Blindsight (22 page)

straddle the toilet. Tony pulled the bathroom door partially closed as the woman with the cart of water
pitchers entered the room.
Angelo had his gun ready. The silencer was in place. He did not like the idea of using it, but he was afraid he didn't have any choice. With the bathroom door open a fraction of an inch, he was able to watch as the woman switched O'Connor's water pitcher for a fresh one. He held his breath. The woman was only a few feet away. His plan was to wait for her to spot Mrs. O'Connor before he made his move. To his surprise, the woman disappeared from view without so much as a glance in Mrs. O'Connor's direction.
After waiting for a full minute, Angelo told Tony to take a careful peek. Slowly Tony opened the bathroom door enough so that he could get his head around the door. "She's gone," Tony said.
"Let's get out of here," Angelo said.
Exiting the bathroom, Tony paused at the bedside. "You think she's dead?" he questioned. "You can't be that blue and still be alive," Angelo said. "Come on. Grab your flowers. I want to be long gone before they find her."
They made it to the car without incident. Angelo was thinking it was a good thing he'd gone in. Trigger-happy Tony would have left a trail of bodies in his wake. Angelo was just pulling away from the curb when Tony confided in him. "Smothering wasn't bad. But I still like shooting them better. It's surer, quicker, and definitely more satisfying."

Lou took out a cigarette and lit up. He didn't even feel like smoking particularly. He was just interested in killing time. The meeting was to have started half an hour earlier but officers were still drifting in. The subject was the three gangland-style executions that had occurred in Queens overnight. Lou had thought the cases would have inspired a sense of urgency in the department, but three detectives were missing. "Screw them," Lou said finally, referring to the missing officers. He motioned to Norman Carver, a detective sergeant, to start. Norman was nominally in charge of the investigation, although in point of fact the three units covering the cases were acting independently. "I'm afraid we don't have much," Norman said. "The only link we've established between the three cases, other than the manner of murder, is that each of the men was involved in the restaurant business in one way or another, either as an owner, partner, or supplier." "That's not much of an association," Lou commented. "Let's review each case." "The first one was the Goldburgs in Kew Gardens," Norman said. "Both Harry and Martha Goldburg were shot dead in their sleep. The preliminary report suggests two guns were involved." "And Harry's occupation?" Lou asked.

"Owned a successful restaurant here in Manhattan," Norman said. "Place is called La Dolce Vita. East
side. Fifty-fourth. He was partners with an Anthony DeBartollo. So far we've come up with no problems, financial or personal, involving the partnership or the restaurant." "Next," Lou said.
"Steven Vivonetto of Forest Hills," Norman said. "Owned a chain of fast-food joints all over Nassau County called Pasta Pronto. Again no financial problems that we've come across, but these are all just preliminaries."
"And finally."
"Janice Singleton, also of Forest Hills," Norman said. "Married to Chester Singleton. He has a restaurant-purveyor business and was recently picked up by the Vivonetto chain as a supplier. Again, no financial problems. In fact things had been looking up with the Pasta Pronto account." "Who'd been supplying the Pasta Pronto before Singleton?" Lou asked. "Don't know that yet," Norman said.
"I think we should find that out," Lou said. "Did the Singletons and the Vivonettos know each other personally?"
"We haven't established that yet," Norman said. "But we will." "What about any organized-crime associations?" Lou asked. "The way these people were killed certainly suggests as much."
"That's what we thought when we started," Norman said. He glanced around at the five other men in the room. They all nodded. "But we've found almost nothing. A couple of the restaurants that Singleton supplied have some loose association, but nothing major." Lou sighed. "There's got to be some connection linking the three." "I agree," Norman said. "The slugs we got from the medical examiners suggest that Harry Goldburg, Steven Vivonetto, and Janice Singleton were shot with the same gun, Martha Goldburg from another. But that's not the ballistics report. It's just from preliminary examination. But they were all the same caliber. So we have a strong suspicion the same people were behind all three murders." "What about burglary?" Lou asked.
"Relatives of the Goldburgs say that Harry had a big gold Rolex. We haven't found it. Also his wallet could not be located. But at the other scenes, nothing seems to have been taken." "Seems that the answer has to be in the restaurant connection," Lou said. "Get detailed financial statements on all the operations. Also try to find out if these guys had been subjected to extortion or other threats. And do it sooner rather than later. The commissioner is on my back." "We've got people working around the clock," Norman said. Lou nodded.

