St. Albans Fire

Chapter 17

Lil Farber was sitting at her computer again, this time waiting for a document to appear on the screen. There was a glitch in the system, and things were running slow.

“You boys lay it on thick, don’t you? Connecting Gregory’s brother to a murder you have no clue he’s involved with.”

Willy was dismissive. “We have a clue. We just don’t have the evidence yet, which is why it would be handy if you got that thing working.”

Farber looked at Joe in wonder. “What do you see in this guy? He is such a jerk.”

Joe smiled. “I wouldn’t leave home without him.”

A flicker on the screen drew Farber’s attention. “Here we go. Dante Lagasso. A lieutenant in the Facci family-same outfit as Tony Hands, so there’s a tie-in-usual assortment of activities. Spent half his life behind bars. Loan-sharking, assault, grand larceny… ouch-vehicular manslaughter; wonder what that was about? Bunch of other stuff, including fraud and blackmail. Let’s see… ‘Associates.’ What’ve we got here? Apparently, he once ordered a warehouse burned down after the owner couldn’t pay him back.”

Farber stopped to laugh. “Unbelievable. A note here says that the arson had all the hallmarks of Vinnie Stazio, except that Stazio was already dead. God-what’s not in one file, of course, shows up in the next. All the arson information we were looking for yesterday is in the Organized Crime records. Tell me that makes sense. Damn, we have got to get this crap into one database. Drives me crazy.”

“What else did you find?” Willy asked, ignoring her woes.

“Suspicion was the job was done by a student of Stazio’s,” she continued reading. “Possibly Gino Famolare. Jesus-right there in black and white. God knows where else in this pile of crap his name might be lurking.” She slapped the computer with the flat of her hand and sat back to look at them. “Do you know, nine times out of ten, I get more from Google than I do out of our own files?”

Willy gave vent to some frustrations of his own. “Bet neither one of them can tell you Gino has a girlfriend he keeps Down Neck.” Joe winced. Even for Willy, this was clumsy.

Farber frowned. “How do you know that?”

“We hayseeds followed him right to her.”

She leaned forward and switched the computer off, a telling gesture, to Joe’s mind. The spirit of cooperation was now officially in disrepair.

“Meaning you staked him out?” she asked icily.

Willy was unrepentant. “You had zilch. Patted us on the ass and said we didn’t know how things were done in the big city, so bye-bye and we’ll let ya know when somethin’ comes up. Well, so much for that. You can’t even get your computer to work, and we got a fresh angle on your guy in one afternoon. You want to know where the candy lives?”

Farber ignored him, standing up to face Gunther. “I guess you wouldn’t mind if I did the same thing in your backyard, right?”

Joe was surprised, embarrassed, and genuinely apologetic. “That’s not the point. It was a breach of protocol, and I’m sorry we didn’t tell you. There was no malice intended, believe me. You’ve been great with us. It was kind of spontaneous,” he concluded lamely. “I guess we got our dander up.”

Farber stared him straight in the face for several long seconds, letting him absorb her irritation.

Willy, watching them both, finally burst out, “Fine. We’ll get the fuck out of Dodge, then.” He moved toward the door.

“Don’t go on my account,” she said quietly, still looking at Joe.

Willy froze, trying to interpret what had just happened. He stayed silent, however, letting his boss find out. Willy was used to having insults hurled at his back. This was something new.

“We’re okay?” Joe asked dubiously, only half believing he had figured her correctly.

She finally broke eye contact and strolled to the window, where she sat on the ledge. “Yeah, you and I are okay. You messed up, you said you’re sorry. We’re both cops. I know how it feels. You, though,” she spoke directly to Willy, “you’re a whole different game. I’m not so sure I’m crazy about having you underfoot anymore.”

It was a Willy moment in the making-a golden opportunity for him to choose from among a variety of sarcastic replies. In fact, his hesitation seemed to Joe only an inability to select one over another. The shock, therefore, was that he chose none.

“Yeah. Sorry,” he said quietly. “You didn’t deserve my shit.”

