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 collapse 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
