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  “Quite a place. What were you doing there?”

  “Dreckorating.” They stopped at the elevator, and Azalea produced her key ring. “Ballz asked me to do the job but said everything had to be their tastes, not mine. So don’t blame me for that old ugly shit. Blame Martha fucking Stewart, ex-con. Princess of chintzes.” They entered the elevator and rode back down. “You meet the kids, too? Should’ve. Show you another side of Ballz. Little sweethearts, all three of them, and he adored them. You know, he used to make their school lunches sometimes? He’s barely back in the house, being out all night, and there he is in the kitchen, chop chop, slice slice. Imagine that? A king like him making tuna fish sandwiches and ham and Swiss and egg salad, and packing pears and bananas and apples, and a thermos with hot milk and Ovaltine. No sweet sodas for those kids, no junk food neither, no way. And that’s the other angle of Ballz, part of the side I want to remember. But not an angle he showed much outside. If he had, he’d probably been killed even sooner.”

  “By whom?”

  “By whom? You kidding?” They stepped from the building out onto West Broadway, the sky still messy, wind whipping wet garbage along the gutters, pedestrians clutching at hats and collars. Azalea began waving for a taxi, any taxi. “Tell you what,” she said to Flo. “You got time to keep coming with me now? I mean, it can take all day to figure out that story, you know, by whom? I got my jobs, but you’re welcome to string along. And I’ll tell you what I can, Officer. And what I can’t, I can’t. What you pick up, you pick up. You just keep asking, but like I said, only an asshole would kill Ballz. And there’s enough assholes in New York to fill Yankee Stadium a hundred times over. Not that I know any.” An empty cab whizzed by, ignoring Azalea’s waving arms, and she flipped him the bird. “Like that cabbie driving blind. Ought to arrest him.” A second cab appeared and pulled over. They scrambled in. “Christ, that’s better,” said Azalea. “Works up an appetite rushing around like this.” She dug down in her satchel and produced another pill, yellow.

  “More meds?” Flo said.

  Azalea shook her head as she gulped mineral water. “Vitamins. Got to watch my diet. Ever see a fat designer? I’ll show you an unemployed designer.”

  The cabbie, in a Pakistani accent, clipped tired tones, said: “Ladies? Ladies, where are we going?”

  “Chelsea, please,” said Azalea. “West Twenty-Second, between Seventh and Eighth. I’ll point out the building when we get there, the one with scaffolding all over it.”

  12:31 P.M.

  They emerged from the taxi at their next destination, a tall narrow brownstone, the home address of Mr. Edwin Duke Brooks, publisher.

  The stone exterior of the building was being refinished, as were the ground and parlor floors, the offices of Manly Magazines, Edwin Duke Brooks, president.

  “Muscle guy stuff,” said Azalea Butte. “Edwin is totally out of the closet. Tons of boyfriends, tons of bucks. And tons of books, this house is like the public library. And not just fag reads. Edwin is a real scholar, PhD from Princeton. But in what, don’t ask me. He’s down in his St. Barts place now, won’t be back till after New Year’s, when I got to be all finished up here. Ballz, in case you didn’t know, was a switch hitter. Kind of opens things up some, doesn’t it? Being acey-deucey?”

  Flo released a long puff of air as they entered at the ground floor from under the stoop. “He must have been the busiest man in New York,” she said.

  “Let’s just say Ballz didn’t cool his heels much. Definitely not your laid-back type. He spit on slackers. Literally. He and Edwin and me, we got to be real close, because…Well, one time I came over here to meet a new client, an investor in the BB Property Fund that Ballz started up, big-time fund, even Magic Johnson was one of the backers, and Ballz and Edwin were sick as dogs. They’d just heard that this friend of theirs, this investor guy who’s supposed to be my new client, had killed himself that afternoon, intentionally, head in an oven, legs sprawled across a kitchen floor. You know, when you got nowhere to turn, you turn on the gas. Now, normally I don’t hold with that, against all my beliefs. But this poor guy just found out he was HIV positive and saw no point in dragging it out more. Ballz and Edwin got knocked down flat, they couldn’t move. They wouldn’t ever, not in a million years, give up on life like that, they’d fight all the way, and me, too, I’d fight like hell. I got them some supper, chicken soup and meatloaf and mashed potatoes, comfort food. And yeah, I scored a big bag of Great Alaskan Thunderfuck for their dessert. But don’t you ever quote me.”

