“Come on, guys. It’s a four year old homicide of a …” he hesitated, reminding himself about the color of Blades’ skin, “of a Nellie Bly kid. He probably got mixed up in some drugs or shit and somebody put a cap in his ass.”
“The mother said he was a good kid,” Healy said.
“So did Hitler’s mother.”
“Still …”
“Look, even if the kid was a saint, maybe he pissed off one of the local gangstas. It don’t take much.”
“Did he step on the wrong toes?” Blades wanted to know.
“We didn’t find jack shit. You know how it is. No offense, Detective, but no one talked to us from the projects. And after that other kid took the dive off the roof … forget about it. Word was a cop shoved him. All we know is that someone in a dark hooded sweatshirt walked up to Edgerin Marsden, put a Sig to his head, and blew his brains out. Then he knelt down and took all the kid’s possessions.”
“No new leads?”
“The only thing we ever hear is from the mother.”
“You might wanna give her a call every few months, even if it’s to tell her you got nothing,” Healy said in an unassuming voice.
“Yeah, I might. But fuck you! Who are you to come in here and tell me how to handle my fucking cases?”
Healy kept his mouth shut because he had no official standing and because he understood where the detective was coming from. Blades kept her mouth shut too, but reached into her pocket and pulled out a card. She handed it to the detective. She watched his eyes get big.
“You call the mother today. Now,” she said, “or I’m gonna make fucking up your career my reason for living. Understand?”
He tried acting tough, but didn’t pull it off. Blades picked up his phone and handed it to him.
“Start dialing. We’re headed over there right now.”
Joe Serpe thumbed through the Suffolk County PD reports on the oil driver homicides that Hoskins had left in the office. What a dick Detective Hoskins was, Joe thought, that he couldn’t just drop off the reports or have a subordinate do it. No, not Hoskins, he had to make it dramatic and destroy something in the process. Some people just can’t get out of their own ways. It wasn’t like Joe hadn’t met Hoskins’ type when he was on the job. Christ, Rusty Monaco was no better. Maybe he was even a little worse. Hoskins was a buffoon, but Rusty had some ability. He had all the makings of a good cop that Hoskins lacked.
As he took his first pass through the files, Serpe wondered if it was worth all the trouble he’d gone through to get them. Nothing jumped out and bit him in the ass. The only things that linked all the victims together were the things the whole world already knew about: They were all C.O.D. oil drivers who had been assaulted making nighttime deliveries in high crime areas. They all had at least two thousand dollars in cash on their persons. They were all shot with the same 9mm weapon. They were all dead. Beyond that, it seemed Hoskins had actually handled the cases by the book. Sure he’d managed to piss people off, but he hadn’t really made any big mistakes. The only one he fucked up was Alberto Jimenez and that one didn’t count. But Joe knew that sometimes files had to be massaged like cramped muscles before they gave up their secrets. Police work would be easy if all the important details floated to the surface. Maybe he was missing something that Healy would see. He shut the file, stood up, and stretched.
He’d called up John and Anthony and told them to get back to bed and enjoy the extra sleep because he was going to work them to death for the next week. Neither driver complained about the extra sleep or extra work. Gigi had already called in to her work and took the week off with vacation time she had coming. She seemed to enjoy playing Bob Healy’s role; answering the phones, giving price quotes, and writing delivery tickets.
“There any way to steal in this business?” Gigi asked when the phones died down a little.
“That’s a strange question?”
“Not from where I come from. Angles. My old man was always figuring angles. Of course, the angles he figured got him lots of time at Rikers, the Tombs … So, you gonna answer my question?”
“It’s pretty hard to make a dishonest buck in oil. This is one of the most regulated businesses you can imagine. We have to account for every gallon of oil that goes in and out of our trucks. Hell, we get audited every few years whether we do something wrong or not. I mean, yeah, there are a few scams, but they usually catch up to you.”
“Like what? What scams?”
“Prepunching tickets.”
“Huh?”
“Come outside to the trucks with me.”
