Fourth Victim (11 page)

G
igi was at least partially correct in her assessment of Brian W. Stanfill, Esquire. He ran his practice out of a storefront in a strip mall on Sunrise Highway in Seaford. As to whether she was right about the lawyer being slimy, Serpe couldn’t yet say. Cops, even disgraced ex-detectives, don’t, as a rule, hold lawyers in high regard, but Stanfill had a pleasant enough phone voice and had been very courteous when Joe called to schedule the appointment. What he did know was that Stanfill wasn’t a complete idiot. For while the strip mall had the classic Long Island lineup of stores—deli, dojo, pizzeria, Chinese take-out, bar, card store—it also contained a doc-in-the-box walk-in clinic and a real estate sales firm.

The lawyer’s office was shouldered on one side by the dojo and by the walk-in clinic on the other. The real estate company was next to the clinic. So it was by no means coincidental that one of the two biggest signs in Stanfill’s front window advertised a set fee for house closings. The other sign boasted of his success in medical malpractice and personal injury law suits. His mall neighbors must have just loved him. According to other window advertisements, Stanfill did criminal defense work—with a particular expertise in DUI and DWI—and flat fee divorce settlements. He also did mediation, prepared tax returns, pre-nups, and wills. The man had a bigger menu than Applebee’s. Joe wondered if he did card tricks too.

Serpe pressed his face against the front window, cupping his gloved hands at the sides of his eyes, but couldn’t see a thing through the maze of signs. The door glass was darkly tinted, but not quite to opacity. Stanfill’s name—the “a” missing completely and the bottom of the “f” torn away—and his title were displayed at the top of the door with his office hours listed below. Hanging inside the door was one of those little
Out of the Office-Will Return At …
signs. The clockface on the sign indicated Stanfill would be back at 2 PM. Problem was that 2 PM had come and gone nearly three hours ago and that his appointment with Joe was in less than five minutes. Serpe didn’t pay much attention to the window sign. People were always careless about stuff like that.

Serpe tugged hard on the door handle. It stubbornly refused to pull back. He rapped on the glass to no good end. This crap was hard enough to stomach when his oil customers blew him off, but to have wasted his time driving down to the South Shore after a twenty stop day, fully pissed him off. He thought about getting a few slices of pizza or a quart of pork chow fun for dinner. Angry as he was, Serpe realized he didn’t have much of an appetite.

He got halfway to his car and about-faced. He stormed through the parking lot to the end of the mall building and went around back. Here was the real world, the back alley, no neon signs or fancy facades here. This was a cop’s world, an oil driver’s world; a place of loading docks and Dumpsters, of rotting refuse and kitchen steam, of little brown men in white aprons smoking cigarettes. Serpe counted backdoors and found Stanfill’s. Unlike its front counterpart, the pitted metal backdoor pulled right open.

Before the door swung shut behind him, just enough light leaked in with him to let Serpe catch a glimpse of the storage room. He called out Stanfill’s name and ran his right hand along the wall. He flicked up the toggle switch and a bare bulb mounted to the ceiling popped on. The unpainted walls were unadorned, the tape and joint compound showing at the seams on the bare plasterboard. There was a bathroom to his left, shelves of office supplies on his right, and another door straight ahead. As he walked forward, checking to see if the bathroom was empty—it was—Serpe was treated to a muted serenade of grunts and screams, thuds and smacks coming through the walls from the dojo.

He pulled open the storage room door, once again calling out Stanfill’s name. There was, as before, no reply, although the dojo chorus was even louder in here. He found the wall switch, but the light fixtures in this room were a few steps up from a bare bulb. There were a series of recessed halogen highhats buried in the drop ceiling. This too seemed to be a storage room of sorts, but for case records and files, not toilet paper and ink cartridges. The walls were lined with file cabinets. Serpe tugged on some of the cabinet drawers. Locked. The walls above the cabinets were painted an off white and the floors were covered in a cheap gray industrial carpet.

