Читать книгу City of Fear - Alafair Burke - Страница 18

Chapter Eleven

The distance between the Thirteenth Precinct and the Meatpacking District was almost exactly two miles, but culturally, the neighborhoods were a globe apart. The short drive from the east twenty-something blocks of Manhattan to the far west teens unveiled a dramatic transformation from the sterile and generic high rises of Stuyvesant Town to what was currently the city’s hottest neighborhood.

The key to the Meatpacking District’s current popularity rested in its unique blend of glamor and grit. All of the upscale requirements were here – high-end boutiques, trendy clubs with signature cocktails, expensive restaurants with tiny portions piled into aesthetically pleasing towers. But they existed in loftlike, pared-down spaces that still had the feel – if not the actual structure – of rehabbed warehouses. The streets outside were narrow, many still cobblestone, adding to the sense of an old neighborhood uncovered, dusted off, and polished by its latest visitor.

And, of course, there was the name. Not SoHo. Not Tribeca. Not NoLIta. Nothing cutesy, crisp, or clean. This was the Meatpacking District, and, lest you forget it, the distinctly bloody odor emanating from the remaining butchers and beef wholesalers was there to remind you: this was a neighborhood with substance, history, and dirt beneath its blue-collar fingernails. Just ask the Appletini-sipping supermodel taking a load off her Manolo Blahniks on the stool next to yours.

Ellie had called Pulse from the car on their way to the west side. There had been no answer at the club where Chelsea was last seen – just a recording over techno music with the club’s location and hours – but Rogan figured it was worth a pop-in before trying to track down a manager through business licenses and other paperwork.

The entrance to the club was underwhelming, at least before sundown. No velvet rope. No bass thumping onto the street outside. No well-dressed revelers lined up in front, eager to be selected for admission. No stone-faced body builders clothed in black to pass judgment on who was worthy and who must remain waiting. Just a set of double wooden doors – tall, heavy, and closed, like the sealed entrance to a fortress.

A frosted glass banner ran along the top of the threshold, the word Pulse etched discreetly across it. The trendiest establishments always had the least conspicuous signage. Some bars had no signs at all. One hot spot around the corner from here didn’t even have a name. If you were cool enough to be welcome, you’d know it was there, and you’d know where it was.

As Ellie pulled open the heavy wooden door on the right, the first thing that struck her about the darkened club was its temperature. In the second week of March, it shouldn’t have been colder inside the building than out. ‘Geez. They’re taking the whole meatpacking concept a bit literally,’ she said.

‘Don’t you get out, Hatcher?’

‘Not to places like this.’ Ellie wondered again about her partner’s off-duty lifestyle. She scanned the lofty space. The club was dark and windowless, but had enough accent lights here and there to provide a general sense of the place. Clean. White. Really white. Swaths of crisp cotton hung from the twenty-foot ceilings to the floor. Ellie’s usual haunts were decorated by dartboards, jukeboxes, and dusty black-and-white photographs of pregentrified New York.

‘A few hours from now, bodies will be crammed into this place like a full pack of cigarettes. And trust me, no one will be complaining that it’s cold.’

‘Hey, numbnuts.’ A tall, muscular man wearing a fitted black T-shirt and dark blue jeans appeared behind the glass bar. ‘We’re closed.’ His announcement delivered, he continued on with his business of unpacking bottles of Grey Goose vodka from a cardboard box.

Ellie looked at her partner with amusement. ‘Which of the numbnuts gets to break the news?’

Rogan flashed a bright white smile, pulled his shield from his waist, and held it beside his face. ‘You say you’re closed, but your door out front’s unlocked. Who’s the numbnut?’

The man behind the bar emptied his hands of the two bottles he was holding and brushed his palms off on his jeans pockets. ‘Sorry ’bout that. You guys look more like customers than cops.’

He stepped around the counter and met them halfway, next to an elevated runway extending across the dance floor. A trim of hot pink neon light ran along the runway edge.

‘I’m expecting a couple deliveries,’ he said, nodding toward the entrance. ‘But I’m the only one here right now.’

‘Not a problem if you’re the person who can help us out,’ Rogan said. ‘And who exactly are you?’

‘Oh, sorry.’ Two apologies already. That was good. Rogan was establishing his authority over a guy who was used to lording over the minions who felt blessed to enter this sanctuary. ‘Scott Bell. I’m the assistant club manager. Is there some kind of problem? We’ve been keeping our occupancy down since the last time you guys were out.’

‘We’re not here about fire codes. We’re here because of her.’ Rogan removed a sheet of paper from his suit pocket and unfolded it. It was the photograph of Chelsea and her friends that had been taken with Jordan’s iPhone the previous night at the restaurant before dinner. Ellie had cropped it down to a close-up of Chelsea. They were more likely to find people who recognized her using that picture than one taken today.

