Murder in Greenwich Village

by Lee Harris

  “Yeah?”

  “Hey, Mr. Testa?” Jane said, using her girlish voice. “It’s Jane from downstairs. Can I talk to you?”

  “Who?”

  “From downstairs. The super said I should come up.”

  Two locks opened, then the door. Smithson and the uniform charged inside, grabbing Testa, who spewed a series of obscenities as Jane dashed past them to search the apartment.

  It was empty. “Shit,” she said both aloud and to herself. Where did they have him? She went into the main bedroom and looked around. It was messy but showed no evidence of another person. She opened the closet, found nothing but clothes and shoes, then went into the other bedroom.

  Something there was different. She took out one of the two pairs of rubber gloves she always carried in a plastic bag and put them on before entering. A single bed, little more than a spring with an old mattress on it, sat in the center of the room. A cursory glance along the wall, where a window led to a fire escape, showed accumulated dirt and dustballs. They had moved the bed so it would not be near the window.

  The bed was unmade. Food garbage dotted the floor, paper cups, pizza boxes, plastic utensils, used and unused. Her heart racing, she opened the closet door, took out her flashlight, and swept the interior. Some men’s clothes hung on wire hangers, and a pair of shoes were on the floor. She picked them up. Could they be Defino’s? She didn’t know. They were black leather, lace-ups, very plain. The clothes were not his. She remembered what he was wearing on Friday, and besides, they were too large for the wiry Defino.

  She pushed the shoes aside. Something black lay on the closet floor. She bent and picked it up. With her rubber gloves, she could not feel the texture of the item, but the size and shape were recognizable. She flipped it open.

  “Holy Mother of God,” she whispered. Inside were Defino’s shield and photo ID.

  22

  SHE RAN BACK to the living room, where Smithson and the uniform were keeping watch on Testa. “Cuff him,” she said to the uniform, whose name she had already forgotten. She opened the ID wallet and showed it to Smithson.

  “What the . . .” Testa looked nervous.

  “You son of a bitch,” she said. “Where is this man?”

  “What man?”

  “This man, you—” She shut her mouth, trying to control her rage.

  Testa looked at the ID photo. “Where’d you find that?”

  “I’m asking the questions, Testa. You’re answering them. Where is this man?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t know what’s going on.”

  “Tell me everything you know, and make it quick. If this man dies, you’re an accessory to murder. Unless you killed him yourself.”

  “I didn’t kill nobody. I picked up a van on Friday morning to make a delivery for my boss.”

  “What’s his name?”

  “Mr. Spiegel.”

  “And who gave you the van?”

  “Guy named Montana, owns a video store. I went over, I picked up the van, I did what Mr. Spiegel asked me to do. Mr. Spiegel said, ‘Bring it back to Mr. Montana when you’re done.’ I got done early, so I called a friend.”

  “What’s his name?” Smithson asked.

  “Charley Farrar. And I says, ‘Charley, I got a van for the afternoon. You wanna take a ride?’ and Charley says, ‘Sure. Pick me up.’ So I pick him up and he says, ‘You know what? A friend of mine over on Minetta Street, he just came back from vacation. Let’s drive over and say hello.’

  “So I drive over to Minetta Street and I leave the van like I’m making a delivery, and we go upstairs and Charley rings the bell. His friend opens the door and then everything goes crazy.”

  “What happened?” Jane asked.

  “His friend is inside, Sal something. And another guy. Sal says something quick to Charley, we go inside, and him and his friend, they take this guy down.” He snapped his fingers. “Just like that. They just fall on top of him and Sal cuffs him. Charley calls me over; I should make sure the guy doesn’t get up. So I sit on him.” Testa probably weighed one-ninety. “Then this guy Sal, he goes in the back, comes back with a raincoat, a black one, throws it over the guy, and we take him down the stairs, careful-like, so no one sees us. Do I know he’s a cop?”

  “So it’s three of you and the cop.”

