Gods and Fathers (5 page)

Bob Davila and Nick Loh sat in their unmarked car looking at the shadowy outline of the mansion located at 211 Piping Rock Road in Locust Valley. From their vantage point, a knoll on the grounds of the Piping Rock Country Club golf course across the street, they had an unobstructed view of the large house’s winding driveway leading on a graceful curved incline to its front entrance on the left and a detached five-car garage on the right. The fountain in the middle of the rolling, snow-covered front lawn, with three dolphins suspended in mid-jump above it, was not spewing water. It was the dead of a late February night, and 20 degrees Fahrenheit.

On the console between them were two large empty thermoses that, three hours ago, were filled with hot coffee. Taped to the dashboard were three-by-five color photographs of two young Arab men, one bald with heavy-lidded eyes, the other with a thick head of wiry hair and a hooked nose.
Suspect 1
was written across the bottom of the first picture in black marking ink, and
Suspect 2
on the second. In the detectives’ jacket pockets, clipped to their NYPD ID cards, were light-blue plastic cards, with photos, that identified them as UNIIIC Special Investigators.

Shielded by a stand of tall pine trees, they could not be seen from the house, although the dark night was their best cover. In an hour they would be relieved. In the passenger seat Loh held a pair of expensive digital night vision binoculars in his gloved hands. The Cantonese-American detective had just scanned the house and grounds.

“You love playing with those things,” Davila said.

“They’re very cool,” Loh replied.

“I know. Too bad there’s never anything to see.” The house was completely dark, as it had been since midnight.

“We’re committed, Bob.”

“Right, we’ll be promoted. I’m having my doubts.”

It was Davila who had been offered the assignment and who had talked their commanding officer into offering it to Loh as well, and Loh into accepting it. Now, after three weeks of stakeouts as part of an eight-person rotating team, he was sorry he had. Suspect 1 and Suspect 2 had not left the house, not even to take out the garbage. They
were
in there because occasionally someone would get lucky and spot one or the other of them in a window with the binoculars. Groceries were delivered, but not the mail.

“
Observe and communicate
. What kind of bullshit is that?” Davila continued.

“It must be a Dutch thing,” Loh replied, “or U.N. speak.”

“We never should have got involved with the U.N.”

“You mean this assignment, or back in 1947?” Loh said.

“1947. They hate us.”

“The world loves us now, Bob. All we had to do was elect a handsome young black guy as president.”

“Fuckin’ U.N.”

“You’re working for the U.N. right now.”

“No I’m not, I’m working for the NYPD, on special assignment to the U.N.”

Smiling, Loh picked up the binoculars and scanned the house and grounds.

“It sounds glamorous, doesn’t it?” he said, returning the glasses to his lap. “Too bad they won’t tell us what we’re working on.”

“Right. What the fuck is
Monteverde
? Fuck-nuts mentioned it a couple of times yesterday, like it was the Vatican or the Holy Grail.”
Fuck-nuts
was how Davila referred to U.N. Deputy Director of Investigations, the Dutchman Ehrhard Fuchs.

“You’re very Christian-centered, Bob.”

“What the fuck are
you
? I thought you were a Catholic.”

“I am, but there are other religions, other holy places.”

“Not for me,” Davila said, looking at his watch, thinking,
45 minutes.
After these ten-to-two shifts he usually stopped by The Roost, a bar on Glen Cove Avenue where a waitress he knew was getting off work.

“So that means you’ll be coming to the church on Sunday,” Loh said.

“No way, Nicky, I’m sleeping in. What time at the house?

“Noon. We’re having a brunch.”

“That I won’t miss.”

Davila had stood godfather for Loh’s first son, Nicholas Robert, three years ago. His second boy, Vincent, was being baptized on Sunday. It would be the detectives’ first Sunday off in three weeks.

“What’s that?” Loh said, putting the binoculars swiftly to his eyes.

“A car,” Davila said. “Can you get the plates?”

“Hold on,” Loh said, adjusting the focus ring on the glasses. “No, they’re covered.”

Davila had pulled a small spiral notebook and pencil out of his coat pocket. By the time he put them away, the car was stopped on the circular driveway parallel to the front door.

“Two guys,” said Loh.

The lights came on in the house.

“Suspect 2 is at the door,” Loh continued. “Fuck!”

“What?”

“He shot him. Let’s go.”

“What about
observe and communicate
?”

“Come on, Bobby. Let’s block their car in. Then we’ll call for backup.”

