Morgan completely. They believed he may have hired someone to kill his wife. They created a composite sketch of the suspect and began a citywide manhunt for the killer. A few weeks later, police tailed Morgan to a meeting at a diner in Chelsea with Vinny “The Blade” Silvera, a killer known to have connections to the mob. Later that night, Silvera was brought in for questioning, but wouldn’t confess to anything. Morgan was arrested separately. Under heavy interrogation, Morgan – who had his own business links to organized crime – was told that Silvera had confessed and then Morgan, falling for the ploy, promptly gave a taped confession, implicating Silvera. Both Morgan and Silvera were tried and sentenced. A few months later, Morgan was found beaten to death in a bathroom on Riker’s Island.
Of course there were many obvious differences between Alexis Morgan’s murder and the recent murders of the two women in the East Seventy-fourth Street townhouse, but there were many similarities as well. In both cases, robbery was the apparent motive. In both cases, the victims had been killed brutally, as if murder was the sole intention. And in both cases the husbands had convenient airtight alibis.
Kenneth Simmons, Detective Investigator at the 19th Precinct, had had nothing to do with the Alexis Morgan case. He was only in his second year on the force in 1989 and he was still spending most of his time doing clerical work. But, like everyone else who lived in the city at that time, he had followed the details of the case closely in the news. Several years later, at a promotion ceremony at One Police Plaza, he met Lieutenant Anthony Santana, who had broken the case, and Santana filled him in on many of the details. In particular, Kenneth recalled how Santana had told him that he would have broken the case much sooner if it weren’t for all the media hype. “It was like a zoo,” Santana said. “The suspects always knew they were being watched twenty-four hours a day.” He believed that if Morgan didn’t know he was being watched, he would have led them to Silvera much sooner. Santana said, “You can’t shoot a deer when he hears your footsteps, you gotta sneak up on the fuck, know what I’m saying?”
Kenneth knew.
While he wasn’t going to rule out any possibility, Kenneth was ninety percent certain that the townhouse murders were Alexis Morgan all over again. Max Fisher had hired somebody to kill his wife and Stacy Goldenberg was just in the wrong place at the wrong time. When he interviewed Max at the house he had a feeling Max was holding out on him and Kenneth’s detective instincts were rarely wrong. But he also knew that the important thing was not to press him. Like Santana said – you can’t let them hear your footsteps.
Kenneth was hoping that the townhouse case would be his big case, the one that comes along once in a detective’s life. Solving the murders of two white women would also be great P.R. and could lead to a promotion to Sergeant or Lieutenant in a couple of years. Kenneth had been married for eight years and five years ago had had a baby son with Down Syndrome. The baby’s condition had near destroyed his wife. And people’s comments like Mongoloid Retard Damaged goods Handicapped had ignited a rage in Kenneth that simmered close to the surface every waking moment. He was searching for an outlet to vent and Max Fisher was going to be it. He hated the prick anyway, with his freaking designer suits, fake hair, smarmy attitude, and that collection of classical music. Kenneth was a closet opera buff – not a fact you advertised as a New York City cop – but when he saw Fisher’s classical collection he knew right away that the man was full of shit. He had all the big names out, like he was trying to impress, but it was obvious he had no true respect for the music.
And what was up with that navy tracksuit he’d been wearing during the first interview, acting like he thought it made him look all that? Kenneth wanted to put the man in another kind of suit – an orange one.
Fisher was going to be Kenneth’s ticket to a promotion all right. His goal when he came on the force was to make Lieutenant before he was forty and to start collecting his pension by the time he was forty-five. He was thirty-nine now, so time was running out. He already had a time-share at a condo on the Jersey shore, but he couldn’t wait until he was retired, and could spend all his days on the golf course.
Two days after the murders, Kenneth and his partner, Detective Louis Ortiz, were in Kenneth’s office. Louis said, “Gluckman from Ballistics just called. They ran the bullets and shells through Bulletproof and Brasscatcher and came up dry.”
