Dead Man's Grip

by Peter James

  There was a knock on the door and DC Nick Nicholl entered. He was beanpole tall, wearing a grey suit that looked as if it had been made for someone even taller, and bleary-eyed, courtesy of his young baby. ‘You said 5 p.m. for the briefing, guv?’

  Grace nodded. He was holding the meeting earlier than his favoured 6.30 for evening briefings, because he was anxious to get back to the hospital and be with Cleo.

  ‘Next door in Detective Chief Superintendent Skerritt’s office.’

  He followed the DC in there.

  ‘I hear Cleo’s in hospital. Is she OK?’ Nick Nicholl asked.

  ‘Thanks – yes, so far so good. I seem to remember your wife had problems during her pregnancy, Nick. Is that right?’

  ‘Yeah, internal bleeding twice. First at about twenty-four weeks.’

  ‘Sounds similar. But she was all right?’

  ‘No, not at first.’

  ‘It’s a worrying time.’

  ‘Yep, you could say that! You need to see she gets a lot of rest, that’s vitally important.’

  ‘Thanks, I will.’

  Grace, who managed the police rugby team, was proud of having converted Nick Nicholl from football to rugby, and the young DC was a great wing three-quarter. Except that since the birth of his son some months ago, his focus tended to be elsewhere and he was often zapped of energy.

  Nicholl sat down at the long meeting table and was followed a few moments later by Bella Moy. The Detective Sergeant was in her mid-thirties, cheery-faced beneath a tangle of hennaed brown hair and a little carelessly dressed; she carried a box of Maltesers in one hand and a bottle of water in the other. She was stuck in her life beyond work, caring for her elderly mother. Give her a makeover, Grace always thought, and she would be one attractive lady.

  Next came DC Emma-Jane Boutwood. A slim girl with an alert face and long fair hair scooped up into a ponytail, the DC had made a miraculous recovery after being nearly killed by a stolen van the previous year.

  She was followed by the shambling figure of DS Norman Potting. Because of the pension system in operation for the police, most officers took retirement after thirty years’ service. The system worked against them if they stayed on longer. But Potting wasn’t motivated by money. He liked being a copper and seemed determined to remain one as long as he possibly could. Thanks to the endless disasters of his private life, Sussex CID was the only family he had – although, with his old-school, politically incorrect attitudes, a lot of people, including the Chief Constable, Grace suspected, would have liked to see the back of him.

  However, much though he irritated people at times, Grace couldn’t help respecting the man. Norman Potting was a true copper in the golden sense of the word. A Rottweiler in a world increasingly full of politically correct pussycats. Pot-bellied, with a comb-over like a threadbare carpet, dressed in what looked like his father’s demob suit from the Second World War, and smelling of pipe tobacco and mothballs, Potting sat down and exhaled loudly, making a sound like a squashed cushion. Bella Moy, who loathed the man, looked at him warily, wondering what he was about to say.

  He did not disappoint her. In his gruff rural burr, Potting complained, ‘What is it with this city and football? How come Manchester’s got Man United, London’s got the Gunners, Newcastle’s got the Toon Army. What have we got in Brighton? The biggest bloody poofter colony in England!’

  Bella Moy rounded on him. ‘Have you ever kicked a football in your life?’

  ‘Actually, yes, I have, Bella,’ he said. ‘You might not believe it, but I used to play for Portsmouth’s second team when I was a lad. Centre half, I was. I was planning to be a professional footballer, until I got my kneecap shattered in a game.’

  ‘I didn’t know that,’ Grace said.

  Norman Potting shrugged, then blushed. ‘I’m a Winston Churchill fan, chief. Always have been. Know what he said?’

  Grace shook his head.

  ‘Success is the ability to go from one failure to another, with no loss of enthusiasm.’ He shrugged.

  Roy Grace looked at him sympathetically. The Detective Sergeant had three failed marriages behind him and his fourth, to a Thai girl he had found on the Internet, seemed like it was heading in the same direction.

  ‘If anyone would know, you would,’ Bella Moy retorted.

