Same difference, p.22
Same Difference, page 22
‘We’re not cops,’ I said, gesturing toward Ken and myself. ‘We don’t need proof to act. We’re not going to arrest anybody. But if Brooker is holding Eliza somewhere, we need to find out where and we need to find out fast.’
Mank is a cop (I think I might have mentioned that) and, as such, hates to believe that other cops aren’t quite as upstanding and honest as he is, but this wasn’t Mayberry, and Brooker wasn’t Andy Griffith (I watch a lot of classic television). He was pacing the tiny floor in our kitchen while I made coffee and Ken sat around looking at us. We have extra-heavy-duty kitchen chairs for exactly that purpose.
‘The only person who ties someone who looks like Brooker to Damien is Laura Rapinoe,’ Mank said. ‘She’s not the most reliable witness I’ve ever met. That’s not a lot to go on.’
‘He has the same first name as Brooker, too,’ Ken pointed out. I got the sense he was enjoying this because he knew the whole back story that Mank and I had, and he liked seeing us argue a point without trying to piss each other off.
‘The point isn’t whether we can prove it’s Brooker,’ I said, ignoring both men. ‘We think it’s Brooker. The point is where he might have taken Eliza. And I’m willing to believe he isn’t stupid enough to go to his own apartment with her. What can you find out about him from NYPD files, Mank?’
‘I am really uncomfortable digging into personal details of a police officer, even if those files are open to me as a member of the department.’ Mank didn’t want to believe Brooker was the culprit because that would lead to speculation that Brooker had killed Damien and Merchant, too. That was something a cop would do almost anything not to believe about a fellow officer.
‘Give me your password and let me look,’ Ken suggested. ‘I’m not at all uncomfortable doing that.’
Mank gave my brother the look I wanted to give him except that Ken actually shut up. Mank groaned lightly and gave me a different kind of look entirely. ‘I’ll look, but you can’t,’ he said. ‘I’ll tell you what I think is relevant and that’s all. This is not open to negotiation. Take it or leave it.’
‘We’ll take it,’ I said before Ken could think of some way to mess up the deal.
‘OK. I need a space where I can be alone so nobody’s looking over my shoulder.’ I was going to protest but he was right: one of us would have been trying to eavesdrop. ‘I don’t have my laptop and I’m not using yours, so it’ll be on my phone. Probably take about half an hour. Where?’ Mank looked around as if he hadn’t been in my apartment before. He had.
‘My bedroom or Ken’s,’ I said. ‘Do you need to plug in your phone?’ I might have cringed, thinking of the times I’d plugged in myself and not my phone in my own room.
‘It won’t hurt. Do you have a charger?’ Did we have a charger?
We set him up in Ken’s bedroom at Mank’s insistence. Maybe being alone in my room would have projected the wrong kind of image for him, or he’d noticed that Ken’s room, like Ken, is larger. Mank closed the door and I heard him knocking around inside, no doubt plugging in the charger and his phone. I figured he’d set up at Ken’s desk in a far corner of the room rather than have to sit on his bed the whole time. With all the privacy contingencies in mind, I backed away from the bedroom door and headed back into the living room.
‘You know what bothers me?’ Ken asked when I got there.
‘The fact that all women don’t fall at your feet?’ I suggested.
‘Well, yeah, but that’s not what I was thinking of. How come Brooker had time to come after you if he’s holding Eliza? Can he just lock her up somewhere when he needs to go be a cop?’
I love my brother but there are times I truly can’t follow the way he thinks. ‘That’s what’s bothering you?’ I said. ‘Brooker’s daycare situation?’
‘What if he didn’t kill Damien?’ Ken said, digging into this devil’s advocate role. ‘What if he really is just a detective who’s now trying to figure out who staged his partner’s suicide while working on a murder in the Bronx? What if there’s someone we’re overlooking?’
‘Like who?’ I sat in the side chair to consider my brother, who had walked into the living room and deposited himself, sideways, across the sofa, his feet hanging over the arm.
