Sinner's Ball

by Ira Berkowitz

Nothing ever changes.

  “Have you heard from Franny?”

  His face went cold.

  “She’s yesterday, so screw her. From here on in it’s just the two of us. Just like old times.”

  Just like old times!

  Something in my brother’s face sparked an unsettling thought.

  “You’ve told me everything?” I said.

  He smiled. “See you after lunch.”

  2

  “Why do I do this to myself?” Allie said.

  Café Buffo was a watering hole for folks in the ad business. Every year, on the third Friday in January, the restaurant honored the industry’s movers and shakers. Their caricatures went up on the walls, and their names were attached to menu items. Allie had yet to make the cut. This year was no different. The winner was busy taking his bows when I arrived.

  “No luck, huh?” I said, easing into a seat opposite her and DeeDee, who suddenly looked older to me. Maybe it was the lighting. Or maybe it was something new.

  DeeDee had always been kind of a tomboy, wearing whatever was handy. But today she wore freshly pressed jeans and a black tank top, and her long black hair was lustrous and neatly combed. Most disturbing, her eyes sported just a hint of mascara. Allie noticed my confusion and greeted it with a raised eyebrow and a things are changing and you better get used to it smile.

  Even in the depths of depression, Allie, the love of my life, looked terrific. Her honey-colored hair was pulled back in a ponytail. And under a furry vest she wore a T-shirt that announced WHAT MAKES YOU THINK I GIVE A DAMN?

  “Ignored again,” Allie said. “The winner, an unctuous little brain with a Brit agency, walked off with top honors for a campaign for fly-front adult diapers.”

  “Fills a need, I guess,” DeeDee said. “Who wants to see grown men with wet blotches all over the front of their pants?”

  “I think you’re missing the point, kiddo,” I said.

  “Out of the mouths of babes,” Allie said. “It’s target marketing at its best. Zipper. Button. And Velcro. An incontinent’s dream.” She shook her head. “To top it all off, he’s maybe thirteen, and doesn’t even shave.”

  “Why do you put yourself through this?” I said.

  She looked over at the winner posing with his caricature as cameras flashed.

  “Look at him. Besides being totally bereft of talent, there’s no sign he’s hit puberty yet! I lost to a brainless fly-front-adult-diaper schlockmeister child.”

  “Why do you care what these imbeciles think?” DeeDee said. “Besides, he looks retarded.”

  She did have a mouth on her.

  “Good question. Maybe, it’s a Rift Valley–size masochistic streak. Or maybe, it’s a yearning for the occasional pat on the back for writing ads that make the cash register ring. Do you know what it’s like to write copy and then have it turned into a rag by clients, account schmucks, researchers, lawyers, and other assorted experts who turn to Hallmark for help in saying happy birthday?”

  She plucked a pencil-thin breadstick from the breadbasket and inserted the tip between her teeth. For Allie this was lunch.

  “It must suck,” DeeDee said.

  “You think? Imagine wildebeest at a lion buffet.” Allie threw up her hands. “What’s the use?” She shook her head and tried for a smile. “How’s your day going, Steeg? Battling the forces of evil and keeping the world safe from itself?”

  This wasn’t going to be pretty. My brother wasn’t exactly on Allie’s fave list.

  “In a manner of speaking. Dave has a … situation, and needs my help.”

  Carefully placing the breadstick with the barely nibbled tip on her plate, she took the news without expression. “You’re going to work for your brother,” she said.

  After a too-long pause punctuated by a really deep sigh, she continued. “Why?”

  “Hate the sin, love the sinner,” I said, using one of the many stock lines I had developed over the years to deflect that specific question.

  “That’s too pat by half, Steeg. Look, because he’s your brother I tolerate him. But he has this little problem that I find a tad vexing.”

  “And that is?”

  “His vocation is killing people.”

  “No one’s perfect,” DeeDee said, rising to my brother’s defense. “Besides, he’s always been nice to me.”

  I could have kissed her! For DeeDee it was all about family—and Dave was family.

