by J. L. Abramo
The store owner stands in his doorway looking on, as do a few curious people on the street.
The truck starts with no trouble.
A Frank Sinatra tune pours out of the speakers.
“You can shut it down now,” Rosen calls from behind.
“Kevin would never have been listening to that radio station,” says Addams, coming back to Detective Rosen.
“Oh?” says Rosen, putting a cotton swab into a plastic evidence bag.
“He’d listen to an FM rock station, or a CD.”
“Maybe someone else drove the truck,” Rosen says, more aloud to herself than to Addams.
“I need to make a few phone calls,” says Addams, as he moves away from the vehicle.
Addams calls the dairy and asks that another truck be loaded and sent out to complete the missed deliveries. Then he reluctantly calls home. His wife is trying to sound calm; she is preparing breakfast for their two daughters. Addams tells her that there is nothing to worry about, that everything will be alright. He ends the call knowing that neither of them was convinced and returns to Rosen.
“Is there anything I can do?” he asks the detective.
“I think the best thing you can do is go home to your family.”
Seeing the look on the man’s face, Rosen knows better than to tell him that there is nothing to worry about.
Ron Hoyle has made a deal to sell the 1965 Mustang. Ten thousand dollars. Much less than it is worth.
Hoyle will need cash for the bail bondsman and the earliest the buyer can come up with that kind of cash will be the following morning. But Ron has kept his promise to his brother; he will have Bobby out of jail on Monday. He prepares for a visit out to Rikers to give Bobby the good news. He tries not to think about giving up the car. As Ron Hoyle dresses, he practices trying to sound very happy about the good news when he sees his brother.
Lou Vota polishes off a plate of French toast at the New Times Restaurant. He has been leafing through the pages of the Sunday Daily News as he eats. The newspaper is jammed full of advertisements for jewelry stores, with Valentine’s Day less than a week away. Vota has been thinking for some time about popping the question, asking Lorraine DiMarco to be his wife. He is thinking that this just might be the right time.
A waitress approaches Vota, looking out of the window as she reaches the table.
“Look at that place,” she says. “It stands out like a sore thumb.”
Vota follows her gaze across Coney Island Avenue.
“The Happy Horse,” Vota says. “Been there as long as I can remember.”
“With all of the fancy new buildings and businesses coming into the neighborhood, it’s very distracting. No matter how much better the avenue begins to look, that run-down old dump always catches my eye,” the waitress says.
“A blot on the landscape.”
“Excuse me?” she says, tearing her attention away from the Happy Horse.
“Next time you need a tire repair or a hubcap, I bet it will be the first dump that comes to mind.”
“Probably a good bet. Can I get you anything else?”
“No, thank you.”
She places the guest check on the table and glides back to the kitchen.
Vota takes a last swallow of coffee, places a ten-dollar bill on the table to cover the meal and a healthy tip, folds the paper under his arm and walks across Coney Island Avenue to the Precinct.
Alone in the detectives’ squad room, Vota makes a few phone calls. Nothing found on 7.19.15 as a birth date for any violent offenders or parents of violent offenders in the NYPD database.
The central phone bank is backed up by a request put in earlier by Detective Murphy and it will be a while before they can get around to checking combinations of the two letters cut into the Ventura boy’s face and the five digits written on the wall against phone numbers in the 212 and 718 area codes. For something to do, Vota plays around with the task himself. He places a number of phone calls, but all he achieves is infuriating a number of people who are sick and tired of being bothered by phone solicitation. Vota soon abandons the idea and revisits the jewelry ads in the Sunday News.
Tony Territo sits on his large leather chair behind his large oak desk in his large oak-paneled office behind the showroom of Titan Imports on 4th Avenue at 89th Street in Bay Ridge. The late morning has turned warmer, the sky is clear and the temperature is expected to reach the mid-forties. A balmy day for Brooklyn in February.
A good day to sell cars.
Less than three miles away, on 41st Street, in the shadow of the Gowanus Parkway near Third Avenue, Tony Territo leases a twenty-thousand-square-foot garage from Dominic Colletti. It is in this building that Territo stores his inventory of high-end stolen vehicles.
Colletti owns most of the buildings in the area, including Mom’s Bar on 42nd Street, where Colletti can be found most weekend nights guarded by Sammy Leone.
Along with the lease to the building where Territo keeps his cache, Colletti provides a level of protection against intruders.
Particularly those wearing uniforms.
The cars brought into the garage are all late-model, high-priced vehicles. They are either sold south of the border on the black market, after minor identification alterations, or chopped up for expensive parts.
Territo ran a small, trusted crew. He would never use a fuck-up like Johnny Colletti. More than that, vehicles were never taken from their owners in the way the Colletti kid tried to grab the Mustang. Territo’s people were pros. They knew how and when to take a car. Johnny Colletti was a fucking purse-snatcher. Dominic Colletti understood that and this is what angers Tony most—that the old fuck could even suggest that Territo was remotely responsible for the actions of Colletti’s idiot nephew and that Colletti would have the audacity to threaten Tony’s family.
