“Racial thing?” Priscilla asked.
Rizzo nodded. “Couple a nights before this happened, some old white man got mugged on Cropsey Avenue. Perp was black. So these neighborhood kids figured they’d go vigilante, even up the score, so they grabbed this poor kid. Well, the case got a lotta ink-politicians, activists, all the usual parasites. Me and my partner at the time, Johnny Morelli, we were the assigned.”
“Okay,” Priscilla said. “What’s this got to do with anything now?”
Rizzo continued. “We locked up a bunch of kids. One of ’em wound up sentenced seven-to-ten upstate, a few others did some time, too. One of the kids, Stevie Cappelli, was the son of a guy I happened to know. Well, Stevie wasn’t a bad kid, he was just hangin’ around on the wrong night at the wrong time with the wrong bunch. I couldn’t see ruinin’ his life on account of it. So me and Morelli got a little creative with the DD-fives and the witness statements, and next thing you know, Stevie Cappelli was outta the picture.”
Priscilla shrugged. “Okay,” she said.
“Yeah. Okay. Anyway, how I knew the kid’s father, Cappelli-he was a beat reporter for the Daily News. Handled the Brooklyn police blotter. Nowadays, he’s a big-time feature writer and mainstream reporter. Needless to say, he was very grateful to me for savin’ his kid’s ass. Cappelli was always a flamin’ liberal, very PC. How would it look if his son got caught runnin’ with a lynch mob? So the old man tells me, ‘If there’s anything I can ever do for you…’ Like that.” Rizzo shrugged. “Seems like nowadays Stevie boy is a senior at some journalism college up in Massachusetts, getting all the liberal indoctrination he’ll need for a career in the impartial world of print news.”
“So,” Priscilla said, impatient, “you saved the kid’s life.”
“Yeah, sorta. With a little help from his SAT scores and his old man footin’ the tuition bill. Anyway, I been sittin’ on this payback for a lotta years, Cil. It’s not something I can hand off or pass down to anybody, and Morelli retired to the bottom of a vodka bottle. So the time to cash in is now. It’s why I asked Schoenfeld to run down to the court house for those warrants and the court order freezing the passport instead of sendin’ you to do it. See, Cappelli’s gonna show up here at the precinct. And he’s gonna wanna talk to Vince. Seems as though an anonymous source down at the court house tipped him off to the warrants and this impending bust on the Mallard case. Maybe it was the cop who applied for the warrant, maybe one a the court officers on Cappelli’s payroll, a court clerk-who knows? But Cappelli learned that two Six-Two cops are about ready to break open the infamous Avery Mallard murder. That would be us, Cil, me and you.”
Priscilla laughed. “So when Lombardi tells Vince to pull us off the Lauria case so the Plaza can cut us out of the Mallard case, this reporter, Cappelli, tells them, ‘Not so fast, guys, I already wrote the story.’ ”
Rizzo nodded, smiling. “Exactly. Cappelli gets his liberal righteousness all in an uproar. ‘How dare you bureaucrats attempt to deny the citizenry of its right to know the full truth. If Sergeant Rizzo and Detective Jackson-African-American female Detective Jackson, I might add-are not given their due desserts by the NYPD, the Daily News will demand, in headlines, to know exactly why not.’ ”
“So Cappelli makes a deal,” Priscilla added. “He’ll hold off on breaking his exclusive story until after we lock up Bradley, and the Plaza is forced to let us plant the flag on both cases.”
“Bingo,” Rizzo said. “Everybody and their brother’ll figure we leaked it to Cappelli, but they can’t prove shit. They’re stuck with us. Best they can do is capitalize on my generosity for even callin’ this guy Lombardi. That call will take the edge off, pacify them a little. They can get their pictures in the papers, too.” He paused. “And bottom line, Cappelli still owes me. After all, I’m gettin’ him an exclusive on the Mallard murder.”
“Sounds good,” she said. “Now let’s hope the search warrant turns up a blue raincoat that matches the fiber found on Lauria’s corpse.”
