Gottiguard: The Fourth and Final Kate McCall Crime Caper

By Rich Leder

A killer calls with his latest song and dance. And when homicide is on the program, it's no laughing matter…

Kate McCall is determined to make sure it's finally curtains for her father's killer. But her first priority is playing bodyguard to the bad-boy standup comic who hired her to protect him while he tries to prove he's innocent of murder. That is until the real culprit takes a shot at her client just as her dad's assassin sends her a clue to his next victim.

With the body count rising faster than her bar tab, the way-off Broadway actor-turned-PI pulls in her regular crew of crackerjack colleagues to track down two separate psychos. And she isn't amused when the infamous funnyman she's safeguarding decides to pull a vanishing act.

Will Kate have the last laugh and nail two murderers, or is she about to suffer a fatal punchline?

Gottiguard is the frenetic fourth and final book in the Kate McCall Crime Caper series. If you like sidesplitting stories, crazy conflicts, and the wackiest oddball band of sidekicks onstage or off, then you'll love Rich Leder's hilarious whodunit.

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookBaby
• Release date: May 19, 2022
• ISBN: 9780999260470

Book preview

1

CINEMATIC INSANITY

I stashed Rick Gotti in my apartment and rejoined the cast and crew for the first day of principal photography of the martial-arts masterpiece, the karate classic, the jujitsu gem in the making: Kung Fu Fu. It was slated to be a tour de force, an all-out, action-packed magnum opus. What it had was drugs and dealers and dopers and cops and crime and murder and mad scientists and a runaway bomb on an unknown city bus and furious kung fu fighting every few minutes.

What it didn’t have was dialogue.

No dialogue whatsoever.

Not one scripted word for any of the characters appearing in the film. Every line said out loud so the audience could hear it, process it, and use it to follow a plotline or a character arc would be improvised. LaTanya had written a treatment that presented a general sweep of the action intended for each scene, but what would actually happen was left to the cast.

For highly trained, talented, and experienced actors, ad-libbing all the dialogue in an independent feature film would be a monumental challenge. But the Kung Fu Fu cast (me excepted, she said with some modest amount of modesty) was not composed of actors. The Kung Fu Fu cast was populated by the irregular residents of the Upper East Side brownstone I lived in and managed—the House of Emotional Tics. So, yes, we were filming scenes out of order with no idea what was said in the scenes before or would be said in the scenes to come. And, yes, cinematic insanity.

Fu Chen, my enigmatic Chinese-assassin maintenance man, had been cast as the star, Detective Fu Steinberg. I played the role of Fu’s sidekick and costar, Detective Cassie Barnett. LaTanya, the writer-director-producer and self-anointed future recipient of the heretofore nonexistent Academy Award for Karate (which she predicted Hollywood would invent just for her) had cast herself as NYPD Captain Rashida Jewel. We were all renegade cops. Warren was the renegade mad scientist who’d hidden a bomb on one of the five thousand city buses, and Al and Charlie were renegade drug dealers. Everyone was chasing someone while running away from someone else for reasons that had not been addressed in the treatment, reasons we had to make up on the fly. The story was chaos wrapped in confusion rolled in bedlam but felt tight as a tick compared to the reality of the shoot itself, which was anarchy in a bowl of pandemonium topped with turmoil.

We were shooting in the morning—starting with the second-to-last scene in the movie—because we all had jobs to get back to in the afternoon. It was the climactic scene where Fu, LaTanya, and I take down Charlie and Al—who’ve been chemically enhanced by a mysterious martial-arts drug invented by Warren’s mad scientist character. Outrageous kung fu kicks and outlandish ad-lib dialogue filled the set—which was the hallway on the third floor of the brownstone because the location fee was zero and because no one with a badge would wander by and ask to see our permits. Spoiler alert: we had no permits.

Warren was today’s director of photography and camera crew. He had no film experience of any kind. So there was that.

Charlie had brought his badass brass knuckles to our improv kung fu fight and accidentally clipped Fu in the face. This pissed Fu off—never a good idea—and he whacked Charlie with a real-life roundhouse kung fu kick in the chest that sent the three-time ex-con-turned-city-tow-truck-driver careening halfway down the hallway.

