The 19th Christmas (Women's Murder Club #19)(15)

CHAPTER 19





CONKLIN AND I were heading down the fire stairs to the Anthony’s lobby when a curvy young woman stepped out of the shadows on the fourth-floor landing.

She said, “Hey. Inspectors. I got something to tell you about Savage. I mean Chris.”

She looked to be around twenty years old and was wearing frayed black tights and a tight red top with sequins at the neckline. Her haircut was choppy and there were studs in her face, hoops in her ears. The tattoo on one arm read BITE ME. One of her hands was inked with a baby’s face under a banner reading ANGEL.

I asked her name.

“I go by Dancy.”

“And Savage is?”

“Your boy. Chris Dietz,” she told us.

Muffled shouts, Christmas carols, and door slams resonated through the stairwell, as if it were acoustically designed to pull sound upward through the thin walls of adjoining apartments.

I asked her, “How well did you know Chris Dietz?”

“I lived next door to him for two months. Since he moved in,” she said. “When I got jacked outta my room, I found an empty one downstairs. When can I go back to my place?”

I said, “When the crime scene guys are done. Probably take another day.”

“What about all the holes in my door?”

I shrugged an apology and said, “That’ll be up to hotel management and Nationwide. You have something for us?”

She scowled. “I need a hundred dollars. Savage was my rent money.”

Conklin said, “A hundred? That’s a little much, isn’t it?”

“It’s cheap for what I’ve got for you,” she said. “He used to talk to me when we were done. He told me his plans.”

I didn’t want to take a witness statement in a fire stairwell if I could help it. If Dancy had something, I wanted her in an interrogation room on camera.

We had a map of Golden Gate Park with a circle around the museum that had come from Dietz’s phone. It was a good start. Maybe we had the where. But I wanted more. Much more. Times, dates, names, all the details needed to flesh out this sketchy story. If Dancy had answers, truthful ones, a hundred bucks was cheap.

I said, “I have to get the boss to sign for that. Let’s take a ride to the station.”

She scoffed and trotted down toward the lobby.

I shouted after her, “Dancy. We’ll get the money.”

She spun around. “You want to lock me up.”

“No,” I said. “I want to talk to you in private—”

“Listen, and make sure you hear me,” she said. “I’m not going to no damned police station with you.”

A door opened on the floor below us. Children’s voices rang out and their footsteps clattered in the stairwell.

I sighed. Our potential informant was dancing away.

“Come back,” I said. “I’ll give you what I’ve got on me.”

The young prostitute walked up to the landing and stuck out her palm.

Conklin dug his wallet out of his back pocket and I searched my jacket for spare change.

I handed him my little wad.

Conklin counted his bills and said, “I’ve got sixty. All together, we’ve got seventy-five dollars and thirty-five cents.”

Dancy looked at it and snorted. “Keep the change,” she said. She plucked the bills from Conklin’s hand and stuffed them inside the bodice of her red spangled blouse.

She said, “Dietz told me that he was going to hit the mayor.”

“Caputo?” I said stupidly.

“He’s the mayor, right?”

“Why was Dietz going to kill the mayor?”

“He didn’t say why. Savage always wants to be a big man. There was supposed to be a huge paycheck in the hit. He said he knew where the mayor was and when. He was just waiting for the call and it would be a go.”

“Waiting for the call from whom?” Conklin asked.

Dancy looked at him like he was an idiot.

“You don’t know anything, do you?” she said. “Loman. Savage was working for Mr. Loman.”





CHAPTER 20





CONKLIN AND I sat across from Brady in his small, glass-walled office at the back of the bullpen.

Our lieutenant had a few to-do lists in front of him, yellow pads marked with a red grease pencil. A flurry of Post-it notes covered his lamp and walls. Every light on his phone console blinked red.

The stress of several punishing months of double duty showed in Brady’s face and posture. I wondered how much longer he could take it, how long before either a new chief was hired to replace Jacobi or Brady took the bump up to the bigger job. He had the chops to be chief, but the position was 100 percent administration and politics.

I didn’t think he would like it.

Brady punched a button on his phone console and said, “Brenda, can you clear these calls before the phone shorts out?”

To us he said, “Y’all have to make this quick.”

Conklin and I told him about our morning with Clapper at the Anthony and dangled the two shiny objects: Dancy’s tip about a contract on the mayor and the circled museum on the hit man’s phone.

Brady leaned back in his chair and stared out at the traffic on the freeway.