A Killer's Essence

by Dave Zeltserman

  I drove back to the station and finished interviewing the suspects, at least to where I was able to corroborate enough of their alibis to convince myself that none of them were our killer.

  I left at five o’clock when my shift ended, figuring I’d already wasted enough of the taxpayers money. When I got home I called Cheryl, and this time Stevie was willing to talk with me. Mostly it was to brag about the Red Sox beating my Yankees (as if I personally had a financial stake in them), but at the end he thanked me for the package I sent. I was relieved that Cheryl hadn’t censored the books I’d included. I was worried that she would take out the Robert E. Howard books, claiming they were too violent and racy for an eleven-year-old, especially given the Frank Frazetta artwork on the covers.

  “The books look really cool, dad.”

  “Hey, those are some of my favorites.”

  “I’ll let you know what I think.” He hesitated, then added before getting off the line that he still wasn’t going to New York for Thanksgiving.

  I wasn’t going to fight him on it, and least not then. After Stevie, I talked with Emma, and she no longer felt compelled to tell me how mad she was at me. Instead she spent fifteen minutes reading me one of the books I had sent her, and listening to her do that was nicer than I would’ve imagined. Fuck, I missed her.

  Later that night before heading off for my shift at the nightclub, I told Bambi it would probably be best if she didn’t come with me for the next few nights. She wasn’t too happy with that and insisted on me telling her why. I didn’t want to get into it with her right then, especially telling her what I thought might be going down soon. While I was trying to think of some credible excuse apart from the feeling that there might be some trouble at the club tonight, she let loose with a few suggestions about what I could do to myself since I wasn’t going to be doing them to her anytime soon, then slammed the bedroom door in my face. I figured it was just as well and left it at that.

  Joel Cohen was as on edge as he was the previous night, maybe even more so. He asked again if I could stay until three, and I told him I would. It was quiet, though. Whatever he was expecting again didn’t happen, at least not by the time I left.

  When I got back to the apartment I found the bedroom door locked and ended up sleeping on the sofa. Given how wiped out I felt, that was okay with me. The next morning I didn’t bother trying to get a fresh change of clothes out of the bedroom. I set up the ironing board and ran the iron over what I had worn the day before, and was out the door before Bambi left the bedroom.

  The investigation had the feel of one that was growing cold fast. We had finished interviewing the tenants at the Upper West Side apartment building and had come up with nothing. Hennison was still collecting ballistic samples, but so far all tests were negative, and it was hard to believe we’d catch our killer that way. Three of the detectives on the team were digging into Paul Burke’s background and who he’d been sleeping with, and they were getting nowhere. From my vantage point, the FBI was only spinning its wheels like the rest of us. More and more this was looking like the type of case that would crack only if our guy started making noise about what he’d been doing—either contacting us or the newspapers or bragging at bars to strangers. According to the psychological profile Jill Chandler worked up, there was little chance he’d be doing any of that.

  I spent part of the day twiddling my thumbs, part of it tracking down an informant lead that went nowhere. That night was only more of the same as the previous one. Bambi was still too angry to acknowledge me and instead let her body language do her talking, especially in the way she banged cupboard doors and threw things around the apartment. Joel Cohen was as much on edge as he’d been the previous two nights and asked me to stay late, and again, nothing happened. When I returned back to the apartment, the bedroom door was locked, and I slept on the sofa. All in all, a night of déjà vu.

  Wednesday, October 27, 2004

  The following Wednesday I followed Zachary Lynch as he made his way to and from Strombolli’s. There was no sign anyone was out hunting for him. That night the Boston Red Sox finished sweeping the St. Louis Cardinals, winning their first World Series in eighty-six years. It was a tough pill for Yankee fans everywhere, but I decided it was just one of those weird aberrations. Fine, let them have their one championship every eighty-six years as long as we had our twenty-six rings during the same stretch. By the time Boston won their next World Series, I’d be dead and buried and wouldn’t have to see all those chowdahead fans gloating.

