CHAPTER
6 – MARIA BRUTTI
Garza
didn’t like to kill women, let alone this woman. If he’d had more time to plan
the operation, perhaps he could have avoided it. But Victor was insistent.
Their West Coast clients had to be distracted, and quickly. The big Australian
was getting more reckless.
From
long experience Garza knew hasty actions often backfired. They were dealing
with some very dangerous people. He’d thought about taking his concerns to
Alana. Christian had never warmed to her, but Garza had come to respect her
judgment. Ballantrae had specifically told him to keep her out of the loop on
this one. Something had changed in their relationship. It was obvious that they
were no longer having sex. But it went deeper than that. Ballantrae had fallen
in love with her. Now spurned, he was listening to her less and less. As ruthless
and calculating as Alana had proven to be, she had somehow managed to rein in
Victor’s more impulsive propensities. And the simple truth was that it was
usually Alana’s coups that were the most profitable and least risky.
Garza
sighed and rubbed his shoulder as he followed the woman out to the parking lot.
I hope it’s not a rotator cuff. I’ll never make fun of Christian and his
Pilates again. One class and I can feel it. That instructor must have trained
with the Green Berets. I must be getting old. He put on his gloves.
***
Maria
Brutti was tired. Perhaps Pilates three times a week was a bit much, especially
after teaching recalcitrant fifth graders all day. But her husband was proud of
her. She lifted the rear hatch of her S.U.V. and threw in her gym bag. Carlo
thought she was crazy. Which was funny. Because her brother
was
crazy,
though she loved him. He liked the way she looked as is, probably because she
reminded him of their mother, who died young and still beautiful. Maria knew
she was attractive, but would not consider herself beautiful until she lost the
15 pounds her last (definitely the last) baby had added to her frame. Seven
more pounds to go.
“Maria,
you dropped your wallet in the locker room!”
She
turned toward the voice and saw a man in a black sweat suit running up to her
holding something in his hand. She strained to make out his face. It was the
good-looking Spanish guy who had worked out next to her. It was his first time
and she had given him some help with his form. They had chatted amiably and he
said he was going to sign up again. She waved hello and then instinctively
looked down and started going through her pocketbook. What was his name? She
was always doing that. Exchanging names and then forgetting the other person’s.
So lame, especially when they remembered yours.
Her
wallet was right where it was supposed to be.
“I
have my wallet,” she said. “It must belong to someone else.”
Only
then did she wonder why he hadn’t checked the name in the wallet. But it was
too late.
“I
know,” Garza said. “I’m sorry, but it won’t hurt much.”
He
quickly and expertly drove the ice pick through the fabric of her sweat suit
under her left breast and into her heart, up to its hilt. He caught her as she
sagged and lifted her into the back of the vehicle, grunting at the pain in his
shoulder. As she fell back she said, “My babies.”
Garza
grimaced as he took her car keys, still clenched in her hand. He gently folded
the body into the back around a small child’s car seat.
“You
had to say that. As if I didn’t feel bad enough about this already.”
He
left the ice pick in her. It was a common tool in the area where she would be
found. As the hatch closed Maria Brutti’s last conscious thought was not of her
children or husband, but of Carlo, who had protected her from their schoolyard
days.
***
Garza
drove the dead woman’s S.U.V. from the parking lot. Like most suburban mom
vehicles it was filled with the detritus of childrearing: hand wipes, empty
juice boxes, animal crackers, Star Wars figures, plush toys, games and enough
electronic gadgets to manage a nuclear war.
“I
don’t know how you do it,” he said to the dead body in the rear.
Since
it was Seattle, of course it had started to rain. The roads were slick and he
drove cautiously. An accident wouldn’t do. He’d be hard pressed to convince a
cop that Maria Brutti had died in a fender bender. The rain got heavier, which
actually worked to his advantage. He doubted there would be anyone out and
about in the dock area.
When
he pulled up to the warehouse next to the pier 20 minutes later the area was
deserted. The only sounds, other than the steady patter of rain, were from
straining hawsers and lapping waves. The building itself was dark. He would
have been surprised by the apparent lack of security but for the fact he knew
who owned the warehouse. Nobody in their right mind would trespass.
There
were several large containers lined up along the dock. He hoisted Maria Brutti
up over the side of one of them. It smelled of fish. She landed inside with a
sickening thud. Then he drove back to the gym parking lot and parked next to
his rental.
