A Murder Too Close

by Penny Mickelbury

  I closed the phone wishing I could feel better about the positive outcome with Sam Epstein. After all, I’d done what I was hired to do and we’d clear a healthy profit. I also didn’t create any debt with Carmine Aiello, something that had worried me from the beginning and had flat out scared Yolanda. She didn’t want us asking him for favors, but the reality was we couldn’t go into Irish and Italian communities asking questions and expecting answers. This wasn’t television. Mottola, Casey, and McQueen wouldn’t have given me the time of day, and would probably have kicked my ass for being bold enough to go on their turf asking questions, especially about their activities. I needed Carmine. Simple as that. Being able to keep Joey Mottola out of the picture came as an unexpected gift. Now I didn’t owe Carmine and he didn’t owe me, and that thought cheered me.

  So did the sight of Mike Smith rounding the corner of the Furniture Depot. He was walking normally, not hurried, not as if he expected somebody to be on his tail. I didn’t have to tell the driver to start the car; he did it on his own, shifted into gear, and let the car drift slowly toward Mike, who opened the door and hopped in while the car was in motion. “Go out the other end,” Mike said, and the car turned slowly and smoothly in the other direction and joined the queue exiting the parking lot into the Ninth Avenue southbound traffic. “You’re a damn good driver,” Mike said.

  “Thanks,” Eddie the driver said. Then, realizing that he was expected to explain it, he did. “I took this defensive driving course. I was working for this singer and he was worried because a couple of his buddies got popped, so he bought this armor-plated limo, thing weighed a ton, then paid for me to take this defensive driving course. It was interesting, tell you the truth. Some ex-CIA guy taught it. I don’t know what I was thinking, though, because the first time somebody shot at my guy everything I learned went right out of my head. I just wanted to get away. My guy was happy—he thought it was the defensive driving techniques that got us away—but I knew it was fear, the kind of fear I smelled on your guy this morning. I quit the second time we got shot at and went to work for the car service. They like it that I’ve got this training, but I refuse to drive rappers, gangsta or otherwise.”

  Mike and I were both laughing by the time Eddie finished his story. It was a good one, and I knew it was true. We didn’t accept work from celebrity clients of any stripe for the very reason that they often were targets—of adoring fans as well as the competition. Then Mike turned serious. “If I had to guess I’d say your boy Jackie has met a bad end.” And he related his experience on the loading dock. Jackie’s name was French, spelled JACQUES, last name Marchand, he was twenty-six or thereabouts, his supervisor thought. And the supervisor, whose name was Jerry Talbot, also thought Jackie was, here lately, in some kind of trouble. “He couldn’t be specific,” Mike related, “except to say that he was so preoccupied he dropped one end of a ten-grand plasma TV.”

  “Preoccupied or clumsy?” I asked.

  “The supervisor, Talbot, swears that Jackie’s a straight arrow, pays attention to his work, is always on time, doesn’t bullshit with the other guys, smoking reefer, drinking beer, and listening to rap music when he should be working. Which is why the guys on the dock called him Jackie instead of Jack.”

  I wasn’t sold and said so, though I didn’t tell Mike why; he already didn’t like that I used Raul as a source. Mike had been a cop too long to ever be able to trust an ex-con, especially one who was an ex-addict. And while I did trust Raul’s information, I wasn’t certain that somebody like him would know or associate with a guy described as a straight arrow. Especially a twenty-something with a name like Jacques Marchand. “Is he French, then? Jackie?” I asked.

  “French Canadian by birth, according to the supervisor, but here long enough to have dual citizenship and work his way halfway through NYU.”

  I heard an alarm bell but couldn’t pinpoint the source. “How long’s he worked at Furniture Depot, and how does dropping a TV translate to meeting a bad end?”

  “A year and a half and never missed a day, according to Talbot.” And the way Mike said that I knew something about this story was chafing him, too, so I stayed quiet and let him work through it. “Okay, here’s the part that doesn’t add up for me. Talbot says Jackie didn’t enroll in school for the current semester because he wanted to work full-time and save enough money so he could go to school full-time in September.”

