“Karmen Brown,” the woman said. She added a number with the new 646 prefix. Probably a cell phone, Leonid thought.
“Hold on. Let me get a pencil,” he complained. “Brown, you say?”
“Karmen Brown,” she repeated. “Karmen with a K.” Then she gave the number again.
“I’ll put it on his desk,” Leonid promised. “He’ll get it the minute he gets back to town.”
“Thank you,” the young woman said.
There was hesitation in her voice. If she was a thinking girl she might have wondered how a janitor would know the whereabouts of the private detective. But after a moment or two he could hear her heels clicking down the hall. He returned to his office to stay awhile just in case the girl, and her possible accomplice, decided to wait until he came out.
He didn’t mind hanging around in the office. His sublet apartment wasn’t nearly as nice, or quiet, and at least he could be alone. Commercial rents took a nosedive after 9-11. He picked up the ESB workspace for a song.
Not that he’d paid the rent in three months.
But Leonid Trotter McGill didn’t worry about money that much. He knew that he could pull a hat trick if he had to. Too many people had too many secrets. And secrets were the most valuable commodity in New York City.
At 5:39 the buzzer sounded again. But this time it was two long blasts followed by three short. Leonid made his way down the hall and opened the front door without asking who it was.
The man standing there was short and white, balding and slim. He wore an expensive suit with real cuff links on a white shirt that had some starch in the collar and cuffs.
“ Leon,” the small white man said.
“Lieutenant. Come on in.”
Leonid led the dapper little man through the reception area, along the hallway (that had three doors down its length), and finally into his office.
“Sit down, Lieutenant.”
“Nice office. Where’s everybody else?” the visitor asked.
“It’s just me right now. I’m in a transition phase. You know, trying to develop a new business plan.”
“I see.”
The slender white man took the chair in front of Leonid’s desk. From there he could see the long shadows across New Jersey. He shifted his gaze from the window to his host. L. T. McGill, P.I.
Leonid was short, no taller than five seven, with a protruding gut and heavy jowls. His skin was the color of dirty bronze and covered with dark freckles. There was a toothpick jutting out from the right side of his mouth. He wore a tan suit that had been stained over time. His shirt was lime green and the thick gold band on his left pinky weighed two or three ounces.
Leonid McGill had powerful hands and strong breath. His eyes were suspicious and he would always appear to be a decade over his actual age.
“What can I do for you, Carson?” the detective asked the cop.
“Joe Haller,” Carson Kitteridge said.
“Come again?” Leonid let his face wrinkle up, feigning ignorance if not innocence.
“Joe Haller.”
“Never heard that name before. Who is he?”
“He’s a gigolo and a batterer. Now they’re trying to tell me he’s a thief.”
“You wanna hire me to find something on him?”
“No,” the cop said. “No. He’s in the Tombs right now. We caught him red-handed. He had thirty thousand right there in his closet. In the briefcase that he carried to work every day.”
“That makes it easy,” Leonid said. He concentrated on his breathing, something he had learned to do whenever he was being questioned by the law.
“You’d think so, wouldn’t you?” Carson asked.
“Is there a problem with the case?”
“You were seen speaking to Nestor Bendix on January four.”
“I was?”
“Yeah. I know that because Nestor’s name came up in the robbery of a company called Amberson’s Financials two months ago.”
“Really?” Leonid said. “What does all that have to do with Joe whatever?”
“Haller,” Lieutenant Kitteridge said. “Joe Haller. The money he had in the bag was from the armored car that had just made a drop at Amberson’s.”
“An armored car dropped thirty thousand dollars at the place?”
“More like three hundred thousand,” Kitteridge said. “It was for their ATM machines. Seems like Amberson’s had got heavy into the ATM business in that neighborhood. They run sixty machines around midtown.”
“I’ll be damned. And you think Joe Haller and Nestor Bendix robbed them?”
Lieutenant Carson Kitteridge stayed silent for a moment, his gray eyes taking in the rough-hewn detective.
“What did you and Nestor have to say to each other?” the cop asked.
“Nothing,” Leonid said, giving a one-shoulder shrug. “It was a pizza place down near the Seaport, if I remember right. I ducked in there for a calzone and saw Nestor. We used to be friends back when Hell’s Kitchen was still Hell’s Kitchen.”
“What did he have to say?”
“Not a thing. Really. It was just a chance meeting. I sat down long enough to eat too much and find out that he’s got two kids in college and two in jail.”
“You talk about the heist?”
“I never even heard about it until you just said.”
“This Joe Haller,” the policeman said. “He practices what you call an alternative lifestyle. He likes married women. It’s what you might call his thing. He finds straight ladies and bends them. They say he’s hung like a horse.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah. What he does is gets the ladies to meet him at hotels near where he works and goes in to teach them about how the other eight inches live.”
“You’ve lost me, Lieutenant,” Leonid said. “I mean unless one of the she-guards at Amberson’s is Haller’s chicken.”
The elegant policeman shook his head slightly.
“No. No. This is how I see it, Leon,” the policeman said. He sat forward in his chair and laced his fingers. “Nestor pulled off the robbery but somebody let it slip and me and my crew got on his ass. So he calls on you to find him a pigeon and you give him Haller. Don’t ask me how. I don’t know. But you set up the Romeo and now he’s looking at twenty years in Attica.”
“Me?” Leonid said, pressing all ten fingers against his breast. “How the hell you think I could do something like that?”
“You could pluck an egg out from under a nesting eagle and she’d never even know it was gone,” Kitteridge said. “I got a man in jail and his alibi girlfriend saying that she never even heard his name. I got an armed robber laughing at me and a P.I. more crooked than any crook I ever arrested lyin’ in my face.”
“ Carson,” Leonid said. “Brother, you got me wrong. I did see Nestor for a few minutes. But that’s all, man. I’ve never been to this Amberson’s place and I never heard of Joe Haller or his girlfriend.”
“Chris,” Kitteridge said. “Chris Small. Her husband has already left her. That’s what our investigation has accomplished so far.”
“I wish I could help you, man, but you got me wrong. I wouldn’t even know how to set up some patsy for a crime after it was committed.”
Carson Kitteridge stared mildly at the detective and the darkening neighbor state. He smiled and said, “You can’t get away with it, Leon. You can’t break the law like that and win.”
“I don’t know nuthin’ about nuthin’, Lieutenant. Maybe the man you caught really is the thief.”
Katrina McGill was a beauty in her day. Svelte and raven-haired, from Latvia or Lithuania-Leonid was never sure which one. They had three kids, of which at least two were not Leonid’s. He’d never had them tested. Why bother? The east European beauty had left him early on for a finance lion. But she got fat and the sugar daddy went broke so now the whole crowd (minus the sugar daddy) lived on Leonid’s dime.
“What’s for dinner, Kat?” he asked, breathing hard after scaling the five flights to their apartment door.