Hack, p.21
Hack, page 21
It was the most I had ever heard Phil talk at a stretch. “Does that mean the good guys are winning?” I asked.
“Right now, it looks like the game is just postponed because of rain,” Izzy said.
“What if the DA called Tal Edgar back into court on Monday?” Phil asked. “You know, call an unscheduled bail hearing, try to get it revoked based on new evidence?”
“To find out where he is before a month goes by?” I asked.
“I like that idea,” Izzy brightened. “We ask a judge to up his bail or revoke it because we uncovered new evidence.”
“Yes,” Phil agreed.
“What new evidence?” I wondered.
“We could RICO them,” Phil suggested.
“I love it,” Izzy grinned. “If he doesn’t show up, we get a warrant. If he does, we can have the DA put him in front of a grand jury. He can either testify or plead the Fifth Amendment against self-incrimination. Beautiful.”
My confused expression amused the detectives.
“RICO is the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act,” Izzy explained. “We use it to go after the mob.”
“You’re going to say in court that the New York Mail is like a Mafia family?” I asked.
“If the DA will agree,” Phil said.
“Has this ever been done before?” I asked.
They both shook their heads and laughed.
“They are running an illegal scheme in which they are killing people for profit and to silence them. Sounds like wiseguys to me,” Izzy concluded.
The pen is mightier than the sword.
54.
I spent the weekend with Jane and Skippy, just living. There were no more murders or breaking developments, much to the disappointment of my new editor at the Daily Press, a red-faced fireplug of a guy named Barney Blood. But Blood was content with the almost endless supply of scandal from the Mail files I had obtained, courtesy of the memory stick Izzy slipped me. Jane and I walked Skippy together, stayed up late, went out to eat. We drank too much, fooled around a lot and slept in.
“I’m a vet,” Jane said, as we lounged in bed. “My diagnosis is we are eating like pigs, drinking like fish and fucking like bunnies.”
She giggled at her own joke.
“How do you know fish drink?” I inquired. “Have you ever seen one with a glass?”
“They do nothing but drink. They are in the drink.”
“You’ve got me there, Doc.”
“No, I’ve got you here,” she said, hoisting me by my own petard.
I looked up the expression online and discovered that it was about demolition men in the Middle Ages, who used gunpowder in big pots to blow open castle doors but sometimes used too much powder and became dead projectiles.
Later, as we got sleepy, we hugged and Jane asked me something so quietly I had to ask her to repeat it.
“I said ‘is it over?’”
“You mean the case?”
“Yes.”
“I don’t know. No. Not yet.”
“I wish it were,” she said dreamily. “Neil was a slimeball. Cushing was a vile human being. I can understand why somebody wanted to kill them but that idiot girl, Porkie?”
“Pookie,” I corrected her. “Relax, we’re safe.”
“That’s only part of it,” she said.
“What else?”
But she was asleep and breathing softly on my chest, the distant, pleasant aromas of her perfume and the Bordeaux from dinner scenting our bed. Wine and roses. I could get used to this.
* * *
On Monday, I tried to figure a way to end it, to figure it out. Barney Blood had assigned half the Daily Press reporters to work on leads from my documents and Ginny was zooming all over town, interviewing people who had been screwed over and spied upon by the Mail. To me, it was a pile-on, more of the same, just different names but the professionals didn’t agree. When I got bored, I told them I was working on another part of it. They kept my name on the stories and left me alone. Ginny was happy to get more ink. There was no sign of Molloy or Lucky Tal.
* * *
On Tuesday, Lucky Tal failed to show up for his RICO court hearing. The District Attorney had told the judge that they were investigating the New York Mail as a possible Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organization and demanded that Lucky Tal appear and respond to the charges. He didn’t. The judge issued an arrest warrant—just like in Aubrey Forsythe’s case.
