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  “Fire away.”

  “The accountant, the one who keeps the books for this bar. What’s his name?”

  “Vincent J. Narcissi. And he’s a slick one.”

  Detective Sergeant Marty Keane made a note of the name, and he and Flo left Hernando’s bar to begin the long ride back to Brooklyn.

  10:33 A.M.

  “Our dead man knew some real beauts,” Marty said. “Wait’ll you meet the next one.”

  “The accountant?”

  “No, Azalea.”

  “What does she do?”

  “Apartments. Mr. Busta put a lot of his cash in real estate. Azalea Butte was part of the package. Fixes them up for rich moneybags. Like the mayor’s honey. And Rupert Murdoch and lots of other billionaires. Spoiled people with megabucks.”

  Flo’s cell rang. Frank Murphy on the other end: “You can relax, Flo.”

  “How so?”

  “Cecil’s at home, working the phone all day. And I’m sticking with him.”

  “Then only you get to relax. I got to drill another bimbo. But after today, what’s Cecil looking at?”

  “Talks in schools and churches.”

  “Great, lots of kids and old ladies. Can you picture that? All it takes is a single bomb in one of those places, and we’re patrolling the Coney Island boardwalk, Frank, until the day we retire.”

  “He campaigned to be the education senator, the family senator. He says he’s got to get out there on the front lines. Schools and churches. But so far I got him to agree—at least, I think I have—no advance notice, not a peep. Surprise visits only.”

  “C’mon, a politician who doesn’t want publicity? No such animal.”

  “The media can work out some sort of pooling arrangement. One guy with a video camera and they can take turns and maybe the Times one day, another day the News—”

  “And the Post?”

  “Dangler, our boy Terence? Mister Mouth? Cecil says no way that little shit gets to know anything in advance. Cecil’s words. He doesn’t trust Dangler. Says the Post really doesn’t give a damn about kids and families anyway, the Post never supported him and never will. Cecil figures Dangler will be too busy spinning for the new DA to bother with the old one. And the Post will certainly be all over us on Ballz Busta. Bet on it, Flo, day after day.”

  Indeed they will, Flo was sure, if—no, when—the press got hold of what she was now scrolling up on her laptop, it would leak out to the world that fur-clad multimillionaire celeb victim, Ballz Busta, family man, was—according to this initial forensics report, just emailed to her phone—in so many words, stoked on coke and booze and heading toward a rendezvous in his mistress’s apartment, a three-million-dollar-plus condo, which he owned.

  Murder at a good address…every tabloid’s dream: drugs and money, a mistress and a corpse: ideal fuel for a perfect media firestorm.

  “Call you later,” Flo said, and focused her attention on the forensics lab report.

  Bloodstains on the back of his fur coat were indeed from his own coked-up, boozy blood, and only his, but there were also traces of cotton fiber, probably blue denim, and of black wool probably from a sweater, that were not connected to any apparel on the victim’s body.

  No DNA on the fibers; the samples were too small.

  On the victim’s hair, on his skull fragments, in his brain tissue, in the cranium blood and on the back of his fur coat were traces of rust particles—from steel—flakes of paint, two colors, an orange base and a green outer layer, and more fibers, again black wool and blue denim. Both paints were outdoor paints estimated to be several decades old; the steel implement, a bar, suggested part of a fence or a gate. The bar was thought to be hexagonal in shape, perhaps up to an inch and a half in diameter, about eighteen to twenty inches long, and at one time soldered to another piece of metal on one end, the end that smashed open Owen Smith/Ballz Busta’s skull. Judging from the rust fragments, the steel bar had not been painted in many years and had long been exposed to the elements.

  Flo looked up and stared out the car window. A darkening sky threatened a day of downpour.

  She thought about Maria Magdalena’s performance and its implications of money laundering and tax evasion. These were developing aspects of the murder case that might open up whole new highways for investigation and complicate an already none-too-simple operation.

  In Owen Smith’s home life, nothing suggested a complex network of highly orchestrated crime. The Smith family seemed well shielded from whatever dark, twisted realities paid for their cushioned existence.

