GUNNER (ALTON RHODE MYSTERIES Book 5)

GUNNER

An Alton Rhode Mystery

By

LAWRENCE DE MARIA

Gunner, a novel by Lawrence De Maria

Copyright © Lawrence De Maria 2014 (Revised 2015)

All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this

book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever.

For information, email
[email protected]
.

This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead,

events or locales is entirely coincidental.

Published by St. Austin’s Press

www.lawrencedemaria.com

Special thanks to my website designer,
Nancy Kreisler
, and to

Maryellen Alvarez
and
Deborah Thompson
,

whose sharp eyes and insights have improved my work.

Dedicated to my wife,
Patricia
, without whose love, support and faith this book

– and others –

would not have been possible,

and to my sons,

Lawrence and Christopher
.

Good men, both.

GUNNER

PROLOGUE

April

From his rental car across the street, the killer watched as the man clearing the snow from the driveway paused every few minutes to lean on the shovel handle to catch his breath.

The man in the car shook his head and mashed his cigarette in the ashtray, immediately lighting another one. It wasn’t a long driveway, but the old guy should know better. Typical of a spring snowstorm, the accumulation was wet and heavy. Each shovelful probably weighed 30 pounds. Kids were roaming the neighborhood asking residents if they wanted their sidewalks and driveways cleared. As a teen-ager, the assassin had made good money doing just that when he was sent to live with relatives in Boston. He wondered what the kids charged now. Probably a fortune. Hell, he thought, I once cleared over a hundred bucks in one day, and there were just two of us doing it. Whatever the cost now, the man should have hired some young muscle. He’s overweight and obviously out of shape. His face is mottled red with the exertion. Might have a damn heart attack.

And, the killer knew, he wouldn’t get paid if the man did a face plant in his driveway slush. He smiled. Maybe I should give him a hand, just to make sure he lives long enough for me to ace him. 

It was getting dark, and that was good. The man lived, apparently alone, on a quiet street in a secluded neighborhood, Eltingville, on Staten Island’s south shore. The assassin in the car had reconnoitered the job for days. He was quite sure that no one would pay any attention to a well-dressed white man walking up to Panetta’s door. This would be a piece of cake. The guy didn’t even have a dog. He could never understand why anyone living alone didn’t have a dog. But he was happy when they didn’t. He loved dogs and didn’t like killing them, something he’d had to do a few times. Dogs didn’t turn on you like most of the people in his life. He smiled at the memory of the dogs he’d had before he went into the Army. Hunting dogs. Labs and pointers. Smart as all get out. He was a crack shot, with good dogs. Life in rural Kentucky was just about perfect before the family lost the farm to foreclosure. Maybe someday he’d get a job that involved killing some Wall Street types or bankers, who he blamed for all the country’s ills. He often fantasized about doing some pro bono work along those lines on the side. He lit another smoke. Shit. I’m probably working for some of those pricks half the time, he thought in disgust.

John Panetta finished his shoveling and slowly trudged into his house. Some cars turned onto the street. Most pulled into driveways. People probably coming home from work. There was a train station nearby with a commuter lot. The killer liked the neighborhood. It wasn’t what he expected on Staten Island, so near to Manhattan. It was his first time in the borough, although he did know someone who lived there. His platoon leader in Afghanistan. I wonder how the Skipper is doing, he thought. Love to see him. But that just wasn’t in the cards.

