Knockdown: A Home Repair Is Homicide Mystery (2 page)

“Sam,” she repeated, “are you …?”

His door closed. The lock clicked. The music went up again, although not enough to bring the building super. It was as if Sam knew just exactly how far he could go.

What do you mean, “as if”?
she asked herself bitterly as she left the apartment.

THE LOBBY OF HER BUILDING ON CENTRAL PARK WEST HAD
the kind of prewar glamour you couldn’t find in new construction: art deco wall sconces, gleaming black marble floors, crystal chandeliers. Her heels clicked past the concierge’s desk with the vase full of fresh florist’s blooms on it, then the security guard’s podium, and finally the low table spread with complimentary copies of the
Times
and
The Wall Street Journal
.

She picked up a
Journal
as she went by; she could read it as she cabbed to the office. “Mrs. Tiptree?”

Damn
. She turned, trying to indicate by her expression and posture that she was late. Which she wasn’t; not yet. But she did not want to talk to the building superintendent, Mr. Halloran.

Or rather, be talked to by him. “Mrs. Tiptree, I’m sorry to have to trouble you.”

Have to
. That was a bad sign. “But our other residents …”

She drew herself up. “There’ve been complaints?”

Her tone dared him. But of course there had been complaints. What with the threats and accusations flying between her and Victor, and Sam’s music being played at volumes generally reserved for arena concerts, it was a wonder that the other tenants didn’t assemble outside their apartment door with torches and pitchforks.

Inspiration hit her. “Talk to my husband about it.”

“But—”

“The man of the house,” she practically spat at the unlucky building superintendent. Really, he didn’t deserve this.

But by now she
was
late, and anyway, there wasn’t a thing in this world she could do about any of it, and especially not about the music; heaven knew she’d tried. So for now she thanked her lucky stars that Sam at least still lived at home, and not on the street half the time like the Tooley boy.

Outside, limos picking up other tenants sat idling along the curb while their drivers read the papers and drank coffee. On the sidewalks, elderly ladies in pastel Chanel suits tottered along behind tiny dogs on pastel leashes; nannies pushed Italian-made strollers and luxury baby carriages.

Changing her mind about the cab, she turned south, hoping a walk might clear her head. At this hour she could travel faster on foot than the traffic could move, anyway.

Thirty minutes later, at Madison and Thirty-fourth, the city was one part blaring cab horn, one part jackhammer, and three parts way
too many people, all hustling like mad. In the deli on the corner, she got coffee and a bagel and carried them into her building, where they were nearly knocked from her hands by a man rushing past her out through the lobby.

Gray fedora, salt-and-pepper mustache, scarred face …

She knew him, and he must have recognized her, too, because he turned around and came back in. It was Jerry Baumann, known to his friends and associates as “Da Bomb.”

She did not like thinking about why he was called this, or how she knew.

“Listen,” Jerry growled, not pausing for niceties. “I went upstairs and told him the situation. It’s not gonna change. He gets the money to us by tomorrow, or—” He drew a crooked finger across his throat.

“I beg your pardon?” Jake began, aware of the doorman listening with interest from his desk just inside the front door. “How did you even—”

The whole reason for having a doorman at all was that no one was supposed to be able to get upstairs without first being announced via intercom, and approved.

But when she glanced over inquiringly, he was suddenly extremely busy with some papers in one of the desk’s drawers.

Come on
, Jerry “Da Bomb” Baumann’s face said clearly.
You think some freakin’ rent-a-cop’s gonna stop me?

“You tell him,” he repeated as he opened the door to the street. The sudden clamor of noise was so loud that it was almost comical.

“Don’t let him get thinkin’ anything else,” Jerry Baumann said, and then the door swung shut.

“Some help you are,” she said to the guard, who upon Jerry’s departure found his paperwork less engrossing.

“Yes, ma’am,” the guard said evenly, unsmiling.

“Who’s up there?” she demanded. Despite leaving home late, she’d made good time; her appointment wasn’t for another ten minutes.

