Текст книги "Lucas Davenport Novels 1-5"

Автор книги: John Sandford

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Текущая страница: 80 (всего у книги 105 страниц)

CHAPTER

21

Most visitors came through O’Dell’s office; when the knock came at Lily’s unmarked office door, she looked over the top of her Wall Street Journal and frowned.

There was another light knock and she took off her half-moon reading glasses—she hadn’t let anyone see them yet—and said, “Yes?”

Kennett stuck his head in. “Got a minute?”

“What’re you doing down here?” she asked, folding the paper and putting it aside.

“Talking to you,” he said. He stepped inside the door, peeked through a half-open side door into O’Dell’s office, and saw an empty desk.

“He’s at staff,” Lily said. “What’s going on?”

“We’ve papered the town with the female Bekker picture,” Kennett said, dropping into her visitor’s chair. Small talk. He tried a smile, but it didn’t work. “You know Lucas got it, the cross-dressing thing. It wasn’t Fell.”

“I thought maybe he did,” Lily said. “He wants Fell to do well.”

“Nice,” he said, his voice trailing off. He was looking at her as though he were trying to see inside her head.

“Let’s have it,” she said finally.

“All right,” he said. “What do you know about this Robin Hood shit that O’Dell is peddling?”

Lily was surprised—and a small voice at the back of her head said that was good, that look of surprise. “What? What’s he peddling?”

Kennett looked at her, eyes blinking skeptically, as though he were reevaluating something. Then he said, “He’s been putting out shit about Robin Hood, the so-called vigilantes. I’ve got the feeling that the fickle finger is pointed at my ass.”

“Well, Jesus,” Lily said.

“Exactly. There aren’t any vigilantes. It’s all bullshit, this Robin Hood business. But that doesn’t mean he can’t fuck me up. If they think they’ve got a problem . . .” He pointed a thumb at the ceiling, meaning the people upstairs, “And they can’t find anybody, they might just want to hang somebody anyway, to cover their asses.”

“Boy . . .” Lily shook her head. “I’ve got a pretty good line on what O’Dell’s doing, but I don’t know anything like that. And I’m not holding out on you, Richard. I’m really not.”

“And I’m telling you, he’s behind it.”

Lily leaned forward. “Give me a few days. I’ll find out. Let me ask some questions. If he’s doing it, I’ll tell you.”

“You will?”

“Of course I will.”

“All right.” He grinned at her. “It’s, like, when you’re a lieutenant and down, you’ve got friends and lovers. When you’re a captain or above, you’ve got allies. You’re my first ally-lover.”

She didn’t smile back. She said: “Richard.”

The smile died on his face. “Mmm?”

“Before I risk my ass—you’re not Robin Hood?”

“No.”

“Swear it,” she said, looking into his eyes.

“I swear it,” he said, without flinching, looking straight back at her. “I don’t believe there is such a guy. Robin Hood is a goddamn computer artifact.”

“How?”

He shrugged. “Flip a nickel five hundred times. The events are random, but you’ll find patterns. Flip it another five hundred times, you’ll still find patterns. Different ones. But the pattern doesn’t mean anything. Same thing with these computer searches—you can always find patterns if you look at enough numbers. But the pattern’s in your head; it’s not real. Robin Hood is a figment of O’Dell’s little tiny imagination.”

Her eyes narrowed: “How’d you find out so much about what he’s doing?”

“Hey, I’m in intelligence,” he said, mildly insulted by the question. “The word gets around. I thought his little game was pretty harmless until my name started popping up.”

She thought about it a minute, then nodded. “All right. Let me do some sneaking around.”

CHAPTER

22

Lucas called Darius Pike in Charleston and gave him the plane’s arrival time, then met Sloan and Del downtown. They hit a sports bar, talking, remembering. Lucas was long out of the departmental gossip—who was kissing whose ass, who was shagging who. Sloan went home at one o’clock and Lucas and Del wound up in an all-night diner on West Seventh in St. Paul.

“ . . . shit, I said, gettin’ married was okay,” Del said. “But then she started talking about a kid. She’s, like, forty.”

“Ain’t the end of the world,” Lucas said.

