The Killer Sex Game (A Frank Boff Mystery) (3 page)

Frank Boff was sitting up in bed eating Nestles chocolate chip cookies out of a bag and drinking milk when his phone rang. His wife, Jenny, who had been asleep, woke up.

“Frank, who do you think that is?” she asked.

“Not a clue.”

Before picking up the phone, he activated its recording device, then said, “Frank Boff.”

This is McAlary. Sorry to bother you this late. Something has happened.

“Tell me about it, Ryan.”

As Boff listened, his tall teenage son, Steven, walked in, looking groggy and annoyed. “What’s going on, Boff?” the boy said. “Now you’ve got your scumbag clients calling in the middle of the night and waking me up?”

“Steven!” Jenny said. “How many times have I told you not to use that word?”

“Sorry, Mom. What...
criminal
is Boff talking to?”

“It’s not a criminal,” his mother replied. “It’s Ryan McAlary. Danny’s trainer.”

Both Steven and his sister Sharon had been calling their father Boff instead of Dad since they were kids. Their father figured it was their way of getting back at him for all the flak they took in school when he was helping to defend a particularly notorious felon.

“Ryan, are the police still there?” Boff was asking.

Just Damiano. She’s getting ready to leave.

“Ask her to wait until I arrive.”

Okay.

He hung up and got out of bed. He was wearing his favorite orange Knicks pajamas with the team logo emblazoned across the chest. A big man at six-foot five, he had the kind of ordinary face you could easily forget, except for his intense, steel-blue eyes that never missed a thing.

“Frank,” his wife asked, “what did Ryan say?”

Grabbing his street clothes off a nearby chair, he started to change. “One of the boxers he trains was shot and killed tonight.”

“Oh, my God! It wasn’t Danny or Mikey Bellucci, was it?”

“No. It was a Cuban defector who was an Olympic gold medalist. The boxer, his wife, and their little girl have been staying at McAlary’s house.”

“That poor woman and her daughter,” Jenny said. “I’m going to pray for them.”

“Hey, Boff,” Steven said. “Why’d the trainer call you?”

“He wants to hire me to help find the boxer’s killer.”

Steven looked surprised. “Another manhunt? Boff, you’re blowing my image of you.”

“Your father,” Jenny said patiently, “is doing pro bono work like this so we can be together in heaven.”

Boff looked insulted. “This isn’t pro bono, honey. They want to pay for my services.”

She shook her head. “The McAlarys are good people,” she said. “I don’t want you charging them.”

He blew out a sigh of frustration. “Well, can I at least put in for my expenses?”

“Nope. It’s God’s way or the highway.”

“Tough luck, Boff,” Steven said, grinning.

Jenny pointed to her son. “Back to bed for you!”

After the boy was gone, Jenny got out of bed and slipped into a bathrobe. In her mid-forties, she still looked like the pretty, high school prom queen that Boff had taken to their senior ball.

“You don’t have to get out of bed, honey,” he said.

“Yes, I do. I’m going to wait up for you.”

“Well, if you are,” he said, leaning down to give her a quick kiss, “then would you make me a peanut butter and jelly sandwich and defrost some donuts?”

“I’m on it, big guy.”

Although he had grown up in the Bronx, Boff had lived the past five years in Las Vegas. A month ago, he decided to move back to the Bronx in order to be closer to his mother, Thelma, who lived in the Port Morris section of the borough.

After selling all the furniture in his
Las Vegas house, he had bought a three-bedroom condo in Riverdale, then, at his wife’s insistence, had hired an interior decorator to help furnish the new place. The one thing he wouldn’t leave behind, however, was his trusty old Chevy Malibu, which had a lot of dust and miles on it. He could easily have afforded a new one, but the car had been a gift from his wife. So he had it shipped east by train.

Getting off the elevator in the garage under his high-rise building, Boff walked over to the car. Before getting in, he took a label-free aerosol can out of the
Malibu’s trunk, sprayed a clear liquid on both license plates to make them invisible to cameras, then used a bomb detector device to make sure there wasn’t one attached under his car.

To get to the McAlary house in the
Crown Heights section of Brooklyn, he took the FDR south to the Long Island Expressway, then the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway south into Brooklyn. Shortly after he started the car, he popped in a new Buddy Holly and the Crickets CD he had recently added to his extensive collection of Fifties rock, the only music he ever listened to.

As he drove, he thought of the strange arc his career had taken.

Near the end of his senior year at Kean College in Jersey, where he had been a star basketball player, a DEA recruiter had come to campus. With his basketball career over, he had little direction in his life and no clue as to what he wanted to do with the rest of it. In retrospect, he knew he had been a perfect target for the recruiter. The DEA had promised a glamorous life as a federal agent committed to ridding the world of bad guys. He’d signed that day, joined the agency immediately after graduation, and quickly embraced patriotism and the idea of serving his country.