Territo tries to put Colletti out of his mind. He jumps up from his leather seat and puts on his showroom smile. The sun is shining and Tony has cars to sell.
The temperature has climbed to fifty degrees and the sun is shining. Samson decides that it is mild enough to take the girls over to Alley Pond Park. He asks Jimmy to come along.
Jimmy Samson has places where he would rather be, but a quick look from his mother convinces Jimmy that it would be a good idea to accept his father’s invitation.
Kayla and Lucy sit on adjacent swings; Samson and Jimmy stand behind, giving the girls a ride.
“So,” says Samson, “tell me about Nicky Diaz.”
“Nothing much to tell,” says Jimmy. “Just a friend from school. We play basketball together.”
“And you had dinner with his family last evening?” asks his father.
“Cheese enchiladas with rice and beans,” says Jimmy, not sure where his father is going with the interrogation. “Nicky’s mother is an excellent cook.”
“And his father?”
“His father runs a pool hall over in Flushing; Nicky helps out there on weekends.”
“I don’t want you hanging around a pool hall, son.”
“I’ve never been there, Dad. It doesn’t really interest me.”
“Push me higher, Jimmy, up to the sky,” calls Lucy from her swing.
Murphy pushes his empty plate away.
“That’s it, Mom,” he says. “I have absolutely had enough.”
“I hope you saved room for dessert,” says his mother. “I baked a pineapple upside-down cake, I know it’s your favorite.”
Murphy feels as if he is about to burst.
“Where’s Michael?” Murphy asks.
“Michael is hardly ever here. Since he lost his job and had to move back home, all he does is run in to shower and change clothes and grab something from the refrigerator. I worry about him, Thomas. He never talks to me about what he’s doing and he always seems so unhappy.”
“He brought it on himself, Mom.”
“That is not true, Thomas,” insists Margaret Murphy. “I don’t believe for a minute that Michael took th
at money. Your father and I did not raise thieves.”
“Why would his boss lie?”
“I don’t know. I only know that Michael wouldn’t do it. And he loved that job. It was the first time in a very long while that he felt good about himself. Why would he jeopardize that?”
“The kid has been trouble ever since Dad died.”
“Maybe it would help if his older brother took a little more interest.”
“Mom, you know I’ve tried with him, more times than I care to remember. And every time I get him out of a mess he jumps right back into another. I’ve had enough. Even Dad would have given up on the kid by now.”
“How can you say such a thing, Thomas? Your father would never have given up on one of his boys; he never gave up on you.”
Murphy realizes how upset his mother truly is about her youngest child.
“I’m sorry, Mom, I didn’t mean that. I’ll talk with Mike. Try not to worry so much. How about some of that pineapple cake?”
Lorraine DiMarco is at home, trying to catch up on domestic chores. A few loads of laundry, a quick vacuum, and the impossible task of paying bills and attempting to balance a very unbalanced check book.
Lorraine gets a call from Ron Hoyle. He tells her that he will have the bail money sometime early the next morning. Lorraine assures Hoyle that if he can get it to the bondsman before noon, Bobby will be out of Rikers in time for dinner.
Lorraine asks Ron to call her as soon as he has the cash in hand. She will meet Hoyle at the bondsman’s office and they can walk across to the courthouse to take care of the paperwork.
A few minutes after Hoyle’s call, Lorraine’s phone rings again. This time it is Lou Vota, calling from his desk at the Precinct. There is nothing going on there. He has already gone as far as he could with the Sunday crossword, which wasn’t very far. He asks if she is free for dinner, maybe a movie afterwards. Lorraine is feeling pretty well, chores mostly taken care of, things looking a little better for Bobby Hoyle, and miraculously the headache has not returned. Yet.
She tells Lou that she will be ready at six.
George Addams has called the 63rd Precinct every thirty minutes for the past four hours. There is still nothing to report. He is told he can pick up the delivery truck anytime; they have done what they could to gather evidence. The desk sergeant is able to tell Addams that they were unable to lift prints from the steering wheel or from the dashboard, which suggests that the inside of the cab may have been wiped clean and which sounds like very bad news.
Tony Territo is with a customer in the showroom. He is hoping to close on a $110,000 Mercedes coupe, when his father walks in.
Territo signals for his best salesman to take over and leads his father back to the office.
“I spoke with Colletti last night,” Vincent Territo says, as soon as they are seated. Wasting no time.
“And?”
“His mind is set on you doing this thing for him. He has a distraught sister-in-law on his hands, but I think that it is just as much a test. To see what he can expect of you in terms of tribute. Colletti wants to see you again, and he insists that his inquiry about your daughter was innocent.”
“So, what do we do now?”
“I warned you about getting involved with Colletti. You make more than enough selling those cars out there.”
“Well, Pop, maybe I’m sorry I didn’t take your advice, but that’s no help. We have to deal with the situation at hand. And I’m all ears. What do I do?”
“You see Colletti and tell him you’ll take care of it. Just try to buy some time. I’ll set up a meeting with John Giambi in Long Island. Giambi can get Dominic Colletti off your back if he can be persuaded to do so.”
“I hate for you to have to see Giambi, Dad.”
“I appreciate the sentiment, but as you say, we have to deal with the situation at hand.”