“Do I look like Life with Father?” Del asked. He spread his arms: he was wearing a jeans jacket with a black sleeveless tank top. An orange and black insignia on the sleeve of the jacket said, “Harley-Davidson—Live to Ride, Ride to Live.” He had a five-day beard, but his eyes were as relaxed and clear as Lucas had ever seen them.

“You’re looking pretty good, actually,” Lucas said. “A year ago, man, you were ready for the junk heap.”

“Yeah, yeah . . .”

“So why not have a kid?”

“Jesus.” Del looked out the window. “I kinda been asking myself that.”

Del peeled off at three o’clock and Lucas went home, opened all the windows in the house, and began writing checks to cover the bills that had arrived with the mail. At five, finished with the bills, and tired, he closed and locked all the windows, went back to the bedroom and repacked his overnight bag. He called a cab, had the driver stop at a SuperAmerica all-night store, bought two jelly doughnuts and a cup of coffee, and rode out to the airport.

The plane taxied away from the terminal at six-thirty. The stewardess asked if he wanted juice and eggs.

“I’m gonna try to go to sleep,” he said. “Please, please don’t wake me up . . . .”

The fear got him as the takeoff run began, the sense of helplessness, the lack of control. He closed his eyes, fists clenched. Got off the ground with body English. Held his breath until the engine noise changed and the climb rate slowed. Cranked back the seat. Tried to sleep. A while later, he didn’t know how long, he realized that his mouth tasted like chicken feathers, and his neck hurt. The stewardess was shaking his shoulder: “Could you bring your seat upright, please?”

He opened his eyes, disoriented. “I was sleeping,” he groaned.

“Yes,” she said in her most neutral voice. “But we’re approaching Atlanta, and your seat . . .”

“Atlanta?” He couldn’t believe it. He never slept on airplanes. The plane’s left wing dipped, and they turned on it, and, looking down, he could see the city of Atlanta, like a gritty gray rug. Ten minutes later, they were down.

The Atlanta airport was straight from RoboCop, with feminine machine voices issuing a variety of warnings just below the level of consciousness, and steel escalators dropping into sterile tile hallways. He was glad to get out, though the flight to Charleston was bad. He fought the fear and managed to compose himself by the time the plane was on the ground.

Pike was waiting inside the small terminal, a stolid black man wearing a green cotton jacket over a white shirt and khaki pants. When his jacket moved, Lucas could see a half-dozen ballpoint pens clipped to his shirt pocket and a small revolver on his belt.

“Lucas Davenport,” Lucas said, shaking hands.

“I gotta car,” Pike said, leading the way. “How’s New York?”

“Hotter’n here,” Lucas said.

“This is nothin’,” Pike said. “You ought to be here in August.”

“That’s what they say in New York . . . .”

They left the airport at speed. Lucas, disoriented, asked, “Where’s the ocean?”

“Straight ahead, but the city’s not really on the ocean. It’s kind of like . . . Manhattan, actually,” Pike said. “There’s a river coming in on both sides, and they meet, and that’s the harbor, and then you gotta go on out past the Fort to get into the ocean.”

“Fort Sumter?”

“That’s it,” Pike said.

“I’d like to see it sometime. I’ve been going to battlefields. Tell me about Reed.”

Pike whipped past a gray Maxima, took an off-ramp, then turned left at the bottom. The street was cracked, the borders overgrown with weeds and scrub. “Reed is a stupid motherfucker,” he said matter-of-factly. “I get mad talking about it. His old man has lived here all his life, runs a garage and gas station, does the best body work in town, and makes a ton of money. And Red did good in high school. Did good on his tests and got into Columbia University on a scholarship. The silly fuck goes up to New York and starts putting junk up his nose, the cocaine. Hanging out in Harlem, coming back here and talking shit. Then he didn’t come back anymore. The word was, he was putting it up his nose full-time.”

“Huh. How long’s he been back?”

“Few weeks,” Pike said. “I feel bad for his folks.”

“Is he staying?”

“I don’t know. When he first got back, there were a couple of rumbles from Narcotics that he was hanging out with the wrong people. But I haven’t heard that lately. Maybe something changed.”

