St. Albans Fire

Chapter 12

Lil Farber was driving, with Joe up front and Willy in the center of the back seat, sitting slightly hunched forward. They were in Farber’s unmarked SUV, heading toward downtown Newark.

“How long you been a cop?” Joe asked conversationally, looking out the window at what he believed was one of the most unremarkable urban centers he’d ever visited. It didn’t always look bad or blighted, necessarily, barring the occasional weed-choked, empty city block. Mostly, it seemed like a jumble of spare parts borrowed from other communities-a little suburbia here, a little small-town America there, some anonymous big-city bits elsewhere. There was no particular rhyme or reason to it, and no overriding sense of identity. The only common thread Joe could see-in this section of town, at least-was the occasional glimpse of the New York skyline down several of the eastern-pointing streets-hovering enormously on the horizon like a supertanker bearing down, albeit far enough off to be only startling.

“Twenty-two years,” she answered. “I came into the prosecutor’s office straight out of college.” She laughed and glanced at him to raise her eyebrows. “Did it for the money, if you can believe that. It was the best job offer I had going.”

“Jesus,” Willy commented. “What else were you looking at? Panhandler?”

“I can’t complain,” she said, ignoring him. “It’s interesting work, and I have a business on the side. A lot of us do. I’m part owner of a restaurant.”

“There it is,” Willy exclaimed suddenly, his pointing finger appearing between the two of them. “I told you.”

Joe looked ahead and saw looming into view an enormous rusty metal bottle perched on stilts atop an abandoned building.

“Hoffman bottling plant originally,” Farber explained. “Then the Pabst brewery, before it went out of business. People never paid much attention that the beer bottle started out as a soda bottle.”

“Close as Newark comes to a landmark,” Willy repeated. “Like the Eiffel Tower.”

Farber glanced over her shoulder quickly. “You’re quite the asshole, aren’t you?”

“One of our best,” Joe agreed.

“I’m taking you on a small side trip,” Farber explained, driving between two cemeteries, one Jewish, the other Catholic. “The Newark most people know is actually several municipalities, of which Newark’s just one. They all fit together like puzzle pieces. There’s Irvington, Orange-where we just came from-Belleville, Bloomfield, Glen Ridge, Nutley, and a few others. They all have their own governments, police and fire departments. New Jersey is one of the most heavily bureaucratic states around, and it’s bloated with patronage and corruption. One reason that bottle stands out like it does is because everybody’s too busy lining their own pockets to care much about civic pride.

“We have a beautiful old courthouse that looks like a palace,” she continued, “built in 1907 for two million bucks. Not a hundred years later, it’s been under renovation for six years, and supposedly the scaffolding cost more to put up than the original building. Tell me someone isn’t making a profit on that one.”

She indicated one of the empty lots that Joe had noticed earlier, and which had been increasing in number as they headed south. “You’ll see those all over Newark. The really big ones were once either factories or public housing buildings, the smaller ones were usually properties that burned down during the ’67 riots, back in the days of ‘Burn, baby, burn.’”

“Forty years ago?” Joe asked, surprised.

“That’s when the city started dying big-time,” Willy added.

“Actually,” their host continued, “it was dying way before then. The riots were just the last spasms. Whatever a town could do wrong, this one did, decade after decade, including taking all its poor and stuffing them like black powder into the biggest collection of public housing projects in the country. Talk about a time bomb. After the riots, of course, they tore them all down. No halfway measures here.”

The neighborhood they were in now had disintegrated into a variation of what Joe had seen in New York’s poorer sections a couple of years earlier. The streets were dirty, cars were abandoned everywhere, building after building was gutted and empty, windows gaping.

Farber waved her hand as if introducing a stage act. “So here’s the latest version: Welcome to Irvington-our current time bomb. With the projects gone, Newark decided the next best move was to throw out its poor. Irvington became the trash barrel. We had a surveillance we were running in Irvington Park a while back. It was broad daylight, middle of the week, but we couldn’t get the job done because we were constantly distracted by all the crime going on around us, some of which was too bad to ignore.”