  “Wonderful! Look, it’d be bad enough if he just killed his own kind. But the bomb that was meant for Dave nearly cost Steeg his life.” She turned to me. “So I ask again, why?”

  Not a bad point. I was outside of Feeney’s when the explosion ripped it apart.

  “Two reasons.”

  I told her about the fire.

  “I have a really serious problem when justice is asymmetrical.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “When the DA decides to pin someone to his personal butterfly collection board—especially an easy target like my brother—things like guilt or innocence go out the window.”

  “Maybe the DA is balancing the scales for the other crimes your brother’s gotten away with.”

  “Not supposed to work that way. Besides, if it were Dave’s handiwork, there wouldn’t be any bodies to find.”

  “Good point, Steeg,” DeeDee said.

  “Dear God!” Allie said, shaking her head.

  “You wanted honesty.”

  “And the other reason?”

  “You’re an only child, right?”

  “Where’s this going?

  “Call it the pull of blood. I’m all he has.”

  “You’ve got to give him that,” DeeDee said.

  “I would if this were a debate, DeeDee, but it’s not. It’s that little thing we call life.” She turned back to me. “That’s very noble, Steeg.”

  “Not really. Sometimes the law is an axe poised over the wrong bare neck.”

  “And that’s where you come in.”

  “Pretty much.”

  Allie thought about that for a few moments, trying hard, I guess, to understand what life with me really meant.

  “All right,” she said. “For now. But there’s one thing you have to promise.”

  With Allie, you were never quite home free.

  “Name it.”

  She reached over and ran a fingertip across my cheek.

  “Be careful,” she said.

  Once again, all was well with the world.

  “I can’t believe that warehouse burned down,” DeeDee said.

  “Things happen,” I said.

  “I was there right after it was closed. Nick took Justin and me there a few months ago. Said he was getting rid of stuff and told us we could have anything we wanted.” She fingered the hem of her tank top. “Where do you think I got this?”

  A tiny little paternal alarm bell went off.

  “Who’s Justin?”

  DeeDee’s cheeks reddened just a bit.

  “Justin Hapner,” she said, in a way that made his name glow like neon. “He goes to Devereaux Academy with me. He’s a senior.”

  Devereaux was the city’s premier private school and had had the good judgment to give DeeDee a full scholarship.

  “Where does he live?”

  “Brooklyn. Bensonhurst.”

  With that address, I figured Justin for a scholarship kid too.

  “How come you never mentioned him?”

  “Enough with the questions.”

  “I like to know about your friends.”

  She glanced out the window, and jumped up from the table.

  “I’ve gotta run.”

  “Where’re you going?” I said. “You haven’t even eaten.”

  “Justin’s outside,” she said, pointing to a gangly kid in a hoodie pacing out in the street. “We’re going to a concert at the South Street Seaport.”

  She was out the door in a flash.

  I turned to Allie.

  “What wa
s that all about? I figured we’d spend the day together.”

  She smiled. “It appears your little girl has grown up.”

  3

  On my way back to Feeney’s, Benny Kim flagged me down.

  Benny was the latest incarnation of the folks who made Hell’s Kitchen vibrate like a Charlie Parker saxophone riff. People of dark melodies whose harmonics were all fluid and harsh. Men who’d left the old country behind and bowed to no one.

  Now the Irish and Germans who’d built the railroad, worked the docks, run the rackets, and operated rotgut bars and whorehouses on every corner were pretty much gone.

  Except for throwbacks like my brother.

  The new kids on the block were Koreans like Benny, and Guineans, Jamaicans, Indians, Somalis, and a sprinkle of yuppies to leaven the mix. All trying to make it. And their music was as dark and rough-edged as that of the hardscrabble people they’d replaced.

  But Benny Kim was one of a kind.

  In a city full of wannabes, he was a true artist. And his greengrocery was his canvas. Fruits and vegetables and flowers in all their glorious hues were nothing more than paints on his palette. A daub of kiwis here, a tumble of Yukon golds there, a splash of blood oranges fronting rolling mounds of Granny Smiths.

