“See, this the reason I don’t wash car,” my driver Joe was saying as we bounced along a potholed section of Brooklyn far from the borough’s pockets of yuppie gentrification. The parked cars had broken headlamps or were missing wheels. Trash littered the street and the sidewalks. Young brothers and a few sisters sat unmoving as statues on the steps of mottled brownstone apartment buildings, following us with their eyes.
“Even with the dirt camo, we’re still not exactly blending in, Joe.”
“Maybe not. But we not making anybody mad enough to throw rocks, neither.”
One block farther, the atmosphere did a 180. The street was clean, the buildings well tended and slacker-free. It was like finding a model-neighborhood color photo in the middle of a black-and-white panorama of life’s defeat.
The reason was Glory’s Doughnut Shoppe, a freshly painted storefront with a bright-red awning that was on the ground floor of a well-cared-for building in the middle of the block. I told Joe to park directly in front.
“You not be long, right?” he asked.
“Relax,” I said. “This is the safest place in all of Crooklyn.”
I pointed to a bicycle with a large front basket that rested on its kickstand near the door. A metal sign attached to the basket read: GLORY’S—FOR THE BEST BREAKFASTS AND LUNCHES IN BROOKLYN.
“Do you see a lock and chain on that bicycle?” I asked Joe.
“No.”
“That’s because it, the shop, and the building are owned by a friend of mine, Henry Julian. You know the name?”
“Maybe. Old gangsta. Scary.”
“More or less,” I said, getting out of the car. “Glory’s was his mother’s place. It’s run now by Henry’s sister and her daughter, Ramona. Nobody in their right mind is going to be stealing anything that belongs to Henry or bothering anyone who’s visiting Henry’s shop.”
Joe blinked and said, “Okay. But you still not be long, right?”
Henry spent most of his mornings at Glory’s, arriving just after the breakfast customers and leaving just before the lunchtime crowd. He sat at “his” table at the rear of the shop, dressed in suit and tie, shoes polished to a sheen, sipping coffee, reading newspapers and magazines, and, on occasion, sharing some time with a friend who dropped by.
“This glazed doughnut hits the spot,” I said.
“It better,” Henry said. “Call your place a doughnut shop, better have some damn fine doughnuts.”
“And the coffee’s excellent.”
“Robusta brew,” he said. “Six dollars a pound wholesale, not that the poor brothers in the Congo who do the harvestin’ get more than a few pennies of that. But you didn’t drive all the way to Brooklyn to talk about pastry and fair trade.”
“I wanted to show you this,” I said, handing him my cellular with the photo of the cat drawing.
“My, my, my,” he said. “Felix’s calling card. These new boys got more vanity than opera singers. My man sent me a fax of a drawing that was found near the Nigerian general’s dissected corpse. This looks like the real deal. When d’you take this?”
“Last night in the Meatpacking District,” I said. “In front of a building that caught fire and killed a man.”
“Just read about it,” Henry said, pointing to the pile of papers. “They ID the victim?”
“Not officially. But every news source except the papers thinks it must’ve been the guy who lived there, a friend of mine named Phil Bruno, who worked for the network.”
Henry took one more look at the photo and returned the phone. “Yeah, well, that’s what I’d been told. Felix’s interest was somebody in the media.”
“Might have been a double,” I said, and reminded him of Rudy Gallagher.
“Any idea who sicced Felix on ’em?” Henry asked.
“Not who but why, maybe.” I told him about the night at the pub in Kabul and the mysterious object that seemed to link three deaths.
Henry nodded. “Probably something political at the heart of it,” he said. “From what I unnerstand, Felix’s early success kicked him up into the bigs, where the real money is. Political assassinations. He hopscotches the world for his clients.” He smiled. “You’re much too young to remember, but there used to be a TV newsman. Dapper little white dude. Always began his show with, ‘This is John Cameron Swayze, hopscotching the world for headlines.’
“But I digress. Mos’ likely there was a cat drawing somewhere in that Irish barroom that ever’body ignored.”
“I don’t see how Felix could have had anything to do with the death of the Touchstone mercenary in Kabul,” I said. “Witnesses saw the killers. Two Afghanis.”
Henry smiled at me as if I were a naive child. “Billy, you ever hear the term ‘murder by proxy’? The way it used to be done, back in the sixties, you sent some hop head at your vic with a speedball full of death. How hard it be to talk some Afginnie crazies into cutting the throat of an American who was bein’ paid a fortune to mess up their country?”
“The two killers were definitely focused on that particular target,” I said.
“Hell, probably a cat drawing at the apartment of the news guy who got poisoned,” Henry said. “Could be restin’ in a police evidence room.”
“The guys they’ve got investigating the murder might have thrown it away,” I said.
Henry chuckled. “Take it from me, Billy. No matter how stupid, cops never throw nothin’ away.”
“What else can you tell me about Felix, Henry?”
“Jus’ one thing: Leave him be.”
“I’m not sure I can.”
“Oh?” He was sitting upright now, frowning. “Why’s that?”
“Because right now I’m still the main suspect in Rudy Gallagher’s murder.”
“And you’re doing what?” Henry said. “Tryin’ to solve the murder yourself? Son, that’s about as smart as carrying a hair-trigger piece stuck down your pants. Didn’t work so well for that dumb shit played for the Giants, and it won’t turn out any better for you. My lawyers got excellent investigators who do that kind of stuff.”
“I’m not planning on hunting the guy down,” I said. “I just want to gather enough evidence to turn over to the cops. Let them take it from there.”
He reached out and placed a large hand on my arm. “I always figured you as bein’ bright, a man who knows the way the world works. You’re not seeing this situation clearly. If you do succeed in pointing the cops in Felix’s direction, it’ll be like poking a bear with a stick. A big-ass, dangerous bear. You think you got trouble now. Imagine what it’ll be like if you attract that bad boy’s full attention.”
“Point made and taken,” I said.
“I sincerely hope so, Billy,” the old man said. “Because of my profession and my age, I have become accustomed to losing friends. But I sure wouldn’t want to lose a good restaurant.”