Magic City Blues, page 7
The detective holstered her gun, and in the same motion, moved her hand underneath the tail of her coat. She brought out a pair of gleaming metal handcuffs and caught Abby’s wrist in one hand. D’Agostino spun the young woman into a hammerlock, bringing Abby’s hand up between her shoulder blades. I heard one of the cuffs ratchet closed.
“No!” Abby yelped, and I moved forward, putting a hand on D’Agostino’s forearm.
“You don’t have to—”
D’Agostino swiveled away from me, putting Abby between us.
“Move back,” she said, and her voice had the cop’s cold ring of command to it. Underneath it, though, I could hear a small trilling note of fear. D’Agostino was hyper-alert to the fact that she was the only cop here. She had cleared the first floor, but there were three more floors above us, and neither of us knew if there was anyone else in the house. “Move back unless you want me to run you in for interfering in an investigation.”
I backed up a few steps and held my hands wide apart at shoulder height.
“All I’m saying is that you don’t have to do this,” I said as D’Agostino pulled Abby’s other arm behind her and clicked the second cuff into place.
“The hell I don’t,” she said. “She’s already run away from you—some bodyguard, right?—and now she’s lied to me. She can be held as a material witness in a homicide investigation, and that’s just what I’m going to do.”
D’Agostino flipped the hem of Abby’s T-shirt up and found her phone tucked into the waistband of her yoga pants. She took it out and placed it on top of the piano a few feet away. I watched in stony silence as Abby began to cry, real tears that welled at the corners of her eyes and began to slip slowly down her apple cheeks. Her whole face began to crumble.
“Please,” she said. “I don’t want to go to jail.”
“Is there anyone else in the house?” I said. “Anywhere?”
“N-no,” Abby said. “Not anymore.”
D’Agostino and I looked at one another. She still held Abby, her hand on the cuffs that bound the young woman. She’d already lied to us. We’d have to check.
“Only one way to find out,” I said, and turned for the stairs.
“Wait,” D’Agostino called after me. I stopped on the first step and looked back.
“Your weapon,” she said. “Leave it on the piano next to Miss Doyle’s phone.”
I looked back up the stairs. I had no way to know how many rooms there were, and only Abby’s untrustworthy word that we were now alone in the big house. Shit. I stepped down from that first stair, drew my gun gently with just my forefinger and thumb, and went to the piano. I put the gun next to Abby’s phone as instructed.
“You have trust issues,” I said as I passed D’Agostino on the way back to the stairs.
“Yeah,” she said, her eyes steady on me the whole time. “Blame my ex.”
I went up the stairs like my head didn’t hurt, like a man with purpose. Like I wasn’t afraid. The second floor held four bedrooms. Each had an attached bathroom, and there was also a bathroom at the end of the hall. The rich are very different, they piss more. I paused before I went into the first room and drew in a deep breath to steady my nerves. There was an itching sensation between my shoulder blades, and I badly wanted a gun in my empty hands. Reaching around the doorway, I fumbled for the light switch and turned on the overheads. Nothing moved inside the room. I inched my way inside and found a guest bedroom. The wallpaper was rich, maroon accented with creamy white stripes. The duvet matched, only with the color scheme inverted. The headboard of the bed was nearly obscured by decorative pillows. In the room’s single closet, I found a set of golf clubs in a rich brown leather bag. I drew the nine-iron and carried it with me when I checked the bathroom. Then I used it to sweep under the bed. There was nothing. I moved the pillows at the headboard to make sure they were pillows.
I repeated the process with every room on the second floor and kept finding a whole lot of nothing. When I went out to the half-wall that separated the second floor from the foyer, I yelled down that the area was clear.
“Good,” D’Agostino’s voice echoed up from below. “Third floor now.”
“Yes ma’am,” I called back.