  Aside from bulging bookcases, Edwin Duke Brooks’s ground-floor office was Danish modern spare, white and gleaming and straight lined, not a rough or rounded edge in sight.

  “This is my kind of place,” Azalea said. “This is taste. Ballz took me to Copenhagen once for a long weekend, we saw all the modern art and the design collections, and it was a real eye-opener. He thought so, too. But his own home had to be different, of course…I’m meaning, his wife.”

  Azalea turned to an electrician installing recessed ceiling lights. “Make sure each spot picks out a unique piece, where those tape Xs are on the floor. Aim for the Xs.”

  And to Flo: “Only collectors’ items here, one of each thing, like in a good museum. One desk, one armchair, one straight-back chair, one sofa, one table. But each one perfect, and nice crisp white linen covers on the upholstered stuff. And a carpet made specially in Turkey, double knot, silk on silk, twenty foot by twenty foot. This room alone will have way over a million dollars put into it. And in case you’re wondering about all this money, yeah, Ballz owned a piece of Manly Magazines, too, but he was a silent partner. Very silent. Won’t his wife be surprised when she finds out what she’s inherited here.”

  When it came time to leave the Edwin Duke Brooks residence and offices, the rain was resuming, and Azalea called a car service rather than risk hailing a cab again. “And I hate Uber, never know what you get for a driver. Or even the price. Once they charged me $650 to go over only to Beekman Place, and said it was the market-adjusted rate for that destination at a peak traffic hour. Can you believe that shit? Thieves, you ought to put Uber in prison, while you’re at it, Officer.”

  1:15 P.M.

  Flo and Azalea Butte headed uptown and across Central Park to their next destination.

  East Eighty-Fourth Street, between Park and Madison, an immodest, overly tall modern apartment building, with a uniformed doorman. The home address of Mr. and Mrs. Bloom, Leon and Doris, a prosperous pair in their late fifties, who ran a family hedge fund.

  Azalea held forth: “Some kind of wheeling and dealing and gambling scam, you ask me. But Ballz was in on that, too, and he said he made bundles with the Blooms. They’re a very health-conscious couple, open minded, open marriage, open doors. Doors always open, and neither’s none too choosy about your sex neither, long’s you’re young and pretty. They meet their pickups over in those workout gyms on East Eighty-Sixth and bring them up here to their place. I know Ballz used to join them for parties. ‘Gotta go lift weights with the Blooms,’ and you’d know what he was talking about. I think they’re creeps.”

  On her cell, Azalea called ahead and let it ring a long while before disconnecting.

  “Not home. Be grateful, Officer, you sure wouldn’t want to run into these two. If they’d been home, I wouldn’t even take you up there. They’d be jumping out the windows, they find out you’re a cop.”

  “What have they got to hide?”

  “Everything, you ask me. Their sneaky business, these kids they drag in from the gyms, you name it. Sleazeballs. And they got these old birds, a pair of mynahs that crap all over the place. Try and refurbish with those birds around always squawking and crapping, and they can even talk some. ‘Sweet ass, Sweet ass!’ And, ‘Yo, big tits, Yo, big tits!’ Every time you walk in the door, they start screeching, ‘Sweet ass! Sweet ass!’ Drives the workers crazy, and me, too. Hey, it’s past lunchtime, you must be hungry. I’m real sorry, Officer, but I never do lunc
h unless it’s business.”

  “That’s okay, let’s keep talking. I want to know more about Mr. Busta and his associates.”

  “Oh, they associated all right, him and the Blooms. They associated every which way.”

  “I arrested a killer near here once,” Flo said, looking out the car window as they turned onto East Eighty-Fourth Street. “A priest actually, a Jesuit who taught in this boys’ high school across the street there. Thought he was the father almighty, always pestering the boys, including a kid who lived in Brooklyn. He had a big crush on this good-looking young kid. The boy kept putting him off, pushing him away, threatening to report him to the police. One night, he followed the boy home from a basketball game, got him coming up out of the subway and lured him off into Prospect Park, where he strangled the kid to death. He was a big guy, this priest, he’d been a football player for Boston College. Thought he could get away with anything.”

