Bust

by Ken Bruen

  Bobby took the paper with him back to his apartment. Suddenly, Leppard sounded okay again. Thanks to a millionaire named Max Fisher, Bobby was back in business.

  Eleven

  Sutter looked at him. “I prefer tough, rich and a pussy magnet.”

  “As a cop, you might get two of those three.” Sutter smiled and said, “You never know.”

  JAMES O. BORN, Walking Money

  On May 12, 1989, Alexis Morgan, a thirty-six year-old former model, was walking her two pet chihuahuas through a secluded path near Belvedere Castle in Central Park when she was brutally stabbed to death by a mysterious assailant. The single wound to her throat had nearly decapitated her, and police believed she was grabbed from behind and cut with a large knife or machete. There were no witnesses to the attack but several people reported seeing “a suspicious white man” in the area minutes before the killing and hearing her chihuahuas barking moments afterwards.

  Although he didn’t fit the description of the “suspicious white man,” Ms. Morgan’s husband Henry, a wealthy real estate mogul, was a prime suspect. The Morgans had had a stormy two-year marriage, marred by loud public fights and Mr. Morgan’s accusations that his wife was having an affair. While Mrs. Morgan’s pocketbook was stolen in the attack, police believed this may have been “a decoy,” to make it appear as if robbery had been the motive.

  Mr. Morgan had a rock solid alibi – he was playing tennis with a friend at the Wall Street Racket Club at the time of the murder, and the friend and workers of the club vouched for him. However, the police still didn’t rule out Morgan completely. They believed he may have hired someone to kill his wife. They created a composite sketch of the suspect and began a citywide manhunt for the killer. A few weeks later, police tailed Morgan to a meeting at a diner in Chelsea with Vinny “The Blade” Silvera, a killer known to have connections to the mob. Later that night, Silvera was brought in for questioning, but wouldn’t confess to anything. Morgan was arrested separately. Under heavy interrogation, Morgan – who had his own business links to organized crime – was told that Silvera had confessed and then Morgan, falling for the ploy, promptly gave a taped confession, implicating Silvera. Both Morgan and Silvera were tried and sentenced. A few months later, Morgan was found beaten to death in a bathroom on Riker’s Island.

  Of course there were many obvious differences between Alexis Morgan’s murder and the recent murders of the two women in the East Seventy-fourth Street townhouse, but there were many similarities as well. In both cases, robbery was the apparent motive. In both cases, the victims had been killed brutally, as if murder was the sole intention. And in both cases the husbands had convenient airtight alibis.

  Kenneth Simmons, Detective Investigator at the 19th Precinct, had had nothing to do with the Alexis Morgan case. He was only in his second year on the force in 1989 and he was still spending most of his time doing clerical work. But, like everyone else who lived in the city at that time, he had followed the details of the case closely in the news. Several years later, at a promotion ceremony at One Police Plaza, he met Lieutenant Anthony Santana, who had broken the case, and Santana filled him in on many of the details. In particular, Kenneth recalled how Santana had told him that he would have broken the case much sooner if it weren’t for all the media hype. “It was like a zoo,” Santana said. “The suspects always knew they were being watched twenty-four hours a day.” He believed that if Morgan didn’t know he was being watched, he would have led them to Silvera much sooner. Santana said, “You can’t shoot a deer when he hears your footsteps, you gotta sneak up on the fuck, know what I’m saying?”

  Kenneth knew.

  While he wasn’t going to rule out any possibility, Kenneth was ninety percent certain that the townhouse murders were Alexis Morgan all over again. Max Fisher had hired somebody to kill his wife and Stacy Goldenberg was just in the wrong place at the wrong time. When he interviewed Max at the house he had a feeling Max was holding out on him and Kenneth’s detective instincts were rarely wrong. But he also knew that the important thing was not to press him. Like Santana said – you can’t let them hear your footsteps.

