Ace and A Pair: A Dead Cold Mystery (Dead Cold Mysteries Book 1)

by Blake Banner

  The sign said walk, so we crossed the road and stepped over the wall into the park.

  I said, “But while they’re playing cards, the bell rings and Maria opens the door to somebody else.”

  “Professionals, accustomed to killing. They work efficiently. They have a grudge against Nelson, and they take his money, which suggests they feel they have a claim on that money…”

  “But…” I stopped and faced her. “They leave his stash of dope, of coke, of H, which must have a street value of several hundred grand or more, and they take Maria.” We walked on a few steps in silence. “And here is another question. Who was Mick drinking tequila with that night?”

  She thought for maybe three seconds before saying, “The captain.”

  “Back then, Detective Cuevas, his partner.”

  “We know he had a taste for Latina women.” We sat on a bench and stared out at the trees and the grass. She exploded suddenly, “That bitch is hiding the motherfucker!”

  “Little grasshopper, if the strength of your determination to hit the bull’s eye makes you jump up and down and stamp your feet, your aim will become faulty and you will miss the target.”

  I looked at her. She looked back. “Fuck you. What would you know? You’re blind anyway!” She leaned back, raised her face to the sun, and rubbed it with her palms. Then she said, “Okay, Stone, point taken.”

  I sighed. “But I kind of agree with you. I might express it differently, though.”

  “How would you express it, Sensei?”

  “There is a link between Mick, Maria, and Jennifer that we are not seeing.”

  “Oh, very good!”

  I gave her a withering look that she didn’t see because she had her eyes closed and her faced turned up to the sun again. “And we are more likely to find that link by asking focused questions, rather than by making wild statements we cannot substantiate.”

  “Like?”

  “Like, your theory is that the only gunmen we have left are the Sureños…”

  She sat up. “Yes. Everybody else was busy. And they had motive, maybe the best motive.”

  “So we need to find out who the Sureños muscle was back in 2007. Which means we need to go back to putting pressure on José and his mom.”

  She nodded as though she wasn’t really listening.

  “Here’s another question for you. What would make Jennifer go back with Mick, drink tequila with him in the small hours of the morning, and then go home while he disappears?”

  “That is a damn good question.” I turned to face her. “I’d go so far as to say, answer that, and you answer everything.”

  Back at the precinct, Dehan set about finding out who were the enforcers for the Sureños back in 2007. Meanwhile I tracked down Mick’s address. He had a small rented house on Longfellow Avenue, near Crotana Park. Half an hour on the phone get me the Realtor who let it to him. It turned out he’d only been renting it for a year. Before that he’d had his own house, which he’d sold through the same realtor.

  “I know it was a long time ago, but would you have any record of a forwarding address after he left?”

  The guy seemed eager to please and said that if he left one, they’d still have it. He went away and came back two minutes later saying that Mick Harragan had not left a forwarding address. In fact, he’d left without letting them know he was going.

  I thanked him, hung up, and stepped outside to phone Bernie on my cell.

  “John, I was about to call you.”

  “Before you do, Bernie, do something for me. In 2006, Mick Harragan…”

  “The same Mick Harragan…”

  “The very same. In 2006, he sold his house. I need to know where the money went.”

  He was quiet for a moment. “That’s a tall order, John.”

  “Yeah, I know. But it could involve police corruption, the Triads, the New Jersey Mob, and the Sureños, as well as five unsolved murders and a disappearance.”

  “For real?”

  “For real.”

  “Okay, I’ll call in some favors. By the way, there isn’t a trace of this guy anywhere.”

  “I know, Bernie. He seems to have vanished off the face of the Earth.”

  “Okay, I’ll get back to you ASAP.”

  As I hung up, I heard a piercing whistle. I turned and saw Dehan walking toward me from the precinct entrance. I was surprised at how graceful her walk was. As she came close, she said, “José just called. His mom wants us to go see her.”

  I frowned. “She wants us to go to her house? Does she know how risky that is for her?”