  Roy Grace looked down at the briefing notes typed out by his assistant as he waited for Glenn Branson, who had just come in, to sit down. Glenn was followed by the cheery uniformed figure of the Road Policing Unit Inspector, James Biggs, who had requested the involvement of the Major Crime Branch in this inquiry.

  ‘OK,’ Grace said, placing his agenda and policy book in front of him. ‘This is the first briefing of Operation Violin, the inquiry into the death of Brighton University student Tony Revere.’ He paused to introduce Biggs, a pleasant, no-nonsense-looking man with close-cropped fair hair, to his team. ‘James, would you like to start by outlining what happened earlier today?’

  The Inspector summarized the morning’s tragic events, placing particular focus on the eyewitness reports of the white van which had disappeared from the scene, having gone through a red light and struck the cyclist. So far, he reported, there were two possible sightings of the van from CCTV cameras in the area, but neither was of sufficient quality, even with image enhancement, to provide legible registration numbers.

  The first sighting was of a Ford Transit van, matching the description, heading fast in a westerly direction from the scene, less than thirty seconds after the collision. The second, one minute later, showed a van, missing its driver’s wing mirror, making a right turn half a mile on. This was significant, Biggs told them, because of pieces of a wing mirror recovered from the scene. Its identity was now being traced from a serial number on the casing. That was all he had to go on so far.

  ‘There’s a Home Office post-mortem due to start in about an hour’s time,’ Grace said, ‘which Glenn Branson, temporarily deputizing for me, will attend, along with Tracy Stocker and the Coroner’s Officer.’ He looked at Glenn, who grimaced.

  Then Glenn Branson raised his hand. Grace nodded at him.

  ‘Boss, I’ve just spoken to the Family Liaison Officer from Traffic who’s been assigned to this,’ he said. ‘He’s just had a phone call from an officer in the New York Police Department. The deceased, Tony Revere, was a US citizen, doing a business studies degree at Brighton University. Now, I don’t know if this is going to have any significance, but the deceased’s mother’s maiden name is Giordino.’

  All eyes were on him.

  ‘Does that name mean anything to anyone?’ Glenn asked, looking at each of the faces.

  They all shook their heads.

  ‘Sal Giordino?’ he then asked.

  There was still no recognition.

  ‘Anyone see The Godfather?’ Branson went on.

  This time they all nodded.

  ‘Marlon Brando, right? The Boss of Bosses? The Godfather, right? The Man. The Capo of Capos?’

  ‘Yes,’ Grace said.

  ‘Well, that’s who her dad is. Sal Giordino is the current New York Godfather.’

  21

  Standard protocol on receipt of notification of the death of a US citizen overseas was for the NYPD’s Interpol office to inform the local police force where the next of kin resided and they would then deliver the death message. In the case of Tony Revere, this would have been Suffolk County Police, which covered the Hamptons.

  But anything involving a high-profile family such as the Giordinos was treated differently. There were computer markers on all known Mob family members, even distant cousins, with contact details for the particular police departments and officers that might currently be interested.

  Detective Investigator Pat Lanigan, of the Special Investigations Unit of the Office of the District Attorney, was seated at his Brooklyn desk when the call from a detective in the Interpol office came through. Lanigan was online, searching through the affordable end of the Tiffany catalogue, tryin
g to decide on a thirtieth anniversary present for his wife, Francene. But within seconds he picked up his pen and was focusing 100 per cent on the call.

  A tall man of Irish descent, with a pockmarked face, a greying brush-cut and a Brooklyn accent, Lanigan had started life in the US Navy, then worked as a stevedore on the Manhattan wharves before joining the NYPD. He had the rugged looks of a movie tough guy and a powerful physique that meant few people were tempted to pick a fight with him.

  At fifty-four, he’d had some thirty years’ experience of dealing with the Wise Guys – the term the NYPD used for the Mafiosi. He knew personally many of the rank and file in all the Mob families, partly helped by his having been born and raised in Brooklyn, where the majority of them – the Gambinos, Genoveses, the Colombos, Lucheses, Bonnanos and Giordinos – lived.

