Law & Order Dead Line Read online

  24

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  Briscoe leaned to look past the man, but saw nothing unusual. “You must be Ralph Emerson Chesko.”

  “In the flesh.”

  “Your neighbor told me you used to manage a growth fund,” said Green.

  “At the Monticello Investment Group. ‘Brother can you spare a dime?’” said Chesko.

  “So you’re working construction?” asked Briscoe.

  “It’s not exactly the Hamptons, is it? I’ve always liked working with my hands, but I never expected to do it twelve hours a day.” He raised his palms to show calluses and an assortment of Band-Aids.

  They stepped across the threshold. A large electric fan whined on the floor as if it were about to give up, directing air at a sofa with a sleeping bag on it. On the arm, a carton of Chinese food with red-lacquered chopsticks teetered in the artificial breeze. Chesko reached to turn off his portable CD player, while Briscoe peered up at the opening where a section of old flooring had been removed. Upstairs, hanging from a nail in the cracked plaster, a bare lightbulb dangled above a saw table.

  “I’m doing subflooring today. I don’t believe in just slapping good wood over the old. This house is the bottom of my new ladder. It had squatters, but I ac-quired it from the city for back taxes. I’ll remodel, sell it, and use it to finance another. One rung, then another. I’m redeeming my soul with honest labor,” he said cheerfully.

  “So what happened with your growth fund?” asked Green.

  “Tanked,” said Chesko. “I made three big mistakes.

  First, that damned fiber optics thing. I knew it was 25

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  risky, that’s the only way to get real returns. Who could have guessed that—” He stopped abruptly, smiled. “Something tells me that you’re not really interested in that.”

  “We’re interested in your American Express card.

  It was used to book a room at the Waterloo Hotel.”

  Chesko looked genuinely confused. “Hotel?”

  “A woman checked in with it.”

  “That’s crazy!”

  “Maybe the number was stolen?” asked Briscoe. He was thinking of the building supply store. If the number had been stolen there, Green and he were on a wild-goose chase. Anybody could be using it. “The woman prepaid for the room online.”

  “Oh,” said Chesko. “You see, I’ve got the card in my duffel bag over there. But I know who has the number. Both my ex-wives. But Emily’s catting around Palm Springs, as far as I know. And Barbara has no reason to book a hotel room.”

  “Barbara?”

  “My first ex-wife. Emily’s in the process of making it double-down.”

  “Is Barbara about five-six?” said Green. “Around a hundred and thirty-five pounds? Dark hair? Touch of gray?”

  “I’m not sure about the weight. She put on a few after the divorce. Not that she got fat.”

  “Did Barbara wear a black beret?”

  Chesko winced. “Christ, yeah, that’s her. The Jac-queline Kerouac of the twenty-first century. Ever since the divorce, she’s decided she’s some kind of artiste, always wearing black and that stupid beret, babbling about a ‘room of her own.’ Of course she left out the rest of that Virginia Woolf quote, the part about 26

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  having the ‘independent means.’ Call me Mr. Means.

  I was supposed to provide that. Everything first class: her fancy computer, her business-class software, all her supplies. Even the damned paper. I think she really believed her manuscripts would be archived.

  We’re talking ten thou a month, fellows. How’s that for Bohemian? But I paid until the roof fell in.”

  “So she went Beatnik on you?” said Briscoe.

  Chesko shook his head. “She had no more business playing writer than Mike Tyson. It’s embarrassing. A woman like her. Or like she was.”

  Green’s eyes met Briscoe’s. “What do you mean

  ‘was’?”

  “When I met her, she was a runner-up for Miss Connecticut. Even after a decade of marriage, I could walk into a room with her and guys would swivel their necks so hard they’d need a chiropractor. Then, it was the garden parties and the salad recipes and the linens and the apricot glaze on the quail. Yawn!

  I don’t know how she could get wrapped up in that so much. Maybe it was the painkillers. She might as well have put pills in the candy dish. God, after twenty years she was boring!”

  “So you traded her in for a sporty V-8,” said Briscoe.

