Part 25 - Wolfe: The Wolf’s Den

I let the rain wash across my face, unwilling to move, to give myself away. I’d done enough stake-outs. Knew the tricks. Knew the trade. The drizzle tip-tapped against the newspapers I’d wrapped myself in, my coat wadded up underneath me. Just a homeless man on a bus stop bench. No one looks at the homeless. Too much fear there. Too many who see themselves reflected in those eyes.

I hunkered down when the black SUV pulled up in front of the building, and a hint of familiarity washed over me. I’d seen that vehicle before. I watched them go in, a dazzling dame in a sparkling gold dress, and behind her a husk of a man, decided limp in his left leg. He wore a dark suit, a dark fedora too big for his head, silver hair peeking out from under the brim. I didn’t know him, but I recognized her immediately. Goldi.

How was she here? How was she mixed up in this? There’d never been a word from her about an old man. A patron? A relative? A benefactor? I’d also never seen that dress, those shoes. She was a work of art in that moment, a golden trophy headed into a dark building that looked like it’d been rotting in Harlem for decades, avoided by the revitalizationists. He’d held an umbrella over her head, one shriveled old hand gripping her elbow, but not in a possessive way, and not in the way the giant had handled Gretel.

He never even looked around. Not a care in the world, even with that piece of ass on his arm. That spoke volumes.

I watched the big double doors close behind them, and then I shrugged off my wet paper blanket. The SUV pulled away, and I slid my coat on casually, letting my eyes drift, noting the tag. JST RT. New Jersey plates, plain and unremarkable like the truck itself. There were a thousand luxury SUVs like that in the city, but something about that one rang out. It wasn’t the tags, but as I watched the hulking thing lumber into traffic and out of sight, there was something. The tags. I could run them. Maybe that would get me somewhere.

An old woman sat on a plastic chair far enough under a jutting overhang to stay dry. Her eyes devoured me as I approached the building. Crows feet flexed when she squinted, and I wondered how much he paid her for her failing eyesight.

“Who lives here, mother?” I kept my distance, let the drizzle run down my cheeks.

She looked me up and down, held up a folded newspaper, crossword mostly filled in. The paper threw a shadow over her bag, and I wondered what she brought to her stakeouts. “Empty.”

“And yet a walking trophy and her grandfather just strolled through those doors.”

She didn’t look up again. “Didn’t see nothing. Wrong place, fella,” she grumbled and filled in ten across.

I leaned in and laid a hundred-dollar bill across her crossword, and her pencil hesitated. “I was never here.”

“What’s a ten-letter word for what Jack stole from the Giant’s castle?”

I stared at her and smiled. “Golden Harp. That’s two words.” And I slipped another hundred on top of the first. “He also stole the Golden Goose, greedy fucker.”

She smiled up at me then, and I did a quick count of her teeth.

“My turn,” I said, laying one last hundred on her crossword and leaning in. “What was the wolf famous for saying in the fairy tale The Three Little Pigs?” I waited, watching her smirk slip away into the night. “I’ll huff and I’ll puff and I’ll blow your fucking house down.” I took up her smirk and laid my badge on top of the hundreds so she could see my picture and my name. “You never saw me.”

She pushed the hundreds into her shawl, hunched down into her crossword, and didn’t look up again.

The doors were heavy but moved with perfect precision, swinging easy once I’d given them the initial tug. I’d half expected them to creak open and reveal a hotel horror scene worthy of a movie, but they gave way to a tidy space featuring a gallery of silver-doored elevators. A wall of intricately carved wood depicting the New York skyline faced the front door. It reminded me of the Empire State Building. Only this building was just a few stories tall, not the city’s first skyscraper. Flat and unremarkable, just another crumbling structure the city would tear down and replace with luxury apartments or a concept restaurant. Depending on who lived here.

The elevator had stopped. I stared at the old-fangled arrow pointing to the sixth floor. What was up there? Who? On the top floor in a building where no one lived. A slender old man? A giant? Someone else? Surely not Gretel. Not Goldie. But they were both up there, and up there was where I needed to be. But who or what was up there with them?

