“What’ll you have?”
“Blue Point lager.”
“Hey, Pete. Blue Point and an O’Doule’s here,” Stan called to the barman.
“O’Doule’s! You’re drinking near beer? You quitting, Stan?”
“Nah. I got a date meeting me hear in a few minutes and I want to be straight when she gets here.”
Serpe took a good look at Stan. The ex-pug was in nice black wool slacks and a gray wool sweater. It was the first time he’d ever seen the man out of his work clothes and boots. You could really see his boxer’s build when he wasn’t dressed in coveralls and hoodies. Hell, he even smelled like something other than #2 home heating oil. The barman put the drinks up. They clinked bottles.
“Looking sharp, Stan the Man. Looking sharp.”
“Thanks, bro.”
“So they found out who was killing us,” Brock said, recalling the conversation they’d had the previous month.
“That they did.” Given his bizarre evening to that juncture, Serpe didn’t feel like discussing it further. Brock had other ideas.
“Murder, man. It’s like a fucking virus. Once Cain done in his brother, it spread.”
“You religious, Stan?”
“Me? Nah.”
“A philospher?”
“Yeah, sure. Brock and Plato Home Heating Oil, Incorporated.”
“Sounds good to me,” Joe said. “You hear?”
“Hear what?”
“Jimmy Mazzone’s selling Baseline,” Brock said. “Gastrol bought ‘em out for big big bucks. Millions, I hear.”
“Baseline Energy?”
“Never thought I’d see the day that Jimmy Mazzone would sell out to one of those full service motherfuckers. What’s this business coming to?”
“It’s rough.”
“I guess. Maybe after Stevie got murdered. The wife and the daughter had probably had enough. I heard he was gonna marry the daughter.”
“I heard the same thing.”
“Life’s too short.”
“Watch it, Stan, or that philosophy thing is gonna get around.”
They clinked bottles once more and had a laugh. Joe said his goodbyes and shook Brock’s hand again.
“Thanks for the beer, Stan.” Serpe was about to ask his friend who the lucky woman was when Kathleen Cummings came in through the front door. Brock fairly twitched at the sight of her. “Watch your left nut, bro.”
“What’d you say, Joe?”
“Have a great time. See ya.”
[Twenty-two Gallons]
TUESDAY, FEBRUARY 15TH, 2005
Bob Healy nearly swallowed his tongue when Hoskins showed up the next day asking for Joe. Serpe hadn’t warned Healy, hadn’t discussed last night. He’d thought about letting his partner in on the news of his alliance with Hoskins, but realized he scarcely believed it himself. Serpe stepped out of the bathroom when he heard the trailer door shut. He checked his watch.
“Four on the nose. Good.”
“I never saw you limp that heavy,” Hoskins said as Healy sat in utterly stunned silence.
“After a full day on the truck … It’ll be better when I’m off it for a little while. Give me and Healy about five.”
“I’ll be outside.”
Healy stared at his partner in disbelief. His mouth moved, but every word he tried to put in it seemed not to fit.
“I’ll explain it to you later, Bob, when I understand it. Is the money right?”
“Fifty cents over.”
“Don’t let the IRS find out. I’ll call you about it later. Right now I gotta go.”
Serpe picked up the cardboard box in which the copies of the homicide files had sat dormant for the last few weeks and left. Healy sat, looked at the door, and shook his head.
Hoskins followed Serpe to his condo in Holbrook. The two of them walked from the parking lot, each with a cardboard box of his own.
“Nice digs,” Hoskins said.
“It’s too big for me, but. Fuck it!”
“I can find her, you know, Marla Stein. I know she split.”
“You’ve been checking up on me?”
“Yeah, for a time there, you were my hobby,” Hoskins confessed. “You gonna ruin a man’s life, you gotta know about that man’s life.”
“Sick kinda logic to that, I guess.”
“The offer stands. I can find her.”
“Thanks, but no thanks. I’ve already done her too much harm. You want a drink?”
“JD on the rocks.”