  “Yeah, Charley, his friend Sal, and me. I run out the front door and unlock the back of the van, open the doors, and go back into the building. This cop, he’s like a wild animal. He’s kicking and elbowing and trying to get away. But he doesn’t make any noise because it turns out this guy Sal, he taped his mouth shut with duct tape.”

  “Then what?”

  “Then we get back in the van, I’m behind the wheel, the other two are in the back trying to tie up the cop, who’s still fighting them.”

  “Where did you go?”

  “We didn’t know where to go. Charley, he’s got a wife, we can’t go to his place. This guy Sal says there’s another cop out with his girlfriend, so I say, ‘OK, bring him to my place.’ And we come here.”

  “How long was he here?”

  “Too long. I thought this was, like, for an hour or so. Those guys, they don’t know what to do. You can’t kill him; he’s a cop. I don’t know what’s going on. They won’t let me get the van back to Mr. Montana. I can’t go to work. I got this cop in the bedroom.”

  “Answer my question,” Jane said. “How long was he here?”

  “Till last night. They gave him something to knock him out and we got him down to the van and they drove away.”

  “Was he alive?”

  “Yeah, he was alive. We fed him. We took care of him. But I’m gonna lose my job over this.”

  “You already lost it,” Smithson said.

  “Does Charley Farrar work?” Jane asked.

  “Yeah. He’s got a good job, works for the TA.”

  OK, Jane thought. We’ve got the connection. “Did he go to work this week?”

  “He called in for time off.”

  Charley could go back to work as long as Gregory Testa kept quiet, but Manelli couldn’t go back to his apartment ever again.

  “Where did they go?”

  “For a ride.”

  “A ride where?”

  “Charley said something about his sister had a place in the Rockaways, a summer place. She wouldn’t be there for a couple of weeks. Maybe that’s where they went.”

  “Tell us where the house is.”

  “I don’t know where the house is. How the fuck should I know? I don’t know Charley’s sister.”

  “He call her?” Smithson asked.

  Testa thought about it. “Yeah, I think he did.”

  “From your phone?”

  “Yeah. From this phone here.”

  Jane flipped her cell phone open and called MacHovec. Quickly she outlined what they had and what they needed, a list of numbers called from Testa’s phone in the last forty-eight hours.

  “You got it,” MacHovec said. “I’ll get McElroy in on this. Where can I find you?”

  “Use my cell. We’ll take this guy in now and head out to the Rockaways in Smithson’s car. You get something, you give me a call before you tell McElroy.”

  “Done.”

  Testa had listened to the conversation with obvious distress. “Where you takin’ me?” he asked when Jane got off the phone.

  “To the precinct.”

  “I didn’t do nothin’. I’m an innocent man. All I want is to get that van back and go back to work.”

  “You should have thought of that when you were kidnapping a cop.”

  The two uniforms took charge of Testa, and Jane and Smithson started driving toward Long Island. Smithson knew his way and he leaned on the pedal, putting his flashing light on the roof and using his PD plate at tolls. As they drove, MacHovec called back and said, “I’ve got the address. There were only a few calls from that number yesterday. One of them was to a number assigned to a Richard Porter, who also has a phone in the
Rockaways. The phone company confirmed it’s the same Richard Porter.” He gave her the address and she took it down, juggling the phone and the pen. “I’m taking it to McElroy now.”

  “Good work. Tell him we’re on our way.”

  The Rockaways were as far as you could go in Queens, to the shore of the Atlantic Ocean and to the edge of Long Island. They lay at the end of a peninsula jutting into the Atlantic Ocean with the bay on the other side. Part of the borough of Queens, it ran from Rockaway Point on the west to the Nassau County line on the east, the line marking the end of the city and the beginning of Long Island. The house owned by Richard Porter was in the One Hundredth Precinct.