Fu you, Fu, Charlie said, rubbing his chest.

Fu you too, Fu said, rubbing his jaw.

Then Charlie pulled a knife, and we stopped improvising to make peace between them. That’s how much of the morning went.

You might imagine that even under theatrical conditions such as these, being the off-off-off-off-Broadway professional actress I was, I would have been able to focus on the improvisational jujitsu at hand. But somewhere around midmorning, my concentration became less concentrated because the first day of Kung Fu Fu happened to fall on Halloween.

My thoughts drifted back to when I was an eight-year-old champion trick-or-treater growing up in Queens. I knew I’d been a champion trick-or-treater because Jimmy, my father, had held my hand, walked me from house to house, and said, "Katie, I’ve seen Halloweens come and I’ve seen Halloweens go, and you are a champion trick-or-treater in anybody’s book."

And because it was Halloween and I was thinking of Jimmy, my thoughts wandered again to the end of this past July, when he’d been found murdered in an insurance-company elevator, eyes shot out of his head. At the reading of his will (in Mel Shavelson’s office), I’d inherited his private investigations business and become the McCall of McCall & Company.

And once my mind landed there, it meandered through the three cases I’d already solved—workman’s compensation, stolen identity, and embezzlement—that were decidedly mine. And also ambled through the three murders I’d simultaneously investigated that were decidedly not mine. Murders that were categorically the domain of NYPD Homicide. Murders where the victims’ eyes had been shot out of their heads in the same way my father’s eyes had been shot out of his head. Meaning after they’d been murdered. Meaning it was the killer’s signature—payment due on delivery.

I’d worked those murders, pissing off the police (surprise!), because it was the only way I could track the killer, and I’d promised Jimmy up in heaven somewhere that I would catch the creep who’d killed him.

I’d come close on several occasions. Close enough to almost have my eyes shot out one time, my brains blown out another, and to punch the killer in the jaw yet another. Close enough for him to text me clues to his next victims—personally text me clues! Close enough for him to give me a pet name: Little Engine. As in The Little Engine That Could. Or in his opinion, Couldn’t. Meaning I couldn’t keep up with his ultra-uber-brilliance. Meaning I couldn’t stop him from murdering his next target even with the clues. Meaning I was nothing but an entertaining sidebar, a compelling puppet he was playing with to keep him amused while he murdered high-powered people for money and stayed ten steps ahead of the police in the process.

Whoever he was, he had an ego the size of St. Patrick’s Cathedral, which is to say you could see it from space. I was the PI in the middle, his bridge to Detective Lew Logan and Logan’s recently formed NYPD task force. Recently formed because after half a dozen professional hits, the city had decided in earnest it was time to stop this top-tier corporate assassin from shooting people’s eyes out all across the boroughs.

So I lost focus on the first day of shooting Kung Fu Fu, and then the first day was in the can, and it was time for lunch, so I went into my apartment and started the ball rolling on my fourth case: being Rick Gotti’s bodyguard.

2

NOW HE WAS KNOWN FOR MURDER

His professional name was Rick Gotti. But his real name was Richard Gottfried. So no relation to the famed, late New York mob boss. Just the normal NYPD presumed-guilt-by-name association.

Mel Shavelson, my father’s disheveled lawyer, who I’d unhappily inherited along with Jimmy’s PI business-in-a-box, had sent Rick to me first thing this morning. Rick was a celebrity for some of the right reasons—sitcom star from ages fifteen to eighteen, and cult-status stand-up comedian until he turned thirty-three. Then he’d vanished from public life into a succession of rehab, recovery, and halfway houses. Meaning he was also a celebrity for the wrong reasons—drug and alcohol misuse and abuse leading to exceptionally bad behavior on and off the set for years and years and years.

Now he was known for murder.

In the midst of making a career comeback after fifteen years of hiding from the crushing cogs of the entertainment machine, he’d become famous anew for killing fellow comedian Kenny Cochran after Cochran had blatantly stolen his material. This is what the police said.

Rick said otherwise.

