Clever Fox

by Jeanine Pirro

I turned to leave when I got a queasy feeling. I’m not a big fan of the supernatural, but I’ve always trusted my instincts and my gut was telling me something was wrong. I decided to try the front entrance and it opened. So much for security.

  When there was no answer at the Mancinis’ door, I knocked louder and called out, “It’s Dani Fox from the District Attorney’s Office!”

  The door directly across the hall opened and an older woman peeked out. “You the police?” she asked.

  “District Attorney’s Office. Do you know if they’re home?”

  “One of them should be. Whenever Roman and Maggie both leave, they tell me and put a card on their door so people know to speak to me if it’s an emergency. They’re real good about that.”

  I tried the door to their apartment, and when the knob spun around in my hand, my gut tightened even more. Its locking mechanism was busted. Bracing myself, I drew the pistol I kept in my purse and pushed open the apartment’s door. “Mr. Mancini, are you here? It’s Dani Fox, from the D.A.’s office.”

  The only light in the apartment came from sunshine streaking through the tiny cracks in a set of aging venetian blinds.

  “Mr. Mancini? Mrs. Mancini?” I took two steps into the room but froze when my shoe hit something soft on the floor. It felt like a body so I stepped back, fighting the urge to run. With my left hand, I felt the wall for a light switch. It was an old push-button type but nothing happened when I hit it. I waited, gun out, for my eyes to adjust to the low light; when I looked down, I fully expected to see one of the Mancinis sprawled on the floor.

  Instead, it was one of their cats, eyes wide open and lying in a pool of its own blood.

  I’d seen enough.

  Backing into the hallway, I told the neighbor still peeking out of her doorway to call the police.

  “Are they hurt?” she asked me.

  “Please call the police now!” I repeated.

  She disappeared into her apartment while I took a moment to catch my breath. I knew that I had to go back inside. If someone was injured, every second could matter. I wasn’t going to have Roman or Maggie Mancini die because I’d been too afraid to search for them.

  With my handgun leading the way, I quietly reentered the dark living room, careful to step over the cat. When my eyes adjusted, I scanned the room and noticed that someone had slaughtered the two other cats, as well. Was it cruelty or was this supposed to be some sort of a warning?

  “The police are coming,” I announced in a loud voice.

  There was no reaction.

  Moving quietly down the hallway, I stopped outside the first bedroom’s closed door. With my left hand, I turned the knob and opened it. Something shifted in the darkness. A pair of eyes suddenly appeared and something dropped from above my head to the floor. A fourth cat leaped down from a shelf.

  I felt for a wall switch. This one worked and I found myself looking into a room stuffed with cardboard boxes, clothing hanging from racks, and two shelves crowded with dolls. Chatty Cathy and Barbie stared blankly at me. I pulled the door closed and moved down the hallway to the second bedroom, perspiring and breathing fast.

  When you don’t know what you are about to find behind a closed door and you’ve just seen several dead cats and been surprised by a live one, you tend to be a bit shaky. The good thing about fear is that it seems to slow down time and you become keenly aware of every sight, smell, movement, and sound. I could hear my own heart racing as I began to open the door. I hoped the room was empty. I wanted the Mancinis to be out to lunch. I pictured them at a nearby restaurant and hoped the dead cats had been left merely as a warning by someone who’d broken in.

  I used one hand to open the bedroom door and then quickly returned it to the grip of my pistol. I instinctively bent my legs slightly at the knees, assuming a firing position.

  The door slowly swung open. There were no windows. The interior was completely black. I listened but heard nothing. With my left hand, I reached into the darkness and felt the wall-mounted light switch.

  Light flooded the room, causing me to squint.

  Through half-lids, I saw a completely naked Roman Mancini propped against the wooden headboard of the couple’s double bed. His arms had been tied to the bed’s corners, making him appear as if he had been crucified. Dried blood covered his hairy chest and the bedsheets. His skull had been pushed back and was resting on the headboard’s wooden top bar. From where I was standing, it looked as if he was wearing a tiny red necktie. But it wasn’t a piece of clothing. His throat had been slit just above his Adam’s apple and his tongue had been pulled downward through the opening. I had to look away.