  They passed from Manhattan through the Brooklyn Battery Tunnel, once the longest tunnel in the world. They exited onto the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway, familiarly known as the BQE. This took them around the curve of Brooklyn with its view of the Statue of Liberty and the Verrazzano Narrows Bridge. Smithson got off at Flatbush Avenue and grabbed his PD plate to avoid the toll on the Marine Parkway Bridge. On the far side, they were finally on the Rockaway Peninsula, traveling east on Rockaway Beach Boulevard.

  As they drove, their phones rang several times and Jane answered. Four detectives, two from the One Hundredth Detective Squad and two from the Precinct AntiCrime Unit, would meet them in two unmarked cars a block away from Thursby Avenue in Arverne, where the Porter house was located, between Beach 72 Street and the bulkhead above Vernam Basin. It was an area of houses built before World War Two as summer homes, most of them long ago converted to year-round residences with the addition of heating systems and storm windows.

  Smithson stopped behind the second unmarked car, and they got out and introduced themselves. One car had driven down Thursby Avenue and noticed no unusual activity. The house itself was quiet, with no cars visible. The missing van was also nowhere on the street and probably too large for the old garage at the end of the narrow driveway.

  They moved in a convoy around the corner and stopped before reaching the Porter house, a two-story wood frame on a stone and concrete foundation. The house was covered with siding over the original clapboard, painted a drab white and needing a fresh coat to perk it up. The shingle roof sloped on both sides, and a wooden porch ran the width of the house and along the left side.

  Two detectives went to watch other doors, and the remaining four mounted the porch steps and walked across the gray peeling deck to the door. One of the precinct squad detectives rang the bell. No answer.

  He knocked hard and called, “Anyone home?”

  A neighbor opened a door and stood outside, watching.

  “We go in?” the detective said.

  “Now,” Jane said.

  The door broke open easily, no match for the shoulders of the two detectives. Made of wood and fastened with a simple lock, it was old and painted many times. In New York City apartments, fire doors were reinforced with steel, and only on television could a man’s shoulder do the trick.

  They walked in, the silence thick. Then there was a sound, something falling upstairs. They all took off.

  Two bedroom doors were open and the rooms empty. The third door was shut and locked. This one took only one shoulder, the wood splintering before the lock gave way. They stepped through the hole and found Gordon Defino.

  The bus from Peninsula General Hospital came so quickly, Jane thought it might have been camped around the corner. She rode with Defino while Smithson followed in his car; she needed a ride back to the city. Defino had been barely awake when they burst into the room, lying on a bed made for a child. Stuffed animals and rag dolls were strewn on the floor, as though thrust from the bed. He was filthy, dried blood on his face, either drugged or dying, and both possibilities scared the hell out of her. The only word he said was, “Toni.” There was something to be said for marriage.

  She assured him that Toni would be her second call, but he had lapsed into unconsciousness and probably hadn’t heard. In the ambulance she called McElroy, who let out a cheer at the news; then she called Toni, who was too distraught to speak. Jane put one of the paramedics on the phone to tell her where they were going. When they were done, she held Defino’s hand and kept talking to him. His eyes flickered once or twice, giving her hope that some of what she was saying had gotten through.

  A medical triage team was waiting for him at the ambulance bay, and moved so quickly she felt cheered. Smithson joined her, her new, temporary partner, and she realized how much had happened since Friday afternoon, when she sat drinking coffee with Judy Franklin, leaving Defino in the apartment with Manelli.

  They sat in chairs near the emergency room, not talking much. Jane was afraid her cell phone would lose power, and she pulled out a plug for a lamp no one was using and plugged it in.

  “Don’t let me forget it,” she told Smithson.

  “Use mine,” he offered. “You’ve been using yours all day.”

  She did, calling McElroy, who put Graves on. Their voices had changed since that morning; the tension was gone, their man had been saved, and by the most rudimentary of police work. Graves said “good job,” a little grudgingly, she thought. He hadn’t gotten over her disobedience on Saturday night. He would not forget to exact penance from her, but she didn’t care. They had found Gordon alive.

