Counterplay

21

July

Detective Clarke Fairbrother drove slowly down Eden Street in Bar Harbor, Maine, looking for the address he’d located by calling a pal with the NYPD union’s pension fund and asking where they sent retirement checks for former Detective Brian John Bassaline.

He didn’t remember Bassaline, even though they were about the same age and had come on the force about the same time. But that wasn’t all that unusual, they’d worked out of different precincts and Bassaline had mostly stayed with homicide, while he’d spent the bulk of his detective years chasing after the mob-racketeering, vice, drugs, with of course a few murders thrown in.

At last he spotted the house number on a mailbox outside of a light blue cottage near the waterfront. He could see the gray-green waters of the harbor fifty feet beyond the house and a small quay with a sixteen-foot sailboat tied up next to it, but it was difficult to see much farther as the fog left over from the night before had not yet melted away in the morning sun. Getting out of the car, he inhaled deeply, catching the salt air mixed with a slight tinge of fuel oil. Somewhere in the fog a buoy bell tolled. It was peaceful, almost a throwback to a simpler time, and he understood why a former NYPD homicide detective might want to retire to such a spot.

Fairbrother had considered the retirement thing himself. He was eligible, but after his wife, Marge, took sick and passed away a few years back, there was nothing for him at home. They hadn’t been able to have kids, so it was just a big empty house without even the sound of his wife puttering around in some corner. He and Marge had talked about selling their old place in Yonkers when he retired, buying a Winnebago and then traveling around the country, but it wasn’t something he wanted to do by himself.

Trouble was, he didn’t feel like he fit in down at the precinct either. In fact, he felt like a dinosaur with all the new hotshots coming in with their college degrees in “criminal justice” and the newfangled technology and ways of doing things. The officers humored him, but it was clear that they were all just waiting for him to toddle off to the old folks’ home or maybe keel over at his desk.

So he’d jumped at the chance when V. T. Newbury called and asked if he wanted to work in the DAO’s office for his anticorruption unit-with the option of staying on even after the department eventually kicked him out. He hooked up with Ray Guma, a tough, hard-nosed prosecutor he’d done a couple of mob prosecutions with back in the day, to work on cold cases-icing on the cake. Real detective work again.

Still, ol’ Brian has got himself a nice place here, Fairbrother thought as he walked up the path toward the cottage. He was glad to see there were only a couple of stairs to the porch as the arthritis in his hips had been acting up. Reaching the steps, he looked up as a man appeared at the screen door accompanied by a large German shepherd.

A low-throated growl emanated from the dog as the man with him, a pug-ugly archetypical Irish cop with a face as gnarled as the piece of driftwood decorating the front lawn, said, “Whaddya want?” The dog growl even louder.

“If you’re Detective Bassaline, and I’m guessing by the Bronx accent that you are, I’d like to ask you a few questions,” Fairbrother answered, holding up his gold detective badge. “Clarke Fairbrother. I’m working with the DAO.”

“I got nothin’ to say,” Bassaline replied and started to turn around. “Come on, Fred.”

“It’s about the Teresa Stavros case,” Fairbrother continued.

Bassaline hesitated at the door. “I still ain’t interested.”

Fairbrother knew he was losing the battle and decided to take a chance. “I guess not,” Fairbrother retorted, “since you dropped the ball the first time.”

The detective thought perhaps he’d taken too great a chance when Bassaline whirled and snarled, “Who the fuck says that?” The dog picked up on his master’s anger and lunged at the screen door in full-throated roar with his teeth bared.

“Fred, down!” Bassaline commanded. The dog immediately stopped and lay down.

“K-9 unit,” Fairbrother said. “Didn’t know you worked that division.”

Bassaline looked down at his dog with undisguised affection. “I didn’t,” he said. “Fred here is a hero. He took a bullet for his handler, but it made him shy of loud noises…unfit for duty. They were going to put him down. But I heard about it, and there was no way I was going to let them kill one of our own after he’d given himself up for another cop…I didn’t care if he was a dog. That was ten years ago, about when I retired, so we’ve been hanging out together ever since.”

“A man with integrity,” Fairbrother said. “A rare breed these days, which means you didn’t drop the ball on the Stavros case, did you…at least not because you wanted to.”

Bassaline looked at him hard for a moment, but then the look softened. “Nice technique, Detective,” he said and chuckled. “Used it once or twice myself. Get them talking about their dog, or their kids, or their car, then toss ’em a compliment. Well, can’t let that kind of effort go to waste. Come on in and let me buy you a drink.”

