“Soon I had enough money in an online bank account to start going to classes to learn the language better and reduce my accent. I was in America now. Here surface is everything. I came up with the name ‘Sayre Rauth.’ I hired Paul Windmann. I rented the townhouse.”
“Sounds like everything was going peachy. So what went wrong?”
“Elena,” she said.
“What about Elena?”
“I saw her. Just one day on the street. I was surprised —I look very different than I used to, but she…she looks the same. I followed her. She was living on First Street then; the place she is now on Avenue C is new. I found the name she was using and the name of the man she was living with. I ran a credit check on them and what do you think I found?”
“Lots of debt?”
“The opposite. A joint savings account they had totaling over seventy thousand dollars.”
I whistled.
She nodded.
I said, “So naturally you wondered where that money had come from. Were you afraid she was running the same set-up as you, shaking down former customers?”
“It crossed my mind.”
“That would really screw everything up, wouldn’t it?” I said. “After all, the whole point of blackmail is exclusivity, the promise that no one else in the world knows. If more than one person knows the secret, why pay up?”
A quote from Benjamin Franklin popped into my head: Three can keep a secret, if two of them are dead.
Sayre nodded. “As you say, if it was true. I needed to know. So I contacted her. Politely, I swear to you. But she was spooked, started making threats. And then the robbery.”
She propped herself up on an elbow and pulled some strands of hair out of her mouth.
She asked, “How much money would you need to live on for the rest of your life?”
“The rest of my life? Darlin’, the way today is shaping up, probably what I got in my pockets right now.”
“I’m being serious.”
So was I, but I’d play her game of what-if if she wanted. Only problem was: all far-reaching numbers are relative, all currencies in flux; to have given her a truly honest answer, I would’ve had to project a figure phrased in gold ingots.
In my experience, money wasn’t everything. For instance, I always got a much better return when I bartered in information. It provided a higher yield.
But she wanted a number, so I said, “Five million.”
She huffed. “Dollars?” She frowned. She blew hair out of her eyes. “That’s a lot of money. Too much, I’m afraid.”
I stretched out, airing my matted armpit hair. “Sorry, but at least now you know what you’re working for.”
“Why so much? I would think from the way you live that—”
“Look, I never haggle. It’s part of my charm.”
“I only asked—”
“And I answered. Now let me ask you one: Did you kill Paul Windmann?”
“What?” Her mouth formed a moue. “Paul is—”
“Paul was,” I corrected her.
“When…when did this happen?” She dug an elbow into my chest, raising herself to look down at me. “I saw him at one.”
“Uh-uh-uh, answer my question first.”
“What question—did I kill him? Payton, you think I—ha! Funny time to be asking me that, don’t you think?”
I could think of a funnier time to have asked it, but then again I wasn’t in it just for laughs anymore.
“Answer the question.”
“No. I didn’t kill Paul. Are you satisfied?”
“I was satisfied before you answered the question.”
“Was he shot?”
“Why, missing any bullets?”
She turned her head away, so all I saw was her long dark hair. With her face averted, her voice sounded thick.
“I loaned Paul my gun this afternoon.”
“You did what?”
“He said he needed it for protection. His keys were taken in the robbery. He was arranging to have all his locks changed, but until then…I gave him my gun.” She turned back to me. “Now tell me, was he shot?”
“Yes.”
I didn’t know a word of her native tongue, but just then I learned about half a dozen of the worst ones you could say in it. When she simmered down, she asked, “Was my gun still there?”
“Yep. Looks like there was a struggle for it and it went off in his face.”
She grimaced, but her voice held a note of resignation.
“And you thought it was me?”
I thought a lot of things. I thought she had a motive: Windmann wanted those files on the iPod for himself, either to take over her operation or, more likely, to blackmail her, threatening to expose her to some of those men on her list. A good enough reason enough to kill. I thought she was capable of killing anyone she set her sights on. But I didn’t think she was stupid.
I said, “Nope.”
I wriggled out from underneath. I stood and walked over to where my pants had ended up. I fished her gun out of my back pocket and tossed it to her. She caught it one-handed.
I said, “If you shot him, you wouldn’t have left that behind.”
She sniffed the barrel and reared back, her nose wrinkled.
She looked at me. “I… Thank you.”
“Don’t mention it.”
She grabbed the daybed’s quilt and hugged it to her, laying the gun on top of it.
“It is very…considerate of you,” she said.
“Stop. You’ll make me blush.”
“Why did you take it from the scene?”
I shrugged. “I wanted something to hold over you.”
“But not anymore?”
I shook my head. “If I were you, I’d get rid of it right away. It’s better than even money that’s the gun killed Windmann.”
She asked, “Do you know who did kill him?”
Maybe the woman who stole his keys and used them to steal the data. Elena. Though she’d seemed to be more of a knife woman.
“Not yet,” I said. “But it’s nothing for you to worry about. I, on the other hand…”
“What are you doing?”
I was putting on my pants.
“What’s it look like?” I said.
“Where are you going?”
I shook floor dust off my shirt, put it on again and started buttoning.
“Sorry—but I’m on the clock. Got one more lead to check out.” She had, god help me, a hurt expression on her face. “I wasn’t expecting anyone…” I started. “Look, I’ll be back in a couple hours. Stay. Help yourself to…uhm, there’s water in the sink.”
She held up her gun and pointed it at me, while pointing out to me, in a voice as dark and velvety as moonshadow, “I could make you stay.”
She would have been doing me a favor.
Chapter Sixteen: MEAT MARKET
At the turn of the 20th Century, the Meatpacking District on the lower west side of Manhattan was a bustling distribution center for slaughtered livestock, back when there were still boats docking actively at many of the Hudson River’s piers. But once transporting produce over roadways became more economical than doing so by water and the piers fell into disuse and disrepair, the life of that section of the city faltered and fell away.
Around the turn of the 21st, it was a veritable no man’s land, though that’s a bit of a misnomer, since one of the few trades to flourish there in the 1980s and 1990s was freelance male prostitution.
But now the early part of the new century had arrived and the area had undergone enormous changes. It began with many of the defunct and abandoned meatpacking establishments being bought up for art spaces and studios. Bars and lounges sprouted to cater to the people leaving the art galleries. Then trendy upscale nightclubs arrived to accommodate the people getting out of the bars. Finally, multi-million-dollar condominiums rose up to house the people who frequented and owned these businesses.