‘What about Laura?’
‘Well, we just left her and Eliza definitely wasn’t there.’
‘You’re talking about a woman who signed her cat’s name to a lease because she thought it was funny,’ Ken pointed out, as if that proved something.
‘What motivation did Laura have to kill Damien? Or especially Merchant? She loved one and probably never met the other.’ Dammit, I was going to keep logic on my side.
Ken didn’t sit up, because there’s nothing he loves better than lying all over the couch (extra long, for three people), but his face did get a little more thoughtful. ‘OK, I can’t answer that,’ he said.
‘Now, if we could find this “associate” of Jules’, maybe he had a grudge with both guys, but I can’t think of a reason he’d kidnap Eliza, because he’d only do what Jules told him to do.’ Everywhere I looked in this case there were questions that had answers that led to more questions. ‘And if Damien wasn’t strangled, what killed him?’
‘And what about Malcolm X. Mitchell?’ Ken said out of nowhere.
I sat back on the chair and let myself be overwhelmed for a moment. ‘Yeah, what about him?’ I said.
The door to Ken’s bedroom opened and in walked Mank, putting his phone back into his pocket lest either of us see the web page he might have been looking at a minute ago. Mank knows Ken and I can do things he can’t, but he’s not really clear on what. Seeing back through time is not one of them.
Mank looked troubled, which led me to believe he’d found something that made a fellow officer (likely Brooker) look bad. That might have been bad news for him but not for me. People have different priorities.
Nobody said anything until Mank sat down next to me on the side chair rather than try to displace any particular section of my brother. ‘OK,’ he said. ‘There is something that took a little digging to find out, but as city employees officers are required to list investments that might cause a conflict of interest.’
Investments? Did Brooker list a campus drug business as a side business for him? I didn’t think he was that stupid.
‘What kind of investments?’ I asked, because saying what I’d just thought out loud would have made me sound like an idiot.
‘Like real estate,’ Mank said, sounding depleted. It really bothered him when he had to admit that his fellow officers weren’t all boy scouts. (Or just scouts, these days.) ‘It seems like Detective Brooker owns a twenty-percent stake in a company called Urban Investments, which has a number of interests, including apartment buildings, bodegas, a parking garage and two small hotels around the city.’
That sounded expensive. Twenty percent? ‘Where’d he get the money for that?’ I asked.
‘It’s a good question,’ Mank admitted. ‘But the real problem is that one of the investments Urban made was a particular real-estate purchase, made only six months ago.’
Ken actually sat up, which was more than I would have expected. ‘What?’ He couldn’t say that lying down?
‘They own the Bronx apartment building where Damien Van Dorn was murdered,’ Mank said.
We sat there for a moment. Just sat.
‘Wow.’ Ken exhaled. ‘That’s a pretty big coincidence.’
‘Worse,’ I said. ‘There’s not a chance in the world Brooker didn’t know that.’
More sitting and staring. I don’t know about the others but I was trying to absorb what Mank had just told us.
Ken seemed to come to consciousness first. He stood up, which for him can be a time-consuming process. ‘Well, we have to go there,’ he said.
I’m not that quick on the uptake. ‘To the Bronx?’ I said.
Mank nodded at Ken. ‘He’s right. That’s the most likely place Brooker would have taken Eliza. Julio’s operation is based there; that’s why Damien went to that building. Brooker clearly knows the place. He’s one of the owners. He’d never expect anyone to show up there looking for Eliza. If she’s still alive, I’m willing to bet that’s where she is.’
I didn’t want them to be right, but they were. I got up, too. ‘Do you have your gun, Ken?’ I asked.
He gave me a look that indicated he did. He’s licensed to carry it but he doesn’t have it on him all the time. I never carry a weapon because I really don’t like them.
‘So do I,’ Mank chimed in.
