Brooklyn Noir (22 page)

The old woman leaned forward conspiratorially. “You want me to canvass for witnesses? I could do that—I know everyone from Shore Road to Fort Hamilton Parkway. Maybe somebody saw something. That snippy waitress got her break at the diner a little while ago. Maybe she knows something—she’s always talking to those boys who go in there, the little gossip.”

“No, no, that could be dangerous.” Ippolito put an arm around her skeletal shoulder and guided her through the kitchen to the rear door. “I need you to go back to your house and write down everything you saw and experienced here tonight.”

“Write down…?”

“You’re our main witness right now. We need to protect you.” He nodded solemnly. “I’ll have a car sent to watch your door, too. Just in case.”

Hope enlivened her voice. “Am I… in danger, you think?”

“Just in case.” He touched one beefy finger to the side of his nose. “But do me a favor—no axes. We can’t have our most valuable witness hurting herself.”

Now she was positively glowing. “Of course. Of course, you’re right. But the Bridgeview is on my way. If I stop there I can question—”

“Straight. Home.” He closed the door before she could argue.

Epstein had kept a small office next to the kitchen. Ippolito used its phone to make his report before going back out to the front shop to wait for assistance. Through the front window he watched snow begin to fall on an empty Fourth Avenue. Memories of his grocery delivery days returned like ghosts of Christmases past.
Way too many years ago. Years and pounds
. He started to smile until a glare reflected off the floor and reminded him why he was there. The car, a Mercedes SUV with a Christmas tree’s worth of headlights, had stopped at a red light outside. A shirtless young man wearing a thick gold rope around his neck hung out the passenger window.

“I love you, Angieeee! Merry Fucking Christmas!”
the man screamed.
“Aaaaaaaaa! I love you, Aaaangieeee!”

Across the street an apartment window slammed open. “She don’t love you, ’cause she’s up
here
sucking my
dick! Just shut the hell up!”

Now the driver of the SUV joined in. “You can’t talk to my boy like that!
Fuck
you!”

“Fuck
you!”

The light turned green and the SUV sped off in a screech of tires and obscenities. “Home sweet home,” Ippolito shook his head. “Where everybody’s a tough guy and no one takes crap from no one, because their boys have got their backs.”

He turned away from the window and his memories to study the scene. The tray atop the serving counter was also filled with those mobster gingerbread men, in eight neat rows of four. Gingerly he avoided the pool of blood as he stood over them. The cryptic message on the display case was backwards from this side, but the baked goods looked just as wonderful. From this position he couldn’t see the body either, and any of the smells death brings were smothered by the overwhelming scent of delightful holiday treats.

“Temptation,”
he reminded himself. He stared into the display case, feeling like a child, before something odd caught his eye: One of the gingerbread mobsters had red hands. And they all had white frosting eyes and pinstripes, but red mouths.

Ippolito frowned. The gingerbread mobsters on the countertop looked identical, but with white frosting mouths. He picked one up and circled the counter, stepped over Epstein’s body, and crouched to take one from inside the case. His knees creaked. Holding the two side by side he noticed the one from inside the case, in addition to the varied coloring, also seemed… bigger.

Fatter.

“Hmph.”

Carefully he replaced the larger one, an involuntary grunt escaping his pursed lips as he reached.
“Jesus
, I’ve got to lose some weight. My New Year’s resolution.” Still in a crouch, he leaned against the counter for support. The hand on which he rested his weight clutched the gingerbread mobster from the countertop.

“What are you looking at?”

The gingerbread mobster had no reply. Its white frosting eyes remained unblinking, its white frosting mouth remained in a fixed sneer.

The temptation proved too much. He cocked his head at the cookie and adopted the tone of the SUV driver: “Fuck
me?
Fuck
you!”
He chuckled as he bit off its head and chewed. “Yeah, I can eat you. It isn’t New Year’s yet.” He took another bite. The gingerbread was still faintly warm, and a hint of cinnamon tickled his palate. It dissolved in his mouth like butter on hot pancakes, leaving an aftertaste of gingery vanilla.

