A Murder Too Close

by Penny Mickelbury

  “I hope you’re not in too much pain and misery to help slam the door shut on the cousins Kearney and their loving Aunt Mary Katherine.” He pulled a sheaf of papers from his inside jacket pocket and waved them back and forth.

  “You got ’em?”

  “Yolanda laid the trail. I merely followed . . .”

  “...The paper.”

  “Yup. You know why I never wanted to work the gang or drug task forces? Because those dudes are so much smarter than the smart fuckers. Your average drug wholesaler moves millions more than your average white collar criminal but nobody knows for sure how many millions more because there’s no paper. Drug merchants don’t write shit down. Your white collar fool, on the other hand, goes to great lengths to set up dummy and phony accounts and route money here, there, and yonder, to this overseas bank and that overseas bank. A computer genius like Miss Yolanda Aguierre in cahoots with a devious, pond-scum-hating bastard like myself on the trail of pseudo-smart crooks: They don’t stand a chance.”

  “You really got ’em, Abby?”

  “Signed, sealed, and ready to deliver to the DA’s office.”

  My joy faded. “Are you crazy?”

  He was genuinely confused. “No, I don’t think so.”

  “You don’t work for the cops anymore, Abby, for the government!”

  “We still catch the bad guys, don’t we?”

  “No! We don’t! That’s not what we get paid to do. We get paid—more money than the cops are ever paid, by the way—to get Big Apple Insurance Company to pay out Ravi Patel’s and Jawal Nehru’s insurance claims! And we want that to happen this week or next week, not in two or three or five years from now!” I was yelling and my head was pounding and I was dizzy and nauseous again.

  Abby was watching me, probably waiting to see if I was going to faint or puke or something. When he saw that I wasn’t, he came closer to the bed. “Does that mean we don’t care if the fuckin’ Kearneys don’t get what’s coming to them?”

  “Oh, hell no, Abby!” I started to shake my head no. Big mistake. In fact, everything I did or said seemed to be a mistake. “No, Abby,” I said in a whisper. “They’ll get what’s coming to them. After they pay our clients what’s owed to them.”

  “But why would they do that?” Abby asked, frustration written in bold block letters all over his face. “What’s in it for them?”

  “We don’t turn ’em in to the DA is what’s in it for them.”

  “But you said they’d get what’s coming to them.”

  “And they will. On the front page of the Daily News.”

  Abby jumped up and hugged me before I could stop him. I yelped in pain, he backed away and started apologizing, still backing up, until he backed into Connie. Then he turned around and started a new round of apologies.

  “Abby!”

  “What?”

  I put my finger to my lips and shushed him, then introduced him to Connie, and he was off and running again, congratulating her on our engagement, telling her how lovely she was, how pleased he was to meet her. She was trying hard not to laugh. “He’s our new associate, is Mr. Horowitz, and clearly one of the most polite people on the planet.” He and Connie shook hands, then Abby hugged her.

  Amused and bemused, she came and sat next to me on the bed. “The doctor’s coming to sign you out. She’s not happy, but I promised her that I’d keep an eye on you and get you back in here immediately if you fainted.”

  “If I faint, don’t bother bringing me back here, just dig a hole and roll me into it.” I was feeling so good I thought I could stand up. I almost made it.

  “You need to rest,” Abby said.

  “I need to eat,” I said. “Lunch on me. Let’s have something delivered to the office and have a feast. How about Indian food?”

  “It’s dinnertime, and you’re not going to the office, you’re going home.”

  I knew better than to argue. “So, Abby. Guess I’ll see you manana.”

  “Or the day after,” Connie said.

  “Tomorrow,” I said.

  “We’ll see,” Connie said.