Fairbrother looked at his watch. “At ten o’clock in the morning?” he asked.

Bassaline glanced back over his shoulder. “What? An old-time cop who doesn’t drink?” he asked. “What are ya, Mother Teresa?”

“Hardly,” Fairbrother laughed. “But I’ve got a little too much fondness for the bottle, if you know what I mean.” Nearly caused Marge to leave me early in the marriage, he thought, surprised by how the sudden memory caused a pain in his chest. Loving her more than the booze was the only thing that saved me.

“Yeah, I know what you mean,” Bassaline replied. “I just never let it stop me. How long she been gone?”

“Who?”

“Your wife…she passed away,” Bassaline said. “You’re wearing a wedding band, which means you’re not divorced like me-my old lady couldn’t handle my girlfriends, the lovely Miss NYPD and her streetwalking sister, Miss Wild Turkey. So let’s see, you’re past normal retirement age; you walk like someone shoved glass up your ass; and you probably aren’t any more fit for duty than Fred here. But you’re not home tending the garden with your bride in one hand and a Scotch and soda in the other, or on a second honeymoon riding some tour bus around Italy with a bunch of other old fogies. So I figure you for a widower.”

Fairbrother fought back a choking sensation in his throat and swallowed hard. “Pretty good work yourself, Detective,” he said softly. “You know, maybe a snootful just to take the chill off this Maine ‘summer’ air would do the trick.”

Soon the two detectives were sitting in Bassaline’s spartan living room, each with a highball glass filled with ice and WT, and sharing old war stories while Fred slept happily between them. When it was time for the second snootful, Fairbrother turned the conversation to the Stavros case.

“Son of a bitch ought to be rotting in the can,” Bassaline growled, which caused Fred to perk up his ears and a deep rumble to reverberate in his black and tan chest.

“What do you mean?”

“What do you think I mean?” Bassaline said, rolling his eyes. “I wanted the bastard to go down for her murder.”

“What about his alibi-that he was with his mistress? The doorman says they went in and didn’t come back out until morning.”

“Come on…ever hear of a doorman who wouldn’t take a bribe?”

“And the chauffeur…Dante Coletta…he says he saw her alive that night after he dropped off Emil and Miss Bliss.”

Bassaline looked at him over the rim of his glass-the same sort of look Marge used to give him when he was being dense. “You met the chauffeur, right? Real upstanding individual, our Mr. Coletta. Guy’s done more time in the can than out of it. Assault. Rape. Burglary. And those are just the ones he got caught for…besides, I had my own pretty decent witness.”

“Who? Zachary?”

“Zachary? Teresa’s kid?” Bassaline said. “Nah, he was what…five years old? No, I’m talking about the gardener, Jeff Kaplan.”

“What gardener? Jeff who?” Fairbrother asked, racking his brain trying to recall any mention of a gardener in the Stavros file.

“Kaplan,” Bassaline replied. “Teresa Stavros loved roses. She had the whole backyard turned into a rose garden, lots of varieties, some of them rare and difficult to grow, I understand. Anyway, she hired this guy Jeff Kaplan on the advice of the chauffeur who’d done some time with him at Attica.”

“Oh, another con,” Fairbrother said.

“Yeah, but Kaplan was the other side of the coin from Dante Coletta,” Bassaline said. “He was a former boxer from Jersey City, serving ten to twelve for manslaughter; got drunk and killed some guy in a barroom fight. None too bright but really a gentle sort of guy-at least when outside the ring and not boozed up. Anyway, he was sort of a self-taught expert on roses, which he’d grown around some of the prison grounds. Apparently, he and Coletta celled together. Dante got him the job with Teresa Stavros, but I got the impression that something happened and the two didn’t like each other so much anymore.”

“What exactly is he a witness to?”

“I’m getting there,” Bassaline said. “Not that he saw anything about what happened to Teresa Stavros, or so he says. But he told me a few weeks after she went missing that he talked to Teresa Stavros in the late afternoon before she disappeared and she didn’t act like she was planning on running away from home. He knew her marriage wasn’t a happy one; he’d heard them arguing pretty energetically on a couple of occasions, usually about money-she had a lot of it and Emil always seemed broke. But she had her kid and couldn’t have cared less if Emil had his little mistress; in fact, it was probably a relief. But she was also Catholic and wouldn’t divorce the bastard. Anyway, as Kaplan was leaving that afternoon, she stopped him to talk about plans she had for changing the garden that she wanted to begin the next week. That’s when I figured she didn’t just take off.”

