French Kiss Read online

  “I opened a nice Chilean Chardonnay. You want a glass and we can talk?” she asks.

  “Yes,” I say. “Mix a glass of wine with a quart of tequila and we’ll have a drink that might make me forget what a miserable day this has been.”

  “Maria, Maria, Maria,” Dalia says. She shakes her head as she pours the wine into two wineglasses. Then she says, “I hate to ask, but…any ideas yet?”

  “I sure don’t have any guesses. I don’t even have all the details yet. Plus Maria’s husband is a crazy mess right now.” I decide to skip the details.

  “Understandably,” Dalia says.

  I cannot shake the mental picture of Joey Martinez’s hurt and anger as he spat out the words “She loved you.”

  Then Dalia says, “But what about you? How are you feeling?”

  “How can I feel? Maria was my partner, and she was as good a partner as anyone ever had. She was damn near perfect. As my rugby coach used to say, ‘The best combination for any job is the brains of an owl and the skin of an elephant.’”

  “What was the name of the genius who came up with that little saying?” Dalia asks.

  “Monsieur Pierre LeBec. You must remember him—the fat little man who was always smoking a pipe. He coached boys’ rugby and taught geometry,” I say. A reminiscence is about to open up.

  Dalia and I speak often about the school in Paris we had both attended. We became girlfriend and boyfriend during our second year at Lycée Henri-IV. And we fell in love exactly the way teenagers do—with unstoppable passion. There wasn’t enough time in the day for all the laughter and talking and sex that we needed to have. Even when we broke up, just before we both left for university, we did it with excessive passion. Lots of door slamming and yelling and crying and kissing.

  Ten years later, when Act II of The Story of Dalia and Luc began, it was as if we were teenagers all over again. First of all, we “met cute.” Dalia and I reconnected completely accidentally three months ago at one of the rare NYPD social functions—a spring boat ride on the Hudson River. I was standing alone at the starboard railing and must have been turning green. About to heave, I was one seasick sailor.

  “You look like a man who needs some Dramamine,” came Dalia’s voice from behind me. I’d know it anywhere. I turned around.

  “Holy shit! It’s you,” I said. We hugged and immediately agreed that only God himself could have planned this meeting. It may not have been an actual miracle, but it was certainly une coïncidence grande. Two former Parisian lovers who end up on a boat and then…

  Dalia reminded me that she was not Parisian. She was Israeli, a sabra.

  “Okay, then it’s a fairy tale,” I said. “And in fairy tales you don’t pay attention to details.”

  By the time the boat docked at Chelsea Piers, we were in love again. And—holy shit indeed—had she ever turned from a spectacular-looking teenager into an incredibly spectacular-looking young woman.

  She invited me back to her ridiculously large penthouse at 15 Central Park West, the apartment that her father, the film director and producer Menashe Boaz, had paid for. That night was beyond unforgettable. I couldn’t imagine my life if that night had never happened.

  After the first week, I had most of my clothes sent over.

  After the second week, I had my exercise bike and weights sent over.

  After a month I hired a company to deliver the three most valuable pieces from my contemporary Chinese art collection: the Zao Wou-Ki, the Zhang Xiaogang, and the Zeng Fanzhi. Dalia refers to them as the Z-name contemporary art collection. She said that when those paintings were hung in her living room, she knew I planned to stay.

  But now we have this night. The night of Maria’s death. A night that’s the emotional opposite of that joyful night months ago.

  “Will you be hungry later on?” Dalia asks.

  “I doubt it,” I say. I pour us each another glass of wine. “Anyway, if we get hungry later on, I’ll make us some scrambled eggs.”

  She smiles and says, “An eight-burner Garland range and we’re making scrambled eggs.”

  That statement should be cute and funny. But we both know that nothing can be cute and funny this evening.

  “I want to ask you something,” I say.

  “Yeah, of course,” she says. She wrinkles her forehead a tiny bit. As if she’s expecting some scary question. I proceed.

  “Are you angry that I’m so sad about Maria’s murder?”

  Dalia pauses. Then she tilts her head to the side. Her face is now soft, tender, caring.

