“I sure will.” Philly picked up the telephone receiver on the wall. Before he started dialing the number, Nick slipped in another request.
“Do you think you could come down to the station when you get off and maybe look at a few pictures? See if you can identify this woman from some photographs we have at the station?” That lie always rolled off the tongue so easily: “Maybe look at a few pictures”-actually, it’s several books full of pictures, and you may be there for a few hours!
“Sure thing,” Philly replied. “Whatever you guys want.”
Paul and David were both in their mid-thirties, clean-cut and very fit. Paul worked at home and had converted one of the two bedrooms into an office. Tony questioned Paul in his office while Nick and David chatted in the living room.
“We were sitting in the living room watching TV–I can’t remember what show it was. I think it was NYPD Blue,” Paul told Tony. “We heard this noise. It sounded like a blasting cap or a firecracker. You know, you don’t normally think, hey that’s a gunshot, because frankly I never heard a gunshot before except on TV. We both went to the window. We didn’t rush or anything-just kind of curious. The sound had been pretty close.”
“Did you see anything?” Tony asked.
“Yeah. We look out and to the left we see this car with the driver’s door open, and there’s a man lying on the ground. And there’s this other man leaning over him-he could have been checking him out to see if he was okay. I’m not saying he’s the person who shot the man-I couldn’t say that. I didn’t even know he was shot at the time. I found that out later. Anyway, the man who was leaning gets up and he walks toward us and then he sees us at the front window. He’s looking at us and we’re looking at him-and then he takes off. I wrote a description down right away. So did David. And we didn’t compare our descriptions. Nobody came to talk to us, so we figured you must have caught the guy.”
Paul handed Tony the description he’d written. Tony took a couple of minutes to read it, then looked up at Paul. “How far away from you was this man when you saw him?”
“Well, when we first saw him he was maybe twenty, thirty feet, but when he came closer, he was six or eight feet from us.”
“What about the lighting? Was it light enough for you to get a good look at him?”
“Oh yeah, I’ll show you before you leave. We have security lights on the side of the building. It’s like daylight out there.”
“Could you see if he had a gun on him?”
“I didn’t see a gun.”
“Did you see him take anything off the deceased, like a wallet or something?”
“No.”
At about the same time, in the living room, David was at the window showing Nick exactly where the man was standing when they spotted each other.
The two men agreed to come to the station the next day to give a sworn statement and “look at a few pictures.”
After the interviews, Tony had wanted to quiz Angie about her mysterious girlfriend right away. “If we go to her apartment right now we may catch her before she goes to bed,” he told Nick.
Nick suspected that Tony simply wanted to catch Angie in her negligee again.
“Let’s go tomorrow,” he said. “We’ll call first, so she’s not surprised and defensive. We’ll tell her we’re trying to tie up some loose ends.”
Nick saw the disappointment on Tony’s face, but his partner didn’t argue with his decision.
“Did you tell Philly not to say anything?” Tony asked when they were in the car and driving back to the station.
“Oh yeah. When I got through with him, he was only going to talk to movie producers after he and I solve the case together.”
Tony chuckled. “I gotta admit, Nick, you certainly have a good line of bullshit.”
Nick ignored the compliment. “What did you think of David and Paul?” he asked.
“Well, they’re very credible. Their descriptions are consistent and so detailed. I can’t believe we have people scouring the neighborhood for witnesses, and they miss the two guys who had front-row seats to the action.”
“It happens. At least we found them and now we have something to go on.”
Tony glanced again at the two descriptions. Both David and Paul had written that the man leaning over Carl Robertson had been about five-seven or five-eight, with somewhat unruly or greasy hair. He was thin and dressed totally in black. Paul wrote that the man appeared to be Latin, perhaps Puerto Rican or Cuban, based solely on his skin color. David noted that he wore no jewelry and that his eyes appeared to be brown and glassy.
“How about Angie’s girlfriend?” Tony asked. “Any possible connection to the murder?”
“I don’t know,” Nick replied. “It may be a red herring but we gotta check it out.”
“If Angie is a switch hitter and this woman looks as good as Philly says, I think we should set up a surveillance.”
Nick looked at him and smiled. “I’ll let you handle that.”
9
Johnny made the team that first year, but there were times he wished he hadn’t. Practices were two nights a week and on Saturdays until the season started. Then the games were on Saturday mornings. Johnny had just turned sixteen and was by far the youngest person on the team. He barely saw any playing time.
There were eighteen teams in the Greater Metropolitan League, and they were equally divided into Eastern and Western divisions. The season was eight games long, and the winner of each division made it to the championship game. The Lexingtons were the only team from Manhattan. Four or five were from Brooklyn, and the rest were from the Bronx.
The Lexingtons didn’t have a home field; every game was an away game for them. They also didn’t have a sponsor to pay for uniforms and transportation and things like that. So they wore white shirts and white pants that each player had to supply for himself, along with his own equipment. And they had to find their own way to the football fields in the Bronx and Brooklyn. For Johnny that meant lugging his equipment on the subway. It was okay, though. He usually went with Mikey and his brothers.
You had to be at least sixteen and not older than nineteen to play, and everyone had to submit a copy of his birth certificate at the beginning of the season to prove it. The age requirements were the biggest joke in the league. You could change the date on the copy of your birth certificate pretty easily if you wanted, but it was even easier than that to beat the system. All you had to do was borrow a younger guy’s birth certificate; nobody ever bothered to check whether it was really yours.
As a result, ringers were rampant. That first year, Johnny saw guys showing up to play games with their wives-and kids! The referees never batted an eye.
Late in a game if the score was lopsided, Johnny would be sent in to play-usually at a position that required no skill, like defensive tackle. Johnny, who was six feet tall and maybe 170 pounds soaking wet, would often line up against a 250-pound, thirty-something man.
“When that ball is snapped I’m gonna kick your fucking ass, kid,” was not an uncommon line for Johnny to hear. It was a far cry from high school football, where he should have been playing. But Johnny, like everybody else on his team, was a street kid. He knew bullshit and bluster had to be ignored. He also knew that Frankie O’Connor, who played middle linebacker, expected him to do the job when he was in there, no matter what the score or who he was up against. Even though he was scared, he was not going to be intimidated in front of Frankie. He might not be stronger than the guy on the other side of the scrimmage line, but he was usually faster and he was definitely tough enough. Late in the season, after he had made some tackles for losses and recovered a couple of fumbles, the coach started to play him more-probably at the suggestion of Frankie.