Connections in Death (In Death #48)(33)

“Duff on the other hand.”

“Yeah, I skimmed hers. Illegals, possession, possession with intent to distribute, unlicensed solicitation. A long line of petty shit. No real violent crimes on her sheet.”

“Now she’s dead, and if she wasn’t dead, she’d be looking at charges of accessory to murder.”

Jones made it out in about three, red hoodie, black pants, scarred high-tops.

Black, Eve noted, but not Lightning brand.

“I want some breakfast.”

Since he kept walking, Eve signaled Peabody, fell into step with him.

“I have to hand it to you. I don’t know if I’d have an appetite if I had the cops coming around asking about the murders of two people I’m connected to.”

“I ain’t worried about it.”

He turned into a grease trap called 24 Hour Eats.

It smelled like overcooked onions, tremendously bad coffee and fake meat sopped in that grease.

The decor ran to walls painted screaming orange, decorated with blissfully optimistic pictures of food. The yellowing white of the counter had scorch scars, and the handful of backless stools carried strips of duct tape along the seats.

The line of booths looked no more promising, but Jones swaggered back to the last, a corner, slid in, tapped a hand on the scarred laminate of the table like he owned the place.

Which he did, Eve thought. At least a share thereof.

A waitress, somewhere in her forties, Eve gauged, with a lot of tits straining against an atomic-yellow uniform, shuffled right over with a coffeepot.

“How’s it going, Slice?”

She poured what pretended to be coffee into the brown mug he turned over. Eve waved a hand in a no signal over hers. Peabody shook her head.

“Get me the cheese grits, Melba, and three eggs scrambled soft, sausage and toast.”

“I’ll put that right in for you.”

She shuffled off, pausing to fill the mugs of a couple of men who looked more like they were ending the night than starting the morning.

The counter waitress slapped a plate in front of a solo female Eve tagged as street level.

Jones added three containers of nondairy creamer and three packets of fake sugar to his coffee.

“How’d Dinnie get herself dead?”

“Probably by letting three murdering goons into Lyle Pickering’s apartment. She finished that up getting beaten to death, raped repeatedly, choked, and stomped on. Her assailants stole her shoes, her coat, her ’link if she had one, ripped her earrings out of her ears, and left her under the Manhattan Bridge overpass.”

He hadn’t shown any reaction to Eve’s listing of the violence, but his face lit with fury at the location.

“Fucking Dragons.”

“I don’t think so.”

“Fuck you know?”

“I know she, reportedly, told at least two of your crew she intended to go to work, needed the scratch. But she never showed, and hasn’t worked there in days. I know she went to Pickering’s apartment for the specific purpose of aiding his killers with entry.”

“She had the softs for Pick.” He jabbed a finger on the table. “I say bullshit she helped him get dead.”

“Yet that’s exactly what she did, and a few hours later—in fact, about the time you and I had our first conversation, she was being gang-raped—and not onstage for pay—and beaten, kicked, having bones broken and her skull fractured.”

“If she did that to Pick, she earned it. If she did that, she went in with the Dragons, that’s what.”

“Unless you can give me a solid reason why the Dragons would order a hit on Pickering, and Duff would work with them on it, I’m not buying they killed her.”

“Dragons don’t need a reason.” But his tone lacked conviction. Then it turned ugly. “Chinks talking Chink more’n they talk American. Why don’t you go over to Chinktown and bang at that mofo Fan Ho instead of getting on my ass.”

“We’ll table your racism for now. Who had it in for Pick?”

“I said, you talk to Fan Ho about that, ’cause it ain’t none of mine. Now some maybe don’t like how Pick didn’t come back when he got out, but you don’t kill a brother over that. Now maybe Dinnie got her ass up seeing he didn’t come back to her neither. Maybe she got high and got pissed and got some fuckers to do him.”

“You just said she was soft on him, wouldn’t have a part in killing him.”

“Maybe didn’t mean to.” He shrugged, drank coffee. “Maybe just give him a good taste of what he’d been missing. That boy loved his Go. Maybe she figures she gets him back on it, he comes back to her.” He shrugged again. “How the fuck I know?”

She leaned in, ignoring the waitress who set down his plate—grits as orange as the walls, runny powdered eggs, sausage that smelled like something pigs wallowed in, and toast as thin as paper.

“I, the fuck, know the men who entered Pickering’s apartment entered with the intent to kill him.”

“Pick?” The waitress squeaked it out, then trotted rather than shuffled away when Jones aimed a hard look at her.

“You don’t know shit about what’s in their heads.”

“They came up behind him, restrained him, jabbed a needle right through his shirt to tranq him. They set him up so it would look, if you didn’t look close, like he pumped himself full of that Go, planted more in his room.