Chapter Twelve #2
She scrounges in her inside jacket pocket, feeling for pointed sharpness, and comes out with two slender metal filaments.
She’s practiced a lot with these, mainly on Keil locks.
This is a Kwikset, but it doesn’t look tough.
Now she slips her tension wrench into the keyway, applies some light torque to the plug, rakes the pins gently .
. . There’s a click. She tries the handle again. This time, it gives.
She glances over her shoulder at Noone, her unstitched eyebrow raised. “Oh wow, looks like the door’s open.”
“Did you . . . Did you just pick the lock?”
“Shut up, come on.”
This is the second time in three days she’s snuck into a stranger’s living room. Thankfully, there are no dead bodies in this one.
The apartment is three rooms—the living area, one cramped bedroom, and a kitchen with a bath, as predicted.
Janice has worked hard to pretty things up: She’s hung nice curtains, polished the hardwood floors, kept the shelves and fixtures white to match the walls, added a few ferns.
But it’s still a fairly down-market place.
“Stay by the door,” Nomi says quietly. “I want to look around.”
“Not much to see.”
“Noone, you’re great with corpses, but not so good with domestic details.
” She points at signs he overlooked as she pulls on a pair of leather gloves.
“Some small picture frames are gone from their spots on the walls, no keys on the hook by the door, no coat on the coat stand. And I’m not seeing a handbag anywhere.
I think she’s split, but keep watch while I check. ”
Noone returns to the door as Nomi searches the apartment.
The bed is unmade, and a bunch of clothes are missing from the dresser.
No jewelry, no makeup. Janice D’Addario is in the wind.
Nomi checks old mail on the kitchen benchtop, but she only hits the jackpot when she looks through the wastebasket.
She goes back to Noone, holding her prize. “Okay, we’re done, let’s go.”
“We’re done?”
She shows him the matchbook and the flyer she found in the trash. Both display the same image: a pair of lips, open wide to show tonsils and teeth, done in a comic book style. “That’s the logo for Big Mouth—it’s a club up near West Fourteenth and Ninth. One of Lamonte’s.”
“You think Janice might be there?”
“I think Janice is covering her ass. She’s staying somewhere else, because she’s not an idiot. But she’s probably working shifts at Big Mouth so Lamonte knows she hasn’t flown the coop just yet.”
Noone examines the flyer. “How can you be sure she hasn’t just—”
“Not here,” Nomi interrupts. She takes back the flyer, shoves it and the matchbook into her tote. “I’ll explain later, but hanging around when you’ve broken into someone’s apartment is never good policy. Let’s go.”
Nomi locks the door behind them. Once they’re down the shallow steps and out of the building, she feels safer.
But as they walk through the courtyard, someone else arrives through the carriage entrance: a guy in his thirties, medium build on the shorter side, curly dark hair and glasses.
He’s wearing polyester trousers and a turtleneck under a brown corduroy jacket, carrying a large coffee to go, and Nomi recognizes him instantly.
She pinches the elbow of Noone’s peacoat and trains her eyes forward, voice low. “Keep walking.”
Nomi’s never mentioned anything to Noone about the guys she used to work with at Tenth Precinct, but something in her tone must send out alarm bells, because she feels him straighten.
When they pass the guy wearing corduroy, and his voice behind them says, “Hey, hold it right there,” Noone has already positioned himself in front of her before they turn around.
“Can we help you?” Noone’s posture is relaxed, but his words are completely cold.
Nomi can see this going poorly, opts to defuse. “Nah, it’s okay, Detective Gaffney was just saying hello, weren’t you, Calvin?”
“Nomi Pace?” Detective Calvin Gaffney seems genuinely surprised to see her, which is wild because this is homicide related and they’re in her district: They’d have to know she’d make inquiries.
It doesn’t say much for the general level of intelligence at the precinct since her departure if they haven’t figured that out.
“Ah geez, I thought it was you. Someone finally got ya, huh?”
He nods toward her bruised eye and makes a shit-eating grin, which has always been one of Gaffney’s standard facial expressions. God, she hates twerps like him.
“Yeah, they got me all right.” Nomi tries to make her tight smile look more normal. Beside her, close enough to maintain contact, Simon Noone seems ominously quiet. “Fancy bumping into you, huh?”
“So, what, are you here on business?” Gaffney removes the lid of his coffee, takes a casual sip as he comes closer. “Did you just try to check Janice D’Addario’s apartment?”
“Yeah, I did,” Nomi confesses. “I just came by to see Janice, but I guess she’s not home.”
“Well, yeah. Janice is gone. Whoops, skedaddled.” Gaffney swaps hands on the coffee cup, shaking out his burning fingers. “And respectfully, you probably shouldn’t be poking your nose into this one, Pace. This is out of your line.”
