Mommy, Mommy : A Danny Boyland Novel

by Henry Hack

  “Why should I believe you?”

  “I just want to find my real mother now.”

  “Are you going to leave another trail of bodies until you find her?”

  “No,” I said. “Here take my gun from my waist and I’ll be on my way. I’d like to take these documents though, if that’s okay.”

  Angela was debating what to do, and when she reached for the gun at my waist, I twisted away and ripped the revolver out of her hand. She gasped and got up to reach for the phone. I shot her in the side of the head with her own gun, then twice through her cold, hard heart. After carefully wiping down any items and surfaces I might have touched – I was getting proficient at this – I grabbed the papers, shoved the revolver in my waist alongside my Glock, and left the apartment closing the door as softly as I could.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  “What do we have so far, partner?” Spider asked as I drove the unmarked sedan from Mineola to Farmingdale.

  “The call came in about an hour ago. A waitress named Maria Ferraro failed to show up for work for the lunch trade at the Wolf’s Lair restaurant in Woodbury. Although she hasn’t been working there long, she had always showed up promptly for her shifts. The manager called her home, but all he got was her answering machine, so he drove over to check things out. When he knocked on the front door an elderly woman answered and said Maria was her tenant in the upstairs apartment. They knocked repeatedly and when they got no response the landlord used her key to get in. Maria was dead on the living room floor. One gunshot wound to her head was visible.”

  I pulled up to a two-family house in a well-kept residential street – all the lawns on the block were green and trimmed and the homes were kept in obvious good shape. I spoke first to the landlady who had returned to her living quarters downstairs. Mrs. Verna Lombardi was distraught over what had happened. Using her hands she said, “Oh, that poor woman. Who could have done that to her? And in my home!”

  I let her talk herself out for a while before I interrupted her and said, “Mrs. Lombardi, my partner is upstairs checking things out. We don’t know what happened yet. This could have been an accident or a suicide. Now, if you can calm down, I would like you to answer a few questions…”

  It wasn’t easy getting everything there was to get from Mrs. Lombardi. Her difficulty in hearing – I had to practically shout at her – was not much help at all. Maria had only been her tenant a few weeks having told her she recently moved here from California. What she did know was that last night Maria worked the dinner shift and usually got home around midnight. However, she did not hear Maria come in the house, or hear her move around, or hear any arguments or gunshots.

  “I’m usually in bed by ten o’clock,” she said. “And I’m a pretty sound sleeper, so I didn’t hear a thing.”

  Not to mention you’re three-quarters deaf, I wanted to say, but I just thanked her for her cooperation and headed upstairs. Crime Scene Search people were just finishing up as was the deputy medical examiner. Doc Maguire said hello and explained that, pending the results of his post-mortem examination, Maria Ferraro died from multiple gunshot wounds, one to the head and two to the chest. “No gun anywhere around, Danny,” he said. “Looks like you have a whodunit on your hands. Probably a large bore weapon – .40 caliber or a .357 magnum based on the damage.”

  “Any cartridge cases found?” Spider asked.

  “Better ask the crime scene guys,” Maguire said, “but they hadn’t found any when I first got here.”

  “Where’s the restaurant manager?” I asked.

  “I let him go back to work,” Spider said. “Told him we would stop over there when we finished up here to get his statement.”

  “Okay, let’s nose around,” I said walking over to Maria’s body. She was lying on her side, one large gaping wound visible on her temple. I rolled her over to better see her face and when I did a flash of recognition went through my mind. Spider must have noticed a reaction from me because he said, “What’s up Danny? Do you know her?”

  I continued to stare at her trying to force my memory cells to connect the dots, but all I could do was shake my head and say, “No, Spider, I don’t know her, but there’s a familiarity to her face, maybe from the distant past.”

  “And the name doesn’t jog your memory?”

  “No, I’m sure I never knew a Maria Ferraro.”

  “Maybe it’s her marriage name.”

  “Could be, we’ll find out when we do the background check.”

