Pigtown Page 11

  He had just made it around his desk when Kahn came in behind him and closed the door. She walked over to the chair at the side of his desk and sat, crossing her legs. Stuart opened the folder containing the intelligence reports on Russo and Mary Terrella and said, “What’s on your mind?”

  She shook down her brushed-gold bracelets and said, “I’ve been elected the spokesperson for the Squad. We’d all prefer it if you didn’t do what you’re doing.”

  He saw the concern in her face. “What am I doing?”

  “You’re going it alone, trying to protect us from the bad guys. I found those mug shots in Rodriguez’s apartment. It’s my responsibility to make the IAD notification.”

  Stuart held up his hand to cut her off. “Helen, I hold the bag for everything that goes down in this squad. There is no reason for all of us to put our heads on the block.”

  “Why don’t you just make the damn notification?”

  “You ever hear of IAD or Intelligence arresting one of their own?”

  “No.”

  “That’s because those units want their secrets kept, so they slap their bad cops on their wrists and let them slide with their pensions.”

  “Like they did with Paddy Holiday?”

  “Maybe.” He became aware of rockabilly music coming from the radio on Jerry Jordon’s desk.

  Kahn looked up at the precinct map and said, “Even the real Lone Ranger needed Tonto. I’m single, with nothing on my plate except watching NYPD Blue on Tuesday nights.”

  He regarded the way her black hair touched her shoulders, accentuating her bronze skin and long graceful neck. Her eyes gave a clear indication of her keen intelligence. She was a resourceful detective who kept her cool in tight situations. Her help would move the case along a lot faster. He needed her.

  He picked up the intelligence report on Andrea Russo and handed it to her. “Read this.” He started reading the other file on Terrella.

  Mary Terrella had no arrest record but was suspected of dealing in stolen property and being a numbers runner for the Gambino crime family. She was known to be Frankie Bones Marino’s girlfriend. The report went on to state that Marino, who lived in Whitestone, Queens, with his wife, Carmela, and their five daughters, never spent the entire night with Terrella.

  They exchanged files and continued reading.

  Andrea Russo’s report listed her arrest record and stated that her father was a captain in the Lucchese crime family.

  After Kahn finished, she put the file back on his desk, saying, “They’re both clearly on the fringes of organized crime.”

  Stuart placed the reports side by side, his eyes flicking back and forth to the file numbers on the upper right-hand corners. “Some of the file numbers are the same.”

  She got up and stood beside him, placing her palms on the desk and bending to look at the numbers. Her ample breasts filled her blouse. “Those numbers without Russo’s or Terrella’s initials means they’re cross-referenced from other surveillances,” he said.

  “Tech Services laid a camera on Frankie Bones and came up with Terrella, too,” she said.

  He handed her both intelligence reports. “I’d like you to get me copies of all those cross-referenced surveillance reports.”

  “You got it, Lou.”

  She took the reports and left, and a few minutes later Stuart walked out into the squad room. Smasher lumbered over to him and rubbed up against his leg. Stuart scratched the dog behind its ear and walked into the property room, where he took out the evidence bag containing Beansy Rutolo’s personal effects.

  The house at 112 Fenimore Street was situated in the center of a line of late-nineteenth-century yellow brick row cottages. A small square of dirt with a barren tree planted in the middle decorated the curb in front of each house. One Twelve had a green aluminum awning over its entrance. Stuart took out Beansy’s keys and let himself into the vestibule, where he unlocked the heavy wooden inner door.

  The musty smell of disuse filled the air. Mahogany sliding doors lined both sides of the high-ceilinged foyer. The door on the right led into a parlor; the one on the left, the living room. Ahead and slightly to the right rose a stately staircase, its treads carpeted in a blue-and-gold fleur-de-lis design.

  Stuart walked into the parlor, looked around, and left, crossing the foyer to the living room. He was struck by the absolute silence inside the house. A black-and-white-striped sofa with two matching armchairs were grouped around a teakwood coffee table. He looked up at the rococo molding and spotted a spiderweb in the corner. He ran his finger across the film of dust on the coffee table and walked into the connecting dining room.

