by J. L. Abramo
He chooses orange. The red was the boy’s favorite, but the red is gone. He tears the cover from a coloring book, turns it to its blank side and writes the note.
Samson and Murphy leave the New Times Restaurant, cross Coney Island Avenue and return to the 61st detectives’ squad room. Murphy left the tip; Samson left most of the meatloaf. Back at their desks they take to the phones. They are trying to track down sales of pancuronium bromide.
Before long, it is clear that the drug wasn’t purchased over the counter. So, now the tedious job of plowing through computer files and databases to identify known local dealers in illegal pharmaceuticals.
The possibilities seem endless.
The body of Billy Ventura has been moved to Graziano Funeral Home on 24th Avenue and 86th Street, directly across from Levine’s Liquor Store. The wake is scheduled to start the following afternoon. Samson leaves Murphy at a computer monitor and drives over to the mortuary.
There are reasons to keep certain details about the boy’s death out of the public eye. Samson meets with the funeral director to make these reasons unambiguous. The man seems to understand. In this part of Bensonhurst, Graziano has had to deal with similar concerns before.
Many times.
This was the easy part. Now, Samson would have to be as successful with the boy’s parents.
The Ventura home is only five blocks away. Samson has made an appointment to meet Mary and Paul Ventura there at three.
It is time to tell them the whole story.
How do you tell a mother, someone has used a razor blade on the face of your eight-year-old son. How do you tell a father, the small finger of your son’s right hand has been amputated.
There is no way.
Only to tell it.
And then there is moaning and wailing and inconsolable grief and it is as if the boy has died again, this time more terribly, and Samson is trying to explain MOs and copycats and the small daughter is crying for her mother from the bedroom and the woman escapes from Samson’s voice and goes to the child and the man sits stunned, unable to move to show Samson to the door.
Samson sees himself out.
Before he reaches his car, Samson hears Ventura’s voice calling from the front door and waits as the man comes down to meet him.
“Something happened,” says Ventura, moving up to the car, “a week or so ago. I didn’t give it much thought at the time.”
“Okay,” says Samson.
“A man got into my cab, hailed me as I left the garage at the beginning of my shift. Asked to go to Fourth and 36th, about two miles up the avenue. It was a cold day; it had snowed earlier. He was bundled in clothing, stocking cap, scarf across his lower face. And sunglasses.”
Ventura pauses, he places his arm on the hood of Samson’s car as if needing support.
“Go on,” Samson says.
“He asked me if I knew the story of Abraham and Isaac. About the sacrifice asked of Abraham to prove his fear of God. I said I knew the story and then he asked me if I would be willing to make the same sacrifice. I told him that I didn’t think I could.”
Ventura pauses again, collecting his thoughts.
Samson doesn’t interrupt.
“Now don’t get me wrong,” Ventura continues, “it wasn’t all that unusual. I get that kind of talk from passengers all the time. But here’s what is strange. I drove around the block after dropping him off, over to Third and then back up to Fourth to go downtown and I think I saw the same man get on to a Fourth Avenue bus heading back in the direction of the garage.”
“Can you do better describing the man?”
“Not really, most of his face was covered. Do you think it has anything to do with what happened to Billy?”
“Can you think of any reason why someone would want to do harm to you or your family?”
“Nothing.”
“Then it’s probably nothing. Will your wife be alright? Can you see to it that she understands the importance of what I was trying to explain in there?”
“Is there anything you’re not telling us?”
“No,” says Samson.
“I’ll do my best,” says Ventura and moves to return to the house.
Return to his wife.
And Samson watches the man go and climbs heavily into his car. And all Samson can think about at this moment is the horrible circumstance that has brought these two people back together.
Lorraine DiMarco drives over to her parents’ house late Saturday afternoon. At dinner the previous evening, Fran DiMarco had mentioned to her daughter that she could use help going through some old clothing and packing it up into boxes for Goodwill or the Salvation Army to pick up. That is if Lorraine has the time.