“Wow,” he smacked his lips. “Mr. Epstein, the world will mourn the loss of so great a cookie master—”

Scuttling above him made Ippolito’s head snap up. He dropped the half-eaten cookie and started to rise, reaching for his gun. As he came eye-level with the counter he saw the flat pan was now empty. Before he could process this, he saw why.

And he screamed.

“God, he just called this in,” the patrolman said sadly. “Can’t have been more than twenty minutes ago.”

Detective Mike Schofield’s jaw tightened. “Well, obviously the killer came back.”

Ippolito’s body lay atop the body of the bakery’s proprietor. It took two blankets to cover the mass, and both were sponging up blood. It was everywhere. Schofield noted spray patterns from severed arteries as well as smears that showed the hefty detective hadn’t gone down without a fight. Judging by the damage to Ippolito’s body, there had been more than one assailant.

The patrolman was staring at the display case’s glass window. “What’s this supposed to mean?”

Schofield glanced at it. “Whatever it means, it’s written here, too.” He pointed at the countertop.
“‘Run, run, as fast as you can. Can’t catch me…’
We’ll see about that, scumbag. You don’t kill a cop and walk away. We watch out for our own.”

Next to the writing sat a tray filled with gingerbread mobsters. Schofield frowned. They were big and fat, overlapping each other in a way that would have made them burn in the oven if that was how they’d been cooked.

“Let me ask you something,” he said to the patrolman. “You bake gingerbread men, you give them faces with white frosting, right?”

“Yeah.”

Schofield pointed at the cookies on the countertop. “So how come these ones have red mouths?”

The fear enveloped her, and yet despite it, or perhaps because of it, she found herself oddly detached, being from body, as she ran frantically from the stifling grip of the subway station out into the rainy, darkened street.

Her physiology now took full control, independent of her conscious thought, and her pupils dilated and gathered in the dim light to scan the streets, the storefronts, the randomly parked automobiles. Like a laser, her vision locked onto him, undiscernable in the distance. Her brain computed: one hundred yards away. Her legs received the computation and turned her body toward him, propelling her faster. How odd, she thought through the terror, as she watched herself from above. It was almost the flight of an inanimate object. So unlike that of a terrified young woman.

When her scream came at last, it struck her deeply and primordially, and she ran even faster with the sound of it. A microsecond later the scream reached his ears and she saw his head snap around toward her. The silver object at the crest of his hat glistened in the misty streetlight, and she felt her heart leap wildly in her chest.

Oh my God, she thought, a police officer. Thank you, dear God, a police officer!

As he stepped from the curb and started toward her, she swooned, and her being suddenly came slamming back into her body from above. Her knees weakened and she faltered, stumbled, and as consciousness left her, she fell heavily down and slid into the grit and slime of the wet, cracked asphalt.

Mike McQueen sat behind the wheel of the dark gray Chevrolet Impala and listened to the hum of the motor idling. The intermittent
slap-slap
of the wipers and the soft sound of the rain falling on the sheet-metal body were the only other sounds. The Motorola two-way on the seat beside him was silent. The smell of stale cigarettes permeated the car’s interior. It was a slow September night, and he shivered against the dampness.

The green digital on the dash told him it was almost 1 a.m. He glanced across the seat and through the passenger window. He saw his partner, Joe Rizzo, pocketing his change and about to leave the all-night grocer. He held a brown bag in his left hand. McQueen was a six-year veteran of the New York City Police Department, but on this night he felt like a first-day rookie. Six years as a uniformed officer first assigned to Manhattan’s Greenwich Village, then, most recently, its Upper East Side. Sitting in the car, in the heart of the Italian-American ghetto that was Brooklyn’s Bensonhurst neighborhood, he felt like an out-of-towner in a very alien environment.

He had been a detective, third grade, for all of three days, and this night was to be his first field exposure, a midnight-to-eight tour with a fourteen-year detective first grade, the coffee-buying Rizzo.

Six long years of a fine, solid career, active in felony arrests, not even one civilian complaint, medals, commendations, and a file full of glowing letters from grateful citizens, and it had gotten for him only a choice assignment to the East Side Precinct. And then one night, he swings his radio car to the curb to pee in an all-night diner, hears a commotion, takes a look down an alleyway, and just like that, third grade detective, the gold shield handed to him personally by the mayor himself just three weeks later.

