SISTER (ALTON RHODE MYSTERIES Book 4) (6 page)

CHAPTER 10 - NANDO’S MOUTHPIECE

I went back to my office. I wanted to find out more about Harry Frost.

When a lawyer leaves Staten Island suddenly without a trace there are only two possible explanations: alien abduction or malpractice. I ruled out aliens. Malpractice can take many forms, but it usually involves client money. To lawyers of a certain bent, escrow accounts are like pots of honey to a badger. I checked with the Staten Island Bar Association and someone got back to me fairly quickly, saying that there was no record of any disciplinary action against Harry Frost, Esq. My call to them was more or less pro forma. The old-boy network is very powerful on Staten Island and the bar association’s list of lawyers it sanctioned probably took up the back of a stamp. Hence the quick reply. It’s an open secret in legal circles that attorneys who skate the ethical line are often nudged toward judgeships where they can do less damage.

I called contacts at both the daily
Staten Island Advance
and the weekly
Register
and, after the promise of a couple of lunches, got them to go through their old morgue files. There were a handful of stories in which Frost was mentioned, but they all involved community or bar association events tangential to his practice. They were all so brief that my contacts just read them to me over the phone and I dismissed them. They weren’t worth a cup of coffee, let alone a lunch. But I was stuck for the lunches.

Next, I tried the D.A.’s office. None of the younger D.A.’s remembered a Harry Frost so I eventually got bumped up to the man himself.

“I knew him slightly when I was starting out,” Mike said. “Heard some talk that he wasn’t exactly Learned Hand, ethically. But I don’t think he was ever accused of anything. Officially, that is. I could check.”

“Don’t bother. Something like that would have made the media. I was just wondering if anyone in your shop had a problem with him.”

“Before my time, Jake. Did you try the Bar Association?”

“Just to say that I did. If he wasn’t indicted for anything, what are the odds the bar association would care.”

“I hear you. I’m hoping things will change once the new court complex is built. I guess I benefited as much as anyone from the ‘old boy’ network on Staten Island, but maybe it will prompt a new sense of professionalism in the bar.” Sullivan was referring to the new five-story, $230 million, State Supreme Court building was nearing completion nearby, part of a much-ballyhooed rejuvenation of the St. George area that was scheduled to include the world’s tallest Ferris wheel, a shopping mall, retail shops, a hotel and condos. The new courthouse complex would centralize all the local judicial departments, criminal and civil, which were now spread throughout several communities on the North Shore. “Of course, with our luck, they’ll find Jimmy Hoffa’s bones on site and it will never open.”

The courthouse project had been delayed for years after construction workers uncovered the remains of 19th-century immigrants who had died in the quarantine hospital that once sat on the site. The plan was to rebury them in a memorial green at the complex, where presumably dogs and vagrants will supply fertilizer. As far as I was concerned, all the new courthouse meant was that parking in the area, which is also a commuter hub to Manhattan for tens of thousands of people, would go from unlikely to nonexistent.

“Is it true that the new courthouse will be entirely funded by parking tickets?”

Sullivan laughed. I thanked him and was about to hang up when he said, “Why don’t you try Sam Rosenberg?”

“Nando’s old mouthpiece?”

“Yes. I said I didn’t know Frost well, but I seem to remember that he and Sam had something going. Not partners, exactly, but interests in common. I could be wrong about that, but Sam knows a lot of gossip anyway. It’s his stock in trade.”

“He must hate my guts. I cost him his biggest client, both financially and literally.”

The corpulent Nando Carlucci had broken most laws and quite a few scales in his time.

“Since when do you care about people hating your guts?”

“Good point. By the way, since we’re talking about my popularity, or lack thereof, my credentials came through. I want to thank you again.”

“You don’t have to thank me, Alton.”

We left it at that. Mike thought he owed me, probably forever, for contriving the coverup that saved his career, and probably his sanity, after the Denton murder case blew up in everyone’s face and left bodies strewn all over the borough. Because of the personal tragedies involved, I had never asked him for any special treatment from his office, above and beyond what I always had been able to finagle out of it. But knowing he could make my professional life easier, he had made me a non-paid “consulting detective” to his office, with an I.D. and Law Enforcement Officer carry permit to match. That meant I could take my gun into any American jurisdiction and, more importantly, on a plane. Cormac, acting on Mike’s behalf, had also crafted a letter saying that I was basically always on official business for the N.Y.P.D. Mac suggested that Sullivan probably got the idea (“which is probably as illegal as the deck I had two moonlighting firemen attach to my house”) from the TV show,
Sherlock
, where a modern-day Holmes character has the same designation. I didn’t care. Whatever bureaucratic doors might still be closed to me, I could easily lie my way past them. The only downside was that I just knew that Mac would start calling me “Sherlock.”    

“Give my love to Alice, will you?”

