Skull Session (31 page)

It was almost eleven by the time he got back to his apartment, feeling baked, beat, fried. He had swung the door open before he noticed the note that was taped on it at eye-level. He flicked on the lights, wincing at the unflattering illumination of his bare apartment, and opened the folded paper.

It was a short note from Alice, his neighbor downstairs, inviting him to drop by for some wine if he felt like it, don't worry if it's late. Alice had been making her interest clear since he'd moved in. Mo swore she had a radar that could spot a single man, could pick up that single man's lonelier and more vulnerable moods. Or maybe it was just that her apartment was directly below his, allowing her to hear his footsteps, and that Mo could generally be counted on to be in a lonely and vulnerable mood.

She was in her late thirties, divorced, a sweet kid, and not Mo's type at all. Mo had run into her on the street a couple of times, once accompanying her to the deli to grab a sandwich. She'd talked at him fast and loud, office gossip from the travel agency where she worked. Overdone black hair piled and frizzed and sprayed into place, a plain face that she tried to dramatize with too-bright lipstick and eyeshadow, and a good figure kept trim from aerobics classes at Mt. Kisco Athletic Club, where Mo also worked out occasionally. In fact, it was the recollection of meeting Alice in the lobby of the club—smiling, scrubbed clean of the too-much makeup, wearing a red-and-white-striped leotard and white tights—that now bothered Mo. Damned good legs, trim stomach, broad hip bones. Aerobics-firmed arms and shoulders. Downstairs right now with a bottle of Chardonnay.

Why not? Mo got a beer from the refrigerator and slumped in his chair. Why the hell not? Partly because nothing came without a price, and if the price was at some point in days or weeks having to tell her it wasn't going to work out, then it was too steep. She was just doing what he was doing, keeping the loneliness at bay however she could, and she didn't need any more disappointments. Anyway, the image of Alice in her tights had quickly given way to the memory of Lia McLean, the sun slanting onto her dark honey-colored hair, her clear, alert eyes, the sweet perfection of her legs in her jeans as she sat in the wing chair at Highwood—

Mo swigged down the beer, took off his shoulder holster and draped it over the chair at the head of his bed. If he were smart, he would probably go see a shrink or join some self-esteem group or men's drumming circle or whatever crap you did nowadays, to figure out his thing with women. The hell with it. He hoped he'd be able to get some sleep. He cut the light and got into bed.

39

O
N FRIDAY, MO MADE A point of stopping in Tommy Mack's cubicle first thing. It was wise to catch the Lewisboro barracks' lone Narco investigator early, before the day's stress and overwork and frustration had melted down his circuits. Tommy should have burnt out long ago, but some incredibly durable part of his constitution kept him coming back at it day after day, year after year, hke an Irish pub brawler with an iron jaw. In the mornings, before the day got away from him, he was generally clear-headed and not unfriendly. Tommy was too harried to give Mo's past any concern; probably, if put to a choice, he'd be one of those to come down in Mo's favor for having put those neat clusters of holes in the mutts in White Plains—especially given that it was a drug-related thing, Tommy's specialty.

"Yo, Tomas," Mo said.

"Oy," Tommy returned, not looking up.

"You were in here pretty late last night. I thought I smelled something cooking—you must have some pot about to boil over."

"Ahh." Tommy looked disgusted. "That was the smell of burning insulation." He tapped the side of his head meaningfully. Tommy saw himself as a David, facing every day the Goliath of entrenched state and federal bureaucracies and the tangled morass of the laws he was expected to enforce. It wasn't a good idea to get him started.

"Got a question for you. Have you got anything going with this place, Highwood, over on the Lewisboro Reservoir Road? I need to look into some things there, but I don't want to step on anybody's

toes."

"Huh?" A blank look.

"You using uniform help on a marijuana case in that area?"

"Uniform help like who?"

"Pete Rizal."

"Rizal?" Tommy made a face like he'd bitten into something rotten. "No," he said. "Not using Rizal on anything."

"Well, let me ask you this: If there was anything going on in Lewisboro, maybe out of another jurisdiction or something, you'd know about it, right?"

Tommy smiled evilly. "Who, me? Hey, I'm just the Narco officer in charge here, that's all. Why would anybody let me know what the fuck they were doing?" He laughed sourly. "Seriously, what kind of thing? If it's something big or something imported, Customs or the DEA might take the lead, I might not know first off. But they sure as hell wouldn't be asking for uniform support at the barracks level if that's what it was."

"What I heard was, it concerned somebody bringing home-grown marijuana down from Vermont."

Tommy shook his head
no.
"Then we'd get it first. Lewisboro, North Salem, they'd call us in right away. It'd be ours. We've got nothing like that going right now."

