“Here,” Tessa says, pulling to a stop across the street from 12988, a house that looks just like all the rest except the four CCTV cameras discreetly placed under the eaves of the roof, the iron bars on the front door and windows. I’m willing to bet the windows are one-way and bulletproof. Tessa hands me a pair of binoculars.
I raise the glasses. You can learn a lot about a house from the roof. I notice 12988 and 12990 next to it have identical new air-conditioning units. It is an interesting coincidence. The two houses also have the same doormat. There is a high wall connecting the two properties so there is no view of the yard between them.
“Guess,” Tessa says.
I can just make out the top of a swing set rising over the wall between the houses. “It’s a day-care center, a foster home, a rehab, or a women’s shelter,” I say.
“You got it.” Tessa consults her notebook. “I was in domestic violence. I know every women’s shelter in Queens, but I never heard of this place. Mrs. Steevers was in residence from December thirtieth to March fifth. That’s her alibi for the night her husband was killed. She may know who did it.”
“Let’s get out of here,” I say.
We drive in silence for a few blocks.
“Did you go inside?”
“No. I called Susan and made an appointment to see her. When I got to her apartment, she had a lawyer who showed me a video on her iPad. It was of Susan in the shelter, with plenty of time codes. They have CCTVs up the wazoo, plus a list of people who would swear she was there that night. I asked her where there was. That, she said, would require a court order. I left and waited in my car. An hour later, Susan drove out, and I followed her here.”
Tessa loves detail; the rest of my questions might as well be over coffee. “There’s a Starbucks on the corner. I’m buying.” We order lattes and settle into a quiet corner. Tessa takes out her notebook.
“I checked the property records. It’s registered under the name Artemis—that’s the name of a Greek goddess.”
I know this. In Greek mythology, Artemis is the goddess of the hunt, but she is also known as the protector of young women. The latter makes an appropriate name for a women’s shelter.
“It opened in 1998 as a residence for women. Fire, health, and safety permits are up-to-date, but here’s the weird thing: it could easily qualify for a 501(c)(3) nonprofit status. It means anyone who donates money to it would get a tax deduction. Of course, you would need to have a board of directors, list your donors, and make your tax returns available. It all has to be completely transparent. Artemis isn’t a nonprofit.”
“What is it?” I ask.
“A corporation. It’s a business.”
“Who pays for running it? The women?”
“I doubt it. They’re running from their husbands. They have kids, nowhere to go. They don’t have any money.”
“What do you know about the corporation?”
Tessa looks at her notes. “It’s registered in Delaware, so lots of luck in getting their tax returns. Corporate tax returns are not public record. All we know is there is a president of the corporation, named Phyllis Berke. She is also listed as the sole employee.”
“So either Berke is wealthy, or somebody funded it and keeps it going. Who handles the business? Pays the bills, does the taxes?”
“There’s a CPA in Merrick. Her name is Vali Lopez. I talked to her on the phone. She says she doesn’t know Ms. Berke, never met her. She does the books, pays the bills. She said if I wanted any information, I would have to come back with a search warrant. Talk about under the radar.”
“I get that part,” I say. “If I were hiding women whose husbands are looking for them, I wouldn’t want a sign out front.”
“But we never heard of it.” She scrapes the last bit of foam out of her paper cup. “Isn’t that strange?”
“Not really. They don’t want police to know where they are. Especially if they are sheltering women whose husbands are cops. Like Susan.”
“So, what next?” Tessa says.
“Let’s go back to Ronald. Assume he was fired for beating Susan when they were in Farmingdale. It was either because they had an enlightened chief of police, or his abuse was too over-the-top.”
“I think it’s more complicated. By the way, what’s your definition of over-the-top?” Tessa asks.
“For me, touching any part of my body without permission is over-the-top. Was Ronald going to kill Susan? He may have been getting ready to.”
“That’s not what was scaring Susan.”
“What was?”
