"I'm sorry if I impugned your motives."
"Steve Glodt is only interested in money," Moyle said. "I have my beliefs, and I have my principles."
"So tell me about rotten, unprincipled Steve Glodt's girlfriend in Oyster Bay. She runs a nail parlor there?"
"I've heard that, yeah. She has an apartment over the nail parlor, and Steve spends as much time there as he does with his hideous wife in his mansion in Center Island, according to Irene. The wife knows about it, but what's she gonna do? Out in the open market, she'd be worth about eighty-nine cents a pound, and she'd miss her Chris-Craft and her helipad and her New Year's-to-Groundhog Day in Boca. The setup works perfectly for everybody involved."
"What's the girlfriend's name?"
"Annette, I think. But that might not be her real name. No, it is, it's Annette something. Listen," Moyle said, "do you really think Steve could be behind the kidnappings? I've been fucked over by people I knew before, but… This could be some major shit of a type that a man even as cynical as I can be finds very hard to get my mind around."
"I'm not sure," I said, "but Glodt is looking more and more promising. The girlfriend's apartment over the nail parlor in Oyster Bay might have been where you were held, and it sounds like a good locale to produce an overwhelming smell of nail polish. It's the right distance from the city too, at the end of a route that includes tunnels and expressways. And now you yourself, need I add, have offered up a specific motive, even beyond Glodt's well-known general horri-bleness. Is it safe to say that when you do the J-Bird's show on Monday, you'll be seething?"
"Oh, I'll be pissed beyond belief-at Steve, if he did it."
"But even if you went into the studio Monday morning thinking some radical gay group like the FFF was responsible for what happened to you and the J-Bird, you'd be very, very angry, wouldn't you, Leo?"
"I'd be ripshit."
"A state of affairs that would not go unnoticed at GSN, I'll bet."
I described to Moyle the overnight development in the case, where a moist object that the kidnappers asserted was Jay Plankton's tongue had turned up in the New York Post newsroom. "But I doubt it's actually the J-Bird's tongue," I said. "Plankton would be of no use to Glodt if the J-Bird was in a perpetual rage every weekday morning but his diction was worse than Quasimodo's."
Moyle said, "If Steve is actually behind this, somebody's tongue is gonna get ripped out, but it's not gonna be Jay's. If Annette wants her cunt licked in the future, she's gonna have to go down to the pet store and shop for a new friend other than Steve Glodt."
I guessed Moyle was speaking figuratively in his colorful way, but his breathing was sounding labored again, so I wasn't sure.
Chapter 23
Oyster Bay, despite the popular misconception, was a largely working-class town on the Island's generally silk-stockinged North Shore. Theodore Roosevelt had had a home there-Sagamore Hill, now a museum-but most of the town's residents were neither political nor business aristocracy. They were the people who installed the hot tubs, pumped out the septic tanks, and rolled the lawns of this section of Long Island's old and new rich. Oyster Bay, it appeared, as we drove through it en route to the House of Annette: Nails of Glory-which we had found in the Nassau County yellow pages-was not so much a Jay Gatsby town or a Tom and Daisy Buchanan town as it was a George and Myrtle Wilson town.
There was no Doctor T. J. Eckleburg sign, as in Gatsby, but plenty of suburban retail and office sprawl, most of it identical to what we'd passed in Hempstead. One difference between the commercial suburbia I was familiar with in Albany and that of Oyster Bay was the Long Island preponderance of retail stores in long buildings, probably dating to the 1920s and 1930s and done in a brick "colonial" motif or an "Old English" style that featured leaded windows and exposed timbers. These were the North Shore versions of LA strip malls, except sometimes with second stories.
The strip we parked down the street from included- along with a pizza parlor, a tae kwon do emporium, and a copying center-the House of Annette: Nails of Glory. Of additional interest to Lyle, Dave Welch, Thad, and me-all of us in Lyle's NYPD
Ford-was Annette's next-door neighbor, Damien's Den of In-Ink-Kwity, a tattoo parlor.
At 6:25 Sunday morning, all of the businesses were closed. So was the chain video store we were parked in front of. Traffic was all but nonexistent, and a fine mist was in the air, which was so rainforestlike that I would not have been surprised to hear a macaw cackling or see a salamander skitter across the hood of the Ford.
We sat for several minutes going over our options. Both Barner and Welch were skeptical of my theory-which had become a conviction over the past hour-that Steve Glodt was the mastermind behind the Moyle and Plankton kidnappings. Both cops agreed that powerful people were capable of savage criminal acts-Lyle had seen it numberless times over his long career-but they both doubted that Glodt would be so spectacularly arrogant and reckless.
Having spent a couple of days, off and on, with Jeris, Plankton, and Moyle, I thought I understood them well enough to make this argument: Glodt had calculated he had plenty to gain from the cruel stunt-publicity and, even more importantly, added
"edge" that the Gonzo Sports Network would go for. And he figured he had little to lose if caught. Glodt could well have speculated that if Plankton and Moyle remained in character, they would consider the whole thing a hilarious practical joke-just guys joshing other guys on a colossal scale-and they would consider it unsporting, even unmanly, to press charges or ever to testify in court against the charmingly roguish prankster who also happened to own their network.
Having observed Plankton and Jeris at their most oafish, Thad found my scenario plausible. He was also eager to expose Glodt and, like me, to test the limits of the J-Bird's willingness to let sadistic straight male jerks of a well-known type be sadistic straight male jerks of a well-known type. Lyle was indulging Thad and me by driving us over to Oyster Bay, and Welch came along to watch. On the way to Oyster Bay, Lyle had checked again with the other detectives working the case back in the city, but none reported any breaks.
Lyle said, "Miss Annette living next door to a tattoo parlor does get my attention."
"Is this one of the tattooists that was checked?" Welch asked.
"I'll find out."
Lyle phoned his office, spoke to someone there, and hung up. "It was checked out yesterday by the Oyster Bay department."
I said, "What did the questioning consist of? Did they ask Damien the tattooist if he was involved in the Moyle kidnapping, and he said no, and they left, or what?"
"It could have been something like that."
We sat for another minute looking down the street through the mist at the nail and tattoo parlors. The long business block was set back from the highway about thirty feet, with face-in parking along the facade. The second-story windows bore no signs or lettering, and it looked as if there were apartments behind them. That would square with my information from the J-Bird gang that Glodt's girlfriend lived above her nail parlor. At the center of the block was what looked like a first-floor entryway leading to the second-floor apartments. Fire regulations, I guessed, would have required a second entrance and stairway, probably in the rear of the building.
Thad said, "What if we just went up to the apartment over the nail parlor and knocked on the door?"
"And say what?" Lyle said. "Even if I identified myself as a police officer, whoever's in there could tell me to screw off. I could wake up a judge and ask for a search warrant if I had something more to go on than Strachey's imagination running wild. But I don't, so getting in there with either a legal document or a battering ram is not in the cards."
"The chances are good," I said, "that at this early hour everybody inside the apartment is asleep. Maybe Thad and I could get inside the apartment, look around, and either confirm that the J-Bird is being held in there or that he isn't, and then leave. Thad, do you think you could get us inside?"