Janek, sweating, sat in his car in front of the house, listening for the sound of shots. He didn't hear any, but wouldn't have been surprised if he had. It was summer, the season of random gunfire, bullets discharged in rancor, piercing windows, killing babies in their cribs and grandmothers waiting to cross dusty, savage streets. All that summer, it seemed to Janek, the city had teetered on the edge of a breakdown.
He glanced at himself in his rearview mirror. There were bags under his eyes, but his features, he was pleased to see, were still intact.
Forty-four years old and I can maybe pass for forty-eight. But what about ten years from now? Will I end up with a turkey gobbler neck and one of those old cop faces that remind me of a shattered piece of safety glass?
He wiped his forehead with a handkerchief, stuffed it back into his pocket, then stepped out of his car. The house, he saw, was covered with some sort of synthetic siding made to look like roughly finished stone.
The tiny front yard was enclosed by a chain-link fence, high enough to imprison a dog.
Janek unlatched the gate, entered and carefully closed it behind him.
Three narrow brick steps led to a front stoop defined by a surprisingly delicate iron railing. From there he looked back at the street. There was a small wooden structure set out by the curb to hold garbage cans.
Except, Janek knew, there'd never be any garbage in front of this house; if someone were in residence, the garbage would be hauled off in a van with blacked-out windows.
He wiped his forehead again and pressed the buzzer. A moment later the door opened and he was staring into Baldwin's chilly little eyes. The balding borough commander, wearing baggy shorts and a gray police T-shirt, looked different than in uniform-smaller and much more ordinary.
"Frank-" "Harry," Janek said.
"Kit's here. She's waiting for you."
Baldwin, who was standing too close, stared at him for a moment, then stepped aside. As Janek crossed into the narrow front hall, he smelled deli food on Baldwin's breath.
"That you, Frank?"
Janek followed Kit's. voice into a small living room where a bare bulb illuminated functional secondhand furniture. There he found her, reclining in a maroon lounge chair, sipping coffee from a Styrofoam cup.
A short, dark, intense woman with sharp Greek features and burning eyes, Kit Kopta was chief of detectives of the city of New York.
Janek crossed to her, bent and kissed her cheek.
"Just you, me and Baldwin?" he asked.
"The others are with the prisoner." Kit raised her eyes to the ceiling.
A prisoner upstairs. Made sense. This was a police safe house. But the presence of the C of D and the borough commander suggested a prisoner of more than ordinary stature.
"Get yourself some coffee, Frank." She gestured toward the kitchenette.
When Janek walked in he found Baldwin hunched over the counter, making himself a corned beef sandwich. There was a sweat line on the back of his T-shirt. Janek noticed the flab on his biceps.
"Been a while, Frank," Baldwin said.
"Yeah, about a year, I guess." Janek filled his cup. Beside the pot on the stove, there was a spread of deli meats, sliced bread and Danish laid out on the counter, an open jar of mustard and a neat pile of napkins and paper plates.
"Big one, huh?"
Janek nodded knowledgeably and returned to the living room. Kit was dozing. When she heard him, she opened her eyes.
"Baldwin says this is a big one," Janek said.
"Could be."
"Am I supposed to guess?" Kit smiled, a warm, dazzling smile that took him back nearly twenty years-to the time when they'd been young detectives, heady on each other and the job. Their affair had lasted three months. They'd been close friends ever since.
"We got a guy upstairs says his sister was Mendoza's maid."
Mendoza. Of course. The case had haunted him for the better part of a decade. Mendoza's maid had been the missing witness. Janek had been assigned to find her. He never had. :'Jesus," he said. "Does this thing never stop?"
"Maybe now it will. You see why we called you, Frank?"
Sure, I see. Who the hell else would she call?
There wasn't much of a story, at least not so far. The prisoner, one Angel Figueras, had been apprehended by an alert patrolman the previous evening, emerging through the back door of a mom-and-pop jewelry store on Queens Boulevard, pockets stuffed with watches and engagement rings.
Figueras was arrested, booked and awaiting arraignment when he asked to see a criminal defense attorney named Netti Rampersad. "She's upstairs with him now," Kit said.
"Rampersad. Never heard of her. Is the name for real?" Kit smiled. "It's real and she's a powerhouse. Anyway, they had a little conference, Rampersad went to see the D. A., and now here we are, about to make a deal.
"He locates his sister-we let him off."
"That's about it," Kit confirmed. "He especially requested you, Frank.
You're the one he wants to tell it to."
"He knows me?" Janek was surprised.
"Seems that way. Meantime his story checks out. He's Tania's brother and he swears he can give you her address. All we gotta do is give up a small-time safe cracker for a shot at a woman we've been wanting to talk to for nine years. Not a bad deal, seems to me."
"No guarantee she'll talk to us."
"No. But we know you'll give it your best shot." Kit smiled at him again, her gorgeous smile. "Don't we, Frank?"
They went upstairs. Baldwin didn't join them, just grinned at them, jaws masticating meat.
"What's he doing here?" Janek whispered when they reached the upstairs hall.
"Harry? Well, it's his safe house." Kit lowered her voice. "Also… he's Dakin's friend."
"Looking out for Dakin's interests?"
Netti shrugged. "A case like Mendoza-who knows?"
Four of them were sitting on plastic chairs around a card table in what Janek took to be the master bedroom. There was a stained rust-colored shag rug on the floor. Figueras, a short, lean, hard-bodied, mustachioed Hispanic in a soiled tanktop, looked fairly relaxed considering he was handcuffed. There was a slicked-down young A. D.A. named Gabelli, who wore his sleeves rolled up Manhattan district attorney-style; Detective Sergeant Tommy Shandy, who guarded the portals to Kit's office; and Netti Rampersad, clearly the dominant personality in the room.
Janek studied her. She looked to be in her early thirties, a tall attractive woman in tight jeans, with a lush mane of red-blond hair and a galaxy of freckles on her upper chest, exposed by a scoop-neck blouse that looked like it had cost a lot of money. There was a glow on the lady, too, a glow Janek had observed on certain female attorneys when they thought they had a group of men by the balls. Evidently Ms.
Rampersad thought she had the assembled males exactly that way tonight.
"Tony and I've worked it out," Rampersad said to Kit. "No typewriter, so we wrote it up by hand."
She handed Kit a handwritten document. Gabelli turned to Kit at the same time.
"Sure you want to do this, Chief?"
"Why shouldn't I?"
"I'd prefer to see him plead, do a deal on the sentencing. "
"We've gone over that, Tony." Rampersad stared at Gabelli, not bothering to conceal her annoyance. "No plea, no felony on the books.
That's the only way he's going to talk." She turned to Kit. "Take it or leave it, Chief." "We'll take it," Kit said.
"I thought so. Now all you've gotta do is sign… Later, alone with Figueras in the smaller bedroom, Janek asked him if they'd ever met.
"No, sir. But I know your name. My sister said, ', Angel, the cops pick you up, I'm your ticket out of trouble. Ask for Lieutenant Janek. Tell him where I am." That was her good-bye present, see."