“NOT MUCH BLOOD,” says O’Hara. She entertained hopes of a modern glassy structure streaming with tropical light à la Dexter. And maybe a nice view of palm trees and water and a buff Latin cop or two. Instead, she finds herself in a windowless room filthy enough to be back in the 7, studying a dozen eight-by-tens of an elderly Jewish man on his bathroom tiles. The photos, taken in the early afternoon of March 3 in Unit 306 of a Longboat Key condominium called Banyan Bay, offer a pretty fair idea of the final moments of Benjamin Levin, a retired eighty-seven-year-old manufacturer of cosmetic gloves for women.
“That’s what you get for using a rabbit gun,” says Connie Wawrinka, the Sarasota detective O’Hara talked to on the phone a couple nights before. “It’s not like he blew his brains out. The twenty-two-caliber bullet never left his skull. Didn’t even reach it.”
The first row of photos shows, from various angles and distances, Levin on his bathroom floor, his tennis shorts and shirt slightly darker than the white tiles. The only inkling of how he came to be there is the dried trickle that connects his nostrils to his upper lip and the dark stain no bigger than a tablespoon ballooning from his thin mouth like comic-strip dialogue. Despite his age, his hirsute limbs are still wiry, and O’Hara wonders if Leibowitz will look this lithe at the end. Jews age well, she thinks. Then again, considering the knee-jerk litany of nos and toos—no drinking, no smoking, too late, too spicy, no this, too that—it’s not much of a payout.
“Take a look at this one,” says Wawrinka, and points to a picture of Levin’s bedroom in the next row. To the left is the victim’s neatly made bed with a dark rectangular shape on top of it. To the right, just outside the bathroom door, are the rubber soles of Levin’s tennis sneakers. In between, leaning against the night table, is the antique wooden rifle Levin used to end his life. “Even after firing a bullet into his brain, he was able to prop the gun against the nightstand and get almost all the way into the bathroom.”
“He didn’t want to leave a mess,” says O’Hara. Just like Leibowitz, she thinks, and longs for him in a way she hasn’t for weeks.
“EMS said the body was still warm. The poor fuck took ten minutes to die. He’s lucky he died, period.” O’Hara looks up from the picture at the six-foot Wawrinka. Although she reminds herself not to stare, she holds her gaze a beat too long or reveals something nonplussed in her expression, because Wawrinka smiles and says, “Hawaiian mom, Polish dad.”
That’s funny, thinks O’Hara, but is it a joke? Like a lot of things about Wawrinka, O’Hara isn’t quite sure. Wawrinka’s disclosure of her mutt ancestry explains the almond eyes in the fleshy East European face, but it hardly decodes the spectacle of Wawrinka’s striking androgyny. NYPD is thick with butch gay females. It goes with the territory, but what Wawrinka is doing with her button-down oxford shirt, jeans, and old-school Pumas is more charismatic and stylish, more like cross-dressing. With her thick jet-black hair and short bangs carved like sideburns, she resembles a Polish-Asian Elvis. “Is that a book?” asks O’Hara, referring to the dark shape on the bedspread.
“A framed photograph,” says Wawrinka, “of his grandson. Apparently, before he shot himself, he took it off the night table, looked at it one last time, then left it facedown on the bed.”
“How about that dark shape on the floor just under the bed?”
“Don’t remember exactly—a hanger maybe, or the edge of a shoe.”
“At the time, nothing struck you as hinky?”
“No. Just a lonely old widower who decided he’d had enough. Now we know the same gun also killed the boy, we start from scratch, no question. But like I said, at the time, we didn’t see a single thing that didn’t support a straightforward suicide.”
As striking as Wawrinka’s rockabilly swagger is her lack of attitude. A homicide detective from NYC waltzes in and informs the locals they got their heads up their asses, you expect nothing but pushback and a fuck-you smile, but Wawrinka isn’t playing it like that. Not at all. O’Hara gets more bullshit on a daily basis from her own sergeant.
“So let me ask you something, Connie, you ever do karaoke?”
“Of course,” says Wawrinka. Like O’Hara, she is in her mid-thirties, but with her schoolboy attire seems half a decade younger.
“What do you do—‘Heartbreak Hotel,’ ‘Blue Suede Shoes’?”
