"I don't have a career," Lucas said.
"I do," said Fell. "Four more years and I'm out. I'd like to make it."
"What're you going to do when you get out?" Lucas asked, making talk while she smoked. He tipped his head back and looked up again. He seemed to do that in New York, even with buildings only twelve stories tall.
"I'm gonna move to Hollywood, Florida, and get a job as a topless waitress," Fell said.
"What?" She brought him down, startled him.
"Joke, Davenport," she said.
"Right." He looked back up, turning in the street. "Who is this guy?"
She took a drag, coughed, covered her mouth with a rolled fist. "Jackie? He's fairly big. The others we've talked to, they were middle-sized or small-timers. Jackie's a wholesaler. There are three or four of them here in midtown. When somebody hijacks a truck full of Sonys, one of the wholesalers'll get it and parcel it out to the small-timers. If Jackie feels like it, he could put out the word on Bekker to fifty or sixty or a hundred guys. If he feels like it. And those guys could probably talk to a million junkies and thieves. If they feel like it."
"If you know all this…?" He looked at her with a cool curiosity. A man turned the corner behind them, saw them standing on the sidewalk, and went back around the corner out of sight.
"He's got his own business, remaindering stuff," Fell continued. "If somebody has six zillion nuts and no bolts to go with them, he calls up Jackie. Jackie buys them and finds somebody who needs them. That's all legal. If you tag him, you'll find him going in and out of warehouses all day, ten or twenty a day, different ones every day of the week. Talks to all kinds of people. Hundreds of them. Somewhere in the mess, he's got eight or ten people working for him, running the fencing business out the back door of these legit warehouses… It's tough, man. I know he's doing it, but I can't find his dumps."
"He knows you?"
"He knows who I am," she said. "I once sat outside this place for three days, watching who came and went. Running license numbers. It was colder than shit. You know how it gets when it's too cold to snow?"
"Yeah. I'm from…"
"Minnesota. Like that," she said, looking down the street, remembering. "So the third night, this guy comes out of the building, knocks on our window, my partner and me, and hands us a Thermos of hot coffee and a couple of turkey sandwiches, courtesy of Jackie Smith."
"Hmph." He looked at her. "You take it?"
"I poured the coffee on the guy's shoes," Fell said. She was talking through her teeth. She took a last drag, grinned at him and flicked the cigarette into the street, where it bounced in a shower of sparks. "The silly shit thought he could buy me with a fuckin' turkey sandwich… C'mon, let's do it."
The warehouse door was built of inch-thick glass poured around stainless-steel rods, with an identical second door six feet farther in. A video camera was mounted on the wall between the two doors. Fell pushed a doorbell marked "Top." A moment later, an electronic voice said, "Yes?"
Fell leaned close to the speaker plate. "Detectives Fell and Davenport to see Jackie Smith."
After a short pause, the voice said, "Step inside and hold your badges in front of the camera."
The door lock buzzed and Fell pulled the door open, and they went inside. Now between the two doors, they held their badges in front of the camera. A second later, the lock on the second door buzzed. "Take the elevator to twelve. It's on the way down," the voice said.
A sterile lobby of yellow-painted concrete block waited behind the second door. There were no windows, only the elevator doors and a steel fire door at the far end of the lobby. The elevators were to the left, and another video camera, mounted in a wire cage near the ceiling, watched them.
"Interesting," Lucas said. "We're in a vault."
"Yeah. You'd have a hell of a time getting this far if Jackie didn't want you in. You'd probably need plastique to do it in a hurry. Then you'd have to get through the fire door, to find the stairs, assuming that the elevator was up and locked. By that time, Jackie'd be gone, of course. I'm sure he's got a bolthole somewhere…"
"And he's probably recording all of this," Lucas said.
Fell shrugged. "I'd like to get him, and I've thought about it-that ain't no secret." Halfway up, she said, "You got a thing with Rothenburg?"
He looked down at her. "Why?"
"Just curious," she said. They watched numbers flickering off the floor counter, and then she said, "When she came in, the way she looked at you, I thought you had a thing."
"Nah…"
She shook her head; she didn't believe him. Then the elevator doors opened and they stepped into a lobby identical to the one on the bottom floor: yellow-painted concrete block with a gray steel door set in one wall. Another video camera was mounted in a corner.
"Come in," the disembodied voice said.
The steel door opened on Wonderland.
Lucas followed Fell onto a raised hardwood deck, shaped like a half-moon, overlooking an enormous room. Ten or twelve thousand square feet, Lucas thought, most of it open. Different activity areas were defined by furniture, lights and carpet, instead of walls. The kitchen was to the right; a blond man was peering into a stove, and the odor of fresh hot bread suffused the room. To the left, halfway back, a dark-haired man stood on a square of artificial turf with a golf club.
"Over here," said the voice from the hallway, and the man with the golf club waved at them. Fell led the way, a weaving route through what seemed like an acre of furniture.
A jumble of furniture, with no specific style, Lucas thought: it looked as though it had fallen off the back of a truck. Or trucks-different trucks, from different factories. A king-sized English four-poster bed sat on a huge Oriental carpet, and was covered with an American crazy quilt. A six-foot projection TV faced the bed, and three tripod-mounted video cameras pointed at it.
Behind the TV, a semicircular wall of shoulder-high speakers flanked a conversation pit; a marble-topped table in the center held an array of CD and tape equipment, along with a library of a thousand or more compact discs. The floor beneath the stereo area was hardwood, covered with animal skins: tiger and jaguar, stitched beaver, a buffalo robe, a sleek dark square of what might have been mink. Erroll Garner bubbled out of the speakers, working through "Mambo Carmel."
Beyond the bed, and between the bed and the sports area, a glass shower stall stood out of the floor like an oversized phone booth. Two toilets sat next to it, facing each other, and on the other side, a huge tub.
Smith waited in the sports area, two thirds of the way to the back wall. The wall was pierced by three or four doors. So there were more rooms, Lucas thought…
Smith, his back to them, waggled a driver, drove a golf ball into a net, shook his head, and put the club in a bag that hung from a wall peg. Behind him, a rank of unlit lights waited over what appeared to be a real grass putting green, built on a raised surface. Beyond the green, a stained-glass lamp hung over an antique pool table; and at the back of the room, a basketball net hung from a wall. Below it, a court was complete out to the top of the free-throw circle.
"Can't keep my head down," Smith said. He strode toward them, his golf shoes scuffing over the artificial turf. Smith was a short, barrel-chested, barrel-gutted man with a fuzzy mustache and kinky black hair. He wore a black golf shirt tucked into black pleated slacks, with a woven leather belt circling his waist. A gold chain dangled from his neck, with what looked like a St. Christopher medal. He smiled at Fell and stuck his hand out. "You're the cop who was watching me last year…"
Fell ignored the hand. "We need to talk to you about this Bekker guy," she said bluntly. "The guy who's chopping up these people…"
"The freak," Smith said. He took his hand back, couldn't find a place for it, and finally stuck it in his slacks pocket. He was puzzled, his mustache quivering. "Why talk to me?"