Same Difference, page 7
If what Laura Rapinoe had told me was true – and I couldn’t be sure but it seemed to check out after a night of internet research on the area – the building where Damien Van Dorn had gone for a showdown with his adversaries would be on this block or another around the corner. I hadn’t been able to show Laura pictures of the buildings I’d brought up in the search because I was already back at my apartment by then and doubted Laura would want to talk to me again. Probably ever.
So I was guessing that this building, with its large, seemingly spray-painted images in monotone of various ballplayers (don’t ask me who, but none of them was Babe Ruth), might be the one we were looking for. We’d looked in to a few basement windows but had not yet visited a basement. Frankly, everywhere we’d looked we’d gotten odd stares from bystanders – something neither of us saw as unusual – but a basement is essentially a basement. There had been no reason for us to look more closely.
We walked across the street to the apartment building in question. Ken, who is more a basketball fan but knows a little about baseball, noted the players by name and tried very hard to interest me in why each one might be especially memorable. I’m not recreating any of that information for you now because I don’t remember any of it.
When we got to the building’s entrance, which surprised neither of us by lacking a doorman or a visible security system, there was an older man sitting on the stoop watching people go by. He was drinking something that from the color of it might have been iced tea and from the smell of it might not.
‘There’s no game today,’ he said when we approached. ‘They’re out of town. Chicago, I think.’
‘We’re not here for a game,’ I said. ‘The Stadium is over there.’ Not like he could have missed it; the place is enormous. I pointed from where we had come. I was doing a lot of pointing all of a sudden. ‘We just want to visit someone in the building.’
He looked Ken up and down. ‘You cops?’ the man said.
‘No, sir. We’re private investigators.’ I told him that because sometimes, just every once in a while, people can be impressed by that.
‘Uh-huh.’ This wasn’t one of those times. ‘Who you want to visit?’
Ken, who had been looking from side to side presumably for potential assailants, looked down at the seated man. ‘We’re not visiting anybody,’ he said. ‘We want to look in the basement first and then maybe go upstairs.’
‘The basement!’ The man looked amused. ‘What you want to look in the basement for? You never seen mice before?’
I don’t have a problem with mice on principle, but I’m also not their biggest fan. My stomach fluttered just a little. Go ahead, laugh.
‘There might be something downstairs that can help us find a guy we’re looking for,’ Ken told him. He pulled out his phone and showed the man a picture of Damien that we’d gotten (OK, Ken had gotten) from New Amsterdam’s files. ‘Have you seen this guy around here anywhere lately?’
To his credit, the man looked thoughtfully at the photograph. ‘I don’t think so,’ he said. ‘He don’t live in this building, I’m sure of that.’
I knew it wasn’t a competition, but I didn’t like Ken taking over my interview. I stepped forward, a little in front of my brother. Don’t worry, he was still visible. ‘Do you know two men who live here, or maybe just hang out here?’ I asked. ‘One is kind of large, with a shaved head, and the other one is slim and has a van dyke.’
‘A what?’ the man asked.
‘A goatee,’ my brother, ever helpful, answered.
‘The big guy – he a Spanish dude?’ the man asked.
Some people say that. They’re wrong, but then so was the goatee. ‘Latino, yes,’ I said. ‘And the slimmer one has a mole or a birthmark on this side.’ I indicated the side of my head just to the right of my eye.
‘I don’t know that one,’ the man told us. ‘But the big dude, I seen him around. Don’t want to mess with him.’
Ken looked interested. He likes a physical challenge. Ken, you should know, is crazy. ‘Why not?’ he asked.
The older man looked at him as if trying to decide if there was some sort of cognitive deficiency present in my brother. There isn’t, but I understood his concern. ‘Because he’s about your size and he carries a gun,’ he said.
‘So do I,’ Ken answered. He did not offer a glimpse of the weapon, and I wasn’t sure he had it with him. This was the usual macho nonsense. Probably.