The killer waited another 45 minutes until the street quieted down and then got out of his car and calmly walked across the street to Panetta’s house. He carried no weapon on his person. There would be something suitable to use in the house. In his pocket was a plastic bag containing some hairs and skin fragments from a man long since buried. The dead man was black. The killer wasn’t a racist. He was only playing the racial card to throw the cops far off the scent. Staten Island was a conservative borough, he’d been told. His other instructions had also been clear. Make it look like a home invasion. Take some cash and the guy’s watch, which would go in the plastic bag, and then in the nearest body of water, which wouldn’t be a problem. It was an island, after all. The killer knew that murders were rare on Staten Island. He had done some homework with recent crime statistics. Only six people had been murdered the entire previous year in the borough. He had a hard time getting his head around that figure. Six! Out of a population approaching half a million. It was so safe, he might have to move here. True, robberies had jumped 16 percent, to 476, a figure that had local law enforcement in a froth. As he approached the front door, he smiled. He knew of cities with many fewer people that would have loved such a low robbery incidence. He wondered where the Panetta hit would fit in. Homicide or robbery? Probably both. Jesus, he was going to boost the murder rate in Staten Island by about 15%! If he were in sales, he could put that on his resume. 

The killer had no idea who John Panetta was. Or who wanted him dead. It didn’t appear to be a mob hit, despite the victim’s name. Guy’s a nobody. Living too openly and too modestly. Shovels his own walk, for God’s sake.

Moreover, he didn’t care. All Panetta was to him was $20,000. He did wonder, however, why a nobody rated such premier treatment.

It started snowing again as the killer ascended the steps to the porch. Not that he was particularly worried about leaving any traces, but he appreciated the fact that the snow would cover any footprints. Looks like it would be a couple of more inches. He put a smile on his face and rang the doorbell.        

Panetta opened the door. He looked past the man standing on his porch.

“Damn it! Wouldn’t you know? It never fails. I just finished shoveling.”

“I wouldn’t worry about it,” the killer said.

    ***

“Hey, Howie! Take a look at this.”

Howard Caduceus put down the prescription pill bottles in the dead man’s medicine cabinet.

“Nothing special in the bathroom,” he said, walking into the bedroom. His partner, another homicide detective named Charles Palermo, was standing by an old chest of drawers with his back to the door. The only other furniture in the room was a metal-framed bed. “Aspirin, Cipro and Crestor, the same statin I’m on for my cholesterol. I’ll check with his pharmacy and doctor to see if anything is missing, but my guess is whoever killed him never came up here. Probably panicked. Not that I think this guy had much to steal.”

Caduceus was an experienced homicide cop who always kept an open mind. But he was fairly certain that the murder they were investigating was straightforward. A break-in gone horribly wrong. The victim’s wallet had been rifled and his pockets turned inside out. From markings on his wrist it looked like his watch was also gone. The forensic boys downstairs were dusting for prints and bagging and tagging whatever they could find on the body and the room in which it was found. They’d come upstairs later. After the post, the M.E. would announce the official cause of death, but Caduceus knew strangulation when he saw it.

Palermo turned around. In his gloved hands was what looked like a black felt jewelry case. 

“What’s that?” Caduceus said.

“This what I think it is?” Palermo said, handing the open case to Caduceus. “It was in there under his socks.”

Inside the case was a medal on a thick pale-blue ribbon. The medal itself was a five-pointed gold star surrounded by a green laurel wreath. It was suspended from a gold bar inscribed VALOR, on which stood an eagle.

Caduceus turned the medal over and saw another bar on which there was an engraving:
THE CONGRESS TO JOHN PANETTA, U.S. ARMY.

“Oh, Christ,” he said. “Better tell the boys downstairs to be extra careful, Charlie.”

Caduceus knew that Panetta’s murder might still be straightforward, but it was also going to create a shit storm.

***

In Dallas, where he now lived, the hit man had been checking the Internet for any news related to the killing.

There was nothing the first day. Or the second. Apparently nobody missed the poor old guy.

Finally, on the third day, Panetta’s death was reported. Except it wasn’t on the Internet.

The killer was in his kitchen having his regular breakfast of black coffee, two poached eggs and rye toast while he watched
CBS This Morning
with Charlie Rose, the only news he could stand; all the others, in his opinion, having turned into entertainment shows. The broadcast started off with a 90-second recap of the day’s top headlines. The fourth item concerned “the brutal murder of a Medal of Honor winner in New York City.”