  Kenneth was hoping that the townhouse case would be his big case, the one that comes along once in a detective’s life. Solving the murders of two white women would also be great P.R. and could lead to a promotion to Sergeant or Lieutenant in a couple of years. Kenneth had been married for eight years and five years ago had had a baby son with Down Syndrome. The baby’s condition had near destroyed his wife. And people’s comments like Mongoloid Retard Damaged goods Handicapped had ignited a rage in Kenneth that simmered close to the surface every waking moment. He was searching for an outlet to vent and Max Fisher was going to be it. He hated the prick anyway, with his freaking designer suits, fake hair, smarmy attitude, and that collection of classical music. Kenneth was a closet opera buff – not a fact you advertised as a New York City cop – but when he saw Fisher’s classical collection he knew right away that the man was full of shit. He had all the big names out, like he was trying to impress, but it was obvious he had no true respect for the music.

  And what was up with that navy tracksuit he’d been wearing during the first interview, acting like he thought it made him look all that? Kenneth wanted to put the man in another kind of suit – an orange one.

  Fisher was going to be Kenneth’s ticket to a promotion all right. His goal when he came on the force was to make Lieutenant before he was forty and to start collecting his pension by the time he was forty-five. He was thirty-nine now, so time was running out. He already had a time-share at a condo on the Jersey shore, but he couldn’t wait until he was retired, and could spend all his days on the golf course.

  Two days after the murders, Kenneth and his partner, Detective Louis Ortiz, were in Kenneth’s office. Louis said, “Gluckman from Ballistics just called. They ran the bullets and shells through Bulletproof and Brasscatcher and came up dry.”

  Kenneth finished a long sip of coffee, said, “But they still say it was a. 38, right?”

  “Yeah, but get this – they think it was a Cold Lady. 38. Our killer wouldn’t be too smart if he bought a broad’s gun on the street.”

  “Unless the killer is a broad.”

  “You really think so?”

  “I doubt it sincerely. But I think the guy might’ve fucked up on purpose – sets the alarm and buys the pussy gun because he wants to give us a lot to think about.”

  “You really think that’s what happened?”

  “You know what I think. The job was sloppy – the guy who did it wasn’t a pro. He was a friend or someone Fisher had met. We got any priors with this gun?”

  “ Nada so far.”

  “Any word on the street?”

  “They’ve been debriefing everybody they bring in, all Manhattan precincts, but so far nothing. Nothing from Forensics either. They said the women died somewhere between five-thirty and seven-thirty – probably closer to five-thirty, and both right around the same time. Nothing to go on with the blood either – it all came from the victims. The coroner also said the perp liked what he did. Some of the wounds were unnecessary, the victims were already dead. He called it overkill.”

  “And Fisher’s alibi?”

  “Rock-fucking-solid. A stripper remembered him – said she was giving him a lap dance around that time. Gave me her business card, too, by the way. She said she likes giving freebies to cops. You should’ve seen his friend, the client he was ‘entertaining.’ The guy was shitting bricks, man. He was like, ‘You gotta promise me – this won’t go back to my wife, right? This won’t go back to her, will it?’ Man, and I thought I was p-whipped.” Then, smiling, he added, “But maybe we’ll get lucky and get some DNA off the turd the shooter left.”

  Kenneth got up from his desk and stretched. He’d helped his wife move some furniture last night and he’d thrown his damn back out. He said, “Let’s give it a couple of days – see what happens. At least the media isn’t jumping all over this case
the way I thought they would. Gives us a little more room.”

  “Yeah,” Louis said. “It’s lucky that crazy bitch set her kids on fire in Brooklyn.”

  “Hey, I’ll take a break anyplace I can get it.” Then Kenneth, rocking his hips to keep his back loose, added, “We still got one big problem – motive. Why did Max Fisher want his wife dead?”

  “Wild guess – she was fucking some other guy.”

