Murder in Greenwich Village Read online

  “He could have done any of those three things,” the captain said. “In my opinion, he would have walked. He was an athletic guy, as fit as anyone I’ve ever seen, and he could do that mile in fifteen minutes easy, ten if he jogged. The subway . . . well, by the time he got to a station, waited for a train, rode down to Thirty-fourth Street, and walked to his house, he might as well have walked the whole way. If he took a taxi—and it’s not out of the question; he was tired and he hadn’t seen his wife for a couple of days—they never found a record on a trip sheet.”

  “Was it just a coincidence that the meet was so near where he lived?” Defino asked.

  “Far as I know, yes. These guys had a place on the East Side, but the lease had expired and they found the new one on West Fifty-second. When they were arrested, only three guns were found, samples of the goods so the buyer would know they could deliver on the order, but enough for a charge of possession.”

  “How many people knew about the operation?” Jane asked.

  “We kept the number down. I knew, obviously. The PAA knew something undercover was going on, but she didn’t know the details or the players. She never met Micah, by the way. We didn’t give her things to type up. He did that himself. And then there’s his wife.”

  “What about the wife?” Defino asked.

  “I don’t know what he told her; I only know what she said she knew, which was that he was working undercover on a special assignment, that she shouldn’t worry, and everything would be all right. He called her right after he called me; they verified that. It was a short call: ‘Honey, I’m coming home.’ That was it. I still call her once in a while. She remarried last year, maybe the year before; time goes by faster than I can keep track. She’s a stunning woman: smart, knows how to make money. This guy was after her to marry him for a couple of years. She told me . . .”

  They waited.

  “OK, you’re the investigators; there’s no personal secrets in a homicide case. She told me she didn’t feel she could be intimate with another man after Micah. I guess she changed her mind. And if you think Micah went down to the Village to see some babe, you won’t find one. He was crazy about Melodie. They were a nice couple, expecting their first child, waiting to move to a new house. The Six looked in every bedroom down there for a girlfriend. There wasn’t any and no evidence of recent sexual activity in the autopsy.”

  “Lovers don’t always meet to have sex,” Jane said, wondering if she was the only one in the room who knew that from personal experience. From the looks on the men’s faces, it appeared to be so.

  “It was eleven at night; he’d worked hard all day,” Captain Bowman said. “He hadn’t seen his wife for a few days. If he had a girlfriend, you think he went down there to play patty-cake?”

  She let it pass.

  “But there was no girlfriend,” Bowman said. “I’m sure of it.”

  “You said the PAA never met Anthony. How did that work?” Defino asked.

  “I’ll lay it out for you.” Captain Bowman pushed himself back from his desk, nearly hitting the wall. Space did not come cheap. “We were OCCB at One PP.” That meant the Organized Crime Control Bureau at One Police Plaza. “Micah was a UC detective, working in deep undercover operations. The last one was guns. You know that. He had no actual assigned command or a real office. On paper he was part of a task force we called WRAP, Weapons Reduction and Purchase, just so we’d have a name for it. We talked by phone when he was able, mostly for his protection. I wanted to know he was alive. Once in a while we’d meet, sometimes in New Jersey, once in Connecticut, once or twice upstate or out of Manhattan, never the same place twice. His paychecks went directly to a bank. He received city money that he signed for to do his work, flash money or buy money, depending on what he was doing at the moment. Before his last assignment, he had a great record of arrests. He was never present, you understand. That would have blown his cover.

  “He was fantastic at his job. He could have gotten an Oscar for the parts he played. He gave us a steady flow of intelligence information no one else had been able to get. There were hundreds of guns involved in the last buy that never took place. When we raided the crib after his death, we found just the three guns, including a long-range rifle.”

  “Three,” Jane said.

  “Right. We traced them to weapons stolen from an armory. We never found the guns Micah was buying.”

  “Maybe they didn’t exist,” Defino said.

  “They existed, all right. The number and type of each weapon Micah was told he could buy exactly coincided with the number of weapons of those types stolen from the armory. We just don’t know where the hell they were hidden.”

  “And you still don’t know ten years later?”

  “Right. They could have been in another apartment, loaded on a ship to Timbuktu, or buried somewhere. New York’s got a lot of parks and dumps. But not one of those stolen weapons has ever turned up, and we’ve made a lot of busts with guns in the last ten years.” He tasted his coffee, which was cold by now, and pushed it away. “That’s it, Detectives, the Micah Anthony story. We gave him an inspector’s funeral, a pension to his wife, and life went on. I still haven’t met another guy like him on the job.” He looked at his watch pointedly.

  They thanked him and left their cards, and he said they could call anytime they wanted to.

  “How many guns were involved?” Jane asked as they were about to leave.

  “Two hundred twenty-seven.” He said it as though the number had been engraved on his brain. Ten years later he didn’t have to look it up. The amount of money involved in a buy like that would be in the eighty-thousand range.

  Out on the street they turned toward Lexington Avenue.

  “I’d like to crack a case like this,” Defino said.

  “That makes two of us.”