I remembered my dumb question about whether several different people had committed the murders and thought of another dumb question. Why hadn’t Aubrey come out of hiding? First, the Mail blamed the killings on me, then the Daily Press—with actual evidence—blamed them on the Mail. You would think Aubrey would have come forward and declared his innocence. But, with a text, he had called me to the second murder, the foreclosure on Cash Cushing, so he must have done at least that one. If he was the one using his phone to send the text. I still didn’t think he had killed Neil and we knew Leslie and Molloy had probably killed Pookie. They had texted me on a new phone, pretending to be Aubrey. What if they had kidnapped Aubrey, like they tried to do to me, and used his phone to text me an invitation to Cushing’s murder as well? That would mean they had Aubrey and were using him as a fall guy. Was he still alive? Maybe Matt Molloy and Lucky Tal Edgar were playing cards somewhere, with Aubrey tied up in a back room. But, if they would kill all these people, including me, why would they let Aubrey live?
Aubrey was probably dead, I decided. My HR pals must have committed Hacker murders two and three, Cushing and Pookie, pinning them on Aubrey, the fugitive. But it seemed unlikely they had killed Neil Leonardi. The Mail had had no exclusive—until I gave it to them, purely by chance. If you kill for circulation, obviously you have the exclusive. Maybe Neil’s murder had been committed for more personal reasons and the Mail just jumped on the bandwagon to cash in on the story for the second and third killings? So who really killed Neil Parmesan?
I called Izzy with my new theory. He disagreed.
“The first one is like the second but not the third,” he said. “The first two seemed more… controlled. But I like the part about Leslie and Molloy using Aubrey Forsythe’s phone to contact you. That’s good, thanks. We can theorize that Molloy also killed Forsythe. The DA might like that. Maybe it was a big murder club, like the sex club on Pookie’s show.” He laughed.
“Sex club?” I asked.
“You never watched Bitch Blanket Bimbos?” Izzy asked.
“Never saw any of the victims’ shows,” I said proudly.
“You never saw You’re Foreclosed or Food Fight?”
“Nope.”
“You’re kidding. Got Netflix?”
“Yep.”
“You gotta treat yourself.”
I did. I had nothing else to do.
55.
Jane did not have Netflix, so, when she went to work the next morning, Skippy and I went back to my place. I didn’t have to look far to find what I was searching for. Bitch Blanket Bimbos was near the top, listed as “Popular on Netflix,” and, as advertised, the show did have a “sex club.” The show itself consisted mostly of drinking, loud arguments, sex and vomiting by high-school dropouts from New Jersey. It turned out Pookie wasn’t quite Italian-American at all. She was a Balkan refugee who was adopted by an Italian family. The sex club involved Pookie playing a different version of beer pong and then asking some strange guy in a beach bar to show her his “club,” after which they would have sex, usually in public, often with other “dudes” and “babes” joining in the fun, with body parts blacked out and discreet cutting. The drunken guy would then be added to an online interactive gallery of sex club members, on whom the audience could vote and rate their prowess and other qualities, like staying power—of his hair gel. Over eight long hours, I learned a great deal about the abilities of the late Miss Pookie Piccarelli, but little else. I did a lot of fast-forwarding but never saw Jack Leslie or Matt Molloy join her club, or anything else remotely resembling a clue to her killing. Fortunately, there was only one season made up of twenty half-hour episodes to watch or I would have committed suicide. The girl was a jerk with a drinking problem but she did not deserve to be butchered. I called it a day and Skippy and I went back to Jane’s.
The next morning, after walking Skippy and eating breakfast, the self-inflicted torture continued. Right behind Pookie in the Netflix hit parade was You’re Foreclosed, with his royal highness Cash Cushing sitting, literally, on a golden throne and deciding which unfortunate family to throw into the street next. They all pleaded their cases to him, as he made snarky comments about how it was their own fault and they were greedy and got in over their heads. Listening to a slimeball who was born into millions brag about how he was a self-made man was sickening. Especially since—as I discovered from Wikipedia—Cash himself went bankrupt in the 1990s while operating the world’s tackiest casino in Atlantic City. He actually went broke in a business where morons bring you their money and throw it at you.