Davila was more than happy to comply. He had been about to call Fuchs. Instead he shoved his radio into his coat pocket, turned the car on, and swung past the pine trees toward the club’s side entrance.

“They went in,” Loh said, the binoculars still to his eyes, his voice urgent but calm. “Go, Bobby. Nice and easy.”

“Are there just the two?” Davila asked.

“I can’t tell,” Loh replied, “the car windows are smoked.”

Davila, driving cautiously, his headlights off, crossed the quiet street and headed up the mansion’s driveway, stopping where the asphalt pavement looped toward the house. He did a quick scan. The house’s large oak front door was wide open. Suspect 2 was lying on the threshold, his legs twisted beneath his body. The visitor’s car, a black Hummer, about fifty feet away, was running, smoke from its tail pipe condensing in the cold air. His unmarked Ford was blocking the bulky SUV’s exit.

Then he got on the radio.

“China 1, China 1, this is Red 2 calling. Acknowledge.”

Nothing.

“China 1, this is Red 2, come in. Suspect 2 has been shot. We’re going in. We need backup.”

“Red 2, this is China 1. I read you. Do not enter. Repeat, do not enter. Backup is on its way. Acknowledge.”

“They’re gonna kill the other one.”

“Do not enter. Acknowledge.”

Before Davila could respond, one of the two visitors, a tall, bearded man in a long black leather coat, appeared at the front door and began to drag Suspect 2 into the house. The next thing he knew, Loh was in a crouch outside the car, pointing his service revolver at the black-coated visitor.

“Stop right there,” Nick yelled, his voice sharp and crystal clear in the night air. “Put your hands over your head.”

Instead of complying, the man, in one deft and swift movement, reached inside his coat, pulled out a large automatic pistol and began spraying the detectives’ car from driver’s side to passenger’s side, back and forth, twice. Davila ducked down and scrambled out of the driver’s side door, crawling around the back of the car to Loh, who was flat on his back, bleeding heavily from his chest. Davila had his Glock 19 out. Shielded by the open passenger door, he fired three quick rounds at the front entrance, but when he looked quickly he saw only the body of Suspect 2. He dragged Loh closer to the side of the car, then reached in for the radio, which he had thrown on the seat.

“Officer down! Officer down!” he shouted, pushing hard on the transmit button. “I need backup. China 1, acknowledge.”

“Two minutes, Red 2, two minutes. We’re on Forrest Avenue. Over.”

“Call EMS! Officer down…”

Davila took a quick look at the house, then crouched over Loh and tried his version of mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. His friend’s body was inert.

“Nick,” he said. “Nicky…”

Inside he heard shots. He grabbed Loh’s Glock, still in his right hand, stuck it in his belt, and peaked around the open car door. Nothing. Suspect 2 still lying there. Then he heard the sound of the Hummer starting up.
They left someone in the car,
he thought, but before he could react, the Hummer was backing up and smashing into the front of the Ford, whose passenger door swung wildly on impact, knocking Davila onto his back. He rolled quickly to his right, rose to one knee, and fired four rounds rapidly at the Hummer as it smashed into the Ford again, knocking it another twenty feet back and leaving Nick Loh’s body lying exposed in the snow.

Looking around for cover, Davila saw the first two visitors run out of the house, both firing bursts from their automatic weapons in his direction. He returned fire and one of them went down. The other one jumped into the moving Hummer, which, trampling over shrubs and knocking a small tree halfway to the ground, careened across the snow-covered lawn back to the driveway then onto the street and away. Davila found the radio in the snow and called to Fuchs, describing the Hummer.
At least two armed suspects
, he said,
I got dead bodies here.

The detective took off his coat and laid it over his partner’s body. Then, his gun pointed straight ahead, he walked over to the man he had shot; first picking up his gun, a .45 caliber Ingram machine pistol, and putting it in his coat pocket, then rolling him onto his back with a shove of his right foot. It was not the bearded one, but his clean-shaven partner, his dark eyes dilated, his face ashen. Moaning, he looked right at Davila, who quickly kicked him back over and cuffed him, noticing as he did the blood oozing from under his rib cage.

With sirens sounding in the background, Davila moved very fast, first confirming, with a hand to his carotid artery, that Suspect 2 was indeed dead, then searching him for a weapon and I.D. There was no weapon, but in his wallet he found a biometric national identification card issued by the UK, a U.S. State Department driver’s license, and a Syrian Embassy photo I.D., all bearing the name and photo of a Syrian national named Ali al-Najjar. These he put in the front pocket of his jeans.

