Yep, Game…
Sarah Lieberman’s story had indeed interested Caruso, as Mrs. Rodriguez here had suggested. Sarah’s itinerant younger days, a bit of a rebel, her settling into life in New York City quite easily. She seemed to be irreverent and clever and to have no patience for the pretense that breeds in the Upper East Side like germs in a four-year-old’s nose. Caruso decided he would have liked the woman.
And he was mightily pissed off that the Westerfields had beat her to death with a hammer, wrapped the body in a garbage bag, and dumped her in an unmarked grave.
It seemed that mother and son had met Sarah at a fund-raiser and saw a chance to run a grift. They recognized her as a wealthy, elderly vulnerable woman with no family, living alone. A perfect target. They leased the apartment on the ground floor of her Upper East Side townhouse and began a relentless campaign to take control of her life. She had finally had enough and one morning in July, a year ago, tried to record them threatening her. They’d caught her in the act, though, and forced her to sign a contract selling them the townhouse for next to nothing. Then they zapped her with a Taser and bludgeoned her to death.
That afternoon Carmel returned to the townhouse from shopping and found her missing. Knowing that the Westerfields had been asking about her valuables and that Sarah was going to record them threatening her, the housekeeper suspected what had happened. She called the police. Given that—and the fact that a routine search revealed the Westerfields had a criminal history in Missouri and Kansas—officers responded immediately. They found some fresh blood in the garage. That was enough for a search warrant. Crime Scene found the Taser with Sarah’s skin in the barbs, a hammer with John’s prints and Sarah’s blood and hair, and duct tape with both Sarah’s and Miriam’s DNA. A roll of garbage bags, too, three of them missing.
The clerk from a local spy and security shop verified the Taser had been bought, with cash, by John Westerfield a week earlier. Computer forensic experts found the couple had tried to hack into Sarah’s financial accounts—without success. Investigators did, however, find insurance documents covering close to seven hundred thousand dollars in cash and jewelry kept on her premises. Two necklaces identified as Sarah’s were found in Miriam’s jewelry box. All of the valuables had been stolen.
The defense claimed that drug gangs had broken in and killed her. Or, as an alternative, that Sarah had gone senile and went off by herself on a bus or train.
Juries hate lame excuses and it took the Lieberman panel all of four hours to convict. The two were sentenced to life imprisonment. The farewell in the courtroom—mother and son embracing like spouses—made for one real queasy photograph.
Carmel now said to Eddie Caruso, “I kept hoping the police would find her remains, you know?”
John’s car had been spotted several days before Sarah disappeared in New Jersey, where he was reportedly looking at real property for one of his big business deals, none of which ever progressed past the daydreaming phase. It was assumed the body had been dumped there.
Carmel continued, “I don’t know about her religion, the Jewish one, but I’m sure it’s important to be buried and have a gravestone and have people say some words over you. To have people come and see you. Don’t you think, Mr. Caruso?”
He himself didn’t think that was important but he now nodded.
“The problem is, see, this is a simple death.”
“Simple?” The woman sat forward, brows furrowing a bit.
“Not to make little of it, understand me,” Caruso added quickly, seeing the dismay on her face. “It’s just that it’s open and shut, you know? Nasty perps, good evidence. No love children, no hidden treasure that was never recovered, no conspiracy theories. Fast conviction. With a simple death, people lose interest. The leads go cold real fast. I’m saying, it could be expensive for me to take on the case.”
“I could pay you three thousand dollars. Not more than that.”
“That’d buy you about twenty-five hours of my time.” On impulse he decided to waive expenses, which he marked up and made a profit on.
Before he went further, though, Caruso asked, “Have you thought this through?”
“What do you mean?”
“Well, it was a terrible crime but justice’s been done. If I start searching, I may have to ask you things—you’ll have to relive the incident. And, well, sometimes when people look into the past, they find things they wish they hadn’t.”
“What could that be?”
“Maybe there’d be no way to recover the body, even if I find it. Maybe it was…let’s say disrespected when it was disposed of.”