  “Makes sense to me,” I said. “Loading and unloading furniture for eight hours straight is back-breaking work. He wouldn’t have energy left for school.”

  Mike was frowning, shaking his head. “This job was part-time. He’d got himself a second part-time job and Talbot said that’s when Jackie started behaving strangely.”

  “Strangely how?”

  “Coming in late, calling in sick. And now Talbot says he didn’t show up at all today and didn’t call, which was so unusual that Talbot called him. Busy signal on his home phone since early this morning.”

  “That doesn’t necessarily translate into bad news, even if the guy’s a saint. He’s still a guy, a twenty-something in sin city. Maybe he met a girl over the weekend and hasn’t gotten out of bed,” I said, liking the thought of that much better than thoughts of bad ends. “And did Talbot call the second job? Did Jackie show up there?”

  “He doesn’t know where it is, just that it’s with some insurance company, doing salvage and reclamation work.”

  Another alarm bell sounded, this one louder than the first, both of them insistent now, and I got the messages: Foreign-born person and insurance company. “Where’s he live? And did Talbot know anything at all about this insurance company?” I knew I was grasping at straws and that was because I now shared Mike’s feeling that Jackie, if he hadn’t already come to a bad end, was moving in that direction.

  “Zip on the insurance company. I pressed Talbot pretty hard on that, especially on the salvage angle, but came up dry. But he did know that the kid lives off First Avenue somewhere.”

  “East Second,” I said.

  Mike looked at me. “Yeah. How’d you know?”

  “That’s where Raul works. That’s how he knows Jackie.”

  The remainder of the day just . . . happened. I was present but I didn’t feel like a participant in events as much as an observer of them. Yolanda and Eddie had taped their conversation with Sam Epstein and were certain that he’d told them all he knew, so I took him home, but I’d had to read him the riot act first. He was still pissing and moaning about his father being involved, still criticizing his cousin Ellie for calling him. I don’t know what came over me but I couldn’t listen to another sentence. “You ungrateful, useless piece of shit,” I said to him, getting his full attention. I stood in front of him, making him look up at me. “Your old man sat right there, in that same chair, and cried like a baby because he was afraid you were dead. You’re all he has left, Sammy, you and Sasha, and he thought you were dead. Do you understand what that means? The man had four children. By now he thought he’d have a dozen grandkids. Instead, three of his children are dead and your sorry ass was missing. Your mother’s in such a state that she couldn’t even make the trip. She couldn’t bring herself to come here only to find out that you were dead, too, like three other of her children. And all you can do is whine and complain. That old man will be so grateful to see you that he won’t care if you did burn down that restaurant and kill that delivery man. He just wants you, his only remaining child, to be alive. Now go get in the fuckin’ car and stop your fuckin’ pissing and moaning.”

  Everybody was looking at me like I was some new species of being, even Eddie the driver, and I was feeling like a new species, maybe like a mutation of Carmine and my regular self. Except my regular self seemed to have taken a leave of absence and all I had left was the mutation. Yolanda insisted that Mike and Eddie go with me to return Sam to his family, and insisted that we come right back. She had things to tell me, she said. So we did what we were instructed to do. Dave Epstein an
d Ellie and Sasha were so glad to see Sam that they didn’t even notice that we’d left. When we got back to the office Yolanda told Eddie the driver that we were finished with him and gave him such a large tip that he stuttered for several seconds before he could express his thanks. “Anytime you folks need a driver, please ask for me,” he said. “And tell dispatch to call me if it’s my day off. I mean it. I’d drive for you folks anytime.”

  Finally it was just the four of us. Yolanda locked the door and pulled the shades even though it was barely four o’clock. We were closed to the outside world, and inside we had a world of trouble staring us in the face. I was content to let Yolanda do all the talking and explaining. She began by playing Sam’s tape for Mike. She and Eddie had done such a good job of questioning him that Mike didn’t have any questions, but he had lots of commentary, though it was nothing I hadn’t said to myself, the most salient of his comments being, “You have really stepped into a big pile of elephant shit this time, bro.”

