by Blake Banner
ACE AND A PAIR
Copyright © 2017 by Blake Banner
All right reserved.
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This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, brands, media, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is coincidental.
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ONE
TWO
THREE
FOUR
FIVE
SIX
SEVEN
EIGHT
NINE
TEN
ELEVEN
TWELVE
THIRTEEN
FOURTEEN
FIFTEEN
SIXTEEN
SEVENTEEN
EIGHTEEN
NINETEEN
TWENTY
TWENTY-ONE
TWENTY-TWO
TWENTY-THREE
TWENTY-FOUR
TWENTY-FIVE
TWENTY-SIX
TWENTY-SEVEN
TWENTY-EIGHT
TWENTY-NINE
EPILOGUE
NOTE FROM THE AUTHOR
EXCERPT OF BOOK TWO...
One
The door was open, but I knocked anyway. The captain looked up from her desk. She was one of those women who should have been attractive. She had thick black hair and deep brown eyes, and olive skin that in her midforties looked like it was still in its twenties. She had all the right bits in all the right places, but she was somehow unlovable. Her eyes gave me that “what the hell do you want” look. Then I guess she remembered she’d called me, and gave something that should have been a smile but wasn’t. Captain Jennifer Cuevas was all about what should have been.
“John, come in. Take a seat. Close the door, would you?”
I closed the door and sat. She laid her pen very carefully in front of her, like everything would go wrong if it wasn’t perfectly aligned.
“How long have you been with the NYPD, John?”
“Twenty-eight years, Jennifer.”
She glanced at me. It was okay for her to call me John, but I should call her Captain. I smiled nicely.
“You just turned forty-eight.”
“Last November.”
She sighed, like it was a shame I’d turned forty-eight in November. “John, don’t get me wrong, you are a very highly valued member of this precinct…”
“Thank you, Captain. That’s probably because I have the best successful arrest record of any cop at this station.” I was still smiling nicely, but she ignored me.
“However, things have changed since you qualified as a detective…” She glanced at a sheet of paper on her desk.
I said, “Twenty-five years ago.”
She said, “Thank you, twenty-five years ago. And somehow, and I don’t mean this in any critical sense at all, John, you don’t seem to have moved forward, kept up with the new technologies and methodologies…”
I raised an eyebrow at her. “What’s your point, Captain? I get the right results but in the wrong way?”
“No, John, what I’m saying is that perhaps it’s time for you to think about allowing some of the young bloods to move up the ranks. There are some very talented young officers chomping at the bit behind you. And you have, perhaps, already given us your best work.”
I frowned. “You want me to take early retirement so that somebody else can have my job?” I shook my head. “Not going to happen. We’re not here to offer jobs to college kids we happen to like, Jennifer. We’re here to serve and protect the public, and as long as I’m doing a good job, I’m going to keep doing it. When I find myself failing, then I’ll stand down.” She stared at me hard. “Was there anything else?”
“Yes.”
“What?”
She reached behind her and grabbed two boxes of files. She heaved them over and dumped them in front of me. She had to stand then, to be able to see me. I looked up at her. “What’s this?”
“We are creating a cold-cases team. In view of your exceptional record, Detective Stone, you will be heading up the team. These here are the cold cases we’ve accumulated over the last thirty years. I’ll leave it up to you how you tackle them, but work your way through them, and close them.”
I stared at her for a very long moment. “What about my current cases?”
“They have been reassigned.”
“Why?”
“I just explained it to you, Detective.” She echoed my words from a little earlier. “Anything else?”
I stood and picked up the boxes. At the door, I stopped. “You said I was heading up a team?”
She’d sat down again and had a smug look all over her face. “Yes. Detective Carmen Dehan will be working with you. I think you two should make a fine team.”
Dehan.
I carried the boxes to the detectives’ room and dropped them on my desk. I wasn’t all that surprised by what had happened. Jennifer had been gunning for me for a couple of years. We had bad chemistry, and to be honest I didn’t care enough to make an effort to improve it. I was never good at kissing ass, and I wasn’t sure it would help much anyway. In her eyes, I was a dinosaur. The only people she wanted kissing her ass were the “New Bloods.”
I was scowling at the boxes and wondering whether a Scotch would make me feel less sour, when Dehan came up and stood looking down at me. We had never exchanged more than couple of grunts and nods, so I shrugged and made a “whatcha gonna do?” face
Dehan was the best-looking cop in the 43rd precinct. She could have been a model. But everybody hated her because her attitude was as ugly as her face and body were beautiful. She was about five seven, built like a goddess with long black hair and black eyes, and had a face as sullen as a Monday morning hangover.
“So what did you do to piss her off?” I said.
She pulled out her chair with her foot and dropped into it, watching me, weighing me. “I forgot to leave my opinions at home.”
“They were attached to your attitude and you brought the whole lot in together, huh?”
“Yup.” She almost smiled. “What about you?”
“I’m a dinosaur.”
