by J. L. Abramo
Lorraine DiMarco had three motions before the judge for this late Friday afternoon hearing. First, she moved that all charges be dropped since the victim had a criminal record, Bobby had no such record, and he was pointed in the general direction of the 62nd Precinct when he was stopped. Everyone involved, Lorraine included, saw the chances of the judge granting the motion as slim at best.
Everyone was correct. The motion was quickly denied.
The second motion was for a reduction in bail, which was currently set at $200,000. Hoyle’s brother was having difficulty raising the ten percent needed for a bondsman. The fact that Ron Hoyle was trying so diligently was almost surprising, since he wanted to strangle his kid brother for running off with the Mustang in the first place. The kid had been behind bars for three days already and Bobby Hoyle wasn’t well equipped for the experience. The judge agreed to a bail reduction to $100,000; but it would still take some doing for Ron Hoyle to scrape up the ten grand.
Lastly, Lorraine asked for a delay to the start of the trial. She argued that the defense needed sufficient time to try locating the person who had lifted Johnny Colletti’s wallet and gloves. The thief may have been witness to the actual shooting. The prosecution argued there was nothing to substantiate that Colletti had gloves on his person, or even a wallet for that matter, at the time of the shooting. Since the start of the trial was more than four weeks away, the judge ruled to let the date stand and invited Defense Attorney DiMarco to resubmit the motion if more time was necessary as the date became imminent.
All in all it was not a great day for Bobby Hoyle.
Lorraine had known Ron and Bobby Hoyle their entire lives. She had babysat Bobby when she was a teen. Hoyle’s father, who lost a battle with lung cancer the previous summer, had played pinochle with Lorraine’s father every Friday night for many years. Hoyle senior, who also played the horses at Aqueduct, Belmont and OTB without restraint, left little for his sons beyond a heavily mortgaged house on West 12th Street, a few doors from Lorraine’s parents.
Coming up with $10,000 to free Bobby on bail was going to be tricky.
Bobby Hoyle rises to join his escort back to Rikers.
“How did we do?” he timidly asks Lorraine.
“I guess it could have been worse,” she answers, not too convincingly. “Stay away from the other inmates. Get through the weekend; I’ll get you out by Monday.”
“Promise?”
“Hang in there, kid,” Ron Hoyle says, coming up from his seat in the gallery. “I promise you’ll be home Monday.”
The bailiff walks Bobby Hoyle out of the courtroom; Lorraine turns to his older brother.
“Will you be able to swing it?”
“I hope so. I think I have someone interested in going ten thousand for the Mustang,” Ron says. “Perfect irony.”
He thanks Lorraine and heads out of the courtroom.
“Is everything alright, Victoria?” Lorraine asks as they collect their paperwork.
“Last time I checked, why?”
“The way you were drumming on your pad, I thought you were late for a date.”
“The only date I have is with my bar exam study books, and I’m totally monogamous. And you? Big Friday night plans?”
“Detective Vota is coming over to my parents’ house for dinner. We’ll eat lots of delicious and unhealthy food and then I’ll look through old photo albums with Mom while Dad and Lou glue themselves to the hockey game.”
“Bobby didn’t look very good,” says Victoria.
“Not surprising, the kid is terrified. We have to get him out of there, and soon. Have a good weekend. I’ll see you Monday morning.”
Vota and Samson were back at the 61st Precinct at four-thirty. The three-story brick building sat back off Coney Island Avenue at Avenue W.
For all appearances, the building could have been a city public school. Only the marked police cars filling the parking area gave away its identity.
Desk Sergeant Kelly calls down from his throne as they head for the stairs to the third-floor Homicide detectives’ squad room, stopping Vota in his tracks.
“Got a minute, Lou?”
“I’ll go up and see if Murphy has found anything,” says Samson.
“What are you reading now?” asks Vota, referring to the book sitting open in front of the desk sergeant.
“One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest; as part of my continuing attempt to somehow understand the nature of this precinct. I just got a call from old man Levine at the liquor store on 86th Street.”
