“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.”