  “That’s the obvious answer, so where’s the other guy? And how come none of her friends or relatives ever heard her talking about a lover? I’m telling you, there’s something about this case that just doesn’t fit. The answer’s out there – we just gotta find it.”

  As he always did when he was distracted, or when he was angry or frustrated about something, Kenneth touched the gold pin in his lapel. It showed two hands reaching out to each other, never quite touching and looking like they never would. It was the symbol for Down Syndrome, and one night on CNN he was thrilled to see Bill Clinton on there wearing the pin. Kenneth had done a little Google search, and discovered the pin had been given to Clinton by some obscure mystery writer. When he told his wife all she could say was, “I don’t read mysteries.”

  Kenneth looked up, saw Louis watching him playing with the pin.

  “You really wanna nail this motherfucker, don’t you?” Louis said.

  “Yeah, I really do,” Kenneth said.

  The next few days brought a couple of new developments. It was discovered that Max Fisher had made several withdrawals from his bank accounts the few days before the murders, but it only added up to several thousand dollars – something worth thinking about, but it wasn’t enough money to prove that he had hired a hit man. Ballistics’ Brasscatcher database determined that the Lady Colt. 38 may have been the same gun used in the unsolved homicide of the owner of a shoe store in Queens a year and a half ago. At first, Kenneth thought this could be the big break, then he found out that Brasscatcher couldn’t be one hundred percent about the match. And, even if the same gun was used in both crimes, it didn’t mean that the gun hadn’t changed hands on the street one or more times since the Queens murder. It was suggested that the Boyos, who had a front in the Bowery, were selling these guns on the street but it was almost impossible to pin anything on them. Worse, people liked them, because everyone had seen In The Name Of The Father and thought that’s the way it really was. Trying to arrest an IRA guy was like trying to arrest a Mafia guy, you were messing with the public’s romantic notions.

  Louis questioned people at Max’s office and friends and family members of Deirdre Fisher and Stacy Goldenberg and came up with no new leads. Jeez, it was going cold already.

  Kenneth and Louis were having lunch, sitting at one of the back tables in Pick-a-Bagel on Second Avenue, when Louis said, “We gotta start looking at other possibilities, man.”

  Kenneth swallowed a bite of bagel with tofu scallion cream cheese, then said, “Like what?”

  “Like maybe it was just what it looked like at the beginning – a guy was robbing a townhouse, the women came home, he panicked and shot them.”

  “The alarm was reset,” Kenneth said. He hadn’t been able to sleep for the past two nights, his frustration with the case getting to him. “Fisher set the alarm off when he went into the house. Unless Fisher was lying – and I see no reason why he would lie about that because it just makes him look more guilty – then Fisher must’ve given the alarm code to whoever killed those two women.”

  He’d gone over this a hundred times till his wife had roared, “You’re obsessed.”

  She was right.

  “Hey, that makes sense to me,” Louis said. “So why don’t we just bring Max Fisher in?”

  “If I thought that would help – believe me, I wouldn’t be sitting here on my fat ass eating bagels. But we gotta make Fisher think he’s safe, let him get complacent. Every day that goes by that he doesn’t hear from me he gets a little more nervous. Right now he’s probably thinking, ‘Why isn’t Detective Simmons calling? He said he’d call.’ But pretty soon he’s gonna think we forgot all about him and that’s when his big shot side is gonna come out. He’s gonna think he’s above the law, king of the world, and that’s when he’s gonna slip up. And that’s when I come in and go for my knockout punch. That’s when he gets the new tracksuit.”

  “Tracksuit?” Louis asked.

  “Trust me on this one,” Kenneth said. “We keep up with the silent treatment a few more days and start tailing him. Who knows? Maybe it’ll be like Alexis Morgan all over again. Maybe he’ll dig his own grave.”