  Thursday, October 28, 2004

  The next night was when something went down at the nightclub. Joel Cohen asked me to stay late, which had become routine over the past week.

  At one thirty two guys entered the club whom I hadn’t seen before and who didn’t look like they belonged in the neighborhood, one of them thick-bodied with his hair cut close to the scalp, the other lean and wiry and sporting a well-groomed goatee and long black hair that fell past his shoulders. They both had a hardness about them, as well as a distinctive Eastern European look. From where I was sitting I could see the bulge in the thick-bodied man’s jacket. They were both smirking as they made their way through the club. I got up to intercept them and stepped in front of them before they reached Joel’s office.

  “Do you have a permit to carry?” I asked the thick-bodied man.

  He stared at me dully while his partner smirked. “Why don’t you go shoo,” he said, making a shooing gesture with his hand, his Russian accent as thick as his body. His partner laughed at that.

  Up close I could see the scars tattooing his face and that his nose had been broken several times and was bent to the right. I’d already taken my badge out, and I showed it to him.

  “NYPD,” I said. “Sir, I won’t be asking you this again, do you have a permit to carry a concealed weapon?”

  He continued staring at me, his eyes dulling to the point where they appeared almost translucent. “Why not mind your own business?” he said. “This not concern you. No reason to get hurt, yes?”

  He was smiling thinly, his shoulder muscles bunching. His partner took a sliding step to his right, trying to get behind me.

  “Both of you, on your knees now, hands on your head!” I ordered.

  The thick-bodied Russian shrugged and for a second looked as if he were going to comply, and then made a move to charge me. Christ, I don’t know what he was thinking. I grabbed him by both shoulders and used his momentum to pull him toward me, while at the same time bringing my knee hard into his groin. That took the fight out of him, and he stumbled back, his face purpling as he gasped in air. I had my service revolver out and pointed at him, and he went down to his knees. I then swung the .38 around at the other Russian, whose smirk intensified as he also lowered himself to the floor, kneeling, his fingers interlaced behind his head.

  “This is big trouble for you,” the thinner, goateed Russian said.

  “Shut up!” I yelled back at him, the adrenaline pumping hard through me. This was the first time in more than ten years that I’d had to pull out my service revolver and point it at someone. “Don’t you fucking move! Neither of you!”

  Joel Cohen came out of his office to see what the commotion was about. He stared deadpan at the two Russians. I patted them down, removing 9 mm Lugers from both of them. With them on their knees and their hands behind their heads, I took my cell phone out and called dispatch, telling them what I had and asking them to send backup.

  “Tell your friend mistake he’s making,” the thick-bodied Russian said to Joel between gasps of air, his eyes still tearing from the blow he’d taken, his face mottled purple and white.

  Joel, without a word, went back into his office and closed the door. I started reciting them their rights. The thick-bodied Russian interrupted me and told me whatever I was being paid wasn’t enough.

  “Are you threatening a police officer?” I asked.

  He met my stare full-on; then a dark shadow passed over his eyes. “Fooking
jid,” he swore, spitting on the floor near my feet. I didn’t know what he was calling me, but whatever it was it made my ears burn red.

  “What the fuck did you just call me?” I asked.

  He didn’t say anything. All he did was smile at me. An empty smile filled with the promise of violence.

  Two police cruisers responded to the scene. They cuffed the two Russians, and I followed them to the Flatbush precinct on Empire Boulevard where the Russians were each charged with illegal possession of a firearm as well as threatening a police officer, and the thicker-bodied Russian also charged with assault and battery on a police officer. Their bond hearing wasn’t going to happen until morning, so they were going to be spending the night in lockup. The detective I spoke with agreed with me that the “threatening a police officer” charge wouldn’t stick since they didn’t make any specific threats, but he’d leave it in since it could bump up their bail.

  “It was lucky you were on the scene,” he told me. “It might’ve gotten ugly if you weren’t.”

  “Yeah, well, the club’s in the neighborhood. Just having a few drinks.”