  2

  JANE TOOK HER third of the file home with her. She had been walking or jogging to and from work in good weather for several months, but the weight of the file pointed her toward the subway. It was still necessary to walk at the other end, as she lived in the West Village, out of range of the subway. As she walked, she thought about whom she knew from her twenty years on the job who might have an insight into the Micah Anthony homicide, but she came up with no one. A man who worked as deep undercover as he did didn’t have pals he said hello to on the job, didn’t go for a beer with the guys after work, and didn’t tell tales out of school.

  She got home and listened to her messages. Her father had called and she called him back, telling him about the new case so he could experience it vicariously. He was retired and living in the Bronx in the same apartment she grew up in. His health had improved in the last few months, the heart medicines working, and he was getting around more, although she worried about him and his friend Madeleine using the subway, not to mention walking from his station to their building after dark.

  After dinner she sat with the file. Listening to Captain Bowman, she had felt a tingle of excitement replacing the initial disappointment of working on a case that no ordinary mortal could clear, and that her boss wanted cleared. The thought of recanvassing the area where Anthony was found after ten years left her cold. Even the next day’s interview with Anthony’s widow would probably be so routine, so full of practiced rehashed statements, that it would lead nowhere. They needed an angle, something different, something that would get them into Anthony’s skin, but she didn’t see how to do it. They would have to find the men in the crib. One of them could easily have followed Anthony into the street, even overheard his conversations at the pay phone, then taken him by car to the street where he was shot. But what had happened during the three hours between Anthony’s kidnapping and his murder? Had he gone willingly with his captors? They had not beaten him. No bruises or abrasions were found on his body. If they had handcuffed him or tied him up, they had managed to do it without leaving marks—not a likely situation. It looked as though he knew his captors, or they had contacted him to meet th
em and he had gone there willingly. But if the latter were true, they had not reached him on his cell phone or through his pager. That information would have turned up in the initial investigation. And if the people he had just left had told him to go somewhere, he would not have called Bowman to say he was done, or his wife to say he was on his way home. Someone had gotten to him after the phone calls.

  None of this qualified as original thinking. In a case as old and important as this one, someone on the job had suggested almost every possibility, explored it, and come up with nothing. This time around, they had to do something different.

  Her phone rang while she was trying to think what that different approach would be.

  “How are you?” Hack said.

  “Hi.” She smiled at the voice. “Where are you?”

  “Driving home. I spend more time driving than working these days, and I’m putting in lots of hours.”

  “We’ve got a new case.”

  “Tell me.” In his old assignment at One PP, he often knew it before she did. Now that he was a deputy chief and working in the Bronx Borough Command, his knowledge of and influence over her job was close to zero.

  “Micah Anthony.”

  “Oh, shit.”

  “Listen to Graves, he really thinks we can do it.”

  “Don’t give up your day job.”

  He was the red meat of her life, what kept her going and what would destroy her if she lost him. It had started ten years ago when he was a lieutenant, almost a captain, and she had just gotten her gold shield. Their attraction was as strong as a ton of magnets, and she had not struggled against it or thought about consequences. He understood consequences, but didn’t care. They were careful—very careful—and kept it secret. He had told her a thousand times that he would leave his wife if she would marry him, but she refused. An adopted child who had given up her own accidental child, she wanted his daughters brought up by two parents.

  She knew, because he had told her and she believed him, that sex with his wife had ended years ago. The intimation that his wife did not miss it filtered into an occasional conversation. It was likely that she knew something was going on, but it was more important to her that it remain secret than that it end. Jane and Hack did not talk about it.

  Although cops did not discuss such intimacies in her presence, Jane knew that Irish cops, now mostly Hack’s generation, complained about BIC wives, Bronx or Brooklyn Irish Catholic. But the initials were a euphemism. To those who used them, they meant Born Ice Cold.

  Jane was a Bronx Catholic, if not Irish, whose misadventure in her late teens left her parents almost paralyzed. That they had supported her was the reason she had turned into a confident, functioning human being. And she wasn’t ice-cold.

  She and Hack had gone to Paris in March, her first trip out of the country. He had picked the time so that she would celebrate her birthday in that city, and so that they would celebrate ten years of being together. Now they had started another year.

  “If I had one,” she said, responding to his comment about a day job. “Defino and I talked to Captain Bowman this afternoon. He was Anthony’s contact at OCCB.”

  “Harold Bowman. I remember him.”

  “He still stays in touch with Anthony’s widow, and he’s sure Anthony didn’t go down to the Village to see a girlfriend.”

  “They looked into that pretty thoroughly.” A horn sounded at his end.

  “His reason is that the autopsy showed no evidence of sexual activity. So I said—”

  “Let me guess. You said maybe they met to have a nice long conversation on world affairs. Did he laugh you out of the room?”

  “Not quite, but you’re about to.”

  “Jane, Harold Bowman had a little something going once that I knew about. He didn’t go to see her to improve his mind or eat her cookies. And if Micah Anthony visited a woman that night, it was for what he wasn’t getting at home.”

  “He didn’t visit a woman. He told his wife he was on his way home. Hack, before you start breaking up, I don’t want to do this case according to rules.”