Norman handed a typewritten sheet to Lou. "Here's a summary of what I just told you. Sorry for the
typos."
Lou read it over quickly. He took a thoughtful drag on his cigarette. Something big and bad was going on in Queens. There was no doubt about it. He wondered if these murders could have had anything to do with Paul Cerino. It seemed unlikely. But then Lou thought of Marsha Schulman. He wondered if any of the deceased were acquainted with her husband, Danny. It was a long shot, but there was a chance he was the connecting thread.
8
3:00 p.m., Thursday
Manhattan
After getting a cup of coffee from the ID office that looked more like sludge than coffee by that time of the day, Laurie pushed her way into the Thursday afternoon conference which was held in the conference room connected to Bingham's office. This was the one opportunity for all the city's medical examiners to get together and share cases and discuss diagnostic problems. Although the office of the chief medical examiner handled deaths in the Bronx as well as Manhattan, the boroughs of Queens, Brooklyn, and Staten Island had their own offices. Thursday was the day they all got together. Coming to the conference was not an option. As far as Bingham was concerned, it was a command performance. As usual, Laurie took a seat near to the door. When the discussions became too administrative or political for her taste, she liked to slip away. The most interesting part of these weekly conferences usually occurred before the meeting was called to order. It was in these casual conversations beforehand that Laurie was able to pick up interesting tidbits and details of particularly baffling or gruesome cases. In that respect, this Thursday's meeting proved no different.
"I'd thought I'd seen it all," Dick Katzenburg told Paul Plodgett and Kevin Southgate. Dick was a senior medical examiner assigned to the Queens office. Laurie's ears perked up. "It was the weirdest homicide I'd seen," Dick continued. "And God knows I've seen some strange ones."
"Are you going to tell us or do we have to beg?" Kevin asked, obviously as eager for the story. Medical examiners loved to swap "war stories" that were either intellectually stimulating or grotesquely bizarre. "It was a young guy," Dick said. "Done in a funeral home with the aspirator that they use for embalming."
"He was bludgeoned to death?" Kevin asked. So far he was unimpressed. "No!" Dick said. "With the trocar. The aspirator was running. It was as if the kid was embalmed alive."

"Ugh," Paul said, obviously impressed. "That
is
weird. It reminds me of the case--"
"Dr. Montgomery," a voice called.
Laurie turned. Dr. Bingham stood before her. "I'm afraid there is something else I have to discuss with you," he said.
Laurie felt queasy. She wondered what she'd done now. "Dr. DeVries came to see me," Bingham said. "He complained that you have been coming in his lab bothering him about some test results. Now I know that you are eager for those results, but you're not the only one waiting. Dr. DeVries is swamped right now. I don't think I have to tell you. But don't expect special treatment. You're going to have to wait like everyone else. I'll thank you not to harass Dr. DeVries any further. Do I make myself clear?" Laurie was tempted to say something like DeVries had a hell of a way of going after more funding, but Bingham turned away. Before Laurie had a chance to dwell on this, her third reprimand in four days, Bingham called the meeting to order.
Bingham began the conference, as usual, by summarizing the statistics for the previous week. Then he gave a short report on the status of the Central Park murder case since it had been so much in the news. He again rebutted the media's charges of mismanagement of the case on the part of the medical examiner's office. He concluded by advising everyone not to offer any personal opinions. Laurie was certain that last remark was directed at her. Who else had been offering opinions from within the medical examiner's ranks?
Following Bingham's talk, Calvin spoke about administrative issues, particularly concerning how reduced city funding was affecting operations. Every other week one service or supply was being curtailed or eliminated.
Following Calvin's talk, each of the deputy medical examiners from the other borough offices gave summaries. Some of the people present yawned, others nodded off. When the borough chiefs were finished, the floor was opened up for general discussion. Dick Katzenburg described a few cases, including the rather grisly one at the Queens funeral home. Once he was through, Laurie cleared her throat and began to address the group. She presented her six overdose cases as succinctly as possible, careful to delineate the demographic differences that set them apart from usual overdoses. Laurie described the deceased as single yuppies whose drug use came as a surprise to friends and family. She explained the cocaine was mainlined although not mixed with heroin. "My concern," Laurie said, avoiding looking at Bingham, "is that we are seeing the beginning of a series of unusual overdose deaths. I suspect a contaminant in the drug is to blame, but so far none has been found. What I'd like to request is that if anybody sees any cases similar to the ones I've described, please send them to me."
"I've seen four myself over the last several weeks," Dick said once Laurie was through. "Since we see so many overdose/toxicity cases I didn't give the demographics much thought. But now that you mention it, all four seemed like overachievers. In fact, two were professionals. And three of the four took the cocaine intravenously, the fourth orally."

