The Killer Sex Game (A Frank Boff Mystery)

by Nathan Gottlieb

  “Well, Mr. Boff, how’s the soup?”

  “Delicious.” He slurped in another mouthful.

  After sipping his own soup, Mantilla said, “Is fire coming out my ears?”

  “Just a little smoke. Anyway, I was wondering if, or how much, Rafael confided in you.”

  “I wouldn’t say confided in the strict sense of the word. But he did call from time to time for advice about investing his money. I come from a banking family, and while my father and I are estranged right now, I worked for a couple years in the family bank. I also studied finance in college.”

  “Did he come in here to eat?”

  “Occasionally. But only with his wife.”

  Mantilla’s phone rang. He took it out of his pocket, looked at the caller ID, and frowned. “I apologize for the interruption, Mr. Boff, but I have to take this.” He lowered his voice as he spoke into the phone. “What is it now, Alicia? This is the third time you’ve called me today … That’s ridiculous. You know how loyal I am to you … Look, I’m in a business meeting. I’ll call you back.”

  He hung up and let out a sigh. “In addition to Sudden Death, I also have a weakness for hot-headed women. Alicia has a bigger bite than the hot sauce.” He paused, then leaned forward toward Boff. “What I’m about to tell you does not get back to Rafael’s wife, right?”

  “You have my word.”

  “Well, I haven’t been quite candid with you. Once I was shopping in a jewelry store in Park Slope for a present to give Alicia. Rafael walked in holding hands with a very beautiful woman. He looked embarrassed to see me. He said hello, but he didn’t introduce me to the woman. They left the store without even shopping.” Mantilla leaned back. “I never asked him who the woman was. And he didn’t say anything the next time I saw him. The reason I didn’t mention this to you at first was because I wanted to protect Rafael. Which I now realize is silly. He’s dead. You need information to help find his killer. I apologize.”

  “No problem. I understand completely.”

  After asking Mantilla a few more questions, Boff finished his soup and stood up.

  “Thanks for your time and the delicious soup.”

  “Where can I reach you if I think of something else?”

  He gave Mantilla his business card.

  “I have many friends in the legal system,” Mantilla said. “If you need any information of that nature, I can get it for you. Call me any time.”

  Chapter 15

  As she had done many times, Marla stepped out of her taxi a block from Cullen’s building. She didn’t relish walking on a dark street, but she had to keep up the illusion for Danny that she took the subway and couldn’t afford a cab from Columbia.

  She hadn’t seen him for four nights and was eager to be with him now. As she approached the alley where the beggar had been the last time, she saw a different man. He didn’t look all that scraggly, but he was jingling a cup. Marla dropped four quarters in his cup, but when she set her backpack down to get a sandwich for him, she suddenly felt a strong arm curled around her neck and choking off her air. A gun was pressed to her head.

  “Don’t make a sound!”

  She nodded that she understood. After the assailant took a quick look around to see if anyone was watching, he dragged her all the way to the end of the alley, where he threw her down on her back.

  Gasping for air after the choke hold, she implored, “Do what you want, but please don’t hurt me.”

  In reply, the man tore off her button-down blouse in one swipe, then unzipped her dungarees and yanked them down. As he ripped off her panties, she closed her eyes and tried to pretend she was just on another job and everything was going to be okay.

  At the same time, a white and blue patrol car with two cops in the front seat happened to be a block away. As it approached the alley, the cops heard a gunshot. The driver floored the gas pedal. Reaching the alley seconds later, both officers sprang from the car, guns drawn. At the end of the alley they saw a man with a pistol standing over a woman’s naked body.

  “POLICE! FREEZE!”

  Instead of freezing, the assailant fired off two quick shots at the cops, then darted toward a wire fence at the end of the alley and started to scramble up it. But before he could reach the top and boost himself over, the cops fired back at him, nailing him several times in the back. The gunman fell off the fence, landed on his back, and didn’t move.

