“It was Jimmy Regan and this Furlong guy who broke the St. Jean case when they were in uniform. That helped them get the bump to detective. You’re telling me you didn’t know any of this?”
“That’s what I’m telling you.”
“Then why would the Alison St. Jean case haunt you?”
“Because of my little cousin Apollonia.” He laughed. “I guess she’s not so little anymore.”
“What about her?”
“My Uncle Christos used to live around the corner from the St. Jeans. Apollonia went trick-or-treating with Alison that night, but went home early because she got a little sick from eating too much candy. That’s why it haunts me. It could have been her that wound up strangled in the park with her tights wrapped around her throat and things shoved into her. She was my favorite cousin. She married some Jewish guy and moved to California. They have two kids and a big house in the valley. Wherever that is. I didn’t even know about Jimmy Regan and this Furlong guy.”
Now I was laughing. In spite of the hardest lesson I’d ever had to learn, I sometimes fell into my old ways of thinking. I should have known the universe didn’t work according to the way we assumed it did. That it operated without regard to human plans and visions. It operated without regard to consequence. It just did what it did, coldly, without reason except whatever reason was built into neutrinos. If the universe had a sense of humor, it would have been laughing at me as I was laughing at my own ridiculousness.
“What are you laughing at?” Roussis wanted to know.
“Forget it.”
“Thanks for lunch, but is this mysterious message you got that I never meant to deliver why you wanted to see me?”
“Yeah, and something else that might help you not have to go all the way back to square one with Tommy Delcamino’s murder.”
That got his attention. “I’m listening.”
“I think I have some idea of who those guys were who took shots at me before I found Tommy Delcamino’s body. I don’t have last names for you, but I know how you can find them.”
He took out his notepad and a pen. “Go ahead.”
“One guy’s name is Jamal. African-American. Light-skinned. Twenty-five. Five eight. Maybe a hundred sixty pounds. Cold eyes. Rugged face. The other guy’s named Antwone. African-American. Dark-skinned. Twenty-five. Six seven, six eight. Three hundred pounds. Head as big as a house. Both of them are strapped.”
“And you know this how?”
“How I know it isn’t important,” I said. “I know it. The thing is that they are connected to a former boxer, gang enforcer turned big-time drug dealer named Kareem Shivers. He lives over in Melville. You know Alvaro Peña?”
“Sure.”
“He can fill you in on this Shivers guy.”
“I’ll check with him,” Roussis said.
“This Shivers guy is a stone-cold piece of work, Al. Watch out for him.”
“Sounds like you’ve got some firsthand experience with the man.”
I half smiled, unconsciously rubbing my abdomen where K-Shivs had punched me. “Some.”
“You think this Shivers’ guys killed Tommy Delcamino?”
I shook my head. “I don’t think so, but I can’t promise you that for sure. As far as I know, neither one of them carries a .357. I’m not saying they wouldn’t’ve killed Tommy D. if he wasn’t already dead. They strike me as men very capable and willing to do violence.”
“But you’re sure they were at the scene?”
“They were there. I think they’re the ones who tore the place up. I think you’ll find their prints were all over the place at Tommy D.’s trailer.”
“You tear a place up, you’re looking for something,” he said. “But what?”
“Ask them, Al.”
He shrugged. “Seems pretty simple to me. You say these two are connected to a big-time dealer. They were probably looking for—”
“Drugs!” I slapped the sides of my head with my palms. “I’m an idiot.”
“If you’re waiting for an argument from me, Gus, don’t hold your breath.”
“Listen, Al, do me a favor.”
“If I can.”
“If you pick up Shivers and his crew for questioning, let my name slip.”
He made a face. “You got a death wish or something? You just got done telling me these guys were bad news.”
“Not a death wish. Just a wish to set things right for a guy who didn’t have much go right in his life.”
“Delcamino? I talk for the dead, Gus, so he’s my responsibility. What’s your stake in this? Why do you care?”
I thought about it for a second, and the last two years came rushing back to me so that I was light-headed. But in particular, my last few sessions with Dr. Rosen came back to me.