“That would be a little too easy, don’t you think?” says Wawrinka, running one hand through her mop and curling her upper lip. “No, I do Warwick, ‘Walk on By,’ or the Carpenters’ ‘Close to You.’ The room goes so quiet you can hear the panties drop.”
“That’s fucking quiet,” says O’Hara, and Wawrinka laughs. “Do me a favor,” says O’Hara, “no matter how obvious, take me through everything that said straight suicide. Help get my bearings.”
“For starters, you got an eighty-seven-year-old sprawled on his bathroom floor with a bullet in his brain and a rifle by the bed. He’s sick—according to the autopsy, advanced melanoma and prostate cancer. He’s alone; his wife of sixty-one years—I know, it’s sweet—died eight months earlier. And according to his daughter, it wasn’t pretty. A stroke, a second stroke, feeding tube, infections from the feeding tube, infections from all the time in the wheelchair. And she died at home, so Levin had a front-row seat. Knew what he had to look forward to. Alone. At a certain point, getting it over with is a pretty good option, and it looked like Levin had gotten there.”
“And nothing about the scene looked off?”
“No. I know the killer could have taken a picture off the night table and dropped it facedown on the bed, but the truth is, nothing about the scene felt staged. You stage it, you wipe the gun down and place it in the victim’s hand. At the very least, you drop it on the floor beside the body, you don’t lean it neatly by the bed. Plus this gun was covered with twenty years of prints. But the main thing was that there was no evidence of anyone else having been in the place. No sign of a break-in, no one else’s blood, no sign of struggle, nothing stolen.”
O’Hara glances at the autopsy report lying beside the pictures. “You said someone could easily have flipped the picture, given us a little detail to make it look legit, but you don’t think someone could have overpowered him, put the gun in his mouth?”
“Possible, but there were no bruises on Levin. No sign of any struggle.”
“According to the report, Levin was five-six and a hundred and eighteen pounds. How much of a struggle could he have put up?”
“Maybe he would have gone down, but he would have fought back.”
“What makes you so sure?”
“In the last eight months, he was arrested for assault. Twice.”
“I thought he was a nice old Jew from Teaneck.”
“First incident was at a restaurant called Sweet Tomatoes. Apparently some guy cut the line at the early-bird special,” says Wawrinka with a straight face.
“Sweet Tomatoes?”
“A salad bar on Tamiami. Even after seven, it’s like eight dollars all-you-can-eat, soup, dessert, everything. And it’s good. I have no clue how they make money. Maybe it’s a front for the cartel. Those old fucks wolf it down like there’s no tomorrow, which is pretty much true. At five o’clock, people are lined up out the door, guys in their patent leather shoes, ladies all dolled up. Except for grandchildren, no one’s under seventy.”
“What the hell happened?”
“Like I said, some guy cut the line.”
“Cut the line at the early-bird special at Sweet Tomatoes?” says O’Hara, as if repeating the words will give them meaning.
“Not a good idea when Benjamin Levin is in the line. He walks up to the guy, who is about a foot taller and seventy pounds heavier, and he tells the guy to go to the back of the line. And he doesn’t do it nicely. The guy says something back, and Levin decks him.”
“The guy is like a hundred pounds?”
“One punch,” says Wawrinka. “Lays the guy out across the croutons and sliced beets. The beets stain the guy’s pants, which is half the reason he files charges. I can get you the police report.”
O’Hara flashes back to the picture of the kid in the Chelsea gallery with his arm around his girl and smiling up at the camera like it’s nothing, and thinks, related or not, the old man and the kid are two of a kind. Little guys with brass stones.
“Okay,” says O’Hara, “that’s assault number one.”
“Three months earlier, same story, different place. This time on a golf course. He’s playing with his buddies at Landmark, up near the airport. Instead of the early-bird special, it’s the senior off-season discount. These nutjobs out in the midday heat to save a couple dollars. Apparently Levin’s foursome isn’t moving fast enough, hardly surprising considering it’s a hundred eighteen degrees. And someone in the group behind them yells something. Levin drives the golf cart back, asks who’s in the big hurry. Finds out it’s a fellow named Frank McGraw, and knocks him out cold. In the golf cart, on top of the steering wheel, like Faye Dunaway in Chinatown.”
“Except there’s no horn on a golf cart,” says O’Hara. “Not the same without the horn.”
“True.”