Murder in Greenwich Village
Table of Contents
Â
Â
In loving memory of DJL
Â
Â
The city is the teacher of the man.
âSimonides of Ceos (556â469 B.C.E.)
Plutarch: Should Old Men Govern?
Praise for Lee Harris's Manhattan Mysteries
“Harris's characters are gritty and realistic. . . . This author draws readers into this top-notch novel [
Murder in Alphabet City
] with a mystery that's as compelling as the relationships between the players. In the subgenre of police procedurals, this is one of the very best.”
âRomantic Times
“Lee Harris brings to the police procedural terrific New York moments, intricate plotting and characters as real as if they were in the next room.”
âMystery Scene
“A very dynamic and exciting police procedural . . . Lee Harris can always be counted on to give her fans an exciting mystery.”
âThe Midwest Book Review
“Lee Harris . . . gives us a new detective and a grittier neighborhood in
Murder in Hell's Kitchen,
but her storytelling skill remains top quality.”
âTONY HILLERMAN
“Lee Harris is a good writer and she has a winner here.”
âMysterious Women
“Harris knows a lot about cops and a lot about women and she knows how to plot a good mystery.
Murder in Hell's Kitchen
is so believable I kept expecting to read more about the case in the morning papers.”
âSTEPHEN GREENLEAF
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Many thanks to James L. V. Wegman for contributing his time as well as his knowledge and expertise. This book has benefited greatly because of him.
1
THE WHIP HAD gotten his gold leaf. By virtue of commanding the Cold Case Squad at 137 Centre Street, which since its formation the previous fall had cleared at least three tough cases spectacularly, Capt. Francis X. Graves had been promoted to deputy inspector. Det. Jane Bauer, whose team of three detectives had been responsible for two of those cases being put to rest, learned of Graves's good fortune on her return from her first trip to Paris in March with the man she loved illicitly and passionately, a deputy chief. Her partner, Gordon Defino, had also been promoted from third-grade to second-grade detective, and deservedly so. The third member of the team, Sean MacHovec, had earned a bump to second, but was living under a cloud because of an incident at the end of the last case, and had not received the promotion.
With all the changes, returning to the job after only a short time away was jolting. But the squad was doing its job and although not a permanent fixture, would continue its work, sparing the detectives a return to ordinary precinct squad activity. Results paid off. Jane herself had been moved up two grades to first after their first case.
Spring had been splintered. Jane had to appear in court for a long-delayed trial, thus requiring a refresher on the case. It was a nasty one, with ornery activists on both sides trying the patience of the judge and luring the various media to the courthouse, inside and out. As Jane's testimony came to an end, Defino was called to do the same on an old case of his. Graves was worried: his best team out of commission for weeks. With his ambition, he needed a steady stream of results.
When the trials and vacations were out of the way, MacHovec returned from his temporary transfer to another team, which appeared devastated to lose him. Defino would have liked to have seen the last of him, even if not as strongly as the day they met. Today was a fine day in May with the smell of spring in the air, as the team sat in the whip's office to receive their new assignment. Deputy Inspector Graves, a handsome, articulate man who frequently played police spokesman before the TV cameras, looked more gorgeous than usual, and happier. Something about a gold leaf on his shoulder.
“I see you're all looking good,” he began. “Well rested, I hope. We've got a biggie here.”
“Less work than painting the house,” MacHovec said. He, too, had taken vacation time.
“Maybe not this time. You folks remember the Micah Anthony hit?”
“Oh, shit,” Defino said under his breath.
Jane seconded the sentiment. “The undercover cop. That was a long time ago, Inspector.”
“And the case is still open,” Graves said, “as you know.” The file on the desk in front of him was the tallest Jane had ever seen. It represented the work of team after team of angry investigators, angry that one of their best had been gunned down by an anonymous shooter who had left no clue to his identity, and had covered his tracks so well that he might have dissolved into the mist.
“Well, we did good twice,” MacHovec said in a you-can't-win-'em-all tone of voice.
“Do good once more,” Graves countered dryly. “I don't know who can heft this thing. Annie put it in three separate jackets so you don't break your arms on day one.” Annie was the police administrative aide, and probably couldn't have hefted the whole file herself.
“That it?” Defino asked.
“That's it, Detective. I don't have to tell you how important it is to clear this case.”