The next set of stairs was in the middle of the second floor, and I took them a little less cautiously. The third floor contained an office at one end and a small theater with tiered seating and a huge projection screen at the other. I checked the closets, checked under furniture, checked every nook and cranny where someone could hide. There was no one. I could’ve walked back down the stairs at that point and yelled again to D’Agostino that the third floor was also clear. Instead, I took the wrought iron staircase that stood in one corner of the office. It led to the fourth floor.
The staircase opened up onto the master bedroom. It ran the length of the house and featured deep pile carpeting. There was a king-sized platform bed at one end of the room and a heavy bag for boxing set in one corner at the opposite end. There were dumbells and other exercise equipment scattered along the floor, and the walls held blown-up photos of Britt Parker and Abby Doyle. There were nightstands on either side of the bed and a long, low dresser. The walk-in closet was bigger than my motel room. Judging from the state of the bedclothes, this was where Abby had slept.
Again, there was no one there.
I crept back down the spiral staircase still carrying the nine-iron I’d appropriated on the second floor. There was no one waiting for me in the office. I checked the theater again. If I’d missed anyone, perhaps I’d drive them down toward D’Agostino, and she could deal with them.
I went down the stairs to the second floor and did a cursory re-check of every room, just to be thorough. When I was satisfied, I came back down the opposite marble staircase into the foyer.
“No one there,” I said. “I checked all the way up to the—”
My voice trailed off. D’Agostino wasn’t in the foyer. Neither was Abby. I looked over to the piano where I’d laid my gun. The weapon wasn’t there. Neither was Abby’s phone. Something rose inside me, a panic I didn’t know I was capable of. I tore through the first floor of the house, but there was no sign of D’Agostino nor Abby.
They were gone.
ten
D’Agostino’s car still crouched aggressively in the driveway, its nose forward like a predator ready to pounce. Around me, everything was still. Nothing seemed out of place. I turned away from the front door and went back to the top of the house, moving room to room again and peering around corners as if I expected the boogeyman to jump out at me. I don’t know what I was looking for. Nothing had changed. I kept ahold of the nine-iron, bringing it up in a high arc every time I went through a doorway, but my enemy was my own imagination, and I could never get ahold of it.
My mind was buzzing along at a hundred miles an hour: I had to call the local cops. No, I had to call the Birmingham cops. They were better equipped to deal with something like this than the Mountain Brook force, and D’Agostino was one of theirs. I had my phone out, ready to hit the emergency dial button, when I stopped. I was thinking like a civilian. I wasn’t thinking like a cop, and I damned sure wasn’t thinking like a crook.
Smart crooks don’t kill cops. They know that murdering an officer brings down heat like no other. Every level of every operation in the Birmingham metro area would be disrupted. Officers who might look the other way in certain situations would still have their hands out. Only now those hands would be holding a baton. Heads would—quite literally—roll.
So if someone had taken D’Agostino and Abby Doyle, they were smart. They got into the house silently, and took the women while I was upstairs. That told me that the kidnapper—maybe more than one—had bided their time until there was an opening.
That meant D’Agostino was still alive.
“Shit,” I said aloud in the empty house, and my voice echoed up the walls. This wasn’t a problem that could be solved by punching some slob on the bazoo. It required thinking, and thinking was my worst subject. It’s not that I couldn’t do it; I just preferred problems that could be solved with an application of well-timed violence.
Think, Kincaid. Think.
I went up to the third floor and found Britt’s office. He had a laptop computer on his desk that was password-protected. I didn’t even bother with it, because breaking into it would be beyond my capabilities. But I could look through his desk and trash can, so that’s what I did. On the desk, there was a photo of Britt and Abby caught in mid-laugh, looking at one another. Happier times. I was aware of Britt’s face in the photograph as I plundered through his desk, so I turned it face down as I continued my plunder..
Even so-called paperless offices still generate a lot of paper, and Britt seemed to generate more than most. He liked to have things printed out, and that’s where I caught a break. He was an attorney—I’d called that one right—and I found file folders full of transcripts and depositions and legal filings for the past year or two, probably dating back to when he passed the bar exam. There were bank records going back to that same time period that showed Britt Parker was a lot more than solvent. He was rich, with a capital R.
