7
Tremont was jumping today. But nobody on the crowded sidewalk seemed to be looking for a PI. They weren't his sort of clientele anyway.
Richie didn't know why business had been off lately. He gave good service to his clients and got a lot of referrals from them, but things had been unaccountably slow since the summer.
Which was why his second income stream had become more important than ever. The regular snoop jobs had always been the meat and potatoes, but the gravy had come from blackmail.
Blackmail He hated that word. Sounded so dirty and underhanded. He'd tried for years to find a substitute but hadn't come up with anything that worked. Private knowledge protection … secret safekeeping service … classified information management . . . none of them did anything for him.
So, he'd resigned himself to blackmail … which made him a blackmailer.
Not something he talked about at Hurley's, but not as bad as it sounded. Really, when you got down to it, he was simply supplying a service: I have information about you, information you don't want made public. For a regular fee I will keep my mouth shut.
What could be fairer than that? Participation was purely voluntary. Don't want to play? Then don't pay. But be ready to face the music once your ugly little secret gets out.
Plus he had to admit he loved being able to pull people's strings and make them dance to whatever tune he felt like playing. That was almost as good as the money.
Richie rounded the corner and walked up past the newer apartment houses toward the zoo.
Yeah… blackmailer. Not exactly what he'd planned for himself as a kid.
What do you want to be when you grow up, Richie?
A blackmailer, Mom.
He hadn't planned on being a cop either. Cops had been "pigs" back then. But as he grew older in a crummy economy and saw his old man lose his factory job, he started thinking maybe being a cop wasn't so bad. Chances of getting laid off were slim to none, the pay was decent, and you could retire on a pension after twenty or twenty-five years and still have a lot of living ahead of you.
He'd tried for the NYPD but didn't make it. Had to settle for the NCPD—Nassau County—where the pay didn't turn out to be all that decent. Didn't take him too long, though, to find ways to supplement it.
As a patrolman first and later a detective, Richie spent twenty-six years with the NCPD, twenty-four and a half of them on the pad. That got him into a little trouble toward the end, but he'd traded keeping mum about a certain IAD guy's sexual tastes for a Get Out of Jail Free pass, and walked away with his pension intact.
That had been his introduction to the power of knowing things he wasn't supposed to. Instead of putting himself out to pasture, he applied for his private investigator license and opened Cordova Security Consultants. No big expectations, just someplace to go every day. Startup had been slow, but stuff sent his way by his old buddies in NCPD had helped keep him afloat. He found he liked the work, especially the spouse snooping. He'd got pretty good with a camera over the years and had taken some pretty steamy pictures. He'd kept a private gallery back at the house until this past September.
But often it was the bonus material he collected that paid the best. While checking out a husband or wife suspected of getting it on with somebody else, he frequently came across unrelated or semi-related dirt that he put to work for himself.
Like this nun, for instance. Helene Metcalf had traveled all the way from her Chelsea high-rise to hire Richie. Her hubby Michael was a capital campaign consultant—that meant professional fund-raiser—and had been out on the job an unusual number of nights. She was starting to suspect he might be sneaking a little something on the side and wanted Richie to find out.
Mikey's latest account was raising money for the renovation of St. Joseph's Church on the Lower East Side. Camera in hand, Richie started tailing him and found he was indeed going to St. Joe's—but not just for fund-raising. Seemed he was also doing a little habit-raising with one of the nuns.
Richie took a few shots of the pair in flagrante delicto, as they say, and was about to show them to the wife when he realized he might be sitting on a gold mine. Normally putting the squeeze on a nun would be like trying to buy a whale steak from Greenpeace, but this nun was one of the honchos in the fund-raising project. That was how she'd got so tight with Mikey boy in the first place. Lots of cash flowing through that lady's hands, and those photos was a way to tap into that stream.
So Richie told wifey that her hubby was going exactly where he said he was—showed her photos of him entering and leaving the St. Joe's basement on the nights in question—and said he'd found no impropriety.
He put the squeeze on Mikey as well. Usually he had a rule: Never use nothing against the client. That was a no-no. Had to keep up the reputation, keep up the referrals from satisfied clients.
But Mikey wouldn't know that the guy who was milking him had been hired by his wife.
Because another rule was keep it anonymous. Never let the cow see your face or, worse, learn your name.
So Mikey Metcalf became the second cow in this particular pasture.
Up until a couple of months ago, Richie had maintained a perfect score on the anonymity meter. Then one September night he'd come home from Hurley's and smelled something funny. He raced up to his third floor and found out some guy'd poured acid over everything in his filing cabinet. The guy got away by running over a neighbor's roof.
Only explanation was that one of the cows had found out who he was. Richie had burned his gallery of photos—hated to do it but it was evidence if anyone hit him with a search warrant—and moved his sideline to his office. He'd been looking over his shoulder ever since.
He was puffing a little by the time he reached the wall of the zoo. A hot dog pushcart tempted him but he forced himself to keep moving. Later.
Call the nun first.
Kind of fun to have a nun on the hook. Back in grammar school the penguins—nuns dressed head to toe in black in those days—had always been after him, whacking him on the back of the head or rapping his knuckles whenever he acted up. Not that he'd been damaged for life or nothing. That was a crock. Truth was, he couldn't think of a single time he hadn't deserved what he got. That didn't make them any less of a pain in the ass though.
The nun thing had got to be a game after a while. A badge of honor. If you hadn't got hit you was some kind of fag.
He guessed this was sort of like payback.
He chose a public phone at random and licked his lips as he dialed the convent. He knew Sister Margaret Mary would be over at the school until three or three-thirty, but wanted to shake her up a little.
And he knew just how to do that.