Lorraine doesn’t really have the time, but she knows that her father will be playing pinochle at the Italian-American Social Club on Highlawn Avenue and it will be a good opportunity to speak with her mother alone.
Lorraine waves a quick hello to Ron Hoyle before going into the house. Hoyle is out at the Mustang, looking under the hood of the car with a younger man who Lorraine guesses is the prospective buyer. The other man is poker-faced, fighting to hide his excitement.
The look on Hoyle’s face, on the other hand, describes his own sentiments exactly.
Lorraine pulls an old winter coat off the heap of clothing her mother has piled in the middle of the living room floor and places it aside. It looks like something her sister Linda wore in high school.
“I met a woman last night who may be able to use it,” Lorraine explains without being asked.
“Okay,” says her mother, not asking.
They fold pants and shirts and sweaters and place them into cardboard boxes that Sal DiMarco carried home from Joe Campo’s grocery that morning. Lorraine spots a pair of men’s dress shoes and lifts them up, toying with the idea of placing them aside with the winter coat. Lorraine is thinking of the man called Sully, of what they might find if they ever find him, of what it might take to make him at least look like a credible witness, if he had seen anything that could help Bobby Hoyle, and if they could even persuade Sully to go before a judge.
Lorraine shakes her head and drops the shoes into one of the boxes.
“Are you alright, sweetheart?” her mother asks.
Lorraine brings her fingers up to her face and is surprised to discover that her cheeks are wet. She turns to her mother and says, “I guess not.”
And then she tells her mother about the headaches.
And about the rendezvous with the MRI table scheduled for the following Wednesday morning.
FIVE
Samson returns to the Precinct and finds Murphy just as he left him, staring at a computer monitor.
“Get anything?” he asks.
“A neck ache. I tried running some queries in an Access database from tables of known dealers in controlled pharmaceuticals with the intention of isolating drugs used particularly for presurgical anesthesia.”
“How did that go?”
“Sort of like trying to solve a Rubik’s Cube blindfolded,” says Murphy.
“That well.”
“I e-mailed the Access files to the central computer lab; they’ve got people down there that can work on it all night. They’ll also be looking for any known felons with the initials J and G—maybe the sick bastard monogrammed his work—and looking for any similar mutilations in the five boroughs, though I doubt we’ll find anything quite like this one. I just hope that we never see another. I put in a request to the phone bank to contact all of the Brooklyn hospitals to inquire if any of this Pavulon has gone missing recently.”
“How about the number written on the wall?”
“Lou called after you left and made the mistake of asking if there was anything he could do to help. He said he’d work on it.”
“Good. Why don’t you call it a day? It’s Saturday evening, I’m sure there’s something you’d rather be doing.”
“You bet there is. Ralph and I have to get the chips
and guacamole ready for the HBO Saturday night premiere and Boxing After Dark. How did it go with the Venturas?”
“Rough. Give me a quick take on this, Tommy. Ventura tells me he picked up a guy in his cab a week or so back who engaged him in a conversation about biblical references to human sacrifice. Then Ventura thinks he saw the same man hop a bus back toward where he picked the guy up originally.”
“Sounds like any one of the three head cases I come across on the street every day. Ventura say if anyone has it in for him or his family?”
“He said no.”
“I guess we could put in a request to the dispatcher. Have local patrols run by both residences occasionally with an eye out.”
“Okay, let’s do it.”
“What did you tell them about how the boy died?”
“I feel guilty as hell about it. I didn’t mention the needle, only the blow on the head. I felt that I had to hold something back, I’m not sure why. I guess it’s just become a habit when these kinds of crimes come up,” says Samson. “The kind with no apparent motive. What’s the HBO movie tonight?”
“Nice segue,” says Murphy. “Some Steven Seagal flick where he’s a cop in yet another urban jungle. Detroit this time, I believe.”
“I’ve always wondered why you don’t have Seagal up there in your collection.”
