Holy Terror Read online

  He pulled out all of his desk drawers, starting at the bottom and leaving them open, in the way that an experienced police officer would. Paperclips, stationery, notebooks – all undisturbed. In the corner, his green steel locker was still locked. He opened it and took out his Smith & Wesson .38. It was still in its holster, with the stud fastened, and no ammunition had been taken from his belt. Nothing else had been stolen, either.

  Nothing except time. He had lost twenty-nine minutes from the moment he had walked into the store to the moment he had looked around and realized that the man and the woman were gone. And in those twenty-nine minutes, what had he done? And, more importantly, what had they done?

  He was still searching his locker when Darrell Bussman came in, carrying a clipboard and a raspberry donut with sprinkles on it. Darrell was the store’s operations manager, plump, crimson-cheeked, like the kid who nobody ever picked for their football team. He was only 23 and he had a catastrophic taste in neckties, but his uncle Newt Bussman owned 47 per cent of Spurr’s Fifth Avenue and had as much sense of humor as a hammerhead shark and those were all the vocational qualifications that Darrell had ever needed.

  ‘Hey, Conor, what kept you?’ he wanted to know, in his high, clogged-up voice. ‘We had to go through the delivery schedules without you. And nobody knew when UPS was supposed to drop off the Gucci collection.’

  ‘Accept my apologies, Darrell. The custody hearing went on for ever.

  ‘So, what happened?’

  ‘What do you think happened? I’m a man who cheated on his wife. I got shafted.’

  ‘You still got visitation, though?’

  ‘Qualified, at Paula’s discretion.’

  ‘Well, better than nothing, hunh?’

  ‘You think so? You don’t know Paula.’

  ‘Listen, how about getting UPS to pick up those Rolex watches the same time they deliver the necklaces?’

  ‘OK. Good idea.’

  Darrell stopped and looked around the office, at the open locker and the open drawers.

  ‘Hey, Conor, you’re not – ah – clearing your desk here, are you?’

  ‘No, no, everything’s fine. I was looking for something, that’s all.’

  ‘Must have been pretty damned lost.’

  Conor stood up straight. ‘To tell you the truth, I had a kind of strange experience, and I was just making sure that everything was OK.’

  ‘You had a strange experience? Don’t tell me. You were abducted by Cardassians. No, stranger than that. My uncle came in and offered you a raise.’

  ‘This isn’t a joke, Darrell. This is for real. I can’t even begin to work out what happened.’

  ‘You saw ghosts, right? They always said that Spurr’s Fifth Avenue was haunted. A woman with no head who walks around the hat department. Get it? A woman with no head who—’

  ‘Unh-hunh. These two characters weren’t ghosts. A man and a woman. A tall woman, dressed in black, and a kind of Cuban-looking guy.’

  ‘Hey! No kidding! I saw them, too!’ Darrell nodded his head as if he were never going to stop. ‘They were in luggage.’

  ‘You saw them?’

  ‘For sure. They walked up to me and asked me something. They said—’

  Darrell opened his mouth and then he closed it again. He lowered his clipboard and pressed the heel of his hand against his forehead. ‘Isn’t that stupid? I don’t know what they said. I really can’t remember.’

  ‘Try, Darrell. This could be critical.’

  ‘I’m sorry, Conor. I just can’t remember. Still, it couldn’t have been anything much, right? One minute they’re talking to me and the next minute, piff, they’re gone.’

  ‘When did this happen?’

  ‘Oh … forty minutes ago, maybe a little less. Thirty-five, maybe.’

  ‘I wish you’d called me.’

  ‘I did call you as a matter of fact, just to see if you were back. You didn’t answer. But anyway, what are you worried about? They didn’t say anything, they didn’t do anything. Not that I can remember, that is.’ He took an anxious bite out of his donut, and then another, and then another.

  ‘I think we’d better check the strongroom,’ said Conor.

  ‘The strongroom? What the hell for?’

  ‘I want to make sure that nothing’s missing, that’s all.’

  ‘How could anything be missing?’ said Darrell, his mouth crammed.

  ‘I don’t know. What happened to you up in luggage, that exact same thing happened to me, too, only I didn’t lose a few seconds. I lost twenty-nine minutes.’

