Suspects

by William Caunitz

  Maggie Higgins was a lesbian. Three years ago she had come out of the closet in order to testify before the City Council on the gay-rights bill. The bill was shelved for the ninth time and Higgins was flopped from the prestigious Bond and Forgery Squad to Greenpoint. The Nine-three Detective Squad had become a dumping ground for fallen angels.

  Whatever reservations Scanlon had had about Higgins soon disappeared. She had turned out to be one of his best detectives when there was work to be done, which wasn’t often. The other members of the Squad liked her too. Cops like an underdog. Especially one who has guts. It had taken guts to do what she had done, to come out. But the way the other members of the Squad felt about her did not prevent them from exercising their male egos at her expense. A cop’s machismo knows no bounds.

  It was a little after twelve forty-five in the afternoon when Scanlon strolled from his office and dragged a chair over to where Higgins sat. Lowering himself, he glanced over at Lew Brodie, who was at the next desk with his feet up, reading an old issue of Soldier of Fortune magazine. “I’m going on patrol, Maggie,” Scanlon said, leaning forward, reading the page in the typewriter. In the lexicon of the Job, “going on patrol” meant that the Whip of the Nine-three Squad was off to his favorite watering hole, Monte’s.

  Higgins looked up at him and smiled. “I’ve got the number, Lou,” she said, addressing him with the diminutive of “lieutenant” that was regularly used in the Job.

  It had been Maggie Higgins’s hurried telephone calls that had sent Tony Scanlon running from Monte’s to the double-parked department auto in front, and had sent Hector Colon fleeing from his girlfriend’s apartment, and had caused Howard Christopher to rush from the Y without showering.

  When Scanlon arrived at the crime scene he found Driggs Avenue clogged with police cars, many with their turret lights still whirling and splashing red and white light on the faces of bystanders. The wail of sirens continued to fill the air. Units were responding from adjoining precincts. 10-13, Assist Patrolman; Report of an Officer Shot.

  A sergeant stood by the open door of his radio car shouting into the radio, “Call it off! No further. No further.”

  Two lengths of cord had been hastily stretched from the entrance of Yetta Zimmerman’s candy store to the handles of two radio cars. Police officers stood behind the barrier holding back gawkers. The forensics station wagon was parked on the sidewalk. Technicians were sliding out black valises, preparing for their grim but essential tasks.

  Traffic for a five-block radius around the candy store was at a standstill. Scanlon had to double-park three blocks away and run the rest of the way. When he arrived at the scene, he straddled the cord barrier with his right leg, pushed the rope down with his hand, hefted the artificial leg over, and ran into the candy store.

  Maggie Higgins rushed over to meet him. Her face was drawn and shocked. “It’s Joe Gallagher,” she shouted, as though unable to believe her own words.

  Scanlon was stunned. Not Joe Gallagher! Not the Joe Gallagher who was the past president of the Holy Name Society. Not the Joe Gallagher who was the chairman of the Emerald Society. Not the same Joe Gallagher who acted as the unofficial master of ceremonies at department promotion and retirement rackets. Not Lt. Joseph P. Gallagher, NYPD. Not that Joe Gallagher. That one was immortal; everyone in the Job knew that.

  He brushed past her and rushed into the store, recoiling from the carnage. Shards of bone and gray globs of brain were splattered about. An eye was attached to a bloody optic nerve. Chunks of body parts plastered the walls and the tin ceiling. A severed arm lay in a pile of whipped cream. Fragments of cake and raspberry filling had settled into the gore.

  Yetta Zimmerman’s body was sprawled over the top of the soda fountain, her arms stretched unnaturally over her head. In the rear of the store, detectives had corralled the three boys who had been playing the video games. The detectives were trying to calm them down and get statements.

  Scanlon bent down next to the corpse on the floor. The face was gone. The body was the same size as Joe Gallagher; it had the same strong frame. He looked around the scene. Higgins came over to him and bent and began to search the body. Scanlon looked at her and said, “Whaddawe got?”—automatically lapsing into the dialect of the Job.