The killer stared at the screen. There was a clip of Panetta’s house, easily recognizable, now surrounded by yellow crime scene tape. Squad cars and media trucks were parked out front and officers could be seen walking in and out. Uniformed cops kept small clusters of the curious across the street.

A somber voice-over explained how Vietnam War vet John Panetta “winner of the nation’s highest award for valor” had saved his entire company during a North Vietnamese attack outside Saigon by sticking to his machine gun even after being severely wounded “only to be strangled during an apparent robbery in his own home.”

“Those cocksuckers,” the hit man said aloud. “Those rotten cocksuckers.”

CHAPTER
1
– SOMETHING BREWING

Ordinarily, a team of Clydesdales couldn’t drag me to a political rally.

But Alice Watts could, and did.

Which is why I was sitting behind the first base dugout at the Richmond County Savings Bank Ballpark early on a warm Thursday evening in May. I cast a glance at the perfectly manicured field, with grass so green it almost hurt to look at it. It was the home field of the Staten Island Yankees, unfortunately known as the “Baby Bombers.” They were a Single-A minor league affiliate of the New York Yankees, and their home opener was but two weeks away. At this time of night they would be taking infield practice. Now, the infield was swarming with men in suits and women in nice dresses. Some of them were clumped around the pitcher’s mound setting up chairs and a podium. A high school band was assembling behind second base. A color guard stood at attention deep in center field, flags flapping. 

“What?”

I turned to Alice, who was eating raw peanuts out of brown bag. Somehow she had managed to eat several of them without getting any shell pieces on her dress. When I ate peanuts out of a bag, my lap looked like I was collecting sawdust.

“I didn’t say anything.”

“You sighed.”

“Hard-boiled detectives don’t sigh.”

She shelled a peanut and offered it to me.

“A peanut for your thoughts.”

I took the nut, and sighed, loudly, for effect.

“It’s a great night for a ballgame.”

“Please suck it up, Alt. It won’t last long.” Alice leaned over and gave me a peck on the cheek. “I owe you one.”

“A peanut?”

She laughed.

“I was thinking about doing something to satisfy one of your other cravings later tonight.”

“Does it have anything to do with politics making strange bedfellows?”

“I don’t know about strange. Kinky, maybe.”

Kinky? I decided to suck it up. Strangely enough, despite the fact that I’d rather have a root canal performed by Stevie Wonder than listen to political speeches, I was actually having a pretty good time. The free beer, peanuts and hot dogs might have had something to do with that.

“I think I’ll get another beer,” I said. “Want one?”

“No, thanks,” Alice said. She was barely through her first, which was warming in a cup holder on the back of the seat in front of her. My cup holder already had two empties. “And please go easy on the hot dogs. You are taking me out to dinner, remember.”

“What does one have to do with the other?”

She gave me the indulgent smile that all girls are taught at birth and I headed up the aisle. The ball park bash being thrown by the borough’s ruling Conservative Party was featuring several of the excellent local brews produced by the Flagship Brewing Company of Staten Island and I was democratically sampling all of them. I didn’t know where the hot dogs came from, but with hot dogs I’m pretty sure it doesn’t matter.

On the way to the concession stand I spotted Mario Blovardi, Staten Island’s outgoing Borough President, walking in my direction. He was a fat little red-faced man with a small, oblong-shaped, bald head that from a distance looked like a pimple ready to burst. As he approached, I stifled an urge to squeeze it. He was too near the hot dogs and I didn’t want to get pus all over them.

Blovardi was being term-limited out of office and the ballpark rally was intended to introduce his putative successor, a newcomer to Staten Island named Nathaniel Yorke.

Ah, yes. Term limits. Constitutionally, I’m against them. But in pus head’s case, I made an exception. He should have been shown the door four years earlier but was reprieved when the City Council, ignoring legislation passed by the voters, added another term to the term-limits law by fiat. The ploy was as crooked as it looked, since it allowed many of the councilmen to stay in office.

