Drowning Barbie (7 page)
Authors: Frederick Ramsay
Sunday dinner at Abe Schwartz's farm was variously described as a heart attack-about-to-happen or the tryptophan two-step. Either way, the time that might have been devoted to discussingâor rather avoiding a discussion ofâa forthcoming wedding, devolved into desultory murmurings and, in Abe's case, snoring. The dinner and its sequelae would have no long-term effect on the life and times of the citizenry of Picketsville, nor on Ike and Ruth. After all, plans are made to be modified or, in this instance, remain unspoken.
While the family attempted to stay on task, four miles away, two people, who should have known better, sat across the table from one another and downed the first of what would be many sidecars. By the end of the next week, one more body would be added to the count. It would not be discovered for several hours and its significance for several more.
One of the two was George LeBrun, convicted felon, arsonist, and local terror. He had been put away for life-plus-twenty for murder, attempted murder, and assault on a police officer among other things. But a judge, at the cajoling of a member of the Richmond ACLU and backed up by the considerable talent of one of the country's more prominent jurists and former member of the previous presidential administration, had been persuaded there were, or might reasonably be, certain technical irregularities with the evidence presented at George's first trial and ordered a new one. The Rockbridge County prosecutor would assure local police and Ike's office that re-conviction on all counts was a slam dunk. That was all well and good, but in the meantime, George posted bond and God only knew where he disappeared to. The betting was on Picketsville with revenge in his heart. Essie Sutherlin, nee Falco, would hear of his release on Monday and, unlike George, would really disappear. She would take her child and remain invisible until her husband, Billy, found her in a cheap motel in Bristol, Tennessee. He would consider and then reject the sensible possibility of joining her there.
***
Meanwhile, back in the nation's capital, Hannibal Colfax's cynicism, combined with his superior's ambition and the threat of a Congressional Oversight Committee visit to his small corner of the FBI, had resulted in one of those classic bureaucratic moments when progress and accountability cross paths and efficiency flies out the window. By late Friday, his section had, as he'd ordered, ground to a complete halt. All requests for information, some even vital to the solution of serious crimes in several parts of the country, piled up in in-boxes. Police departments from Albany, New York, to Albany, Georgia, from Bangor, Maine, to Bangor, Washington, waited while suspected perps with dental records on file roamed free. Within the remoteness of the alabaster-lined halls in the nation's capital, the possibility that a Congressional committee might create as many problems as it solves is a topic rarely, if ever, discussed.
At any rate, the dental chart belonging to the unidentified remains found in the woods outside Picketsville, Virginia, arrived, was logged in, and then sank deeper and deeper in a pile of similar requests forwarded hourly to the NDI/IR, all newly dispatched to it from all parts of the country and nearly all marked URGENT. They had continued to pile up on Saturday and Sunday. For all intents and purposes, on this weekend the National Dental Information/Imaging Repository did not exist. Thus, it would be days before a tentative ID would be forthcoming and a few more days before Ike would hear anything. And, when he did hear, it would not be what he'd hoped or expected.
As Hannibal had expected, the arrival on Monday of the Congressional Oversight Committee turned out to be all “show and no go.” An array of politicians and their sycophant aides, following an unacknowledged but familiar choreography, pranced through Hannibal's area poking into cabinets and asking questions about privacy and the potential breech of Fourth Amendment guarantees. He guessed they'd lifted the queries from the morning's
New York Times.
An Op-Ed columnist, possibly tipped off by one of the members of the committee, had devoted three column-inches to the topic and the impending visit, and wondered editorially if storing dental records of criminals was somehow another blatant example of governmental over-reach infringing once again on the right to privacy guaranteed by the Constitution. It was followed by a brief and quite inaccurate recap of the leaks that had dominated the news sometime in the recent past.
Hannibal bit his tongue and resisted the temptation to quote the amendment to them and point out that the word
privacy
does not appear in the text at all, and in any case, what his group did was not technically a search, and was most certainly warranted. The staff stayed busy and the piles of requests for matches slowly diminished. The group from across town finished their posturing and was on its way back to the halls of Congress and an early lunch, not to mention the evening news deadline, when a worker signaled to Hannibal that he had a problem.
“There's a flag on this one,” he said.
“A flag? What sort of flag?”
“This guy is dead.”
“Of course he's dead. That's why the⦔ Hannibal glanced at the sheet of paper that accompanied the chart, “â¦why the coroner for the Picketsville police requested the search.”
“No, that's not what I mean. Look, the FBI investigated this murder a bunch of years ago. They filed this chart with a notation that the case was closed, the body accounted for.”
“Wait a minute. If the case was closed, why did they send the chart over to us?”
