A Scourge of Vipers

by Bruce DeSilva

  “I’ve been in perilous situations before.”

  “Come on, get moving. One spark and this thing could blow.”

  “So you’re saying I shouldn’t smoke?”

  “I don’t have time for your jokes.”

  “If I refuse to leave, are you going to arrest me?”

  He shook his head and sighed.

  “If you insist on staying, I can’t guarantee your safety.”

  “Nobody ever has. Can you spare a minute to fill me in on what happened here?”

  “Walk with me.”

  We strode together down the street to his command car, where he placed the briefcase on the hood.

  “The plane is a Beechcraft Premier I, a small twin-engine jet. According to the tower at Green, it took off from Atlantic City shortly after eight P.M. The flight plan had it coming straight up Narragansett Bay. The pilot had already begun to descend when the fog rolled in. He was attempting a routine instrument landing, and there was no sign of trouble until the tower lost contact seconds before he was supposed to touch down.”

  “How many on board?”

  “The pilot and one passenger.”

  “Dead?”

  “Very.”

  “The bodies still in the wreckage?”

  “Yeah. Gotta wet everything down to reduce the fire risk before we can cut them out.”

  “Anybody home when it hit?”

  “A married couple and their three-year-old daughter.”

  “And?”

  “The adults were watching TV in the family room on the other side of the house. They managed to climb out a window. Their daughter was in a back bedroom on the second floor. The father got a ladder from the garage, climbed up, broke a window, and found her cowering in her closet. Poor little thing was scared to death. He carried her down before the first responders got here.”

  “Any of them injured?”

  “They’re pretty shaken up, but they’re all okay.”

  “What are their names?”

  He gave me a stony look.

  “Hey, I can always look it up in the city directory.”

  “Philip and Julia Correia.”

  “Philip with one l or two?”

  “No idea.”

  “And the daughter?”

  “Lucy.”

  “Where are they now? I’d like to talk to them.”

  “Some friends took them in, and no, you can’t have the address. After what they’ve been through, they deserve a little peace tonight.”

  I nodded. They’d had a hell of a scare, and their house was so badly damaged that it would have to be torn down and rebuilt. I hoped their insurance was paid up.

  “Have you ID’d the pilot and passenger?” I asked.

  “Tentatively.”

  “And?”

  “You know I can’t give you that until next of kin are identified.”

  “How about off the record?”

  He didn’t say anything.

  “Look,” I said, “I just want to Google them, see if I can find some background so I’ll be ready when you release the names.”

  “Can I trust you on this?”

  “Come on, Oscar. After what we went through together on the Kwame Diggs case? How can you even ask?”

  “Okay, Mulligan. The pilot was Christopher Cox, age twenty-eight. He worked for Egg Harbor Aviation, a small outfit that flies high rollers in and out of Atlantic City.”

  “And the other victim?”

  “Lucan Alfano, forty-four, of Ocean City, New Jersey, according to the passenger manifest.”

  “Anything more on him?”

  “Not yet.”

  “The briefcase was his?”

  “I managed to pry it from what was left of his lap, so I’m thinking yeah.”

  “What’s in it?” I asked.

  “Probably business papers, but maybe there’s something in here to confirm the ID.”

  Hernandez slid a pocketknife from his pants pocket, used the blade to jimmy the lock, and raised the lid. Then he muttered, “Oh, shit,” and slammed it shut.

  “Did you see that?” he asked.

  “I did.”

  “I should never have let you get a look at it.”

  “No, you shouldn’t have, but I tell you what. Give me half, and I’ll forget I was ever here.”

  The chief raised an eyebrow.

  “Just kidding,” I said. “Why don’t we keep this between us until we figure out what it means?”

  The briefcase was crammed with blue-banded bundles of hundred-dollar bills.

