by Archer Mayor
“It’s only fair to tell you,” Ogden told him quietly, even gently. “I would seriously like to have a sit-down with Willy.”
The dawn was just paling when Willy Kunkle drove into the ghostly quiet community of Broad Channel. One of the city’s most unusual neighborhoods, Broad Channel was built on an ironing-board-flat island in Jamaica Bay, hemmed in by a few dozen other, uninhabited islands, and located midway between Kennedy Airport and the Rockaway Peninsula, all tucked under the sheltering arm of Brooklyn and Queens combined.
Despite the airport’s proximity, it seemed as if Broad Channel should play host to the Fort Lauderdale set. So sliced into by parallel boat slips, it looked like a chunky comb on a map, and with its wildlife refuge neighbors and proximity to Lower New York Bay beyond Rockaway Point, it seemed perfect for those mega-rich who like both their banks and their recreation within arm’s reach. In fact, as he glanced west across the water, Willy could just make out Manhattan’s prickly skyline beginning to emerge from the night’s tendrils.
But Broad Channel was no rich man’s retreat. Surprisingly, it better resembled a forgotten Florida backwater for seasonal workers. The buildings were extremely modest, middle-class, mostly one-story wooden structures, packed together like mixed spare parts from a variety of construction sets, and lorded over by a congestion of sagging, heavy utility wires crisscrossing the main road from a forest of light, telephone, and power poles.
This wasn’t a total surprise to Willy. He’d heard about Broad Channel, and its reputation as a pretty conservative enclave, suspicious of outsiders and any enlightenment they might bear. He’d also heard, deserved or not, that it was an aggressively all-white neighborhood, and that any and all strangers, regardless of race, were checked out pretty thoroughly.
If one could not afford to live in a gated community, but wished to leave most of the world at the door, this sounded like a fair compromise, assuming the locals let you in to begin with.
Willy slowed down and looked again at the address on the driver’s license he’d stolen off Ron Cashman’s body, along with his wallet and keys, and later his car, which he’d found parked just outside the warehouse. Broad Channel wasn’t on any subway route, and Willy had known that he didn’t have much time before the cops were called in to investigate the firefight in Red Hook. Stealing a car seemed the least of his problems now. Also, he comforted himself with the fact that the license, while equipped with Cashman’s photograph, was in the name of John Smith, which he hoped would buy him some additional time. He hadn’t ruled out that the address might also be fictional, of course, but it would have been foolish to simply make that assumption.
Craning over the wheel, he tried to read the street numbers unfolding in the half-light.
He knew he’d stepped over the line by now. Certainly the Ward Ogdens of the world would want him back in jail for the moment, and out of a job at the very least. And it was possible even Joe Gunther had reached the same point. Lord knows, Willy hadn’t done much to encourage the poor guy to do otherwise.
But Willy was back in overdrive mode now. He’d survived his charge through Cashman’s hail of bullets, he’d discovered that Riley was probably going to live and had done what he could to guarantee it with a 911 call, and he’d been given just enough through Cashman’s last words to propel him once more toward resolving Mary’s death. Never the best of long-range thinkers, Willy was once more consumed with a need to know and heedless of what it might cost him.
He finally found the street he was after, the equivalent of a wide alley lined by more squeezed-together homes, and drove down half the block before parking in front of one of the humbler residences.
He stayed put for a few minutes, with the engine and lights off, watching the street for signs of life. Three or four houses had lights on, perhaps in a bathroom or kitchen, but otherwise things still seemed acceptably dormant. Willy got out of the car, walked quietly and quickly to Cashman’s front door, and slipped the key into the lock, hoping to hell the dead man didn’t have a fondness for pit bull housepets.
He didn’t. The place was absolutely silent.
By the dawn’s strengthening light, Willy took rapid inventory of the small house, deciding how to maximize his time. He figured half an hour overall would be risky but acceptable.