  She looked up from her grisly task. “Two DOA by shotgun.” She passed him the leather shield case she had just removed from the body. He snapped it open. Stared at the photograph on the laminated identification card. That familiar face. That familiar grin. The man standing before the red backdrop wore a blue uniform shirt and a black tie. His commanding presence could be felt even in the photograph. Scanlon visualized him walking into the monthly LBA meeting. Tall, proud, his brother lieutenants rushing to shake his hand.

  Lt. Joseph P. Gallagher, NYPD … Postman, Return Postage Guaranteed.

  Higgins raised the dead man’s shirt to reveal a .38 Colt Cobra secured in an in-trouser holster. “He never had a chance to get it out,” she said.

  “What do we have on the woman?” Scanlon asked Higgins, looking over at the corpse.

  “Yetta Zimmerman, age sixty-three, according to neighbors. Been operating this store for about twenty-five years.”

  “Physical evidence?”

  “Three shell casings were found near the entrance. We also found a shopping bag that we think was used to conceal the shotgun,” Higgins said.

  Scanlon looked to the store’s entrance and saw the evidence technician putting a shopping bag into a plastic evidence sheath. Standing a few feet away from the technician was a familiar face from the Ballistics Squad, Frank Abruzzi.

  Scanlon went over to the ballistics detective, who was wearing plastic gloves and examining the base of a shotgun shell through a magnifying glass.

  “Hello, Frank, whaddaya got for me?” Scanlon said.

  Abruzzi looked up from the glass. “Howya doin’, Lou? Long time no see. For starters, your perp used an automatic shotgun and sixteen-gauge shells.” He held the glass over the base of the shell. “Take a look.”

  Scanlon bent and looked through the round glass.

  “That mark that you see at three o’clock is from the firing pin. And the one at one o’clock is from the ejector. The mark at twelve o’clock is from the extractor.”

  “Which all means?” Scanlon said, looking up from the glass.

  “I can’t be positive,” Abruzzi said, “but there is a good shot that your perp used a Browning automatic, Sweet Sixteen model. The Sweet Sixteen makes an unusual configuration like that. In most shotguns the firing-pin mark is closer to the center, and the extractor and the ejector marks are more dispersed.”

  “Could it have been concealed in a shopping bag?”

  “Yes. The Sweet Sixteen breaks down. You turn a screw and push the barrel down. It takes seconds to break the weapon down.”

  Yetta Zimmerman’s housecoat was shredded; her right breast was gone, in its place a scarlet patchwork of puffy black holes. “What notifications have been made?” Scanlon asked Higgins, who was standing a few feet away.

  “Command and Control and the borough have both been notified,” she said, moving up to him and handing him the wallet she had just finished tugging from Gallagher’s back pocket. “Temporary headquarters has been established across the street, in the rectory.”

  Scanlon rummaged through the compartments in the wallet. The driver’s license and the car registration were tucked in behind a wedding picture. Scanlon moved to the door and stood in the entrance. The crowd had grown. Reporters shouted questions at him from behind the rope barrier. Ignoring their racket, he carefully examined the streets for Gallagher’s car. A homicide victim’s car was important physical evidence. People keep things in their cars, important things, telling things. He spied a car fitting the description on Gallagher’s registration parked on Pope John Paul II Square.

  Stepping into the street, Scanlon took a sergeant by the arm and led him aside. He described the car and its location. “If the plate che
cks out, call department tow and have it brought into the house. Store it in the garage and have it safeguarded for prints,” Scanlon told the sergeant.

  Lew Brodie was a tough-minded detective with a poorly repaired harelip, broad shoulders, hooded eyes, and a drinking problem. He had been flopped out of the Manhattan North Homicide Task Force eighteen months ago because of what the department perceived to be his persistent and unnecessary use of force on minority citizens. Lew Brodie had been classified as Violent Prone. The department shrink had recommended a less demanding assignment. There were no blacks living in Greenpoint. And Lew Brodie had quite a different idea on the whole subject: he was a good cop who was conducting his own urban renewal program.