  We finished up at the scene taking all of Maria’s personal effects with us. We located her car parked on the street, gave it a cursory search for weapons and then posted a uniform officer on it pending the arrival of the tow truck. We drove to Woodbury, and after taking the restaurant manager’s written statement, we returned to the squad room to put our heads together and go over what we had so far.

  What we had was not much. Maria Ferraro was a murder victim who was apparently not sexually assaulted, or burglarized, or robbed. Her killer had taken the murder weapon and expended cartridges, if any, with him, and since there were no signs of a break-in, he may have been known by Maria. A canvas of neighbors by the responding officers and Nine-Eight squad detectives had failed to turn up anyone who saw or heard anything out the ordinary at or about the time of her death, which Doc Maguire had preliminarily determined to have occurred between 12:30 – 2:30 a.m.

  It was past five o’clock and there was nothing more to do until tomorrow morning. We initiated the background check and put out a brief press release. We would attend the autopsy tomorrow, obtain Maria’s fingerprints and have them run through AFIS, the national automated fingerprint database. Crime Scene would thoroughly search her car, and Spider and I would re-canvas the neighbors.

  “Let’s go home, Spider,” I said. “Tomorrow will be a long day.”

  “And hopefully a productive one,” he said, “because, as the saying goes, right now we ain’t got shit.”

  “Piece of cake for a couple of hot-shot dicks like us,” I said smiling and poking Spider on the shoulder. Right?”

  “Right,” he said, “see you in the morning, Dick Tracy.”

  By the time we got back from the morgue it was 10:30 a.m. We had dropped the three slugs off at the Ballistics Section of the Police Lab where the technician, Walt Gennaro definitely identified them as .357 caliber rounds fired from a Smith and Wesson magnum revolver. “I’ll run it through the national firearms database as soon as I can,” he said. “If I get a hit I’ll give you a shout right away.”

  “Thanks, Walt,” I said. “We have nothing on this one yet.”

  We also had dropped the fingerprints off at that section and the technician there promised a quick search for us. Now back at our office our first stop was the coffee room where we found Allison Hayes, the crime reporter for the Long Island Chronicle, adding sugar to her mug of coffee.

  “About time you two decided to come to work,” she said. “This is my third cup of this crap you guys call coffee.”

  “Well, good morning to you, too, Lois Lane,” Spider said using the nickname that had been tacked on to her for her resemblance to the actress that played that role in the Superman movies.

  “I’ll have you know, Miss Lane,” I said, “that we just came back from a gruesome few hours at the morgue on our last caper.”

  “That’s what I want to talk to you about, Danny,” she said looking at her copy of the press release. “This tells me nothing. What else do you have on this woman?”

  “Not much yet,” Spider said and then filled her in on what we had in the works.

  “Do you have her date of birth?”

  “Probably,” I said, “she still has a California driver’s license and it would be on there. Plus I have some personal papers that we have yet to examine.”

  “So go examine them and get me her date of birth would you? Or do I have to wait until you both finish your damn coffee?”

  “Hey,” Spider said, “you’re not our
damn boss, you know.”

  “And,” I said, “your snotty attitude is uncalled for.”

  “Okay, I’m sorry. Please just get me her DOB.”

  “No,” I said.

  “What do you mean, no?” she asked eyes flashing with anger. “I’ll go to Lieutenant Veltri, I’ll go to my boss…”

  “Allison, calm down,” I said. “What’s going on with you? I’ll give you the date of birth, but you have to tell me why you want it so badly.”

  “I don’t have to tell you anything, Danny Boy.”

  “What the hell is going on with you, Allison?” Spider asked. “We always worked great with each other. You never stuck it to us in print and we always gave you all we had when we could. What’s changed?”

  “Nothing’s changed, but I think I’m onto something big – real big. And if that date of birth is a date I’m familiar with, you’ll be onto something really big, too.”

  “And will you tell us what this big thing is if we give you that DOB, and if we continue to give you information as it comes in?” I asked.

  She seemed to calm down a bit then nodded her head and said, “Deal.”

  “Let me find an empty office and get Maria’s papers,” I said, “and we’ll see what we can see.”

