van.’
‘Can you describe the van?’
Forty-five minutes later, I followed the van back through Maspeth and into Greenpoint, virtually retracing the route I’d taken a few hours earlier. I gave the van plenty of room, passing by the corner of Eagle Street and Franklin Avenue in time to watch it disappear through a roll-up door into the interior of a warehouse. The warehouse was two stories high and no more than twenty feet wide. As decrepit as its attached neighbors to the east and west, the entire face of the building, including the steel door in front, was covered with graffiti. This corner of Greenpoint was mostly Hispanic and poor, a place where folks minded their own business, which was definitely not the plight of a few blanquitas who didn’t even speak English, much less Spanish.
While Aslan and the women were still in church, I’d briefly inspected the van. I called in the plates, first. They came back registered to an outfit called Domestic Solutions. Jane, it appeared, was somebody’s servant. That done, I checked the well-worn tires. I’d photographed a tire impression at the crime scene. Now I had something to compare it with. Finally, I looked inside the vehicle, just in case there was a kilo of cocaine lying in plain view. Instead, I discovered a pair of car seats in the back, one clearly meant for an infant. Children, of course, would add another layer of control, especially pre-schoolers who could be kept out of sight.
As I passed by Eagle Street for a second time, a light went on behind the curtains in the two small windows on the second floor. This was a violation of the building code I could turn to my advantage. Industrial structures cannot be used for residential purposes, not without going through a complicated conversion process that requires a thorough renovation, inside and out. That the home of Domestic Solutions and its workers had not undergone that process was obvious at a glance. A wooden sign running across the building’s facade looked as if it was about to drop onto the street below. Eagle Street Roofing was what the sign said, and I didn’t grasp its significance until I was on my third circuit of the block. Bottom line, there’s very little call for walk-in refrigerators in the roofing business. That meant Jane was killed somewhere else and the only somewhere else she could have been killed was at work. Again, I remembered the Roach’s prediction: there’s a sadist in the mix.
I kept at it for another twenty minutes, certain of only one thing: come tomorrow morning, bright and early, I’d be staking out Domestic Solutions. The single issue to be resolved was the vantage point from which to do it. Tradition would have me sitting in an unmarked car, pretending to read a newspaper. But this block of Eagle Street, between Franklin Avenue and West Street, was only fifty feet long.
I pictured Aslan as I’d seen him walking into the church, his eyes in constant motion. If I was parked in plain view he’d spot me in a minute. And I didn’t want to be spotted, not before I had a better idea of what I was up against.
Eventually, I settled on a place and a plan. Across from Domestic Solutions, a narrow yard was closed off by a chain-link fence topped with barbed wire. The yard ran back at least sixty feet and was littered with everything from bags of garbage to sheet metal boxes and tubes. There was even a cracked toilet. I didn’t have to guess where the debris came from. The squat brick warehouse on the eastern side of the yard had been long abandoned and long ago looted. Whether or not it was also unoccupied remained to be seen.
TWELVE
A t one time in the not too distant past, I was good-old Harry Corbin, friend to all. My favorite hang-out was a cop bar in Brooklyn where my drink was waiting before I took off my coat, where no one had a bad thing to say about me. That all stopped when I busted Dante Russo and his cronies. Now it was just Adele Bentibi and Conrad Stehle, and
‘Can you describe the van?’
Forty-five minutes later, I followed the van back through Maspeth and into Greenpoint, virtually retracing the route I’d taken a few hours earlier. I gave the van plenty of room, passing by the corner of Eagle Street and Franklin Avenue in time to watch it disappear through a roll-up door into the interior of a warehouse. The warehouse was two stories high and no more than twenty feet wide. As decrepit as its attached neighbors to the east and west, the entire face of the building, including the steel door in front, was covered with graffiti. This corner of Greenpoint was mostly Hispanic and poor, a place where folks minded their own business, which was definitely not the plight of a few blanquitas who didn’t even speak English, much less Spanish.
While Aslan and the women were still in church, I’d briefly inspected the van. I called in the plates, first. They came back registered to an outfit called Domestic Solutions. Jane, it appeared, was somebody’s servant. That done, I checked the well-worn tires. I’d photographed a tire impression at the crime scene. Now I had something to compare it with. Finally, I looked inside the vehicle, just in case there was a kilo of cocaine lying in plain view. Instead, I discovered a pair of car seats in the back, one clearly meant for an infant. Children, of course, would add another layer of control, especially pre-schoolers who could be kept out of sight.
As I passed by Eagle Street for a second time, a light went on behind the curtains in the two small windows on the second floor. This was a violation of the building code I could turn to my advantage. Industrial structures cannot be used for residential purposes, not without going through a complicated conversion process that requires a thorough renovation, inside and out. That the home of Domestic Solutions and its workers had not undergone that process was obvious at a glance. A wooden sign running across the building’s facade looked as if it was about to drop onto the street below. Eagle Street Roofing was what the sign said, and I didn’t grasp its significance until I was on my third circuit of the block. Bottom line, there’s very little call for walk-in refrigerators in the roofing business. That meant Jane was killed somewhere else and the only somewhere else she could have been killed was at work. Again, I remembered the Roach’s prediction: there’s a sadist in the mix.
I kept at it for another twenty minutes, certain of only one thing: come tomorrow morning, bright and early, I’d be staking out Domestic Solutions. The single issue to be resolved was the vantage point from which to do it. Tradition would have me sitting in an unmarked car, pretending to read a newspaper. But this block of Eagle Street, between Franklin Avenue and West Street, was only fifty feet long.
I pictured Aslan as I’d seen him walking into the church, his eyes in constant motion. If I was parked in plain view he’d spot me in a minute. And I didn’t want to be spotted, not before I had a better idea of what I was up against.
Eventually, I settled on a place and a plan. Across from Domestic Solutions, a narrow yard was closed off by a chain-link fence topped with barbed wire. The yard ran back at least sixty feet and was littered with everything from bags of garbage to sheet metal boxes and tubes. There was even a cracked toilet. I didn’t have to guess where the debris came from. The squat brick warehouse on the eastern side of the yard had been long abandoned and long ago looted. Whether or not it was also unoccupied remained to be seen.
TWELVE
A t one time in the not too distant past, I was good-old Harry Corbin, friend to all. My favorite hang-out was a cop bar in Brooklyn where my drink was waiting before I took off my coat, where no one had a bad thing to say about me. That all stopped when I busted Dante Russo and his cronies. Now it was just Adele Bentibi and Conrad Stehle, and
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