  Eddie the driver picked me up the next morning and took me to work. I hurt in places I didn’t know it was possible to hurt but the ass-kicking headache had subsided somewhat and I didn’t get dizzy and nauseous with every movement. I had to work to convince Connie that I really did feel up to going in, and I had to raise my right hand, cast and all, and promise that I’d come home if I felt faint. I almost cried when the car pulled up in front of my building and saw that the new windows were in, and I did get a little choked up when I opened the door to find Yo, Mike, Eddie, Abby and breakfast waiting for me. It hurt to talk, it hurt to laugh, it hurt to chew, it hurt to move, it hurt to breathe—and I had never felt better in my life. So glad was I to be in the company of these four people that I didn’t mind that somebody had to open my bottle of juice, put cream and sugar in my coffee, and cream cheese on my bagel, put the tray holding my food on my lap, and tuck my napkin under my chin. I didn’t mind having them do those things because they didn’t mind doing them.

  After I told the tale of my close encounter with Tank for what I hoped was the last time, I listened more than I talked; talking hurt and my associates now knew things that I didn’t know, though I did have a couple of pieces of information to add to the discussion: I remembered the piece of pipe that Tank hit me with, that may also have been what killed Jackie Marchand, and that it might still be lying there on the sidewalk; and I remembered something that he’d said during the attack. “He’d rather trust a Jew than his own blood.”

  “Tank’s related to Kearney, too,” Yolanda said. “His name is William—they call him Willie—and they’re all family—Casey, McQueen, Tank, the Kearneys, and Aunt Mary Katherine.”

  Yolanda had tied them all to a maintenance man who’d been killed in the World Trade Center that day, guy named Francis Kearney. Mary Katherine was the guy’s sister, Francis and Thomas his sons, Casey and McQueen his grandsons, the sons of his daughters. Tank apparently was a grandson, too. It was Mary Katherine’s survivor’s money that had financed Francis Kearney’s real estate development company, and Mary Katherine was the brains behind the scheme as well. We had all the pieces to this puzzle, everything we needed to leverage them into paying the Patel and Nehru insurance claims. What we didn’t have was a solid ID on Bill Calloway’s killer, and what we couldn’t do was get back the properties of those merchants who had been forced to sell out because Big Apple wouldn’t pay their claims. A smart lawyer, though, Abby said, could squeeze some serious money out of Big Apple because Kearney was acting for the company in denying legitimate claims. Abby thought he could convince those cheated merchants to hire us to make their case. That Horowitz was some fast learner.

  When it seemed that we were finished with that case for the moment, Mike asked if we wanted to watch some home movies. “We’re gonna have one hell of a show-and-tell session for the KLM people,” he said, putting a disc into the DVD player.

  We all watched in silent appreciation of what could be accomplished with the kind of digital video camera that anybody could use. It was almost like watching a movie.

  “I sure wish we could get inside there,” Abby said.

  “This is great stuff,” I said.

  “Yeah, it is: Great stuff of guys going in the front door of a building and out the back door of the same building a half hour or an hour later. To Richard King, it’ll look like enough to fire that Kallen character . . .” He stopped mid-sentence and turned a piercing, questioning gaze on Yolanda. “How, by the way, did you find out that he’s not really Mike Kallen?”

  “Fingerprints,” she said. “I offered him a cup of coffee and he accepted. And when he left, I bagged the cup and sent it to our lab . . .”

  “We’ve got a lab?” I asked, and expressed way too much surprise because the next emission from my mouth was, “Ow!” followed by—and there’s no other adequate or accurate way to describe it—a whimper. The h
eadache was back with a vengeance.

  Yolanda jumped up and ran over to me. Eddie took the tray off my lap. Mike grabbed my coffee cup before I could add second degree burn to my vast array of injuries. It was agreed that what I probably needed to do was stretch myself out on the sofa. I let myself be out-voted and while the room was being arranged so that I could watch Mike’s surveillance video from a prone position, I listened to Mike, Eddie, and Abby discuss the difficulty the cops were having policing the Russian criminal enterprise. I realized that I must have been dozing, drifting in and out of wakefulness. I realized that Connie was right, that I probably should have stayed home and slept today. Of course, it was too late for that now. I forced my eyes to open and remain that way, and tried to will the headache to subside enough to let my brain function, at least minimally.

  “Say that again,” I said, sounding so weak I didn’t know if anyone heard me.

  “What part?” Mike asked.

  “About how the Russians don’t play by the rules.”

