“I HAVE APPLIED,” THE suspect said, bearing an expression of great anguish. “I have applied, and applied, and applied.”
“What are you talking about?” Jack said patiently.
He and Richie were standing in a drab little interview room over at the Seven-oh house.
“I don’t want to be illegal,” the driver said. “I wish to vote, pay taxes, all of this.”
“You want to pay taxes,” Richie said, grinning. “Well, that’s a great start for an honest interview!”
Jack had zero interest in their suspect’s citizenship status, but it seemed like it might make a useful bargaining chip. He sat down and clasped his hands together. “Monday. In the morning. What were you doing over at the S & R deli on Coney Island Avenue?” Don’t ask the suspect if he was there; ask why he was there. Let the guy at least place himself at the scene.
But Fahad Marashi’s eyes widened. “Monday? Monday you are asking me about? I was in Charlottesville, Virginia! For my cousin’s wedding! He works at the university, in the mathematics program.”
Richie scratched his ear. “You have any proof of that? Witnesses? A bus ticket?”
Marashi brightened. “Witnesses, tickets, yes! And I can show you photos, on the Internet!”
“Why’d you run then, when you came into the taxi office just now?”
The man’s eyes widened. “Why did I run? Because you were chasing me!”
IT DIDN’T TAKE LONG to confirm Marashi’s alibi. And then Jack and his partner stood outside the precinct house and watched the cabbie stride quickly, joyously away. They were on a homicide case and could not be bothered with immigration matters. What the hell, a hardworking guy—why bust his chops? The detectives took their setback philosophically. A lead didn’t pan out? Just part of the job. Adios, amigo. Vaya con dios.
Jack shrugged. “Let’s do Plates at the Scene.” On a busy thoroughfare like Coney Island Avenue, at rush hour, someone must have seen their perpetrator walk out of the deli, likely with bloodstained clothes. As part of their routine that first day, the detectives had jotted down the license plate numbers of any cars parked outside. Now they would begin the tedious job of tracking down the drivers, asking if anyone had been near the scene at the time of the murder. Criminal investigations, even of homicides, were rarely glamorous; they tended to involve a lot of slogging along, poring through files, canvassing for witnesses, praying that some small, significant detail might pop out of the mundane mass. After almost two decades as a detective—with Homicide, with Robbery, with other units—Jack knew that full well, but still, by the end of the tour, he was nearly cross-eyed with the tedium of the task.
“You wanna grab a beer?” Richie asked, standing up and throwing his sports jacket over one shoulder.
Jack thought about going home to his empty apartment, about watching TV while eating cheap takeout food. “Sure,” he said. “Why not?”
THEY WENT OVER TO Monsalvo’s, a little bunker of a place Jack sometimes visited on the edge of Midwood. It was far from any precinct house, so he didn’t have to listen to shop talk after work; he could just park himself on a stool like the resident old-timers and watch a ball game in peace.
Pat stood behind the stick, a ruddy-faced young man, son of Pat Senior, the night barkeep. The dim interior was lit by a couple of neon beer signs, a string of Christmas tree lights, and old TVs above each end of the bar; their light flickered in the big glassy eyeballs of a deer head mounted on the back wall. On a shelf above the register, some little statuettes—Jimmy Durante, W. C. Fields—stood patiently underneath a Spanish moss—like coating of dust.
“A couple of cold ones,” Jack called out, but Richie overruled him.
“Just a seltzer for me. With a squeeze a’ lime.”
Jack didn’t say anything—a man’s drinking habits were his business and his alone—but he couldn’t help cocking an eyebrow.
“I don’t drink,” Richie said. “It’s not an AA thing or anything. I just don’t go for the stuff.” He smiled ruefully and pointed at his face. “I know: the nose fools ya.”
Jack did his best to avoid comparing it to the veiny, bulbous schnoz on W. C. Fields.
“It’s not drinking,” Richie said. “It’s a skin condition. It’s called rosacea. Millions of people have it. And everybody assumes we love the sauce.”
“Well, that sounds like a drag,” Jack said.
Richie shrugged. “Hey—it ain’t fatal. But it is a bit of a curse. If it wasn’t for this, I would’a made commissioner by now.” He laughed at his own joke, causing a couple of old-timers at the far end of the bar to tear their gazes away from the TV. Pat delivered a pint of seltzer; Richie raised it and began to declaim:
Here’s to the camel, whose sexual desire
Is greater than anyone thinks.
One night in a moment of madness
It tried to make love to the Sphinx.
But the Sphinx’s posterior opening
Was clogged with the sands of the Nile,
Which accounts for the hump on the camel
And the Sphinx’s inscrutable smile.
The old-timers set down their beers and clapped.
Richie bowed. “Just ’cause I don’t drink doesn’t mean I can’t enjoy a good toast.”