  A large, ornate white dining room set filled the room. Cherubs decorated the edges of the china closet. He noted the blanket of dust on the table and walked into the kitchen. The long, narrow room had a window over the sink that looked out over a small backyard covered in weeds. The refrigerator was unplugged. He opened the door; a warm smell of old rubber and stale food leaped out at him. The box was empty.

  Lining the walls on both sides of the sink were cupboards filled with plates and glasses. He looked into the pantry; the shelves were empty save for one lone can of tomato soup.

  Under the sink he found a green wastebasket with a newspaper rolled up inside. He took out the can and unrolled the paper. His eyes widened. Beansy Rutolo reading The Wall Street Journal? The date on the masthead was Wednesday, August 18, 1993. He opened the newspaper and saw that an article on page three had been cut out. He put the paper back and returned the can to its place under the sink.

  The king-size bed in the second-floor bedroom had a beige quilt and matching pillow shams. He lifted one edge of the quilt and saw a mattress cover, no sheets. He crossed the room to the closet. It contained white, blue, and brown summer shirts on wire hangers. Each of the five drawers of the standing chest was lined with paper. All of them were empty. He looked around the bedroom, wondering where Beansy Rutolo had really lived.

  Two flower cars were parked at the curb in front of St. Thomas Church. The Renaissance-style church, once the center of one of Brooklyn’s most affluent Catholic communities, had long since exchanged its upper-middle-class parishioners for the poor underclass. The once pristine neighborhood of two-family homes and apartment houses had deteriorated into a graffiti-covered slum of junkies, muggers, and dope pushers who preyed on the decent, hardworking people sentenced by poverty to live there.

  Stuart parked his car across the street from the church. He did not toss his vehicle identification plate on the dashboard because he knew that if the mutts made the car as a police vehicle, they’d steal it. He got out and locked the car, then fished a quarter from his trouser pocket. But when he went to insert the money into the parking meter, he saw that the coin box had been ripped out. It was the same with all the meters on the block.

  The hearse and the cortege had not yet arrived. The funeral mass was scheduled for twelve o’clock. He darted across Nostrand Avenue and entered the church. Once inside, he walked off to his right and went halfway down the side aisle, where he opened the door to the confessional and snuck into the priest’s compartment, which gave him an unobstructed view of the church.

  An altar boy walked from the vestry to the altar and lit the candles. The air inside was heavy with the accumulated years of incense. The few remaining Pigtown mourners began arriving, women bent with age, wearing widows’ black clothing. They struggled through half a genuflection and sat in the pews. A well-dressed woman who looked to be somewhere in her late forties, a black alligator pocketbook hanging off her right shoulder, walked a quarter of the way down the center aisle and slid into a left-side pew without genuflecting. Her eyes were glazed and she was sobbing.

  A clanging sound caused Stuart to look around at the entrance. The coffin was being wheeled inside atop a gurney. The mourners began wailing. The woman with the expensive pocketbook began crying uncontrollably. The pallbearers pushed the coffin down the center aisle, positioned it at th
e foot of the altar, and drifted off into the side aisles.

  The cortege began filing into the church. Angela Albertoli came in, accompanied by an older couple. Stuart assumed they were her parents. Danny Lupo and Frankie Bones walked behind the Albertolis. Andrea Russo was also in the procession, along with Mary Terrella, whom Stuart recognized from surveillance photos.

  Danny Lupo angled off to his left and gave the crying woman with the expensive pocketbook a quick squeeze of condolence on her shoulder. Stuart hadn’t seen Danny L in over eight years, and he wondered just how legit Danny L had become.

  The priest walked out to the altar.

