Hoax

by Robert K. Tanenbaum

  Besides, Jones thought that it was high time he got the star treatment and had been working on his own rap lyrics. When snitching on his friend, he’d mentioned that to the record executives. They didn’t say no, he’d thought when the limo driver pulled over to the curb. But shee-it, I didn’t think they was gonna blow the fool’s head off while he was bangin’ the ho next to me. Thas cold. He was about to get out of the car and clean the blood and gore off his face when his self-assurance took a nosedive. The black-clad figure on his side of the car was pointing what, in his professional gangster’s opinion, looked like an AK-47 assault rifle.

  “No, no,” he shrieked as he tried to shrink beneath the hooker who was scrambling to get off him and out of harm’s way. “I ain’t ’sposed ta die! I’m gonna be a star…” His pleadings and the screams of the prostitute were drowned out by the roar of the rifle.

  The shooter emptied the clip and replaced it with another. This time he aimed more carefully and made sure that each small burst caught each of his two victims in what remained of their heads. There would be no miracle recoveries for these potential witnesses. His task complete, the shooter with the assault rifle walked back to the sedan, where he placed the gun in the trunk of the car and covered it with a blanket before getting into the front passenger seat.

  His partner on the other side of the limo stood for a moment watching the bodies twitch. Involuntary muscle spasms, he thought. Satisfied, he nonchalantly let the .45 fall from his gloved hand. It clattered onto the pavement, and he kicked it beneath the limo and returned to his car.

  A block away, Vincent Paglia was still moving despite the pounding of his heart and rivers of sweat that followed the contours of his body. When the gunfire stopped, he pulled his cell phone out of his pocket and dialed 911. Trying to make his voice sound black, he said, “I wanna report a shootin.’ ” He gave the street address and hung up.

  At last he reached Third Avenue, where he found a cabbie willing to take him to his home in the Bronx.

  “Vinnie, is that you?” his wife called out when he clicked the front door shut.

  “Yeah, baby.”

  “You have a good night?”

  “Yeah, Katie. A great night, just great.”

  “Come to bed, Vinnie, it’s late.”

  “In a bit, baby,” he said. “I’m gonna unwind with a little ESPN.” There was no response, so he went to the refrigerator and grabbed a beer. Twisting the top off, he walked as softly back to Annie’s room as he could, where he stood sipping and looking down at the sleeping child. Please, God, get me through this…, he thought and began to cry silently.

  5

  DETECTIVE SERGEANT MICHAEL FLANAGAN OF THE NEW YORK City Police Department homicide division and his junior partner, Detective Robert Leary, were sitting in their unmarked sedan just inside Central Park when the radio crackled. “Shots fired, vicinity of 121st and the East River, officers responding.”

  Flanagan calmly finished the meat potato pie his wife had baked and placed in his brown paper lunch bag and carefully took another sip of the coffee he’d picked up at McDonald’s. Next to him, Leary wolfed down the last of two Double Quarter-Pounders with Cheese and two extra-large french fries, and then set the whole mess awash in his stomach by gulping the last half of the supersize Diet Coke.

  “Why in the name of the Saint Joseph do you bother gettin’ Diet Coke,” Flanagan asked his partner when they ordered. “That other stuff has barrels of bad unsaturated fats, ’nough to plug the heart of an elephant.”

  Flanagan considered himself something of an expert on diet and fitness. At forty years old, half of that as a cop, he still had a full head of copper-colored hair and was hard as a rock from a daily regimen of two hundred push-ups and two hundred sit-ups—all done in cadence with repeated Hail Marys and Our Fathers. The way he figured it, he was years ahead of any sins he’d committed, all the while adding years to his life by keeping the temple of his soul in shape. He’d even instructed his wife to make the meat pies with virgin olive oil, instead of butter, and “use whole wheat flour, not white.”

