James Patterson: French Kiss

So I stand with my new partner in a pink marble lobby a few hundred yards from where my old partner was murdered.

Okay. I’ll be the adult here. I will try to appear cooperative.

We review our plan. I am to go to the lobby bar and talk to the one or two high-priced hookers who are almost always on the prowl there. You’ve seen them-the girls with the perfect hair falling gently over their shoulders. The delicate pointy noses all supplied by the same plastic surgeon. The women who are drinking in the afternoon while they’re dressed for the evening.

Burke will go up to the more elegant, more secluded rooftop bar, Auberge in the Clouds. But of course she’ll first stop by the hotel manager’s office and tell him what he already knows: the NYPD is here. Procedure, procedure, procedure.

If Maria Martinez is watching all this from some heavenly locale, she is falling on the floor laughing.

After agreeing to meet Burke back in the lobby in forty-five minutes, I walk into the bar. (I once visited Versailles on a high school class trip, and this place would have pleased Marie Antoinette.) The bar itself is a square-shaped ebony box with gold curlicues all over it. It looks like a huge birthday present for a god with no taste.

At the bar sit two pretty ladies, one in a red silk dress, the other in a kind of clingy Diane von Furstenberg green-and-white thing, which is very loose around the top. I don’t think von Furstenberg designed it to be so erotic. It takes me about two seconds to realize what these women do for a living.

These girls are precisely the type that Nick Elliott wants us to speak to. Yes, a ridiculous waste of time. And I know just what to do about it.

I walk toward the exit and push through the revolving door.

I’m out. I’m on my own. This is more like it.

K. Burke thinks a good New York cop solves a case by putting the pieces together. K. Burke is wrong.

You can’t put the pieces together in New York because there are just too goddamn many of them.

One step out the revolving door onto East 68th Street proves my point. It’s only midday, but everywhere I look there’s chaos and color and confusion.

Bike messengers and homeless people and dowagers and grammar-school students. Two women wheeling a full-size gold harp and two guys pushing a wheelbarrow full of bricks. The Greenpeace recruiter with her clipboard and smile, the crazy half-naked lady waving a broken umbrella, and the teenager selling iPad cases. All this on one block.

The store next to the Auberge bar entrance is called Spa-Roe. According to the sign, it’s a place you can visit for facials and massages (the “spa” part) while you sample various caviars (the “roe” part). Just what the world has been waiting for.

Right next to it is a bistro… pardon …a bar. It’s called Fitzgerald’s, as in “F. Scott.” I stand in front of it for a few moments and look through the window. It’s a re-creation of a 1920s speakeasy. I can see a huge poster that says GOD BLESS JIMMY WALKER. Only one person is seated at the bar, a pretty young blond girl. She’s chatting with the much older bartender.

I walk about twenty feet and pass a pet-grooming store. A very unhappy cat is being shampooed. Next door is a “French” dry cleaner, a term I’d never heard before moving to New York. There’s an optician who sells discounted Tom Ford eyeglass frames for four hundred dollars. There’s a place to have your computer fixed and a place that sells nothing but brass buttons. I pause. I smoke a cigarette. The block is busy as hell, but nothing is happening for me.

Until I toss my cigarette on the sidewalk.

A man’s voice isn’t angry, just loud. “What’s with the littering, mister?”

Littering? That’s a new word in my English vocabulary.

The speaker is a white-bearded old man wearing brown work pants and a brown T-shirt. It’s the kind of outfit assembled to look like a uniform, but it isn’t actually a uniform. The man is barely five feet tall. He holds an industrial-size water hose with a dripping nozzle.

“Littering?” I ask.

The old guy points to the dead cigarette at my feet.

“Your cigarette! They pay me to keep these sidewalks clean.”

“I apologize.”

“I was making a joke. It’s only a joke. Get it? A joke, just a joke.”

This man was not completely, uh…mentally competent, but I had to follow one of my major rules: talk to anyone, anywhere, anytime.

“Yes, a joke. Good. Do you live here?” I ask.

“The Bronx,” he answers. “Mott Haven. They always call it the south Bronx, but it’s not. I don’t know why they can’t get it right.”

“So you just work down here?”

“Yeah. I watch the three buildings. The button place, the animal place, and the eyeglasses place. They call me Danny with the Hose.”

“Understandably,” I say.

“Good, you understand. Now stand back.”

I do as I’m told until my back is up against the optician’s doorway. Danny sprays the sidewalk with a fast hard surge of water. Scraps of paper, chunks of dog shit, empty beer cans-they all go flying into the gutter.

“Danny,” I say. “A lot of pretty girls around here, huh? What with the fancy hotel right here and the fancy neighborhood.”

He shuts off his hose. “Some are pretty. I mind my business.”

A young man, no more than twenty-five, comes out of the pet-grooming shop. He has a big dog-a boxer, I think-on a leash. Danny with the Hose and the man with the dog greet each other with a high five. The young man is tall, blond, good-looking. He wears long blue shorts and a pathetic red sleeveless shirt.

“Hey,” I say to him. “Danny and I have just been talking about the neighborhood. I’m moving to East 68th Street in a few weeks. With a roommate. A German shepherd.”

“Cool,” he says, suddenly a lot more interested in talking to me. “If you need a groomer, this place is the best. Take a look at Titan.” He pets his dog’s shiny coat. “He’s handsome enough to be in a GQ spread. I’ve been bringing him here ever since we moved into 655 Park five years ago.”

My ears prick up. I go into full acting-class mode now.

“Isn’t 655 the place where that lady cop got killed?”

“They say she was a cop pretending to be a hooker. I don’t know.”

“Luc…Luc Moncrief,” I say. We shake.

“Eric,” he says. No last name offered. “Well, welcome. I said ‘pretending,’ but I don’t know. Women are not my area of expertise, if you know what I mean. All my info on the local girls comes from one of the doormen in my building. He says all the hookers hang out at the Auberge.”

“That’s where I’m staying now,” I say.

“Well, anyway, Carl-the doorman-says most of the girls who work out of the Auberge bar are clean. Bang, bang, pay your money, over and out. He says the ones to watch out for are the girls who work for the Russians. Younger and prettier, but they’ll skin you alive. I dunno. I play on a whole other team.”

“Yet you seem to know a great deal about mine, ” I say. “Nice meeting you.”

The guy and the dog take off. Danny with the Hose has disappeared, too.

I look at my watch. I should be meeting up with K. Burke.

But first I’ll just go on a quick errand.

If you ever need to get some information from a New York doorman, learn from my experience with Carl.

A ten-dollar bill will get you this: “Yeah, I think there’s some foreign kind of operation going on at the Auberge. But I’m busy getting taxis for people and helping with packages. So I can’t be sure.”