“Will do. You know, Mike, this is the first time I asked for information and you didn’t want to know what I was up to.”

“New strategy. I’m going to try it out for a while. I think I’ll sleep better that way.”     

***

I headed back to St. George. I began to think I should move my office there.

Samuel L. Rosenberg was a mob lawyer without a mob client. Since he used to have a very lucrative one, the late, unlamented Nando Carlucci, I was right in suspecting that he would not be thrilled to see me. Even Sam could probably make the case that I was the principal reason Nando was late and unlamented.

Sam was a slippery devil, so I thought it prudent to drop in on him unannounced in his office on Central Avenue just up the block from the D.A.’s office. I had been in the building many times and knew he was on the third floor, although I never had the occasion to meet him there. It turned out he was so slippery his office wasn’t on the third floor anymore. It wasn’t even in the building. The new occupant, some sort of financial consultant, told me that Sam had downsized and was now operating in a smaller office next to a pizza restaurant in West Brighton, near Bard Avenue.

Oh yes, he’d be delighted to see me. 

I drove to West Brighton. I thought about buying a couple of slices in the pizza parlor to bring him as a peace offering but decided against it. He might take it as a dig about Nando, who was known to eat two pies at a sitting. I had no trouble getting past Sam’s receptionist. He didn’t have one. I found him buried in paperwork at his desk. He smiled expectantly when I walked in, perhaps thinking I was a potential client. Then he recognized me.

“What do you want, you rotten son of a bitch?”

“Is that any way to talk, Sam? How do you know I’m not a potential client?”

“I would represent Himmler at this point, Rhode, but I draw the line at you. You made Nando Carlucci disappear and he took most of my practice with him. Look what I’m reduced to.”

He waved an arm at his surroundings, which I was forced to admit, were dismal. Early-American Goodwill. There was a brown bag on his desk and a slight pastrami overlay cut through the tomato sauce smells wafting from his neighbors.

“Accident cases. Slips and falls. Workman’s comp. Do you know how much paperwork is involved dealing with insurance companies and the meshugganah Government? I was a respected criminal attorney. And now this?
”
I wanted to say that no one had ever respected him, and his criminal experience was limited to one crime family. I was pretty sure he’d never actually handled a case at trial. I might have even mentioned that I hadn’t actually been a party to Nando’s “disappearance.” Arman Rahm never told me which landfills he deposited the fat rival mobster in, and I never asked. I probably could have also noted that Carlucci had tried to kill me, several times in fact, but why bother?

“Look, Sam, I’m sorry if I caught you between ambulances, but I need some information. So let’s cut the bull. You’ll never get another meal ticket like Nando, but maybe I can put in a word for you with some people I know. Throw you some business.”

A gleam came to the old shyster’s eyes.

“I have heard that you’re tight with the Rahms. I wouldn’t mind an introduction there.”

“That wouldn’t be a conflict of interest for you?”

“I’ll recuse myself if Carlucci ever shows up. Him and Lazarus.”

So much for Nando.

“I’ll see what I can do.” I sat down in a client chair that could have doubled for lawn furniture. “Now, what can you tell me about Harry Frost.”

“That rotten, thieving son of a bitch. He should rot in hell.”

I suspected that this would be a productive interview.

“I thought you worked together.”

“We worked on some deals before I decided to concentrate on criminal law. Real estate stuff, probate, estates, trusts, that sort of thing. Then one day he took a powder. Left me holding the bag with a lot of angry clients.”

“Why were they angry?”

“A lot of them had money, and I emphasize ‘had,’ when they came to us. You remember how Staten Island was after they built the Guinea Gangplank?”

“You mean the Verrazano Bridge?”

“What are you, some kind of politically correct asshole? I know your name ends in a vowel but I also know you’re not Italian. Besides, it’s just a phrase. I ain’t prejudiced. I saw
42
, the Jackie Robinson flick. Liked it, too. So don’t get high and mighty on me. Where was I?”

“Staten Island after the bridge.”

“Yeah. Well, after it opened, a lot of farmland and oceanfront property that wasn’t worth diddley squat before suddenly took off. Big pieces of property. A lot of old-time families cashed in. They owned restaurants on the water, or pieces of the old airport and the drive-in mid-Island, all before your time probably, and they got small fortunes for them. I mean, had they held on they would have gotten even bigger fortunes, of course, but they did OK. Most of them were cheap squareheads, so they thought they were rich. I never could figure out why Staten Island had so many Northern Europeans, but they were hard-working, I’ll say that. Anyway, we got a lot of business from that. You know, families falling out over the windfalls, divorces, somebody dies and the money has to be split up. Typical human bullshit.”

He was revving up. I think I saw where it was all going.

“Large escrow accounts,” I said.

“Huge.  A goddamn gold mine.”

“And Harry dipped.”