I turned to face him and shook my head. ‘You’re not going, Detective Mankiewicz. You are a member of the New York Police Department and you have not been called to the scene. There’s not even any evidence that a crime has been committed there. You need to let us do the legwork on this one and wait until you hear from me. But just in case Brooker still has me on his radar, I’m turning my phone off until we see what’s going on up there.’
‘I’ve been with you all night,’ Mank said. ‘I’m going as a private citizen, not an officer.’
Ken folded his arms across his chest. ‘You don’t want to have to get past me, Rich,’ he said.
Mank looked my brother up and down. ‘No, I don’t. I guess I’m not going.’
Ken and I started toward the door. Mank cleared his throat and we looked at him.
‘I’ll drive,’ he said.
My brother and I exchanged a look and waved him toward us. ‘Where will you park?’ I asked.
‘Anywhere I want. I’m a cop.’
THIRTY-FIVE
At night the building looked worse, and it hadn’t looked all that great to begin with. Luckily there was no game at the Stadium that night or the foot traffic would have been impossible. I guessed the Yankees were still out of town.
‘How do we approach it?’ I’d asked from the passenger seat of Mank’s car. ‘Do we go in together or do I go in and you follow if I need you?’ I was still operating on the unlikely theory that Mank would just sit quietly outside in his car and not do anything about the possible abduction and presence of murder suspects inside the building. It’s lonely in my reality.
‘We’re all going in together,’ Ken answered. ‘There’s strength in numbers and no advantage to sitting outside and wondering what’s going on.’ My brother has the capacity to think logically and it’s really annoying.
Mank, driving with his usual casual intensity (if that’s even possible), did not comment on my leaving him out of the scenario. He would just ignore my arguments and do what he thought was right. Men are infuriating.
I decided to show my displeasure by putting my chin on my chest and not speaking again while we were in motion because that’s exactly how mature I am. Luckily, by then we were close to our destination.
We did not linger at the entrance to the building. Just suffice it to say we got inside the lobby. Don’t ask me how. There’s no sense in you being privy to something that could get you in trouble.
Mank had done some research before we left the apartment as to the lessees in each of the spaces here. The three most likely residences for Jules’s pals were upstairs, on the second and fourth floors. We weren’t sure of their names, so checking the mail boxes wasn’t going to help. It would be trial and error. Hopefully not too much error. Our ‘informant’ from our previous visit had mentioned the fourth floor but he’d also been drinking something that smelled like embalming fluid.
Ken started moving around without speaking as if he were the lead officer in a war movie. He pointed at his eyes, then up the staircase, then at me. I looked at Mank but he appeared to be as baffled as I was. ‘What?’ I asked.
My brother looked royally irritated. ‘I’m going to go up first,’ he said in a hiss, ‘and then you follow me and we’ll hit the door.’
I gave him a light shove at the base of the staircase and passed him on the way up. ‘We’re going to knock on the door and wait,’ I instructed. ‘What if the first one isn’t the apartment we’re looking for?’
‘Their problem, not ours,’ he mumbled, but he followed me dutifully up the stairs, and I heard Mank’s footsteps behind him. I could picture the amused expression on the detective’s face. Dammit, he was cute.
Our informant from our first visit was nowhere to be seen, and given that he’d thought Julio was one of the people living here when I had seen the drug dealer’s considerably-more-upscale apartment in Manhattan, I wasn’t in a hurry to seek out more information from that gentleman. He’d tried, probably against his sense of self-preservation, but all we’d found had been in the basement we’d come to see anyway. And, unfortunately, more.
We reached the door to 2D and I practically had to restrain Ken from throwing his considerable shoulder into it. I held up a palm and showed it to him, he looked disgruntled and then I turned and knocked on the door, three times, sharply.
The woman who opened the door was not Jules, not Brooker, not Eliza and not anybody else I’d ever seen. She spoke in Spanish, and I know a few words. They weren’t enough. There was no one behind her as far as I could tell, so I thanked her because I didn’t know the words for ‘I apologize,’ and we backed away from her door, which she closed, looking puzzled as to why the Jehovah’s Witnesses were so big this year.