Farber smiled thinly, but was apparently satisfied, probably knowing by now that even so slight an apology was a miracle. Joe, on the other hand, was less surprised this time, having seen Willy’s flip side before, especially with those he respected. As in his relationship with Sammie, Willy could be protective and obnoxious in side-by-side sentences.

Farber merely headed back to her desk. “All right, then,” she said, sitting down. “Tell me about the girlfriend.”

Gino Famolare was sitting in his den at home when the phone rang.

“Gino. Frank. How you doin’?”

“Good, Frankie. You been behavin’?”

His long-retired older neighbor from three doors down laughed. “God. I hope not. You?”

“No way.”

Frank laughed again. Gino waited. This was not a social call. It wasn’t that kind of friendship. The two men were less pals than they were members of the same fraternity, in this case the nebulous labyrinth of Organized Crime of which Frank, unlike Gino, had actually once been a soldier. The entire neighborhood was populated with people of a vaguely similar background.

“So,” Frankie resumed, “you been on the road?”

“Yeah. Way up north.”

“Lotta snow still up there?”

Gino played along. The sound was off on the TV set, muted since the phone had interrupted, but it was just a string of commercials right now. Nothing he cared about missing.

“Mostly melted-a little bit here and there. You know how it is.”

“Yeah, yeah… You were gone about a week, right?”

Gino well knew that his older neighbor kept an eye on the street. It was one reason he’d never had Peggy over when the wife was out of town. “Yeah. A week.”

“Right.” There was a telling pause as Frank finally decided to stop circling the reason for his call. “You have anyone over today?”

Gino stopped watching the screen before him, suddenly alert. “What’s up, Frankie?”

“It’s not like it’s any of my business, but I just wondered. A couple of guys were waiting for you.”

“How, ‘waiting’?”

Frank chuckled. “Oh, you know the routine. One of ’em naps; the other one keeps his eyes open. Then they switch.”

“What’d they look like?”

“One older, one younger. Couldn’t see all that good, since they stayed in the car, but they kept moving so as not to be too obvious. The younger one looked like he had somethin’ funny goin’ on with his left arm. Can’t be sure about that, though.”

“Cops?”

“That was the weird part,” Frank admitted. “If they were, they were using the dumbest cover I ever saw. I mean, they did look like cops, but the plates were from outta state.”

“You see where from?” Gino was by now sitting forward in his chair, his feet off the ottoman, the TV program abandoned.

“Oh, yeah.” Frank laughed. “That was the other thing. Vermont. They even have cops up there?”

Gino hadn’t given that question much thought until now. “I guess they do. Thanks, Frankie. I owe you one.”

“Nothin’ to it. Happy to help.”

Gino wasn’t quite so sanguine that there was nothing to it. Staring sightlessly at the den’s far wall, he was thinking that if the news of that kid dying in the barn fire was the first shoe dropping, then this little tidbit had to be the second.

And it was a lot closer to home.

“Is that him?” Willy asked, craning to see through the car’s back window.

Lil Farber was sitting in the passenger seat, with access to the outside rearview mirror. She quickly checked the mug shot in her hand. “Santo Massi, John Samuel Gregory’s old playmate, looking a little the worse for wear-as advertised.”

Joe was watching in his own mirror as the man they were discussing, once the swaggering, leather-clad teenage hood of Frederick Gregory’s memories, lurched out of a bar in North Newark and stumbled over to a parking meter where he caught his balance. His pallor was luminescent under the streetlamps, and he was skeleton-thin, but the resemblance between man and photo was unmistakable.

They’d been waiting for him for just under five hours, sitting in the car sharing nary a word, each so inured by years of past stakeouts as to barely notice the dullness any longer, their inbred impatience replaced by something like tranquility.