“Coming up.”
Serpe spread the files out on the living room floor, while Hoskins did his work at the dining room table. Joe couldn’t help but think about how empty the place had been since Gigi left. It wasn’t so much that he hungered for Gigi’s presence. It was more that some places are just meant for two. At that moment, there with his former enemy at his table, Serpe decided he’d put the townhouse on the market as soon as he could. Marla had long ago given him her power of attorney.
“This is bullshit!” Joe shouted, his eyes tired and sore. “There’s nothing here.”
“You’re not seeing it.”
“I’m not seeing it because there’s nothing here to see.” Hoskins shrugged his shoulders in defeat.
That only pissed Serpe off. “Are your files any different than mine?” he snarled. “Is there anything in the originals that you left out when you made these copies?”
“My hand to God, what you got is an exact copy of what I got here.” Hoskins swept his thick arm above the files. “Check for yourself. The only thing not here is the actual crime scene evidence and that we’ve got pictures of.”
“Come on,” Serpe said, already throwing on his leather jacket. “Let’s go have a look.”
“At what?”
“At what’s not here.”
They had the plastic bags laid out on a table, no one paying the two of them any mind. Most Suffolk cops gave Hoskins wide berth to begin with and none of them really knew Serpe. Hoskins was right; there wasn’t much evidence. There were the recovered bullets, of course, swaths of bloody clothing, some papers, etc. There were contents from the cabs of all four trucks. Serpe imagined he could smell #2 oil even through the plastic bags.
“How the fuck can you stand that smell all day long?” Hoskins asked. “Christ, it stinks.”
Serpe was glad he wasn’t imagining it. “Like anything else, you get used to it.”
“Does it ever go away?”
“Not really. It’s almost impossible to wash outta your clothes and there’s no getting it out of your head. Is it alright to handle the evidence out of the bags?”
“Here,” Hoskins said, handing Serpe a pair of latex gloves. “Officially, these are still open cases for now. In a few months, when everyone’s moved on and forgotten, they’ll convene some sorta pow wow and declare them closed. My luck, I’ll be dead already. When you wanna look at a different case, I’ll give you new gloves.”
It wasn’t five minutes before Hoskins asked for Joe to come over by him and explain something about the business.
“Serpe, come over here,” he said, a scratched and dented metal ticket box next to him on the table. On the box was a blue plastic label, the name STEVIE in raised white lettering.
“It’s a ticket box. So what? I’ve got one for every truck.”
“What do you keep in it?”
“My drivers have to keep a copy of the BOL—sorry, the bill of lading. That’s how much oil is loaded on the truck at one time. They keep a manifest, which justifies the differences between what’s newly loaded and what’s already on the truck. They have their delivery tickets, trip/inventory card, and whatever non-cash payments they receive. Checks and money orders, that kinda thing.”
“Okay,” Hoskins said, flipping open the ticket box with a pencil in spite of the fact they were both wearing gloves. “So this here is the trip/inventory card.”
“Right. See, the driver writes down after each stop where the delivery was made and
how much oil he pumped. And there, next to each entry, he’s marked the method of payment. You can keep a running inventory that way, so you know when you’re running low on oil.”
“Makes sense. And these two sheets are the BOL and the manifest?”
“Right.”
“And these are the delivery tickets, right?” Hoskins fanned ten Baseline Energy tickets across on the table. “Holy fucking shit!”
“What is it?”
“They were prestamping tickets. Look,” Joe said, pulling out two of the tickets. “See, they’re both for the same address: 108 Hilltop Avenue in Brentwood.”
“So what?”
“See this ticket is dirty and the stamp at the top says one-hundred-seventy-eight gallons. That ticket’s been handled by a driver who’s been out working, who’s got grime on his hands and gloves.”
“I see that, yeah.”
“But look, the rest of the ticket is blank; no per gallon price, no tax, no total, no nothing. And see here, the yellow customer copy is still attached beneath the merchant copy. Look carefully at its twin. It’s pristine. It’s all filled out. It’s signed for and the customer copy has been torn out. This ticket was punched by a man with clean hands and fresh gloves. But most importantly, look at the gallons pumped stamp.”