There had been some discussion in the media about why Blovardi had not been able to anoint one of his political cronies to succeed him. And quite a bit of grumbling among those cronies, some of whom had been waiting for their chance almost as long as Prince Charles. But to my mind, anyone would be better than Blovardi or one of his hacks, even someone who sounded like a character in
The Last of the Mohicans
.

Blovardi and a few of his flunkies, one of whom was holding his sweating boss’s suit jacket, swept by. Blovardi was built so low to the ground it looked like he was rolling, rather than walking. I had never seen him mixing with the common people during a game. Usually he was ensconced in one of the private boxes owned by one of the banks or real estate developers whose pockets he was also in. I never could get my head around private, glass-enclosed, air-conditioned boxes in a minor league ballpark. It seemed vaguely un-American. But, then, the $1,000-a-game field seats at Yankee Stadium in the Bronx seemed un-American to me.

“Good evening, your boroughness,” I said as we passed each other.

Blovardi barely managed a smile. Why bother? No one could vote for him anymore. But even that fleeting smile evaporated when he realized it was me.

“Go fuck yourself, Rhode.”

He stormed off. Our dislike was mutual and well-deserved. We had a history. A few years ago he had created something called the Borough Economic Enterprise Corporation, a /files/21/70/18/f217018/public/private hybrid whose ostensible purpose was to fund small start-up businesses in some of Staten Island’s industrially zoned areas where older factories had closed. The B.E.E.C. would purchase abandoned factory buildings and warehouses, break up the interiors into smaller areas called “incubators” and provide “seed money” to entrepreneurs, artists and other small businesses. The corporation’s $21 million operating budget was to be provided, in equal shares, by city and state government, and local banks.

One of the banks that were being strong-armed to participate smelled a rat and asked the law firm that owns my building to do a little due diligence. The firm hired me to sniff around. It didn’t take me long to find out that the bulk of the $21 million was earmarked to buy the abandoned buildings, most of which were moldering and wouldn’t have been suitable as a Nike factory in Bangladesh. It wasn’t bad budgeting; it was an old-fashioned boondoggle. The factories and warehouses had been purchased by a consortium of “investors,” all of who just happened to be political contributors and supporters of Blovardi. Believe it or not, there was apparently nothing illegal about the scheme — this was New York City, after all. But the ensuing uproar and media firestorm was so great that Blovardi’s “incubator” collapsed like a house of cards. I probably cost him at least a million bucks and he’s hated me ever since, so I like to think he would have told me to fuck off even if he was running for office.

***

I got a better reception at the concession stand, where one of the owners of Flagship Brewing, a good-looking young guy named Jay Sykes, was behind one of four taps.

“Which one this time, Mr. Rhode?’

“I’m working my way left to right,” I said, pointing at the third tap.

“Are you going to stop at four?”

“Don’t know. If the speeches get unbearable, I may start again at the other end.”

“This is slightly darker than the rest,” he said, filling a cup for me.

He handed me the cup and I took a sip. It was excellent.

“Pity I won’t be able to drink it after Memorial Day,” I said.

Wayne Miller walked up and ordered a beer. Wayne is the Artistic Director and Production Manager at the St. George Theater on Hyatt Street, just up the street from the ballpark. He’s helped restore some of the luster to the venerable theater, once one of New York City’s premier vaudeville and cinema palaces. The St. George now attracts some of the biggest acts in New York City and has recently been showcasing some local playwrights. Alice has also dragged me to a couple of shows by new dramatists, which ranged from the dreadful to the not-too-bad.

“How’s Scar?” Wayne asked. “Brought home any zebras lately?”

Wayne, who lives in my neighborhood, has occasionally cat sat for the feral feline who has made my house the base of his operations. Scar, named after his many wounds, may be the largest tomcat I’ve ever seen.

“He’s fine. Slowing down some. Sticks to wildebeests.”

“I just ran into Alice,” Wayne said. “Gave her a couple of tickets to a play we’re putting on Sunday afternoon.”