I pushed a box across the desk at her. “We’ll have to organize this somehow. By gravity, age, impossibility…”
She looked at the box but didn’t move. “Thirty years, huh?”
I took a handful and started leafing through them: two female arms found in a lockup; unidentified, naked body found in a refuse sack; severed head, later identified by dental records as…
I paused. The next file down caught my eye. I vaguely remembered it. I threw the stack on the desk and opened the Nelson Hernandez file. It was just ten years old.
“This one always interested me.”
She was reading but looked up. “Is it more interesting than Ruby Eldrige, a pimp and heroin dealer who was shot in an alley and ha
d all his money and jewelry stolen?”
“You tell me. Nelson Hernandez, found in a back room in a house in Hunts Point, with four gang members who were also his cousins. They were all sitting around a table where they’d been playing poker. The cards were all dealt. They all had beer or whiskey, and there were bags potato chips and little dishes of peanuts laid out. His four cousins had been shot point-blank with a shotgun, or shotguns. Nelson had also been shot, but he had also been decapitated and castrated, and his head and his balls were in the middle of the table.”
I looked up. Her eyebrows had risen, and she was almost smiling. “Ace and a pair.”
I did smile. “Yup, the losing hand. Somebody was sending a message. But it gets more interesting. There was no indication that any one of them had tried to defend themselves. They were all armed, but nobody reached for his weapon. And there must have been at least three or four triggermen, because the shots were all fired from directly in front of the victims, across the table. It’s hard to visualize.”
I stood up and backed up a bit. She watched me as I acted out the scene. I said, “We open the door, and all four of us come in holding shotguns.” I made the gesture and tramped like I was four men filing into a room. “‘Good evening gentlemen, continue with your game, nothing to be alarmed about!’ We troop around the table and take up our positions. And all the while these guys just keep on playing poker.” I made a gesture like I was shooting somebody with a shotgun. “Bam! Then we blow them away.”
We stared at each other a moment, and I sat down. “There was no money anywhere in the apartment, but they found a substantial stash of various types of narcotic.”
“Was the lock forced?”
I checked, shook my head, “Uh-uh. And the key to the apartment was found in Nelson’s pocket.”
“Weapons?”
“None at the scene, except the unfired weapons of the victims.”
She threw the file she’d been reading back in the box and leaned her elbows on the desk. “How about blood from the castration and the beheading?”
I pulled out the ME’s report and tossed it to her. She scanned it while I read. After a moment, she said, “Both the castration and the beheading were postmortem. There was minimal bleeding.”
“Lead detective was Sam Goodman. Now retired. It was suspected at the time that Nelson and his gang may have run afoul of the Mob, but a total lack of evidence or witnesses meant the case foundered.”
“Foundered…”
“Yeah. The other victims were Dickson Rodriguez, Evandro Perez, José Perez, and Geronimo Peralta. All cousins of Nelson’s, and Evandro and José were brothers.”
We spent the next hour studying the case and looking at the pictures of the crime scene. Eventually I called Sam and asked him if we could drop by to discuss the case with him. He was friendly and said to come right over.
She eyed my car for a moment but didn’t comment. I have a right-hand drive burgundy Jaguar Mark II from 1964, with 210 bhp. It is beautiful, elegant, and powerful, the way a car should be.
As we pulled out of the lot, Dehan put on her aviators to look at me and said, “A dinosaur, huh? What does that mean, you carry a magnifying glass and you’ve memorized six hundred different types of tobacco?”
I shrugged as I turned onto Storey Avenue. “It means I don’t kneel at the altar of technology. It means I’d rather see it with my own eyes than through a lens. I’d rather talk to the people involved and get a ‘feel’ for them than allow the machinery of the system to process them. So if you’re talking symbolically, then yeah, I guess I memorize tobacco and carry a magnifying glass in my pocket.”
I didn’t look, but I like to think she was hiding a smile. I turned left into the concrete desolation of White Plains Road, Babies “R” Us and Kmart, and said, “So, as we’re sharing, why the attitude?”
She was quiet all the way to the railway bridge. As we crossed it, she said suddenly and with feeling, “I guess most guys are assholes. I got into the habit of kicking them in the nuts before they open their big mouths.” She thought for a moment, then shrugged. “Not just guys—women too. Most people are too damned stupid to be worth the effort.”
I turned right onto Morris Park Avenue. It was agreeably green and leafy after the dead concrete of White Plains. I was grinning. “Being pleasant is an effort?”
She turned to face me and smiled for the first time. “Yeah. With most people, yeah.”
I took the third left and parked.
Sam’s house was tall, narrow, gabled, and green. He opened the door to us like we were his long-lost family. Maybe after forty years on the force, that was how he felt about cops.
“Come on in! I live alone with my cats. My wife died. My kids moved away. I have some coffee on. There are cats everywhere. Come in, sit down.”