  “Oh, Luc,” she says. “I would only be angry if you were not sad.”

  I feel that we should kiss. I think Dalia feels the same way. But I also think something inside each of us is telling us that if we did kiss, no matter how chaste the kiss might be, it would be almost disrespectful to Maria.

  We sit silently for a long time. We finish the bottle of Chardonnay.

  It turns out that we never were hungry enough to scramble some eggs. All we did was wait for the day to end.

  Chapter 10

  The person responsible for whatever skill I have in speaking decent English—very little French accent, pretty good English vocabulary—is Inspector Nick Elliott. No one has mastered the art of plain speaking better than he has.

  “Morning, Pretty Boy. Looks like it’s going to be a shitty day” is a typical example.

  This morning Elliott and a woman I’ve never seen before appear at my desk. Looks like I’m about to receive an extra lesson in basic communication skills.

  “Moncrief, meet Katherine Burke. You two are going to be partners in the Martinez investigation. I don’t care to discuss it.”

  I barely have time to register the woman’s face when he adds, “Good luck. Now get the hell to work.”

  “But sir…” I begin.

  “Is there a problem?” Elliott asks, clearly anxious to hit the road.

  “Well, no, but…”

  “Good. Here’s the deal. Katherine Burke is a detective, a New York detective, and has been for almost two years. She knows police procedure better than most people know their own names. She can teach you a lot.”

  I go for the end-run charm play.

  “And I’ve got a lot to learn,” I say, a big smile on my face.

  He doesn’t smile back.

  “Don’t get me wrong,” Elliott says as he turns and speaks to Burke. “Moncrief has the instincts of a good detective. He just needs a little spit and polish.”

  As he walks away, I look at Katherine Burke. She is not Maria Martinez. So, of course, I immediately hate her.

  “Good to meet you,” she says.

  “Same here.” We shake, more like a quick touch of the hands.

  My new partner and I study each other quietly, closely. We are like a bride and groom in a prearranged marriage meeting for the first time. This “marriage” means a great deal to me—joy, sorrow, and whether or not I can smoke in the squad car.

  So what do I see before me? Burke is thirty-two, I’d guess. Face: pretty. No, actually très jolie. Irish; pale; big red lips. A good-looking woman in too-tight khakis. She seems pleasant enough. But I’m not sensing “warm and friendly.”

  And what does she see? A guy with an expensive haircut, an expensive suit, and—I think she’s figured out already—a pretty bad attitude.

  This does not bode well.

  “Listen,” she says. “I know this is tough for you. The inspector told me how much you admired Maria. We can talk about that.”

  “No,” I say. “We can forget about that.”

  Silence again. Then I speak.

  “Look. I apologize. You were trying to be nice, and I was just being…well…”

  She fills it in for me: “A rude asshole. It happens to the best of us.”

  I smile, and I move a step closer. I read the official ID card that hangs from the cord around her neck. It shows her NYPD number and, in the same size type, her title. These are followed by her name in b
ig bold uppercase lettering:

  K. BURKE

  “So you want to be called K. Burke?” I ask her as we walk back to the detective room.

  “No. Katherine, Katie, or Kathy. Any of those are fine,” she says.

  “Then why do you have ‘K. Burke’ printed on your ID?”

  “That’s what they put there when they gave me the ID,” she says. “The ID badge wasn’t high on my priority list.”

  “K. Burke. I like it. From now on, that’s what I’m going to call you. K. Burke.”

  She nods. For a few moments we don’t speak. Then I say, “But I must be honest with you, K. Burke. I don’t think this is going to work out.”

  She speaks, still seriously.

  “You want to know something, Detective Moncrief?”

  “What?”

  “I think you’re right.”

  And then, for the first time, she smiles.

  Chapter 11

  The lobby of the Auberge du Parc Hotel is somebody’s idea of elegance. But it sure as hell is not mine.

  “Pink marble on the walls and the floor and the ceiling. If Barbie owned a brothel it would look like this.” I share this observation with my new partner as I look out the floor-to-ceiling windows that face Park Avenue.