Rick said Cochran had stolen his act, and he, Rick, had walked into the backstage dressing room at The Joke Joint, a popular New York comedy club, to confront Cochran face-to-face, and had seen some big guy holding a plastic bag over Cochran’s head. Cochran was already dead. The big guy had been taking an extra few seconds just to make damn sure of it. Rick hadn’t seen the big guy’s face, but Cochran’s real killer thought he had.

Indeed, Cochran’s real killer thought Rick had gotten a good long look at him while he’d been busy killing Cochran. So he’d chased Rick into the dark, empty club, saying something like, You saw me, so you die too. But the big guy never nailed him because Joke Joint security had grabbed Rick first, and the big guy had vanished without a trace. Which meant security had never seen Cochran’s real killer either.

And now the real killer thought he needed to kill Rick quick, before Rick could find out who he was, actually was—maybe by picking him out of a lineup; maybe by looking at a mug shot; maybe by describing him to a police sketch artist. Which is why the bodyguard—me—needed to keep Rick alive for the next six weeks so he could prove his innocence at the pretrial in December.

Rick Gotti was three years older than me, so forty-eight give or take a few months, and about two inches taller, so five-nine. He had hip celebrity hair, copper-colored and curly, flecked with gray, a little long, a little wild, a little rebellious. He was thin and wiry. Recognized for the smartass smile he’d flashed on his hit TV show The Jungle. Celebrated for his wise-guy delivery of the show’s iconic tagline, Welcome to the jungle! Infamous for the bad-boy reputation fans had come to know from his time in the tabloids. And now notorious for a murder rap everyone knew from the police reports.

He was sitting on my sofa watching Animal Planet. Faded blue jeans with a white dress shirt untucked, sleeves rolled up. Expensive watch. No wedding ring.

Before you jump to conclusions, noticing the absence of a wedding ring was in no way related to even the slightest hint of a romantic thought on my part. Ever since Tom Mullin, my son Matthew’s biological father, had flown all the way west (and turned all the way gay) after impregnating me at age sixteen, I’d been unlucky in love. I’d never let it ruin my life, which I liked just fine—single mother and musical-theater actor working every odd job under the New York City sun—but I’d always dreamed of being in a committed relationship, like Jimmy and my mother, Christine, who’d died of cancer when I was ten. That I’d never been able to make a monogamous relationship work for more than an unimpressive number of months was as much my doing as it was the doings of the men I had chosen along the way. Which is to say I was bad at choosing men.

The late great Kate McCall was not at all great (or even good) at choosing men to be romantically involved with and was equally bad at being involved with them once she’d made her not-at-all-good choice would be a true-that sentence in my obituary.

Honestly, it had been as true these past three months as it had ever been. Indeed, after the men I’d been tenderly entangled with since the end of July, a romantic relationship was the last thing on my mind. The Harriman Affair had nearly destroyed me. The end of the romantic road with the rock star-real estate-decathlon stud—fifteen years younger than me and Matthew’s friend from law school—had left me despondent, dispirited, dejected, and depressed. And Blue had broken my heart into pieces I still couldn’t put back together. Starry-eyed interlude? No, thank you. It was going to be business and nothing but business with Rick Gotti. All bodyguard, all the time.

I stepped into my apartment and shut the door behind me. What animal?

Peregrine falcon, he said. Fastest bird in the world. Two hundred forty miles per hour when it stoops.

Stoops?

Deep dives from high altitude. That’s how it hunts.

I’m about to deep dive into my kitchen for a BLT. Want one? It’s on me.

There’s no such thing as a free lunch, he said, turning off the TV and following me through my railroad flat. How was the shoot?

All the apartments in the House of Emotional Tics were railroad flats, meaning the living room, situated at the front of the brownstone, looked out onto East 83rd Street and led into the first bedroom, which led into the second bedroom, which led into the dining room, which led into the kitchen at the back of the brownstone, overlooking the crabgrass garden and grubby shrubs. All the rooms were in a row, like pearls on a necklace or, as the name implies, like the railroad cars of a train.

Weird doesn’t begin to describe it, I said. Out of body? Out of mind? Out of control? Out of bounds? All of the above? We shot the next-to-last scene of the movie, when we catch the renegade drug dealers, kung fu fight them into submission, and haul them off to jail. But there’s no written dialogue.

