Fare Play

  Fare Play

  A Marian Larch Mystery

  Barbara Paul

  MYSTERIOUSPRESS.COM

  1

  He was looking at a fortyish woman carrying a cheap all-weather coat over her arm and wearing a black-and-white polka-dot dress. Square neck, oversized shoulder pads, voluminous knee-length skirt … the sort of thing his mother wore back in the fifties. This woman had what was once a good haircut; but she’d let it go too long between trims and now looked on the verge of messy. Campy and messy. Didn’t the woman own a mirror?

  Was she the one he was here to meet? He hoped not. All Virgil had said was to carry a copy of Opera News prominently displayed and the courier would find him. He’d left the magazine lying out in the open on the small table in The Token Bar; now he signaled to the waiter. One more martini and he’d leave. He didn’t like waiting for women.

  Not that it had to be a woman; but Virgil typically did use women as couriers. Artistic types trying to make ends meet, girl graduates learning their brand-new degrees from Columbia weren’t worth spit, mothers unable to take on full-time jobs. All Virgil demanded of them was that they be on time, do exactly as they were told, and ask no questions. For this they were paid promptly and in cash. What the IRS didn’t know wouldn’t hurt it.

  The door of the bar opened and a young woman came in, alone, shrugging out of her coat immediately. The waiting man smiled in approval: short skirt, high heels, careful make-up, well-tended hair. But he knew this one wouldn’t be Virgil’s courier; too expensive, for one thing. For another: too noticeable.

  “Opera News.” The woman in the polka-dot dress slid into the chair opposite his.

  “You’re late,” he said coldly.

  “I didn’t spot you right off.” She glanced at the magazine lying on the table. “I thought you’d be holding it. Reading it, like.”

  The man didn’t answer. He held out his hand.

  The polka-dot woman opened a purse the size of a saddlebag and extracted a large mailing envelope which she handed over. The seal on the back was intact. She didn’t get up and leave, as she was supposed to, but instead sat waiting expectantly.

  “Was there something else?” he asked shortly.

  A look of mild disappointment crept into her eyes. She shook her head and stood up. He watched her go with barely concealed contempt. Damned if he’d buy a drink for that frump.

  He broke the seal on the envelope. Inside were two five-by-seven glossies and a personal data sheet. Anthony Pasquellini, greengrocer, Mulberry Street. Someone was willing to pay Virgil’s exorbitant fee to get rid of an Italian vegetable-seller? This Pasquellini couldn’t be connected; the Mafia took care of its own problems. The man wasted no mental energy wondering about it; he never wondered about it.

  He finished his martini and put on his overcoat. Outside, perhaps two hours of daylight left; the markets in Little Italy would still be open. If the crowds were big and noisy, he could take care of this one before dinner.

  He hailed a cab and went to work.

  The woman had to make an effort not to slump as she sat on the bus. She’d collect her fee and go home; maybe she’d have some time to herself before Hank got there and started making his demands. She just didn’t feel like playing the admiring audience today. Today? Today, yesterday, the day before … she was tired of Hank, tired of the role he’d cast her in, tired of listening to him brag about whatever deal-of-a-lifetime he was at that very moment putting together. She was tired of never having enough money. She was in a rut and didn’t see how to get out.

  Knowing that, she’d worn her new black-and-white polka-dot dress to make herself feel better. It didn’t work. And then to top things off, that cold-eyed bastard in The Token Bar wouldn’t even buy her a drink.

  He was a new one—new to her, at any rate. She didn’t like the kind of people Virgil was sending her to meet lately; they were hard and dangerous-looking, men who made it impossible for her to go on pretending that Virgil was just an ordinary businessman doing nothing more than a little shady wheeling and dealing on the side. The men Virgil was sending her to meet made her uneasy, and she didn’t know what to do about it. Virgil was not interested in employee complaints. But he paid in cash and he never wrote her name on any tax form. Still, it was just one more rut she was stuck in.

