“Shame,” I said. “Up until that point Frost was really growing on me.”
It was the first time I’d seen her smile. She looked different. The hard aspect left every part of her. She suddenly became softer, and more dangerous. I’d seen that kind of smile before. It was the kind of smile that could set your house on fire.
“What now, Eddie? We can’t roll on these guys. It’s not worth it,” said Jack.
Both of them looked at me. I stared at the files on the table. Jack was right. Putting our lives on the line was stupid. We were lawyers. We didn’t owe Maria Hernandez our lives—just our professionalism.
I nodded at Jack. “I don’t care what you and McAllister want to do, but I’m not settling this case.”
“What? Are you stupid?” said Jack.
“I probably am stupid. But I’m not walking away. And I’m not taking the two and a half grand.”
“You’re not stupid. You’re just plain crazy. You’re really going to run this case in court after the warning we just had? After you saw two men shot in front of you?” said Jack.
“It’s not just about Maria and Chilli anymore. Think about the people Marzone has allowed to be killed and the people he’s put away. Innocent people. How many lives have been ruined? No, this has to stop. Tomorrow we take these bastards down.”
Chapter Seventeen
Two pots of coffee, a few more beers, and a few hours later, I had been through all of the files and data McAllister brought to the table. There was some juicy stuff in there—statistics that I could make work for Maria.
The files on the Morgue Squad made grim reading. Slab Marzone was forty-nine years old, a former linebacker for the Sentinels, and had a psychological profile that would frighten Hannibal Lecter. He was going through his second divorce, and thankfully he hadn’t yet had any children with either of the ex-Mrs. Marzones. Officially he’d killed three people in the line of duty. Two in one incident—a robbery in a liquor store. After each shooting he’d been cleared by IAB, but the force psychiatrist recommended that Marzone should not return to active duty. She said there were unresolved anger issues and that Marzone showed a lack of basic human empathy. So the commissioner’s office paid for a second opinion after the union kicked up a stink, and Marzone got a clean bill of health both times from a so-called independent head shrinker handpicked by the union. That’s the thing about police unions. They protect their own—even the bad ones. Although in this case, I thought the union might’ve changed its mind if they’d known what Marzone was really up to. But their doctor had come through for Marzone, anyway. I got the impression the union’s doctor of choice would tell you Charles Manson was a pussycat if you paid him enough.
His pal Roark was another guy who didn’t score too highly on the head exam. One phrase stood out in his most recent psyche report—“borderline sociopath.” Not the kind of guy you want on the street to protect and serve. Again, union pressure and a second opinion and Roark was good to go.
There were a half dozen more files on cops who were suspected of involvement in the squad. They weren’t yet players in this game. I read the files and studied their pictures, just in case one of them tried to make good on their threats. Two of them looked like the cops who’d tried to grab me coming off the ferry.
The last file was the most interesting to me. It was a collection of the evidence that McAllister had presented to Frost in relation to the connection between a contract killer and the Morgue Squad. Pictures of the original crime scenes, some images from security cameras. I spread them out on the table.
“See if you can spot the connection. Keep in mind I had a couple dozen photographs per crime scene,” said McAllister.
In front of me there were only twelve murder scene photos. One picture from each scene. In some photos the body wasn’t even in the shot. They were each taken from a distance, showing the location of the crime: a stairwell, a men’s room, a street corner, an alleyway. In some shots you could see crime scene techs, or the ME, or cops, but in a lot of them there were no personnel at all.
I returned to the stairwell photo. A dark stain on the landing but no body. One of the lights on the wall was out. But below the unlit fluorescent tube, I saw something. A mark, beside a heavy piece of graffiti. I quickly scanned the rest of the photos. It was there, in all of them.
A small white cross, drawn in chalk on the wall. I thought about the cross Roark had drawn on my chest. The hairs on my hands stood up, and I felt a cold, sick feeling in my stomach.
“The crosses,” I said.
Her eyes were focused on the street below as she spoke.