“It came in a batch. When we set up the NDI/IR they just sent everything they had, old, stuff, new stuffâ¦everything with notations of each case's status. I guess they figured they didn't want to waste time culling through them and figured if the case was closed it wouldn't get a hit and, anyway, it would be our problem.”
“They punted it to us and now we have a dental chart of a man who's supposed to have been identified and accounted for eleven years ago. That would mean either we have a dental twin or somebody screwed up over in the big house.”
“I guess.”
“Find out who closed the case and ask them to check in with us. It's probably just a foul-up or a wrong label on the file.”
“Probably.”
Karl Hedrick had been assigned desk duty for more than a month. He wasn't complaining, but he found shuffling through the old cases of a recently retired agent bordered on the boring. Still, he could catch a quick nap now and then, which he counted as a blessing. With a new baby, sleep in his eight hundred-square-foot apartment had become a rarity. More importantly, Samantha, his wife, was on maternity leave and, between the baby and the gift of free time, she'd discovered just how small their apartment really was. Every Sunday she dragged out the real-estate ads from the paper. The words “Here's a nice place in Fairfax we could afford” had induced a cold sweat on Karl's forehead. He greeted Mondays and the need to drive downtown to his office at the FBI with relief, desk job or no desk job.
His morning had been quiet and, except for inventing excuses for why he couldn't possibly go look at some properties during lunch, uneventful. As it happened, he had been assigned all the old cases left by retired special agent Tom Phillips. Most of them needed no attention, but he had been instructed to be keep them as active/solved until all parties involved were deceased. Karl had only a quick look at most of them. Some were still on microfiche, waiting to be digitalized. Newer ones had already been processed into the latest technological format which, given the rapidity of technological innovation, would be obsolete in six months. Someday, he thought, he would find the time to sort through them, but not today. The live bad guys and open cases owned his time.
His phone rang and the person on the other end asked for Phillips.
“Not here, Special Agent Phillips retired a year ago.”
“Oh, sorry. I was told the Barbarini file was his and was given this number.”
“You got half of that right. I am Special Agent Hedrick and Phillips' files were dumped in my lap. What can I do for you?”
“I don't really know. This is Al Sampson at the NDI/IR andâ”
“The what?”
“The National Dental Imaging/Information Repository. We have a problem with an ID.”
“What kind of problem?”
“We had a request to match a dental record with anything we might have on file and we made it but it can't be right. What can you tell me about Anthony Barbarini?”
“Who?”
“Anthony Barbarini. The notation on the file says he is dead and the case closed ten or eleven years ago, but we have a newly unearthed stiff down in Virginia whose dental records match his. I need to reconcile this somehow.”
“I'll have to pull the file and call you back.”
Karl made a note and went back to sorting through the stack of papers on his desk. One dead guy more or less could wait. He'd take the file to lunch and see what's up with Anthony whoever he is, or was. He'd told Sam he was too busy at lunch to house hunt. Now it was true.
His phone rang again.
“Hedrick? This is Tom Phillips. I'mâ”
“You're a retired Special Agent. I have your cold files.”
“I know. That's why I'm calling. Listen, you will be getting a call from those dental guys aboutâ”
“I already have. Something about a guy named Barbarini.”
“Tony Barbarini. He was known as Barbie back in the day.”
“Barbie as in Barbie and Ken?”
“Maybe, I don't know where the nickname came from. Anyway, they think they have his body but that can't be.”
“Okayâ¦you might want to fill me in a little here.”
“Do you have some time? This could take a while.”
Karl looked at his watch and sighed. “Shoot.”
“Barbarini was a made man in the New York crime scene and a wannabe big-time wise guy. The word on the street back then said he had plans to take over one of the New York families. Next thing you know, he disappeared and then the word got out that Alphonse Damato and Johnny Murphy iced Barbarini. It turns out it was Damato's family he was trying muscle into. Both of them were arrested, charged, and convicted of murder, racketeering, and witness tampering a dozen years ago, okay? The federal prosecutor believed that Barbarini had been dumped in the ocean off Atlantic City.”
“In the Atlantic Ocean?”
“Yeah. A snitch said that Murphy and Damato took Barbie out in Murphy's boat one night, wrapped an anchor and chain around the guy's ankles, and dumped him overboard. There was surveillance film of Murphy dragging something in a bag, that could have been a body, onto his boat which backed up the prosecutor's assertion. It was a weak case, but juries don't like organized crime and will happily convict anybody of anything if you can show they're mobbed up.”
“Okay. So, he was drowned, but no body was recovered?”