  A plump woman wearing curlers, a flowered muumuu, and pink fuzzy slippers was tied to a chair next to the bed facing Mancini. Her throat also had been slit, but thankfully her tongue had not been dragged through the opening. There was nothing I could do to save either of them. With my gun still drawn, I slowly retreated out of the apartment and back into the building’s entryway. As I was standing there, catching my breath, two uniformed Yonkers police officers came through the front door and assumed the worst when they saw me holding a pistol.

  “Freeze!” one yelled, grabbing his sidearm.

  “I called you! I’m with the D.A.’s office.”

  “Drop the weapon!” the cop nearest me demanded.

  It was no time for an argument.

  Bending down, I placed my .38 on the tile floor. “My ID’s in my purse. There’s a dead couple inside that apartment.”

  One of the officers darted by me into Apartment 1. “Oh shit,” he yelled. I knew he’d stepped on the dead cat.

  “Show me your ID,” the other officer ordered.

  I reached for my ID as O’Brien came in behind them. “What the hell?” he exclaimed. “She’s my partner.”

  The cop lowered his pistol and started toward the apartment door to join his partner.

  “Watch out for the dead cat on the—” But before I could complete my sentence, he too had stepped on it, and cut loose with a profanity.

  “You okay?” O’Brien asked me.

  I nodded.

  O’Brien said, “The chief agreed to assign two officers to guard the Mancinis. I followed them over.”

  “Too late,” I replied. “We’ve got to make sure they don’t mess up the crime scene. C’mon. And watch out for the dead cat on the floor.”

  “The what?” he said rushing in behind me. “Oh, shit!”

  He’d stepped on it, too.

  O’Brien and I found both officers in the bedroom.

  “You need to keep everyone out of the apartment,” I said.

  One of them shot me a “Who the hell are you?” look.

  In a firm voice, I said, “I’m an assistant district attorney who will be prosecuting these murders. You need to leave this room immediately. Call your dispatcher and get a photographer and medical examiner over here. Now!” Just as I had done when I’d seen Isabella’s mangled body dangling from the ceiling in this very same apartment building, I did a careful sweep of the scene, trying to create a mental photograph.

  Why was Roman Mancini nude? There was a pair of men’s flannel pajamas on the floor next to the bed. Why had he been tied to the headboard? I ran my eyes down his nude body and noticed something that I had missed earlier. Someone had cut off his little toe on his right foot. Had he been tortured before he was murdered? Was it premortem or postmortem? I looked at Maggie and noted that her right thumb had been amputated. Why had their killer or killers tortured her? “Why so brutal? Slitting their throats, pulling down his tongue?” I said.

  “That’s an Italian necktie,” O’Brien said. “A mob signal.”

  “A what?”

  “You slit someone’s throat, grab their tongue, and pull it through the hole.”

  The message seemed obvious. I thought about Will and his all-important exclusive, front-page story. Why hadn’t he listened to me? Now our witness and his wife were dead and as far as I was concerned, Wil
l had blood on his hands.

  15

  FBI Special Agent Walter Coyle was waiting at a table in the back of Bistro Bistro when I arrived ten minutes late for our 7 p.m. meeting.

  “Thought you were standing me up,” he said, rising from his chair when the maître d’ escorted me to our table. “I heard your key witness and his wife got their throats slit this afternoon.”

  I told Coyle that O’Brien was still at the crime scene but that I’d seen enough. “Cops prefer talking to other cops anyway, not assistant district attorneys,” I added. “There’s still a line there.”

  “Especially when it comes to women prosecutors,” he said in a sympathetic voice. “Being the only female A.D.A. must be difficult. You’re a woman in a man’s domain.”

  “The whole world is a man’s domain.”

  “Must be why it’s so screwed up,” he said, smiling.

  I liked his comment but wasn’t going to let it pass without adding my own. “One reason is because of people like your boss, Jack Longhorn.”