The second door yielded nothing. No one answered, and between my hearing and Ken’s it was fairly obvious that there weren’t any people inside, although we did hear a dog snoring a little. There was no reason to break down the door, although Ken seemed eager to try if just for fun. He was outvoted.
Based on the records Mank had scanned, there was only one other likely apartment to search, with no small children listed as residents and no people over the age of seventy-five. It was two more flights up.
Despite what Ken might have wanted us to believe, we were not in military gear and we were not carrying automatic weapons on our persons, so climbing up another couple of flights wasn’t really much of a concern. But my brother, who had adored GI Joe as a child, was playing it up to the hilt, turning each corner as if an assailant might be around the bend and taking the stairs two at a time. It was doing nothing more than playing soldier but Ken felt like he was making a contribution and I guessed there was some value in that. I’d devote some time to determining what that value might be at a later date.
After much macho posturing we finally ended up at the door to 4B, our last likely place to search. Ken plastered himself against the wall next to the door, facing Mank and me. Mank managed not to laugh out loud and gestured toward the door, inviting me to make the first move. I felt like this was an invitation to knock on an apartment door, so I did.
Unlike the last try, there was considerable sound from inside as soon as I knocked. Voices were in conversation, maybe heated conversation, although I couldn’t make out the words. I think Ken could because he looked even more grim if such a thing were possible. His expression indicated to me that things inside the apartment weren’t going well. I knocked again, louder.
Then I heard a voice that sounded much like Eliza’s with decent volume say, ‘Let me …’ something, and that was enough. I wanted to kick the door in but some strange, un-New-York instinct in me said to turn the doorknob, and the door just … opened.
No, it didn’t. This was New York. Nobody leaves their door unlocked. I considered my options and listened again. Then I heard someone say the word gun and that did it for me.
I threw my left shoulder hard into the door near the lock and it gave a little but didn’t break. So I gave it another shot and it broke through, which was lucky. My brother would no doubt have insisted on knocking down the door and then lording over me how much stronger he was for the rest of my life. The door swung open.
I pushed into the apartment with Mank and Ken (in that order) behind me. I noticed Ken had drawn the gun he’d brought with him and Mank had not. The scene that I’d interrupted was – and there is no other word for it – chaotic.
Standing in a fairly large main room was Brooker, along with Jules, a man with a birthmark next to his right eye, another moody-looking man I didn’t recognize (who did not have a birthmark next to his right eye), and Eliza. What I wasn’t expecting was that the only person holding a weapon (in this case, the handgun Anton Chekhov had no doubt given her at Rainbow’s apartment) was Eliza. She was pointing the gun at Brooker, who looked downright incensed but had his hands in the air. I could still see the bulge of his service weapon under his right arm, though. Eric/Jules/Julio did not appear to be armed and seemed to be mostly baffled, which in my experience was his default expression.
Oh yeah, and standing to the side, shoulders hunched like a defeated athlete, was Brian Hennessey.
‘Different,’ Ken said.
THIRTY-SIX
‘Eliza,’ I said in the friendliest voice I could muster, ‘what’s going on?’
‘That man grabbed me off the street and took me here because I’m trans,’ she said, pushing the gun even more toward the new guy without the birthmark. ‘I think he killed Damien and if he tries anything, I’m going to shoot him.’
‘That’s pretty straightforward,’ I said. I wasn’t sure if Eliza had gone off the deep end or if Brooker had, or (and this seemed a slightly more unlikely possibility) I had. In any event, at least one person in the room wasn’t acting with terrific judgment and I wanted to make sure things didn’t escalate further. I especially didn’t want Eliza shooting anybody. ‘But maybe we should put the guns away for now and try to figure this out, huh?’
‘That is the best choice, Fran.’ Mank had not pulled out his service weapon but he was inching his way carefully toward Brooker. No doubt he’d seen the gun under Brooker’s armpit too and wanted to defuse the situation as quickly as possible. ‘Why don’t we start by finding out who everyone here might be?’