Garza
checked the back of the S.U.V. Not a drop of blood. He wasn’t worried about any
other fibers or D.N.A. There wasn’t a forensic scientist on the planet who
could find anything incriminating among the stains and crumbs in that S.U.V.
The police – and her brother – would assume Maria had been snatched after her
class.
Garza
was starving. He got into his own car and let the on-board G.P.S. system guide
him to Eliot’s Oyster House. He had programmed the unit before heading to the
gym. He was sore and wet. Nothing a dry martini couldn’t fix.
***
Garza
assumed Maria Brutti’s body would be discovered almost immediately and given
its location her brother would draw the obvious conclusion. The assumption was
wrong. Busy dockworkers didn’t notice the corpse and the container in which she
lay was filled with a load of iced fish. It was almost a full day later when a
worker culling the catch inside the warehouse stuck his hook into one of her
legs. The delay, which normally would be of no import, would prove catastrophic
to the Ballantrae organization, validating Garza’s misgivings about hastily
planned operations.
CHAPTER
7 – THE WILD EAST
“Behind
every great fortune, there is a great crime,” Dudley Mack said after Scarne
told him about the Ballantrae case. “Balzac.”
It
was cool on the deck but it felt like spring was finally gaining a toehold.
“Stop
showing off,” Scarne said, warily watching his friend fiddle with the pilot
lights on a gas grill the size of the
USS Nimitz.
“I know who said it.
Behind a lot of small fortunes too.”
“Well,”
the big Irishman said with a wolfish grin. “I try.” He kicked the gas canister
beneath the grill. “Come on, you son of a bitch. I just replaced you.”
Scarne
leaned down and turned the tank’s handle and was rewarded with a confirming
hiss.
“Thanks,
Cochise. I was just about to do that. What do you make of the old man’s story?”
“I
don’t know what to think. I like the guy, and he’s obviously hurting. But it
all seems so improbable. There’s probably a rational explanation to all his
suspicions. What do you think? Other than quoting dead French novelists?”
“My
gut tells me Shields is on to something. So does yours. That’s why you took it
on.”
“He’s
paying me $20,000 and promised me as much as I need.”
“Irrelevant,
to you, I’m sorry to say. Most guys wouldn’t take five times that to get on the
Randolph Shields shit list. You didn’t get a good look at the guy in the
church?”
“Blonde
hair, light skin and quicker than a lap dance in one of your Jersey Shore
dives.”
Scarne
was getting distracted by the continuing gas hiss.
“Turnover,
my boy. It’s all about turnover.” Mack started scraping the grill. “Kind of
funny coming right after meeting Shields. I’m not crazy about coincidences.
What the hell were you doing in St. Christopher’s anyway? Oh, yeah. That’s
where you and Kate… A trip down memory lane, huh. Nostalgia is dangerous, Jake.
Guys who look back never see who kills them. Course, you getting aced in a church
is as likely as my ex-wives dying in a kitchen.”
“He
didn’t seem to want to do me any harm.”
“Just
the same, I’d be careful. Want to borrow Bobo a couple of days?”
Scarne
shook his head and poured himself some bourbon from the Maker’s Mark bottle
kept expressly for his visits. Mack’s usual pitcher of martinis sat on the rail
near the grill. Scarne had made an early ferry, hoping to catch Patricia Mack
in the kitchen so he could snare some fried meatballs before they went into the
sauce. For some unknown reason Dudley’s Irish mother excelled at Italian
cooking. Dinner would start at 2 P.M. and last into the evening.
“Well,
watch your ass. If it’s connected to the Miami thing, that means you’re already
in somebody’s sights.”
“You
just watch that damn grill,” Scarne said. “It’s filling with gas. We’re going
to wind up in low orbit.”
Mack
pushed the starter. The grill whooshed to life explosively, sending him
staggering backwards across the deck.
“Son
of a bitch!”
The
kitchen window off the deck opened.
“What
in the name of God was that?”
“Nothing,
Ma,” Mack said, laughing. “Grill’s ready. Send out the steaks.”
I’ll
get them,” Scarne said as the window slammed shut. “Try not to immolate
yourself.”
“You
try to leave the rest of us some fuckin’ meatballs.”