Mo thanked him and went back to his own office. So Paul was right—Rizal had some other ax to grind. How did he tie in?

He left a message at the office of Bennett Quinn, the agent in charge of the Ridgefield case of the human thigh, asking for a call back, then did the same with Dr. Mathewson, the medical examiner who had done the autopsy on Richard Mason. His telephone luck wasn't running good and Mo decided to give it a rest.

Back at his computer, Mo did some more routine work, looking up Royce Hoffmann. As he'd suspected, there was nothing. The petty vandalism Royce had committed back when, "criminal mischief," wouldn't ever have made it past the police blotter to a permanent file. As for more serious juvenile crimes, it was hkely that Royce or his mother had asked for a sealing order that permanently expunged any record of criminal activity from police files. Very common for juvenile offenders.

Mo sat with his notebook in front of him, thinking about what he'd learned. The sticky one was Rizal. It looked as if Pizal had motives of his own for his visits to Highwood. His main goal, if he had one, seemed to be to get Paul to leave the job. Why? The problem was that looking into a fellow State Police employee wasn't easy to do, especially when half the system had doubts about Mo's own conduct. Without bringing a charge of malfeasance or conduct unbecoming, he didn't have any right to suspect Pdzal of anything. He was willing to bend rules, but this was serious stuff, enough to ruin Rdzal's career or his own. He'd have to give the matter some thought.

Next he ran a search for Salvatore Falcone, who according to Paul Skoglund had been a gardener at Highwood. Paul had said that his aunt suspected Falcone because they'd had some kind of altercation long ago. NYSPIN showed that a Salvatore Falcone, of Purdys, had been charged twice with assault and battery, with one conviction resulting in a jail sentence, in the mid-eighties. Mo jotted down Falcone's address and telephone number.

What he needed was some local perspective on Falcone. Mo thumbed through his Rolodex until he came up with a name Wild Bill had suggested as a resource in North Salem, Sam Lombardino, who for the last twenty years had run a dry cleaning business by day and worked as one of North Salem township's police constables by night. Sam had lived in the area all his life and would know about Falcone if there was anything to know about.

Risking the phone again, he called the dry cleaner's number, and the woman put him through to her boss.

"Mr. Lombardino? This is Mo Ford, State Police BCI in Lewisboro. Have you got a minute?"

"I got about that," Lombardino answered. He had a gruff, harried voice. "Everything's gone haywire down here, I got repairmen all over the place."

"Okay, this won't take long. I'm looking into a case, I can't disclose the specifics just yet, but the name Salvatore Falcone came up. You know him?"

"Yeah, Salli. Family's been in the area forever."

"Ever have any trouble with him?"

Mo heard the sound of the phone being covered with a palm and Lombardino's muffled voice, barking at his repairmen or whoever. Then: "Sorry. I got a mess down here. Salli's got a wife and four kids, drinks a little too much and gets mad too easily. I had to arrest him once, for beating the stuffing out of a couple of guys. Salli's a big guy, not someone you want to get physical with. But I got him into the car okay.

I knew his father a little bit, twenty, thirty years ago. When he saw it was me, he calmed down."

"He the type to hold a grudge?"

"I'd have to say no, I'd think he gets it out of his system pretty fast. In fact, I wish he'd hold his grudges a little better. And his booze."

"Do you know where he works?"

"Well, I saw him at the butcher counter in Croton Falls for a while, but I think he moves around, job to job, quite a bit." Through the phone, Mo heard a loud
clunk!
followed by a gabble of voices. "Son of a—listen, I gotta go now. I don't know anything that'll help you anyway."

After saying good-bye to Lombardino, Mo checked his watch, then put on his coat. It was nearly lunchtime, and he thought he'd visit the grocery store in Croton Falls, see if he could get a look at the Great Beast Falcone.

Falcone had left his job at the grocery store, but the manager said he'd heard he went to work at Jason's Gym in Danbury. The manager hadn't fired him; he'd quit.

"The gym job's perfect for Salli," the manager said. "He was there half the time anyway, training for these bodybuilder competitions." He made a gesture around his own bony chest, signifying bulging muscles.

Driving toward Danbury, Mo realized that if Falcone had worked at Highwood in the early sixties, he'd now have to be the world's oldest competing bodybuilder. He wished he'd looked more closely at the records. Something didn't figure.

At Jason's Gym Mo followed his nose to the workout rooms and spotted Falcone immediately. There were only a few people inside. But directly in front of Mo was a broad, muscled back shaped like a shield, glistening with sweat. Falcone was seated on the bench of a Universal machine, wearing small purple briefs, a sleeveless T-shirt and training shoes, no socks. As Mo watched, he raised the bar and lifted an incredible column of stacked iron weights. The muscles of his shoulders swelled and striated as he did eight repetitions, then dropped the bar. The floor shook with the pile-driver impact.