  Brodie came up to Scanlon, looking down at his steno pad. “According to the three kids, Gallagher walked in and Zimmerman rushed out from behind the counter to greet him. Shortly thereafter the perp appeared in the doorway and shouted, ‘Hey you,’ and then proceeds to produce a shotgun from inside the shopping bag and starts blasting. The kids take a dive onto the floor. Job done, perp flees. We came up with two housewives who were on their merry way to the A&P and were passing the candy store as the perp ran from the store to a waiting blue van. License number eight eight Henry Victor Robert.”

  “Description of shooter,” Scanlon demanded.

  Brodie read: “Male. White, between five-five and five-nine. Wearing old black pants with paint stains on both legs, a white pullover under an army fatigue jacket. He had long gray hair, a wrinkled face, and a scruffy beard.” He checked his notes. “That’s it, so far.”

  “Age?” Scanlon asked.

  Brodie shrugged. “There we got a problem. None of the witnesses can agree on this guy’s age. The three boys say he was old, maybe in his sixties. One of the women says in his forties, and the other late thirties.”

  Detective Hector Colon came up to Scanlon and Brodie, who were standing over Gallagher’s body, and without prelude read from his steno pad. “Lieutenant Gallagher had twenty-two years in the Job. Married with two kids. Lived in Greenpoint, 32 Anthony Street. He was assigned to the Seventeenth Narcotics District. He ran one of the buy-and-bust operations and worked out of the One-fourteen. He worked a ten hundred to eighteen hundred yesterday and swung out. His next scheduled tour was Saturday, an eighteen hundred to oh two hundred.” Colon lowered his pad. “The PC and the borough commander have been both notified. The CO Labor Policy and the Catholic chaplain are on their way to notify Gallagher’s wife.”

  Scanlon sighed. “And the Zimmerman family?”

  “She was widowed with two grown kids,” Colon said. “The son, a doctor, lives on East Seventy-ninth Street in the big city. The Nineteenth is going to make the notification.”

  Scanlon asked Brodie if they had come up with anything on the van.

  “The driver was a male, white,” Brodie said. “We ran the plate through NCIC and it came back not stolen. Then we checked for the registered owner and discovered that the owner ain’t on file. We figure that it’s probably a new registration. It takes Motor Vehicles about ninety days to get the new ones into the system. Biafra Baby is across the street in temporary headquarters calling Motor Vehicles in Albany on the department tieline. They should be able to tell us something.”

  Scanlon took out a De Nobili and lit it, carefully inserting the dead match between the back cover and the bottom file of matches and putting the matchbook back into his pocket. He shifted the cigar to the other side of his mouth. “Anything on the murder weapon?”

  “Among the missing,” Higgins said, working the wedding band off Yetta Zimmerman’s lifeless finger.

  Sucking on the cigar, Scanlon surveyed the crime scene. First impressions were important; some overlooked point could later prove vital. Too many bad guys walked because some detective failed to do what he was trained to do during the preliminary investigation. He recalled the DOA that had been discovered last month on Crown Street in the Seven-one. The radio car team first on the scene reported back that the DOA appeared natural. The detective who responded to the scene found nothing suspicious. The ME in his not unusually casual fashion endorsed natural causes. The undertaker had the gall to report that he had discovered a tiny hole behind the left ear that later proved to have been made by a .22 short. There were a lot of red faces and a lot of excuses in Brooklyn North over that one. It pissed Scanlon off when a case went bye-bye because of police ineptitude. So he moved all around the crime scene, satisfying himself that what was supposed to be done was done.

  He examined the glass fractures that the stray shotgun pellets had made in the doors of the display cabinet. The radial and concentric fractures formed cobwebs with holes the shape of volcano craters. Looking inside the opened door he noticed numerous flakes of glass in the guiding tracks. Some of the shot had embedded itself in the wall of the cabinet. He motioned to one of the forensics technicians. Moving out from behind the soda fountain, Scanlon went up to Hector Colon and told him that he was going across the street to the rectory.

  According to the Patrol Guide, a temporary headquarters will be used to coordinate police resources at the scene of an emergency when the circumstances of the occurrence indicate that the police operation will continue for a period of time and when direct telephone communications and record keeping will improve efficiency. The green police standard and lantern were on station outside the rectory to indicate to members of the force that temporary headquarters was located inside that building. Scanlon took the rectory steps two at a time.

