"Me? She don't ask me in much," Vargas said, one side of his mouth pulling up in a smile. "I can't afford it."
"Enough to know if anything is missing? If it looks the way Ms.
Bristol always kept it?"
"Not my job." He held his hands up, palms outward, the strong, thick fingers in front of his face. "I don't go in there since I fix her toilet last summer."
"Do you know any of her friends? Any of the people who came to see her regularly?"
I thought of the doormen in my high-rent high-rise building, only twenty blocks away. The sharpest ones held dozens of secrets-infidelities and betrayals by neighbors-thirty floors' worth of them. "I not a busybody, lady."
"You live in the basement here?" Mike asked.
"Si. I got my television, my girlfriend, and my six-pack. I do my work and I keep to myself."
"Anybody else have a key to her apartment?"
"How would I know? If a key work, nobody bother me." Mike's frustration was growing. "Dylan. There's a bar around the corner called Dylan's. You ever seen that guy visiting here-the guy who owns the joint?"
"I got no idea who you mean. Dylan what?"
"Men pay you to forget they were here, Vargas? Is that how it goes?"
"They don't have to do nothing, Detective. Ms. Amber takes care of me very good not to hear nothing, not to see anybody," Vargas said, cracking the knuckles of his left hand in his powerful right fist. "That girl and trouble, they was always together.
SIX
Isat on a bar stool at Primola, sipping my sparkling water like it was aged Scotch. Mike was next to me, stirring the ice cubes in the vodka with his finger. Every table in the chic East Side restaurant was full of people escaping the August heat with a good meal. "Is the air-conditioning blowing on you, Alessandra?" Giuliano asked. "I'll have a table for you in five minutes."
"We're fine right here."
The owner had been my friend for many years. He was used to seeing me with Mike or Mercer and kept us well fed through many long nights of highly charged casework.
"Fenton," he said to the bartender. "Give Signora Cooper a drink.
On me."
"She's like Ali before a big fight, Giuliano. Can't be flirting with a hangover when she faces the jury in the morning."
"I'll take a raincheck," I said, nibbling on a bread stick as thin as a straw.
Mike turned to me and rested his feet on the rungs of my stool. We made an odd couple, from backgrounds as different as anyone could imagine, but had forged a real intimacy over a decade of working on some of the grisliest cases the city had seen.
"Have some pasta, Coop. You need the carbs."
"I just want a bowl of gazpacho. It's too hot for anything else." He turned back to Fenton. "I'll start with linguine. White clam sauce. Then I'll have a veal chop, thick as they come."
Murder never got in the way of Mike's appetite. His father, Brian, had been one of the most decorated cops in the NYPD's history, retiring after twenty-six years on the job. Mike had been weaned on investigative skills and instincts, but he was also the first in his family to attend college. When Brian died of a massive coronary less than fortyeight hours after turning in his gun and shield, his only son became even more determined to follow in his footsteps. Immediately on graduation from Fordham, where he had waited tables to supplement his student loans, he, too, joined the department.
"Have you ever been to Dylan's?" I asked.
There weren't many watering holes in Manhattan that Mike had missed, between his personal barhopping and the complex directions of many of his cases.
"Too preppy for a blue-collar guy like me."
"How did an Irish pub get to be so preppy?"
"When I was in college, the place had more of a neighborhood feel." He had turned thirty-seven the previous fall, six months before me. "Jimmy Dylan was good to the cops. Happy to have guys from the precinct going off duty drop in when he was trying to get the drunks out at the end of a long night."
I chewed another bread stick and leaned closer to Mike, trying to hear over the laughter of the patrons at the closest table. Mike's eyes were almost as dark as his hair, and I was pleased to see that they had regained some of the sparkle that had disappeared for the better part of a year after the accidental death of his fiancée, Valerie. "Dylan started to make some money for himself, so he began to send his kids-the oldest three are sons-to private schools. Junior- that's what they call the eldest son-he must be almost thirty now. All his high school pals hung out at the joint, 'cause Jimmy served them liquor when they were too young to get it anywhere else. He didn't really give a damn what anybody thought. Once you had all that teenage testosterone mixed in with a little alcohol, Dylan's became a magnet for the prep school girls, too. Fancy broads like you, looking to get lucky."
"I didn't-"
"Yeah, sorry. You were too busy memorizing Shakespeare sonnets and sublimating your sexual desires swimming laps to hang out at pubs," Mike said, opening one of the linen napkins on the bar and spreading it across my knees as he saw our waiter, Adolfo, approaching with my chilled soup.
I had been raised in Harrison, an affluent suburb of New York City.
My mother was a registered nurse who stopped working to raise her three children-my two older brothers and me. My father's medical career took a radical upturn when he and his partner designed and patented an innovative device that became a staple of cardiac surgery.
The Cooper-Hoffman valve moved us to northern Westchester, where much of my adolescence was spent training for swim team competition, and paid for my superb education at Wellesley College and then the University of Virginia School of Law.
Mike tucked his napkin into his open shirt collar and started twirling his linguine-filled fork against a large spoon, even as steam still rose from the clam-covered pasta.
"You ever see the bodies on the guys who swim the thousand-meter crawl?" I asked, reaching out to pinch Mike's side. "Totally buff. No NYPD doughnuts. No chips."
"They're always soaking wet and they wear bathing caps. Nothing sexy about it. Soup cold enough for you?"
"Very refreshing. Does Jimmy Dylan know you?"
"Nope. He knew my pop," Mike said. "Brian worked on a case back when I was twelve or thirteen. Two kids who met at the Brazen Head, drinking at the bar. Girl wound up dead in Gracie Square Park, just south of where the mayor lives."
"And what did Dylan have to do with it?"
"Nothing. And everything. The boy was nineteen years old, just off the boat from Ireland. Brought a mean cocaine habit with him. Both he and the girl were underage, but Jimmy's crew made them welcome at the bar. Three parts cocaine, two parts tequila shots, and one part homicidal rage when the girl tried to say "no" transformed the perp into a cold-blooded killer-alcohol courtesy of Jimmy Dylan."
"So you'd think the SLA would have shut the place down," I said.
The State Liquor Authority licensed every drinking establishment. "All the publicity just gave Dylan's more cachet. Jimmy paid a big fine, I think, and by then kids from Connecticut and Jersey were queuing up around the block, fake IDs and all, just 'cause the place had its fifteen minutes of fame."
"Are you going to try to find him tonight?" I asked, wiping some sauce off Mike's cheek with my napkin while he sliced into his chop. "Yeah. Spoils it a bit, though, that Janet gave him a heads-up."
"I guess I'll be paying you back on that one for a while." My cell phone vibrated on the smooth varnished surface of the bar.
I picked it up and noted the district attorney's home number in the illuminated display before I answered.
"Good evening, Paul." I plugged a finger in my left ear and walked out to the vestibule, through the crowd waiting for tables, so Battaglia wouldn't hear the background noise.
"How come you're not home yet? I tried you there first. Don't you have a big day tomorrow?"