  Ballz Busta, on the other hand, appeared to have led a life that flipped a bird, thumbed a nose, cocked a snoot, mooned a great big bad ass at laws, state and federal, every time Owen Smith stepped out his front door onto the two-toned stoop of the Smith family mansion on Montgomery Place, and metamorphosed into Ballz Busta.

  Complications, like tax evasion or money laundering, invited law enforcement interventions that could—almost certainly would eventually—bring in the Federal Bureau of Investigation, an otherwise unwilling ally. That is, at least until the New Year and Senator-elect Cecil King’s empowerment in Washington…if Flo Ott and Frank Murphy could keep him alive long enough.

  11:23 A.M.

  A rain-drenched, windswept downtown Manhattan.

  Flo walked west on Houston Street, head bent forward into blasting gales gusting in off the Hudson, all the while trying to keep an umbrella in front of her face as well as over the head of Azalea Butte, which wasn’t quite as difficult as it might otherwise be, since at about five foot three Azalea Butte was at least a half-foot shorter than Flo, and at just over a hundred pounds a mere wisp of a young woman, age twenty-six. Her face was a pale oval, smooth and pleasing, with a tiny upturned nose and gray-green eyes.

  Azalea Butte hailed from South Dakota and was living East ever since age fifteen, when she ran away from home or was kicked out, depending on to whom she was telling her life story.

  Azalea began telling her story to Flo a few minutes before, back at her two-room loft apartment and office up three long flights of stairs, no elevator, past the corner on Greene Street.

  But she had to interrupt her life narrative to check on a client’s project around the next corner, on West Broadway, a ten-thousand-square-foot duplex loft penthouse makeover, a property sold by Ballz Busta—for eleven million dollars plus renovation costs—to a woman known to some as “the mayor’s friend.”

  Azalea Butte was an essential part of the deal.

  An interior designer, a Parsons School of Design graduate, Azalea Butte (one arrest, narcotics, suspended sentence) earned three thousand dollars a day for her expert advice and supervisory services, and she couldn’t afford to interrupt her work, not free for nothing, just for homicide detective Lieutenant Florence Ott.

  On the other hand, and perhaps even more to the point, neither could Azalea Butte run the risk of disrupting her interrogation by Flo in a murder investigation.

  Azalea wasn’t unfamiliar with investigations, as discreet snooping around and reporting back on her clients to her late patron, Ballz Busta, was the other half of her job until yesterday.

  And Azalea didn’t want to go to prison for those investigatory efforts.

  Or be found out and sued by her clients.

  Or be obliged to start declaring to the Internal Revenue Service and paying back taxes on the income Ballz always gave her in cash and off the books.

  All this Flo Ott learned or figured out in her first few minutes with Azalea Butte.

  And now Flo was accompanying the interior designer on her job-site rounds in Manhattan, so she could discover the rest, the telling details of this young woman’s life under the thumb of the recently deceased Ballz Busta.

  She would assess Azalea Butte’s value, if any, in identifying, arresting, and convicting Owen Smith’s killer, no matter how rotten an individual the victim may have been in life.

  Murder was always murder.

  “He reminded m
e a little of my daddy, I guess, maybe that’s why…” An explanation, of sorts; Azalea Butte’s answer to Flo’s question: “What attracted you to a man like him in the first place?”

  “Ballz looked a lot like my father. After I ran off from home for good, I called up my momma.”

  Breathless, rain-wet in the face or tear-soaked and eager to get it all out, Azalea Butte worked hard to set her juvenile record straight as they turned the corner onto West Broadway and out of the wind, her heartfelt tale of flying the coop way back home out in South Dakota.

  “ ‘Just gone, Ma, and don’t ask where I am.’ I was calling her from a truck stop in Ohio somewhere, working my way cross-country to New York, you might say. And she’s telling me, ‘Your daddy is dead, Azalea, killed himself with a broken heart when you run away.’ And I said, Good. I said that was definitely the best going-away present I could ever get. And I hung up the phone, slam, just like that, and I never called home again. Shit on his grave, I figure, my daddy’s grave that is, definitely not Ballz. And I ain’t ashamed to say it. He never gave me nothing, nothing but beating me, like he did my mother. Free with his fists, especially on women. Ballz, though, he gave me everything. Never laid a mean finger on me. Paid my college tuition, gave me my apartment, gave me my work, took me to Europe, got me passing in the real world. I’d be way out of line to say I’m glad Ballz is dead, ’cause I sure as sugar ain’t. You better catch whoever did it, Lieutenant, and definitely make it never happen again. Like to me, for instance.”