“It’s in the interview. She’s a talker. I only asked a few questions.”
She taps the voice recording icon on her phone. I recognize Susan’s voice.
“We had a deal—he works days, I work nights, he keeps his car and clothes here, we don’t sleep together, we don’t eat together, until he finds a place he can afford once he starts working again in law enforcement. If he hits me again, then all bets are off. He has to move out. It was a crazy arrangement, but it was working. Until I made the mistake of saying hello. When did this begin? In group at the shelter, I was asked to create a diary of the past.”
“Could you tell me what that looks like?”
“Imagine you wrote it in the present. You start with how you met, how you fell in love, how you decided to get married—you tell the diary about your wedding, your honeymoon, and the first time he hit you.”
“When was the first time?”
“In Farmingdale. It was an argument about money. I said he spends too much on his car, his Islanders seats, his bike, his video games; he said I spent too much money on groceries. I showed him the credit card bills; he ripped them up and mashed them into my face. I pushed him away, and the next thing I knew I was on the floor, and I couldn’t feel my jaw. I ran into the bathroom, locked the door, and called 911. The police came, but they were friends of Ronald’s, and they talked me out of pressing charges. That was the first time.”
“And the beatings, did they continue?”
“Yes.”
“Did you call the police again?”
“Two more times. But by then he had convinced them that I was the aggressor. He grabbed my hand and scratched his face with it, so that he had the marks. And then he decided that I needed a different punishment when I was bad, and bad was a lot of things.”
“What was the punishment?”
“He would throw boiling water at me.”
“Ronald’s mother said that Susan did that to Ronald,” I say.
Tessa pauses the recording. “She showed me the burn scars on her back.”
Tessa hits play. Susan continues,
“Ronald was trained to be obeyed, to always be in command of a situation; his authority is not to be questioned. He was trained to use force, and he liked using it on the job, so I guess he liked using it at home.”
Tessa and I look at each other. We both know she’s right. If you are married to a male policeman, your chances of being abused go to 70 percent.
“It turns out I wasn’t Ronald’s only punching bag. We went to the movies one night and some kids in front of us were pretty rowdy, making noise. Ronald yanked one of them out of his seat and dragged him up the aisle and threw him out of the theater. The kid came back with his father and a couple of patrolmen. There was a lawsuit, and I was deposed. I admitted that Ronald was violent with me, too. They settled, but Farmingdale police fired Ronald. He blamed my testimony for losing him his job.”
“What prevented you from leaving?” Tessa asks.
“At first because I guess I loved him. And we had a life plan. He would advance in his police career, we would save my nursing salary for a house, have kids, you know, a regular life. And after Ronald hit me, he would apologize, promise to change, swear he loved me, all the other bullshit, which I bought into. We moved here, he got his job at Home Depot, he had applications out to other police forces and a buddy who said he could get him into the NYPD, so things were l
ooking up. But it wasn’t right. I told him I wanted a divorce. That’s when he showed me the bottle.”
“The bottle?”
“Acid. It would go in my face when he found me. He showed me pictures of women who had had acid thrown at them. He poured out one drop on his own arm. You want to know what happens when a drop of acid hits skin? No, you don’t. But I believed him. The boiling water was just a preview of things to come. Someone, don’t ask me who, told me about a women’s shelter where I would be safe. The next day, Ronald went to Home Depot and I went to the shelter. I didn’t come out until I saw on TV that he was dead. I have no idea who killed Ronald, but you know what? I’m grateful.”
“Can you tell me about the shelter?”
“No.”
There was a pause. I was about to say something, but Tessa cut me off.
“Wait. There’s one more part.”
“Once, when he was slapping me back and forth, one hand holding my neck, the other whipping across my cheeks, I caught a glimpse of a picture of him on the mantel—ten years old in a Cub Scout uniform. He looked proud, and his grin was so sweet. A permanent tooth not yet arrived, making him cuter. Freckles, bright eyes, combed hair still wet. Adorable. I wanted to ask him: How did you grow up to be who you are? Who taught you to hit?”
