“For what?”
“You’re the only one I can trust to help me talk some sense into my drug-addled husband.”
“Spence’s counselor specifically told you — you have to let the man hit rock bottom. You can’t save him, Kylie.”
Kylie almost never cries, but I could see that she was fighting to hold back the tears behind that strong MacDonald wall of resolve. She almost never curses either, but she wheeled around and hurled an f-bomb at me.
“Fuck Spence’s counselor! I’m his wife. I’m also a detective first grade with the most elite police unit in this city, and I’ll be damned if I’m going to sit around and watch my husband pull a ten-year stretch for crack possession.”
Chapter 32
Shelley’s apartment was only a five-minute drive from the precinct. With Kylie behind the wheel, I figured I had half that time to bring her down from DEFCON 1 to a more manageable state of hothead with a short fuse.
“Do you have a plan?” I asked.
“You know me, Zach. I’m methodical to a fault. That’s why they call me the queen of departmental procedure.”
“Listen to me,” I said. “You’re a cop. You can’t just storm into the apartment—”
“I’m not storming. Shelley left me a key. What he should have done was change the lock after he put the place off limits, but he trusted Spence to play by the rules. Big mistake to trust a junkie. Spence had a key, the doormen all knew him, so he apparently just waltzed right in with Marco and Seth.”
“You know his drug buddies?”
“I’ve seen them around Silvercup. Marco works for the catering company that services Spence’s productions. He’s a decent guy — married, goes to meetings when he’s clean — but he relapsed about a year ago and never bounced back. Seth is a total asshole. He’s a kid, maybe twenty-four, went to NYU film school, works on and off as a production assistant, acts like he knows it all, and when he’s hopped up, he knows even more. Neither of those two guys has enough money to feed his habit, which is why they glommed on to Spence.”
“Let me repeat the question,” I said as she pulled up to the building on East End Avenue. “Do you have a plan?”
“No. Do you?”
I didn’t answer. My only plan was to keep her from going ballistic.
The concierge at the front desk barely looked at us. He handed Kylie a set of keys, then busied himself with paperwork. Clearly he’d spoken to Shelley.
I’ve been to crack houses, but never to one on the tenth floor of a luxury building with a magnificent view of the East River. The smell hit us as soon as Kylie opened the door, and while the place hadn’t been destroyed like the studio sets, it looked like the aftermath of a frat party. No wonder the cleaning lady bolted. Spence had turned Shelley’s multimillion-dollar corporate apartment into a three-bedroom, three-bathroom drug den.
There were two men in the living room, one sprawled on the sofa, one on the floor, neither of them Spence. Kylie and I searched the place. He was gone.
We went back to the living room. The man on the floor had managed to pull himself to a sitting position, his back against a coffee table littered with drug paraphernalia, his legs stretched out on the rug.
“You got a warrant, Detective Harrington?” he said. “Or are you just not familiar with the Fourth Amendment?”
“It’s Detective MacDonald, Seth, and I’m here because the owner of this apartment reported a break-in.”
“And I’m here because your crackhead husband was having a boys’ night out, and he invited me over.”
“I’m going to make this easy on you, Seth,” Kylie said, standing over him. “Tell me where to find Spence, and I’ll let you walk.”
“Let me walk? I can walk anytime I want to. You busted in here without cause. But if you want to haul me in, fine. I’ll tell the DA that the cop who arrested me is married to my drug dealer.”
“I’m trying hard to be nice to you,” she said, her voice calm and composed. “Last chance, Seth. Where’s Spence?”
“You want to know where Spence is? Sure thing,” he said, looking up at her and spreading his legs even wider. “But first, suck my dick.”
And that was all it took for the woman without a plan to come up with a brilliant strategy. She kicked him right in the balls.
Seth curled up into himself, screaming in the kind of excruciating pain that only some men have ever experienced, but all men dread.
I grabbed her just in case she thought she hadn’t made her point, and for the next three minutes we watched Seth writhing on the floor, gasping for air, and fouling Shelley’s hand-knotted one-of-a-kind Persian rug with vomit.
Relief came eventually, and Seth finally settled into a teary whimper.
“Marco,” Kylie said to the man on the sofa, her voice barely above a whisper. “Did you see what just happened? Your friend here said, ‘I can walk anytime I want to.’ Does it look like he can walk?”
Marco shook his head, his eyes wide with fear. He sat up, knees pressed tight against each other, hands cupped over his nuts. “I swear on my daughter’s life, I don’t know where Spence went. Him and me, we’re friends. I don’t have a lot of money, but I always know where to get the good shit, so we make a good team.”
My phone rang. I picked up.
“Did you find Annie Ryder yet?” It was Q.
“NCIC is still working on it.”
“Then you were right,” Q said. “I do have a better database than they do. Annie’s back in New York. She’s got a place in Astoria.”
He gave me an address on Hoyt Avenue. I hung up and nodded at Kylie. “We’ve got a twenty on Annie.”
“We’re done here,” she said to Marco. “Take this worthless piece of shit with you.”
Marco dragged Seth to his feet and practically carried him out the door.
Kylie locked up and texted Shelley to send for a cleaning crew and a locksmith.
“Thanks,” she said once we were back in the car. “I was pretty crazy when we left Cates’s office. Having you there helped calm me down.”
I smiled. All things considered, she had been pretty calm. But I doubted if Seth would agree.
Chapter 33
“Ed Koch or Robert F. Kennedy?” Kylie asked before we pulled out into traffic.
I laughed out loud. Annie Ryder lived in Queens, and we were in Manhattan, on the opposite side of the East River. There were two ways to get across, neither of them any faster than the other. But having butted heads with me about her need to run the show, she was now turning the next critical decision over to me: which bridge to take.
“Haven’t you busted enough balls for one day?” I said. “Just get me there alive.”
We took the RFK.
Ryder lived on the seventh floor of a newly constructed fifteen-story tower that had been designated as affordable housing for seniors. Kylie rang the bell in the lobby.
“Ms. Ryder,” she said. “NYPD. Can we ask you a few questions?”
“Only if you have identification,” the voice came back. “I can’t open the door unless you show me proof that you really are the police.”
Kylie gave me a grin. Annie was playing the little old lady afraid to open the door for muggers. The charade continued outside her apartment until we proved that we were legit, and she finally let us in.
Annie had been charged twice with fraud, and even though nothing stuck, her picture was still in our database. But the person who opened the door looked nothing like the steely-eyed, stern-jawed, fiftysomething grifter whose mug shot I’d studied. This Annie was twenty years older, and with her gray hair pulled back in a bun and a warm crinkly smile on her face, she looked like the woman you’d cast to play the farmhouse granny in a Hallmark commercial.