  Sprinting down the alley with their guns still raised, they rushed up to the gunman’s bullet-riddled body. One cop knelt to feel his neck for pulse.

  “DOA.”

  “So is she.”

  There was no need to take Marla’s pulse. She had a bullet hole in her forehead.

  The cops radioed it in.

  More than a little worried by now, Cullen was staring out the living room window hoping to see Marla walking up the street.

  “Mikey, she’s never been this late before.”

  “Maybe she forgot you were supposed to get together tonight.”

  Suddenly, they heard sirens coming from all directions. Cullen’s heart started racing. When two police cars blew past his window, he dashed out the apartment door, Bellucci on his heels, took the stairs two at a time, and flew out the front door. Both of them stopped on the stoop and looked down the street toward where the cop cars had stopped. More cars were arriving.

  Cullen and Bellucci sprinted toward the cops. As they got closer, they saw police going in and out of the alley. Yellow tape had already been strung around the perimeter.

  A cop who saw them running in his direction placed a hand on the handle of his holstered gun and kept it there. Paying no attention, Cullen tried to duck under the tape, but the officer shoved him back.

  “Nobody gets inside!”

  Cullen wasn’t to be deterred. “Tell me what happened!”

  The cop shook his head. “No can do, pal.”

  Cullen looked like he was ready to haul off on the cop, so Bellucci put a restraining hand on his shoulder. Cullen shook him off.

  “My girlfriend is missing!” he said. “I need to know if something happened to her.”

  At that moment, he spotted Damiano stepping out of her car. As she approached the alley, he shouted: “Damiano!”

  Seeing Cullen and Bellucci, she walked over to them.

  “My girlfriend didn’t show up!” Cullen said. “She takes the subway and walks right past this alley.”

  Another cop approached. “These guys giving you a hard time, Damiano?”

  “No, Jack. I’m fine.” She ducked under the tape, took Cullen’s arm, and led him several feet away.

  “Danny, I just got here. I didn’t see the crime scene yet.”

  “Were you told what happened?”

  She hesitated before nodding. “A Caucasian female was raped and murdered. Her attacker was killed fleeing. That’s all I know.”

  Cullen felt like he couldn’t breathe. He looked desperately at Bellucci.

  “Don’t think the worst,” his friend said.

  He turned back to Damiano. “Would you go and look at the body?” Yanking out his wallet, he pulled a snapshot of his girlfriend from it and showed it to the detective. “This is her.”

  He tried to hand her the photo, but she looked reluctant to take it. “Look, Danny, you shouldn’t even be here.”

  “Where the fuck should I be?”

  “Go home. When I find out I’ll—”

  “No! I need to know now!”

  “Okay. Okay. But make sure you wait right here. And don’t give this officer any trouble.”

  Taking the snapshot from him, she ducked back under the tape again and disappeared down the alley. When she returned in a few minutes, her face looked grim.

  Cullen’s heart sank. “It’s fucking her, isn’t it?”

  As Damiano nodded, Cullen felt like he’d been hit in the chest by a sledgehammer. He grabbed onto Bellucci’s arm and held it tight.

  The detective said, “Take him home, Bellucci. I�
��ll be over when I finish here.”

  “Come on, Danny,” the young boxer said gently, “let’s go home.”

  ‘She was so beautiful and decent, Mikey. She can’t be dead.”

  “I know. I know. I’m so sorry.”

  Too shaken to offer resistance, Cullen let his friend lead him back to their apartment building.

  Chapter 16

  At the same time, Boff was parking his car near a row of storefronts, most of which were dark at this hour, on North 6th Street in the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn. Information broker Billy Wright had called him earlier to tell him that he had Rafael’s financial workup ready, plus a list of all the recent phone calls he and his wife had made. Boff saw the CLOSED sign on the door of Billy’s Computer Repair, and the lights were off inside, but he waved at the surveillance cam mounted over the door. In a moment, the door buzzed open.

