Black and Blue

by David Rosenfelt

  Those are the basics, and once that is accomplished, Bradley says that he hopes everyone understands, but he will not be able to comment on the specifics of the investigation because it is ongoing and in the early stages.

  He then opens the floor to questions, and the press comes up with about ten different ways to ask him questions about the investigation, forcing Bradley to say ten more times that he can’t comment on the investigation, you know, because of the ongoing thing.

  He does not mention the threatening note that I received. That would just cause greater alarm, without any benefit. It is also something that can be used to judge any possible future confessions; any legitimate confessor would have to be aware of the note.

  I’ve got a hunch the actual killer isn’t going to do any confessing.

  Our first stop after the presser is to see Miriam Brookings, widow of Walter. She lives in a large house on Derrom Avenue in Paterson, which is coincidentally the street that abuts Eastside Park near the tennis courts. As a neighborhood, it is as close to ritzy as Paterson gets.

  Nate had called Mrs. Brookings to alert her to what Bradley was going to say at the press conference, in effect giving her a heads-up that the wound that probably hadn’t closed was about to be pried open even further. It was a considerate thing for Nate to do.

  It’s about twelve stone steps up from the street to the house; my guess is that UPS drivers would not look too favorably on this stop. I’m afraid I’m going to have to hire a crane to get Nate up to the top, but he makes it with surprising ease. Those fourteen ounces he’s dropped on his four-year diet have really made the difference.

  Mrs. Brookings has opened the door and is waiting for us at the top of the steps. “Hello, Nate … hello, Doug.” There’s a sadness in her voice, which is no surprise. What I focus on is the use of my first name; I obviously spent some time with this woman, who my memory tells me I have never seen before in my life.

  Business as usual.

  We go inside and she brings us our coffee, Nate’s is with cream and artificial sweetener, mine just black. She didn’t have to ask us how we take it, she just knew.

  “How are you feeling?” she asks me. “I heard about your accident and have followed your heroism; I tell people I knew you when.”

  “I’m fine, thank you. It’s good to see you again.” I’m confident saying that; if she knew me when, then I must have known her when as well.

  It’s hard for me to make small talk, especially since it would probably be a repeat of something I’ve talked to her about in the past. But I see photos of two young children on the table, so I ask about them.

  “Those are Walter’s kids, but they are adults now. They’d been estranged from their father for a number of years. He loved them in his own way. I always thought that someday they would reconcile, but I also thought there would be more time. All of a sudden the time was up.”

  Now that I’ve established the kids as a conversational area that I should have avoided, Nate thankfully bails me out. “Did you watch the press conference?” he asks.

  She shakes her head. “I’m sorry; I couldn’t bring myself to turn it on.”

  “We understand. As I told you, the purpose was to announce that the killer is the same one as…”

  He stops, reluctant to finish the sentence, so I pick up the ball. “The victim’s name was Alex Randowsky; he was a local attorney. We’re trying to determine if there was any connection between Mr. Randowsky and your husband.”

  She thinks for a while. “I don’t believe I ever heard the name, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that Walter didn’t know him. Walter knew many people. We can check in his computer contact list.”

  She goes and gets her husband’s laptop and turns it on. “This hasn’t been used in many months,” she says.

  A look through the contacts and an email search both turn up nothing. “I could check with the management people at the factory; maybe there’s a business connection,” she says.

  “Please do,” I say, and I give her my card.

  “Do you have any idea who is doing this?” she asks.

  I want to bullshit her, but I can’t. “Not yet,” I say. “But we will. And you’ll be the first to know.”

  Steven Galloway is one of three founding members of the law firm Randowsky, Myers and Galloway.

  He was playing tennis with his partner and friend in Eastside Park that day, a match which ended in that partner and friend taking a bullet in the heart.

  Nate and I visit him in his office, which takes up one floor of a building in Ridgewood. We take the elevator to a reception area, but there is no receptionist behind the desk. In fact, there seem to be no people anywhere, and the lights are dimmed in here.

  “Hello?” Nate calls out, and when there’s no answer, he does it again.

  “Sorry.” It’s a voice that sounds off in the distance, but a short while later a door opens and the owner of the voice is standing there. I assume it must be Steven Galloway, but he’s not dressed in lawyer’s clothes. He’s wearing jeans and a pullover.

  “We’re closed,” he says. “I gave everyone the week off; nobody felt like working because of what happened to Alex. I’m Steven Galloway.”

  We introduce ourselves and shake hands. “Thanks for speaking with us,” I say.

  “I told the Paterson police everything I know, which I’m sorry to say is absolutely nothing.”

  “Sometimes it helps to go over it again.”

  “Come on back to my office. I thought it might help to try and lose myself in work, but I was wrong about that. I can’t concentrate on anything.”

  We follow him back, and as we pass a large office, he says, “That’s Alex’s office … that was Alex’s office.”

  Once we’re settled, Nate asks Galloway to take us through the events at the tennis court.

