“It sounds as if you had hard feelings for Dr. Abner.”
“I figure he got what he deserved, and so what? Then again, he’s a good part of the reason I don’t have the bitch and the brat, both whiners, dragging me down.” He showed his teeth again in a big, exaggerated smile. “Maybe I should send flowers.”
Eve edged closer, watched Thane’s fists ball as he dropped his foot back to the floor, straightened in his chair. And something else. She saw the flicker of cowardice in his eyes.
“Just how many bitches and brats do you figure you’ve slapped, punched, shoved in your worthless life?”
“You’d better get the hell out before I file harassment charges.”
“You think this is harassment?” Just a little closer, close enough to see a thin line of fear sweat pop out above his upper lip as those fists balled tighter. “Not even close. But it could be, and soon. Watch yourself, Thane, and think twice before you use those fists on another woman or minor. Because the next time you do, it won’t be community service, probation, and anger management. I’ll make sure you go inside. It’ll be my mission.”
“Ours,” Peabody corrected. “And we’re really good at fulfilling missions.”
“I’m calling my lawyer.”
“You do that.”
Now Eve showed her teeth in a big, exaggerated smile before they walked out.
“I was waiting for you to kick his ass,” Peabody muttered as they worked their way around the cubes to the elevator. “I was actually hoping you would.”
“This way was better, and less paperwork. Now he’s shaken, pissed off, and worried.”
Peabody sucked in a breath, huffed it out as they rode down. “You have good men in your life, in your work, you mostly forget that type’s around. Damn it, I just thought of something. When he said kiss my ass, I should’ve said how he couldn’t get a woman to perform that act unless he paid for it.”
Because she could all but see the steam puffing out of her partner’s ears, Eve gave Peabody’s shoulder a pat. “There’s always next time.”
“He could’ve done it.” As they crossed the small, empty lobby, went back outside, Peabody glanced back. “He’s got the temperament to want serious payback. He may not know where his ex and kid are, but you can make book if he saw them, he’d want to hurt them. He knew where Abner was.”
“Agreed. And we can look at his attitude two ways: Why antagonize the cops, bring more attention to yourself if you’re guilty? Or make sure you do so they consider the blatant stupidity and think you couldn’t be guilty. Check out the names and location for the time of the drop.”
“Thane and three guys.” Peabody pulled out her PPC as they got into the car. “Probably their weekly meeting of Misogynists United. We’re talking to the maintenance guy next?”
“He’s up. Then I want to go by and talk to Rufty again, their children if they’re with him.”
* * *
Curtis Feingold had a craphole apartment in a craphole building on Avenue C. As the exterior had been thoroughly tagged—much of it anatomically impossible drawings or badly misspelled insults and/or sexual suggestions—and more than one window had boards instead of glass, Eve figured he didn’t maintain much.
The interior only cemented that opinion, with its grungy closet of a lobby, its out-of-order elevator (also tagged), and the broken door on the stairwell.
Fortunately, Feingold’s craphole squatted on ground level. Eve pressed the buzzer, but didn’t hear it sound. And since she could hear, clearly, voices raised in an argument inside, and somebody’s poorly played horn from across the hall, she judged it busted.
She hammered the door with the side of her fist.
“Fuck you want?” came the response through the closed door.
“NYPSD. Open the door, Mr. Feingold.”
“Screw you.”
“We can and will return with a warrant—and a representative of the Division of Building Standards and Codes, as this building appears to be in violation of too many of both to count.”
The door opened an inch on its security chain. A bleary eye peered out—and the sour smell of booze flooded through the crack. “Screw you,” he repeated. “Don’t have to talk to no cops.”
“Would you prefer a conversation or a few hours in the tank while the BSC reps inspect this building?”
“Not my fucking building,” he muttered, but released the chain.
In a white T-shirt that may have been clean in some forgotten past and a pair of brown pants that strained against his belly, he had the doughy look of a man who’d gone to fat but had once been big and muscular. His hair, sparse, thin, and dirty, barely covered his scalp. His eyes, bloodshot and angry, ticked from Eve to Peabody and back.
His breath was enormous.
“Fuck you want?”
“To speak to you about Dr. Kent Abner.”
“Doctors’re bullshit artists. Don’t believe in them.”
The apartment would have been called an efficiency, but there was nothing efficient about it. The screen—the source of the argument between a group of people on some sort of talk show—took up one short wall. The rest stood naked and dingy, as did the pair of windows facing the street.
The bed sort of sprawled in the middle of the room, covered with a jumble of sheets. Take-out cartons and empty bottles appeared to comprise the decor.
“Dr. Abner was murdered yesterday.”
“So the fuck what?”
“Dr. Abner was your daughter’s pediatrician and the one who filed the complaint, testified against you, which resulted in you doing two years for child abuse.”
“That fucker’s dead? Calls for a drink.”
He walked over to the bottle and glass on the table beside the bed, poured himself some cloudy brown liquid.
“Where were you at ten P.M. night before last?”
“Right here. Got nowhere I wanna go, nobody I wanna see.”
“So you saw and spoke to no one?”
“So the fuck what? You thinking I killed the asshole? What the fuck does that get me? System’s rigged against somebody like me ain’t got money to grease palms. Old lady took off with the kid, and good riddance there. Who the fuck needs them?”
“Yesterday morning, about nine-thirty. Where were you?”
“Right the fuck here. I got 3B bitching about roaches, and 2A screaming about seeing a damn mouse, and what does 2C do but skip out without paying the rent. Somebody’s always beating on the door, bitching about something.”
“You are in charge of building maintenance,” Peabody pointed out.
He just snorted, drank. “Place is a shithole. Always going to be a shithole. So the fuck what? People don’t like it, they can sidewalk sleep.”
“When’s the last time you saw or spoke to Dr. Abner?”
“In court when the fucker tried to make me out to be some kind of maniac because I gave that sniveling kid a few smacks. Kid’s my flesh and blood, ain’t she? I can do what I like with my own flesh and blood. But the system’s rigged, so they tossed me inside. You’re telling me somebody gave that fucker some good smacks, maybe beat him to hell for being all holier-than-thou? I say good for them.”