The Silver Chariot Killer. Richard A. Lupoff
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Pax Americana on the world and on the country. Congressman Amoroso’s rival was the mayor of the upstate community of Newburgh Heights. The rival’s name was Oliver Shea. If Lindsey had barely heard of Amoroso before coming to New York, he was positive he’d never heard of Oliver Shea.
Amoroso responded to Shea’s charge by stating that a return to the age of the Pax Romana would mean the salvation of American civilization.
Lindsey laid the newspaper back on the hard composition bench. He watched a couple of uniformed cops drag a pair of women past. If these were hookers they were cut from a different cloth than Julia Roberts or the whores-with-hearts-of-gold who turned up so often on Barney Miller reruns. Lindsey opened the paper again and leafed through it searching for coverage of the dual murder of Cletus Berry and Frankie Fulton.
He found the killings mentioned in a roundup piece on crime in the city. The article quoted Marcie Sokolov to the effect that the death of Frankie Fulton was one just more gang-related execution. Sokolov didn’t say as much, but Lindsey got the feeling that she was perfectly happy to see mobsters removing one another from circulation. Berry’s death was more puzzling, but Sokolov implied that even a solid citizen such as Cletus Berry seemed to be, could get mixed up with the wrong type and find himself in big trouble.
The civilian receptionist caught Lindsey’s attention with a shrill whistle and a sharp, “Hey, you!” Lindsey dropped his newspaper. “Hey, help us keep this place tidy, willya?” the receptionist complained. “Upstairs, third floor, just ask for Sokolov. Here, don’t forget to wear this visitor’s badge.”
Lindsey folded his Times neatly and left it on the bench.
Detective Sokolov’s office wasn’t an office at all, but a desk in a noisy bullpen. Marcie Sokolov was a petite woman with glossy black hair, an olive complexion and sharp features. She was wearing a pale blue blouse and a patterned pull-over sweater. Her detective’s badge was pinned to the sweater; beside it, she wore a plastic Santa face. Instead of eyes, Santa possessed green micro-lights that flashed on and off at random.
Sokolov put down a heavy coffee cup and stood up when Lindsey approached her desk, and extended her hand. She had a hard grip, gave Lindsey’s hand a single tug up-and-down, and released his hand.
“I suppose you have ID.”
He nodded and showed Sokolov his driver’s license and I.S. credentials.
“You related to the mayor?”
“No.” He shook his head.
“What’s wrong with Zissler? How come they sent you out here from Denver? Where is that, Colorado, right? I always wanted to see the Wild West, since I was a little kid and I watched those Gunsmoke reruns and the rest of the westerns.”
Lindsey stood uncomfortably.
“Take a load off.” Sokolov pointed to a hard chair.
Lindsey cleared his throat. “Mr. Zissler comes from our Manhattan East office. He has his other duties. I’m from SPUDS—Special Projects Unit/Detached Status. Cletus Berry was part of SPUDS. He was my friend. I wanted to do what I could do.”
Sokolov held her face pointed downward, looked up at Lindsey with great dark eyes beneath jet black eyebrows. “When a man’s partner is killed he’s supposed to do something about it,” she said.
Lindsey said, “That’s right.” He recognized the line but didn’t say anything else.
“I told you on the phone, Mr. Lindsey, this is a matter for law enforcement. We have something like 16,000 police officers in New York. Hundreds of detectives. Evidence technicians. Laboratory analysts. The DA’s office. Prosecutors and courts and jails. This city spends a fortune on law enforcement.”
Lindsey waited.
Sokolov frowned. “What makes you think you can do anything we can’t do?”
“When a man’s partner is killed,” Lindsey repeated Sokolov’s line. “Doesn’t Bogie say that?”
“Maltese Falcon, by Dashiell Hammett, Sam Spade speaking to Brigid O’Shaughnessy.”
“The line is in the movie, too.”
“I know that. And it’s true. My partner is out on a bust. If anything happened—” she paused “—I’d do something about it, you can bet on that. But then it would be bye-bye, Roscoe, and I’d have to get myself another partner. Life is hard, cowboy.” She picked up a folder and laid it down again. Lindsey was surprised to see that she had sharply pointed, scarlet-painted fingernails. Somehow he’d expected her to trim them short and avoid nail polish. Come to think of it, she was wearing lipstick, too, the same color as her nails.
“Okay,” she said, “talk to me. What do you need to know? What can you give me that I don’t have already?”
Lindsey heard a slight scuffle and looked up. A young man in an immaculate three-piece suit and what looked like a hundred-dollar haircut was approaching with a scruffy-looking older man in a torn sweatshirt and faded jeans. The scruffy man had a badge pinned to his sweatshirt. The younger man was handcuffed.
As they passed Detective Sokolov’s desk, Sokolov grinned at them. The scruffy man said, “Yowza, Mama,” and Sokolov said, “Cat’s pajamas. Congratulations, Roscoe.” To Lindsey she said, “Speak of the devil.”
Lindsey said, “Moe Zissler put me up at Cletus Berry’s place.”
“His apartment? With his family?”
“No. His office. On 58th Street. His little place. There’s a futon there and a microwave.”
“Yeah. In the old days it would have been an army cot and a hotplate. What else is different?”
“Well, don’t you think there might be evidence there? I mean, the man is killed. You’re supposed to be detectives down here. There wasn’t even crime scene tape on the place.”
“It wasn’t a crime scene, now was it?” Sokolov spread her hands as if she couldn’t understand Lindsey’s needing to have this explained. “Berry was killed in Hell’s Kitchen. Look, Mr. Colorado, I’ll make a deal with you. I won’t sell life insurance and you don’t try and solve homicides.”
“You don’t get it.” Lindsey said. “Somebody murdered Cletus Berry and—”
“For the last time, what do you think he was doing in an alleyway with Frankie Fulton, sneaking a little kiss?”
Lindsey made a small shrug.
“I don’t know either,” Sokolov furnished. “But you can bet it was nothing he’d want to tell his scoutmaster about. People who are clean don’t get mixed up with the likes of Frankie Fulton. I’d like to know what it was all about, and I expect to find out. All in good time.”
“Then how come you didn’t—”
“—seal off Berry’s little pad?” Sokolov grinned. Lindsey thought, she has pretty teeth, dear. She said, “We were in there by noon yesterday. I was there myself. We turned up nothing. Nada. Nicht.”
Lindsey said, “Oh.”
“That’s why there was no tape. We rifled his file cabinet. Nothing. We peeked in his computer. Looks like routine insurance matters to me. In fact, you might want to take a gander yourself and see if there’s anything strikes you funny. Give me a call if there is.”
She stood up.
“Wait a minute,” Lindsey stopped her. “Did you have a search warrant? How did you get in there?”
Sokolov looked annoyed. “We didn’t have a warrant and we didn’t need a warrant. Your Mr. Zissler kindly informed us that your company pays the rent on Berry’s little nest. Zissler has a key and he let us in. Is that okay with you?”
Lindsey felt the anger he’d been building for Sokolov, drain from him. Reluctantly, he nodded.
“Now,