“Ms. Baker, are you sure none of these thieves is the one we’re looking for?” Van Holt asked skeptically. “These people there behind that glass are all known burglars, and three are violent.”
Was it possible John Marino hoodwinked Detective Van Holt? No, that line of thinking contravened common sense. When Ms. Baker had reported the robbery, she described one of the gunmen as tall, polite, and civil. And on meeting Sacco, Van Holt did find him well-mannered and gentlemanly, whereas Marino was not tall and had a gruff demeanor, typifying a street hooligan. Then who was lying, Lauren Baker or John Marino?
Van Holt had grown frustrated and started acting it. He forfeited his pretentious sophistication, and his tonality heightened to one of rudeness and harassment, his body language suddenly jumpy and hostile. “Lemme ask you this, Ms. Baker.” He indicated the glass window. “Did anybody threaten or approach you?”
She gave the detective a stare as though that was an absurdity. “Absolutely not!”
“I have a feeling you’re not being truthful. And if it turns out you’re not telling me the truth, you can be charged . . .”
“You’re irking me, detective. I said I don’t see anyone in this lineup that faintly resembles the men who robbed me. Period.”
Van Holt was wordless. Someone is lying. Either Marino or this rich bitch. Which one is it?
“If we’re done here, detective, please have your lackey drive me home. I’ve had enough of the body odors in this place.” And she fast-stepped out into the hallway, her high heels clacking on the pavement.
Van Holt scented a foulness of collusion; had he, Sacco, bought her silence? Perhaps. But despite the detective’s reservations, he had to release him, even though Marino had proffered a sworn affidavit affirming Sacco’s role in the robbery. Pursuant to New York State laws, the testimony of someone who partook in the same crime as the defendant is not admissible unless it is corroborated by independent evidence; that is either a witness who had no involvement in the felony, or additional supporting facts. And Van Holt, bound by the law, had to disregard the allegations against Nick Sacco.
It had been a close call for the Cat, who had picked up on Ms. Baker’s attraction to him. Her resoluteness pretending not to have recognized him was a magnanimous act, and he was fascinated. He thought about Lauren every minute, and visions of her were imbedded in his brain; the svelte figure; the defined outline of her jaws that was unpadded by excess flesh; and those large eyes, black as polished marble. Sacco felt a flutter in his heart for her, but was she a dead end for him? It was a godsend that she hadn’t pressed matters, and it’d be wise for him to let sleeping dogs lie.
At times, however, the heart does not obey the mind. This is the day I go for broke. The Cat showered, splashed on cologne, and donned a double-breasted Pierre Cardin. Preened and shaved, he cut the figure of a Hollywood actor, and drove to Lauren’s home—a risky impulse.
CHAPTER 89
The white sign on the curb of Peninsula Boulevard read: ENTERING HEWLETT, ONE OF THE FIVE TOWNS. Sacco’s pulse raced as he turned right onto Kew Avenue, the street where Lauren lived. He parked his powder-blue Lincoln Mark III across the street from her house. It was a dreary, drizzly day, and chances were she was at home. He strutted to her front door, a bouquet of red roses in his hand. The Cat rang the bell, and thirty seconds passed. No answer. Disappointed, and about to leave, he heard the door knob clang. Lauren Baker, in an orange satin blouse and a black skirt, looked at Sacco unsurprised. “I’ve been expecting you.” Unconsciously, she patted the side of her hair, a subliminal sign when a woman is awestruck by a man. “Please come in. This time you don’t need a gun.” She gave Sacco an unrestricted smile and waved him into the black-marbled vestibule, vivaciousness illuminating her face.
To say Sacco felt awkward would be an understatement. “I . . . didn’t mean to barge in on you. If . . . if I knew your phone number, I would’ve called first.”
“You should’ve asked for it the last time you were here. But you left in a hurry.”
Almost negligent, Sacco gave her the flowers. “Oh, these are for you.”
She sniffed the bouquet and closed her eyes. “Red roses! My favorites. Thank you! So thoughtful of you . . . and romantic. Come into my den.”
“You’re not gonna call the cops, are you?” he asked half jokingly.
Lauren threw her head back, feigning drama. “I wouldn’t think of it. Or maybe I should. No, don’t be afraid. Come, come.”
