Killer Heat

six pairs of leather boots. There were a bunch of empty hangers and lots of large hooks affixed to the back of the door.

'Nothing unusual?' Mike asked. 'No sex toys? No other obvious equipment?'

'I'll confess ignorance. I wouldn't know what it's supposed to look like.'

'Right. And you're the expert.

'Sex crimes, not games.'

'I love it when you play the dumb blond. Those are the rare times I feel most connected to you,' Mike said.

'There's plenty of room to hold stuff-big hooks and lots of wire hangers. But that would be just a guess 'cause there are normal things that would fit right in.'

Mike scratched his head. 'Maybe Janet's wrong. Or nuts.'

'Or Amber didn't work out of her home. Or she retired.' The beads made a clicking noise as I brushed through the curtain to look in the refrigerator. Vargas Candera leaned against the doorjamb.

'No, senora,' he said laughing. 'She not retired. Amber, she's a very busy lady.'

Mike leaned his back against the wall and crossed his arms. 'Doing what?'

'No se. Plenty of men, they come and they go,' Vargas said, playing his fingers in the air like they were climbing up and down the stairs. 'I'm not supposed to know nothing, right? I jus' work here.'

'Must have been noisy,' Mike said.

The skim milk was ten days past its sale date and the butter gave off a sour smell.

'Ms. Amber, she paid me to extra-soundproof the apartment when she move in,' Vargas said, stroking his moustache. 'She tell me she likes to play her music loud. Paid me good to double Sheetrock. Put in 'coustic tile.'

'Was noise a problem in the building?'

Vargas rubbed his grease-stained thumb and forefinger together, suggesting that he had been well compensated for his ignorance. 'I never heard no music after that.'

'When's the last time you saw Amber?' Mike asked.

'Not for a week. Maybe more.'

Vargas started to walk into the foyer. 'Stay right there,' Mike said. 'Don't put your hands on anything. I need to get some guys here to dust for prints. When's the last time you were in this apartment?'

'Me? She don't ask me in much,' Vargas said, one side of his mouth pulling up in a smile. 'I can't afford it.'

'Enough to know if anything is missing? If it looks the way Ms.

Bristol always kept it?'

'Not my job.' He held his hands up, palms outward, the strong, thick fingers in front of his face. 'I don't go in there since I fix her toilet last summer.'

'Do you know any of her friends? Any of the people who came to see her regularly?'

I thought of the doormen in my high-rent high-rise building, only twenty blocks away. The sharpest ones held dozens of secrets-infidelities and betrayals by neighbors-thirty floors' worth of them. 'I not a busybody, lady.'

'You live in the basement here?' Mike asked.

'Si. I got my television, my girlfriend, and my six-pack. I do my work and I keep to myself.'

'Anybody else have a key to her apartment?'

'How would I know? If a key work, nobody bother me.' Mike's frustration was growing. 'Dylan. There's a bar around the corner called Dylan's. You ever seen that guy visiting here-the guy who owns the joint?'

'I got no idea who you mean. Dylan what?'

'Men pay you to forget they were here, Vargas? Is that how it goes?'

'They don't have to do nothing, Detective. Ms. Amber takes care of me very good not to hear nothing, not to see anybody,' Vargas said, cracking the knuckles of his left hand in his powerful right fist. 'That girl and trouble, they was always together.

SIX

Isat on a bar stool at Primola, sipping my sparkling water like it was aged Scotch. Mike was next to me, stirring the ice cubes in the vodka with his finger. Every table in the chic East Side restaurant was full of people escaping the August heat with a good meal. 'Is the air-conditioning blowing on you, Alessandra?' Giuliano asked. 'I'll have a table for you in five minutes.'

'We're fine right here.'

The owner had been my friend for many years. He was used to seeing me with Mike or Mercer and kept us well fed through many long nights of highly charged casework.

'Fenton,' he said to the bartender. 'Give Signora Cooper a drink.

On me.'

'She's like Ali before a big fight, Giuliano. Can't be flirting with a hangover when she faces the jury in the morning.'

'I'll take a raincheck,' I said, nibbling on a bread stick as thin as a straw.

Mike turned to me and rested his feet on the rungs of my stool. We made an odd couple, from backgrounds as different as anyone could imagine, but had forged a real intimacy over a decade of working on some of the grisliest cases the city had seen.

'Have some pasta, Coop. You need the carbs.'

'I just want a bowl of gazpacho. It's too hot for anything else.' He turned back to Fenton. 'I'll start with linguine. White clam sauce. Then I'll have a veal chop, thick as they come.'

Murder never got in the way of Mike's appetite. His father, Brian, had been one of the most decorated cops in the NYPD's history, retiring after twenty-six years on the job. Mike had been weaned on investigative skills and instincts, but he was also the first in his family to attend college. When Brian died of a massive coronary less than fortyeight hours after turning in his gun and shield, his only son became even more determined to follow in his footsteps. Immediately on graduation from Fordham, where he had waited tables to supplement his student loans, he, too, joined the department.

'Have you ever been to Dylan's?' I asked.

There weren't many watering holes in Manhattan that Mike had missed, between his personal barhopping and the complex directions of many of his cases.

'Too preppy for a blue-collar guy like me.'

'How did an Irish pub get to be so preppy?'

'When I was in college, the place had more of a neighborhood feel.' He had turned thirty-seven the previous fall, six months before me. 'Jimmy Dylan was good to the cops. Happy to have guys from the precinct going off duty drop in when he was trying to get the drunks out at the end of a long night.'

I chewed another bread stick and leaned closer to Mike, trying to hear over the laughter of the patrons at the closest table. Mike's eyes were almost as dark as his hair, and I was pleased to see that they had regained some of the sparkle that had disappeared for the better part of a year after the accidental death of his fiancee, Valerie. 'Dylan started to make some money for himself, so he began to send his kids-the oldest three are sons-to private schools. Junior- that's what they call the eldest son-he must be almost thirty now. All his high school pals hung out at the joint, 'cause Jimmy served them liquor when they were too young to get it anywhere else. He didn't really give a damn what anybody thought. Once you had all that teenage testosterone mixed in with a little alcohol, Dylan's became a magnet for the prep school girls, too. Fancy broads like you, looking to get lucky.'

'I didn't-'

'Yeah, sorry. You were too busy memorizing Shakespeare sonnets and sublimating your sexual desires swimming laps to hang out at pubs,' Mike said, opening one of the linen napkins on the bar and spreading it