  “Here it is,” Spider said holding up her driver’s license and a birth certificate. “Same date on both.”

  “And would that date be November 17, 1967?” Allison asked.

  “Bingo, Miss Lane, ace investigative reporter. Now how in the hell did you now that?” I asked

  “Based on my superior investigative skills, of course,” she said with a smile.

  “We’re listening, Lois,” Spider said.

  Allison told us the story of the serial killer in southern California of which Spider and I had both vaguely heard of, but not lately. When Allison had broken the story I had been on a two-week vacation down South with my wife Tara. Spider had read the feature in the Chronicle but paid the case no further heed; after all the maniac wasn’t killing anyone in our jurisdiction. But even before Allison finished her story, we both now knew differently. “You made a great leap connecting this California killer to the murder of Maria Ferraro,” I said. “Tell us how you did it.”

  “Two items,” she said. “One, the murders had stopped over three months ago and two, Maria, according to your press release, was a new arrival from Los Angeles. So I figured he had given up killing women there and tracked Maria down to kill her here.”

  “This doesn’t make sense,” I said. “I can see why he stopped killing out there. His composite picture was in the papers and they knew who his targets would be based on physical resemblance and date of birth. But why track this particular person down all the way to Long Island? Why hadn’t he killed her out there?”

  “Maybe she was next on his list and he figured why not follow her to New York where there was no heat at all,” Allison said.

  “But now,” Spider said, “he’ll bring the Feds down on him. It’s not a local matter anymore.”

  “There’re already involved,” Allison said. “An FBI agent from VICAP in the Behavioral Analysis Unit is on the California Task Force.”

  “And I’m sure he’ll be winging his way here when your story hits the stands tomorrow,” I said.

  “You two don’t have a problem with me printing the connection to the California killings and the date of birth?” she asked.

  “Why should we?” Spider asked. “Do you think it will create a panic?”

  “Maybe,” she said.

  “Wouldn’t it be advisable to warn women with the same date of birth? Don’t we owe that to them?” I asked.

  “You know, you guys surprise me,” Allison said. “I figured you’d want me to sit tight on this for a while, but you seem to be thinking the same as me.”

  “If we had a lead on the killer, then maybe I’d ask you to hold off,” I said. “But we have absolutely nothing at this point.”

  We decided to get an opinion from my boss, Lieutenant Pete Veltri and from Allison’s editor, Marge Bernard, when Bernie Gallagher stuck his head in the room and said, “Latent prints on line three for you, Danny.”

  I picked up and listened to Detective John Dennison for a few minutes and when he finished all I could say was, “Holy Shit!”

  “Danny, what is it?” Spider asked. “You have no color at all left in that pink Irish face.”

  “I knew I recognized her. Her name’s not Maria Ferraro, it’s Angela Chandler. And I know who killed her.”

  “Who?” Spider and Allison asked simultaneously.

  “Her son, Frankie. Frankie Chandler. This changes everything.”

  Allison fished around in her briefcase and came up with the first article, the one the Chronicle had reprinted from the LA Times, the only one that showed the suspect’s composite photo, the one that ran when I was away on vacation, the one where Frankie Chandler now stared right out at me. Case Closed.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  I drove straight back to my motel in Hicksville. No one had followed me and apparently no one heard the gunshots as the street in front of Mommy’s home had been very quiet as I got into my car. Still in shock from Mom… my moth…Angela Chandler’s revelation, I took stock of my situation. I was twenty-seven years old, possessed a two-year associate’s degree in computer science, was a navy veteran and a so-called serial killer, my last victim being a woman I was convinced was my mother.

  My basic mission in life since I was ten years old was to be re-united with my mother, and I had finally advanced to that moment when I discovered that Angela Chandler was not my mother at all. A woman named Ellen Weston was. Now the question I had to ponder was what I was going to do about it, if anything. I should really just forget about her and get on with my life. Twenty-seven years old, no job, no steady girlfriend – I guess anyone who has taken a couple of psych courses could tell you why – and the police were no doubt getting closer all the time.