“I could never find a spot on the wall large enough for his ego. I’ll check in with the troops tomorrow to see if anything popped up.”
“Thanks. I’m heading home. Try to make up for missing most of the birthday party last night. Give me a call if you need me.”
After cooking up potatoes and eggs at Lorraine’s late that morning, Lou Vota had returned to his house in Red Hook to deal with a slow-draining sink. As he tried to squeeze his arms into the small bathroom vanity he thought about all the times he had watched his father work when he was growing up. About how all he wanted to be when he grew up was a plumber like his dad. When the large pipe wrench slipped as he was trying to loosen the U-trap and smashed his hand into the wall, he appreciated the relative safety of his current profession.
Later that Saturday afternoon, Vota sits in front of a computer in the main branch of the Brooklyn Public Library at Grand Army Plaza. He is looking for any clues that the number 71915 might reveal, the number written on the wall of the empty apartment where the Ventura boy may have spent the last minutes of his life.
He quickly ascertains that it isn’t a postal zip code and begins to treat it as a date.
July 19, 1915.
Vota rules out the possibility that it was the perp’s birthday. He couldn’t picture a man in his nineties carrying the boy up a fire escape.
He plugs the date into a number of Internet search engines, using words in his search criteria like Today in History. Most of the hits have to do with World War I events and are of little help. Vota does learn that the Brooklyn Dodgers had defeated the Pittsburgh Pirates, 3–0, at Ebbets Field on that date. He jots the information down to have handy for the next time Murphy claims to be the undisputed king of baseball trivia.
Vota considers the possibility that it could be a parent’s birth date, the father or mother of the killer. Since he doesn’t have access to that kind of data from the library, he decides to call it into the central NYPD data center. Since no relationship between the numbers on the wall and the letters cut into the boy’s face has yet been established, Vota also recommends that combinations of the two be looked at as a possible telephone number.
Finally, Vota simply plugs the number itself into a mega search. What comes up is a wide assortment of retail items with a 71915 product code. A Dell computer universal floppy drive cable. A wooden box for carrying artists’ paints manufactured in Düsseldorf, Germany. An Edelbrock nitrous oxide kit for boosting horsepower on motorcycles. A painted Christmas angel lightbulb. A twenty-five-thousand-gallon Mueller tank for storing hazardous liquids. A twenty-one-foot run of plastic tents and tunnels called the Playhut MegaPalace for kids three years old and up, which sounds to Vota much more appealing than the storage tank.
71915 is also the identifying number of a weather buoy off Coral Harbour in Nunavut, Canada, a computer bug known as Bugzilla that creates problems when cutting and pasting URLs into e-mail and the Rhino Records catalog number for The Very Best of John Lee Hooker.
Vota decides that he has learned enough for one day. He leaves the library and heads home to nurse his scraped knuckles.
Lorraine DiMarco left her mother after helping carry boxes out to the garage and before her father returned from his afternoon card game at the club. Now at dinner, which Fran and Sal take at the kitchen table when they are alone, Fran is somewhere else. She is in a frightening place where medical specialists sit around a table looking at X-rays and discuss options. And the pictures they are gathered around are pictures of her daughter’s brain.
Fran is pushing the food around in her plate and has not taken a bite.
“What’s wrong?” asks her husband.
“Nothing.”
She is making a feeble attempt at coming back from that scary place and at looking interested in her food.
“I know you better than that, Frances.”
“It’s something I’m not ready to talk about right now. Are you going to press it?”
“No, I won’t press it,” says Sal DiMarco. “I know better than that, also.”
After dinner, Samson is helping Alicia dry the supper dishes. At the dinner table, he had been very quiet.
“Okay, what is it Sam?” his wife asks.
“What’s what?”
“Give me a break, what’s bothering you?”
“Why do I have to ask why Jimmy wasn’t at dinner?”
“Because I thought you already knew, since I told you this morning that he was having dinner at a friend’s house. I guess you weren’t listening.”
