Thrilling Thirteen

by Ponzo, Gary

  Men say that women are hard to understand and perhaps that’s true, but no one’s motives were ever more obvious than mine. You see, my father was a cop and I loved him dearly. God rest his soul, he put in twenty-nine years on the force and loved every minute of it until diabetes up and ran away with his life. It was the one crime he was powerless to stop. Dad’s been gone a while now. I remember him in his prime; strong, healthy, and dedicated to the job. He was a guy with honest-to-God moral values; old-fashioned values acquired from a strict Catholic upbringing. He was the kind of guy who would never let a little guy take a beating. As you can see, he made quite an impression on me. So there it is. Police work is in my blood or under my skin. In either case, my dad put it there.

  I think he’d be proud of me these days. His little girl was recently called a hero. My picture was in the newspaper and on TV. The brass certainly stood up and took notice. It earned this young detective some badly needed respect. I won the department’s flavor-of-the-month contest. I’m not so much vanilla, but more of a mocha-almond crunch. I collared a Libyan freedom fighter by the name of Gamal Haddad with a backpack full of explosives on New Year’s Eve. It seems that Mr. Haddad, an emissary of goodwill from the land of goat’s milk and camel dung, had decided to steal some attention from Ryan Seacrest by going up in a blaze of glory in Times Square. In the process, Mr. Haddad would have assured himself a place in paradise, praise be to Allah and all the rest of that overzealous dribble. All’s fair in love, war, and religion. Right? Bullshit! Well anyway, Ms. Photogenic’s picture was in all the New York newspapers. Everyone got a good view of my puss as I led Haddad away in handcuffs. The news programs all had me on camera. I hope they were shooting my good side.

  To balance my desire to be an instrument of justice against my damnable feminine attributes, I’ve been forced to concoct a tough-as-nails persona for myself. My fellow detectives know me as cold, tough, and cynical: the kind of woman whose legs couldn’t be pried apart with the Jaws of Life. It’s not the way I’d like it to be but it’s necessary, sadly so, and it works. The titanium veneer allows me to be an effective cop and not a name scratched into the wall above the men’s room urinal. It’s been eighteen months since I made detective and I really think the boys are starting to come around. I’m apolitical, focused, and driven. I’m one of the most determined detectives on the squad. I won’t accept no for an answer, and I run down every lead until there’s absolutely no place to go.

  That’s what good police work is really about: hard work, some brains, and then more hard work. I don’t come across very many Sherlock Holmes types. Genius criminal detectives are few and very far between. The archetype of a good detective is more like Rocky Balboa, a guy with a huge heart who never gives up, no matter how hopeless the circumstances seem. Did I say Rocky Balboa? Well, Rocky Balboa with some brains, but you know what I mean, a guy who keeps coming at you even after you’ve emptied a magazine full of Black Talons into his chest.

  Back to the here and now. It’s Saturday and it’s five-twenty in the morning. Yes, the goddamn morning. That’s right, I said five-twenty. There’s nothing funny about the time of day, or the reason I was forced to chug a double shot of espresso just to shake out the cobwebs. I had just finished the aforementioned bar crawl when the call came in from my CO. There’s nothing quite like a double homicide to start the day. Two dead bodies were found on the Roosevelt Island tram at three-something in the morning. One was shot in the back. The other fatality was not as easily explained.

  My partner, Gus Lido, was half in the bag. Gus looked as if he had slept in his clothes. He was unshaven, his eyes were bloodshot, and he was sporting the most incredible pillow-head hairdo. I’m quite certain he had forgotten to mousse. Despite his apparent lack of energy, Gus’ eyes kept wandering from the road to my left thigh. I should’ve pulled my skirt over my knees, but Gus looked as though he needed something to keep his heart going. Besides, he had been thoughtful enough to stop at Starbucks and bought coffee. In addition, he had prepared mine the way I liked it, with half and half and Sweet’N Low. Moreover, Gus is a stud. He’s actually a bright and caring guy. He’s even prone to an occasional moment of genius and one day . . . well, let’s just wait and see where it goes. But for the meantime, the exposed thigh was definitely keeping him happy. As his partner I wanted him alert and motivated when we got to the tram.