Lucas hadn’t thought about what Charleston might look like, but as they drove through, he decided it was just right: Old South. Clapboard houses with peeling paint, and weird trees; bushes with plants that had leaves like leather, and spikes. A few palms. A lot of dirt. Hot.

The Reed garage was a gray concrete-block building sitting side by side with a Mobil gas station and convenience store. All but one set of the gas pumps had a car parked next to them, and uniformed attendants moved around cleaning windshields and checking oil. “You come in here, they wipe your windshield, check your oil, put air in your tires. The only place you’ll find it,” Pike said. “That’s why Don Reed makes the money he does.”

He killed the engine in the body shop’s parking lot and Lucas followed him into the shop office. The office smelled of motor oil, but was neatly kept, with plastic customer chairs facing a round table stacked with magazines. Behind a counter, a large man was hunched over a yellow-screen computer, poking at a keyboard one finger at a time. He looked up when they came in and said, “Hey, Darius.”

“Hey, Don. Is Red around?”

Reed straightened up, his smile slipping off his face. “He done somethin’?”

Pike shook his head and Lucas said, “No. I’m from New York. Your son witnessed a shooting. He was a passerby. I just need to talk to him for a couple of minutes.”

“You sure?” Reed asked, a hostile tone scratching through. “I got a lawyer . . .”

“Look: You don’t know me, so . . . But I’m telling you, with a witness standing here, that all I want to do is talk. There’s no warrant, no anything. He’s not a suspect.”

Reed regarded Lucas coolly, then finally nodded. “All right, come on. He’s out back.”

Red Reed was coming out of a paint room when they found him, a plastic mask and hat covering his head. When he saw his father and the two cops, he pulled off the protective gear and waited uncertainly by the paint room door. He was tall, too thin, with prominent white teeth.

“Police to talk to you. One from New York,” his father said. “I’m gonna listen.” Red Reed looked apprehensive, but nodded.

“Can we find a place to sit?” Lucas asked.

The elder Reed nodded: “Nobody in the waiting room . . . .”

Lucas took Bobby Rich’s report from his pocket, unfolded it, and led Red Reed through it, confirming it bit by bit.

“White-haired guy,” Lucas said. “Thin, fat?”

“Yeah. Skinny, like.”

“Dark? Pale? What?”

“Tan. He was, like, tan.”

“What was the scene like, when Fred Waites was shot?”

“Well, man, I wasn’t right there. I saw the car go by and I thought I saw a gun and I headed the other way. I heard the shooting, saw the car.”

“What kind of car?”

“I don’t know, man, I wasn’t paying attention to that,” Reed said. He was looking at his hands. Pike moved impatiently, and Reed’s father looked out the door but didn’t say anything. Reed’s eyes wandered to his father, then back to Lucas.

“What time was it?” Lucas asked.

“I didn’t have a watch . . . .”

“I mean, afternoon, evening, night?”

Reed nervously licked his lips, then seemed to pick one: “Evening.”

“It was three o’clock in the afternoon, Red,” Lucas said. “Bright daylight.”

“Man, I was fucked up . . .”

“You don’t know what kind of car it was, but you could see inside that the guy was white-haired, skinny and tanned? But you didn’t see anything about the other guys? Red . . .” Lucas glanced at Don Reed. “Red, you’re lying to us. This is an important case. We think the same guys shot a cop and, before that, a lawyer.”

“I don’t know nothing about that,” Reed said, now avoiding everyone’s eyes.

“Okay, I don’t think you do. But you’re lying to me . . .”

“I’m not lying,” Reed said.

Don Reed turned to face his son and in a harsh, cutting voice said, “You remember what I told you? No bullshit, no lies, no dope, no stealing, and we’ll try to keep you alive. And you’re lying, boy. There never was a time, from when you were a little baby, that you didn’t know what kind of car was what—and you see a man and know he’s got white hair and a tan, and you don’t know what car he was in? Horseshit. You’re lying. You stop, now.”

Lucas said, “I want to know how much John O’Dell had to do with it.”

Reed had been staring miserably at his feet, but now his head popped up.

“You know Mr. O’Dell?”