  * * *

  It was well past midnight by the time I got back to the newsroom. The place was deserted. Twisdale had left a note on my desk directing me to file something for our online edition, as if I needed to be told. I banged out a news story heavy on description, leaving out the cash and the names of the dead. When I was done, I shot Chuckie-boy an e-mail suggesting he have someone track down the Correias to get their account of surviving the crash. I figured he needed to be told. Then I spent a few minutes on Google.

  I turned up a few routine business stories about Egg Harbor Aviation, a two-year-old item about Christopher Cox getting his pilot’s license, and nothing at all about Lucan Alfano of Ocean City, New Jersey.

  5

  Next morning, my ringtone for Twisdale woke me at eight o’clock. I shut the phone off and went back to sleep. Around noon, I got up, made coffee, and popped a frozen sausage, egg, and cheese into the microwave. I snapped on the TV and ate standing up as I watched Logan Bedford, the blow-dried reporter for Channel 10, stand in front of the crash scene and paraphrase my story. He didn’t have anything new. He rarely did.

  I turned the cell back on, checked my messages, and found six, all from Twisdale. I didn’t listen to them. Tuukka’s water dish was dry, so I refilled it and dropped in another mouse. He startled, flicked his tongue at it, and turned away. Apparently still full from yesterday, he curled up to sleep. I considered joining him. Instead, I fired up my laptop, logged on to The Dispatch’s online edition, and was scanning the sports news when Twisdale called again.

  “Where have you been?” he said. “I’ve been trying to reach you all morning.”

  “Where do you suppose I’ve been after working half the night, Chuck?”

  “Well, shake off the cobwebs and get your butt in here.”

  “Have you forgotten already? You gave me today off.”

  “No, I haven’t forgotten, but I need somebody who knows what he’s doing to follow the crash story.”

  “Maybe you could hire back one of the veteran reporters you let go.”

  “Okay, okay. You’ve made your point. Now come on in. You can reschedule the day off for next week.”

  “No thanks,” I said, and clicked off.

  He rang back. I didn’t answer. I was not about to spend the day under Chuckie-boy’s thumb, but I couldn’t leave the story alone either. He’d want me to chase the survivors for a feel-good human interest story. I wanted to find out who Lucan Alfano was and why he’d been hand-carrying tens of thousands of dollars in cash to Little Rhody.

  I was trying to remember if I knew anyone in Atlantic City when my cell played the opening guitar riff of “Who Are You” by The Who, my ringtone for unknown callers.

  “Mulligan?”

  “Yeah?”

  “It’s Judy Abbruzzi.”

  “Hey, Judy. How have you been?”

  “I’m good.”

  Judy had been The Dispatch’s night city editor before she got laid off a couple of years back.

  “You working?” I asked.

  “I am. I hooked on with The Atlantic City Press last November.”

  “As what?”

  “Assistant metro editor.”

  “Glad to hear you landed on your feet.”

  “One of the few,” she said. “I’m counting my blessings.”

  “So, Judy. I’m guessing this isn’t just a social call.”

  “It’s not. I hear t
hat one of our South Jersey worthies got himself killed in Rhode Island last night.”

  “Two of them, actually.”

  “I know,” she said, “but the one that intrigues me is Lucan Alfano.”

  “I thought the victims’ names hadn’t been released yet.”

  “They haven’t. I got it from a source.”

  “So who was Lucan Alfano, and why are you intrigued?” I asked. “Other than the fact that he’s dead, of course.”

  “Officially, he was the silent owner of a string of New Jersey pawnshops and an Atlantic City payday loan company.”

  “And unofficially?”

  “The state cops down here say he was a fixer for local gambling interests.”

  “That right?”

  “That’s what they tell me.”

  “What did he fix, exactly?”

  “Whatever needed fixing,” she said. “Zoning variances, wetlands exceptions, building permits, liquor licenses. That sort of thing. My sources say he was also the man to see in South Jersey if you wanted someone to disappear.”

  “He was a hitter?”

  “No. They say he was to contract killers what Scott Boras is to Bryce Harper and Jacoby Ellsbury.”

  “Except that when ballplayers and their agents get paid,” I said, “the only thing that gets hit is a baseball.”

