The Payback Game (2 page)

Brooklyn. Four months later

Frank Boff pulled over and parked his dusty old Malibu near Nino Biaggi’s Gym, which was on a busy stretch of Nostrand Avenue in Crown Heights. After killing the engine, he stepped out and stretched his long arms overhead. At six-foot five, he was a big man, but other than his height and intense steel blue eyes, he wasn’t particularly distinctive looking.

Just seconds
out of the comfort of his air-conditioned car, Boff’s face broke out in a sweat from the broiling summer sun. Even though he knew it was a waste of time, he pulled a handkerchief out of his pocket and mopped his face. Inside the gym, where there was no air conditioning, it would be just as hot. And really smelly.

In order to get to the gym, Boff had to climb two flights of rickety wooden stairs attached to the side of the building. By the time he finished
climbing, he was gasping for breath. Once upon a time, when he was a crack DEA agent, he had always been in shape and two flights would have been nothing. Now, the most exercise he got, besides walking up these god-awful stairs, was lifting his arms to stuff junk food into his mouth.

The private investigator glanced at the sign above the gym door:

NINO BIAGGI’S
ONE PUNCH GYM

A Champion is someone who gets up when he can’t.

—Jack Dempsey

Boff stood there a moment and mopped his brow again. When he’d caught his breath, he went into the sauna that passed for a gym. He could hear hammers banging away from the third floor, where a health club co-owned by Michelle, Biaggi’s widow,  and trainer, Ryan McAlary, was in the process of being built.

The second he stepped inside, he was assaulted by a wave of hot, stale air laced heavily with body odor. He took up his customary spot
, leaning against a wall by the door. The smell today was riper than usual. He was tempted to stuff Kleenex in his nostrils, the way he did when he watched an autopsy, but decided that would make him look like a wimp in front of the dozen or so young boxers who were working out under the watchful eyes of McAlary and his assistant, Angel Sierra.

Boff was many things, but a wimp wasn’t one of them.

Biaggi’s was a no-frills gym with a decent ring, an assortment of punching bags and weights, and one treadmill, currently occupied by world champion boxer, Danny Cullen, who was running at a good clip. Jogging was the only exercise Cullen was allowed to do until his left arm healed from a bullet he had taken a few months ago that had been fired at Boff.

Among the other boxers
and wannabe boxers working out today was Boff’s teenage son, Steven, who had been in training for almost a month. Despite getting the crap beat out of him every day by the more experienced boxers, the kid hadn’t quit.
Well
,
at least not yet,
Boff thought. He was still holding out hope his son would lose interest in boxing and return to his high school basketball team, where he’d been a forward coming off the bench. Steven had the talent to be a basketball star, as Boff himself had been in college, but the kid lacked the commitment and willingness to win at all costs. Even if it meant playing dirty.

At the moment, McAlary was putting
the boy through one of the trainer’s many unorthodox drills. Steven was pulling a bobsled with a pair of two-hundred-pound weights on it. When he reached the outside of the ring, he began to slowly drag the weighted sled in circles around it.

Boff was mopping his face again when the gym door opened and in walked Mikey Bellucci,
a street-savvy kid of twenty who wore his black hair spiked with blond tips and often referred to himself in the third person.

Spotting Boff, the young boxer pointed to Steven and said, “I see your son
’s getting his usual dose of pain.”

“That’s fine with me. The more McAlary grinds his ass into the ground, the sooner he’ll quit.”

“Well, man, I wouldn’t be so sure of that. Steven’s got heart.”

Boff shrugged that off. “Meanwhile, Mikey, how come you’re late?”

“I’m not late. Ryan sent me to Gleason’s gym to spar with a top ten welterweight. It was good experience for me.”

“Mikey!” McAlary shouted
. “Stop bullshitting with Boff and get your ass changed!”

Bellucci quickly ducked into a tiny locker room separated from the rest of the gym by a wall partition.

As he stood there watching his son pull the sled, Boff thought about the morning he had spent in court with his client, an orthopedic surgeon who was being sued for malpractice because he had operated on the wrong knee of a patient with a torn meniscus. The surgeon’s defense lawyer, Dave Galloway, was an old friend and college basketball teammate of Boff’s. They were trying to convince the jury that the
hospital
,
not the surgeon
, was at fault, because a hospital worker had prepped the wrong knee.

Boff was confident he would win. It
was what he did.

A civil case like this one was not his usual gig
, however. Most of the time his clients were some of society’s worst felons. Even though the majority of the dirtbags he worked for were guilty as sin, he had a great track record for helping lawyers beat the cases. His legend as a crack P.I. now rivaled the reputation he’d had in his previous life as a DEA agent.