Unlike the two other doors, the door in the file room pushed out into the office. The office was dark, but not completely black. Stray light from the parking lot filtered in through small spaces between the front window signs and through the door. Even before Serpe stepped into the vacated door jamb, he knew something was wrong. He could feel it and he could smell it. There was a heavy masking odor of Chinese food in the air and beneath it, the cloying, unmistakable stink of shit. Joe Serpe stopped moving, stopped breathing. He listened for noises that didn’t belong, but all he could hear was the whoosh and splash of passing cars riding through snow melt puddles in the parking lot and the ever present dojo soundtrack. Serpe stepped back, shut the lights, and pulled out Healy’s Glock in one seamless motion. Generally, it would be bad form to rack a weapon at this point, but given that he had made no secret of his presence, the unmistakable click-click of a round being chambered wasn’t such a terrible thing. It would certainly let any potential attacker know that Joe was more than an agrieved husband armed with more than complaints about an unfaithful wife.

“All right, motherfucker! When I step into that room, I want you face down on the ground, hands behind your head. I come in there and see you in any other position or holding anything that even looks like a weapon and I’m gonna blow your nuts off. Now, get the fuck down on the ground!”

Serpe listened closely, but couldn’t hear anything more than what he heard before. He crouched low, scanning the office as best he could. Neither the view nor the lighting was what he would have wanted. None of this is what he would have wanted. Joe could make out Stanfill’s desk tucked in the far corner close to the front window, a few chairs facing the desk, a leather couch on the wall opposite, and a little magazine table next to the couch. No body. The one problem was that because the door opened out into the office, it created a big blind spot.

Serpe stood slowly out of the crouch and took silent steps back into the file room. He took a few deep breaths to calm himself, checked the Glock, counted to three in his head. At three, he ran. When his foot got near the threshold of the office door, Joe shoulder-rolled. He hit hard, crashing into the chairs in front of Stanfill’s desk, but at least he had the corner of the desk between him and the blindspot. Righting himself, pushing the Glock before him, Serpe peeked around the desk. There
was
someone hiding in the blind spot, but he was in no shape to do Joe Serpe or anyone else any harm, ever.

It was difficult to say much about the body other than it was a man’s and that he was dressed in an expensive suit. He was cold to the touch and lay on his side, hands and feet tied behind him. Serpe didn’t want to risk turning on a light to get a better look. Instead he went back into the rear store room and searched around for a flashlight. He found one in a box on a shelf along with a hand-crank radio, a first aid kit, candles, matches, and other emergency paraphenalia. Nice try, Serpe thought, but there were emergencies that you can’t prepare for. He latched the backdoor, tested the flash, and went back into the office.

Serpe made sure not to aim the flashlight out toward the parking lot as he more carefully examined the body. It was a pretty gruesome scene. The smell of urine and feces was very intense close to the body. The man’s face had been savagely beaten to a pulpy mess, his nose pushed back in to the skull, lips swollen and shredded. A bloody gag stuck to a strip of duct tape, one end of the tape still attached to the dead man’s cheek, hung down to the carpet. Bits of the man’s broken teeth were embedded in the gag. There was blood spray all over the corner of the office. When Joe checked more carefully behind the body, he saw that the man’s fingers had been broken and that one had been cut off. The crudely amputated finger lay in a sticky pool of drying blood a foot or two from the wall. Serpe removed the stiff’s wallet from his back pants pocket. It
was
Stanfill. It had been a very slow and painful death for the lawyer.

Joe didn’t know how to feel about it. There was nothing he could see that tied the lawyer’s murder to Rusty Monaco. The best lawyers on Earth made enemies, so Serpe had no doubt that a cheap storefront shyster like Brian W. Stanfill might collect them by the dozen. During his own divorce, Joe had been angry enough at his wife’s scumbag lawyer to have ripped the asshole’s heart out and fed it to him in small pieces. It wasn’t difficult to imagine a hundred scenarios that could have resulted in Stanfill being tortured to death. Now wasn’t the time to consider them. Serpe had his own worries.

He felt like an ass for making an appointment with Stanfill instead of just walking in off the street. Chances were the lawyer had a record of the appointment somewhere, either written in a day planner, on his Blackberry, or on his computer. Even if he hadn’t written it down, there would be phone records. “Fuck!” he hissed to himself. He had to get out of there. If he could manage that, Serpe thought, he’d be okay. This was Nassau County, not Suffolk, and the NCPD would have no reason to tie him to Stanfill or Rusty Monaco or his sister. Joe would just be a guy who wanted to have a lawyer prepare a new will.