Of course, that would make sense. Abby Doyle was rich, too, or at least her father was. Two rich kids in love or something like it, no cross-class romance here.
It looked like Britt dealt with a lot of property law, and that pinged something in the back of my head. He helped broker deals between major landowners for shopping malls and mixed-use properties around the metro area. Judging from his bank statements, he made a good living at it. He owned this house and a cabin on Lookout Mountain in Mentone, a small vacation town just outside Fort Payne, and a house on the shore in Orange Beach. He also owned parts of six other ventures around Birmingham, ranging from parking decks to part of the Uptown shopping and dining complex.
I don’t know when my brain put two and two together, but when I did, it felt like turning a key in a lock. I sat down in Britt’s leather executive chair—he wouldn’t be needing it anymore—put my elbows on the desk and held my aching head in my hands.
The intersection of everything came down to money. Money and power, although they were often the same thing. Who had the money? Who wanted it? Gears were clicking forward in my head, slowly. When things began to tumble into place, I got up from the desk and started to move.
The first thing I needed was wheels. I couldn’t take D’Agostino’s car, because I was pretty sure she’d pocketed the keys. I went outside and checked anyway. The Charger was locked up tight. Next, I made my way to the garage. Hanging next to the door that led to it was a plaque that helpfully read “Keys.” Two sets of car keys hung from hooks attached to the plaque: one of them was a more traditional key with the Porsche logo. I grabbed it and stepped into the garage.
The Porsche was at least ten years old, maybe more, an old yellow Boxster S with a black cloth bonnet and six gears on the floor. Inconspicuous, that’s me. The leather seats felt perfect, and the rumble of the engine when I cranked it was a nearly sexual thing. I tried not to feel disloyal to the Mustang. There was a garage door opener on the visor, and I punched it. I kept to the speed limit all the way through Mountain Brook and back into Birmingham. The Porsche didn’t want to do that. I could feel the engine raring to let loose and unspool, and I desperately wanted to let the top down and fly up along the Interstate with the sun on my face and the wind in my hair.
I forced myself to stay within the speed limit and never got the Porsche out of fourth gear. Damn it. Back at the motel, I keyed in my code on the room safe and got out the big .357 that I kept in case I needed to bring down Donald Trump’s ego. It felt too bulky on my belt, so I stripped off my coat and put on a webbed leather shoulder holster. It was uncomfortable and I didn’t like the way the gun peeked out from under my coat, but it was worlds better than going unarmed.
At the last minute, I tossed my phone onto the bed. If things got bloody, the cops could ping my phone to try to place me at the scene. At that point, I didn’t really care. All I wanted to do was find Abby and D’Agostino and bring them back safely. I caught a glimpse of myself in the mirror as I turned to leave. There were bright red spots high up on my cheekbones, like a man burning with fever, and my hands trembled visibly with barely contained rage. My face was swollen and freshly bruised from where Ralph had struck me. I took one last look around before I closed the door behind me.
No one would care if I didn’t come back, and that was fine. I could live with that. I’d been a solitary, lonely man for a long time. Now Laura D’Agostino had inexplicably cracked the walls I’d built to protect myself from the world, and I couldn’t tell if I was hurt or scared or happy, or some mangled combination of all three.
I left the Porsche in the motel parking lot with the key in it. It wasn’t mine, and Britt couldn’t use it anymore. Besides, the Mustang was much more my style. I roared away toward a man who might provide me with some answers.
eleven
The man I wanted to see had an office on the fourth floor of the so-called Tower Building in Homewood. The building, ugly and blighted like an old scar, was elevated around the rest of its suburban surroundings so that it provided an unobstructed view of downtown Birmingham. As far as I could tell, that was its chief allure. It was located on a hill a little ways off Valley Ave., behind Sammy’s, a profitable-but-questionable strip club where I knew Carlton Doyle had a financial interest.