"Orally?" someone echoed with surprise. "An oral cocaine overdose? That's pretty uncommon. You
usually only see that in drug-smuggling "mules' coming from South America whose condoms break." "I'm never surprised what druggies do," Dick said. "One of the cases that I had was found wedged in the refrigerator. Apparently he got so hot, he had to crawl into the ice box for relief." "One of mine climbed into a refrigerator, too," Laurie said. "I had one also," Jim Bennett said. He was the chief at the Brooklyn office. "And now that I think about it, I had another who ran out into the street stark naked before he had a terminal seizure. He'd taken the drug orally but only after attempting to take it IV." "Did these two cases have the same unlikely demographics for a drug overdose?" Laurie asked Jim. "Sure did," Jim said. "The man who ran out in the street was a successful lawyer. And the families in both cases swore up and down that the deceased didn't do drugs." Laurie looked to Margaret Hauptman, who headed the Staten Island office. "Have you seen any similar cases?" she asked.
Margaret shook her head.
Laurie asked Dick and Jim if they would mind faxing over the records on the cases they'd described. They immediately said that they would.
"One thing I have to mention," Dick said. "In three out of four I've had a lot of pressure from the involved families to sign the case out as natural." "That's a point I want to underline," Bingham said, speaking for the first time since the beginning of the discussion. "With upscale overdose deaths like these the families will certainly want to keep the whole episode low profile. I think we should cooperate in this regard. Politically we cannot afford to alienate this constituency."
"I don't know what to make of this refrigerator aspect," Laurie said. "Although it brings me back to the contaminant idea. Perhaps there is some chemical that has a synergistic effect with cocaine vis-a-vis causing hyperpyrexia. At any rate I'm concerned that all these deaths are coming from the same source of the drug. Now that we have this many cases we ought to be able to prove it by comparing the percentages of its natural hydrolysates. Of course we will need the lab to cooperate." Laurie looked nervously at Bingham to see if his expression changed with her reference to the lab. It didn't.
"I don't think a contaminant is a given," Dick said. "Cocaine is fully capable of causing these deaths all by itself. On the four cases I've seen, the serum level was high. Very high. These people took big doses. Maybe the cocaine wasn't cut with anything; maybe it was one-hundred-percent pure. We've all seen that kind of death with heroin."
"I still think a contaminant is involved," Laurie said. "With the general intelligence of this group of victims, it's hard for me to believe that so many would mess up if it were purely dose related."

Dick shrugged. "You may be right," he admitted. "All I'm saying is let's not jump to hasty conclusions."
Leaving the conference, Laurie felt a strange and disturbing mixture of excitement, yet a renewed frustration and anxiety. Within a couple of hours her "series" had doubled from six cases to twelve. That was ominous. Her intuition about the number of cases increasing was already coming to pass, and at an alarming rate.
Now, even more than before, Laurie felt that the public had to be warned, especially this group of yuppie types. The problem was how to do it. Certainly she dared not go back to Bingham. But she had to do something.
Suddenly she thought of Lou. The police had a whole division devoted to drugs and vice. Perhaps that division had a way of putting out the word that a certain drug was particularly dangerous. With growing resolve, she went to her office and dialed Lou immediately. When he answered, she felt relieved. "I'm so glad you're still there," she said with a sigh. "You are?" Lou asked.
"I want to come right down and talk to you," Laurie said. "You do?"
"Will you wait for me?" Laurie demanded. "Sure," Lou said. He was puzzled and elated at the same time. "Come on down." Laurie hung up the phone, grabbed her briefcase, opened it, threw in some half-finished records, snapped it shut, snatched her coat, and literally ran down to the elevator. A slight rain was falling as she stepped out onto First Avenue. She despaired of catching a cab, but as luck would have it, one pulled up to the curb and let off a passenger right in front of her. Laurie got in before the passenger had a chance to close the door. Never having been to New York City police headquarters, Laurie was surprised to find it a relatively modern brick structure. Entering the front entrance, she had to sign in while a security person called up to Lou to make sure she was expected. Then they went through her briefcase. Armed with a visitor's pass and directions, she found his office. Like the entire building, it reeked of cigarette smoke. "Can I take your coat?" Lou asked as she stepped inside. Lou took the coat and hung it on a coatrack. While he was doing so he caught Harvey Lawson giving him a dirty look from across the hall. Lou closed his office door.
"You sounded excited on the phone," Lou commented as he went around behind his desk. Laurie had taken one of the two straight-backed chairs. Her briefcase was on the floor next to her. "I need your help," Laurie said. She was intense and obviously nervous, clutching her hands in her lap. "Oh, really?" Lou commented. "I was hoping this excitement had something to do with dinner tonight, like you had changed your mind." He couldn't keep the sarcasm from his voice. He was obviously disappointed.