“Aw, shit,” Lucas said. He stood up, walked once around the tiny room, whacked the spherical Lions Club gum machine with the palm of his hand, then pinched the bridge of his nose, closing his eyes. “You’re fuckin’ working for O’Dell.”

“Man . . .” said Reed.

“O’Dell a dope pusher?” Don Reed asked, voice dark, angry.

“No,” Lucas said. “He’s about the fifth most important cop in New York.”

The two Reeds exchanged glances, and Pike asked, “What’s going on?”

“A goddamned game, pin the tail on the donkey,” Lucas said. “And I’m the jackass.”

He said to Reed, “So now I know. I need some detail. Where’d you meet him, how’d you get pulled in on this . . .”

Reed blurted it out. He’d met O’Dell at a Columbia seminar. O’Dell spoke three times, and each time, Reed talked to him after class. Harlem was different than an Irish cop could know, Reed said. The fat cop and skinny southerner argued about life on the streets; went with a few other students and the professor to a coffee shop, talked late. He saw O’Dell again, in the spring, but he was into the dope by then. Busted in a sweep of a crack house, called O’Dell. The arrest disappeared, but he was warned: never again. But there was another time. He was arrested twice more for possession, went to court. Then a third time, and this time he had a little too much crack on him. The cops were talking about charging him as a dealer, and he called O’Dell. He got simple possession, and was out again.

Then O’Dell called. Did he know anybody, a crook, with a connection to a cop? To a detective? Well, yes . . .

“Sonofabitch. It was too neat, it had to be,” Lucas said.

“What the fuck is going on?” Pike asked again.

“I don’t know, man,” Lucas said. To Reed, he said, “Don’t call O’Dell. You’re out of this and you want to stay out. Whatever’s going on here, and it’s pretty rough, doesn’t have anything to do with you. You’d best lay low.”

“He’s out,” Don Reed said, looking at his son.

Reed’s head bobbed. “I don’t want nothing more to do with New York.”

On the way back to the airport, Pike said, “I don’t think I’d like New York.”

“It’s got some low points,” Lucas said. He took a card from his pocket diary, scribbled his home phone number on the back of it. “Listen, thanks for the help. If you ever need anything from New York or Minneapolis, call me.”

The flight to Atlanta was bad, but on the way to New York, the fear seemed to slip away. Lucas had reached a tolerance level: his fifth flight in three days. He’d never flown that much in his life. More or less relaxed, he found a notepad in his overnight case and doodled on it, working it out.

Bobby Rich hadn’t been assigned to work the case because he had the best qualifications—he’d been assigned simply because he knew a guy who knew Red Reed. So that Red Reed could call his friend and insist that the friend pass information to the cops about the shooting of Fred Waites.

Except that Reed hadn’t been there at all. The man with white hair and the deep tan was an O’Dell invention. Lucas grinned despite himself. In a crooked way, it was very nice: lots of layers.

He closed his eyes, avoiding the next question: Did Lily know?

At La Guardia he saw a copy of the Times with Bekker as a blond woman. He bought a copy, queued for a cab, got a buck-toothed driver who wanted to talk.

“Bekker, huh?” buck-tooth said, his eyes on the rearview mirror. He could see the picture on the front of the paper as Lucas read the copy inside. “There’s a goofball for ya. Dressed up like a woman.”

“Yeah.”

“This last one, man, took her right out of a parking garage. Girlfriend says Bekker was right there with them, could’ve took them both.”

Lucas folded the paper down and looked at the back of the driver’s head. “There’s another one? Today?”

“Yeah, this morning. They found her in a parking lot with the wire gag and the cut-off eyelids and the whole works. I say, when they get him, they ought to hang him off a street sign by his nuts. Be an example.”

Lucas nodded and said, “Listen, forget about the hotel. Take me to Midtown South.”

CHAPTER

23

Carter, Huerta and James were huddled together over a tabloid newspaper in the coordinating office, all three of them with Styrofoam coffee cups in their hands. Lucas looked in and James said, “Kennett’s down in the corner office, he wants to see you.”

“Have you seen Barbara Fell?” Lucas asked.

