Naturally, one of my kids at home had set it onto the stupidest ring available in the settings, a doofy electronic ditty called “By the Seaside.” As I unsuccessfully tried to hit the right button to shut it off, Henry leapt up with an impromptu belly dance for his buddies. Thanks, Henry.
As the chaos erupted, I looked down at my phone screen and saw that the call was from Chief Fabretti, my boss. Which was actually a little concerning. He didn’t call me unless there was something happening.
“Hey, Sr. Claire,” I said, waving my phone. “I’m sorry. I actually have to take this.”
“Please, Detective. Take it, by all means,” she said, settling Henry back into his place on the floor.
Leaving, I glanced back and saw Chrissy covering her face in abject embarrassment. Great.
“Another fine speaking engagement, Tony Robbins,” Father Seamus said, giving me a mock thumbs-up as I left. “But don’t worry, I’ll cover for you.”
I shook my head as my stage Irishman of a grandfather rushed to the front of the class and cleared his throat elaborately.
“Boys and girls and girls and boys. Please allow me to introduce myself. My name is Father Seamus,” he said, taking a bow as the door closed behind me.
Chapter 2
Twenty minutes later, I was on 67th Street between Broadway and Columbus, standing in front of a beeping Caterpillar front loader as it was about to drop a bunch of rubble into a curbside dump truck. Inside the hollowed-out dirt worksite behind it, I could see yellow crime-scene tape cordoning off a section to the right.
“Hey! Hold it right there! Back it up!” I yelled to the hard hat in the cab, showing him my shield.
“What the hell is this?” said a big guy, who looked like the contractor in charge. He rushed over and got in my face. “What’s the problem? We’re working on the other side, away from the body. The first officer said it was okay.”
“The first officer was wrong,” I said, stepping up till we were practically forehead to forehead. “I’m the responding detective. This entire site is a crime scene. Nothing gets moved out of it. In fact, you and everybody else get out on the sidewalk until I say different.”
“Are you mad?” the contractor said, in his thick Brooklyn accent. “We’re on a schedule. Cement is on its way. We’re pouring in less than an hour.”
“Not anymore,” I told him as I walked toward the crime-scene tape.
“Hey, Detective. Sorry about that,” said a young black sergeant, stepping up beside me as I arrived at the crime scene. “I thought it would be all right since they wanted to work on the other side of the site. Besides, the guy looks like he fell or jumped.”
“Looks can be deceiving, Sergeant,” I said. “Please go out on the sidewalk and keep those people off my back.”
“Hey, Mike. Long time, no see,” said a sharp crime-scene tech I knew, Judy Yelas, who was photographing the body. “What brings the legendary Major Case to the lowly West Side? I thought the Twentieth Precinct was handling.”
“Me, too, until my boss called,” I said with a shrug.
“Ah, I see. Orders from on high. Poli-tricks as usual,” Judy said, rolling her eyes.
Poli-tricks was actually kind of right.
As it turned out, Index House, the hotel beside the crime scene, kept appearing in the headlines for all the wrong reasons. Open for only six months, it had received negative publicity for a couple of viral videos. One was of people having sex on a balcony. Another was of a famous NFL player drunkenly knocking out a woman in an elevator.
It also turned out that the owner of the hotel was a wealthy political contributor and close family friend of the new governor. Now, the powers that be wanted to “figure out” this latest Big Apple hospitality fiasco as quickly and discreetly as possible.
I don’t know about any of that wishful sort of political thinking. Nor, frankly, do I care. A person was dead, and I was available, so here I was.
I came around the pile driver and squatted down on my heels to look at the body. The deceased was a tall, lean, dark-haired man in his early thirties, maybe. He wore a nice dark suit and was positioned lying on his back in a pool of blood, his face smashed up horribly.
I took a few steps back, looked up at the hotel and unintentionally let out a whistle. He must have come down face-first and hit the metal pile driver on the right, which flipped him like a rag doll. I felt terrible for the guy. Like pretty much every other jumper I had ever dealt with, he seemed to have suffered a gruesome death.
“Wallet? Phone?” I said to Judy.
“None that I can see. I didn’t pat him down, though. Thought you’d want to.”
I knelt beside him, pulled on a pair of rubber gloves, and went through the pockets of his pants and jacket. There was nothing. No wallet, no phone. Not even when Judy helped me turn him and look underneath the body.
Didn’t make a lot of sense. Drunk? I thought. Suicide? But I let my conclusions slide for the time being, and snapped a few pictures with my phone of this poor citizen’s ruined face.