  He nods. “We finished playing; we had played for a long time. It was a three-set match. Then we walked past courts one and two, behind the baselines because people were playing on them. We walked out together, then we said goodbye, because we were parked in different places.

  “Then I heard this noise; I thought it might be a car backfiring—but then, cars don’t backfire anymore, do they?”

  Nate smiles. “I don’t think so.”

  “Then I thought I heard someone scream, though not real loud, and I turned around. I don’t think it was Alex who screamed. He was on the ground; it took me a while to realize what had happened. I thought he just fell or something, and then I saw all the blood. It was horrible. More people started to scream, and I’m afraid I was one of them. It seemed surreal, like it couldn’t possibly be happening this way.”

  “Perfectly normal,” Nate says. Then, “Did you see anyone do anything unusual? Maybe quickly get into a car and leave? Anything that, looking back, seems strange?”

  He thinks for a few moments. “No. Not that I can recall. But if it was just someone leaving, I don’t think there’s any chance I would have noticed. I was pretty shook up.”

  “Can you think of any enemies that Alex might have had? Maybe because of issues involving work? Did he ever mention anyone he was worried about?”

  “The Paterson cops asked me all of that, and I’ve been wracking my brain. Lawyering is an adversarial process, that can’t be helped sometimes, but Alex was as well-liked as anyone I’ve ever met. I can’t think of anyone he’s gone up against, or the firm has gone up against, that could have done anything like this. Not in a million years.”

  “What about outside of work?” I ask.

  He smiled. “For Alex there was no ‘outside of work.’ Work consumed him. The firm benefited from it, even if it didn’t do much for his family life.” Then, “Sometimes there’s no room for both, as much as one might try.” Then, “Starting now I’m going to try harder.”

  “What about any connections to Walter Brookings?” I ask. “Did Alex know him? Represent him? Go against him in court?”

  Galloway’s shake of the
head is a firm one. “I know he didn’t, because we talked about it when Brookings was killed. I knew Brookings; not well, I met him a few times. But Alex said he didn’t know him personally. Of course he knew of him; Brookings was a prominent citizen.”

  We thank Galloway, ask him to call us if he thinks of anything, and leave.

  I’m not surprised that we’re not finding a connection between Randowsky and Brookings. If there is a link, I think it is only that they were both somehow connected to the killer. Everything runs through him.

  Or maybe they were selected and targeted at random.

  The truth is, we have no idea.

  “It depends what we use as the metric,” Jessie says.

  She’s addressing the team, updating all of us on what information she and her people have come up with. I know she’d rather be doing the listening than the talking, because that would mean she’d be going out on the street rather than sitting behind a computer.

  But she’s come to terms with it and has adjusted pretty well. And no matter how much it has bothered her, she never lets it affect her work … at least not that I can remember. The fact of the matter is that she is much more valuable in this role compared to being another one of us cops running down these leads, but I don’t have nearly the guts to tell her that.

  Maybe the old me had more courage; I don’t remember.

  The first topic of the session is the cryptic note sent to me that talked about the ninety-six “creeps” out of ninety-nine still on the wall. Since we only know of two killings, a major effort has been put forth to identify the possible third victim.

  Jessie continues, regarding the metrics. “There are two basic things we can look for. The first is ballistics, whether the same M4 rifle was used in any additional shootings. We can safely rule that out, though we do have two shootings that utilized the same make and model of weapon. One is in the New York Metropolitan area, and information about both is provided in your folders. Of course, we have no way to be sure that the killer struck in this area, but I am sure you will want to prioritize geographically.

  “The next metric is the method of killing, meaning one bullet shot directly through the heart. We also have a number of those, including two in this area. You have that information in your folders, and also included are single-bullet shootings that did not hit directly in the heart, but in relatively close proximity.

  “There is no obvious connection between any of these victims to either Mr. Brookings or Mr. Randowsky, just as we are not aware of any connection between those two men themselves. But we are very early on here and haven’t come close to running down all the possibilities. Obviously you’ll also be doing that yourselves firsthand, out in the field.”

  She turns the floor over to Nate, probably because he’s famous for using as few words as possible when speaking in any kind of public setting. “Thanks, Sergeant,” he says. “Excellent work. People, we are going to run down every lead we have, and plenty that we don’t yet have. Captain Bradley has authorized all the overtime we need, and vacations and days off are hereby considered nonexistent until we bring this son of a bitch down.

  “Also in your folders are your specific responsibilities, so that there is no overlap. They will be updated daily, maybe even hourly. We have no time to make a false step; the note said ‘three down,’ which means there are likely more to come.”

  Left unsaid by Nate is the fact that forensics got absolutely nothing off the note—no print, no DNA, nothing. The envelope was sealed not with saliva, but with tap water.

  None of this is surprising.

  So now it becomes just a matter of legwork, hoping to uncover something that will solve the puzzle. Of course, we are more likely to catch a break than an inspiration, but we’ll take either.

  Looming over us is the knowledge that another victim could go down at any time. We don’t know who to protect, other than ourselves. Our vests will fend off a bullet to the heart, though of course our shooter could always make an exception and center a shot in one of our foreheads.

