Alafair Burke - Angel's Tip

“You don’t need to explain.” Even though she hadn’t meant to imply any type of accusation against Rogan, she found herself grateful for the information.

“Like I said, it’s all relative in New York. Three thousand dollars for a night of partying. That’s some crazy shit.”

“Do you have a sense yet who the idiots are who shelled out that kind of money last night?”

“Investment bankers. Commercial developers. And, with at least some of these, apparently shortchanged shareholders and duped clients. So far I’ve already got three corporate cards.”

“No known pimps? Rapists? Perhaps even a very naughty pornographer?” Ellie asked.

“Not yet. Anyone worth checking out on your end?”

Just as Rogan finished asking the question, the last employee on the list popped up clean on NCIC. “I gotta hand it to Bell. He wasn’t kidding when he said they ran a tight ship. Most of these places are run by lowlifes, but I’ve got nothing.”

“Nothing? Impossible.”

The arrest of the SoHo bouncer had revealed the flagrant disregard that bar managers showed for the city’s hiring regulations. That case had been a wake-up call, but only so much can change over a few years in an industry driven by profit margins.

“That goes without saying, but it’s not much. I’ve got one guy-Jaime Rodriguez-with a six-year-old Burg II conviction and a couple pops two years ago for suspected drug distribution, but no convictions.”

“How does he get popped twice without charges? How hard is it to make a drug case?”

“Both times, he was picked up on the street in the Bronx,” Ellie said, looking at her notes. “High-crime neighborhood, late at night. Seen walking between open car windows and a nearby building. No drugs found in the searches incident to arrest.”

It was a standard setup for street-level drug dealing. Rodriguez would’ve been the negotiator, coming to an agreement on price and quantity with the customers in their cars and then directing them to a nearby location. He’d send a signal to someone-most likely a juvenile-who would run to an area stash house and meet the buyers at the agreed-upon delivery spot. Rodriguez keeps his hands clean.

“I get the picture,” Rogan said. “I wouldn’t call that nothing. The vic had meth in her system, and if it didn’t come from her friends, it came from somewhere else.”

“Problem is, Rodriguez wasn’t working last night.”

“Damn.”

“We’ll get to him, but-”

“Yeah, I know. Anyone else?”

“I got a janitor. Leon Symanski.”

“A Polish janitor? Insert joke here.”

“I don’t think you’re supposed to say that.” Ellie wagged a finger in Rogan’s direction. “Leon the janitor has a prior conviction for sexual misconduct. But it was twenty years ago.”

“Could you track down any of the facts?”

“I already had the reports faxed over. He admitted having sex with a sixteen-year-old who lived in his building. Apparently the girl was a regular at the Symanski apartment-talking to the wife, helping with the baby, that kind of thing. The dad was snooping around the girl’s room and found some records from an abortion clinic. He pulled her out of the Symanskis’ apartment and was smacking her around in the hallway. All hell broke loose, and when the cops showed up, Symanski owned up that he was the one who got the girl pregnant. The girl said it was consensual, but at sixteen, of course, that doesn’t matter.”

“Twenty years ago?”

“Yeah. Symanski would’ve been twenty-six at the time. He got a year’s probation. No problems since.”

“A year of probation? No time?” Rogan asked.

“Weird, huh?”

“I’ve got to think that even twenty years ago you got more for sleeping with a teenager than shoplifting.”

“Right. So that’s why I don’t think we’ve got anything here. My Spidey senses tell me that whatever ADA caught Symanski’s case didn’t think it was a predator kind of situation.” Although all kids under the age of consent were legally off-limits, those in law enforcement frequently used their discretion to distinguish between men wrapped up in a precocious teenager’s March-September experiment and the true sex offenders. “Twenty years of law-abiding behavior since then suggests they got it right.”

“I’ll call Mariah Florkoski at CSU to make sure she compares the latent from the victim’s shirt against both Rodriguez and Symanski. Maybe one of them somehow got left out of NCIC.”

“Can’t hurt,” she said. It wasn’t likely to help, either. Florkoski had already run the latent in the NCIC database, which should have contained prints for both Rodriguez and Symanski.

“Well, on that uplifting note, I say we get some rest and start anew tomorrow,” Rogan said. “We’ll start with the biggest credit card charge and work our way down until we find the right VIP lounge. We should have a doodle from the sketch artist by then. That will help.”

Ellie was never good at walking away from a case before she at least had a theory. She’d been that way even with her petty fraud cases. But fresh eyes and a rested mind could make up for hours of spinning the same old wheels. As much as she hated to leave, she could feel in her bones they weren’t going to break this case today. Starting again tomorrow sounded good.

THE MAN WAS DISAPPOINTED to find a woman named Gail in the seldom-used lunchroom. She was one of a few different two-hundred-pound assistants who seemed to roam the building. He found her unpleasant to look at. Her hair dye was so black it was blue. She wore too much blush, too much lipstick, and too colorful an outfit for her amorphous frame.

But he made a point of being pleasant, even to his most disgusting coworkers.

“Hey, Gail.”

Gail glanced up from her fashion magazine, grunted a hello, and removed her second Twix bar from the wrapper. The idea of a woman like Gail using her break to focus on fashion and beauty tips struck him as pathetic. Here’s a tip on self-improvement: Walk around the block and stop eating candy bars.

The man fed a dollar into one of two side-by-side vending machines. It took three attempts before the machine registered his credit. He pushed the buttons B and 3 and watched the black metal spiral spin on the second row of the machine, releasing a bag of peanut M &Ms. He retrieved the candy and his quarter of change from the machine.

On the muted television that hung on the wall next to the vending machine, the credits were rolling on The Oprah Winfrey Show. The man watched as Oprah peacocked across the set of her talk show in a red turtleneck and black pants, alternately pointing at the guests in their comfortable chairs and pumping her flattened palms robustly above her head. He could imagine her voice, imploring her audience to “give it up” for the earnest speakers.

“I just love her,” Gail said.

“Doesn’t everyone?” the man said in agreement.

He made his way back to his office and sat in his black leather desk chair. Using the remote control on his desk, he turned up the volume on his flat-screen TV. He pulled on the sides of his M &Ms bag to open it, then shook a couple of the colored candies directly into his mouth.

The chipper music on the television changed to a lower, more staccato tune, and Oprah’s designer set was replaced by an image of the station’s talking-heads duo sitting behind a desk. As seemed to be the case at least twice a week in New York, the top story was a fire, this time at a home in Long Island. Cause? Most likely an electrical problem, although police were investigating reported connections between the homeowner and the Mafia. The flames made good film from the helicopter hovering above. More at eleven.