  Chesko shrugged. “Why go on suffering? Maybe I was getting older and thinking about not having any kids. Maybe I just wanted someone who wasn’t thinking about the linen sale at Bergdorf’s when we made the beast. I know there was an age difference with Emily, but so what? Call it a mid-life crisis. Is that terrible?”

  Briscoe toed a pile of sawdust and tried to shift closer to the fan.

  “But it’s classic, guys. I’ve been punished, and how!

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  I ended up with a young and beautiful woman who secretly took the pill to save her figure and was thinking about money when we made the beast. After the fund collapsed, Emily hit the road.”

  “You get what you pay for,” said Briscoe.

  “No one believes I haven’t socked a bundle away somewhere, but I really haven’t. They think I couldn’t be that stupid. I believed in what I was doing. Why else would I have put all my own money in? I wasn’t one of these bastards drifting down to the penthouse in their golden parachutes. I’m sleeping here!”

  Briscoe and Green looked at each other.

  “That’s what integrity gets you. I don’t care what Barbara is saying, I’m tapped. I know I’m in violation of the settlement, but I warned her I couldn’t keep it up.” He stuck his arms out. “So arrest me. She can’t get a nickel if I’m in the poke.”

  “We’re not here about your support payments, Mr.

  Chesko.”

  “I’m tired of paying for her crazy notions. The well is dry. She should get a job.”

  “She has crazy notions?”

  “She’s going to write the great American feminist novel, rake me over the coals for being a shit, and have me pay for her groceries while she does it. It’s nuts and I’m sick of hearing about it.”

  “So you said,” said Green.

  “Well, you won’t be hearing about it anymore,”

  said Briscoe. He rocked back on his heels to watch Chesko’s reaction to what Green was about to tell him.

  “I’m afraid it appears that Barbara Chesko may be dead.”

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  Chesko squinted, looked from Green to Briscoe and back again. “I don’t understand.”

  “A woman fitting your description of Barbara fell down the air shaft of the Waterloo Hotel. From the eighth floor.”

  “She was the one who checked in? What was she doing in the Waterloo Hotel?”

  “We don’t know,” said Green.

  “For certain,” said Briscoe. “It appears there was a man with her.”

  Chesko staggered unsteadily backward to the sofa, groping for it with his spread fingers. “She’s dead?”

  He lowered his head into his hands.

  “Are you all right, Mr. Chesko?” asked Green.

  “Yes. I think so.” He shook his head. “No, I’m not

  ‘all right.’ We were married for twenty-three years.”

  “So, you met her at the Waterloo?”

  Chesko looked up and squinted again. “Why would I do that? To rekindle our romance? Do you think there would be anything interesting after twenty-three years?” He winced. “I didn’t mean that like that. We were a good couple once.”

  “I wouldn’t know much about twenty-three years, but it’s always interesting if she isn’t your wife,” said Briscoe. “Even if she’s an ex-wife.”

  “She has an apartment in the Village. Why a hotel?

  If she had a boyfrien
d, why wouldn’t she just take him home? What’s the point? And using my card number!”

  “Maybe that was the point,” said Green.

  Chesko shook his head again, this time as if he knew that this was exactly the kind of thing she would do. Then, suddenly, his jaws clenched and his nostrils flared. “Maybe she was looking for another ‘patron 29

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  of the arts.’” He shook his head. “It’s just like her.

  Pathetic. How could she fall out the window?”

  “That’s what we’d like to find out. We were hoping the man who was with her could tell us,” said Briscoe.

  “You wouldn’t have been that man by any chance?”

  asked Green. “Maybe she was all right when you left?”

  Chesko’s hands were shaking. He crossed his arms and sighed. “I’ve told you. You’ve got the wrong turkey, fellows. Not me. And I have no idea who’d have wanted to bang her.”

  Briscoe raised an eyebrow.

  “They’re going to love this,” muttered Chesko.

  “Everybody’s going to blame me! The Post will be after me again. I took my investors’ money, then pitched my wife off the roof to get her life insurance.”