“Oh?”
“He wants to talk with you, about the shooting on Bay Parkway. The carjack incident your lovely attorney friend is working on. Isn’t that case with the 62nd?”
“Yes.”
“You don’t want to step on their toes, Lou. That’s a treacherous bunch over on Bath Avenue.”
“I was only asking a few questions. I’m not looking to rain on anyone’s parade. But I do appreciate the concern. I didn’t know you cared.”
“There’s a lot about me you don’t know,” says Kelly. “For example, I came in second in the Brooklyn Borough Spelling Bee finals when I was fourteen years old. I missed the word decorum.”
“Figures. What did Levine have to say?”
“Levine said that some street guy who comes into the store to buy a bottle of Ripple or Boone’s Farm, whenever he can scrape together enough pennies and empty soda cans to afford one, walked in two nights ago and purchased a bottle of expensive Irish whiskey with a crisp new C-note and then tried to sell Levine a pair of genuine calfskin driving gloves. Levine thought you might be interested.”
“I am.”
“Levine said he’d be at the liquor store until nine.”
“Okay, thanks Kelly, I’ll give him a call,” Vota says and heads for the climb to the squad room.
“How do you like the new addition?” Detective Murphy asks when Samson walks into the Homicide squad room.
Murphy is pointing at the photograph which had found its place hung between pictures of Dennis Franz and Clint Eastwood on the wall behind his desk. It was Murphy’s Wall of Fame, his shrine to the great homicide cops of film and television.
“Is that my man Pembleton?”
“None other. Andre Braugher circa 1993.”
“Any luck with missing kids?” Samson asks.
“I don’t know if luck is quite the word for it. We have eight girls: 6, 9, 10, 11, 13, 14 and two 16-year-olds. Three Caucasian, three African-American, one Korean and one Hispanic. And four boys: 3, 8, 12 and 13. What the hell is going on, Sam?”
“I wish I knew, Tommy. Or maybe I’d rather not. What about the eight-year-old?”
“Jamaican,” says Murphy.
“Any luck?” says Vota, walking into the room. “Is that Andre Braugher?”
“No and yes,” says Murphy.
“Do me a favor, Tommy,” Samson says. “I realize that it is Friday night, but I could use you over at the scene to see how Landis and Mendez are doing with the apartment canvas. Residents should be starting to arrive home from work. I’d go myself, but it’s Lucy’s birthday. I promised Alicia that I wouldn’t be late and I’m having strong feelings about wanting to spend time with my children. I’ll have Kelly forward any calls about missing kids over to me at home.”
“Sure, Sam, no problem.”
“Call me if you need any help, Tommy,” Vota offers, handing Murphy a telephone number. “I’ll be at Lorraine’s parents’ house watching the Islanders pummel the Rangers.”
“Fat chance,” says Murphy, wondering afterward where the expression came from.
Vota goes over to his desk to call Levine at the liquor store.
“What do you have in the Prince of Pizza box, Tommy?” Samson asks.
With Thomas Edward Murphy, nothing was obvious.
“A meatball calzone for Ralph. I refuse to cook for him on Friday nights.”
Before heading over to join Mendez and Landis at the crime scene, Murphy goe
s over to his apartment to share the meatball calzone with Ralph and run Ralph over to John Paul Jones Park. Murphy parks his Chevrolet in front of a fire hydrant a few hundred feet from his building. Finding a legal parking space that was closer than a taxi ride to his place would be impossible at that time of day. He plants a city parking permit on his dashboard.
Murphy takes the stairs up to the fourth floor, calling it his daily aerobics. He had missed his usual three-mile run that morning and was feeling the worse for it. He knew that Ralph had surely had a bad day, pacing the apartment, rearing to sprint. Thomas Murphy struggles with his Irish-Catholic guilt over denying Ralph his morning exercise as he takes the stairs two at a time. The calzone is Murphy’s attempt at atoning for his sin.