  Lena was a good girl, twenty-five years old and “right off the boat, as they say” from Ireland, he’d told Leary. She’d been introduced to him by an aunt on his mother’s side after his first whore of a wife left for southern California with the kike doctor who’d done the ten-thousand-dollar boob job he’d paid for by working overtime. By comparison, Lena was skinny, flat-chested, and unappreciative of his attentions in bed—in fact, she pretty much lay there reciting Psalm 23, “I will fear no evil,” like a wooden statue. But at least she made no demands that he try to satisfy her—like the first slut—when all he wanted was to finish, then roll over and go to sleep. He considered himself a good Catholic, better than most, and believed that a husband had a right to his wife’s body without a whole lot of hoopla.

  “I ain’t kiddin’ ya, Bobby, that stuff’s gonna kill ya,” Flanagan continued as he turned up the radio. He was genuinely concerned about his partner, as he liked having a good Irish Catholic boy in the car with him.

  “I ain’t prejudiced or nuttin’,” he told Leary on their first day together, but he didn’t like the way the black police officers smelled “kind of spicy,” or that they talked “like they was gangbangers themselves…. No disrespect or nothin,’ but I believe that we ought a be able to ride with our own kind.” He just felt that when his ass was on the line, he could trust a good Irish Catholic cop, especially those like himself and Leary whose fathers had also been part of the thin blue line of the NYPD that had always stood between civilization on Manhattan and those who would destroy it.

  So he didn’t want Leary to eat himself to death. When the kid first joined the force some five years earlier, he’d been a twenty-three-year-old, six-foot-four block of ripped muscle, a former Navy SEAL who could really kick some ass when a perp tried to resist or needed a little persuasion. But in the years since—three in patrol and two as a detective—the fast food, proverbial doughnuts, and soft drinks had added a roll around the gut and the beginnings of a jowl. He was still a guy not to be trifled with, but Flanagan knew that he’d have to stay on him about his weight or he’d turn into a big tub of goo and have a coronary right there in the car.

  Leary shrugged. “I don’t have a wife like you, Mikey,” he complained. “I’m livin’ wit my mom and she don’t cook, even when she’s not hittin’ the bottle.”

  The younger detective liked working with Flanagan, who was practically a legend in the department for his ability to crack the tough cases, not to mention that he’d been decorated for bravery after rushing into the World Trade Center on that terrible day to save people. He was a stand-up guy, too, who didn’t chastise him when he shyly admitted that he was “a little prejudiced” in that he hated “niggers, spics and towel-heads, faggots, Jews, Chinks, liberals, and people from France…Other than that I get along wit most everybody.”

  Leary’s only complaint with his partner was that Flanagan sometimes mothered him, like with this weight thing. Well, that and his partner was also real religious and wouldn’t tolerate any cursing in the car and was always on him about being more regular at Mass. Otherwise, he idolized the older detective and would have rather confessed his sins directly into the ear of God and been tossed into the fiery pit than see the look of disapproval in Mike Flanagan’s green eyes.

  “Well, I’ve offered before to fix you up with my wife’s sister,” Flanagan suggested. “She ain’t much to look at, sort of like my ol’ lady, if ya know what I mean. But them’s the kind ya won’t catch in bed wit some Jew doctor, which would only tempt you to put a hot one in her head.”

  Leary smiled and mumbled, “Maybe so.” But he’d seen a photograph of Lena’s sister and thought he’d rather continue taking his chances of getting AIDS from the hookers on Forty-second Street than marry that.

  • • •

  After wiping his face with a napkin from his bag, dabbing daintily at the corners of his mouth, Flanagan s
tarted the car and began to drive toward East Harlem. Almost on cue, a breathless patrol officer reported from the scene. “Got a homicide here…multiple victims.”

  Picking up the car radio mike, Flanagan responded. “This is Flanagan in homicide. I’m four blocks away and en route. Stand by.” Even before the dispatcher could acknowledge the call, the detective had placed the red bubble on top of the car and punched the gas pedal. Before some uniform screws it up, he thought.

  Flanagan saw the blue and red police lights bouncing off the buildings before rounding the corner and arriving at the scene of the crime. He was pleased to see that the responding patrol officers had already cordoned off a black limousine with wide bands of yellow crime-scene tape. He told them so when they rushed up to his car.

  Excited and nauseated at the same time, the patrol officers, who were both young and at their first homicide scene, said they’d checked the victims—“two African-American males, two females”—for vital signs. Finding none, they’d set up the tape and backed off to await the arrival of detectives. Having given their report, they looked like golden retrievers waiting to be praised for retrieving tennis balls.