  It looked like a typical neighborhood computer shop. Which was Wright’s intention. While he did fix computers, this was only a front for his real business. Boff stepped inside and crossed the small store to an open door in the back, where the information broker was waiting for him. Wright was a dark-skinned man in his early forties with a round face, thick nose, and large lips. When Boff had partnered with Wright in the DEA, the guy had been a martial arts fanatic and always dead fit. Now he had a bulging gut and a spreading backside, the obvious product of too many hours spent with his ass glued to a computer and too much fast food.

  As they entered his back room, Wright said, “Take a seat, Frank. I’m just finishing something up.” He sat down in front of one of the four computers in the room, plus a state-of-the-art printer/fax machine.

  “I gather things are better with your daughter,” Boff said as he brushed aside a bunch of McDonald’s bags and donut boxes from the couch and sat down. As usual, except for his work desk, Wright’s place was really messy. In addition to takeout food bags, donut boxes, and Chinese cartons, there was a bunch of Styrofoam coffee cups lying around on the floor, along with a grease-stained Pizza Hut box.

  “They had a sudden reconciliation,” Wright said without turning around. “Will it last? Who knows?” A minute later, he added, “Are you taking your magnesium, Frank?”

  “Every day.”

  Besides being an information broker, Wright was a conspiracy theorist. His latest obsession was jet contrails, which he believed were laced with chemicals and biological agents being deliberately sprayed at high altitudes by the government for an undisclosed but sinister purpose. He believed that some of the stuff in the so-called chemtrails was inactive and would be triggered and released in the future when the New World Order was ready to reduce global population. The only way to prepare your body for the coming rain of poison, he’d told Boff several times, was to take mega doses of magnesium twice a day. For Boff’s last birthday, in fact, Wright had bought him a case of magnesium. Boff had promptly sold it on eBay and used the money to add more Fifties CDs to his collection.

  A minute later, Wright took one hand off the computer keyboard and pointed to a table near the couch. “There’s some new photos of chemtrails,” he said. “Take a look.”

  “I’ll pass. You’ve seen one chemtrail, you’ve seen them all.”

  Wright shook his head. “Go ahead, Frank, make light of it, but just remember I warned you that the New World Order is going to replace sovereign states and eliminate checks and balances—”

  Boff s put his hands over his ears. “I’m not listening!”

  Wright went on, “The plan is to establish a global federal system controlled by the members of the New World Order. First thing they’re going to do when they take over is eliminate what they call the ‘useless eaters.’ Which means killing off the poor, elderly, and destitute of the world. I’m pretty sure private investigators will fall on that list of useless eaters.”

  Putting up with Wright’s mumbo jumbo was the price Boff had to pay to get the best info around. The information broker was fiercely loyal to him, not in small part because during a raid on a drug operation in Jamaica, Boff pumped four bullets into a dealer who was about to chop Wright’s head off with a machete.

  After he finished typing, he swiveled around in his chair and held out a folder. Boff got off the couch, grabbed it, flipped it open, and studied it a few minutes.

  “There’s a lot of charges here to strip and dance clubs,” he finally said.

  Wright nodded. “The majority of the club charges in New York were at a hot spot called Devil’s Own. It’s in the meatpacking district. Fourteenth Street between 9th and 10th Avenues. I looked it up in the New York magazine. It’s apparently the bastion of cool for the thirty-something set.”

  Boff flipped a page, studied it a minute. “What about all these charges in Miami?”

  “The guy made four trips in the last five months from New York to Miami. He spent plenty on dinners and at women’s boutiques, jewelry stores, and clubs.”

  Something caught Boff’s eye. “When Oquendo flew down to Florida,” he said, “he bought just one round-trip ticket. Meaning the wife wasn’t with him. Even more curious is that each time he returned to New York, he paid for a two other tickets. Both one-way.”

  “Yeah. What do make of that?”

  “I’m not sure yet. But it certainly appears there was a lot more to this guy’s life than just boxing. What about his phone calls?”

  “His Sprint bill shows the usual ones. To the wife. His trainer. Various stores. But what was unusual was that the majority of his other calls came from or went to restricted numbers, which the bill listed as unavailable.”