“You're kidding, right? It's a big ocean with lots of hungry fish. Unless you had GPS coordinates and got on it within days, the chances of finding anything other than the anchor and a pair of five hundred-dollar shoes would be slim to none.”
“Maybe he slipped his chains and swam away. Made it to shore andâ”
“You don't really think he was awake when he went in, do you? Houdini he wasn't. No, they would have made sure he was dead.”
“So, if he's in the ocean, how come the dental records people are getting a request to ID a body from someplace in Virginia?”
“See, there's the problem. If it turns out that guy is Barbarini, we have a couple of goons in Sing Sing who might get sprung or, best case, get a new trial. That would create a problem because the snitch who was obviously lying back then, turned up dead a few weeks after the trial, and the evidence trail, you could say, is very, very cold. The Federal Prosecutor's Office is going to get egg on its face. The goons could walk. You see where this is going? If that's Barbie down there, nobody's going to be happy.”
“What are you telling me, Phillips?”
“I'm not telling you anything, Hedrick. Consider me the messenger, okay? I am passing on a heads-up from some folks who worked the case a dozen years ago who hope, if you follow my drift, that you will declare that this new dead guy is definitely not Barbarini.”
“So, I should do what?”
“Can't say, Hedrick. The dental records got sent over to that identity facility, so it's too late to lose them. You might go down to wherever they found the stiff and make sure it can't be Barbie.”
“And how would I do that?”
“He had other identifying marks, like a missing pinky finger. You'll say it's a dental clone or twin or something. I don't know. You figure that part out. Best case, if this new body has all his fingers, you're in the clear.”
“I'm in the clear? Excuse me, Phillips, but it's not my out-of-wedlock baby we have here. If there was a screw-up in the original investigation, it's someone else's problem.”
“Hedrick, you haven't been listening.”
“I haven't beenâ¦Wait, are you asking me to âtake one for the team'? A couple of our guys go for a quick close on the basis of a snitch's chatter, and the prosecutor isâ¦is what, running for office and needs some good ink? Sorry, not my game.”
“Listen, Hedrick, you're right, it's not your game, mine either, but the trouble is, there's some guys who worked this case then who are still active now and who are in positions that could affect your career. I don't like this any more than you do. Just know what's at stake here.”
The line went dead.
Essie Sutherlin had every right to flee from an at-large George LeBrun. It had not been that long since he'd dragged her and her then-to-be husband to a local park and attempted to kill them both. As soon as she heard the news, she'd packed up the baby and left for Bristol. She told no one, not even Billy, where she was going. Once there, she checked in to a motel owned by an old high school friend who would not register her name in the computer. George LeBrun would have his work cut out if he wanted to find her.
***
A year and a half in prison, denied the crystal meth that previously had been LeBrun's daily diet created for him a clearer state of mind, and a set of government-issue dentures had restored his face to near normality. Before his surprising andâfor practically no one elseâwelcome release from the maximum security facility, he'd used this relative clarity to assess his business opportunities, past and future. His cousin had made a botch of the meth cooking operation in his garage, and his brother likewise the importing of weed and South American glass from Norfolk. As both were no longer in play, he'd managed to assemble another, tighter network from his prison cell. Everything seemed to be going well and he'd intended to focus his attention on his retrial when the news that Ethyl Smut had been found dead in a shallow grave in the woods threw a small wrench into his not-yet-well-oiled machinery.
At this particular moment the object of his anger was not Essie Sutherlin, but whoever killed the Smut bitch. The man across the beer stained-table shook his head.
“I got nothin', George. I asked around, you know, but nobody out there has a line on her or anybody who might have snuffed her.”
“Nothing?”
Ethyl Smut meant very little to George in the big scheme of things, so her death did not disturb him that much. What did cause him to overdo his first hit since coming outside was the possibility that her death signaled the entrance of a rival drug dealer into what he considered his territory. Ethyl, for all her obvious faults, had served him well enough as an informant and dealer. Her irregular visits to the prison had enabled him to put together his current group and keep track of it, not to mention the considerable cash it generated, cash he needed to keep lawyers on retainer.
In her younger days, before the effects of her addiction had ravaged her face and melted her mind, Ethyl had served him in other ways as well. But then she'd stooped to taking on anyone, anything , any way, to support her habit. It was too bad her kid had run off like she did. He preferred younger womenâhell, everybody did. He licked his lips and fumbled in his shirt pocket for his cigarettes.
“What about her kid?”
His companion looked away and mumbled something George couldn't make out. He cleared his throat and said he had put out feelers but did not get much in the way of information. The girl was in the wind, maybe dead, maybe in a foster home Back East. He didn't know.
“You don't know or don't want to say?”