  “Damn good thing you were alert, anyway,” he said. He stopped to rub a hand along his jaw. “Is this a place we should be keeping an eye on?”

  “I don’t know. Those two were making threats, but I don’t know how serious they were. Maybe Organized Crime needs to get involved. Find out who these jokers work for and put some heat on their boss.”

  “Yeah, maybe,” the detective said, his eyes dulling enough to tell me that wasn’t going to happen.

  After I left the Flatbush precinct, I went back to the nightclub. Joel was still there. “Whatever you’ve paid me I earned out tonight,” I told him when we were alone in his office.

  “Yeah, you did,” he agreed, his eyes glassy. He sniffed, rubbed a hand nervously across his nose. “I won’t argue that, but I wouldn’t mind having you on the payroll as long as you want to be on it. Give it some thought, Stan. It’s good money.”

  “No, I don’t think so. Let’s say I’d walked in a minute earlier and caught you snorting coke, I’d be busting you like I did those two Russians.”

  “Jesus, Stan—”

  I held up a hand to stop him. “Don’t bother. By the way, do you know what jid means?”

  “What?”

  “One of those Russians called me that.”

  He smiled sickly at me. “Yeah, I’ve had enough contact with these Brighton Beach boys to know what it means. These assholes are pure Russian, you know. As anti-Semitic as they come. It’s a not-so-nice word to call a Jew. Kind of like kike or yid, except worse.”

  “Fucking A,” I said. “To think, I could’ve cracked that fucker’s skull open and passed on the opportunity.”

  “Keep working here, and maybe you’ll have another chance.”

  I didn’t bother answering that and left him. I usually don’t drink hard alcohol, but I accepted a shot of bourbon from the bartender when he mentioned that it looked like I could badly use one, and then followed that with a second shot. My hands were still shaking from the adrenaline rush earlier.

  I was too charged up to go home after that. I ended up stopping for a large coffee and a bag of doughnuts, then driving to Canarsie and pulling off of the Belt Parkway. I sat in my car and stared out in the direction of the ocean. It was too dark to see much, but I could hear the waves coming in. Hours later when the sun started to come up and the sky turned into more of a gray murkiness, I pulled back onto the Parkway and headed to Manhattan.

  Later that day Phillips pulled me into his office so I could give him a report on what happened at the nightclub. I gave him the same story I gave the Brooklyn detective. He suggested I take my job more seriously, and not drink late into the night when I had an eight o’clock shift the next morning. He also added that it would be a good idea not to come to work in the same clothes I slept in the night before.

  That night I told Bambi what happened at the nightclub.

  “Is that why you didn’t want me coming with you?”

  “Yeah, I knew something was going down. I didn’t want to see you caught in the crossfire.”

  “Why didn’t you tell me?”

  I didn’t have to answer her. She knew the reason was that I didn’t want her worrying. Whatever grudge she was holding melted away, and for the first time in a week I didn’t have to sleep on the sofa.

  Over the next several weeks the case became ice-cold. The FBI had been looking at other open cases throughout the country, but wasn’t able to connect these murders with any of them. Jill Chandler thought there was a chance if we publicly altered this guy’s story that he might make contact to correct the record. We ended up leaking a story to the papers that Paul Burke’s murder was the result of an argument that had gotten out of hand, and an arrest was imminent. If this ended up getting under our killer’s skin, he didn’t let us know.

  Monday, November 15, 2004

  At this point, Jack Hennison was the only detective working the case full-time. Jill Chandler and the other two FBI agents were gone, and the other detectives from the team were reassigned. I was still working the case when I could fit in the hours, but spent most of my time on other calls. I was still following Zachary Lynch every Wednesday as he made his weekly trek to Strombolli’s. This had become more habit than anything else, but I’d be damned if I was going to hear about him ending up in the morgue.

