Well, with any luck, I’d be able to find out.
I went to Yahoo’s home page, clicked on “Mail.” When it asked for a Yahoo ID, I entered “Cassie 19934.” The next box asked for a password. The cursor blinked patiently, waiting for me to type something.
A few keystrokes—that’s how close I was to getting into Dorrie’s e-mail account and whatever information it might hold. Not just the photos, but correspondence with her clients and who knew what else.
But those few keystrokes were as formidable a barrier as the combination to a bank vault. What would she have chosen? I didn’t expect it to work, but I typed in “Dorrie” and clicked on the “Sign In” button. After a second, the message “Invalid ID or password” appeared on the screen in red letters. I tried “Cassie.” I tried “Burke.” I tried spelling each name backwards. I tried her birth date, forward and backward. Invalid, all of them.
Damn it, when the time had come for her to choose a password, what would have occurred to her? It could be anything, of course; even a random sequence of letters, in which case I’d never be able to guess it. But in that case she’d never have been able to remember it either. It had to be something she could remember easily.
I tried some more possibilities. Eva, her mother’s name. Douglas, her father’s. I looked at the teddy bear sitting on my shelf and tried “FAO.” I even tried my own name. Nothing.
There were too many possibilities. I couldn’t think of them all, and even if I could it would take forever to try them all. There had to be another way. Maybe she’d have written the password down somewhere? Maybe in some file on her computer, or...
Her computer.
It felt like too much to hope for. But I remembered the sparsely populated directories I’d found on Dorrie’s laptop. She’d been at best a casual computer user, and as such she might have been the sort to take advantage of shortcuts when they were offered. She might well have taken advantage of the one I’d just thought of.
I shut off my computer and headed across the street.
Chapter 9
Before Michael Florio inherited it from his father, the Barking Boat was a neighborhood teahouse, an eight-table downtown hangout originally frequented by unemployed beatniks who liked to pay their tab by scrawling sketches and scraps of incoherent poetry on napkins. Florio père apparently let them get away with this, which left me wondering how he’d managed to stay in business for thirty years. Michael let me in on the secret: Out of the back room, his father had run a long-standing numbers operation, one blessed by the Genovese family. Those were the days when the people running organized crime would give their blessing to men with names like Vincent Florio. Today, the nod was more likely to go to a Dmitri or a Nguyen—or a Miklos.
Michael did away with the numbers business when he took the place over, renovated the kitchen and the seating area, and did his best to turn the Boat into a real restaurant. But that didn’t mean that honest business was the only business conducted under his roof. When he wasn’t cooking, Michael liked to describe himself as a go-between, a provider of liquidity. My old boss, Leo, an ex-cop from the days before the sort of sensitivity training they forced on James Mirsky, put it more succinctly, calling him a fence and a shylock. Michael would take things off your hands for a fraction of what they were worth, and he’d loan you money when you needed it badly enough that you were willing to pay more than it was worth. There was always an angle with him. When I’d needed a new place to live three years back, he’d told me about the building across the street and had leaned on the landlord to give me a good deal; the condition was that every once in a while, when he was holding something particularly hot, he could treat my closet as an extension of his storeroom. I could live with that. For the rent I was paying, I could live with a lot of things.
On weekends at brunch time, the line trailed out to the corner to get a taste of Michael’s Eggs Florentine, but right now it was a weekday evening in the dead time between the end of lunch and the start of dinner. The place was empty except for Michael’s one waitress, a 24-year-old whose longevity in the job probably had more to do with how she looked in a Barking Boat t-shirt than how good she was at waiting on tables. He trusted her and would discuss business in front of her, but I didn’t and wouldn’t. I pushed the swinging door to the storeroom open and gestured for him to follow me.
Floor-to-ceiling metal shelves held sacks and cans and bottles of various supplies: red mesh bags of onions and potatoes, five-gallon containers of extra virgin olive oil, jars of cored whole pineapples in syrup, cardboard boxes of produce. I went to the corner furthest from the door and reached behind a box with Spoons written on it in barely legible magic marker. My knapsack was still there. I pulled it out.
“What?” Michael said. “What do you want?”
I tugged open the pair of buckles holding the knapsack closed, shoved the plastic bag of shredded paper to one side and pulled out Dorrie’s laptop. “Where’s an outlet?” I said. Before he could answer, I spotted one and headed over to it. I plugged in the adaptor, turned the machine on. It whirred quietly to life.
“Listen, Michael,” I said, “I need to ask you something, and you can’t ask me why. Okay?”
He looked unsure about it. “Okay.”
“You ever hear of a man named Ardo?”
I watched his eyebrows ride up on his forehead. He’d been going bald long enough that you’d barely call what he had left a hairline, so they had plenty of forehead to ride.
“Sure,” he said. “I’ve heard about him. So have you. So’s everybody else in this city, though they don’t know it. Remember the Bishop murders last summer?”
I shook my head.
“Yes you do. Social club out in Red Hook, eleven people gunned down? Marty Bishop and his two brothers, some guys worked for them, the two bartenders? The waitress?”
It rang a bell. Faintly. “I guess I read about it. That was Ardo?”
“You never saw his name in the papers, but between you, me, and the lamppost, damn straight it was Ardo. Fuckin’ Hungarian psycho.”
The laptop’s screen faded from black to pale blue and icons popped up like little square weeds. One of them showed the wireless modem searching for an Internet connection. I double-clicked on another to bring up Dorrie’s Web browser. The computer made some more soft whirring sounds.
“I thought it was some street gang thing,” I said, stirring the cold ashes of my memory to try to get a spark.
“The guys who pulled the trigger were in a gang, sure. But who gave them the guns and told them where to go?”
“Ardo?”
He nodded. “And why? Because Marty Bishop wouldn’t kick back a piece of the action from his houses when Ardo told him to. We’re talking houses out in Brooklyn, for Christ’s sake.”
“Houses?”
“Whorehouses,” Marty said. “ ‘Brothels’ to a college boy like you. That’s Ardo’s business—whorehouses, massage parlors, those Chinese tui-na places. If it’ll get you off and it’s in New York, Ardo’s got a piece of it.”
“That can’t be true. There must be hundreds—”
“So he’s got a piece of half of them. A third. I don’t know. But I do know he wants a piece of all of them. If he could find a way, he’d charge my wife every time she blows me. Not that he’d get rich that way, god knows.” He leaned over my shoulder. “What are you doing? Surfing for porn?”