As Sacco followed Lauren, he was admiring her womanish hips and roundish buttocks, and those silky, beautiful legs whose calves funneled nicely into her mocassined feet. The den was wood-paneled and painted white, the seating all red leather. Lighted candles emitted a sweet scent, and Lauren motioned him to sit on the couch, her hands long, slinky, the fingernails red and lacquered.
“Uh, I wanna apologize for, you know, everythin’ that happened. And, well . . . I wanna thank you for what you did last week at the lineup. Eh, thanks, I really appreciate it. And I won’t forget it.”
Lauren’s sleek, pointy tongue touched the tip of her nose. “Does that mean you’re going to give me back what you stole from me?” she asked in a harmonious voice as she unwrapped the bouquet, the cellophane crackling.
“I can’t give you back your jewelry ’cause I sold it, but I do wanna pay you for it.”
“That’s fine.” She sat on an armchair and crossed her legs, the skirt creeping up her thighs. She cast her eyes at the sofa. “Please, sit.”
Sacco did, and seemed tongue-tied. Lauren saw this and asked lightheartedly, “Now that we’ve taken care of business, are you going to take me out to dinner?”
Her cleverness was becoming apparent to the Cat. She was infatuated by him, not only because of his physical prowess, but also due to her underlying attraction to him as a criminal. But the young widow’s ulterior motivation not to have thrown Sacco to the dogs at the lineup was her bet that he’d be appreciative and would come calling. He’d surely reimburse her for the jewelry; and if he wouldn’t do so she could always tell Detective Van Holt that she had been fuzzy, but now was certain Nick Sacco was one of the armed robbers. Above all, Lauren knew that if he were sent to prison, she’d recoup the limits of her insurance policy, $250,000—a far cry from her $850,000 stolen jewelry.
Sacco looked at his watch, a gold Rolex he had traded a jeweler for swag gems. “Sure, soon it’ll be dinner time, and we can have a bite somewhere.”
He and Lauren were warming to each other, dining at a French restaurant. But apparitions of the coffin in her bedroom, well, that was dampening the evening. He’d been delaying asking her but he could no longer resist: “Hope you won’t mind, but I gotta ask you . . .”
Lauren adapted a naughty look and interrupted him, “Why do I have a coffin in my bedroom, right?”
Sacco blushed at her candidness. “Well . . . yeah. I mean it’s kind of . . .”
“Weird?”
“Well, yeah.”
She waved her hand in understanding and chuckled, silliness in her giggle. “It was a fetish of my late husband. Eh . . . he . . . he liked for us to make love in the coffin.” And Lauren laughed in a ticklish cackle.
Sacco laid down his knife and fork, a startled look on his face. “I’ll be damned . . . I’ll be . . .”
“Don’t worry. Tomorrow, someone is coming to take it away.”
“Thank God, ’cause I ain’t into nothin’ like that. Know what I mean?”
She was fiddling with the top button of her blouse, her cleavage bubbling beneath it. “But I have some sex fetishes of my own.”
Christie Furnari’s position as consigliere of the Lucchese Family was a powerful rank but one that mandated fairness and unwavering determination, traits requisite for one to be respected in the underworld societies. “Nick,” Furnari had instilled upon Sacco, “Your word is your bond. When you say you’re gonna do somethin’, you gotta live up to it. You know me well enough that if I tell you I’m gonna put
you on the moon, you should buy yourself a space suit. And if I tell you I’m gonna kill you, you better get in your coffin and try it on for size. Understand?”
And Nick Sacco was a man of his word who could be relied on. Two weeks into his relationship with Lauren Baker, he invited her to a Sunday brunch at Tavern on the Green, a famous Manhattan restaurant. It’s on 67th Street and Central Park West, and boasts an enchanting panoramic view of Central Park. Before ordering, sipping champagne mimosas, Sacco gave Lauren a greeting card in an envelope. She sliced open the flap with her fingernail and the brass key to a safe deposit box spilled out. She read the card:
To my one and only sweetheart, Lauren,
The stars will fall from the sky before I stop loving you.
This is the first of many promises to you that I will keep.
The key that came with this card is to a safe deposit box that has $850,000 of your money.