  Back in the 1970s, soon after he’d first joined the NYPD, Lanigan had been assigned to the team hunting down the killers of mobster Joe Gallo, several years on from his death. The mobster had been shot in a retaliation killing during a meal in Umberto’s Clam House in Little Italy. But he’d found it hard to feel too much sympathy for the man. Crazy Joey, as he had been known, kept a full-grown lion in his basement. He used to starve it for three days, then introduce his debtors to the snarling creature, asking them if they would like to pay up what they owed him or play with his pet.

  From that point on, Lanigan had spent most of his career to date on busting the Mafia.

  He listened to the information that the Interpol officer relayed. He didn’t like the hit-and-run part. Retaliation was a big part of Mob culture. Each of the families had its enemies, the old, historic rivals, as well as new ones created almost daily. He decided that the best way to see if that line of thought had any relevance would be to take a ride to East Hampton and check out the family himself. He liked to visit Wise Guys in their lairs. You got to see a different side of them than you did in a police interview room. And delivering the shock message just might make one of them blurt out a giveaway.

  Thirty minutes later, having washed down the chicken pasta salad his wife had made him with a Diet Coke followed by a shot of coffee, he tightened his necktie, pulled on his sports coat and scooped up his regular work buddy, Dennis Bootle. Then they headed out to the parking lot and climbed into an unmarked, sludge-brown Ford Crown Victoria.

  Pat Lanigan was an Obama man who spent much of his free time doing charity work for wounded veterans. Dennis Bootle was a diehard Republican who spent most of his free time as an activist for the pro-gun lobby and out hunting. Although two years older than his colleague, Bootle had hair a youthful straw-blond colour, styled in a boyish quiff. Unlike Lanigan, who despite all his dealings with the Mafia had deliberately never once fired his handgun in all his years in service, Bootle had shot three people, on three different occasions, killing two of them. They were chalk and cheese. They argued constantly. Yet they were close.

  As Lanigan started the engine and accelerated forward, a twelve-inch square of cardboard printed with the words on BROOKLYN D.A. BUSINESS slid off the top of the dash and fell on to Bootle’s lap. Bootle stuck it on the rear seat, face down, saying nothing. He was a taciturn man and had moods in which he remained silent, sometimes for hours. But he never missed a thing.

  As they headed off, Bootle suddenly said, ‘What’s this sound like to you?’

  Lanigan shrugged. ‘Dunno. You?’

  Bootle shrugged. ‘Sounds to me like a hit. Got hit written all over it.’

  The early-afternoon traffic on Long Island was light and it stayed that way during the next ninety minutes as they approached the Hamptons. In high season, this stretch of road would be slow, the traffic fender to fender. Relaxed, Lanigan steered the car along the lush shrub- and grass-lined freeway with one hand, keeping a wary eye on the exit signs, distrustful of the occasional instructions of the satnav he had stuck to the windshield.

  Bootle had a new girlfriend who was rich, he told Pat, and had a big spread in Florida. He was planning to retire and move down there with her. The news made Pat sad, because he would miss his buddy. He did not want to think about retirement just yet – he loved his job too much.

  The satnav was showing a right turn ahead, as the trees and shrub gave way to the outskirts of East Hampton, with its large houses, set well back from the road, and then a parade of white-painted, expensive-looking shops. They turned right in front of a Mobil Oil garage and headed along a leafy lane with a double yellow line down the middle.

  ‘You know what you can guarantee about the Hamptons?’ Bootle said suddenly, in his clipped Bostonian accent, breaking twenty minutes of silence.

  ‘Uh? What’s that?’ Lanigan always sounded like he was rolling a couple of marbles around in his mouth.

  Bootle nodded at a vast colonial-style mansion with a colonnaded portico. ‘You ain’t going to find any retired NYPD guys living in this area!’

  ‘This isn’t ordinary Wise Guy terrain either,’ Pat Lanigan retorted.

  ‘This kid’s mother, she’s married to Lou Revere, right?’

  ‘Uh huh.’

  ‘He’s the Mob’s banker. You know that? Last election, rumour has it he gave the Republicans ten million.’

  ‘All the more reason to bust him.’

  ‘Go fuck yourself.’

  Pat Lanigan grinned.