  “They could’ve all been to one person,” Boff said.

  “If they were, that person must’ve been someone special. Like a girlfriend.”

  Boff nodded. “Do you have anyone inside Sprint who could give you the restricted numbers?”

  “Well, I do have a friend at Sprint, but his pay grade is too low for him to access those kind of numbers. The best he could get me was a copy of the boxer’s latest phone bill. Basically, we’re going to have to rely on the plastic.”

  “What about his wife’s phone?”

  “It’s all in the folder.”

  “Which I’ll study later,” Boff said, closing it. “But right now give me the short version.”

  “Most of the wife’s calls were either to her husband, McAlary, or his wife, Kate. There were also some rather long calls to a guy named Alberto Mantilla. I made some inquiries. It appears he owns a restaurant in Brooklyn called Giancarlo’s.”

  “I was there today,” Boff said. “Mantilla helped Oquendo defect.”

  “Well, then maybe when the hubby was out screwing around, the wife phoned Mantilla to cry on his shoulder.”

  “Could be.”

  “Her calls to Miami were for the most part, routine. A lot were to her father and a woman with the same last name as her old man’s. I assume a sister or an aunt. The only thing out of the ordinary in her Miami calls was that about two weeks ago, she phoned a guy there named Jorge Gamboa. Four times. Gamboa apparently has Cuban mob connections in Florida.

  This caught Boff’s interest. “If this Gamboa’s connected, he could’ve contracted a hit man for her,” he said. “Or maybe did the shooting himself.”

  Wright wrote a quick note on a pad. “I’ll look into this guy some more. But outside of this Gamboa, there’s nothing else that’d keep the wife in play.”

  Boff’s phone rang. He picked up.

  “What’s up, Mikey?” He listened, then winced. “I’m on my way.”

  “Bad news, Frank?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Not family, I hope.”

  “No. Thanks for the workup, Billy. I owe you dinner.”

  Wright waved it off. “If you’re gonna take me to Burger King again, thanks but no thanks.”

  Taking his folder with him, Boff headed for the door.

  On the way to the gym, he called Damiano and got a quick rundown on what had happened to Cullen’s
girlfriend. After parking his car near the gym, he lumbered up the stairs, walked inside, and found Bellucci, McAlary, and Kate sitting on benches watching Cullen pound the heavy bag like he was trying to kill it. Grunting with rage, he was hammering the big sack relentlessly. Boff figured he must have been at it awhile, because his tank top and sweat pants were completely soaked. He nodded at the others, then leaned against the wall by the door and watched Cullen.

  “Danny,” McAlary said, “maybe you should quit now. You don’t want to risk hurting your hands.”

  Cullen ignored him and kept at the bag.

  A minute later, Bellucci stood up and walked over. “Danny, listen to me.”

  “Go away.”

  “I know you’re hurting, buddy. But if you break a hand or tear a ligament, you won’t be able to fight for the championship.”

  “I don’t care!”

  “Bullshit.”

  Cullen fired a vicious uppercut and then three straight right hooks.

  Bellucci stepped closer to Cullen. “How many times have you told me you want to win this title fight to honor your father?”

  Although Cullen didn’t reply, after pounding the bag for another minute, he finally stopped, dropped his arms to his sides, and stood there panting. Finally he nodded at Bellucci. As they walked over and sat on an empty bench, McAlary got up.

  “Let me see your hands,” he said.

  Cullen held both gloves out to his trainer, who after unlacing them and removing the wraps, carefully inspected his hands. “No apparent damage,” he said, sounding relieved. He grabbed a clean towel from a nearby bench and tossed it to his boxer.

  “I…I… keep thinking…this was my fault. Maybe, you know, maybe if I’d pushed her harder, she would’ve taken money from me for a taxi.”

  Bellucci shook his head. “No, she wouldn’t have, Danny. You said Marla didn’t even let you buy her dinner. She wanted everything Dutch.”