  Virgil’s man was waiting for her outside Cinema I on Third Avenue. Today he was wearing the long mustard-colored coat that made him look even more sallow than he already was. He handed her the familiar small brown envelope and turned away without a word. In the nearly thirty times she’d kept an appointment with the paymaster, he’d uttered only one word and that was the first time they’d met. He’d said: “Identification?” When she’d showed him her ID, he’d handed her her first envelope and established the routine they’d been following ever since.

  No talk. No personal contact. Ever.

  The polka-dot woman was out of his mind even before she was out of his sight. The sallow-faced man had one more pay-off to make, and he was a bit worried about it. Grad student at NYU, always late. Unreliable, in the paymaster’s opinion. But Virgil picked them, he didn’t. And Virgil didn’t welcome suggestions.

  They were to meet in a pizza parlor on West Fourth. The paymaster took the subway, pocketing the difference between that and cab fare from the transportation allowance Virgil gave him. If he had been running the show, he’d do away with the couriers altogether; but Virgil wanted a buffer of people between his paymaster and the Talent. Careful man, Virgil.

  She wasn’t in the pizza parlor. Swearing to himself, the paymaster ordered a cut and a Coke and settled down to wait. He stretched a second cut out as long as he could and then went outside to wait there, turning up the collar of his mustard-colored coat against the February wind. When his watch told him she was forty minutes late, he left. This time he took a cab back uptown.

  The sign on the office door said TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY CONSULTANTS; and underneath in smaller letters, WE PLAN FOR THE FUTURE. The office was deliberately nondescript, like thousands of other small offices scattered across Manhattan similarly doing business of a vaguely designated nature. The only person the paymaster had ever seen there was a woman who sat in the front office; the door to the back office was always closed. The paymaster had never met Virgil.

  “My last contact didn’t show,” he said abruptly. “I told you that girl was unreliable.”

  The receptionist frowned. “How long did you wait?”

  “An hour. I don’t even know if she met with the Talent or not.”

  She opened a drawer of her desk. “Leave the pay packet with me. I’ll give you a receipt.”

  The paymaster jerked his head toward the closed office door. “I’d better talk to Virgil.”

  “He didn’t come in today.” She wrote out the receipt.

  That made the third time he’d asked to speak to the boss and been told he wasn’t there. If he could be trusted to handle Virgil’s money, then he sure as hell could be trusted to know what the boss looked like. Irritated, he stepped over to the closed door and threw it open—to find another nondescript office. Empty.

  “I said he didn’t come in today!” the receptionist spoke sharply. “Here’s your receipt.”

  Defeated, the paymaster turned over his uncollected brown envelope. “Can I make an appointment to see him?”

  “I’ll ask,” she said noncommittally.

  Sure, you will, he thought sourly, and left.

  She waited until she heard the elevator doors open and close; even then she looked out into the hall to make sure the man in the atrocious mustard coat had really gone. Then she went back into the office and locked the door. She powered up the computer and waited while the communications program loaded automatically. The only numbe
r in the dialing directory was hidden from her; she pressed the code number 1 and waited.

  Two messages to pass on to Virgil today: Contact 4 no show and Paymaster B wants a meet. Usually she had to wait a day for a reply, but this time the answer came immediately: No follow-through. And that, she’d learned, meant Virgil would take care of the problem(s) himself and she was to forget about it.

  She’d love to forget about it. She’d love to forget this damned office and what happened here. What the paymaster didn’t know was that she had no more idea of who Virgil was than he did. But whoever he was, he was nothing more than a filthy murderer—and she was his unwilling accomplice.

  It was the Social Security number that was holding her here. The lack of a new number for a false name forced her to stay in the job she’d been blackmailed into taking. How this, this Virgil had found out what she’d done … no one could have found out! But Virgil had, damn him, and he’d coerced her into coming in here and doing servant work for him … she could almost understand hiring a killer, when she thought of Virgil. No; don’t dwell on that.