And you know what it’s for.
With love, Nick.
Overcome by Sacco’s noble promise, Lauren, wide-eyed in wonderment, placed a hand on her bosom. “I don’t know what to say. You are a marvelous man. But you know, I already got some of the money from my insurance company.”
“Yeah, but the insurance company didn’t give you the replaceable cost of the jewels. Right?”
“I got $250,000.”
“Well now I made you whole and plus.”
Lauren looked up at the ceiling in thought. “Then why don’t we take the difference from this and buy ourselves a beach house where it’s warm in the winter?”
“Deal!” Sacco said.
Nick and Lauren became inseparable. His marriage to Nora couldn’t be restitched together, and not for his lack of trying. What had been adding salt to the wounds in the long-existing conflicts in Sacco and Nora’s matrimony were the early nuances of infidelities on his part. Those insinuations materialized into a reality as Nora was now aware of Nick’s commara, his mistress.
CHAPTER 90
Livid and highly combustible, Nora Sacco was bent on unleashing her scorned woman’s wrath. But how could she inflict the worst damage to her disloyal husband? She could inform the police of Sacco’s criminalities, but she didn’t know any specifics and had no proof of any wrongdoing. Nora then thought of alerting the IRS about his underreported income, but that posed a problem for her. They had been filing joint returns, and that would make her an accessory. What else could she do to avenge his indiscretions? Nora, in a perpetual state of disorientation, and feeling denigrated, her bipolar disorder muddling her thinking, devoted every waking minute to that thought.
Lauren still didn’t know that Sacco was married and had two toddlers; and should those eye-openers have come to her attention, she’d blast off into an explosive temper. But today, September 18, 1976, it was her thirty-fifth birthday, and she had woken to the placid whirring of crickets, sunlight filtering through the black blinds of the master bedroom. On the prior evening, Lauren and Sacco had celebrated at a restaurant and then at the movies, viewing the film Rocky. But she spent the rest of the night alone. For reasons she couldn’t justify, he always had somewhere to go or something to do in the middle of the night that couldn’t wait until tomorrow. Lauren longed to have Nick in her bed and wake beside him in the morning, and here on her birthday she was alone, again. She felt malaise and grogginess, the aftermath of the cognac she had drank after Nick left at 2:00 A.M. Still in bed in her white satin nightgown, she was nursing a cup of tea, gazing vacantly through the window into her colorful backyard, an array of lovely flowers coloring the green grass.
Suddenly, remembrances of Lauren’s marriage to her late husband, Roy Baker, intruded upon her sullenness. She and Mr. Baker had been a world apart in age, and he was more a father figure than a spouse to her, though she genuinely adored the man and did not marry him for his wealth. Her dad, a financially well-heeled textile industry executive, had been an absentee parent. In redemption, though, prior to his death he erected a substantial trust fund for his only daughter; thus she never had to rely on anyone’s support, husband or otherwise. But Lauren’s father had failed to provide her with the four human essentials a child instinctively craves, paternal attention, guidance, love, and affection. And Roy Baker unwittingly became the subliminal fatherly companion to her.
Lauren looked at the clock on her nightstand: 8:30. Then she heard a heavy thumping at the front door. Surprised, she laid the teacup on the stand and scuttled to answer the harsh knock. She opened the door, and a haggard woman dangling a gallon-size plastic jug at her side was standing there, feet apart, no makeup, and disheveled brown hair. The caller’s eyes had the look of an untamed animal, and to Lauren’s dread it was instantly palpable that this stranger was emotionally unbalanced.
“Who . . . who are you, and why are you here?”
“I’m your boyfriend’s wife, you filthy bitch,” Mrs. Sacco announced.
“You mean Nick?”
“Yeah, Nick, as if you didn’t know, you whore.”
Confusion and the raw news of betrayal ripped into Lauren, siphoning the air from her lungs. Heart pounding, she wasn’t hearing all the vilifying words spewing through the intruder’s mouth, though she understood the core of her harangue.
“Don’t you know he has children who need a father at home and not running around with a two-bit slut?” Mrs. Sacco berated, wielding the plastic jug.