  “An asshole. Just like our guy, the guy who killed Ballz. Same as him, I bet.”

  “Well, this priest really did get away with it, in a fashion. He committed suicide in his cell before we even got to trial.”

  “How’d he get away with that?”

  “Pills. Little poison pills his sister smuggled in when she visited him. Digitalis. It can kill in sufficient dosage, twenty or thirty granules. Enough for a fatal dose can get smuggled past prison guards in the hem of a woman’s blouse, say, and then passed unseen from palm to palm. Digitalis is available to a practicing nurse, and his sister was a nurse. It’ll cause heart failure within thirty minutes after ingestion. Maybe the only choice this bent priest had left was to save a scrap of honor, a little bit of dignity in exchange for what remained of his rotten life.”

  “You get her? His sister?”

  “She disappeared, somewhere in Australia.”

  “Just goes to show.”

  “Show what?”

  “Takes all kinds. You got some job, Officer. And I thought I met every type of weirdo there is. Like the creepy Blooms.”

  1:24 P.M.

  Azalea Butte appeared upset as she strode rapidly into the apartment house on the south side of East Eighty-Fourth Street.

  “They got no right, none of them, picking on kids like that. I don’t hold up with that kind of shit. I know what it means.”

  They ascended in an elevator to the seventeenth floor.

  Inside the apartment, a bird screamed, “Sheeeit! Sheeeit!”

  “Hear it? Just like I said.”

  “Sweeet ass! Sweeet ass!”

  “Kiss mine,” Azalea said when they entered.

  “Kiiiss mine! Kiiiss mine!”

  The mynah birds were an excitable, unrelenting pair perched on separate swings in a large cage standing on the floor by a window in the living room, where the birds might catch glimpses of Central Park and the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

  The cage was the only object in the room not covered by canvas drop cloths.

  The furniture, draped and grouped in the center of the long room, loomed up large and ghost-like.

  The wood paneling, formerly dark teak, was being replaced by light oak.

  “New wood,” Azalea said. “The whole seven-room apartment, including the kitchen, one room at a time. And all new furniture to match. Even the frames for the paintings, everything to match. Their choice, not mine. But it’s their dough and they got pots of it. What are you laughing at?”

  “Those birds.”

  “Yo, big tits! Yo, big tits!”

  Azalea laughed. “Shut up, birds, or I’ll twist your heads off. Sure you’re not hungry, Officer? They got a big fridge here, lots of healthy food.”

  “I’m a cop, Azalea. I can’t steal.”

  “Food ain’t stealing, not when you’re hungry. Not from the Blooms. C’mon, let’s get out of this place, then, everything looks okay here anyway. Let’s go. This joint’s a bore. But wait a minute, you know what else they got? They got videos of them and the gym kids. And Ballz, too, I bet. Secret stuff. In fact, I know they got them with Ballz. I bagged some for him, just in case he ever needed something to keep them in line. The Blooms, I mean. Boy, was he pissed off at them. He wanted me to go nose around again and grab all the ones with him on, to keep the Blooms off his back, you know, blackmail and so on. But now it won’t matter, not now he’s dead. Or maybe the Blooms will try and sell them anyway. Still, there might be something on the videos for you.”

  “Might be, although I’m not in my bailiwick here. And I don’t have a search warrant. Still I’ll pass the info along.”

  “Just don’t tell anyone I sent you, okay? Tell them anything, but don’t tell them that. It would kill my business. But Ballz, he was a genius no matter what happened, he’d figure out a way to cash in, to write stuff into his music, stuff he learned about people like the Blooms and so on. That way he’d let people know all what he knew about them, you get my meaning? Ballz wasted nothing. Everything, absolutely everything went into the Ballz Busta moneymaking machine. He was a totally focused man, a real craftsperson at making money. And he wasn’t shy about showing off his success neither, that’s part of the whole formula. Whoever killed him, they must’ve ripped him off but good.”

  “No, nothing was stolen. Not as far as we can tell.”

  “Go on. Kill him and not take nothing? I don’t believe it. Makes no sense. Look, you know what, I know where we can go right now nearby here. A nice quiet place and I can get something to wash down my vitamins with. C’mon, this Bloom place is too creepy.”

