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  “What tramp, Ms. Hopkins?”

  “You don’t know? I thought she was famous, going out with that music star. The rap guy. He’s the one you ought to talk to. Not me. He’s always creeping into this place all hours of the night.”

  “He’s the one who’s dead, Ms. Hopkins. That’s why we’re here.”

  “Jesus Christ, it could’ve been me! Right next door to that Celestina bitch, that’s her name, you know, his bimbo. Celestina Lo Belle, she’s the one you ought to lock up. Her and all the other tramps around here. Clean out this place for good. The investment I got, it’s going right down the toilet now, definitely done for after this horror. Lookit, Officer, my dog here, he’s got to go any minute now. I got to get my Angel up to the park, while he can still run around the meadow. After nine, he’s got to be back on the leash up there.”

  “You can leave, Ms. Hopkins. But we might want to talk again soon.”

  Leading her gotta-go Doberman, Marjorie Mary Hopkins stalked off, muttering loud enough for everyone to overhear.

  “People, they goddamn drive you crazy. Right on your own property. Good-bye investment, straight down that gutter there.”

  Flo Ott watched this angry grab bag of grievances and her monster, Angel, waddle past the police barricade and head up toward the park.

  Flo approached Sergeant Marty Keane. “Where’s his girlfriend?”

  “Apartment 2-D. We got someone up there trying to keep her calm. She’s a handful.”

  Lover

  8:24 A.M.

  Flo Ott entered the building and ascended the staircase, letting herself into 2-D, a loft apartment centered on a large rectangular living room with wall-to-wall white carpeting.

  The furniture consisted of seven bloated armchairs in pale cream leather and two matching sofas, and in the middle, a tan glass-top coffee table ran for at least four yards.

  On a couch stretched a fleshy blonde in a black silk dressing gown, sobbing for air, while in an armchair close to her, perched as if set to leap up at the blink of an eye, a snap of two fingers, sat an overweight patrolman, cap on head, hands on knees, fingers drumming a fast lemme-the-hell-outta-here tempo.

  Flo Ott stood quietly in the apartment vestibule, where she could observe Celestina Lo Belle without being seen. Although it was warm in the apartment, the blonde’s black silk dressing gown sported a sable fur collar thick enough to ward off the windiest of midwinter blasts. Her long blond hair—Flo noted as Celestina Lo Belle reached over to the table for a glass of juice—was so carefully cut it fell perfectly into place with each movement. Tresses multiply shaded, blond on blonder and set off by a few stark streaks of no color at all. Celestina Lo Belle’s nose was bobbed, naturally it appeared. Her mouth was large. Sunglasses, saucer-sized, obscured her eyes, although the sky in the early morning was a wintry lead, and the apartment lights were dimmed as low as they could go. Celestina Lo Belle’s skin was tan, perhaps lamp-tanned, or maybe a product of the Bahamas. Her face was past childhood and on the nearer side of womanly, though still vulnerably young, as if adolescence was a chemical solution in which she was permanently immersed, a slightly sinister effect, a youthfulness disturbingly preserved, a crystal kid, guileless, unsullied, dew-damp and sparkling as a springtime raindrop. A prematurely beautiful nymphette was the character role Celestina Lo Belle might have pulled off except for her height, or length in repose, close to six feet was Flo’s guess, and mainly legs. Ms. Lo Belle’s breasts flopped around inside the silk dressing gown like a pair of buoyant oranges.

  Before introducing herself to the apartment’s grieving presence, Flo slipped silently into the kitchen to peruse the trash in a plastic bag set out for garbage collection. She noted Dean & DeLuca take-out containers. Empty wine bottles, all French, all premium, even a Château d’Yquem. People. Vanity Fair. But no newspapers except for the National Enquirer. Junk mail, mostly from Bergdorf’s and Prada. Plus a few postcards, which—aside from discernible postmarks (Houston, Little Rock, New Orleans)—were torn too small to read. Flo retrieved and pocketed all the postcard fragments in a plastic evidence bag.

  As Flo entered the living room, the tensed patrolman introduced her. “This is detective Lieutenant Florence Ott, homicide.”

  At the mention of the word “homicide,” Celestina Lo Belle released a cry to melt the iciest hearts. Even the patrolman looked alarmed, although still quite unprepared for heroics. His eyes pleaded, Can I get out of here now?