  “Yeah. Except for that.”

  “Did Alfano have a record?”

  “Uh-uh. The feds and staties dogged him for years, but they never came up with anything solid.”

  “How come The Press never published anything about him?”

  “How do you know we didn’t?”

  “There’s this new thing called the Internet,” I said.

  “We didn’t because we could never prove anything. Whenever we started asking questions, his lawyers made noises about a libel suit. Maybe we could have found something if we’d put a couple of people on it for six months, but we don’t have the resources for that kind of thing anymore.”

  “Any idea what was bringing Alfano to Rhode Island?”

  “I was hoping you could tell me,” she said.

  “No idea.”

  I didn’t tell her about the briefcase full of cash. No point in turning over my hole card until she had something more valuable to trade.

  “You going to poke into this?” I asked.

  “Got my best man on it, but I can only spare him part-time. Just a couple of hours a day.”

  “Let’s stay in touch,” I said. “If you learn anything, give me a call.”

  “And you’ll do the same?”

  “You bet.”

  After we signed off, I tidied up the kitchen and mulled over what I’d just heard. Then I called Chief Hernandez and asked if he could spare a few minutes.

  * * *

  The first thing that grabbed my attention when I entered his office was his bulletin board. The pocked, ten-by-twelve-inch color photo of Joe Arpaio, the jowly Arizona sheriff notorious for harassing Mexican immigrants, had been taken down. In its place was a photo of Ted Cruz, the lunatic-fringe freshman senator from the great state of Texas. The darts that had once riddled Arpaio’s image with holes rested beside the blotter on Hernandez’s big mahogany desk. I snatched one up and flicked it, nailing an FBI poster of James T. Hammes, a Kentucky accountant wanted for liberating nearly nine million dollars from his corporate masters.

  “Hit what you were aiming at?”

  “Not even close.”

  Hernandez swept the remaining darts from the desk, leaned back in his chair, and fired them off in rapid succession, nailing Cruz twice in each eye.

  “Impressive,” I said.

  “It’s like everything else. You get better with practice.”

  “Not like everything,” I said. “Some things, like losing your virginity or dying in a plane crash, you have to get right the first time. So, tell me. Did you count the dead guy’s money yet?”

  “Close the door and sit down.”

  So I did.

  “Are we off the record?” he asked.

  “For now.”

  “The briefcase contained exactly two hundred grand, all in hundreds.”

  “Good bills?”

  “Yeah. No funny money. At the prevailing rate, it could buy you two hundred liquor licenses, forty building permits, or twenty contract killings.”

  “I gather you’ve done your homework on Lucan Alfano,” I said.

  “Of course I have. I don’t sit here fixing traffic tickets for the mayor’s kids all day, you know.”

  “Wow. Who would have thought?”

  “Alfano was a fixer,” Hernandez said.

  “For the Atlantic City casinos,” I said, “although I doubt he would have stooped to anything as mundane as traffic tickets.”

  “Jesus, Mulligan. You mean to tell me you have sources in Jersey?”

  “I’m very resourceful, Oscar. It’s my best quality.”

  “So what did your sources have to say about why Alfano was coming to Rhode Island?”

  “They were clueless,” I said. “Yours?”

  “The same.”

  “Can you trace the money?” I asked. “That could lead us to whoever he was working for.”

  “Can’t be done. They’re all circulated bills. No consecutive serial numbers.”

  “I only caught a glimpse,” I said, “but to me they looked like freshly packed bundles with bank bands on them.”

  “Doesn’t help us any,” Hernandez said. “Anybody can buy bank bands, manufactured and color-coded to Federal Reserve standards, for less than seven dollars per thousand. And for three hundred bucks, you can buy a counting machine that will spit out counterfeits and bundle the good bills for you.”

  I slid a Partagás out of my shirt pocket and clipped the end. Hernandez got up and threw open the window behind his desk. Then he sat back down again and said, “Got another one of those?”