  “Are you afraid it will happen to you?” Flo said.

  “Might. Why not? Could be somebody real jealous, right? And in that case, a lucky sister like me, well, you never know. Never mind Ballz was no saint. I owed him and I worked at paying him back, like I pay all my debts one way or the other. Here’s our building.”

  For Flo, the question remained, was it possible to love someone—Azalea loves Ballz, Ballz loves Azalea—if the first interest was the use one could make of the other? Didn’t the profit motive, and any accruing guilt, however small, inhibit the growth of higher emotions? The mutual utility principle—sex, shelter, stroked ego—was only human, Flo concluded; maybe love could grow over time.

  You adapt and you learn to overlook each other’s faults. An eternally happy marriage? Really, Lieutenant, do you truly believe in such a thing? Ours was trouble-free, at least I can say that much…

  And then the reverse side of the image, the difference between merely using and total exploitation was like the difference between eating fresh mushrooms from the store and eating the woodsy wild kind that might or might not kill you, the Ballz Busta potentially toxic kind. Azalea Butte was neither a heartless harridan nor a sweet, inadequate prop of a trophy arm piece. She knew more than a little about Ballz’s other women and granted him full clemency. Her resilience amazed Flo.

  They entered the building on West Broadway. The ground floor housed a high-end art gallery of big-name painters and sculptors and an Asian-French fusion restaurant, the sort of place where you couldn’t get out for less than two hundred a head before the tip.

  “Ballz owned the gallery,” Azalea Butte said, a touch of pride in her voice. “And he had a share in that restaurant, too, La Saison. I designed both. They insisted on gilt all over the restaurant, not my taste, but it’s supposed to justify the high prices and teeny-weeny portions on big plates. Guess his wife’s got it all now. You met her?”

  Flo nodded, admiring of the young woman’s pep and drive, a supersized engine of energy in a pint-sized chassis, lithe and muscular like a graceful ballerina or a trapeze artist. Her eyes radiated intensity, conscientiousness, an acute awareness of her surroundings. Her eyes said, I don’t miss a trick.

  They arrived at an elevator, and from a capacious shoulder bag, Azalea Butte produced a great metal ring jangling with dozens of keys, all color-coded with nail polish. The elevator was key-operated only. They rose straight to the penthouse, eleven floors up.

  “This is the mayor’s friend. She works on Wall Street, a real big shot at Goldman Sachs. Only time she’s home during the day is when she has lunch with him here. Nooners, once a week. And just between you and me, whenever he comes over here, he dresses up in her underwear and gowns and stuff. Can you picture that? The mayor? Eating lunch in a bra and silk frou-frou. They ever get pictures of him cross-dressing, his career is down the toilet. Guaranteed. On weekends, they’re out at her Hamptons place. Otherwise, she’s your genuine worker bee, like me, nonstop. I know Ballz had a lot of money invested with her at Goldman.”

  Yes, Flo thought, so often true in too many sex murders, sadistically streaked men sporting parallel masochistic drives, like the mayor. And it took their women with hooker instincts for an ashamed victim’s unspoken needs to spot this and make demands accordingly, tables turned and the public humiliator savored private humiliation’s fuller flavors, an artist recognizing the talents of a superior artist.

  11:54 A.M.

  “Up here in her place,” Azalea said, “we’re at the point now where we’re doing over the kitchen and the last three bathrooms. Then we’re all done.”

  They stepped from the elevator directly into the apartment’s large foyer.

  Following the briskly moving Azalea Butte, Flo passed through a long living room, a restaurant-sized dining room, and into the kitchen, where two workmen were laying a travertine stone floor along the length of the breakfast bar, behind the bar a panorama window and a postcard view north up the west side of Manhattan.

  The rain was letting up, and winds propelled clouds fast enough so the peaks of the Empire State and Chrysler buildings loomed above the mists.

