The Mayor of Lexington Avenue (3 page)

There were several constants in Wesley Brume’s life. He had always been short and fat, and he had lived his whole life in Bass Creek. The only time he had ever left the town for an extended period was when he joined the Marines for four years after high school. In high school, Wes never conformed to the limitations nature had imposed on him. He tried out for the football, basketball and baseball teams, never getting past the first cut. But his determination was monumental. Whether attempting to throw a block, make a layup, or hit a curveball, Wes gave it his all, heaving and grunting as he missed each time. His classmates were so amused by the noise he made in his efforts to become an athlete that they called him “the Grunt.” It was meant to be derisive and funny, but Wes wore it as a badge of honor and aspired to be just what he was labeled, a “grunt” in the marines.

He served two years in Vietnam, receiving a Purple Heart and a Bronze Star for bravery. When he came home, the police department was the perfect fit for him. Wes had learned that if you carried a gun and were not afraid to shoot or be shot at, you could command respect even if you were short and fat.

Although many of the citizens of Bass Creek were poor and there was a large transient population, there wasn’t a great deal of crime—a smattering of robberies, burglaries, drugs and domestic stuff. Most of the department’s time was spent catching speeders racing for the new bridge and the big cities beyond. In his twenty-two years on the force, Wes had only investigated seven murders, and in five of those cases, the identity and whereabouts of the murdering husband were hardly a mystery.

Nonetheless, Wes and Del were well versed in forensic techniques, having been all too eager to spend the taxpayers’ money on any and every seminar addressing the subject, whether it was in San Francisco or Scotland Yard. Unfortunately, book training was no substitute for experience.

When the two men walked into Lucy’s trailer and saw her corpse immersed in her own blood, Del’s first reaction was to follow Brenda Carrero down the street. The throng of locals outside nixed that option, so his second choice was to head for the john and puke his guts out. The Grunt held his ground. He’d seen worse in ’Nam.

After Del emerged chalk-faced, they started their investigation, donning their plastic gloves. Contamination had been drilled into their heads by the experts. Wes sent two uniforms to canvass the neighborhood and find out if any of the neighbors had seen or heard anything unusual in the last few days. At that point, they had no idea when the death had occurred.

“Write down everything they tell you verbatim,” Wes told them, mimicking the words of one of his seminar teachers. “You never know what might be important.”

Next, Del took pictures—pictures of the body, the bedroom, every inch of the trailer. They searched for evidence of a break-in or robbery but found nothing. The house was in perfect order except for the body and the blood on and around the bed, and a bloodstain on the living room carpet. Wes walked around the body looking for obvious clues like a knife or footprints or handprints in the blood, but there was nothing he could see with the naked eye. He didn’t want to touch the corpse.
Let the coroner handle that
, he told himself. It was Del who searched the garbage and found the broken mug with bloodstains on the glass. It was the only clue they had besides the bloodstain on the carpet and, of course, the blood on and around Lucy’s corpse.

Harry Tuthill, the coroner, arrived a half hour later. Harry had been the medical examiner of Cobb County for twenty-five years, but even he was overcome at the sight of Lucy’s body.

“Holy Jesus!” he exclaimed to Wes. “Who the hell would do something like this?”

“I don’t know, Doc. We’ve got nothing.” Harry had relaxed by then—it never took him long—and he considered it time to break the tension with a little humor.

“Let me see, I’d say death was caused by a knife wound to the throat.”

“No shit, Doc. Tell me something I don’t know.”

Harry gave up. He hated working with dumb cops.

Three

1957, N
EW
Y
ORK
C
ITY

Summer in the city was hot and muggy and sometimes downright intolerable, but not for a seven-year-old kid with places to go. Johnny was up and out of the house every morning at nine on his way to summer school at P.S. 6 with his buddy Mikey, who lived upstairs in the same tenement building off Third Avenue. Patty, another neighbor, sometimes went with them but only when Johnny’s mother gave him strict instructions to call on her and walk with her over to school. He and Mikey didn’t like girls, period, although if he was pushed he’d have had to admit that Patty was different than most. She didn’t wear dresses and walk slow and whine to them to wait for her. She was right there with them stride for stride in blue jeans or shorts, and she had her own Spalding that she bounced and caught as she walked. Mikey liked her more than he did, always picked her on his teams and with good reason—she was a better athlete than most of the boys.

