Fourth Victim (14 page)

“Here you go.” She handed him a bottle of Corona. She had one of her own.

“Thanks.”

“The couch looks pretty, but sleeping on it don’t do much for your back.”

“I’ll live with it,” he said. “What did you think about the kid’s photographs?”

“Edgerin Marsden’s? They were good, I guess. I ain’t much for photography. Why you wanna know?”

“I’m not sure. There’s just something about them that I can’t get outta my head.”

“Whatever. Let me go get you some bedding.”

As he watched Blades walk away from him, he felt a pang of desire that made him as uncomfortable as anything he’d felt in years. It also felt pretty damned good.

M
ost mornings it was usually dark and hauntingly quiet when Joe Serpe got to the yard. Sometimes the quiet would be shattered by an early morning LIRR train pulling in or out of Ronkonkoma Station or, when the wind blew just right, by the whining of jet engines from the airport. Snow only added to eerie silence. And it was snowing intensely by the time he got out of his car to unlock the chain link gate. Gigi got out of the car to help. She wasn’t the type of woman to sit on her hands and let other people do for her. Joe had to confess, if only to himself, he kind of liked having Gigi with him. She seemed to like it too. Gigi fit in Joe’s world. Blue collars didn’t frighten her.

“Keeps snowing like this,” he said, looking up into the dawn sky, “and I won’t send any trucks out.”

“You’ll lose alotta money, won’t you?”

“Some, but it’s not worth getting someone killed by a skidding truck or having a truck flip over and spilling three thousand gallons of home heating oil into a front yard.”

“Makes sense.”

“Besides,” he said, wiping the snow off his face and turning to Gigi, “if it stays this bad, most guys won’t put trucks out today and my customers will still be there tomorrow.”

When he reached the key to the lock, Serpe froze.

“What is it?” she asked.

“The lock’s cut. Get back in the car.”

“But—”

“Get back in the car!” he barked, pocketing the keys and replacing them with his Glock. “I’m not waving to you in five minutes, call nine-one-one and drive the hell away from here.”

She didn’t argue. Serpe waited until he saw her get behind the driver’s wheel and lock the doors. He undid the ruined lock and unraveled the chain that held the two sides of the fence gates together. He wiggled his gun hand into the opening and pushed the gate back so he cleared enough space to walk through sideways. He closed the gate behind him so that if something happened to him, Gigi would have time to get away. As Serpe walked slowly ahead, he realized he should have taken the flashlight out of his trunk. It was just light enough to render the flash useless, but there were spots in an oil yard that were dark even under a noonday sun. He didn’t turn back.

First thing he did was to look at the snow for other footprints. There weren’t any as far as he could see, but that didn’t mean someone hadn’t broken in before the snow started falling. He turned to his right and saw that the lock on the trailer door had also been cut. He was tempted to check the trailer first, but thought that might be a set up. He’d be very vulnerable climbing the stairs and turning his back. So Serpe walked away from the trailer and did as thorough a search through the rest of the yard as he could in the diffuse light and intensifying snow. He was glad Healy was stuck in the city. Not that Healy couldn’t handle himself. Serpe’d seen him in action. It was just that he didn’t know his way around the yard and the trucks the way Joe did and that was dangerous.

Serpe climbed on top of the tugboat’s tank, which gave him a good perspective on the entire yard and adjoining lots. Nothing. At least nothing out of the ordinary. By the time he’d climbed down off the truck and checked under the chassis of all the trucks, his mouth was cotton dry and his heart was pounding. It was time for the trailer.

He nearly slipped climbing the snow slick wooden stairs, which were wobbly at the best of times. The lock clanked to the landing without much of a fight, but Serpe hesitated to go into the trailer. As open to attack as he had been before now, it was nothing compared to his vulnerability at this point. The trailer door opened out. If he stood behind it, the door would pin him against the landing rail. He’d have nowhere to go and no way to get there. If he stood on the steps and threw the door open, he would be as easy a target as a shooter was ever likely to find. Still, he chose to open the door from the steps.

He yanked the door open and dived off the steps. When he hit the ground, he rolled into shooting position. Nothing. No one. No sound. He leaned over, found a stone with his free hand, and tossed it through the open door. Again, nothing. He carefully climbed the stairs, came into the trailer, sweeping his gun at the blind spots in the room. He was alone, but when he turned on the office lights, he saw that Santa had delivered a late Christmas gift.

