“Look, Ma, I got your favorite – vanilla.”
His mother turned away, like she was angry, but Bobby kept the little wooden stick with the glob of ice cream on it in front of her face until she turned back and started eating it. Some ice cream dripped down her chin and Bobby wiped it off with the sleeve of his shirt. He took a lick himself and that shit wasn’t half bad.
When she finished eating, Bobby stayed with her a while longer, watching her sleep. Then he realized that it was past one o’clock and her soap operas were on. He turned on the TV in front of her bed to channel 7 and cranked the volume. He leaned over the bed, kissed her, and then left the room quietly.
When Bobby got back to his apartment he realized he had nothing to do. He would’ve gone to Central Park with his camera and scouted for some new prospects, but it was getting cloudy outside and the air felt like rain. Maybe he’d just go out to the video store, check out the new releases, pick up some food at the supermarket, and then come back home and call it a day.
Bobby came back from the supermarket and cooked himself dinner – baked beans, powdered potatoes, and two cans of Beefaroni. Even Def Leppard couldn’t get him out of his funk. When the Def couldn’t crank you, it was way past time to shoot someone.
While he ate he stared at the pictures of Mr. and Mrs. Brown, thinking that the guy was starting to look familiar again. He didn’t know if he was imagining it – maybe it was just that he was staring at the pictures for so long, of course the guy was starting to look familiar. But, no, there was more to it than that. Bobby had seen that face before. Then, suddenly, it clicked. He wheeled out to the hallway, to the incinerator room, and when he didn’t find what he was looking for there, he rode the elevator down to his building’s basement. In one corner, the porters stacked the old newspapers they picked up from the recycling bins on every floor. Once a month they’d tie them up and cart them off, but recycling day must have been a couple of weeks off because the pile was pretty big. Bobby fished through the papers until he found the week-old Daily News he was thinking of. But he didn’t really get excited until he turned to page three and saw the big picture of Mr. Brown, and the story of the two women who were murdered on the Upper East Side in this very expensive-looking townhouse. Max Fisher, the article said, was the founder and CEO of NetWorld…
Bobby took the paper with him back to his apartment. Suddenly, Leppard sounded okay again. Thanks to a millionaire named Max Fisher, Bobby was back in business.
Eleven
Sutter looked at him. “I prefer tough, rich and a pussy magnet.”
“As a cop, you might get two of those three.” Sutter smiled and said, “You never know.”
On May 12, 1989, Alexis Morgan, a thirty-six year-old former model, was walking her two pet chihuahuas through a secluded path near Belvedere Castle in Central Park when she was brutally stabbed to death by a mysterious assailant. The single wound to her throat had nearly decapitated her, and police believed she was grabbed from behind and cut with a large knife or machete. There were no witnesses to the attack but several people reported seeing “a suspicious white man” in the area minutes before the killing and hearing her chihuahuas barking moments afterwards.
Although he didn’t fit the description of the “suspicious white man,” Ms. Morgan’s husband Henry, a wealthy real estate mogul, was a prime suspect. The Morgans had had a stormy two-year marriage, marred by loud public fights and Mr. Morgan’s accusations that his wife was having an affair. While Mrs. Morgan’s pocketbook was stolen in the attack, police believed this may have been “a decoy,” to make it appear as if robbery had been the motive.
Mr. Morgan had a rock solid alibi – he was playing tennis with a friend at the Wall Street Racket Club at the time of the murder, and the friend and workers of the club vouched for him. However, the police still didn’t rule out Morgan completely. They believed he may have hired someone to kill his wife. They created a composite sketch of the suspect and began a citywide manhunt for the killer. A few weeks later, police tailed Morgan to a meeting at a diner in Chelsea with Vinny “The Blade” Silvera, a killer known to have connections to the mob. Later that night, Silvera was brought in for questioning, but wouldn’t confess to anything. Morgan was arrested separately. Under heavy interrogation, Morgan – who had his own business links to organized crime – was told that Silvera had confessed and then Morgan, falling for the ploy, promptly gave a taped confession, implicating Silvera. Both Morgan and Silvera were tried and sentenced. A few months later, Morgan was found beaten to death in a bathroom on Riker’s Island.
Of course there were many obvious differences between Alexis Morgan’s murder and the recent murders of the two women in the East Seventy-fourth Street townhouse, but there were many similarities as well. In both cases, robbery was the apparent motive. In both cases, the victims had been killed brutally, as if murder was the sole intention. And in both cases the husbands had convenient airtight alibis.
Kenneth Simmons, Detective Investigator at the 19th Precinct, had had nothing to do with the Alexis Morgan case. He was only in his second year on the force in 1989 and he was still spending most of his time doing clerical work. But, like everyone else who lived in the city at that time, he had followed the details of the case closely in the news. Several years later, at a promotion ceremony at One Police Plaza, he met Lieutenant Anthony Santana, who had broken the case, and Santana filled him in on many of the details. In particular, Kenneth recalled how Santana had told him that he would have broken the case much sooner if it weren’t for all the media hype. “It was like a zoo,” Santana said. “The suspects always knew they were being watched twenty-four hours a day.” He believed that if Morgan didn’t know he was being watched, he would have led them to Silvera much sooner. Santana said, “You can’t shoot a deer when he hears your footsteps, you gotta sneak up on the fuck, know what I’m saying?”
Kenneth knew.
While he wasn’t going to rule out any possibility, Kenneth was ninety percent certain that the townhouse murders were Alexis Morgan all over again. Max Fisher had hired somebody to kill his wife and Stacy Goldenberg was just in the wrong place at the wrong time. When he interviewed Max at the house he had a feeling Max was holding out on him and Kenneth’s detective instincts were rarely wrong. But he also knew that the important thing was not to press him. Like Santana said – you can’t let them hear your footsteps.
Kenneth was hoping that the townhouse case would be his big case, the one that comes along once in a detective’s life. Solving the murders of two white women would also be great P.R. and could lead to a promotion to Sergeant or Lieutenant in a couple of years. Kenneth had been married for eight years and five years ago had had a baby son with Down Syndrome. The baby’s condition had near destroyed his wife. And people’s comments like Mongoloid Retard Damaged goods Handicapped had ignited a rage in Kenneth that simmered close to the surface every waking moment. He was searching for an outlet to vent and Max Fisher was going to be it. He hated the prick anyway, with his freaking designer suits, fake hair, smarmy attitude, and that collection of classical music. Kenneth was a closet opera buff – not a fact you advertised as a New York City cop – but when he saw Fisher’s classical collection he knew right away that the man was full of shit. He had all the big names out, like he was trying to impress, but it was obvious he had no true respect for the music.
And what was up with that navy tracksuit he’d been wearing during the first interview, acting like he thought it made him look all that? Kenneth wanted to put the man in another kind of suit – an orange one.