  Flo Ott nodded toward the vestibule and the front door and the grateful guard beat his retreat.

  Flo Ott crossed the room, seated herself in the armchair vacated by the exiting patrolman, and regarded the wall Celestina Lo Belle was facing. A room-long, ceiling-high, digital flat-screen TV, the sound off, was playing the promotional video of Ballz Busta’s latest hit, “Redeema Schema.” Busta, clad in nothing but a black leather thong, his body a cascade of rippling muscles, was strapped to a blinking neon cross.

  “Guess you’re wondering…” Celestina Lo Belle said, easing back on the sofa, sipping a drink that looked like pineapple juice. “Well, he was the sweetest, most generous man I ever met. And now I don’t know how I’ll live without him. He just started writing what he called his masterpiece—‘Concerto for Celestina’—and it was supposed to be all for me.”

  The sound of her voice surprised Flo. The blonder-than-blond beauty spoke as if her mouth were busy with a couple of pounds of Dixie corn mush.

  Celestina Lo Belle removed her dark glasses and revealed hazel eyes—green-flecked, Flo noted at these close quarters—a pair of moist, shattered prisms, windows to a soul destroyed, a personality smithereened perhaps irretrievably. Celestina Lo Belle tried to focus her teary eyes on the video image. Busta, an actor of sorts, was pretending to strain at neon hoops, yellow and red, that held him to his cross of light. His mouth was moving a mile a minute, but fortunately, not a syllable could be heard.

  Flo was surprised when she felt a sudden maternal urge to console the childlike Celestina Lo Belle, a compulsion to say something, anything that might ease the young woman’s suffering. This was a helpful attitude and certainly nothing to repress, if Flo wanted to learn how disaster had struck. She detected little in the distraught woman of the urbane chic her apartment radiated. The condo’s occupant resembled a battered woman-child, a runaway waif, another damaged victim, albeit collateral, of city predators. Flo also noticed the woman’s fingernails were gnawed to the nub, no sudden accident there.

  Celestina Lo Belle tried drying her teary eyes on a silken sleeve.

  “Ms. Lo Belle,” Flo said.

  “No!” The mourner’s eyes flashed rage. “Just don’t call me Lo, Officer, okay, I hate that name. My father called me Lo. And my grandfather and my uncles and all my brothers, and all the men cousins, too. All the same thing…‘Lo, get over here.’ You ever watch Oprah, Officer? She knew. Oprah told it exactly like it was. Totally. So please, no Lo, okay? They all did me, every male in my family, every one of them but the damn dogs they owned, thank God for that much. So just call me Celestina and that’ll do just fine now, know what I mean?” She released another mournful cry. “Please, excuse me, I’m no hostess. Would you like to have…” Celestina didn’t finish her offer but fainted dead away, toppling off the sofa like a broke-back rag doll.

  Flo sank to her knees and caught Celestina as she slumped to the floor.

  The scent of expensive perfume wafted up, a whiff of musk and cloves and roses, utterly congruous, if not with the mourner’s mood, certainly with the plush environment. Flo had several pretty good ideas about how the bereaved could account for the luxury lair, but she suspected a fuller, truer explanation might have been even more of a doozy.

  As gently as she could, Flo shifted her unconscious hostess back onto the sofa. The blonde in black silk and sable lay stone-still. Flo placed a pillow under her feet to raise her legs so that the circulation could flow back into her brain and revive her.

  Celestina blinked her eyes briefly a
nd murmured, “So awful tired…” before promptly tumbling off to sleep.

  Flo sniffed at the glass of fruit juice. Pineapple, yes, and a stiff dose of something stronger, something more like Jamaican white rum. Not Flo’s idea of a breakfast eye-opener.

  At nine a.m. merely the smell of alcohol set her stomach churning and her brain spinning out images of a fur-coated corpse in the courtyard, skull bashed in, brains and blood leaking onto cobblestones, a multimillionaire rap star’s whiter-than-white living room where the near-naked performer was forever mounted on a neon cross, and now startling hints of a young woman’s appalling childhood. You never know on whom the gods will smile, until they stop smiling.

  Revenge murder?

  Or a killing driven by a psychotic fan’s delusion?