  “I see what you mean,” Flo said. “A very successful owner.”

  “Ballz only knew successful people. He said failure was a disease and he didn’t want to catch it. He hated failures. And he had no time for wannabes.”

  “He made a lot of enemies that way?”

  “Well, let’s just say he didn’t have any friends who were flops. None that I ever heard of anyway. Check this. Flops don’t have this.” They paused to watch a workman installing a Jacuzzi next to its backup bath, a twenty-inch-deep Zuma soaking tub with Zucchetti shower wand and chrome controls, all in a bathroom corner facing a large window with a southerly view of the harbor and the Statue of Liberty. “Bathrooms like this,” Azalea said, “only belong to the biggest winners.”

  As they mounted an interior staircase winding past another south-facing, harbor-view window, Azalea described the detailing with the pride of a designer coloring her voice. “You got carved stone arches here, all embellished with Corinthian Wheat Shaft terracotta apron work, and fitted with custom fabricated, solid oak sound-attenuated frames. As pricey as it gets.”

  When they reached the top of the stairs, Flo popped the question. “You think anyone would’ve wanted him killed? And paid someone to do it?”

  While mulling over this one, Azalea gave orders to a mason installing a slate wall in a tropical-garden shower-and-steam room meant to resemble a pool in the Amazon rain forest. Then to Flo she said, “Only a rich asshole would do something that stupid. And I don’t know any assholes, Officer, not in my business. I don’t employ them. And they don’t employ me. Assholes don’t get to buy apartments like this. They lose their money first.”

  “Interesting observation,” Flo said, although she had no plans to exclude the rich from any list of suspects. She didn’t feel beholden to them, not like Azalea.

  They paused in the doorway of the third bathroom. “No window on this side,” Azalea said. “So we got that wall-sized flat screen displaying great art pieces, one at a time. All twentieth-century masters, Pollock drips, Picasso blue nudes, Klimt gold-draped beauties.” A television technician was adjusting the equipment. “We need some Warhols on this visuals wall here, some Johns, Koons, lots more pop to brighten the mood. Which reminds me. Time for tensies.” Azalea extracted a large bottle of pills from her shoulder satchel, meds of many hues. She selected
a pale green capsule. “All prescription, Officer, so don’t you worry. And no OxyContin either, no heroin in a pill, not for this girl. None of that stuff, no way. I don’t do illegal drugs, believe it or not. Ballz did, but then that’s the music business for you.”

  “Did he deal?”

  Azalea fell silent.

  “Did he invest in drug deals?”

  “I don’t know, Officer. I didn’t go poking my nose into coke or into any other business of his except real estate. Do I look like a jerk? I sure hope not.” She stopped to wash down the pale green capsule with a swig of mineral water.

  “You have to take a lot of medications?”

  “What’s a lot? My kind of life, there’s never enough. But Ballz. Poor Ballz, and I mean it, really. Ending up dead way before his time. Lying there middle of the night, head split open. My God, what a sick picture. His poor family. And I mean that. For all their millions, they’re poorer now. I’m not like Maria Magdalena, and I know you talked to her already. She’s tickled pink. Maybe her hair will turn red again, after all this. She’s got herself a bar now, a steady business, and all I got is clients. But don’t get me wrong, I’m not accusing that woman of anything. She’s not the type, Maria, she’s too holy, know what I mean? A spiritual person. No, without Ballz around, my clients could walk away, and I might not get any new ones. Maybe I ought to raise my fee and they’ll think I’m worth more. That’s what Ballz said I ought to do, never undersell yourself. I cared for that man, Officer, I really did, and I still do. So you got to understand this much, I admit it wasn’t all just business between us. I met his wife, too. And don’t look so surprised. She’s got real class, Chrissy Smith does, and great children, which makes her way human in my opinion. Someday, I’ll have kids, but not before I can support them all on my own. She’s a good woman, Chrissy. Even if her taste in interior design is kind of stuffy. And her mother, you meet her mother? The island empress? Talk about stuffy. She ought to be in a museum for stuffed dinosaurs. What do you think of their house in Brooklyn?”