The Striver Page 2

  Thoroughly familiar with the logo, Boots knew the scene would have to be carefully preserved. There could be no mistakes here. Amoroso Construction belonged to Johnny Pianetta, a self-styled Mafia Don with a hand in every criminal pursuit this side of international arms trafficking. The NYPD’s Organized Crime Control Bureau would definitely come calling, and sooner rather than later.

  ‘Yo, Boots, have a doughnut.’

  The offer came from Sergeant Craig O’Malley who worked alongside Boots in the Sixty-Fourth Precinct, universally called the Six-Four. O’Malley stood next to his cruiser. He was a large man, but his driver, Boris Velikov, towered above him. The Bulgarian was stuffing a powdered doughnut into his mouth. Though he couldn’t speak, he waved a hand the size of a baseball mitt in greeting.

  ‘Where’s the body?’ Boots asked.

  ‘Behind that pillar.’

  ‘How about the car over there? You check it out yet?’

  O’Malley didn’t ask what car Boots referred to. The 2013 Lexus GS was the only car parked on the block.

  ‘Never gave it a moment’s thought, Boots. Maybe that’s why you’re a detective and I’m still workin’ patrol. But I’ll get to it in a minute.’

  ‘Let Boris handle it, if he can stop eating. I want you to take me to the body.’

  ‘What’s the hurry? Carlo Pianetta’s not goin’ anywhere. Have some coffee.’

  Although he’d made the same argument to his father, Boots said, ‘Call me untrusting, but I wanna see for myself.’

  O’Malley tracked the line he’d taken when he first inspected the crime scene, leaving Boots to follow in his footsteps.

  ‘The paramedics responded, but I held them off,’ he explained. ‘Carlo was as dead as dead gets and I didn’t want them contaminating the scene. Boots, I knew this was gonna be trouble from the beginning. Amoroso? Johnny Piano’s outfit? Bad news, Boots, and when I laid eyes on the body …’

  O’Malley didn’t bother to complete the sentence. They’d rounded the pillar and Boots could see for himself. Boots had known Carlo Pianetta from birth. Both he and the Pianetta family attended the same church, a blasphemy that Boots was forced to endure. Boots had been hearing Mass at Our Lady of Mt. Carmel all his life.

  ‘We need backup,’ Boots said, ‘before Amoroso’s workers arrive. And let’s rope off the block all the way to the water. Nobody in or out.’

  Boots wouldn’t lead the investigation, of this much he was certain. And more than likely, no higher authority would seek his insights. Nevertheless, he examined the scene carefully.

  Dispatched by a single shot to the head, Carlo lay on his right side, his body limp now that he’d come through rigor mortis. That meant he’d been dead for at least thirty-six hours and probably more. Although the cause of death screamed mob execution, Carlo’s pants and boxer shorts were bunched around his ankles, an inconsistency that demanded its own attention.

  There being no good reason for an immediate answer to the obvious question, like what exactly Carlo was doing when he bought the farm, Boots knelt to examine the entrance wound and the surrounding tissue. The hole left by the bullet was round and neat, with none of the tissue damage associated with a contact or near-contact wound. On the other hand, the left side of Carlo’s neck and face was speckled with gunpowder residue, little black dots that looked like warts, which meant the shooter had been somewhere between three and six feet away.

  Boots rose, then took a deep breath as he shifted his attention. He was standing within a yard of where the shooter had fired the single round that took Carlo’s life, if not on the exact spot. He swept the dark asphalt with his eyes, looking for shoe impressions, but the surface was too smooth. If any faint impressions existed, the Crime Scene Unit would have to find them.

  About to back off, Boots took one more look, a habit he’d cultivated many years before. The effort rarely produced any good result, but this time his diligence paid off when he found an irregular stain just a bit darker than the asphalt, maybe four inches long and two inches across, a bloodstain. The stain was only a few feet away from Carlo’s body, but it wasn’t his blood. Carlo’s blood, along with bits of bone, brain, hair and skin, extended for a good eight feet from the side of his head. No bit of it reached within two yards of the smaller stain.