Chapter 17
Bobby B is more optimistic than I am about my trip to Hawaii.
“If you get the shooter’s identity from his DNA or fingerprints, all kinds of things fall into place. He’ll have to explain travel, receipts, cell phone locations—we know who we’re looking for on CCTV shots at gas stations, rental cars, 7-Elevens, McDonald’s. The guy has to eat, right? If all else fails in terms of evidence, you can go back to plan B and shoot him.”
“That’s plan A, not B.”
The sushi chef interrupts us with the next item in the omakase, an endless tasting menu he is creating: two porcelain teaspoons with a single clam floating in pink broth. We have worked our way through eight tiny, elegantly presented pieces of raw fish that could fit on a microscope slide. Bobby is a regular customer and is therefore allowed to say, “Hido, stop when you get to two hundred bucks, okay?”
“No prob.”
“I’m done,” I say.
We toss two credit cards on the counter. In the car, Bobby B says what he always says after a $200 omakase, “Burger King or Wendy’s?”
I wake up in the middle of the night playing questions. Here’s one: What came first, the chicken or the egg? Aristotle says actuality precedes potentiality. An egg is a potential chicken, and a chicken is a chicken; therefore the idea of a chicken must precede the egg. And why doesn’t Mr. McDermott know whom he has killed? And where’s Artie Crews’s son’s cat? Bobby wakes up and puts his hand under my T-shirt.
“Bobby, don’t do anything. Just lie there.” He knows what I like to do before he gets to do what I like.
The next morning, I drive by the women’s shelter where Susan was staying when Ronald was killed. I just wanted another look on my way to work. Later, in the detective’s room, Lieutenant Hagen stops at my desk, carrying an armful of thick folders. I know what they are: cold cases.
“Have a good time in Hawaii?”
“Yes. I needed some rest, warm sun, and pineapple juice. It’s in the brochure.”
“We got the guy who killed the girl in the car.”
“The boyfriend?”
She shrugs. “He walked in yesterday. He read her cell phone. Saw texts to her other boyfriend.”
Police work: luck, guilt, and a confession.
“You ready for some fun?”
I nod. She drops five of the folders on my desk. Cold cases, unsolved homicides. I am not expected to solve them in an hour as they do on television, I am merely required to go through them, look for clues, check out the suspects once again, see what crimes they have committed since, see if any of them resemble the original ones, and see what might be gleaned from evidence using more recent technologies, spectrum analysis, powder tests, murder weapon genealogy, and DNA. Then I am expected to write an evaluation statement, one that recommends the case be reopened or sent back as being impossible to solve: deaths of all witnesses, lack of any worthwhile evidence, and realistic chances of ever solving the crime, and use of police resources. We all know that occasionally, the process works, a detective notices a clue overlooked, a connection to another killing with the same method, and someone is arrested for a crime they committed twenty years ago and the victim’s family gets justice and closure.
My cousin Aline works at a Wall Street law firm. She calls herself Rumpelstiltskin—a clerk or intern with a shopping cart loaded with merger documents arrives and places them on her desk. A minute later, she gets a call from a senior partner saying he needs these documents edited, prepared for signatures, and they had better be perfect—by tomorrow. “Turn straw into gold,” Aline says.
In front of me is that stack of straw. They are only five on my desk, but there are more in cardboard file boxes in the basement of the building. I will consider these five, and there will be five more, and it will never end as long as people continue to do bad things to each other.
