Fourth Victim (17 page)

H
e was walking down one of the paths in the courtyard of the Nellie Bly Houses, only the green paint patches had been replaced by grass so green and thick it might well have been carpeting. But the overwhelming scent of cut grass put a lie to that notion. The sun was out everywhere except over the four towers, whose beige brick had turned blood red. A dense, gray layer of fog hung over the buildings and when he looked up at the fog, it descended slowly down to the ground. He could not move as the fog washed over him, settling at his feet. He could not see the grass through the veil, but when he looked back at the buildings he saw they were once again beige; the blood washed off in the fog.

He smiled. As he smiled, the fog rose. As it rose, it lifted him up. Oddly, there was no sense of movement, no noise, no wind. He did not look down, but he was more curious than terrified. Passing the fifth floor, his mouth watered at the smell of frying bacon. He saw Evelyn Marsden standing out on the terrace, flanked on her right by Edgerin the little boy and by Edgerin the teenager on her left. None of the apartments had terraces, yet there they were. Evelyn and young Edgerin were smiling and waving. Teenage Edgerin was angry, thrusting his right arm skyward. He waved back to the Marsdens and their eyes followed him up. When he looked back at the terrace, teenage Edgerin was gone as were the smiles from his mother and younger self.

When the elevator of fog had risen to the rooftops, he finally looked down and noticed two graves in the new carpet of grass. He was too high to read the names on the headstones, but he knew them just the same. He stepped off the fog onto the roof of Building #4 and followed footprints that had been painted on the tar like dance steps. They led to the edge of the building that Bogarde DeFrees used as a launching pad or from which he was launched into a better world. He felt someone close behind him and he spun around from the ledge. It was the teenage Edgerin Marsden. He was furious, his eyes raging as he made stabbing gestures with his arm. “Look! Look! Look! Look! Look!” he screamed, “Look!” He could hear himself asking Marsden what it was he was supposed to look at, but got no reply.

Healy knew it was a dream, but didn’t fight it and tried not to get in the way of it. Sick with worry, he hadn’t slept at all last night. He wasn’t so much worried about Joe Serpe. Serpe could handle himself. The lies Joe told Keyes were his alone and if there was a price to pay, Joe would pay it. No, he was more worried about Raiza Hines. She could handle herself too, but the bump and sudden transfer were wrong. He could feel it. Healy had seen what happened to cops whose careers were built on a convenient lie or a favor. The NYPD was enormous and there were a few hundred places to bury mistakes or potential stars who got too far too fast and whose rabbi had since fallen out of favor. Merit and performance were no guarantees either, but they didn’t evaporate as fast as lies or favors.

He had a lot of coffee and got through the morning pretty well, but by noon he was finding it nearly impossible to keep his eyes open. At Gigi’s suggestion, he’d gone into the spare office in the trailer and stretched out on the old couch they kept there for occasions such as this. It wasn’t ten minutes before he was deep into sleep. When the dream had come to him, he could not say. It morphed into something else, something about his wife Mary, and then there was nothing but the womb of sleep itself.

At about four, Gigi came in and shook him awake. Joe had called and said he was headed back into the yard. Healy felt rested, if not better. He thanked Gigi and called Serpe on the truck.

“So nap time’s over?” Joe said. “Gigi told me you were out like a light.”

“She did, huh?”

“I’ll be in in fifteen minutes. What is it that couldn’t wait?”

“Can you cash everybody out tonight? There’s something I gotta take care of.”

“What?”

“I made a mistake that I think I’ve still got time to fix.”

Healy did it right. He called his brother and asked what kind of champagne he should buy. George knew about stuff like that. Bob didn’t need any help with the flowers. He always had a good eye for flowers. Driving in, he kept finding little pieces of windshield stuck in the folds if his seat. He wasn’t angry about it. He knew that no matter how thorough you were, there were always cracks and crevices and things just small enough to hide in them. It was like the dream he’d had that afternoon. Pieces of it came back to him as he made his way into the city. He still had no idea what the hell any of it meant beyond an expression of frustration and grief. As he pulled his car into a legal spot, he wasn’t much concerned with grief or frustration. He was too busy feeling like a sixteen-year-old on a first date.

She looked stunned when she saw him standing in the hallway, an arrangement of two dozen white and yellow roses and a cold bottle of Mumm’s in his hands.

“Congratulations, Detective Hines. These are for you,” he said, handing her the flowers. “This is for us.” He waved the bottle. “Do I get a second chance?”

She put the flowers down, reached out for his hand, and pulled him in.

W
hen he woke up, he could feel Blades’ body against his. And as outrageous as the sex had been, he thought he enjoyed the proximity and the warmth of her body almost as much. Almost. He pulled her closer, her back pressed hard to his chest and abdomen. “You’re up,” she said.