  “I told him that. She says she doesn’t care, neither does he.”

  Okay, let’s go.”

  She had a small apartment on the second floor of a rundown house on Manida Street, a few blocks from where Nelson had been shot. There was no elevator, so we climbed the stairs, stepping over kids who were smoking dope and talking about the whores on Lafayette. They went quiet as we passed them, and watched us with predatory eyes. I hammered loud on José’s door and shouted, “Open up! Police!”

  A pretty woman in her late fifties opened the door holding a tea towel. She looked alarmed. Before she could say anything, I barked at her, “Is José here? Don’t lie to me, Mrs. Garcia. Let me in to talk to him and we’ll avoid any trouble.”

  I pushed past her without waiting for an invitation. Dehan stepped in and closed the door.

  The woman was shaking her head, saying, “No hace falta…”

  José was standing in his bedroom doorway, looking sad. “She said it’s not necessary to come barging in. She invited you.”

  I turned to her, sharing José’s sadness. “Do you speak English?”

  “Yes.”

  “You don’t want a reputation for cooperating with the cops, Mrs. Garcia. It’s easier for you if they think I’m bullying you.”

  She shook her head and said, “And so it goes on? Forever?”

  For a moment, I saw in her what other men must have seen in Maria, a goodness, a righteousness that was almost primal, and I understood what they must have felt. I smiled. “Let’s just try to avoid anybody else getting hurt.”

  She sighed and pointed at the small sitting room. We followed her in and sat. “Are you still in contact with Maria?” I asked.

  She was shaking her head before I had finished. Her eyes were wise with a wisdom born of pain and patience. She said, “Do you think she is still alive?”

  I hadn’t expected the question, and I had to think for a moment. Finally, I nodded. “Yes, I think she probably is. I have no reason to think she isn’t.”

  “Then why she never contact us?”

  “She may be protecting you.”

  “From what? Nelson is dead.”

  I smiled. “Who killed him?”

  She heaved a sigh. “Ay, Dios!”

  Dehan asked her, “Do you know?”

  José said, “Tell them, Mamá. Somebody got to stand up to these hijos de puta.”

  She was screwing the tea towel into a bunch and releasing it again, over and over. She said, “The mothers gossip, we meet, we talk. After Nelson died, Carlitos took over. He was not so crazy. He is very dangerous man, but not like Nelson. The gossip was that Carlitos killed him.”

  As far as it went, it made sense. “Did Carlitos have any kind of relationship with Maria?”

  She frowned and shrugged. “No.”

  I stared out of the small window at the grim, dilapidated buildings opposite, like a yellow-brick monument of despair. We had found Maria’s mother, her brother, and her boyfriend, but we were no closer to finding Nelson’s killers than we had been when I put the box on the desk. Maybe that was the way it should be. Maybe his killers should go unpunished.

  José was leaning in the doorway. “You want I should talk to Carlitos, see if he’ll meet with you?”

  “No!” I stared at him. “José, I am serious, whatever you do, you do not talk to Carlitos. You understand me?” He nodded. “If he thinks
you’ve been talking to the cops, you will have big trouble.”

  “Okay, okay…”

  As we picked our way down the stairs, I began to feel mad. We got in the car and slammed the doors. “We pull him in.”

  “Carlitos?”

  “Yeah.”

  “On what charge?”

  “Anything. I don’t care. There have to be a thousand things we can charge him with. If he killed Nelson, he knows what happened to Maria.”

  “He’ll call his attorney, plead the fifth, and sit it out.”

  I sighed. “I know, but we need to get something on him and get him to break.”

  She danced her head around a bit, like she’d had an idea and wasn’t sure if it was a good one. “Maybe Pro could help.”

  I frowned. “How?”

  “Word is that Carlitos and his Sureños are cooperating with the Jersey Mob. So maybe you could have Pro talk to Vincenzo, who talks to Carlitos to persuade him to cooperate with you.”

  “That’s only going to work if Carlitos didn’t kill Nelson, and we are inclining to the view he did.”

