“Can I help you?”
Healy turned to face the heavyset blond Serpe had described to him the night before. The splint on her hand was hard to miss even with it down at her side.
“Yes, hi, I was just talking to the oil guy and he recommended you guys to fix my kid’s Honda. Dented fender.”
She flashed the smile Joe had mentioned. “No problem.”
“I don’t know about that. We’ve got a five hundred dollar deductable.”
“Like I said, no problem. We’ll just bury it in the estimate.” Nice, Healy thought, offering to commit insurance fraud before your first cup of coffee of the day. They exchanged pleasantries while she opened the shop, turned off the alarm, and flipped over the OPEN sign.
“Almost seven-thirty on a Saturday morning. Must be a busy day. I’m surprised you guys don’t get in earlier.”
“Yeah, I know, but the boss lives out east and—” “The Hamptons?” Healy cut her off.
She laughed. “The Hamptons, that’s pretty funny. Nah, Mastic. Hammer ain’t a Hamptons kinda guy.” “Hammer?”
“Hank Noonan. His dad owns the place.” “When will he be in?” “Before nine,” she said. “Thanks. I’ll be back.”
Her tiny silhouette was backlit by the early morning sun. She was sitting on the hood of his car as he came around the side of the town house. There was a big sports bag on the ground at her feet. She looked so small and pale; her hair limp and dull. Some of the life had been bleached out of her. But when she smiled at him, he thought he recognized a trace of the woman he’d fallen in love with. He was slow to approach her, reminding himself to look closely, to make certain he was seeing her and not the her he wanted to see. It was no use.
“Hi,” she said, tears in her eyes.
“Going somewhere?”
“Away, yeah.”
“Where?”
“Just away.”
“You need some money?”
She hesitated. He took all the money he had out of his wallet plus the fifty dollars he used as a bank and folded it into her hand.
“If you need more, call me,” he said. “If you don’t wanna call me, call Bob. If you need me, I’ll come get you.”
“I know.”
“You sure you won’t tell me where—”
“Shhh.” Marla put her index finger across his lips and then wedged herself into his arms. “Just let met go, Joe.”
“Okay.”
“You know I miss this smell sometimes, the way it stays on your work clothes even after you wash them.” “Heating oil?” “Crazy, right? But I do.” “Crazy.”
“It’s Saturday morning, you’ve gotta go,” she said, gently pushing him away.
“I love you.”
“I know you do. I’ve gotta go.”
He stood and watched her disappearing around the corner of the town house. As she went, Joe searched for signs of the fifty-first gallon in her gait.
Bob Healy was pretty used to the Blue Wall of Silence. He’d banged his head against it for over twenty years. Cops didn’t give up other cops; that was the myth. Yeah, and the Mafia had omerta, their code of silence. The reality was a lot less romantic. Healy had never made a big case without the cooperation of other cops and one look at the state of the American Mafia revealed that the RICO statutes were a lot more persuasive than omerta. What Bob Healy didn’t expect to find was a conspiracy of silence amongst the owners of body shops, but that’s pretty much what he’d run into.
He had gone all the way from Kings Park, to Commack, to Smithtown, to St. James, twelve shops in all, and he couldn’t find anyone willing to talk to him about Noonan’s Collision. He guessed it made sense. With all the insurance fraud and stolen parts floating around, these guys weren’t anxious to open themselves up to investigation or retaliation. That said, Healy was losing patience. And as any one of the cops he had targeted during his career could testify, that wasn’t a good thing.
He walked into Pete’s Towing and Collison on Middle County Road in St. James and asked the guy at the counter for Pete. A bald, wiry man in his forties, wearing a ripe tomato red sweater—the name Pete embroidered in blue above his heart—stepped out of the office.
“I’m Pete. Can I help you?”
“I don’t know, maybe. I was gonna bring my kid’s car here to get the fender fixed and repainted because I heard good things about your shop, but I was having a brew at TGI Friday’s at the mall and met this guy named Hank from Noonan’s in Kings Park.”