None? he said.

It’s all ad-lib. Every word made up on the spot.

So how did what you said in the whole movie you didn’t shoot yet lead up to what you said in this scene?

No way to know. We didn’t say it yet.

And you don’t know what you’ll say until you—whoa, what’s going on in here?

He’d stopped in my second bedroom, which I’d turned into my walk-in-walk-through closet.

These are the costumes, accessories, and accoutrement of all the roles I’ve played for the past twenty-five years or so, I said. Wigs, glasses, purses, scarves, gloves, bags, shoes, jewelry, and clothes from all the local late-night cable commercials, failed TV pilots, forgotten indie features, and way-off-Broadway plays and musicals that make up my life’s work. Plus, my real clothes are in here too.

Hallowed space on Halloween, he said. Like a sacred Indian burial ground.

Floor-to-ceiling shelves lined the walls, with racks and hooks and hangers and dressers in between. A vintage armoire, an antique vanity, a full-length mirror, plenty of lighting.

Except nothing’s dead and buried in here, I said, digging deep into the closet. Including you. So put this on and don’t take it off until after your pretrial. You can take it off in the shower, obviously.

I tossed him the concealable bulletproof vest Jimmy had made me wear on an especially dangerous surveillance case involving a manic husband with a gun who’d threatened to kill his wife for cheating on him.

He tossed it back to me. The camera adds ten pounds as it is, McCall. This thing adds another twenty. It’s going to look like I ate my way through recovery.

I tossed it back to him. You’re wearing it.

He tossed it back to me. No, I’m not.

I decided to fight the bulletproof battle later, put the vest back in my closet, and kept moving. He followed me through my dining room and into my kitchen. The one full bathroom in the apartment was off the kitchen. A large plate-glass window was set on the back wall so you could look out into the yard. It was the mirror image of the window on the front wall of the living room. Because I was on the first floor, both windows had bars over them, like a jail cell. But the building was rent-controlled, and I got a manager’s discount on top of that, so I didn’t see the bars.

Rick watched me make BLTs for both of us. The bacon was from the fabulous Florence Prime Meat Market on Jones Street, where they custom-cut slices from an enormous slab. The bread was fresh from the East Side Orwashers, a bakery to which bread-lovers pilgrimaged and genuflected. The lettuce and tomatoes had come from the Korean market around the corner on First Avenue, where it seemed like they grew fresh produce on a country farm somehow hidden in the alley beside the building.

Before you start thinking I was overly overboard with food, you should know I was a lifelong New Yorker. Food was my cultural DNA. When I had money, I spent it on food. When I didn’t have money, I spent it on food.

As the bacon sizzled, I grabbed two bottles of Sam Adams from the fridge.

He gestured thanks but no thanks. Sober for six years.

Congratulations, I said, meaning it. I’ll drink yours.

I was Jimmy McCall’s daughter so I enjoyed a drink as much as the next guy but only when I should, never when I shouldn’t. My father had taught me the difference.

Congratulations, he said, meaning it. Two for you.

I assembled the BLTs—they were works of art, if I said so myself—and we sat at my small kitchen table.

So keeping me alive until the pretrial, Rick said between bites. What are you thinking?

"I’m thinking you live here for six weeks. Camp out on my couch. No one knows you’re in my house. You’re safe here. I feed you. I buy you every magazine on the stand. You watch Animal Planet until you have a degree in zoology, and you stream Netflix like nobody’s business. Binge The Jungle for old-time’s sake."

He was in heaven, either loving the BLT or my plan for keeping him alive.

Not happening, he said.

It was the BLT. Not the plan.

The point of me hiring you to be my bodyguard is for you to keep me alive while I prove I didn’t do it, not for you to keep me alive in your living room. Although, when you think about it, the living room is a perfect place to keep someone alive.

It was a funny line because of him. He was funny. His delivery was a big part of what made the joke funny. Probably funnier than the joke itself. He had a unique, smart-mouth style that was engaging despite its smart-mouthness. You knew it, and he knew it with you. He was in on the joke with his audience. Laughing along with them—in this case, me. It was part of the fun, part of the funny, that Rick Gotti thought it was funny too. Plus, the joke came with that Rick Gotti sitcom smile at the end, like punctuation, like permission to laugh your head off. I could practically hear his signature line in my head: Welcome to the jungle!