With theatrical timing, they saw a man bolt from a doorway and run down the sidewalk, pursued by another brandishing a knife. Farber barely gave them a look. The duo vanished into a side alley. Joe glanced back at Willy, who silently shook his head.

“In 1975,” she went on without a pause, “some magazine rated fifty cities in twenty-four categories. Three guesses on who came in dead last by a mile.” She suddenly held up her hand. “Hear that?”

They heard two faint, very distant pops.

“Gunshots. There’re about two killings a week in Irvington.”

She turned a corner and began driving east. “We’ll go check out those car rental records now.”

Willy sat back in his seat and smiled. “Happy you got that out of your system?”

She looked into the rearview mirror at him. “What?”

“City mouse, country mouse?”

She laughed. “All right, so what city do you come from, as if I couldn’t guess?”

“I used to drop by here when I was with the NYPD. It was like visiting a zoo.”

“No argument from me,” she said, still amused at being found out. “So how did you end up in cow country?”

The smile faded from his face, as Joe suspected it might. “Long story,” was all he said.

To her credit, Farber merely quipped, “Then here’s to a happy ending,” before dropping the matter.

The central office of the car rental company was near the intersection of Broad and Market Streets, which Farber told them was Newark’s original settlement site in 1666 and remained the heart of the city to this day.

Joe, however, was once more struck by the whole place’s time-warped aura. To his eye, almost all that was necessary to make this a living snapshot of the 1940s was to replace every vehicle with its sixty year-old equivalent.

Lil Farber took them into a large sandstone office building, still in tour director mode. “This is the flip side of places like Irvington. Old on the outside, jammed with modern electronics on the inside. And talk about ironies: Newark is second only to Hartford in its number of insurance companies. Very high-tech.” She smiled broadly at that, adding, “Not a bad idea, given the number of local claims.”

On the building’s fifth floor, Farber delivered the court-signed paperwork she’d secured before setting out, earning in exchange the attentions of a young woman named Melanie, who studied the subpoena as if it were written in Latin and finally gave all three of them a hapless expression, along with the question “What do you want?”

Joe reached across the counter and tapped the form with his fingertip. “The registration listed there belongs to one of your cars. We want to know who was renting it on the date marked.”

Melanie looked nonplussed. “That’s it?”

“Too much?” Willy said caustically.

Thankfully, she didn’t get it, her eyes on his arm and her smile doing its best. “Oh, no. This shouldn’t be a big deal. I will have to get my supervisor, though.”

The supervisor, a steely-haired man named Philpot, with too little power and too few opportunities to exercise it, wasted half an hour asking questions he wasn’t entitled to have answers to, before finally delivering a copy of the rental contract. As with the motel registration in Vermont, it was signed “S. Corleone.”

Joe showed it to Farber. “That home address do anything for you?” he asked her.

She studied it for a moment. “Yeah. Makes me think of the Hudson River. The street numbers there don’t run that high.”

Joe turned back to the supervisor. “We’ll need the name and address of the employee who handled this contract.”

Philpot rose to his full splendor. “I don’t believe that falls into the purview of your subpoena. We have to protect our people from unwarranted harassment.”

Having reached his limit, Willy shot his hand out, aiming for the man’s throat. Joe saw it coming. He seized Willy’s thick wrist in midair and brought it down with a thump onto the counter.

“What was that?” Philpot stuttered, his eyes wide. “What did he just do?”

Joe leaned forward, making the supervisor tuck in his chin nervously, as if expecting a punch. “Do you have any idea why three cops would come into your office with a court order looking for this information?”

Philpot looked stumped. “A crime?”

“A big one. Do you really want to hinder a murder investigation?”

Without further delay, a printout of the clerk’s name and address was produced.

“Do you have a business card, Mr. Philpot?” Joe asked, handing the printout to Lil.

“Yes. Why?”

“So I can get my boss to write your boss a letter of thanks for your cooperation.”