  After a mostly sleepless night I put the morning news on the TV. There was not yet anything about Angela’s murder, probably because no one had discovered her body. I went out to get breakfast and pick up my mail which was a letter from my college congratulating me on my grades and attaining my degree. Proud of this accomplishment I carefully put it back in its envelope and walked back to the motel. I opened my laptop and spread out the documents I had taken from Angela. There was plenty of information there on my real mother, Ellen Weston, including her date of birth, date and place of marriage, and social security number.

  Once again, accessing the New York State Motor Vehicle Database under the name of Ellen Weston and Ellen Chandler, and limiting the search to her date of birth of July 19, 1972, I obtained zero hits. Either Ellen had left New York or she was still here and did not have a driver’s license under her maiden or original married name. And if she had re-married and took a different last name, I would be at a fast dead end.

  The next morning the story of Angela’s death – Maria Theresa Ferraro’s death, that is – was on the morning news. The story was brief, asked for anyone with information to come forward and to contact Detective Daniel Boyland at Nassau Homicide with that information. Then I suddenly realized when Maria Ferraro’s fingerprints were run in the national database and came back as belonging to Angela Chandler, the light would go off in Danny’s head and he would come looking for me. It was obviously time to get out of Dodge, but to where?

  I didn’t run very far, just over the county line to the borough of Queens. Since community college back in California was inexpensive and I had a good paying job out there, I had managed to save quite a bit of money. I had a five-year old paid off Toyota Corolla that got great gas mileage and got me across the country without a bit of trouble, and over ten thousand dollars in cash. I checked into another inexpensive chain motel on Queens Boulevard, left my car parked in their lot and jumped on a subway to Manhattan. I had to do something that, in hindsight, I should have done a long time ago, someth
ing that Angela Chandler had the foresight to do – get a new identity.

  After a few brief inquires in the Times Square area, and a twenty-dollar bill having passed from my hand into a grimy one, the unkempt, red-eyed, street person pointed to a doorway halfway down a narrow alley and said, “Knock t’ree times. Tell him Willy sent you.”

  I did as instructed and was welcomed into a surprisingly clean room by a smiling, unusually tall Asian man who asked how he could be of assistance. I told him what I needed and we settled on a price of six hundred dollars for a New York State Driver’s license and New York state birth certificate. Mr. Li said his work was of such quality that obtaining a passport with the birth certificate would be a breeze. I gave him a down payment of three hundred dollars and he promised a two-day turnaround.

  Back at the motel, the address of which I had given Mr. Li to use on my driver’s license, I switched through the local news channels. There was nothing further on the death of Maria Ferraro. I was sure that in a day or two my picture would be all over the media. I could picture the newspaper headlines: California Serial Killer Moves East – Mother Latest Victim. Frank Chandler—Mass Murderer now in New York. But I wouldn’t care one bit. By then I would be Matthew Hopkins, a resident of the state of New York, with a date of birth about three months younger. And, of course, I would look nothing like the curly-haired, clean-shaven composite photo they would display. Still totally bald, with a neatly-trimmed dark beard, I had added black horn-rimmed glasses with clear lenses. I felt certain that Boyland, and all the other cops looking for me, would never find me based on their known description.

  When I paid the balance to Mr. Li he pointed out the carefulness of his work and promised complete satisfaction. He said with a grin, “Mr. Hopkins, if there is ever a problem with these, come right back and I will fix it. And send anyone who may need my services if you are happy with the products.”

  I thanked him and said I was going to test the documents right away as I was headed to the motor vehicle office to register my Corolla and get New York plates. The California plates would be folded up and disposed of in one of the city’s myriad storm drains and I would be set to begin the search for a new job and an apartment and a whole new life back where it all began. Mommy – Angela – was dead. I had exorcised that demon and I was certain I would never kill anyone again, but I was not ready to dispose of my guns. It was time to find a girlfriend, settle down and build a new life as Matthew Hopkins. But I had to admit to myself I was more than a little curious about Ellen Weston – my real mother – but not curious enough to pursue her right now.