“You heard we found her body?” Fairbrother pointed out.

“Yeah, Bar Harbor’s a quaint little place, but I still pick up the Times-saw the story about the hearing,” Bassaline said. “How they going to explain that?”

Fairbrother shrugged. “They haven’t said. I expect we’ll hear at trial.”

“Yeah, well, I figured she was in the backyard,” Bassaline said. “I called Kaplan a few months after she disappeared to see if he could remember anything else, and he was all upset. He’d gone back to work the next week and somebody had messed with some of the rosebushes…. Wasn’t anything you or I would have noticed. In fact, I’d been in the backyard right after she disappeared and, heck, the whole place just looked like a jungle of flowers and bushes to me. But apparently they were some special sort of rose-a hybrid he and Teresa had developed and were going to name after her. He swore they’d been moved.”

Bassaline swirled the ice around in his glass for a moment, then looked up. “You might be right about me dropping the ball on this one-”

“Hey, I was just yankin’ your chain, I didn’t mean nothin’-” Fairbrother started to say.

“Nah, it’s okay, but you’re right also that I didn’t want to,” Bassaline said. “It was enough for me. I wanted to get a search warrant and dig up the yard…even went to my division chief, but he wouldn’t go for it. Gave me a line about how Stavros was a big muckety-muck and we were going to need a whole lot more than some, and I quote here, ‘dim bulb ex-con killer’s opinion about some rosebushes’ before we went to a judge. I pointed out that I thought I had a pretty good circumstantial case. I mean: the woman’s gone, leaves her kid and most of her stuff-except a suitcase and a few clothes, which probably ended up in the ocean, plus her husband’s got a mistress and money problems. All I wanted was to dig up a few rosebushes. But my chief wasn’t going for it, and I might have gotten a little out of hand, called him a fuckin’ ass kisser because this guy Stavros was a big politico. He took me off the case and gave it to some nimrod detective who couldn’t find his ass with both hands. Kaplan got canned, but a month or two later, he calls me and says that he heard from the gardener next door to the Stavros place that they’d ripped out the rose garden and cemented the place over.”

“Why wasn’t this stuff about the gardener in the file?” Fairbrother asked.

Bassaline’s thick brows knitted. “Whaddya mean it’s not in there? It’s all there, including the affidavit I filled out for the search warrant.”

Fairbrother shook his head. “Nothing about a gardener named Jeff Kaplan, no affidavit either.”

Bassaline was quiet for a moment, then nodded. “Well, guess that makes sense considering who they turned the case over to-”

“Who was that?” Fairbrother asked.

“Guy’s been in the news quite a bit lately,” Bassaline answered. “First, last fall when he went down for whackin’ that rap singer and them hookers, which is why I figured he got his comeuppance in prison. Still, got the story taped to my refrigerator.”

“You telling me that the detective who took over this case was Michael-”

“Flanagan,” Bassaline finished the sentence. “Yeah, little holier-than-thou prick, at least that’s how he tried to come off-though there were a lot of rumors floating around the precinct that he was handing out his own brand of justice, him and some other little hyper, self-righteous, religious pricks. Didn’t surprise me at all that he was workin’ for that a-hole Andrew Kane.”

Fairbrother’s mind was racing and suddenly clear of the effects of the alcohol. “You know where I can find Kaplan?” he asked.

Bassaline laughed but it wasn’t a pleasant sound. “Yeah, he’s easy to find, but it won’t do you any good. He’s buried in Acacia Cemetery over in Queens.”

“What happened to him?”

“You tell me,” Bassaline said. “Guess Jeff liked to fish for stripers almost as much as he liked his roses. About nine years ago, they found his boat out in the Long Island Sound. His body washed up a few days later. He had a nasty knock on his head, but the ME said he drowned. They ruled it accidental.”

“My ass,” Fairbrother said.

“Got that straight,” Bassaline replied and chugged the remainder of his drink.

Fairbrother stood up and shook Bassaline’s hand. “We may want you to testify about the gardener.”

“Figured as much,” Bassaline said. “Tell you the truth, that one’s weighed on me for a while. I should have gone over my chief’s head, but I didn’t know Flanagan was dumptrucking the case or even that he was dirty…not until that stuff with Kane went down.”