It was still snowing heavily, but the wind had quieted some and it wasn’t all that cold to begin with. Joe started up Anthony’s big blue Mack because it still had some leftover oil in the tank. He climbed up to the top of the tank and asked Gigi to hand him the hose. When he climbed down, he took some tickets out of the cab and showed Gigi how to set the meter and place a ticket in.
“Normally you pull the hose to a house and pump oil out of the tank,” Serpe said. “But the meter’s a machine. It doesn’t know where the oil’s going. All it knows is that you’ve set it to pump a certain number of gallons; a hundred, two hundred, or whatever. As the truck pumps, the meter clicks off the gallons. When you’re done pumping, you clear the meter and it stamps or punches the number of gallons you’ve pumped at the top of the ticket. That’s an official number because the county calibrates the meter on every truck in the county every year and seals it shut.”
“Yeah, but where’s the scam?”
“Let’s say I come in early every morning, turn on my truck, and pull the hose up on top of the tank and put it back inside the tank like I just did. I’ve created a closed system, pumping oil out of the tank and right back in. Now let’s say I put a ticket in the meter,” he said, slipping a ticket in the meter. “I pump two hundred gallons back into my tank, and stamp the ticket.” He cleared the meter and stamped the ticket. “Say I do that for five times for different gallon amounts. Now I’ve got officially stamped, prepumped tickets with no names on them.”
“But—”
“I’m getting there. Now I go to Gigi Monaco’s house. Miss Monaco’s ordered two hundred gallons, but like ninety-nine percent of all oil customers, she doesn’t come out of the house and stand by the meter to make sure she’s getting what she ordered. So instead of pumping in the two hundred gallons she ordered, I pump in one-eighty.”
“You’re shorting me twenty gallons, but you’ve got a prepunched ticket that says you’ve pumped in two hundred,” Gigi said as proudly as if she’d gotten straight A’s in school. “You just write in my name and that’s that.”
“Very good. And twenty gallons isn’t so much that a customer will notice the shortage unless you do it to the same customers all the time. Let’s say oil’s two bucks a gallon. I just made forty dollars above what I would have made on the delivery and I’ve still got that twenty gallons in my tank to resell. Do it five times a day and that’s two hundred bucks. Do it six days a week and it’s twelve hundred bucks. Do it on three trucks and that’s thirty-six hundred. Do it fifty weeks a year and. That’s big money in this business.”
“So why don’t people do it?”
“They do, but they get caught,” Joe said. “Either you get some OCD customer who measures inches of oil in his tank instead of trusting the gauge and he reports you to the state or the feds. Or you get sloppy and greedy and you don’t find ways to bury your oil surpluses. But it’s usually more simple than that. It’s one thing if you’re an owner and you do it. You’re not gonna turn yourself in, right? But let’s say you have a driver doing it for you and he fucks up. He curses at a customer or doesn’t show up for a shift and you fire him.”
“He rats you out.”
“Right. He either drops a dime on you or makes a deal with the authorities and gets immunity while you rot in prison. Okay, now that Oil Crime One-oh-one is done, let’s get back inside.”
When they stepped back
inside, the smile ran away from Serpe’s face. On the TV that they’d left on was a photograph of Brian W. Stanfill, Esquire. The still was followed by videotape of a body bag being removed through the front door of his strip mall office. The crawl at the bottom of the screen read, “Nassau lawyer found brutally murdered inside his Seaford offices …” For Serpe, the clock was now running.
They didn’t have much in the way of reserves after their visit to the precinct and the door slamming bullshit got very old very fast. The fact was they had missed their chance, if there ever had been a chance, to get people to talk about Bogarde DeFrees’ plunge. Once Detective Hines and Healy had taken their break yesterday, they were screwed. Yet even if everyone in the project had been loose-lipped, the odds were there wasn’t anything for them to say. Some crimes, some incidents, are just like that; somebody winds up dead that maybe shouldn’t have, but there’s no evidence, no witnesses, no video. It’s frustrating. All you can do is your best and just move on.