One woman with cancer, who had lost her job and her health insurance, pleaded with Cash to cut her monthly payment so she and her kids would not lose their home.
“It’s not your home,” Cash snapped. “It’s the bank’s home because you made the wrong decisions and now you want me to pay for them. This is the best thing that can happen to you. You’re foreclosed.”
When he said the catchphrase it was accompanied by a whooshing noise and “You’re Foreclosed” lettering on the screen, along with special theme music. The woman sobbed. The woman killed herself three days later, so her life insurance settlement would pay off the mortgage. On the next episode Cash praised her for finally making a sound business decision.
The answer to the question “Who would want to kill Nolan Cushing?” was simple. Everybody. Including me. But I still did not detect anything that would help solve his murder. The only direct link between Cushing and the Mail was the fact that Tal Edgar lived in one of Cash’s buildings.
That killed my second day of reality-show surfing. I decided I wasn’t getting paid enough.
I swore my third day would be my last. Food Fight was also getting serious play after the murders. It had begun airing the previous year and two seasons were available. Neil’s murder had interrupted the filming of the third. It was pretty tame in comparison with the other shows. Aubrey was a bloated bastard, who lived to trash restaurants and humiliate people. Neil was sly but actually sort of charming. Each show had Aubrey pigging out on an industrial scale, while playing the gourmet. He would cook, with Neil assisting. It was obvious that Neil hated Skippy, from the way he would insult him in a fake-sweet voice. During the first such instance, Skippy came running in from my bedroom and barked at the screen. He watched the rest of the episodes with me.
The basic script was that Aubrey would go to a restaurant and make nasty notes on a tape recorder, the prelude to a trashing in the Tribune. In one episode, Cash Cushing made a two-second appearance at a gala dinner attended by Aubrey and Neil but the two men just waved and smiled at one another. Interesting. I fast-forwarded through a lot of the footage, looking for Skippy coverage, since that was what the last argument between Neil and Aubrey had been about—Neil kicking Skippy. The show was very repetitive. Only the names of the restaurants and the menus changed. In the second season, it was much the same. The housekeeper, Adela, made an appearance. I remembered talking to her on the phone when I’d been checking up on Skippy. I had read her voice right. She was an elderly Hispanic lady. Her screen time was limited, probably because she kept looking at the camera. Once she appeared with a young teenage boy behind her, who was leading Skippy on a leash. I rewound and hit PLAY.
It was strange to see the kitchen before the murder. The boy was the dog walker and his name was Bobby. He was shy and nervous on camera. Neil came over to try to put him at ease but the boy seemed to have stage fright. Neil tousled the lad’s hair and Aubrey snapped at Neil. The boy left and Aubrey began to prepare a meal. I played the scene over. It was subtle but the kid shrank away from Neil’s touch. It seemed just a friendly gesture but there was something odd in the way the boy recoiled. Also in Aubrey’s overreaction. I watched it again, then fast-forwarded to find more footage of Bobby but he never reappeared.
I finished up the episodes and celebrated with a beer. I found one of my notebooks and called the number for the field producer of Food Fight. She did not remember the kid and tried to end the conversation.
“Doesn’t everybody have to sign release forms to be on a TV show?” I asked her.
She sighed. “Yes, that’s true. Hold on, I’ll look it up.” I heard the clicking of a computer keyboard. “He was only in that one episode, the dog walker, a minor, fourteen years old. We had to get his grandma to co-sign the release. She’s the housekeeper. Was.”
“Adela?”
“That’s right. Adela and Bobby Enriquez.”
She gave me an address on the Lower East Side, in an area called Alphabet City.
“What’s this about?” she asked, smelling a story.
“I’m talking to all the people on the show. I’m doing a book,” I lied.
“Cool. We should shoot you for the new season.”