  Thanksgiving rolled around and Stevie was still adamant against coming to New York, and if he wasn’t coming, Emma wasn’t either. I didn’t fight him on it. I was still calling and writing both of them every day, and my relationship with them was improving, and that was enough for now. Things were also getting better with Bambi. There was less of that dissatisfaction from her about the way we were living and how little money I was keeping from my paycheck each week. We ended up cooking a full Thanksgiving dinner together—a fourteen-pound turkey, mashed potatoes, stuffing, yams, peas and pearl onions, even a pumpkin pie. Mike and his kids were supposed to join us, but at the last minute he bailed on me. It was okay—it was still nice, just the two of us—but shit, we ended up with a ton of leftovers.

  The next day I drove up to Cumberland, Rhode Island. Bambi stayed behind in New York, not really wanting to spend several days at a Motel Six and still feeling uncomfortable about being with my kids, and I didn’t push hard to change her mind.

  Things went better with Emma than with Stevie. Whatever shyness she showed was gone within an hour. Stevie, however, stayed aloof the whole weekend. I tried, though. Saturday I took them to Boston where we spent the day at the Aquarium and later at the Museum of Science, and Sunday to a local diner for chocolate chip pancakes, a movie, and ice skating—which being Brooklyn-bred, I’d never done before, and kept falling on my ass. Mostly all I got out of Stevie were monosyllabic grunts to whatever I asked him, although he did begrudgingly tell me that he liked the books I’d sent him, his favorite being Conan the Adventurer. Still, while things didn’t go perfectly, it was hard leaving them when I did Sunday, and I felt a heaviness welling up in my chest as I drove back to New York.

  The first week in December my mom suffered a major stroke. It had been hard enough seeing her over the last few years, but it was heartbreaking seeing her in the hospital barely a shell of what she’d once been. The Alzheimer’s had robbed her of so much, and the stroke took away the little she had left. One of the nights I was visiting her, Mike showed up. It was the first time I’d seen him in months. We talked for a little while. He was still on disability, and with him still missing twenty percent of his lung capacity it didn’t sound as if he’d be getting off of it anytime soon. He didn’t look good. I couldn’t help feeling as if things were slipping away from him. It had been bad for more than three years, ever since 9-11, but this was worse. He apologized for missing Thanksgiving and promised he’d make it up the following year. When I tried asking him if things were getting any better between him and Marcy, he cut me off short and left.<
br />
  The following week a couple of detectives from Organized Crime talked to me about what happened at Joel Cohen’s nightclub. If they suspected me of being on Joel’s payroll they kept it to themselves. Anyway, it was a brief talk, and they wanted to know if I had contact with any associates of the two Russians I arrested. I told them so far I hadn’t, and one of them hinted that with some luck it would stay that way.

  By the end of December I was officially off the murder investigation. I was still watching over Zachary Lynch each week, but that was strictly my own time. Jack Hennison was still working the case part-time, and even that, you could tell was taking a toll on him. He didn’t want to give up on it. None of us did. But sometimes these damn cases just can’t be solved no matter how much you pound away at them.

  Chapter 20

  Tuesday, January 18, 2005

  Acting on a tip, detectives from Major Crimes broke into the basement of a building on Wooster Street. The building had once been a textile factory, later converted to office space, and had been abandoned since suffering fire damage in 2003. The detectives found, in a sealed-off area in the back, one Gerard Fiske and seven young children. The children, all between the ages of five and eight, were locked up in dog cages. Fiske had abducted them from parents who were illegal immigrants and, as the investigation later showed, were too afraid to come forward about the abductions. Three of the children were girls, the rest boys. The news only reported a small part of what Fiske had done to those children—and that was horrifying enough. I talked later with one of the detectives on the case and he gave me the full story, which was far worse than anyone could’ve imagined.

  The day the story broke and I saw Fiske on the news, something about him seemed familiar. It bothered me throughout the night. I kept trying to remember where I’d seen him before.

  The following day he was still being held at the Tombs, and I took a trip over there to get a look at him in person. While I stood outside his cell, Fiske sat on his cot with his head bowed. It was minutes before he realized I was there, and when he did he told me to go fuck myself, that he wasn’t talking to the police.