The Midnight Club_ A Novel - James Patterson [20]
Parker dropped the gun right there. He and Jimmy Burke quickly, but calmly, walked down East Fiftieth to a waiting Buick Skylark. The two N.Y.P.D. detectives disappeared inside, and the nondescript sedan drove off.
Invisible men.
20
John Stefanovitch; One Police Plaza
AT A LITTLE past eight in the morning, Stefanovitch propelled himself between the double-glazed front doors and into the main lobby of One Police Plaza. He had two newspapers, a New York Times and a Post, folded over his lap. The news was all bad. “MAFIA HEAD SHOT DOWN! MOB WAR RAGES.” His high from Coney Island was definitely over.
A used and battered VCR had been set up by Audio-Visual in a cozy interrogation room near his office. By eight-fifteen, he was viewing the first of the videocassettes that had been discovered at Allure.
As he watched the tape, Stefanovitch kept thinking about St.-Germain’s words, the phrase the two call girls had heard him use. “Are you from Midnight?” For years, there had been stories about something called the Midnight Club. Supposedly, it was a small group of crime lords who controlled organized crime around the world. The precise makeup of the Club remained mysterious.
Had the secretive Club ordered the deaths of St.-Germain and Traficante? Who inside the Midnight Club would be giving the orders? What might be on the sex tapes from Allure?
Stefanovitch had decided to watch the videotapes alone. He couldn’t imagine what might be recorded on the tapes, but he didn’t want anyone else there when he found out. Crime figures? Powerful New York businessmen? Entertainers? Politicians? Members of the Midnight Club?
The fewer people who knew what was on the tapes, the less complicated and political the murder investigation was going to be.
Sarah McGinniss was hunched forward inside a Checker cab. She was trying to leaf through some of her files on Alexandre St.-Germain as the taxi sped down the West Side Highway.
Much of the material in her St.-Germain file had been compiled by an unusual researcher, a former Organized Crime Task Force member. According to the files, many of the women involved in high-level prostitution weren’t professional hookers these days. They were more likely to be aspiring types in the glamour professions: models, actresses, women who worked at employment agencies, film-production houses.
According to her source, the super-rich didn’t have to exert themselves much in order to obtain sex. If they were at a Mortimer’s in New York, at Chasen’s or Spago’s in L.A., the maître d’ might have the names of available women, or men. The same was true at exclusive hotels. Bordellos like Allure operated in several cities around the country: Los Angeles, Miami, San Francisco, Las Vegas, Houston, Dallas, even Cincinnati and Cleveland, and much smaller cities as well.
Sarah finally shut the folder holding her notes. At eight-thirty, the Checker pulled up in front of its destination downtown. Sarah jumped out and hurried up the front steps, then across the pedestrian mall into Police Plaza.
She checked the name she’d scribbled in her notepad—Lieutenant John Stefanovitch.
21
“SHIT. CHRIST ALMIGHTY, what? what is it, Bear?”
The first images had no sooner flashed onto the VCR monitor screen when Bear Kupchek entered the darkened office and interrupted the movies. Stefanovitch reached over and flicked off the set.
“I told you I wanted to screen these by myself.”
Kupchek’s doughy face twisted itself into a frown. “I heard you the first dozen times. I think I understand the situation. You want to be alone with the dirty movies.”
“So what’s the problem? I have about a hundred hours of tapes to watch before lunch.”
Kupchek was jiggling change in the pockets of baggy gray trousers that looked like the pants of an old man. A plastic protector for pens stuck out from his white shirt pocket. Kupchek was about as stylish a dresser as the guys who hung out at the OTB betting parlor near Stefanovitch’s apartment. All his clothes