“Gone home.” There was a rapid-fire exchange of glances among the three cops, a vein of thin amusement. They knew he was sleeping with Fell.

“Anything happening?”

“About a thousand sightings on Bekker, including three good ones,” Carter said. “He’s driving a Volkswagen Bug . . . .”

“Jesus, that’s terrific,” Lucas said. “Who saw him? How’d you get the car?”

“Two witnesses last night at the parking ramp. The Carson woman’s girlfriend and the cashier. The girlfriend is a sure thing—she even told us he was wearing too much Poison. That’s a perfume . . .”

“Yeah.”

“ . . . And the cashier remembers the blond part, and says she—he—was driving an old Volkswagen. He remembers because it looked like it was in pretty good shape and he wondered if Bekker was an artist or something. He thinks it was dark green or dark blue. We’re running it through the License Bureau right now, but the Volkswagen part isn’t public yet. If he goes outside now, he’s gonna have to go in a car. And we’re stopping every Bug in Midtown.”

“You said three people . . . .”

“The third’s a maybe, but pretty definite. The night clerk in a bookstore down in the Village says he remembers the face very clearly, says it was Bekker. He says he was buying some weird book about torture.”

“Huh.”

“We’re getting close,” Carter said. “We’ll have him in two or three days, at the outside.”

“I hope,” Lucas said. “Any returns on that stun-gun business?”

“Three. Nothing.”

“Phones?”

“Nope. Goddamn rat’s nest.”

“Okay . . .”

Lucas started to turn away, and Carter said, “You’ve seen the papers?”

“With Bekker? Yeah . . .”

“No, that was this morning; the afternoon paper . . .” Huerta picked up the paper they’d been looking at, closed it, and handed it to Lucas. On the cover was a woman’s face, eyes staring; before the headlines reached the brain, the terror of the face came through, then the words: “Kill #8—Bekker Death Pix.”

“This legit?” Lucas asked.

“That’s Carson,” Carter said grimly. “He sent notes and photos to three newspapers and two TV stations. They’re using them.”

“Jesus . . .”

From down the hall, he heard a woman’s voice.

Lily.

He walked down to the corner, found the room in semidarkness, the door open. He knocked, standing back, and Kennett said, “Yeah?”

Lucas stuck his head in. “Davenport,” he said.

“Come on in. We were just talking about you,” Kennett said. He was sitting in a visitor’s chair in front of a standard-issue metal desk, his feet up. His shirt collar was open, and his bright Polynesian Gauguin tie was draped across a stack of phone books at the front edge of the desk. Lily sat in another chair at the side of the desk, facing him.

“Fuckin’ photographs,” Lucas said.

“The shit is hitting the fan,” Kennett said grimly. “First the New School thing and now the pictures. The mayor had the commissioner on the carpet. You could hear the screaming in Jersey.”

Lucas dragged a third chair around, bumped Kennett. “Move your ass over so I can get my feet up.”

“And me with a fuckin’ bad heart,” Kennett mumbled as he moved.

“You told Fell about the transvestite thing,” Lily said. She pushed the phone books out of the way, picked up the necktie.

Lucas shrugged, sat down, put his feet up. “We talked it over and decided it was likely.”

“That came at a good time. We told everybody that Carson’ll probably be the last, that we’ve pretty much got him pinned down,” she said.

“Should have thought of it sooner, the cross-dressing,” Kennett said glumly. “The one before was a lesbian, we knew that. We should have seen that she wouldn’t let a strange guy get too close, not outside a lesbian bar.”

“Hell, you did everything right . . .” Lily began.

Kennett interrupted: “Everything but catch him . . .”

“He’s pinned.”

“We fuckin’ hope,” Kennett said.

Lily had been rolling the tie in her fingers, and now she looked down at the bare-breasted Polynesian woman, shook her head and said, “This is the craziest tie.”

“Don’t knocker it,” said Kennett, then slapped his leg and laughed at the pun, while Lily rolled her eyes.

“You were jerking me around, Gauguin and Christian Dior,” Lucas said to Kennett. He looked at Lily. “He told me this Gauguin dude was Christian Dior’s necktie partner.”