Looking suspicious, Philpot slowly produced a card from under the counter. Joe took it, smiled, and slipped it into his pocket. “Thank you.”

On the ride down in the elevator, Willy said, “You should’ve let me kill him. Would’ve been faster.”

Back in the car, Lil looked at the employee card and shook her head. “You don’t actually think this person is going to remember renting a car to a guy in a hat weeks ago at the airport, do you? And even if he does, what’s he going to tell us?”

“That had crossed my mind,” Joe admitted.

“Let me try something else,” she offered. “I don’t want to step on any toes, but maybe a quick meeting with the rest of my guys might kick something loose. I keep thinking the hat’ll help. It could be more than just something to keep the cold off, like a trademark. Fedoras aren’t that common anymore.”

Two hours later, Joe and Willy were sitting in a windowless conference room back on the third floor of the task force’s garish building. Around the table were Lil Farber and all five of her investigators, something Joe took as an extraordinary show of professional courtesy, given-as he knew now-the overwhelming size of their workload.

Introductions completed, Joe addressed them: “I want to thank you first off for meeting with us…”

“We just wanted to see what you looked like,” cracked a voice to general laughter.

“… and to thank you also for putting up with my colleague,” Joe continued.

Responding to the general mood, Willy shot them all the bird.

“As you have no doubt discovered by now,” Joe went on, “he’s our token New Yorker. We’ve had him Christ knows how long, and it hasn’t done any good whatsoever.”

“We could’ve told you that,” said another voice.

“The reason we’re here,” Joe kept talking, “other than to give Willy a breath of polluted air, is because we’ve had a few fires in our neck of the woods which may have been started by one of your locals-certainly somebody whose MO is like the one you filed with ATF.”

He began passing out stapled packets of all the relevant information, which he’d generated from a borrowed copier just prior to the meeting. “I’ll give you a few minutes to familiarize yourselves with what we’ve got.”

The room filled with the soft sound of pages being turned over and restless men shifting in uncomfortable seats. They were a seasoned group, with only one still in his twenties, casually dressed in khakis or jeans and clearly at ease with one another. Lil had told him earlier that her most recent member had five years with the unit, and the rest a lot more than that. This was a crucial detail, she’d said, because in a highly computerized world of databases and instant communications, the arson task force was just now getting its case information digitized. As a result, until that process was completed-God knew when-the archival intelligence of the unit would be only as good as the memories of the men around this table. It was a curiously quaint reminder that much of the high-tech razzle-dazzle portrayed on TV and assumed by the public was either downright fiction or only true for certain elite state and federal outfits. Not county cop shops like this one.

Joe waited for the last man to finish before he resumed. “It goes without saying that the evidence linking our torch to yours is pretty skimpy, but we’re hoping against hope that maybe something in what you’ve just read will ring a bell.”

“A man in a hat?” one of them asked.

“A fedora,” Lil responded, coming to Joe’s aid. “I suggested this meeting, thinking one of you might remember something like that. It’s a Humphrey Bogart hat. Real distinctive. Might be a trademark.”

A tall, heavyset man in a T-shirt spoke up. “We’re not trying to bust your chops. And the thing with the chemical squibs and the chips and chasing the fire downstairs does fit our profile, but we don’t have a name, either.” He gave Joe a hapless look. “Maybe the hat is a trademark. We can add it to what we got, but…” He shrugged to show his conclusion.

“Give us more,” another suggested. “He rented a car at the airport, drove up north, rented a room, then what?”

“Looks like he scoped out his targets,” Joe answered him. “Not bothering to dress locally or fit in. Either that, or he thought the hat would act as a disguise, which I guess it did, since that’s all anyone remembers. At one place, he was just seen driving by; at the other, he was on foot.”

“What was he wearing?”

“A short leather coat-another thing that stood out. We tend more toward wool or ski parkas or barn coats. Not a lot of leather.”

There was silence in the room as everyone pondered the unlikeliness of success here. On pure impulse, Joe added, “He registered, both for the car and the motel room, under the name S. Corleone.”

“Sonny Corleone?” asked the heavyset man.

