Then she shook her head and pushed me away, saying, “What does it matter! He’s dead! Gino is dead!”

Chapter Eleven

CHAPTER ELEVEN

NoHo—the area north of Houston Street, with its quiet tree-lined streets, early 19th-century homes, and former factories with cast-iron facades—had been turning trendy for a while now. Three main arteries and small, sometimes cobblestone side streets hosted boutiques, eateries, art galleries and avant-garde theaters. Artistic types and Yuppies had discovered the neighborhood a while ago, but the tourists hadn’t gotten wise. You didn’t have to be rich—not yet anyway—to live in a loft-like pad in a former dry-goods warehouse like this one.

You could also die here.

Just ask Gino Mazzini.

He was where I’d found him, a corpse in his jockey shorts leaning against a wall of the sparsely furnished apartment, his legs akimbo, forming a V that pointed to the rest of him, his head so slumped he might have broken his neck trying to fellate himself.

But he was a casualty of something even nastier: the now-familiar cannonball blow to the chest, which had driven his blue-and-red Mets 1986 World Series t-shirt into him like a line drive with a bowling ball. He’d been killed at least three or four hours ago, because this stiff was stiff all right—rigor mortis had set in.

The mist had kept its promise, though the thunder had overstated its case, raindrops half-heartedly spattering, then angling down the slanted glass like unattended tears, throwing eerie shadow streaks on a room lighted only by a bedside lamp. It was half an hour or so past my discovery of the body, which I’d made with a key and directions from Sheila Ryan, who’d remained with her friend Julie.

Seemed when she’d got there to collect her things, Sheila had knocked, no answer, then used her key to get in. She found her ex-boyfriend dead, with his chest pushed in. That’s all I bothered to get from her before heading to the bartender’s NoHo loft apartment—Pat would get the details out of her later.

The apartment was mostly one big room, dominated by a king bed with black faux-silk sheets and a few cheap black-and-white modern furnishings from one of those “apartment living” joints; a fridge hummed in the kitchenette, its overhead light the only other illumination, and the john was boxed in at a corner (I checked, but no corpse was seated in there this time).

The gray walls were bare but for a pair of framed movie posters—Rocky, signed “Best,” with a fluid scrawl that presumably said, “Sylvester Stallone,” and The Godfather Part II autographed to the late tenant by Robert DeNiro (“You mix a mean Martini!”).

Pat Chambers, glancing at the posters with a humorless smirk, said, “Well, at least he was proud of his heritage.”