“Gimme a few minutes. It takes us old white guys some time.”

“Yeah, but when you get goin’ …”

They laughed quietly.

“I didn’t take it.”

“You didn’t take what?” he asked, not understanding.

“The bump, the transfer.”

“Why?”

She spun around in his arms to face him. “Because after I came down from the high of it, I knew you were right. The timing
was
suspicious. So I did a little checking and found out that this was a rush job. Skip said he was happy for me, but that he wasn’t the one who put me in for it. It wasn’t easy and I know I pissed a whole lotta people off, but I sort of pieced together how.” she stopped, noticing that Healy seemed not to be listening. “Are you paying me any kind of attention?”

“What did you say?” he asked.

“That I knew you were right.”

“Not that part,” he said, jumping out of bed as if he were shot out of it.

“What part then?”

“Coming down.”

“After I came down from the high of it, that part?”

“That’s it! I know what the dream means now. Come on. Get dressed.”

“Dream! You crazy? I gotta shower.”

“Later, come on.”

“Where we going?”

“Long Island.”

There were only the vaguest hints of sunrise toward the East River. The sun hadn’t quite reached over the tops of the buildings to throw its light this far west. As they stepped out of Blades’ building, a bug buzzed by their ears and smacked into the door behind them. The glass broke, but didn’t shatter. They both froze for a second, puzzling over insects in January. And when they turned to see the shape of the hole in the glass, they understood and hit the deck. Something buzzed overhead and pinged off the door handle. Both Blades and Healy went for their weapons. They both rolled for cover behind a tree and the minivan parked in front of it. When Blades then reached for her cell, Healy shook his head no.

“Not yet,” he said. “If we get the cops involved now, there’ll be time for people to cover their tracks.”

Blades put the phone down. They waited for another shot that didn’t come. Tires screeched. They combat crawled to Healy’s car and sat with their backs to the passenger side doors, heads below window level.

“You okay?” Healy asked.

“Never been shot at before,” she said, taking huge gulps of air. “Always a first time.”

“For alotta things.”

The four of them stood around the desk looking at the photograph Edgerin Marsden had taken of the Brooklyn skyline.

“He took this picture from the roof of one of the other towers of the Nellie Bly Houses,” Healy said. “And there was more than one taken from up there. Evelyn had them all over her walls. He was up there a lot. My bet is, we check around and we’ll find he was up there taking pictures the day Bogarde DeFrees took his solo flight. It’s why the kid was executed the next day.”

“It’s interesting, but pretty thin, Bob,” Serpe said.

“Maybe not. Bla—Detective Hines, why don’t you tell my partner and Detective Monaco’s sister here the short version of what you uncovered about your promotion and transfer.”

“I was promoted and transferred because Assistant Chief of Detectives Desmond Green signed off on it and told his subordinates to make it happen immediately.”

“Desi Green is Assistant Chief of Detectives!” Serpe was incredulous. “I knew Desi from Brooklyn North Narcotics when he first made detective. Nice guy and an okay cop, but how the hell did he get—”

“In the wake of the DeFrees incident and because we needed to put on a unified face for the world after nine/eleven, one of the concessions the mayor and commissioner made in order to stop the constant protests was to appoint more African-Americans and Hispanics to positions of authority inside the department,” Healy said. “Remember, I was still on the job then. Guess who was the leading citizen advisor to the commissioner on the appointments?”

“Burgess?”

“That’s right, Joe, Reverend James Burgess.”

“But how does it all fit together that winds up with Rusty Monaco and the other drivers getting murdered?”

Healy turned to face Georgine Monaco. “Look, Gigi, I’m gonna say some stuff about your brother that maybe you don’t wanna hear. So, if you’re not up for it—”

“No, that’s okay,” she said. “I got no fantasies about who my brother was. Go ahead.”

“The way I see it is that McCauly and Monaco show up to make their arrest and then this woman comes and tells them about the disturbance in the accessway to the roof,” Healy paused, taking a deep breath. “Rusty investigates and when he gets up on the roof, he witnesses Bogarde DeFrees being thrown off the roof by Burgess himself or one of his associates.”

“This may sound stupid, guys,” Gigi interrupted, “but why would an important man like Burgess throw some dumbass kid off a roof?”

“That’s not a stupid question,” Joe said. “The thing is, I don’t know why. Maybe the kid stumbled onto Burgess making a dirty business deal. Maybe the kid worked for Burgess and fucked up bad. Like Healy says, maybe it wasn’t Burgess, but one of his associates. For now, let’s work backwards and hear Bob out.”

Gigi agreed. “Okay.”

Joe nodded for Healy to continue.