“Dipped? He used a steam shovel. After he split, I found out that there was hardly anything left in the accounts. He billed so many hours he would have had to start working for some of those people before Henry Hudson sailed into the Narrows. What he didn’t bill, he siphoned off to dummy corporations, you know, for title research and other crap.”

“How much are we talking about.”

“Almost $3 million, spread out over about 20 clients.”

“I have to ask, Sam. What was your involvement?”

Rosenberg sat back and put his hands behind his head. He smiled.

“You probably won’t believe this, but at one point I was pretty wet behind the ears. Me and Harry weren’t partners, thank God, but I trusted him. I saw just enough money to think everything was on the up and up. He snowed the clients and he snowed me.”

“They must have come after you.”

“They tried. ‘The Jew lawyer must have been behind it.’ But it was pretty obvious I hadn’t done anything but be stupid. Harry’s fingerprints were all over the clients’ funds. Besides, he ran, and I stayed behind. I didn’t have much of a bank account.” He paused and gave me a look. “Like now. The clients got new lawyers but didn’t have all that much money to pay them, so you know how that goes.”

“But they could recover the money, couldn’t they?”

“Sure. Theoretically. If they found Harry. But most of the clients were kind of down on lawyers by that time. Can’t say I blame them. They knew their legal fees would eat up anything they recovered.”

“But it was still a crime.”

“Yeah, So is jaywalking. When was the last time a lawyer on Staten Island got indicted for bilking his clients?”

“So, he got away with it.”

“A crying shame. All that money and I hardly saw a dime.”

CHAPTER 11 - BETA

I got up early Saturday morning, packed and headed to Massachusetts. I didn’t know how long I’d be gone, so I probably took too many clothes. But that’s the beauty of traveling in one’s car. You don’t have to pay extra baggage fees. I also put an extra gun and ammunition in a lock box in my trunk. I never know how many bullets to pack, so I erred on the side of World War III. 

The drive to Worcester brought back memories not related to the case at hand. When I was nine, my parents rented a place called Red Rock Farm just outside Sturbridge for two weeks in the summer. It was a real farm and I hadn’t gone 20 feet from our station wagon when I stepped in cow flop. In additions to a small herd of bovines, which regularly broke out of their ancient corral and wandered down the road, there were also chickens and ducks, a small stream with little darting trout and 10 acres of wooded wonderland.

We went to Old Sturbridge Village, which was set up to recreate a rural New England town of the 1830s. People walked around the meetinghouses, school, country store, working gristmills and the like in period costumes. There was even another working farm, although I managed to avoid stepping in anything. I remembered being fascinated by how basic life was early in the 19th Century. I thought I had been roughing it because Red Rock Farm didn’t have air-conditioning! We ate regularly at the nearby Publick House, where I discovered Indian pudding topped with vanilla ice cream. I had a wonderful time.

I drove around now but wasn’t able to find Red Rock Farm. I thought about asking someone but decided against that. The farm had probably been turned into a housing development full of McMansions. But the Publick House was still standing as it has, according to the plaque next to the front entrance, since 1771. The property was a lot grander than I remembered. There was now a conference center attached to the original building, and what looked like a motel was just down the path.

I had timed my drive to hit Sturbridge at lunchtime, with my fingers crossed, hoping that Ebenezer's Tavern was still operating in the Publick House. It was, and didn’t look much different than I recalled. I went in happy, but knowing that I’d be melancholy coming out. That’s a certainty when memories involving parents are involved. Most of the tables were occupied with parents and children. The melancholy index spiked.

Even the Tavern menu looked much the same, although I didn’t remember anything called an “Ebenezer Burger.” It didn’t matter. I ordered a half bottle of Bordeaux and an open-faced turkey sandwich with all the trimmings. Except for the wine, that was the meal I ordered every time we went to the Publick House, lunch or dinner. My eyes naturally drifted to the bottom of the menu, where the desserts were listed. My luck held.

“There’s no chance you will run out of Indian pudding, is there,” I asked the waitress, who looked like she could be Mrs. Ebenezer. “This place is pretty busy.”

“No chance, sonny,” she said indulgently. “But I’ll put some aside for you anyway. And we have plenty of vanilla ice cream.”

An hour later I left for Worcester, 20 miles away, pleasantly full. And melancholy

The melancholy didn’t last long. My cell phone buzzed. It was Cormac Levine.

“You wanted to know if there were any murders similar to the one in Worcester?”

“Yeah. You dig up any?’

“Interesting phrasing. I can give you a definite maybe.”

I waited.

“I checked with the one of those new databases they started with all this terrorist bullshit so that various jurisdictions, local and Federal, would be on the same page. I won’t bore you with its name or its acronym, which has more letters than I have piles. It’s not public anyway. A friend of a friend got me into it. It’s in butter , whatever that means.”

“It’s beta.” I spelled it out. “That means it’s in a testing phase.”

