“Isn’t that the same thing?”
“Similar, agreed, but what I’m getting at—what I looked for in my profile—is her as a person. To me, her story was about someone who survived a life of getting the crap kicked out of her and was determined to control situations. That’s why she sent perfectly cooked steaks back to be redone. Because she could. Or screwed actors because they needed her more than she needed them. Or made guys like me show up to work at the crack of dawn and then mosey off to get a bagel. Know what I think? I think Cassidy loved the fact that she was able to get so into Toby Mills’s head that he came to her place and kicked down her door. It validated her power, her relevance. Cassidy Towne thrived on making things happen her way. Or when she was at the center.”
“Couldn’t be much more at the center than now.”
“My point exactly, ma’am.” He rolled down his window and looked up like a little kid at the cotton-ball clouds reflecting on the towers at Time Warner Center as they rounded Columbus Circle. As they came out of the rotary onto Broadway, he continued. “All things considered, she’d rather be alive, I’m fairly sure, but if you’ve got to go and you’re Cassidy Towne, what’s a better legacy than having half the city looking for you while the other half is talking about you?”
“Makes sense.” And then she added, “But you’re still kind of creeping me out.”
“Does it make you scared? . . . Or happy-scared?”
She mulled that and said, “I’m sticking with creeped out.”
The gentrification of Times Square in the 1990s had miraculously transformed the once-dangerous and skeevy zone into a wholesome family destination. Broadway theaters got face-lifts and blockbuster musicals, good restaurants popped up, megastores flourished, and people came back, symbolizing, and maybe driving, the comeback of the Big Apple.
But the Skeeve Factor didn’t go away. It mostly got pushed west a few blocks, and that’s where Heat and Rook were headed. Holly Flanders’s last known address after a prostitution bust was a weekly-rate hotel off Tenth and 41st.
The two drove in silence most of the way down Ninth Avenue, but when Heat turned onto Tenth and the streetwalkers started to show, Rook started singing a cold-cut jingle. “Oh, my hooker has a first name, it’s H-O-L-L-Y . . .”
“All right, listen,” Heat said. “I can put up with your theories. I can tolerate your inflated sense of significance to this case. But if you insist on singing, I need to warn you, I am armed.”
“You know, you keep needling me about my significance in this case, but let me ask you, Detective Heat, who got you in to see Toby Mills when you were stonewalled? Who got you in with Fat Tommy so we can now be happily en route to question a woman whose very existence we didn’t know of until Fat Tommy led us to Chester Ludlow, which led us here?”
She thought a moment and said, “I should have shut up and just let you sing.”
An undercover police car is anything but undercover to most street prostitutes. A champagne-gold Crown Victoria might as well have “VICE” written in Day-Glo lettering on the doors and hood. The only thing more obvious would be to light the gumball and run the siren. Mindful of that, Heat parked around the corner from the Sophisticate Inn so she and Rook could make their approach without lighting up the radar too much. It could only help that the parking spot was behind a mound of uncollected garbage.
In the manager’s office a skeletal dude, with a nasty patch of hair missing where somebody had ripped it out, was reading the afternoon edition of the New York Ledger. Cassidy Towne’s face filled the space above the fold. The headline was in giant font, the kind usually reserved for V-E Day and moonwalks. It read:
R.I.P. = M.I.A.
Murdered Tattler’s Body Missing