  We got caught behind a granny going cross-town on our way to the crime scene. By my account, there are more seniors on the streets than ever before. I could see the dear old girl clear as a bell. She had silver-blue hair and wore a polyester blouse. Her face was pressed up against the steering wheel. Who else would be up and about at this ungodly hour but an octogenarian? I hit the yelp button. The old dear pulled slowly to the side. Lido almost took the mirror off our unmarked car as he squeezed by. I smiled sympathetically as we passed and the old darling flipped me the bird. I had to smile over her gumption. What’s the deal? Is Florida filled up? Does the early bird special no longer mean anything?

  The sun was just crowning in the east when we arrived at the crime scene. There was barely any standing room on the tramway platform. The crime scene guys as well as the medical examiner were already there and waiting for the okay to proceed. Dozens of uniformed officers from the local precincts were in attendance. Fifty-ninth Street is the dividing line that separates the seventeenth and nineteenth precincts and as such, patrol cars from both jurisdictions had responded to the call. For some reason, there were Port Authority personnel there as well, although they really had no place in the investigation. Whatever.

  Wendell Johnson, a tram employee, was there and was not looking well at all. The perp had fled the scene and in the process had almost broken Mr. Johnson’s back. The president of the Roosevelt Island Operating Corporation had gotten a call at home and come over from Roosevelt Island by launch; kudos to him. The Roosevelt Island Tramway was a sanctified gem in an otherwise heavily rusted MTA crown. Other than a small mishap with a construction crane a few years back, the tram’s history had been quiet and unremarkable. The RIOC president was looking out for his own.

  Lido and I had to push and claw our way through the crowd just to get a look at the victims. A cop named Dressen had secured the crime scene and was doing a good job of keeping everyone from trampling on it. “Think there are enough cops here?” I asked him.

  Dressen smiled wryly. I like a nice wry smile in the morning. “CYA,” he said.

  “CYA?”

  “Yeah, cover your ass. Jurisdiction is in question,” he said, “so everyone responded to make sure everyone’s fanny is covered. The altercation took place after 3:00 a.m. Try getting a brain trust on the phone at that hour.”

  “Really.” Lido did a quick head count. There were close to fifty of New York’s finest on the platform. “How many do we need?” he asked.

  “How many Kardashians actually have talent?” I replied.

  Dressen winked before stepping aside. “Point well taken.”

  I pulled a pair of latex gloves out of my coat pocket. “Got another pair?” Lido asked.

  “Can’t you remember anything?” I asked, scolding him playfully.

  “Come on, Cha-lee-see.” I liked the fact that he pronounced my name correctly. “Look at the time.”

  “Your memory stinks. I thought you were taking that ginkgo biloba stuff.”

  “I was.”

  “So what happened?” Lido shrugged. Maybe it was too early . . . for him.

  Anyway, I handed Gus an extra pair of gloves. “You’d make a lousy proctologist.” Gus laughed as he pulled them on and snapped the fingers into place. He smiled, probably not so much at the comment but at the image it must have elicited. Penny for your thoughts, big guy.

  The first victim was a guy named Teddy Balto. The entry and exit wounds suggested that Balto had been popped in the back with what looked to me like a 9mm at close range. Obviously close range since we were in a tram cabin and not on a football field. The bul
let had entered the lower back and gone through his heart before exiting out the front of the rib cage.

  “Looks like our perp knew how to kill a man,” Lido commented.

  “You’re not kidding, fast and precise.” I tried to imagine the path of the 9mm after it exited Balto’s chest and found it lodged in the steel window seal. Two inches lower and it would have pierced the safety plate glass and disappeared into the East River. I pointed it out to Dressen and asked him to show it to the forensics boys. “Looks like the perp came up behind the conductor and took him out without warning. Poor guy never knew what hit him.”

  “So why didn’t he shoot the woman?” Lido asked.

  “Beats me,” I replied. “Let’s find out.”