  Or a New York mob feud?

  Certainly a witches’ brew. A gut twister, and whatever the explanation, the celebrity murder was over and done and begging for solution, unlike the threat of assassination to come, the impossible challenge of waiting for a murder promised and yet to be delivered.

  Flo considered where, after the kitchen rubbish, to search for truth. A framed poster on the bedroom door read: “A man is defined not by his circumstances, but by how he rises above them.–– Nelson Mandela.”

  Here, waiting for Flo to discover and delineate it, was a story titled “The Rise and Fall of Owen Smith, a.k.a. Ballz Busta.”

  9:02 A.M.

  Flo found the bedroom and turned on the light.

  To describe Celestina (Lo) Belle’s bedroom as simply a room was doing it an injustice. Almost an apartment in itself and larger than an entire floor of Flo’s house, it was a chamber of mirrors on walls and ceiling, and all the mirrors gold-framed.

  Three eight-foot-high windows.

  The bed—circular, draped in white silk, mounted from a pair of gilt-painted steps—looked as if it could comfortably accommodate a ménage of a half-dozen athletes in Olympic-class indoor games.

  On an antique white rug stood a white-lacquered table, and on the table a large crystal bowl overflowing with white mums.

  The floors were highly polished old oak parquet that gave the room a natural warmth it otherwise lacked.

  All this luster and dazzle made for a jarring contrast to the funereal gloom in the courtyard below.

  Off the far end of the bedroom were his-and-hers dressing rooms and bathrooms. Flo was going to start her search here, not a fine-toothed-comb hunt, which would be done by forensics, but an experienced once-over scan for telltale signs. She was circling the bed when something caught her eye on the floor of the bed’s raised platform.

  A book.

  It was bound in soft white leather with thousands of gold-edged pages, and inscribed on its cover, in Gothic script, letters of embossed gold, Holy Bible. The only book in sight, color-coordinated with the room.

  Flo opened the Bible.

  And surprise, surprise: inside, the pages were hollowed out, leaving just enough space to hold a gold-plated Glock pistol, a gun far more likely to kill than wound, designed to stop an attacker or drop a fugitive permanently.

  Flo removed the pistol from the Bible and walked back into the living room.

  9:09 A.M.

  Ballz Busta, still up on the screen, cavorting now in a three-piece white suit and white turtleneck, balancing on the backs of a dozen or so bikini-clad women down on all fours.

  His lips were moving fast but soundlessly.

  “Celestina?” Flo said. “Celestina…”

  A drowsy Celestina opened her eyes. “You still here?”

  “Did he always keep this in the house?” Flo hefted the gold-plated Glock.

  Celestina was wide awake. “Where’d you get that?” She tried to stand but wobbled and sagged back down onto the sofa. “You’ve been snooping around.”

  “There’s a search warrant, always issued right from the get-go on any murder case. And we got a murder here, that’s clear enough. Now, why did he have this? Or is it yours—”

  “His. Be careful, it’s loaded. He had enemies. Everyone in his business has enemies. Outside in the city, he usually had his guards, the posse. But in here, I didn’t want anyone else around. So I guess he knew what he was doing. Just look what happened.”

  Flo sat down and, keeping her finger off the trigger guard, opened the action and removed the pistol’s magazine. She emptied the magazine and slipped the cartridges into her coat pocket.

  “Take the gun, too,” Celestina said. “I don’t want guns around no more. I don’t need a gun. I’ve never fired a gun in my life. I have no enemies.”

  Flo put the unloaded pistol in her briefcase. “Did he keep more guns here?”

  Celestina shook her head. “I never saw any.”

  “Okay, you never saw other guns. But how long did you know him…Mr. Owen Smith?”

  “A few years. He came down to New Orleans to do a charity concert for all the poor people. They were still waiting then—and a lot of them still are—waiting for help after Katrina. I was on the local stage crew. That was in the spring. And in the summer, he brought me up here.”

  Flo assessed Celestina Lo Belle. The grieving blonde was growing more awake and calmer.

  “Did you work for him here, too?” Flo said.

  “No. He didn’t want me working. But he kept me busy enough taking care of this place and so on. And of course, we loved each other.”

  And so on…of course…

  “Thank you,” Flo said. “For being straightforward with me.”