“What else did you tell me?”
“I also told you that he and his friend were going to a movie after dinner and that he’d be home at eleven.”
“What friend?”
“Nicky Diaz, a friend from school. He lives over on 40th Avenue. I’ve met him and he seems like a good kid. I’m guessing he doesn’t have a rap sheet,” says Alicia.
“We found a dead eight-year-old boy on a roof in Brooklyn yesterday; so forgive me if I’m interested in where my son is and who he’s with.”
“That’s understandable, but Jimmy is seventeen and he has a good head on his shoulders. Which, I might add, he inherited from his father.”
“I think about myself at that age and all the crazy things I got myself into.”
“That was the old neighborhood, Sam. And you turned out alright and you teach your children well. Relax, Jimmy is fine.”
Samson walks over to peek in on his two girls. They sit on the living room sofa staring straight ahead at a blank television screen.
“They look like two little zombies in there,” he says.
“They’re waiting for you to start the movie. And you’re stalling.”
“How many times are they going to watch The Little Mermaid?”
“Half as many times as you’ve seen Do the Right Thing. And they haven’t watched it for a while because they like watching it with you. They enjoy your imitation of Sebastian the Crab more than they do the movie. Although I’ve always thought you sounded more like Desi Arnaz.”
“How did you get to be such a comedian?”
“It’s easy when you have such a great straight man. Now get in there, I’ll make the popcorn.”
Vincent Territo enters the Torres Restaurant on Bay Parkway. Across the avenue, pairs of Saturday night moviegoers are leaving the Marlboro Theater. Territo removes his fedora as he walks in.
Dominic Colletti sits at a table in the rear of the dining room. At his side sits Sammy Leone, 220 pounds of paid muscle. Colletti smiles as Territo approaches the table.
“Paesano, buona sera. It is good to see you. Sit. Have some espresso, per f
avore,” Colletti says offering a hand, but not rising from his chair.
Territo accepts the handshake and sits opposite Colletti.
“Sammy, bring a demitasse for Mr. Territo,” says Colletti, “and a bottle of anisette with two glasses.”
“Dominic, I wanted to pay my respects. I was very sorry to hear about your nephew,” Territo says after Leone leaves the table.
“My nephew, Johnny, was a foolish and reckless boy,” says Colletti. “I am thankful that my brother is not alive to see how he turned out. The boy’s mother, however, is alive, and as every mother she believes that her son could do no wrong and in her anger has demanded action. And I cannot deny my brother’s widow in her time of grief.”
Leone returns with a small coffee cup, a bottle of liqueur and two short glasses. Colletti pours espresso from the small pot on the table and moves the cup across to Territo. He then pours the anisette.
“I spoke with my son, Anthony, this morning,” says Territo. “He told me that he was disturbed by the talk he had with you last evening.”
“Sammy, please leave us for a moment,” Colletti says.
Leone walks off to sit at the bar.
“Vincenzo, with all respect, your son does not show proper appreciation for all that I do to allow his business to thrive.”
“It is my understanding that Anthony provides your family with a fair percentage of every transaction.”
“Yes, as is required,” agrees Colletti. “But what I speak of here goes beyond the business arrangement. All I ask of your son is that he show a willingness to volunteer personal services when necessary.”
“Forgive me, Dominic, I want to clearly understand what was said last evening. From what Anthony told me this morning, it did not exactly sound voluntary. And he seemed to have the idea that you were threatening his family.”
“He said this?”
“He said that you inquired about his daughter, Brenda.”
“And why would I not—his daughter is a lovely girl and a friend to my granddaughter. Your son misunderstood, which concerns me greatly. Anthony should know that my dealings with him would not involve innocent members of his family. I have a problem. I need to satisfy my brother’s wife. I simply asked your son to assist me and I expect him to do so. The consequences of not complying with my wishes will affect him and him alone. Please make him understand this.”