  On impulse, Boots again dropped to one knee, this time to examine Carlo’s hands. He found dried blood on the man’s knuckles and fingers. Par for the course. Carlo’s reputation for brutality extended back to his childhood when he terrorized his schoolmates on the playground. In that way, at least, he differed from his old man. John Pianetta embraced the use of violence to solve problems, but there was no indication that he enjoyed the pain he caused. A means to an end, that’s all violence was for him, his victims’ humanity irrelevant, if not entirely unsuspected.

  Satisfied, Boots retreated to O’Malley’s cruiser in time to snatch the last doughnut. Two more cruisers had arrived, and six cops now stood before the chain-link fence enclosing the yard. Boots carried the doughnut and a paper cup of overly sweetened coffee to where O’Malley stood.

  ‘So?’ O’Malley asked. ‘Whatta ya think?’

  ‘Three questions.’

  ‘Shoot.’

  ‘Who reported the body?’

  ‘An anonymous tip called to the Six-Four.’

  Called in, Boots noted, not to 911, but to the Sixty-Fourth Precinct. ‘Man or woman?’

  ‘Man.’

  Two items caught Boots’s attention. First, the body couldn’t be seen from outside the fence. Second, the phone numbers of local precincts weren’t publicized. Unless the caller was a cop, he’d have to look the number up. So, why not call 911? More than likely because incoming calls to 911 were not only recorded, the caller’s number was captured as well.

  ‘What about the car?’ Boots asked Velikov. ‘You run the plates?’

  ‘Yeah, it’s registered to the scumbag in question.’

  ‘Carlo Pianetta?’

  ‘The one and only.’

  Boots wolfed down the last of the doughnut, then called Detective Lieutenant Carl Levine, his commanding officer at the Six-Four. Levine’s nickname was Lieutenant Sorrowful, in part because his droopy face resembled that of a bloodhound with a toothache.

  ‘The vic,’ Boots explained, after briefly describing the scene. ‘He’s Carlo Pianetta.’

  ‘Johnny Piano’s kid?’

  Boots shuddered. He hated the nicknames these jerks gave themselves. ‘Yeah,’ he said, ‘that’s him.’

  ‘Shit,’ Levine said.

  ‘My sentiments exactly. And the worst part is that Borough Command will definitely take the job away from us. It’ll go to Homicide or OCCB.’

  Boots had no desire to be a hero. His concern had always been with the overall security of the small neighborhood where he worked and lived. But this particular murder wasn’t about to vanish. Johnny Pianetta lived only a mile away. And like Boots, he made his home territory his place of business.

  ‘Johnny,’ Boots continued, ‘he’s gonna tear up the neighborhood lookin’ for whoever hit Carlo.’

  ‘Unless he knows right away,’ Levine pointed out. ‘It could be that Carlo had a beef with someone and his old man’s aware of it.’

  Boots took a moment to consider the oddities: Carlo’s pants around his ankles, the small bloodstain, the blood on Carlo’s hands. Best guess, Carlo had been surprised in the act of … of sex, at least. But why behind a pillar in the shadows beneath the Pulaski Bridge? Unless Carlo was doing something he needed to hide.

  ‘I’ll pass the info up the chain,’ Levine said. ‘Meanwhile, I don’t have to tell you to fill in every blank.’

  ‘You don’t actually, but you always do.’

  Boots attempted to fill in one of those blanks when he examined Carlo’s Lexus. He found the front doors open and conducted a quick search, including the glove compartment, under and behind the seats, then finally the trunk. He found nothing out of order, noting only that the keys
were in the ignition. Whatever Carlo was doing under the bridge, he hadn’t expected to spend a lot of time doing it.

  As he closed the trunk, Boots’s cell phone rang. Lieutenant Sorrowful with the anticipated bad news.

  ‘OCCB is on the way,’ he announced. ‘They’re expecting to find the crime scene undisturbed.’

  FOUR

  As Boots settled down to wait – most likely until he was summarily dismissed – he found himself wanting a cigarette. The craving rushed over him, as cravings had been rushing over him since he quit more than a year before. Cops spend a lot of time waiting and Boots had always filled that time with a smoke, sometimes two or three. Now …

  Boots took out his cell phone, checked the little green battery to make sure he’d remembered to charge it, and called in to the Six-Four. He greeted the sergeant who answered the phone, then asked for a patrol lieutenant named Nouza Mahoud. A second-generation Egyptian, Mahoud was resolutely gung-ho on America. He told you how much he loved his country somewhere in the course of every conversation, as if his loyalty was perpetually in question.

