by Frank Zafiro
Carson looked away.
“Semi-auto.22,” Battaglia said. He didn’t touch the gun. Carson knew that a detective would have to respond and investigate the suicide to ensure it wasn’t a homicide. It was standard procedure. Their job now was to allow medics in to either work to save the woman or declare her deceased. After the medics were finished, their duty became protecting the integrity of the crime scene.
“You see a casing anywhere?” Battaglia asked.
Carson looked around. “No.”
Battaglia peered at the woman. “Looks like she shot right through the roof of her mouth. I don’t see an exit wound or any spray on the wall behind her. The bullet probably just bounced around inside her head. Pureed her brains, I bet.”
Carson glanced out the door. The man still stood at the front door of the house. Carson hoped he wasn’t hearing this.
“Awful nice of her to bleed out into the sink, I guess,” Battaglia continued quietly, leaning forward to examine her more closely.
Carson swallowed hard and felt a rush of nausea. The stench of human and cat box odor didn’t help her queasy stomach. She focused on taking tiny breaths through her mouth.
“She’s probably right-handed, so she would have to hold the gun just so”-he made a gun with his thumb and forefinger-“which would eject the casing over there.” He shined his flashlight into the bathtub. It was dirty but empty.
Carson followed his flashlight beam, then glanced up at Battaglia’s face. His hard expression was covered by a sheen of intensity. Carson wondered at his callous attitude toward this poor woman. Was this the same man who had comforted her after the Russian traffic stop? Who joked over beers at the Happy Time?
She heard the fire truck arrive, its loud diesel engine rattling, its air brakes hissing.
“Or,” Battaglia said, turning his hand over, “she could hold it so, which would eject the casing right here.” He moved the light to shine on Carson’s boots, then looked up at her quizzically.
No. Please don’t tell me I screwed up the crime scene.
She lifted her right foot carefully. Nothing underneath. She checked the tread. Nothing.
“Now the left,” Battaglia said. His tone was even, but she imagined a hint of dread in it.
Carson lifted the left boot. Nothing underneath it. She turned her foot over. A small gold.22 caliber casing was wedged in the tread.
“Damn,” she muttered. So much for being a good cop. She couldn’t even handle a straightforward suicide scene without mucking it up.
Battaglia chuckled slightly. “Don’t worry about it. Put it back where you stepped. The detective will never know the difference.”
“Damn,” Carson repeated. She picked the casing out of her boot tread and put it down where her foot had been. Then they both backed out of the bathroom.
“Case solved,” Battaglia told her. “Now we wait for an hour for the detective to get here and another two hours for him to reach the same conclusion and give it his blessing.” The resentment in his voice sounded more contrived than bitter.
Fire Station Paramedics, Squad Three, came barreling through the door. Battaglia shook his head at the lieutenant of the squad and they all slowed down.
“I just need one man to come in and verify she’s DOA,” Battaglia told the lieutenant.
The fire lieutenant nodded. He motioned to one of the three men behind him. “Dean?”
A short fireman with what looked like a large tackle box in his hand stepped forward. Battaglia led him to the bathroom.
“What happened?” the lieutenant asked Carson while they waited.
“Suicide.Gunshot.” She looked to see if the man who had let them in was watching. She spotted him out on the porch, smoking a cigarette. Carson put her finger in her mouth and simulated a gun. The lieutenant nodded.
Carson stood by with the firemen. She cringed when she overheard Battaglia warn Dean not to step on the bullet casing.
After a few minutes, Dean returned. “Nothing, El-Tee.”
“All right. You need anything?” the lieutenant asked Carson and Battaglia.
“Nope,” said Battaglia. “Just your run sheet.”
The lieutenant jotted down the names of his crew and their response time on his paperwork, then tore off the pink copy. He handed it to Battaglia.
“Thanks, threes,” Battaglia said. The firemen filed out the door and back to their truck. Once they were out of earshot he turned to Carson. “Back to bed for them guys. Must be tough.”
