Neptune Avenue (23 page)

Tanney crossed his arms, looking more defensive than in charge. As usual. “Well,
I’m
not convinced. I’d like to help out, but I can’t justify committing these resources to what basically amounts to just a hunch.”

You little bean counter,
thought Jack.
You oughta be rejecting claims for a health insurance company.
He pressed his fingers to the bridge of his nose, suppressed his usual urge to throttle the man, and then stood up and left the office. He veered into the storage room around the corner, closed the door behind him, and took a minute to think. He poured himself a cup of coffee and stood there stirring in the sugar. He considered taking his case one step higher, to Lieutenant Cardulli, the head of Brooklyn South Homicide, but that kind of chain-of-command jump was always a risky move—and he was afraid that Cardulli would demand more evidence too.

But then, half an hour later, a call came in to the Homicide squad room from the New Jersey State Police. A park ranger had contacted the staties from the northern end of Lebanon State Forest, about sixty miles south of New York City. A couple of hikers had gotten lost in the park, and their dog had trotted off into the underbrush and found an interesting smell under a patch of freshly turned forest mulch. The animal had started to scrabble down into the rocky soil.

It soon uncovered a human arm. Attached to the battered body of Andrei Goguniv.

J
ACK THOUGHT OF SEMYON
Balakutis sending that drink out to his car in Mill Basin. He thought of the man’s creepy little teeth, of the way he had asked what it felt like to get shot, of his asking Jack and Linda Vargas if they wanted a free doughnut.

And he thought of Joseph Joral, of the man’s brutal streak and his cockiness and his evident belief that he could outwit the NYPD.

The one was gonna go down just like the other. “Maybe you two can share a cell up at Attica or Auburn,” he muttered to himself as he pored over his computer screen in the task force squad room.

Linda Vargas and another detective from the squad had tracked down Balakutis this morning—and learned that he had a rock-solid alibi for every day since Goguniv’s disappearance. His wife and neighbors testified that he’d come home to Mill Basin every evening, and no one had witnessed any late-night departures.

Jack had a backlog of other cases, but now he was doubly determined to find the chink in Balakutis’s armor. He didn’t have to find the connection to Daniel Lelo’s murder right away, nor that of Goguniv; often the careers of the worst criminals could be unraveled starting with a tax violation or a drug possession charge, or by busting some associate and getting him to snitch.

He placed calls to contacts at the Bureau of Criminal Information, the Organized Crime Control Bureau, the Department of Taxation and Finance, the DMV, and even—though he was no fan of federal agencies—the DEA and FBI. He worked at it all day; at least his boss wouldn’t give him a hard time, not with two unsolved murders on their plate.

What did he come up with? Nada. Zip. Nothing.

At four thirty, after his tour left, he stayed on, working a spare computer, on his own dime.

Finally, when his eyes were starting to get bleary, he went out and got in his car. For lack of anything better to do, he drove by the Cosmopolitan club. He thought of going in, but what was the point? Visiting a nightclub during the day was always depressing, like seeing a crack whore without her makeup. When the spotlights went off and the houselights came up, even the swankest places looked soiled. You saw the drink stains and the chewing gum on the carpets, the duct-tape patches on the stage, the cigarette burns in the upholstery. … He wasn’t likely to see anything illegal anyway; if there
was
something, it probably went on behind locked doors.

He thought of driving over to Mill Basin to scope out Semyon Balakutis’s bunker, but he didn’t want to get in the way of the surveillance team that Sergeant Tanney had finally authorized. So far, they’d come up with absolutely nothing. The man had spent the day visiting his doughnut franchises, going to the bank, eating lunch. A model citizen.

Jack found a parking spot on busy Brighton Beach Avenue and pulled over to think. Why had Balakutis’s violence escalated? He already owned a modest but relatively lucrative franchise—and was in on the nightclub take too. Why kill Daniel Lelo, and now the fish company manager? Just to put the squeeze on their business? It wasn’t taking in all that much profit—Linda Vargas had looked over the books.

Frustrated, he started his engine and drove to nearby Sheepshead Bay, where he had dinner at a fast-food joint with a view of the water and a spectacular, angry-looking sunset. On top of everything else he had to ponder this evening, he couldn’t help wondering where Zhenya was and what she was doing with her friend.