“Presumably.”

The man looked across the table at one of his colleagues. “The Godfather. Who’s the Godfather freak? Talks about that fucking movie all the time.”

“Gino?” was the response.

“That’s it.” The big man smiled and addressed Joe. “Gino Famolare. Used to be an electrician, till he moved up. Now he drives a truck out of the port-a long-haul man. Mob associate. A real Nicky Newark. I never pegged him for a torch, though.”

“Nicky Newark?” Joe asked.

Lil smiled as she explained. “That’s what we call the typical lowbrow Italian hood around here. They’re not made men or Mafia bigwigs. Just small-time players-workingclass Mob, if you like. They have real jobs, live regular lives, but when a favor needs doing, they can be found. We call the female counterpart Connie Cavone-it’s kind of our version of Ken and Barbie.”

Joe’s optimism was guarded. “But there’s no connection linking Famolare to arson?”

The big man didn’t seem concerned. “Not yet. Not directly. But it may not be a big reach. Rog,” he asked another squad member down the table, “remember Vinnie Stazio?”

“What’s not to remember? You’re right. They were real close.”

“Who’s Vinnie Stazio?” Joe asked.

“Big-time local torch,” Rog answered. “A legend. I thought of him when this signature first surfaced. Vinnie used to like glue and a potassium chlorate/sugar mix, too, and he was a real mechanic. Did clever work. For fast timers, he would inject sulfuric acid into Ping-Pong balls and plant ’em in the potassium. Depending on the acid’s concentration and makeup, it would take longer or shorter to melt through and ignite the mix. Amazing work.”

“What happened to him?”

Lil answered that. “Dead. Maybe fifteen years ago, he was shot by a night watchman-an off-duty Newark cop. Shouldn’t have happened. He wasn’t armed. But I guess he ran. Supposedly, he threw something at the cop, who claimed he feared for his life as a result.”

“Yeah, that was a whitewash,” the man named Rog said. “I mean, I don’t want to bust the guy’s balls who shot him. I wasn’t there. But I thought it was bogus he got off without even a loss of pay. Vinnie was at least a pro-always made sure nobody got hurt. I’m not standing up for him, but he was super careful that way.”

“Could Gino have been an apprentice?” Joe asked, his hopes slowly rising.

“It’s possible. The solve rate for arson being so low, if you know what you’re doing, it wouldn’t be surprising we never heard of you. Sure as hell Gino kept the right company if he wanted to learn the trade.”

Lil rose from the table and crossed over to where a computer was perched on a counter along the wall. “Let’s see what central records has on him, just for kicks.”

Instinctively, most of the others got up also and gathered around behind her as she typed in her request. In a couple of minutes, the screen lit up with a photograph and a history. Lil intoned what she read for those behind her and for Willy, who typically hadn’t stirred from his seat.

“Giorgino Ernesto Famolare, born Newark, 1963, middle of five kids. Father was a longshoreman, also connected. Gino was brought up in Silver Lake, attended the local schools, initially trained as an electrician…” She tapped the screen with her finger. “He still lives in the ’hood. Probably brings flowers to his mother, good boy. Two daughters, one teen, one just beyond and in college. Okay… here we go: some teenage stuff-vandalism, petty theft, trespassing. He gets older; here’s a bookmaking rap, transportation of stolen goods. Sounds like he was a runner for the big boys. Then…” She scrolled down the screen. “Nothing. Clean as a whistle.”

She pushed away from the computer, and the group around her returned to their seats. “Just another urban story,” she concluded, sitting down.

“Suggestion,” said Rog. “If you want to find out about somebody, you check out his friends. If we collect every name he was ever busted with and run their records, could be we find him lurking dirty in the background. It would give us a better picture of what he’s been up to, even if he wasn’t the one in cuffs.”

Joe nodded in appreciation. In some police jurisdictions-and clearly this was one-note was made of everyone present at an individual’s arrest, whether those extras were charged with anything or not. It was a useful intelligence tool for exactly this kind of situation. But this was the kind of homework one did on a personal case-not on behalf of some cop from out of town.