Lily laughed again, and Kennett said, “How do you know he wasn’t?”

“Looked him up,” Lucas said. “He died in 1903. He was associated with the symbolists.”

“Now if you knew what a symbolist was, you’d be in fat city,” Lily said.

“It was the use of color specifically for its symbolic impact, the emotional and intellectual impact,” Lucas said. “Which makes sense. Some holding cells are painted bubble-gum pink for the same reason. The color cools people out.”

Kennett, staring, said, “I never fuckin’ thought of that.”

“Carter tells me you’ll have Bekker in three days at the outside,” Lucas said.

“That fuckhead. That’s the kind of talk that gets us in trouble,” Kennett grumbled. “We’ll get him soon, but I wouldn’t bet on the three days. If he’s got food and water, he could hole up.”

“Still . . .”

“I figure no more than a week,” Kennett said. “He’ll break. I just hope I’m still working for the goddamn police department when it happens. I mean, people are pissed. These fuckin’ pictures, man: the mess at the New School was nothing, compared to this.”

“People think cops . . .” Lucas started.

But Lily was shaking her head. “It’s not the people, it’s the politicians. People understand you can’t always catch a guy immediately; most of them do, anyway. But the politicians think they’ve got to do something, so what they do is run around and scream and threaten to fire people.”

“Mmmm. A week,” Lucas said. “That’s a long time, in ward-heeler years.”

“Anxious to get home?” Kennett asked.

“Nah. I’m enjoying myself. I want to be there for the bust.”

“Or the kill,” said Kennett.

“Whatever . . .”

Lily pushed herself out of the chair, stretched, and tousled Kennett’s hair. “Let’s go look at the river,” she said.

“Jesus Christ, the woman’s indefatigable, and me with this heart,” Kennett complained.

Lucas, vaguely embarrassed, stood and drifted toward the door. “See you guys tomorrow . . . .”

A message from Fell was waiting at the hotel: “Call when you get in, until one o’clock.” He held the slip in his hand as he rode the elevator to his floor, dropped it on the bedstand, went into the bathroom, doused his face with hot water, and looked up in the mirror, the water trickling down his face.

He’d had a long relationship with a woman, the mother of his daughter, that now, when he looked back, seemed to have been based on a shared cynicism. Jennifer was a reporter, with too much time on the street, edging toward burnout. A baby, for her, had been a run at salvation.

He’d had a shorter, intense relationship with Lily, who had been struggling with the end of her own marriage; that might have been something, if they’d been in the same town, from the same emotional places. But they hadn’t been, and some of the guilt of their affair still stuck to their relationship.

He’d had any number of other relationships, long and short, happy and unhappy. Most of the women he’d gone with still liked him well enough, in a wary, once-burned way; but he tended to think of them as others, not Jennifer, not Lily.

Fell was one of the others. A wistful, lovely, finally lonely woman. In a permanent relationship, they would drive each other crazy. He wiped his face with one of the rough hotel towels and wandered back to the bed. He sat down, picked up the phone, looked at the receiver for a moment, then smiled. He’d felt for a year as though he were under water: quiet, placid, out of it. The New York cops were bringing him up, and Fell was fixing him in other ways. He tapped out her number. She picked it up on the second ring.

“This is Lucas,” he said.

“Kennett knew it was you, but I got good mileage out of the cross-dressing thing,” Fell said, without preamble. “My name was on the TV news, and it’s in the Times and the Post. That never hurts.”

“I saw it . . . .”

“I’d like to find a way to thank you. Oral sex comes to mind, if I get my share,” Fell said.

“Women are so forward these days,” Lucas said. “How quick can you get here?”

Fell brought a change of clothes with her, and they spent the evening laughing and making love. The next morning, when they were dressed, Lucas asked, “How would we find Jackie Smith?”

“Call his office,” she said.

“That easy?”

“He’s a hustler,” Fell said. “Getting found is part of his business.”

“So call him.”

Smith called back in five minutes. “Aren’t you guys ever going away? Can’t you find out anything on your own?” he complained. “I’ve done everything you wanted . . . .”

“All we want to do is talk,” Lucas said.

