Caine said, “Bullets matching the ones from that case have shown up this century—in a murder here in Miami.”
Ciccolini exhaled smoke, his expression giving them nothing. “No kiddin’. That is kinda out there, isn’t it?”
“Way out,” Caine said. “Quite a coincidence, gun from a Trenton murder turning up in Miami. It’s also a coincidence that the man accused of the original crime—however long ago—now lives here too.”
Ciccolini shrugged, and his manner was not hostile. “Hey, I can see your problem, and why you might think I was involved—guess in your place, I’d come around and rattle this old cage myself—but if you read that file closer, you’ll notice the Trenton police never found the murder weapon.”
“Which is how it was able to turn up years later,” Caine pointed out.
Unimpressed, Ciccolini said, “They never traced it to me, never arrested me. Oh, yeah, they rousted my ass—talked my ear off, held me for questioning, only when push came to shove…they had nada.”
“But we both know,” Caine said, keeping his tone carefully good-humored, “not being charged doesn’t make you innocent.”
Ciccolini gave the CSI a tiny smile. “I got a pal who can rent you a boat, Lieutenant, if you wanna go fishing. Look, this is a coincidence. You had to follow it up. You did. I cooperated. Anything else?”
Offering up his own little smile, Caine said, “In my line of work, you have to look at all coincidences with a skeptical eye.”
“It’s part of your job. No offense taken.”
“Mrs. Rosselli said there’ve been break-ins in your neighborhood. I was just thinking, one way that weapon could’ve gotten to Miami would be if you owned it, and somebody stole it.”
“Which would get me off the hook for this new murder, right?”
“Right.”
“But for the old murder, I’d suddenly be openin’ up a whole new can of worms for you to go fishing with. Sorry to disappoint you: I didn’t do either one of these crimes.”
“Then I would imagine you can account for your whereabouts on Monday evening.”
Ciccolini nodded, his face turning melancholy. “That was our last night out, the boys. Abe, Tony, and me, we were playin’ poker in a little club we like. We kinda lost track of time—Abe was winnin’ big, which he didn’t usually. Anyway, normally we wouldn’t stay out that late…after all, we ain’t kids.”
“How late?”
“After midnight. Not sure how far past, exactly.”
“And then?”
Ciccolini shrugged, pitched his cigarette and sparks flew; but his words were calm if grave: “On the way home, Abe complained that his chest hurt. We went straight to the hospital…and were there, in the emergency-room waiting area, until he passed away last night.”
“We are sorry for your loss, Mr. Ciccolini,” Caine said. “But you’ve been down this road enough times to know we’ll still need to check out your story.”
Ciccolini looked mildly exasperated, his eyes cutting toward the back door of the funeral home, then back to Caine.
“Then what do you need?”
“Where were you playing cards?”
“Carrelli’s Social Club in Miami Beach.”
“Can’t say I’ve heard of it.”
“It’s on Drexel near Espanola. No idea the street number—you’ll have to look it up on your own time.”
Caine gave him a quick nod. “And which hospital?”
“Mt. Sinai.”
As he thought about that, something struck Caine as odd, but before he could comment, the back door opened and Anthony Rosselli stepped outside.
“Vinnie, please—people are asking for you.” Rosselli’s voice was steady, but Caine could hear the struggle for control in it. His grief was closer to the surface than Ciccolini’s.
Who turned toward Caine and raised both eyebrows and gazed at the CSI like a man through a gunsight. “We through here?” A new coldness was in the voice.
“You can go, thank you,” Caine said; then—as Ciccolini headed for the door—he turned his own hard gaze on the bald, goateed man, adding, “Mr. Rosselli, a moment of your time?”
Rosselli still held the door open with one hand and glanced back down the hallway toward the main corridor. “If it can wait…”
“It’s okay, Tony,” Ciccolini said. “Get it outa the way. It’s no big deal. These officers just have a weird kinda coincidence they need to satisfy themselves about. Just talk to them for a minute and they’ll be gone…. Right?”
Caine nodded.
“Sure,” Rosselli said, with a shrug. “Whatever, Vinnie.”