  “Great job, boyos,” Flanagan said, which brought smiles and jaunty finger salutes to the brims of their hats. They, of course, knew who Flanagan was and counted themselves lucky that he was the one who’d responded. “One of the truly great cops,” they’d tell the other guys in the precinct later. “A class act all the way.”

  “Any witnesses?” Flanagan asked.

  “Yes, sir,” said one. “Well, sort of, sir. He ain’t much of a witness. Sort of a looney, if you ask me, sir.”

  Flanagan furrowed his brow. “Where is he?”

  “We got him sittin’ in the patrol car,” the officer said, pointing to where the detectives could see a dark figure rocking back and forth in the rear seat. “He was just sort of standin’ in the shadows of that building across the street when we got here. He was shoutin’ this crazy biblical shit…”

  “Careful with your mouth there,” Flanagan warned. “No need to use foul language, especially in conjunction with the Good Book.”

  “Sorry, sir,” the crestfallen officer apologized. “Anyway, he won’t say nothin’ that makes any sense. He was going to walk off so we detained him.”

  Flanagan nodded and patted the officer on the shoulder to let him know he was forgiven. He and Leary then walked over to the patrol car and opened the back door. The smell that billowed out nearly gagged him. Apparently, the witness did not believe in bathing regularly.

  “Jaysus,” Leary exclaimed. “Somethin’ crawled up inside of this guy and died.”

  They held their breath and looked in. An older man, one of the thousands of New York street people, sat moving as though he were in a rocking chair as he looked out the windshield ahead of him. His long, frizzy hair was gray, greasy, and impossibly tangled; the jaundiced skin of his face supported only patches of a beard, and his eyes bugged out of his head like two eggs with blue dots on the ends. He wore an old army field jacket over a food-stained tie-dyed T-shirt that proclaimed Grateful Dead World Tour 1976, as well as baggy khaki pants held up by a rope belt and sandals kept together by duct tape.

  “Hey, old-timer,” Flanagan said and tried to smile despite the stench. “You see what happened here?”

  The man kept staring ahead without reacting except that every once in a while his eyes widened as if he saw something frightening coming at him, only to have it pass him by. He was breathing hard through cracked and bloody lips as though he’d been running.

  “Hey, my partner was talkin’ to you,” Leary said, giving him a poke in the shoulder with a big finger. “We got some murders here. And these officers say you was standin’ across the street. Now you want to tell us what you saw? Or do we need to run you downtown on a vagrancy?”

  At first the man remained silent and unresponsive. Then slowly, as though some unseen hand was turning his head, he looked at Flanagan. The blue-dot eyes cleared as if sanity had returned for a brief appearance.

  “And I looked, and behold, a white horse,” he said softly, his yellowed and broken teeth gleaming dully in the light one of the patrol officers was shining on his face. Then in the next instant, his voice boomed and spittle flew from his mouth so that the officers and detectives jumped back startled. “AND HE WHO SAT ON IT HAD A BOW; AND A CROWN WAS GIVEN TO HIM, AND HE WENT OUT CONQUERING AND TO CONQUER!”

  As suddenly as he’d started bellowing, the man went silent again. He turned his head back to stare out the windshield, the eyes again focusing on something the other men could not see.

  “Jaysus, Mary, and Joseph,” Leary whispered. “What in the hell was that?”

  “Revelations 6:2,” Flanagan said dryly. “You should study your Bible more, Bobby.” He turned on his heel walked back past the patrol officers, one of whom asked what they should do with the witness.

  “He doesn’t know anything. Let him go and fumigate your car,” Flanagan suggested as he ducked under the crime-scene tape and looked in the limo. In the spotlight of the police cruiser, he could see the 10-78 tattoo on one of the victims, which he found ironic. Now who needs assistance? he thought.

  He looked at the front seat, then turned around. “The chauffeur wasn’t one of the victims?” he asked the patrol officers. “Where’s the chauffeur?”

  “We figured maybe he was one of the guys in the back.”