“Oh, it’ll be there, Cil, and it’ll match. But even without it, now we have DeMaris’s testimony. And she’s damn lucky we grabbed her so quickly. Once the pressure started to build on Bradley, he’d have come to one conclusion, that he had to kill DeMaris, just like you’ve been scared of since all this started.”
Priscilla shook her head. “Always treat murder like a solo act, boys and girls. A partner in crime’ll get you busted every time.”
“Amen, sister,” Rizzo said. “Amen.”
“So now?” she asked.
Rizzo shrugged. “Now we wait for everybody to get here. Let the D.A. bureau chief make his preliminary arrangements with De-Maris’s lawyer. Then we talk to Vince and Lombardi, and don’t forget to look surprised when Cappelli walks in.” He stood up. “But right now I want to calm DeMaris down a little, tell her what to expect. I don’t think she realizes she’s gettin’ locked up to night, maybe for two nights before bail is set and posted. Come on, Cil, come with me, I need a witness in there so she can’t claim I copped a feel of her sweet-lookin’ ass.”
“Just give me a heads-up before you do, so I can look away. That way I won’t be lying when I tell I.A.D., ‘Hey, I didn’t see nothin’.’ ”
Vince D’Antonio, his face tight with anger, glared across the desk at Rizzo. They, along with Priscilla, Lieutenant Lombardi, and Assistant District Attorney Raymond Kessler were in D’Antonio’s office.
“Damn it, Joe,” D’Antonio said, “you shoulda told me about all this, you shoulda kept me posted from day one.”
“This aspect of it just come up, boss,” Rizzo said lightly. “Check the DD-fives; everything we had is in there. We just didn’t see the whole picture till now. We followed the leads and next thing we know, we’re lookin’ at this Mallard thing.”
D’Antonio shook his head sharply. “That’s bullshit. You knew where this was goin’ from the moment you and Cil first found Lauria’s play.”
“You’re givin’ me too much credit here, Vince. I ain’t that sharp.”
D’Antonio frowned and began to speak, then suddenly changed his mind. He glanced to Priscilla.
“You got anything to add here, Jackson?”
“Not really, boss,” Priscilla said. “It’s like he told you: we just followed our noses and kinda tripped over Mallard.”
D’Antonio held her eyes for a moment, before turning to Lieutenant Dominick Lombardi.
“What can I tell ya?” he said to Lombardi. “It’s the first I’m hear in’ about any of this.”
Lombardi, a thirty-year veteran of the NYPD, smiled. “Yeah, I got that impression.”
“Well, what ever,” Rizzo said, addressing Lombardi. “What’s done is done. We should drop the warrant on Bradley and look for that raincoat. We got enough in DeMaris’s statement to lock him up right now. Then we wait for the lab test on the fiber. Should be a slam dunk.”
Lombardi’s face brightened. “We?” he said. “I’m not followin’ you here, Sergeant. What do you mean, ‘we’?”
“I mean, we, like us,” Rizzo said. “Like me and my partner. And, of course, you’re welcome to come along.” He reached into his shirt pocket, extracting a packet of Nicorette. “Being how it was your case and all.”
Lombardi laughed. “I like a guy with balls, Rizzo,” he said. “Refreshing change from most of the Plaza boys and girls. But, in this particular case, I gotta say, you’re outta line.”
“Yeah, well, I can see where you might figure that, Loo. But you can ask Vince here-I don’t go outside the lines.”
Raymond Kessler, the homicide bureau chief from the Brooklyn District Attorney’s Office, interjected from Rizzo’s left.
“Maybe you do and maybe you don’t, Rizzo,” he said curtly. “But you could use a little work on your statement-taking skills.”
Rizzo responded, wearing a puzzled look. “Oh?” he asked. “And why’s that?”
“Oh, I think you know,” Kessler said. “That statement you took from DeMaris has more holes in it than Swiss cheese. A kid straight outta law school could convince a jury DeMaris was just in it for the plagiarism angle, didn’t know shit about the murders. She can practically walk away from this. The prosecution will have to spit nickels for even a conspiracy count to stick, let alone felony murder.”