  I handed him a cigar and leaned across the desk to set fire to it with my Colibri. He puffed, plucked it from his lips, and studied the band.

  “Kind of pricy for a scribe who lives in a dump on America Street.”

  “Not the way I come by them. If you want, I can get you a box.”

  “How much?”

  “No charge. I get ’em for free.”

  He raised an eyebrow at that.

  “Sorry,” I said, “but a reporter never reveals his source.”

  We smoked in silence for a few minutes.

  “Alfano owns some pawnshops and a payday loan outfit in Jersey,” he said. “The payday loan company deals mainly in checks, but pawnshops are a cash business.”

  “Which makes them a great way to launder money,” I said.

  “Yeah. Chances are we’re never going to figure out what the hell this was about.”

  “Anything on the cause of the crash yet?”

  “Investigators from the FAA and the NTSB started combing through the wreckage this morning. It’ll be at least a couple of weeks before they tell me anything.”

  “And six months before they release their final report,” I said.

  “Sounds about right.”

  “Okay to print the names of the crash victims?”

  “Yeah. The notifications were made this morning.”

  I thanked him, rose to leave, and then turned back when I got to the door.

  “I don’t suppose you’ve got a photo of Alfano you could let me have,” I said.

  “What for?”

  “I’m thinking I might show it around. See if it gets a rise out of anybody.”

  “I’ll e-mail you a copy.”

  I was halfway home when my cell stared playing the theme from The Godfather, my ringtone for Zerilli.

  “Hi, Whoosh. What’s up?”

  “I need to see you. We got trouble.”

  6

  The little market on Hope Street was the destination of choice for stocking up on Yoo-hoo, Ding Dongs, Red Bull, Cheetos, malt liquor, Juggs magazines, and illegal t
ax-stamp-free cigarettes. It was also the place to go in Providence to lay down an illegal sports bet.

  The old brass bell over the front door clanked as I pushed through it and wound my way down the cramped grocery aisles to a short flight of stairs in back. At the top, I knocked on a locked, steel-reinforced door. An electric lock buzzed to admit me. I stepped in and found Zerilli hunched over his keyhole desk. He was clothed in a light gray suit jacket, a white dress shirt, a green-and-yellow tie with red parrots on it, and clashing sky-blue boxer shorts. As always, he’d draped his suit pants over a hanger on the office clothes rack to preserve the crease.

  Shortstop, who looked like a cross between a bull mastiff and a Tyrannosaurus, was half in and half out of the office’s only visitor’s chair, his rump planted on the seat and his front paws braced on the floor. That was as close as he could get to wedging his bulk into the solid oak Windsor. Whoosh tossed a Beggin’ Strip into the corner by his black floor safe to coax the beast down. Shortstop slid off the chair, lumbered over, and snatched the treat in his jaws. Then he locked eyes with me and growled like a muscle car. The hair he’d shed on the chair was enough to make another dog. I brushed it off and sat.

  “So what’s up?”

  “Hold on a sec,” Whoosh said. He reached up with his left hand, the one without the tremor, and closed the blinds on the long, narrow window that looked out over the grocery shelves. “Anita? The new cashier? I think she reads lips.”

  “This must be serious.”

  “Hell, yeah, it’s fuckin’ serious. You know what your favorite nun’s up to, right? You coulda warned me, asshole.”

  “You mean the governor?”

  “Like you ain’t already heard.”

  “Sorry, Whoosh, but I’m clueless.”

  “What the fuck, Mulligan. I thought you was always on top of things.”

  “Except nuns,” I said. “Besides, my new boss doesn’t let me out much.”

  “Well, from what I hear, the bitch is gonna introduce legislation to legalize sports betting.”

  “You’re shitting me.”

  “I am absolutely goddamned fuckin’ not. You really ain’t heard about this?”

  “No. Where did you get it from?”

  “Coupla statehouse lackeys on Arena’s pad.”

  “Can she do this? I mean, isn’t there some federal law prohibiting sports betting?”