Blades was right, the couch was incredibly uncomfortable and Healy hadn’t slept very well. Problem was, Healy couldn’t blame it on the furniture. He had spent half the time dreading that Blades might come to him in the night. He spent the other half hoping she would. It was clear she had been flirting with him the other night at the bar and although she had conducted herself like a complete professional during their time at the Nellie Bly Houses, Healy had caught her glancing at him when she thought he wasn’t looking. He may have been out of practice with women, but he wasn’t so far gone that he didn’t recognize the signs of attraction. He certainly was recognizing them in himself.

They’d taken the F train back into Brooklyn. Detective Hines had thought to stop at IAB and get a car, but the snow put the kibosh on that idea. In any case, the subway stop was located only a few blocks from the precinct in one direction and the Nellie Bly Houses in the other. Neither Healy nor Hines was much in the mood for a morning of door slamming, so they chose to go to the precinct first. If they had known about the lack of enthusiasm with which they were to be greeted at the local precinct, they might have chosen differently.

It wasn’t that they were getting the usual bullshit because Hines was IAB. On the contrary, both Blades and Healy had been purposefully vague about their departmental association. Blades had introduced herself as Detective Hines and she had introduced Healy as a friend and retired detective. It was the Marsden case itself that had produced the reaction. Though the number of homicides in New York City had shrunken from an astounding two thousand plus per year to somewhere in the six hundred range, detectives didn’t like open cases any better now than in the bad old days. When they persisted, one of the detectives whispered to them in confidence.

“Come on, guys. It’s a four year old homicide of a …” he hesitated, reminding himself about the color of Blades’ skin, “of a Nellie Bly kid. He probably got mixed up in some drugs or shit and somebody put a cap in his ass.”

“The mother said he was a good kid,” Healy said.

“So did Hitler’s mother.”

“Still …”

“Look, even if the kid was a saint, maybe he pissed off one of the local gangstas. It don’t take much.”

“Did he step on the wrong toes?” Blades wanted to know.

“We didn’t find jack shit. You know how it is. No offense, Detective, but no one talked to us from the projects. And after that other kid took the dive off the roof … forget about it. Word was a cop shoved him. All we know is that someone in a dark hooded sweatshirt walked up to Edgerin Marsden, put a Sig to his head, and blew his brains out. Then he knelt down and took all the kid’s possessions.”

“No new leads?”

“The only thing we ever hear is from the mother.”

“You might wanna give her a call every few months, even if it’s to tell her you got nothing,” Healy said in an unassuming voice.

“Yeah, I might. But fuck you! Who are you to come in here and tell me how to handle my fucking cases?”

Healy kept his mouth shut because he had no official standing and because he understood where the detective was coming from. Blades kept her mouth shut too, but reached into her pocket and pulled out a card. She handed it to the detective. She watched his eyes get big.

“You call the mother today. Now,” she said, “or I’m gonna make fucking up your career my reason for living. Understand?”

He tried acting tough, but didn’t pull it off. Blades picked up his phone and handed it to him.

“Start dialing. We’re headed over there right now.”

Joe Serpe thumbed through the Suffolk County PD reports on the oil driver homicides that Hoskins had left in the office. What a dick Detective Hoskins was, Joe thought, that he couldn’t just drop off the reports or have a subordinate do it. No, not Hoskins, he had to make it dramatic and destroy something in the process. Some people just can’t get out of their own ways. It wasn’t like Joe hadn’t met Hoskins’ type when he was on the job. Christ, Rusty Monaco was no better. Maybe he was even a little worse. Hoskins was a buffoon, but Rusty had some ability. He had all the makings of a good cop that Hoskins lacked.

As he took his first pass through the files, Serpe wondered if it was worth all the trouble he’d gone through to get them. Nothing jumped out and bit him in the ass. The only things that linked all the victims together were the things the whole world already knew about: They were all C.O.D. oil drivers who had been assaulted making nighttime deliveries in high crime areas. They all had at least two thousand dollars in cash on their persons. They were all shot with the same 9mm weapon. They were all dead. Beyond that, it seemed Hoskins had actually handled the cases by the book. Sure he’d managed to piss people off, but he hadn’t really made any big mistakes. The only one he fucked up was Alberto Jimenez and that one didn’t count. But Joe knew that sometimes files had to be massaged like cramped muscles before they gave up their secrets. Police work would be easy if all the important details floated to the surface. Maybe he was missing something that Healy would see. He shut the file, stood up, and stretched.