“Some of these murders were almost ten years apart, and nobody thought to look at the marks on the wall. Sure, the detectives checked for gang tags, but nobody thought to look at the chalk marking. Or maybe they did and just ignored it. That was my thought. So I checked the files and found the same small group of detectives came up again and again as leads on these murders. Marzone, or cops with strong connections to him, worked these cases. This was the link,” said McAllister.
“Frost hinted to me that he had something else hidden up his sleeve. That he knew exactly what happened to Chilli,” I said.
“Did he tell you this, or are you reading between the lines? asked McAllister, swinging away from the window and giving me her full attention.
“He told me. Didn’t tell me what it might be, but it was more than a hint. He had something.”
“If he did, he never mentioned it to me.”
“Where did he keep his files?”
“In the filing cabinets in his office. Actually, in the locked filing cabinets in his office.”
“You managed to pick your way into my Ford,” I said.
“Yeah, but, no offense, the lock on the filing cabinet is a little trickier than the lock on the trunk of your car.”
“Thanks. It’s an old car. So you think you can get it?”
“I don’t know,” she said. “I’ll think about it.”
Two hours of sleep. I was used to it. My body somehow adjusted to sleep deprivation after a while. This happened just after Amy was born. I was working the night courts, coming home at five a.m. and looking after Amy while Christine got some shut-eye. As much as I loved my daughter, goddamn it, she didn’t sleep until she was two years old. I could handle it for about eight days—going on only an hour of sleep each night on a bench outside of a court, or in an office on the top floor of the courthouse. But at the end of those eight days, I would begin to hallucinate. I’d even fallen asleep in the car once. Trust me, you only do it once. Waking up in a lane of oncoming traffic, doing thirty miles an hour, that shit’ll wake you up fast. Thankfully, I didn’t have an accident. I’d managed to swerve back onto my own side of the road just in time.
Those two years were hell, but now I was reaping the benefits. A couple of hours on Jack’s couch felt like a night in a Park Avenue hotel.
I thought over my late-night call with Vinnie.
“We want to settle. But we’re not taking two and a half. You’ve got to do better,” I said.
“Why should I? My client tells me you’re running scared, Eddie.”
I thought about throwing the phone into the wall, then driving over to Vinnie’s and putting his head through a window. I didn’t, of course. Playing smart is better than playing hard.
“Fifty,” I said.
“Good night, Eddie. Hope you can manage some sleep before tomorrow.”
“Wait. Hold on,” I said. I wanted Vinnie to think he had the power here.
“What about ten?” I said.
“Ten is too much. The offer is two and a half grand.”
“So meet me in the middle. Five.”
Silence on the other end. I could almost hear Vinnie’s little vindictive brain working overtime. Ultimately, he had to protect his client and bury this case. Now that he had the upper hand and knew the case would go away, he had to think about protection for Marzone. If Marzone paid money to a victim
, he could be seen to be admitting some wrongdoing. That could be enough to get him kicked off the force. There was an alternative, but most reputable lawyers would never even think of it.
At that moment, I was kinda glad that Vinnie was a bad guy.
“I’ll pay five. But you gotta dump,” said Vinnie.
Perfect. A dump is where a case is settled out of court, but the settlement itself is secret. So we would go into court, tell the judge we wanted to withdraw the lawsuit. The legal proceedings get struck out, and the defendants get a verdict in their favor. The fact that they handed over a bunch of money under a table to get their verdict is kept a closely guarded secret. There’s not even a confidentiality agreement—it’s all clandestine and illegal. All I had to do was tease him now, convince him by getting him to convince me.
“That’s not going to wash with my client. When I first saw Maria, she told me she didn’t want money; she wanted justice for Chilli. We need the judge to record the settlement, make it public, so that Maria knows she did right by her man, that she cleared his name.”
“So your widow’s got principles, great. They cost money. And they come with a big risk. What if she fell down the court steps one day? Woman in her condition could fall anytime and that could be a disaster for the baby . . .”
