The Dog Killer of Utica (9 page)

Conte in pajamas. Nothing to do but wait for Catherine’s return from Troy, while working to distract himself from the waiting and the feeling inside the waiting that he is himself nothing, choked now by the fear that he would lose his new life as Catherine Cruz’s housekeeper, cook, and proud gardener—lose Catherine herself and be dragged back to the Eliot Conte whose life before Catherine could not be called living. Flees the kitchen table to the couch, obsessively checking his watch, but time refuses to pass when she’s gone. To the desk—fifteen seconds. Places watch in desk drawer. Stands in the middle of the room, floor gazing. Bedroom—her side of the bed—recalling the story of the ex-assistant chief Coca at the supermarket trying to buy a single mushroom and the report from the Unimpeachable Remo Martinelli of Coca on Bleecker, whacking the side of his nose with a popsicle stick, rhythmically and relentlessly whacking his nose bloody—a spectacle of irreversible insanity.

The couch again—reclining and retrieving the single positive of the last three terrible days: Angel Moreno … he and Angel and Angel’s parents in Cooperstown, two summers past … Baseball Hall of Fame … picnic, Otsego Lake … on a perfect day in mid-July. Angel … the unqualified good … He awakes at 7:30
A.M
. to find himself covered with an afghan, his head pillowed … bracing odor of brewing coffee … kneeling beside him, Catherine Cruz, who says:

“Hey.”

“When did you get back?”

“You were asleep.”

On his right side, elbow supported, he says: “Dressed to kill this early?”

“Coffee?”

“You see Bobby?”

“He’s closing in on his old salty self.”

“In other words, Catherine, he tells you to tell me to go fuck myself. In a loving manner.”

“Yes.”

“Did you tell him I told you the story?”

“No.”

“He already assumed it?”

“Yes. Bacon and eggs?”

“Not hungry, Ms. Cruz.”

“Me neither.”

At the kitchen table, over coffee, he returns to her attire: “Going somewhere special this morning?”

“No.”

“I don’t believe you.”

“El, the apartment above Tom Castellano’s is for rent. Rutger and Culver.”

“I know where it is. That’s where the Mafia hitter lived. Going weird on me?”

“Tom told me because of what you did for him twenty years back, he’s offering me the apartment at half the usual rent. ‘On behalf of Eliot,’ he says, ‘who saved me from my cheating wife.’ You’ll have to tell me the story sometime. Rutger and Culver is no more than a ten minute walk—a two minute drive.”

“We’ll have physical proximity there?”

“Let’s change this dangerous subject, Eliot.”

“Spell out the details of dangerous. Slowly.”

“Stop.”

“Bobby know about his dog?”

“Not yet.”

“The way he talked about that dog, Detective Cruz, you’d think—”

“It’ll devastate him when Maureen tells him.”

“What she should tell him, Catherine, somehow the dog got loose and was hit by a car. Let’s call now and tell her that.”

“What can you possibly be thinking, Eliot? The Rintrona family is in grave danger. She
has
to tell him. My former chief assigned a cruiser to the house 24/7.”

“For how long? Forever?”

“Two weeks.”

“Then what, Catherine?”

“We need to find the shooter. We have two weeks. Or shooters.”

“
Shooters
? What d’ya mean? I’m driving down to see him after I get ready for the day.”

“Go after lunch. He’s got therapy this morning.”

“Hear about Freddy Barbone?”

“Did we ever. Don got the call when we were talking to the top crime lab technician in Albany. Don struggled to hold back his pleasure.”

“Freddy was an asshole.”

“Our theory, El, a single gunman who did both Troy shootings?”

“An obvious true theory. I need more coffee.”

“You’re not crippled.”

He fetches another cup. She refuses a refill.

She says, “The theory needs revisiting.”

“You look like the cat that ate the canary.”

“The crime lab in Albany compared shell casings recovered from both shootings. Different guns. Bullet fragments recovered: same story. Different guns. No question.”

“So what? The shooter is a smart psycho. The theory is still good.”

“The vehicles described by Bobby and Maureen—not even close to being similar.”

“A very smart psycho.”

“Who shoots the dog, El?”

“An extremely smart psycho, a diabolical bastard. He knows where the terror button is. Kill their dog and they’ll crawl under the bed and never come out.”

