French Pressed

Bree’s lawyer friend. If I get lucky today, Joy’s case will never have to go to trial.”

“You think you can nail Keitel’s killer?”

“Vinny’s, too. I think Brigitte killed them both. She’s on the lam now, but Mike and I are on her trail.”

“Keep following it then.” Matt paused. “Look, I know I’ve been down on you in the past for butting in, for being a nose hound, but this is our daughter we’re talking about, so…anything you can do, Clare, anything…”

“I know, Matt. I’ve been doing the best I can—”

My eyes lifted up just then. I noticed Mike in his long overcoat, turning away from the newsstand. He glanced back at the Dodge, met my eyes.

“—now let me get back to work.”

Eighteen

The prescription bottle carried an Inwood address, which meant we had to go even farther uptown, way above 125th Street—the last road most tourist maps bothered to show as part of Manhattan Island.

The neighborhood was largely residential. Most of its structures were town houses, apartment buildings, and two- and three-family dwellings. It was probably the most suburban of Manhattan’s seventy-plus neighborhoods with three shopping districts, a hospital, and a public park.

Mike drove us up one quiet, tree-lined street and down another. When the car’s direction twisted and turned in a particularly odd way, I was a little confused whether we were heading east or west.

“The lay of the land’s different up here,” I remarked, leaning forward to peer at the passing street signs. “There’s no grid pattern.”

“Right,” Mike said. “Some of these streets are based on old Indian trails. They weren’t laid out by city planners like the rest of Manhattan.”

“Except not all of Manhattan has the grid,” I reminded him.

“True…”

The lanes in the West Village, for instance, were far from straight. This often confused people, but without the legal protection of historic preservation, my neighborhood’s one- and two-century-old town houses—including the four-story Federal that the Village Blend occupied—would have been razed by now and replaced with thirty- story apartment buildings, all lined up in the nice, neat pattern of the rest of the borough, with addresses that were standard, predictable, and all-conforming.

I leaned back against the car seat. “You know what? I’d rather have the Indian trails.”

Ironically, the address we were currently after was on a wild frontier, just beyond the invisible border of Inwood’s happy, middle-class Hispanic lives. Sherman Creek, a rundown subsection of Inwood, was located along a strip of the Harlem River. To get there we drove through a sprawling public housing project called the Dyckman Houses.

The Saturday afternoon weather was pleasant, bright, and only mildly chilly, yet the grounds around the project appeared close to deserted. Benches along the sidewalks were empty, and a children’s playground was lifeless. I wasn’t surprised, since I recognized the name of this housing development as the center of a recent crime wave that had been reported on the news.

Sherman Creek itself was mostly industrial. When we arrived in the neighborhood, Mike gave me a quick rundown on the place. He said it was mixed zoning, with warehouses and businesses existing next to apartments and lofts, some of which were now inhabited by urban pioneers, an adventurous and hearty breed of city dweller that I’d always admired since they paved the way for further residential development and eventual gentrification.

At the moment, gentrification was a moot point for Sherman Creek. The businesses we drove by— construction and demolition companies, air-conditioner installation and repair, and automotive garages—were branded with more gang tags than we’d noticed in Washington Heights. As Mike parked, I pointed out the graffiti.

“Yeah,” he said. “It’s pretty bad. Then again, you should have seen the Upper West Side fifteen years ago, when I was working anticrime.”

“You were in an anticrime unit?”

“Yeah, and I did some antigang work, too. Then I moved to OCCB-Narcotics—”

“What’s OCC—”

“Sorry. Organized Crime Control Bureau. It’s how I earned my gold shield, but I still attend antigang seminars twice a month.”

“So you’re an expert. Then what’s the deal with this one?” I pointed.

Most of the gang tags were a mess, aesthetically speaking. But the scarlet symbol I’d singled out had been done with admirable graphic flair: two stylized letter Rs spray-painted together, one drawn backward. The artist even added a drop shadow. All things considered, it could have worked as a corporate logo.

“Whoever painted it has a decent technique,” I said, tilting my head to check it out at another angle.

“That’s the Red Razors,” Mike replied, folding his arms and regarding me, regarding the tag. “Nothing but a pack of small-time punks peddling ganja. They wouldn’t last a week against the gangs we faced back in the day. Stone killers like the Wild Cowboys, the Red Top Crew. But the worst of the bunch was the Jheri Curls—”

“The what? You’re kidding me, right? There was not a gang named after Little Richard’s do?”

“It’s a real gang. I promise you. Funny name. Nothing funny about their methods.” Mike turned and began walking down the sidewalk. “The address we’re looking for is Rayburn Way,” he reminded me. “It should be a few more blocks this way.”

I caught up to his long strides. “So what did they do? The Jheri Curls?”

Mike continued to glance up and down the street, taking in our surroundings. “Rafael Martinez and his four brothers ran a major cocaine trafficking operation out of Washington Heights, committed several murders, including a gang-style hit of a witness.”

“What happened to them?”

Mike shrugged. “Some undercover guys got the goods on their cocaine operation from the inside, and they were taken down. Rafe and his hermanos are behind bars for good.”

There was something about the way Mike told me the story, the hint of pride in his voice. “You had something to do with that, didn’t you?”

“No comment,” he said, but the faintest upturn at the edges of his mouth told me that he was glad I’d guessed. A second later, however, the grim line was back. “That’s the trouble with police work. It’s always one step forward, two steps back.”

“I don’t follow…”

“Within a year, the Wild Cowboys and the Young Talented Children had taken the Curls’ turf and their business.”

I frowned. “But Dean Martin warned us, didn’t he?”

“Excuse me?”

“You never heard him sing, ‘You’re Nobody ’Til Somebody Loves You’?”

“The song?”

“Yes, Lieutenant. Most memorable line: ‘The world still is the same. You’ll never change it.’”

Mike thought it over, grunted. “Good line. Good song. I’ll grant you that. But if you want to talk Rat Pack, my guy’s Sinatra.”

“I should have guessed. You’ve both got that Ol’ Blue Eyes thing going.”

Mike smiled, then he stopped us on a corner. The green street sign read Rayburn Way. Under it, a bright yellow metal sign warned the alleyway was a dead end, and under that I spied another Red Razor gang tag. Mike pulled the brown prescription bottle out of his overcoat pocket.

“The address we’re looking for is seventy-nine,” he said, squinting to read the tiny letters.