As carefully as he could, Serpe retraced his steps and tried to make sure he hadn’t left anything behind that would tie him to having been in the office. He even replaced the flashlight before heading back out into the alley. It seemed empty in the back, no one out smoking a cigarette, no one making a delivery. Joe walked quickly back around to the lot and made his way to his car in the shadows at the fringes of the parking area. Inside the car, he called Stanfill’s number.

“Sorry, Mr. Stanfill, this is Joe Serpe. I’m running a little late,” he said when the machine picked up. “It’s about five-fifteen now. I should be at your office in a few minutes.”

Serpe then started his car, left the parking lot with his headlights off, drove around the block, and re-entered the lot a minute or two later. He made sure to swing into the lot too fast and blare his horn at a few cars. He parked as closely as he could to Stanfill’s office, removed his gloves, walked over to the office and banged loudly on front window and locked door. He made sure to comment to a woman leaving the dojo with her kid about how a lawyer couldn’t be trusted. He called Stanfill’s number again and left a somewhat angry phone message about the lawyer not being in his office. Serpe bought a slice of pizza to go, making sure to ask the counterman if he knew when the lawyer a few doors down was scheduled to get back in.

“Guy’s an asshole,” the counterman said. “I don’t got anything to do with him.”

As Serpe left, he hoped those weren’t the last words that would be spoken about Stanfill. He didn’t know the lawyer and he wasn’t sure why he should care, but after seeing the way the man had died, it just didn’t seem like a fitting epitaph.

Fiddle-Faddle’s was a big pub on Greenwich Avenue in the Village. The old plank floor had as many swells and dips to it as the surface of the Hudson on a blustery day. Healy figured the place would be busy on a Friday night. He figured right. The music was loud beyond his tolerance. He was old, he thought. You get near fifty and everything you once loved starts to make you cranky. There were hockey and basketball games up on the TV screens. Horrible thing, the mixing of TV sets and bars. It was hard enough to pay attention to someone in a loud bar. Throw in TVs and. His crankiness was showing again. It was wall to wall people and he wasn’t sure he would be able to find Blades in the crowd. She found him.

“What are you having?” she asked, pulling him by the arm over to the bar.

“Beer.”

“I’m not sure that’s generic enough.”

“No wonder you get along with Skip. You’re a wiseass.”

Blades twisted her body and looked at her backside. “That’s not most men’s reaction.”

Healy felt himself blush and was glad of the dim lighting. “Corona. I’ll have a Corona.”

“You gonna be daring and have a lime with that?”

“Sure, I like life on the edge.”

She was still laughing when the bartender took the order. When she came back with their drinks, Blades directed Healy into a private room only a few feet from the bar.

The side room had an unstocked bar, an unused pool table, and bench seating. There was even less light in here than in the main bar. They sat down on one of the benches.

“Why this place and not Cloudy Dan’s, huh?”

“One reason is I live around here,” she said.

“You gay?”

“You are old school, aren’t you? Woman cop’s gotta be a dyke or a slut.”

“Whoa. I didn’t mean anything by it.”

“I strike you as a lesbian, Healy?”

“Not really, but what the fuck do I know about lesbians? How am I supposed to know if your special friends at DOI are men or women?”

“Well, I’m not gay. Okay then?”

“What’s the other reason we’re here?” he asked, happy to change subjects.

“Too many eyes and ears at Cloudy Dan’s.”

“Maybe, but they’d all be IAB.”

“Yeah, and maybe sometimes there’s things to say that’s even too hot for friendly ears to know about.”

That got Healy’s attention. There had been a few times during his own tenure at IAB that investigations were too hot to discuss with even your closest friends. This was particularly true with big media cases. The press didn’t give a shit about long term, far-reaching investigations. They seemed much like the public they were supposed to serve in that they had a short attention span. But if a street crime squad guns down an African immigrant in a hallway or if a drunken cop plows into a crowd of people at a street fair, then the press is all over it. The weird thing here was that Healy couldn’t see the sexy angle with Monaco.