Most of the day just past had been spent in research and debate at Lil’s office, as they’d struggled to map and make reasonable the relational tangles of this case. In the end, connections had been made, however tenuous in places, between Gino Famolare, his mentor the late Vinnie Stazio, and the now incarcerated Antonio “Tony Hands” Lamano; between Lamano and Dante Lagasso-once the bane of Frederick Gregory’s checkbook-who both worked for the Facci family, and John Samuel Gregory; and finally between Lagasso and Santo Massi, who had been used in the old days by Lagasso for odd jobs, until Massi’s recreational habits with drugs and alcohol made him too unreliable.

But unreliable to the bad guys was hoped to be good news to the investigators, since, among this cast of potential interviewees, there were precious few available to try cracking. Stazio was dead, and Gino, his wife, daughter, and girlfriend couldn’t yet be approached, Lamano was ancient and in a far-off prison, and Lagasso was still active enough to not even acknowledge their existence without legal counsel, much less engage in conversation.

And conversation was what they were after-which made Massi the only possibly rusty link in the criminal chain opposing them. He was broke, he was strung out, he’d been all but cashiered by his pals, but he was still marginally on the inside. Most of all, he was John Gregory’s former co-juvenile delinquent, and-they were hoping-the man John had called for the name of a good arsonist.

To Lil, the best approach was to avoid the very routine she’d outlined in her office: calling the man’s lawyer for a meaningless chat with both of them “downtown.” Instead, she’d urged merely grabbing him off the street and putting the fear of God into him. They had nothing on him, after all, and it was clear from his recent history that they probably never would-several times, already, he’d been taken to area ERs as an overdose and just barely brought back. Santo Massi was drifting into human transparency, on the edge of vanishing altogether. A conversation with the likes of such a creature, she’d reasoned, didn’t need to follow protocol.

Besides, she’d said to counter Joe’s protests, assuming Massi did give them something, no prosecutor in his right mind would ever want him later as a witness. Better to just treat him as an anonymous source and not clog up the process with the living dead.

Joe had argued Massi was so shaky that they could sweat him in Lil’s office and easily get what they wanted. But Willy, unsurprisingly, had sided with Lil. Massi was their only shot, and given how ancient loyalties were often the last to die, they’d doubtless need every advantage they could get to make this one chance succeed. Finally, he’d added, all they were talking about was a conversation. Santo Massi himself was of no interest to them. They just needed to be set on the right track.

Warily, with few other options, Joe had conceded, feeling in the pit of his stomach that this was fundamentally wrong.

His head seemingly cleared enough for him to proceed, Massi tentatively released the parking meter and stood independently for a few moments on the sidewalk, looking dazed and indecisive. Finally, he took a step in their direction, then two, established a vague momentum, and set off on some goal he only possibly recalled.

It wasn’t to be. As he drew abreast of their car, Willy and Lil stepped out, boxing him in.

“Santo?” Willy asked him.

Massi blinked carefully several times, studying the unfamiliar face, his eyes inevitably wandering to the emaciated arm.

He raised his eyebrows. “Whoa-bummer.”

“You Santo?”

Massi scowled theatrically. “Yeah… I mean, what’s it to ya?”

“I want to make sure I give money to the right guy.”

“Money?” The man’s tired, beaten face creased into a smile. “Sure. I’m Santo.”

“Good. Get in the car.” Willy moved aside, as if ushering a woman through a restaurant entrance.

The smile vanished. Both the gesture and the invitation had too many poor connotations.

“You got money for me, I’m ready for it.”

But Willy shook his head good-naturedly. “Do I look like I got money? I gotta take you to him. A buddy from the old days.”

Santo still demurred. “Who?”

“John Gregory. You remember him?”

The man’s pleasure was clear. “Johnny-again? Wow. Good timing. Sure, I remember.” He stooped down to peer into the darkened car. “He in there?”

Before Willy could answer, Massi straightened abruptly, his face watchful. “That’s not Johnny.”

Lil saw her opportunity. From being there merely to impede his retreat, she now stepped forward and placed her hand gently on Massi’s shoulder, making him jump.

“That’s Joe,” she said softly as he spun in her direction, falling against the car.

She looped her arm around his waist to steady him, her face close to his. “Wow. Easy, there.”

“You’re pretty,” he said simply.