“I guess I’m not doing it for Delcamino. Not if I want to be honest about it. I’m doing it because there has to be a reason why Tommy and his kid got murdered. I need to know that at least sometimes there is a reason why. I need to know why because sometimes, Al, there is no reason why. I need to do it because I need to know there are some answers sometimes.”
I looked around and saw the guys behind the counter were staring at me and that Al Roussis had his hand on my shoulder.
“All right, Gus, no need to let everyone in Suffolk hear you.”
“Was I being loud?” I asked, noticing that my hands were shaking and that I was breathing heavily.
“Pretty much, yeah.”
“Sorry.”
I waved sorry to the guys behind the counter. They nodded back, seeming to understand.
“I’ll drop your name when I pick up this Shivers guy for questioning, if that’s what you want.”
“It’s what I want.”
Still trying to calm myself down, I stayed seated a few minutes after Al had gone.
Outside, my hands were still shaking a little and I dropped my keys into the slush in the parking lot. When I got down on my knees to look for them, the air above my head whistled. I heard the squeal of brakes and the rapid crunch, crunch, crunch of one car hitting another hitting another hitting another. It was a few seconds before I heard the screaming woman.
There’s screaming and then there’s screaming. Street cops learn to differentiate between them pretty early on in their careers. This was the latter, that hysterical, high-pitched scream of raw terror and disbelief and panic. And it didn’t let up. So I scooped my keys out of the slush and ran as fast as I could, given my wounded leg. When I got out onto the street, there were three damaged cars lined up. The back two had battered front ends. The lead car had veered sharply left, its nose blunted against the center median. It was still running and the car was in drive, the engine straining against the median. It was outside the lead car, a pearl-white Cadillac, that the woman stood screaming. She was sixty if a day, heavy, her nose bloodied, her red eyes tearing and unfocused, cheeks swollen. She was well dressed. Her camel-colored overcoat was covered in blood. Only some of it was hers. And when I looked past her, through the smashed passenger’s side window, I understood.
Inside the Cadillac, slumped forward against the now-deflated air bag, was a dead man. Blood and brain tissue were splattered all over the air bag, the driver’s side window, the windshield, and the interior of the car. Not very much of his head was left intact. It looked as if his head had exploded. But heads don’t just explode of their own accord, not without a helping hand. A crowd had formed around the screaming woman, and drivers and passengers from the other cars were becoming aware of what had happened, but not why. Then a Porsche with MD tags pulled over and a dark-haired man popped out of the driver’s seat and came rushing toward the crowd. He could rush all he wanted, but unless he’d had experience putting Humpty Dumpty back together again, there wasn’t a thing he could do.
As he came toward the crowd, I w
alked a path to where the skid marks began on the pavement. I turned back to look at where my car was situated in the restaurant parking lot and got a sick feeling in my belly. The Cadillac would have been parallel to where my car was parked when I’d dropped my keys in the snow. I recalled the whistling air above my head and realized the bullet that had killed the driver of the Cadillac had been meant for me.
54
(MONDAY NIGHT)
Things had gotten very serious very suddenly. Bullets made things much more real than vague threats, planted evidence, and a night in a smelly jail cell. Someone had tried to kill me and had killed an innocent civilian instead. That stank of desperation and it meant that they had little to lose by trying again. So I did what I should have done days before and retrieved my off-duty Glock 26, the gun that had been cleared by ballistics from the scene of Tommy Delcamino’s murder. I would have felt better if I could have gotten my old service weapon back, too, but that was unlikely to happen, as it had been taken from me the night I got pulled over on the Sag. I doubted I would ever see that gun again.
