F Train Read online

  Back at the car, Frank slid in behind the wheel. “The Russian’s place next. It’s not that far.”

  Flo leaned back, easing her head against the seat. “Guess we know now whose baby died when Marie Priester inhaled the gas. We see William Eng as soon as he’s back from China.”

  2:50 P.M.

  West Second Street, a short road off the end of Ocean Parkway, a couple of blocks from the Coney Island boardwalk and the beach.

  No one answered the bell at the home of the late Sidney R. Davidov and his common-law wife, Bea Liebowitz, when Sergeant Frank Murphy pressed a fat finger on the buzzer for Apartment 2F, in the lobby of Building Four, Trump Village, West Second.

  “You looking for Bea?” A woman of indeterminate age, certainly not young, scarecrow thin and wheezing heavily, shuffled into the building’s small entrance hall, a cigarette dangling from her long yellowed fingers, a half-inch of ash threatening to drop onto her faded red housecoat. She gave Flo Ott and Frank Murphy a sharp assessor’s once-over, eyes squinting through curls of smoke. “Cops, right?”

  “Right,” said Frank. “You got great eyes, miss.”

  “Bea’s got to work. Him? Good riddance. God’s will be done. He never gave her nothing but tsouris anyway.”

  Frank nodded. “And where’s poor Bea now?”

  “Finishing the lunch shift. Odessa Gardens on Surf. Just say I sent you, okay? Viola. She worked her tail off for that son of a bitch. And only bupkis mit kuduchas from him, no insurance even. He was a bum, take my word. No big loss. Them others, I feel sorry for them, real sorry they got caught up in it. But not him. Good luck to you…”

  3:10 P.M.

  Odessa Gardens cafeteria, a vast and noisy Russian restaurant…

  A busy afternoon and the cashier was irritated and harassed. She pointed Flo Ott and Frank Murphy to one of waitress Bea Liebowitz’s tables beside the swinging doors leading into the kitchen.

  Frank picked up a menu the size of a magazine, but lost like a small pamphlet in his huge hands. While he studied it, Flo surveyed the restaurant.

  Almost all the tables were taken and few of the customers looked under the age of fifty. The language spoken—loudly, animatedly—was the same as the second language on the bilingual menu, Russian. To judge by most customers’ familiar manner with the waitresses, everyone else but them was a regular at the Gardens.

  Flo watched the servers bustling in and out through the swinging doors.

  “So which one’s Bea Liebowitz, Frank?”

  “Beats me. You want tea or coffee? They got one kind of coffee, eleven kinds of tea. Even one with vodka. You got to love Russians.”

  A server stopped to take their order. A woman around forty and wearing every minute of it, she had a round, tired, but friendly face, the face of a silent screen heroine. Her eyes were hazel. Her hair, short, badly cut, of a color Flo would describe as “home colored,” almost nondescript.

  “Ms. Liebowitz?” Flo said.

  The woman nodded, eyes wary at the mention of her name.

  “We’re with the police department. Homicide. Viola said you’d be here.”

  Bea Liebowitz’s face sagged like a Brooklyn tenement. “Please, I don’t want no trouble. I need this job.”

  “No trouble,” said Frank. “We promise. We’ll wait till you finish your shift.”

  “It’s almost done, everybody’s paying up. What can I get you?”

  Frank Murphy glanced at the menu. “What kind of tea you like, Ms. Liebowitz? They all look good.”

  “After all day on my feet? Black with vodka, enough so the tea’s not black no more. Put a dime in the cup, you see the dime. Moscow tea.”

  “Okay. Could we have one of those big pots—a samovar?—with the darkest tea and some cream for us, please? Plus whatever you want.”

  When Bea Liebowitz’s other tables emptied, she sat down and placed a bottle of Stolichnaya next to Frank Murphy. She helped herself to a half-cup of tea from the glistening silver samovar and pushed the cup over to Frank.

  “Pour like it’s for you,” she said. “And pass it back to me.”

  Frank poured vodka into the half-cup of black tea.

  “Keep going,” she said. “Stop when you see the bottom of the cup.”

  She lifted the cup—“Budem”—took a few sips, closed her eyes, and sighed. “Okay, now what do you want to know about the bastard?”