  The other victim was a woman in her late thirties or early forties. She was dressed conservatively and tastefully. She wore an Escada pantsuit and had an absolutely divine scarf around her neck. I saw the telltale Hermès signature in the corner; exquisite as were the Manolo Blahnik pumps she sported. It occurred to me that I’d never seen a thousand-dollar pair of shoes before. The victim’s tennis bag was next to her. I riffled through it quickly. It contained the requisite racket, warm up suit, towel, and unmentionables.

  “There’s a tennis club on the island right under the Fifty-ninth Street Bridge,” Dressen volunteered.

  I winked at him. “Thanks.” He was trying to score some brownie points—can’t fault him for that.

  The female victim’s name was Ellen Redner. Her unopened purse and Coach briefcase were on the floor next to her. Let’s rule out the robbery motive, shall we? She had a New York State driver’s license that listed an address on Sutton Place. She was probably on her way back from the tennis courts before someone decided to put her lights out. There was a membership card for the Roosevelt Island Racquet Club stuck in the outer pouch of her wallet. I’d call over there in a bit to confirm that Ms. Redner had in fact played.

  I found legal stationary in her briefcase. Ms. Redner was listed as a partner with Holmes, Stockton, and Deveraux, a heavy-hitting law firm that I’d heard of, with offices on Wall Street.

  There were no obvious signs of an attack. In fact, Ellen Redner looked very peaceful in death and it would take the medical examiner’s practiced eye to determine that she had been murdered, had it not been for the fact that her mouth was stuffed with a rag. A torn scrap of paper had been pushed in with it. The spacing of the lines on the paper was the kind that kids use to practice their penmanship. I knew it would happen sooner or later. I knew that one day I’d be investigating an honest-to-God psychopath. That’s exactly what we had. Two underlined words were written in pencil: Look back!

  Chapter Three

  Lido and I had pretty much covered the crime scene by 7:00 a.m. Wendell Johnson was the only employee available for questioning. Johnson had merely stumbled upon the corpse. The poor old guy was in shock after his short stint as a battering ram. By all rights, he should have gone right over to New York University Hospital for a thorough once-over, but seeing as Wendell was the salt-of-the-earth type, he waited around to tell me that he hadn’t seen the truck that hit him. At least we knew that the perp was a powerful male who had worn a ski mask and had fled the scene on foot after using Wendell as a tackling dummy. We already had the word out on the street to see if anyone had seen our perp. Good luck.

  We arranged for a police launch to take us out to Roosevelt Island. The investigation had put the tram out of commission so to speak, which was a pity because I’d never had the pleasure.

  What the tram could accomplish in four minutes took us fifteen by boat. Despite the beautiful weather, the ride across the East River was cold and choppy. I spent the entire ride holding down my skirt. So much for femininity.

  The hearse, excuse me, the tram cabin that had transported Ellen Redner’s and Teddy Balto’s lifeless bodies back to Manhattan had been set in motion by a gent named Seth Green. Green had allegedly gone off duty shortly after seeing the last cabin on its way. He was a resident of Roosevelt Island and had been an employee for three years.

  We had made several phone calls to his home, which went unanswered. Green, a thirty-four-year-old ex-landscaper, was single and lived alone, or so the shift supervisor had told us. He said that Green was a decent type, a bit of a loner, but what’s so bad about that? An RMP had been dispatched to Green’s residence. Green was either not at home or dead. In any case, he wasn’t answering the door. I was betting on the latter. Then again, let’s keep an open mind. After all, it is New York. I’m sure there are plenty of ways to stay busy, even on Roosevelt Island. We couldn’t just break down his door. It’s always embarrassing when you break into someone’s apartment only to find that the person of interest was just down the block, wrapped in the arms of the lonely neighborhood beautician.

  Other than waiting to question Green and get the medical examiner’s official report as to the time and cause of Redner’s and Balto’s deaths, there wasn’t too much to do on Roosevelt Island. Poor Ellen Redner, I was betting that the standard list of snitches and informants would turn up very little. What manner of psycho leaves a crumpled note in his victim’s mouth, for Christ’s sake? This was definitely uncharted territory for me.

