Mystery: The Frank & Ernest Box Set - Mystery and Suspense Novels (The Frank & Ernest Files, Mystery, Thriller, Suspense Book 6)

by David Archer

  After a few unpleasant weeks living with his dad, Ernie managed to land a job. Remembering an old paisan’ from a few years back, he strode into Longo’s Appliance and Repair Shop.

  “Hi, could I speak to Salvatore Longo, please?” he asked the clerk behind the counter.

  “Sorry, the boss is out to lunch. Prob’ly be back around one thirty.” So, Sal had taken the business over from his dad. Even more interesting.

  As it turned out, Sal did have a job for his old friend. He started Ernie out as an installer’s assistant, with an eye to becoming a full-fledged technician as soon as he learned the ropes. Well, at least he could earn his own living again. He and Evelyn had to give up their nice place in The Northern Liberties, but he found an affordable efficiency in Kensington that wasn’t too bad.

  He visited Evelyn every chance he got, and whatever else came up in their conversation, a single thread ran through each and every one. No, he persisted, he was not going to abandon her. No, he would not give her a divorce. This is for your own good, he told her again and again, At some point, they are going to let you out of here. I can wait and so should you. I give you my word, he had assured her, I will stay true—not even a hand job. Come on, he would keep arguing, with good behavior, you could be out in six years.

  Evelyn, for her part, did not dare voice her strongest argument for their parting. She had wisely transferred $50,000 into her Philadelphia bank account—just enough, she figured, that the state would imagine they had successfully confiscated her ill-gotten gains. She had also had the foresight to tell Jonesy about that trick, just to reinforce the notion that the pair of them had stupidly put their freedom on the line for a pittance. She still had over half a million dollars in Switzerland, but she would have to live in Europe if she wanted to get at it. She did not want to put a choice like that on the man she loved. She would also need to go there to sell her art. Notoriety had suddenly turned her into a celebrated artist. She could now get top dollar for her work, but, again, not here in the land of her birth. The new law on the books that a criminal could not profit in any way from his (or her) crime had seen to that. Again and again, she would protest her love to Ernie, then beg him for a divorce. Again and again, Ernie would protest his love right back and refuse to give her one.

  A year passed with no change in the greater scheme of things, but stuff had happened under the surface. Frank and Sadie were expecting their second. Arlene had begun dating a nice fellow from South Philly. Her mother thoroughly approved. In addition to liking the young man, she figured her grandsons would have an Italian family name once again, just as she had before she married Hector Gomez, God rest his soul. Even if her long-deceased husband had still been around, she was sure he would approve of Bobby Rocco.

  On the other hand, things looked bleak for the Philadelphia Civic Center. A bigger, newer convention center was now inevitable. Arlene realized it may be a smart thing to get her résumé updated.

  Ernie, for his part, learned his new trade in a hurry. Three months into the job, Sal had promoted him to a full-fledged installation and service tech. When Longo’s Appliance’s made the decision to branch out into alarm systems, Ernie was the one who had learned about how they worked the quickest. It was not as fascinating as crime detection, Ernie was quick to realize, but it also involved a lot less back-stabbing and office politics. Unlike that prick bastard Maddox, Sal was good people.

  From time to time, Frank and Sadie and even Arlene would have him over to Sunday brunch. Frank especially was the heart and soul of compassion for his unfortunate friend, but then, he was desperate to keep from Ernie the part he had played in cracking the case. Sadie and Arlene took their cues from Frank. After a while, Arlene came to realize that the poor guy had really loved this woman and been blind to her criminal ways. They both admired his resolve to stand by her, no matter what.

  Mickey Firenze died because he had been overpowered, not because he had been stupid. Throughout his dealings with Paul Morris, which he had recorded, he kept note of everything that had gone down. When Mickey turned up dead, his brother John “Buddy” Firenze knew where to uncover the information.

  If Buddy Firenze was not quite as bright as his older brother (although he was pretty sharp in his own right), he was a good deal more brutal. After months and months of effort, he had finally managed to locate and capture Morris, who quickly gave in to the excruciating torture. Soon enough Buddy had the name, address and description of the guy Paul Morris worked for.

  Two weeks later a powerful Washington lobbyist was found stabbed to death in a dark alley off of K Street, the apparent victim of a mugging gone wrong. Except it had not been a mugging and it had gone exactly as the attacker had planned.

  Of course Buddy Firenze was not the only person connected to this sad affair who thirsted for revenge. In an elegant Society Hill townhouse a bitter old lady had been spending a great deal of her time dwelling on just that very thing. Not a day had passed when she was not at some point overcome with rage.

  She had two options, as she saw it. The first was to suffer in silence. That had its drawbacks, to be sure, but, if there was a Heaven, this way would give her the chance to get there when she died. Considering the frightening number of angina episodes she had recently experienced, that day may be too far off. The second option involved visiting the darker side of her ancestry. It was not a part of her life that she wanted to visit, but the idea was not entirely without appeal.