  The double yellow line ended and the lane narrowed to single-track. On both sides there were trim hedges.

  ‘Are we right?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  The satnav told them they had arrived.

  Directly in front of them were closed, tall, grey-painted gates. A sign below the speaker panel said ARMED RESPONSE.

  Pat stopped the car, lowered his window and reached out to press a button on the panel by the gates. The cyclops eye of a CCTV camera peered suspiciously down at them.

  A voice speaking broken English crackled out: ‘Yes, hello, please?’

  ‘Police,’ Pat said, pulling his shield out and holding it up for the camera to see.

  Moments later the gates swung slowly open and they drove through.

  Ahead of them, beyond an expanse of lawn and plants straight from a tropical rainforest, rose the grey superstructure of an imposing modern mansion, with a circular building to the left that reminded Pat of the conning tower of a nuclear submarine.

  ‘This a bit like your new lady’s pad?’ Pat asked.

  ‘Nah. Hers is much bigger than this – this would be like her pool house.’

  Pat grinned as he drove along woodchip, towards a garage large enough to accommodate an aircraft carrier, and pulled up alongside a gold Porsche Cayenne. They climbed out and took in the surroundings for a moment. Then, a short distance away, the front door opened and a uniformed Filipina maid stared out nervously.

  They strode over.

  ‘We’re looking for Mr and Mrs Revere,’ Pat Lanigan said, holding up his shield.

  Dennis Bootle flashed his, too.

  The maid looked even more nervous now and Pat instantly felt sorry for her. Someone wasn’t treating her right. You could always tell that with people.

  She mouthed something too quiet for him to hear, then ushered them through into a vast hallway with a grey flagstone floor and a grand circular staircase sweeping up in front of them. The walls were hung with ornately framed mirrors and abstract modern art.

  Following her nervy hand signals, they walked after her through into a palatial, high-ceilinged drawing room, with a minstrel’s gallery above them. It was like being on the set of a movie about Tudor England, Pat Lanigan thought. There were exposed oak beams and tapestries hanging on the walls, alongside ancestral portraits – none of which he recognized. Bought at auctions rather than inherited, he surmised.

  The furniture was all antiques: sofas, chairs, a chaise longue. A large picture window looked out over a lawn, bushes and Long Island Sound beyond. The flagstone floor in here was strewn with rugs and there was a faintly sweet, musky smell that reminded him of mus
eums.

  It was a house to die for, and a room to die for, and he was certain of just one thing at this moment. A lot of people had.

  Seated in the room was an attractive but hard-looking woman in her mid-forties, with short blonde hair and a made-to-measure nose. She was dressed in a pink tracksuit and bling trainers, holding a pack of Marlboro Lights in one hand and a lighter in the other. As they entered she shook a cigarette out, pushed it between her lips, then clicked the lighter, as if challenging them to stop her.

  ‘Yes?’ she said, drawing on the cigarette and exhaling the smoke towards the ceiling.

  Lanigan held up his shield. ‘Detective Investigator Lanigan and Detective Investigator Bootle. Are you Mrs Fernanda Revere?’

  She shook her head, as if she was tossing imaginary long tresses of hair from her face. ‘Why do you need to know?’

  ‘Is your husband here?’ Lanigan asked patiently.

  ‘He’s playing golf.’

  The two police officers stared around the room. Both were looking for photographs. There were plenty, over the fireplace, on tables, on shelves. But all of them, so far as Pat Lanigan could ascertain in a quick sweep, were of Lou and Fernanda Revere and their children. Disappointingly, there were no pictures of any of their friends – or associates.

  ‘Will your husband be home soon?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘Two hours, maybe three.’

  The officers exchanged a glance. Then Lanigan said, ‘OK, I’m sorry to have to break this to you, Mrs Revere. You have a son, Tony, is that right?’

  She was about to take another drag on her cigarette, but stopped, anxiety lining her face.

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘We’ve been informed by the police in Brighton, Sussex, in England, that your son died this morning, following a road traffic accident.’

  Both men sat down, uninvited, in chairs opposite her.

  She stared at them in silence. ‘What?’

  Pat Lanigan repeated what he had said.