  “Then you’ll lose your job. Original thinking isn’t part of your job description, or Graves’s. He’ll forget all the good things you’ve done.”

  She ignored him. “I want to get inside the stuff that Anthony was doing.”

  “How?”

  “I don’t know yet.”

  “My battery’s low. You’re getting fuzzy.”

  “Look at that. Five minutes together and no sex.”

  “How can you be sure?”

  She laughed, but the voice in her ear was gone.

  Sutton Place, Jane always thought, was short and to the point. Along the eastern edge of Manhattan in the expensive Fifties, it was a few blocks of superexpensive real estate, apartment houses and town houses fitted with the amenities required by the wealthy.

  Jane and Defino walked east from the Fifty-third Street exit of the Lex. The building was on the east side of the street, which meant the apartment might have a view of the East River and a daily sunrise for those whose schedules awoke them early. It turned out she was right. The door-man checked their shields, matched their photos to their faces, then called upstairs and directed them to the elevator. The door was on the river side of the building, and once they were inside the view from the living room was superb.

  Mrs. Appleby was as beautiful as her legend promised, and gracious as well. Coffee was already made, and she served it in fine porcelain cups with a coffee cake that she cut with a silver knife. When she turned to pour for Defino, Jane looked at her profile and thought she might be pregnant.

  “We understand that you’ve answered a lot of questions over the last ten years,” Jane said when they had been served.

  “Not a lot of questions, just the same group of questions over and over. My answers haven’t changed, but I know you have to ask them. I’m certainly willing to cooperate. It hurts me that the people responsible for Micah’s death are still free. I will do anything to help put them where they belong.”

  “We know the gist of the last two phone calls,” Defino said. “We talked to Captain Bowman yesterday and we’re reading the file.”

  “Then that’s a question I don’t have to answer. I suppose the other thing you want to ask me is about the girlfriend. I know wives are the last to know about those things, so whatever I say doesn’t count for much, but I don’t believe there was another woman in his life.” She smiled. “Except for his mother.”

  “Captain Bowman agrees with you,” Jane said.

  “He’s a dear man. He felt this as deeply as I did.”

  “Did your husband tell you what he was involved in?”

  She inhaled deeply. “He was undercover. He worried about my safety. He told me what he was doing was dangerous, but if I was ever in a situation—that’s what he called it, and I understood it to mean where my life was being threatened—I could give a phone number to the person threatening me. I kept it with me all the time. I believe it led to someone at OCCB, but I never called it so I don’t know. And I was never in a situation.”

  “Did you know it was about selling guns?” Defino asked.

  “Only after he died.”

  “What’s your scenario of what happened that night?” Jane asked.

  “Someone was waiting for him when he left the house on Fifty-second Street. Whoever it was followed him and waited while he made his phone calls. Then he told Micah something had come up and they had to go wherever. The person had good ID and Micah went with him.” She paused to sip her coffee. “It had to be someone he trusted.” Although she didn’t say it, the possibility that it might have been a cop hung in the air.

  It was one of the possibilities Jane had turned over the night before. A cop would trust a cop if he had a good story. “Do you mean a cop?” she asked.

  “Someone he trusted,” Mrs. Appleby repeated. “Law enforcement isn’t out of the question. I’m sure it’s been on the minds of all the inves
tigators when they couldn’t come up with a suspect. But it wasn’t Lieutenant Bowman. And no one in that office knew Micah’s name or what he was doing. Or so I’ve been told.”

  “It could have been the people your husband had just seen,” Defino said.

  “It could be, yes. They were arrested and tried and nothing much came of it. I’m sure they knew more than they said, but the evidence wasn’t there. I don’t know where to look, Detectives. I hope you do.”

  “When he called you to check in with you while he was working, did he tell you where he was calling from?”

  “Sometimes. He’d say, ‘I’m up in Harlem. Give me half an hour,’ or ‘I’m on Tenth Avenue near Fifty-second. I’ll see you soon.’ That’s what he said the last night.”

  “When did you call Lieutenant Bowman?” Jane asked.

  She made a sound with her lips closed. “About midnight, maybe a little earlier. Micah was still alive at that point, something that has always bothered me. I knew he was in trouble; I just didn’t know how big the trouble was. I was trying to find him and he was trying to save his life and it just didn’t work.”

  “Did you call his cell phone?”

  “I tried several times but he had turned it off.”

  “Was that usual?”

  “Yes. He used it mostly for outgoing calls. And I wasn’t supposed to call him. It was just that night I knew something was wrong.”

  Jane put her card down on the coffee table and Defino did the same.

  “I’m sorry we dragged you into the city for this interview,” Jane said.

  “I’m glad you’re still trying. Someday someone will crack this case, probably by accident. I hope it’s in my lifetime.”

  Jane stood and went to the window. The view was everything she had expected, the river, the southern tip of Roosevelt Island, and beyond it, Queens. Turning left and right, she saw the view extended grandly. To the south she could just see the Williamsburg Bridge in a New York haze. The other two bridges over the East River were invisible around the bulge of southern Manhattan that had become known as Alphabet City.