The Twelfth Card (53 page)

  • Sent to Parker Kincaid in
Washington, D.C., for document examination.

    • Writer’s first language most likely Arabic.

• Improvised explosive device, as part of booby trap. Fingerprints are those of convicted bomb maker Jon Earle Wilson.

  • Located. En route to Rhyme’s for interviewing.

POTTERS’ FIELD SCENE (1868)

• Tavern in Gallows Heights—located in the Eighties on the upper West Side, mixed neighborhood in the 1860s.

• Potters’ Field was possible hangout for Boss Tweed and other corrupt New York politicians.

• Charles came here July 15, 1868.

• Burned down following explosion, presumably just after Charles’s visit. To hide his secret?

• Body in basement, man presumably killed by Charles Singleton.

  • Shot in forehead by .36 Navy Colt loaded with .39-caliber ball (type of weapon Charles Singleton owned).

  • Gold coins.

  • Man was armed with Derringer.

  • No identification.

  • Had ring with name “Winskinskie” on it.

    • Means “doorman” or “gatekeeper” in Delaware Indian language.

    • Currently searching other meanings.

      • Was title of official in Boss Tweed’s Tammany Hall political machine.

PROFILE OF UNSUB 109

• Determined to be Thompson G. Boyd, former executions control officer, from Amarillo, TX.

• Presently in custody.

PROFILE OF PERSON HIRING UNSUB 109

• Bani al-Dahab, Saudi national, in country illegally after visa expired.

• Deceased.

• Search of apartment revealed no other terrorist connections. Presently checking phone records.

• Currently investigating his employers for possible terrorist links.

PROFILE OF UNSUB 109’S ACCOMPLICE

• Determined not to be man originally described, but Alina Frazier, presently in custody.

• Search of apartment revealed weapons and money, nothing else relevant to case.

PROFILE OF CHARLES SINGLETON

• Former slave, ancestor of G. Settle. Married, one son. Given orchard in New York
state by master. Worked as teacher, as well. Instrumental in early civil rights movement.

• Charles allegedly committed theft in 1868, the subject of the article in stolen microfiche.

• Reportedly had a secret that could bear on case. Worried that tragedy would result if his secret was revealed.

• Attended meetings in Gallows Heights neighborhood of New York.

  • Involved in some risky activities?

  • Worked with Frederick Douglass and others in getting the 14th Amendment to the Constitution ratified.

• The crime, as reported in the
Coloreds’ Weekly Illustrated
:

  • Charles arrested by Det. William Simms for stealing large sum from Freedmen’s Trust in NY. Broke into the trust’s safe, witnesses saw him leave shortly after. His tools were found nearby. Most money was recovered. He was sentenced to five years in prison. No information about him after sentencing. Believed to have used his connections with early civil rights leaders to gain access to the trust.

• Charles’s correspondence:

  • Letter 1, to wife: Re: Draft Riots in 1863, great anti-black sentiment throughout NY state, lynchings, arson. Risk to property owned by blacks.

  • Letter 2, to wife: Charles at Battle of Appomattox at end of Civil War.

  • Letter 3, to wife: Involved in civil rights movement. Threatened for this work. Troubled by his secret.

  • Letter 4, to wife: Went to Potters’ Field with his gun for “justice.” Results were disastrous. The truth is now hidden in Potters’ Field. His secret was what caused all this heartache.

F
RIDAY
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CTOBER 12, TO
F
RIDAY
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CTOBER
26

The fifty-four-year-old white man in a Brooks Brothers suit sat in one of his two Manhattan offices, engaging in an intense debate with himself.

Yes or no?

The question was important, literally a matter of life and death.

Trim, solidly built William Ashberry, Jr., sat back in a creaking chair and looked over the horizon of New Jersey. This office was not as elegant or stylish as the one in lower Manhattan but it was his favorite. The twenty-by-thirty-foot room was in the historic Sanford Mansion on the Upper West Side, owned by the bank of which he was a senior officer.

He pondered: Yes? No?

Ashberry was a financier and entrepreneur of the old school, meaning, for instance, he’d ignored the eagle of the Internet when it soared into the heavens, and hadn’t lost a night’s sleep when it turned on its masters, except to superficially console clients who hadn’t listened to his advice. This refusal to be wooed by fad, combined with solid investing in blue chip companies and, especially, New York City real estate, had made both himself and Sanford Bank and Trust a huge amount of money.

Old school, sure, but only to a point. Oh, he had the lifestyle afforded by a million-plus annual salary, along with the revered bonuses that were the mainstay of Wall Street, several homes, memberships in nice country clubs, pretty, well-educated daughters,
and connections with a number of charities that he and his wife were pleased to help out. A private Grumman for his not-infrequent trips overseas was an important perk.

But Ashberry was also atypical of your Forbes-level business executives. Scratch the surface and you’d find pretty much the same tough kid from South Philly, whose father’d been a head-knocking factory worker and whose grandfather’d done some book cooking, and tougher work, for Angelo Bruno—the “Docile Don”—and later for Phil “Chicken Man” Testa. Ashberry had run with a tough crowd himself, made money with blades and brains and did some things that could have come back to haunt him in a big way if he hadn’t made absolutely sure they were forever buried. But in his early twenties he had the presence of mind to realize that if he kept loan-sharking and busting heads for protection money and hanging out on Dickson and Reed streets in Philly, his only rewards’d be cheese-steak change and a good shot at prison. If he did more or less the same thing in the world of business and hanging out on lower Broadway and the Upper West Side of Manhattan, he’d get fucking rich and have a good shot at Albany or Washington. He might even try to fill Frank Rizzo’s shoes. Why not?