That’s funny, I said. But the answer’s still no.

Now I get it, I thought. It’s not that he wants me to keep him alive for the next six weeks so he can prove he’s innocent at his pretrial. It’s that he wants me to keep him alive for the next six weeks because he’s planning to prove he’s innocent before he ever gets to his pretrial. He’s planning to catch the real killer, and he can’t do that if he’s dead. He’s not going to sit on my sofa like a good boy and watch TV until December. He’s going to play private investigator and solve Cochran’s murder on his own. What a stupid freaking thing to do. Who does he think he is, me?

I could tell he wasn’t happy with my take. He’d lived his entire raucous and rampaging life disregarding advice, disobeying rules, defying social norms. But he didn’t say anything, which surprised me. Shooting his mouth off had put him in hot water a thousand times. He couldn’t help himself. It was his nature. His reputation. He was famous for it. So he’d either mellowed over the years or was saving something worse than shooting his mouth off for later.

We ate our sandwiches in silence. He drank bottled water, and I drank two beers, and then he walked to the back window, looked through the bars, and said, Your costar is doing tai chi with a parrot on his head.

I put the dishes in the sink and joined him at the window. It was true. But after all I’d learned about Fu, he’d have to do something more than tai chi with Jerusalem Joe perched on his head to shock me.

He’s a Chinese-mob assassin banished to the brownstone for reasons no one wants to know, I said. Tai chi with a parrot on his head is just one of a long list of things that make him the most unusual maintenance man in New York. Also on that list, his father abandoned him at a Shaolin Temple when he was seven. He has no mother.

Everyone has a mother, Rick said.

"Not Fu. His shifu taught him ten different martial-arts disciplines. Fu earned the highest possible belt in all of them, the highest possible belt being Master of Don’t Fuck with Me or I’ll Snap Your Neck with My Bare Hands. Which he can do without breaking a sweat, trust me. I’ve seen him crush concrete with his fingers. But he can also bake like Betty Crocker. Tea cakes are his specialty. And he listens to Italian opera at decibels that make AC/DC sound like a soft breeze. He loves birds. Except pigeons, which he kills indiscriminately with poisons and shovels and slingshots. He knows how to work a boom mic because he made bird movies in China. He’s as graceful as a Bolshoi ballerina, as fast as a Funny Car, as agile as an antelope, and as brutal as a bulldozer. Plus, he was a trick horse rider in a Chinese circus before the mob made him an assassin. And, oh yeah, he’s saved my life four or five times. One time is in dispute."

Saved your life?

Four or five times while helping me find my father’s killer. I mean, clearly, he’s helping me if he’s saved my life, which he has, four or five times. Don’t tell anyone about Fu and my father’s case. Especially Logan.

Logan?

Homicide detective working Jimmy’s murder from his side of the street. Don’t tell him about Fu. Not sure Fu has a green card or a bingo card or any card.

I moved back to the sink and washed the dishes. Rick watched Fu and Joe a little longer, then leaned against the counter beside me.

So you know where I’m coming from, wanting to catch the guy who killed Kenny Cochran, he said.

I did. Of course I did.

I can’t let you do it, I said. I’m responsible for your life now.

He took a breath and let it out slow. I’m still going need stuff from my house. Clothes and toiletries. My laptop.

We’ll go tomorrow, I said. First place the real killer will look for you is your house. And he’ll look tonight now that you’re out. That’s my guess. We’ll let it settle. Make him think you left the city for someplace safe.

He nodded and went back to the window. After a minute, he said, He just flipped me off. Fu. Without breaking his routine. Double birds. Like it was part of his tai chi.

Welcome to the jungle, I said.