What they did have was enough energy to make it back to the Marsden apartment. Evelyn was an odd mix of downhearted and humble. She smiled when they first came into the apartment. Her smile was a living reminder of the resemblance between Evelyn and her son. She offered them coffee. Neither Detective Hines nor Healy had the heart to refuse.
“That detective called me this morning,” Evelyn said, as she fussed with the coffee machine in her galley kitchen. “He said there wasn’t nothing new on my boy’s case. I guess I already knew as much, but it was just better to hear it from him. He apologized to me for not being more attentive. I s’ppose I have y’all to thank for that.”
“All we did was remind the detective of his job,” Healy said, as he paced around the living room. He was very taken by some of Edgerin Marsden’s photography. “Cops get discouraged too and sometimes they’d just as soon forget their failures.”
“Well, it did make me feel kinda ashamed for the way I spoke to you both yesterday and I’m sorry for that.”
“No need, Mrs. Marsden,” Blades said.
“Your son was very good at this. There’s something about these shots I can’t get outta my head,” Healy said.
Evelyn Marsden stuck her head out of the kitchen and could see that Bob Healy wasn’t just being nice. “Please take that one,” she said, “the one of the Brooklyn skyline. I like it, but it kinda depresses me, you know? It’s all that fog and such.”
“I couldn’t take it.”
“Oh, yes you could!” Evelyn stepped out of the kitchen, took the frame off the wall, and handed it to Healy.
He took it. He wasn’t a cop anymore and he really was quite taken by the late Edgerin Marsden’s work. “Thank you very much, Mrs. Marsden. I’ll treasure it.”
“I know you will. You would have liked my boy.”
“I’m sure I would have.”
“These days are the hardest on me,” Evelyn said, slipping the frame into a shopping bag. “I’m home from work ‘cause of the snow and all the kids ‘round too. These are hard hard days.”
As pleasant and as giving as Evelyn Marsden had been, Blades and Healy were glad to be out of there. Grief can be more than oppressive. It can be communicable and they already had too much on their plate to get sidetracked. When they got downstairs and stepped out into the commons, the paths had been plowed, but the concrete lawns were piled high with snow. Kids were having snowball fights, building snowmen and igloos, doing what kids do in the snow.
“What’s next?” Blades asked.
“I guess we can go talk to Finnbar McCauley and get his take on what happened the day DeFrees died. We were gonna have to talk to him eventually, anyway.”
“Waste of time. We know what he’s gonna say. You debriefed him right after it happened. He’ll say he doesn’t know anything now and he didn’t know anything back then. And when we turn our backs on him, he’ll whisper ‘Fuck you’ and laugh.”
“Maybe,”
“Maybe? C’mon, Healy. Monaco was his partner.”
“I knew Rusty Monaco. He wasn’t exactly the kind of man who inspired loyalty. His own pets would have growled at him.”
“Yeah, but they were partners.”
“So were Ralphy Abruzzi and Joe Serpe.”
[Dracula’s Dog]
MONDAY, JANUARY 17TH, 2005—LATE AFTERNOON
The 61st Precinct was on Coney Island Avenue in the Gravesend, Brighton Beach section of Brooklyn, so Hines and Healy just got back on the F train and rode it toward the far reaches of the borough. Although they hadn’t wanted to, they called ahead. Both of them knew it would be better to catch McCauly off guard, but they couldn’t risk making the trip for nothing.
McCauly picked them up at the subway station in an unmarked Chevy. He was just as Bob Healy remembered him; a jolly motherfucker; Santa Claus without the white face hair. He was six foot tall and five foot wide. He had a beer barrel gut, a gin blossom nose, and whiskey red cheeks. He had twinkly eyes that smiled like little blue suns and a charming way about him, but he was old school trained. He liked kicking ass and getting simple answers, but unlike his late partner, McCauly had a knack for skating right up to where the thin ice started. He had to be close to sixty and had probably done time in every other precinct in the city.
“I thought you retired,” he said to Healy, seated in the front next to him.
“I did. I own a business on Long Island.” Healy thought it best not to get specific.
“For fuck’s sake, a businessman.”
