I fired once more, this time at the man’s head, and a soupy slop of gray, red, and black splashed out his opposite temple, a small black hole appearing on the nearer one.
The bound figure slumped now, lifeless.
I grinned, nodded back at the slumped figure in the chair. “Your pal didn’t think I’d do that.”
I thumbed back the hammer on the .45 — the click seemed to fill the big room — and walked back over to Colby.
“Of course, Harry Strutt was lucky,” I said. “He went fast. You? You’re going to get it nice and slow... arms, legs, then your belly, where it takes a good while, but don’t worry, you won’t pass out — you’ll have plenty of time to think about what you did to a good man named Casey Shannon.”
He was shaking now, like a bad dancer at the Tube. “You can have your damn money!”
I laughed. “No, Vinnie, that was just theater! Melodrama, my man! But it did get your attention, didn’t it?”
“You bastard!”
“I get that a lot.” I shoved the gun’s snout into his belly. “Time to die, you psychotic son of a bitch...”
“No! No!”
My narrowed eyes looked into his wide ones. “Unless...”
“Unless what?”
I stepped back, the gun no longer in his belly. My voice was the essence of reason.
“Unless,” I said, “you’d care to confess. With that on tape, I would have options. We could talk real money... regular payments...”
His eyes went wild, his so-white teeth bared. “I’ll confess, goddamn you! I’ll tell you everything!”
I stepped away and folded my arms, gun still in hand. “I’m listening. Sit your ass back down. And we’re recording.”
He spilled. Spilled everything, except for the two earlier murders. I let him have those. These four kills would be enough. And Jasmine Jordan had been blackmailing him, as I’d thought, foolish girl. Kraft had wanted more money, too. Foolish man.
“That’s all,” he said, exhausted.
“Lights!” I said.
The lights came up on the huge, mostly empty room, the bricks, the catwalks, the spots hung above, all came into sharp relief.
African-American hands, never really tied (they had controls to work), came around from behind the chair in which the “dead man” sat; then Thalmus Lockhart pulled the tight-fitting prosthetic mask off his head. He’d made the mask right there at the farmhouse, utilizing the corpse of Harry Strutt, who had split his skull when he fell, hitting that projection TV.
All it took was Vaseline, alginate, plaster tape, gypsum-base plaster, sulfur-free plasticine clay, gypsum slurry, and genius. And the bullet hits and squibs and gore effects had gone off perfectly.
To say that Thal and I were even now — for me getting him out of that barroom manslaughter beef — was an understatement.
Gotta love movie magic.
Colby was on his feet again, his eyes wide, his mouth making a sex-doll “Oh!”
Revealed also, now that darkness had been banished, was Velda at a table with a cassette tape set-up, and a big microphone pointed at us like a gun. Nearby was a borrowed NYPD video camera that Chris Peters was running — Chris was not here, if anybody asks you. A Homicide captain, say.
“You can go now,” I told Vincent, returning the blanks-filled .45 to the shoulder holster. “You’ll be hearing from the authorities. Now would be a good time to talk to your old man about countries without extradition agreements with the USA.”
Any sane man would have run for the door and taken advantage of that generous offer. But, as we know by now, Vincent Colby wasn’t sane and instead chose to lurch at me, and grab me by my head with both hands, like he was clutching a soccer ball to kick. As he tried to yank me down, to deliver one last crushing knee blow to the chest, my hands gripped his neck and I jerked and twisted. The result was the loudest snap anybody ever heard, its echo rivaling the .45 shots.
He collapsed into a fashionable Armani-clad pile of dead.
“No sensei taught me that,” I told the corpse.
Velda was right there, hugging my arm. “Looks like he really did have a temper.”
Chris called, “Mike — the camera was rolling. It got everything, including... uh, what you just did.”
I shrugged. “Well, it makes backing up my self-defense plea this time a snap.”
Velda didn’t laugh at that — neither did Chris or Thal. Tough crowd.
But I took the opportunity to talk to the camera and offer an embarrassed smile.
“Sorry, Pat. I tried.”
Chapter Fourteen
A white-haired butler in traditional black livery met me at the door to the co-op apartment. He was so ancient that he’d been doing this long enough for such a thing to be common among a certain class. That included the Colbys, of course, although frankly they may have been among the poorer folk housed in one of the twenty-two apartments on these sixteen floors. Billionaires looked down their noses at measly multi-millionaires in these here parts.
I was visiting, after all, an art deco, limestone-fronted monument to wealth on Fifth Avenue between 64th and 65th with a view on Central Park. Built between the wars, this was one of those white-glove palaces sporting a twenty-four-hour doorman at a canopied entrance and uniformed elevator operators waiting inside for those deemed worthy. I was expected, worthy or not, having called ahead. Otherwise, I couldn’t have gotten in without a search warrant.
This was Tuesday and a laundered story of what happened in a certain Meatpacking District warehouse Sunday night had been all over the media on Monday. I’d met privately with my client’s son to take a sort of deposition (so went this version of the “facts”) about things I uncovered in my investigation of the chophouse hit-and-run; Vincent Colby became excited and attacked me — I defended myself with tragic results. For him. The personality change that followed his concussion was mentioned. Not much else.
Mostly it’d been photos in the papers of young Colby at the brokerage and out on the town, with footage on the tube of him at the Tube (and other clubs) as well as social and charity events. I spent much of Monday at One Police Plaza in Pat’s office, viewing the video tape — Captain Chambers watching it with cold interest.
I won’t go into how furious Pat was with me over my tactics, but he knew damn well having a non-police officer staging a charade like that had a positive side — namely, it made the tape’s contents useable in court... or would have if Colby had lived to go to court. A citizen can’t be accused of entrapment, after all. And for all his glowering, Captain Chambers had trouble holding back a smile when I looked at the camera and apologized to him.
For all his talk of putting Vinnie in stir to endure a lifetime away from privilege and freedom, Pat obviously didn’t mind seeing the sick fuck dead. I knew I sure didn’t.
But that attitude needed some sanding off at the edges for my client. I had a check in my wallet refunding his ten-grand retainer, though I doubted the old man would give a damn about getting his money back. I clearly hadn’t delivered what he was after.
Vance Colby deserved the truth, though. Softened a little maybe, but when one day you have an heir ready to take over the reins of your successful brokerage, and the next you’ve got a dead murdering maniac for a son, nothing much can take out the sting.
And it would get worse. Soon Vincent Colby would be a notorious name in the headlines, joining the ranks of Bundy and Berkowitz, as more and more inevitably came out. With garish TV movies and documentaries to come.