Access to the building was easy. No security guards, no receptionist. I headed for the elevator and went up to the MJ Development suite and didn’t knock when I went in.
The place didn’t spend a whole lot on overhead. The walls were mostly bare, with only a couple of Daniel Moore prints depicting past glories by the University of Alabama football team. In one corner there was a plastic plant that wasn’t fooling anybody, and directly in front of me there was an equally plastic secretary behind a desk that held a computer monitor and phone.
“May I help you?” The secretary asked. Okay, so maybe she was a little more lively than the plant, but not nearly as smart.
“No,” I said as I breezed past her. There was a single door set into the far wall, and I raised my right foot and placed a heavy kick above the doorknob. The door sprang open so hard that it banged against the wall. My momentum carried me through, and Martin James looked up from his desk in surprise, his eyes widening with fear.
He scrambled to open the middle drawer of his desk, but I went over it like a swimmer diving into the surf, got hold of his lapels and toppled us to the floor in a heap. I rose to my feet first, and grabbed the front of his shirt in my left fist. The fabric tore as he pulled away, and I caught him by the shoulders and hit him twice low in the gut to try to settle him down. They were mean punches, thrown with a lot of body weight behind them. His face paled and he made an urk! sound deep in his throat.
Martin bent over his desk, head hanging, his dark and glossy hair hanging in his face. A stream of saliva leaked from his mouth to the desktop.
“I think I’m gonna be sick,” he whispered. With my foot, I shoved a wastebasket from one side of his desk toward him. He bent over it and threw up noisily. His secretary had risen from her desk and peeked in at us.
“Mr. James? Do you want me to call the police?”
I crossed my arms over my chest and looked at him without mercy.
“Yeah, Marty. Let’s get the cops in here. What do you say?”
He shook his head, then raised his voice so the secretary could hear.
“No cops, Jenna. It’s okay. It’s just a misunderstanding. Close the door and go back to what you were doing.”
“Maybe drive over to Starbucks,” I said. “Get yourself a nice, iced coffee.”
Jenna looked bewildered but nodded.
“I, uh, I’ll take my break early, then?”
Martin James nodded, not quite meeting her questioning gaze.
“Do that,” he said.
Jenna backed out of the room. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw her try to close the door, but the jamb had cracked open and it wouldn’t close. She settled for pulling it to.
“You’re going to pay for that,” James said. It would have sounded much more intimidating if he had been able to look me in the eyes. Instead, he stayed bent over, his stomach heaving a little as it tried to deal with unexpected seismic waves of pain. “I’m going to see to it.”
“Gosh, Marty. I thought we were such good friends. Hey, it’s nice to see you dressed for a change.”
He raised his head against the pain, turning his face toward me, and I could see anger flicker in his eyes. His eyes darted downward and then I saw his hand dive for the middle desk drawer. He raked it open and I hip-checked it closed, catching his fingers in the process. He yelped, a high startled cry, and jerked his hand to his mouth. His left arm was easy to turn, and I did it, pulling the wrist behind his back and up toward his neck with my left hand while pushing his shoulder forward. I reached up and got hold of his hair, the old cop move, and banged his forehead onto his desk.
He was already moving forward with the momentum of my left hand pressing his arm up and up and up, and he couldn’t bring his other hand forward to stop the motion. When his head hit the wood, it sounded like a David Ortiz home run.
Martin slumped down to the floor in a kind of swoon, and I reached into the desk drawer Martin had been trying for. There was a Desert Eagle .45-caliber semiautomatic in there that Martin probably kept in case a blue whale wandered in. I ejected the clip and ran the slide back, making sure the gun was unloaded. I tossed it away and felt, rather than heard, it bounce.
There was a private bathroom just off the office, and I went to it and found a hand towel. I ran it under cold water for a few minutes and squeezed it out, imagining my hands around Martin’s neck
I went back to the office and squatted in front of Martin James. His forehead was mostly goose egg and his eyes were unfocused. I folded the towel into a square and pressed it into his hands.