  “Funny, but that’s exactly what he always said he liked about me. I’m a straight-out and up-front person, word for word that’s what he always said.”

  “Does his wife know about you?”

  “I guess so. No, I know so. Anyway, he told me she did. But she didn’t want a divorce because of the kids. They have three. He was a generous man to them, to her mother, to me. To everyone who worked for him. I don’t know why anyone would do this. Is he still…outside…down there?”

  “No, not anymore.”

  “They asked me to go down and identify him. It was the hardest thing I ever did. Do you know if I can stay here now, can I keep on living here?”

  “For the time being at least, I guess so. I suppose he had a lawyer and a will and so forth. It’ll all depend in the end on who inherits the apartment. Did he ever say?”

  “He always said he wanted me to have it. But I never saw any papers. Hey, wait a minute, you’re not thinking I killed him—you don’t think that, do you? So I could inherit this place or something?”

  “Why would I think that?”

  “You tell me. You accusing me?” Tears welled up in Celestina’s eyes.

  “No one is accusing you of anything. But of course you’re a person of interest. That’s why we’re talking here. Just talking. If it turns into something else, I’ll tell you your rights. But now we just talk. You’re not a suspect, not at this point. Okay?”

  “Like I got a choice?”

  “Not really, not if you want to keep your name clear. You clam up, and that’s suspicious, like you got something to hide. See what I mean?”

  “I got nothing to hide. Not a damn thing. I want you to get his killer. I’m on your side. All the way. I loved him. I never hated him. And he loved me.”

  “Good. Together, we might find something that leads me to that killer.”

  “I don’t know no one who’d do a thing like this. No one. That clear? I swear to God Almighty, I got nothing to do with people like that. And if I had any ideas now, you’d be the first to know. I want that killer caught.”

  Flo found this convincing as far as it went. Celestina might be innocent, and as utterly ignorant as she claimed. Still, a contract killer wasn’t entirely out of the question, far from it. Flo paused for a moment, and then: “How did he behave the last time you saw him?”

  “Like usual. Full of energy. Eager. Attentive, very attentive. He didn’t miss a trick.”

  “Did he always co
me over here at four in the morning?”

  “Whenever he was out working. He worked hard. And he had a lot of obligations.”

  “Did you also go out with him at night?”

  “Of course. Lots of times. Dinner, clubs, shows. I’ve never been no homebody. He liked taking me out. His wife had to stay back with the kids. And who can blame her, it’s a great house they got, huge, with live-in servants and everything over on Montgomery Place, best block in the Slope.”

  Flo Ott began to understand the kind of man Owen Smith/Ballz Busta must have been, but she wasn’t completely clear about the woman sitting across from her. Flo’s mind, her built-in censor, was constantly assessing, rejecting, re-forming the rise-and-fall story she was hearing, but in constructing the outlines of truth, she could absorb only so much, and Celestina Belle was a great deal to absorb.

  “How did you feel about sharing him with his family?”

  Celestina gave her an amused look. “Actually, I didn’t mind. Just check out this place here, he spoiled me. And when we weren’t together, I sure as hell never interfered.”

  “You know a lot of men here in New York?”

  “Here? I got no other boyfriends here, if that’s what you mean. Of course, back home, I had boyfriends. But not here. He was very jealous. I wouldn’t dream of fooling around, not in New York. Risk my life in this great setup? No way. I’m no hooker. You can just forget about that kind of stuff. Really, I loved him, okay?” Celestina paused and looked Flo Ott straight in the eyes. “And so what’ll happen now?”

  “People will search this place today. Completely. Just stay here. Remove nothing, destroy nothing. After I leave, there’ll be a guard by your door. And I want to come here again and we’ll talk some more.”

  Celestina leaned back on the sofa and sighed. “Okay. I got nowhere else to go. This is my home.”

  Flo Ott rose and picked up her briefcase. She felt Celestina’s tired eyes track her to the door. She thought about what the young woman said, her gratitude for the dead man’s generosity, and she considered what he got in return for his investment. Owen Smith had set up a comfortable, if complex, life for himself. He had enemies. He paid for protection, and he didn’t get his money’s worth. He knew he might be killed, yet despite all his millions he still couldn’t stop the killer when opportunity struck.