  K. Burke either doesn’t get the joke or doesn’t like the joke. No laughter.

  “We’re not here to evaluate the decor,” she says. “You know better than I do that Auberge du Parc is right up there with the Plaza and the Carlyle when it comes to expensive hotels for rich people.”

  “And it affords a magnificent view of the building where Maria Martinez was killed,” I say as I gesture to the tall windows.

  Burke looks out to the corner of 68th Street and Park Avenue. She nods solemnly. “That’s why we’re starting the job here.”

  “The job, you will agree, is fairly stupid?” I ask.

  “The job is what Inspector Elliott has assigned us, and I’m not about to second-guess the command,” she says.

  Elliott wants us to interview prostitutes, streetwalkers, anyone he defines as “high-class lowlife.” Enormously upscale hotels like the Auberge often have a lot of illegal sex stuff going on behind their pink marble walls. But asking the devils to tell us their sins? I don’t think so.

  This approach is ridiculous, to my way of thinking. Solutions come mostly by listening for small surprises—and yes, sometimes by looking for a few intelligent pieces of hard evidence. Looking in the unlikely places. Talking to the least likely observers.

  Burke’s theory, which is total NYPD style, is way more traditional: “You accumulate the information,” she had said. “You assemble the puzzle piece by piece.”

  “Absolutely not,” I replied. “You sink into the case as if it were a warm bath. You sense the situation. You look for the fingerprint of the crime itself.” Then I added, “Here’s what we’ll do: you’ll do it your way. I’ll do it mine.”

  “No, not your way or my way,” she had said. “We’ll do it the NYPD way.”

  That discussion was a half hour ago. Now I’m really too disgusted and frustrated to say anything else.

  So I stand with my new partner in a pink marble lobby a few hundred yards from where my old partner was murdered.

  Okay. I’ll be the adult here. I will try to appear cooperative.

  We review our plan. I am to go to the lobby bar and talk to the one or two high-priced hookers who are almost always on the prowl there. You’ve seen them—the girls with the perfect hair falling gently over their shoulders. The delicate pointy noses all supplied by the same plastic surgeon. The women who are drinking in the afternoon while they’re dressed for the evening.

  Burke will go up to the more elegant, more secluded rooftop bar, Auberge in the Clouds. But of course she’ll first stop by the hotel manager’s office and tell him what he already knows: the NYPD is here. Procedure, procedure, procedure.

  If Maria Martinez is watching all this from some heavenly locale, she is falling on the floor laughing.

  After agreeing to meet Burke back in the lobby in forty-five minutes, I walk into the bar. (I once visited Versailles on a high school class trip, and this place would have pleased Marie Antoinette.) The bar itself is a square-shaped ebony box with gold curlicues all over it. It looks like a huge birthday present for a god with no taste.

  At the bar sit two pretty ladies, one in a red silk dress, the other in a kind of clingy Diane von Furstenberg green-and-white thing, which is very loose around the top. I don’t think von Furstenberg designed it to be so erotic. It takes me about two seconds to realize what these women do for a living.

  These girls are precisely the type that Nick Elliott wants us to speak to. Yes, a ridiculous waste of time. And I know just what to do about it.

  I walk toward the exit and push through the revolving door.

  I’m out. I’m on my own. This is more like it.

  Chapter 12

  K. Burke thinks a good New York cop solves a case by putting the pieces together. K. Burke is wrong.

  You can’t put the pieces together in New York because there are just too goddamn many of them.

  One step out the revolving door onto East 68th Street proves my point. It’s only midday, but everywhere I look there’s chaos and color and confusion.

  Bike messengers and homeless people and dowagers and grammar-school students. Two women wheeling a full-size gold harp and two guys pushing a wheelbarrow full of bricks. The Greenpeace recruiter with her clipboard and smile, the crazy half-naked lady waving a broken umbrella, and the teenager selling iPad cases. All this on one block.

  The store next to the Auberge bar entrance is called Spa-Roe. According to the sign, it’s a place you can visit for facials and massages (the “spa” part) while you sample various caviars (the “roe” part). Just what the world has been waiting for.