So it was law school at night, a real estate license and eventually a job at Sanford Bank—first on a cash drawer, then moving his way up through the ranks. The money did indeed start coming in, slowly at first, then in a steady stream. He rose fast to be head of the bank’s hottest division, the real estate operation, rolling over competitors—both within the bank and outside—with his bare-knuckle approach to business. Then he’d finagled the job as
head of the Sanford Foundation, the philanthropic side of the bank, which was, he’d learned, the best way to make political connections.

Another glance at the Jersey horizon, another moment of debate, rubbing his hand compulsively up and down his thigh, solid from his tennis sessions, jogging, golf, yachting. Yes or no?

Life and death . . .

Calculating, one foot forever rooted on South Philly’s Seventeenth Street, Bill Ashberry played with the big boys.

Men, for instance, like Thompson Boyd.

Ashberry had gotten the killer’s name from an arsonist who’d made the mistake of burning down one of Ashberry’s commercial properties—and got caught in the process—some years ago. After Ashberry realized he had to kill Geneva Settle, he’d hired a private eye to track down the paroled burn-man and had paid him $20,000 to put him in touch with a professional killer. The scruffy man (for God’s sake, a
mullet
?) had suggested Boyd. Ashberry had been impressed with the choice. Boyd was fucking scary, yes, but not in some over-the-top, ballsy South Philly way. What was scary was that he was so
calm,
so flat. Not a spark of emotion behind his eyes, never spitting out a single “fuck” or “prick.”

The banker had explained what he needed and they’d arranged for payment—a quarter million dollars (even that figure hadn’t gotten a rise out of Boyd; he seemed more interested—you couldn’t say excited—about the prospect of killing a young girl, as if he’d never done that before).

It looked for a time like Boyd would be successful and the girl would die, and all of Ashberry’s problems would be over with.

But then, disaster: Boyd and his accomplice, that Frazier woman, were in jail.

Hence, the debate: Yes, no . . . Should Ashberry kill Geneva Settle himself?

With his typical approach to business, he considered the risks.

Despite his zombie personality, Boyd had been as sharp as he was frightening. He knew the business of death, knew about investigating crimes too, and how you could use motive to point the police in the wrong direction. He’d come up with several phony motives to mislead the cops. First, an attempted rape, which hadn’t worked. The second was more subtle. He’d planted seeds where they’d be sure to grow nowadays: a terrorist connection. He and his accomplice had found some poor raghead who delivered Middle Eastern food to carts and restaurants near the jewelry exchange, the building that was across the street from where Geneva Settle was to be killed. Boyd located the restaurant he worked for and staked out the place, learned which van was his. Boyd and his partner set up a series of clues to make it seem that the Arab loser was a terrorist planning a bombing and that he wanted Geneva dead because she’d seen him planning the attack.

Boyd had gone to the trouble of stealing sheets of scrap office paper from the trash behind the exchange. He’d drawn a map on one sheet and on another written a note about the girl in Arabic-tinted English (an Arabic language website had been helpful there)—to fool the cops. Boyd was going to leave these notes near crime scenes but it’d worked out even better than that; the police found them in Boyd’s safe house
before
he’d planted them, which gave more credibility to the terrorism hook. They’d
used Middle Eastern food for clues and called in fake terrorist bomb threats to the FBI from pay phones around the area.

Boyd hadn’t planned to go any further with the charade than this. But then a goddamn policewoman—that Detective Sachs—showed up right here, at the foundation, to dig through their archives! Ashberry still remembered how he’d struggled to stay calm, making small talk with the beautiful redhead and offering her the run of the stacks. He’d used all his willpower to keep from heading downstairs himself and casually asking her what she was looking into. But there was too great a chance that this would arouse suspicion. He’d agreed to let her take some materials and when he looked over the log after she left, he didn’t see anything too troubling.

Still, her presence alone at the foundation and the fact she wanted to check out
some
materials told the banker that the cops hadn’t caught on to the terrorist motive. Ashberry had immediately called Boyd and told him to make the story more credible. The hitman had bought a working bomb from the arsonist who’d put Ashberry in touch with Boyd. He’d planted the device in the delivery van, along with a ranting letter to the
Times
about Zionists. Boyd was arrested just after that but his partner—that black woman from Harlem—had detonated the bomb, and finally the police got the message: terrorism.

And, since the raghead was dead, they’d pull back the protection on the girl.

This gave Alina Frazier the chance to finish the job.

But the police had outsmarted her too, and she’d been caught.

The big question now was: Did the police believe the threat to the girl was finally gone, with the mastermind dead, and the two professional killers arrested?

He decided they might not be completely convinced, but their defenses would be lowered.

So what was the level of risk if he went ahead?

Minimal, he decided.

Geneva Settle would die.

Now, he only needed an opportunity. Boyd had said she’d moved out of her apartment in West Harlem and was staying someplace else. The only connection Ashberry had was her school.

He rose, left his office and took the ornate elevator downstairs. Then walked to Broadway and found a phone kiosk. (“Always pay phones, never private landlines. And never, ever mobile phones.” Thank you, Thompson.)

He got a number from Directory Assistance and placed the call.

“Langston Hughes High,” the woman answered.

He glanced at the side of a nearby retail-store delivery truck and said to the receptionist, “This is Detective Steve Macy with the police department. I need to speak to an administrator.”

A moment later he was put through to an assistant principal.

“How can I help you?” the harried man asked. Ashberry could hear a dozen voices in the background. (The businessman himself had detested every minute he’d spent in school.)

He identified himself again and added, “I’m following up on an incident that involved one of your students. Geneva Settle?”