They usually started the day inside with a game of Ping-Pong, knock-hockey or checkers before the big kids came. The big kids never came early but when they arrived they took over everything, pushing the younger kids out of the way. They didn’t push Mikey, though. Paulie Cane tried it once. Mikey pushed him right back. When Paulie went to push him again, Mikey punched him in the face and jumped on him, knocking him to the ground before a counselor broke it up. Paulie was twelve at the time, Mikey just eight.

“I’m going to get you for this, Kelly,” Paulie yelled.

“Anytime,” Mikey responded, not an ounce of fear in his voice. Johnny, who was standing next to him in shock, truly believed that Mikey meant it.

“Come on. Let’s go home,” Johnny pleaded after the counselor took Paulie away. “Those guys aren’t playing around.”

“Neither am I, Johnny. Neither am I.”

He didn’t leave and Paulie never came after him. Somehow Paulie knew that Mikey was not a person to mess with no matter how old he was.

The afternoon was spent outside playing punchball or on the third floor playing dodgeball. The younger kids had their own punchball court. Mikey was always a captain and Johnny was his first pick even though he wasn’t the best athlete available. Patty was much better but Mikey could get her with his second or even third pick because she was a girl. Mikey counted on that. He made Johnny feel good and he didn’t lose anything in the process. Johnny suspected as much. It was part of the reason he wasn’t crazy about Patty always tagging along.

Sometimes Johnny skipped their own game to watch the older guys play on the big court. He loved watching Joey Maier snare a ball hit down the line with his right hand and flip it over to “Spider” at first. There was no hitting above the fielders’ heads on this court. You had to “punch” it through, and the shortest distance and the best place to try for a hit was down the third base line, which Joey patrolled and protected. Rarely did a ball get by him. He’d flip it underhand to first where Spider was a vacuum cleaner, always catching the ball with one hand, his left. Never missing.

They were his idols in those days. He spent hours emulating them, throwing the rubber ball against the concrete wall across the street from his house, picking up the return grounder with his right hand, flicking it back against the wall and snaring it on the fly with his left. In those moments, he was Joey and Spider all wrapped in one.

Saturday mornings they huddled in front of the television at Mikey’s house. It was a black and white, maybe fourteen inches, with a lot of fuzzy white lines. The Kellys were a brood, six kids in all, and they were scattered over the couch, chairs and floor, transfixed for hours on the Saturday morning lineup: “Fury,” “My Friend Flicka,” “Mighty Mouse,” “The Lone Ranger,” “Tales of the Texas Rangers,” “Roy Rogers” and “Sky King.”

Johnny always found a spot on the floor. Mrs. Kelly would walk among them silently handing out bowls of cereal. Johnny got Raisin Bran because Mrs. Kelly knew that was his favorite.

On Sunday after church, the teenagers played stickball right on his block, hitting towering shots sometimes two, three sewer covers long with that little rubber ball, the Spalding, and somebody’s mother’s broomstick. Only two guys in the neighborhood could hit it over three sewers, big Joe Coyle, who lived across the street, and Jimmy Hayes, who lived next door. People hung out of their windows just to watch those guys play. Years later, Boyle became a college football halfback and Hayes a basketball star, but to Johnny their best days were out there on the street.

Those were the only days of his life that were magical as he lived them. No worries, no cares. A life that was full. Things would change soon enough.

Four

Word of the murder of Lucy Ochoa spread through Bass Creek like wildfire. At first Rudy didn’t know who it was because Lucy had never told him her name. But as customers filtered in and out over the next week talking about the young woman and describing her, Rudy started to wonder. He only knew for sure when the
Bass Creek Gazette
finally obtained a picture of Lucy and published it on the front page a week after her body was discovered. Rudy was shocked. He went to the
Gazette
building, which was a block away from the hotel on Oak Street, and bought every paper for the last week. Then he carefully read everything about the murder of Lucy Ochoa.