“Are you threatening her now?”
“Of course not. I haven’t threatened anybody. You dump the case in the morning, and we’ll settle up later.”
“No. Money first. Cash, and you can’t bring it by the office. I’ve had half a dozen reporters torturing me all week. They’ll be camped outside, so we need to do this someplace else.”
“Let’s say I could get the five, where and when?”
“We got a guy in Little Hong Kong. He’s an old friend who does our process serving all over Chinatown. You’ll find him eating breakfast at Harry Lam’s Restaurant on Orchard Street. He goes in there six a.m. and he’s out of there at six thirty. Name’s Jiang.”
“And how will I know who he is?”
“He’ll be the guy with the big plate of egg rolls, a cup of coffee, and the Bangkok Times. You can’t miss him.”
“I’ll be there,” said Vinnie.
I disconnected the call.
If we were going to war with the Morgue Squad, I needed a way to control their lawyer. In the last few years Vinnie had kept his nose clean, at least in public. No more wining and dining jurors. Those days were behind him, but he still carried the rep.
That bad reputation gave me a way in. A way to place Vinnie in the palm of my hand.
Chapter Eighteen
At five thirty a.m., I sat in a cold, cherry-red Chevy. McAllister’s car. It was just the two of us, and we hadn’t said a word to each other for ten minutes. The detached Colonial home some three hundred yards ahead of us remained silent, too. Vinnie had not left his house, and his car sat in the driveway. The sun broke over the houses in this little patch of suburban New Jersey. Dogs barked their good mornings at the lawn sprinklers and the houses began to wake. I blew into my hands to warm them. We couldn’t risk turning over the engine and starting up the heater. Too much noise.
“You got a family?” I said.
“My father’s in Florida. That’s it,” she said, without looking at me, killing the conversation.
Radio was turned off—to save the car battery. No coffee either. McAllister had slept in Jack’s spare pullout bed. While I’d worked at the kitchen table, I’d heard both of them snoring softly. I didn’t know how either of them could sleep—eventually I’d nodded off on the couch, but not for long.
A yawn escaped from me, and McAllister leaned over from the driver’s seat of her Chevy and said, “Cover your mouth; you’re misting the windows.”
“Sorry,” I said.
We let the silence back in.
I hit the button to draw down my window.
“Roll it back up,” said McAllister.
“I need some air,” I said.
She used the master control on her door console to shut my window.
“You put that window down again and I’ll kick you out of this car,” said McAllister.
“Relax, it’s just a window,” I said.
Her jaw was set firm and she looked at me hard. Then, as quickly as the anger had arrived, it passed.
“Sorry,” she said. “An open car window is the reason I’m sitting here.”
I nodded, not really understanding. I could tell she wanted to explain, but I knew not to ask, just to wait and listen.
“When I was a rookie out on my first patrol, my supervisor told me that you always got to be on your guard. I did my time, and I was two days from being signed off as a trainee when we stopped our patrol car at the newsstand on Ninety-Eighth Street. I got out to buy a paper and some Cokes. It was one of those summer days that’s hot enough to melt the blacktop. My supervisor rolled down her window and stuck her arm out of the car for some air. A guy rolled up beside her on a motorcycle, stuck a gun in the car, and shot her in the head. She was a fifteen-year street cop; knew all the angles and taught me more about the job than anyone else. You know what I did? I froze. Didn’t even manage to pull my gun. That’s when I started to work toward a detective shield. I wanted to work homicides—hit men in particular.
“Since I’ve been in Internal Affairs, I can see the attraction to that kind of work, too. Bad cops make everyone stink. Especially those who spent every working day of their lives helping people before they caught a slug from a .45. When a cop gets rough with a suspect, it makes people scared of the police. You can’t blame them. You ask me, Internal Affairs is the most important division in the whole department. We’ve got to keep our own honest and clean. For the real cops. For the cops who give everything to this city.”