  Kenneth put a twenty-four hour surveillance on Max Fisher, but this didn’t turn up any new leads. Fisher went to the park, the supermarket, his health club, and other normal places. Then, just when it seemed like the case was going nowhere, there was a breakthrough. Some of the jewelry that was stolen at Max Fisher’s apartment turned up at a pawnshop in Chinatown. The owner of the shop, Mr. Chen Liang, didn’t speak a word of English, but through a translator swore to Kenneth that he didn’t know who the man was who’d sold him the jewelry, he’d never seen him before. The man had allegedly come into the shop on Saturday afternoon, the day after the murder. He dumped the jewelry on the counter and said “How much?” Liang said he offered the man five thousand dollars, even though the jewelry was worth ten or twenty times that much. The man must’ve not known jack about jewelry because he didn’t complain, didn’t even try to negotiate. He happily took the cash and left the store.

  Liang gave a complete description of the man. He was about five-eight, one-thirty, dirty grey hair, funny-looking mouth, and was wearing a leather jacket with what looked like a bullet hole in it. He spoke English with some kind of accent. Liang was very cooperative and polite until he found out he’d have to give back the jewelry. Then he started screaming like a maniac in goddamn Chinese, carrying on so much Kenneth almost had to cuff him.

  Kenneth put out a citywide alert for the man. He knew that this guy might not be the killer – he may have just been a fence the real killer or someone else had sold the jewelry to – but finding him would definitely be a good start. Also, Kenneth now knew for sure that this wasn’t a professional job. A pro wouldn’t be dumb enough to unload jewelry he’d stolen from the scene of a double murder. And a pro wouldn’t be dumb enough to sell off jewelry for a fraction of its worth. The alarm business meant that it couldn’t have been random either, so the only logical conclusion was that Fisher had hired a non-pro to bump off his wife – either an acquaintance or a small-time hood. Fisher had gone cheap and that would cost him.

  Later in the day, Kenneth got word from his cop on surveillance that Fisher had gone into work. Kenneth drove down to Fortieth Street in his tan Coup-de-Ville and took over the stakeout himself, hoping that this might be the day Fisher slipped.

  Finally, after seven o’clock, Fisher left his office. He looked nervous – like a man who’s guilty as hell, Kenneth thought – looking in both directions as he headed toward Fifth Avenue. Kenneth drove around the corner, making a right on a red, and made it to the corner of Fifth and Fortieth in time to see Fisher getting into a cab. The cab continued downtown on Fifth, so at least it didn’t look like Fisher was going directly home. At Thirty-third, the cab turned right. It continued, inching along two traffic-congested blocks, pulling over in front of the side entrance to the Hotel Pennsylvania.

  Kenneth stopped and double-parked about four or five car-lengths behind the cab. It was getting dark and he couldn’t see clearly into the back of the cab, so he was surprised when Fisher got out wearing a curly blond wig. He looked so ridiculous that Kenneth almost started to laugh, asked aloud, “The fuck’s with that?”

  He got out of his car and followed Fisher into the hotel.

  Fisher was at the reception desk, checking into a room. There was a lot of activity in the lobby, but Kenneth stayed a safe distance away anyway. After Fisher headed toward the elevators, Kenneth waited to see what would happen next. He wondered if
Fisher was planning to meet his hit man to make his final payoff, just like Henry Morgan. He was already imagining himself in front of the mikes and cameras, explaining to the reporters how he had cracked the case. Then he saw himself, Lieutenant Kenneth Simmons, on the podium at One Police Plaza, shaking the Mayor’s hand. His gold pin matching the new gold shield.

  After about fifteen minutes had passed, Kenneth decided to go to the desk, start asking questions. The short woman with thick glasses behind the desk seemed uncomfortable, like she might be hiding something. He asked her if the man with the curly blond hair was meeting anyone in his hotel room and the woman pointed toward a good-looking white woman with big, blow-dried hair who was about to get on the elevator. For some reason, she looked familiar to Kenneth and a couple of seconds later it clicked. Earlier in the evening he had seen her leaving Fisher’s office building. So Max Fisher was the one having the affair, not the wife. This was definitely getting interesting.