As soon as Cullen got a break, he stepped off the treadmill, grabbed a towel, dried his face, and headed
toward Boff. The son of a boxing Hall of Famer, Dan Cullen Sr., the boxer was twenty-seven-years old and a recently-crowned champion in the super middleweight division. Besides his skills as a fighter, he also considered himself something of an amateur sleuth, although Boff scoffed at the notion. Cullen had even taken a course in investigation and gotten a certificate. A piece of paper Boff considered worthless.

Fate had conspired to throw Boff and Cullen together on three straight cases involving murder in the boxing world.
Each time, they had found the killers and made sure they were punished in a way that didn’t always involve the judicial system.

Boff preferred defending killers to hunting them down, but his wife
, Jenny, who was a devout Catholic, had been on a crusade for nearly a year, trying to rehabilitate his image with God. Part of his rehabilitation was to do
pro bono
work, something he had long vowed he’d never do.

Noticing how pensive Boff looked, Cullen said, “A penny for your thoughts.”

“A penny? Try paying my five thousand buck retainer.
Then
you
might
buy my thoughts. I don’t work cheaply, as you well know.”

Typical Boff answer
, Cullen thought. He switched the subject. “So how’s your court case going?”

“Same old same old.”

“Meaning you’re going to win.”

“Correct. What’s up with you?”

“Doctor told me that in a week to ten days I can begin sparring again.”

Before Boff could reply, his cell phone rang. Pulling it out of his pocket, he saw that the caller ID
said “unknown.” This wasn’t unusual. Many of his calls came from mobsters and other disreputable people who didn’t like to advertise. He picked up.

“This is Frank Boff.”

Boff, I want to see you
, a hoarse, whisky-voice said.

“And who might you be?”

Mike Cassidy. Meet me at Bailey’s Corner Pub. York Avenue at 85
th
Street. One hour.

The line went dead.

“Who was that?” Cullen asked.

“Mike Cassidy.”

“Never heard of him.”

Boff let out a short laugh. “Tell me something
. Do you know
anybody
outside of the boxing world?”

“Sure. About as many as you know who aren’t criminals or lawyers.”

“Well for your information,” Boff said, “Cassidy was the best investigative reporter New York has ever seen. He worked for the
Daily News
until he retired.”

“
So what does he want with you? They indict him for something?”

“He didn’t say.”

“But you’ll meet with him anyway.”

“Sure. If only out of curiosity.”

“My workout’s done in ten minutes. Wait and I’ll go with you.”

On the drive from Brooklyn into Manhattan, Boff turned down the volume on a Buddy Holly and the Crickets CD and gave Cullen the CliffsNotes version of the retired reporter’s career.

“Cassidy started out as a copy boy at the
News
. Worked his way up into covering the crime beat, and eventually became the paper’s lead columnist. He was known as a guy who wore out shoe leather rather than working the phone.”

“What’s that mean?”

“It means, my uneducated friend, the man got off his ass and pounded the streets looking for stories. Legend has it that he found his best sources in bars frequented by cops and firemen. He also had good contacts inside the various mobs. Several of Cassidy’s columns won awards, including one he wrote the day the first Space Shuttle was launched. I think it was 1981.”

“What’d he write?”

Before replying, Boff used his signal to make a right turn onto 1
st
Avenue and head uptown.

“Instead of going to Florida,” Boff continued, “and get
ting spoon-fed quotes from NASA flaks, Cassidy rode the 42
nd
Street Shuttle back and forth from Times Square to Grand Central Station.”

“Why’d he do that?”

“If you’ll let me finish, I’ll tell you. The gist of it was that Cassidy interviewed the train driver about whether he’d rather pilot the Space Shuttle or the shuttle he was running. It’s called thinking outside the box, Danny, and he did it better than anyone.”

After finding a space a few doors away from Bailey’s Pub, Boff and Cullen stepped out of the car and walked to the bar. Knowing what the retired reporter looked like from his column picture, Boff spotted him sitting at the bar talking to a pretty young woman with long, unruly red hair. Boff also noted that Bailey’s looked like a typical neighborhood hangout, with low milky sconces, a dark tin ceiling, and an old brass-studded bar.

Seeing Boff approach
ing him, Cassidy slid off his chair and nodded. “Let’s take a booth.”

Cassidy and the redhead sat on one side of the booth, Boff and Cullen on the other. In his mid-seventies, Cassidy was a heavy-set man with jowls, a thick nose, and
dark, deep-set eyes. He nodded at the young woman next to him. “This is Hannah Riley. Granddaughter of one of my best friends. She covers crime and the courts for the
Brooklyn Eagle.”