Davila had been an alter boy in Puerto Rico, traveling around his dirt-poor rural province with the parish priest as he ministered to his flock. He no longer went to mass, but the heady mix of religion and island superstition had taken a powerful hold on his imagination as a boy and never quite let go. Kneeling at Nick Loh’s side, he spit on his fingers and rubbed his saliva on his friend’s forehead.
“Through this holy unction and his most tender mercy may the Lord pardon thee whatever sins or faults thou hast committed, by sight, by hearing, by taste, by carnal…”
When he finished, he looked up and saw Ehrhard Fuchs standing over him shining his flashlight in Nick’s face.

“Have you been inside?” Fuchs, a stocky blond man with slits for eyes and a permanently flushed face, asked.

“No,” Davila said, getting to his feet.

“Why not?”

“You told us not to.”

“What happened?”

Davila looked up at Fuchs, using his hand to block out the glare of the Dutchman’s flashlight. No mention of Nick. Just,
have you been inside?
As if Nick had never existed. Who
were
those two scumbags in the house? The other members of the UN team had arrived and were deploying around the mansion and its grounds. One was searching the downed bearded man. More sirens could be heard approaching.

“You took too long,” Davila said, “that’s what happened.”

“They’re doing work on Forrest Avenue. We had to go around.”

“That’s been going on for two weeks. Who the fuck was driving?”

“We got here as fast as we could,” Fuchs replied, ignoring Davila’s question. “What happened?”

Before Davila could answer, two EMS techs appeared carrying a collapsible gurney. The wiry little detective got to his feet, but kept his eyes on Nick Loh, not turning away until one of the techs, kneeling, put his index and middle fingers to his dead friend’s neck for a couple of seconds, then took them away and covered the body with a brown blanket.

“They shot the fat one at the door,” Davila said, facing Fuchs, who had lowered his flashlight, “then went in. We waited. A few minutes later they came out, blasting away.” Davila pulled the Ingram out of his coat pocket, a small cannon that could fire twenty rounds per second on fully automatic and that both he and Fuchs knew was used by terrorists and other very bad actors almost exclusively. “Nick was just sitting in the car.”

“How many?”

“Three.”

“Did you get a good look?”

“Yes, at the shooter.”

“We wasted no time,” Fuchs said.

As Fuchs said this, a man named Alec Mason, an Englishman who had joined Fuchs’ team just in the last week, had appeared out of the darkness. Later Bob would try, without success, to remember if he had been standing there all along. “I was driving,” Mason said. “I’ve been working days. I didn’t know they were doing the street work at night. I’m sorry about your friend.”

“You hung us out there,” Davila said, ignoring Mason and staring hard at Fuchs. “You told us not to enter while people were getting shot at inside. Fuck you and the fucking UN.”

Jack McCann and Clarke Goode stood over the body of Felix Diaz slumped over a Formica table in the kitchen of his tiny apartment on Clinton Street on the Lower East Side. Don Russell, the sergeant in charge of Manhattan’s Crime Scene Unit, was kneeling under the table pointing out two bullet holes in the linoleum-covered floor to the photographer kneeling next to him. McCann had sent the responding patrolman to the apartment below to see if anyone was hurt or had heard anything. The rest of Russell’s team was going about its business, dusting for fingerprints and shoe prints, bagging Diaz’ hands, looking for entry and exit wounds other than the four they had found. This last involved lifting the body and carefully turning it so as not to disturb evidence that was not obvious. Another patrolman was going door-to-door through the rest of the sagging four-story walkup.

On the table was Diaz’ wallet with nine dollars in it.

His daughter, who had found him when she returned at midnight from her job as a salesperson at the Duane Reade store on East Broadway, was on the couch in the living room, a stunned look on her face. A neighbor was sitting next to her holding her hand. While McCann helped scan the body, Goode went in to talk to Diaz’ daughter. The neighbor, a stout black lady in her fifties, was crying into her free hand. The detective gave her his handkerchief, washed and pressed yesterday by his wife of thirty years.

“Please excuse us ma’am,” he said, stepping back to allow her to rise and walk across the small room where she sat in a battered easy chair. He sat down next to the daughter, the springs of the old couch sagging beneath his two hundred twenty pounds.

“Your name is Carla, is that right?”

The daughter nodded.

