“Were you involved in the… execution?”
“No, they just told me about it. But I was, and am, eternally grateful. So I signed up to be a ‘Friend of Gotham,’ as they call it. I do what I can for them, because I think they’re what the city needs, to keep us safe.”
“What have you done for them?” Jon asked.
“Your turn now,” she said, poking him in the chest. “Are you gonna be one of the cops who works for GS when they take over, or are you gonna be exiled by them because you’ve been a bad cop? Are you a part of the corruption they say has been the most abiding tradition among New York police, or will you be a part of the new force that actually cares about the city?”
“Well, first of all,” Jon said, taken aback by her idealism, “remember I’ve only been here a day.” His first instinct was to tell her what she wanted to hear, so he could get any information from her that might help in his investigation. But then he thought about his promise to her, and his heart strangely warmed to it. It was somehow becoming more real to him than when he had first said it.
“So I haven’t had enough time to sort all that out,” he said. “But I’m not convinced that Gar Render really loves the city as much as he wants power over it.”
“I’m sure there’s some of that in there,” she said. “But I’ve talked to him personally, and I really think… there’s that intuition thing again… that he’s mostly on the level.”
“Funny, I felt the same thing with the Mayor.”
“Oh, she might be sincere, or at least mostly sincere, like Render is. But she’s sincerely wrong… taking money away from law enforcement to put into the arts and such, tying the hands of the police by limiting how much force they can use. Render will fix all that, like he fixed my problem.”
The references to the law and Render made him think of a question he was curious about. “What do you think about the city employing Muslims, like in important jobs with security access?”
“I don’t have a problem with it per se,” Mallory said quickly, having obviously thought about the issue before. “But only if there’s a thorough enough background investigation, etc., to establish that the person’s not a risk, and I’m not confident Mayor King has the balls to do that.”
“Yeah.” Jon smiled. “I’m pretty sure she doesn’t have any balls.”
She laughed, then said, “So if I tell you what I’ve done for GS, will you drop it and trust me?”
Jon thought for a few seconds, then answered, “If it’s not pertinent to my investigation.”
“Oh, it’s not. In fact, it’s about GS doing your job for you, and better. Because they can’t do police work legally on the streets yet, they have to do it on the sly. So the management gives lists of people who need protection or other help to a middleman like me, and we pass them to one of their agents. In my case they come into the bar, of course. Render doesn’t want the police to know because they’re resentful of someone working on their turf, and I don’t want any of you to know the details, so there’ll be no hindrance to them helping others like they helped me.”
“So you’re not going to tell me who the GS agent is,” Jon said, “the one that comes into the bar?”
“No.”
“I thought we were being honest.”
“We are being honest. I’m honestly telling you why I’m not telling you.”
“Okaaay,” Jon said, shaking his head. “Can I see one of the lists you passed on?”
“Don’t have them,” she answered. “They’re on a piece of paper.”
“Can you take a picture with your phone and send it to me, the next time you get one?”
“Why?”
“So I can make sure there’s no relevance to my investigation.”
“I’ll think about it.”
They sat and stared at one another, their breakfast long forgotten and this particular conversation apparently over.
“While we’re being honest,” Jon finally said, “were you actually attracted to me when I first came into the bar?”
“Not really. Not any more than other good-looking guys who come in.”
“So the invitation to walk you home?”
“Self-protection,” she said, pondering it. “I got scared, knowing what I do for GS and having two MPDs asking questions. I didn’t want you to ask more, and maybe get in the way of what they’re doing, so I used the only tools I have to try to get you to forget about it, and not take it any further.”
Jon nodded cheerfully, but inside he was disappointed, despite the fact that he had already known what she would say, if she was truly being honest.
“What about you?” she asked him. “Would you have walked me home if you didn’t want information from me?”
“No,” he said, part of him wanting to stick it to her in return. But then he remembered his promise of honesty. “Not while I’m in the middle of something like this, anyway. But at some other time, I might. I would…”
He let the thought trail away because she was looking at him differently than she ever had previously. And then she took his face in her hands gently and started kissing him. He responded and did the same, and they continued for several minutes, slowly and affectionately in contrast to their frenzied physical passion when they had arrived in the apartment. This time they didn’t even give a thought to things like phones and guns—until they were interrupted by Jon’s phone beeping with a message from Amira, which said that another avenue of investigation had yielded a suspect.
Jon apologized and pulled himself away, but he was thinking on the way out that those few minutes on the tall seats, fully clothed, were way better than anything that had happened earlier on the bed. The feeling of dread was still somewhere inside him—the one that was saying he had been brought to this city to fail at his job. But now there was another emotion bubbling up with the faint hope that there might be another reason for him to be here.
12
Halladay wasn’t answering his cell phone, so Jon couldn’t tell him from the car what Amira had said, nor could he warn him that he was coming back to the apartment. When the young cop arrived at Three Hundred Lex, the lobby was busier with hookers and clients than it had been a few hours before. Initially Jon thought this might be because it was around eight o’clock at night, but then he remembered that it was always night in Manhattan and so time probably had very little to do with the cycles of activity in the brothel.
He banged on the door to Halladay’s apartment and rang the doorbell, but there was no answer, so he located the house key on the chain he had taken and let himself in. The living room was as he’d left it, and the same type of music was still playing loudly in the back room. He called Halladay’s and Nina’s names as he proceeded in that direction, but no one answered, so he opened the door gently and peered inside. The music was even louder than he thought it would be, which explained why they couldn’t hear anything, and they were both sound asleep on the bed.
Jon stepped softly to Halladay’s side of the bed and grabbed the gun off the nightstand next to him, to test the older man’s cop instincts and make sure he didn’t get shot if they were good. Sure enough, Halladay woke up and furled his thick sandy eyebrows in Jon’s direction.
“I hate to interrupt your nap,” Jon said, leaning down close to him. “But we have a suspect.”
“Wait out in the living room,” Halladay finally said after climbing back into full consciousness.
Jon left the bedroom, but took the gun with him to make sure the tired older man didn’t just roll over and go back to sleep. In a few minutes Halladay appeared from the back room, fully dressed. Jon handed the gun to him and they made for the car.