  “First,” Flo said, “we want to offer you our condolences.”

  Bea Liebowitz shrugged her eyebrows. “Thank you, I’m sure you mean well.”

  “Do you know why your husband was on the subway that late hour of the night?”

  Bea Liebowitz shook her head. “Same question some other cop asks me right after I learn he’s dead. Nice talk, I’m still in shock, and they’re asking me crazy questions. I don’t know why then, and I don’t know why now. He never told me nothing.” Tiredly, she raised her teacup to Flo, then to Frank, before polishing off the contents. “Maybe I’ll have another cup.”

  She winked at Frank and he did the honors.

  Bea Liebowitz peered into her cup as if looking to find her future in the leaves at the bottom. “Looks like almost perfect Moscow tea. I’m sorry, you just keep on asking now, okay. What else you want to know? I’ll do what I can.”

  “You got any idea where he was earlier that evening?” Flo said.

  Bea nodded wearily, taking a long slow sip of her tea and vodka. “Probably he was downtown at the Marriott. In the lounge next to the bar. That’s where they usually hang out. All the time, especially nights.”

  “They?”

  “Him and the other bastards.”

  “Other bastards?”

  “His buddies, that’s what they actually call themselves. I don’t make it up—the Bastards—they think it’s a funny name. His so-called business partners, ones he took the whole rap for.”

  “What rap?”

  “Eighteen months. Don’t tell me you don’t know about that one. Dannemora. Upstate.”

  “You got names?” Flo said.

  “Here.” She began writing on her order pad as though she were adding up a bill. “These are the only names I remember hearing.” She passed the note to Flo.

  “Thanks. Your husband had a lot of cash on him, Ms. Liebowitz. If it turns out it belonged to him rightfully, then it’s all yours.”

  “That’s a hot one. First cash he gives me in years. How much?”

  “Twenty-two hundred and change,” Frank said. “A real wad.”

  Bea’s eyebrows shot up. “It’s something.” She took another long pull on her Moscow tea.

  “Carrying that much cash,” said Frank. “Why do you think he took the subway, why didn’t he take car service?”

  “He was a cheap bastard, that’s why. Always. Tighter than a clam’s ass, you pardon my Russian.” Bea Liebowitz smiled weakly at Flo. “It’s the chai, honey, the tea, it relaxes me.” She stared vacantly at a point beyond Flo’s right shoulder, blinking a few times before returning her gaze. “Okay, so now what else…you got more?”

  “Bea,” said Flo. “How old were you when you came to this country?”

  “Just a kid. A stupid kid. I should’ve stood in school here. I knew nothing. And of course Sid spotted that. He was a good spotter. I wanted kids, I wanted a son. Irwin, I even had his name picked out. My mother never had a son. But my husband, Sid, he couldn’t do it. Or wouldn’t. Not him. Every Friday night, I lighted the candles and I prayed for a boy. I prayed and I prayed, Burach ee, burach shmoi, Burach ee, burach shmoi…But nothing.” Bea Liebowitz’s cheeks glistened with tears. “Look, you got to excuse me.” She wiped her face with a paper napkin. “But I got to turn in your bill for this now. You don’t pay out of your own pocket, do you? Cops?”

  Frank Murphy smiled. “Bea, honey, it’s all on the city. You thank the mayor next time he drops in.”

  “In that case, it’s thirty-five dollars, tip and tax extra. And please, you thank the mayor first for me,
okay? Don’t forget.”

  Frank handed her a fifty. “The change is all yours, Bea. Enjoy.”

  Swaying slightly, Bea Liebowitz ambled over to the cashier’s desk.

  Watching her, Flo released a sigh as much of resignation as determination. “Okay, now we got the Bastards on our list. And we’ll see Bea again, when she’s sober and rested.”

  “Sure, rested. Whenever that is.”

  Whenever that is…Flo Ott pieced together the fragments of new facts so that all the bits and sad scraps started producing a landscape. It didn’t matter if, at this early stage, she couldn’t distinguish between conjecture and the whole.

  The point was not to get detoured.

  The point was to ascertain the right direction.

  And head straight that way.

  Relentlessly.