If you’ve got to fall ass-backwards into an arrest, fall into the one where the lovely young college roommate of the lovely young daughter of the mayor of New York City is about to get raped by a nocturnal predator. Careerwise, it doesn’t get any better than that.

McQueen was smiling at the memory when Rizzo dropped heavily into the passenger seat and slammed the door.

“Damn it,” Rizzo said, shifting his large body in the seat. “Can they put some fucking springs in these seats, already?”

He fished a container of coffee from the bag and passed it to McQueen. They sat in silence as the B train roared by on the overhead elevated tracks running above this length of 86th Street. McQueen watched the sparks fly from the third rail contacts and then sparkle and twirl in the rainy night air before flickering and dying away. Through the parallel slots of the overhead tracks, he watched the twin red taillights of the last car vanish into the distance. The noise of the steel-on-steel wheels and a thousand rattling steel parts and I-beams reverberated in the train’s wake. It made the deserted, rain-washed streets seem even more dismal. McQueen found himself missing Manhattan.

The grocery had been the scene of a robbery the week before, and Rizzo wanted to ask the night man a few questions. McQueen wasn’t quite sure if it was the coffee or the questions that had come as an afterthought. Although he had only known Rizzo for two days, he suspected the older man to be a somewhat less than enthusiastic investigator.

“Let’s head on back to the house,” Rizzo said, referring to the 62nd Precinct station house, as he sipped his coffee and fished in his outer coat pocket for the Chesterfields he seemed to live on. “I’ll write up this here interview I just did and show you where to file it.”

McQueen eased the car out from the curb. Rizzo had insisted he drive, to get the lay of the neighborhood, and McQueen knew it made sense. But he felt disoriented and foolish: He wasn’t even sure which way the precinct was.

Rizzo seemed to sense McQueen’s discomfort. “Make a U-turn,” he said, lighting the Chesterfield. “Head back up 86th and make a left on Seventeenth Avenue.” He drew on the cigarette and looked sideways at McQueen. He smiled before he spoke again. “What’s the matter, kid? Missing the bright lights across the river already?”

McQueen shrugged. “I guess. I just need time, that’s all.’’

He drove slowly through the light rain. Once off 86th Street’s commercial strip, they entered a residential area comprised of detached and semi-detached older, brick homes. Mostly two stories, the occasional three-story. Some had small, neat gardens or lawns in front. Many had ornate, well-kept statues, some illuminated by flood lamps, of the Virgin Mary or Saint Anthony or Joseph. McQueen scanned the home fronts as he drove. The occasional window shone dimly with night lights glowing from within. They looked peaceful and warm, and he imagined the families inside, tucked into their beds, alarm clocks set and ready for the coming work day. Everyone safe, everything secure, everyone happy and well.

And that’s how it always seemed. But six years had taught him what was more likely going on in some of those houses. The drunken husbands coming home and beating their wives; the junkie sons and daughters, the sickly, lonely old, the forsaken parent found dead in an apartment after the stench of decomposition had reached a neighbor and someone had dialed 9-1-1.

The memories of an ex-patrol officer. As the radio crackled to life on the seat beside him and he listened with half an ear, he wondered what the memories of an ex-detective would someday be.

He heard Rizzo sigh. “All right, Mike. That call is ours. Straight up this way, turn left on Bay 8th Street. Straight down to the Belt Parkway. Take the Parkway east a few exits and get off at Ocean Parkway. Coney Island Hospital is a block up from the Belt. Looks like it might be a long night.”

When they entered the hospital, it took them some minutes to sort through the half-dozen patrol officers milling around the emergency room. McQueen found the right cop, a tall, skinny kid of about twenty-three. He glanced down at the man’s nametag. “How you doing, Marino? I’m McQueen, Mike McQueen. Me and Rizzo are catching tonight. What d’ya got?”

The man pulled a thick leather note binder from his rear pocket. He flipped through it and found his entry, turned it to face McQueen, and held out a Bic pen.