THE ROUND WAS a .357 Magnum. We got a priority in processing at the National Crime Information Center because the round had been recovered from a homicide scene. The weapon that had probably killed McVane was an electronic match with six other bullets fired from the same weapon over a seven-year peri
od, most recently in Algiers, where two black men were shot to death in the kitchen of a rented house full of crack paraphernalia.
I spent the next three days talking to cops in Orleans Parish, Tampa, Key West, Fort Lauderdale, and New York. Other than the two crack dealers, the victims were a retired button man from Yonkers, a bartender who shilled for a craps game, a serial pedophile, and a shylock. The obvious common denominator in the victims was criminality. But if these were Mob-connected hits, the usual pattern wasn’t there. Button men (so known because they pushed the “off” button on their victims) didn’t use the same weapon repeatedly. They also favored a smaller-caliber handgun, because the bullet slowed more quickly and bounced around inside the brain pan. Their classic execution featured one round through the forehead, one in the mouth, and one in the ear. Our shooter seemed spontaneous and left wounds all over the map. He had a way of painting the walls in public, too, without anyone ever getting a good description of him.
For example: He walked into a clam house in Brooklyn and fired point-blank into the face of an infamous gangster who was having a midnight dinner with a beloved television actor. The shooter was so nondescript that no one could remember a distinguishing detail about him. One diner said the man picked up a raw oyster on the way out and sucked it from the shell, and apologized to the diner for disturbing his meal.
I went into Helen’s office and told her everything I had.
“This sounds like either an East Coast hitter or a maniac,” she said.
“Or both.”
“What’s he doing here?” she said.
“At least we know it probably wasn’t about McVane. But that means the real target is still out there.”
“Nightingale?”
“That would be my bet.”
“You said Nightingale blew you off.”
“His sister didn’t. She thinks Tony Nemo wants to take Jimmy off the board because Jimmy wants to produce Levon Broussard’s work.”
“No wonder most films hurt my eyeballs,” she said. She spun her ballpoint on her desk pad.
“Something else bothering you?”
“The prosecutor’s office. Lala Segretti thinks you should retire.” She kept her gaze straight ahead, not looking at me. “He says the Dartez homicide and investigation will always be a subject of scandal.”
“What’s your opinion?”
“If you go, I go, too.”
“Nobody got me drunk except me.”
“The DA has got his head up his ass on this one,” she said.
“You’re a loyal friend, Helen.”
She massaged the back of her neck with both hands, her breasts swelling against her shirt. “And shit goes great with vanilla ice cream.”
I didn’t try to think through that last one.
I LOOKED AT the array of notes, file folders, and photos on my desk. I had cases that had been open fifteen years. Most of them would never be solved. I knew inmates who were innocent of the crimes they were in for but guilty of far more serious ones, including homicides. I knew scores of politicians who sold out their constituencies on a daily basis and were lauded for it. Every cop has a private ulcer about a particular child molester who skates, a victim of sexual assault who’s hung out to dry by a misogynistic judge, a greaseball who plays the role of a family man while he extorts and ruins small businessmen, or a racist cop whose behavior puts shooters on rooftops.
How do you handle it when your anger brims over the edge of the pot? You use the shortened version of the Serenity Prayer, which is “Fuck it.” Like Voltaire’s Candide tending his own garden or the British infantry going up the Khyber Pass one bloody foot at a time, you do your job, and you grin and walk through the cannon smoke, and you just keep saying fuck it. You also have faith in your own convictions and never let the naysayers and those who are masters at inculcating self-doubt hold sway in your life. “Fuck it” is not profanity. “Fuck it” is a sonnet.
In this instance, that meant I had to trust my own perceptions about several open cases I believed were connected. At the bottom of the pyramid were the Jeff Davis Eight. The cultural background was prostitution and narcotics and white slavery. Kevin Penny was a player. He had ties with the Nightingale family, of what kind I wasn’t sure. A witness put Penny at the site of the Dartez murder. Why was he there? Had he been sent to follow me and do me harm? Probably, although I had gone to his trailer later and he had seemed unsure of my identity, which meant he had never gotten a good look at me the night Dartez was killed.
Then there was Spade Labiche. Labiche had been seen with Penny right before the Dartez killing. His prints were also in Penny’s trailer, though he claimed he had been there to interview Penny and for no other reason.
In the mix were Tony Nine Ball, Jimmy and Emmeline Nightingale, and Levon and Rowena Broussard, and finally, the attack upon Rowena by Jimmy.
Strangely enough, I believed the key lay in the torture death of Penny and the rape of Rowena. The question marks in both cases seemed endless. Who would put Penny through such an ordeal? My guess was Tony Nine Ball. Sherry Picard had said Penny was a federal informant. In his younger years, Tony’s logo was a bloody baseball bat. But Tony’s victims were either left alive or disappeared altogether. They weren’t left at a crime scene with toggle bolts drilled through their limbs.
Another issue was Levon’s apparent lack of interest in prosecuting Jimmy Nightingale, the same man whose face he’d spat into. Levon was the kind of idealist you admired but also feared. He seemed to have the inclinations of a pacifist but owned a large number of firearms. He despised dictators and demagogues but revered his ancestors in gray who were authoritarian in their own fashion. He had been a leftist in Latin America, then traveled to Cuba and been picked up by the secret police and confined for a month in a hellish place filled with cockroaches and lice and feces. In my opinion, Levon and Jimmy Nightingale were opposite sides of the same coin. Neither understood himself. And without knowing it, both of them probably served an agenda created for them by someone else, perhaps long dead.