“Good idea,” Lil said. “It’ll fall to one of us to do it, though, since these guys don’t know our computers.”

“I can handle it,” Rog said immediately. “Maybe it’ll be worth a free ski pass someday.”

The big man burst out laughing. “You? On skis? I would pay to see that.”

“I would make you,” Rog came back.

“Well,” said Joe, “if not a ski pass, whatever you’d like. Our treat.”

“Yeah,” Willy added. “We’ll show you mud season, ice fishing, and fifteen ways to slide off a road.”

“Willy moonlights for the tourist industry,” Joe explained amid the startled laughter that greeted Kunkle’s comment.

“Okay,” Lil said during the short lull following. “It’s getting late. You two probably want to get settled. You have a place to stay?”

Joe answered that they were all set and gave her the name and number of the motel he’d booked from Brattleboro before setting out, to which one of the men responded, “Too bad. We could’ve put you up in Irvington for a whole lot less.”

Outside Montpelier, Vermont, in a condo overlooking the valley and the town, Gail Zigman sat in her living room admiring how the setting sun slowly abandoned each roof to the coming night, leaving the sparkling gold dome of the capitol building until last.

“How was your trip?” she asked Joe on the phone.

“Strange,” he admitted. “I still have a hard time figuring out what all these millions of people do.”

She laughed. “Don’t feel bad. A lot of them were up here today. The GMO debate is heating up, and the troops are on the march. Everybody under the dome is running around looking for the best political cover they can find. How’re the police down there?”

“Great,” he answered. “They work directly for the prosecutor’s office, which is a little weird, but they’re good people. Incredibly helpful. They pulled our chains a little, doing the city cop, country cop routine, but that was par for the course.”

“Us?” she asked. “Who’d you take with you?”

“Willy. He knows Newark from the old days.”

Gail didn’t respond immediately. Having a thorough dislike of Kunkle, she was hard-pressed to say anything positive.

Joe took advantage of the pause to ask, “What’s the big debate about GMOs anyway? I wouldn’t have thought there’d be much question.”

“Not for me, there’s not,” she agreed. “But the Monsanto, Archer-Daniels-Midland types have done a good job brainwashing my conservative counterparts. They’ve got some powerful allies quoting the corporate scripture chapter and verse and making the organics and traditionalists look like a bunch of Chicken Littles.

“The problem,” she continued, “is that the small operators are right. We can’t compete with Iowa and Kansas, so we better concentrate on turning out specialty products. Ye olde Vermont farmer and the rest. Slap a premium price on everything from milk to sauerkraut and sell it like Ben amp; Jerry’s. It’s about our only trump card and we’re about to give it up. The purchase of GMO seeds in this state has quadrupled in the last three or four years, to a half million pounds.”

Now it was Joe’s turn to remain silent. Politics was of no great interest to him, and not an advisable pursuit in his line of work. Plus, he often felt uncomfortable when Gail climbed onto one of her soapboxes. Her enthusiasm could feel like a steamroller.

As if on cue, she kept going. “I hate it that this entire nation’s agriculture policy caters only to the megafarmers far from New England and is being driven by people who have no thought beyond the bottom line. I mean, everywhere you look, the biotechnology industry lords over both scientific research and regulation, including in Vermont. Our entire food chain is being controlled by a handful of global corporations located as far away from us as they can get.

“Sorry,” she muttered after taking a breath, the vehemence of her outburst echoing in his silence. “Didn’t mean to lecture. I know you hate that.”

“No, no,” he said quickly, embarrassed. “It does sound like things are heating up. Are you getting a lot of flak?”

Gail hesitated. The threatening note she’d received about playing with fire lay on the table by her side, unacted upon but certainly not forgotten. Given her personal history, she didn’t take such gestures lightly. Still, she knew how political debates pushed people to where their passions got the better of them. She hadn’t done anything about the note.

Nor did she mention it to Joe now.

“No more than usual,” she said, and changed the subject.