Carson was usually grateful for Battaglia’s humor, but it didn’t seem right at the moment. “Do you want to call for a supervisor and a detective? I can inform the complainant that she’s DOA and then get his story for you.”
“Sounds like a plan,” Battaglia said. “Thanks, B.J.” He turned and went into the kitchen, looking for a phone.
Carson walked back into the bathroom. The fireman hadn’t moved the woman. A rubber contact remained on her upper chest where the paramedic had hooked her up to the heart monitor. The blood and mucous that hung from her mouth had thickened into a gel-like substance. Her glazed-over eyes held no life in them, no expression. Less than four minutes had passed since Carson had seen her last.
Death is instantaneous, she thought, but it must also be a process. This woman’s life-her soul, if she had one-was clearly gone.
Carson left the bathroom and found the man still on the porch. She took a deep breath of the fresh air.
“Sir?”
The man glanced up quickly. A cigarette dangled between his fingers. “Is she okay?”
Carson hesitated. She’d never delivered news like this to anyone before, and was unsure exactly what to say. Finally she managed to say, “No, sir. I’m afraid she’s… gone.”
Tears welled up in the man’s eyes and dropped down his face. “I knew it.”
“I’m sorry for your loss,” Carson added, remembering a line from a cop show she used to watch.
The man took a long, wavering drag on his cigarette. “She was an alcoholic, you know? A mean drunk, too. So was I. But when she was off the sauce, she was the sweetest woman in the whole damn world.”
“I’m sure she was.”
Carson stood silently to give the man a chance to digest the news while he smoked his cigarette. The man took deep, deliberate drags and let the smoke out in shuddering exhales. Carson wondered what was going through his mind.
When he’d finished the cigarette and stubbed out the butt, Carson cleared her throat. “Sir, if you can,” she said, “I need to ask you a few questions.”
The man nodded. “Sure.”
“Your name, sir?”
“Robert Carew. Her name is Anne.”
Carson wrote that down on her notepad. She took a few minutes to get biographical information about both him and Anne, then asked, “What happened tonight?”
“She’d been drinking all night,” Robert said. “We had a fight earlier. I said some things I didn’t mean. She said some things I’m pretty sure she didn’t mean. Then she… did this.” He waved toward the house as his face dissolved into tears.
Carson changed gears. “Let’s start at the beginning, Robert. When did she start drinking?”
Robert wiped his eyes. He shrugged. “I don’t know. She was probably fourteen or so, I guess. Her parents were both alcoholics, so it wasn’t tough for her to get ahold of some booze.”
Carson shook her head. “No, sir. That’s not what I meant. I meant, when did she start drinking tonight?”
“Oh.” Robert let out a rueful chuckle that died on his lips. “I’m not sure. See, I’m a knife salesman. I have a route. I spend two nights a week away from home. I was in Oregon last night. I came home tonight at about six o’clock and she was already hammered.”
“Did you drink tonight?”
“No. I’m an alcoholic, but I’m sober. Five months now.”
Carson made a note. “So there was an argument, you said?”
“Yeah. It’s hard, you know? When one pers
on quits and the other one won’t. You sympathize, you know what they’re going through, but being around it is hard. It’s very tempting.”
“Was that what the argument was about, Robert?”
He nodded, reaching into his robe for his cigarettes. “She wanted me to drink with her and I wouldn’t. She said I thought I was better than her. ‘Holier than thou,’ she called me. I just listened to her a while, then told her to shut up, and I went into the bedroom and read.”
“Did she say anything else to you?”
“Just that she thought that I’d be better off without her.”
“Did you respond to that?”
Tears welled up in Robert’s eyes again. He nodded, his face pinched. He struggled to shake a cigarette out of the pack, then lit it up.
“What did you say, Robert?” Carson asked gently.
