Gravesend

by J. L. Abramo

  “How much time can you give me?”

  “To be truthful, I don’t know,” says Gately. “If you can’t get me something very quickly, something exclusive, I’ll have to put one of my veteran reporters on the story. I have people here who know how to squeeze the NYPD press people for information, and so do our competitors.”

  So long, Sixty Minutes, thinks Serena when he hangs up.

  “The guy said he ate them?” says Samson, after Vota gives him a synopsis of the confession.

  “Finger food,” says Vota. “Just goes to show you that no matter how dark Tommy’s humor can be, it can’t even come close to the human comedy.”

  Gabriel Caine takes the Bay Ridge Parkway bus toward Coney Island. He gets off at Stillwell and Highlawn.

  He crosses Stillwell. At the corner sits the Avenue Hobby Shop. This is where he picked up the first child.

  Caine walks to the street where the last boy lives.

  The last sacrifice.

  He passes the blue house and casually looks it over.

  He continues to the next corner and leans against a car, opens a newspaper, watches and waits.

  People on the street seem to pay him no mind. Others lean on automobiles, alone or in pairs, talking. A group of teenagers throw a football around. Women pass, pushing wheeled carts filled with groceries. Cars pass, blasting loud music out onto the avenue. Passersby smile, he smiles in return. A handsome, nonthreatening smile.

  Finally, the maroon Ford station wagon pulls up to the opposite corner and parks. A man and the child step out of the vehicle.

  The man stoops to give the eight-year-old a kiss, and watches as the boy walks down the street. The man lights a cigarette and smokes, and watches until the boy reaches the blue house and is safely inside. Then the man puts out his cigarette and walks into the corner grocery store.

  Gabriel closes his newspaper and begins walking back toward Stillwell. He waits for the bus that will take him back to Bay Ridge, back to his temporary home.

  Gabriel will take this trip again the next afternoon, one more dry run.

  And Monday he will be ready.

  “Lorraine goes into the hospital today,” says Vota.

  “How is she handling all of this?” asks Samson.

  “I think she’s doing better than I am with it.”

  Samson is trying to come up with an appropriate response when his phone rings.

  “Lieu, it’s that reporter again, Huang,” says Kelly. “Should I tell her you’re not here?”

  “Put her through, Kelly. I’ll tell her myself.”

  Kelly transfers the call.

  “Don’t call me, I’ll call you,” Samson says.

  And he disconnects.

  Murphy needs to talk to someone about his brother, and is surprised when he finds himself reaching out to Rosen.

  She goes directly to his place when he calls at three that afternoon; she hears the urgency in his voice.

  They walk with Ralph along the Shore Road Promenade.

  Rosen listens without interrupting.

  “My mistake was trying to be a father to my brother after Dad died. Michael had just turned sixteen, and he worshipped my father. But what Michael needed was a big brother, not someone trying to be a father who had no idea how to be one.

  “Mike started having trouble in school soon after Dad passed away, and I was very hard on him. Mike had always been a bright kid, and now his grades were falling and he was running around in the wrong circles. I was very busy then, I had recently graduated from the Police Academy. I never thought that I would wind up being a cop, and here I was at twenty-five in uniform. Mike on the other hand had been talking about being a policeman like his dad since he was five years old. But by the time he turned eighteen, he had already flunked out of high school and had been in some trouble with the law around a shoplifting incident. I was able to get him off with just a fine, but there was no way he was going to be accepted into the Department after that.

  “Michael kept having brushes with trouble and I kept covering them up when I could and I kept being hard on him. I tried to do what I thought a father should do if his son was fucking up. The thing is, my father would have behaved very differently. And I must have known so because I knew the kind of man my father had been. I knew how he related to us growing up. He was always positive, he always taught through example. My father never lectured, never lost his temper, would never have given up on either one of us. The father who I tried to be for Michael was a negative, pontificating, impatient, loudmouthed tyrant. I have no idea who I was taking after, but it surely wasn’t Patrick Murphy.

  “Two years ago, I helped Michael find a job at a small coffeehouse in Brooklyn Heights. One of the guys at the station had an older brother who was just opening the place and needed some help. We arranged an interview and Mike was taken on. Michael did very well, learned quickly, was liked by the manager he worked for, and he was turning his life around. He loved working in the Heights, and he met a very sweet girl who worked in a boutique next door to the shop. In less than a year, Mike was promoted to Assistant Manager and given a second pay raise. He talked to Mom and me about getting his own apartment and began looking around Carroll Gardens for a place.

  “Then the manager left for a position elsewhere. The owner thought that Mike was still too young to manage, so he brought in a new manager. Mike continued as assistant. Michael had problems with the new manager from the start.

  “Mike complained that the new guy was making his life hell. The new man was never satisfied with his work, was always putting him down in front of customers. He insisted he wasn’t doing anything wrong, that for some reason this guy simply didn’t like Michael. I told Mike to talk to the owner. Mike told me that he had spoken with the owner and the owner had told him to just do his job. I had a lot on my mind at the time. I was working toward qualifying for my detective’s shield.