  I considered defending myself but was glad I didn’t when Yolanda dumped a thick file folder in the middle of my desk. “Arson fires in businesses owned by non-white immigrants in the last year. There are seven. Three of them Sammy admitted to setting with his friends, but he says he called DHS and reported all of these business owners as suspected terrorists.”

  Silence reigned, but I was certain it was only external because I knew that the other three brains were spinning and sputtering as loudly as mine and coming up with the same balls dropping into the same slots: There were two sets of arsonists, a fact Sammy had neglected to mention, which suggested, at least to me, a mastermind, which Sammy also neglected to mention. Maybe he didn’t know? I replayed the Sammy/Yolanda/Eddie tape in my mind. They had let Sammy talk, then they had pushed for the information they suspected he was withholding; Yolanda pushed gently but insistently, Eddie pushed hard and mean when necessary. They believed, and I agreed, that Sam Epstein had told them all he knew about the fires, including the fact that they were set because Homeland Security didn’t seem to be doing anything about the terrorists among us. Yolanda had asked him why he thought those specific people were terrorists. “All you have to do is look at them,” he’d replied. “Look at the clothes they wear, listen to them talk.”

  There was a brief silence after that, then Eddie’s nastiest laugh. “So did you report the Hassidic Jewish community in Brooklyn as terrorist suspects? They dress funny, talk funny. Or would you like for me to make that call to Homeland Security for you?” It had taken several more minutes but they finally got Sam to admit that all those reported to DHS as suspected terrorists were people of color, and that focusing on them had been McQueen’s idea.

  “And what did you think would happen to those people?” Yolanda had asked, and Sammy had replied, “They would be sent back home.” Then Eddie must have made a sudden move because Sam cried out, “Please don’t hit me!” and Eddie had shouted, really screamed at the top of his lungs, something I’d never heard him do, “I ought to kill you, you cowardly piece of shit! Those people are home! This is their home, just like it’s your home!”

  But there hadn’t been a specific question to Sam about the other fires, whether or not he knew about them, though Yolanda had asked whether other people were involved with the four of them—himself, Mottola, McQueen, and Casey—and he’d said no.

  “So what are we gonna do, bro?” Mike Smith asked.

  “I’m for serving up Epstein’s sorry ass to the Homeland Security assholes. They deserve each other,” Eddie said.

  I agreed but Sam Epstein no longer was a concern of mine, Ravi Patel was our paying customer and it was the New York City Fire Department and Big Apple Business Insurers who needed to be convinced that Patel hadn’t torched his own building, which meant finding a way to drop Tim McQueen into the elephant shit pile since he was the one who started the fire. For sure Sam Epstein wouldn’t point the finger; he shook and trembled every time anybody said the words, McQueen, Casey, and Mottola. Mottola was out of the picture, due to my deal with Carmine. I had to find another way, which led me right back to Jackie Marchand.

  “Find Jackie Marchand. Get the loading dock supervisor to violate his rules and give you the guy’s address, bribe him if you have to. Then go find him. I need to know what he knows.” Mike nodded and Eddie looked expectantly at me so I told them about Raul and before they could react the way I knew they would, I told them not to. “The dude is righteous whether you two think so or not. I’m telling you he is, and if Mike’s bad feeling about Jackie Marchand is right, and knowing Mike it probably is, then I need Raul’s help. Talk to him mano a mano, Eddie, not like cop to perp . . .”

  “Phil?” Yolanda gave me a look I couldn’t interpret, so she had to spell it out. “If you need something more from Raul, you should be the one to ask him for it. He just got to the point of trusting you, he’s not going to trust Eddie, and you’ll lose him forever.”

  She was right and I knew it. I nodded and Mike stood up, stretched, slipped into his coat which was hanging on the back of his chair, and headed for the door. “I better try and catch Talbot before he leaves,” and he was out the door.