THE NEXT MORNING, AFTER
another night of bad sleep, he stopped by the task force office to see if any of his fishing calls and e-mails might have paid off, but there was still nothing new. He sat at his desk, frowning and spinning his chair slowly from side to side. And then he picked up his phone and dialed Semyon Balakutis’s doughnut shop.

A girl answered.

“Can I speak to Semyon?” he said, making his voice gruff.

“He won’t be in till three,” she said.

“
Spaciba
,” he mumbled, thanking her in Russian just in case the girl told Balakutis about the call.

He hung up. Then he went out and got in his car.

There was a different girl behind the counter this time, a plump teenager wearing too much black eye shadow, like a raccoon, and a big stud in her lower lip. The place was still crowded with the morning rush. Jack ordered a cup of coffee and a cruller, and then he found a little table in the corner with a newspaper lying on it. He pretended to read it as he scoped out the store and his fellow customers.

The business still didn’t quite make sense. It was easy to see why Semyon Balakutis would get involved in a nightclub: he’d get to play the big shot and feel all glamorous, like some movie gangster. Though plenty of criminals moved into legitimate businesses once they’d built up enough ill-gained cash, there was something so mundane about doughnut shops, so silly, almost, that he couldn’t see it appealing to the thug’s oversize ego. The man might go for a sports car dealership or a partnership in some entertainment management venture. …

“I tole you to shut up!” someone said loudly behind Jack, and he turned to see a mountain of a woman threaten to give her cute little daughter a wallop. Across the way, a bleary-eyed old man in wrinkled clothes sat pinching an old-fashioned doughnut into dozens of tiny pieces. Why? Who knew? Maybe he was gonna go out and feed some pigeons.

Jack took a bite of his cruller. The shop did a brisk business, that seemed evident. He glanced down at the paper. The tabloid headlines for the past several days had focused on a Long Island story involving an electrician who had married a multimillionaire’s widow just three months after the husband was slain. Over the top of Jack’s paper, he saw the line moving forward, people on their way to work, trying to jump-start their sleepy engines with a blast of sugar and caffeine. He overheard little snippets of conversation. “I ain’t been there since the last time I was there,” he heard a guy in painter’s overalls tell his buddy. A minute later, a woman in a pink sweat suit, talking to
her
friend: “I told him, you want some sugar tonight, you better lay off the sauce.”

Jack sipped his coffee, trying to make it last. He wasn’t going to be able to sit here forever. He hoped the manager wouldn’t come out of the back office and recognize him. The room was full of light—a harsh morning sun outside, glinting off parked cars; the totally unnecessary glow of the fluorescents above—but it illuminated nothing. Soon he’d have to call in to Sergeant Tanney; the boss liked regular reports on what the members of the squad were up to, and what was he gonna say?
I’m reading the paper and eating doughnuts?

He watched the girl behind the register. Unlike the glut of zombielike youngsters who populated the service industry these days, she seemed quick and efficient. She turned and grabbed doughnuts out of the glass display case behind her, bagged them, and rang up the purchases; the line moved forward quickly. A little old couple who looked as if they had just come off a Caribbean cruise, in matching Hawaiian shirts. A tall, gaunt black man who stepped forward on long legs, like a patient stork. A couple of elderly women who looked like famous Russian dictators in drag. The door opened and a lean, sharp-featured young man in black jeans and a black T-shirt entered. He waited his turn in line, but when he got to the counter, he didn’t seem to make any order. The girl behind the register reached down, came up with a small doughnut bag, handed it to him, and then took the next customer’s order. The young man didn’t hand her any money—he just turned and slipped out of the shop, and the line moved forward, and the girl turned to pour a couple of cups of coffee. Jack shook his head: a couple of free doughnuts for the boyfriend. Semyon Balakutis would never notice the loss.

He sat there for another twenty minutes, stretching out his coffee and cruller—and then the same lean young man came back in, slipped around the line, and left with another little doughnut bag.

Jack sat up and blinked; the odd little transaction would have been very easy to miss if he hadn’t been looking for something out of the ordinary, and if he hadn’t just seen it repeated.

Doughnuts,
he thought—
what a homely little thing to sell.
(Even if you owned five or more stores.) But then, so was pizza. And back in the mid-1980s, one of the biggest criminal cases in U.S. history had centered around an Italian mafia scheme of distributing heroin and laundering money through a string of midwestern pizza parlors.

