Neptune Avenue (28 page)

He set down the beer; he had no taste for it. He lay back on the couch, remembering her girlish joy during their jaunt along the boardwalk, her sadness in the middle of the nights, the taste of her sweet mouth. And he remembered their final talk. She had not betrayed him, not really, not even with that last forceful jump.

Ironically, she had even freed him from his job troubles. Before the paramedics arrived, he had started to explain the situation to Linda Vargas. They had worked together for a decade and learned to trust each other more than most married couples, and he couldn’t bear for her to think that he was abusing that trust. But Linda looked at him, standing there so stricken, and she raised a hand to stop him. “I’m going to ask you just one question,” she said. “Did you have anything at all to do with either of these deaths or with covering anything up?”

He could have gotten huffy, but he had no right. He just shook his head.

“All right, then,” Vargas said. “It’s over. Whatever happened, it’s over.” She put her hand on his arm. “Don’t beat yourself up for this. If it wasn’t for you, we might never have closed this case.” And then she left him alone.

Now he lay in the dark, musing. He had been a detective for many years, but the true mystery was never really the whodunnit or the how. It was why it was so hard for people to really
see
each other, and why they inflicted so much absolutely unnecessary pain. The world offered some real external troubles, from famine to hurricanes, but violence based on hatred, greed, or jealousy was a purely human creation.

(Of course, if people
did
manage to stop killing each other and get along, he would be out of a job. …)

He got up and picked up a DVD. He inserted it into the player and pressed the remote.

Bright digital letters flashing time code in the corner of the screen: 4:27
A.M.
From a recently planted surveillance camera, a
g
rainy view looking down: a room with bare metal walls. In the background, three men wearing bulky jumpsuits to protect themselves from the freezing cold. Two severe-looking strangers and a third figure, unmistakably Semyon Balakutis. In the foreground, a big fish company employee, standing behind a massive tuna laid out on a table. The worker picked up a circular saw and applied it to the belly of the fish, which gleamed dully in the low light. He made a deep, careful incision, then set the saw down and pried up a segment of the fish’s heavy flank. Balakutis, wearing long rubber gloves, stepped forward, reached into the fish, and started pulling out white packages bundled heavily in plastic wrap.

After a few seconds, the room suddenly flooded with people wearing jackets marked NYPD.

Jack turned off the DVD player. That was why poor Andrei Goguniv had died, that deadly powder. He thought of Balakutis’s face as he had been led, handcuffed, toward a waiting police van. Just before he’d been pushed in, he had turned and seen Jack standing there. The man had done his best to maintain a proud, scornful expression, but it didn’t quite reach his eyes, which were weak with fear.

Now Jack lay back down on his couch. He should have been feeling more satisfaction, but he didn’t. He had put two bad guys away; tomorrow two more would spring up in their place. Angry, brutal men seemed to be one of the world’s great renewable resources. He thought of his son, Ben, and of the ways in which he had failed as a father to the boy, and he resolved to try harder.

After a few minutes the angry faces faded from his mind, but another took its place. He thought again of what he had seen in Zhenya Lelo’s eyes in her final moments. There was a weight deep in his chest, a pool of Russian sadness. The clock ticked on, and the night grew long, and gradually he felt another emotion taking hold, a surprising warmth, as if he had drunk of some smooth and very powerful liqueur.

Zhenya had given him a parting gift, with her last look of love, and he would carry it with him to the very end of his own days.

I
AM GREATLY INDEBTED
to Reed Farrel Coleman and Peter Blauner for their wise counsel about the penultimate draft of this book. Thanks, guys!

I’m also grateful for earlier helpful critiques by Lise McClendon, Katy Munger, Rob Reuland, and SJ Rozan. Many other people gave me invaluable assistance, including Roxanne Aubrey, Tim Cross, Brooklyn North Homicide lieutenant John Cornicello, Michael Epstein, Erika Goldman, Carrie Grimm, Peter Grinenko, Ian Hague, Eileen Lynch Hawkins and Dennis Hawkins, Dinah and Bob Kerksieck, Sylvia and Lenny Pervil, Isabelle Redman, Jay Shapiro, former chief of the Rackets Division at the Brooklyn D.A.’s office, Helen Suby and her wonderful mother, and Elly Sullivan.