“You don’t have to rub it in, Pop.”
“Be careful with Colletti. Don’t upset him. Just try to put him off long enough for me to work this out.”
“Okay. I’ll be a sweetheart. And thanks.”
“I have to go,” says Vincent. “Your mother is waiting in the car. And you had better get back out to the floor before your stand-in blows the sale.”
Samson gets a callback from Desk Sergeant Kelly. He had phoned Kelly earlier and asked that Nicky Diaz and his father be run through the computer. According to Kelly, the boy came up clean. No offenses, good student, all-county high school basketball star.
Alicia Samson had guessed right, Jimmy’s friend didn’t have a rap sheet. But Nicky’s father, Felipe Diaz, a.k.a. Phil the Pill, does have a sheet. As long as his arm.
Samson stores the information in his mental filing system and thinks that he may want to stop in for a game of pool the next time he is passing through Flushing.
SEVEN
When Serena Huang looks into the mirror, she sees a rising star. A much talked-about investigative journalist behind a large desk piled high with research in the busy City Room of the Washington Post or the New York Times and a future spot with a very popular TV news magazine.
Serena is nine months out of New York University with a master’s degree in Journalism and the only work she has been able to land is two freelance pieces for the Arts and Leisure section of New York Newsday and a tenuous job as a stringer for a local weekly called the Brooklyn Eagle.
This week’s assignment will have her standing outside of a movie theater on a Sunday evening, stopping patrons as they exit, jotting down inane answers to questions addressing the merits of the most current releases.
If nothing else, the result will necessarily showcase her imagination.
Samson has decided to drive to Brooklyn after all. It has been two weeks since he visited his father. The girls want to go along, but are told that he expects them to be long asleep by the time he gets back. Samson thinks about asking Jimmy to ride with him, feeling it would be good to spend more time with the boy and knowing how much it would please the boy’s grandfather. But something that he cannot quite put his finger on has Samson deciding to go alone.
Murphy gets a call from the central phone bank. It has been determined that two vials of pancuronium bromide were taken from a cabinet at the emergency room of Lutheran Medical Center in January. Ralph is groaning, barely able to move, paralyzed from too much of Mom’s cooking. The dog won’t be much company for a night at home. Murphy decides to run over to the hospital to see what he can learn.
Dr. Bruce Wayne is showing his new assistant around the crime lab. He has waited two months for a replacement, and they send the rookie over on a Sunday. Wayne attempts to look glad to be there. From Robin Harding’s perspective, Wayne’s attempt is far short of the mark.
A nasty flu that ran through the 68th in Bay Ridge has the police station shorthanded. Officers Stan Landis and Rey Mendez of the 61st are picking up overtime covering the three-to-midnight patrol for the rival precinct. Rey suggests a Mexican joint at 5th and 73rd for their dinner break.
Joe Campo closes the grocery and walks the half block to his son’s house on West 10th Street. It is the house he grew up in, the house where he spent the first twenty years of his life.
The house was full of family when Campo grew up.
His father’s parents, Italian immigrants, lived in the small basement apartment.
Campo had lived on the main floor with his parents and his two sisters. His mother and father had both come from Sicily as young children, from villages only a few miles apart, and had finally met as young adults in Gravesend.
His father’s brother lived on the second story with his wife and had raised three daughters there. Campo was brought up in a house full of female children.
When Campo met and later married Roseanna, they moved into her parents’ home on West 9th Street between Highlawn Avenue and Kings Highway, just two blocks from the Campo house. They raised their three children there. When his in-laws retired to Florida, Joe and Roseanna inhe
rited the house where they still lived. Their daughter Millie lived in the apartment above with her husband and two children. A second daughter, Josephine, had moved across to Staten Island after her marriage. She and her husband ran a small pharmacy.
Joe’s oldest child, Charles, had moved back into the house on West 10th Street with his wife and children after Joe’s father passed away. Charlie had the entire first floor and basement remodeled. The children had bedrooms and a spacious play area downstairs. There was a master bedroom and a guest room on the main floor, a living room, a dining room, a roomy bath, and an enlarged kitchen with sliding glass doors opening out to a rear deck.
Joe’s aunt and uncle, both in their nineties, still live in the apartment above.
Roseanna and her daughter-in-law, Angela, are in the kitchen preparing dinner. Charlie Campo is in the living room, reading a story to his son Frankie with the Knicks game playing in the background. The granddaughters are down in the basement, quietly watching a video.
The house is full of family still.
When Joe arrives he greets his son and walks back to the kitchen to his wife. He leans over to kiss her on the cheek. Angela looks on and smiles. Joe walks to the glass doors and gazes out into the yard, where two fig trees had stood when he was a child. He feels a tug on his pant leg and looks down to find Frankie. Joe lifts the boy up into his arms, and tries not to think about the boy on the roof.
Lou Vota and Lorraine DiMarco leave the New Corner Restaurant at 72nd Street and 8th Avenue and drive over to Gravesend to pick up her parents. Lorraine thought it would a nice gesture to invite Sal and Fran to join them for a movie, and Lou didn’t argue.