  “Ouch. Tell me how you really feel,” he said. “Longhorn warned me about you. He said you two clashed over a case. But that’s between the two of you, not me.”

  “You’re still FBI, he’s your boss, and based on what I’ve dealt with in the past, that makes me skeptical of you and cautious… very cautious.”

  “I get that,” he said. “And I’m actually fine with it. I’ve been proving myself all of my life.”

  Our waiter interrupted. Coyle ordered calamari fritti as an appetizer to share. I chose linguine with clam sauce as my entrée. Coyle ordered a filet mignon.

  “This is my treat,” he said. “Don’t worry, I’ll put it on my bureau expense account since it’s an official meeting and not a dinner date. Besides, it sounds as if the FBI owes you.”

  “Thanks, but I pay my own way.”

  “And if this were a date, I suspect you’d pay your own way then, too, right?”

  “My boyfriend and I split it most nights.”

  “Would it make a difference if I told you that you’d be doing me a favor by letting me pay? I can only use my bureau expense account if I take a source to dinner.”

  “A source? I’m not your source and I will definitely be paying my own tab. I sure as hell don’t want to be identified on some slip of paper somewhere as an FBI informant.”

  “You really are a stickler for the rules. And you really don’t like us, do you?”

  I thought perhaps I was being a bit too rough. “Saying you’re different from Longhorn is easy. Proving it is another matter.”

  He smiled. “Well put. No problem. I like a challenge, especially when it comes from someone as attractive as you. If this works out, maybe we can be more than professional colleagues. Maybe we can become friends. Imagine, Dani Fox with a friend in the FBI.”

  “Then you are in for a big challenge,” I said. “Now, what can you tell me about Nicholas Persico?”

  “Would you like wine with our dinner?”

  “I’ll stick with water, thanks.”

  “You Italian? You look Italian. Dark hair, sparkling brown eyes. You look European. I like that.”

  This was the third time in recent days that someone had asked me if I was Italian. “I’m not Italian,” I said. “My parents are of Lebanese descent. But we’re not here to discuss my looks or ethnicity, are we? Let’s talk about the Butcher.”

  “I didn’t mean to pry. Just trying to melt the ice, you know, get comfortable with each other. I think it’s important when I’m working with someone in law enforcement to get to know a bit about them. A lot of what we do depends on trust, you know, protecting each other’s backsides.”

  He opened the wine menu. “I guess I’ll have a glass by myself. You sure you don’t want to have some? They say red wine is good for your heart. And it might help you to relax.”

  “I am relaxed and my heart is fine. Now tell me about Persico.”

  He closed the menu and shook his head good-naturedly. “So much for small talk. As capo of the Battaglia crime family, Persico oversees all of Westchester County. But the Butcher is much more important than his title suggests. The actual head of the Battaglia crime family is Johnny Battaglia, but he’s in prison serving back-to-back life sentences. Since he’s in the joint, Persico is calling the shots on the streets and in charge of holding the family together. That makes him the de facto leader of the entire family.”

  “For how long?”

  “He’ll be in charge until Johnny Battaglia wins an appeal, which is unlikely, or cedes his power, which is even more unlikely.”

  “No, I mean, how long has Persico been running the Battaglia family?”

  “Oh, about two years, and he’s done it with an iron fist. His people are all loyal or afraid of him. Any threat comes from outside—namely Giuseppe ‘Tiny’ Nunzio over in New Jersey.” He hesitated and then said, “I’m sure you recognize the name.”

  “Yes, he’s a capo in the Gaccione family,” I said.

  “Speaking of Nunzio, my boss wasn’t happy when he realized your boss didn’t share the murder victim’s name with us. It would have been nice of you to have told us during our meeting that the victim was the daughter of a New Jersey mobster.”

  “I’m only an A.D.A.,” I said, passing the buck.

  Coyle smirked. “Well, Longhorn was furious, if that pleases you.”

  Actually, it did.

  Coyle continued: “Nunzio and his crew have had their eyes on several lucrative garbage contracts that bleed over into Staten Island.”

  “Which,” I interjected, “likes to call itself the largest landfill in the world.”