“I asked around, spent some money, and dealt some smack, but no one knew anything about the old woman's killing or where the kid went.”
“Listen, Dellinger, you disappear for a million years. Then you pop up on the radar screen looking to make some money. So, okay, we can do business, like, maybe for old time's sake. But if you're not being straight with me, if you're hiding something, it could go hard on you.”
“George, you got more important things to do than worry about the girl. Your lawyer saidâ”
“I know what that snake said.”
“All I know is that the kid has dropped out of sight. Someone said she went to live in a foster home in Virginia Beach, but I can't find her nowhere. Some said they heard she OD'ed up in Baltimore. It's a big user town now so, that makes sense. Jesus, leave it. Is it that important? I could, maybe, put somebody on it, but it would cost you.”
As far as George was concerned, she could stay out of sight in Virginia Beach or Timbuktu. If she did come back and refused to get back in the game, though, she'd have to be taken out of circulation. She knew too much and, more than that, she could send people to jailâimportant people. That is, if she decided to talk to the cops. So there could be no talking.
“There's rumors that she's come back to town,” he said.
“I ain't heard that.”
“If they're true, it could complicate my day.” George polished off his third beer and a shot. “See, it could be good if she's on the game, but not so good if she's clean and chatty. Either way it's a good bet she'll turn up in time. Stoners and junkies always do. They need their lift. Keep your eyes open just in case.”
For the moment, he needed to sort out who bumped off the old lady and deal with the guy on the other side of the table who, George was convinced, had an agenda that had put them on opposite sides, so to speak. Some people, like this guy, were too sentimental about things like family and friends. He leaned back in his chair, finished his beer, and realized he liked the way this was working out. It's a lot easier working on the outside than in.
***
“Where's Essie?” Ike asked. The main office seemed unnaturally quiet. The few deputies who were on their way out, shrugged.
“She called in and said she needed a few personal days and asked me to fill in,” Rita, the night dispatcher, said. “I've fixed it up so Darcie Billingsley will sub for me tonight. Things are quieter at night and her kids are old enough and smart enough to go to bed and stay there. Besides, Ike, she needs the work.”
“Okay, I'm good with that, but why did Essie go off? Did she say?”
“You haven't heard?”
“Apparently not. What should I have heard?”
“George LeBrun. He's out of jail. Some smarty pants lawyer from Richmond got him a re-trial hearing and he's out on bond, or something.”
“Ah, that would explain it. I have seven text messages on my phone. One of them must be about that.”
“You have seven texts and you haven't responded?”
“I don't like text messages. You want to contact me, call, write, drop in and chat. Nobody's time is so damned important that they have to resort to misspellings and ridiculous contractions just because it will save thirty seconds of their precious time. So, no, I haven't responded. I am sure there is an official announcement on my computer or in the mail. What has that to do with Essieâ¦? Oh, crap, I almost forgot. It's George LeBrun who's on the loose. Where'd she go?”
“She didn't say. She was just scared of what LeBrun would do to her if he found her.”
“How about Billy?”
“He's off duty for two days anyway. I guess they've both bolted.”
“Billy knows better. See if you can find either of them and let me know. And, thanks, Rita.”
“No probs, Boss.”
Ike slipped into his office and nearly tripped over the bag of miscellany from his father's barn. He gave it a kick and sent it into the corner. Two dead guys and George LeBrun on the loose trumped a bag of trash. He paused and stared at the bag again.
“Might it have been left in that particular barn because whoever left it there wanted it found by someone who would tell me? But who's that clever and if they are, wouldn't it be simpler to drop it off here? Maybe they didn't realize what they were doing as a conscious thing. Maybe it was one of those Freudian worms Ruth was talking about.”
“You talking to me?” Rita called from the outer office.
“Nope, just consulting with my inner cop.”
“If you say so. While you have his attention, ask if he can get some more of those coffee thingies. The night crew went through the whole box. That's what you get when you serve up drinkable coffee.”
“On it. By the way, Rita, you've lived here all your life. What can you tell me about Ethyl Smut and her daughter?”
“You have enough overtime in the budget to cover the hours it will take to tell you? I mean there's a thick book on the old lady and another, thinner one, on the girl. Neither one of them is pretty reading, you could say.”
“Check with me before you go home and, yeah, I can cover it.”
“Just kidding about the money, but hey, if you got it⦔
“I do, and I will.”
Ike turned back to the papers on his desk, booted up his computer, cursed at three error messages and wished Samantha Ryder had never been shanghaied by NSA. And why did that girl in Lee Henry's Hair Cuttery seem familiar, and where the hell was the kid from the academy, TAK?