Ten years later
, all that had change
d
.

Despite becoming a near legendary agent over the years, Boff had grown disenchanted with the DEA after being sandbagged too many times by agency bureaucrats, meddling politicians, and people rich enough to override the system. Bitter and disillusioned, he’d quit the agency and become a private investigator whose mission statement was to frustrate and defeat the judicial system every chance he got. Now, after helping to successfully defend a long list of indicted felons, he was one of the most sought-after investigators in the country.

Over the course of the past year, however, his career had taken another twist, thanks in no small part to his wife. Unlike her husband, who thought organized religion was a circus run by the clowns, Jenny was a devout Catholic. After her priest had told her it was highly unlikely that her husband would be joining her in heaven because of the line of work he was in, she had started taking steps to rehabilitate Boff’s image with God. To his chagrin, that meant taking on fewer cases involving “scumbags” and doing pro bono work for defendants who were likely innocent and couldn’t afford his fee.

Although he still defended plenty of indicted felons who were guilty as sin, he had twice in the last year helped hunt down killers in cold cases. In both instances, he had almost been killed. After the second case, he’d vowed never again to put himself in harm’s way. And yet here he was, about to sign on for another dangerous assignment. For all of a minute he wondered why he was doing this. Then, not being one given to introspection, he shut it out of his mind and just listened to Buddy Holly and the Crickets singing, “That’ll Be the Day.”

With traffic unusually light, it took him only twenty-five minutes to arrive at McAlary’s limestone row house on St. Mark’s Avenue. After
double parking behind Damiano’s unmarked Dodge Charger, he walked up the front stairs, stopped at the top, surveyed the block for a few minutes to see if the house was being watched, then, reasonably sure it wasn’t, rang the doorbell.

It was answered quickly.

“Thanks for coming,” McAlary said.

The trainer didn’t offer to shake hands, and Boff hadn’t expected him to. Even though he and Cullen had recently found and punished the killers of McAlary’s best friend, fellow trainer Nino Biaggi, he knew the Irishman couldn’t warm up to someone who made his living the way he did. 

Stepping into the living room, Boff saw that besides Kate and Damiano, Cullen and his roommate, boxer Mikey Bellucci, were there, too.

He turned to McAlary, “Are the wife and kid upstairs?”

“Yes. So keep your voice low.”

As he had expected, Boff caught Damiano frowning at him. He walked over to the detective, held his hand out, and said, “Can I see the note?”

“Just for the record, Boff, I object to you being here. This is my case.”

“I understand completely. Now, can I see the note?”

She pulled out the evidence bag and slapped it, harder than necessary, into his open hand. After reading the note twice, he handed the bag back, then turned to McAlary. “You do realize, Ryan that your life could be in danger?”

“I already advised him of that,” Damiano said. “He turned down my offer of police protection.”

“Then, Ryan,” Boff said, “perhaps you’d like some help from my friends again?”

The last time the McAlarys’ lives had been threatened, Boff had asked an Italian mob boss he was friends with to supply him with “bodyguards.” Without hesitation, Bruno Benvenuti had set up twenty-four hour surveillance in front of the house the McAlarys had been staying in at the time.

The trainer nodded. “Yeah, I’ll keep your offer in mind,” he said.

Boff now turned his attention to the others in the living room. “Did any of you have an inkling that the boxer might be in some kind of trouble?”

“I asked them that, too,” Damiano interjected.

“I’m sure you did,” Boff said. “You’re a
very thorough
detective. But surely you don’t mind if I ask a few questions of my own. Do you?”

“If I did, would it matter?”

He smiled. “Not really.”

As the detective split for the kitchen with her empty coffee mug, Kate stepped up to Boff. “Ryan and I couldn’t think of any problem Rafael might’ve been having,” she said. “To us, he didn’t seem to have a care in the world.” She frowned. “Obviously we were wrong.”

Boff nodded, then turned to Cullen. “What about you, Danny?”

“Nope.”

“Mikey?”

“Lemme think about it a second,” said Bellucci, a street-savvy kid of twenty who wore his black hair spiked with blond tips and often referred to himself in the third person. After a minute, he shook his head. “Sorry. Nothing comes to mind.”

At this point, Damiano returned with her coffee, took a sip, and watched with obvious displeasure as Boff wormed his way into her investigation for the second time in less than four months.

“Kate,” Boff was saying, “at some point I’d like to talk to the boxer’s wife.”

“Me, too,” Damiano quickly added.

“Well, at least wait a couple days,” Kate said. “I’ll let you know when I think she’s able to handle questions.”

“Okay,” Boff said. “In the meantime, can I get Rafael’s mobile phone number?”

“Why?” Kate asked.

“It will help my investigation if I know who he’s been talking to recently.”