  4:25 P.M.

  Flo’s office.

  Contrary to volatile expectations and a Niagara of garbled information flooding in from that ever reliable source, the Helpful Public at Large, beating against a current, bucking a cascade of cooperation, Sergeant Marty Keane brought a scintilla of hard news for Flo Ott and Frank Murphy.

  “You have it?” she said. “A lead on the bucket, you can actually trace it?”

  “We’ve got a positive trace on the bucket,” he said.

  “Where to?”

  “That importer in Oregon, they sold camping buckets like that to only one store in the New York metropolitan area. Down on Canal Street.”

  “Called?”

  “Sam’s Hardware and Supplies.”

  “Great lead.”

  “But it went out of business almost two years ago.”

  Frank flicked a paper clip into an empty Starbucks cup. “Shit.”

  “Hold it,” said Marty, “there’s more. The importer got the buckets from a manufacturer in China.”

  “And?” Flo said.

  “They made supplies for the Chinese army, stuff like this bucket.”

  “We’ll draw straws,” Frank said. “See who goes to China tonight. About time I hit the mother lode on dim sum.”

  Marty laughed. “Except the Chinese company went out of business, too.”

  “So who could’ve had a bucket like this in New York?”

  “No one around here from the Chinese Red Army,” Flo said and smiled. “Maybe someone who shopped for camping supplies on Canal Street two years ago.”

  Frank was not encouraged. “Really narrows it down, Flo. We are so cooking with gas here, please pardon my pun.”

  Marty seemed more sanguine. “You think maybe this is the sort of red meat we can fling at the media? Keep them busy, happy now we’re really on to something.”

  “Not a squeak,” said Flo.

  Their thoughts were similar, and they lapsed into silence, until Flo’s intern, Krish Krishnaswami, rushed into the office. “Sorry, I got a call over to City Hall. For this.”

  He handed Flo a large envelope more than an inch thick. She opened it and extracted a CD-ROM and several bound printouts.

  “What’s all that?” Frank said. “Smells like more horse manure. From the mayor, right?”

  Flo glanced at the titles on each of the documents. “ ‘Psychological profiles, by Howard Gerald, PhD.’ Plus opinions, diagnoses, prognoses.”

  “Our genius on call. Instant analysis. What’s he come up with?”

  “Let me guess,” Marty said. “A lone killer abused in childhood. Picked up age seven by a kiddie molester in the park playground. Or on the F train. Never recovered. Clearly this slaughter, like most mass murders in our nation, is an act of misguided vengeance. Strictly Freudian. Definitely not a political actor here, because by now we’d have heard some credible claims. Otherwise, what’s the point, right? The CIA certainly doesn’t see any or they’d have been all over us by now. And the Bureau would rather distance itself from an unlucky agent caught cheating on his wife.”

  Frank laughed. “Marty, you deserve the PhD. Not that schmuck.”

  “It’s not that funny,” said Flo. “Maybe you two should wade through all this bullshit.” She hefted the reports. “And give me a synopsis.” She flipped through the pages of the first and thickest report, The Witness: Raymond O’Hara.

  “Check this.” Flo sounded incredulous. “It’s got attachments, all photocopies of other people’s published papers that Gerald’s charging the city for just sticking them into the file.”

  “Nice work, if you know the right people.”

  “Interesting papers, like ‘An Etiology of New York City Violence in the Twenty-first Century,’ ‘Gas as a Weapon of Choice: A Military Solution Adapted for Civilian Applications,’ ‘The ISIS Iraq and Syria Experience: A Role Model for Individual Behavior? Or Stimulus for Borderline Personality?’ ”

  “Terrific stuff,” said Frank. “I’m beside myself with awe. And what kind of cerebral crap’s he got for O’Hara?”

  “ ‘Believing Is Seeing: Bearing Witness as a Matter of Faith’…and…‘Alcohol Behavior Modifiers on the Reliability of Testimony.’ Maybe this is the folder I should read first.”