Falcone groped for a towel and wiped his body down. An impressive specimen, Mo admitted. His thighs and arms were wadded with muscle, his sweat-soaked T-shirt clung to a stomach sectioned into sharply defined squares, his calves were swollen spheres gripped by branching blue veins. Black hair, heavy brows, a square face. He put the towel over his shoulder and approached Mo.

"Help you?" he asked.

"Are you Mr. Falcone?"

"Yeah. What d'you need?"

"I'm Morgan Ford. I'm an investigator with the New York State Police. I was hoping I could talk to you." Mo flipped open his ID.

Falcone glanced around the room. "What the hell? I just started working here. I don't need any trouble." He took a black sweatshirt from a hook and pulled it over his huge torso. It was a hooded sweatshirt, but the sleeves had been cut out to reveal Falcone's knotted arms. With his face shadowed by the hood, arms bare, Falcone looked like a medieval executioner.

"There won't be any trouble if you answer some of my questions." Mo tipped his head toward the free-weight room, empty now. "We could go in there to talk. If your boss asks what it's about, tell him I'm thinking of becoming a club member."

In the free-weight room, Falcone sat on a tall stool while Mo leaned against the wall, facing him. "I don't know nothing about nothing," Falcone said. "Whatever it is, you got the wrong guy."

"Maybe so. You're not who I thought I was going to be talking to. Your father's name is Salvatore too, right?" Mo had figured his mistake the moment he saw Falcone's unlined face. He couldn't be any older than thirty-five, if that.

"That's right."

"Where's your father now? Maybe he's the one I should be talking to."

Falcone gestured with both hands, as if throwing something into the air, Italian for
it's a moot point.
"He's dead. We think he's dead. He disappeared a long time ago."

"Why do you think he's dead? Maybe he just—"

Falcone thrust the idea back at Mo with a gesture of his huge right arm. "You never heard of family pride? You don't know my father, you don't know my family. So don't insult. My father wouldn't have left my mother and us kids."

"I respect that," Mo said. "No insult intended." So family pride was a big issue with Falcone. Having already put his foot in it, Mo decided he might as well tough it out for the duration. "Listen, Mr. Falcone, tell me about Highwood. About Vivien Hoffmann." At the sudden change of tack, the bodybuilder's head jerked toward Mo, eyes suddenly wary.

"I don't know anything about them."

"You got a grudge going, Mr. Falcone? You mad at somebody?"

"I never been up there in my life."

"Oh? So who's smashing the place up?"

"The fuck should I know? I wouldn't set foot up there."

"Why's that?"

Falcone got off his stool and lifted it with one hand, holding it near the end of one metal leg and swinging it up and down, using just his wrist and the bunching muscles of his forearm. "Because the bitch that owns the place, the Hoffmann bitch, is the one that screwed my father."

"How'd she do that?"

"She got him set up. When he worked there as a gardener. She called the police on him, said that he'd stolen things and wrecked some valuable stuff. It was all bullshit. But she was rich and he was a dirt laborer. Who was the judge going to believe? And when he got out of jail, he couldn't get a decent fucking job around here. My mother had to support us. He was home for a few years and then he disappeared. Personally, I think he was ashamed he couldn't support his family and went off and killed himself. She fucked him up. She fucked up my whole family."

"So you want to pay her back."

Falcone set the stool down and sat on it again. He was breathing hard, out of proportion to his exertion, and Mo was aware of the power and mass of his body, like a throbbing diesel engine. "She could die for all I care," he muttered.

"You want to help her along, maybe?"

"I haven't
thought
about the bitch for maybe ten years. For all I know, until you come in here today, maybe she's already dead."

"Why would she do that to your father?"

Falcone's eyes were bitter. "You want to know? My brother told me why, when I was a little older. You know what my brother said? Because he wouldn't fuck her. My father had a build'd make me look like a faggot. Face like Mastroianni. She's up there alone on the hill, divorced, he looks pretty good to her. Only she can't understand maybe he's got a wife he likes, maybe he's a good Catholic. Just maybe he's got some goddamned pride. So she's gonna make him hurt."

Falcone glared at him defiantly, and while Mo thought about where to go with it, two women from the stationary bicycles came in and started working out with tiny dumbbells. They were both dressed in neon Spandex that made Mo's eyes ache.

"And now I got work to do," Falcone said. He got up and walked back into the main workout room. Mo did a few curls with a forty-pound barbell, trying to decide whether to push Falcone a little harder this time, or wait. Finally he decided he'd probably done all he could for now. When Mo passed Falcone on his way out, the bodybuilder was doing some paperwork at a small desk near the door.