“I said that in her current state, she was probably right.” Robert sniffed and wiped his nose with his robe sleeve. Then he looked squarely at Carson. “And you know what? Those were the last words I said to her.”
Carson nodded. “I’m sorry,” was all she could think to say.
Robert stared off down the street, trembling and smoking.
Carson heard Battaglia open the screen door and step out onto the porch with them. “Detective Finch has been notified and is en route. Sergeant Shen was advised. You can probably leave once the detective gets here.”
“Okay.” She turned back to Robert, very aware of Battaglia’s watching eyes. “I know this is difficult, but I’m going to have to ask you a few more questions, Robert. Are you up to that?”
“Yes,” Robert answered, his voice thick from crying.
“Has Anne ever tried to harm herself before?”
“Just by damn near drinking herself to death.”
“Has she been down lately?”
“A little. It was her son’s birthday last week. She tried to call him but he wouldn’t come to the phone.”
“Why’s that?”
“They don’t get along so good.”
“Did that upset her?”
“Yeah, a little. Then she drank and a little became a lot. You know how drunks are. I know how drunks are. I was one for eight years.” Robert inhaled deeply from his cigarette.
Carson paused. “Who does the gun belong to?”
“It’s hers. I bought it at the pawn shop so she had something to protect herself with when I was out of town.”
“All right.” Carson tried to keep her voice as soothing as possible. “Tell me what happened after you went into the bedroom to read.”
Robert sighed. “Well, I read for about three hours. I got up, went into the bathroom to take a leak-”
“Where was she?”
“Still on the couch.Still drinking.”
“Okay. Go on.”
“I went into the bathroom and as I was going in, I saw her get up and go into the bedroom. I was thinking, you know, great. She either wants to fight some more, or make up and be… well, with me, you know? Or she’s stealing the bed for the night, which would leave me with the couch. But then when I finished using the bathroom, she had come out of the bedroom and was back on the couch. So I went to bed.”
Carson nodded and waited for him to continue.
“She was getting the gun,” Robert said. “That’s what she was doing in the bedroom. I didn’t know it then, but that’s what she had to be doing. Anyway, after about twenty minutes, I heard a loud bang. I ran into the bathroom. She was sitting on the toilet and bleeding and I saw the gun on the floor…”
Robert began to cry again. He struggled to stop, but the sobs came in huge seizures and shook his whole upper body. The ash on his cigarette had grown long. It defied gravity, staying on the cigarette as Robert sobbed.
Carson glanced at Battaglia. His mouth was set in a hard line as he watched. Carson put her hand on Robert’s shoulder. “I’m sorry, Robert. No more questions, okay?”
“The questions don’t bother me,” Robert said. He sniffed and wiped his nose on his robe sleeve again. “I know you’re just doing what you have to do. It just rips me up. Like I said before, when she’s clean and sober, she is the most wonderful woman alive. And her figure comes back, too. God, for a woman of forty-five…”
“Alcohol changes people,” Carson said.
Robert nodded and wiped his nose again. “You know, they tell you in Al-Anon that you can’t make a person stop drinking. They have to want to stop.”
“I’ve heard that.”
“They also tell you that sometimes you just have to let a person sink to their lowest point.” Robert looked at Carson with a straight face. “I guess that’s what she did.”
Carson patted his shoulder and turned away. She bit the inside of her mouth and didn’t say another word while she waited for Finch to arrive. She ignored Battaglia’s inquisitive glances. Once the detective was on scene, Carson cleared the call.
Only when she was back in her patrol car and safely out of the neighborhood did she laugh aloud at Robert’s comment. Her laughter came in huge gulps of air, blasting out in high-pitched tones. She slapped the steering wheel.
“I guess… that’s… what she did,” she repeated in between the peals of laughter.
Now she understood Battaglia’s reactions. She understood, and because she understood, she laughed.
She laughed because Robert was right.
She laughed because it struck her as tragically funny.
She laughed until she had to pull into an empty parking lot and cry.