  He waved both hands down. “Christ!”

  “We’re just trying to find out how she died,” said Briscoe. “Did she have insurance?”

  Chesko looked at him coldly. “I don’t believe this.”

  “Did she?” asked Green.

  “She used to. When the fund tanked, I stopped paying for it. Look, I’m very upset. Do you have to badger me right now? Is there something suspicious about her death? You said she fell.”

  “I’m sorry, Mr. Chesko,” said Briscoe. “We don’t mean anything by it. It’s our job, you understand.”

  Chesko stared at them for a few seconds, then lowered his head. “What I wouldn’t give for that big bottle of Napoleon cognac I used to keep in my office.”

  “There’s always Mad Dog 20/20,” said Briscoe.

  30

  BARBARA CHESKO’S APARTMENT

  228 BLEECKER STREET

  THURSDAY, AUGUST 22, 7:17 P.M.

  The super, a gaunt man named Voskov, flipped along the key ring. “No, haven’t seen her since I picked up the rent Tuesday. She’s pretty quiet. A good tenant.”

  He tried a key. It didn’t work.

  “She ever have guests?” asked Briscoe. “A boyfriend?”

  “I saw her with a guy once. It’s none of my business.”

  The lock clacked and the super bumped the door with his shoulder. “It’s tight,” he said. “I tried to loosen the frame with a hammer, but it’s an old building…”

  “Maybe you relocked it,” said Briscoe.

  Voskov turned it back the other way until it clacked.

  This time when he bumped it, it opened with a squeak. He shrugged and went inside. “Mrs. Chesko?

  Mrs. Chesko? The police are here!”

  “If she answers, I’m running,” said Briscoe, checking the side room.

  “Amen,” said Green. “Anybody been in here since Tuesday?”

  Voskov shook his head. “Not me. No.”

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  Green put his hand on the super’s shoulder. “You’re not in trouble. Barbara Chesko’s dead.” Voskov looked around as if he expected to see the body.

  Briscoe emerged from the bedroom.

  “I don’t come in unless they ask me. Somebody might get in when I go to lunch, but I haven’t seen anybody.”

  Briscoe held up an eight-by-twelve photograph. “I found this on the desk. There’s five of them. Is this her?”

  Voskov nodded.

  “Bingo, Ed. Barbara Chesko with a face.”

  Green studied the photograph. From her torso up, Chesko stared defiantly into the camera, arms crossed, chin raised, hair pulled back. She was wearing a black turtleneck. Green remembered the body with half its face torn away and winced. “That’s her.”

  “You smell that?” asked Briscoe.

  “Gas?” sniffed Voskov with wide eyes.

  “More like oil,” said Green.

  Voskov nodded in relief. “The exterminator came on Wednesday. Every six months.”

  “So someone was in the apartment after Tuesday,”

  said Green.

  “Sure, sure. But he’s nobody, just the exterminator.”

  “Thank you, Mr. Voskov. We’re going to look around a while.” Briscoe gently pushed him toward the door.

  “When can I run an ad for the apartment?”

  “We’ll let you know,” said Briscoe, closing the door.

  “In addition to the insecticide,” he added, “I smell a rent hike.”

  “Life goes on,” said Green. “You know, this isn’t exactly one of those studio portraits.”

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  “Looks a little frightening,” said Briscoe.

  “Women can get that way when they’re dumped.”

  They examined the tiny apartment. There was a kitchen area to the left, with a small cappuccino machine. The refrigerator contained yogurt, a tub of tabbouleh, soy milk, and some leftover pasta with mussels. A pint of expensive ice cream sat in the freezer. The dishes and the sink were clean, except for a cup waiting to be washed. A dry herbal tea bag was stuck to the bottom. Nothing in the trash can under the sink was unusual. Junk mail and orange peelings. Two cockroaches dead on their backs.

  “See any sign of a boyfriend?” asked Briscoe, checking the medicine cabinet. “If she provided the protection at the hotel, she didn’t leave the box.”