Predictably, this set off old regular Tommy McKettrie, a wrinkled, long-retired bus driver sitting a few stools down. He stood gravely, adjusted an imaginary necktie, and raised his glass of whiskey. “Here’s to the bee that stung the bull, that started the bull to bucking. Here’s to Adam who ate the first apple, and started the whole world to—”
“Eating apples,” Pat stepped in, dryly fulfilling his role in the miniature ongoing drama that was Monsalvo’s.
Richie grinned. “I like this joint.”
Pat shrugged and wiped the bar with a wet rag. “We can’t all have good judgment.” One of the old-timers signaled and he went off down the bar.
“So,” Richie said to Jack. “If I remember correctly, I’ll only be graced with your presence for a little bit longer.”
Jack nodded. “I have a couple more days to work exclusively on this.” That was the way it worked: the Homicide Task Force detectives got assigned a certain number of days to work a fresh case with the local precinct detectives, and then they had to go back into the squad’s rotation, subject to catching fresh murders. “But I’ll still help out whenever I have time.” Jack took a sip of his beer and snorted. “Like I’ve already provided such invaluable assistance.”
Richie shrugged. “Some cases are easy; some ain’t. We don’t get to pick and choose.”
Jack nodded. “You got that right. You know what this case reminds me of? I had a job, a little while back, we had a gun that went overboard from a boat and we had to call in the Harbor Unit. The scubas went in; they’ve got this thing called a rope line. It’s murky as hell down there at the bottom, and apparently you can’t even see your hand in front of your face. So they stretch out this rope, maybe a hundred feet, and then they move along it, holding onto it with one hand. With the other, they just grope around.”
Richie nodded. “Sure sounds like our situation right now.”
Jack made a face. “The thing is, it seems to me that this Charlson fella is up there on the surface, with a really nice sonar unit.” He shook his head. “I can’t believe that this department rivalry crap still goes on.”
“Nothing new from your boss about getting more cooperation from the feds?”
Jack snorted. “Here’s the thing about Tanney: He cares the world about all the externals of the job—performance reviews, getting promoted, playing it smart with department politics. Most of the time, though, he barely gives a rat’s ass about the only thing that’s really important, as far as I’m concerned—and that’s the actual work.”
Richie nodded. “I hear that. How about Lieutenant Cardulli? He seems more sympatico.”
Jack shrugged. “He is. But Tanney is so insecure that if I say anything to the Loo, he’ll make a big stink about me violating the chain of command.”
He waved to the bartender for another beer. “I’m gonna shut up now. I hate cops who sit around and gripe all the time. We’re freakin’ lucky, no matter what happens: we get to work in the greatest city in the world, on the greatest police force. And—despite all the pencil pushers—we’ve still got the best damn job.”
Richie’s cell phone trilled. “Excuse me,” he said. He took the call, then hung up and turned back to Jack. “The wife. I gotta go. See you tomorrow, okay?”
Jack nodded and raised his glass in salute. “It’s good working with ya.” He pictured his partner going home and spending the rest of his evening at home with his wife: a red-haired woman, Irish maybe, rather stout and busty.
He decided that he would stay on just long enough to finish his second beer. (He wasn’t much of a drinker either.) So he sat there, while the old-timers chatted amongst themselves, and the sports channels played with no sound up on the TVs, and Pat restocked the beer coolers for the night shift.
He thought about cases. They might be baffling for a while, but when it came down to it, the solutions were simple. He didn’t have to plumb the deep mysteries of the human heart or ponder why things played out the way they did in the grand scheme of life. He didn’t have to explain why good people died young or bad people died old, or why it was so damn hard for parents and their kids to get along. He just needed to come up with concrete evidence to prove one simple fact: person x killed person y. That was the job.
Sometimes, when the bigger mysteries—love, family, what the hell he was doing on the planet in the first place—started to weigh him down, the only way to find some relief and release seemed to be to connect the dots and solve one of the solvable puzzles. To make a little sense of something; maybe even provide a bit of cosmic justice. Take one killer off the street; give the friends and relatives of one victim some sense of balance and fairness and possibly even peace.
Right now, though, he wasn’t making progress on any front, and even being in Monsalvo’s, this friendly, dumpy little bar that often provided a small oasis from life’s big concerns, wasn’t doing him a whit of good.
It was time for a little direct action.
BY THE TIME HE reached his destination, the late afternoon sun was glowing golden orange against the top stories of the little brick buildings, Brooklyn’s magic hour.