SEVEN
Thursday, July 17th
0756 hours
Valeriy rode in silence in the back of Sergey’s car. Black Ivan drove, guiding the sedan with expertise. He was Val’s go-to driver for the important jobs. Sergey sat next to him, also quiet.
Val pondered briefly what was going through the older man’s mind, but didn’t dwell on it. He wondered why there was no sense of elation or even satisfaction in his own demeanor right now. After all, things were playing out much as he wanted them to. Logically he should be feeling quite pleased with the turn of events. Instead, his stomach was laced with an uncharacteristic tightness. He combed through possibilities of what could go wrong with this play and those that followed.
Chickens are counted in autumn, he reminded himself.
As they neared the warehouse he felt Sergey get mildly restless beside him. He didn’t want his boss to be nervous. In fact, he needed him not to be. Sergey’s role was essential. He had to sell all of the other gang leaders on his position as the dominant player in their organization.
Most organized crime groups were not nearly as tight-lipped as their own. Some, in fact, were completely porous. If Sergey presented himself as the supreme Russian gang leader, that was the report that the police would eventually get as word filtered through the other gangs. That painted a huge target on Sergey’s back and left Val comfortably in the shadows.
“How many will be there?” Sergey asked.
“Five men,” Val answered. He had briefed Sergey at length on each of the five men before they’d left. But this was, he knew, Sergey’s process. He asked questions that he knew the answers to and then convinced himself of his own superiority because he’d already known the answer. Val found such circular logic largely false and weak, but recognized that Sergey needed the positive self-talk.
He wondered if any of the men still loyal to Sergey would remain so if they knew about this particular idiosyncrasy.
“And who of this group,” Sergey asked him, “is first among equals?”
“DeShawn Brown would be my choice,” Val said.
“And the Mexicans? They have chosen a new leader?”
Val shrugged. “One of their lieutenants has come to the meeting, the brother of the man we eliminated. He’s the one that I would worry about the most.”
“You mean for revenge?” Sergey asked.
“Yes,” Val answered. “That’s exactly what I mean. DeShawn Brown is lar
gely a businessman. He may wish revenge at some point in the future, but right now he knows that he is outgunned. He’ll see the wisdom of complying with our modest demands.”
“But not the Mexican?”
Val shrugged. “I do not know much about this man. I do know that the Mexicans are a fiercely emotional race. He may attempt to take his vengeance out during this meeting, but I doubt it.”
“What precautions have you taken to avoid it?”
“I have three men on the second level of the warehouse. All three have rifles and scopes. One of them will remain on this Mexican for this entire meeting. The remaining two will be responsible for two men each.”
“Outer security?”
“Three men at the front door,” Val said. “Three more on the inside.”
“Watching how many?”
“Each leader was allowed to bring a driver and one lieutenant. That is all. Both must remain outside.”
“And they agreed?”
Val shrugged. It had not been easy, but what choice did the men really have? “This is our meeting, so our rules.”
Sergey glanced at Val. “And what would you say to these men if you were attending this meeting in my place?”
“I believe we are best served with brevity,” he replied. “I would avoid any discussion about the events that brought us here, beyond recognizing that they occurred. Lay our offer on the table. Remind them that it is generous, and that it is non-negotiable.”
“And then?”
“Don’t give them time to think about it,” Val said. “Demand an answer before they’re allowed to leave.”
Sergey pursed his lips. “An answer drawn out by force is likely to be an untruthful one.”
“Possibly,” Val answered. “But it makes no difference. We are not bluffing. If a man in that room gives a false promise, we will deal with him. And that will only serve to drive home our point to those who remain.”
Sergey nodded his approval. “You are a wise lieutenant, Valeriy,” he said. “Perhaps I misjudged you when it came to strategic matters.”
“I am only trying to emulate you,” Val said.
“Ah,” Sergey replied. “Flattery.” He shook his head. “It does not become you, my friend.”