  “I told Mike to just do his job.

  “A month later, Mike came to me more upset than I had ever seen him. He had lost the job. The manager had told the owner that he caught Michael stealing money and Michael was fired on the spot. Mike insisted he was innocent, that the manager lied just to get rid of him. I found it very hard to believe that someone would do something like that, and apparently so did the Department of Labor. They denied Michael unemployment insurance benefits after two appeals.

  “So, I became a detective and Mike became unemployed with a one-job résumé and no references.

  “It all went downhill from there and now my brother is twenty-four and he’s out there all alone thinking that he’s killed someone and he’s afraid to come to me because I’ve been such a self-righteous bastard.”

  “And you didn’t believe Michael?” asks Rosen. “When he told you that he didn’t steal the money from work?”

  “I didn’t believe him. And today I went to the place and found the owner there. He told me that the manager had taken nearly a thousand dollars from the safe two months earlier and disappeared. He asked how my brother was doing and I walked out. I passed the boutique next door and I caught a glimpse of the girl Michael had dated before his trouble. She wouldn’t him see again after he was fired.”

  “Mike will call, Tommy,” says Rosen. “In his heart he knows he can trust his own brother. And what will you do?”

  “I’ll do everything that I can do to help him.”

  “Talk to your mother about this, so she can assure him if he contacts her. And talk with Samson and Vota, they can help. I have to get going.”

  “You won’t say anything about this.”

  “I’m glad if it helped to talk, and flattered that you chose me, but it does put me in a tough spot. I’ll keep it to myself and I’ll pray that no one asks.”

  At 4:07, Andre Harris is handing a hundred-dollar bill to a man with one hand, payment for the names and addresses of a couple of homicide cops named Samson and Vota who had put eight bullets into his little brother Dwayne three days earlier.
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  As a bonus, Stump mentions that Samson has a son who sometimes ran with one of Phil Diaz’s boys.

  At 4:33, Stump calls Officer Rey Mendez at the 61st Precinct to inform Rey about his chat with Andre Harris. With hopes of scoring another fifty bucks by doing so. Stump is told that Mendez is still on sick leave.

  He asks for Mendez’s partner, but Landis is off until Saturday afternoon.

  At 5:30, Agent Stone introduces herself to the two teams of officers staking out Gabriel Caine’s residence before she enters the house.

  Stone goes through the rooms. Looking. Taking notes. In the boy’s bedroom, she reads the writing on the wall.

  I speak of what I know: those who plow iniquity and sow the seeds of grief reap a harvest of the same kind.

  It is all one, and this I dare to say: innocent and guilty, he destroys all alike.

  There is anger stirred to flame by evil deeds; you will learn that there is indeed a judgment.

  The Book of Job.

  Stone shudders and leaves the room. She has decided how she will proceed. She starts by gathering every piece of the mail scattered throughout the front rooms and piles it all onto the kitchen counter.

  Stone begins examining each item, one by one.

  At 6:25 p.m., Salvatore DiMarco drives his daughter to University Hospital of Brooklyn to check in. Frances has come along. The operation is set for ten the following morning.

  Lorraine’s parents sit with her for a while once she is settled into her overnight accommodation.

  “Why don’t you get out of here, Lou?” says Samson. “Didn’t you tell me that Lorraine was checking into the hospital this evening?”

  “Yes,” says Vota.

  “So, get over there.”

  “You’ll call if you need me?”

  “I will.”

  At 8:20, Murphy is sitting at the bar waiting for Augie Sena to pour another bourbon.

  “Don’t you think you should eat something, Tommy?” Augie asks when he delivers the drink.

  “What are you, my mother?”

  “If I was your mother, you’d be calling me up on the phone every ten minutes asking about your brother,” says Augie.

  At 9:00, Samson calls his wife to tell her that he would be a little later. Again.

  Alicia tells him it’s okay, and to be careful.

  Again.

  The phone rings as soon as he places the receiver down.

  It is Sergeant Hackett, who works the front desk after Kelly leaves at four.

  “Lieutenant, I’m calling out for food from across the street,” says Hackett. “Can I order something for you?”

  “How about a bacon, cheese and egg on hard roll?” says Samson.

  “I’ll do it, but only if you promise not to tell your wife that I was an accessory before the fact.”

  At 9:55, Vota and Lorraine are both exhausted.

  It would have been difficult to tell, listening to the reassurances voiced over the past two hours in Lorraine’s hospital room, which one of them was scheduled to go under the knife at ten the next morning.

  “They’ll have to shave my head,” says Lorraine.

  “I’d imagine they would,” says Vota.

  “Will you still love me when I’m bald?”

  “There is nothing they could possibly do with your hair that would change the way I feel about you, Lorraine,” Vota says, taking her hand. “Well, maybe a Mohawk.”

  At 10:35, Michael Murphy is checking into the Midwood Suites on East 15th Street off Avenue K. Michael thinks seriously about calling his brother as soon as he gets up to his room. He can’t bring himself to make the call.

  Michael is lucky enough to have a mother who will not report a stolen credit card, so he calls room service for dinner instead.