Kate told him the number, and he wrote it down on a small pad. So did Damiano. Then Boff turned to the trainer. “When you called me, Ryan, you said the Cuban had not come home with you after his debut fight at the Garden. Did he tell you where he was going?”

Cullen stepped in. “He said he was going to meet with his promoter, Gary Shaw. I called Shaw. He said he never asked Rafael to do that.”

“What’s this promoter’s reputation?” Boff asked.

“He’s the kind,” Bellucci replied, “who falls in love with his fighters and treats them like sons. Gary’s Mikey’s promoter. I’ve never heard anybody say a bad word about him.”

“I’ll want to talk to him.”

“No problemo. Mikey can arrange that.”

Cullen, who fancied himself as something of an amateur sleuth, added his two cents’ worth. “The fact that Rafael told us Shaw wanted to see him immediately raised a red flag for me. No promoter would take a fighter away from his family after his pro debut. I tried to go in the taxi with him, but he shoved me away.”

Boff turned to McAlary. “You mentioned on the phone there’d been a threat made on the fighter’s life. Tell me about that.”

After recounting the rumors from
Miami, the trainer told him about the presence of the detectives at the boxer’s fight. Boff scribbled down some notes in a form of shorthand he had developed over the years.

When McAlary was done, Boff closed his pad. “Given the rumors, Ryan, weren’t you concerned about your boxer going off alone after the fight?”

“Of course I was! I even threatened not to train him anymore if he went. A lot of good that did. I guess I shoulda been more forceful.”

Boff stifled a yawn. It was way past his bedtime. “Sorry. It’s late, and my wife is waiting up for me. I’ll start on this tomorrow morning.”

McAlary took a checkbook out of his pocket. “How much do you want as a retainer?”

Boff tried not to frown. “There won’t be a charge for my services,” he said a bit sourly. “You can thank my wife for that.”

Putting away his checkbook, the trainer smiled. “Pro bono work again, huh?”

Just hearing that term made Boff cringe. “So it would seem.”

Cullen whispered something to Bellucci, then turned to Boff. “Mikey and I want to help, too.”

Damiano groaned. “Aw, hell! Not again! Come on, Boff. Gimme a break!”

Cullen turned to the detective. “Let’s not forget,
Miss
Damiano, that if it wasn’t for me, you would’ve never gotten those hostages out alive.”

The detective looked at
Boff. “It’s bad enough having you butting into one of my cases again. Please, please tell me you’re not going to let those two idiot boxers meddle, too.” 

Boff, as he was wont to do, said nothing.

Damiano turned to McAlary. “Ryan?”

“Look, Vic, even if I ordered Danny not to get involved, he’d ignore me. You know that. Stubborn mick that he is.”

Cullen tugged on Boff’s arm. “Mikey and I have a workout at the gym tomorrow from eight to eleven. After that, we’ll be free to help you. Pick us up at the gym. Okay?”

Without replying, Boff removed the boxer’s hand from his arm and headed for the door. As he walked out, Damiano hustled after him and caught him on the sidewalk.

“Boff! We need to talk.”

He turned around. “The answer is no. I won’t work with you.”

“Why not?”

“You annoy me.”

“And you don’t bug me?”

“All the more reason for us not to team up again. I take pride in learning from my mistakes,
Victoria
.”

“So do I. But even though I’d much rather work this case without you, if you’re in, then we should share this like we did last time. A major police department has assets you could use.”

Boff’s reply was a yawn. Then, “We’ll see. If I need your help, I’ll be sure to call.”

“Like hell you will! Come on, let’s get coffee. I’ve got some things I’m
sure
you’ll want to hear. First, however, I suggest you look on the front seat of my car.”

Mildly curious, Boff walked over to her Dodge. There was a manila envelope on the seat. As he reached through the police car’s open window, Damiano turned her back on him. He picked the envelope up and slid out the contents. After skimming through them, he turned to Damiano, whose back was still to him.

“You know, detective, letting me look at the crime scene report could get you suspended.”

“I didn’t see you do it.”

“Okay, let’s go for that coffee.”

The only place still open nearby was a seedy-looking diner whose windows were badly in need of washing. After parking their cars, they went inside and walked over to a booth. To Boff’s chagrin, the seats and table top were littered with crumbs. Before sitting down, he picked up a handful of paper napkins and used them to brush the crumbs onto the floor.

“My son could get a job here,” he said. “He cleans up after himself about as well as they do in this joint.”

He ordered coffee and a cheese Danish, Damiano just coffee. After he had studied the crime scene report a few minutes, he looked up at the detective. “The body was laying face down, but liver mortis is present in his back. Meaning it was originally positioned face up.”

“Correct. He was dumped outside the church after he was shot.”

“By the rope marks on his wrists, I’m guessing he was tied to a chair.”

“So it would seem.”

Boff kept reading. “He had his wallet, cash, and credit card on him. Which rules out robbery.”