  With the passing of her late ex-husband, Deborah Ann Sanderson found herself able to entertain even more lavishly in her Georgetown home. True to their divorce settlement, he had remembered her in his will. Her parties had become the talk of the society pages, but, of course, her many guests would never get to see the two most precious objects in the house: a spectacular painting attributed to Winslow Homer and an old doll with fake red hair.

  In truth, she did intend to return the painting to the Philadelphia Museum of Art, at some point when she had become almost too old to live on her own, but that was not to be. The Friday after her 54th birthday, she had gotten blind drunk on fine French wine, as was her custom, but, on this occasion, lost track of the smoldering cigarette she had started, then forgotten about. The DCFD had been able to pull her out of the house with some painful burns, but nothing she couldn’t live through. The house itself, though, was a total loss. Now, if anyone wanted to look upon “Sailor’s Delight,” they would have to content themselves with a copy. When they came to her hospital bed and told her the bad news about her house, Deborah was devastated.

  “Oh, God,” she sobbed, “Raggy’s gone forever.”

  Things continued in the same predictable pattern until the evening of November 13, 1979, when Evelyn Campanella got shanked in the shower. The blade just missed her kidney, but she was still badly injured. The stabbing had astounded everyone who knew about it, inside and outside the facility.

  From the very first day of her incarceration, Evelyn had managed to make friends. Before long, she got a prison job as a combination art teacher and GED instructor. Just about every woman in the place wanted to learn from her. On her own, she had begun a correspondence course to get the necessary certification she would need to become a teacher on the outside. Obviously the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts wanted nothing more to do with her, ever, but they were not the only school in the city. Maybe she could stay in her home town after all. Then came the stabbing.

  Nobody was more shaken up by the event than Ernie. He tried to soldier on, but it was apparent he was almost apoplectic with anxiety. At some point, shortly after the stabbing, the person who saw him the most became concerned.

  “You wanna talk about it?” Sal asked Ernie as they sat alone in the break room.

  “The thing I can’t figure out is why,” Ernie said when they had resumed the conversation in Sal’s office. “I know shit like this happens in prison, although not so much in the women’s prisons. Evelyn was popular and well-liked from everything I could tell. Who
would want to do this to her?”

  “Did they catch the stabber?” Sal asked.

  “Yeah, some black woman, but, you know something? She refused to give a reason.”

  “You know, I bet a smart guy like you could figure this out if you weren’t so close to the victim,” Sal told him. “Let’s take a careful look at what we got here. For sticking your wife like she did, that bitch is going away to a much worse place for a much longer time, and yet she has nothing to say in her own defense. Why do you suppose that is?”

  “The one thing that comes to mind is really absurd.” Ernie answered. “Only way an inmate would dummy up like that would be if it was a Mob hit, and that makes no sense at all?”

  “Are you sure about that?” Sal was not just playing a fanciful game of devil’s advocate. His dad had ties with the Mob when he offered up the store as a numbers drop. Growing up in that atmosphere, Sal had learned a good deal more about the underside of life in Philly than the average youth—even the average Italian youth.

  “Jesus Christ, Sal, what in the blue-eyed hell does my wife have to do with the goddam Mafia?”

  “She stole that painting, right? Who do you suppose owned it?”

  “I don’t know, some rich old broad. I forget her name.”

  “Maybe you should make note of it. You actually met her once when you were drunk on your ass. Remember when the broad’s chauffer came to our table and asked us to shut the fuck up after that Phils sweep?”

  “Yeah, sorta.”

  “Good, ‘cause here’s a hot news flash for you. That old broad is the great grand-niece of a fella named Salvatore Sabella. Ever hear of him?”

  “Yeah, he was one of the old Moustache Pete’s in the Mafia, like years ago.”

  “Even if you call him a funny name, he was as dangerous as a cobra in his day. He’s long gone, but another guy you might have heard of still looks out for the old girl. The name Angelo Bruno ring a bell?”

  “Oh, shit,” Ernie concluded.

  Throughout all the weeks and weeks of planning, not a day went by when he didn’t pray for his wife. There was no way he could get to Bruno or find out who else the mobster might have hired for a second try. Although he dreaded the idea, the only way to end this was to end the source of the complaint. Ernie’s instinct told him that Bruno—if it was Bruno behind the assault—had acted from a sense of obligation, rather than passion. He might even be happy to see the obligation somehow disappear.

  During the darkest part of the night of March 20, 1980, Ernie Campanella took action. After having determined that Elizabeth Gildemeister slept by herself at night, Ernie quietly disabled the alarm system, broke in, clogged up the flue to her furnace, then got out of there pronto, making as sure as he could to cover his tracks. Mrs. Gildemeister’s already-weakened heart could not stand up to the resultant excess of carbon monoxide. She died in her sleep, only minutes after dawn. Ernie hoped against hope that would be the end of it, and it was, but not in the way he had expected.

  On March 21, 1980, Angelo Bruno was assassinated while he sat in his car. The killing had nothing to do with Elizabeth Gildemeister or “Sailor’s Delight” or anything else that touched Ernie Campanella’s suddenly horrific life. He had committed a murder for no reason at all.