“Beta, butter, who gives a rat’s ass. Anyway, there were a ton of stabbing deaths over the last few years. Most involve domestic disputes, of course, with kitchen knives and the like. Murders of passion or convenience. Some gang killings, of course. And a couple of maniacs who were quickly caught. Makes you think the Government should regulate kitchen utensils. But I was even able to narrow it down to stabbing deaths roughly similar to the one that killed the nun. You know, single thrust to the heart with a very sharp, presumably thin blade. Believe it or not, there were dozens. Gotta figure some pros or mob guys still know how to use a stiletto. And a shiv is the weapon of choice in prison, so a lot of cons probably came out with graduate degrees in knifing people. But the killings were all over the country and many of the victims seemed to have it coming to them. But there were four, including Worcester, that involved religious persons.”

“All nuns?”

“No. I wish.” There was a pause, then a bitter laugh. “I can’t believe I said that. What I mean …. never mind. But this is where it gets dicey. Two nuns, a priest and a brother, you know, one of those guys who belongs to a religious order but is not ordained. Didn’t you get taught by them?”

“Yes. Xaverian Brothers. Xaverian High School in Brooklyn. Four stabbing murders, Mac? Religious. That hasn’t raised any red flags?”

“You would think somebody would notice, wouldn’t you. And maybe somebody will once this system gets out of that phase you say it’s in. Probably if they were all nuns, or priests, or whatever, someone might have spotted it. But they weren’t and the murders were spread across the country, over a year. Would you believe California, Colorado, Illinois and Massachusetts? Most serial killers stick to one time zone, at least. And the ages of the victims are all over the lot. That also goes against the serial killer grain. I hate to say it, but they could be random, including your girlfriend.”

I pulled over to the side of the road and fished in my glove box for a pad and pen.

“Give me what you have.”

“Emilio Salazar, 55, pastor of Puertas del Cielo, Gates of Heaven, Roman Catholic Church in Windsor, California, was found dead April 17 of last year next to a stream where he liked to fish. Jeanette LeFebvre, 19, a cloistered nun belonging to the Contemplative Sisters of Fatima in Lafayette, one of Denver’s suburbs, was killed on August 5 in a field adjacent to her convent. Brother Alfred Variale was 88 and living in a retirement home in the Prospect Heights section of Chicago. He was found on December 8
th
sitting in his wheelchair in his room in front of a TV watching a Bears game.”

“No one saw him killed?”

“They thought he just nodded off. It was a Bears game, after all. Put anyone to sleep. You know nursing homes. Anyone can walk in, most of the time. Our guy probably could have killed a half dozen before anyone noticed. He didn’t use a gun, remember. The staff would have heard that, if not the residents.”

“Jesus Christ. And the one in Denver was only 19? And what was a cloistered sister doing in the field?”

“Apparently the nuns maintain a small garden to raise vegetables and the like. Actually, LeFebvre was called a postulant, that’s a nun in training. It was her day to tend the tomatoes, or something. Postulants probably got all the dirty jobs. And she was training to be a ‘nun,’ not a ‘sister.’ Sisters can work in the community, usually as teachers. Nuns, on the other hand, are usually cloistered. I figure a Papist like you should know that.”

I just loved being lectured on Catholicism by a Jewish detective who hadn’t seen the inside of a synagogue since his own bar mitzvah.             

“So,” I said, “the first killing was about 13 months ago, in California. Then three more, including Ronnie, spaced about four months apart. Could it be a serial killer moving east?”

“Where’s his next victim, Iceland?”

“Anything stick out?”

“Well, except for the first one, which was on a Wednesday, all the murders were on a Friday, Saturday or Sunday.”

“So?”

“So, serial killers have to start somewhere. In many cases, their first is close to home. Let’s assume the first killing was a hometown job. Then the next three might indicate he was traveling on or near weekends.”

I thought about that. It was thin gruel, but I filed it away.

“That’s it?”

“Hey, what do you want? You know anyone else who would come up with something like that? So, what are you gonna do?”

“I’m on my way to see those cops in Worcester. But something tells me I’ll be on a plane soon. Can you email me what you have. I’ll want to share it with the cops up here.”

“If they already checked that angle, they’ll be pissed you questioned their competency. If they haven’t they’ll be pissed and embarrassed. Where do you want me to send the bail money?”

“I’ll work my usual charm on them.”

“In that case, where do you want me to send the flowers?”

“I’m guessing they never even heard about that new database. They might even be grateful I’m sharing.”

“Oh, so you intend to ‘beta’ them up.”

“That’s terrible, Mac.”

“How about ‘beta late than never’?’

“Please, you’re killing me.”

“You’re just mad because I said it before you did.” He wasn’t near finished. “Beta me than you?”

I hung up when he spouted a line from
Gunga Din
.