“New season?” I asked. “I thought the show was over?”
“With these numbers? Are you kidding? It’s called Food Fight III: The Investigation. We have a detective, a psychic and a new chef, working together to solve the killings.”
I suppressed a laugh. I told her it sounded great and we would get together soon—another fib. I called the library at the Daily Press and asked them to check Bobby and Adela Enriquez for past clippings but they found nothing. I googled the names. I got a huge number of hits but they were common names and none seemed to be the people I was looking for. I was done with fake reality shows. I wanted to be done with the whole case, so I decided to run over to Alphabet City before heading back to Jane’s place. Talk about reality.
56.
It was a rough neighborhood named for Avenues A, B, C and D that ran north and south. The address was on the second floor of a beat-up tenement on a run-down block. The peephole window wobbled a bit.
I knocked. I heard movement but the door didn’t open. “Mrs. Enriquez?” I asked in my best friendly voice. “Adela Enriquez? My name is Shepherd. Do you remember me? We spoke on the phone after Mr. Leonardi’s murder, about Skippy. I’ve been investigating the murder.”
The door opened a crack and her face appeared, barely, above the security chain. She looked tired.
“Can we talk?”
She shrugged, dropped the chain and let me in. The place was lemon-scented and immaculate, befitting her profession. Her purple sofa was glazed with plastic covers, under a large framed black velvet portrait of Jesus, his head shimmering with holiness, dripping crown of thorns in place. Her glass and brass coffee table had several greeting cards standing open on top. I tried to read them but they were in Spanish.
“Please sit down, officer. Can I make you some coffee?”
As I crinkled the plastic on the couch, I explained to her that I was a reporter, working with the police.
“Oh,” she said, probably reconsidering her coffee offer. “You’re the one who wrote those bad things about Mr. Aubrey?”
“I would say I wrote some bad, some good, just as he said it.”
“Is he back?” she asked, brightening.
“No. Not yet. Have you heard from him?” I asked. She shook her head sadly. “You don’t have a job right now, do you?”
“No. Mr. Neil is dead,” she said, crossing herself. And Mr. Aubrey is gone. Nothing for me to do. Unless he comes back.”
“Maybe your grandson Bobby has heard from Aubrey? Is he in school?”
She gaped at me for several seconds. Her sob was so explosive it scared the hell out of me. I jumped. She ran out of the room shrieking in Spanish. I stood up, unsure what to do. She was crying in the kitchen. I followed her and asked if I could help. She was blowing her nose.
“I’m sorry, sir… Bobby is in the hospital…”
“I’m so sorry. What happened? Is he sick?”
“Yes… My grandson is in God’s hands.” She blew her nose again.
I couldn’t get anything more out of her. I gave her my number and asked her to call if I could help. She said yes, she would, but I knew she would never call.
Outside, an old lady was sweeping the front steps. I told her I just heard about poor Bobby Enriquez. The woman also crossed herself. It seemed to be contagious. I asked what hospital he was in. I wanted to send flowers. She told me he was in Ward’s Island. The way she said it, it sounded like a death sentence. I asked when he was hospitalized and how he was doing. She shook her head like I was stupid and returned to her sweeping.
On the street, I got a listing and called the hospital, the Ward’s Island Rehabilitation Institute. I asked for Bobby Enriquez’s room.
“The patient does not have a phone, sir,” the operator told me.
“Really? Why not?”
“Sir, the patient is in the critical care unit.”
“You mean, like he’s in a coma or something?”
“I have no idea, sir, and we cannot discuss medical information over the phone. Are you a relative?”
“No, just a concerned friend, thanks.”
I hung up. I considered calling back and pretending to be a doctor but I didn’t know enough. I looked around the neighborhood. A bodega on the corner had three teens with droopy pants in front, drinking something out of paper bags and passing a joint around, like it was legal. Two had red t-shirts on and the third had a red bandana on his head. Gang colors? I went over.