  Abby pulled a chair over to the sofa where I lay. “They didn’t think they had to. They thought they could just come here and set up their illegal enterprises—gambling, prostitution, drug dealing, counterfeiting, auto theft—you name, they did, and they did it on a grand scale and with a kind of ruthlessness that, at first, was startling. That’s why they got away with it at first: Nobody could believe the balls on these guys. I mean, they’d get here—illegally, most of ’em—and set up shop. Go to work.”

  “You shoulda seen the Dominican dealers Uptown and the Jamaicans over in Brooklyn when the Russians started dealing!” Eddie laughed at the memory, then turned quickly serious. “The blood started flowing and didn’t stop until finally the cops had had enough.”

  Heavy silence followed as the cops in the room relived that ugly period in the history of the New York City Police Department. I had never patrolled the streets where the blood had flowed and had not, until this moment, had a clear understanding of what had caused the turf wars because I hadn’t wanted to know. What I knew and had always known was that the police department was a stepping stone for me—the best, most efficient way for me to become a licensed private investigator. “So, this was all the work of the Russian mob?” I asked, sounding like the student I was.

  Mike was shaking his head. “Not the way you mean mob.”

  “How many ways are there, Mike?”

  Mike looked at Abby, who answered the question. “For our purposes: Two. The Devil we know—our own organized crime paisanos—and the Devil we didn’t know—the fuckin’ Russians.”

  Carmine’s words rushed back to me with such force it made me breathless: “They’re nothin’ like us. They got no rules, they got no organization, and they got no morals.”

  “You look green, Phil,” Eddie said, “like how I felt those first couple a days in the hospital.”

  “I’m okay,” I said, “really. And I want to see the rest of Mike’s video.” Yolanda looked at me so long and hard I almost shifted my eyes, but she gave in before I did and restarted the DVD.

  We all turned our attention to the screen again, me with a completely different attitude about what we were watching. Yes, I still wanted KLM’s business; without us, Richard King would be hard-pressed to prove that the brothel Mike Kallen was running was his own enterprise and not a KLM-sanctioned enterprise: Men in the front door and out the back gate day and night; all of the social security numbers of all the new female tenants were bogus; Mike Kallen’s identity was a sham; whoever Boris was, Boris wasn’t his name; and the limo driver who cut and ran that morning, leaving Mike and me in the car, was a Russian criminal wanted by Interpol. Equally, though, I wanted some Russians to go to jail. Or, better still, back to Russia. And, unlike Carmine, not because they were Russians . . . at least I didn’t think so.

  “Are they really as ruthless as their reputations would have us believe?” Yolanda asked.

  “Worse,” Mike, Eddie, and Abby answered in unison.

  “We were told that they’d rather die in a shootout here, or do a life sentence in one of our prisons, than go back where they came from,” Mike said.

  “They don’t fear us—our law enforcement agencies—because, compared to what they’re used to, we might as well be Santa Claus at Christmas,” Abby said. “In fact, some years back, when we’d bust some of them on a misdemeanor and they were looking at being ROR, they’d assault a cop so they could go to jail. Three squares, a bed, and clean clothes—a better life than they’d ever had.”

  Yeah, I was thinking, back to the Motherland for Mike and Boris, when Abby jumped up so quickly that he knocked his chair over. Mike and Eddie jumped up, too, weapons in hand. Yolanda was on her feet and backing away. I couldn’t jump up; I couldn’t even sit up quickly, so I was the first to see that Abby’s focus still was on the television screen, that his mouth was open in shocked amazement.

  “You rat bastard! You low life piece of shit! Freeze that! Back it up a few frames!” He was roaring, hopping from foot to foot, and pointing at the screen.

  I finally managed to get myself upright on the sofa and waved a hand at Abby—I wanted him to stop yelling and jumping; every sound, every movement, reverberated in my head. He picked up his chair, then put his face next to the TV screen where the image was frozen, and pointed to the man being welcomed in the front door of the Avenue B building by a smiling Boris.

  “That filthy, fuckin’ rat bastard is Alex Sabzanov. He’s a detective second grade. He used to work out of Harlem, but he’s Downtown now, assigned, I heard, somewhere in the Village.”