He’d called up John and Anthony and told them to get back to bed and enjoy the extra sleep because he was going to work them to death for the next week. Neither driver complained about the extra sleep or extra work. Gigi had already called in to her work and took the week off with vacation time she had coming. She seemed to enjoy playing Bob Healy’s role; answering the phones, giving price quotes, and writing delivery tickets.

“There any way to steal in this business?” Gigi asked when the phones died down a little.

“That’s a strange question?”

“Not from where I come from. Angles. My old man was always figuring angles. Of course, the angles he figured got him lots of time at Rikers, the Tombs … So, you gonna answer my question?”

“It’s pretty hard to make a dishonest buck in oil. This is one of the most regulated businesses you can imagine. We have to account for every gallon of oil that goes in and out of our trucks. Hell, we get audited every few years whether we do something wrong or not. I mean, yeah, there are a few scams, but they usually catch up to you.”

“Like what? What scams?”

“Prepunching tickets.”

“Huh?”

“Come outside to the trucks with me.”

It was still snowing heavily, but the wind had quieted some and it wasn’t all that cold to begin with. Joe started up Anthony’s big blue Mack because it still had some leftover oil in the tank. He climbed up to the top of the tank and asked Gigi to hand him the hose. When he climbed down, he took some tickets out of the cab and showed Gigi how to set the meter and place a ticket in.

“Normally you pull the hose to a house and pump oil out of the tank,” Serpe said. “But the meter’s a machine. It doesn’t know where the oil’s going. All it knows is that you’ve set it to pump a certain number of gallons; a hundred, two hundred, or whatever. As the truck pumps, the meter clicks off the gallons. When you’re done pumping, you clear the meter and it stamps or punches the number of gallons you’ve pumped at the top of the ticket. That’s an official number because the county calibrates the meter on every truck in the county every year and seals it shut.”

“Yeah, but where’s the scam?”

“Let’s say I come in early every morning, turn on my truck, and pull the hose up on top of the tank and put it back inside the tank like I just did. I’ve created a closed system, pumping oil out of the tank and right back in. Now let’s say I put a ticket in the meter,” he said, slipping a ticket in the meter. “I pump two hundred gallons back into my tank, and stamp the ticket.” He cleared the meter and stamped the ticket. “Say I do that for five times for different gallon amounts. Now I’ve got officially stamped, prepumped tickets with no names on them.”

“But—”

“I’m getting there. Now I go to Gigi Monaco’s house. Miss Monaco’s ordered two hundred gallons, but like ninety-nine percent of all oil customers, she doesn’t come out of the house and stand by the meter to make sure she’s getting what she ordered. So instead of pumping in the two hundred gallons she ordered, I pump in one-eighty.”

“You’re shorting me twenty gallons, but you’ve got a prepunched ticket that says you’ve pumped in two hundred,” Gigi said as proudly as if she’d gotten straight A’s in school. “You just write in my name and that’s that.”

“Very good. And twenty gallons isn’t so much that a customer will notice the shortage unless you do it to the same customers all the time. Let’s say oil’s two bucks a gallon. I just made forty dollars above what I would have made on the delivery and I’ve still got that twenty gallons in my tank to resell. Do it five times a day and that’s two hundred bucks. Do it six days a week and it’s twelve hundred bucks. Do it on three trucks and that’s thirty-six hundred. Do it fifty weeks a year and. That’s big money in this business.”

“So why don’t people do it?”

“They do, but they get caught,” Joe said. “Either you get some OCD customer who measures inches of oil in his tank instead of trusting the gauge and he reports you to the state or the feds. Or you get sloppy and greedy and you don’t find ways to bury your oil surpluses. But it’s usually more simple than that. It’s one thing if you’re an owner and you do it. You’re not gonna turn yourself in, right? But let’s say you have a driver doing it for you and he fucks up. He curses at a customer or doesn’t show up for a shift and you fire him.”

“He rats you out.”

“Right. He either drops a dime on you or makes a deal with the authorities and gets immunity while you rot in prison. Okay, now that Oil Crime One-oh-one is done, let’s get back inside.”

When they stepped back inside, the smile ran away from Serpe’s face. On the TV that they’d left on was a photograph of Brian W. Stanfill, Esquire. The still was followed by videotape of a body bag being removed through the front door of his strip mall office. The crawl at the bottom of the screen read, “Nassau lawyer found brutally murdered inside his Seaford offices …” For Serpe, the clock was now running.