“No, sir.” Defino stood, crushed his empty coffee cup noisily, and took the top third of the file.
MacHovec followed, leaving Jane the bottom third, the beginning of the case, the call to 911, the first officers on the scene, and the desperate, unsuccessful attempt to save the dying cop.
“And I was looking forward to coming back,” MacHovec said, dropping into his desk chair. “This is a dead end. I should've stayed home and given the house another coat.”
Defino, dropping his cup in the trash basket, concurred. “I remember when the call came in. I was on midnights that week, twelve to eight, riding in an RMP with my partner, Pinkie. Long time ago.”
“You sound like a couple of dreamy high school girls,” Jane said. “I was in the Six that night making a good collar. The desk sergeant told us about it when we brought the perp in. Let's get going before you guys start crying.” Newly in the Six at the time, she remembered, and newly in love with Lieutenant, almost Captain, Hackett. Defino was rightâa long time ago.
It had been a headliner in every paper, even the
Times.
Det. Micah Anthony was six-one, thirty, black, and a former amateur boxer who worked with poor kids on his days off. He left a wife so beautiful that she was photographed from all possible angles, her skin several shades lighter than her husband's, and her belly big with their first child, a boy born three months after his father's death.
Micah Anthony's family was strict and religious, every child with a name from the Bible. His father worked as a janitor in an office building in Manhattan and his mother taught in day care. One child in the family had died of a gunshot wound years earlier, before the term “drive-by” had been coined. After the killing, Micah made up his young mind to be a cop.
The family lived in Harlem, in a ratty walk-up that they often talked about leaving but never did. Micah was the first to make the move. With a regular paycheck from the job, he found an apartment in the West Thirties, a walk-up like his family's, but in better condition. While living there he met his future wife and married her. They worked for a few years before she became pregnant: she as a model, bringing in enough income that they had a deposit down on a house on Staten Island at the time of his death. A month after the funeral, she moved in, telling reporters it was what they wanted for their child.
After the baby was born, she stayed out of the news for a year, then took up causes for cops, for black cops, and for the kids her husband had coached. Even now, about ten years later, her face and her name appeared occasionally on the news or in a small piece in one of New York's daily papers.
All this Jane knew without reading the file. Every cop in New York knew it. As an earlier generation could pinpoint exactly where they were when JFK was shot, cops of Jane's vintage knew where they were when Micah Anthony was hit. He had been working undercover, investigating the movement of handguns into and within the city, infiltrating a group of “businessmen” who were buying and selling the weapons. He had phoned in his location at ten thirty that evening after a crucial meeting in a house in the West Fifties, about as far west as there were buildings, and said he was going home. A few minutes later he called his wife from the same phone to tell her the same thing. Their apartment was about a mile south of where he stood to make the calls, but he never got home that night. At two the next morning, two shots awoke residents of Waverly Place just west of Washington Square Park in Greenwich Village, a historic and arty area of downtown Manhattan. Three calls came in to 911 almost at the same moment reporting the shots, and radio cars from the Six screamed to the scene. Micah Anthony did not survive the night.
The bottom line was there was nothing: no DNA, no prints, no shells from the Colt .357 Magnum, no marks on the body, no car reported to have torn away from the curb. Anthony had no connection to the Village. His family lived in the middle of Harlem, seven or eight miles north of where he was shot, and they hadn't seen him for a couple of weeks. His old friends hadn't seen him; his wife had barely seen him and had worried daily about his safety.
Reluctantly, the detectives on the case speculated that he had a girlfriend in one of the brownstones on Waverly Place, someone he had visited after making his last two phone calls, although the medical examiner found no evidence of recent sexual activity. Perhaps the shooting was related to a lovers' dispute, not his police work. A meticulous canvass of the neighborhood with attention to the young women who lived there turned up nothing, and his wife, Melodie, not really a suspect, was at home when the police came to her door. A record of calls from her telephone indicated she had made several to her husband's lieutenant during the night, fearful for his safety when he failed to return home after calling her.
It was a case with one body, two bullets, and no leads. The three men Micah Anthony had spent a couple of hours with at the crib in the West Fifties were hauled in, questioned “continuously and roughly,” said their attorneys, and indicted for possession of guns found in the apartment but not for his murder. The evidence was not strong enough for a solid case, and two of them walked, disaster following disaster. From what Jane remembered, every human being who had touched Anthony's life was questioned, down to his kindergarten teacher. What, she wondered, would be left for the three of them ten years later?