“I never think of myself that way.”
“And you didn’t think of yourself as a traitorous cocksucker when you were in IAB. Funny how we see ourselves,” McCauley said, the charm vanishing.
“Now wait a fucking sec—” Detective Hines started to jump up in McCauly’s face.
Healy cut her off. “That’s okay, Detective. McCauly’s earned the right to call me some names. Haven’t you, you fat incompetent fuck?”
McCauly laughed a hearty laugh. “That I have. That I have. So what’s this about Rusty?”
“That business I own on Long Island, it’s a home heating oil delivery business and my partner’s Joe Serpe.”
McCauly slammed on the brakes and turned the wheel so that the Chevy skidded into a snow berm along the curb.
“Now you’re just fucking with me,” McCauly growled, turning to face Healy.
“No. Joe and me are partners.”
“What’s the company’s name, Two Rats Oil?”
Healy could see Blades getting worked up again, but waved at her to stay calm.
“The company already had a name when we bought it, but otherwise we might’ve gone with Two Rats.”
“So what is it about Rusty?” McCauly asked, keeping his eyes on Blades in the rearview.
“It seems him and Joe and Ralpy Abruzzi worked together on a drug task force in the late eighties. They were doing a bust in the projects and it went bad. Rusty saved Joe Serpe’s ass.”
“Jesus, well that was a mistake.”
“Listen, McCauly,” Healy said, putting his face close to the fat man’s, “I don’t give a flying fuck about you or Rusty Monaco, but he saved my partner’s life. Joe thinks he owes him for that, so we’re trying to find out who killed him and the other oil drivers.”
“Why not let the Suffolk cops handle it?”
“Cause the detective on the case makes you look like Eliot fucking Ness.”
“And what’s she got to do with it?” McCauly threw a thumb at the backseat.
“She’s here to make sure you don’t lie to me. That’s all.”
“Lie to you about what? I mean, some nig—some perp stuck a gun to Rusty’s head and killed him and took his money. What the fuck would I know about that? I mean, it’s not like me and Rusty were tight. We only partnered for six months.”
“You were tight enough to be in his will,” Blades said.
That hit a nerve. All the piss and vinegar, all the swagger in his demeanor vanished. It came back as fast as i
t disappeared, but there was no denying something had changed.
“We weren’t close, but we went through hell with that DeFrees thing. You know, Healy. You put us through it.”
“I was doing my job.”
“So was Eichmann.”
“Nice. What’d Rusty leave you?” Healy asked. “It’s none of your fucking business, but it was a letter. That’s all. What’s any of this shit got to do with somebody robbing and shooting Rusty?”
“Probably noth—” Healy said. “James Burgess,” Blades whispered.
“Huh?” McCauly said, acting as if he hadn’t heard. But he had and the mention of the name took the red out of his nose and cheeks.
“Forget it,” Healy said. “I don’t think there’s any connection between Rusty getting whacked and your days together, but I had to ask.”
“Yeah, well, at least you’re interested,” McCauly said, trying to change the subject. “Rusty didn’t exactly make a lot of friends.”
McCauly, a man who never turned down the offer of food or drink, turned down Healy’s offer of both. He couldn’t get away from Healy and Blades fast enough. He was like the female cat in the Pepe LePew cartoons. Still, he couldn’t resist asking Healy what was in the bag as he dropped them back off at subway.
“This?” Healy said, pulling the frame out of the shopping bag. “It’s a photograph taken by a kid named Edgerin Marsden. He was murdered at the Nellie Bly Houses the day after the DeFrees kid took the plunge. You like it?”
“I hope the East River floods the tunnel as your fucking train goes through,” McCauly said before Healy closed the car door.
“How the hell did that man last on the job this long?” Blades asked as they watched McCauly’s car fishtail away.
“Charm,” Healy said. “Charm.”
They were both silent for a few moments. Although subway cars are never exactly quiet, the white street scenes outside the window seemed to dampen the clangs and squeals of the train as it snaked its way back toward Manhattan.
“I don’t know,” Blades said, breaking the silence.
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