The Cold Room Read online

  I raised my left hand to display my shield. ‘Good morning, ma’am.’

  The woman’s shoulders flew up and she rose onto her tiptoes, scattering crystals of sugar from the jar she was holding. Then she spun to face me, revealing cheeks filmed with black stubble that contrasted sharply with the green mascara on her upper lids and a well-defined adam’s apple that bobbed up and down like a yo-yo.

  For a long moment, until I finally broke the silence, her eyes jerked back and forth, from my weapon to my shield, from my shield to my weapon, as if was I offering her a choice, pick one or the other.

  ‘Is there anybody else in this building?’ I asked.

  She raised her head to look into my eyes. ‘Dimitri,’ she shouted, ‘you best get your sorry Greek ass in here. We got company.’

  The door on the other side of room opened a second later to reveal a short muscular man wearing a T-shirt and a pair of blue boxer shorts covered with little red hearts. The man’s black hair stuck out in all directions, while his once-prominent nose was flattened at the bridge and bent at the tip. In his right hand, he carried a length of galvanized pipe, maybe two inches in diameter and three feet long.

  I let the barrel of the Glock swing in his direction. ‘I’m a cop,’ I told him, ‘and I’m going to be spending some time here. My business has nothing to do with you, but if you don’t put down that pipe, I’ll kill you anyway.’

  Dimitri didn’t hesitate. He tossed the pipe into the room behind him where it clanged on the floor.

  ‘If there’s anyone else back there,’ I said, ‘now would be a good time to tell me.’

  ‘There’s nobody else in this building,’ he replied, his wide mouth twisting into a sneer of defiance. ‘I don’t allow nobody else. This is my home.’

  I turned to his companion. ‘Tell me your name.’

  ‘Giselle.’

  ‘Giselle, if I put this gun back in its holster, Dimitri’s not gonna do anything stupid, right?’

  ‘Not stupid enough to make you take it out again.’

  I holstered the Glock, put my badge away, then removed my wallet. ‘Call this rent,’ I said, offering Giselle a twenty.

  She took the bill, stuffing it into the pocket of her robe. ‘You plan to stay long enough for breakfast?’

  ‘What’re you making?’

  ‘Making?’ Giselle swept the room, her vermilion-tipped fingers somehow at odds with a forearm that would have embarrassed Popeye. ‘Do you see a stove? Do I look like somebody’s housewife?’

  ‘What she’s sayin’,’ Dimitri said, ‘is that if you want breakfast, she could fetch it from the bodega on the corner.’

  ‘Long as you’re payin’ for it,’ Giselle added.

  I responded by retrieving my kit, which I’d left outside, then crossing the room to a large window at the front of the building. Several inches thick, the window was made of translucent glass bricks, a few of which had been knocked out, perhaps in a failed attempt to gain entry. I sat down on a milk crate and sighted along one of these holes.

  With my field of vision narrow and rounded, the effect was oddly telescopic, but I could see the first floor of Domestic Solutions well enough, both the roll-up door and a smaller doorway on the eastern side of the building. The smaller door was windowless and covered with a sheet of metal that gleamed in the angled sunlight. Both its lock and its outer edges were shielded to resist the insertion of a pry bar.

  I fished my Thermos out of the garbage bag and poured myself a cup of coffee. ‘Tell me what you know about the people across the street.’

  ‘They’ll be goin’ out soon,’ Dimitri said. ‘In the van.’

  ‘They?’

  ‘All I know is every Monday morning, around seven thirty, them girls get driven off. And they don’t come back until Saturday afternoon. What happens in between, I can’t say.’

  ‘Who drives them?’

  ‘A white man,’ Giselle announced. ‘A damn foreigner.’

  ‘Does he stay with them, or does he come back?’

  ‘He comes back a few hours later.’ Giselle took a pot of water off the grate above the Sterno lamp and poured the water into a bowl before producing a throwaway razor. Finally, she began to soap her face.

  ‘Describe the man.’

  ‘Men, baby, two of them, both ofays, one uglier than the next.’

  ‘Describe them.’

  Giselle went back to work on her face and Dimitri took over, leaving me to wonder if they also finished each other’s sentences.

