F Train (9 page)

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.

“Fantastic. Like when we were kids, Marty. You don't see fish like this much nowadays. The ocean was really something back then. Full of these fat fuckers. Not like now.”

They were on Church Avenue between Thirty-fifth Street and Dahill Road, a neighborhood commercial quarter owned, patronized, and lived in by immigrants from the rest of the world.

Across the bustling avenue on the corner of Story Street was Moussari Hardware, the store locked and dark. A sign on the iron-shuttered door announced in Urdu and English: “Temporary Closing—Family Mourning.”

They entered the Jamal Fish Market, the small shop redolent of sea and ice.

A man in a bloodied white apron, a brown knitted cap on his dark head, all smiles.

“Can I help you, sirs?”

“You got great fish,” Frank said. “Terrific store. But we just want to talk with you. About Mr. Hakim Jamal.” He displayed his police shield. “This is Detective Keane. Me, I'm Detective Murphy.”

“Thank you, sirs. We're all documented immigrants in this family. We all have Green Cards. Our children are born here, sirs—”

“That's not the question.”

“My brother was documented, too.”

“We're sorry about your brother.”

“Thank you, sirs.”

“Your name?”

“Ali Muhammed Jamal.”

“The other night, do you know why your brother was out that late? With Mr. Panesh Moussari, right?”

“Yes, sir, Mr. Moussari. He owned the hardware store. You can see it right over there across the street.”

“And do you know where they were that night?”

“We do good business, sirs, we work hard.” Ali Muhammed Jamal nodded and wiped his hands on his apron. “We make good money, not millions, but nice. It's a living. We have families where we come from and we send them money. That's what they were doing.”

“In the middle of the night?”

“Yes, sir. We work all day and half the night like now. Middle of the night here is middle of the day in Karachi.”

“And?”

“They carried the money to the remittance banker downtown. He calls his partner in Karachi. He tells him how much to give our relative in Karachi. Right there, same time, our relative is with the banker in Karachi. It's all very simple, sirs, very honest. And very fast. Not like Chase Bank, no sir, they take forever, they charge more, sometimes they lose our records. Yes, sir. Remittance is the best bank. And that's where they were that night. They go one, maybe during holidays even two times a week. Or they used to. Now I'll go. It's all legal, sirs. A good system. Much better than Chase Bank.”

“They weren't afraid? Carrying around so much cash like that?”

“Going downtown, yes. That's why they went together. They took car service. Coming home, no. Their pockets were empty, of course.”

“Of course. Where downtown?”

“Sir?”

“Where's the bank downtown?”

Ali Muhammed Jamal glanced around his shop, nervously, Frank noted, as if hoping all these fantastic fish on ice, although fresh, were by this point quite deaf.

“Over behind the Marriott hotel, sirs, two blocks, there's a mosque. The newspaper store next to the mosque, it's in there.”

“That's the bank?”

“Yes, sirs. They're very honest. And my family is very honest. We all pay all our taxes. Please, we want no more troubles. My brother left a widow with three children. This store must support them, and my wife and children, too, and our children's grandparents in Karachi. Please, sirs, we make no trouble. No one here is political. We only work.”

Ali Muhammed Jamal's worldly concerns, Frank concluded, were packed into the bosom of his family. The detectives thanked him for his time and again extended their condolences.

“I'm always here, sirs. Please, when you catch him? God willing? Please, sirs, you tell me. I want to know the swine's name, may he suffer in hell.”

Back out on Church Avenue, Frank said, “Nice people, probably harmless. They won't take up our time. But check out that bank, can't believe everything he said. Otherwise, I think we're done here. I'm calling Flo. She can meet us for a bite on Smith.”

“Give her a break from all the bullshit she's reading.”

They looked over at the darkened hardware store belonging to the undocumented immigrant, Panesh Moussari.

“We need a warrant to get in there,” Frank said, sounding regretful.

7
P.M.

Smith Street, snow again.

Icy sidewalks, blasting winds.

Temperature in the teens.

The front window of the Lemon Grass
restaurant—Asian
fusion—was misted over, the room filled with a dinner crowd. Flo Ott and her colleagues sat at a table by the window.

Frank Murphy regarded the shadowy arctic scene on Smith Street. “Just the way it was outside on that night. The North Pole.”

Flo produced the day's late edition of the
New York Post
. “It could be worse. Check out our snow job meister.”

