“Yeah. Call Jenny Kester in the domestic crimes unit in Manhattan. You have her home number?”
“Um, yeah…”
“No one will take my calls right now, King. you know that. But Jenny’s a good egg. We went to law school together.” I rubbed my face, wishing there were more I could do. But this was the right thing to do. “Tell her this is coming from me and that you need an emergency subpoena for the Metropolitan Museum of Art.”
“Zola, come on. Do you really want to involve another DA in your obsession with this girl? It’s over, man. She lost.”
“It’s not over,” I said, looking up at the cameras that hung from the corners of the room, and which I knew for a fact were installed in every elevator. “These are new charges. Rape in the first degree. And we have video proof.”
Nina’s mouth fell open with dread. “We—we do?”
“The Met has had twenty-four-seven surveillance cameras in every exhibit and elevator since 2004,” I told both her and Derek. “I know because of...well, some things that happened here last year.” I didn’t want to say to Derek that I had gone into the security room and personally deleted the evidence of Nina’s and my tryst in the elevator last year after learning that it recorded remotely even when it was offline. “Unless that elevators just ‘happened’ to be out of order that day, there is a recording somewhere of what he did to you, Nina. Irrefutable evidence.”
Nina blanched. “I…oh…”
The look on her face stopped me from rattling off more orders to Derek. Instead, I put my hand over the receiver. “Do you want to let him go?”
“I…I…”
My heart thumped with her. “Yes or no, Nina.”
She blinked, and then her face hardened. “No. I want him in jail.” She shook her head and straightened. “Let them release the tape if they want. I’m done hiding his secrets too.”
“That’s my girl.” I kissed her on the cheek. “All right, Derek. You’re asking for the security footage from the elevator bank that goes to the Costume Institute, March and April of 2013.”
“All right. And who am I looking for here?”
I paused. I almost didn’t want to say, because I knew Nina wouldn’t like it.
But Derek was good. I knew he wouldn’t joy-watch any of that shit, although whoever ended up prosecuting the case would, and so would the others. I’d seen footage of shit like that before. It wasn’t easy for anyone to look at that sort of thing. It made any decent human being sick to their stomach.
“The perp is Calvin Gardner. And the victim…”
I turned and found Nina watching me, her gray eyes turned to steel. She was crying and wild, but I was so fuckin’ proud to say she had never looked less like a victim. She nodded slowly. Do it, she seemed to say.
“The victim is Nina de Vries.”
Derek swore softly to himself. “You really don’t know how to stay out of trouble with this girl, do you?”
I looked at Nina again and touched my finger to her face. “Good trouble, though.”
She smiled, then placed a soft kiss on my lips.
“Thank you,” she whispered.
“It’ll be there, King, I promise. We’ll wait here with Gardner for the patrol unit. First floor. The Greek room.”
“And I thought I was going to have a quiet night at home,” Derek said. “Wait there. I’ll be there too.”
He hung up. Nina and I sat there for a moment, still digesting everything for a few moments. Then, finally, I managed to push myself up from the ground.
“Duchess, I’m going to need that sash around your waist,” I said, even as I started stripping off my own white bow tie. It was a shame to be ruining any part of the suit Nina had bought, but it had to be done.
She handed me the garment, and then I crossed the hall to where Gardner lay. I bound his hands firmly behind his back, then sat his sloppy ass up so that he was sitting against a balustrade leading down to another floor, and tied his hands to the balustrade behind him.
Then I sat back on my heels, and without any mercy, reached back and slapped him across the face as hard as I could.
“Wake up, you stupid son of a bitch.”
Gardner blinked, groggy and his eyes fixed on me, and then he registered where he was and what had happened.
“I—what? What the fuck!”
“Calvin Gardner,” I said. “Károly Kertész. Whatever the fuck your name is. In about ten minutes, you’ll be under arrest for rape in the first degree. That’s a class B felony, punishable by up to twenty-five years in prison. And I don’t care how many judges you think you can bribe in this city—I know more. And now I will personally make sure your sloppy ass lands behind bars if it’s the last thing I do.”
Postlude
New York Star
August 4, 2018
Disgraced investor sentenced for first degree rape of socialite wife
Setting a landmark precedent for marital rape, Calvin Gardner, originally known as Károly Kertész before changing his name in 2004, was sentenced today for twenty-five years in a maximum-security prison for several counts of physical assault and rape of his estranged wife, New York socialite Nina de Vries. The case first burst on the scene when a 2013 video recording of Ms. de Vries being assaulted by her husband in an elevator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art was leaked and went viral.
Gardner has faced nothing but legal woes over the last few years, but managed to elude them until last month, when former Brooklyn prosecutor Matthew Zola uncovered long term extortion of local judges and law enforcement officials. Mr. Zola was originally an attorney with the bureau pursuing the trafficking charges that Mr. Gardner eluded late last year.
“Even though I was off the case, something wasn’t right,” he said. “As a friend of the family, I couldn’t let it slide. So I did some digging, and it was pretty