  ‘The one’s got a skinny face and jumpy eyes, bald across the top. The other dude’s older. Got a big round face like a pumpkin.’ Dimitri squeezed his eyelids together. ‘And tiny little eyes that look down at you like you were shit on the sidewalk.’

  I took out two more twenties and handed them over. ‘Go to the bodega, get anything you want for yourselves, just don’t come back until dark.’

  That said, I turned my back on them and began to watch the street. It was still quiet outside, but I wasn’t fooled. At night, especially on weekends, industrial neighborhoods can seem like ghost towns, like they’ve been abandoned for decades. But they roar back to life on weekday mornings. The bosses and the managers arrive first, along with a favored employee or two. Lights go on, doors roll up, forklifts begin to move, trucks are pulled out onto the street. Then the workers begin to arrive . . .

  ‘It’s not right, evicting a man from his own house. You’re only doin’ this because we’re homeless.’

  Giselle chimed in before I could point out that homeless people, by definition, don’t have houses.

  ‘Uh-uh, baby,’ she said, ‘it’s our damn lifestyle the officer don’t approve of. Thinks because I’m of a different sexual persuasion I ain’t got no rights at all.’

  I looked from Dimitri to Giselle, then smiled my broadest smile. ‘Okay, you can hang around. Just give me back the sixty dollars.’

  Giselle stepped away from me as though I’d just farted. Her eyes opened wide and she pursed her lips in distaste. I continued to stare at her, with my hand out and my affable smile firmly in place. The ball was in her court.

  ‘I ain’t about to leave my abode,’ she finally announced, ‘till I fix my face.’

  At seven o’clock, a van pulled into the driveway in front of Domestic Solutions’ roll-up door. I could see Aslan in the driver’s seat and someone alongside him, a man. I strained to make out the man’s features, but the angle was too severe. The view I had was of the back of his head. It might have been the man with the narrow eyes. It might have been anyone.

  Aslan leaned on the horn, once, then twice, before the door rolled up. A moment later the van disappeared from view. At seven ten, a woman emerged from the warehouse. She was plump and middle-aged and her thinning hair was dyed a brassy red. Without glancing in either direction, she slapped a magnetized sign on the door, then went back inside. I had to peer through one lens of my binoculars to read the sign. On top, in white letters, it revealed the name of the company: Domestic Solutions. Beneath that, the address: 532 Eagle Street.

  At seven thirty, the larger door rolled up and the Ford Econoline backed out. The van was driven by Aslan and there were five women inside, the same women I’d seen at Blessed Virgin. They were gone a moment later, undoubtedly on their way to work. For the next three hours, until Aslan returned, all was quiet at Domestic Solutions. Aslan parked the van on the street and entered the warehouse through the smaller door without unlocking it. Domestic Solutions was open for business.

  I could hear the wheels of industry turning in the other warehouses on Eagle Street, but my limited view was so unchanging, I might have been staring at a picture on a wall. My back hurt, of course, from leaning into the narrow opening in the glass wall, and both my eyes were red and itchy because I kept switching them in a useless effort to prevent fatigue. But my mind kept rolling along, faster and faster as the minutes ticked by, ignoring, even laughing at, my discomfort. It was now possible, I told myself, to coll
apse the entire house of cards, to bring all the guilty parties to justice. The entire process would take no longer than a few days and it could begin as soon as I determined that the fat man with the narrow eyes was in the Domestic Solutions warehouse.

  Needless to say, the sequence of events, as I finally imagined them, didn’t pop into my brain fully formed. But once I’d identified the various elements and set them in place, I couldn’t find a hole in the logic.

  Fabricate a reason to bring the fat man into the precinct, then dig up Clyde Kelly and have him make an identification. Arrest the fat man on the basis of that identification and use the arrest to obtain a search warrant for the van and the warehouse. Domestic Solutions was a business and businesses generate paperwork. An examination of that paperwork would certainly reveal the names and addresses of its customers. If Jane wasn’t killed in the warehouse, then she was necessarily killed at her place of work, since she had no other life. And if she was killed where she worked, given the nature of her various injuries, trace evidence would be found.

