Leader of the Pack

by David Rosenfelt

  Iurato picked up the dishes and placed them on the table. He then propped Nicky up in his chair; he had slouched a bit and had a difficult time lifting himself back up.

  Once that was accomplished, Iurato stepped behind Nicky, and in one motion, broke his neck. He did it quickly and expertly, in the same manner he had used with previous victims.

  Iurato went into the bathroom and turned on the shower, then ripped the shower curtain and threw it on the wet floor. He then dragged Nicky into the bathroom, which was not an easy task, as Nicky now defined the term “deadweight.”

  Iurato placed Nicky on the floor, and then left the bathroom, closing the door behind him. The official report would say that Nicky had slipped and fallen in the shower, and no one would contradict it. No coroner in his right mind would believe that someone had come into Nicky Fats’s house and killed him.

  And no one could ever have imagined who ordered it, or why.

  I am at my computer when I have a potentially life-changing experience. There, sitting in my e-mail in-box with far less important messages, is one with the subject, “Urgent response requested.”

  Never one to fail to respond to an urgent request, I open the e-mail and am shocked to find that it is from one Amin d’Amino, a bank officer in Ghana. He is writing to me because he has learned that I am a man that can be trusted to handle a sensitive matter with great discretion. And this is clearly a sensitive matter.

  It turns out that there are twenty million dollars sitting in this particular bank, needing only a destination to allow Mr. d’Amino to send it to. And he has chosen me! From a country full of people! Obviously the Andy Carpenter star shines brightly around the world.

  For my trouble and discretion I will receive eight million dollars for myself. Amazingly, all I have to do is send him my bank account information, so that he can wire it. It’s an eminently reasonable request; if it takes me five minutes to do it, I will have earned one point six million dollars per minute. There are NBA players who don’t earn that much.

  Having said that, I’m thinking that maybe I’m not worthy of something like this. I’m debating this in my own mind, when I hear the doorbell. Laurie opens it and lets Hike in, and he comes into the den, carrying a filled cardboard box, which he puts down on the desk.

  “Give me your bank account number,” I say.

  “What for?”

  “Eight million dollars, that’s what for. It’s your lucky day.”

  “Is that the Ghana money?” he asks.

  “How did you know?”

  “I already sent them your information. You should get the wire any minute. Which is good, considering you’re working for a client who hasn’t paid you for six years.”

  He’s referring to Joey, though of course I haven’t done any work for him during those six years. There was little need to fight to keep someone out of prison when that person was already in prison.

  “Let’s take a look at the file,” I say, and proceed to take folders out of the box that Hike brought from the office. While I’m not being paid for this, Hike is, which is why he was so willing to pick up the file and bring it over. If I asked Hike to drive to Wyoming to pick up an acre of cowshit, he would be fine doing so, as long as he could bill by the hour, and he could get time and a half for washing off his shoes.

  “Your schedule is a little off,” Hike says.

  “What do you mean?”

  “It’s not the end of the month.”

  Hike knows that my going through old files on cases I’ve lost is a common practice for me, as I’m always hoping I’ll suddenly find something I’d previously missed. But I usually reserve the last week of every other month to do so, and the next time isn’t for six weeks.

  “I got some new information yesterday, from Nicky Fats,” I say.

  “Did you kill him after he gave it to you?”

  “What does that mean? We did therapy with him.”

  “He’s dead; I just heard it on the way over here. He died yesterday afternoon.”

  This is stunning news. “How?”

  “They’re not saying … but apparently he was depressed, and they’re hinting at suicide. Maybe you’re not that good at the therapy stuff.”

  The timing of Nicky Fats’s death is a direct violation of my coincidence theory, which is that coincidences don’t exist. Of course, the theory might very well not apply in this case, since Nicky was very old, losing his mind, and not exactly a picture of health. There is also no real possibility that his rambling to me could have gotten him killed, since only Tara and I heard it. I only mentioned it to Pete, Vince, and Laurie, and that was apparently after Nicky was already dead. As far as I know, Tara hasn’t barked it to a soul.

  One thing is for sure: the death is untimely. It does not allow for further questioning of Nicky, should that be necessary. Of course, that in itself is a mixed blessing, since I had absolutely no desire to ever be in the fat man’s presence again.

  “So what did he say?” Hike asks.

  “That Richard Solarno was into possibly illegal activities; he called him ‘dirty.’ Made me wonder if Richard might have been the target, rather than his wife, Karen.”

  Hike wasn’t working with me back then, so he’s unfamiliar with the case. I lay out the rough picture for him, that the prosecution’s case was predicated on Joey killing Karen and her husband as an act of revenge. Joey and Karen had been having an affair, which Joey readily admitted to. She had broken it off, a fact which he also confirmed.

  Richard was thought to be an innocent victim, first wronged by his wife, and then killed by her lover. He was essentially a fisherman, albeit a very successful one. He ran a shrimping company, which employed a fleet of more than ninety boats, stretching from New Jersey to Florida.