  Anyway, thirty minutes had come and gone and if studly Seth Green was still servicing that beautician down the block, well . . . mad props to him. Um . . . I mean too bad. It was after 9:00 a.m. before we asked the superintendent to let us in, which always leaves a better impression than taking the door off the hinges.

  Green had a two-bedroom on the second floor of a four-story walkup with an uninspiring view of the courtyard. Green hadn’t been there in a while. It certainly didn’t look as if he had slept in the bed. It was made up neatly, with military corners and a blanket pulled tightly enough to bounce pocket change.

  Green didn’t own an answering machine. So now what? Well, Seth Green was now wanted for questioning, and like I said, I doubt that the usual rogue’s gallery of tattlers would result in much. This wasn’t your typical homicide. The usual motives for murder are theft and revenge, followed by random acts of violence. Planned homicides are the rarest of all.

  It was now 10:30 a.m. and I needed to be back on the mainland for an appointment at noon. There was something important I really needed to do—more on that later. Lido now looked fully awake. The wrinkles had shaken out of his clothes and his eyes were clear, but that phenomenal pillow-head hairdo thing was here to stay.

  “Okay, strategy?” Gus asked. I told you he could be brilliant.

  I told Gus that I needed a couple of hours of personal time and we agreed to meet back at the house at two. Gus was going to try to get hold of one of the partners at Ellen Redner’s firm and see if we could check her office. After that, we were going to head over to Ellen’s apartment to see what was what.

  By this time, all of the special teams had cleared off the Fifty-ninth Street side of the tram, so I was able to get that ride that I had been looking forward to at long last. The view was spectacular. The sun was tall and brilliant. It reflected off the windows of the monolithic skyscrapers that covered Manhattan from tip to tip. It gave me an entirely new perspective on the city. From such lofty heights, it almost seemed pure, as if the sun had bathed it in a cleansing light. For the moment I enjoyed it, the illusion that is, knowing that in a few minutes my feet would be back safely on the ground, planted firmly in the ooze. I had been on the job for six years. In that time I had learned that you could smell crime, feel it, hear it, Christ, you could almost taste it. But see it? I found that one sensory modality the least reliable of all. Nothing was ever as it seemed and appearances were most often deceptive. It was often difficult to recognize crime’s face, but I knew that it was out there, lurking in the darkness. All I had to do was scratch beneath the surface to find it.

  Chapter Four

  A taxi pulled up as soon as I hit the curb. You’d be surprised at how fast a cabby will stop for a woman in a skirt, especially a short one. Such
serendipity usually comes at a price and this time was no exception. The driver, a prince of a man going by the name Salem Ejaz, looked like the poster boy for the National Perverts Alliance. His grease-laden hair deposited an oily smear on the Plexiglas partition. Despite the balmy weather, Mr. Ejaz was wearing a trench coat. What’s the story with that? He looked like a Hindu version of Ratso Rizo. Just looking at his photo ID gave me the willies. He seemed like the kind of slug who’d offer a free ride to a blind woman so that he could look up her skirt when she got into the cab.

  I felt uncomfortable just being in a skirt and in his cab. I knew he couldn’t see anything, but that didn’t stop my skin from crawling. Of course, there was always the possibility that he had one of those miniature lipstick cams hidden somewhere. You know, like the ones HBO uses for those seedy Taxicab Confessions. That would be pretty sick, wouldn’t it? I could just imagine this perv locked in his bedroom masturbating to illicit panty shots. That thought put me over the edge. I flashed my detective’s shield. “Step on it!” I told him. “Police business.” Well, it really wasn’t police business, but I am the police after all and if some sleazebag was videotaping my vajayjay . . . Well, the thought was too much to bear.

  Be that as it may, the shield got me downtown in a hurry. I was fifteen minutes early for my appointment so I blew into Starbucks for a quick cappuccino. I looked at one of those inedible cranberry-encrusted things they call scones and then opted for the smoked turkey on pumpernickel bread.