Bell the bartender took a two-second glance at the printout. ‘I don’t know what to tell you. We’ve got hundreds of girls just like her coming through here every night.’

‘Well, this particular girl was here last night,’ Rogan said. ‘Late.’

‘So were a lot of people.’

‘Yeah, but my guess is, most of them got home safe and sound and are sleeping it off as we speak.’

‘What’s the problem? She OD’d, and you want to blame it on my club? I don’t know how many times I’ve told you guys that we do everything we can to keep that shit out of here.’

‘You really think two detectives are going to show up in the middle of the day about some drugs going in and out of a Manhattan nightclub? Why don’t we go down to Christopher Street and bust some of the flip-flop boys for having wide stances while we’re at it?’

‘Hey, whatever floats your boat.’

‘Take another look, Scott,’ Rogan said. As he tapped the paper in front of the bar manager another time, Ellie found herself looking at it as well. Now that the picture was cropped to focus only on Chelsea, something about it was bothering her. She scanned the photograph from top to bottom, left to right, but couldn’t place her finger on the problem.

‘She was here last night. She was hanging in one of the VIP rooms.’ Bell locked resentful eyes with Rogan until the detective dropped the bombshell. ‘And she was found strangled a couple hours later.’

Bell’s eyes dropped immediately to the printout. ‘Oh, fuck.’

‘There we go. That’s the most authentic response you’ve given us since we got here. By tomorrow morning, the name of this club is going to be in every newspaper, next to a picture just like this one, while everyone who scans the headline is going to wonder whether this is a safe place to be. So if I were you, I’d drop the attitude and start asking how you can help us.’

Bell swallowed. ‘I – I –’ He ran the fingertips of both hands through his dark brown hair. ‘Fuck. I don’t know what I can do to help. I don’t remember her.’

‘You’re sure?’ Ellie asked.

He shook his head. ‘If you’re saying she was here, then she was here. But when you spend enough time in clubs, everyone looks the same.’

Ellie had of course never met Chelsea Hart, but she found herself replaying flashes of the conversations she’d had that morning with Chelsea’s friends. Chelsea would never leave us in limbo like this. She was always the one who’d meet other people for us to hang out with. Chelsea’s going to freak if she misses the deadline for her Othello paper; she wants to be an English major. Someone has to remember seeing her – she’s a really good dancer. It seemed profoundly sad that Chelsea had spent her last couple of hours in a place where no one was special, where everyone looked the same.

‘Her friends said she was in a VIP room,’ Ellie said. ‘Who were the VIPs?’

‘You’re kidding, right?’

‘Hey, now, I thought we were done with the attitude,’ Rogan said.

‘Sorry. It’s just, I mean, we call them VIP rooms, and sometimes we get some actual celebs in here, but usually because they’re C-list and we’re paying them. Most nights, it’s just some dumb group of nobodies who called with enough notice and slapped down a fat enough deposit for prepaid liquor to create a guest list.’

‘See, you’re more helpful than you think,’ Ellie said. ‘We’ll take a look at those guest lists.’

Bell’s face momentarily brightened before it fell again. ‘Shit. They’ll be gone by now.’ He made his way over to a stainless steel podium near the entrance and fished out a clipboard from a built-in shelf. He skimmed through the top few pages, then flipped to the back. ‘This one’s for tonight. We got rid of last night’s already.’

‘It’s not in a computer?’ Ellie asked.

‘All in pencil. Too many last-minute changes to run back and forth to the office.’

‘Garbage?’

‘Gone,’ Bell said, shaking his head. ‘We’ve got to get the place clean right after closing so it doesn’t stink like all the spilled booze.’

‘We’ll take credit card numbers instead,’ Ellie said. ‘Easy enough for us to get names from there.’

‘What credit card numbers?’

‘You said people have to leave a deposit for the VIP rooms? I assume that involves credit cards.’

‘Yeah, right. Okay, yeah. I can get that for you. Definitely.’ It was clear from Bell’s eagerly nodding head that he was happy to have finally found a way to be useful.

‘A list of employees would be nice, too,’ she added.

The nodding continued for a few rounds, but then slowed to a pensive halt. ‘Employees. From here?’ Bell asked, pointing to the ground in front of him.

‘Unless you know of some other club this girl went to before someone tossed her body by the East River.’

‘But – but what does that have to do with –’

‘Um, hello? Does the name Darryl Littlejohn ring a bell?’

