Hose Monkey (23 page)

“But sometimes the money is dirty,” Healy said. “Oh yeah. A load of it is dirty rubles getting scrubbed into nice clean dollar bills. The reason there’s always been suspicions about Black Sea is that one of the biggest scams the Russians used to pull was tax fraud on gasoline. Somehow, Black Sea Energy was never caught,” said Schwartz.

“There were suspicions?”

“Always, but that was really before my time. Most of the tax fraud stuff was over with by the late 80s. They’ve moved on.”

“Who are the two guys who own Black Sea?”

“Sergei Borofsky and Misha Levenshtein. Levenshtein pretty much runs the business these days. He still lives in the area, over in this hideously gaudy house in Manhattan Beach, off Oriental Boulevard. Borofsky’s in sort of semi-retirement out in your neck of the woods. I think he lives in some town called Seatuckit or something like that.”

“Setauket,” Healy corrected. “Pretty fancy addresses over there.”

“Really? Yeah, our intelligence says he’s helping his kids with their businesses.”

“Do you know what kind of businesses his kids are—”

“Limo services, motels … I think his daughter might own a few gentlemen’s clubs and I know one of the sons owns a string of gyms. Any of this helping you?”

Abso-fuckin’-lutely! “Maybe, but probably not.”

“You’re good. You’re really good,” Schwartz said. “Skip warned me about you.”

“What are you—”

“Come on, Healy. I may be built like a house, but I still got a
Yiddisha kup.”
“A what?”

“A Jewish head. It means I’m not half as dumb as I look or you think I am. So, you wanna just tell me what’s going on here?”

Firehouses are some of the cleanest places in the city of New York. Firefighters, much more so than cops, take extreme pride in their equipment, but Joe Serpe suspected that lurking beneath the surface was a darker, more powerful motive than simple human pride. Though it was true that vigilant maintenance of their equipment might someday help save their lives, there seemed to Joe to be an almost Lady Macbeth-like aspect to firefighters’ obsession with sparkling equipment. It was as if by scrubbing out the soot and washing away the stench of smoke, they could remove any reminders of the dangers they faced and the cruel facts of mortality.

Joe was shocked by the power of his reaction as he strolled through the open doors of the firehouse at 2929 West 8th Street in Coney Island. He had not set foot in a firehouse since before September 11th, 2001. It was the day Vinny got his permanent assignment at Engine Company 226 way over on the other side of Brooklyn. Those were very dark days for Joe, coming as they did, just after his expulsion from the force and during the disintegration of his marriage. Yet, for Vinny’s sake, he had made the effort. He hadn’t spent more than half an hour at the firehouse that day, staying just long enough to deliver the beers and six foot hero sandwiches he had brought to honor his brother. He couldn’t remember Vinny ever being that happy.

“Can I help you?” a woman asked as she slopped soap on a red truck. She was about thirty. She had a flat, plain face, short brown hair and an athletic build.

“Maybe you can. My name’s Joe Serpe. Captain Kelly from—”

“Serpe,” she repeated. “Any relation to Vincent?”

“Vinny was my little brother.”

“Mary Keegan.” She wiped her right hand against her uniform and held it out to Joe. “I went through the academy with Vincent. We had to put up with a lot of the same shit from the other assholes. I was real sorry to hear about your brother. He was a gentleman.”

“Thank you, Mary. He was all of that.”

“You’re the cop, right?”

“In another life, yeah. Now I just drive an oil truck.”

“Anything I can do for you, Joe, I will.”

“I’m thinking of buying into an oil delivery business out in Suffolk County with a retired fireman. This was the last house he worked and I was wondering if anyone is still around who knew him. It’s a big investment and I don’t know him that well.”

“Hey, I completely understand. What’s his name?”

“Steve Scanlon.”

Mary Keegan frowned like she’d bitten into a rancid tomato. Subtlety didn’t seem to be her specialty. Joe liked that.

“Nice face, Mary. I guess you aren’t Scanlon’s biggest fan.”

“That obvious, huh?” She didn’t wait for an answer. “I got posted here about a year before Scanlon retired. So you could say I knew him a little bit. Don’t get me wrong—Steve was a good fireman, great driver. The thing about it is, the prick still owes me a hundred bucks. I think when he left, he was into everyone in the house for a few grand. I didn’t go to his retirement party, but my guess is that anyone who did wrapped his gift in IOUs.”