So, Caine thought, Ciccolini is the boss.
At the doorway, Ciccolini paused. “Should I tell Abe you’ll be interrogatin’ him next?”
Caine said nothing, but he could feel Sevilla tense up beside him.
Rosselli said, “That ain’t funny, Vinnie.”
Nonetheless Caine smiled and said, “Well, Abe wouldn’t be the most uncooperative witness I’ve ever had.”
Ciccolini’s face softened. “I really do wish I could send the old bastard out here. Losin’ a friend, a close friend…like the kids say…it sucks.”
Calleigh said, “Please accept our condolences. And thank you for your time, Mr. Ciccolini.”
He favored her with another of those tiny smiles, then disappeared inside, door closing of its own volition.
Under the same line of questioning, Rosselli seemed more nervous than Ciccolini, his hands fluttering as he spoke, diving into his jacket pockets, only to come flying out again as he told them pretty much the same story Ciccolini had.
A little too close maybe, Caine thought, almost rehearsed; but then again, the two men had been friends for most of their adult lives and Caine knew that sometimes friends did tend to parrot each other. If they hadn’t been two parts of a suspected three-man hit squad, he’d have thought nothing of it.
This time, Caine asked the question that bothered him about both their stories.
“If you were at a club on Drexel, South Beach, Mr. Rosselli,” Caine asked, “what made you take Mr. Lipnick to Mt. Sinai?”
Sevilla chimed in: “Yes, instead of South Shore—that’s closer to where you were.”
Rosselli shrugged and nodded and turned his hands upside down. “True, true, but Abe liked Mt. Sinai better. He thought they had better heart doctors.”
“Did he have a history of cardiac trouble?”
“He’d had a bad ticker for maybe ten years. Had a stroke too, a while ago, though he bounced back good. The docs knew him at Mt. Sinai, and Abe was comfortable there. I hope to hell he didn’t croak ‘cause we didn’t take him to the nearest hospital. But he had attacks before and always come out of it. We just didn’t know how bad he was.”
Caine nodded, turned to Sevilla. “Anything?”
Before the detective could come up with a question, Rosselli, still a bundle of tics, said, “Look, as far as this gun is concerned…I don’t have to tell ya, these pieces float all over hell. It really ain’t such a surprise that a piece from the East Coast winds up down here.”
“Perhaps not,” Caine said, “but we have to look into it.”
“Sure. Can I, uh…get back to Abe?”
“Certainly.”
They followed the man back inside, this time filing past the coffin too. Looking down at the body inside, Caine wondered if these men could possibly have committed a kidnapping and double murder.
Ciccolini looked to be in pretty good shape, but Rosselli stooped a little, and even in the coffin Lipnick looked like he would have had trouble lifting more than a cup of coffee. Frail, riddled by the trouble his heart had given him, Abraham Lipnick might have been one of a million other men who had come to die in the sun and shade of Miami Beach.
Odd to think that, only fifteen years ago, the man in this coffin had still been a professional killer. Only the prominent nose that might have been flattened from long-ago punches gave any hint that this wa
s not your average shuffleboard player; the wide wrinkled forehead, the deflated jowls, the wisps of gray hair, all reminded Caine of the greeter in the lobby.
Caine stopped in front of Ciccolini and Rosselli again on his way out. “We apologize for the intrusion and, again, we’re sorry for your loss.”
Ciccolini extended a hand. “No hard feelings.”
Caine shook the hand, the grip firm. Then he shook hands with Rosselli, whose grip was less firm and noticeably clammy.
“You know,” Ciccolini said, patting his side sport-coat pocket, out of which a brown paperbag peeked, “I’m sending Abe off the same way as Sinatra—with a pack of smokes, a bottle of bourbon, and a roll of dimes.”
“So he can always make a phone call,” Caine said, half-smiling.
Ciccolini nodded.
As Caine turned to go, Ciccolini said, “I hope you find who you’re looking for, Lieutenant. I’d just like to see this cleared up, so we can finally leave Trenton back in New Jersey where it belongs.”