Joey Gallo’s old block might have turned into overpriced yuppie real estate, and humble little Smith Street here was now a paradise for young hipsters, a row of trendy bars and boutiques. But there were still a few places where the old-timers held sway. Aside from tossing bocce balls or betting on the ponies at the OTB, little old men who had been big shots in the Mob’s heyday stood around chatting in groups with their hands clasped behind their backs over on Court Street, or took their wives to fancy dinners at the Fontana di Trevi restaurant, with its parking valets and starched white tablecloths. And they still whiled away the time in a few remaining social clubs like this one.
The three-story building had an unassuming brick façade. There was no sign out front—just a blacked-out picture window and an old metal door with a diamond-shaped little window cut in the center, blocked by a faded red curtain. It would have been very easy to miss, distracted as you might be by the flashy boutique next door and the French-Asian restaurant on the other side.
Inside, it looked as if nothing had changed for the past fifty years, and certainly not since the only other time Jack had been here, two years earlier. The same old geezer in a beige leather sports jacket finally admitted him after making him wait outside; the same beefy guys in track suits were playing dominoes at a card table in the middle of the room; the place still reeked of cigar smoke and looked like a grubby 1950s basement rec room. And John Carpsio Jr., the man Jack had come to see, looked exactly the same: a small, trim, middle-aged man, with wire-rimmed spectacles and a rather nondescript, putty-colored face. The Mob boss was behind his club’s wet bar, puttering around with a fancy espresso machine. At first, he barely acknowledged Jack’s presence; he looked down at his machine with disgust. “I can’t believe I paid two grand for this piece ’a shit—I can get better coffee out of a ten-dollar stovetop son of a bitch.” He looked up. “Well, well, well. Lookit who’s slummin’ in the old nabe.”
He and Jack had a bit of a history. They had both grown up in Red Hook and even attended the same elementary school, though they were several grades apart. A couple of years ago, the detective had inadvertently done the criminal a favor, and then Carpsio had tipped him off on the whereabouts of a killer. But it pained Jack to even look at the man. “Can we talk?” he said.
Carpsio shrugged. “So? Talk.”
Jack’s shirt collar felt tight and he tugged it away from his neck. “This, ah … this isn’t an official visit.”
“You been jonesing for a game of dominoes?”
“Not exactly.” Jack looked around: the others in the club were yards away, and the TV overhead—showing some kind of afternoon spouse-versus-spouse freakshow—was loud enough to mask their conversation. Still, he hated even mentioning Petey in public, in this shithole. “The last time I was here, you said that you remembered my brother. And what happened to him.”
Carpsio shrugged. “Of course. He got shivved by some mooley.” Mooley, for mulignan. “That kinda crap didn’t happen in Red Hook every day.”
“No,” Jack said, nodding. “It didn’t.”
“I told you: your family should’a let us handle it,” Carpsio said, and there was no doubt who he meant by us. “We would’a taken care of them punks by nightfall.”
Jack crossed his arms. “But see, here’s the thing. I happen to know for a fact that it wasn’t just some random mugging. There was someone from the neighborhood behind it.”
Carpsio’s eyes narrowed and his whole manner changed. “Someone from the neighborhood. What the fuck are you saying?”
“I think this had something to do with my father. That he pissed someone off.”
“So what are you comin’ to me for?”
Jack raised his hands in a placating gesture. “I’m not saying that you or your, ah, friends had anything to do with it. I was just hoping you might have heard something about my father that would help me make sense of this thing.”
Carpsio drew himself up. “That last time you did me a solid and I was glad to repay the favor. But I don’t know what the hell you want from me here. You want I should tell you about your own old man? You think I know more about him than you do?”
Jack shrugged. “You were older than me. Maybe you heard things.”
Carpsio shook his head. “I’m only two, t’ree years older than you, guy.”
“Look: this is ancient history. I’ve been thinking about who might’ve been in cahoots with any black guys back then, and the only person I can think of is Joey Gallo. He’s been dead for over thirty years, so I can’t imagine that there’s any harm in talking about him, right? I just want to know what happened. Did you ever hear anything besides the official story?”
John Carpsio Jr.’s eyes were like ice and they didn’t give away anything. But his next words did.
“Listen up, Leightner, and listen good. You did me a favor once, and I’m gonna do you another one right now. And this one is on the house. Get the fuck out of this neighborhood and stay the fuck away, unless you’ve got some kinda official business that’s got nothing to do with this cockamamie bullshit.” He stood up, indicating that their little talk was over, but he had one final word. “You go poking a stick around in a goddamn hornet’s nest, don’t come cryin’ to me if you get stung.”
Jack walked toward the door, bearing one small grain of satisfaction. He hadn’t had much of a plan, coming in here, but he had figured he would do exactly what Carpsio had just said: poke around in the hive with a stick and see what flew out.
Now he knew for sure what Larry Cosenza had only hinted at: this story wasn’t ancient history at all, and some thug much more alive than Joey Gallo was directly involved.