“
He
? When questioned, Bobby said he couldn’t tell gender or race. Maureen says ditto except she adds that for some reason she leans toward female.”

“Female so-called intuition?”

“I’m saying in a loving manner, El, go fuck yourself.”

“I’d rather—”

“You’ve heard of the National Integrated Ballistic Information Network?”

“Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms?”

“Yes. A database of over two million digital images of hard ballistic information gathered from crime scenes since the midnineties. The way it works, you digitally enter new crime scene ballistics into the system and in a matter of an hour or two you may get a hit. Meaning, what you entered seems to
match ballistics derived from a prior crime scene, someplace else. The Albany lab got a hit, El. The guns identified were a Smith & Wesson M&P 9 millimeter and a Sig Sauer 1911 .45.”

“Let me guess. These guns were used some time ago in crimes committed in Utica.”

“Yes. And these guns were confiscated by Utica PD.”

“But don’t police departments destroy those guns?”

“Don says sometimes they’re destroyed, sometimes they’re auctioned off. But not immediately. An important fact. They’re stored in the department basement until they have enough to auction or go through the trouble of sending them to a steel plant where they’re melted.”

“So there’s a window of opportunity for someone inside to grab a gun or two. Who would have access to the storage unit?”

“Don is checking this morning on the two weapons linked to Utica. If they’re still there.”

“They can’t be.”

“Which means for sure, El, someone inside.”

“Unless a cleaning—”

“Only high-level UPD personnel have keys to that area. According to Don.”

“Definitively, then, Catherine. Someone inside. Has to be Antonio.”

“You’re leaping over a chasm now.”

“Has to be, Catherine.”

“Your female intuition, Professor Conte?”

“Of course. What else do we know?”

“Remember I said the database hit confirmed what seemed to be a match? To be certain the actual physical shell
casings from the Troy shootings have to be compared under a microscope with the actual casings recovered from the Utica crimes. We have the Troy casings for a limited period. Don is thorough. He’ll check if the guns in question are still there, and then he’ll do the job that no one pays him for, which he’s been doing on weekends for twelve years, since his wife died. Describing and logging all ballistic info from Utica crime scenes.”

“There must be hundreds of shell casings he’d have to comb through before he finds the match.”

“Don has a log and the patience of Job. It may take him a while, but he’ll find the matching casings and then we’ll know definitively.”

Her cell. Don Belmonte, who tells her the weapons in question, according to the records clerk, were neither auctioned nor sent off for destruction. “And—ready for this? They’re still there. In storage. I’m still working on the shell casings, Cath. Sometime this afternoon, the guns go to Syracuse for tests that determine if they’ve been recently fired, which we’re confident they have. Hope to have the casings match tied up by noon.”

Conte says, “This is beyond me,” when she relays Belmonte’s message. “This makes no sense on any level. Someone on the force contracts with someone to do these shootings? This someone on the force had some time ago pilfered the guns from storage for some possible, he knows not what,
future
action? This someone on the force hires an assassin to hit Bobby, or does it himself?”

“And then this engineer of violence, El, tells the would-be assassin to return the guns to him so that
he
can return
them to storage where they’ve not been for several years. You said that the shooter was a smart psycho—”

“Extremely smart.”

“You said he, she, whatever, was a diabolical bastard. Most criminals are fatally stupid, at the end of the day.”

“Not this one, Catherine. This one is playing a game that I—I have no idea what game this one is playing.”

“Bobby, Monday morning—the dog, Tuesday morning. Who else is in danger—it can’t be the work of Antonio because if Antonio—it’s obviously not Antonio. Because why would he put the guns back in storage?”

“Maybe we should add, Cruz, what happened Monday night. Freddy Barbone.”

“Why? What does he have to do with Bobby and the dog? What possible pattern would Freddy fit into? Shooting from a car is one thing. It’s antiseptic, sort of like high altitude bombing, but Freddy in the head at close range and then virtual decapitation, that’s a very different M.O. That’s not cold assassination. That’s personal.”

“What if inconsistency of M.O. is part of the plan? Let’s think about that, Cruz. An effect of randomness, a deliberate performance of randomness and disconnection, which makes a coherent theory of these crimes impossible. I’m lost.”

“Me too.”