  She gave Smithson the phone, found a pay phone, and used a phone card to call Hack.

  “You OK?” he asked.

  “We found him, Hack. He’s alive.”

  “Good job. Tell me.”

  She did it quickly, leaving out most of it.

  “You don’t sound good.”

  “I’m OK. It’s just—it was so close, Hack. He looked so awful.”

  “I’ll bring dinner tonight and we can talk.”

  She smiled. “OK. I can use some good talk.”

  Toni arrived just as the doctor came out with a report. Defino was dehydrated and under the influence of a sedative that would wear off in the next couple of hours. He had been kicked around and might have a fractured rib or two. They would give him tests and monitor him for a few days before they let him go home. The doctor took Toni in to see him briefly. She came out with a smile and a tearstained face.

  “He wants to see you,” she said to Jane.

  Jane looked at the doctor, who said, “Two minutes. No more,” and she followed him to the room. Defino lay on two pillows with his eyes closed, IVs in his hands, monitors near the bed.

  “Gordon?”

  He opened his eyes and raised a hand, reaching for her. “Jane, c’mere.” His voice was raspy and he looked like hell. “Sit down.”

  “You’re going to be OK.”

  “I know. Just out for a while.”

  “I heard.”

  “How . . . ?” He cleared his throat. “How’d you find me?” She told him, racing through the search for the van as though she were reliving it. “It was the first van we looked for, just a stroke of luck. We’ve learned a lot, Gordon. I’ll tell you all about it when you’re home and feeling bored.”

  “I still don’t get—”

  “Detective,” the doctor’s voice sounded sharply. “That’s a long two minutes.”

  She grinned at Defino and squeezed his hand. “Get back soon. I miss you.”

  A weak smile fluttered over his lips and his eyes closed.

  Entering 137, they had to dodge TV cameras. McElroy and Graves were waiting for them upstairs, along with several of the conference room detectives and a few others from the squad. Applause greeted them. The rescue of a cop was a big deal.

  After a lot of handshakes, Graves asked them if they wanted to be interviewed for the evening news.

  “Let Warren take it. I want to get home.”

  “Not without you,” Smithson said.

  Nice, she thought. She would remember that.

  McElroy let the cameras up and they stood before the microphones in the briefing area, saying little because they were still looking for the van and the two missing men.

&nbs
p; “Just a lot of rudimentary police work,” Jane said.

  “And rubber and shoe leather. And cooperation from plenty of good people,” Smithson said.

  Graves took over, his good looks and smooth patter bringing smiles from the interviewers. Jane ducked to her office, checked her messages, made a quick call to her father to watch the news, and went home.

  23

  HACK ARRIVED SOON after Jane did, carrying a bag with a dinner of hot Japanese food, a bottle of sake, and chop-sticks. While Jane warmed the sake, he set the table, covering the two bullet holes with dishes. The holes bothered him. He had wanted to fill them in with wood putty but she wouldn’t let him. All she allowed was for him to sand the rough edges.

  They ate and talked, she more than he. The tension of the day dissipated with the food, wine, and talk, and with the easy feeling of being with him.

  “I cost the department a lot of money,” she said when they were clearing the table. “That foray into the Lex must have cost a bundle.”

  “You went with your intuition. It’s never a hundred percent, but yours is on the high side. Graves’ll make you give up some pay, but you’ve probably got as much lost time as I have and it won’t cost you anything.” Lost time was hours worked without pay and banked at time and a half. She could use it at her discretion, and she could trade it in to pay for Graves’s punishment.

  They sat down in the living room and the phone rang almost immediately. It was Flora Hamburg.

  “So you found him alive and got your face on the news,” she said when Jane answered.

  “Flora. Yes, we found him. It all worked out. He’ll be home in a few days and he’ll be fine.” She glanced over at Hack, who was grinning at her. Flora wasn’t one of his favorite people. “I could have done without the TV, but you know Frank Graves: The more the better.”