Thanks for fascinating medical information and for sharing their remarkable work to the present and former staff at the NYU Hospitals Center’s Tisch Hospital and Rusk Institute of Rehabilitation Medicine, including Dr. Jung Ahn, Tara Kornberg, Evan Cohen, Bev Divine, Debra Shapiro, and Heather O’Brien. Thanks likewise to Peter Hisle and Elise Carney of Bellevue Hospital Center, and to Dr. Gregory Fried, former executive chief surgeon of the NYPD.

Thanks again to all of the good people at Thomas Dunne Books and St. Martin’s Minotaur who helped make this book possible.

And thank you for reading it!

Turn the page to continue reading from the Jack Leightner Crime Novels

D
ETECTIVE JACK LEIGHTNER WAS
struggling to extricate half a bagel from his toaster when the doorbell rang. It was a day off from work and he just wanted to sit in his kitchen and eat breakfast in peace. He was tempted to ignore the bell, but it rang again. As he walked out of his kitchen, half his mind was preoccupied with remembering to unplug the toaster before sticking a fork in, and the other half was busy imagining what might happen if he didn’t. Electrocution was a pretty rare cause of death, yet he had seen a few startling examples in his years with Brooklyn South Homicide.

The hallway of the house he shared with his elderly landlord was musty, and carpeted with a layer of Astroturf. (Mr. Gardner was a home fixer-upper, but he tended to improvise with found materials.) As Jack approached the door, he saw a vague figure standing outside beyond the frosted glass. The mailman? No, it was Sunday. He shook his head: maybe a Jehovah’s Witness.

He opened the door. “Yes?”

A stranger stood there, a middle-aged, stoop-shouldered black man, several inches taller than Jack. He wore black pants, a white shirt, and a frayed gray windbreaker.

“Are you Jack Leightner?”

The man’s cheeks were spotted with dark freckles, and the skin under his eyes was droopy. He looked like he had seen more than a few miles of bad road.

“That’s right,” Jack said. “How can I help you?” He lived in the quiet Brooklyn neighborhood of Midwood; one of its benefits was that unexpected visits were rare.

“Could I take a minute of your time? I don’t mean to bother you.”

Jack frowned. In his experience, people who said that they didn’t mean to bother you actually meant to do just that. “Are you selling something? I’m sorry, but I’m not interested.”

“No, sir,” the man replied. “I’m not selling anything at all. Would you mind if I come in for just a minute?”

Jack crossed his arms. “Why don’t you just tell me what this is about?”

The man bowed his head for a moment, and then he raised it. “With all respect, I don’t think this is something you’ll want to discuss out here on the stoop.”

Jack didn’t like the sound of that—it was something he often said before breaking the news to relatives of homicide victims. “I don’t generally invite strangers into my home unless I know what they want.”

The man stared at him for a moment, then sighed and shook his head. “Of course not. I wouldn’t either.” He looked away for a moment and watched a neighbor trundle her shopping cart down the street. The day was bright and sunny and a dogwood tree was blossoming above the sidewalk. (Later, when Jack recalled this day, he would envision this splash of pink, like a bomb going off.)

The stranger turned back. “I don’t suppose you recognize me. I didn’t think you would.”

Jack’s first thought was of the .45 service revolver sitting on top of his bedroom dresser. As one of only about a hundred NYPD members of service who had earned the designation Detective First Grade, and one of the most seasoned and determined of that elite bunch, he had helped send quite a number of men to prison. Very few had been accepting of their fate. “Excuse me for a second,” he said. “I left something on the stove. I’ll be right back.”

“I’ll wait,” the stranger replied.