Boff put a hand on Cullen’s shoulder. “And this young man is—”

“—Danny Cullen,” Cassidy said. “I still follow boxing. Danny, you’re quite the hotshot now ever since you jumped out of the ring after winning your championship fight and saved Boff’s worthless ass.”

Thinking Cassidy
was joking, Boff smiled, but when the retired reporter shook hands with Cullen and didn’t offer to shake his hand, he realized the guy had meant what he said. That was when he got the feeling this wasn’t going to be the most pleasant of conversations.

“Danny,” Cassidy continued, “I often did columns on the big fights at the Garden. Especially when your father was fighting. Your old man was a helluva boxer
. Tough as they come.”

It was time to steer
the conversation away from boxing. “Cassidy,” Boff said, “can I ask how you knew it was me when I walked in?”

“First, because this is a neighborhood joint and I know everybody who comes here. Second, you were defending a killer several years ago who had murdered the son of a decorated cop I was close with.”

Boff nodded. “Yeah. I remember that case. My client proved to be innocent.”

“My ass
, he was!” Cassidy snapped. “You and that sleazeball defense lawyer, Galloway, did an end run around the facts and planted doubt where there should’ve been none.”

Boff spread his hands. “Well,
Mike, that’s my job.”

“Name’s Cassidy. Only my friends call me Mike. And in case you haven’t figured it out yet, I don’t like you or what you do for a living.”

No stranger to hostility, Boff just smiled and plowed on. “So,
Cassidy
, if you feel that way, why’d you ask me to come up here?”

Without replying, the retired reporter looked at Cullen. “You want a soda, Danny?”

“Diet Coke.”

Cassidy turned to the bar and waved at the bartender, a beer-bellied bruiser in his late fifties with a bald head. “Yo, Sean! Get a Diet Coke for our celebrity boxer here.” He pointed to Cullen. “This kid’s a world champion.”

Boff quickly added, “And I’ll take a regular Coke with lime.”

“Sean, put that second Coke on a separate tab
.” Cassidy lifted his empty beer mug. “I’ll have a refill, too.” He turned to the redhead. “Hannah, do you want another bottle of that fancy Smithwick’s Ale?”

“I’m fine, Uncle Mike.”

Turning back to Boff, Cassidy finally replied to his question. “You wanna know why I asked you up here?”

“That’d be nice.”

“I want to hire you.”

That caught Boff by surprise. “Really? Why? Are you in trouble?”

“I’m too damn old to get into trouble.”

“So what’s the case?”

Cassidy folded his hands and leaned forward. “Someone I was very good friends with was murdered four months ago. Three bullets in the chest, one in the head. He was a columnist for the
Daily News.
He was heading home to his apartment in the Village at around midnight when he was shot. The cops haven’t come up with a single clue. The case is very rapidly going cold.”

Boff narrowed his eyes. “And what does this case have to do with me?”

Cassidy leaned back, unfolded his hands, and pointed a finger.  “Boff, I want you to find my friend’s killer.”

Again, Boff was caught off guard. The last thing he wanted to do was track down another killer. The three previous times he
’d done that, he’d nearly been killed.

“Why me?” was all
he could think of to say. “I mean, as you well know, Cassidy, I
defend
accused murderers. I don’t
hunt
them down.”

Cassidy waved that off with
one hand. “Is that so? Well, my cop sources tell me you caught a few killers in the past year or two that they couldn’t find.”

Boff shrugged. “I got lucky.”

“Nobody’s
that
lucky. Not without being very good.”

More out of habit than genuine interest, Boff said, “Tell me about the murder.”

Before Cassidy could reply, the bartender came by with the Cokes and a mug of beer, set the glasses down on the table, and left.

W
aiting until he was gone, Cassidy said, “My friend’s name was Nicky Doyle. You heard of him, right?”

“Actually, I haven’t.”

“Jesus Christ. Don’t you read the friggin’ newspapers?”

“Not much
, really. Although once in awhile I’ll glance at the crime section to see if there’re any prospective clients.”

Cassidy turned to the redhead. “Hannah, fill this illiterate P
.I. in on who Nicky was.”

Hannah set her bottle of ale aside
. “Nicky Doyle was the best investigative columnist in the city
and
a protégé of Uncle Mike’s. He and Uncle Mike were really close. I was also tight with Nicky. He and I tried to have dinner once a week. Nicky often threw me a lead on a good story in Brooklyn.”

But t
he young woman’s meandering narrative was making Boff impatient. He glanced at his watch, then looked at Cassidy. “Where was your friend murdered?”