  “You know about garbage,” he said appreciatively.

  “I know there’s big money in collecting it.”

  “And in finding places to dump it.”

  The waiter arrived with a glass of pinot noir. “Agent Coyle,” I began.

  He interrupted me. “Please, call me Walt. Sometimes it’s good to break a few rules, Dani.”

  “At taxpayers’ expense?” I asked.

  For the first time, Coyle frowned. “I don’t want to argue. If it makes you happy, I will pay for my own meal and wine, but the two of us work hard for the public. We put our lives on the line every day. So forgive me if I order a glass of wine now and then, or use my expense account to take an attractive colleague to dinner.”

  “So you do this often? Take women to dinner on the taxpayers’ dime?”

  “I can see why you’re a good prosecutor,” he replied. “You don’t let up, do you? What’s next? Handcuffs?”

  “What’s next is more conversation about the Battaglias and Gacciones.”

  He took a sip of his wine. “Our task force has been using wiretaps and some low-level snitches to monitor the two crime families, and from this intel, it appears that Nunzio has been getting bolder and bolder about encroaching into Persico’s domain. A lot of New Jersey trash companies dump their waste in Staten Island so he’s using that as an excuse to establish a foothold in New York.”

  “How so? I’m not up to date on interstate transfer of waste.”

  “Nunzio already forces trash companies in New Jersey to pay him a kickback for doing business. Now he wants the landfills, which charge the New Jersey trash companies a fee to unload their waste in Staten Island, to kick back a piece of the action for every truck that he sends across the river. The landfill operators already are paying kickbacks to Persico. So that means they now have two hands dipping into one pot. When that happens in the mob, one hand gets chopped off.”

  “Do you think Persico murdered Isabella as a warning to Nunzio or to punish him for trying to move into Staten Island?” I asked.

  “It’s a good question. Who knows?” Coyle said. “What I do know is that he did it. Has the medical examiner given you a time of death?”

  “The killer cut an electrical cord from an alarm clock in the bedroom that he used to tie her. The clock stopped at three-thirty-five. The coroner
says the death happened sometime between then and about six o’clock that night.”

  “That window means the murder happened at the same time Persico was with her in that apartment,” Coyle said. “He got there at two-thirty p.m. and left three hours later. Seems open-and-shut to me. When are you planning on having him arrested?”

  “That’s a bit premature,” I said. “We’ve got some loose ends that need to be resolved.”

  “Like what?”

  “Isabella was meeting someone in that apartment twice a week over the past three months. We suspect she was having an affair—”

  “And you’re having a tough time,” Coyle said, interrupting me, “imagining a crusty old codger like Persico having a fling with a younger, attractive woman.”

  “That’s part of it.”

  “Maybe Isabella had a daddy complex or maybe she wanted to get back at her own father. What better way to punish your father than to sleep with someone who your old man hates—someone even older than he is? But why does any of that really matter? We know he was there at the time of her murder. Arrest him, sweat him, and make him talk.”

  I thought it was an odd comment coming from an FBI agent. Mobsters like Persico didn’t sweat when the police arrived and they rarely talked. “It just feels off to me,” I said. “My gut tells me—”

  Coyle chuckled. “You can’t base investigations on your gut. It’s facts that matter. Persico was there. I saw him. Why else would he rush out of that building? Why else would he change his clothes before he went home that night? It’s circumstantial, but it all fits.”

  “Leaving in a hurry and changing clothes are hardly signs that you committed a murder,” I argued.

  “What my gut is wondering,” he replied, “is why are you so intent on defending a known mob killer?”

  “I’m not defending him. I’m trying to catch a killer and I don’t want to put an innocent man on trial even if he’s a scumbag like Persico.”

  “I want to catch bad guys, too. I’m just surprised you’re throwing up roadblocks.”

  I was quiet for a moment to collect my thoughts. “Explain this to me,” I said. “Why would a capo butcher a woman who he was having an affair with? Better yet, why would Persico risk doing his own dirty work? Why not send some of his goons to do it?”