ELIZABETH IS acting a little different; I can tell. I just can’t tell why. Not yet…
She squinted at me from across her spotless desk that afternoon in the First Precinct, her home base, not too far from City Hall. She wanted to trust me but wasn’t sure. “What are you not seeing?” she asked.
“I don’t know. I’ll know it when I see it, though,” I said, handing her back a copy of the autopsy report on Jared Louden, our murdered hedge-fund manager.
The cause of death was never in doubt. Multiple stab wounds.
Elizabeth was still squinting. “Do you think the medical examiner missed something?”
“Not necessarily,” I said.
“Then what is it?” she asked.
“Nothing,” I said.
“I don’t believe you.”
“Fine. Don’t believe me.”
“Seriously,” she said. “What aren’t you telling me?”
“Better yet,” I said, “why are you nagging me about this?”
She blinked. “Did you really just use the word nagging with me?”
“I’m sorry. Would you prefer busting my balls?”
“Hey, you two, get a room,” came a man’s voice from behind two tall stacks of paperwork on a nearby desk.
Elizabeth leaned back in her chair so she could see the guy, a fellow detective. “Sorry, Robert,” she said before turning to me again. Her squint was gone, but there was still something in her eyes. Again, she’d been looking at me a little differently ever since I’d arrived at the precinct.
“Listen,” I said. “Louden’s already dead and buried. The question is whether there’s anything he can still tell us about his killer.”
“I get that,” she said. “I can’t have you holding back on me, that’s all.”
Holding back?
“I’m not,” I said. Although I couldn’t help tacking on a slight chuckle.
“What was that for?” she asked.
I glanced over at the other detective, Robert—or at least what I could see of him over the files, which was basically the top of his forehead and his receding hairline. My concern was what I couldn’t see. His ears.
“Later,” I told Elizabeth.
“No, now,” she insisted. “And don’t worry about Robert; he knows more about me than my shrink…if I actually had one.”
I still hesitated.
“Hey, Robert, you still there?” she asked.
“Yeah,” came his voice again from behind the files. He sounded like Abe Vigoda from his Barney Miller days. Drier than rye toast.
“When’s the last time I had sex?” she asked.
Robert snap-answered. “Eight months ago.”
“What foods give me gas?”
“Wheat bread, hummus, and potato chips.”
“Why don’t I speak to my father?”
“Because he cheated on your mother,” he said. “That’s why you have trust issues.”
Elizabeth cocked her head at me, spreading her arms wide. Satisfied?
More like entertained, but it was the same difference. She apparently had nothing to hide.
“It was something Grimes said to me,” I explained. “Right after you bolted from the diner. A warning. He was telling me to be careful around you.”
“Why?” she asked.
“He more than implied that your rank on the force wasn’t entirely your doing, that you had some help,” I said. “I think his exact words were…you were in bed with someone.”
Immediately the girl who had nothing to hide raised a finger to her lips. Shh.
“Hey, Robert?” she called out.
“Yeah?” came his voice.
“Go smoke a cigarette,” she said.
Chapter 27
“SURE,” SAID Robert without the slightest hesitation. “That sounds like a great idea.”
I watched as he promptly rose up from behind the file stacks, not once making eye contact with me before turning and walking away.
“Does Robert sit and roll over, too?” I asked once he was out of earshot.
“Yes, and he’s fiercely loyal to boot,” she said. While I was joking, she was making a point. “For a guy who knows so much about me, including intimate details about my personal life, he sure seemed fine with my telling him to get lost for a few minutes. Do you know why that is?”
As a matter of fact I did. “Because there are some things a person doesn’t want to know, and he trusts you to know the difference on his behalf,” I said. “I believe the term is plausible deniability.”
Elizabeth rolled her eyes. “I should’ve known better than to ask a psych professor,” she said. “What exactly did Grimes say to you?”
“I told you,” I said. “You’re in bed with someone.”
“He didn’t name names?”
“No, and I didn’t ask him to.”
“He wouldn’t have told you anyway,” she said. “He’s enjoying the thought of you and me having this conversation way too much. He probably fed you lines, too, like why he came to me instead of any other detective.”
“As a matter of fact…”
Elizabeth glanced around, making sure no one else could hear her.
“Plenty of other places we could go,” I offered.
“We’re fine,” she said. Still, she leaned in a little closer. I could smell her perfume, a hint of jasmine. “Three years ago, I was put on the mayor’s security detail. It had been only guys up until that point—an all-boys club—and it was determined that the optics of that weren’t good. That was the pretense, at least.”
“Pretense?” I asked.
“It was true that the detail had only been men prior to me, but let’s just say fixing a gender imbalance wasn’t the primary concern,” she said.
“What was?”
“That’s the part you shouldn’t know.”
“Then why even mention it?”
“Because you asked.”
“Only because of what Grimes told me,” I said. “So it’s the mayor? Grimes thinks I need to be careful because of your connection to him?”
“Actually, Grimes doesn’t really think that. He just wanted to see how much you know.”
“About what?”
“Exactly,” she said. “Plausible deniability. You didn’t know.”
“Only now you’re going to tell me, right?”
Chapter 28
IF I’D leaned in any closer, Elizabeth and I would’ve been bumping foreheads.
“I was the first detective Grimes called,” she said. “But I wasn’t his first call.”
“Who was?” I asked.
“Beau Livingston,” she said. “The mayor’s chief of staff.”
“Why?”
“Crime reporters, by definition, are a pain in the ass for a mayor, especially one who advocated making the city safer.”
“Advocated?” That word didn’t begin to describe it.
During his initial run for City Hall, Mayor Edward “Edso” Deacon made Rudy Giuliani look like Neville Chamberlain in his effort to combat crime. Deacon’s reelection campaign, backed by his own immense fortune from commercial real estate, had been no less relentless. The only problem was that the statistics weren’t exactly in Deacon’s favor. Far from it. Crime hadn’t dropped at all since he took office.
“Yeah,” said Elizabeth, bobbing her head. “Advocated isn’t really the right word, is it?”
“His ad blitz was more like an all-out assault.”