“Two hundred gallons.” A light went on behind Hoskins’ sled dog eyes. “I get it! He’s charging for two hundred gallons, but he’s pumping in twenty-two gallons less. It’s like keeping two sets of books.”
“Bingo! And see the trip/inventory card, the driver wrote down two hundred gallons.”
Some of the steam went out of the cop. “But is it worth killing over? I mean, it’s only twenty-two fucking gallons.”
“It’s more,” Joe said, pulling out another pair of twin tickets. “That’s thirty more gallons. Now we’re up to fifty gallons. That’s two phony tickets outta ten. Baseline’s got eight trucks. They go out seven days a week in the winter. You do the math and tell me if it’s worth killing over.”
“I seen people kill for less, a lot less.”
“Me too. And there’s something else.”
“What?”
“Last night after you split, a friend of mine, an old timer in the business bought me a beer. He told me that Jimmy Mazzone is selling Baseline to Gastrol.”
“So what?”
“The sale price of an oil company is based upon the average gallons pumped over a two or three year period. You get like a buck a gallon, give or take. We’re talking millions of dollars here, Hoskins. Shit, my little rinky-dink outfit is gonna pump a few hundred thousand gallons this year. So if Mazzone has been doing this for years, it’s major fraud. He’s been shorting customers on one end and inflating his pumping figures on the other. What if Steve Reggio got a guilty conscience and planned on going to the authorities or to Gastrol?”
“But this Stevie guy was engaged to Mazzone’s daughter.”
“Yeah,” Joe said. “And Khouri Burgess just murdered his own father and blew his head off. Under normal circumstances, neither thing happens. But neither situation is normal.”
“Okay, so he kills the kid, but you think he killed three innocent men just to cover it up?”
“Why not? It’s the same theory everyone was working on for why Monaco was killed, right? Rusty was the real target and the other drivers were killed to obscure that fact. Maybe we were right, but about the wrong victim. Besides, once you’ve killed your son-in-law to be, I figure it’s gotta get easier.”
“Even if I buy this, and I’m not saying I do, why would Mazzone leave the tickets there for the world to see? Why not destroy the evidence?”
“Maybe he didn’t have it planned out. Maybe he went to throw a scare into the kid, but Stevie wouldn’t listen. They struggle. Bang! The kid is dead. Somehow, I don’t think Mazzone’s first thought is to clean out the ticket box with his daughter’s fiance bleeding out at his feet. Besides, by making it look like a robbery, he must’ve figured the cops would focus on that, not on fraud.”
“He was right. I didn’t know what the double tickets meant.”
“Come on, we got some photocopying to do.”
[Vengeance and Forgiveness]
THURSDAY, FEBRUARY 17TH, 2005
The two of them sat in Hoskins’ Crown Vic down the block from Baseline Energy, Inc. watching the fleet of trucks pull out of the yard and head toward the oil terminal for loading. Neither man was in a very good mood because neither man enjoyed the prospect of what they were about to set in motion, but they had been left no choice. The fact that they’d let Bob Healy in on their theories and that he was most miserable of all, gave them no comfort.
Serpe was wrecked, bleary-eyed and a bit disheveled. Hoskins, never the fittest looking speciman to begin with, was showing signs of the disease. He was swollen and bruised. They had kept Healy up late and he’d been the one to make the call to his brother. Joe didn’t think he’d likely forget his partner’s expression as he laid the phone back in its cradle.
“So, what’d he say?” Hoskins had asked. It was an unnecessary question. They both saw the answer in his face.
“He said to forget it. He won’t take it to the DA. He said there aren’t enough chickens in the world to lay the eggs to match how much egg on their faces him and the rest of the brass would be wearing. After the press conference, he said, there was no going back. It’s a dead issue.”
“How about another ADA?” Joe said. “Or we can take it to the DA ourselves.”
