maybe it lay under the bottom file drawer, though. All you’d have to do is pull the drawer out and underneath would be the secreted file.

But no.

Nothing.

I fared little better. I did find a secret compartment but only family photos were within, Casey’s late wife, his kids when they were... kids. I collected these and dropped them in my suit coat pocket. The grown versions of those youngsters would be coming in for the services, in a few days. Shannon would get the complete police funeral with honor guard and a sea of blue in attendance.

There’d be an End of Watch call, officers from Casey’s division gathering around a car’s police radio as a dispatcher issued a call to Lt. Shannon with silence the response. A second call would go out and get the same silent response. Then an officer who’d worked with him — probably Chris or maybe Ben Higgins — would respond that Lt. Shannon could not answer because the officer had fallen in the line of duty.

I swallowed and abandoned the roll-top search. Chris had finished the file cabinet as well, with equally unsuccessful results. We started in on the bookcase and went through every page of every book. We occasionally found a random piece of paper — a receipt from Coliseum Books, a bookmark, a slip of paper with a grocery list or some work reminder on it.

Nothing worth finding, really, just the routine detritus of a life lived.

I sat on the couch with Casey’s body outline next to me. Chris stood in front of me, eyes avoiding the ghost of his partner.

“Fool’s errand?” he asked.

“Too early to know.” I sighed. “We’re going over ground the forensics guys, and for that matter Pat Chambers, have already gone over good. We have only one advantage.”

“What?”

“You.”

The young cop gestured to himself, frowning, then said again, “What?”

“You worked with the man. You worked with him on this case. Casey knew he was poking around in the dirty secrets of a powerful Wall Street firm. Politics stink sometimes, but they’re real and they have an impact on cops. The Commissioner says, ‘Drop it.’ When you don’t, the Chief of Police says, ‘We’ve got a nice beat for you to walk in Staten Island. You’ll love it.’”

His arms were folded but a hand was up rubbing his chin. “You mean, if anybody anywhere knows what Casey Shannon was thinking, in the weeks before... before this happened... it’s...”

“It’s you, kid.” I stood. Gestured toward the rest of the apartment. “Let’s look at the places the pros wouldn’t think of.”

He frowned. “There can’t be many of those.”

“Well, hell, let’s try anything that strikes you as a possibility. Then we’ll look everywhere else, harder than the pros did. You’re the one whose partner got killed, not them.”

We went through the cupboards. On our hands and knees, we sorted through the area under the sink where cleaning products were kept. Checked to see if there was a plastic bottle that was empty but had something rolled up in it. When that was a no go, we tried the refrigerator, where the dead man’s food was waiting never to be eaten. I figured maybe the box of frozen pizza, still in its plastic wrapper, might give up a prize, and it did.

A frozen pizza.

Back into the freezer it went, while we headed into the bedroom. We gave it a thorough going over, even though I knew everything we were doing had been done before by an experienced team and a certain captain of Homicide. We looked under the mattress and the bed itself, like maybe a cuckolded husband was hiding under there. Went through the nightstand, pulling out the drawer, checking every damn thing and place you could imagine.

A linen closet had us going through towels and sheets like Lawrence of Arabia after a new look. The bathroom had the usual supplies and bath towels and clothes; the medicine cabinet contained everything from a few prescription meds to razor blades and corn pads. A clothes closet gave us nothing special, just more of the specially-cut-for-a-cop suits and some sports clothes, including an ill-advised Hawaiian shirt. A cubbyhole above the closets had suitcases, which we dragged down and went through and found lots of empty.

All these closets reminded me I hadn’t bothered with the front one. We wandered back into the living room, feeling defeated, and I looked in at fall and winter coats and a shelf with a collection of hats that put Casey on the same dinosaur list as Pat and me, only Casey was already extinct.

In the bottom of the closet were galoshes and sandals, but also something else.

I knelt. Two good-size unopened boxes — one low-slung, longer than it was wide, much like the one Velda’s VCR had come in; the other was a cardboard cube with something heavy inside. Both were from Radio Shack.

“Tandy 1000 TX,” I read from the lower-riding box. “Computer?”

“Yeah.” Chris was kneeling too. “And that’s a monitor to go with it. I think the keyboard’s in the box with the computer.”