My first one is as thick as a suburban phone book, if they still have them. Everything one needs to know about an unsolved murder case is in them: photographs of the victim, the murder scene, the murder weapon, the mug shots or party pictures of the suspects, the family, friends. There are timelines, forensic reports, medical examiner reports, coroner reports, blood tests, fingerprint analysis, sputum, stool, and urine samples. Witness statements from the last person to see her/him alive, lists of people—using the means-motive-opportunity test—who might be suspects and deserve to be questioned again. Some cops see cold case files as containing nothing you need to know about an unsolved murder case; it’s unsolved for a good reason—nobody solved it. Is the glass half-empty, or half-full? I’m an optimist, so I open the first file and look for inspiration, an overlooked possible killer. If it’s a young girl, I will check out all the family members again.
The first case is a man shot to death, found in the trunk of his car. If it had not been for the smell emanating from the trunk of his decomposing body and the attempts of the restaurant to provide a pleasant outdoor dining experience, the corpse would have lasted for at least another month and into winter. Although the premise of the cold case project is that every murder leaves behind other victims—the family, the friends, the fiancé, the parents—this man in the trunk of his car seems to have died a singular lonely death. His biography begins in Tulsa, where he was fostered out of an orphanage to an older couple who are both dead. There was a serious attempt to find his birth parents; they, too, are deceased. No siblings, uncles, aunts; he died alone. Hopeless. Why he was killed and by whom would have to wait for a confession. I have no faith in that. It could have been a debt unpaid, an argument turned violent, or a revenge killing like the one I have planned for myself.
The next one has a yellow Post-it note attached to the inside of the file: My advice: don’t spend a whole lot of time looking for whoever killed this piece of shit. The first document is a faded wanted poster with a mug shot of the victim: Nelson Gooding, taken at the prime of his career as a serial rapist and murderer. Nelson was a white male in his thirties, five eight, 175 pounds, arms covered with tattoos from wrist to shoulder. He is considered armed and dangerous; call the following number if you should see him, and under no circumstances approach him. No kidding. There are copies of his fingerprints at the bottom of the page. I visualize the rural post office in Grahamsville and can’t remember wanted posters on the walls. I wonder if this one is old enough to be appraised on Antiques Roadshow. I continue to read through the file containing the list of his rapes and murders, and how he tortured his victims, all of whom were under fifteen. Nelson was found under a bench in Forest Park, his throat slit and his penis stuffed in his mouth. Maybe Nelson got off easy, but I doubt if anyone will, as the Post-it said, “spend a whole lot of time look
ing for whoever killed this piece of shit.”
My next file concerns the hit-and-run death of a Daniel Huang, sixteen-year-old high school student who worked nights stuffing takeout menus in mailboxes. His wallet was missing, which means the driver hit him, stopped, got out of his vehicle, and robbed him. I notice the original CSI homicide team didn’t examine his clothing for paint fibers. The case is five years old, but the science is better now, so if they find any traces of paint, we can identify the make and model of the vehicle that hit Daniel. I compose a brief memo of why I want this case reopened. That’s three down, two to go.
Cold case four is Sean Brody, an Irish immigrant who had overstayed his tourist visa—by ten years—and was employed as a medical aide at Queens General Center Hospital. He was found floating in the Eleventh Street Basin with bruised eyes, a broken nose, loose lower teeth, and a blood alcohol level that was off the charts. There were two theories—one: he was in a bar fight, stumbled away, fell drunk into the water, and drowned. The other was that he was beaten and purposely thrown into the basin. It was either a homicide or an accident. All the neighborhood bars were canvassed, and there were no reports of fights that night. Or of Sean’s presence in any of them. Mystery of mysteries, and there wasn’t enough information to justify further investigation. Noted. Cold case five is Juanita Castro Gooding, age twenty-eight, bludgeoned to death in her apartment in Rego Park. Prime suspect is Nelson Gooding, her husband, and aforementioned piece of shit whose case I just read. I went back and opened Nelson’s file. There it was: a restraining order from the Queens municipal court forbidding Nelson from all contact with his wife, Juanita Castro Gooding, whether it be in person or by telephone, notes, mail, fax, email, or delivery of flowers or gifts. Nelson was a suspect in the murder of Juanita. He was questioned by police and released. A year later, he was murdered.
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