“Just outside his apartment building
. On Morton Street in the Village.”

“No witnesses, I gather.”

Cassidy shook his head. “Zilch. Morton’s a quiet residential street, but nobody heard any shots. Meaning, the mutt used a silencer.”

Again out of habit, Boff
began considering the case. What struck him first was that Doyle had been an investigative reporter. “The killer could’ve been somebody who Doyle targeted in his columns, right, Cassidy?”

“That’s certainly possible,”
the old man said. “But Hannah thinks otherwise.”

“Why’s that?”

“Why?” The redhead leaned forward. “Here’s why. Two days before Nicky was killed, I had lunch with him in a Brooklyn restaurant near where I live….”

Cullen cut her off. “Brooklyn? What section?”

“Crown Heights.”

At this, t
he boxer, who also lived in Crown Heights, put on his best smile. “Well, then, that makes us neighbors.”

Showing no reaction
, Hannah continued. “Mr. Boff, shortly before Nicky was killed, he told me he’d been working for a couple of weeks on a potentially explosive story an informant had tipped him off to. He said it was about a murder disguised as a heart attack.”

Again, the investigative wheels turned involuntarily in Boff’s head. “A shot of potassium chloride could do that,” he said. “Who was the victim of this so-called murder?”

“A detective,” Hannah replied. “In Brooklyn’s 71
st
Precinct. His name was Patrick Maloney. So Nicky, working off the info from his snitch, did a little digging around and found out that the cop was only forty-two, worked out six days a week, and there was no history of heart disease in his family.” She looked at Cassidy, then back at Boff. “Uncle Mike and I both believe Nicky was killed because he was asking questions about the dead cop.” She leaned back in the booth and took a sip on her ale, waiting for a reaction from Boff.

Still on investigator cruise control,
Boff said, “Did Doyle tell you the name of the informant?”

“Yes, and I met with him,” Hannah replied. “He was one of several informants in the five boroughs Nicky paid well for quality info. The snitch lived in the same neighborhood as the cop. Late one night, while the informant was playing cards with some friends on a stoop, he noticed that after Maloney
walked past the game, someone was tailing him.” She paused to sip the last of her ale. “So the snitch folded his cards and followed the stranger. A few minutes after Maloney went into his apartment building, the lights in a dark, second-floor apartment facing the street came on. The tail made a quick phone call, then used what was probably a lock pick to get into the building.”

H
er bottle empty, she grabbed Cassidy’s mug and took a sip before continuing. “Less than a minute after the tail broke into Maloney’s building, the lights in that apartment went off. Right after that, the tail rushed out and hopped into a Land Rover that had just pulled up without its headlights on. The Land Rover then took off fast, still without its lights on.”

“Did the snitch get the license plate?” Boff asked.

Hannah shook her head. “He couldn’t. Not with the car’s lights off.”

Boff
had yet to take a sip of his Coke. He did so now. Then he said, “How reliable is this snitch?”

“As good as they come,” Hannah replied. “Nicky always checked out his people thoroughly before hiring them. The informant figured from the way the tail left the building and hopped into the Land Rover, something bad had gone down in that apartment. So the next day, he checked the newspapers for a story about the cop being murdered. There was nothing in either the
News
or the
Post
about it. Puzzled, on a hunch, he looked at obits.”

“And the cop was there,” Boff said.

“You got it. Cause of death was listed as a heart attack.”

Boff nodded. “And because it was a heart attack,” he said, “the police didn’t bother investigating.”

“That’s right.”

At this point,
Boff was mildly interested. He looked at Cassidy. “I’ve got a question for you. You’re known as a big friend of cops. How come you don’t let them find Nicky’s killer? Why hire me, whom you obviously don’t like?”

“Why? Let me tell you something about cops, Boff. They come in all shapes and sizes. Some are very good at what they do. The majority
are somewhat less competent. My experience is that when a murder case like Nicky’s drags on this long without a single lead, then chances are the killer won’t be found.”

Boff looked at Hannah. “Did you tell the police what the informant said?” he asked.

She nodded. “The detectives I spoke with told me they couldn’t find any evidence pointing to a murder.”

“And they wouldn’t have,” Boff said. “Even if they’d done an autopsy, they would have come up empty. Potassium chloride metabolizes fairly quickly into
potassium and chloride, both of which are found normally in the body.”

Hannah nodded. “That’s what my research showed, too,” she said. “The long and short of it
is, the detective I spoke with told me they weren’t going to waste valuable time on anything an informant said, because informants routinely lie just to get paid.”

“Which is true,” Boff said. “I worked with plenty of them in the DEA.”