After
returning with a huge platter of steaks, Scarne watched Mack lovingly prepare
the rib-eyes with a variety of his “special” sauces and rubs before consigning
them to the fire. Dudley Mack was a carnivore of the first order. When home, he
usually could be found searing some kind of meat. Year round. One Super Bowl
Sunday, wearing a snow parka, he grilled in near-zero temperatures in a
blizzard. Even the family dogs, fierce-looking creatures straight out of a Jack
London novel, refused to venture out of the house, scraps or no scraps. Scarne
now reminded him of the incident.
“No
sense owning stupid dogs,” Dudley said.
The
hounds of the Super Bowl had long since departed into legend but two fierce
creatures that resembled wolves were now watching their master’s every move. He
flipped the steaks. When they were done, he cut off some big chunks and put
them in a bowl that he set on the railing. The dogs, which had started to
stand, eased back down. The rest of the steaks went on a fresh platter.
“Feed
the boys their meat after it cools. I have to give these to Mom. She finishes
them in the oven. It’s her secret thing.”
Scarne
leaned back on the railing and filched a cigarette from Mack’s pack. The dogs
followed the big platter, but once the sliding door closed returned to their
new best friend.
“You
guys are easy,” he said, looking at the Mack residence.
The
house was a reflection of its owner. There was more to it than met the eye. It
sat on a one-acre parcel on Howard Avenue in Grymes Hill, just down the street
from both Wagner College and the Staten Island campus of St. John’s University.
From the street, the dwelling was unremarkable, with the appearance of a large
brick ranch. In fact, it was three levels deep in the back, as the property
sloped down a heavily forested hill to Van Duzer Street 100 feet below. The
third, or top, floor contained a living room, dining room, kitchen, library,
master bedroom and two baths. A 40-by-80-foot deck supported by 30-foot steel
beams jutted out of the hillside. One could jump from the deck to the top of
70-foot trees, if suicidally inclined. One of the highest points on the east
coast from Maine to Florida, it was cool in the summer, and on a clear day the
view was remarkable, stretching from Coney Island and the Verrazano up the
Narrows to the Statue of Liberty and Manhattan. The middle level of the house
contained three bedrooms, two more baths and a 3,000-bottle hermetically
controlled wine cellar. The bottom level had a game room and small cabana and
bath that opened out to an in-ground pool on a rock promontory set away from
the house to catch the sun.
***
Jake
Scarne and Dudley Mack met as juniors at Providence College, a small liberal
arts school run by the Dominican Order. Both their families separately hoped
the good friars would have a salutary effect on the wild boys.
They
initially despised each other. “Deadly” Mack – as he was known to friends and
foes alike – was the chief enforcer on the varsity hockey team that frequented
the saloon Scarne managed for one of his relatives after school. It was his job
to maintain a semblance of order in the bar. After a few drinks, Mack liked to
hit people. One night he punched Scarne, who was trying to evict him. Scarne’s
temper, legendary in Montana, finally made its eastern debut. Although
outweighed by his beefy opponent, Scarne fought him to a memorable “no
decision” that left both battered before Mack’s friends, who didn’t want to be
barred from their favorite watering hole, broke it up.
Mack,
never one to let sleeping dogs lie, came back a week later for a rematch. It
was early Monday night, typically slow, and he figured he’d have Scarne all to
himself. When he walked in, he found his nemesis already being pummeled by four
sailors. One of them, face bloodied, had Scarne’s arms pinned so the others
could use him as a punching bag. None of the winos in the bar was inclined to
interfere. Mack did, on general principles. The boys won but wound up on
adjoining chairs in the local emergency room.
“Nice
fucking bar you run,” Mack said, “Every time I walk in, I get the shit kicked
out of me.” He extended his hand. “Dudley Mack.”
“Jake
Scarne.” They shook hands, and both winced in pain and laughed.
“I
owe you” Scarne said. “I was about to be turned into hamburger. What were you
doing there?”
“I
came in specifically to kick your ass. I didn’t know I had to take a ticket.
What’s the deal with the Atlantic Fleet?”
“Great
minds think alike,” Scarne said, smiling. “I threw them out last week too.
Listen, we should soak these hands in ice. I know just the place.”
Dudley
Mack now had those hands in most of the illegal activities on Staten Island,
which because of its longtime isolation from the other boroughs, had developed
a small town culture alien to the rest of “the city.” As college buddies do,
Mack and Scarne visited each other’s home turf. Mack spent a summer working
construction on the reservation in Montana, where he became a favorite with the
local lunatics, one of whom even taught him how to scalp. (That would come in
handy on one still unsolved occasion back home.) And Staten Island became
Scarne’s home away from home during and after college, especially after his
grandparents died. He dubbed it “the Wild East.”