And because things had taken this bloody turn, I had choices to make. Slava and I had set up our payback meeting with Milt Paxson for tonight, but I was no longer sure he was worth the time or effort. I wasn’t sure how much he knew. I wasn’t sure of anything anymore. I had two seemingly parallel lines of inquiry going on in terms of the Delcamino homicides: Regan and K-Shivs. Both threatening, powerful, and dangerous men with lots of resources at their disposal. All weekend long, I had been leaning toward Regan. Although I couldn’t figure out why he would mean Tommy and TJ Delcamino harm, he had acted so guilty. And then there was his misconduct on the job, paying hush money to Furlong. Look, I was never a detective, never wanted to be one, but I could smell the rot. The floorboards were collapsing under Jimmy Regan. I knew it. He knew it. I even think Father Bill knew it. I’d thought if I could just press a little harder . . .
Yet now that it seemed this was all about missing drugs, it was far easier to imagine any number of scenarios that would explain why Kareem Shivers looked better for the Delcamino homicides. All that information that didn’t amount to much before suddenly added up perfectly. The drug deal with Lazy Eye that had gone wrong. TJ turning up sick and strung out at Frankie Tacos’, then, only a few days later, turning up at Ralph O’Connell’s high as a kite, flush with cash and promises of more to come. TJ had somehow managed to steal a shipment of K-Shivs’ product. He’d sold some off, used some himself, and stashed the rest of it. Shivers had traced the missing shipment back to TJ and had him tortured to force him to tell where he had hidden the remainder of the drugs. TJ had either stubbornly refused to talk or had died before he could reveal where the drugs were hidden. Months later, K-Shivs figures that TJ must have told his father where the product was stashed or had the goods himself.
There was still some stuff that I was sketchy on and some stuff at the edges that I didn’t get, like why had it taken so many months for Shivers to go after Tommy? Why would anyone assume I had the stash? Why wreck my house? And the big question mark was still Jimmy Regan. Why would the cops, especially detectives I had known for decades, protect a suspected murderer, a gang enforcer turned heroin dealer, from a homicide investigation? Sure, law enforcement agencies often shielded important informants from things, but not usually active murder investigations. And if the SCPD was protecting Shivers because he was an informant, he was a shitty one. There was a flood of heroin on the street, and according to Jimmy Regan himself, kids were OD-ing left and right. There was something I wasn’t seeing.
Then, as I was headed downstairs to the lobby to tell Slava that we might as well go ahead with our plans to have a chat with Milt Paxson, I got a bad feeling. A very bad feeling. I told him to forget it, that Paxson wasn’t worth the risk, not with what was going on. He didn’t question my change of heart, nor did he flinch when I asked for the keys to his car.
55
(MONDAY NIGHT)
On the island, it’s easy to know who pays property taxes and who matters to the politicians. You can measure it by the unplowed snow on the streets of places like Brentwood or Wyandanch. At least that was the way it used to be before I put in my papers. I didn’t know if that was as true any longer, because for two years I hadn’t paid attention to the unplowed snow or to politics or to life on earth. For two years, it was one foot first then the other then the other, and then only most of the time. It was inhale exhale inhale exhale. It was trying to stay human in spite of my instinct to bury myself alive. As I drove to North Bay Shore, I couldn’t stop thinking about the black chick at Malo. I had no memory of her face at all, only of her movements. All dark skin and sinew, one wet naked leg before the other.
I tried not to think too much about the last time I’d been on Fifth Avenue, but it wasn’t working. Less than a mile south of where I was on Fifth Avenue sat the Third Precinct. And it was off Fifth Avenue that Smudge lived. Problem was, I couldn’t remember which street off Fifth. It had been dark the time I picked Bill up from Smudge’s terrible rental and I hadn’t paid all that much attention. I remembered the house well enough. Half its windows boarded up, the wilt and exhaustion of the place. And as I cruised around Anna, Bancroft, Marvin, and Dalton roads, I listened to the reports on news radio, trying to decipher if the SCPD had made any progress in the shooting earlier that afternoon. So far, the cops had put it down to a twisted act of violence, some lunatic sniper with a rifle who had killed at random.