A couple of years earlier, a student from Ellie’s alma mater, John Jay College, disappeared after having a final drink at a SoHo bar just before closing time. Her barely recognizable naked body was found the next day on a road outside Spring Creek Park in Brooklyn. It took police a week to conclude that the helpful bouncer who told them he’d seen the victim leave alone was in fact the same man who’d stuffed a sock in the girl’s mouth, wrapped her entire head with transparent packing tape, and then brutally raped and strangled her. When she saw the victim’s photograph in the newspaper, Ellie thought that she might have met the criminology graduate student during an alumni event at John Jay’s Women’s Center.

‘That’s my point,’ Bell said. ‘That guy had, like, five felony convictions.’

Seven, actually, Ellie thought. And he was on parole. His mere presence in that bar past nine o’clock at night would have been enough to violate him if his PO had known.

‘We don’t run that kind of club. I do background checks. We do drug testing. We have biannual employment reviews.’ Bell ticked off each of his good deeds on his fingers.

‘Scott, calm down.’ Rogan put his hand on Bell’s shoulder and gave it a small squeeze. It was one of the standard moves that Ellie rarely got to use. For Rogan, and about ninety percent of cops, a small touch like that was a sign of brotherhood, a soothing indication that the touch’s recipient was viewed as one of the good guys. From thirty-year-old Ellie, with her wavy blond hair and a body that men always seemed to notice no matter how modestly she dressed, that kind of contact was viewed – depending on the confidence of the recipient – as either provocative or emasculating.

‘When are you gonna clue in?’ Rogan continued. ‘We are not code enforcement. We’re not vice. We want to find out who murdered this sweet college girl who was visiting New York from Indiana. That’s all we’re trying to do. There’s no problem here.’ Rogan moved his hand across the gap between the two men’s chests. They were copacetic.

‘Yeah, all right. I got it on the computer in back. With the credit cards.’

‘Good man, Scott.’

‘I gotta call my boss, though, okay? The manager.’

‘You wouldn’t be doing your job if you didn’t. But you’ll tell him we’re cool, right?’

‘Yeah, no problem.’

‘Do we need to worry about him back there alone?’ Ellie asked, watching Bell walk through an office door at the rear of the club.

‘I don’t get that feeling,’ Rogan said, helping himself to a spot behind the counter to check out the labels on the various liquor bottles. ‘Do you?’

‘Nope.’

‘Just checking?’

‘Yep.’

Ellie was grateful to have a few minutes away from Scott Bell so she could refocus her attention on the photograph of Chelsea Hart that had been bothering her.

‘Take a look again at this,’ she said, laying the now-familiar image before Rogan on the bar. ‘Notice anything significant?’

‘No, but apparently I’m supposed to. What’s up?’

‘Earrings. She was wearing earrings last night at dinner, but not this morning when we found her at the park.’

He squinted, mentally pulling up an image of the body he’d seen at the crime scene. ‘You’re sure?’

‘Positive.’

He was silent for a few seconds, and Ellie assumed he was having the same thoughts that ran through her mind when she’d first made the observation. No pawnshop would buy what was obviously costume jewelry, so there was no point following that avenue. The earrings could have fallen out in a struggle. Or, more interestingly, they could have been removed as a souvenir.

‘Any ideas about how we use that information?’ Rogan asked.

‘Not yet.’

‘Well, at least we know what to look for.’

‘If only we knew where to look.’

Bell returned from the back office carrying a thin stack of paper just as Rogan’s cell phone rang. Rogan flipped open the phone, read the screen, and excused himself to the corner of the bar.

Bell handed Ellie a two-page document, neatly stapled together in the upper left-hand corner. ‘This is a list of bills last night for parties with bottle service – amounts with form of payment. A couple of them paid cash, but there’s a bunch of credit cards there as well.’

Ellie gave the single-spaced document a quick scan and had to suppress a cough. The two parties who paid with cash had racked up bills of nearly a thousand dollars each. Most of the credit card charges went into the four digits.

‘Are these charges just for drinks?’ she asked.

Bell folded his arms across his chest, his confidence returning for a subject matter that was familiar territory. ‘Depends on what you mean by ‘just drinks’. We don’t serve food, that’s for sure. But people pay big for bottle service.’

‘That just means you pay for a bottle of liquor. Even if you use a triple markup, how much can that be?’

‘We don’t look at it as a markup.’ His grin told a different story. ‘It’s not just a bottle. It’s bottle service. You get the VIP room. You get a private server assigned to your room to mix and pour the drinks. It’s the personal touch that people are paying for.’

‘That,’ Rogan said, returning from his phone call, ‘and not having to wait in a five-man-deep crowd around the bar, just to get a drink.’

Ellie suddenly got the picture. In a world where a $15 martini bought you crummy service, the wealthy were willing to pay for something different.

‘So how much is, I don’t know, a bottle of Grey Goose, for example?’

‘We’re at $350.’

Now she did allow herself a cough.

‘Bungalow 8’s at $400,’ Bell continued. ‘I hear a few places are about to go even higher.’