Carmel had not considered this, he could tell. Clients rarely did. But she said, “I want to say a prayer at her grave, wherever it is. I don’t care about anything else.”
Caruso nodded and pulled a retainer agreement from his credenza. They both signed it. Also, on whim, he penned in a discounted hourly rate. He’d seen pictures of her three children when she’d opened her purse to get her driver’s license number for the agreement. They were teenagers and the parents were surely facing the horror of college expenses.
You’re a goddamn softy, he told himself.
“All right,” he said to her. “Let me keep these and I’ll get to work. Give me your home and cell numbers.”
A hesitation. “Email please. Only email.” She wrote it down.
“Sure. Not call?”
“No, please don’t. See, I mentioned to my husband I was thinking about doing this and he said it wasn’t a good idea.”
“Why?”
She nodded at the news clippings. “It’s in there somewhere. There was a man maybe working for the Westerfields, the police think. Daniel’s worried he’d find out if we started looking for the body. He’s probably dangerous.”
Glad you mentioned it, Caruso thought wryly. “Okay, I’ll email.” He rose.
Carmel Rodriguez stepped forward and actually hugged him, tears in her eyes.
Caruso mentally bumped his fee down another twenty-five, just to buy her a little more of his time.
When she’d gone he booted up the iPad just to see what he’d missed sportswise. The match was over. Senegal had won five zip.
Five?
A BBC announcer, beset by very un-BBC enthusiasm, was gushing, “Some of the most spectacular goals I have ever seen in all my years—”
Caruso shut the device off. He pulled the stack of clippings closer, to take more notes—and to read up in particular on the Westerfields’ possible accomplice.
He was reflecting that in all his years as a privately investigating security consultant, he’d been in one pushing match that lasted ten seconds. Not one real fight. Caruso did have a license to carry a pistol and he owned one but he hadn’t touched his in about five years. He believed the bullets had turned green.
He wondered if he would in fact be in danger.
Then decided, so be it. Game had to come with a little risk. Otherwise it wasn’t Game.
* * *
NYPD DETECTIVE LIEUTENANT Lon Sellitto dropped into his chair in his Major Cases office, One Police Plaza. Dropped, not sat. Rumpled—the adjective applied to both the gray suit and the human it encased—he looked with longing affection at a large bag from Baja Express he’d set on his excessively cluttered desk. Then at his visitor. “You want a taco?”
“No, thanks,” Caruso said.
The portly cop said, “I don’t get the cheese or the beans. It cuts the calories way down.”
Eddie Caruso had known Sellitto for years. The detective was an all right guy, who didn’t bust the chops of private cops, as long as they didn’t throw their weight around and sneak behind the backs of the real Boys in Blue. Caruso didn’t. He was respectful.
But not sycophantic.
“You’ll guarantee that?” Caruso asked.
“What?”
“No beans, so you’re not going to fart. I don’t want to be here if you’re gonna fart.”
“I meant
I don’t get the refried beans. I get the regular beans, black beans or whatever the hell they are. They’re a lot less calories. ‘Fried’ by itself is not a good word when you’re losing weight. ‘Refried’? Think how fucking bad that is. But black beans’re okay. Good fiber, tasty. But, yeah, I fart when I eat ’em. Like any Tom, Dick and Harry. Everybody does.”
“Can we finish business before you indulge?”
Sellitto nodded at a slim, limp NYPD case file. “We will, ’cause sorry to say, the quote business ain’t going to take that long. The case is over and done with and it wasn’t much to start with.”
Out the window you could catch a glimpse of the harbor and Governors Island. Caruso loved the view down here. He’d thought from time to time about relocating but then figured the only real estate he could afford in this ’hood would come with a view even worse than his present one in Midtown, which was a few trees and a lot of sunlight, secondhand—bounced off that Times Square high-rise.
