it was a vagrant passed out on the sidewalk. Then they noticed all the blood.”
“Holy shit!” O’Hara joined in, then downed his drink.
“You can’t run with this just yet, Mickey, but there’s something different with this pop-and-drop.”
“What?”
“He was strangled and beaten. But no bullet wounds.”
O’Hara banged the glass on the wooden bar and, making a circular gesture with his hand over their drinks, barked to the bartender: “Johnny, all this on my tab. We’ve got to go!”
[TWO]
Loft Number 2055 Hops Haus Tower 1100 N. Lee Street, Philadelphia Sunday, November 1, 1:14 A.M.
Tossing his suit coat and kicking off his loafers, H. Rapp Badde, Jr., chased the beautiful and giggling Cleopatra past the floor-to-ceiling windows of the living room. His intent: to make the beast with two backs after ripping off the Halloween outfit as fast as humanly possible.
I love that there’re no other high-rises near here so no one can see us through those big windows.
I can do whatever the hell I want. . . .
It wasn’t the first time that the idea of doing whatever the hell he wanted—damn the consequences—had entered the mind of H. Rapp Badde, Jr.
For almost all of his thirty-two years, Badde—a fairly fit, five-foot-eleven two-hundred-pounder with a thin face, close-cropped hair, and medium-dark skin—had learned that what he could not get with his charisma or his arrogant badgering, he could always get by subtly, or sometimes not so subtly, playing his favorite card, that of being a disadvantaged minority.
It was a tactic—a remarkably effective one considering that Philly as a whole was half black, some sections up to three-quarters—that he had learned from his father. Horatio R. Badde, Sr., had used it successfully to work himself up from being a small-business owner—first a barber in South Philadelphia, then the owner of a string of barbershops throughout the city—to being elected to the Philadelphia City Council, and then, almost ten years later, to the office of mayor.
Which was exactly Rapp’s planned next step: to become mayor. He was banking both on the name recognition—“Mayor Badde” still was familiar to voters despite the eight years since his father held the office—and what he considered to be his own accomplishments as a city councilman. And he was going to let nothing get in his way. There’d already been rumors trying to tie him to voter fraud, but he publicly dismissed them as exactly that—rumors that were simply a part of petty politics.
Rapp Badde did as he pleased—damn the consequences—and the Hop Haus Tower condominium was no exception.
The tax rolls of the Philadelphia County Recorder of Deeds, in Room 156 at City Hall, showed Loft Number 2055—a year-old 2,010-square-foot, two-bedroom, two-bath condominium on the twentieth floor—as being owned by the Urban Venture Fund, in care of Mr. James R. Johnson, JRJ Certified Public Accountants, 1611 Walnut Street, Suite 1011, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19103.
There was similar information on the books at the complex.
The building management kept a regularly updated computer file known as PROPERTY OWNERS: PERMANENT RESIDENTS & REGISTERED GUESTS. It listed everyone who was officially on file and showed that 2055’s permanent resident was named Johnson, James R., and its listed registered guest was a Harper, Janelle.
While it wasn’t unusual for the names of owners and guests to be different—there were, for example, many unmarried couples who cohabited, as well as many lawfully married couples whose surnames were not the same—neither James Johnson nor Janelle Harper had a genuine financial investment in Loft Number 2055.
In fact, the apartment’s official owner, the Urban Venture Fund, was a corporate entity solely owned by one H. R. Badde, Jr., 1611 Walnut Street, Suite 1011, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19103.
That was in technical terms.
Practically speaking, Unit 2055’s permanent resident and its (very) regular guest were actually Jan Harper and Rapp Badde.
Never mind that Mr. James R. Johnson, CPA, had never set foot in the place.
And never mind that Badde had purchased, with cash, the pied-à-terre love nest.
And certainly never mind that the funds for the purchase were a small part of those provided to his mayoral election campaign chest by a generous businessman who believed in the politician, in his future at City Hall, and his influence therein for old friends.
Twenty-five-year-old Jan Harper—who had a full and curvy five-six, one-forty body and a silky light-brown skin tone—was down to barely-more than Cleopatra’s golden-colored sheer panties and plastic-jeweled collar and crown as she ran into the bedroom. Rapp was hot on her heels.
And just as she jumped on the king-size bed’s thick goose-down comforter, her legs