  And then there was the fat man and the charge of second-degree murder I would level against him. Would he cut a deal? If he hadn’t killed Jane? If he’d only been involved in the cover-up? Though I couldn’t be absolutely sure, I was looking forward to presenting the argument in favor of cooperation.

  I didn’t forget Sister Kassia’s plea or Adele’s admonition as I put my strategy together. The women were now at work and wouldn’t return until the weekend. Aslan could not round them up in the short time between the fat man’s arrest and my obtaining a search warrant for the premises. Once I knew where they were, of course, I’d be after them myself. And I’d give Sister Kassia a heads-up along the way. If Blessed Virgin wanted to hire a lawyer to represent the women, that was fine by me.

  I riffled through my notebook until I found Clyde Kelly’s information, then dialed the phone number of the Karyn Porter-Mannberg Senior Residence. The woman who answered told me that Clyde was still a client, though he wasn’t in the building.

  ‘Most of the time,’ she volunteered, ‘he comes back in time for dinner. If not, he always returns for the ten o’clock curfew.’

  By three thirty, my lower back nearly in spasm, I was ready to call it a day. I was expected at the Nine-Two and I was in desperate need of a quick shower, not to mention a change of clothes. I hurriedly packed my kit, then stole a last peek through the broken window just as the fat man emerged, carrying a bag of garbage in each hand.

  I watched him walk to the curb, his gait quick and graceful despite an extra fifty pounds, watched him look, very deliberately, up and down the block. For just a second, as his head swept from right to left, his narrow eyes crossed mine. No more than slits, they were as disfiguring as a birthmark or a tattoo. Kelly’s identification would be quick and sure, and beyond challenge in a courtroom.

  The fat man nodded once after completing his sweep, then crossed the street, disappearing from view. A moment later, he returned with his hands empty. The garbage, apparently, had gone over the fence.

  FOURTEEN

  I was up and moving before the door closed behind the fat man. Down the corridor, through the lot, across the street. I tried to compose myself as I went. A pure waste of time. I entered the small office as though I owned it.

  On the far side of the room, Aslan and the fat man sat behind large desks placed at right angles to each other. The woman with the red hair was standing to my right, at the foot of a stairway leading to the second floor. She had a toddler by the hand, a boy wearing a Mickey Mouse t-shirt. Aslan said something to the woman in a language I didn’t understand. Without answering, she picked the child up and climbed the stairs. I let her go, not because I wouldn’t have relished a conversation with her, but because I was much more interested in the joint Aslan held between the thumb and forefinger of his right hand.

  Aslan stared at my badge, then into my eyes. I expected him to make some effort to conceal the joint, even to swallow it whole. Instead, he laid it on the edge of a glass ashtray in a gesture of pure defiance that I would later make him regret.

  ‘Okay,’ he said, his tone echoing his earlier gesture, ‘you are big-deal cop. Now can put tin badge in pocket and show me search warrant.’

  ‘Hey,’ I said, looking directly into the narrow eyes of Aslan’s companion, ‘what’s with your buddy’s attitude? He doesn’t even know what I’m here for and already he’s asking for a warrant. Gimme a break.’

  When neither man replied, I inventoried the room, taking my time about it. Perhaps twenty feet square, the office was paneled with sheets of some material halfway between wood and wallpaper. Dark blue tiles, shot with irregular veins of silver, covered the floor.

  The tiles were bright and shiny, as they should have been, given the number of servants who lived there.

  Above my head, an air conditioner blasted away. A pair of three-drawer filing cabinets to my left were arranged along the front wall. I registered these items quickly, suppressing an urge to open those cabinets and examine their contents, until my attention finally settled on a flag mounted behind Aslan’s desk. The flag was bright green, with three stripes – white, red, white – about two-thirds of the way down. At the flag’s center, in stark black and white, a large disc contained a semicircle of nine stars. The stars supported a pedestal on which an animal lay with its legs dangling and its head facing outward, so that it stared at me through a pair of ghost-white eyes.

  ‘That a cat or a dog?’ I asked Aslan, pointing to the flag.