Ralph’s joy at Murphy’s return is manifested by barks and attempted embraces that have Murphy juggling the pizza box for control. He manages to fake left, do an end run to the kitchen and safely place the box on the kitchen table. It takes Murphy several minutes to calm the large German shepherd. Deciding that a trip over to the park is more critical than diving into dinner for the moment, Murphy grabs the leash from the front door knob, for appearances only, and leads Ralph out of the apartment and quickly down the three flights. The two trot up Marine Avenue toward 4th Avenue and Shore Road.
Lou Vota drives from the 61st to his house in Red Hook via Ocean Parkway into the Gowanus and then onto the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway. At that hour, the great majority of traffic is headed in the opposite direction, coming from Manhattan into Brooklyn.
Vota lives in the house he inherited from his parents. Vota’s two sisters had long ago followed their husbands to places west, gladly leaving the Borough of Churches behind. Lou, on the other hand, loved Brooklyn and had lived there all of his life. When his mother passed away, after losing a battle with leukemia, Lou Vota moved back into the house where he grew up, to provide companionship for his father. John Vota had spent fifty years in the plumbing business, doing most of his work there in the neighborhood. When a massive heart attack took John’s life at age seventy, Lou remained in the residence.
Red Hook had been a predominantly Italian-American stronghold for many years. A slow steady migration to Bensonhurst, Bay Ridge and Staten Island, by families who saw such moves as upward mobility, set the area into a progression of changes. The neighborhood saw worse times before seeing better. In recent years, the so-called gentrification of Brooklyn Heights, Carroll Gardens and Cobble Hill had finally spilled further south into Red Hook. Now Red Hook, as those other neighborhoods before it, had become the next up-and-coming place to live.
Vota had started remodeling the house, as time and resources allowed, after his father’s death. He had redone the second floor and created a two-bedroom, one-and-a-half-bath apartment which brought in a substantial monthly rent. Vota had also built a deck on the roof of the two-story brownstone, which offered a spectacular view of the Harbor.
Vota stops for a box of pastries from Attanasio’s Bakery on President Street, a few doors down from where Joey Gallo was born and raised, before continuing to his house on Verona Street near the corner of Van Brunt.
Vota quickly checks his mail, shaves, showers and dresses in preparation for his dinner engagement.
Checking his father’s prized grandfather clock, Vota finds that he has some time to spare before he needs to be at the DiMarco home. He takes the less trafficked Prospect Expressway into Ocean Parkway toward Bensonhurst to pick up a few bottles of Cabernet and find out what he could learn from old man Levine at the liquor store on 86th Street.
Lorraine DiMarco goes straight from the courthouse to her parents’home.
Lorraine has decided that she can shower and find a change of clothing there and help her mother prepare the meal.
The DiMarcos live in a two-family house on West 12th Street between Avenues T and U in Gravesend, a few doors down from the Hoyle residence. Lorraine finds a parking space directly behind Ron Hoyle’s now infamous 1965 Mustang convertible. The DiMarco house is only three short blocks from where the boy’s body had been found on the roof.
Salvatore DiMarco is a retired Transit Authority cop, who had always wanted to be a lawyer. He had instilled the love of the law in his three children and was extremely proud when Lorraine graduated Queens College Law School and passed the New York bar exam. Lorraine’s mother, Fran, is a retired schoolteacher, having taught third grade at P.S. 97 on West 13th Street for more than thirty years, and Lorraine experienced both the advantages and disadvantages of having a mom who taught at the elementary school where Lorraine herself had attended for seven of those years.
Lorraine’s older sister, Linda, never caught the law bug from her father. Instead she followed her mother’s footsteps into the admirable profession of educating young children and taught elementary school in Denver, where her husband was a surgeon at the Colorado Health and Sciences Center. Sal and Fran DiMarco’s first child, Salvatore Jr., who was smart enough and talented enough to become anything he wanted to become, was killed by a sniper in South Vietnam when Lorraine was three years old.
After a quick shower, Lorraine throws on a T-shirt and sweatpants and joins her mother in the kitchen.
Fran DiMarco immediately puts her daughter to work breading the veal cutlets.