  “The other option is to get Vincenzo to supply information so we can raid Carlitos and some of his guys red-handed. We offer him a deal, which includes fessing up to Nelson and telling us what happened to Maria.”

  I blew out and fired up the engine. “I doubt Vincenzo would go for it. But if we could pull Carlitos in and a couple of his associates, we might be able to play them against each other.”

  Twelve

  But things were about to take a different turn. I hadn’t expected to hear from Bernie for a couple of days at least, but he called me as we were on our way back to the 43rd. I answered and put it on speaker, then dropped it on the dash.

  “Bernie.”

  “Your instincts were right, as usual, John. But I don’t want to talk on the phone. You better come down to the bureau.”

  “We’re on our way.”

  We took the Willis Avenue Bridge, and pretty soon we were headed south on Park Avenue toward Broadway. We didn’t talk. Each of us was lost in our own thoughts. It felt like we were right there, within inches of the answer, but every time we tried to grasp it, all we got was a handful of what we had before. Nothing.

  For the second time in a couple of days, I parked at Federal Plaza and stepped inside. We took the elevator to the twenty-third floor, and Bernie came to meet us in the lobby. He was short, overfed, and cheerful. As we walked toward his office, he said, “I got to tell you, John, you have a nose like a god-darn bloodhound. This is going to be messy.”

  I glanced at Dehan. She was smiling.

  We stepped into his office, and he closed the door behind us.

  As we sat, he dropped a file on the desk. “This is for you. I didn’t want to talk about it on the phone, because we don’t know how far this goes.”

  I picked it up and began to leaf through it. He carried on talking.

  “To start with, Michael Harragan sold his house in 2006, for five hundred grand. That’s a high price back then. He sold it to a company that turns out to be just a name. It bought the house and has done nothing since. The company belonged to José Guzman. We’re looking into it now, but two gets you twenty he works for somebody in the Mexican cartels.”

  “Or the Sureños,” Dehan said.

  He nodded at her. “Okay. So the money was paid into an account in Miami. From which it was transferred, twenty-four hours later, to an account in Mexico, in Belize. But the payee account was not Michael Harragan.”

  I said, “Who was it?”

  “It was Michael O’Hannafin. A name change which makes the forging of documents pretty easy for a skilled professional. The chances are extremely high that Harragan is living in Mexico as Michael O’Hannafin.”

  Dehan said, “That would take it out of our jurisdiction.”

  He shrugged. “We’re not there yet. We’re talking to our counterparts in Mexico to see just how much money went into his account, and if there is any trace of O’Hannafin anywhere. But as you know, getting into an account in Belize is very, very difficult. And if he has opened a numbered one, it will be impossible.”

  “Did you find any trace of him here in the States?”

  He shook his head. “When I saw this, we started searching in earnest, going back ten years. He sold his house, gassed up his car, and after that his credit card and his name vanished from the face of the Earth.”

  Dehan said, “He’d been preparing at least a year in advance. I’d lay money you won’t find him in Mexico. He’ll have put the money, which is going to be a couple of million or more, into a numbered account, and he will have a second identity. O’Hannafin will vanish, just like Harragan did.”

  Bernie nodded. “We’re going to look, because it’s always worth looking. But I would have to agree. Harragan prepared this, and he prepared it well. Chances are, he’s in Brazil, banking in Belize.” He smiled. “It’s what I would do.”

  We talked a bit more, without making much progress, and Dehan and I eventually stood to leave. But as we were going, the phone rang. He answered it and gestured we should wait. He talked for a bit, made some notes, and asked for the details to be emailed via his secure server. Then he hung up.

  “That was Mexico…” He paused and shook his head. “Hold on to your hats. The account has been inactive for ten years. A couple of deposits were made after the house was sold, total of a million bucks. It’s been sitting there earning interest. It was never transferred, and it has not been accessed since 2007.”

  Dehan said, “What the hell does that mean?”