  Think about getting out. All her spare time had been spent visiting outlying graveyards until finally she’d found what she was looking for in Greenwood Cemetery in Brooklyn: the grave of a woman born only the year before she was but who’d been dead for eleven years. Using the dead woman’s name, she’d rented an unfurnished studio apartment to give herself a mailing address. Then she’d gotten a driver’s license under her new name; and with this form of legitimate ID in hand, she’d gone into the Social Security office claiming she’d lost her card and applied for a replacement. And as soon as the card came … the scheme might work, might not. But it was the only way she could think of that would let her leave New York, find a new town, a new job. A new start.

  Any day now that envelope would come, the one from the Social Security office with her new name and number. And then she’d be gone. Everything else was ready.

  And when that monster Virgil goes down, I won’t be here to go with him. The thought gave her immense satisfaction—not only the thought of her own escape, but the thought that Virgil would, eventually, be caught. He had to be. In spite of all his precautions, in spite of the careful chain of command he’d built, Virgil just had too many people working for him for some weak link not to be in there somewhere. Her main regret was that she would not be here to watch it happen. But someday, some cop would figure out what was going on, and that was the day Virgil’s murder-for-hire business would start unraveling.

  Some day. Some cop.

  2

  Lieutenant Marian Larch picked up a report from the pile on the desk before her. An early-morning fire in the Lord & Taylor stockroom had resulted in no deaths or injuries. Good, for more than the obvious reason; none of her detectives would be needed to investigate. She finished the report and started to put it aside. But something teased at her, half-caught her attention; she went back and read it again. What was odd, what was different about this report?

  Aha. No misspellings.

  Wonder of wonders—a cop who could spell. The first officer on the scene of the fire, and the writer of the report, was a bluesuit named Strauss. Marian concentrated, but she couldn’t summon up a face to match the name. So many new faces, and not yet time enough to learn them all. Well, that would come.

  She read the rest of the reports on her desk. Nothing major; Captain Murtaugh would be happy. Marian was happy. Home at a decent hour: she thought she remembered what that was like. She gathered up the reports and took them to the captain’s office.

  “What?” Murtaugh barked.

  Marian ignored his end-of-the-day gruffness and told him what. “Last night’s attempted break-in at Liebowitz Jewelry turned out to be a false alarm—literally. A rat gnawing through the insulation of a wire set off the electronics. Officer on the scene told Liebowitz to call an exterminator instead of a security expert.”

  Murtaugh grunted. “What next?”

  “The fire in the stockroom at Lord and Taylor—nobody hurt. Bomb and Arson gets this one.”

  “Cause?”

  “First officer thought he smelled gasoline.”

  The captain nodded. “Not our problem.”

  Marian cleared her throat. “The only thing new I have on the steroids smuggling—”

  “Pass it on to the Two-three. They’re claiming jurisdiction and we’re going to let them have it.”

  She made a note: 23rd Precinct. “Next, two kitchen workers at Riccardo’s Ristorante on East Thirty-sixth went at each other with butcher knives,” she said. “Both men were treated for superficial cuts and taken downtown to the holding cells. Walker and Dowd are at the restaurant now, interviewing witnesses.”

  Murtaugh waved a hand dismissively; just another knife fight. “Anything else?”

  Marian had saved the best for last. “You’ll be happy to hear,” she said with a smile, “that our friend Dmitri is at last in custody. Perlmutter just called it in.”

  Murtaugh snorted. “About time. How’d he get him?”

  “Luck. Perlmutter was standing on the street talking to a bluesuit when some guy ran up yelling that Dmitri was ‘signing’ the Statler right then. They caught him in the act.”

  “In broad daylight? The guy either has a screw loose or he wanted to be caught.” Dmitri was the nom-de-spray-paint of a mysterious “artist” who had taken it on himself to decorate a number of Manhattan’s edifices with curious abstract designs. It was only when you looked closely that you could see the letters forming the word “Dmitri” worked into each design. Having a Dmitri signature on the building had become a camp status symbol in some quarters; but the Times had printed a no-nonsense article contending that defacing a beautiful building was still vandalism and would never be art. “Is it a kid?” Murtaugh asked.

