“The Best girl, in the West, girl!
“Esther?” Madame glanced at me, just to make sure.
“This is Boris Bokunin,” I said. “He’s a Russian émigré, slam poet, and urban rapper.” He was also a hardworking assistant baker in Brighton Beach, but I knew he preferred the other identifiers. “Did I get it right, Boris?”
Boris gave a little bow. “BB Gunn. That’s my hip-hop handle! Just ask me ladies and—” He clapped his hands and pointed at us. “I’ll light your candles!”
Madame glanced at me, her laugh lines crinkling. “He reminds me of the beats!”
Boris’s eyes widened. “You need someone beat down?”
“She means
BB grinned at that, saluted me, bowed to Madame, then spun on his motorcycle boots and headed for the counter.
Madame touched my arm. “Do keep me informed of the developments on catching Alf’s killer. I’d like to help if I can.”
I patted her hand. “Have a good trip to Vermont with Otto. The bed-and-breakfast sounds amazing. Your beau certainly knows how to keep the romance in the holiday season.”
“Mistletoe and music, my dear.” She winked. “Candy canes by candlelight.”
I nodded, ignoring a surge of mixed feelings. With Joy away and Mike trying to crack a cold case, this Christmas wasn’t going to be a very merry one for me. On a quiet sigh, I bent down and gave Madame a good-bye hug.
I could only hope my daughter was finding the same sort of happiness in Paris that her grandmother was enjoying in New York. Despite the theme of today’s
Eighteen
A few days after wishing Madame a good trip, I was on my way to Staten Island to have lunch with Omar Linford. I even brought backup. With Madame still away on her long romantic weekend, I tapped my old partner in anticrime, Esther Best.
We finished our morning shifts together and she agreed to do the driving—mainly because I didn’t want to burden her with balancing my
According to Dexter Beatty, bringing a home-baked gift was a sign of affection. A black cake would have been a better choice, given Linford’s Jamaican roots, but I didn’t have three weeks to macerate fruit in Manischewitz or travel to Brooklyn and back for a jar of authentic West Indian burnt sugar.
Instead, I made the famous little “Italian Christmas tree” pastry that I’d loved as a child, hoping it would start us out on the right foot (as long as I could prevent the whole thing from ending up on the dashboard, that is).
Esther had been doing fine in the bumper-to-bumper traffic across the Brooklyn Bridge, but now that we’d hit 278, she was tearing down the highway like a Goth out of hell.
“Esther, slow down! We’ve only gone from Lower Manhattan to Brooklyn Heights. Not to Monaco’s Grand Prix!”
“Sorry,” she replied, easing up on the pedal. “It’s just that this part of the drive is seriously tedious...”
As its name suggested, Staten Island was in fact an island, connected to the borough of Brooklyn via the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge. Commuters without cars took the famous Staten Island Ferry.
“It would have been much easier to take the ferry from Battery Park,” Esther pointed out.
It would have, except she knew as well as I did that cars had been banned from the ferry since the 9/11 attack.
“We have no choice. We have to go through Brooklyn.”
Esther sighed and hit the gas again. “So, boss. You never told me how you managed to wrangle this invitation.”
“It was Dexter’s doing,” I explained as we zipped along the highway. “I did a little snooping and found out he knew Linford.”
“Oh, I see. No big deal, then.”
Actually it was a big deal.
I’d started my research on Saturday morning. After typing Linford’s name into a couple of Internet search engines, I learned he’d founded and managed a hedge fund called Linvantage. The fund was based in Antigua and had its prospectus posted online. It appeared to be very profitable, and I noticed the minimum investment was high enough to keep the client list exclusive.
Further research uncovered Linford’s name on the roster of half a dozen import/export companies, all of them based in the Caribbean.
Of course, when I thought of the Caribbean, I always thought of Matt’s friend Dexter—an absolute pillar of the Brooklyn Caribbean community. Any bigwigs from the Islands in the New York area probably made themselves known to Dex at one time or another to purchase authentic West Indian products for a party, family gathering, or traditional celebration.
So I called Dexter that afternoon to ask if the name Omar Linford rang any bells. Strangely, Dex claimed he’d never heard of the man, politely excused himself, and got off the phone. At first I believed him, but that night my research revealed that Linford owned a tiny Jamaica-based specialty food importer called Blue Sunshine.
Back in 2000, shortly after the U.S. Food and Drug Administration lifted its ban on a potentially toxic Jamaican fruit called
At such a low wholesale price, Dex was able to peddle the Jamaican staple in his Brooklyn stores for six or seven dollars a can—about half the going rate everywhere else in the United States. Price points like that made Dexter’s Taste of the Caribbean stores very popular, especially around Christmas when the price of ackee almost always rose because of increased demand.
“I’m not sellin’ that hinky stuff, no neither,” Dex had insisted. “Gettin’ me the top brands for my customers. Nineteen-ounce tins of Island Sun.”
On its Web site, the Blue Sunshine company boasted that it had the lowest wholesale price for Island Sun brand Jamaican ackee on the East Coast. I put two and two together (old-school math this time) and made a pest of myself by phoning Dexter a second time.
“I really put the pressure on during the second call,” I continued explaining to Esther. “And Dex finally admitted that he has a ‘confidential business relationship’ with Omar Linford. Not just the man’s Blue Sunshine company, but Omar himself.”
“That sounds kind of fishy,” she said, arching an eyebrow. “What kind of relationship?”
“Not the kind Vicki Glockner was thinking about. I’m pretty sure Linford isn’t supplying marijuana for Dex to sell out of his stores.”
“
Esther was right. I wasn’t all that sure about anything when it came to Linford’s business interests. Even after I’d confronted Dex with circumstantial evidence that he’d been doing business with Linford’s company for years, he still refused to come completely clean about the extent of his relationship with the importer.
And while all of Linford’s business activities seemed legitimate, so what? If anybody knew how legitimate businesses could operate in a way to mask illegal activity, it was the daughter of the local sports bookie.
In the middle of my second call to Dexter, I remembered how he’d shown up at the Blend—abruptly and unexpectedly—the very same night that Vickie Glockner came to ask for my help in solving her father’s murder.