  Forty minutes later, when the mass ended and the priest had walked away from the altar, the mourners in the first pew began filing out into the aisle. The others waited until the immediate family had passed before stepping out and falling in behind them. Angela and her mother and father stopped to offer condolences to the crying woman, hovering over her and obscuring Stuart’s view. Frankie Bones also went over to her and paid his respects.

  Stuart waited for her to get up and leave.

  She continued to sit in her pew, staring up at the crucifix above the altar long after the church was empty. Finally she got up and quickly left the church.

  Matt waited until she got outside before he hurried after her. The cortege had left. A black Lincoln Town Car was parked at the curb. As the woman started down the steps, a chauffeur hurried out from behind the wheel and rushed around the front of the car to open the door for her.

  Stuart walked across the street to his car and unlocked the door just as the town car drove away from the curb. When the black car had gone a block, Stuart drove out of his space and began tailing it. He lifted the arm of the console between the seats and punched in his personal access code for the computer set into the console behind the cellular phone. When the lime-green screen glowed, he punched in the license plate number of the black Lincoln.

  The 1990 model was registered to Madeline Fine, F/W/50, of 2311 Bedford Avenue, Brooklyn, New York. He typed in the access code for a criminal record check on Madeline Fine. Four predicate names scrolled onto the screen, none of which had the correct age or address.

  The Lincoln drove west on Winthrop Street and then turned south on Bedford Avenue, a wide street that began at Brooklyn’s northern tip at McCarren Park and snaked through the entire borough, ending at Sheepshead Bay. They passed through neighborhoods of decaying apartment houses and through the Satmar Hasidic community, where men walking the streets wore long frock coats and skullcaps and had beards and uncut side-locks, and the women’s shaved heads were wigged or covered with kerchiefs. As he drove past Erasmus Hall High School, Stuart lowered the window to get some air and heard people calling to one another in Haitian Creole, a polyglot of French and various West African languages.

  Stuart maintained his distance behind the town car, careful to stay in sync with the timing of the traffic lights. He kept wondering about the woman inside the Lincoln. She certainly didn’t look the pinky-ring type. But that was something a cop could never be sure of. There were more than a few socially prominent women who got off on going to bed with wiseguys.

  The town car continued driving south, past the part of Bedford Avenue that sliced the Brooklyn College campus in half. Once on the other side of the college, it was like entering a time warp. Mansions, their manicured lawns set way back from the street, lined both sides of the avenue. Some of the houses were well-preserved classical revival homes. Some had second-floor balconies behind their main colonnade.

  The Lincoln turned into the circular driveway of a mansion that looked like one of the antebellum plantation houses Stuart had seen in movies. The woman got out of the car. So did the chauffeur.

  Stuart pulled into a parking space half a block away and watched them talking. The chauffeur nodded to the woman and walked out of the driveway to a late-model Ford parked at the curb. He got in and drove off.

  The woman walked up the steps of the plantation house look-alike, touched something fastened to the doorjamb, and let herself into the house.

  I’ll give her a few minutes, Stuart told himself. She might not be Beansy’s squeeze, he mused, but whoever she is, she sure as hell got their attention back at the church.

  The woman answered the door and looked with mild surprise at the shield and identification card in Stuart’s hand. Then her black eyes flashed up to his placid face, where they remained for a second before she said, “Please come in, Lieutenant.”

  She led him through a foyer with a crystal chandelier into a living room furnished in tasteful opulence, where she motioned him to a Chippendale armchair. She lowered herself into a beige sofa with oversize pillows and cushions. “How may I help you?” she asked.

  “You’re Madeline Fine?”

  “I am.”

  “Did you know Anthony Rutolo?” He saw the anguish fill her eyes and added, “I’m sorry. I need to ask you some questions. I’m investigating his death. I saw you at the church, and—”

  She waved a silencing hand and said softly, “I understand.” She pulled a linen handkerchief out of the sleeve of her smartly tailored black dress and began dabbing her tears. “In all the years Anthony and I were together, his world never collided with mine. And now that he’s gone, a policeman comes to my home.”