  ‘Hey, Lou,’ Boots said, ‘you got a minute?’

  ‘Sure, what’s up?’

  ‘I need to know if someone reported a gunshot near the Pulaski Bridge on Saturday night or Sunday morning. You mind checkin’ the log?’ Boots hesitated, then decided to sweeten the pot by offering a little piece of gossip. The job ran on gossip. ‘We got a stiff here. It’s Carlo Pianetta.’

  ‘Whoa.’

  ‘Exactly. Which is why I need to move before the bosses arrive.’

  ‘In that case, you came to the right man. I was on duty Sunday morning, maybe at seven thirty, when the job was dispatched to … to Six-Four Boy. Yeah, that’s it. That would be Lily Bremer and Louie Fallanga. They were patrolling Boy sector that morning.’

  ‘Who called it in?’

  ‘Gimme a second.’

  The second turned into several minutes and Boots found himself growing impatient. The Crime Scene Unit had arrived and white-suited cops were busy scouring the yard, hoping, maybe, that the perp dropped his wallet. Several Amoroso workers had also come by to retrieve the company’s vehicles. They now stood in a knot on the far side of the street, eight of them dressed in canvas pants and heavy boots, smoking the cigarettes Boots craved. Six months ago, he’d have found an excuse to stand in their midst, to put his nose within a few feet of a little second-hand smoke. Now he felt only a moment of regret. The decision to quit was a concession to oncoming middle age, but succeeding hadn’t made him any younger.

  A black Chevy Caprice pulled up just as Lieutenant Mahoud came back on the line. The uniformed officer who exited the back seat wore the polished bars of a captain.

  ‘You there, Boots?’

  ‘Here and ready, Lou.’

  ‘The report of a single shot fired was logged in at 7:42 on Sunday morning by a 911 operator. According to the operator, a citizen named Hal McDermott heard a shot and ran to his window. He didn’t see anything, but he called 911 anyway. Six-Four Boy responded and called in a 10-90, unfounded, at 8:24.’

  ‘Where does McDermott live?’

  ‘Box Street. That’d be about a block from the Pulaski Bridge.’

  Boots caught a little break here. Lily Bremer was currently at the scene. In Boots’s view, only a small number of cops had a serious interest in the art of policing. For the rest, it was cover your ass and cash your check. It was hunker down until the magic pension kicked in, along with the lifetime medical benefits.

  Lily Bremer’s flag had been planted in the aggressive-policing camp for almost two decades. Tall and bony, her skin was the color of warm caramel, a sharp contrast with her bright green eyes. Boots associated Lily’s accusing gaze with that of Sister Mary Dennis, the nun who’d caught him stealing a candy bar in the school cafeteria. Back when he was eleven years old.

  ‘Hey, Lily …’

  ‘You don’t have to tell me, Boots. We messed up.’

  ‘You can’t win ’em all.’

  Lily Bremer didn’t have to be asked for an accounting. The 911 call established the time of death in the homicide of a mob figure. Everything she and her partner had done and seen on Sunday morning would become part of the case file. Criticism might easily follow, but if she was ever to find a sympathetic ear, she was talking into it right now.

  ‘We interviewed the citizen – Hal McDermott – first thing. McDermott told us that he heard what he took to be a gunshot and went immediately to his window. He looked up and down Box Street, but didn’t see anything, not even a passing car. Most citizens would’ve let it go right there, but he called 911 and we got the job, me and Fallanga.’

  They were interrupted by a tractor-trailer, a tanker, gearing down as it approached the haphazardly parked cruisers. The rig’s engine roared each time the driver changed gears, throwing up twin plumes of black smoke through the exhaust pipes behind the cab.

  The truck was headed for an oil storage depot on the far side of the bridge, a partnership between Exxon and the Kuwaiti government called Alltel Enterprises. Alltel didn’t do business on Sunday, but there must have been a security guard somewhere, and security cameras, too. Oil storage depots with their enormous tanks were prime targets for a terrorist attack. Blow one of those tanks and the fire would burn for a week.