The detective shoved the file Caruso’s way. The Sarah Lieberman homicide investigation. “That was one fucked-up twosome, the perps.” Sellitto winced. “They ick me out. Mother and son, with one bed in the townhouse. Think about it.”
Caruso would rather not.
Sellitto continued. “So your client wants to know where the Dysfunctional Family dumped the body?”
“Yep, she’s religious. You know.”
“No, I don’t.”
“I don’t either. But that’s the way of it.”
“I looked through it fast.” Sellitto offered a nod toward the file. “But the best bet for the corpse is Jersey.”
“I read that in the Daily News. But there were no specifics.”
Sellitto grumbled, “It’s in the file. Somewhere near Kearny Marsh.”
“Don’t know it.”
“No reason to. Off Bergen Avenue. The name says it all.”
“Kearny?”
Sellitto’s round face cracked a smile. “Ha, you’re funny for a private dick. Why don’t you join the force? We need people like you.”
“Marsh, huh?”
“Yeah. It’s all swamp. Serious swamp.”
Caruso asked, “Why’d they think there?”
“Ran John Westerfield’s tags. They had him at a toll booth on the Jersey Turnpike. He got off at the Two-Eighty exit and back on again a half hour later. Security footage in the area showed the car parked in a couple places by the Marsh. He claimed he was checking out property to buy. He said he was this real estate maven. Whatever maven is. What’s that word mean?”
“If we were in a Quentin Tarantino movie,” Caruso said, “this’s where I’d start a long digression about the word ‘maven.’”
“Well, it isn’t and I don’t know what the fuck you’re talking about.”
Sellitto definitely had Game.
Caruso flipped through the smaller folder inside the bigger one. The smaller was labeled John Westerfield. Many of the documents were his own notes and records, and a lot of them had to do with real estate, all the complex paperwork that rode herd on construction in Manhattan: foundation-pouring permits, crane permits, street-access permissions. Interestingly—and incriminatingly—these were all multimillion-dollar projects that John couldn’t possibly have engaged in without Sarah Lieberman’s money.
“Good policing. When was Westerfield in Jersey?”
“I don’t know. A couple days before she disappeared.”
“Before? Was there a toll record of him being there after she disappeared?”
“No. That’s where the grassy knoll effect comes in.”
“The…?”
“Dallas. Kennedy assassination. The other gunman.”
“I don’t believe there was one. It was Oswald. Alone.”
“I’m not arguing that. My point is that the Westerfields probably did have an accomplice. He’s the one who got rid of the body. In his car. So there was no record of Westerfield returning to Jersey.”
“Yeah, my client mentioned there might’ve been somebody else. Why would he be the one who dumped the body, though?”
Sellitto tapped the file. “Just after they killed her—Crime Scene knew the time from the blood—the Westerfields were seen in public so they’d have an alibi. They would’ve hired somebody to dump the body. Probably somebody connected.”
“Organized crime?”
“What ‘connected’ means.”
“I know that. I’m just saying.”
Sellitto said, “We think some low-grade punk. The Westerfields had connections with mob folks in Kansas City and they must’ve tapped some affiliate here.”
“Like Baja Fresh. Mobster franchises.”
Sellitto rolled his eyes, maybe thinking Caruso wasn’t as clever as he’d first thought. The detective said, “The Westerfields stole three-quarters of a million from Mrs. Lieberman, cash and jewelry. They would’ve paid this guy from that.”
Caruso liked it that Sellitto called her Mrs. Lieberman. Respect. That was good, that was part of Game. “Any leads to him?”
“No, but he was after the fact and nobody in the DA’s office gave a shit really. They had the doers. Why waste resources.” Sellitto finally gave in. He opened the lunch bag. It did smell pretty good.
Caruso began, “The couple—”
“They’re mother and son, I wouldn’t call ’em a couple.”
“The couple, they say anything about the third guy?”
Sellitto looked at Caruso as if he’d gotten stupid himself. “Remember, it was gangbangers who killed her. Or she decided to take a cruise and forgot to tell anybody. To the quote couple, there was no third guy.”