She opened the paper and held up page five. A four-column photo: Howard Gerald, PhD, with the mayor and the mackerel-eyed police commissioner, a picture taken months before at the Ancient Order of Hibernians' annual Waldorf-Astoria dinner with the cardinal and the Society of the Friendly Sons of Saint Patrick. A friendly shot and great publicity for the doctor, the accompanying piece a comfortably short read for
Post
fans. Headline: EXPERT RULES OUT SUICIDE KILLINGS.

“No,” Flo said, “not in his professional opinion. Howard Gerald, PhD, doesn't think it was a suicide terrorist. Says the commissioner assured him none of the victims are
suspects—although
the commissioner never told us that. Gerald is making it up as he goes along, and I hope he gets his ass canned. Maybe this has an upside, gets him and the mayor out of our hair.”

“It's down-to-earth,” Frank said. “And so much more accessible, the
Post
. I'm so glad they've told us everything now, so we can sit here all night and eat dumplings.”

“Didn't mean to ruin your appetite,” Flo said.

“Impossible.”

“In that case,” said Flo, “you'll be delighted to know the lab still has the Russian's body. Bea Liebowitz hasn't claimed it. Not even after we saw her.”

“Families. You can never tell, can you? Nobody misses the poor stiff. Laying in an icebox there.”

“He wasn't all that poor, Frank. The lab had a few more things to tell us.”

“Such as?”

“He had a mouth cost a small fortune, Sidney did. Gold crowns, Hollywood caps, bridges. All the best.”

“Lucky he didn't get the gold knocked out in Dannemora.”

“He had protection from his Bastards,” said Flo, glancing out at the snow for a moment. “From here we go to the Marriott, Frank, and check out the Bastards. One of the bartenders, Bucky Skelly, did twenty years with squad cars and always in Brooklyn. Retired a year now.”

Frank said, “Anything else on Sid the money mouth?”

“His blood—the lab says he was on Ecstasy. And Viagra.”

“Guy left nothing to chance. No wonder he carried eleven condoms.”

“The way I see it,” said Flo, “the Bastards, whatever line of work they're in—if they've got any brains, and I think they do—for them, there's no margin covering for a mass murderer. My guess is they're all strictly business. And if the Bastards were out to pay back Sidney R. Davidov—pay back anything they felt he had coming to him—there are simpler, less attention-grabbing methods available to them. Unless, of course, they want to send a message. And none of our sources out on the street have said a word about that. Nobody has heard anything. But we'll check the lounge. And one more thing, the lab is sure he had sex that night.”

Frank laughed. “Go on, Flo. They wouldn't kid us about something like that, would they?”

“They're technicians. They take nothing for granted, no wild guesses.”

“Okay, the Marriott. Maybe lover boy had a steady girlfriend. Someone with a story for us. But more likely a one-off, only a hooker. A wild guess, of course. What do I know about tomcatting around?”

“Tell you what, Frank, if I was taking wild guesses? I'd say Bea Liebowitz had a good reason. And even Reilly's wife, she had a good reason, too. You got a pair of mighty pissed-off wives there, even if obviously not our mass killer kind.”

“Soap opera, Flo. You've been watching daytime TV?”

“No way. I'm a fan of that blonde on the NBC morning news, whatever her name is.”

“Easy view, easy listen. No pretensions, I like her, too. I'm your completely uncomplicated average consumer. Except when it comes to food, of course. You got to try some of these spring onion and crabmeat cakes, Flo, with the little seaweed patties here. To die for, and no pun intended.”

“You know, Frank, now you really sound more like Martha Stewart.”

“Another ex-con. Please, Flo, spare me.”

“Krish taped a morning chat show for me. Hizzonner da mare declared today, and I quote, ‘We've got our best and brightest minds investigating this outrage, working around the clock to catch the psychopaths. We're putting these killers out of action. Forever.' End quote.”

Marty smiled. “Never changes a word, that guy. Must be the tenth time on TV he's said exactly that.”

Flo nodded at the truth of it all; she couldn't argue with realities. “Excluding leads on no one, here's the situation so far,” said Flo. “Lone madman driven by God knows what, but with a talent for making a big splash, will remain in the mayor's files, until Hizzoner needs a rabbit out of the hat for his next campaign. Meanwhile, what we've probably got is a scheming son of bitch—or maybe a whole tribe of them—who've got the time and they can do their planning right down to the weather. For us, the working basis going for our hypotheses so far is…seven bodies, three pairs and a single, gas, a bucket, an executioner. Anything suicidal? Not a hint. Our guy must have strong reasons, strong for him, anyway.”