“I have to ask you a few questions. It won’t take long.” Goode watched the girl nod mutely again. “How old are you Carla?” he asked.

“Twenty-one.”

“And your father?”

“Forty-five.”

“You found him at what time?”

“Twelve, just after. I walked home from work.”

“How long does that take?”

“Five minutes.”

“And you got off at twelve?”

“Yes.”

“Does anybody else live here?”

“No.”

“Your mother?”

“She died last year.”

“Sisters, brothers?”

“No. My brother lives in a home in Jersey.”

“A home?”

“He’s autistic.”

Goode looked into Carla Diaz’ eyes. They were still dazed. Dead mother, dead father, autistic brother. Twenty-one years old.

“Where does your dad work?”

“He’s a doorman uptown.”

“Did he work today?”

“No, he went to Jersey to see Johnny, my brother.”

“When was his last payday?”

“I don’t know.”

“Where did he cash his paychecks?”

“They went right in the bank. Auto deposit.”

“Who would do this to him?”

“I don’t know. Nobody.”

“Did he carry cash around?”

Goode was loath to ask the girl if her father was a drug dealer or involved in something else illicit. He did not want to insult her thirty minutes after finding him dead. Besides, although the killing looked like an execution to him, his instincts told him it was not related to other criminal activity.

“Carry cash?” Carla asked.

Like I asked what year he got out of Harvard,
Goode thought. “Yes,” he replied.

“He had no cash, everything went to extras for Johnny, books, games, clothes, extra therapy.”

“What building did he work at up town?”

“The Excelsior, on Central Park West. Ten-eleven.”

“Who were his friends?”

“Miss Frances.” Carla nodded to the black lady sitting across the room, her sobbing subsided, her face in shock.

“Anyone else?”

“My father worked and visited Johnny.”

“How old is Johnny?”

“Twenty-two.”

“Did your father have any enemies? Any arguments with anybody lately?”

“No.”

“We may need you to come in to talk some more, Carla,” Goode said, handing the girl his card. “I’ll call you.”

Out on the street, Goode found McCann talking to a patrolman, the breath steaming from their mouths. Two patrol cars, their overhead strobe lights flashing blue/red, blue/red, were parked at the curb. In the back seat of one he could see a haggard old woman with a woolen cap on her head and ratty earmuffs on over that. The sidewalk had been taped off, but the onlookers were few. It was too cold, and there was no body to look at. An EMS van was double parked nearby. Goode had passed its two-man crew in the hallway, smoking, waiting for the body to be released.

“What’s up with the bag lady?” Goode asked as he approached his partner and the uniformed cop.

“She was in the hallway across the street,” McCann replied. “She says she saw two men get out of a HumVee and go into the building about 11:30. One had on a long black leather coat. He had a beard.”

“She said all that?” Goode addressed this question to the patrolman, a rookie, he could tell, from his baby face.

“Yes, sir.”

“How does she know what a HumVee is?”

“That’s what she said, sir. I do think she’s high, sir.”

“She’s probably always high, functionally high. Anything else? Faces, colors, height, weight?”

“No. Just the HumVee, the coat and the beard.”

Goode looked at McCann who raised his eyebrows and said, “She’s all we have.”

“What’s her name?”

“Mighty Mary, she calls herself.”

“I.D.?”

“She’s got a picture of Mayor Bloomberg in her pocket. That’s it.”

“Christ.”

“Take her to Manhattan South,” McCann said. “Give her some coffee, feed her, get a composite.”

“Good luck with that,” Clarke Goode said, as the patrolman walked toward his car.

“Let me ask you, Jack,” Goode said.

“What?”

“Bobby Davila. He and Nick Loh caught the Hayek case.”

“Yes they did.”

“Didn’t the girl live at the Excelsior on Central Park West?”

“As I recall.”

“And Davila had talked to the doorman? Name of Diaz?”

Both Goode and McCann had read the arrest and search warrants, and Davila’s supporting affidavits, before heading up to Pound Ridge to arrest Michael DeMarco. That was over three weeks ago, but Goode would be a long time forgetting that night, particularly—above all else, actually—the murderous look in Matt DeMarco’s eyes as they faced each other at the foot of the stairs.

“Yes,” McCann answered.

“Unless I’m mistaken, that’s him upstairs.”

Goode saw the light come on in McCann’s blue eyes.

“That’s right, Jack,” he said. “That’s an execution upstairs. Of a witness—a prime witness—in a murder one case.”