“So sit on my lap and we’ll be lost together and talk about the first thing that comes up.”

“First thing that comes up? Your juvenile idea of erotic humor?”

“Yes.”

“Which you learned in the eighth grade?”

“Yes.”

She’s about to leave to sign the lease with Tom Castellano when he says, “Wait. I have something I’d like you to ask Don to check.” He goes to the desk and returns with a small sealed envelope.

She opens the envelope: “Mind telling me where you got this?”

“After Don renders the verdict.”

Albany. At Saint Jude, midafternoon. Seventh floor. The door to Rintrona’s room is closed—a uniformed policeman sitting outside, who rises at Conte’s approach.

“How are you, officer?

“Name?”

“Eliot Conte.”

Checks clipboard: “Yeah.”

Conte moves to enter.

“Hey! Did I let you in?”

“What’s the problem, officer?”

“I’m the problem. Driver’s?”

Officer looks at picture, looks at Conte, looks at picture, looks at Conte: “Yeah. Let me explain something, buddy. You don’t just walk in for the simple reason the door is locked. The situation of security I’m up against? Life and death.”

“I appreciate your service, officer.”

“Check out with Sister Mary Ronald on the way out.”

“Who’s that?”

“Nurses’ station down the hall. Don’t play dumb. In her twenties. Audrey Hepburn.”

“Officer, we’re on the same page.”

Steps into the room and freezes. Maureen, white as a sheet, by her husband, who’s sobbing. The odor of all those flowers—twelve large bouquets arranged along the base of the walls—like those funeral parlors when he was young, Eliot with his father paying respect to the families and friends of deceased constituents. Heavy here with the same odor, sweet, at the edge of nauseating. Rintrona has a legal pad and ballpoint pen on his lap. He speaks with a hoarseness that Conte has never before heard:

“About time, you motherfucker.”

Conte comes forward to the other side of the bed, facing Maureen.

Maureen says, “This language has to stop.”

Rintrona says, “They killed my poor dog I loved, Maureen loved, fuckin’ kids in the neighborhood loved. Who’s next, Eliot?”

“Nobody’s next.”

“You stupid all of a sudden?”

“We’ll get him soon.”

“When? They let Maureen go for some reason. My daughter is next, that’s who. Fuckin’ throat is killing me.” Conte doesn’t know how to respond.

Maureen says, “I can’t sleep anymore.”

Rintrona says, “We know who did this.”

“Not yet.”

“Stop bullshitting. My fuckin’ throat. A catheter up my dick. Ever have a catheter up your dick?”

Maureen says, “Stop this language for once.”

“What’s the difference, Maureen? We’re in the company
of our dear friend Eliot fuckin’ Conte. My worthless dick. Secular nurse pulled it out the other day, I saw stars. She should have it up hers, then she’d know. Cunt. I get out of here—I can’t talk no more, fuckin’ Christ.”

He writes on the legal pad:
Get out of here eventually I go to Utica kill that friend of yours. Fuckin swear to God
.

“Listen to me, Bobby. The odds are extremely against who you’re thinking.”

Maureen says, “Excuse me. I’m here too you know. Who is this person? We should go to the authorities with his name.”

Rintrona writes and shows Maureen:
Once I get out and do the right thing then you know who this cocksucker is
.

Maureen says, “We don’t have enough to deal with, Bobby? You have to become a vigilante off the deep end against this unknown person?”

Conte says, “Maureen is right.”

Rintrona writes,
Who stops me?

Maureen: “Jesus, Mary, and Joseph.”

Conte then gives them the Troy ballistics findings. The difference of cars. He says, though not believing it, “Two different unrelated shooters.”

Rintrona in a rage that brings searing pain to his throat, in a horrifying scream, “BALLS! BULLSHIT!” The pain drives him to tears and the groans of a dying animal. He writes:
Tell them the throat spray
.

Sister Mary Ronald appears. She says, “Open up for me, dear. I’m going to make you feel good.” She sprays. Rintrona manages a smile. He writes her a note:
This thing they have up me down there. I’d like you to remove it so I can sleep in peace. Every time I move, that thing up me, I hit the ceiling. Please, Sister
.

“The secular’s job, sweetheart.”

He writes:
She’s too rough. You
.

“I’m so sorry, Robert. I’ll speak sternly to her.”