Samson stops at the Reliable Bakery on Sheepshead Bay Road to pick up the birthday cake before heading out Avenue U toward Flatbush. Samson has decided to avoid the rush-hour traffic on the Belt Parkway by taking Flatlands to Pennsylvania Avenue, hopping onto the Jackie Robinson Parkway and then to the Van Wyck Expressway up to Northern Boulevard. The twenty-one-mile trip from the 61st to his three-bedroom ranch house in Douglaston is a thirty-five-minute commute under the best of circumstances. As he passes Flushing Meadows Park and the ball field, Samson gives thanks that the start of the baseball season is less than seven weeks away.
Douglaston is located in that hazy area that was either Queens or Long Island depending on a resident’s disposition. For those who had migrated from Woodside, Astoria, Elmhurst and Flushing, it was called Long Island, with all of the prestige the title could muster. But for Samson, who was born and raised in Bedford-Stuyvesant in Brooklyn, it was Queens. For Samson it was important to be living in one of the five boroughs.
The move to the suburbs had great advantages. A private residence with front and back yards and safe streets for the kids. Alicia’s family nearby. Peace of mind. But it came at a price. A long, nerve-wracking commute. A sense of isolation from his fellow detectives. And a feeling of having abandoned a neighborhood in need of help. It provided Samson with enough guilt to have him working after-school athletic programs in Bushwick and Bed-Sty at least two evenings every month.
Samson comes off Douglaston Parkway onto 235th Street and drives toward 41st Avenue and Alley Pond Park. When he pulls into the driveway, his five-year-old birthday girl runs out to meet him at the door.
THREE
Vota places the two bottles of Cabernet on the liquor store counter and reaches for his wallet.
“Please tell me about the man who came in with the calfskin gloves, Mr. Levine,” Vota says.
“He comes in quite often, but I can’t tell you his name. He’s known on the street as Sully. I haven’t seen him since he was in with the gloves and the hundred-dollar bill. That was Wednesday night.”
“Any idea where this Sully lives?”
“As I told the desk sergeant, I’m sure he lives on the streets. In the warmer weather I’ve seen him a few times sleeping in vestibules along 86th Street,” says Levine. “At this time of year, I imagine that he has found a place more protected. It’s my understanding that some of the homeless use the train station at 25th Avenue, but they wouldn’t show up until the clerk at the token booth goes off at ten.”
“Thanks for your help,” says Vota, taking his change and lifting the bagged wine bottles from the counter. “If Sully comes in again, please call the Precinct. See if you can keep him here, or persuade him to talk to
us. Tell him there’s a reward involved.”
Murphy arrives at the apartment building on Avenue S after polishing off the entire meatball calzone with Ralph and regretting the accomplishment. There is more activity than he had expected. A uniformed officer at the building entrance directs Murphy to apartment 2-D.
Officers Landis and Mendez are there, along with the forensic team called down from the roof. The apartment is void of furniture and looks freshly painted. A small, wood step stool sits in the middle of the front room.
“What’s going on?” asks Murphy.
“Looks like this is where the boy was killed,” says Mendez. “Looks like the killer carried him in through the window.”
“From the fire escape in broad daylight?”
“Seems so. From the back of the building,” says Landis, “and no one we’ve spoken with saw a thing.”
“Has this place been rented?” asks Murphy.
“Not yet,” says a woman coming out of one of the bedrooms, “but a few people have come to look at it.”
Murphy looks to Officer Landis for a clue.
“Detective Marina Ivanov from the 60th,” Landis says as she walks over to them. “Ivanov, meet Detective Murphy. Ivanov was here earlier with Sam and Vota to talk with the woman who discovered the body, and we called her back.”
“I tried to get descriptions of the three people who came to look at the place,” says Ivanov, “but they’re all pretty sketchy. The woman is still very upset.”
“Did she get any names? Anyone fill out papers? Don’t you need a credit check to rent an apartment?”
“This is Gravesend, Murphy,” says Landis. “Credit here is what you owe at the grocery across the street.”