It wasn’t the first time that had happened in Suffolk County. Only a few years after I got on the job, some idiot named Peter Sylvester shot several people through store windows at night with a .35 Marlin hunting rifle. He’d killed one man who had been seated near the front window at a Commack diner and had wounded others in the same general vicinity. So it was natural for the cops to assume that what had happened once could have happened again. They also assumed it because, as yet, they could find no reason for the victim, a retired dentist from Queens, to have been murdered. It seemed the only thing he was guilty of was a terminal case of bad timing.
There it was, Smudge’s ugly house on Eden Road. Eden Road, yeah, right. The house was dark and lifeless and as welcoming as a septic tank. Not even snow and the cover of night could improve its appearance. Maybe it was all Smudge could afford or maybe he thought it was what he deserved. I hoped to ask him and hoped he’d be alive enough to answer. That was the thing, now that I was pretty sure of what TJ Delcamino had stolen and just how far the people who wanted it back were willing to go to retrieve it, anyone connected to Tommy Delcamino or his son were in danger. And no one was more connected to Tommy D. than Smudge.
I’d get around to warning Richie Zito in person later. Crippling arthritis or not, Zee was a guy who knew how to handle himself. You don’t rise through the ranks of the Maniacs and stay alive as long as he had without being a dangerous motherfucker. I had already tried calling him a few times on my ride over to Brentwood, but he’d refused to get on the phone. The fourth time I called, the guy who answered the phone just hung up. Smudge, on the other hand, was no tough guy, and the man who had protected him and befriended him in prison was dead. I didn’t have Smudge’s phone number and the only way I had to get in touch with him was to go knock on his door.
I was encouraged to see that there were two sets of footprints in the snow, but just as quickly discouraged by the size of those tracks. Smudge was a little guy with small feet. The prints before me in the snow belonged to bigger, heavier men whose bulk had displaced the snow so that the soles of their shoes reached down to the walkway. I couldn’t tell much beyond that because I’d left my Maglite in the trunk of my car, so I used the flashlight setting on my phone. I stood in place at the edge of the house’s postage-stamp-sized lot, listening for any sounds coming from inside the house. There were none that I could hear, but there was enough ambient traffic noise coming from Fifth Avenue that I couldn’t be at all sure about what I was or wasn
’t hearing from inside the house.
I took out my little Glock, keeping it down at my side as I approached the house. There were several other houses on the block and I didn’t want to attract unwanted attention by waving my gun around. I walked slowly, carefully, up to the front door and tried the knob. It resisted my efforts to turn it. That was something, at least, a locked front door. I crept around to the side of the house, shined the light through a window into the dark kitchen. The kitchen was a mess. It had been tossed much as the trailer at Picture Perfect Paving and my old house in Commack. My heart sank all the way to the bottom when I walked around back and saw that the rear door was flung wide open. There was no good way for me to spin optimism into the sight of that, and when I got to the stoop, the stench that came at me from inside the house removed any stubborn sense of hope I might have clung to for Smudge’s survival. The smell of death is unmistakable.
Two weeks before, I wouldn’t have hesitated to call 9-1-1, but I couldn’t pretend that the last two weeks hadn’t happened. It was hard for me to accept that I couldn’t trust the very people who had been my brothers and sisters, people to whom I had, on hundreds of occasions, entrusted my life. As hard to accept as it was, I didn’t waste any time denying my distrust. I’d almost been killed once already that day and I wasn’t going to let hesitation give somebody a second chance. Smudge’s body would get found by someone else eventually, but now I had to see for myself.
I walked into the back of the house, gun sweeping before me, and cautiously followed my nose to the source of the stench. You might have thought the house should have been ice cold because of the back door being wide open, but the opposite was true. The cold had caused the thermostat to keep the oil burner churning up heat. Except for the small alcove leading away from the back door into the rest of the house, the damned place was like a sauna. The heat made the nauseating, slightly sweet stink of rotting human flesh and feces even more intense. I found the body in an unfurnished bedroom off the main hall from the tiny living room. In spite of the overwhelming smell and the presence of a man’s body at my feet, I smiled when I saw the body wasn’t Smudge. This man was way too big to be him, but that was about all I could make out about him, since he was facedown.
Where It Hurts Page 27