“Maybe it was a rough divorce or something. Times get tough when you get divorced. I can tell you all about that.”

“Hey, if that was it, Joe, no one woulda said a word about it. We’ve all been through our own share of personal crap. His thing was gambling. I mean, we bet on all sorts of shit in the house. It helps kill the down time, but he was what my dad used to call a degenerate fucking gambler.”

“I know the type. So, you wouldn’t recommend going into business with him?”

Keegan hemmed and hawed. “Normally, I wouldn’t say, but you being Vincent’s brother and everything. No, Joe, I wouldn’t touch it.”

“He must have had a local bookie.”

“I wouldn’t know about that, but c’mon, I’ll introduce you around. There are a few guys still here who worked with him.”

It seemed everyone in the house above the age of thirty had a Steve Scanlon story featuring either the lies he used to borrow money and/or the excuses he made for not making good on his debts. Lending Scanlon money had even become part of the house’s rookie hazing ritual. Ray Santucci, a lieutenant, related the details to Joe.

“What a pisser,” Santucci said. “We used to tell the probies that they were better off lending dough to Scanlon than putting it in the bank. We’d tell them he was golden, that when Scanlon paid you back it was always quick and with a shitload of interest. The best part was watching the probies try and collect. A real fuckin’ pisser, I tell ya. Of course, we never let them lend him too much bread. We didn’t wanna have to make good on it ourselves. Then he went too far and we had to put an end to his shit.”

“What happened?”

“The lending was one thing. After the first time, it was like let the buyer beware. If he didn’t pay you back, well, you knew you were an asshole for trusting him in the first place. But we have a code in the house, in the department; you never steal from a brother.”

“He stole from you?” Serpe asked.

“Not from me directly, no. But he used to collect our weekly football bets for a Russian bookie over in Brighton Beach. We’re fire fighters, what the fuck do we know about football, right? So we lost all the time. Then one week this probie—Flannery I think his name was—hit it big on the Jets giving points and got the over. He was due, like, fifteen hundred bucks, but Scanlon’s not paying up. He was just fulla excuses for two weeks. Flannery was going nuts, threatening to take it to the union and to the department even though we explained that as a probie, he’d be the one to get shit-canned.”

“So?”

“So me and a few of the more senior guys decided to have a little talk with Stevie boy,” Santucci growled. “Turns out the prick never turned in the betting sheets and used our money to make his own bets, but we made sure Flannery got his money.”

“Sounds like a much beloved man.”

“Don’t get me wrong, he was a solid fireman. You wouldn’t mind him having your back walking into a fire. But with money … You get my meaning?”

“Got it. This Russian bookie, you remember his name?” Joe was curious.

“Bookies don’t exactly advertise and Scanlon never shared shit like that with us, but it shouldn’t be too hard to find the guy. Go to the corner and make a left, walk a few blocks down to Brighton Beach Avenue and make a right. Only problem is, you gotta find someone that speaks English.”

After a round of goodbyes and thank yous, Joe Serpe walked out of the firehouse. He had his answers. Most men’s souls are for sale, some at higher prices than others. Gamblers’ souls come cheaply. You’ll find them on the discount rack between crackheads and tweakers.

Back in his car, Joe Serpe took Lieutenant Santucci’s suggestion … sort of. He made a U turn on West 8th, turned left onto Surf Avenue and then made a right under the elevated subway onto Brighton Beach Avenue.

Bob Healy sat in his car across the street from 2243 Brighton Beach Avenue. He wasn’t exactly sure what he expected to see. There was a flurry of activity on the avenue, many people passing back and forth beneath the perpetual dusk of the El, but no one seemed to enter the refurbished building that housed Black Sea Energy, Inc. Like all the other buildings along the way, 2243 was what used to be known as a taxpayer. There was a storefront at street level and a two-story brick building above. Healy had grown up in the third floor apartment of a taxpayer in Red Hook.