I looked back through the glass doors toward the street. Old Mother Hubbard was still hunched over her puzzle, but her eyes drifted to the street again and again. Who lived in an abandoned building on the top floor with a lookout at the front door? A criminal.

I closed my eyes and leaned on the words the Gretel had fed me.

Trafficker. Old Russian man. Not Jack — they called him “the Beanstalk”, but Ivan was Jack in Russian, after all. And he was connected to Red. She was connected to Red. Everything, every lead, every drop of blood spilled came back to Red. I shook my head. How was that possible? How could she…what? I didn’t even know, did I? She’d worked at Smiley’s spinning up on stage for dollars, and during the day, she volunteered at shelters. But did she? What didn’t I know? And how was it possible that I didn’t know it?

I gazed up at the arrow pointing to the six and shrugged. Somewhere up there were the answers I needed. Someone up there knew what had happened that night in the alley. Someone up there knew why there was a hundred large in a paper bag under a dumpster and later in a station locker. Somewhere up there was the killer. Was there any doubt? And I wondered just then, a feeling in my gut and nothing more, if someone up there was going to be killed tonight.

This was a crossroads, and all roads converged here and now. All I had to do was go up there and ask the right questions.

Or, and I reached in to touch my Glock, I was going to blow someone’s house down.

The stairs then. No way I was taking the elevator and coming out into I didn’t know what. A kill box? Someone not 90 years old working a crossword? A mountain of a man who’d whipped Gretel around like a doll? This case wasn’t ending with my death. With a creature like that at hand, you didn’t need protection. He was a wall that held back the sea, the giant that guarded the Golden Goose. And what else did they say about giants? They fall.

I pushed up the stairs, wishing I wasn’t soaked through and through. The jacket was heavy now, and my shoes has seen better days. I wiped the rain, or was it sweat, from my face with a wet hand, took a deep breath at four and kept going. Footfalls echoing down down down into the darkness behind me. Nothing but the faint glow of an emergency light somewhere above.

At the top of the stairs, I reached into my pocket and felt for my phone. I could call it in. This was the moment. The pigs would come squealing up to the front door, push granny aside and storm in. Safer for me. Saner, too. I dangled my fingers over the door handle, carefully pulled it open, listening for a squeak, a curse, movement, some signs of life. But there was nothing. Just my heart in my ears, each heartbeat drowning out everything but my breathing from the climb. No sounds beyond the door. No lights. No movement of any kind, so I pulled on the door a little and pushed my face into the crack.

Nothing there. Just a massive set of doors across from the elevator. Before I could even think of stepping through into the hall, I was backing out and looking up.

The roof was the only way. A fire escape. A skylight. There had to be another way in. Otherwise might as well just knock. Knock and be carried out with the trash. More stairs, but I was close.

The echoes of the Big Apple washed across the night sky. Bright lights to the south, where Manhattan reached for the heavens and big wigs laid out big dollars for fancy views. Not my style, I thought, as I stepped out onto the roof and surveyed the scene. My little corner of the world was enough. Not much, but enough for me. For us. For Red and I, I thought. Five years on and off and on again. I’d tidied up the place, kept it free of mice and put some good sheets on the bed. Somewhere down the other end of the 6 near Soho was a cozy little joint a girl could be comfortable in. Until she packed her things and walked out, until she moved in with Goldi and we were off again. Never back on.

And now…

No skylights, but the fire escape looked like something. A chance at a glance, a peep inside to see who our perps were and what they were about. It smelled, all of it. The more I thought about it, nothing good happened behind those big doors. Nothing good would come of Goldi or Gretel in there with those mooks, no matter who they turned out to be. I was gonna have to at least try to see what the story was.

The first platform shifted when I stepped on it, and all I could see was the old iron shebang crumbling and crashing to the ground and me laying on top, staring up at the sky. But it held. A creak, a tremble, but it held. Another step. I gave myself up to Death and slipped down the few stairs, around and down a few more, fingers crushing the slick railing, waiting for it to give way. The next flat lined up with a single narrow window, but it was all I needed, and I crouched down and took in the scene, wiping the rain from my eyes to be sure what I was seeing was real.

For Gretel’s sake, I hoped it was a dream.