Pete’s skin turned as red as his sweater. “Yeah, and what’d he say?”
“Said you guys did shabby work, bought used parts and charged for new, and that—”
“Fuck him!” The veins throbbed in Pete’s skinny neck. “Noonan, the dad, he was a good guy, but the kid’s an asshole. We don’t ever buy used parts. People hear that, they don’t come back. We’ve been here for twenty years and we got good accounts with every car company and supplier on the island. That schmuck Noonan’s so fucked he can’t even buy sandpaper on credit.”
“What do you mean?”
“They’re on credit hold with all their suppliers. He’s burnt so many bridges that the local Honda dealerships won’t even sell him parts for cash. He’s gotta go all the way down the South Shore for cash parts from Honda.”
“Amazing.”
“Yeah. I don’t know how he fucked up that business, but he did. Noonan’s was a great shop for years. Great rep, lotsa cash walking through the door, but I guess you do sloppy work, start cutting corners and word gets around …”
Healy stopped himself from rolling his eyes. Now that he found somebody to finally talk about Noonan’s, he couldn’t get him to shut up.
“This your business card?” he finally said.
“That’s it.”
“Thanks, Pete. You’ve been a great help.”
“One hundred gallons, right?”
“That’s what you ordered, Mrs. Perchico. That’s what I put in.” “Yeah, but the last few times the oil went so quick.” “Until today, it’s been pretty cold out. Oil goes faster in the cold unless you lower your thermostat.”
“You’re not shorting me oil, are you?”
“If I was, I wouldn’t tell you Mrs. Perchico, would I? But no, I’m not shorting you oil.”
“I know companies they do that sometimes, short their customers. They take advantage of old people.”
“Some do. I don’t. I hope to get old myself someday.”
“Okay, you’re a good boy. Here,” the old woman said, slipping a solitary quarter into Joe’s oil-dirty palm. “Go get yourself a cup of coffee.”
“Thanks very much, Mrs. Perchico. Happy New Year.”
Joe Serpe turned and went down the front steps before the door closed at his back. Normally, Mrs. Perchico’s routine made him want to stick needles in his eyes. She had been a Mayday customer for all the years Joe had driven for Frank and had stayed on after he and Healy bought back the company. In all that time, Joe must have made fifty deliveries to her house and every single time—regardless of per gallon price or season—she complained about the oil going too fast and asked if she was being shorted. And for his patience, Joe was always rewarded with a twenty-five cent tip for coffee. Good thing he wasn’t a Starbucks man. But today, nothing, not even bullets could get through the numbness.
After all these years of driving, Serpe had never quite gotten used to the people aspect of oil delivery. On the street, as a detective, he saw the worst people at their worst; people at their most selfish, most violent, most desperate; people who were barely people anymore. Because the stakes were so high or maybe because the adrenaline rush was so intense, Serpe never quite saw his narcotics work in terms of routine. In oil, it was all about routine, his interactions with customers were the same, always; voices on the phone, faces through doors, quarters in palms.
His invisibility was one aspect of the job he would never understand but had come to accept. Almost from the first, he noticed that no on
e noticed him. People paid far more attention to their mailboxes than their mailmen. That’s how he thought about it. He loved to tell Marla the stories of what people had done in front of him. To this day, women would come to the door half naked, some more than half, hand him the cash for the delivery and point out where the oil fill was on the side of the house. He had stood at the door and watched people smoke crack, shoot heroin, smack their kids, their wives, their pets. To his customers, he was as invisible as the water main or electric or cable wires. If he ran into Mrs. Perchico in the supermarket, she wouldn’t recognize him. But Joe didn’t sweat it anymore. It was just another part of the job, like dirty hands and smelly clothes.
He climbed back up into the tugboat’s cab, put the quarter tip in the ashtray, and looked at the next delivery ticket. He didn’t really see what it said. Maybe invisibility was contagious.