  1:42 P.M.

  Outside, rainfall had redoubled with a vengeance and the wind was picking up, a mix that made the Manhattan air look like a smithereening mirror.

  The two women half-ran down to Park Avenue with nor’wester gusts pushing at their backs.

  “You a Catholic?” Azalea said.

  “Why?”

  “Thought so. Irish. C’mon up here with me. I don’t like going in alone, I’m not Catholic.”

  Here was the Church of Saint Ignatius Loyola, a block-wide edifice, undistinguished architecture, murky interior, red candles flickering in the gloom. An oversized and faux-ancient structure, flashes of glittery gold galore.

  Someone was practicing on the organ, short bursts of low rumbles and high-pitched toots.

  Azalea Butte walked straight up the main aisle and Flo followed her.

  At the polished brass communion rail on the center of the steps below the towering altar—a gold-encrusted white marble confection—they knelt.

  An odor of incense and candle wax surrounded them.

  “I took Ballz here once,” Azalea whispered. “He loved all that gold and the high cross but didn’t care much for the statues, said they looked all bogus with way too much blood on them, and everything all bigged up.”

  From her shoulder satchel, Azalea Butte extracted a strand of gold rosary beads. “Don’t laugh,” she said. “Ballz gave them to me for my last birthday. Genuine antique from Spain. I don’t really know how to use them, but I try.”

  Azalea fingered the beads and her lips moved. Flo could just about follow her soft murmuring. “Please, Mother Mary, remember my momma. And take care of my daddy. Yeah, him, too, wherever he is. And now please look after Bal—Mr. Busta and his family, especially those three sweet little kids he left behind. And most of all, help my detective friend here find the son of a—that person who did it.” She paused and glanced at Flo. “You praying?”

  “Yes. That no one else gets killed.”

  “That’s good. We need all the help we can grab in this world.” She held Flo’s hand. “Help all the poor people, Mother Mary, and please remember…”

  She named more people, her voice too low to be heard, and her whispers and Flo’s silent prayers melded in a strange way into the sound of the organ, growing and spreading as in a font slowly filling with drops of water, until a rich deep sorrow overflowed and saturated the pair of women kneeling before the altar.

  Prayers finished, they walke
d back out in silence to Park Avenue, and through blustery squalls struggled across the wide boulevard and down East Eighty-Fourth Street.

  1:51 P.M.

  A gray, wet, and numbing void had them both thinking about appetites still unsatisfied.

  “Now I’m starved,” Azalea said. “I got to drink something with these vitamins. How about here, this place looks nice.”

  This place was a saloon. The Penguin Lounge. The proprietor, a spry, balding little man, was busily arranging fresh-cut flowers in a Thanksgiving harvest decoration in front of a mirror behind a long mahogany bar.

  The lounge was a classy-looking establishment with a solid air, and the elderly bartender looked as if he’d been serving tipplers in this toney neighborhood since Prohibition’s repeal.

  His name was Jackie Fitz, and he’d been serving Azalea Butte almost since the day she arrived in New York at age fifteen.

  “This is where I first met Ballz. It was Saint Patrick’s Day, right after the parade, and a crew of drunken firemen brought me here. They weren’t too happy about finding Ballz in the place, a black man, until he picked up the tab for the whole house, thousands and thousands of dollars. Then he could’ve sung ‘Did Your Mother Come from Ireland?’ and they’d have kissed, not kicked, his colored ass. He’d flirt with that kind of danger too many times. I think it gave him a thrill, rough trade and all that. But I would think, boy oh boy, kiddo, you’re losing your marbles, you got your brains running out your ears messing with characters like this. Irish wiseguys, sometimes even Italian, and I mean the worst kind of bigots. But Ballz had the mouth, and he had the money, and if he couldn’t bullshit his way out, he’d buy it.”

  “This isn’t getting any simpler,” Flo said. “Excuse me.” Flo’s cell phone was buzzing. “Frank, where are you?”

  “With the senator. We just left a church.”

  “Me, too. It’s catching. How many were you?”

  “Four patrolmen and me,” Frank said. “Three cars. No media. A surprise drop-in on a mothers-to-be group.”

  “Where?”

  “Bed-Stuy.”