‘You’re Anthony Szarek’s brother?’
‘Yeah.’
‘Can we go inside?’
‘I’m on my way to church, me and the whole family. You should come back later.’
I put my hand out to prevent his closing the door. ‘This’ll only take a few minutes. We could do it right here if you want.’ When he didn’t respond, I told him that the circumstances surrounding his brother’s death were being re-examined, then asked him to describe his brother’s state of mind in the days leading up to his death.
No human head is truly round, but Mike Szarek’s came close, an effect enhanced by a short, thick neck made even shorter when he hunched his shoulders. ‘The cops have already been here. Some detective whose name I don’t remember.’
‘Winnman.’
‘Yeah, Winnman.’
I slid my hand in my pockets and smiled the most ingratiating smile in my repertoire. ‘Like I said, we’re taking another look at your brother’s death, going back over the details.’
‘You think it wasn’t suicide?’
‘We’re taking another look,’ I stubbornly repeated. ‘Nobody’s drawing any conclusions.’
After a moment, Szarek’s shoulders relaxed and he again met my gaze, an indication that he’d decided to tell the truth, at least as he saw it. ‘What could I say? Like I told the other detective, me and Tony wasn’t all that tight. Not that we were enemies or anything. It’s just that I’m very active in the church. Tony, he never went to church, didn’t believe in it.’
Szarek paused long enough to gesture at a Roman Catholic church on the far side of Manhattan Avenue, then continued. ‘And when Tony killed himself, he rejected God altogether. Now Tony coulda gone to Father Willenski, who’s also a psychologist, instead of committing suicide. That’s a mortal sin, suicide, and there’s no way to tell the Lord that you’re sorry once you pull the trigger.’
‘Mr Szarek, believe me, I didn’t come here to stir up bad memories. I just need to know if there were any specific events that led you to believe your brother was suicidal. Was he generally unhappy? Did he talk of killing himself? Did he make a suicide attempt in the past?’
‘Like I said, me and him, we weren’t so close.’
‘Who could help me then? Who knew him well enough to answer those questions?’
Szarek frowned as it suddenly dawned on him that he’d walked into a trap. I needed the name of somebody close to the Broom. Mike would now have to furnish that name or be seen to deliberately obstruct my investigation. Myself, I didn’t figure the man had the heart to confront me. He was a good citizen at bottom. Going one-on-one with cops was not on his agenda.
‘You could talk to my sister, Trina Zito. Her and Tony got together once in a while.’ Mike Szarek smiled for the first time. ‘What could I say?’ he asked. ‘Trina’s the family disgrace. She married a wop.’
I clapped him on the shoulder, one kidder to another. ‘It might’ve been a lot worse, Mike. You gotta look on the bright side. She could’ve married a Jew.’ I gave it a couple of beats, enduring Szarek’s quick frown. ‘Say, do you by any chance know a cop named Pete Jarazelsky?’
Szarek’s head jerked back as though he’d been poked in the eye. He was pissed now, and probably freezing cold, even standing back in the doorway. ‘Jarazelsky’s in jail.’
‘I know that, Mr Szarek. I spoke to him recently. What I’m asking is if you knew him.’
‘Pete grew up in the neighborhood, like all of us, but he was a lot younger than me so I can’t say we were actually friends. But if we saw each other on the street, we’d nod hello.’
‘What about your brother? Did your brother know Jarazelsky well?’
‘They were both cops in the same precinct, so I guess they had to know each other.’
TWENTY-FOUR
‘ Yeah,’ Trina Zito told me twenty minutes later, ‘Tony drank pretty much all day, every day. But he wasn’t unhappy and he went to work in the morning, so who am I to judge?’
‘Your brother sees it differently,’ I suggested.
Trina’s husband, Fred, took that moment to put in his two cents. We were in the front room, seated on matching love seats. Though no more than a half-mile from Tony Szarek’s town house, the Zitos’ apartment was far more humble, five rooms in a frame tenement sided with textured yellow vinyl.
‘You don’t wanna pay too much attention to Mike,’ Zito told me. ‘He’s worried about his inheritance. The guy was on the balls of his ass when Tony died. Him, his wife and his three kids. If we hadn’t agreed to let ’em stay in Tony’s house until it’s sold, they’d be on the street.’
‘Tony died without a will,’ Trina explained. ‘Mike and me, we’re his closest relatives.’
‘Is the estate in probate court?’
‘Yeah,’ Fred declared, ‘and it’s taking forever as it is. If Tony was murdered, we’ll most likely never see a dime.’
‘You’ve discussed this possibility?’
Trina Zito cleared her throat. ‘When the cops said it was suicide, I figured they must know. I mean, there was an autopsy and everything. But I’m not surprised that you turned up, either. See, my brother had his pension, plus he made a lotta money in business and he was pretty healthy, so he had no reason to kill himself.’
‘How big is his estate?’
To her credit, Trina answered the question without hesitation. ‘What with the equity on the house and the bank accounts, we’re probably lookin’ at six hundred thousand.’
‘You said Tony was in business?’
‘Right, he was a partner in Greenpoint Carton Supply, on India Street.’
I leaned back and crossed my legs. Trina’s tone was becoming more conversational and I wanted to put her at ease. ‘One thing I don’t get. If your brother drank from morning till night, how’d he run a business?’
‘That I couldn’t tell you, detective. We used to have Tony over to dinner every couple of months and he occasionally took us out to a restaurant, but he never talked about his work. I don’t even know the names of his partners.’
‘Do you know for certain that he actually had partners?’
‘He must’ve, because we don’t inherit his shares in the business. They revert to the corporation. That wouldn’t make a lot of sense if he didn’t have partners.’
I nodded thoughtfully, then took Dante Russo’s photo from my shirt pocket. ‘You ever see this guy with Tony?’
Even as she shook her head, Trina Szarek echoed her brother, Mike. ‘Me and Tony,’ she declared, ‘we weren’t that close.’
‘What about a man named Pete Jarazelsky?’
Fred Zito popped to attention, running his fingertips back and forth over the dense stubble on his chin. ‘Don’t talk to me about Jarazelsky,’ he declared. ‘I own an auto parts store in Williamsburg and I once hired Pete to work for me on Saturdays. The scumbag robbed me blind. Every time my back was turned, something else went out the door. And the guy was a cop, for Christ’s sake.’
I nodded agreement, then asked the same question I’d put to Mike Szarek. ‘If you and Tony weren’t close, who should I speak with? He must have been close to someone.’
Fred and Trina looked at each other for a moment, then shrugged in unison. ‘Yeah,’ Trina admitted, ‘there’s someone alright.’
‘And who might that be?’
‘Ewa Gierek, his live-in lover. Ewa’s suing for half the estate.’
‘You know where she lives?’
‘In Flushing, with her brother.’
Ewa Gierek was the whitest white woman I’d ever seen. Her porcelain skin was nearly translucent, her blue eyes pale and prominent, her hair so light that her lashes and brows were virtually invisible. A wintry landscape, to be sure, broken only by the scarlet lipstick on her small, Cupid’s-bow mouth and the blush worked into her cheeks.
The image of Tony Szarek I’d been carrying up till then, of the pitiful Broom mopping his way through the last years of a stumble-bum career, vanished forever. Szarek was a few months short of his fifty-eighth birthday when he died. Ewa Gierek was no more than forty and might have been a good deal younger.