  Right next to it is a bistro…pardon…a bar. It’s called Fitzgerald’s, as in “F. Scott.” I stand in front of it for a few moments and look through the window. It’s a re-creation of a 1920s speakeasy. I can see a huge poster that says GOD BLESS JIMMY WALKER. Only one person is seated at the bar, a pretty young blond girl. She’s chatting with the much older bartender.

  I walk about twenty feet and pass a pet-grooming store. A very unhappy cat is being shampooed. Next door is a “French” dry cleaner, a term I’d never heard before moving to New York. There’s an optician who sells discounted Tom Ford eyeglass frames for four hundred dollars. There’s a place to have your computer fixed and a place that sells nothing but brass buttons. I pause. I smoke a cigarette. The block is busy as hell, but nothing is happening for me.

  Until I toss my cigarette on the sidewalk.

  Chapter 13

  A man’s voice isn’t angry, just loud. “What’s with the littering, mister?”

  Littering? That’s a new word in my English vocabulary.

  The speaker is a white-bearded old man wearing brown work pants and a brown T-shirt. It’s the kind of outfit assembled to look like a uniform, but it isn’t actually a uniform. The man is barely five feet tall. He holds an industrial-size water hose with a dripping nozzle.

  “Littering?” I ask.

  The old guy points to the dead cigarette at my feet.

  “Your cigarette! They pay me to keep these sidewalks clean.”

  “I apologize.”

  “I was making a joke. It’s only a joke. Get it? A joke, just a joke.”

  This man was not completely, uh…mentally competent, but I had to follow one of my major rules: talk to anyone, anywhere, anytime.

  “Yes, a joke. Good. Do you live here?” I ask.

  “The Bronx,” he answers. “Mott Haven. They always call it the south Bronx, but it’s not. I don’t know why they can’t get it right.”

  “So you just work down here?”

  “Yeah. I watch the three buildings. The button place, the animal place, and the eyeglasses place. They call me Danny with the Hose.”

  “Under
standably,” I say.

  “Good, you understand. Now stand back.”

  I do as I’m told until my back is up against the optician’s doorway. Danny sprays the sidewalk with a fast hard surge of water. Scraps of paper, chunks of dog shit, empty beer cans—they all go flying into the gutter.

  “Danny,” I say. “A lot of pretty girls around here, huh? What with the fancy hotel right here and the fancy neighborhood.”

  He shuts off his hose. “Some are pretty. I mind my business.”

  A young man, no more than twenty-five, comes out of the pet-grooming shop. He has a big dog—a boxer, I think—on a leash. Danny with the Hose and the man with the dog greet each other with a high five. The young man is tall, blond, good-looking. He wears long blue shorts and a pathetic red sleeveless shirt.

  “Hey,” I say to him. “Danny and I have just been talking about the neighborhood. I’m moving to East 68th Street in a few weeks. With a roommate. A German shepherd.”

  “Cool,” he says, suddenly a lot more interested in talking to me. “If you need a groomer, this place is the best. Take a look at Titan.” He pets his dog’s shiny coat. “He’s handsome enough to be in a GQ spread. I’ve been bringing him here ever since we moved into 655 Park five years ago.”

  My ears prick up. I go into full acting-class mode now.

  “Isn’t 655 the place where that lady cop got killed?”

  “They say she was a cop pretending to be a hooker. I don’t know.”

  “Luc…Luc Moncrief,” I say. We shake.

  “Eric,” he says. No last name offered. “Well, welcome. I said ‘pretending,’ but I don’t know. Women are not my area of expertise, if you know what I mean. All my info on the local girls comes from one of the doormen in my building. He says all the hookers hang out at the Auberge.”

  “That’s where I’m staying now,” I say.

  “Well, anyway, Carl—the doorman—says most of the girls who work out of the Auberge bar are clean. Bang, bang, pay your money, over and out. He says the ones to watch out for are the girls who work for the Russians. Younger and prettier, but they’ll skin you alive. I dunno. I play on a whole other team.”