At the back of the room, they paused and watched awhile, as the pair continued to greet mourners.
Sevilla asked, “What do you think, Horatio?”
“I usually have a gut instinct about these things.”
“I know you do.”
“But…not this time.”
Silently, Sevilla led Caine and Calleigh outside.
Calleigh said, “Those old boys don’t look like they could kill time, let alone two healthy, much younger men.”
“It looks like a ground ball,” Caine agreed, “but you know what we do with them.”
“Run ‘em all out,” Calleigh said.
Sevilla said, “Ciccolini seems pretty spry to me.”
“You’ll be checking their story,” Caine said.
“Oh yes.”
“All right. Calleigh, let’s get you back to the lab. I want you to keep up with your workload, so if anything else comes in on this case, you’re clear.”
“I’m for that. What about you?”
Caine’s eyes tightened. “I’m going to take another shot at Daniel Boyle.”
“I don’t suppose you’re talking about with a gun,” Calleigh said, almost wistfully.
“No…but I’ve got a few Boyle ‘bullets’ I haven’t spent yet.”
He took the women back to headquarters, then drove to Miami Beach, crossing on the southernmost road, the MacArthur Causeway.
Night had settled over the city and blue lights highlighted the bridge to the Port of Miami across the main channel of Biscayne Bay. Tiny stars out over the ocean looked like pinpricks in the sky, as if some bright light was on the other side of the night, seeping in; it gave Caine a feeling of being something small in the middle of something big. He did not mind the feeling; in fact, he took a certain comfort in it.
As he came off the causeway, Caine glanced left at South Shore Hospital, right there on Alton Road. He took the left on Alton and went north ten blocks to Fifteenth, then cut east seven more to Drexel. At the corner, he looked to his right and there, on the other side of the street, was the social club Vincent Ciccolini claimed he and his two cronies were at Monday night. Twenty-two blocks from South Shore Hospital.
Mt. Sinai was closer to fifty blocks north through the bumper-to-bumper traffic of Collins Avenue—the same Collins Avenue where Felipe Ortega’s limo had been found in a parking lot.
A car behind him honked its horn and Caine eased through the intersection going on east to Collins Avenue before again turning north. Maybe the men were telling the truth; it was possible that Lipnick’s condition had worsened once he got to the hospital, or that Ciccolini and Rosselli didn’t recognize just how bad off Abe was. Until Sevilla spoke with the folks there, there was no way to know.
During rush hour, people on their way home tried to drive fast on Collins but with little success. Once night settled in, the traffic moved at roughly the speed of a glacier. And again Caine had to wonder: why had the old men come this way? Monday was lighter traffic, granted, the weekend’s tourists having bugged out Sunday night, but still…
At Forty-first, he glanced west toward Mt. Sinai as if merely turning that way would afford him a glance at the hospital that was still blocks away down that street.
He shrugged to himself. No use getting ahead of the evidence; when your brain got too far out in front of the investigation, you could get seriously whiplashed.
Anyway, his best suspect was still Lessor’s step-son—Daniel Boyle.
Normally, the wife would be a good suspect, possibly the prime one, especially if (as with Lessor) there were rumors of infidelity; but she had seemed so adamant in her defense of her late husband, even arguing with her own son over what seemed to everyone else on the planet to be blatant infidelity, that Caine could only wonder if Deborah Lessor could be that skilled an actress.
Of course, her late husband had been, by all accounts, one hell of a talent scout.
Pulling the Hummer into the driveway of the Conquistador, Caine eased up to a vacant spot normally reserved for taxis and parked. As he got out, a cabby slid up next to him, rolling down the power window on the passenger side.
“Hey, buddy! That’s reserved.”
Caine showed him the badge.
“What, and you think that gives you the right…”
Bending down, his left arm resting on the roof of the taxi, Caine looked inside at the driver, a guy in his late fifties who smelled like he hadn’t showered since the Marlins won the series…in other words, 1997.
“And how many violations am I going to find this evening?” Caine asked cheerfully.