  Boots glanced to his right. The still unidentified captain was coming straight toward him. A pair of detectives dutifully trailed behind.

  ‘We crisscrossed the surrounding blocks for a few minutes, but …’ Lily shrugged. ‘No bodies, not even a pedestrian we could ask about the shot, so we called it in as unfounded.’

  ‘Detective Littlewood?’

  Boots turned to his right and raised a hand while Lily made herself scarce. ‘That would be me.’

  ‘Captain Karkanian, OCCB. You want to bring me up to date?’ Karkanian was three inches taller and several years younger than Boots, with a full head of coarse black hair and a unibrow so thick Boots half expected it to wriggle.

  Boots tried not to resent the man’s presence, or his failure to introduce his detectives. But the best he could do was conceal that resentment as he delivered a precise report, beginning with the gunshot called in by Clark McDermott, concluding with the arrival of the Crime Scene Unit.

  ‘Sergeant O’Malley, his driver and myself were the only personnel past that gate before CSU showed up.’

  ‘Good work, Detective. We’ll take it from here.’

  A black Cadillac Escalade tore onto the block just as Boots reached his own car, a battered 2002 Ford Taurus. The Escalade stopped in the middle of the street and five men, including Johnny Pianetta, exited. As they double-timed in the direction of the crime scene, Boots slid into the little Ford. He’d been expecting Johnny Piano to show up. In fact, he’d been keenly anticipating an opportunity to confront the man. Boots hated gangsters in general and Johnny in particular, this despite a relative tolerance for the common criminals he ordinarily pursued.

  Johnny Pianetta relentlessly cultivated a bogus persona. He gave generously to the church, sponsored a Little League team and belonged to a dozen organizations, at all times proclaiming himself a defender of the neighborhood, civic virtue personified. Forget about a loansharking operation that collected debts by any means necessary. Forget about peddling dope, coke and speed to street dealers who sprayed bullets into crowded playgrounds. Forget about extracting tribute from a host of equally violent street criminals.

  When a fire consumed the sanctuary at St Stanislaus, John Pianetta was among the first to contribute to its rebuilding. His picture had appeared in the Daily News: Local Philanthropist Saves Polish Church.

  Boots kept his own count, attributing six hits over the last few years to Johnny’s loansharking operation and three additional murders to a heist that went wrong. That was in addition to the dozens of men who’d turned up in emergency rooms with broken bones, and the dozens more who’d overdosed on Johnny Piano’s drugs.

  Most n
eighborhoods in New York, as they came into being, had reserved some core of upscale housing for the neighborhood’s lawyers, accountants and doctors. Not Greenpoint. One and all, its kids were the offspring of working-class parents only a paycheck or two from poverty. As teenagers, they walked a narrow line while they considered their adult opportunities. Most survived the endless temptations. They either went on to working-class jobs, or graduated college and promptly moved away. But others gave up early on, drifting into drugs and crime, helped by men like Johnny Piano who made sure narcotics were readily available in every one of the neighborhood’s schools.

  This was the same John Pianetta who showed up on Sunday at Our Lady of Mt. Carmel in a suit and tie. Who showed up with an uncle, two cousins and two sons, each of whom dreamed only of replacing him somewhere down the line.

  Boots reached for the gear shift. He’d been dismissed and he had every reason to leave, to let the inevitable confrontation play out. But it was already too late. His equilibrium had shifted and he couldn’t walk away. Boots had a big problem with his temper, a sin he confessed to Father Gubetti every Easter when he took Communion. Usually, he made an effort to control himself, but not this time.

  Boots got out of the car and signaled to O’Malley and the Bulgarian. ‘Show time, boys,’ he said.

  FIVE

  Johnny Pianetta was screaming in Captain Karkanian’s face. And why not? Why not indulge himself, given that his oldest son, his heir apparent, was dead? His people expected him to throw a little tantrum, including the six workers who’d come up to join his regular crew. Meanwhile, the opportunity to embarrass a cop, an officer, didn’t come along every day. Johnny didn’t know exactly what the bars on Karkanian’s uniform represented, but the man’s arrogance struck him. The asshole was used to having his orders followed, which was probably why he kept repeating himself.