  Probably being uncharacteristically kind, Hike doesn’t ask the key question, which is how carefully did I check Richard Solarno out before trial. He doesn’t have to; I’ve been torturing myself with that exact question since I left Nicky’s house.

  The answer is that I didn’t do nearly enough. There were a combination of reasons for that. First of all, the police had conducted an investigation, and what I did do confirmed their view that there was nothing in Richard’s past that would have made him a likely target.

  Karen, on the other hand, was a different story. She was not exactly the faithful, doting wife, and she played around with a number of unsavory characters. Joey actually thought that she dumped him when she found out he was not in the family business; he ceased to represent the excitement and danger she naturally sought.

  Our defense was to offer two possible theories for the crime. They were contradictory, except that each was designed to cultivate reasonable doubt.

  One was that the killing was a random home invasion gone violent, and there had been a few similar, albeit less deadly, incidents in that area around that time. The second was that there were a number of Karen’s ex-suitors both angry and violent enough to have done the deed, and that Joey was just one of the group. Our claim was that the prosecution quickly and unfairly picked Joey because of his family background.

  Lastly, I was not Joey’s original attorney, but they had a falling out, and I was called in just three weeks before trial. I wanted a continuance to give me more time to dig into the case, but Joey wouldn’t hear of it. He was certain of his innocence, and confident in my ability to prove it, so he wanted out of jail as soon as possible.

  Six years later he’s in state prison, so his confidence doesn’t seem to have been entirely warranted.

  The point is that I have a lot of excuses for not more thoroughly vetting the man that was Richard Solarno, but none of them feel acceptable at the moment. The fact that the file does not provide any fresh perspective is not surprising; I’ve been through it enough times that I could almost recite it by heart.

  Most likely none of this will matter, and the ramblings of a soon-to-be-dead fat gangster will be shown to have no relevance in the real world.

/>   But my sympathy for Joey having to sit in prison, plus my guilt at not keeping him out of there, adds up to one thing:

  I’m going to find out what the hell Nicky Fats was talking about.

  Janet Carlson could wake the dead, and is uniquely in a position to do so. Janet is the Passaic County coroner, and while I am not particularly knowledgeable about the history of that office, I can safely say she is the best-looking coroner in Passaic County history.

  She’s almost six feet tall, with jet-black hair and a body that is in Laurie’s league, which is to say the major league.

  She is also completely competent, a fact that often causes me aggravation. Just by the nature of the job and system, she is always a prosecution witness, so it becomes my job to make her look bad on the stand. Maybe someday I’ll succeed at it.

  It’s possible she feels sorry for me, because she goes out of her way to be helpful whenever she can, at least out of court. Since I go out of my way to take advantage of helpful people whenever I can, the relationship works pretty well for me.

  I’m in the lobby area telling the receptionist that I would like to talk to Janet when I see her through a window into the main office area. Even better, she sees me, and comes out into the lobby.

  “Andy, you’re not working again, are you? I mean, have you taken on a client?”

  “No.”

  She pretends to wipe her brow. “Whew, that’s a relief.”

  “Why?”

  “I have three years from August in the ‘when will Andy Carpenter get off his ass’ pool.”

  I laugh. “You’ve got a pretty good shot.”

  “Good to hear. So if you’re not working, this is a strange place for you to show up.”

  “Doesn’t everybody show up someplace like here eventually?” I ask.

  “Now you’re waxing philosophical? What’s up?”

  “Has Nicky Fats come through yet?”

  She looks puzzled for a moment, and then says, “Is that Nicholas Desimone?”

  “You never heard of Nicky Fats?”

  “No, but after looking at him, the derivation of the name is fairly easy to understand. I’m just getting to him now.”

  “Can I watch?”

  “You mean listen?”

  “Yes. Listen.”

  Janet knows the drill, since I’ve sat in on other autopsies with her before. I do so with my back turned to the body and table; I even walk into the room backward so as not to see the unfortunate ex-soul that’s about to be cut up.

  She shrugs. “Sure. I always like live company.”

  We go into the autopsy room. As we approach, I do a neat little pirouette and take the last ten or so steps backward, ignoring Janet’s chuckling at my antics. As always, I’m struck by how cold it is in the room.

  As Janet is getting ready, she asks why I’m interested in this particular autopsy.

  “I saw him just a short while before he died. Just an hour or so, if the news reports are right.”

  “Was he a client?”

  “No, I represented his nephew, Joey.”

  “The guy who shot those people?”

  “Innocent as charged.”

  “Wasn’t there a jury involved in there somewhere?” she asks, but doesn’t wait for an answer. She starts talking into a recording microphone, describing what she is doing to the body, and what she is discovering.

  I don’t understand much of it, since there are a lot of medical terms. Also, since I can’t see what she’s looking at, and because she examines every part of the body, it’s hard to know when what she is saying has any significance.

  When she mentions “vertebral fracture” I perk up. “Broken back?” I ask.

  “Broken neck; it was reported that he fell down in the bathroom. It’s going to be the cause of death.”

  “So no chance of suicide?”

  “Are you asking if he intentionally broke his own neck?”