  He stared at me for a moment, then blinked twice before swiveling his chair in a half-circle to face the flag. ‘This is wolf of Chechnya,’ he told me. ‘All Chechen peoples are coming from wolfs. This is in our national song. This is what we believe.’

  ‘Yeah? It must be a pretty wild place then. You do a lot of hunting?’

  He broke into song at that point, singing to the flag in a language I assumed to be Chechen. I stepped forward, took the half-smoked joint from the ashtray and put it in my shirt pocket. Then I winked at Aslan’s companion, who stared back at me, so unmoving he might have been carved from clay. Dimitri had been right about the man’s gaze. He was, indeed, looking at me like I was shit on the sidewalk.

  I came forward to sit on the edge of his desk, leaning down to study an open checkbook. I barely had time to register a signature on the top check, Konstantine Barsakov, before Aslan challenged me.

  ‘I have ask you before. In America, man’s home is castle. Where is search warrant for castle?’

  ‘Well, it’s a funny thing, but your castle is exactly what I’m here about. What’d you say your name was?’

  ‘I don’t have to say name. Is unconstitutional.’

  ‘Nope, you’re wrong there. Any police officer can ask any citizen for identification at any time. If that identification is not produced, that police officer can detain that citizen until such time as it is.’

  This was a complete lie, but not one likely to be unmasked. Aslan’s eyes traveled to the ashtray, now minus the joint he’d laid down a few minutes before. Then his eyes jumped to mine, displaying a blind and unreasoning hatred.

  ‘Also,’ I added, ‘your attitude is really bad here. I just asked for your name. I didn’t ask you to submit to a strip search.’

  The clear implication, that a strip search would follow a second refusal, didn’t escape Aslan. I could see the struggle in his eyes. He was going to have to back down and he didn’t like it.

  ‘Aslan Khalid.’

  ‘There, was that so hard?’ I glanced down at the second man. ‘And what’s your name, pal?’

  ‘Konstantine Barsakov.’

  ‘And what do you do for Domestic Solutions? What’s your job?’

  ‘I am president,’ Barsakov replied, his English much better than Aslan’s. ‘Now tell us what you want or I will call the lawyer. And remove your ass from my desk.’

  ‘Okay.’ I rose to my feet, leaving a sweaty stain behind, then spread my hands d
efensively. ‘See, it’s really just a routine complaint. This building is zoned industrial and you have people living here. That’s the complaint, anyway. That you have people living here and the conditions are unsafe.’

  I might have left all this unsaid. My intention, when I came through the door, was to use the building code violation as a pretext to detain Konstantine. That ploy was no longer necessary; the joint in my pocket was pretext enough. Still, I couldn’t resist an urge to needle Aslan, to play to his rage. Turned down at the corners, the man’s small mouth had hardened into the sort of petulant frown I associated with a bratty toddler about to launch a temper tantrum.

  When Konstantine failed to reply, I turned to his partner. ‘Do you deny the charges?’ I asked.

  Aslan stared at me for a moment, his eyes traveling from my soggy hair, to the t-shirt plastered to my chest, to my frayed jeans. That my mission had nothing to with the building code was obvious and I had to assume he was already thinking of the murdered girl his partner had dumped six weeks before.

  ‘No more I am playing with you this game,’ Aslan finally declared, reaching for the telephone on his desk. ‘I am calling lawyer.’

  ‘Here, let me help you.’

  I hooked my fingers under the lip of the desk and flipped it over. Aslan tried to get out of the way, but he wasn’t fast enough. The desk caught him in the hips and his chair went flying. Then the monitor of his Dell computer imploded a few feet from his head and he cried out, despite himself. I drew my Glock and put on my game face. These were the foreign gangsters Capra had warned me against. I would treat them accordingly.

  ‘You,’ I said, leveling the Glock on Konstantine while Aslan struggled out from under the desk, ‘get up against the wall.’

  When he continued to stare at me, I drew the gun back, fully prepared to slam it into the side of his head. He apparently got the message, pushing his chair away from the desk, rising slowly, turning and walking off to face the wall. I might have demanded that he raise his hands at that point, but there was only one pocket in his warm-up suit, a back pocket which held his wallet.