“I think you’re right,” I said. “You could say the same thing about lawyers. Most of us do our job and try to help our clients. We don’t want the guilty ones going free because we beat some part of the system, or found a loophole or a breach of procedure that gets some asshole off of a murder or rape. Most lawyers couldn’t do that, don’t want to do that—me included. I want to be able to go home and sleep at night. The likes of Vinnie Federof? He thinks he’s there to get his client off a charge. That’s it. Even if the client told him he’s guilty and wants to take a plea, Vinnie wants to win. I’ve got a feeling that after today, Vinnie might turn over a new leaf.”
Movement. At last.
A small figure in a well-cut but ugly blue suit left the house. Vinnie carried a brown paper bag in his hand. He got into a silver Mercedes and started it up.
“We’re on,” said McAllister.
Vinnie reversed the car out of the drive and pulled away. Soon as he turned the corner of his street, McAllister lit up the engine and went after him. I called Jack.
“Hey, he’s on his way. Expect him in twenty minutes. You ready?”
“No. I’m thinking this isn’t going to work. We should just take the money,” said Jack.
“You getting scared?”
“Of course I’m scared, Eddie. I’d be an idiot if I wasn’t scared.”
“But you know this is the best way, right? This puts an end to it.”
A heavy sigh buzzed the mike on Jack’s cell phone.
“I can’t do this,” he said.
“You can. Listen to me. If you mess this up, we’re done. Do you hear me, Jack? You’ve got to play it exactly as I told you.”
“All right,” he said, and hung up.
“Problems?” said McAllister.
“Jack. He’s not cut out for this,” I said.
“Well, that’s the first sensible thing I’ve heard you say. Congratulations.”
Chapter Nineteen
We followed Vinnie into Manhattan’s Chinatown. At that time of the morning, the narrow streets were backed up with delivery trucks. Eventually, Vinnie gave up the drive, parked a block away, and walked to Orchard Street with the package. McAllister and I stayed in the car and looped around so
that we parked around fifty feet away from Harry Lam’s Restaurant. No sign of Jack, which meant that Vinnie was still inside.
“You think Jack can do this?” said McAllister.
“Maybe I should back him up,” I said.
“Couldn’t hurt,” she said.
I got out of the car and crossed the street. A Chinese laundry, also owned by Harry Lam, sat two doors down from the restaurant on the opposite side of the street. I went in and found Jack nursing a coffee in a Styrofoam cup while he watched out the window.
“I’m coming with you,” I said.
He nodded, patted my arm, and asked if I wanted coffee. I told him to wait, that we’d see Vinnie any second. Sure enough, within a minute Vinnie strode out of the restaurant minus the brown paper package. Jack followed me out of the Laundromat, and we crossed the street, intercepting Vinnie. He saw us and nodded, smiled.
“I already gave it to your guy. Congratulations.”
Jack and I looked at each other, then back at Vinnie.
“No, you didn’t,” I said.
“What? Sure I did. Guy eating egg rolls in Harry Lam’s. Yang or Jiang or whatever the hell his name is. He was expecting it. Took the package and thanked me.”
“You’re playing us, Vinnie,” said Jack.
“Come on, I’ll show you the guy,” he said.
“No need,” I said.
At that moment, an Asian guy in a black sports coat came out of Harry Lam’s, carrying the Bangkok Times under his arm. It was Jiang, our process server. He looked around and spotted us, came over.
“No package,” he said.
“This isn’t the guy,” said Vinnie.
“No shit,” said Jack.
Without another word, Vinnie ran back into Harry Lam’s. As soon as he disappeared into the restaurant, Jiang took out his phone and showed us the video of Vinnie giving the package to another Asian guy who was sitting in Harry’s eating egg rolls and reading the times.
“We got him. Harry Lam was cool with it. We go way back. He took the package and left the restaurant through the back before I got out of my seat. I’ll take my cut and hold on to the four grand for you guys. Harry said he’d leave the money in my office,” said Jiang.
The Cross: An Eddie Flynn Novella Page 7