  “Withdraw the question. Could he have had help?”

  “Let’s see,” she says, and then doesn’t say anything for a few minutes. Finally, “It’s not going to be definitive, Andy.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “There are contusions on the left side of the neck, probably premortem. Slight ones on the right side as well, but much less pronounced. Possible that they were sustained in the fall, maybe if he fell against a sink or something.”

  “So it could have been a murder?”

  “Possibly, but I’m not going to have enough to call it that. Unless you have something enlightening to add.”

  “He was an enforcer and hit man. Those kind of people make a lot of enemies.”

  “He lived a long life,” she points out.

  “True.” I thank her and leave, walking straight out the door, since that leaves me with my back to Nicky Fats.

  I’m not really sure what I wanted her to say, but what I got was the worst of all worlds. Had she said definitively that Nicky died of natural causes, I would have known that it had no connection to what he said to me, and I could have dropped it.

  Had she said for sure that he was murdered, I would have been close to positive that there was something for me to find, and I could have plunged into it, for Joey’s sake.

  This was somewhere in the middle, enough to draw me in, and probably enough to waste my time.

  “I heard it from a guard,” Joey said. “He thought it was pretty funny.”

  “He thought what was funny?” I ask.

  “The idea of Nicky falling out of the shower onto the floor. He said he must have looked like a beached whale.” He shrugs. “That’s what passes for humor around here.”

  Among the things I’d come back to the prison for was to tell Joey about Nicky’s death, in case he hadn’t heard. Obviously he had.

  “I assume you didn’t get to see him?” he asks.

  “Actually, I did. The day he died.”

  “No kidding? That was fast. I’m glad you did. Was he coherent?”

  “He went in and out. But he said a couple of things that I wanted to talk to you about.”

  I go on to tell him what Nicky said about Richard Solarno, and ask him if it makes any sense.

  “Not much,” he says. “I don’t even think Nicky knew him. How would he?”

  “I was hoping you could tell me that.”

  “I can’t. They lived in different worlds. Unless Nicky was also sleeping with Karen.”

  Joey isn’t serious when he says that; it just reflects his continued bitterness about the way Karen Solarno dumped him. It’s an attitude that was damaging to him; witnesses testified about Joey’s anger at Karen, and it contributed to the prosecution’s theory on motive.

  “Did you have any suspicions Richard might be into anything illegal?” I ask.

  “Does domestic violence count?”

  “He beat his wife?”

  “According to Karen.”

  “Interesting, but it doesn’t fit,” I say.

  “I wish I could say otherwise, but Nicky was probably just babbling,” Joey says.

  “Well, he did offer me some of his pasta when I saw him.”

  “So?”

  “He was eating M&M’s at the time.”

  Joey laughs. “You know, I should be trying to get you to think Nicky was sharp as a tack.”

  “Why?”

  “Because if you dig into it, then maybe there’s a one percent chance of you finding something. Which is one percent more of a chance than I’ve got now.”

  “You know damn well I’m going to dig into it,” I say.

  He smiles. “Yeah. You want me to get you some money for your time?”

  “I should be paying you,” I say.

  “For what?”

  “For getting me out of the therapy business.”

  I’m generally really nice to waiters and waitresses. I smile, ask them how they are, thank them whenever they serve me something, and tip really well.

  I am Andy Carpenter, man of the people.r />
  But there is one thing that some of them do that annoys me, and Laurie has just told me it’s about to happen.

  We’re at the Bonfire, a restaurant on Market Street in Paterson. It’s a nice place that I have some emotional ties to, in that it was a hangout on Friday and Saturday nights back in high school. It’s where we would go after dates, or, in my case, after not having a date.

  We’ve just sat down and are looking at the menus, though I pretty much know the selections by heart. Our waiter is taking the orders of the four people at the table next to us, and Laurie has been glancing over at them, so she knows that what’s about to happen is going to bug me.

  After she alerts me to it, she says, “In the meantime, tell me about Nicky Fats and Joey.”

  “Let’s wait until we order. This could take awhile.”

  What Laurie had noticed is that the waiter is not writing anything down as people are ordering their food. He just nods and answers whatever questions they have. There is no way that waiters can remember everything, and I am always positive they are going to make mistakes. Sometimes they don’t, but whenever it happens I am sure that they will.

  This time, to drive me even more insane, the waiter doesn’t put in the orders of the four people at the adjacent table. He just comes straight over to us, which means he’s going to have to remember six people’s worth of food.

  What could possibly be the upside in not writing it down? He’s going to have to tell it to the chef in a few minutes anyway. The chef will write it down, won’t he? Or is he a memory expert also? Why not write it down, hand it to the chef, and be done with it?

  He comes over to us and says, “My name is Danny. Welcome to the Bonfire. Are we ready to order?”

  I say, “We sure are.” What I don’t say, but which I’m thinking, is “Danny boy, prepare to suffer.”

  Laurie orders first, a house salad and then the grilled salmon. She has a couple of additions and special requests, but nothing too complicated. Danny just repeats everything she says, smiling as he pretends to successfully commit it to memory.