He set down the paper and stood up. He needed to get out of the shop immediately, before he was spotted. Whatever was going on here, he didn’t want to interrupt it. Not yet.

Out in his car, he gripped the wheel.
Calm down,
he told himself.
Think this through.
Maybe it was just a small-time operation, putting product into the hands of local dealers. … Or maybe it wasn’t drugs at all—maybe it was something more mundane, like numbers running. But would Balakutis kill two men over something so humdrum?

Five doughnut shops, a fish market. Doughnuts, fish. What was the connection? He considered his drugs theory again. Any such operation would be shaped like a pyramid. The broad base would be made of lots of little transactions, street-level customers buying small amounts of drugs. The street sellers would get their stash from a smaller number of middlemen, who would get theirs from bigger suppliers. The price of the drugs would increase at every step down the pyramid, as each participant marked them up. The most profitable way to run an operation was to control as many steps in the chain as possible, from production to distribution to sales.

Jack started up his car and drove off down the avenue, barely paying any attention to the traffic or the pedestrians moving along in the bright summer heat.

Ultimately, the drugs would have to come from somewhere, usually in large quantities. Crystal meth or marijuana might come from in-state or cross-country. Heroin or coke would have to come from overseas.

Soon he found himself on the Belt Parkway, and then he was cruising along the Shore Parkway, with New York Harbor sparkling on his left and the Verrazano Bridge arcing off to Staten Island high overhead. He passed the old army terminal docks in Sunset Park, then zipped by his childhood neighborhood of Red Hook. He veered onto the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway, then exited in downtown Brooklyn, not far from the Supreme Court and the restaurant where he had interviewed Annette O’Dea.

He left his car near Cadman Plaza and walked across the narrow little park there. Soon the bright sun and heat were getting to him; he took off his tie, folded it, and stuck it in his shirt pocket. At the end of the park, he found a staircase that brought him up onto the Brooklyn Bridge. A hurtling Rollerblader almost clipped him as he moved out onto the pedestrian walkway. Ahead loomed the old stone towers of the bridge, with their harpstring cables. A stream of tourists moved along the wooden walkway; little knots of them stepped aside along the way to take photos. Joggers and bicyclists did their best to weave in and out of the clotted traffic.

By the time he had almost reached the center of the bridge, Jack’s shirt was damp with sweat, and he took out a handkerchief to wipe his forehead. He kept an eye out for anyone selling bottles of water. Looking down to his left, he could see the Verrazano way off in the distance, and the piers of Red Hook, and—in the middle of the harbor—low, wooded Governors Island, a site that had figured heavily in one of his recent cases.

The walkway rose until it reached the center of the bridge, and then it began a slow, steady decline toward the office towers of downtown Manhattan. The bicyclists could coast downhill now, and the Rollerbladers picked up steam. Three-quarters of the way across the river, Jack moved out of the stream of pedestrians and stepped over to the railing. The sun was bright in his eyes, and he shaded them so he could look down. A Circle Line tourist boat was gliding down the East River, moving past nearby Pier 17, topped by the big red layer cake of the South Street Seaport mall. Just to its north lay the low, flat gray building that housed the offices of the Fulton Fish Market. Under the shadow of the FDR Drive, Jack could see the big asphalt lot where—in the predawn hours—the fish would have been laid out for sale.

Daniel Lelo’s fish company was down there. Big shipments of huge fish arrived there on a regular basis, from many exotic ports of call. Jack thought of how—back in the hospital—Daniel had boasted about how his industry had become so international.
Cod caught off the U.S. West Coast might end up in Tokyo. Pollack served as fish-and-chips might come from the Bering Sea. …

And yes, the fish were valuable, but Daniel’s company was small. It cost a lot of money to run. And it didn’t provide the sort of profits that would likely attract a shark like Semyon Balakutis. On the other hand, Jack mused now, it might provide an amazing opportunity. If drugs were indeed Balakutis’s central enterprise, then the company offered a fantastic way to move large quantities into the U.S., in Styrofoam boxes marked
CHILEAN SEA BASS
or
DOVER SOLE
, or maybe even hidden inside the carcasses of the biggest fish.