Normally, Healy wouldn’t’ve been thrilled to see that the Suffolk cop from breakfast was back at the firehouse after lunch. He didn’t know about the rest of Kings Park, but it did seem to have the best protected firehouse on Long Island. Healy decided to put the cop to work, if not for the county, then for him and Joe.
“Jeff, right?” Healy asked, walking up to the cop.
“Right.”
Jeff was young, a real muscle-head who liked wearing his uniform shirt tight and spent as much time out of his unit posing as doing anything else. Healy knew the type. Out here they could survive their twenty years. In the city they tended to get chewed up and spit out.
Healy walked up to him conspiratorially. “Listen, Jeff, a piece of advice.”
“What?” The kid squeezed a lot of the wrong kind of attitude into that one syllable.
“You know what I used to do for a living?” “How would I know and why would I care?” “I was a detective.”
“Yeah. Macy’s or Sears?”
“That’s funny. No, NYPD.”
“How was Traffic Control in the city?”
“You missed your calling, kid.” Healy called him that purposefully. “No, but close. Internal Affairs.”
The kid tried to look completely unaffected, but mentioning IA gets a rise out of every cop, civilians too. While the young cop didn’t exactly blanch, a little of the piss went out of him.
“There some message here for me?” He stuck his chest out in an act of physical defiance.
“You know any of the Suffolk County DAs?”
“Some.”
“My last name’s Healy. Healy, like George Healy.” Now came the blanching, and the kid got that panicky look even innocent people get when they’re not sure what they’ve gotten caught up in. “I didn’t do nothing,” said the cop.
Christ, Healy thought, how many times had he heard people say those same words in just the same tone and how few times was it true?
“Calm down, Jeff. I really am doing you a favor. What I want to tell you is that I think this firehouse, cozy as it is, could use a little less protecting than the rest of Kings Park. Better I tell you than some other citizen calling into the Fourth Precinct. You don’t wanna have your supervising sergeant start watching you. That’s how bad things start.”
“I hear you. Thanks.”
“No problem.” Healy slapped the kid on the back and gave him a big smile. He had him right where he wanted him. “Listen, Jeff, could you do me a favor.”
[Confetti]
SATURDAY, JANUARY 8TH, 2005—EVENING
For the first time in a long time, Healy wasn’t there when Serpe got back to the yard. It was odd not having him around. You get used to people in spite of yourself, Joe thought, and all the loss in the world can’t teach you how to undo that. He had cashed out John and Anthony, paid them for the week, watched a little TV, checked and re-checked the tank valves on the trucks, swept the office floor, and then ran out of ways to avoid going home. He was about to lock up the office and close the yard gates when Healy pulled up. Joe looked out the trailer window, then sat in the quiet office listening to the car door slam, the crunch of his partner’s footsteps, the chuffing of Healy’s soles against the steps, the creak of the door.
“I caught you. Good,” Healy said.
“So, anything?”
“Everything maybe.”
“How so?”
“I think your instincts were right. There’s something going on in that body shop.” “Yeah, but what?”
“I like somebody in the shop for Jimenez.”
“That’s a helluva a leap there, Bob.”
Healy explained about the body shop’s being on credit stop and how Noonan lived in Mastic.
“It’s a long way from not being able to buy fenders from Honda to homicide,” Joe said.
“Maybe, but maybe not. Noonan lives five blocks from where we found the body.”
“How do you know that?”
“A Suffolk cop ran some tag numbers and sheets for me when I was at the firehouse.”
“And you got him to do this how?”
“I said pretty please.”
“You threatened him?”
“Something like that. Hank Noonan’s been in the system since he was a kid, drugs mostly, some other petty shit. Probably drove his old man crazy. But he’s got a real hard case working for him, a guy named William Burns. He has an up close and personal knowledge of the New York State Department of Corrections. Among other things, he did a long bid for assault with a deadly weapon.”