According to the coroner, the murder had happened on Thursday, January 16th, or early in the morning of the 17th. Rudy retraced the days in his mind.
That was the same night I was there!
The time of death freaked him out even more. The coroner had estimated the time of death to have been somewhere between 10 p.m. and 2 a.m. Rudy knew he had locked up the convenience store at eleven and gone directly to Lucy’s trailer, but he wasn’t sure what time he’d left. He read further: Her throat had been cut, probably with a knife. There were no signs of a break-in or a robbery.

After he’d read everything, Rudy sat and thought about it for a long time. He’d been at the murder scene during the time the murder was supposed to have happened. But Lucy was fine the last time he saw her. She didn’t seem to have any problems pushing him out the door. Should he go to the police with what he knew? That idea scared him. They were nice enough when they came in the store but he’d seen them beating up a guy on the street one night, a guy he knew to be a harmless old drunk, and they did it to other innocent people, too—he’d seen it on TV.

At that moment, it hit Rudy like a bullet to the brain that he might actually be a suspect and that the police might try to make him confess, just like they did to people on TV.
I’m not confessing to nothing,
he told himself.
What should I do? Should I tell Mom?
He’d have to tell her about why he was at Lucy’s house—and about the drinking. That just wasn’t going to work. In the end, he decided to do nothing.
Nobody knows I was in her house,
he concluded, and promptly tried not to think about it again.

By the end of the week, the police had analyzed all the blood samples: from Lucy’s body, the bed, the carpet and the pieces of glass. The neighborhood had been canvassed but most of the neighbors hadn’t seen or heard anything unusual that night. Pilar Rodriguez remembered someone with dark hair throwing up on her lawn somewhere around midnight, but she hadn’t gotten a good look at his face. Maybe it was that kid from the convenience store—Rudy was his name—but she really couldn’t be sure. Farther down the block, a young man named Ray Castro said that he’d seen someone, a tall, dark-haired man, go in Lucy’s trailer sometime after eleven and then come stumbling down the street from that direction less than an hour later and puke in the Rodriguezes’ front yard. His friend José Guerrero had seen the same thing. There had been a third person with them that night, a guy named Geronimo, but neither knew his last name and he couldn’t be located. And neither of them mentioned his relationship with Lucy or that he’d headed that way after they’d all seen the dark-haired guy.

The only bombshell—and it really wasn’t a bombshell yet because the only person Harry Tuthill told was Wesley Brume—was the coroner’s aside to Brume that Lucy had had sexual intercourse that evening. He had managed to extract a semen sample and had checked for signs of rape. There were none.

On Friday morning, January 24th, Wes Brume was summoned to the office of Clay Evans IV, the Cobb County state attorney, to discuss the evidence in the Lucy Ochoa murder. The state attorney’s office was just down the block from the police department, so it was a short trip for Brume. The woman’s murder had already been headlines across the state and Clay wanted it solved and the perpetrator brought to trial while interest was still at least lukewarm. Too often the press reported the murder but not the aftermath. If a suspect was discovered early on, the story might continue for a while. But the only surefire way to keep the press on the story was with a trial. They loved trials the way normal people loved sex and they were teaching the public to love them too. Clay desperately wanted that publicity.

Clay Evans IV was a WASP—a fifth generation, blue-blooded Florida WASP. Great granddaddy had once been the governor. His own father had been a state senator from Cobb County and eventually secretary of state for Florida. There had been money once too—citrus groves as far as the eye could see. But granddaddy, the weak link in the family line, had sold all the land at a bad time and squandered most of the money, leaving behind just the blue blood and the arrogance. Clay’s poor father, the Third, had been forced by circumstance to go to work for a living.

The Fourth followed daddy’s footsteps to the University of Florida and eventually to law school. He wasn’t a good student, spending most of his time golfing and partying, and would never have made it into the law school on his own merits, but there were qualifications and there were qualifications: Great granddaddy, the governor, had been a three-sport man at Florida and had attended the law school. So had daddy and he was personal friends with the president of the university and the present governor.