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“All seven well dead, with one-shot-kill head shots by”—Doyle flipped through some pages until he got to the coroner’s report—“.45-caliber ACPs.”
“Whoa. And nothing was missing up here in the cookhouse?” I said. “How much did you find again?”
“Nine hundred thousand in tens and twenties. Twice that in product.”
“Just sitting there?”
Doyle nodded.
“DEA had a theory about the crew but not much else,” said Arturo as he made a snowball. “They called them the no-name crew. By the setup here, the experts think they were easily one of—if not the—biggest ecstasy suppliers in the city.”
“Under the radar. The drug boss, Rafael Arruda, was a smart man.”
“That’s Dr. Rafael Arruda to you, Mike,” Arturo said as he chucked the snowball into the parking lot across 141st. “He was a Columbia University professor, after all.”
“Unbelievable,” I said. “What’s the family dynamic again? Could it have been the wife?”
“No. The wife of the Ivy League’s answer to Pablo Escobar checks out,” Doyle said. “She was his high school sweetheart. Goes to church every morning. You should see his house. He lived up in tony Bronxville. His daughter was home visiting from Georgetown.”
“Canvass?”
Arturo gestured out at the surrounding buildings with both hands as he nodded. “We busted our ass, but nothing.”
“All the windows facing the front, right?”
“Yep. Every vantage on the front sidewalk, where it went down. No surveillance cams pointing this way, unfortunately, and we got only a few people to open doors. They hadn’t seen or heard a thing. Which makes sense. It was the night of the big storm.”
“What time did you start the canvass?”
Doyle looked at his notes again. “Nine thirty,” he said.
“What time you got now?”
“Four thirty. Why?”
“Time to bust your ass again,” I said. “Call patrol and do the canvass all over again right now.”
“How’s that? It’s been a week,” said Arturo.
“That’s why you need to do it again. It’s been exactly one week since the crime. Someone who saw it could have left before you guys arrived on scene to question them. For whatever reason. Work. A date. People are creatures of habit, right? One week later, they’ll be home right now.”
“Hey, that’s smart,” said Doyle, looking at me. “Have you done this detective thing before?”
Chapter 15
The gallery was in West Chelsea on West 30th between Eleventh Avenue and the West Side Highway, directly across from the fenced-in Hudson Yards Penn Station Amtrak train yard.
The opening night installation was called Solar System: ten massive modern neo-expressionist canvases integrated with various materials. Burlap and stainless steel. Flesh-colored porcelain and black rubber. Brass and cardboard. The largest painting, titled Needing to Know #11, was embedded with a mosaic tile of cowhide and fractured plexiglass.
It had taken the artist, Soyi, a twenty-seven-year-old Korean prodigy from Queens, six years to complete them. They were meticulous yet somehow chaotically, primitively powerful, restrained while being simultaneously aggressively expressive. At least that’s what all the critics who had come to sponge the vodka and caviar were talking about.
Matthew, the dealer and gallery owner staring out at the paintings, hoped they were expressing, “Hey, billionaire! I’m what you want on the wall of your new penthouse!”
Matthew turned as a pudgy blond woman waved by the door after grabbing her coat. He smiled and winked and waved back at Hilda Breen, the critic from Art in America who had called Soyi a “definite new force in the art world.”
But would all the critical hype mean a sale? Matthew thought, sipping a vodka and tonic as he watched a pathetic and scarily dwindling number of people orbit the paintings. His client, Soyi, certainly needed a sale badly. Her unemployment was running out, and she was threatening to throw in the towel and go back to waitressing at her uncle’s restaurant in Flushing. Soyi had been so nervous about her show’s opening night that she’d actually fainted about an hour before and had gone home with her mom, the poor thing.
Matthew bit his lip as he thought about Soyi. Great reviews in the blogs and trade rags like Artforum and October were definitely scintillating, but keeping a brilliant young artist from a mind-deadening day job would be even more brilliant, Matthew thou