A wife, children, why didn’t Nick tell me about all this? He misled me. But now, in the heat of this confrontation, Mrs. Sacco’s tirade began to register in Lauren’s head, and her boyfriend’s strange behavior came into focus. He had been leading a double life, and she could never have seen herself as the mistress of a married man, a father no less. But she was Nick’s commara, as the Italians label a mistress, and it repulsed her. Sounding like reproaching voices echoing inside her head, Lauren couldn’t squelch Mrs. Sacco’s profanities, loud vulgarities that were within earshot of her neighbors. And in those rampant seconds, the dignified Ms. Lauren Baker felt as low as a streetwalker.
“You think you’re gonna take my husband from me and his kids? You may have his cock, but I have him by the balls,” Mrs. Sacco hollered in a snarl for all to hear as she splashed the liquid in the plastic jug in Lauren’s face.
It was muriatic acid, and unable to protect herself, Lauren’s eyes and skin burned as if they were on fire. She screamed, rubbing her eyelids. The attacker, wild with vengeance, lunged at her rival, brandishing a barber’s razor, slashing the blinded Lauren’s forehead, hands, and arms. It was 8:35 in the morning, and this spectacle unfolded outdoors on Lauren’s front steps. She pushed herself away from Mrs. Sacco, backpedaling into her doorway, intending to lock out the crazed woman. But the incensed wife, overtaken by fury, was out-powering the wounded Lauren, blood splattering the white nightgown, daylight blackening in her vision.
CHAPTER 91
Lauren tripped to the ground, and Mrs. Sacco straddled the fallen lady’s waist, doggedly hacking at her. Lauren was tightly covering her face, begging Nick’s wife to stop. Instead, she kept punching and slitting, and the shrilling grew louder. A postal worker who was on his daily route saw the clash and knew someone was seriously hurt. He threw the mail sack in his truck and ran to Lauren’s aid, unscrambling the two females.
“She’s nothing but a whore,” Mrs. Sacco yelled to the mailman.
He had known Lauren, and here she was severely lacerated, deep cuts on her cheeks, forehead, and hands, the nightgown shredded and bloody. More serious, the acid might’ve injured her pupils. Four or five neighbors rushed in, and two men restrained Mrs. Sacco, who hadn’t refrained from growling venomous ramblings, thrashing her arms and legs, wriggling to free herself. An off-duty nurse saw to Lauren’s first aid to the best of her ability. Someone who had witnessed the sadistic attack phoned 911, and in minutes two Nassau County police cruisers and an ambulance raced in.
The police officers handcuffed Nora Sacco, and the paramedics wheeled Lauren into the ambul
ance. At South Nassau Communities Hospital in Oceanside, Long Island, a team of doctors and nurses in the trauma center hovered around Lauren’s gurney, and in a choreographed effort stabilized her. Having analyzed the seriousness of her injuries, the chief physician saw fit to send for an ophthalmologist and a cosmetic surgeon.
At police central booking in Mineola, too, the morning awakened to a hectic pace. Coincidentally, on that day Detective Van Holt had been on rotation, and it was he who booked Mrs. Sacco for aggravated assault. “Well, well, well. What’re you know? This yarn is really spinning,” Van Holt said to his partner, Detective Hans Warner. “Something is goin’ on here.” He slurped on a can of Coca-Cola and put a hand on top of his head. “First Marino rats on Nick Sacco. Then Ms. Baker can’t or won’t pick him in a lineup. And now, Sacco’s wife splashes Baker’s face with acid and cuts her into a hamburger. What’re you make of all this, Hans?”
Detective Warner was stumped, but Van Holt was positive that Nick Sacco, Lauren Baker, and who knew who else were in the epicenter of a conspiracy.
In her cell, Nora Sacco wasn’t talking to anyone, and descended into a catatonic state.
That afternoon, the Cat had gone to his home to find a babysitter with the children. “Where’s Nora?”
“I don’t know, Nick. She called me this morning at seven o’clock and asked me to come here. She said she had an appointment somewhere.”
“An appointment!” Sacco questioned. He smelled feces and said to the teenage girl, “I think you should change the kids’ diapers. And please don’t ever let my children lie in shit. You hear me?”
The phone rang, and in a tone of self-importance a man’s voice asked, “Is this Nick Sacco?”
The Pierre Hotel Affair Page 35