“He does now,” Pete Strohmeyer Sr. said, stepping silently out of the woods, a flashlight in one hand and a nine millimeter in the other.
Joe Serpe was no prude and he had seen his share of porn, but it was another thing altogether watching his friend’s star turn. The DVD featured Frank Randazzo, several stage props, and not quite a cast of thousands.
It was perverse, but Serpe was glad Marla was there to watch the video with him. If Joe were alone, he might have clicked the DVD off once it confirmed his belief that Frank was being blackmailed. Marla convinced him that it was important to watch the whole thing through to the end. She was right, of course. As difficult as it was for him to watch, Joe understood that he couldn’t afford to miss anything that might help salvage Frank’s life.
As the video progressed, different things came to light. First they noticed that the DVD lacked a soundtrack. Whether this was a purposeful omission or simply a function of sloppy dubbing was impossible to know. Within ten minutes it also became obvious this was not a disc of one encounter, but a compilation of many encounters-a highlight reel, so to speak. As the camera was stationary and the perspective remained constant, it was pretty clear that the camera was hidden and that Frank had no clue he was being taped. Given the stationary nature of the camera and the fact that the top quilt on the bed was always the same, it was a good bet that these trysts not only took place in the same motel, but in the same room. Although Joe couldn’t recall what the bedcovers looked like at the Blue Fountain, he was pretty confident that’s where this had been taped.
The woman in the video had an exotic, almost Asian face and was built not unlike Tina, but with a competent boob job and ink black hair. Both Joe and Marla agreed that she was in her early twenties, twenty-five at the outside. Their encounters had a sort of natural progression. At first there was a sweet discomfort, almost a shyness between them. There was a lot of kissing and stroking. By encounter number four, the kissing was gone and Frank was in her mouth even before his clothes were off. By encounter six, they had run through every position in the known universe and each had gone every place there was to go. By their eighth meeting, the woman had introduced toys, a leather riding crop, and handcuffs into the mix. Initially, Frank seemed very ill at ease, but eventually got into the spirit of things.
Meeting nine featured a third player. She was blond, curvy, tattooed, pierced, and even younger than Frank’s regular. Whereas the black-haired woman’s vibe didn’t scream “prostitute,” Serpe had been a cop too long not to immediately recognize the blond for a working girl. Whether she was a part of the bigger picture or had just been hired by the other woman for the day was difficult to tell, at least initially. Then she did something that gave not only herself away, but the other woman as well.
“Look at that,” Marla yelled, hitting the pause button. “She just looked right at the camera.”
Marla was right. Throughout the DVD to this point, the black-haired woman had displayed amazing restraint by never once peering up to where the camera was hidden. She was so disciplined you could almost believe she didn’t know it was there. Then Blondie slipped.
In a chair half a yard from the bed, only Frank’s bare legs were in the frame. Blondie was on her back, legs spread, arms fully extended, her hands grabbing fistfuls of black hair. Though there was no sound, Blondie’s mouth was wide open in canned ecstacy, giving the performance of a lifetime as Frank’s girl went down on her. Then, without prompting, she turned her head to the right and stared directly into the camera, even squinting. Apparently, the black-haired woman noticed and slid up Blondie’s body. She pulled her hair roughly as she positioned her perfectly waxed self over Blondie’s mouth. As she did, she unconsciously gazed over her left shoulder at the camera. It was all over in a matter of seconds.
Joe felt he was still missing something, that there was a detail up on the screen that part of him knew was there, but that he just couldn’t grasp. His eyes were killing him and his headache was getting worse.
“Shut it off,” he said.
“But it’s not finished. We should watch the-”
“I know, but I need to rest. My head’s killing me.”
Marla shut off the DVD, got Joe some water for his pills, and brought him a cold cloth. He fought sleep, but not for very long.
When she was sure Joe was asleep, Marla restarted the DVD.
Strohmeyer Sr. didn’t mince words. “Drop the gun and start digging.”
Healy did as he was told. Pete Jr. was right about the ground. It was frozen hard and blisters rubbed up on Bob’s palms almost immediately.
“Not there, asshole! Over there, by the other hump.” Healy, leaving his. 38 on the dark forest floor, trudged over to where the first man was crudely buried. “Dad, don’t do-”
“You disappoint me, son. You put everything I’ve worked for at risk. But I’ll mend it. I always do.”
“I didn’t know what to do. Cathy… I was so-”
The father shook his head. “If you had only listened to me, boy, and not taken up with that trash. I told you nothing good would come of it.”
Nothing had. The kid fell silent.
Healy was making very little progress, barely scratching the surface of the frozen earth. He hadn’t said anything in the hope, slim as it was, that the son could persuade his father to stop the killing. It was now pretty clear that wasn’t going to happen.
“You know you’re not going to get away with this.”
Strohmeyer Sr. laughed. “Talk about cliches. I expected more of you, Mr. Healy.”
“Seems everyone’s a disappointment to you.”
The father quickly lost his sense of humor, pulling the nine millimeter’s trigger. The bullet pinged off the shovel blade, knocking it out of Healy’s increasingly raw hands.
“I am an expert shot and quite the hunter. How else do you think I managed to creep up on you out here?”
“Frankly, I don’t give a shit, Strohmeyer. I don’t know how they treat cop killers in Arizona, but they don’t take too kindly to it here.”
“I’ll tell you what I know about cops, Healy. Whether they’re from Sedona or Smithtown, cops hate Internal Affairs. There’s not a cop who will shed a single tear over your obituary. To other cops, men like you are pariahs. They will no more mourn your death than the death of a sewer rat. That’s if they ever find you out here.”
Healy hated to admit, even to himself, that Strohmeyer was not far wrong. Although Internal Affairs personnel were no longer treated like the enemy within, they still weren’t the most popular kids on the block and never would be. Of all people, the only cop who would care about his murder would be Joe Serpe. Now it was Healy who, in spite of everything, was smiling. God, he thought, really did have a rich sense of irony.
Healy’s smile unnerved Pete Sr. “What are you smiling at?”
“You wouldn’t understand.”
He fired a second shot. This one ripped a chunk off the heel of Healy’s right shoe. “Dig faster.” Healy ignored him. “Why’d you follow us tonight?”
“I followed you last night, too. Let us say I was suspicious of you since that night at Jerry’s. Something wasn’t quite right about you. Then I thought back to the incident on Horseblock Road and how it was just too perfect. I also did some checking up on you. You live in Kings Park, nowhere near Farmingville. That, in and of itself, wouldn’t necessarily bother me. We get believers from all over Long Island. But when I debriefed my son about last night and he told me that you seemed more interested in him than in the cause.”
Healy’s hands were bleeding now and he decided the time had come to do something more than dig his own grave. He dropped the shovel.
“Pick it up and start digging,” the father barked.
“No.”
“I am going to kill you, Healy.”
“You okay with that, Pete?” Healy asked the almost forgotten member of the funeral party. “I understand why you killed Jose, here, but me? Are you comfortable with this?”
“Shut up!”
Strohmeyer Sr. uncorked another round, this one taking flesh with it.
“Fuck!” Healy doubled over, grabbing his left ear, but he couldn’t afford to stop now.
“I never did anything to you, kid. You’re having a hard enough time living with the murder you committed already. How you gonna live with this?”
Pete Sr. lined up the killing shot.