The home’s interior made its shabby outside look good by comparison. Cashman had been clearly uninterested in decor, or cleanliness, or even eating more than cereal, Spam, and /or bread. The whole place felt like a temporary lodging, which in fact it might have been. Given the phony license and his erstwhile livelihood, Cashman quite possibly had several home addresses. Willy could only hope that this one had more in it than dirty clothes, broken furniture, and dying food in the fridge.
He finally found the one exception in a small cubbyhole off the living room, which shared with it a large window overlooking the boat slip.
The desk in this tiny office was a hollow-core door laid across two filing cabinets and covered with bills, newspapers, several phone books from far-off states, three empty beer cans, a calendar with cryptic notations, an assortment of survivalist and weapon catalogues, a legal pad covered with doodles, arrows, boxes, and seemingly unconnected words, and a phone.
Willy didn’t stop to read any of it at first. He was still in the reconnoitering phase, and eager to explore the contents of the filing cabinets.
A loud knock on the front door stopped him cold.
He froze in place, trying to imagine who might be outside.
“John? You in there? It’s Budd.”
Willy remained silent.
The knock came again, slightly heavier. “John. I didn’t see you drive up. You okay?”
Willy very slowly rose from the chair he’d just sat in, careful not to make the slightest sound.
He clearly heard the door latch open and the front door swing back on its hinges. He’d forgotten to turn the lock behind him.
“John?” Now the voice was more tentative, betraying the first inklings of concern.
Willy realized his hoped-for half hour had just evaporated. Trying his best to sound vaguely like Cashman, he growled, “Yeah,” and stepped behind the office door.
Heavy steps approached with renewed confidence, along with Budd’s commentary. “Jesus, man. I thought you were dead or something. Why didn’t you speak up the first time?”
Through the crack in the door, Willy saw a tall fat man flash by, sporting a tight T-shirt, a beard, and tattoos on both arms.
The sheer bulk of the guy dictated Willy’s course of action.
As soon as Budd stepped into the room, Willy threw his
weight against the door, smashing it against the big man and sending him staggering into the far wall, where he hit his head. Not letting him recover from the impact, Willy reached him in two steps, grabbed his hair from the back, and smacked the front of his face into the wall a second time.
Budd collapsed like a felled ox, crumpling to his knees and coming to rest like a drunk taking a quick rest between swigs.
Cursing his bad luck, Willy returned to the desk, grabbed the calendar and the legal pad, and ran for the exit. Whether it was Budd waking up, another neighbor dropping by, or the police suddenly appearing, Willy knew his survival time here was now being measured in seconds.
He reached the car just in time to see a woman appear on the porch next door, squinting against the rising sun’s first glare, trying to see who was at the wheel.
“John?” she called out. “Is Budd with you?”
Willy fired up the engine, did a squealing U-turn, and retreated the way he’d come.
The four of them were back in the interview room adjacent to the detective bureau—Joe, Sammie, Ward Ogden, and Jim Berhle. The mood, once enhanced by a camaraderie cutting across state and department lines, had chilled to where Joe Gunther was thinking he and Sammie might be asked to disappear at any moment.
It was midmorning of the day following the shootout and they were all
living on a steady diet of coffee.
Ogden was the only one standing, pacing back and forth across the small room as he spoke. His tone of voice, however, while a little more concentrated, retained much of its familiar calm friendliness. If he did have problems with the Vermonters, he was keeping them to himself.
“Okay,” he said. “Things are getting messy. I’ve got someone baby-sitting Riley Cox. He’s definitely out of the woods, but still refusing to talk, and there’s not a hell of a lot we can do about that. He didn’t have a weapon when we found him, there were no drugs or contraband at the scene, so he knows all he has to do is keep quiet and this’ll go away without a murmur.
“A crime scene unit was sent to Cashman’s legal address in Sunset Park,” he continued. “So far, they haven’t found anything of interest that we didn’t already know, but records search has revealed he had a car, which apparently now is missing.”
“What about the lookout who was hooked up to the chain-link fence?” Sammie asked.