“The packaging looks new. Did Shannon know how to use one of these gizmos? Velda has a word processor at the office.”

Chris nodded. “Yeah, he had one at work, too.” His brow furrowed. “You know, if Casey’s file was on a floppy disk, all that material would be in Pat’s hands by now. I think we’re on that fool’s errand we talked about.”

I glared at the boxes. “Let’s get in these things.”

We hauled the boxes out, popped them open, but it soon seemed obvious this was their first trip out in the wilds. They were covered in taped plastic, which we removed. We wrestled with the things, but they were new, all right. Even smelled new.

And there were no floppy disks at all.

“Okay, kid,” I said, as I slid the boxes back in the closet. I stood and closed the door on our great discovery. “We better get out of here before somebody calls the cops.”

“Mike... do you think anybody would mind, if...” He seemed embarrassed, suddenly. “No, I shouldn’t. But...”

“Shouldn’t what?”

He walked over, tentatively, and pointed to the framed photo of Reagan on the wall above the file cabinet.

“Casey said, after he was gone... he wanted me to have that picture. Said his boys are a couple of know-it-all liberals and...” He swallowed thickly. “You think it’s okay if I take it now?”

I was over there quick. “Take it down.”

“Thanks, Mike.”

“Save your thanks. Get that thing down for me.”

He reached up and plucked the framed picture off the wall and, puzzled, handed it to me.

I turned it over. Looked at how the back was sealed up with brown paper. It didn’t look tampered with, and the seal was tight. I was probably on another fool’s errand. But I tore the paper off anyway, getting another confused frown out of Chris. A piece of gray cardboard backing was inside. I pried that out with a thumb nail.

There, behind our president, was a 3½-inch unlabeled floppy disk.

I grinned. “Thank you, modern technology. Here, kid... you take Dutch’s picture, I’ll take the file we been looking for.”

That was when the lights went out.

Blackness swallowed everything and neither of us said a word, barely able to get a gasp out. I heard the door open, but no light was on in the hall, either. I sensed somebody coming at me, and swung at where I thought that was, connecting with nothing.

Night vision started working itself in, thanks to the window by the roll-top onto a New York out there that was not suffering a blackout. The intruder was my size but not as heavy, almost certainly male, and Chris went for him but got straight-armed to the floor, a blow so hard and swift I felt the wind of it pass me.

Then hands were on the sides of my head, forcing it down, and I knew in a split second what was coming next, and remembered what sensei Sakai had taught me. I dropped the disk and grabbed the forearms of the attacker and I threw myself backward, taking the bastard along with me before that knee could rise up like a cannonball and make a caved-in corpse out of me. On the floor, on my back, I rocked back and put my foot on the fucker’s chest and flung him over my head.

He landed hard, furniture jumping as if startled, but the attacker was quick, and he was up before me, but then Chris was coming at him again. A karate kick made more wind, a sweeping move that sent Chris flailing into the darkness. I came up behind the attacker, but he swung around and another straight-leg kick knocked me against the wall or maybe the closet door, I couldn’t be sure.

Then the figure was gone, the slam of the door announcing his absence. I almost ran after him, but first checked Chris, who muttered, “I’m okay, I’m okay,” though I could tell he was hurting.

I went to the door, opened it and — .45 in hand — stepped into a hall where no windows onto the street were there to aid night vision. Footsteps were receding, heading toward the elevator, around the corner, I thought.

I did not take pursuit. Not in the dark. Not with Chris in pain. And anyway, the only way I had to light up the world for a moment was a blind shot from the .45.

I was kneeling over the kid, gun still in hand, when the lights snapped on, mechanical sounds kicking in and starting back up, whirring noises that were climbing up to speed. I’d left the door to the hall open, and lights had come on out there, too. Had somebody hit the switch on the entire damn building — first off, then back on?

We were both breathing hard. I sat on the floor and Chris was doing the same.

That was when we noticed the floppy disk was gone.

“Shit,” I said. “He must have been listening in the hall! Somehow he cued an accomplice to kill the lights. But how?”

“Radio Shack also sells walkie-talkies,” Chris said glumly.

“Well, kid — at least he didn’t take your Reagan picture.”

We started to laugh. It beat crying.