  ‘Twenty-nine minutes? Are you serious?’

  ‘I met them outside the security door and that’s the last I remember. That’s why we have to check the strongroom.’

  Darrell lifted his mountainous gold Rolex. ‘Conor, I’d love to, but I’m real busy right now. And – come on – anybody who wanted to break into that strongroom would need an M60 tank. You didn’t see any M60 tanks pass by your door, did you?’

  ‘Darrell, indulge me, will you?’

  ‘For Christ’s sake, Conor. We have alarms, we have infra-red sensors, we have cameras, we have time locks. Neither of us can open the strongroom on our own and I sure as hell wasn’t here, was I? You had a memory lapse, that’s all. It could have been the heat.’

  Conor tried to be patient. It wasn’t easy to be patient with a short podgy boy with his mouth full of donut and silhouettes of hula girls on his necktie. ‘Help me out here, Darrell, and let a suspicious old chief of security put his mind at rest. I’ve got this gut feeling, that’s all.’

  ‘Conor, do you realize the magnitude of what we’re talking about here? The magnitude? We’re probably talking about more than a billion bucks’ worth of stuff here, Conor. We’re talking about stuff that belongs to customers like Mrs George Whitney IV, and Harold D. Hammet. If you have any kind of gut feeling, I think you’d better start praying that it was something you ate.’

  * * *

  Conor crossed the office and lifted down the print that the police department had given him when he resigned. It was Norman Rockwell’s famous painting of a young runaway boy perched on a stool in a 1950s diner, next to a fat, benign cop. It hadn’t been given to him without irony.

  Concealed behind the print was a small wall-safe. Conor punched out four numbers and then Darrell immediately punched out four more. If the second batch of numbers weren’t keyed into the safe in sixty seconds, it would automatically lock and stay locked. The door opened. Inside the safe were two shoulderless safe keys. Conor took one out and Darrell took the other.

  Together they walked down to the strongroom door, with Darrell’s rubber shoe-soles squelching on the marble floor.

  ‘I should be in beachwear by now,’ Darrell complained. He prodded at his mobile phone but there was no signal down here, under reinforced concrete ceilings.

  They reached the strongroom door. Again they had to punch out an eight-figure security code, four figures each. Then they had to insert their keys and turn them simultaneously. The closed-circuit television camera swiveled on its perch like an inquisitive gray parrot.

  They stepped inside. The strongroom was coldly lit, about fifty feet long and fifteen feet wide, with rows and rows of bronze-painted deposit boxes on either side and three more rows along the center. This was where some of Spurr’s wealthiest customers preferred to keep certain items of jewelry and bearer bonds and videotapes and whatever else they didn’t want even their banks or their spouses to know about. In the last century, Spurr’s Fifth Avenue had been of service to Jay Gould the railroad swindler, among many others; and its more recent clients had been Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis and Pamela Harriman.

  Conor walked along the aisles, jingling his keys and running his eyes up and down the tiers of boxes to make sure that all the key slots were in the horizontal (locked) position, and that none of them was missing.

  ‘Anything your side?’ he asked Darrell.

  ‘Nothing. That gut feeling of you
rs was probably gas. It’s all that health food that Lacey gives you.’

  Conor checked the last row of boxes. They were all locked, but he still couldn’t shake the feeling that something was wrong. ‘I guess I was imagining things, that’s all.’

  Darrell gave him a damp slap on the shoulder, like an affectionate seal. ‘That’s why we took you on, Conor. You’ve got imagination, as well as muscle. You don’t get much of that in the security business, believe me.’

  Chapter 3

  Conor went back to his office and stared at his salad like a recovering alcoholic staring at a bottle of Perrier water. In his blue plastic lunchbox there was a big red apple and a muesli bar, too. Lacey was trying to give his alimentary canal a daily workout. She was twelve years younger than him and her father had died of colon cancer, and so he couldn’t really blame her. But there were days when he would have traded six weeks of his life for a turkey and beef brisket sandwich from the Carnegie Deli on Seventh Avenue, six inches thick, with a pickle on the side. And gravy.