“You got a name and address on the blond?” Joe asked.
“Sure. Debbie Hanlon. Lives right over here in Farmingville.”
“I wonder what she does with her Saturday nights.”
“You’re thinking we should find out, huh?”
“I am,” Joe said. “You think we should bring your brother into this or—I can’t believe I’m saying this—Hoskins?”
“Hoskins, huh? You know, now that you mention the prick, was he at the wake?”
“He was there, all right. I got the bruises to prove it. But that’s another story. I met Monaco’s sister too. First, let’s figure this shit out.”
“Before I talk to my brother, let’s talk to the girl. Shake her up a little and see what falls out of the tree. If what’s going on at Noonan’s isn’t related to the murders, I can always get word of it to someone in the Suffolk PD without involving George.”
Joe looked at the clock. “Okay, let’s get something to eat and give Debbie Hanlon time to get home.”
The red Civic two-door pulled onto the cracked blacktop at 47 Tulip Avenue at a little after 7:30. A motion sensitive floodlight popped on and made it that much easier for Serpe and Healy, parked across the street, to watch Debbie Hanlon. The blond pushed open the driver’s side door with her leg and got out of the car carrying a large drink and a bag of KFC. She hip-checked the door shut and took a slow stroll around the car. She put the bag down on the welcome mat, fished the mail out of the box without looking at it and tucked it under her arm. She fumbled with the the front door key before finally getting the door open, picked up the chicken, and went inside the empty little house.
They waited until she got inside and had a chance to relax. They wanted to throw a scare into her, but not push her to do something stupid or dangerous. They wanted to knock her off balance, not run her over. The fact was that detectives, even good ones, were sometimes wrong about their hunches. They were on a fishing expedition and couldn’t afford to have it go wrong.
Bob Healy knocked firmly but politely, shield in hand, Joe Serpe over his right shoulder. Although you are supposed to turn in your shield when you retire, detectives often suffered convenient lapses of memory when the time came. Healy had suffered such a lapse. Joe Serpe hadn’t gotten the chance. He had been forced to hand his gun and shield over on the day he was arrested. The man he handed them to was Detective Bob Healy. Looking back, that was only a small irony in the scheme of things.
The door pulled back. There was recognition and resignation in her face.
“Come on in,”
is all she said.
There were no questions, no protests, no hysterics. It didn’t matter to her that the shield was wrong or that one man didn’t seem to have one. The defeat was immediate and apparent in Debbie Hanlon’s suddenly mournful brown eyes. Both ex-cops knew the look. She was intimate with defeat. She expected it. And now that it had come, she was, if not happy, then relieved. She turned and walked through her small, darkened house into the kitchen and slumped into a chair at the table. The strong smell of fried chicken filled up the whole house, but Debbie seemed to have lost her appetite and swept the food into the garbage.
She pointed at Serpe. “Billy figured you for a cop right away.”
“That was Burns with the moustache?” Joe asked. “Where was Noonan?”
“In the back office. There’s an office behind the shop.” Now she looked up at Healy. “I’m surprised at you. You seemed nice.”
“I am nice.”
“No, you’re a cop.”
Healy changed subjects. “Your house?”
“My mom’s. She moved down south last year.”
“Listen, Debbie,” Joe said, “we’re not here to give you grief.”
“You’d have to take a number to do that anyway.”
“Aren’t you a little young to be so bitter?” Healy said.
“I didn’t know you had to be of age.”
“But you have such a beautiful smile.”
“I guess I shoulda been a clown then.”
Joe pointed to his chest indicating that he wanted to question Debbie for the next few minutes.
“Like I said, we’re not here to cause you trouble,” Joe said. “Why do cops always say that? It’s stupid.”
“We’re here about the murder.”
“What murder?” she asked, her expression unchanging. “Alberto Jimenez, the driver from Epsilon Energy.”
“I told you I did’t know nothing about that.”
Fourth Victim Page 7