  “It means Mick Harragan is probably dead,” I said.

  She narrowed her eyes at me like her brain hurt. “Who…?”

  I nodded. “The same person who drank tequila with him that night.”

  As we stepped out onto Broadway, she suddenly turned on me and placed her fingertips on my chest. She stared hard into my face and said, “I am going to have an intense moment.”

  “Really? What are you going to do?”

  “I don’t know. I need to go out and get drunk! This case is like a fucking maze that keeps going back in on itself!”

  I cocked my head and said in a doubtful tone, “Hmm…”

  “Hmmm…?”

  I nodded. “Mhm, hmmm…”

  She glared at me. “Hmmm…? Seriously?”

  “I think we making progress for the first time.”

  “Explain that to me.”

  We started walking toward the car.

  “We know that Mick had planned to move to Mexico, and there is a good chance he planned to take Maria with him. We can surmise that he got the Triad and the Mob to pay him to eliminate Nelson, and that he paid Carlitos to do it for him at a fraction of the price, while he set himself up with the best possible alibi. He was with another detective at a different crime scene.

  “Now, one of two things happen. Carlitos, as part of the deal, is supposed to bring Maria, and the money, to Mick’s house. However, Carlitos brings Maria but says he is keeping the money. There is a disagreement, and Carlitos kills Mick and Maria, puts them in the trunk of his own car, and dumps them in the Hudson.”

  She nodded a lot. “Yeah.”

  “Or, Carlitos delivers Maria and leaves. But then Jennifer turns up. She and Mick have been making the beast with two backs. Mick has seduced her. Why? Because A, Mick likes Latina girls, and B, because he knows he’s been going too long and pretty soon somebody is going to finger him. The up-and-coming detective, the rising star tipped to be the next commander, is Detective Jennifer Cuevas. So he wants to keep her sweet and onside. Trouble is, she’s fallen for him big-time. She can smell that he is two-timing her. Maybe she watches him, maybe she follows him—who knows? But that night, she turns up while Maria is there, and she kills them both.”

  “Also very feasible. In both scenarios Maria is dead.”

  We had arrived and I leaned on the roof of the Jag, frowning at her. “Yeah, at the moment it’s lo
oking like Maria’s fate is tied to Mick’s. But there are two things that trouble me about both these scenarios—all the goddamn scenarios. If Carlitos is the hit man, why does he leave several hundred grand worth of drugs at Nelson’s apartment?”

  “You took the words out of my mouth. And?”

  “If Maria hates Mick so much, why does she go along so placidly?”

  She shrugged. “That one is less complicated. She’s protecting her family.”

  “If that’s true, she must be dead. Because it looks like both Mick and Nelson are dead, so who is she protecting them from?”

  I unlocked the car and climbed in. She got in the other side and slammed the door.

  “Don’t you mean, from whom is she protecting them?”

  “Yes, that is precisely what I mean. But nobody likes a smartass, Dehan.”

  “Hey, just showin’ I’m leanin’, Sensei. You teachin’, me learnin’.”

  I sighed and started the engine. “So you want to get drunk, huh?”

  “Yup.”

  “Okay.”

  Thirteen

  But we didn’t go and get drunk, not then, anyhow. As we were cruising up Center Street toward Fourth Avenue, a thought came to me, and I could have kicked myself for not having had it sooner. I said, “Okay, this is a long shot, but hear me out. Here’s Mick, a big, brawling, lawless Irishman. A law unto himself. Loves a fight, takes no shit from nobody.”

  “Long live the stereotype.”

  “Say what you like, that was Mick.”

  “Okay.”

  So in the early hours of November 13, assuming he hasn’t been killed by Carlitos or Jennifer, he has four million bucks in the bank, a stash of cash in his trunk, a beautiful young girl on his arm, and he feels like the king of the world.”

  She frowned. “Interesting.”

  “He’s changed his identity, nobody can trace him, and he is going to drive, not fly, to Mexico. Drive because that way he will be untraceable.”

  “Okay…”