“Thank you.” She smiled. “Would you like me to ride in the back with you?”

Willy played along, backing away so that the rear door yawned open invitingly. Lil slid her hand up Massi’s back, lightly massaging his neck.

“Come on, Santo. I’m starting to get cold in this night air.”

Whatever reserves he was clutching slipped away. “Sorry.”

She steered him into the car, sliding in after him, as Willy slammed the door and got in the front. Unbeknownst to Massi, the door beside him had been disabled, just in case he should want to leave.

“Hey,” Joe said brightly from behind the wheel. “How’re you doin’?”

“Good,” Massi answered cautiously, the claustrophobic reality of being among so many strangers growing again. “Joe, right?”

“You got it.” Joe reached across the seat back and awkwardly extended a hand in greeting. “Glad to meet you.”

The movie in his head now totally off track, Massi shook hands distractedly. “Sure.”

Joe put the car into gear and pulled away from the curb, turning left at the first intersection to head west, as instructed earlier.

“You sure you know Johnny?”

“Yeah,” Lil said comfortingly. “He said to tell you that Vermont was ripe for the picking. That you’re nuts to stick it out here.”

That familiar reference seemed to lessen his anxiety a notch. He smiled broadly. “Nah. He can have it. I’m a city guy. I need the action.”

The three of them were quietly pleased by what they were hearing. John Gregory hadn’t been in Vermont very long, and yet not only had Massi not been surprised to hear of him in that context, but they’d all heard how he said “again” when Johnny’s name had first been mentioned. They seemed to be on the right track.

“Yeah,” Lil followed up. “I know what you mean. I’m kinda that way, too.”

Santo attempted a seductive leer. “I bet. What’d you say your name was?”

“Lil.”

He nodded. “Pretty. Did I say you were pretty, too?”

“You did that, yeah.”

“Is that where we’re going?”

Lil was momentarily nonplussed. “Where?”

“Vermont.”

She and Joe laughed. “That’s a long trip, Santo,” she said. “No-Johnny’s back in town for a visit. To check on you, among other things.”

“Oh-right.” Massi sighed, not unhappily, and rested his head against the seat cushion, sliding down a bit to get comfortable.

“Tired?” Lil asked him.

“A little. How much money are we talking about?”

“I don’t know, but Johnny said he owed you a lot for all the good times you had together.”

Massi smiled and closed his eyes. “Good times.”

“With more to come,” Lil intoned soothingly. She touched Joe on the shoulder and indicated in the mirror for him to take a right onto Bloomfield.

Santo Massi lapsed into sleep, mercifully for Lil, who could only go so far with such small talk. Also, they had a way to go yet, and she’d been slightly nervous about how to keep him adequately entertained during the trip.

They were headed to what her task force squad, and in fact most of the prosecutor’s office, had once called home: the abandoned campus of the Essex County psychiatric hospital, a huge and sprawling ghost town of old brick buildings scattered across hundreds of acres of currently prime, rolling, and ready-to-be-developed real estate.

Fifteen minutes along, she tapped Joe’s shoulder again and murmured, “Take the next driveway to the right.”

It was enough to stir Massi from his slumber. He sat up and blinked groggily out the windows, just as Joe drove them through the campus entrance, immediately losing the commotion of a crowded and bustling Bloomfield Avenue to the contrasting darkness and isolation of the empty hospital grounds.

“Where are we?”

Lil patted his arm. “You never been here? It’s a little bit of country we got right in the city. It’s cool.”

On that level, she was correct. At its peak, the century-old complex was a completely self-contained community, shut off from its environs, with a separate power plant, golf course, swimming pool, fire department, and a layout suggesting a sylvan retreat far from the troubles of the surrounding world. Closed for over a decade, the center hovered between decay and a faintly chilling sense that all its ghosts might still be lingering. This impression was only enhanced by the surrounding blackness, offset but feebly by the moonlight shifting through the trees and the sweep of Joe’s headlights across the peeling, gap-windowed faces of a parade of gloomy buildings.