  He poked at his salad and then he put it back in the box and closed the lid. He felt seriously worried. Something strange had happened, something that seemed to defy the laws of physics. Not the end of the world, but something equally bad. Conor had an Irish sense of reality: in other words he believed that there were always two sides to every argument, but that every side had more than one side, and even those sides had their different sides to them. But he didn’t believe in anything that defied the laws of physics, or any other laws for that matter.

  He didn’t have many friends these days, but those that had stayed loyal to him would have described him as the most complicated of all the straight-forward men they had ever met. He believed in justice, absolutely, but he didn’t necessarily believe that justice was best achieved by being either logical or ethical.

  His complexity didn’t show in his face. He had inherited his father’s height and his broad Kerry features, with his eyes as green as the sea off Ballinskelligs Bay and the deep O’Neil cleft in his chin ‘when your great-great-great-grandfather enraged one of the Tuatha Dé Danann, the fairies, and was struck with a tiny silver ax’. However, he hadn’t inherited his father’s freckle-spattered Irish complexion. His gorgeous Sicilian mother had given him her thick wavy black hair and her grace of movement and her open sensuality, too. At parties, other men’s wives would make a point of catching his eye, and holding it.

  He had been bom 37 years ago into a celebrated dynasty of New York police officers. His older brother Gerald had become a successful bedding salesman (‘World of Throws’) but there had never been any question that Conor would be one of the finest of the Finest. He had graduated with honors from the Police Academy with only one blemish on his record, a disciplinary matter involving a female fingerprint expert. At the age of 26, in an undercover operation that had nearly cost him his life, he had almost single-handedly broken the Barocci crime family. By the time he was 30 he was the youngest captain of detectives in the city’s history – confident, charismatic, with his pretty young well-connected wife Paula and their three-year-old daughter, Fay.

  But a little over three years ago, John ‘Three Fingers’ Negrotti had been shot nineteen times in the barber shop of Loew’s New York, right opposite the 17th Precinct, and that shooting had changed Conor’s life for ever. There had been lots of blood, heaps of menthol shaving foam, but no witnesses. At first it was thought that Negrotti was the victim of a classic contract hit. But Conor had unique contacts with the Mafia Commission – the unofficial association of leading Mafia families. Gradually, he had begun to uncover the existence of a secret death squad made up of New York police officers. They called themselves the Forty-Ninth Street Golf Club. For more than six years they had been forcing the Mafia in Manhattan and Brooklyn and Queens to pay them hundreds of thousands of dollars every week. If they didn’t, they would be executed without warning, their wives and children, too.

  As Conor’s investigation plowed up more and more evidence of extortion, torture and murder, he and his family were threatened with every kind of terrible retribution. They were going to firebomb his apartment. They were going to kidnap his daughter. They were going to castrate him and mail his genitals to David Letterman. Paula and Fay had to be guarded round the clock. By the time the case of the Forty-Ninth Street Golf Club came to court, his marriage was wrecked by strain and fear. Paula had taken Fay and gone to Darien to live with her WASPish parents.

  In the witness stand, an accused detective named William Sykes protested that the Golf Club were ‘simply doing their job, only a little more so’. He justified their extortion of Mafia profits by saying that ‘stealing money that’s already stolen doesn’t make it any more stolen than it was in the first place’.

  But it was the capo di capos, Luigi ‘The Artist’ Guttuso, who made the court’s scalps prickle. In what was little more than a whisper, he said, ‘I was brought up never to show no fear to no man. Never. Some lowlife threatens to cut off your hands with a sausage-slicer and what do you do? You spit in his eye. But I have to impress on Your Honor that me and my family was mortally afraid of the Forty-Ninth Street Golf Club. Captain O’Neil has lifted that fear, regardless of the personal consequences. For that reason, I’m proud to call him my honorary brother.’

  Nine members of the Forty-Ninth Street Golf Club were convicted on seven sample counts of extortion and five sample counts of homicide in the first degree. Between them, they were sentenced to 369 years in jail. Conor had cleaned up one of the worst scandals in the police department’s history, and the New York Post hailed him as a hero. But Luigi Guttuso’s ‘honorary brother’ speech and the naked hostility of his fellow officers finished his career. He resigned the morning after the trial; but before he could write out his resignation letter, he had to remove the dead sewer rat fastened to his blotter with a six-inch nail.