“So I go searching in Jersey. Where exactly is this Kearny Marsh?”
Sellitto nodded at the file.
Caruso took it and retreated to a corner of Sellitto’s office to read.
“One thing,” the detective said.
Caruso looked up, expecting legalese and disclaimers.
The detective nodded at the bowl of black beans he was eating. “Stay at your own risk.”
* * *
HOPELESS.
Eddie Caruso stood about where John Westerfield’s green Mercedes had been parked as the man had surveyed the area, looking for the best place to hide a body.
There was no way he could find where Sarah Lieberman had been buried.
Before him were hundreds of acres of marshland, filled with brown water, green water, gray water, grass, cattails and mulberry trees. A trillion birds. Gulls, ducks, crows, hawks and some other type—tiny, skittish creatures with iridescent blue wings and white bellies; they were living in houses on poles stuck at the shoreline.
New Jersey housing developments, Eddie Caruso reflected. But he didn’t laugh at his own cleverness because he was being assaulted by suicidal and focused mosquitoes.
Slap.
And in the distance the crisp magnificence of Manhattan, illuminated by the midafternoon sun.
Slap.
The water was brown and seemed to be only two or three feet deep. You could wrap a body in chicken wire, add a few weights, and dump it anywhere.
He wasn’t surprised searchers hadn’t found her brutalized corpse.
And there was plenty of land, too—in which it would be easy to dig a grave. It was soupy and he nearly lost his Ecco.
He wiped mud off his shoe as best he could and then speculated: How much would it cost to hire a helicopter with some sort of high-tech radar or infrared system to detect corpses? A huge amount, he guessed. And surely the body was completely decomposed by now. Was there any instrumentation that could find only bones in this much territory? He doubted it.
A flash of red caught his eye.
What’s that?
It was a couple of people in a canoe.
New Jersey Meadowlands Commission was printed on the side.
Eddie Caruso’s first thought was, of course: Meadowlands. May the Giants have a better season next year.
His second thought was: S
hit.
This was government land, Caruso realized.
Meadowlands Commission…
John Westerfield claimed he’d come here to look into a real estate deal. But that was a lie. There’d be no private development on protected wetlands. And using the toll road, which identified him? He’d done that intentionally. To lead people off. Not being the brightest star in the heavens, he and his mother had probably figured they couldn’t get convicted if the body was never found. So they’d left a trail here to stymie the police.
In fact, they’d buried Sarah Lieberman someplace else entirely.
Where…?
Eddie Caruso thought back to the police file in Lon Sellitto’s office. He believed he knew the answer.
* * *
AN HOUR AND A HALF LATER—thank you very much, New York City traffic—Caruso parked his rental illegally. He was sure to incur a ticket, if not a tow, here near City Hall since it was highly patrolled. But he was too impatient to wait to find a legal space.
He found his way to the Commercial Construction Permits Department.
A slow-moving clerk with an impressive do of dreadlocks surrounding her otherwise delicate face looked over his requests and disappeared. For a long, long time. Maybe coffee breaks had to be taken at exact moments or forfeited forever. Finally, she returned with three separate folders.
“Sign for these.”
He did.
“Can I check these out?”
“No.”
“But the thing is—”
She said reasonably, “You can read ’em, you can memorize ’em, you can copy ’em. But if you want copies you gotta pay and the machines say they take dollar bills but nobody’s been able to get it to take a dollar bill in three years. So you need change.”
“Do you have—?”
“We don’t give change.”
Caruso thanked her anyway and returned to a cubicle to read the files.
These were originals of permits issued to three construction companies that were building high-rises on the Upper East Side not far from Sarah Lieberman’s townhouse. Caruso had found copies of these in John Westerfield’s police file, the one that Sellitto let him look through. They’d been discovered in the man’s desk. John had claimed to be involved in real estate work, so who would have thought twice about finding these folders? No one did.
Trouble in Mind: The Collected Stories, Volume 3 Page 8