  Marty Keane picked up a file. “Psychopaths: Motives and Modus. ‘The psychopathic killer is almost invariably driven by a long-nurtured, but repressed compulsion for self-assertion and/or revenge. He is convinced he has been cheated, denigrated, and unjustly treated…. While rarely an obvious social deviant—indeed he usually appears to fit the social milieu in which he lives and works—he often suffers profound feelings of inadequacy, believing he does not belong to society, but he is a unique and rejected outsider bound by higher codes and obligated to perform stricter duties…’ ”

  Marty closed the folder on psychopaths.

  And the office grew still, filling up with the sounds of traffic several stories below, a noise like waves pounding on a shore, beating into their thoughts a certainty as dark and relentless as ocean tides.

  Tired, hollowed-out, Flo stared at the window.

  “I’ll start plowing through this crap tonight, but you two go out to Church Avenue. Hakim Jamal, his family’s fish store is supposed to be open to nine. And Panesh Moussari. Both are next on the list. No record anywhere on them, except Moussari was undocumented. People out there will probably talk to you two more easily than they would with a woman around. I’ll stay here with the shrink. And his bullshit.”

  5:15 P.M.

  Frank Murphy and Marty Keane preferred not to lose time hunting for a parking spot on Church Avenue or double-parking their police vehicle on a busy commercial street and drawing too much attention.

  Instead, they rode the Coney Island F train from Jay Street–Borough Hall, following the same route taken by the death train in the small hours of Tuesday morning.

  At each of the two stops after Jay, they stood by an open door and peered out at the platform.

  First, Bergen Street.

  Then, Carroll.

  Same scene at both. Saturday, no rush hour, only a handful of passengers boarded and disembarked. Uneventful, reassuringly normal.

  After the Carroll Street station, the train left the tunnel and ascended outdoors on elevated tracks past an old gasworks site on the left to the east, and to the west a vast vista, in the foreground tarpaper roofs enclosed by expressways—the Brooklyn-Queens and the Gowanus—and behind that the New York harbor from Battery Park to Staten Island, New Jersey on the horizon and the illuminated Statue of Liberty upstage center.

  Continuing its ascent, the train rounded a long curve and pulled into the Smith and Ninth Street station. Here the platform was more than eighty feet above the streets below, highest subway station on the New York transit system and probably in the entire world.

  “Let’s get off,” Frank said. “Freeze our asses off and check it out for a minute.”

  The two detectives disembarked, walking back and forth along the entire length of the platform, peering over the outside wall at the front end, looking across the roofs of warehouses and tenements and down at the recently cleaned
, now polluted again waters of the ancient Gowanus Canal. East of the harbor, they saw street lights as far as the tree line of Prospect Park at the top of the slope.

  “Three in the morning,” Frank said, pounding his rock fists on top of the wall. “A snowstorm. A train stops just short of this exposed portion of the platform. Lets passengers on and off from the sheltered section of the station.”

  “Smith Street,” Marty said, looking down at the road below. “Used to be risking your life walking around down there. Now just a few blocks and you got some of the best restaurants in the city.”

  “You tried them?”

  “Sometimes. We don’t get out much, not with little kids.”

  “We go out as often as we can. Spanish, French, Chinese. They got everything on this street. My wife and I ate at an Asian fusion place down on Smith a couple of weeks ago, terrific. No point going over to Manhattan anymore, here at least you can afford it. But at three in the morning—”

  “Dead as a graveyard. Especially near this canal.”

  They lingered, looking down at the canal before walking back to the sheltered section of the station and waiting for the next train.

  Frank waved a fat hand at the platform cameras. “When a train pulls into this stop”—he waved his arms back and forth, as if battered by a powerful wind—“and you got both ends of this station exposed here, I figure if the wind is strong enough, and snow is blowing around all over the place, of course you got a white-out, everywhere. You can’t tell shit from snow.”

  “But not at the next stop. There’s the tunnel again, right at the front end. You’re exposed only at the back.”

  “So if I’m going to hide from cameras in a snowstorm?”

  “This is your best stop, absolutely. Smith and Ninth. The odds are with you, right here.”

  “On the way back, Marty, let’s grab a bite down on Smith.”

  5:50 P.M.

  Unusually for an Irishman, especially a cop, Frank Murphy loved his food.

  “Look at these fish.”

  He and Marty Keane were standing in front of the window at the Jamal Fish Market.