“It’s all my line these days, Calvin—you know that.” Now Nomi’s showing some teeth. “And it’s not exactly your line, either, is it? Why’s Balter sent you to Greenwich Village from Tenth Precinct? Are the guys from Sixth all washing their hair or something?”
“Hey, I just go where I’m told.”
“So here you are, just hanging around, watching the place . . .”
“Yeah, that’s what I’m doing.” Gaffney nods importantly. “Keeping an eye out for Janice, securing the scene—normal cop stuff. I’m sure you remember that.”
“It’s not a crime scene, though, is it? There’s no tape.”
“No tape, but it’s out of bounds.” Gaffney looks through his glasses and down his nose at her. “And that’s all you need to know about it. Police business isn’t your concern no more if you ain’t police, you know what I’m saying?”
Noone has lost interest in the conversation; he’s crouched down to fix the buckle on his boot. Nomi tilts her head to see Calvin Gaffney from a better angle, but he still doesn’t look less annoying.
“Calvin, this isn’t just police business,” she points out. “It’s district business. That’s why people hire me. I heard about Ricki, so I figured I’d drop in on Janice. But you being here kind of tells me there’s more to it. Is this connected to Lamonte? Or maybe Arthur Galetti?”
Gaffney seems flustered, which is satisfying. “Look—”
“What about this guy?” Nomi snaps open the paper folds on Noone’s sketch.
Gaffney steps in, squints at the drawing. “Jesus, Pace. What are you doing walking around with a picture of Claude Ameche in your back pocket?”
“Claude Ameche, right . . .” Nomi says. “Well, it’s been a pleasure talking with you as always, Calvin.”
“Look, respectfully? You don’t know what you’re doing, and I’m gonna suggest you stay out of it.
” Gaffney is letting his irritation get the better of him.
“When Balter hears you’ve been bumbling around his crime scene, he’s gonna be real unhappy.
We’re trying to conduct an investigation, and you’re—”
“I’m not trying to get in the way of any investigation,” Nomi says. “And respectfully, Balter needs to calm the hell down.”
“Listen, you’re out of your depth on this one, Pace.” Gaffney swaps hands on his coffee again, sneering at her. “You want to investigate Galetti? You should’ve sucked dick like a good little girl and stayed on the force—”
Noone rises abruptly from his crouch. His shoulder brushes Gaffney’s elbow and somehow knocks the cup he’s holding: Sixteen ounces of hot black premium roast spills straight down Gaffney’s front.
Gaffney screams, jumps so hard he dislodges his glasses. “Ahhh, fuck! What the fuck!”
“Oh, I’m sorry,” Noone says in a flat voice. “I didn’t mean to bump you.”
“You didn’t mean to . . . What the fuck?” Gaffney swipes at his jacket, holds his sodden turtleneck away from his chest with pinching fingers. “Who the fuck are you?”
“Nobody.” Nomi wants to laugh but she really can’t. She tugs on Noone’s arm. “He’s nobody.”
“That was all my fault,” Noone says. “I do apologize.”
“Seriously, man!” Gaffney exclaims.
“Real sorry about that!” Nomi is practically dragging Noone away. “Anyway, hey, thanks for the warning, Detective. We’ll get out of your hair, okay? Bye!”
She uses a combination of shoving and pulling to get Noone out of the courtyard and through the shadowed tunnel of the carriage entrance, onto the Downing Street sidewalk.
Noone seems to want to keep checking back on Calvin Gaffney, who’s still swearing in the courtyard and shaking coffee out of his stupid jacket. Who buys corduroy?
Nomi yanks on Noone’s sleeve to bring him around, forcing him to walk fast enough to match her. “Stand down. Are you fucking nuts? The last thing we need is you getting arrested!”
“He can’t arrest me for spilling his coffee,” Noone says stiffly. “And it’s his own fault. He was being rude.”
“Jesus Christ, Simon, he’s a cop—being rude is basically an employment requirement.” Nomi smothers her snort, pulls Noone forward. “Now come on, we got more than what we came for, and I want to get out of here before Gaffney decides to file some kind of report.”
Returning to Gansevoort Street in the back of another cab, Nomi takes a pen from her tote and writes Claude Ameche in big letters at the top of Noone’s sketch. Then she examines the Big Mouth flyer.
She’s already getting ideas. “I’m thinking we go tomorrow night, see if Janice is there, find out what she knows, have a drink, get out.”
“What?” Noone seems somewhat distracted by the lingering satisfaction of dumping hot coffee all over a police detective.
“How would you feel about coming to a nightclub with me?”
“Now?”
“No—tomorrow. Pay attention.”
“You’re in the middle of an investigation and you want to go clubbing.”
“I want to dig up information, Noone. There’s a difference.”
“The difference being that this information is in a nightclub.”
She grins at him. “Come on, you know you want to come. Have you been to a club in NYC yet? I’ll even pay the cover charge.”