  A vibrating work of karmic balance.

  But Benny was also a realist, and he never let art get in the way of commerce. Most of his time was spent stripping week-old roses of their outer petals and peddling them as new.

  I noticed that a fresh helping of scaffolding decorated the building adjoining his. Attached to the woodwork was a sign that read FRANCO DEMOLITION. The real estate barons were interring another dead soldier in Hell’s Kitchen’s graveyard, and were well on their way to turning the city into a Hollywood set. A friend of mine, guy named Danny Reno, grew up in that building. He came to a bad end too. The thought didn’t put me in a cheery frame of mind.

  “What’s up, Benny?” I said.

  “You cops ain’t worth a shit!”

  “And a top o’ the morning to you, my man. Some L.L. Beaner drop a kiwi in the radish bin again?”

  He put down a fading bunch of white roses with cerise centers and pink edging on their petals. “My new Beemer, Steeg. Gone. You know how much endive I gotta sell to buy a Beemer?”

  “A bushel and a bunch of pecks, I suspect.”

  “You make jokes and my insurance rates are circling Mars. Patel? Runs the electronics store? Him too. Check-cashing guy down the street? Him too. The dry cleaner? They stole his Escalade. What do you think of that?”

  “Nice cars. I’m definitely in the wrong business. What do the friendly folks at the neighborhood precinct say?”

  “Too bad, Benny. Doing everything we can, Benny. Maybe we find your car, maybe not. Call your insurance company.” He thumped his chest. “Fucking cocksuckers!”

  “Why’re you telling me this?”

  “Who else am I going to tell? No one else wants to listen anymore. From now on, I’m gonna be the eyes and ears of this fucking neighborhood.”

  “Maybe you should think about parking in a garage.”

  “Where do you think the bastards took it from?”

  I was out of suggestions.

  4

  The Closed sign was still up at Feeney’s.

  Nick met me at the door.

  “DeeDee said you took her and her friend to Dave’s warehouse,” I said.

  He seemed annoyed by my question.

  “Is there a problem?”

  I was annoyed by his answer.

  “It’s counterfeit. Ergo, illegal. And I don’t want her around it.”

  “The stuff was gonna wind up in the garbage anyway.”

  “She needs something, I’ll buy it. Understood?”

  “You live in a sewer, you’re gonna get dirty. Can’t protect her forever, Steeg.”

  “Sure I can. Now tell me about her friend.”

  “Nothing to tell.”

  “Did you talk to him?”

  “Are you kidding? When my kids hit their teens, I stopped talking to them.”

  “They must have appreciated it,” I said.

  He jutted his chin toward the back. “Dave’s waiting.”

  My brother and Anthony sat across from a heavyset, cherubic guy. He appeared to be doing all the talking, punctuating each sentence with a twitch of his brush mustache.

  I walked up to them.

  Dave nodded at the cherub. “Jake, this is Sal Lomascio. We go way back.”

  We shook hands.

  Sal pulled his briefcase off the seat and set it on the table. I squeezed in next to him.

  “Let’s take it from the top,” I said. “Tell me why it was arson and not some bonehead with a cigarette, or a short in the wiring?”

  Anthony looked at me as if I were the dumbest guy in the room. “It’s not that simple,” he said.

  Dave beat me to it.

  “Shut the fuck up, Anthony,” he said.

  My nephew’s eyes wobbled for an instant. Then they fixed on his father with a tightness I had never seen before. Anthony had gone from being the favored son to being a minion. And he wasn’t handling it well.

  Welcome to your new life, kid, I thought.

  “It was arson,” Sal said. “No doubt about it.”

  “And you know that, how?”

  “It’s my job. Dave tells me you were a cop, so you know it ain’t like in the movies. You know, where the handsome lead detective spots this mook standing on the fringe of the crowd with his eyes rolling around in his head like he’s about to come. Then he grabs the freak and hammers him until he confesses.”