For
most of its history, Staten Island had been a bucolic refuge from the grime and
crime of the greater metropolis, ignored by the Manhattan elite. It became a
haven for city workers, especially police and fire officers, lured by
affordable single-family homes that had plenty of room and land for kids to
grow. It also attracted mobsters for the same reasons. The Island’s cops and
resident robbers were equally intolerant of local crime and violence was a
rarity. That began to change in 1964 with the opening of the Verrazano-Narrows
Bridge connecting the borough to Brooklyn and the rest of the world. Political
corruption became rampant, fueled by the easy money in a real estate boom that
rapidly made much of Staten Island unlivable.
In
the decades following the opening of the “guinea gangplank,” as Mack delighted
in calling the bridge in Scarne’s presence, the Island’s population quadrupled
to almost half a million people. (In fact, many of the hundreds of thousands of
post-bridge “immigrants” flooding the borough were Italian-Americans fleeing
the crowded and racially charged confines of Brooklyn and Queens.) Unscrupulous
developers crammed townhouses on top of townhouses. Huge swaths of the Island
fell to the bulldozers of builders whose every project was approved, thanks to
bags of cash exchanged in Hero Park on a bench next to a marble tablet listing
the names of honored war dead from Staten Island. The money eventually wound up
in Caribbean banks or Florida condos. In return for unbridled development,
scarring of pristine hillsides, traffic snarls, crumbling roads and the obliteration
of centuries-old neighborhoods, Staten Islanders were granted free ferry
service. The politicians who orchestrated the carnage named the ferries after
themselves.
Dudley
Mack avoided real estate entanglements. A seventh-generation Staten Islander,
he loved the place. “There’s enough honest crooked money to be made,” he once
told Scarne. “I want to be able to sleep at night.”
The
Mack clan had started out in the funeral business in the 1890’s. But when
Dudley took over he sold the two parlors they owned in declining drug-infested
neighborhoods. As he put it, “You don’t go to a funeral home to get killed;
besides there was never enough parking.” He opened up newer funeral homes in
safer neighborhoods and eventually merged with the Sambuca Home for Funerals.
The Macks and Sambucas had long been close. After bloody confrontations in the
early part of the 20
th
Century between the first Italian immigrants
and the more established Irish, truce evolved into trust. In the handful of
local public and parochial high schools, loyalty to teams soon outweighed
loyalty to nationality. Many a refrigerator-sized Sambuca opened a hole in the
line to running backs named Mack at Curtis or St. Peter’s. Lifelong bonds
formed. It was the same for other families. Then came the war. The guy who
saved you on Iwo Jima was no longer a Mick or a Dago. He was your Mick and your
Dago. And while boys loved their sisters they lusted after their friends’
sisters. Wedding bells united families that had once shot each at other.
Dudley
Mack branched out into nursing homes and hospitals (“not much of a stretch”)
and made a fortune, which he plowed into a city-wide string of massage parlors
and hot sheet motels. (“I get them coming and going.”) His reputation for a
ruthless integrity made him a power broker. The Italian mob, weakened by RICO
prosecutions facilitated by the propensity to talk into every listening device
the Feds could plant, was fighting a losing battle with Russian gangsters who
saw the Island as the Promised Land. (“The Ruskies have been landlocked so long
they can’t believe they can drown people in every direction.”) Mack knew there
was money to be made in a competitive environment. He financed the Italians to
keep them in the game and formed joint ventures with the Russians. The local
District Attorney, by Island tradition Irish, concentrated on drunk drivers and
his golf game and left everyone else alone.
The
sliding door opened and a deep voice rumbled, “Jake, come on in. I think
they’re gonna let us eat at the table for a change.”
He
looked up and smiled at Bobo Sambuca, who filled the entire doorway.
***
Bobo,
one of many Sambuca nephews, wasn’t cut out for the funeral business. He tried
his best but after a widow fainted when he hefted a casket to his shoulder and
the other pallbearers came off the ground, Dudley found him a spot in the
inhospitality end of his organization. He excelled as a bouncer in Mack’s
toughest bars. Mack claimed he’d leave his own bar if Bobo insisted. But one
night he bounced too hard and killed a biker who mistakenly equated tattoos
with toughness. Bobo jumped his bond and Mack asked Scarne, then with the
Manhattan DA’s office, to find him before the cops did.