Wayne was fond of Alice, especially since after returning from Europe she temporarily moved into my place while waiting for the lease to run out for the people subletting her Manhattan apartment. She had taken over much of the Scar-watching reins. I tried to smile. I knew that most of the theater’s open dates were on Sundays, with afternoons usually reserved for productions that wouldn’t attract an audience of lifers on Devil’s Island.

“Really? What’s it called?”

“
Dying Is Wasted on Corpses
,” he said. “We classify it as experimental dramaturgy.”

He saw the look on my face.

“I know. But some of our funding from the city is tied to the development of local talent. A certain number of our productions must showcase them.”

“Even if they are untalented?”

“What was the last thing you wrote, wise guy?”

“Does a shopping list count?”

“Alice is looking forward to Sunday.”

“I think she may have used up all her Alton Rhode torture credits for the month with this rally,” I said. “I’m inclined to pass.”

Wayne finished his beer and smiled.

“Did I ask you how Scar was? Oh, yes, I think I did. I hear Alice will be moving back into her apartment soon.”

“Blackmail? Don’t you think I can find someone else to watch him?”

“I prefer catmail. Alton. I’ll save you two good seats. Should be a couple of thousands of them. I’m fairly certain we won’t sell out.”

I was debating whether to sneak another hot dog when I heard the band strike up some Souza. As I walked back to my row, I saw Alice deep in conversation with Michael Sullivan and a woman. I was momentarily startled, since the woman had auburn hair. It brought back memories of another night at the same ball park with Sullivan and his late wife, also a redhead. They all turned at my approach.

Sullivan looked better than he had in months. His eyes appeared brighter and his skin had a healthier glow. Someone had told me they spotted him working out at a local gym. We shook hands and he introduced me to the woman. Her name was Linda Cronin. She was smaller and less stunning than Sharon Sullivan had been, but that was no knock on her. Sharon had been a Rockette. Linda was merely very good-looking. She had a pleasant, cultured voice and I could sense that Alice liked her. Which meant I probably would.

“Mike wants to know if we want to grab a bite after this,” Alice said.

“Sounds good to me.”

“I was just telling them how tough it was to get you here tonight.” Alice said.

“It probably got easier when you mentioned the free beer,” Sullivan said.

“Don’t you like politics, Alton?” Linda asked.

“Politics, yes. Most politicians, no.”

“Does that include Mike?”

“He’s the best District Attorney we’ve had since Hector was a pup.”

“What a nice thing to say.”

“Faint praise, Linda,” Sullivan said. “He’s marking me on a curve.”

I turned to Alice.

“Just saw Wayne Miller.,” I said. “
Death Is Wasted on Corpses
? You do know the Yankees and the Red Sox are on TV Sunday, don’t you?”

“I’ve got your six, honeybun,” Alice said with the smile that cannot be denied. “It’s an 8 P.M. game. We’ll be home in plenty of time.”

She leaned up and kissed me. Goner. Then she turned to continue chatting with Linda Cronin.

“Any progress on Panetta, Mike?”

The murder of the Medal of Honor winner had roiled the borough as few homicides in recent memory. Staten Island takes its war heroes seriously. At one time, those that were home-grown had ferries named after them. That has since changed. Now ultra-patriotic politicians, most of whom had been no closer to combat than fighting over the last hors d'oeuvre at a cocktail party, name the boats after themselves. But when it was revealed that Panetta, who only recently moved to the borough, was brutally slain in his home, there was genuine outrage, particularly among veterans groups.

“We have DNA evidence,” Sullivan said, “but no suspects. It appears to be what everyone assumes. A home invasion.”

“Robbery?”

“Looks that way. The guy lived simply and apparently didn’t have much, so it’s hard to tell what might be missing, other than some cash and maybe a watch.”

“Hell of a way for a war hero to wind up.”

“I’ll say. We’re pulling out all the stops on this one, but I have to tell you it doesn’t look good.”

“The hairs don’t help?”

“All we know is that they came from an African-American male. But that doesn’t help us unless we can find someone to match them with.”

“No one noticed a black man in that neighborhood?”