Kenneth finished a long sip of coffee, said, “But they still say it was a. 38, right?”
“Yeah, but get this – they think it was a Cold Lady. 38. Our killer wouldn’t be too smart if he bought a broad’s gun on the street.”
“Unless the killer is a broad.”
“You really think so?”
“I doubt it sincerely. But I think the guy might’ve fucked up on purpose – sets the alarm and buys the pussy gun because he wants to give us a lot to think about.”
“You really think that’s what happened?”
“You know what I think. The job was sloppy – the guy who did it wasn’t a pro. He was a friend or someone Fisher had met. We got any priors with this gun?”
“ Nada so far.”
“Any word on the street?”
“They’ve been debriefing everybody they bring in, all Manhattan precincts, but so far nothing. Nothing from Forensics either. They said the women died somewhere between five-thirty and seven-thirty – probably closer to five-thirty, and both right around the same time. Nothing to go on with the blood either – it all came from the victims. The coroner also said the perp liked what he did. Some of the wounds were unnecessary, the victims were already dead. He called it overkill.”
“And Fisher’s alibi?”
“Rock-fucking-solid. A stripper remembered him – said she was giving him a lap dance around that time. Gave me her business card, too, by the way. She said she likes giving freebies to cops. You should’ve seen his friend, the client he was ‘entertaining.’ The guy was shitting bricks, man. He was like, ‘You gotta promise me – this won’t go back to my wife, right? This won’t go back to her, will it?’ Man, and I thought I was p-whipped.” Then, smiling, he added, “But maybe we’ll get lucky and get some DNA off the turd the shooter left.”
Kenneth got up from his desk and stretched. He’d helped his wife move some furniture last night and he’d thrown his damn back out. He said, “Let’s give it a couple of days – see what happens. At least the media isn’t jumping all over this case the way I thought they would. Gives us a little more room.”
“Yeah,” Louis said. “It’s lucky that crazy bitch set her kids on fire in Brooklyn.”
“Hey, I’ll take a break anyplace I can get it.” Then Kenneth, rocking his hips to keep his back loose, added, “We still got one big problem – motive. Why did Max Fisher want his wife dead?”
“Wild guess – she was fucking some other guy.”
“That’s the obvious answer, so where’s the other guy? And how come none of her friends or relatives ever heard her talking about a lover? I’m telling you, there’s something about this case that just doesn’t fit. The answer’s out there – we just gotta find it.”
As he always did when he was distracted, or when he was angry or frustrated about something, Kenneth touched the gold pin in his lapel. It showed two hands reaching out to each other, never quite touching and looking like they never would. It was the symbol for Down Syndrome, and one night on CNN he was thrilled to see Bill Clinton on there wearing the pin. Kenneth had done a little Google search, and discovered the pin had been given to Clinton by some obscure mystery writer. When he told his wife all she could say was, “I don’t read mysteries.”
Kenneth looked up, saw Louis watching him playing with the pin.
“You really wanna nail this motherfucker, don’t you?” Louis said.
“Yeah, I really do,” Kenneth said.
The next few days brought a couple of new developments. It was discovered that Max Fisher had made several withdrawals from his bank accounts the few days before the murders, but it only added up to several thousand dollars – something worth thinking about, but it wasn’t enough money to prove that he had hired a hit man. Ballistics’ Brasscatcher database determined that the Lady Colt. 38 may have been the same gun used in the unsolved homicide of the owner of a shoe store in Queens a year and a half ago. At first, Kenneth thought this could be the big break, then he found out that Brasscatcher couldn’t be one hundred percent about the match. And, even if the same gun was used in both crimes, it didn’t mean that the gun hadn’t changed hands on the street one or more times since the Queens murder. It was suggested that the Boyos, who had a front in the Bowery, were selling these guns on the street but it was almost impossible to pin anything on them. Worse, people liked them, because everyone had seen In The Name Of The Father and thought that’s the way it really was. Trying to arrest an IRA guy was like trying to arrest a Mafia guy, you were messing with the public’s romantic notions.