‘Can you tell us what apartment that man lives in?’ I asked. Preferably before Ken decided to start marking his territory, I thought.
‘He’s on the fourth floor,’ our informant said. ‘I don’t know which apartment. I live on the second floor and my knees don’t go up the stairs that good.’
‘Do you know his name?’ I said. It hadn’t come up but that didn’t mean the older man didn’t have the information.
‘I heard someone call him Julio once,’ the guy told us. ‘Then he threw that boy down the stairs, so I wouldn’t call him Julio if I was you.’ Good advice, I thought.
The man had drunk about half of what he had in his plastic cup. It definitely wasn’t tea, but he had been forthright with us. I reached into my pocket and pulled out a twenty-dollar bill. ‘Thanks so much for your help,’ I said, and extended my hand with the money.
He stared at my hand as if it held a live rat. ‘Don’t you even think about it,’ he said. ‘I’m not a beggar.’
‘No, sir,’ I responded. ‘You are an informant.’ I held out my hand again.
‘Not in this neighborhood,’ the older man said with a growl in his voice. ‘Around here, “informants” get cut. Put your money away.’
So I did, apologized, and walked up the stoop toward the front door, which someone (probably our friend) had propped open with a small block of wood, clearly not for the first time. Ken followed behind me, obviously amused that I’d been seen as insulting the man drinking rye (the smell was unmistakable) in front of his apartment building.
The aroma inside the building wasn’t better. This place of residence for people who were not the poorest in the city smelled of things better left unmentioned. Yes, our senses are stronger than most, but anyone would have found the place, at best, unappealing.
It was not noticeably dirty, though. This building had probably been pretty grand when it was built, most likely in the early part of the twentieth century. The floor of the lobby was marble tile, now faded and cracked in places from a hundred years of wear and neglect. The stairway to the left had probably once had elegant wooden banisters that were now gone. But Ken and I weren’t interested in going upstairs. Not yet.
I looked around for a door or stairway to the basement but came up short. Ken was more successful, apparently, because he whistled to me and pointed toward a part of the lobby wall that looked like the rest. I looked at him and shrugged.
My brother pointed to the doorknob that I had missed. This wasn’t my best detecting day and it was only a little after noon.
The lobby was empty for the moment and I did not have the impression the man on the stoop was watching to see what we might do. We walked over to the door so Ken could turn the knob. Surprisingly, it turned. Apparently nobody in this building, even the super if they had one, had been too worried about the security of the basement. It was not a huge surprise; the place was a home to some but not on the order of Damien Van Dorn’s apartment in Alphabet City. It was being held together, but just barely.
Ken pulled the door open and looked inside. ‘Flashlights,’ he said, brilliant conversationalist that he is. I guessed it was dark in the stairway to the cellar. I pulled out my phone and turned on the flashlight app.
Once we were inside the stairway, I closed the door behind us. No sense in advertising our presence in the basement to Julio, or whatever he’d decided his name was, or for that matter to anyone else.
I turned the flashlight’s beam out and took a look around. Within ten seconds I had located a switch and used it to turn on the lights, which probably annoyed my brother, who had grown up watching The X-Files and thought flashlights made everything cooler. He grimaced a bit and turned his off as well.
This was a completely ordinary stairway to what appeared, from one flight up, to be a completely ordinary basement. The stairs did creak, of course, but that was to be expected. The walls had last been painted most likely during the Carter administration, before Ken and I were, for lack of a better word, born.
‘The staircase can be treacherous,’ he said, quoting one of our favorite movies. I did not laugh.
We made our way down the stairs carefully because again there was no banister, which probably violated all sorts of housing code regulations. Or at least the one requiring banisters. I was watching my step especially closely because, if I tripped, my first cushion to land on would be my brother and who needed that? He’d never let me hear the end of it.
The light in the basement was not working, probably due to lack of bulbs in the fixtures, both overhead and in one sorry-looking floor lamp to the left side. I reached for my phone again when we got to the basement floor.