  Green gave the bedroom a quick look, then paused at the desk. The room was so small the desk chair bumped against the queen-sized bed. Green could actually sit on the bed and reach the desk. The “computer” Briscoe had mentioned earlier consisted of a Sony docking unit with a wireless keyboard, speakers, a cable modem, and a wireless mouse. None of this equipment looked like it had been manufactured more than six months ago, meaning, as with most computer stuff, it had only been obsolete from about the time Barbara Chesko had first plugged it in.

  “The pawned laptop would fit in this dock,” said Green.

  “It would be a strange coincidence if it didn’t,” said Briscoe.

  “This looks pretty high end for your usual PC user,”

  said Green, “like it would run to a few thousand.”

  “Exactly what the ex complained about,” said Briscoe.

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  Just to be certain, they searched the room and into two pieces of luggage in the closet, but found no laptop. Santonio must have lifted it out of her hotel room, along with her purse.

  Green sat on the bed, opened the desk drawer and found a stack of letters, but was distracted by a date book. As he moved toward July he saw a hair appointment, a phone number, an appointment at “K&S!” in late July. On August 21, it said “Waterloo,” but nothing about whoever she was meeting. Every two weeks on Thursday nights going on into October it said “Writing Group, 8 sharp!” with different addresses. The last one had been on October 17. She wouldn’t make the one scheduled for tonight. He bagged the address book because of the various unidentified phone numbers scribbled here and there on different pages.

  In the middle drawer there was a stack of bright white paper and underneath an unopened box of Hammermill 100% cotton bond.

  In the front of the file drawer at the bottom of the desk were a number of thin folders labeled “Apartment,” “Divorce,” “Visa,” “Bills,” and “Receipts.” Behind them, folders nearly the thickness of a telephone directory were unevenly stuffed with different shades of paper. Green pulled out one of the folders and flipped it over to the title page: SHAFTED

  The Story of a Marriage

  a novel by

  Barbara Chesko

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  Sixth Draft

  Green shook his head with a slight smile. “Lennie, get this!”r />
  Briscoe swung his head into the door. “Find something?”

  “It’s the ‘great American feminist novel,’ as Ralph Chesko described it.”

  Briscoe read the title page. “A moving commentary on the ennui of modern marriage, I’m sure. Very original.”

  Green opened to page one and read out loud. “‘This is the story of a marriage, my marriage, my marriage to William Shaft, also known as Bill. Bill was everything a woman could wish for. He was—’” Green broke off, shaking his head.

  “‘He was just my Bill!’” said Briscoe, rolling his eyes. “Is this supposed to be a comedy? Sex and the City revisited?”

  “‘He was tall, handsome, and destined for financial success. He was just out of the Air Force and was known as Major William Shaft. Little did I know how it would all end up twenty-one years later, with Major Shaft’s cheating (both the financial and the marital), anger, and heart-rending betrayal.’”

  “Please,” said Briscoe, “I’m rending.” He took a breath. “Aw, hell,” he added, “we shouldn’t be making fun of her. Maybe this was a first draft or something.”

  “It says ‘Sixth.’”

  “Is this woman published?”

  He lifted several of the letters out and skimmed them. “‘It doesn’t meet our needs at this time,’ ‘Thank you for thinking of us,’ ‘Unfortunately, we feel the 35

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  market is glutted with novels of this type at this time,’

  and so on, and so on.” He flipped a few more. “This one’s not bad.” He handed it to Briscoe.

  “‘While I have utter faith in your talent and the story you have to tell, I’m afraid the editorial board has decided to pass on this at this time. I know it may be a lot to ask, but my personal feeling is that your work is very close to fruition’—I like that

  ‘fruition’—‘and that perhaps another revision, a really close line edit, might provide exactly the polish that could lead to a contract.’”

  “It sounds like she was getting there.”

  “Go figure.” Briscoe handed the letter back. “They hadn’t actually signed her.”

  “Most people can’t write a book.”

  “You know what I mean. Horseshoes and hand grenades.”

  “That might be it,” said Green. “This letter was sent on May 17. What if she got shot down?”