Des nodded. “Georgia.”
“Did you want to come in?”
“That’s okay. This will only take a second. I like to keep an eye on the folks who’ve been of assistance to us. Make sure nobody’s been coming around bothering them.”
“Who we talking about, honey?”
“The resident in apartment C.”
She looked at Des in surprise. “You mean Eboni with an i?”
“That’s the person, yes.”
“What kind of help you been getting from little Eboni?” Her tone of voice was downright mocking.
“It’s part of an ongoing criminal investigation. I can’t go into the details.”
“And yet you show up here on a Sunday. Must be something pretty big.”
“Let’s just say Eboni did right by us. And I have concerns that certain individuals might try to retaliate or whatever.”
“You don’t have to waste no time worrying about that one.” Again with the mocking tone. “Eboni’s got a cop boyfriend.”
“Is that right? New Haven city cop?”
“Don’t know what kind. I ain’t seen no uniform. But he’s law, plain as day. You can tell by the way he struts around.”
“And he visits her regularly?”
“Must be here three, four times a week. He takes real good care of little Eboni. Pays the rent on the apartment. Bought that BMW, too.”
“Is Eboni working these days?”
“Some call it work,” she sniffed. “Others call it something else. Not that I’m passing judgment. What the tenants do is their own business-as long as the rent gets paid.”
“Has Eboni got any other regular men?”
“One or two. Not as many as before.”
“You say he pays the rent. Does he write you a check?”
She let out a huge, rumbling laugh. “Where you think you are? People around here don’t write no checks. They pay in cash. That’s how come I got this security gate on my door. Management company put it in last year after I got ripped off twice. Installed a safe in my kitchen, too.” She paused, puffing slightly for breath. “He puts the rent money right here in my hand the first of every month.”
“How comes he pays you, not her?”
“If he give it to Eboni I’d never see it.”
“Are we talking about drugs?”
“Wouldn’t surprise me. Nothing about Eboni would surprise me.”
“Did she sign a lease or is she here month to month?”
“Oh, there’s a lease all right.”
“Whose name is on it?”
“Eboni’s. Mind you, that’s strictly a what-you-call ‘professional’ name. The lease is in Eboni’s real name.”
“Which is…?”
“Michael Toomey,” she replied, stone-faced.
Des felt her pulse quicken. That explained why the girl’s shoulders and hips had struck her as odd. Richie Tedone’s skanky girlfriend wasn’t a girl at all. She was a he-a drag queen. “Thank you for your time, ma’am,” she said calmly, even though she was ready to plotz, as her friend Bella Tillis would say. “Next time I’m in the neighborhood I could use a few of those sausage and biscuits.”
“Honey, you could use a few dozen. Don’t you know that a man likes a woman who has some decent meat on her bones?”
Des got back in her Saab and headed straight for the Troop F barracks, where she parked herself at her unadorned steel desk and got busy on the computer. First she ran the license plate on that red BMW. The car was registered to Michael Reginald Toomey, Edgewood Vista Apartments, New Haven. Next she ran a criminal background check on Michael Reginald Toomey, age twenty, aka Eboni, aka Deelite. He/she had a long history of arrests for soliciting prostitution and possession of crack cocaine, dating back to when he/she had first been incarcerated at the New Haven Correctional Center at age fifteen. As Des scanned Toomey’s criminal history, one particular case from two years back set off alarm bells in her head. She went trolling through all of the case files she could access. Then pieced together the rest of the story from the online archives of the New Haven Register and Hartford Courant. The case had received extensive coverage. Hell, even the New York City tabloids had covered it.
It went down in Sussex, a ritzy, shoreline commuter town in Fairfield County. Nothing but millionaires and their trophy mansions. On a tree-lined lane in one of those mansions it turned out that a high-end escort service-which is to say call-girl ring-had been quietly operating for months. The woman running it, who came to be known as the Suburban Madam, was a divorced mother of two, named Elaine Gruen. Elaine’s husband had left her for another woman. Elaine got the mansion and child support in the settlement. But not enough income to maintain her Sussex lifestyle. So she’d dusted herself off and started her small business. She catered to a carefully screened clientele of wealthy gentlemen from not only the Connecticut suburbs, but New York, New Jersey and even Massachusetts. Her escorts collected five hundred dollars per hour, with discounted rates for overnight stays and weekend jaunts to resort hotels. The gentlemen contacted Elaine by cell phone or e-mail. She set up the engagements and kept half of the proceeds-which she split with her partner, Tiffany Nelson, a juvenile detention officer at the New Haven Correctional Center. It was Tiffany who recruited the Suburban Madam’s choicest talent. Mostly, she chose the youngest, prettiest girls. But a handful were recruited for so-called special-needs clients-men who favored the company of heavy girls or tiny girls or, in some cases, girls who weren’t girls at all.
It was a gold mine. Until, that is, the Sussex police stumbled onto it when they made a prostitution bust at a local motel. The girl, who’d recently been let go by Elaine for using drugs, was looking to cut herself a deal. Not to mention payback. The Sussex police called in the state’s Organized Crime Investigative Task Force, which spent weeks combing through thousands of phone calls and e-mails. Elaine and Tiffany were eventually charged with violation of the CORA act and promoting prostitution in the second degree. Both women were sentenced to a minimum of three years at York Correctional in Niantic
Des sat there at her computer, frowning. York Correctional. Somebody in the middle of the Augie Donatelli mess had a York connection. Although for the life of her, she couldn’t remember who.
There was more to the story. Elaine Gruen claimed that the task force’s lead officer, Captain Peter Bartucca, had accepted sexual favors from one of her escorts. Elaine’s lawyer went public with her accusation, screaming bloody murder. It got looked into by none other than Captain Richie Tedone of Internal Affairs. After conducting a thorough investigation, Richie found zero evidence that Captain Bartucca had engaged in any such behavior. “Mrs. Gruen’s allegations,” he told the Hartford Courant, “are a scurrilous, baseless, despicable attempt to sully the reputation of a fine public servant and family man.”
The escort who Elaine Gruen said had provided Captain Bartucca with those sexual favors? None other than Michael Reginald Toomey, aka Eboni, aka Deelite.
Gotcha, Mr. Sleazeball.
Seated there at her desk, Des allowed herself the luxury of a satisfied smile. Then she took a deep breath, let it out and went to work trying to find Terri E as in maybe Edsen, who worked in a cubicle somewhere in New York and maybe-big maybe-had been getting busy with Hal Chapman while somebody else was beating Augie Donatelli’s brains in.
CHAPTER 13
They took Mitch’s truck.
Very rode shotgun, his head nodding up and down like a bobble-head doll as he took in the sights of the Historic District. “So how did a city kid like you end up in this colonial theme park?” he wanted to know.
“My wife passed away. I needed to make a change, meet new people. Besides, it’s not a theme park-as your friend Augie would be only too happy to attest to.”
“I hear you,” Very said, his jaw muscles clenching. “How about you and the master sergeant? Any problems with the color thing?”
“That’s for other people to think about. We don’t.”