  “Dressed like a gangbanger?” Flanagan asked incredulously and rolled his eyes.

  Flanagan stooped and looked under the limousine. “What have we here?” he announced, to ensure there would be witnesses to the chain of evidence. He took out a pen from his overcoat and reached beneath the limo. Withdrawing his arm, he produced a .45 caliber handgun, which he held with his pen in the barrel to preserve any fingerprints.

  “We might have lucked out, Bobby,” he said to his partner, who hustled over with a plastic evidence bag he grabbed from one of the patrol officers. “Our killers appear to have been a little clumsy or in a hurry. I’ll bet you a dozen Our Fathers we got one of the murder weapons right here.”

  Leary started to smile but his face froze when a loud voice roiled over them from across the street. It was the vagrant standing half in and half out of the shadows with his arms upraised.

  “AND ANOTHER HORSE, FIERY RED, WENT OUT. AND IT WAS GRANTED TO THE ONE WHO SAT ON IT TO TAKE PEACE FROM THE EARTH, AND THAT THE PEOPLE SHOULD KILL ONE ANOTHER, AND THERE WAS GIVEN TO HIM A GREAT SWORD!” Finished, the man stepped back until he disappeared into the shadows.

  “Friggin’ nutcase,” Leary swore.

  “Watch how you talk, Bobby,” Flanagan replied. “There’s enough cursin’ in this world without you addin’ to it.”

  6

  EVEN AS ML REX WAS BEING CHAUFFEURED PAST THE Waldorf to his rendezvous with a bullet, Andrew Kane rose up on the tiptoes of his Guccis and strained to hear the opening notes of a chamber orchestra playing in the ballroom of the hotel. The exact movement was difficult to make out at first over the murmur of the elegantly dressed crowd as he stood on the dais, but he quickly identified the composer.

  Mozart, he thought, how passé. A few more notes and he knew the piece…. Salzburg Symphony No. 2…Divertimento in B-flat Major.

  Kane knew that when most people listened to Amadeus Mozart, they heard God-inspired genius. However, while he could appreciate the technical perfection of the boy composer, he couldn’t help but reflect that all that talent had been wasted on such a pathetic little fool. He had no sympathy for weak people, and that Mozart had managed to die penniless and almost unnoticed at an early age had earned him Kane’s contempt. Sometimes, he thought, the man upstairs has a wicked sense of irony.

  Kane preferred Beethoven. Now there was honest passion—Allegro ma non troppo…from the Ninth—brooding, powerful, sensual. A composer who was willing to recognize the beauty in some of man’s baser instincts. Mozart was dainty, mincing through his movements like a SoHo queer…
pretty like an orchid, but just as fragile and unsubstantive. Beethoven was a man’s composer with real meat to his work. The German’s music was just as beautiful, but in a different way. Like the ocean in its fury. Or the way that two boxers punching the crap out of each other could be a thing of beauty. A Queen Anne rose rather than an orchid—lovely to behold but with wicked thorns poised to draw blood.

  Settling back onto his soles, he shrugged his shoulders to resettle his tuxedo. A little tight, he thought, going to have to lay off the hors d’oeuvres at these soirées. Political campaigns can be hell on a boyish figure. He cast a quick sideways glance toward one of the full-length mirrors on the wall as if to catch himself in the act of slouching. Still, not bad, old boy, not bad at all for a man in his fifties…or even one in his thirties for that matter.

  A short man, Kane needed the elevation of the dais to look over the crowd, all of them dressed in black and white like so many penguins, only these birds were adorned with all sorts of flashy jewelry. A perfect, toothy smile never faded from his face as he turned his head from side to side surveying the room, nor did the warm, welcoming light of his Aqua Velva–blue eyes. He radiated the impression that he was enjoying himself immensely and that, if only time allowed, he would have wanted to speak to each and every person in the room.

  The truth was it made his skin crawl just to look at them. Yet, most people came away after meeting him thinking that they’d liked Kane the moment they laid eyes on him, a great asset for a man campaigning to become the next mayor of New York City. With every blond hair carefully combed into place above his tanned, square-jawed face, his public persona was so polished that he imagined people could almost see themselves in his reflection.