  Our first stop after the meeting is the Sunrise Senior Living Facility in Teaneck. In a shooting just five weeks ago, a woman by the name of Helen Mizell was shot while walking outside the complex toward a grocery store in a strip mall.

  The seventy-one-year-old Ms. Mizell also received one bullet in the heart, but it was from a .38-caliber revolver. In addition to the location of the bullet, there are other similarities to the Randowsky and Brookings cases. The victim seemed to be targeted, though for no reason that seems apparent to anyone. No one saw the shooter, and no clues to the murder have been uncovered.

  Sunrise Living is on four impeccably kept acres that feel like a college campus, without the Frisbees. Residents walk casually around the grounds, stopping to sit on benches and chat. It’s the kind of place where I’d like to wind up when I’m at that age, and sometimes it feels like that will happen in about twenty minutes.

  We’ve called ahead and are ushered in to see Joyce Peterson, the manager of the facility. She smiles a lot and offers us something to drink, which we decline. Once we bring up the Mizell shooting, her smile appropriately disappears.

  “It is an ongoing nightmare,” she says. “In addition to the obvious tragedy for Helen, it has had a terrible effect on our other residents. They are fearful, and I’m afraid they are correct in feeling that way.”

  “Tell us about Ms. Mizell,” I say. We already know a lot about her from the investigative records that the Teaneck police provided us, but we tend to like to hear things ourselves.

  “She was a bit younger than the average resident here, and was in good health. She had friends, but I’d say kept to herself more than most. She ate in her apartment fairly often, rather than the dining hall. But nothing terribly out of the ordinary.

  “Probably the most social thing she did was play bridge; I don’t play myself, so I have no personal knowledge, but everyone said she was a remarkable bridge player.”

  “Did she have many visitors?” Nate asks.

  “No, I don’t think so. If she did, they didn’t check in here as they are supposed to. But I’m not aware of any close family either. Someone said that she had two children, who I am told live in St. Louis. I’m quite certain that the police notified them, and our executive director did so as well.”

  “Did they come here when she was killed?”

  “I don’t believe so; I think her things are still in storage.” Then, “Why would anyone have possibly wanted to shoot her? It just seems so bizarre, so horrible.”

  I know that the Teaneck police interviewed a number of the other residents, mostly members of Ms. Mizell’s bridge group, but they had nothing to offer. It’s not necessary for us to repeat those interviews; we’d wind up with even less than what we got from our talk with Mrs. Peterson, if that’s possible.

  Bottom line is I don’t think her murder, bizarre and apparently inexplicable as the circumstances might be, is related to the Brookings and Randowsky murders.

  Or maybe it is. When we catch the shooter I will ask him.

  Danny Phelan has been identified as a priority by Jessie.

  At this point that means he is above a pretty low bar, since we have no one close to being labeled a suspect. But Phelan has a number of factors on his record that make him very worth checking out.

  For one thing, he has been in prison. He went in about a month after the Brookings killing and was released four months ago. We don’t know when the apparent third murder took place, but it could easily have been within these last four months. The timing fits.

  Another item which moves Phelan well up on our list is the fact that he is, or at least was, a gun collector. He was infantry in the army, which means he is quite possibly a proficient shooter. He also would probably be familiar with an M4.

  Lastly, he was someone that I interviewed after the Brookings murder, but I came to the conclusion that he was not our guy. I of course don’t remember why I came to that conclusion, but my
notes may explain it when I have a chance to go over them. I’ve only gone over the main files and was waiting to get to my individual notes.

  This last factor leaves me with slightly mixed emotions. We need to nail down a suspect before he strikes again, but if I mistakenly let the killer walk last time, in my view it would make me responsible for the subsequent deaths. That would be tough to take.

  Phelan had arrived in town not too long before the Brookings shooting—or, more accurately, he came back to town after some time on the run. He was surrendering himself to authorities on a drug warrant that went back a couple of years, and that’s what he wound up serving time for. There are no reports of violence in his civilian record.

  Based on Jessie’s analysis, he seems like a good enough candidate that we’ve sent two officers out to his apartment in Elmwood Park to bring him down to the station. We want to put him under some stress, and that includes not giving him home field advantage.

  When Phelan arrives he looks anxious and more than a little angry. I hear him say “this is bullshit” to the cops that bring him into the interrogation room. Nate is watching through the one-way mirror; this is going to be just me, as it apparently was last time.

  “What the hell do you guys want this time?” is his conversation starter.

  “Hello, Danny, nice to see you again.”

  “Is this about Brookings again? Because that other guy got shot?”

  “I just want to have a conversation.”

  “It is about Brookings, right? Well, no way; I’m not talking to you. Not without my lawyer. Maybe not even with my lawyer.”

  “You have something to hide?”

  “My lawyer,” he says. “I want him now.”

  “You can clear everything up right now without him; then you don’t have to be bothered again.”

  “I know how you guys operate; you tried to put the Brookings thing on me. Now you’re doing it again. I’m not saying a word.”