“Vinny West. Nothing there, either,” he told her. “He lawyered up almost as soon as they took the gag off. What he did say was that he never saw who nailed him. He’s got a similar background to the other dead man at the scene—Franco Silva—but nothing with either one of them seems to connect to our case.”
“Actually,” Jim Berhle interrupted in a surprised voice, “maybe we do have something.” He hadn’t been at the crime scene that morning, but now pulled a sheet of paper from one of the several files before him and studied its contents briefly before handing it over to his partner. “That’s Mary Kunkle’s luds and tolls. Look at the seventh number down. I wrote who it belongs to in pencil: Franco Silva. She called him twice in the past month and a half.”
Ogden looked at the list with renewed interest. “No kidding? That’s great. Any cross-reference to his address and her metro stops or receipts?”
Berhle immediately started pawing through the pile at his fingertips, eventually locating the map they’d all worked on earlier. “Right there,” he said, tapping a marked spot with his fingertip. “Both a Metro stop and a receipt, not three blocks away. Sorry. I should have read your pink on the shootout. I would’ve caught Silva’s name earlier.”
Ogden waved that away and studied the map over his younger colleague’s shoulder. Since Ogden had been working on other matters while the three of them had been collecting most of this, he was less familiar than they were with its particulars, which was one of the reasons for this meeting now. “Huh,” he commented, “looks like we’re getting a cluster in Brooklyn. Silva lived there, Cashman, Lenny Manotti… who’s Michael Annunzio?”
“Right,” Berhle said. “Hold it. That’s another connection. I just remembered.” He repeated his search and extracted a document, scanned it quickly, and smiled. “Known associates,” he quoted, “Franco Silva. Small world.”
Ogden tapped him on the shoulder with two fingers. “Nice catch, James.” He straightened and peered down at them all. “What else? Did you run a picture of Bob Kunkle by Mary’s girlfriend, what’s her name?”
Sammie spoke up, although it wasn’t really her place. She’d been feeling out on a limb ever since this morning, acutely aware that the one thing they’d studiously avoided so far was much mention of Willy. “Loui Obregon. She didn’t know him.”
“Right,” Berhle added. “I went back and questioned her and several other Re-Coop workers on Mary’s habits. Now that we’ve got our suspicions about her, I was able to lead the discussion a little. I can’t say I got much, but there was definitely a private part to Mary’s life that she didn’t share with any of them.”
Ogden was back to pacing, his eyes running along the ceiling. “Okay. What about the Re-Coop? There were questions earlier about how it could operate the way it does.”
Gunther took this one. “I did some digging around in whatever incorporation records were publicly available. It’s a little hard to tell, and this not being my patch, I probably missed some resources you would’ve known to hit, but it looks like the primary backer of what’s called the Re-Coop Foundation is a nonprofit charitable outfit named the Seabee Group. There’re other supporters, of course, but Seabee was by far the heavy hitter. I ran out of time before I could chase that down, though.”
Ogden pointed at Berhle. “See what you can do about that, okay? Almost sounds like the name of a boat. What’s the timing on the DNA from the overalls we recovered from Mary’s building trash compactor and the blood from Nate Lee’s head?”
Jim Berhle shook his head. “We’re still weeks away from that, or the samples the ME collected from under her nails. She did confirm that the blood wasn’t Lee’s.”
Ogden picked up Mary’s phone record again and peered at it. “What about John Smith? That sounds bogus.”
Berhle shrugged. “For all I could find, it could’ve been a wrong number. It’s way out in Broad Channel, the call lasted less than a minute, only happened once, and the John Smith cross-indexed with that address is clean as a whistle. I even called it, but got no answer.”
“Well,” Ogden announced, “since the local Brooklyn precinct guys are working on the shooting scene, I think I’ll go out and knock on John Smith’s door. I gotta do something. This standing around is driving me nuts.” He looked at Sammie and Joe. “You two can either stay with Jim and keep beating on the computer or grab some shuteye. I’ll kidnap whoever’s sitting around the squad room to keep me company.”