Unlike the buildings to either side of it, 2243 had a beautiful, if completely incongruous, green-tinted glass block and green-flecked granite entryway. The pitted and painted-over brick face of the surrounding taxpayers was not evident on the Black Sea building. Its upper floors had been resurfaced with a smooth coating of beige-colored concrete. Green-flecked granite inlays shaped like tanker trucks were embedded in the concrete. The old apartment windows had been replaced with deeply smoked rectangular glass panels that stretched nearly the entire width of the building. The structure was made to look even more out of place by the fact that at street level it was flanked by a butcher shop and a fruit stand.

One thing Healy did see was the shiny new, black Lincoln Navigator parked right out front of 2243. He noticed too that the parking meter was expired and that the scooter cop on ticket patrol completely ignored the violation. Corruption, the ex-detective thought, rarely starts big. Many of the cops he’d busted had started down the slippery slope by doing just the sort of thing the scooter cop had just done. Maybe if the damn city paid cops a living wage, they might not be tempted to compromise their futures for a bottle of vodka and a few hundred bucks at Christmas.

During the five or six seconds Healy looked away from the Black Sea Energy Building in order to scribble down the Lincoln’s tag number, things took a decided turn toward the surreal. Because when he picked his head back up, Healy saw Joe Serpe strolling across Brighton Beach Avenue and through the front doors of 2243 Brighton Beach Avenue.

During his career on the cops, Joe Serpe was perhaps best known for the wild chances he took. No one believed more strongly that the best defense was an aggressive, attacking offense. He was never a fly on the wall. He wanted to push the buttons, to take the first swing. He had almost forgotten what it was like, the rush of being first in. But like an alcoholic sober for years, Serpe was drunk with his first sip. Even as he strode through the doors at Black Sea Energy, he was buzzed.

Joe had decided the time had come to shake the tree and see what fell out. He knew he was right. Cain, Reyes, even Toussant, all their murders pointed him in this direction. He could feel it, could taste it. He was so close to getting to the bottom of things, but just as close to losing it all. He had to take his shot before conceding that Healy was right, that the time had come to step back and turn things over to the law.

The interiors of the Black Sea Energy Building continued the themes established on its facade. The lobby floor was made up of six by six tiles of the green-flecked granite. Three walls were covered by one continuous mural in the style of Diego Rivera. From Joe’s left, behind him to his right, the mural featured every aspect of the petroleum business: Arab men working in oil fields, hard hats at a refinery, a mighty tanker crossing a deep blue ocean, pipelines, storage tanks, trucks at the rack, gas stations, an oil truck making a delivery to a snow covered house as a happy family looked on. The mural began at the edge of a wall of green-tinted glass cubes and ended at the opposite edge of the same glass wall. There was a small sliding glass portal and a thick glass door cut into the cube wall.

Joe stepped up to the portal. A heavyset woman with big black hair sat at a black mica desk, answering phones and pecking at the keyboard of a PC. He was surprised to hear her accent, which was decidedly more Bay Ridge than Belarus. Serpe listened, not wanting to attract the receptionist’s attention until he at least figured out why he thought this was a good plan of action.

“Black Sea Energy, how may I direct your cawl? Please hold.”

“Black Sea Energy, how may I direct your cawl? Mista Levenshtein isn’t taking cawls right now. Do you wish to leave a message?”

Joe Serpe’s heart was beating out of his chest. He was thinking about what Healy had said about redemption, that all the good deeds he could do would never undo his past mistakes. He knew Christ would forgive him. Maybe he already had. Christ wasn’t the issue. Joe Serpe needed to forgive himself and there would be no forgiveness if he didn’t find the people who had murdered Cain.

He rapped on the glass with the replica detective’s shield he had made the year before his troubles began. The receptionist looked surprised as Joe pressed the blue and gold shield against the glass. She actually got up and strolled to the window. Though heavy, she had a pleasing shape and moved with unexpected grace.

“Can I help you?”

“Tell Mr. Levenshtein I’d like a few minutes of his time.”

“Name?”

“Detective Serpe.”

“Serpe,” she said licking her red lips, “that means snake, right?”

He winked at her. “For today it means detective. Let Mr. Levenshtein know I’m here, okay?”

“One minute.”

Serpe watched her make her way to a door at the rear of her office and press what looked to be an up elevator button. Joe could feel he was shaking and wondered if it would be as obvious to someone standing in the same room as him. Just as the receptionist pressed the up button, a voice came over the intercom.