  The NYPD had commandeered the waiting room to the left of the large foyer. The walls were done in mahogany paneling, and there was a heavy oak desk with ornate scrollwork edging its borders. A large crucifix hung on the wall behind the desk, and long lace curtains covered all the windows. Two elderly priests were sitting on a carved wooden bench watching with muted amazement as their serene residence was converted into a message center for a murder investigation. A sergeant with dirty-blond hair sat behind the desk manning the Headquarters Log, entering a chronological record of personnel and equipment at the scene, listing specific assignments.

  Linemen from the Communications Division were busy installing additional lines, the numbers of which had already been telephoned to Command and Control, Patrol Borough Brooklyn North, and the Nine-three Desk.

  Scanlon signed himself present in the Log. He went over the list of assignments with the sergeant. From the corner of his eye, he spotted Detective Simon Jones elbowing his way through the crowd. Scanlon shouted to Jones, “What’s with the van?”

  Simon Jones had a long thin frame and a tiny potbelly, and a head of untamed kinky hair that looked like a beehive undergoing constant electric-shock treatment. His long bony arms appeared to reach down to his knees. His skin was coal-black and he had a voice laced with a heavy Mississippi drawl. Ten years ago a detective in the Fifth Squad had commented that Jones looked like one of the starving Biafra babies. The nickname stuck.

  Jones came over to Scanlon. “Just got off the phone with the owner of the van,” he said, patting down his hair. “The man done told me that he bought the van one month ago off a lot off Ocean Parkway in Brooklyn. He parked it last night three blocks from his home and when he went to get it this afternoon, the mother was gone. He was on his way to his local precinct to report it when I telephoned. The owner’s name is Frank Lucas. He resides at 6890 South View Lane in Bath Beach.”

  Scanlon cursed under his breath; he had been hoping that the van had been stolen from someplace in Greenpoint. He had markers out in Greenpoint. He turned to the sergeant manning the Log and told him to telephone the precinct concerned in Bath Beach and have detectives dispatched to do an immediate canvass of the area where the van had been stolen. He picked up the receiver of one of the recently installed telephones and dialed the One-fourteen. He spoke briefly to the desk officer. He signed out in the Log, and he and Biafra Baby returned to the crime scene.

  Higgins met them just inside the entrance. “Thei
r property,” she said, holding the victims’ personal property in two separate evidence bags.

  Scanlon turned to Biafra Baby. “I want you to transport the witnesses into the house. Make sure they’re kept separated. I don’t want them talking to one another about what they saw, changing their minds.”

  Biafra Baby nodded and made his way to the rear of the candy store. A short time later he reappeared leading three frightened boys. They came in single file, the witnesses looking away from the bodies, their feet attempting to avoid stepping on pieces of the two bodies.

  Lew Brodie brought up the rear of the staggered column. Scanlon called to Brodie. “The witnesses agree—the perp yelled ‘Hey you’ and fired?”

  “That’s how it went down,” Brodie said over his shoulder.

  Parallel shafts of sunlight speared through the candy store’s open facade, reflecting on the dead woman’s matted hair and diffusing a shimmering hue of yellow through the pools of blood.

  Higgins looked down at Gallagher’s body. “Then it wasn’t a robbery.”

  Scanlon’s voice took on an edge. “It was a hit, Maggie. But on which one?”

  3

  Tony Scanlon stood back and watched the sergeant slip the steel jaws around the shackle of the black-faced combination lock. The sergeant’s intense face was a sunburst of broken blood vessels. A cigarette that was one quarter gray ash dangled between his thin lips. Gripping the handles, he pressed the arms of the bolt cutter together and the lock fell apart.

  Scanlon had wanted to be present when Gallagher’s locker was broken into. A cop’s locker was a secret place; it was a place to hide things. He had told Higgins where he was going and why, and then had left the crime scene. He knew that he wouldn’t be missed for a while, not with all the commotion connected with a cop killing.

  The drive from Greenpoint to the One-fourteen in Astoria, Queens, had taken Scanlon twenty minutes. The precinct was located on Astoria Boulevard, directly across from the sunken highway that leads onto the Triboro Bridge.