Understandably, it was enough to fully revive Massi’s earlier suspicions.

“I don’t like this. What is this?”

Willy gave up his earlier soft touch. He turned in his seat, purposefully placed his left arm on the edge of the seat so its ghoulish, sticklike profile was in full relief, and said, “A place for a quiet conversation, far from anyone and anywhere.”

His eyes now wide, Massi looked from one of them to the other. “What do you want? I haven’t done anything. Where’s Johnny?”

“Up ahead,” Lil instructed Joe. “Next one on the left.”

Joe had already driven by some of the larger institutional buildings and was now amid a semicircle of ochre-colored brick homes, set even farther back among the trees. According to Lil, these were the former staff residences where the county had housed the various task force squads in the years immediately following the hospital’s closure. Like some cast-aside movie set, these houses were still endowed with lawns and shrubs and even visiting deer who would emerge from the woods by the dim light of dusk.

But it was also ghostly quiet and empty and looking the worse for wear, and offered to someone with Massi’s darkening imagination only the promise of grim tidings and pain.

He began to twist in his seat. “Who are you guys? What do you want from me?”

“Would you believe we’re cops?” Lil asked, displaying her badge.

If her hopes had been that this would increase his paranoia, it worked.

“No, I would not,” Massi exclaimed, now convinced he’d been kidnapped for the proverbial ride of gangster lore. As the car slid to a stop, he grabbed the door handle and yanked on it several times, his entire body heaving with the effort.

“Let me out. I don’t know anything.”

“We think you do, little man,” Willy argued.

Massi’s eyes welled up. Despite what he’d just been told, his panic was now in control.

“Don’t kill me. Please. I mean, maybe I do know something. I just don’t know what you want. But I wanna help. I really do.”

Lil reached out suddenly and grabbed his flailing wrist, bending it over painfully and freezing him in place. He arched his back and began stuttering, “Ow, ow, ow.”

“Calm down,” she said quietly. “We’re going into that house.”

She worked him backward out of the car and handed him over to Willy, who switched to an armlock as Lil dug the building’s keys out of her pants pocket. Joe killed the engine unhappily and joined the three of them on the front stoop. Even given the success of Lil’s plan so far, he hated being a part of this.

Massi was simply repeating in a small, plaintive voice, “Oh, please, oh, please.”

Lil opened the door and ushered them into a small, dusty hallway, lit only by what moonlight managed to seep through the dirty windows alongside the front entrance. She led the way into a side room and backed off, her job done. This was Joe and Willy’s interrogation. It was time to become merely the escort.

In the filtered half-gloom, Willy steered Massi into the room’s middle and hooked an upright chair with his foot and dragged it over.

He sat Massi down hard in it and stepped back so their quarry could see all three of them standing before him, their faces shrouded in darkness but their body language clear.

Massi was weeping by now, his alcohol-and-drug-racked mind succumbing to the terror of finally being on the receiving end of the kind of interview he’d only nervously witnessed before. His brain filled with the pleas and screams and crying of those memories, he fell from the chair onto his knees and held his clasped hands out to Willy in supplication. “Just tell me what you want. I’ll tell you everything. I swear I will.”

Joe watched him with his throat dry. He’d seen such scenes before, in combat long ago, when military officers applied whatever they deemed necessary to get what they were after. Of course, none of that would happen tonight. Even having lost the argument, he was in fact running this interrogation and was thus guaranteed that all of Massi’s terror would be entirely self-induced. Nevertheless, it was unsettling not only to see this pathetic man’s disintegration but to realize how it stimulated in Joe an unwelcome, unpleasant, but undeniable adrenaline rush. As a far younger man, he’d been more like Willy Kunkle than he liked to admit, and had put people through the wringer simply because he didn’t have the patience to pursue the truth less violently.

For a moment, wrestling with all this, it was all he could do not to leave the room. Instead, he chose to get the whole thing over with as quickly as possible, hoping some rationalization would help later on.

Feeling like a hypocrite, he stepped forward, crouched down, and took Massi’s hands between his own, in a grotesque parody of a priest receiving confession.

