Triple Threat

“Maybe there’d be no way to recover the body, even if I find it. Maybe it was… let’s say disrespected when it was disposed of.”

Carmel had not considered this, he could tell. Clients rarely did. But she said, “I want to say a prayer at her grave, wherever it is. I don’t care about anything else.”

Caruso nodded and pulled a retainer agreement from his credenza. They both signed it. Also, on whim, he penned in a discounted hourly rate. He’d seen pictures of her three children when she’d opened her purse to get her driver’s license number for the agreement. They were teenagers and the parents were surely facing the horror of college expenses.

You’re a goddamn softy, he told himself.

“All right,” he said to her. “Let me keep these and I’ll get to work. Give me your home and mobile numbers.”

A hesitation. “Email please. Only email.” She wrote it down.

“Sure. Not call?”

“No, please don’t. See, I mentioned to my husband I was thinking about doing this and he said it wasn’t a good idea.”

“Why?”

She nodded at the news clippings. “It’s in there somewhere. There was a man maybe working for the Westerfields, the police think. Daniel’s worried he’d find out if we started looking for the body. He’s probably dangerous.”

Glad you mentioned it, Caruso thought wryly. “Okay, I’ll email.” He rose.

Carmel Rodriguez stepped forward and actually hugged him, tears in her eyes.

Caruso mentally bumped his fee down another twenty-five, just to buy her a little more of his time.

When she’d gone he booted up the iPad just to see what he’d missed sportswise. The match was over. Senegal had won five zip.

Five?

A BBC announcer, beset by very un-BBC enthusiasm, was gushing, “Some of the most spectacular scoring I have ever seen in all my years—”

Caruso shut the device off. He pulled the stack of clippings closer, to take more notes—and to read up in particular on the Westerfields’ possible accomplice.

He was reflecting that in all his years as a privately investigating security consultant, he’d been in one pushing match that lasted ten seconds. Not one real fight. Caruso did have a license to carry a pistol and he owned one but he hadn’t touched his in about five years. He believed the bullets had turned green.

He wondered if he would in fact be in danger.

Then decided, so be it. Game had to come with a little risk. Otherwise it wasn’t Game.

# # #

Senior NYPD detective Lon Sellitto dropped into his chair in his Major Cases office, One Police Plaza. Dropped, not sat. Rumpled—the adjective applied to both the gray suit and the human it encased—he looked with longing affection at a large bag from Baja Express he’d set on his excessively cluttered desk. Then at his visitor. “You want a taco?”

“No, thanks,” Caruso said.

The portly cop said, “I don’t get the cheese or the beans. It cuts the calories way down.”

Eddie Caruso had known Sellitto for years. The detective was an all right guy, who didn’t bust the chops of private cops, as long as they didn’t throw their weight around and sneak behind the back of the real Boys in Blue. Caruso didn’t. He was respectful.

But not sycophantic.

“You’ll guarantee that?” Caruso asked.

“What?”

“No beans, so you’re not going to fart. I don’t want to be here if you’re gonna fart.”

“I meant I don’t get the refried beans. I get the regular beans, black beans or whatever the hell they are. They’re lot less calories. ‘Fried’ by itself is not a good word when you’re losing weight. ‘Refried’? Think how fucking bad that is. But black beans’re okay. Good fiber, tasty. But, yeah, I fart when I eat ‘em. Like any Tom, Dick and Harry. Everybody does.”

“Can we finish business before you indulge?”

Sellitto nodded at a slim, limp NYPD case file. “We will, ‘cause sorry to say, the quote business ain’t going to take that long. The case is over and done with and it wasn’t much to start with.”

Out the window you could catch a glimpse of the harbor and Governor’s Island. Caruso loved the view down here. He’d thought from time to time about relocating but then figured the only real estate he could afford in this ‘hood would come with a view even worse than his present one in Midtown, which was a few trees and a lot of sunlight, secondhand--bounced off that Times Square high-rise.

The detective shoved the file Caruso’s way. The Sarah Lieberman homicide investigation. “That was one fucked-up twosome, the perps.” Sellitto winced. “They ick me out. Mother and son, with one bed in the townhouse. Think about it.”

Caruso would rather not.

Sellitto continued. “So your client wants to know where the Dysfunctional Family dumped the body?”

“Yep, she’s religious. You know.”

“No, I don’t.”

“I don’t either. But that’s the way of it.”

“I looked through it fast.” Sellitto offered a nod toward the file. “But the best bet for the corpse is Jersey.”

“I read that in the Daily News. But there were no specifics.”

Sellitto grumbled, “It’s in the file. Somewhere near Kearny Marsh.”

“Don’t know it.”

“No reason to. Off Bergen Avenue. The name says it all.”

“Kearny.”

Sellitto’s round face cracked a smile. “Ha, you’re funny for a private dick. Why don’t you join the force? We need people like you.”

“Marsh, huh?”

“Yeah. It’s all swamp. Serious swamp.”

Caruso asked, “Why’d they think there?”

“Ran John Westerfield’s tags. They had him at a toll booth on the Jersey Turnpike. He got off at the Two- Eighty exit and back on again a half hour later. Security footage in the area showed the car parked in a couple places by the Marsh. He claimed he was checking out property to buy. He said he was this real estate maven. Whatever maven is. What’s that word mean?”

“If we were in a Quentin Tarantino movie,” Caruso said, “this’s where I’d start a long digression about the word ‘maven’.”

“Well, it isn’t and I don’t know what the fuck you’re talking about.”

Sellitto definitely had Game.

Caruso flipped through the smaller folder inside the bigger one. The smaller was labeled John Westerfield. Many of the documents were his own notes and records, and a lot of them had to do with real estate, all the complex paperwork that rode herd on construction in Manhattan: foundation-pouring permits, crane permits, street-access permissions. Interestingly—and incriminatingly—these were all multimillion-dollar projects that John couldn’t possibly have engaged in without Sarah Lieberman’s money.

“Good policing. When was Westerfield in Jersey?”

“I don’t know. A couple days before she disappeared.”

“Before? Was there a toll record of him being there after she disappeared.”

“No. That’s where the grassy knoll effect comes in.”