“Oh God!” Maggie finally put down the fork.
“And guess who I almost ticketed!”
“Conan O’Brien?”
“Noel Holden.”
She froze in disbelief.
“And he was so sexy!”
“Please tell me it was for public urination!” She swore she once saw Richard Gere pee in public.
“Smoking inside DiCarlo’s.”
She asked me a zillion questions: What was he wearing? How tall was he? How much did he weigh? How did he smell?
“Was he with Venezia?”
“Later. She and Crispin Marachino picked him up.”
After five minutes of frantic chitchat, Maggie suddenly checked her watch. She had to see her favorite rope-a-dope reality show—A Most Singular Man. I wished her good night and she was gone.
Early the next morning I awoke to the chirp of my cell phone.
“Tell me again why you think he’s a murderer?” a sandpapery male voice asked.
For an instant I thought it was my brother, talking about Saddam. “Who is this?”
“It’s Eddie,” O’Ryan said. He sounded like he had been up all night.
“Oh, you were probably right.” I said tiredly. “I just thought it was weird that he was standing across the street from the crime scene hours later. You know how murderers do that sometimes.”
“Did you ask him what he was doing there?”
“Yeah. He said he’d just gone to an ATM machine, and he showed me the receipt.”
“So why did it strike you that he could be the killer?”
I couldn’t tell anyone about my possibly Kundalini-assisted intuition, so I said: “First I saw him that morning with you outside the restaurant. The body had only just been found a half block away, so he could’ve killed her just before. And he was having lunch at ten in the morning in an empty restaurant—that struck me as odd, particularly ’cause he mentioned later that he only ate when he felt guilty.”
“And what would be his motive for killing the Jane Doe?”
“That I don’t know yet. Maybe he’s a thrill killer. When we spoke, he couldn’t stop talking about the Green Tea murderer.”
“The Green River murderer,” he corrected me.
“Yeah, right. He was totally awestruck by the guy. I mean, he really seemed envious.”
“How do you know it was envy? Maybe it was disgust.”
“You had to be there. The body language, the tone of his voice . . . He seemed particularly bewildered by the fact that the guy had simply been able to abruptly stop murdering.”
“You mean, he stopped stabbing some girl in the middle of a murder?”
“No, he thought the killer had stopped just before he reached fifty victims.”
“Maybe Holden just has a fixation on the guy. Maybe he has OCD.”
“No, I’m the one with OCD. He’s nuts.”
“Did you ask him for an alibi?” O’Ryan said, apparently growing weary of the discussion.
“Actually I did,” I replied. “He said he was on a flight back from Barcelona after a film shoot. I wrote down the information somewhere.”
“What time do you have to report today?”
“Ten a.m., same as you. Why?”
“Maybe he is the killer,” he said. “I mean that would definitely be a career boost.”
“How would his being a killer boost his career?”
“No, our careers. Businesses will be open at nine, so we have an hour to go to the airline office and check if he was on the flight.”
“Why don’t we just do it over the phone?”
“Even with a subpoena it’s difficult. But if we go to the airline in person, show our shields and use the right balance of charm and grit, we might get lucky.”
I sensed he was doing this to get back in my good graces while casting Noel as a villain, but I was okay with that. I still had hopes for O’Ryan. And if displaying jealousy for the movie actor was the closest I could get to a show of affection from him, so be it.
Within an hour, I was showered, dressed and had my contacts in. O’Ryan rang my downstairs bell just as I was ready to go. I Starbucked a cup of chai, and roughly thirty minutes later we walked up to the counter of Iberian Airlines in Rockefeller Center just as they opened. O’Ryan’s sanctimonious manner created a stronger impact, so I let him lead. He asked the clerk if they’d had reservations in the name of Noel Holden on an incoming flight from Barcelona a few days earlier. The clerk took us over to his supervisor. Again we showed our shields and O’Ryan explained our request.
The supervisor clicked his mouse for a moment until the right screen came up, then he said, “We have a first class reservation for a Noel Holden on a red eye flight from Madrid dated two days ago. And it says that he used the ticket.”
“I thought you said Barcelona?” O’Ryan said. I shrugged.
“Do you know Mr. Holden?” I asked Mr. Rodriguez.
“The Hollywood actor?”
“Yes.”
“I’m wondering if any staff member can confirm that they actually saw him on the plane or leaving the airport that morning?”
He sighed and said the home numbers of airline personnel were confidential.
“This is a murder investigation,” O’Ryan said sternly.
“It would just take a simple phone call to ask one of the flight attendants if they remembered seeing him on the plane,” I said delicately. “We don’t want to have to bring anyone downtown for interrogation.”
The supervisor ran his mouse around its black pad until a list of phone numbers appeared. He dialed a number, then listened a minute, hung up, and dialed a second number. I figured he was getting voicemails. After he dialed the third number, I heard him speak softly in Spanish, then he handed me the phone.
“Hola señora,” I began in my awful high school Spanish.
“Alicia speaks fluent English,” he assured me.
I introduced myself and asked if she remembered yesterday’s redeye from Madrid to New York.
“What about it?”
“Did you handle first class?”
“Yes. Why?”
“Do you remember Noel Holden being on the plane?”
“Who?”
“You know, the actor Noel Holden?”
“I don’t really follow actors,” she said softly.
“Who was the last celebrity you do remember serving?” I asked testing to see if she was deliberately withholding information.
“Officer, I’ve been up for nearly forty hours over the last two days. I have to be ready in two hours to do a six-hour flight, so unless you have any questions that I can answer, I’d really like to get back to sleep.”
I thanked her and handed the phone back to the