aged man with ink all over his arms and chest was working on a Coupe de Ville in his driveway, sweat gleaming off of him. He paused now and then to sip from a can of beer and check her out.
Forty-five minutes later the door to apartment C opened. Des zoomed in and began snapping away as Captain Richie Tedone of Internal Affairs stood there in the doorway playing grab ass with a lanky, barefoot young black girl in a purple silk robe. The girl didn’t want him to leave. Flung her body against his. They kissed and kissed. Couldn’t keep their hands off of each other. His started roaming inside of her robe right there in the doorway-until she shoved him away, laughing. Des snapped two dozen nice, clear close-ups of all of this before Richie’s girl finally shut the door on him. He swaggered back to his pickup, jumped in and roared his way out of there. Des ducked down so he couldn’t see her as he drove by. Then she sat back up and kept her camera trained on the door to apartment C.
Richie’s girl left twenty minutes later, teetering on sandals with four-inch stiletto heels-the better to show off her nice long legs and fancy purple toenails… Smile for the camera, honey… Her frilly pink minidress barely covered her butt. And that cascading canary yellow wig she had on looked about as real as spray-painted bubble wrap in the hazy summer sunlight. She was a skinny thing with broad shoulders and almost no hips. Des studied her through the zoom lens, frowning, as she unlocked the red BMW convertible parked outside of her unit and put the top down. Des snapped several close-ups of the license plate as the girl took off, leaving a trail of cheap perfume behind her.
Des promptly got out, locked the Saab and strolled across the street to the apartment complex’s main entrance. Most of the tenants’ names were scrawled on ragged pieces of masking tape over the mailboxes. On the mailbox for apartment C there was a powder blue note card with Eboni written on it in purple ink. The letter i was dotted with a little heart.
The building manager lived in apartment A behind a door that had a steel security grill. Des knocked. A mountainous black woman in polyester sweats opened it-unleashing all kinds of good smells from her kitchen. The TV was blaring in her living room. A half dozen little kids were sprawled there, transfixed by a cartoon.
“Afternoon, ma’am,” Des said politely, flashing her badge. “I wanted to ask you a couple of questions if you don’t mind.”
“Who’s in trouble now?” she demanded, instantly chilly.
“Nobody.” Des showed her a big smile. “Know what? Your place smells just like my grandma’s house. That’s sausage and biscuits you’re making, am I right?”
“Your people must be from the South, like mine,” the woman allowed, thawing slightly.
Des nodded. “Georgia.”
“Did you want to come in?”
“That’s okay. This will only take a second. I like to keep an eye on the folks who’ve been of assistance to us. Make sure nobody’s been coming around bothering them.”
“Who we talking about, honey?”
“The resident in apartment C.”
She looked at Des in surprise. “You mean Eboni with an i?”
“That’s the person, yes.”
“What kind of help you been getting from little Eboni?” Her tone of voice was downright mocking.
“It’s part of an ongoing criminal investigation. I can’t go into the details.”
“And yet you show up here on a Sunday. Must be something pretty big.”
“Let’s just say Eboni did right by us. And I have concerns that certain individuals might try to retaliate or whatever.”
“You don’t have to waste no time worrying about that one.” Again with the mocking tone. “Eboni’s got a cop boyfriend.”
“Is that right? New Haven city cop?”
“Don’t know what kind. I ain’t seen no uniform. But he’s law, plain as day. You can tell by the way he struts around.”
“And he visits her regularly?”
“Must be here three, four times a week. He takes real good care of little Eboni. Pays the rent on the apartment. Bought that BMW, too.”
“Is Eboni working these days?”
“Some call it work,” she sniffed. “Others call it something else. Not that I’m passing judgment. What the tenants do is their own business-as long as the rent gets paid.”
“Has Eboni got any other regular men?”
“One or two. Not as many as before.”
“You say he pays the rent. Does he write you a check?”
She let out a huge, rumbling laugh. “Where you think you are? People around here don’t write no checks. They pay in cash. That’s how come I got this security gate on my door. Management company put it in last year after I got ripped off twice. Installed a safe in my kitchen, too.” She paused, puffing slightly for breath. “He puts the rent money right here in my hand the first of every month.”
“How comes he pays you, not her?”
“If he give it to Eboni I’d never see it.”
“Are we talking about drugs?”
“Wouldn’t surprise me. Nothing about Eboni would surprise me.”
“Did she sign a lease or is she here month to month?”
“Oh, there’s a lease all right.”
“Whose name is on it?”
“Eboni’s. Mind you, that’s strictly a what-you-call ‘professional’ name. The lease is in Eboni’s real name.”
“Which is…?”
“Michael Toomey,” she replied, stone-faced.
Des felt her pulse quicken. That explained why the girl’s shoulders and hips had struck her as odd. Richie Tedone’s skanky girlfriend wasn’t a girl at all. She was a he-a drag queen. “Thank you for your time, ma’am,” she said calmly, even though she was ready to plotz, as her friend Bella Tillis would say. “Next time I’m in the neighborhood I could use a few of those sausage and biscuits.”
“Honey, you could use a few dozen. Don’t you know that a man likes a woman who has some decent meat on her bones?”
Des got back in her Saab and headed straight for the Troop F barracks, where she parked herself at her unadorned steel desk and got busy on the computer. First she ran the license plate on that red BMW. The car was registered to Michael Reginald Toomey, Edgewood Vista Apartments, New Haven. Next she ran a criminal background check on Michael Reginald Toomey, age twenty, aka Eboni, aka Deelite. He/she had a long history of arrests for soliciting prostitution and possession of crack cocaine, dating back to when he/she had first been incarcerated at the New Haven Correctional Center at age fifteen. As Des scanned Toomey’s criminal history, one particular case from two years back set off alarm bells in her head. She went trolling through all of the case files she could access. Then pieced together the rest of the story from the online archives of the New Haven Register and Hartford Courant. The case had received extensive coverage. Hell, even the New York City tabloids had covered it.
It went down in Sussex, a ritzy, shoreline commuter town in Fairfield County. Nothing but millionaires and their trophy mansions. On a tree-lined lane in one of those mansions it turned out that a high-end escort service- which is to say call-girl ring-had been quietly operating for months. The woman running it, who came to be known as the Suburban Madam, was a divorced mother of two, named Elaine Gruen. Elaine’s husband had left her for another woman. Elaine got the mansion and child support in the settlement. But not enough income to maintain her Sussex lifestyle. So she’d dusted herself off and started her small business. She catered to a carefully screened clientele of wealthy gentlemen from not only the Connecticut suburbs, but New York, New Jersey and even Massachusetts. Her escorts collected five hundred dollars per hour, with discounted rates for overnight stays and weekend jaunts to resort hotels. The gentlemen contacted Elaine by cell phone or e-mail. She set up the engagements and kept half of the proceeds-which she split with her partner, Tiffany Nelson, a juvenile detention officer at the New Haven Correctional Center. It was Tiffany who recruited the Suburban Madam’s choicest talent.