3

OPPOSITE SIDES OF THE SERENGETI

I finished up in the kitchen, thinking how nice it would be if all I had to worry about was doing tai chi with a parrot on my head. If all I had to worry about was doing tai chi with a parrot on my head, that would be a vacation in paradise. If I was on vacation in paradise, I would do tai chi with a parrot on my head and hardly worry about anything at all. The only thing on my mind would be vacationing in paradise doing tai chi with a parrot on my head, worried about nothing. Instead, I had Jimmy’s murder on my mind and Rick Gotti’s life in my hands, neither of which was a vacation in paradise. Meaning both were another daunting day in the pressure cooker.

My doorbell rang as I put the period on that thought: pressure cooker. Probably one of the tenants delivering an unannounced complaint. Or maybe LaTanya with tomorrow’s call sheet. Or Fu with bad news about Al’s toilet. As resident manager of the House of Emotional Tics, I was, among other things, the designated complaint catcher. The grapevine for grievances.

Rick was in the living room. I yelled for him not to answer, that I would get it, but patience was not part of Rick Gotti’s profile, and as I arrived in the living room, he was opening the door.

It wasn’t a tenant, but it was a complaint...personified in the form of Homicide Detective Lew Logan.

Who the fuck are you? Logan said to Rick.

His jacket was open and his badge and gun were dead giveaways. And Rick, whose run-ins with the police had been tabloid fodder for years, was on his heels just like that, especially with the whole Kenny Cochran case hanging over his head.

But it wasn’t the badge and the gun that had him off balance—though no one, especially someone like Rick Gotti, wanted to see those particular items when they opened the door. It was Logan’s tone of voice, which was gruff enough to melt glass from the far side of Central Park.

I’m Rick Gotti, Rick said.

Stand-up comedian arrested for killing a stand-up comedian. They should give you a medal, then burn you at the stake. You paid his bail? Logan said to me as I came to the door.

I’m his bodyguard. What are you doing here, Logan? How did you get in the building?

There is what appears to be a zombie washing three identical early-model Corollas in front of your brownstone, and by early model I mean made by the Japanese in Japan during the attack on Pearl Harbor. I asked the zombie if he lived in this building, and he answered that, in fact, he did. I then asked if he knew whether you were home. At which time he told me to, quote, buzz the fucking buzzer like every other fucking delivery boy on East 83rd Street, end quote. I showed him my badge and my gun and told him I’d noticed exactly none of the vehicles he was washing had a current registration sticker and so were clearly not registered and likely not insured. I explained that if he opened the door and spared me the ignominy of buzzing the fucking buzzer like every other fucking delivery boy on East 83rd Street, I would, A, not shove the entire Department of Transportation up his zombie ass and, B, not shoot him in his zombie face. That, McCall, is how I got in. I’m here because I have questions only you can answer. Now, are you going to offer me a cup of coffee, or am I going to kill this stand-up comedian like he killed that stand-up comedian to get him out of my fucking way?

Lew Logan had even less patience than Rick Gotti. Which is to say no patience at all. Negative patience.

No, I said.

No? Logan said.

I’ll meet you on the steps outside. Two minutes.

There was no reason to subject Rick to more Logan than he’d already encountered. Plus, Rick would find his smartass footing shortly and give it back to Logan as good as Logan was dishing it out, and I didn’t want to be in the middle of that unhappy exchange. So Logan left for the front steps, and I told Rick to watch Animal Planet, and then I got my shit together and followed Logan outside.

He was sitting on the top step. It was as pretty a Halloween day as I could remember. The end of October can go either way in New York. Cold and gray like winter or bright and fabulous like fall. Today felt like the last breath of spring. That’s why Al was washing Warren’s fleet.

Warren had purchased three dirt-cheap, totally stripped-down Corollas and was running a black-market rental-car company for people who didn’t want any record of renting a car. People who didn’t want to answer any questions about who they were or why they needed a rental car or where they were taking it. Off-the-grid people. People who paid cash. Drug dealers and bank robbers and other folks from the shadows. And me. I rented from Warren whenever I needed an under-the-radar ride. Part of a PI’s life is hiding in the shadows, Katie, Jimmy once said to me while we were hiding in the shadows.

I sat next to Logan, and we watched Al clean the cars. Al was Warren’s night manager because, well, Al was up.

Is he a real zombie? Logan said.

