“I don’t know,” I said. “I hope not.”
“Thank you,” Marcia said and the cameraman stopped shooting. Then Maria said to Gil, “Would you like to say something for the cameras too?”
Gil made a brief statement then Marcia started talking to other people in the bar. A few minutes later, the other news crews started to arrive. Channel Four was there first, then Channel Five, Channel Eleven, and New York 1, and then the radio and newspaper people showed up. It was getting out of control and Gil came over and asked me if I thought we should shut down the bar. I told him I thought this was probably a good idea.
I turned off the music and told everybody they had to leave their drinks and go home. There was a lot of bitching and moaning but after a few minutes everybody was gone except the reporters. The new reporters wanted me to say something for the cameras so I said pretty much the same thing I’d said for Eyewitness News. I liked having all those cameras and lights pointed at me. I felt like I was acting again. I was in a movie or on a TV show and I knew this was only the beginning. When I was a famous horse owner I’d be holding news conferences all the time.
Then, when I was finishing up the interview, looking past the cameras and mikes, with the bright light in my eyes, I saw Cheryl Lewis, the blond cop who’d been in the bar the other day. She was with another cop and the same detective who’d asked me questions. I stared at her until she saw me and then we both smiled.
“Hey,” I said when she came up to the bar. “Long time no see.”
“I wish I was here under more pleasant circumstances.”
“Fuckin’ sucks, doesn’t it?” I said. “I still can’t believe it. Do they know what happened to her yet?”
“Suffocation was the probable cause of death, but they’re still running tests.”
“Jesus,” I said, shaking my head.
“Did you know her very well?”
“Not too well,” I said. “I mean just from the bar. So are you working on this case too?”
“No, investigators from Homicide will be handling it. We’re just here for routine reasons. Since the robbery was only a few days ago, we want to see if that had anything to do with this.”
“The robbery—I didn’t even think about that,” I said. “You think the robbery has something to do with my boss’s wife—”
“You never know,” she said. “In any case, we might be able to provide the Homicide detectives with any details they might need.”
“Anybody ever tell you you have beautiful eyes?”
She looked uncomfortable.
“I’m engaged,” she said.
I looked down at her left hand and sure enough she was wearing a big rock—probably cost the guy ten grand. It was so big and shiny, I didn’t know how I could’ve missed it the other day.
“So?” I said. “I’m just complimenting you. What, you’re gonna arrest me for that?”
She smiled.
“Sorry,” she said. “I’m just working overtime today and it’s been a very long day. Thank you very much—for your compliment, I mean.”
“No problem,” I said. “So what do you do when you’re not trying to catch crooks?”
“Excuse me?”
“You like movies, dancing, Italian food...”
“Why are you doing this?”
“Doing what?”
“Didn’t you understand what I told you? I’m engaged.”
“That doesn’t mean we can’t go out sometime, does it? I mean I don’t want you to do anything you don’t want to do, but I’d love to take you out to dinner on my next night off.”
“I’m sorry,” she said.
“That’s okay,” I said. “Maybe some other time.”
A few minutes later, a couple of other detectives arrived and asked all the reporters to leave the bar. One of the detectives looked familiar, but I didn’t know why. He was a big guy—about my height, but fatter—and he had short blond hair. He saw me noticing him and came over to the bar.
“You mind if I ask you a couple of questions?” he said to me. He had a Brooklyn accent.
“No problem,” I said.
He took out a little notepad.
“My name is Detective Scott. I work in Homicide—Brooklyn South. And you are?”
Hearing that name, Scott, made it all click.
“Mikey?” I said.
The detective looked up from the pad.
“Do I know you?”
“It’s me—Tommy. Tommy Russo. Remember—Sophomore year, the Canarsie High football team. I played left tackle, you were center.”
The detective was still staring at me. For a second, I thought I’d made a mistake, but then he smiled and said, “Holy shit, Tommy fuckin’ Russo. How the hell are you?”
We shook hands.
“I can’t believe you didn’t recognize me,” I said. “What, I look so much different?”
“Well, you look like you might’ve put on a few LBs.”
“Look who’s talking,” I said.
We laughed.
“So what’ve you been doing for, what, the past fifteen years?”
“I work here,” I said.
“I see that. What are you, a bartender?”
“Bouncer,” I said.
“Tough guy.”
“Yeah, you know how it is. What about you? How long you been a cop?”
“I’ve been with the department eleven years, a detective for three.”
“I always knew you were gonna go places.”
“I’d love to catch up, but we better just get down to business here,” Mike said. “This is all routine, but I just gotta ask you a few questions here.”
“Shoot,” I said.
He asked me some questions—how long have I been working at the bar, did I know Debbie O’Reilley, and other questions I could’ve answered without even thinking. Then he said, “And can you tell me what your whereabouts were last night?”
He must’ve seen the look I was giving him because then he said, “This is all routine. We just try to get little snapshots of the way things were last night and it helps us put a bigger picture together.”
“I was working at the bar,” I said.
“When did you arrive?”
“Around six.”
“And when did you leave?”
“Early—around eleven-thirty. I was fuckin’ zonked. I got home from Vegas three o’clock yesterday afternoon.”
“What were you doing in Vegas?”
“Losing my balls, getting laid. The usual.”
Mike smiled, writing in his notepad.
“Let me ask you something else,” Mike said. “Do you think Gary O’Reilley would kill his stepmother?”
“That’s what the reporters were asking me before. Jesus, I don’t know. I mean I know the kid was hotheaded, but I hope he didn’t do something like that.”
“What do you mean, ‘hot-headed’?”
“I don’t wanna bad-mouth the guy, but let’s just say he had a problem with the way Debbie treated Frank.”
“For example...”
“He’d say things to me about how much he hated her. I mean, I don’t know if you heard, but Debbie was a real slut. She’d come in here all the time with guys, shooting her mouth off in front of Frank, and Gary wouldn’t do anything, but you could tell it was pissing him off. Then he’d say things to me, about how he wanted to kill her, get rid of her, shit like that.”
“He said he wanted to kill her?”
“Yeah, I guess he did. I’m not saying I think he meant it. I mean a lot of people say shit like that when they’re mad. But he did say it—a couple of times.”
“How many times?”
“Jesus, I don’t know. Two or three. Maybe it was more than that.”
“Did he tell you anything specific? I mean did he say he had a weapon of any kind?”
“No, nothing like that. Like I said, it was just talk.”
“Did you see Gary O’Reilley yesterday?”