“Your carriage awaits, madam.”
ONCE BECKER HAD wound his way through the narrow side streets onto the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway, he got the conversation rolling. “So does McIlroy still do that thing where he answers you with a rhetorical question?”
“Does Tara Reid drink beer?”
Becker smiled even though she suspected he’d never heard of Tara Reid. “That’s a damn annoying habit. The man can’t just give you a simple ‘yes,’ you know what I mean? So other than that, how’s Flann doing?”
Ellie heard the discomfort in her own voice when she said he was fine.
“I’ve always had the impression that McIlroy’s not a big fan of mine,” Becker said. “He might have mentioned something to you about it?”
“No details, but I picked up on some tension.”
“Sure you did. You’re a detective, right? It’s not like you couldn’t tell when you guys were up at my house.”
“So, is there some story involving the two of you that I don’t know about?”
“Aah, it’s water under the bridge. I’m not the type to try to taint you on a new partner. He’s a good enough guy. Smart as a whip, that’s for sure.”
“And yet?”
“We’re two different kinds of cops. That’s all. Back in the day, it was Mac who was odd man out. But who knows. Maybe now, it’s guys like me who are the dying breed.”
“Come on. You’re not that much older than Flann. What? Five years?” She was being generous. Her guess was that Flann was in his midforties at best, and Ed was pushing sixty.
“Hell of a lot more than that, but I’m not talking age in years. It’s a way of thinking about the job. The thin blue line. When I was a beat cop, that really meant something. At the end of the day, it didn’t matter what your beef was with another cop. You were all brothers, held together by the job, by a code of loyalty. Flann’s a whole ’nother breed.”
“You make it sound like I can’t trust him.” She thought about Flann sneaking up to see Jason Upton without her and that ridiculous background check he ran on a fellow officer. She thought about the bond her father had felt among his friends at the Wichita Police Department, the commitment that made the city’s treatment of his death so much harder for her to understand.
“I shouldn’t have started running my old mouth. It’s nothing like that. He’s a good guy. He just sees the world different, that’s all. His loyalty to the job is about doing the job itself. He follows all the rules, dots all the i’s, crosses off the t’s. It’s not about the brotherhood. See what an old man I sound like? His way’s the way of the future. And he won’t have any problems with a smart one like you. You probably even went to college, didn’t you?”
“John Jay.”
“How about that. A graduate degree even?”
“No, just a bachelor’s. I started toward a master’s in forensic psychology – even thought of going the FBI route for a while.”
“You didn’t want to be a G-man? Or I guess you’d be a G-woman, huh?”
“Whatever. No, I just was too eager to get into the real world. Studying crime out of books in a classroom never seemed to work for me. I figured the best thing I could do for my instincts was to get out on the street as soon as I could.”
Then, for reasons she didn’t understand, she told Ed about Jerry Hatcher, his role in the College Hill Strangler case, and her unresolved questions about his death. And when she was finally finished, he told her he was sorry her family had to go through that. It was the only response she needed.
“I bet your old man would be proud of you, Hatcher. You’re just a kid and already made detective. Working homicides, even.”
“Well, not really.” She told him about Flann’s special request for her assistance, and he let out a whistle.
“Who knew Flann had that kind of muscle with the honchos. Ever wonder why he asked for you?”
She recalled the partial explanation Flann gave her on the ride back from Becker’s home, but she kept it to herself.
“And he knows about that whole thing with your father. All the attention you got from the news?”
“I think so.”
Becker didn’t speak until they emerged from the Midtown Tunnel. “Flann McIlroy never was one to shy away from the media.”
22
IT TURNED OUT THAT BIG-BONED MEGAN QUINN WASN’T AS popular with the boys on FirstDate as Amy Davis had been. If Megan never left the house, he couldn’t kill her outside late at night. So he made adjustments.
Getting into the building didn’t prove to be much of a challenge. Megan lived in an enormous generic rental building on the far, far east side of the Upper East Side, in the yuppy slum of Yorkville. Unlike the white-gloved doormen in the ritzier apartments near the park, the staff at these places were strictly for show and a false sense of security. He showed up shortly after seven thirty. Evening rush hour. He pulled the hood of his jacket over his head.
“Delivery for 32M. It comes with a song, so I have to see her in person.” He made sure to hold the flowers in front of his face. The doorman was on the phone with one resident and handing a package to another.
“Yeah, okay. Go on up.”
He rode the crowded elevator with his face turned from the camera in the upper corner. He pushed the button for the thirty-second floor with his knuckle. A woman stepped off with him. He waited until she entered her apartment, then knocked on the door of 32M.
IT HAD ONLY been two nights since Jess began his latest sojourn on her sofa, but Ellie was struck by the silence and emptiness in her apartment. She flipped on the television just for the sound of it, and then settled onto the couch with her laptop and logged onto FirstDate.
More new messages and even more flirts. She had a lame two-sentence profile, but a decent if grainy picture. Maybe she’d unwittingly tapped into precisely what men valued. She scanned the list of messages. Only one user name caught her eye, and it had nothing to do with the case. Unpublished, the writer manqué whom she’d e-mailed earlier. She clicked on the message.
Ally, You sound fun. I’d like to know more about you, but I don’t like e-mail. (I know. Stupid way to try to meet someone if you don’t like e-mail.) This may sound forward, but do you want to go for a drink tonight? I promise you can take one look at me and walk out if you like. I won’t take it personally. In fact, I’ve gotten used to it. Peter. He left a phone number.
Ellie started to delete the message, then stopped herself. Jess was out. She was alone. Her brain needed a break from the case. If she stayed here, she’d only surf the Web and feel like a loser. She clicked on the photograph posted with Unpublished’s profile. Peter had dark brown tousled hair and intense green eyes, and he posed with a panting golden retriever. A caption beneath the picture read, “Sorry, but this isn’t my dog.”
She made a deal with herself, thought it through one more time, and then picked up the phone and dialed.
“Peter?”
“Last time I checked.”
“Hey, it’s Ally. Um, from FirstDate. I got your e-mail. Is it too late to take you up on that drink offer?”
“No, perfect timing. I’m just leaving work. Where do you want to go?”
“How about I come to you?” She didn’t need someone like Taylor Gottman cruising her neighborhood later, trying to track her down.
“There’s a place by me called Delta Grill.” He gave her an address, but Ellie told him she knew the place. “You don’t mind coming to Hell’s Kitchen?”
“Nope. I love it over there,” Ellie said.
“Very good. That scares a lot of people off.”
“I think that’s why you’re supposed to call it Clinton.” The neighborhood used to be Manhattan’s ghetto for the roughneck lower middle class, but like the rest of the borough, had experienced what the real estate brokers called a “transition.” Along with a slew of new high-class residents who couldn’t quite swing their dream pad on the other side of Lincoln Center, the neighborhood had also inherited a new, safer-sounding name.