It was a fair question. Al Cutter was thirty-four. He’d lived in apartment 5A since before I’d arrived at the House of Emotional Tics, two and a half years ago. He was tall and zombie thin with stringy, dirty-blond zombie hair that fell below his stooped zombie shoulders. His ears and nose seemed larger than normal because his perpetually bloodshot zombie eyes were set so impossibly deep in his face. His skin was zombie white. Fingers long and bony. The vibe he put out in waves when walking down the street was disagreeable and unpleasant. He was not a nice man. Mothers would keep their kids close when Al walked by because, for all intents and purposes, he was as much a zombie as anyone dead or alive.

Jury’s out, I said. But he’s a real insomniac. Sleeps less than an hour a night for the last sixteen years on account of when he was a freshman at Fordham, his roommate, a premed douchebag named Elliot Morgan, woke Al up in the middle of the night—his name’s Al, by the way—shoved the barrel of a loaded .357 Magnum in Al’s mouth, and called his biology professor to negotiate an F up to an A in exchange for not blowing Al’s brains across the dorm room. The professor’s wife called the police on the other line. The standoff lasted ten hours, all of it with the gun in Al’s mouth. He never slept after that night. Elliot, now a douchebag bond trader, got off with a slap on the wrist. But every month, Al hacks into ConEd’s portal and fucks with Elliot’s bill. So for the rest of time, Elliot has to fight ConEd about how much money he owes them.

Logan was unimpressed. Nobody got murdered, so it doesn’t matter if he sleeps or not or why he does or doesn’t. What matters is if he’s a real zombie, you have to shoot him in the head with your gun while I’m here. It’s the only way to kill them.

Why my gun? And why do I have to shoot him while you’re here?

It turns up as evidence in half my homicides, and I can never prove it was the murder weapon. If I’m here when you shoot him with your gun, I can arrest you again and put you in prison for your own safety.

From my father’s McCall & Company business-in-a-box I’d also inherited his ashes in a German beer stein (now on a shelf in my living room), a bottle of Wild Turkey (which we’d drunk at his wake in the brownstone backyard), a sealed manila envelope with my name written on the front, his most recent case files (open and closed), his satellite cell phone, a miniature digital camera, a very small photo printer, a six-inch restorer’s pry bar, an old-fashioned brass nameplate that read McCall & Company, Private Investigations (that Fu had affixed to my apartment door without my permission), and his automatic .45 Colt pistol.

Logan wasn’t wrong. I’d been forcibly separated from the Colt at several different murder scenes related to Jimmy’s case, which was part of the reason he’d arrested me four different times since the end of July. But, like Logan said, it had never been proven I’d shot anybody, so each time I’d slid off Logan’s legal hook—and weaseled my way off his shit list too. Though that never lasted long. I was usually back on it before I left the room. Since I’d committed to being a PI and told Logan I wouldn’t stop looking for Jimmy’s killer, I was back on the list for good.

You’re a morbid man, Logan.

Everybody says so.

He was fifty-eight. Five-ten and in good shape for his age or any age. He’d been a homicide detective, hunting down the most murderous murderers in the city for more than thirty years. Cranky and crusty rolling out of bed. He detested private investigators as much as he disliked off-Broadway actors. Meaning two strikes against me before I ever got to the plate. Meaning Logan didn’t like me as far as he could spit. He’d said those very words to my very face on multiple occasions—each time he’d arrested me, for instance.

In return, I didn’t like him either. Which was as it should be according to Jimmy, who’d taught me on more than one occasion that, PIs and cops are not friends, Katie. They’re lions and zebras unless and until they need each other, at which time they pretend to be pals at arm’s length. But the minute that need is over and done, they’re back on opposite sides of the Serengeti.

But there was something other than the Serengeti between Logan and me. We had a couple connections that couldn’t be denied.

Connection one was that Logan had reminded me of my father a dozen times since I’d been illicitly investigating Jimmy’s murder. My refusal to stop my investigation, even after Logan had ordered me to, even after I’d promised him I was all done investigating any damn thing in New York, exasperated and infuriated the detective to no end. I couldn’t say I blamed him. I could be as frustrating and irritating and annoying as my father, who’d been known by the law-enforcement side of the city as a titan of frustration, irritation, and annoyance. (In his defense, at the same time, Jimmy had been beloved by his clients for his honesty, morality, and decency.) Anyway, I was his daughter, for Pete’s sake. I’d inherited his DNA. Which meant my father had often—meaning every day of my life—expressed the same feelings of anger, incredulity, and dismay toward me that Logan felt.