  “No, Perlmutter says he’s in his late thirties,” Marian replied. “Postal worker from Queens, quiet, no rap sheet. He just likes to spray-paint buildings.”

  “I know a couple of architects who’d like to spray-paint him,” Captain Murtaugh growled. “Let’s hope the media don’t turn him into some sort of folk hero.”

  “They’ve already made a good start,” she said dryly. “If you don’t have anything for me, I’m going home.”

  “Go ahead.” He waved her out.

  Marian had a few things to clear up in her office before she could leave. Her office—a perk that came with her promotion. The novelty of having her own office following years of sitting in a squadroom had worn off about fifteen minutes after she’d moved in. The office itself was a small windowless cubicle, cramped for space, and in need of a good cleaning. But it had a door that could be closed when the noise level got unbearable, and it gave her a modicum of privacy as she oversaw the work of the twenty-five detectives in her charge at Midtown South Precinct. The detectives were supposed to be divided into three squads of seven or eight, each squad headed by a sergeant. But the unprecedented shortage of sergeants plaguing the police department had left Midtown South one sergeant short at the moment. The two sergeants oversaw squads of eleven and twelve each with Marian herself stepping in to help out when needed. The NYPD’s newest lieutenant was earning her paycheck.

  She’d been on the job only three weeks. But that was long enough to figure out which of her detectives resented taking orders from a woman and which were playing a waiting game. Most of them she had figured, that is; a couple she couldn’t quite pin down. The two female detectives in the bunch appeared honestly glad to see a woman in the lieutenant’s office; no problem there. And one of the men was a toady. Big smiles all the time, if you need any help let me know, my don’t you look nice today. Jerk.

  But they were all watching her, out of the corners of their eyes, waiting for her to make a mistake. Captain Murtaugh was watching too; he’d taken a chance, recommending her for promotion. If she screwed up, he’d look bad. Marian and the captain hadn’t known each other long, had worked on only one case together while she was
still technically attached to a different precinct. All of Midtown South was new to her—the personnel, the beat, the snitches, the danger spots, the ongoing rackets, the “flavors” of the area, the smells. She had a lot to learn.

  Marian cleared her desk and put on her coat, pleased at getting away at a decent hour. She almost made it.

  “Lieutenant Larch!” A young detective in shirtsleeves was talking on the phone and waving an arm at her.

  She crossed the squadroom to his desk as he finished talking and hung up. O’Toole, his name was.

  “This just in, Lieutenant,” the detective said. “Passenger found dead on a crosstown bus. Caucasian male, in his seventies.”

  “Heart?”

  “Bullet. Shot at close range. First officer says there’s no telling how long he’d been riding like that. Dead, I mean.” O’Toole cleared his throat. “Sergeant Campos isn’t here.”

  Neither was anyone else. Campos was O’Toole’s squad leader, the one who made the case assignments. At the moment the young detective was the only one in the squad-room.

  “Looks like you and me, O’Toole,” Marian said. “Saddle up.” So much for getting home early.

  O’Toole grabbed his suit jacket and coat and followed her out.

  3

  The bus was sitting in the right-hand lane on West Thirty-fourth, directly in front of the West Side Jewish Center. Two uniformed officers were directing traffic around the obstacle, while another had the more demanding job of keeping a group of anxious, noisy people from pushing their way off the bus. The passengers were all crowded into the front half of the bus; the driver stood on the sidewalk beside the closed side door, talking to a fourth uniformed officer.

  “Jesus!” said O’Toole. “How do you contain a crime scene like that?”

  Marian was wondering the same thing herself. She started toward the bluesuit questioning the bus driver, but he saw her coming and said, “Stay back, ma’am.”