“His wife remarried,” Defino said, his voice breaking the silence and their concentration.
“When?”
“Two years ago. They always mentioned in the follow-up articles that she hadn't. She was one good-looking gal.”
“I remember,” MacHovec said. “Who'd she marry?”
“Some guy named Harwood Appleby. Looks like plenty of money there. Why'd she wait so long?”
“Because she loved her husband,” Jane said with irritation. “Because the shock of Anthony's death knocked her for a loop. She had her husband's baby and she couldn't see how to start over with someone else.”
Defino looked at her with skepticism. “Just asking.”
“She still live on Staten Island?”
He turned a couple of pages. “Yeah, but he has an apartment in the city. Maybe she wants the kid to go to the same school.”
It sounded reasonable. “I'm reading from the beginning. What a downer this case is.”
“It'll be worse when we give up,” MacHovec said.
Silence returned. Jane started through the file, bottom up. She made notes of the names: the uniforms who responded to the calls, the first detectives on the scene, the crime scene people, Micah Anthony's lieutenant, and everyone else he had contact with on the job. All these people would have to be requestioned. To her left and right her partners were doing the same thing, scribbling on pads. At noon Defino asked if she wanted lunch.
“Let's do it before I start seeing double.”
They got up and left. MacHovec always fended for himself, often bringing a brown bag, sometimes going for a bite from the hot dog stand. The day was spring at its best and neither had a coat. At one of their usual places they ordered their usual choices.
“That gold leaf has Graves believing he's invincible,” Defino said.
“Maybe he is, but the question is, are we? That was the cleanest shooting I ever heard of. We can take six months and recanvass and reinvestigate and end up with just what we have here.”
“Zip.”
“I want to start with the wife, Gordon.”
He looked up from his pasta-based dish. “Any reason?”
“Maybe I'm tired of doing things the right way. We can go to Waverly Place anytime. Nothing's going to change. You pick up anything that developed in the last few years?” Defino was working on the most recent third of the file. The original detectives on the case would make some phone calls every six months and leave a Five, the Detective Division 5 form used to record new information and interviews, in the file.
“They're still comparing slugs from new cases. They don't have much else to go on, no prints, no DNA. And they ask the right questions when they collar a possible shooter. Not that it does any good.”
“Somebody out there knows something,” Jane said. “If we ruffle some feathers, maybe he'll come out of hiding.”
“I think I'll double my life insurance.” Defino said it with the practiced certainty of a man who understood consequences.
“Finish your meat sauce. I want to get started.”
MacHovec made the call. Mrs. Anthony, now Appleby, was home on Staten Island and agreed to talk to the detectives, but not there. She gave him an address on Sutton Place and said the next day at ten would be fine. She would go into Manhattan after seeing her son off to school.
“Looks like you guys rack up all the goodies,” MacHovec said, passing the address to Jane. “I'm not sure I've ever set foot on Sutton Place.”
“I'll wear a new tie,” Defino said.
They worked quietly, accumulating pages of notes. About two, Defino said, “The wife's the last person who heard from him; the lieutenant's the second-last. Let's talk to him up front.”
“I've got his name here somewhere.” Jane ran her finger down a now long list of names. “Harold Bowman. No idea where he's working now. Sean?”
“On it.” He had the number and location in a minute and then Bowman, now a captain, on the phone. After a few seconds of talk, he asked if they could get up there that afternoon. Bowman was over on the East Side in the One-Seven, a quick subway ride uptown on the Lex from Centre Street. They nodded and he set it up.
Defino sprang from his chair. Anything was better than sitting at a desk and reading old interviews.
Captain Bowman was mid-fifties, graying, putting on weight, and nearly buried in paper. A chair next to his desk held the overflow stack that would not fit on his desk. He welcomed the detectives and made a call for coffee. “Micah Anthony,” he said when he hung up. “I haven't seen you two before.”
Defino explained briefly.
“Well, maybe new faces will do the trick. You probably want to know what our last phone call was about.”
“We can start with that,” Jane said.
“It's in the file. I've read it off so many times in the last ten years, I know it by heart. As soon as I heard the news that night, I wrote it down as I remembered it. It wasn't a long conversation. Have you read it?”