Jack ducked back into his apartment, grabbed his handcuffs and crammed them in his back pocket, and stuck the .45 in a pocket of his sweatshirt. It looked pretty obvious in there, which was fine with him. He returned to the front door.

The stranger was sitting on the stoop. He turned to stare up at the detective and immediately took in the new situation. “I don’t think you’re gonna need the piece. I’d just like to talk to you. Are you familiar with Alcoholics Anonymous?”

Jack nodded. “Why?

The stranger took a wrinkled piece of paper from his pocket, lifted it close to his mournful eyes, and read aloud. “Step Eight: we made a list of all persons we had harmed, and became willing to make amends to them all. Step Nine: we made direct amends to such people whenever possible, except when to do so would injure them or others.”

Jack felt his throat tightening. “Who are you? What do you want?”

The man folded the piece of paper and stuck it back in his pocket. He placed his hands carefully on his knees, looked away, and cleared his throat. When he looked back at Jack, his eyes were troubled and piercing. “You had a brother,” he said. “I believe his name was Peter. I was the boy who killed him.”

Jack felt a roaring in his ears and then the ground fell out from under him; he was hurled back to a warm November morning in 1965.

PETEY KEPT SINGING, “HELP
Me, Rhonda.” He loved to sing, Jack’s two-years-younger brother, a lively thirteen-year-old with the biceps of a serious athlete. They were playing hooky, roaming aimlessly around Red Hook, their waterfront Brooklyn neighborhood. They had killed some time tossing pebbles at seagulls, out on one of the piers, and now they were strolling up Sullivan Street, past a vacant lot.

Petey was playing with a Spaldeen, and the little rubber ball took a bad bounce into the lot, beneath an old abandoned trailer. That’s where he discovered the hidden case of Scotch, probably swag boosted out of a ship by some sly longshoreman.

They pulled it out, and were hurrying up the street to go hide the liquor in their friend Joe Kolchuk’s basement when they were approached by two Negro kids, bigger and years older. Jack was holding the case. One of the strangers, wearing a green Army jacket, slammed Petey up against a wall; the other, a kid with a big Afro, demanded that Jack hand over the booze.

That was when Jack saw the patrol car moving slowly up the street, a couple of blocks away. And he said something he’d have a lifetime to regret. He stared defiantly at the kid with the Afro. “You gonna make us?”

Petey looked scared. “Just give it to them, Jack.”

He held onto the case.

“I’m not gonna ask you again,” the kid with the Afro said.

The patrol car was coming closer. Jack smiled. “Fuck you, nigger.”

The others, including Petey, looked at him in disbelief.

“What did you say?” the Negro asked.

“I said, Fuck you and your nigger friend.’” It wasn’t like he really had anything against black people—he ran with kids of all colors in the projects—but he saw the patrol car coming and he reached for the easiest jibe.

The kid who had Petey up against the wall pulled out a switchblade.

“Whoa,” Jack said, going pale. “Look, I’m gonna hand it over.” The cops were just a block away. He started to put the case down, and then he looked up the street and saw—to his horror—that the patrol car had pulled to the curb. The cops jumped out and went into a diner.

Petey began to struggle. And then Jack watched the kid holding his brother click the knife open and stab him. (He might well have stabbed Jack instead, if he hadn’t been holding the case of liquor.) The guy only used the weapon once, but that proved more than enough. Petey put his hand under his shirt and it came out all covered in blood. He stared at Jack as if confused, and then he fell to his knees, and onto his side. He never got up.

The two assailants ran off down a side street, never to be found.

UNTIL NOW.

Jack’s right hand closed on the grip of his .45. “Get up,” he said, jaw clenched. “We’re going inside.”

His brother’s murderer stood up slowly, hands half-raised. Jack looked around to see who might be out on the street, watching, but there was no one. He followed the man into the foyer, and took the gun out of his pocket. “Keep walking. Straight on through.” He marched the man into his kitchen and ordered him to sit in a wooden chair, next to the red Formica table.

“Put your hands behind your back.”