“I’d like to ride along, if that’s all right,” Gunther said.
There was a momentary silence. They all knew Ogden’s generosity was wearing thin, and that this could only further erode it, but the veteran detective finally smiled, if faintly, and granted the concession. “Okay.”
Sammie quickly played the team card. “I’ll stay here and help Jim.”
Berhle looked happy with that, so Ogden said, “Whatever,” and headed out into the larger room to recruit someone from his own department to ride shotgun with him.
On the face of it, the trip to Broad Channel didn’t make much sense. There was no probable cause to request a search warrant of the John Smith residence, Jim Berhle had gotten no answer when he’d called the number, and there was no reason to suspect that the number’s appearance on Mary’s phone record was anything other than an anomaly. But anomalies were what interested Ward Ogden most in cases like this, where he was being faced with an otherwise solid wall of nothing.
As things turned out, it was a fortunate impulse. As soon as he, Joe Gunther, and the junior detective Ogden had tapped to come along emerged from their car at the Smith address and began approaching the front stoop, a large, bearded, tattooed man with a bandage on his head and an ugly expression on his face appeared on the nextdoor porch and shouted at them, “Who the hell’re you guys?”
Ogden displayed his badge. “Police.”
“We didn’t call for you. Take a hike.”
Ogden’s face broke into a smile. “Well, we’re here anyway. The head feeling better?”
The man touched the bandage by reflex, his eyebrows knitting. “How’d you know about that?”
“Lucky guess,” Ogden answered him. “How’d it happen?”
Whether confused by Ogden’s affable response to his own hostility or simply wishing he could get things clarified in his own mind, the big man came off his porch and crossed the five feet of lawn to join them, his tone softening as he drew near.
“Damned if I know. I went in there to shoot the shit with John a little, and the next thing I knew, the son-of-abitch coldcocked me.”
“You had a fight?”
He looked contemptuous. “No, we didn’t have a fight. I would’ve killed him if we had. I told you: He snakebit me. Hit me from behind.”
“Damn,” Ogden commiserated. “That’s pretty weird. The two of you been having problems? What’s your name, by the way?”
“Budd Wilcox. And we’re really good friends. I saw him drive up around dawn—he’s got crazy hours—an
d I went in to talk, like we do sometimes before I go to work. I shouted for him a couple of times and he finally answered me from his office, so I went back there and that’s when he hit me, first with the door, and then by smashing my head against the wall. Bastard turned my lights out, and I never did a damn thing to him. I had to call in sick because of this. Really pisses me off.”
“I bet,” Ogden said, eyeing the house with renewed interest. “So you never got a look at him. Did you actually see him walk from the car to the house?”
Wilcox stared at him dumbly. “What d’you…? It was his car. I looked out once, it wasn’t there, then it was. He’d just gotten home.”
“You didn’t actually see him.”
“You saying it wasn’t him?” he asked incredulously.
Ogden looked surprised. “Me? How would I know?”
Budd scowled and whipped around to face his own house. “Judy,” he yelled, “get out here.”
His wife appeared moments later, her face flushed and her expression ready for battle. She stopped dead when she saw her husband had company.
“You saw John this morning, right? When he drove away? This is the cops.”
She nodded. “I called out to him. Asked him if he knew where Budd was, ’cause I thought they were together.”
“You saw his face?” Ogden asked.
She gave him the same blank look Budd had earlier. “Yeah… well, sort of. He was in his car, pulling out.”
“But you saw his face clearly?”
“No, but it was him,” she answered belligerently. “Who the hell else would it be?”
Ogden murmured to himself, “Who indeed?”
Judy Wilcox studied them for a moment, shook her head, and muttering, “Goddamn cops—frigging useless,” turned and retreated into her house.
Budd faced them again, now totally perplexed. “Why’re you here anyway?”
Ogden gave him a slow smile, as if a ray of sunlight had just slipped into a dark recess of his brain. He reached into his pocket and removed a photograph of Ron Cashman, which he showed to the burly Wilcox.