But just then the guard’s desk phone rang, and the elevator doors opened.
The hell with it
, she thought as she stepped in, pulling the key to her office from her shoulder bag with one hand while balancing a paper bag with coffee and a bagel in it with the other; she’d find out who was there herself.

She didn’t need the key, though, because the office door—no name, just the suite number—stood open. Inside, the anteroom smelled like Old Spice laced with bubblegum.

And something else.
Fear sweat
, she thought. “Hello?”

She didn’t have a secretary or a receptionist. She wouldn’t even have had an office, but some of her clients weren’t the kind of people she wanted coming to her home.

Some of her clients, she didn’t even want them knowing where she lived, although they probably did anyway. “Anyone here?”

The bubblegum smell was getting stronger. On the tan carpet, a few grains of something granular was sprinkled, like a trail of … She knelt and touched the stuff, and after a moment tasted it.

Sugar. What the …?

“Hello.”

She looked up. A little boy, maybe ten years old, stood in the doorway to her inner office, where she met clients.

The boy, scrubbed so clean he practically glowed and with an obviously fresh haircut under his kid-sized baseball cap, wore a blue blazer. Under it he wore a white dress shirt and a striped silk tie—a real one, not a clip-on. His slacks were belted, and from the way they broke just so over his oxblood shoes, they had obviously been tailored for him.

“Hello. Who are you?” She got up, brushing sugar granules from her fingertips while the kid went on eyeing her somberly.

“Steven. My mother calls me Junior.” The boy blinked once, slowly. From the white bits around his mouth, she gathered that the ones on her carpet were from something that he’d been eating.

“Are you going to let the bad men kill my father?” he asked.

His voice held an odd, remarkably unchildish undercurrent of menace. Then it hit her, who he must be.
Oh, for Pete’s sake
.

She should have known; under that new haircut of his, the kid’s ears stuck out a mile.

Just like his dad’s.

“Hi, Jake. Sorry we’re a little early.”

Steven Garner Sr. appeared in the doorway behind his son. “I slipped the guy downstairs a little something; he let us up,” he confided.

Unlike the boy, he did not look freshly laundered. He wore rumpled slacks over white high-top sneakers that had seen better days, a polo shirt with dryer wrinkles still in it, and a blue cotton warm-up jacket with an egg splotch on the front.

“I saw Baumann in the lobby just now,” she said, and watched Garner’s face tighten with anxiety.

The kid was still staring at her. “You hungry?” she asked him, despite the evidence of a recent meal—a doughnut, probably—around his lips.

The boy nodded; what little kid wasn’t always hungry? “But my mom doesn’t let me …” he began as she brought out the bagel.

“Steven,” his father told him gently, “go sit down over there and eat the bagel, okay? Go on,” he repeated as the boy looked doubtful. “I’ll make it okay with your mom.”

The boy rolled his eyes, giving Jake the idea that making things okay with his mom generally wasn’t so easy. But he did as he was asked.

“And don’t do anything else,” his father told him, which Jake thought was a little strange. The look he gave the kid was odd, too: stern, but with a thread of fear in it. “Just sit.”

“Come on,” Jake said, waving Steven Sr. back into her inner office, which was even more spartan than the outer one.

The desk was a gray metal cube squatting in one corner, the chairs like ones in the Motor Vehicle Department’s waiting area, square and
serviceable. No pictures or diplomas hung on the walls or stood on the desk; venetian blinds covered the windows.

All business here, the room’s bare, utilitarian chill said clearly. She sat at her desk, gestured at the seat in front of it, and watched Steven Garner sink onto it gratefully.

“So. How can I help you?”

Although she already knew. His hangdog expression, a mobbed-up minion down in the lobby … even the security guard had known enough to go deaf and blind with Baumann around.

Garner, by contrast, was just a low-level errand boy, the kind of guy who lived for the moment he would be invited along on a truck highjacking.

And who would die waiting, because guys who were always as much in need of cash as Garner was could never be trusted. So she would be his last hope, and his next words would be …

“I need money.” He glanced up at her. At his day job he was a school photographer, she knew.