“George says that’s a non-starter. The DA won’t see us and any ADA who even entertains the thought will be committing career suicide. He says we can try to do it through the cops.”
“He knows that’s bullshit. We got more at stake than the DA’s office,” Hoskins said. “I went to my commander after Serpe and me looked at the evidence. I laid it out for him and showed him the photocopies. I told him I’d reopen the investigation quietly, that I’d do it on my own and that unless it was an air tight lock, a hundred percent, I’d keep my mouth shut.”
“And?” Healy was curious.
“He told me if I said another word about it, he’d bring me up on charges. Took a thick file outta his desk. A history of my past indiscretions, he called it. I’m sure you two understand that there was stuff in there he could make stick. Normally, I woulda told him to jam it up his ass, but I can’t afford to lose my benefits, not now.”
“What did your brother say when you said we’d take it to the press?” Joe asked.
“That shook him up, made him nervous.”
“Good,” Hoskins said.
“No, not so good. My brother said that if we went that route—the nuclear option, he called it—that we’d all better be prepared for all out war. That there were too many people in Suffolk, Nassau, and Brooklyn who had too much to lose. They’d ruin us and Gigi would be prosecuted to the full extent of the law. He also said some stuff I’m not gonna repeat. So forget the media.”
“What about the truth?”
“That’s a pretty funny question coming outta your mouth.” Healy said. “Ain’t it, though? Just the same.”
“George said that the truth was only for us to know and that as far as all these victims were concerned, they’d already gotten all the justice they were ever going to get.”
Serpe turned bright red. “Fuck him and fuck that!”
Bob Healy didn’t disagree.
There was little need of discussion after that. The three of them pretty much understood the mechanics of what had to be done and how to do it. Each had his own reason for doing it. That was eight hours ago. Now the justice clock was about to start ticking.
“Okay,” Serpe said. “The trucks are all gone.”
Hoskins put the Ford in drive and he purposely skidded to a loud stop inside the yard just outside the office door. Hoskins went in first. With his hulking build and lazy, pale eyes, he was an intimidating presence. The puffy face and bruised skin only heightened the effect. Both Marie and To
ni Mazzone sat back in their seats at the sight of him blocking up the doorway. It took them a second to notice his shield and for them to remember who he was. Serpe stepped in behind and then around him. To Marie and her daughter, Joe Serpe seemed like salvation. You could see it in their eyes. Good. That’s what they wanted.
“You heard we got the guy that killed Stevie,” Hoskins said, not waiting for an answer. “We just got some details to clear up before we close the files. Serpe’s here cause he knows the oil business, so don’t mind him.”
The women were both too stunned to talk right away. They looked at each other then turned to Serpe, a plea for help on their faces.
“Congratulations,” Joe said, flashing a broad smile. “I know it’s still tough about Stevie, but I heard Jimmy sold to Gastrol.”
“Where’d you hear that?” Marie said, confused.
“Around. Big money. Good for you.”
“Thanks.”
“Serpe, you talk to the daughter in here. I’ll talk to the mother in the office.”
Hoskins spoke about the women as if they weren’t there.
Half an hour later Serpe and Hoskins were back in the front seat of the Crown Vic still parked in Baseline’s yard. As planned, Hoskins waited a minute before going back in.
“I almost forgot,” he said, handing a white envelope to Marie Mazzone. “This is for your husband, for Jimmy. He really needs to get in touch with me to explain this stuff to me before we can finally put an end to things. Make sure he gets it. I know he’ll wanna do the right thing.”
“What are you talking about?”
“Just make sure he gets the envelope.”
Hoskins parked the car where it had been before, far enough away from the yard not to be noticed, but close enough for Serpe and him to keep an eye on things.
“The daughter’s still a mess,” Joe said. “She said the fiancé had been acting strange for about a month before he was killed. He was going to church a lot. She even found him crying a few times in the morning, but he wouldn’t say what was wrong. The most she said he would say was that he needed to think about big things. I think she just assumed he was getting cold feet.”
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