Burn (Michael Bennett 7)

“Looks like some real Ringling Brothers and Barnum and Bailey Greatest Show on Earth shit so far, from where I’m sitting,” Vonroden said. “But for some strange reason, I don’t feel that entertained. Not even by the clown sideshow you keep putting on.”

Tell me what you really think, Chief, I thought, biting my tongue.

He leaned in to whisper to me. I didn’t think it would be sweet nothings. I was right.

“Got a call last night from a friend of mine, Bennett. He was asking my help about trying to get you off this case and out of Major Crimes Division, but you know what?”

“What’s that?” I said, playing along since I had no other choice.

“It looks like you’re doing a far better job of getting booted off this case than I ever could,” Vonroden said.

As the chief left, I got a call from Detective Siobhan Barton, one of the responding Fifth Precinct detectives I’d sent to canvass the neighborhood. She was calling from the Kate Spade’s around the corner, one of the stores whose bag the female thief had been seen holding.

“Hey, good news, Mike,” the rookie detective said. “We got a lead, I think. Clerk in here says a woman came in and bought some sandals about an hour before the robbery. She paid in cash, but they have a camera, and I got a pretty good shot of her.”

“Was anybody else with her?” I said.

“No, but it’s the woman. She fits the description exactly. Same platinum-blond hair, same black dress.”

“Excellent,” I said.

“That’s not all,” Detective Barton said. “It’s just like the jewelry store staff said. She had a Russian accent.”

CHAPTER 70

ABOUT AN HOUR LATER, with the processing of the SoHo crime scene wrapping up, I made some phone calls and got into my cruiser and headed east and then north up the FDR for the not-so-trendy Boogie Down Bronx.

Just over the Harlem River at Macombs Dam Bridge, I pulled over onto Jerome Avenue in front of Yankee Stadium’s Gate 2 and parked. I made another phone call. About ten minutes later, one of the stadium’s maintenance doors opened and out came a guy in a security guard uniform. He was a short, potbellied middle-aged man with a huge bald head and an even huger grin on his face.

“Mike, I am so glad you called me,” said my old buddy, Yaakov Chazam, as he happily climbed into the cruiser.

Yaakov was quite an interesting character. An immigrant from Moscow, right after the Berlin Wall fell in ’89, he’d been a brilliant math professor at NYU before he ditched academia for the life of a professional poker player. We’d come into contact over the murder of a young Wall Street trader I had worked five years before.

As it turned out, the murdered guy had been killed over gambling debts to Russian mobsters accrued in the underground Brooklyn gambling dens that the mobsters controlled and where Yaakov played. Yaakov, who had been a good friend of the young guy, had done the right thing by contacting me and anonymously named enough names to get the loan shark enforcer and his Mob boss put away.

Since then, Yaakov had turned out to be a veritable font of information about the Russian Mob in Brooklyn. I would tap him for info from time to time, as would the FBI and the DEA.

Though squealing about the Russian Mob was highly dangerous for him, Yaakov couldn’t help himself because he was an incurable mystery reader, police buff, and lover of all things cop. Which explained his choice of low-paying security guard jobs like the one here at the stadium. He didn’t even need a job, with all the money he made playing poker. He just wanted to wear a uniform.

“So, Yaakov, staying out of those poker dens?” I said as I made a U-turn and drove up 161st Street past the iconic Bronx County Courthouse.

“Oh, yeah. Only a little here and there when I’m tight,” he said, rolling his eyes sarcastically. “Actually, my new wife, she hates when I go, yet she never objects to going on these monster shopping sprees when I win. Weird, huh? What can I do for you, Mike? You got something juicy for me?”

“I’m trying to identify a woman. Might be from your neck of the woods,” I said, turning onto the Grand Concourse and pulling over and taking out my iPhone.

“Oh, pictures!” he said excitedly as I brought up the video I’d gotten from the Kate Spade store. “I love pictures. Is it of a crime scene? Is she dead? Naked, maybe?”

“Sorry, Yaakov,” I said as the security footage loaded. “Unfortunately, she’s alive and dressed.”

“This isn’t so bad,” he said as he watched the mystery blonde put on shoes. “She has nice legs. What am I supposed to be looking for? If I know her? Seen her around?”

“Exactly,” I said.

He peered at the screen.

“No, I don’t know her. I don’t think so. Though it’s pretty impossible to tell with those big sunglasses, and that looks like a wig, right? Though she is Russian Mafia.”

“She is?” I said. “How do you know?”