  BOOK V

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Epilogue

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  About the Author

  Prologue

  At the time of her graduation, Lucinda Wallace may have been the brightest person in the Pine Barrens, which is not to disparage the residents. Miss Wallace was a straight-A student, her class valedictorian and the president of the Honor Society. Her IQ was last measured at 158. She had aced every standardized test she took, but then none of those tests included this pivotal question:

  The star center on the varsity basketball team asks you to have unprotected sex with him. You

  a) politely refuse, explaining you are saving yourself for marriage

  b) punch him in the nose, assuming you can reach his nose.

  c) tell him to ask you again after you have obtained your college degree

  d) give in

  Had Lucinda decided to make it a one-time fling, she would have had nothing to explain going forward except perhaps the loss of her virginity. Unfortunately, she found herself falling for the guy, who could manage a respectable jump shot, but would probably be hard-pressed to win a debate with a bag of hammers. It did not take long before she missed her period. Matthew Porch, the father of the child she was carrying, offered to do the honorable thing. He sure wasn’t going to college, so why not? Lucinda, in turn, determined to do the honorable thing on her end, and so they were married, in plenty of time to make Luther Porch their legitimate son.

  Chapter 1

  “Do you reject Satan?” the priest intoned.

  “I do” Ernie Campanella and Arlene Gomez replied.

  ‘And all his works?” the priest continued.

  “I do,” Ernie and Arlene responded again.

  And thus continued the happy process of welcoming Hector James Mueller into the folds of the church. Ernie and Arlene had both readily responded to the parents’ requests that they become the child’s godparents, each of them unaware that the other had been asked, but both of them happy to support Frank and Sadie any way they could. Thus, without having had anything more intimate than a dance, Arlene Gomez and Ernie Campanella, in a sense, had a son.

  The child had been given the first name of Sadie’s father and the middle name of Frank’s. His older sister Juliet was not quite sure yet what to make of the whole thing, but Frank and Sadie were delighted. Now the only question was, should they finish there or try for more? Like many Catholics, the two of them tried to be good people, but birth control was something you winked at.

  If Arlene was a little nonplussed throughout the ceremony—and she was—it had little to do with her pairing with Ernie. No, she had come to hate him less and less as he continued to stand loyally by his incarcerated wife. The source of Arlene’s frustration was that her now serious boyfriend Bobby Rocco had not been on hand to share in the family’s moment of joy. Although he would never say so, Bobby had a perfectly good excuse for not being there—he wasn’t even in Philadelphia at the time. The hour of Hector’s Christening found him still asleep in Brooklyn, next to a girl named Tina Something he had met in a bar the previous night. It would take Arlene a little while to learn, but Bobby had an eye for the ladies. His failure to show up here had been her first clue.

  Standing in for the absent Bobby Rocco was Arlene’s gay friend Howard Ellsworth, and this time, he was the beard. The last thing Arlene wanted was for a number of these people who she barely knew to think of her as what she secretly dreaded being—the children’s crazy maiden aunt. It was even more important to her that she appear to have a date than it was to Howard that he appear to be straight, which was seeming to matter less and less to him as time went on.

  Even if Howard was not Arlene’s first choice for an escort, she was not about to give him that impression. After all, he was a dear friend—maybe her best friend, if you took sex out of the picture. She had on her best happy face as she sought Howard out after the service. His face, as it turned out, was not nearly as happy as hers seemed to be.

  “Howard, Sweetheart, is something troubling you?” she asked him when they had a moment alone.

  “Does it show that much?” he replied. “Actually, I’m going through a little…uh…domestic trouble, so to speak.”

  “Your ex-wife giving you a hard time?”

  “No, she was never
difficult about the divorce. We both knew it had to happen, but we don’t hate each other.”

  “Then, what? If it’s none of my business, just say so, but, if there’s anything I can do to help, I’d like to.”

  “I just broke up with my…uh…partner, I guess you’d say. The thing that really stinks about it is that I moved out of my place and was staying with him. Now, I have no place left to go. I should have kept my lease, but, no, I had to insist on this grand display of good faith. Look where it got me.”

  “I see,” was all Arlene had to say at the moment, but wheels were turning in her head.

  “Sorry, I didn’t mean to bum you out like that. Let’s change the subject, okay?”

  “Wait, let’s not. Howard, I can help you with part of your problem, if you’ll allow me.”

  “Good, God, are you propositioning me?”

  “Come on, man, use your head for something besides a louse sanctuary. I’m offering you a place to live—long term, not, like, a crash pad for a couple nights. Of course you’ll pay for half of everything, but I have a spare bedroom and a big enough bathroom that we could put in a cabinet for your stuff. How about it, Sport?” It was an ideal solution, and paying for half of everything was no problem. He could have paid all the expenses if he didn’t want to make Arlene feel like a kept woman, which he knew would make her uncomfortable. Through the years, Howard Ellsworth’s two passions had been contract bridge and the stock market. He had had his good days and bad days at the former, but made a killing in the latter. Still, he felt he had to ask a question or two, just out of habit.

  “I like what I’m hearing. What about the kitchen?”

  “Forget the kitchen. It’s like the ones in New York apartments—about as big as a bee’s vagina. Still, I don’t see a problem. I live on takeout most of the time, and, as I recall, so do you.”