“Fine, fine! Fuck it.” The cabby hit the button to roll up the window, already pulling away, probably hoping to catch Caine’s toes under the wheels.
His cell phone trilled and he answered it. “Horatio.”
“H.” Tim Speedle.
“Got something for me, Speed?”
“Guy named Plummer stopped by.”
“Daniel Boyle’s driver.”
“Good one, H. How do you stay on top of details like that?”
“Because I lead by example, Speed.”
“Ah. Anyway, Plummer verified his boss’s story and brought in security videotapes that clearly show Boyle in the hotel, right when he said he was there.”
“Any way to verify these tapes?”
“Not really. They could be cooked, all right.”
“So this would be worthless information. Anything that isn’t?”
“Yeah, but I can’t take credit. Sevilla told me to pass along to you that the club on Drexel checked out—your geriatric suspects, right?”
“Right,” Caine said. “Did she get times?”
“Nope. The manager she talked to remembered your coots coming in, but didn’t see them leave.”
“What about Mt. Sinai?”
“She hasn’t got to that yet—had to go out on another call. Said she’ll check the hospital tomorrow.”
“Thanks, Speed.”
“Hey, we’re full service around here, H. Later.”
“Later.”
So, the old men were at the club—Caine just didn’t know how long, exactly. Maybe he would swing past the hospital on the way back. Sticking the phone in his pocket, he walked through the glass doors and into the lobby of the Conquistador, which was not terribly busy—couple checking in, few people heading down the hall toward the bar, a handful going the other direction toward the restaurant for a late supper.
When the couple left the front desk, Caine stepped up. The clerk was an attractive Hispanic woman in her early twenties. She had short black hair, close-set brown eyes, and a thin mouth too generously covered with bright red lipstick. Her name tag read LARA.
She gave him her professional smile; where the Hispanics were concerned, Caine had to take it back: they were more consistently friendly and seemed to value tourists. “May I help you?”
“Daniel Boyle, please.” He didn’t bother with a badge or intimidating “Miami-
Dade Criminalistics” introduction.
“Just a moment.” She turned and called to someone in the back office. “You know where Mr. Boyle is?”
A female voice answered, “Where is he always this time of night? In the lounge.”
Caine nodded his thanks and turned in that direction. As he neared the Explorer Lounge, the throbbing bass of the band thudded into his chest. A young black man in a black suit with a black T-shirt underneath sat outside the door. Caine could tell the man had been watching him all the way down the corridor and didn’t miss much. No money box out here, so Caine figured the guy was just checking IDs.
Caine drew back his jacket so the man could see the badge on his belt. The guy’s eyes widened, just a trifle, then he nodded his approval, his eyes returning to the corridor, where a young couple headed this way as Caine opened the door and slipped inside.
The lounge was dark, the candles on the tables providing the only illumination other than stage lights. There seemed to be a pretty good-size crowd, at least as much as Caine could tell courtesy of the swirling spots that intermittently let him see different parts of the room.
On stage, the band blasted away, the brass fighting percussion for dominion, as Maria Chacon ruled over them all, hardly trying; she was in a much more revealing costume than last time, singing to the crowd. Probably not Cole Porter, he thought, or Paul Simon for that matter; but the song did have that compelling bass beat and Maria’s strong sultry voice. The crowd was coming out of their seats, a few even dancing in the aisles, animal and bird sounds erupting from around the room. Either Maria was very, very good, or this audience was very, very drunk…maybe both.
Quick-scanning the room over the tops of the bobbing heads, he searched for Daniel Boyle with no luck. Then, suddenly, he realized the man was standing right next to him in the dark; he’d been tucked back beside the doorway—Caligula viewing all from his box.
“Amazing what sex, loud music, and no cover charge can accomplish,” Boyle said, working his voice up, leaning in to Caine’s near ear.
“Let’s step outside,” Caine said, in no mood to compete with the roar of the band and the whooping crowd.
Boyle pointed to his ears, signaling that he couldn’t hear. Caine was considering grabbing the man by the lapels of his Armani suit and dragging him into the hallway when Boyle pointed toward the door.
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