“Look at me, Santo,” he said in a quiet voice.

Massi was still switching his attention from Willy to Lil, both of them now standing back to either side of Joe, looking as if they were but one command away from unleashing holy mayhem.

“Look at me,” Joe repeated.

Massi’s eyes briefly settled on Joe’s face.

“You had contact with John Gregory recently. Tell me about that.”

A small crease appeared between Massi’s eyebrows. “Johnny? I haven’t talked to him in years.”

Joe hesitated. Not only had they assumed Santo Massi to have been the most reasonable conduit between John Gregory and Gino Famolare, but he’d all but admitted to seeing Gregory earlier.

Joe tried a more oblique approach, gently releasing Massi’s hands and using his voice to cut through the man’s terror. “But you know what Johnny’s been up to.”

Massi’s expression opened up hopefully. “I know he called Dante for advice.”

Joe relaxed a bit. “Dante Lagasso?”

“Yeah, yeah. Lagasso. I was in the room when Dante told Tito about how Johnny called him up a few weeks ago.”

“What was Johnny after?”

“A torch. Dante finally gave him Gino Famolare, after everybody’d agreed to terms.” Massi was speaking fast, his eyes eager to please.

“And what were those?” Joe asked, feeling the relief that accompanied a long-sought-after reward.

“Forty grand total, with twenty percent going to Dante for making the connection.”

“Isn’t that high?”

“Yeah, but it was an out-of-town job, in unfamiliar territory. It was like an eight-grand surcharge.”

Joe leaned forward on the balls of his feet, getting his face as close as possible to Massi’s and cutting off the latter’s view of the two others. Massi stared into Joe’s eyes, as riveted as if he’d been hypnotized by a snake charmer.

“Was there any explanation,” Joe asked, almost whispering, “why Johnny wanted a torch?”

But here Santo Massi proved a disappointment. “Money?” he asked hopefully.

Joe persisted. “Good guess. How many fires was this contract supposed to cover?”

Massi was clearly confused. “One… I guess. I mean, forty Gs is fat for one, like I said, but it’s cheap if you got more, and Gino isn’t cheap.”

“Do you recall the date of this conversation?”

“Are you kidding?”

Joe let that pass. “Did you meet with, or do you even know, Famolare?”

“No, but he’s kind of famous, if you’re into that kind of thing.”

“Do you know if he was paid for the job?”

“Yeah. But later, I heard Tito say somebody died in it. Tito said Gino would probably be pissed when he heard that, ’cause he’s such a perfectionist.”

“Tito is connected to Gino in some way?”

“He knows him, is all. Tito’s kind of like Dante’s secretary, not that I’d say that to his face.”

“Do you know Tito’s full name?”

Massi looked at him blankly. “No. It’s Tito.”

Joe stood back up and glanced over at Lil and Willy. “I think we’re done here.”

Without comment, they both left the room to return to the car.

Massi stared up at Joe with his eyes wide and pleading again. “What’re you going to do?”

“What we said we were,” Joe answered him, reaching into his pocket and extracting his wallet. “Pay you off and thank you for your time.”

He handed Massi a hundred-dollar bill, more by far than he normally would have paid-a surcharge to assuage his own guilt.

Massi held the money as if he might be asked to read aloud from it. “That’s it?”

Joe had already moved to the door, and now turned back. “What do you mean?”

“You’re not gonna kill me?”

Joe scowled at him, irritated at what the man’s life choices had forced Joe to do to him. “That what you want?”

Massi held up both hands, still holding the bill. “No, no. I’m sorry.”

You are that, Joe thought, wondering if he should even react. Finally, he couldn’t resist. “The way I see it, you’ll kill yourself fast enough anyway.”

Massi nodded. “Yes, sir. Sure will.” After a pause, during which Joe just stared at him, Massi added, “How’m I gonna get home?”

Joe nodded toward the hundred-dollar bill, as disappointed in himself as disgusted at Massi. “Take a cab.”