From my unplanned pregnancy at age sixteen, to my unconventional acting career that barely paid (didn’t pay) my bills, to my endless string of dead-end jobs, including my brief stint as a strip-club dancer (to help pay said unpaid bills), and on and on and on, Jimmy would say in myriad ways, Jesus Christ, Kate. Does your brain not work at all? But he’d been there when I needed him, heard me out when I had something to say, trusted me when he didn’t trust me, believed me when he didn’t believe me, and had my back when there’d been no one else back there.

Logan had done the same, though he’d also said on many occasions, Are you out of your mind, McCall? It’s simply not possible for a person to be this stupid. But in our turbulent time together, the detective had also shown me the hint of a begrudging smile of respect, and even, dare I say, something that passed for not entirely disliking me. Somewhere under his bad-tempered, ill-humored, surly crust, it was possible Logan could accept me as someone he didn’t dislike, as long as no one was watching and he’d had a few beers.

Connection two was what Logan had come to chat about.

Have you heard from him? Logan said.

Not since the subway, I said.

He was talking about Jimmy’s killer. The professional corporate assassin who shot people’s eyes out for six or seven figures.

Nothing from the task force? I said.

Nothing, he said. Son of a bitch is invisible.

No, he’s not. You know who he is. He told me you did.

It was true. The killer had told me he knew Logan well and for a long time. Well enough and long enough to have engineered this whole stinking shit pile so that Logan would be the detective of record, so it would be Logan’s case, Logan’s task force, Logan’s headache, Logan’s ulcer. And because I’d stuck my nose in Jimmy’s murder and the murders that had come after, the killer had made me the middleman between him and Logan.

I’ve spent enough time in Rockefeller Center, they should give me a fucking office, Logan said. "I’ve watched hours of security footage from every camera and every angle going back more than a month. We’ve questioned everyone who works in the building and everyone they know and everyone they know. Thousands of people. Nothing. Not one suspicious fucking thing. We went back to Superior Press. Back to Monument Insurance. All the way fucking back. Still nothing."

Rockefeller Center was the location of the killer’s most recent professional hits—a law firm where one of the partners had no longer wanted to have any of the other partners as partners. Superior Press was the murder scene before that. Monument Insurance was where they’d found my father dead in the elevator. I’d worked my unwanted way into all those cases.

He’s not done, Logan said. He wanted a task force to torture me, and now he has one. He’s going to reach out again. Test you. Test me. The minute he does, McCall, you are going to dial me directly and put me between you and him. Do you understand what I’m saying today?

Put you between me and him, I said.

He wants to kill me, McCall. Whoever the fuck he is and whatever the fuck he imagines I’ve done to him, that is his endgame. If he has to kill you to kill me, then he will, and I will not accept your death as part and parcel of this particular case. You are a rank amateur who cannot defend herself against this sick and violent egomaniac motherfucker. You will call me when he texts you, and you will leave him to me. You will not engage him beyond that. I will send your son a record of this conversation so there can be no mistaking my position. You are done. Is there a way for me to be any clearer about this than I have been regarding you and me and the killer?

Yes, he’d hit a dead end with his task force, and the frustration had eaten him alive because he couldn’t uncover a clue and because the killer was one of the gazillion people he knew or had known during the course of his thirty-plus-year career...and he didn’t know which one it was. And, yes, he’d hoped I’d heard from the killer so there would be another place for the task force to find footing, but he was worried about me too. I could feel it beneath his short-tempered tone.

I realize this is the original lie from which all your ensuing falsehoods flow, but one more time for humor’s sake, repeat after me, Logan said. I, Kate McCall, promise Detective Lew Logan, cross my heart and swear to the God of Far-Flung Bullshit Broadway Musicals, that I am done investigating any damn thing in New York.

"Can’t do it, Logan. You know