‘Wait,’ Ken said.
I stopped with some trepidation. ‘Are there mice?’ I asked. I’d decided by then that I absolutely hated mice.
‘No.’
‘Thanks for not overwhelming me with information,’ I told him. ‘I’m going to turn my flashlight on.’
Ken took a few steps forward and illuminated his app. ‘You’re not gonna like it,’ he said.
That was it. I put on my light and aimed it in the same direction as my brother’s.
Sure enough, there was a very tall, thin, redheaded man. Damien Van Dorn. I recognized him from the photographs we’d seen.
He was lying on the floor with what appeared to be an electrical cord around his neck. His eyes were open and looked appalled.
Damien was quite dead, and now I had to figure out how I’d tell his mother.
ELEVEN
I decided, after considering that Helena Van Dorn was not my client, that she had left our last meeting without a common courtesy, and that I am a coward, to leave the notification of her son’s death to the police. I pay taxes.
We had called 911 immediately, and the good officers of the 44th Precinct had arrived … pretty soon thereafter. This wasn’t exactly the highest priority neighborhood in the city, and Damien wasn’t going to stop being dead any time soon. We were advised not to touch anything, and since I didn’t want to, that was easy to obey.
‘We’ve done this before,’ Ken reminded me after Officers Cantrell and Dominguez had arrived and started taking pictures, debating whether they had to call a detective and deciding that yes, they did. ‘This is not the first dead body we’ve found.’
‘That doesn’t make me feel better,’ I told him. ‘I was looking for Damien to lead me to Eliza. Now Damien is dead and I think it unlikely he’s going to tell me much about where Eliza might be. In fact’ (and here I lowered my voice in case the cops were listening) ‘she’s probably at the top of the suspect list.’
‘What about Julio?’ Ken asked. ‘I’m thinking he’s the most likely candidate.’
‘I’m not ruling him out. I’m thinking about what their detective is going to say.’ I gestured toward the two uniforms, who were measuring distances from Damien’s hand to the cord around his neck. I knew they couldn’t, but I wished they would unwind that thing and give the boy a chance to breathe.
You have weird thoughts when there’s a dead body in the room.
The door at the top of the stairs creaked open and a man who had to be an NYPD detective (given his absolutely generic wardrobe and fairly old shoes) started down the stairs. He was in his forties, clean shaven and chewing what I sincerely hoped was gum. I had to blink a couple of times to make sure I hadn’t seen him playing this exact role on one of the iterations of Law & Order. They film in New York pretty much all the time, so if you haven’t met someone who’s been on those shows, you’re not a New Yorker.
Behind him was a large man (not as large as Ken) dressed a little more carefully, wearing Nikes. He carried an iPad. Detectives never go anywhere without an iPad anymore. Except Rich Mankiewicz, who apparently still works on his phone and lets it get thrown in the river. But I digress.
The first one down the stairs flashed a badge at me. I chose not to look at it for fear that he’d think I was impressed. ‘Detective Sergeant Louis Merchant,’ he said. I took that for his name because I thought it was pretty clear I wasn’t Detective Sergeant Louis Merchant. ‘This is my partner, Neil Brooker.’ Brooker nodded in my direction and I did the same back. I appreciated his not chewing gum.
‘Ken Stein,’ said my brother, extending a hand. Merchant looked at it but made no move. He wouldn’t want us to think we were colleagues or peers or anything. Ken retracted the hand and gestured in my general direction. ‘That’s my sister, Fran.’
‘We’re private investigators,’ I said, lest the detectives think we just liked to hang around in grubby basements. ‘We’re looking for someone who knew the victim here and we found the body.’
That seemed to remind Merchant that yes, there was a body on the floor. Brooker had already walked over there and was taking in the scene, which was gruesome without being gory.