  Conor opened up a yellow legal pad and took a pencil out of the shamrock-decorated mug which Lacey had given him for St Patrick’s Day. Tentatively, he began to sketch the man and the woman he had encountered outside the security door. He wasn’t very good at drawing. His art teacher had told him that he drew people like walking mattresses and horses like ironing boards, and it took four or five attempts before he managed to produce two reasonable likenesses. He even had to stick his tongue out, the way he used to do in grade school. But the finished result wasn’t too far off. He felt that he had caught the woman’s feline face and her upswept hair; and even though the man’s forehead was too bulgy, he definitely had that Copacabana look. Underneath, Conor wrote August 10, 12:27 p.m. Who??? And What??? And Why???

  His deputy Salvatore Morales came into the office. ‘Brinks-Mat called in. They just passed 34th Street. They should be here in less than five minutes.’

  Conor stood up. Even after seven and a half weeks, he still felt uncomfortable with Salvatore. Salvatore was impeccably smart and well pressed and efficient. His mustache was always clipped and his fingernails were always buffed and he always smelled (discreetly) of lavender water. In his eleven-and-a-half-year career at Spurr’s Fifth Avenue he had detained more shoplifters than the rest of the security staff put together. When Bill Hardcastle the last chief security officer had retired, Salvatore had naturally expected to step straight into his shoes.

  Spurr’s board of directors, however, had been urged by their public-relations people to take on ‘Manhattan’s Crusading Cop’. When Conor was awarded the job, Spurr’s had even taken out advertisements in the Sunday papers, with a photograph of Conor in his police dress uniform, and the headline NEW YORK’S FINEST … STORE. Conor was embarrassed. Lacey thought it was wonderful. But Salvatore must have felt like going down on his hands and knees that Sunday and eating cat litter. Conor hadn’t yet found the right moment to talk to him, to straighten their relationship out, and Salvatore was always so formal that it was almost impossible to start up a casual conversation.

  ‘Sal – before you go – did you see anybody unusual
in the store today?’

  ‘Unusual in what way, sir?’

  ‘Unusual like this.’ Conor pushed his legal pad across the desk. ‘Very well dressed. She’s tall, he’s small.’

  Salvatore picked up the pad and studied it. ‘I don’t know, sir. What context?’

  ‘Forget about the context. Context is 90 per cent to blame for witness misidentification. They see a guy in a line-up, witnesses immediately assume that he must have done something.’

  ‘Sir, I was six years with Metro-Dade sheriff’s department, Florida.’

  ‘I know that, Sal. I know your qualifications. I’m just asking you if you ever saw these people before.’

  ‘Respectfully, sir, maybe we could use a police artist.’

  Conor looked at him steadily for a long time. ‘You’re saying what?’

  ‘I’m saying… it’s hard to make any kind of identification, that’s all.’

  ‘In what respect?’

  Salvatore laid the pad back on Conor’s desk. ‘In the respect that these customers look like two chickens.’

  Conor had to hand it to Salvatore. His lips didn’t twitch, even infinitesimally. Conor picked up the pad and stared at it for a moment, breathing noisily through both nostrils. As worried as he was, he needed a lot of extra oxygen to stop himself from laughing.

  ‘You don’t think you might have seen them, though? These, ah, chickens?’

  Salvatore was about to answer when his phone played the first four bars of ‘Swanee River’, the Florida state song. ‘Excuse me, sir,’ he said, and took it out of his pocket. ‘Spurr’s Fifth Avenue security, Deputy Chief Security Officer Salvatore Morales speaking.’ He kept looking at Conor as he said, ‘Yes. Unh-hunh. OK. I’ll be right out.’

  ‘Listen, Sal—’ Conor began, but Salvatore said, ‘Brinks-Mat have arrived, sir. I don’t want to keep them waiting.’

  ‘All right. We’ll talk about these two jokers later. But in the meantime, you can ease off on the “sir”.’

  Salvatore said, ‘If I was in your position, sir, I would expect everybody to call me “sir”. To be called “sir”, that means you have earned something, that you have worked for it.’