  “He’s also Russian,” Yolanda said. “At least his name is.”

  “And he’s probably getting freebies, the lousy rat bastard,” Abby snarled, sounding more mean and nasty than I would have given him credit for managing.

  We all stared at the frozen screen, at the frozen figures on the screen, and at Abby’s face. Then he stood up, gave us a sinister version of the tooth-exposing, mustache-dancing grin and wriggled his bushy eyebrows up and down. “We are now inside Boris’s little brothel,” he said, and began dancing around the room.

  “Is our equipment sophisticated enough for inside undercover work?” Yolanda asked.

  “Are you totally crazy?” I said to Abby, and everybody looked at me. I struggled to my feet, waving off everybody’s assistance, then had to accept it anyway as I swayed before I steadied. “Didn’t you all just finish describing these guys as . . . as brutal beyond belief? And you want us to let you go inside there, and with a crooked cop?” I’d raised my voice, which was a huge mistake, and I had to sit down again.

  “I won’t be going in with Sabzanov, Phil, he’ll just be gaining me entry: Me, another cop, and from Command—in a position to be really useful. Don’t you think Boris will love it?” Abby was nodding his head as if answering his own questions, and rubbing his hands together.

  I didn’t feel much like explaining why I didn’t like the idea of Abby Horowitz—or Eddie Ortiz or Mike Smith—going undercover alone into any situation, to say nothing of going into a den of Russians. Dudes who made Carmine nervous scared me shitless and I didn’t want anybody who worked for me alone and unprotected in a place that.

  Everybody was looking at me. I probably looked as irrational as I was feeling. I wanted my head to stop pounding so I could think, and then say what I was thinking in a logical and rational way. I couldn’t tell them that if Carmine was scared of Russians, that was good enough for me, but I could—and did—claim my own fear. “I already got Eddie almost killed—”

  “Dammit, I knew you were going there!” Eddie yelled at me.

  “You can’t make this about what happened to Eddie,” Mike said, studiously not yelling.

  “And what exactly do you plan on doing once you get inside, Horowitz? If you don’t go with one of the girls, Boris’ll kill you, and if you do go with one of the girls, I’ll kill you, and then I’ll fire your ass, and I don’t even know your wife.”

&nbs
p; “I’ve got a plan,” Abby said, not yelling, either, but definitely not whispering.

  “I don’t want to hear it,” I said. “You can’t go in there, Horowitz, not without backup, and since nobody here can go with you, that means you can’t go.”

  “Ah ha!” he said. “So that’s it!”

  “What’s it?” I asked, but I knew; and he was right. I still had a lot of resentment about needing to hire Abby even though I was glad to have him. I’d like to think I’d have hired him anyway, but because I wanted to, not because I needed to.

  “You know what,” Abby snapped at me. “It’s not my fault, man! What do you want me to do, apologize for being white? Or do you want to apologize for not being white? Or do you want major paydays from Big Apple Insurance and KLM Property Management? ’Cause we can have ’em both, but you gotta stop beating yourself up over shit you can’t change. The world sucks, man, and there’s nothing we can do about it but keep living how we live.”

  I looked at Yo and I’d never before seen the look on her face: Worry, fear, sadness, anger, and a little bit of confusion, as if she didn’t know what to think or say or do. And that made me feel worse than I already was feeling. “Do we have the kind of equipment he needs to go in, Yo?”

  She shrugged first, then she nodded. I looked at the guys; all three of them were looking at me. Damn, I was tired. I felt that I’d sleep for a week if I closed my eyes.

  “Mike and I will be outside the whole time he’s inside, one of us at the front door, the other at the back gate. We’ll be listening and if anything sounds funky, we’ll go in and take Boris’s sorry ass down in the process,” Eddie said.

  “The shape you’re in, you couldn’t take down one of those girls in there,” I snapped. Then added, “And neither could I. So that means,” and I turned to look at Abby, “we’ve got no room for error, dude.” He nodded, started to speak, but I wasn’t finished. “You don’t take this to Spade, Abby. You leave him out of it. And if you can’t do that, then you stay out of it.”