Damien, dressed in strategically ripped jeans and a blue t-shirt with no legend on it, was twisted in what appeared to be a very uncomfortable position. His legs were bent at the knee and stuffed behind him. His arms were tied. There was a chair six feet from his prone body that indicated he might have been sitting there before someone decided to deprive him of oxygen. There was a dark stain, with no color, on his shirtfront. And there was that thick electrical cord, maybe an extension cord, wrapped multiple times around his neck and tightened, then tied. It wasn’t a noose but it might as well have been. His mouth was open but tight. His eyes were open but not bulging. All in all, I’d had better days, and certainly Damien had as well.
‘You know who he is?’ Merchant asked.
Ken had apparently decided he was the point man for our team, so I walked over toward Brooker. I could still hear the conversation behind me.
‘We had photographs to help us find him. He’s Damien Van Dorn,’ Ken said with as much authority as he could muster. I’m sure with his deep voice it sounded to the cops like he knew what he was talking about. ‘He’s a student at New Amsterdam University.’
I watched Brooker work. He was obviously the less talkative of the two and he was observing the macabre scene in front of us the way a detective should, dispassionately and carefully. If there was something here that was going to help identify or find the killer, Brooker didn’t want to miss it. But I could tell he was listening to Merchant question Ken at the same time.
‘But he’s not the one you were looking for,’ Merchant said.
Ken pointed at him as if he were the clever student in the class. ‘That’s right. We’re looking for Eliza Hennessey and we think she was friends with Damien here.’
Brooker reached into his jacket pocket, having already put on a pair of latex gloves, and found a small pair of tweezers. He reached down and pulled something from the floor just next to Damien’s left ear. I couldn’t see what it was before he got it into an evidence bag and then his pocket.
My job had not been to find Damien Van Dorn, yet I had done so in the worst condition possible. ‘Friends?’ Merchant asked. I didn’t know it was possible for a voice to leer.
‘Yeah,’ Ken said. ‘They met at school.’ He glanced at me. Should he go on? I considered that Mank was the detective on the other end of that question, decided not to let the grudge go that far, and nodded. ‘And we think Damien was dealing drugs.’
Brooker looked up, first at Ken and then at me. He stood and turned in my direction. ‘You think this guy was dealing?’ he said.
‘Is that a big surprise for a guy that ends up strangled in a tenement basement?’ Merchant cut in. I was thinking of introducing him to Emil Bendix and then decided that might cause a hole in the space-time continuum.
Brooker, wisely, decided to ignore his partner. ‘What gave you that impression?’ he asked me.
‘We found some packets of pills in his apartment,’ I said. No need to give him the mental image of me going through an empty pair of jeans on the floor in Damien’s hallway.
He raised his eyebrows a bit. ‘What kind of pills?’
‘I don’t know yet.’ Which was true because Mankiewicz hadn’t called me yet. Men. ‘I really wasn’t looking for Damien except as a way to help find Eliza Hennessey. And, as you can see, he’s in no shape to help me do that.’
Probably without realizing it, Brooker looked down at Damien again. I’d had the image imprinted on my cerebral cortex and would never be able to get rid of it. He’d forget it by the time he got home to his wife – or husband – at the end of the day. ‘This wasn’t a planned killing,’ he said, to me and to himself and maybe, if he was really desperate, to Merchant as well. ‘Whoever did this found the extension cord down here; they didn’t bring it with them. Does this Eliza have a grudge against this guy? Did he sell her something bad, maybe?’
I gave Ken an I-told-you-so look, one he’s seen enough times to recognize it in his sleep. ‘I don’t have any evidence that Eliza was buying from Damien or that she was at all upset with him. In fact, she went missing days before he came down here and this happened.’
Brooker shook his head. ‘This guy hasn’t been dead more than a day. He’s not decomposed enough. I think someone held him here at least one day, maybe longer, and then got mad enough to wrap that cord around his neck and yank.’
Happy as I was to be treated like an equal, I felt that Brooker was missing my point. ‘I’m saying, I don’t think Eliza is a great suspect for doing this.’