“I gave you what you wanted,” Smith said again. He was angry.

“Jackie . . . ten minutes, please? Have breakfast with us or something. We’ll buy.”

Smith would meet them at a café outside the St. Moritz hotel, he said. They caught a cab, struggling north through the midmorning traffic, the driver with his arm out the window, whistling. The day would be hot again; already the sky was showing a whitish haze, and when they got out of the cab across from Central Park, Lucas could see the leaves on the park trees were curling against the heat.

Smith was sitting at a metal table, eating a cream cheese croissant and drinking coffee. He didn’t get up when they arrived.

“Now what?” he asked, a sullen look on his face.

“We wanted to thank you—those names you gave us started a chain reaction. We’ve maybe got the asshole pinned down.”

“No shit?” Smith looked surprised. “When’ll you get him?”

“Some of the guys are betting a couple-three days. Nobody gives him more than a week,” Lucas said. “But we do have something we need from you. All the small-time fences who buy from the junkies—they need to tell the dopers that Bekker’ll be out looking for angel dust, ecstasy, speed. Maybe acid. And he’ll kill. The guy we got to, with your help, was boosting stuff out of Bellevue, but he was also dealing dope. Bekker killed him. Cold blood. Walked up and bam. Killed him.”

“I saw that on TV. I wondered . . .”

“That was him,” said Lucas.

Smith nodded. “Okay. No skin off my butt. I’ll tell everybody I know and ask them to pass the word.”

“He’s probably around the Village, but could be anywhere between the civic center and Central Park. That’s about all we know. That’s where the word’s got to be,” Lucas said.

“That’s my territory,” Smith said. “Is that all?”

Lucas glanced at Fell, then said, “No. I gotta ask you something else. You might not want to talk about it with another witness here.” He tipped his head at Fell. “But if you don’t mind if she stayed . . .”

Fell frowned at him, and Smith said, “What’s the deal?”

“Back when I first got here, I banged up your place. Tried to get your attention . . .”

“Well, that worked,” Smith said ruefully.

“Yeah. A couple of days later, I got the snot beat out of me when I was coming out of a friend’s place. I need to know if that was you. Off the record. If it was, it’s no problem, I swear it.”

Smith dropped his croissant on the plate and laughed. “Jesus Christ, it wasn’t me. I read about it, though—but it wasn’t me.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah. And if you don’t mind me saying so, you’re the kind of guy that shit happens to, getting beat up,” Smith said.

Lucas looked at Fell. “Could you hike down to the end of the block for a minute?”

“I don’t know,” she said, studying him.

“C’mon,” Lucas said.

“Are you Internal Affairs?”

“Fuck no, I told you,” Lucas said impatiently. “C’mon, take a hike.”

Fell pushed back her chair, picked up her purse and stalked away.

“She’s pissed,” Smith said, looking from Fell to Lucas and back to Fell. “Are you screwing her?”

Lucas ignored the question: “There’s a big-dog shoot-out going on. Inside the department. And I’m tangled up in it. Now. The people who jumped me might be one set of those big dogs. That’s why I really need to know.”

“Listen . . .”

“Just a minute,” Lucas said, putting up a hand. “I want to put it to you as simple as I can. If you tell me no, it wasn’t you, and I find out that it was, I’ll come back and hurt you. All right? I really will, because I’ve gotta know the truth of this. Not knowing the truth could get me killed. On the other hand, if you say yes, it was you, there’s no problem. I’ll take the lumps.”

Smith shook his head in disbelief, a half-smile fixed on his face. “The answer is still no. I didn’t do it. I wasn’t even particularly happy to see the story in the paper, because I thought you might come back on me.”

Lucas nodded, and Smith spread his hands, lifted his shoulders: “I’m a businessman. I don’t want any shit. I don’t want any muscle around. I hate people with guns. Everybody’s got a fuckin’ gun.” He stared off across Sixth Avenue, the traffic waiting for the light at Central Park South, then looked back at Lucas. “No. Wasn’t me.”

“All right,” Lucas said. “So get the word out to the junkies on Bekker. You might also point out that there’s a twenty-five-thousand-dollar crime-stoppers award for his capture.”