  “There’s something Eddie can help me with,” Yo said, shocking him and me, but he nodded warily. “The tenant and employee files from Kallen for the Avenue B building; there’s something not right about it but I can’t figure out what it is. Eddie, you’re good at reading between the lines. Would you take a look?”

  “Sure,” he said, “bring it on.”

  “What’s this pile on my desk, then?” I asked; I’d thought it was the KLM/Kallen stuff that Yolanda had just asked Eddie to look at.

  “The Patel and Nehru records. Very detailed, as you’ll see; wish all our clients were so organized. You’ll also see that Mr. Nehru is a very rich man. His idea of import-export isn’t trinkets you buy at street fairs and flea markets.”

  Yolanda and Eddie disappeared behind the screens and I followed them, but I stopped at the map of the city on the wall next to the kitchen. Every street and alley, every train track and subway tunnel, clearly marked. I took the list of fire locations and marked each one with a red push pin. Then I added a yellow pin to the fires set by Sammy and Company. I already knew that all the businesses were owned by non-white immigrants, so the only other pattern I could discern was location: All the fires occurred in a slice of the southern part of the city, between 34th and Canal Streets. But was that really a pattern? I stood there looking at the map for a long time, visualizing the streets and the neighborhoods, both East Side and West Side, searching for meaning. I didn’t find it. If it was there, it was going to make me work to uncover it.

  I went back to my desk, switched on the lamp and opened the Patel file, which seemed to contain every piece of paper ever generated pertaining to the purchase of his building and the opening of his restaurant. I couldn’t imagine that anybody could look at this file and see a terrorist, or a man who would destroy everything these pieces of paper represented. I’d read some of the terrorist profile information that flowed like water downhill from the Federal, state, and city police agencies after the declaration of war on terrorists, and Ravi Patel didn’t have a toenail that would fit one of the profiles. I knew a little bit, too, about arsonist profiles, especially those who torched their own homes or businesses, usually to collect on the insurance. Again, no Ravi fit or match. The government spent millions of dollars developing and generating these profiles; did anybody in the government ever read them? Did the damn government agencies themselves even believe them?

  I closed the Patel file and opened Jawal Nehru’s. It was the size of the Manhattan yellow pages. Clipped to the first page was the fountain pen–looking thing that really was for backing up files, and beneath it an arrow pointing to it and, in Yolanda’s handwriting, “It’s called a flash drive, Phil, not a thingy.” I chuckled to myself and started reading the first document, which was the quarterly tax return prepared the night before the fire that destroyed Ne
hru’s life. “Holy shit!”

  Yolanda and Eddie came running from behind the screens. “What?”

  “Nehru lost inventory worth more than three million dollars in that fire!”

  “I told you he was no street peddler.”

  “Yeah, but . . .” I didn’t know what to say. No wonder Mrs. Nehru felt compelled to leave if anyone seriously believed she and her husband would intentionally destroy that kind of net worth, to say nothing of the lifestyle it bought.

  “And they’ve got the receipts for every item on that inventory, Phil. They’d already bought and paid for that stuff, and now the insurance company won’t ante up.”

  “What’s their premium?” I asked, already turning pages.

  “Read it and weep,” Yo said.

  “Holy shit!” I said again. And I thought my insurance premiums. “Wait a minute . . . did you see this, Yo? Big Apple has Nehru and Patel.” She started toward my desk but the phone rang and she went back to her own. I heard her out of only one ear; the bulk of my attention was on Nehru’s Big Apple insurance file, pages and pages and more pages of documents. Then there was the insurance coverage on their West End Avenue apartment . . .

  “Let’s roll, hermano.” Eddie was standing beside my desk zipping up his jacket. “That was Mike on the phone.”

  He didn’t need to say anything more. I strapped on my gun, went to the back and got my jacket, grabbed the cell phone out of the charger, and joined Eddie waiting for me at the front door. I turned back toward Yolanda but found she’d followed us to the door. “Is this a police matter yet?” She shook her head, no, and gave me a piece of paper with an address written on it. I hoped it would stay that way, at least until we had searched for anything helpful to our case.