“That’s the car,” Regan said.
“I’ve got fourteen parking violations since September of last year. What do you need?”
“Locations,” Michael said.
“Four of them are outside a restaurant called La Luna on Fifty-Eighth and Eighth.”
Michael nodded.
“What about the other eight?”
“Various locations in Manhattan and Brooklyn.”
“How are they listed?”
“By building.”
“Where the car was parked?” Regan asked.
“Yeah, the address it was in front of.”
“Any other repeaters?” Michael asked.
“What do you mean?”
“Any other places he parked more than once?”
“No, these are all different addresses.”
“Any streets repeated?”
“Let me see.”
There was a long silence.
“Yeah, we got three addresses on the same street.”
“What street is that?” Michael asked.
“It’s an avenue, actually.”
“Which one?”
“Bowery. In Manhattan. But the addresses are pretty far apart.”
“Can you let us have them, please?”
“What’s your fax number?” Henderson said.
The apartment was above a tailor shop on Broome Street, just two blocks off Bowery. The tailor shop was on the ground floor of the building: The upper three stories had been remodeled as a triplex. From the outside, you saw a four-story brick tenement covered with the soot and grime of at least a century. On the inside, the apartment consisted of an entry and living room on the floor above the tailor shop, a kitchen and dining room on the second floor, and a bedroom on the third floor. There was a lot of expensive cabinetry and hardware in the apartment. Andrew’s father had contracted the remodeling to one of his own construction companies, and they’d done a quality job because they’d realized exactly for whom they were working.
The building was a corner building. The entrance to the tailor shop was on Broome Street, but its large plate-glass windows wrapped around the corner to Mott Street as well. There was a wooden door painted blue on the Mott Street side of the building. The blue door had a Mott Street address on it, and a black mailbox with the name “Carter-Goldsmith Investments” lettered on it in gold was affixed to the jamb beside the door. Inside the door, there was a staircase that led to the first-floor entry of the apartment. There was one other entrance to the apartment. This was through the back of the tailor shop, where a door opened onto another staircase that led to the rear of the apartment’s living room, adjacent to the wood-burning fireplace. The upstairs and downstairs doors to the apartment were fitted with identical deadbolt locks. Andrew was the only one who had a key that opened each lock.
He always parked his car wherever he could find a spot. The side streets in Little Italy and Chinatown were usually impossible, but he’d been lucky finding spaces on Bowery, where all the lighting and appliance stores were. He then walked the two, three, sometimes six blocks or more to the Broome Street tailor shop. The gilt lettering on both the Broome Street and Mott Street windows of the shop read:
A little bell over the door rang whenever anyone entered the shop. On this rainy, wet, and dismal Friday the fifteenth, the bell sounded particularly welcoming, a harbinger of the steamy embrace of the shop. As he entered, Andrew was greeted with the familiar sounds of the bell tinkling, and the pressing machine hissing in the back room, and the sewing machine humming. Louis sat working in the Broome Street window, squinting at a piece of cloth he was running under the feed dog, chewing on an unlit guinea stinker, his rimless glasses shoved up onto his forehead, his foot on the machine’s treadle. To his left and deeper inside the shop was a double-tiered row of hangered garments awaiting pickup.
“Andrew, hello,” he said, and rose immediately and put the stogie in a small ashtray near the machine’s bobbin. Turning to Andrew, his arms wide, he said, “Come vai?”
“Good, thank you,” Andrew said, and went to the old man and embraced him.
Louis was wearing a sleeveless sweater over a white shirt and trousers with a faint stripe. He had made the trousers himself. He had also made the sports jacket Andrew was wearing under an overcoat he’d had tailored at Chipp. Louis had picket-fence white hair, and he always looked a bit grizzled. Andrew guessed he shaved once or twice a week, and then under duress.
“I found a nice cloth for you,” he said. “For a suit. You want to see it?”
“Not now, I’m expecting Uncle Rudy,” Andrew said, and looked at his watch. “Send him right up when he gets here, okay?”
“Sure. What weather, huh?”
“Terrible,” Andrew said.
“Is the jacket warm enough?”
“The jacket is warm enough,” Andrew said, smiling and unbuttoning his coat. Opening it wide to show Louis, he said, “And beautiful, too.”
“Yes, it is,” Louis said modestly.
“I’ll be upstairs.”
“I’ll send him up.”
“How’s Benny doing?”
“Ask him,” Louis said, and shrugged.
His son was pressing in the back room.
“I hate this fuckin’ job,” was the first thing he said.
“You’re a good presser,” Andrew said.
“Can’t you get me something?” Benny said.
Tall and rake-thin, with his father’s unruly hair — coal black as opposed to the old man’s white — he, too, wore glasses, misted now by the steam rising from the pressing machine. He worked in a tank-top white undershirt and dark trousers. White socks and black shoes. He, too, needed a shave. Like father, like son, Andrew thought.
“I’ll take anything you can find me,” Benny said. “Construction, the docks, anything, driving a truck, whatever. I’m stronger than I look, Andrew, I mean it.”
“I know you are. But...”
“I’m skinny, but I’m strong.”
“I know that. But what would your father do without you?”
“It’s just I hate pressing. I hate it.”
“Does he know that?”
“I don’t know.”
“Talk to him. See what he says. If he agrees to let you go, I may have something in the Fulton Market.”
“Jesus, I hate fish,” Benny said.
“Or something else, we’ll see. But talk to him first.”
“I can’t even stand the smell of fish,” Benny said.
“Talk to him,” Andrew said, and walked back to the door on the rear wall. Fastened to the jamb was a speaker with a buzzer button under it. He fished out his keys and unlocked the deadbolt. Flicking on the light switch in the stairwell, he climbed to the apartment’s first floor. The stairwell walls were painted white to match the back of the tailor shop. The door to the apartment was also painted white on this side. He unlocked the deadbolt on the upstairs door, opened it, stepped into the apartment, and closed and locked the door behind him, using the deadbolt’s thumb latch. The inside of the door was paneled in walnut, as was the rest of the living room. He checked the thermostat, nodded when he saw it was set for seventy degrees, and then sat down to wait for his uncle.
In the newspaper office on the fifth floor of the school, Luretta and Sarah were working on next week’s issue of the Greer Gazette, a name both of them despised. The clock on the wall read eleven forty. Sarah and the girl both had free periods, and whatever they could accomplish now would save time for the rest of the newspaper staff after classes today. Luretta was better at headlines than most of the other girls; she had a mind that cut instantly to the chase. The one she was working on now was for a story that detailed the school’s visit last week to the Matisse exhibit at MOMA. She’d tried two ideas on Sarah...