He ushered us into his sitting room. There was a green sofa, and there were two green chairs. They were all occupied by cats that told us with their faces to sit somewhere else. Sam reproved them and threw them gently on the carpet.
“Sit! Sit!”
We sat. Five minutes later, he sat too, pouring coffee.
“So you’re pulling Nelson out of cold storage, huh?” He gave a small laugh and handed Dehan a cup. “I wish you luck. You got a fundamental problem with that case.”
He poured again and handed me a cup. “What’s that?”
He sipped and sat back, crossing one leg over the other. His face was humorous and intelligent. “To begin with, there was no damn physical evidence. The lock wasn’t forced. The damn key was in Nelson’s pocket. The place was rich with prints. They mostly belonged to Nelson and his gang. There were a couple of others, on the glasses and bottle, on the little dishes of nuts. But they weren’t in any database. There were no weapons. The blade used to castrate and decapitate Nelson was sharp, but whatever it was, it wasn’t there. We searched far and wide for four shotguns and a machete or a knife. They never showed up. My guess, they’re at the bottom of the river. So, that was the first problem, no physical evidence.”
He sipped his coffee again.
“The second problem was worse. Whatever witnesses there might be were never going to talk. Because the background to this killing, and the style of the killing, were all saying one thing. Gangland execution. So any witnesses to the killing were either dead or involved, and it’s more than their lives are worth to spill the beans.”
“Did you have any theories?” Dehan said.
He nodded. “Oh sure. We’re talking about the area south of the Bruckner Expressway, Hunts Point. Back then it was a disputed area. The local population were mainly black, white, and Latino. But the drugs and the prostitution were a gold mine for whoever controlled them. Until 2004, that was the Albanians. You know, the Five Families never really had a presence in the Bronx, and the Albanians moved in back in the ’60s and ’70s and took over. But that pretty much ended when we took them down in 2004.”
“I remember. So what happened?” I said.
“Well, that left a vacuum. Don Alvaro Vincenzo, the head of the New Jersey Mob, moved in. It looked like the New York Big Five weren’t interested and gave him the green light. So he moved in a few boys to start taking control of the drugs and the prostitution.”
“You think they killed Nelson?”
He pulled a face. “Nyeeeah… that was like my best guess. See, Nelson was kind of out of his mind. I think he did too much coke when he was a baby or something.” Dehan sniggered and Sam grinned appreciatively at her. “He was a real psychopath, and being Latino, you know, he had a lot of support on the streets, which the Italians haven’t got in the Bronx anymore. And Nelson was feeling kind of invincible. But that’s always a mistake with the Mob. The word was that Vincenzo sent his top hit man, Morry ‘Pro’ Levy. Not an Italian, a Jew, but close to the family and a total nut. He was as crazy as Nelson, but he had years of experience and the backing of the Jersey Mob. That was the word on the street. But right there is the second problem I was t
alking about. Where are your witnesses? Who’s gonna tell you, ‘Yeah, I saw Pro Levy coming out of Nelson Hernandez’s place carrying four shotguns and a meat cleaver’?”
He spread his hands and cocked his head in a “what the hell you gonna do” gesture. Then he smiled. “We canvassed, we knocked on doors, but it was pointless.”
Dehan was making notes in a little booklet. I said, “Pro Levy, didn’t he turn State’s evidence?”
“Yeah, against the Gambino family,” Dehan said.
Sam said, “It caused a lot of upset at the time. He’s in witness protection now, but word is he kept his ties with the Vincenzo family.”
I frowned. “Word from whom?”
He flapped his hands at me. “Ahh! I been out of the business for too long. That was the word on the street back when I retired. Might be bull for all I know. But I do remember that there was talk about Vincenzo having some kind of beef with a cop. It might be totally unrelated, but it was all around the same time and it might be helpful. Don’t quote me, right?”
Dehan had looked up from her notes and was staring at him like a panther watching a baby gazelle. “What cop?”
“You’re probably too young to remember him, but you’ll recall him, John. Mick. You remember Mick?”
“Mick Harragan? Sure, who doesn’t remember Mick Harragan? How could you forget that son of a bitch?”
He threw back his head and roared with laughter. He pointed at me and turned to Dehan. “You partnered with this character now?”
“Uh-uh,” she said with no particular inflection.
Sam“Don’t be fooled. First sight he seems polite, educated, pleasant…” Sam shook his head. “He is the most insolent, outspoken, insubordinate asshole on the whole force!”
He burst out laughing again, and Dehan turned to look at me. “Golly, and I thought that was me.”
“So what about Mick?” I said. “He retired…”
I left the words hanging. Sam stopped laughing and said, “Yeah. I think he moved to Florida. Jennifer will know. They were friends. But word was Vincenzo had some kind of beef with him…” He made a long, slow shrug, staring at the floor. “Don’t quote me, John, but it’s possible—I’m just tossing around ideas here—but it’s possible that if you talk to the Feds, they might be able to arrange for you to talk to Pro. Maybe, I don’t know. I’m just saying…”