  “I love movies like that. Always made me feel good about my career choice.”

  “But in my world it’s all about forensics.”

  “So you found an accelerant.”

  His mustache twitched. “No. But lots of circumstantial stuff pointing that way. Goes a long way to convincing a jury. And it starts with the real estate market.”

  “Hell of a circumstance.”

  “You bet your ass it is. Ever since the subprime mortgage bubble blew all to shit, real estate prices dropped off the cliff. Properties like Dave’s that were on the market at gonzo inflated values suddenly slid twenty, thirty percent or more, and went begging even at the discount. So, what’s an owner to do?”

  “If you can’t make a flood, make a fire,” I said.

  “Exactly. And Pytho has had a bunch of them lately. Sloppy, amateurish jobs.”

  “Tough to find good help these days.”

  “Tell me about it,” Sal agreed.

  “But that wasn’t what happened here.”

  “Nope. Whoever did this was no amateur. Two points of origin.” Sal’s eyes twinkled, and his mustache gave a self-congratulatory twitch. “That was the first clue. It took a lot of looking, and the answer was in the charring.”

  “And that revealed?”

  “The doer bored holes in the lath-and-plaster walls, stuffed them with newspapers, and lit it up.”

  “Burns low and slow,” I said.

  “Right. You had a classic fire tetrahedron—fuel, oxygen, heat, and what eventually became—as we say in the arson game—an ‘uninhibited chemical reaction.’”

  “I don’t get it. Lath is metal, and plaster doesn’t burn.”

  “That’s now. Unfortunately for the stiffs, the warehouse was built around 1900. Back then the lath was wood.”

  “Not a happy circumstance.”

  “I know. Like you said, everything was going on real slow inside the walls. But when the Red Devil hit the wooden flooring and made it to the crates full of all that Chinese import shit, it just had more to eat. Took a couple of hundred firefighters with their snot turned to icicles to put it out. It was one hairy job.”

  “Show me the photos,” I said.

  “Thought you’d never ask.”

  He dipped into his briefcase, came out with a file, and passed it to me.

  I opened it and pull
ed out four close-ups of the walls.

  “Kind of hard to read,” Sal said.

  Actually, they weren’t. Each photo showed a spot on the wall where the charring was more pronounced.

  “What about the sprinklers?” I said.

  “Piping was fucked. I figure before the party got started, the celebrants tried to rip out the pipes, sell them, and maybe do some Christmas shopping. With brass going for close to two bucks a pound, they could score enough shit to last a few days. But all the poor bastards managed to do was break the pipe that fed the sprinkler.”

  “You said there was a party. Why?”

  “An empty bottle of wine near one of the bodies. Ain’t exactly a leap of logic.”

  “Fascinating, but total circumstantial bullshit.” I looked over at my brother. “What’s going on here?”

  He turned to Sal.

  “Tell him,” he said.

  “We found six bodies in the basement,” Sal said. “In packing crates.”

  “I told you there was more,” my brother said.

  “That little fact somehow missed the newspapers,” I said.

  “The DA never released it to the press,” Sal said.

  “Let me get this straight,” I said. “There were two crime scenes. Both primary. One with the squatters on the main floor. And the other with six bodies in the basement?”

  “Fucked up, huh? But just when you think it can’t get better, it does.”

  “I can hardly wait.”

  He reached into his briefcase and pulled out three photos. “These are the shots of the people who bought it on the main floor.”

  Three bodies. Two men and a woman. Curled up in a fetal ball.

  Only two possibilities.

  A defensive posture they assumed when the flames reached them. Or they were already dead, and dehydration had contracted their muscles.

  “Has the medical examiner ruled whether they were alive when the fire took them?”

  “ME’s report hasn’t come in yet.”

  I made a mental note to call my ex-partner Luce Guidry to see if she could get her hands on it.

  Sal then passed me the photos of the guys in the basement. All I could make out were six packing crates that appeared to be totally burned.

  “Not much to see,” I said.

  “I know,” Sal said. “Gotta wait on the autopsy.”