The Midnight Club_ A Novel - James Patterson [43]
“They fed him a ton of junk,” one of the police technicians said. “Must have been shooting him up with smack for a couple of days. Like they wanted to make him some kind of example.”
The medical examiner was an insensitive man whom Parker knew by sight. He spoke in a muffled drone. “He OD’d on junk. His heart went pop. Couldn’t take the strain.”
A broken heart, Parker thought. His brother, Marcus, who had always been so proud and strong, had died in the Bowery of a broken heart.
Now, standing on Ninety-sixth Street, Parker was remembering the scene at the Edmonds Hotel. Sometimes he would be walking somewhere, anywhere, and the images just came to him, flew at him like attacking birds. Would he ever be able to forget the Edmonds? The sights and smells in that horrifying bathroom?
Isiah Parker stared south down the wide, deserted promenade of Broadway. He finally saw the men he had been waiting for on the street corner.
Jimmy Burke and Aurelio Rodriquez were just stepping out of a black sedan parked in front of McDonald’s and Dunkin Donuts. The three detectives had to talk about next steps; about a final hit, the most important one of all.
The side of the angels? Parker wondered once again.
41
John Stefanovitch; One Police Plaza
STEFANOVITCH WASN’T JUST being paranoid—a lot of people were chasing him. The furor about the videotapes from Allure had become intense. Heavy rumors implicating government officials and prominent businessmen were appearing in the leading newsmagazines. Articles about sex clubs in Miami, Detroit, Los Angeles, and San Francisco filled the newspapers in those cities.
Finally Stefanovitch contacted a young film editor from NYU. He enlisted the editor to help him make a condensation of the videotapes, to get them down to a watchable couple of hours.
Stefanovitch had originally met Gregory Weinschenker while the filmmaker was researching a documentary about the street life of cops in the West Village. He had liked Weinschenker immediately. Unlike many of his university cohorts, Weinschenker had reached the radical conclusion that the average police officer was neither a sadist nor a new centurion. Weinschenker knew better from personal experience. His brother and father were cops. They happened to be honest, hardworking men, doing a difficult job that not too many other qualified New Yorkers wanted to do.
Stefanovitch and Weinschenker holed up in a room in the basement of Police Plaza. During the day, Weinschenker screened the videotapes by himself. He compiled tapes that included each new client and bits of dialogue that were relevant to the ongoing investigation.
More important to Stefanovitch was getting a better understanding of the Midnight Club. Police files held evidence of the Club’s existence, but no one had identified the membership—especially those rumored to be business leaders and government officials.
More questions than answers had been raised, which was typical of most police investigations. Who could be murdering crime chiefs around the world? Why?
Were the killings actually connected to the Club at all? How could he begin to make sense of something so secretive? In particular, why had St.-Germain been murdered? Who might be next? Who was controlling the death lists?
At six each night, Stefanovitch arrived downstairs at the screening room. He studied the edited tapes over coffee and deli sandwiches. Usually, he worked with Weinschenker into the early morning.
He and Weinschenker had divided the clients at Allure into four categories: Entertainment Celebrities, Organized Crime, Business and Political, and Unidentified.
Very late one night, Weinschenker came and sat next to Stefanovitch.
“Hey, when this is over, can I tell my old man and my brother that I was deputized by the N.Y.P.D.? How I was holed up in the basement of Police Plaza for three weeks? They’ll freak. Not to mention my friends at film school, who’ll label me as a member of the Fourth Reich.”
“You shouldn’t tell anybody what’s on these tapes. Remember