  He sat there watching in silence as she cried. He felt sorry for her and wished he could say something to ease her sorrow, but he couldn’t, so he just sat there. He felt uncomfortable, so he picked out a spot on the wall behind her and fixed his eyes there. She began taking deep breaths in an attempt to regain her composure.

  “Can I get you a glass of water?” he asked.

  “Please. The kitchen is back there.” She pointed past the dining room.

  He got up, went into the kitchen, took a glass out of the cupboard, and filled it with water. Back in the living room, he handed it to her and sat down. She clutched the glass with both her hands and drank.

  “Thank you,” she said, placing the glass on the side table.

  “Would you prefer if I came back another time?”

  She gave him a haggard smile. “I’d prefer to get this over with as quickly as possible.” She sucked in a deep breath and added, “Ask me your questions.”

  “What was your relationship with Anthony?”

  She lifted her chin and said proudly, “Anthony Rutolo was the love of my life. We had been together twenty-one years, eight months, and twenty-seven days.”

  “Were you his wife?”

  “No. I’m not Catholic, and Anthony would never marry outside his religion.”

  “So you lived together.”

  “Yes.” She saw his curious look and added, “You’re asking yourself how a woman like me could be with a man like Anthony.”

  “Anthony wasn’t exactly in the Social Register.”

  “And neither am I, Lieutenant. I can tell you that Anthony was the kindest, most loving man I’ve ever known. He never discussed his business with me, and I never asked him questions.”

  “Certainly you were aware of what his business was?”

  “Yes, I knew. But that didn’t matter to me.”

  “In all the years you were together, he never once discussed his business with you?”

  She shook her head emphatically. “Never. Anthony went to great lengths to keep me away from all that.”

  Stuart’s eyes roamed the room. “Did he live here with you?”

  “Of course.”

  “This is a long way from where he worked. He didn’t drive, so how did he get back and forth?”

  “Taxis and car service. Sometimes I would get a driver for my car and send him to pick Anthony up.”

  “You don’t drive?”

  “I do. But I hate driving.”

  “Everyone at the church appeared to know you.”

  He watched her expression carefully to see if she was telling him the whole truth.

  “Anthony was a sentimental man. Every C
hristmas we would have his three closest friends over for dinner. And Christmas Eve we would visit his friends in a bar on Fourth Avenue. From the outside it looked like an ordinary bar and grill, but the inside was decorated like a winter wonderland, with ornaments from all over the world.”

  He started to ask the names of Anthony’s friends but decided to play a different card. “Is that where you met Frank Marino and Danny Lupo?”

  “Yes.” She didn’t seem at all surprised by the question.

  “Do you know what they do for a living?”

  “No, I don’t.”

  “Was the name of the bar the Kings Inn?”

  “Yes. How did you know that?”

  “It’s a major wiseguy hangout. You do know what a wiseguy is?”

  “Of course I do.”

  “And do you also know that they murder people?”

  Her eyes fell to her hands. “Yes. But Anthony never did any of that.”

  “Are you sure of that?” Stuart had a hard time buying this rosy version of the life and works of Beansy Rutolo.

  “I am. The man I loved could never take another human being’s life.” She balled up her handkerchief, leaned forward, and said, “I’m going to tell you something that I’ve never told anyone, not even Anthony. I’m the child of Holocaust survivors. After the war my parents went to Italy to await their visas to come to the United States. While they were there, my mother fell in love with an Italian doctor. He was the real love of her life. When my parents’ visas came through, my mother had to make a decision. She did the correct thing and came with my father to this country. Thirty years later, when my father was on his deathbed, he looked up at my mother and said, ‘Now you can go back to Italy.’ I swore that I would never make the same mistake my mother made. Anthony was my love, and I don’t regret one moment of our life together.” She sucked in a breath and said, “I’m very tired. Please leave now.”

  “Of course.” He got up.

  She walked with him to the door. In the foyer he turned to her and asked, “Did Anthony ever introduce you to any policemen?”