“So the kid gets tossed and let’s assume it was by Burgess or someone associated with him. Meanwhile, Rusty spots Edgerin Marsden taking pictures from one of the adjoining rooftops. Rusty confronts Burgess. Burgess offers to bribe Rusty if he’ll take some heat for the kid going off the roof. Monaco agrees to a price, but what Burgess doesn’t know is that there’s photo evidence of the the murder. Rusty sees that with pictures, he can squeeze Burgess like an orange that won’t ever run out of juice. Rusty cuts McCauly in because he needs his partner’s help in tracking down the photographer on the other roof. They find out it’s Edgerin Marsden and they take the kid out and steal his photo bag. Maybe they did it themselves or had someone who owed them do it. I don’t know.”

“Okay, but why would Rusty drive an oil truck for two years and not just take the money and run?” Joe asked.

“Good question. My guess is that either Burgess convinced Monaco he couldn’t raise a lot of money all at once and that he would have to be patient or Rusty, who was a thug but no idiot, understood that it wouldn’t look good for a detective third who had just come out the other end of a scandal to retire to a life of luxury in Florida. Maybe it was a little bit of both.”

“Why the protests?” Joe was curious. “Didn’t they just bring more attention to Burgess?”

“Burgess is a smart man. It would have brought even more attention to him if he didn’t protest. How suspicious would that look, the most vocal and effective black leader in the city not raising up his voice, huh? Besides, his ass was covered by the deal he made with Monaco.”

“But why kill my brother and the other drivers if him and Burgess had this deal and Rusty was headed to Florida?”

“The DOI investigation. Look, if Burgess is so plugged into city politics and business that he has all these contracts and can get his cronies appointed to positions in the NYPD, he must have known about the DOI investigation. Maybe he knew about how they were looking into Rusty’s background too. Put yourself in Burgess’s shoes. You might be willing to cop a plea on corruption and do a few years in a country club prison. But there’s no country club for murderers. Rusty would’ve flipped on him in a second to save his own neck. Burgess knew that, so your brother had to go. But you can’t only target only Rusty. It might look suspicious to the DOI. On the other hand, if he’s just one of a bunch of oil drivers who are robbed and murdered … “

“What about Stanfill?” Joe wanted to know. “Why torture him to death?”

“That’s easy,” Healy said. “He was Monaco’s lawyer.”

“So what?”

“McCauly killed him,” Blades said. “We think it was him who shot at us this morning too.”

“Holy shit! I get it,” Joe said. “Gigi, you said that McCauly got an envelope at the reading of the will, right?”

“Yeah, a plain white envelope. He took it and left.”

“Imagine the expression on old Finnbar’s fat face when he opened it and found that the blackmail photos weren’t in there like he thought they were supposed to be,” Joe said. “He probably went apeshit and figured the lawyer fucked him and kept the pictures for himself to use. He went back to Stanfill and tried torturing him into telling where the photos were. Problem was, Stanfill didn’t know where they were.”

“How can you know that?” Blades asked.

“Because torture works,” Serpe said. “And I saw how bad Stanfill was tortured. He would’ve talked … Shit,
I
would’ve talked a long time before it got to that point. And there’s something else. Stanfill was killed sometime that afternoon, but Gigi’s apartment was ransacked that night, sometime between when she went out and when she found me on her floor. If McCauly had gotten the pictures from Stanfill, he wouldn’t have needed to check Gigi’s apartment.”

Almost unconsciously, all of them turned their gaze at Georgine Monaco.

“Don’t look at me. I don’t know where those fucking pictures are. I swear.”

“Okay,” Serpe said, putting his arm around her shoulders. “Is there anyplace you can think of where they might be, because without them, all we got is a nice fairy tale to tell that no one’s gonna believe.”

“Like I told you, Joe, me and Rusty weren’t exactly close.”

“He left you the money.”

“I don’t know, I’m his only real family left besides that cunt ex-wife and their kid.”

“You think maybe he hid it in his police stuff that he left his son?”

“Nah, my brother always thought the kid was better off without him. I think that insurance policy money in the kid’s name was all he would give and he never woulda left anything his ex could use for money.”

“Can you think of any place he mighta hid the pictures at?” Blades asked.

“I guess we can check that storage place in Plainview again. I still got the key,” Gigi said. “But there wasn’t anything in there except the money.”

“Bob,” Joe said, “help me get the hatch cover off the International’s tank.”

It was an inspired idea, but the picture or pictures were nowhere to be found either in the grocery bags themselves or stuck between the bundles of money Rusty Monaco had left his sister. Serpe had to go out on the truck, so it fell to Gigi, Raiza Hines, and Healy to re-assemble the cash into neat, rubber-banded piles. Healy stacked the piles into blocks, which he then double-wrapped with heavy duty plastic and duct tape. He put the wrapped blocks in more plastic before putting all the money back into the International’s tank and locking the hatch.