  Michael was unlucky enough to be spotted going into the hotel by a police officer on the street, who thought he recognized Michael’s face from a police sketch and headed for his Precinct to check cases.

  At 11:15, Samson is still hanging on to the hope that Tony Territo or Gabriel Caine will turn up. He calls his wife again.

  “Are the kids all asleep?” he asks.

  “Jimmy’s still awake.”

  “When did Jimmy get home?”

  “At the stroke of eleven,” says Alicia.

  “Where was he?”

  “With a friend.”

  “Where and with what friend?”

  “With Nicky Diaz at his father’s billiard parlor.”

  Not good, Samson thinks.

  At 11:37, Murphy calls his mother again, apologizing for the lateness of the hour.

  No word from Michael.

  Murphy finishes the last of his drink, wishes Augie a good night, and heads home.

  Ralph will be very glad to see him.

  At 11:55, Officer Perry returns to the Midwood Suites with two other uniforms along. Perry had found what he was looking for in the warrants file, and was certain that the man he spotted walking into the hotel lobby was the same man wanted for a recent liquor store homicide.

  Officer Perry had tried reaching Murphy or Landis, the investigators of record, but the desk sergeant at the 61st Precinct told him that neither was available. Perry took one of the officers in through the lobby with him and sent the other around to watch the alley in back.

  At 11:56, Michael Murphy finishes his meal and writes a short note on hotel stationery. Tommy, I never took the money from my job. I love you. Tell Mom I’m sorry.

  Michael places the note on bed and goes to his coat. He takes the gun and carries it back to the bed.

  He sits on the bed with the gun in his hand.

  At 11:56, Samson gets word from Desk Sergeant Hackett about a call that had come in for Murphy and Landis. Samson decides he should go over to the Midwood Suites to check out what was going down.

  At 11:57, Gabriel Caine returns from a short walk.

  Earlier in the day, he had repaired the hasp on the alley door and had replaced the lock with a new one from the Ace Hardware on 5th Avenue.

  Gabriel reaches for a discarded, day-old copy of the Tribune that sits on the ground near the alley door before going back into Mitch’s Coffee Shop.

  At 11:59, there is a knocking at the door of Michael Murphy’s hotel room. Followed by a voice.

  “Officer Perry, 68th Precinct, please open the door.”

  Michael instinctively goes for the window and climbs out onto the fire escape, the gun still in his hand.

  TWENTY SIX

  When Murphy walks up the hall toward his apartment door he hears the phone ringing inside. It is just past midnight, late for a phone call, so he thinks immediately of his brother Michael.

  Murphy runs to the door and in his haste to reach the phone forgets to say it’s me, Ralph when he pushes the door open. He is instantly knocked down to the floor, and his head hits the concrete hallway floor with enough force to leave him unconscious.

  Andre Harris finds Phil Diaz in the pool hall on Queens Boulevard in Flushing.

  Diaz owns the place.

  Diaz is a small-time hood, dealing in marijuana and pills, uppers and downers. Like most small-timers he is self-important leaning toward overly suspicious.

  “Hi, Phil,” says Harris, approaching boldly.

  “Am I supposed to know you?” is the wary reply.

  “Not important, I’m here to do you a big favor.”

  “Do I need a favor?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “I’m listening. But not for long.”

  “It’s about your boy.”

  “Which one?” asks Diaz, scanning the room for familiar and unfamiliar faces.

  “Nicky.”

  “What about Nicky? He was here two hours ago and he was good so what the fuck do you have to say?”

  “Doesn’t he run with a kid named Jimmy Samson?”

  “Yeah, Jimmy was with him. Get to the point, man, you’re putting me to sleep.”

  “The kid’s old man is a cop.”

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nbsp; “So?”

  “So, this pig threw his kid in with your boy to get dirt on you.”

  “That’s bullshit.”

  “No.”

  “You trying to tell me this cop puts a seventeen-year-old kid, his kid, on the line for him? I don’t think so.”

  “Your kid ever score for you?”

  “That’s none of your fucking business,” says Diaz. But Harris thinks that Diaz got the point.

  “Better watch your ass,” says Harris.

  “Okay, you had something to say and you said it. You say you came here to do me a big favor, so how come I don’t feel grateful?”

  “Because telling you about the problem isn’t the favor. The favor is helping you solve the problem.”

  “Do I need help?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “I’m listening.”

  If dogs could talk, this one would probably have said Oh, shit when he KO’d Murphy at the threshold of 4B. Now Ralph is licking Murphy’s face as Murphy comes to back to consciousness a few minutes later.

  “It’s me, asshole,” says Murphy, pushing the dog off him. Murphy is halfway to his feet when he realizes that the phone is still ringing.

  “What is it?” snaps Samson, listening to unanswered rings from the phone receiver against his ear and turning to Officer Perry coming up behind him.

  “A call from Dispatch, looking for you specifically. Sounds like another one of those finger murders.”

  “Fuck,” says Samson, cradling the phone receiver forcefully. “Where?”

  And after Perry tells him where, Samson picks up the receiver again. This time to call Vota.