Not exactly a big earner. “A lot,” he added, “of money.” He leaned across the desk. “Because they’re going to kill me if I don’t get it to them.”

“Yeah, so I just heard. But I’m not in the business of—”

Loan-sharking
. Or whatever you wanted to call it. “I help people take care of their money, you know?” Jake said carefully. “Invest it, diversify it …”

Launder it, get it out of the country
. She’d set this appointment up only as a favor to one of those other clients, and she was already regretting it.

“Yeah, I know,” Garner conceded. “I just thought …”

“How much are we talking about?”

He looked up, his eyes alight with hope for a moment. But when he saw her expression, his own face fell again. “Fifty.”

The amount he’d named shocked even her. “Thousand? You’re into them for—”

“Yeah. Don’t ask me how it happened, okay? It happened the way
it always happens. You lose, you chase your losses, next thing you’re on their shoot list.”

Only Baumann didn’t say
shoot
. “I’ve got a family. You saw the kid; he’s a good boy.”

Right, she’d seen the kid because she’d been intended to see him, maybe feel a little sorrier for Garner. She did, too.

Just not fifty grand’s worth. She was about to say so when a small head peeped around the doorframe. “Dad?”

Garner frowned. “I told you, siddown out there, okay? Wait for me, I’ll only be a—”

The boy didn’t move. His big, not-quite-innocent eyes took in the room with its clinical lack of decoration, the metal cabinets and the shelves stuffed with file folders.

He didn’t smile. He looked … sly. “Steven, maybe you could just sit down in the chair out there until your father and I are finished here,” she said gently.

His eyes didn’t change, their expression calm and knowing. It gave her a chill, suddenly, realizing that the boy understood what his father was doing.

That he was begging for his life. But he’d come to the wrong place, because the only thing she knew for sure about Garner was that if she did lend him money, he would never return it.

Heck, he hadn’t paid the mob back, and they were willing and able to kill him on account of it. So what chance would she have?

The boy went back to the outer office. She got up and closed the door. “What have you got?”

“What?” Garner looked confused. “I … What do you mean, what have I—”

“House? Car? Anything? A coin collection? Has your wife got any good jewelry?”

He was shaking his head. “There’s the house, but it belongs to my wife. It was her parents’ place, and anyway, what would you want with—”

She sat across from him again. “You’re not getting it, what I’m saying to you. I don’t want it. But they might.”

Despair filled his face. “Just … you mean …”

He glanced at the door, beyond which his son waited. Right now the kid had a roof over his head, a place to go at night.

And tomorrow maybe he wouldn’t. But his dad would be alive. “Steven, I’m suggesting you offer them something. It’s harsh, I know. But it’s the best I can do for you right now.”

Or ever
, she didn’t add, but he understood. When he got up from the chair he moved like an old man.

She got up, too. “A house is a big thing, Steven. If you’re lucky, maybe they’ll take it.”

“Yeah,” he said bitterly. “If I’m lucky.”

She didn’t offer to put in a word for him. It wouldn’t have done any good. He knew that, as well. He opened the door to the outer office, then turned.

“Listen, I was thinking I might take the kid out for lunch, maybe to a ball game. You know? But …”

He spread his hands helplessly.

He was tapped out, of course; his last twenty to the guard downstairs, probably. Without a word she opened her desk’s top drawer and drew out five hundred-dollar bills.

She crossed the room and handed them to him. In the outer room, the little boy sat in a chair with his ankles crossed and his hands clasped in his lap, waiting. Watching.

“Thanks,” Steven Garner said, stuffing the bills into the inside pocket of his cotton jacket. “C’mon, kid.”

They turned to go. She followed them to the door, hoping Garner wouldn’t decide to just take a flyer out the propped-open window at the end of the corridor.

He didn’t. As they moved away down the hall, the little boy glanced back over his shoulder before they disappeared into the elevator. Those eyes …

Jake shivered, not liking the expression in them and glad when the elevator closed. And that was the last she ever expected to see of them:

Steven Garner Sr., his boy, and her five hundred bucks.

But she was only two-thirds right.