The Killer Sex Game (A Frank Boff Mystery) (9 page)

At the same time, Boff was parking his car near a row of storefronts, most of which were dark at this hour, on
North 6
th
Street in the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn. Information broker Billy Wright had called him earlier to tell him that he had Rafael’s financial workup ready, plus a list of all the recent phone calls he and his wife had made. Boff saw the CLOSED sign on the door of Billy’s Computer Repair, and the lights were off inside, but he waved at the surveillance cam mounted over the door. In a moment, the door buzzed open.

It looked like a typical neighborhood computer shop. Which was Wright’s intention. While he did fix computers, this was only a front for his real business. Boff stepped inside and crossed the small store to an open door in the back, where the information broker was waiting for him. Wright was a dark-skinned man in his early forties with a round face, thick nose, and large lips. When Boff had partnered with Wright in the DEA, the guy had been a martial arts fanatic and always dead fit. Now he had a bulging gut and a spreading backside, the obvious product of too many hours spent with his ass glued to a computer and too much fast food.

As they entered his back room, Wright said, “Take a seat, Frank. I’m just finishing something up.” He sat down in front of one of the four computers in the room, plus a state-of-the-art printer/fax machine.

“I gather things are better with your daughter,” Boff said as he brushed aside a bunch of McDonald’s bags and donut boxes from the couch and sat down. As usual, except for his work desk, Wright’s place was really messy. In addition to takeout food bags, donut boxes, and Chinese cartons, there was a bunch of Styrofoam coffee cups lying around on the floor, along with a grease-stained Pizza Hut box.

“They had a sudden reconciliation,” Wright said without turning around. “Will it last? Who knows?” A minute later, he added, “Are you taking your magnesium, Frank?”

“Every day.”

Besides being an information broker, Wright was a conspiracy theorist. His latest obsession was jet contrails, which he believed were laced with chemicals and biological agents being deliberately sprayed at high altitudes by the government for an undisclosed but sinister purpose. He believed that some of the stuff in the so-called chemtrails was inactive and would be triggered and released in the future when the New World Order was ready to reduce global population. The only way to prepare your body for the coming rain of poison, he’d told Boff several times, was to take mega doses of magnesium twice a day. For Boff’s last birthday, in fact, Wright had bought him a case of magnesium. Boff had promptly sold it on eBay and used the money to add more
Fifties CDs to his collection.

A minute later, Wright took one hand off the computer keyboard and pointed to a table near the couch. “There’s some new photos of chemtrails,” he said. “Take a look.”

“I’ll pass. You’ve seen one chemtrail, you’ve seen them all.”

Wright shook his head. “Go ahead, Frank, make light of it, but just remember I warned you that the New World Order is going to replace sovereign states and eliminate checks and balances—”

Boff s put his hands over his ears. “I’m not listening!”

Wright went on, “The plan is to establish a global federal system controlled by the members of the New World Order. First thing they’re going to do when they take over is eliminate what they call the ‘useless eaters.’ Which means killing off the poor, elderly, and destitute of the world. I’m pretty sure private investigators will fall on that list of useless eaters.”

Putting up with Wright’s mumbo jumbo was the price Boff had to pay to get the best info around. The information broker was fiercely loyal to him, not in small part because during a raid on a drug operation in Jamaica, Boff pumped four bullets into a dealer who was about to chop Wright’s head off with a machete.

After he finished typing, he swiveled around in his chair and held out a folder. Boff got off the couch, grabbed it, flipped it open, and studied it a few minutes.

“There’s a lot of charges here to strip and dance clubs,” he finally said.

Wright nodded. “The majority of the club charges in
New York were at a hot spot called Devil’s Own. It’s in the meatpacking district. Fourteenth Street between 9
th
and 10
th
Avenues. I looked it up in the
New York
magazine. It’s apparently the bastion of cool for the thirty-something set.”

Boff flipped a page, studied it a minute. “What about all these charges in
Miami?”

“The guy made four trips in the last
five months from New York to Miami. He spent plenty on dinners and at women’s boutiques, jewelry stores, and clubs.”

Something caught Boff’s eye. “When
Oquendo flew down to Florida,” he said, “he bought just one round-trip ticket. Meaning the wife wasn’t with him. Even more curious is that each time he returned to New York, he paid for a two other tickets. Both one-way.”

“Yeah. What do make of that?”

“I’m not sure yet. But it certainly appears there was a lot more to this guy’s life than just boxing. What about his phone calls?”

“His Sprint bill shows the usual ones. To the wife. His trainer. Various stores. But what
was
unusual was that the majority of his other calls came from or went to restricted numbers, which the bill listed as unavailable.”

“They could’ve all been to one person,” Boff said.

“If they were, that person must’ve been someone special. Like a girlfriend.”

Boff nodded. “Do you have anyone inside Sprint who could give you the restricted numbers?”

“Well, I do have a friend at Sprint, but his pay grade is too low for him to access those kind of numbers. The best he could get me was a copy of the boxer’s latest phone bill. Basically, we’re going to have to rely on the plastic.”

“What about his wife’s phone?”

“It’s all in the folder.”

“Which I’ll study later,” Boff said, closing it. “But right now give me the short version.”

“Most of the wife’s calls were either to her husband, McAlary, or his wife, Kate. There were also some rather long calls to a guy named Alberto Mantilla. I made some inquiries. It appears he owns a restaurant in Brooklyn called Giancarlo’s.”

“I was there today,” Boff said. “Mantilla helped
Oquendo defect.”

“Well, then maybe when the hubby was out screwing around, the wife phoned Mantilla to cry on his shoulder.”

“Could be.”

“Her calls to Miami were for the most part
, routine. A lot were to her father and a woman with the same last name as her old man’s. I assume a sister or an aunt. The only thing out of the ordinary in her Miami calls was that about two weeks ago, she phoned a guy there named Jorge Gamboa. Four times. Gamboa apparently has Cuban mob connections in Florida.

This caught Boff’s interest.
“If this Gamboa’s connected, he could’ve contracted a hit man for her,” he said. “Or maybe did the shooting himself.”

Wright wrote a quick note on a pad. “I’ll look into this guy some more. But outside of this Gamboa, there’s nothing else that’d keep the wife in play.”

Boff’s phone rang. He picked up.

“What’s up, Mikey?” He listened, then winced. “I’m on my way.”

“Bad news, Frank?”

“Yeah.”

“Not family, I hope.”

“No. Thanks for the workup, Billy. I owe you dinner.”

Wright waved it off. “If you’re gonna take me to Burger King again, thanks but no thanks.”

Taking his folder with him, Boff headed for the door.

On the way to the gym, he called Damiano and got a quick rundown on what had happened to Cullen’s girlfriend. After parking his car near the gym, he lumbered up the stairs, walked inside, and found Bellucci, McAlary, and Kate sitting on benches watching Cullen pound the heavy bag like he was trying to kill it. Grunting with rage, he was hammering the big sack relentlessly. Boff figured he must have been at it awhile, because his tank top and sweat pants were completely soaked. He nodded at the others, then leaned against the wall by the door and watched Cullen.

“Danny,” McAlary said, “maybe you should quit now. You don’t want to risk hurting your hands.”

Cullen ignored
him and kept at the bag.

A minute later, Bellucci stood up and walked over. “Danny, listen to me.”

“Go away.”

“I know you’re hurting, buddy. But if you break a hand or tear a ligament, you won’t be able to fight for the championship.”

“I don’t care!”

“Bullshit.”

Cullen fired a vicious uppercut and then three straight right hooks.

Bellucci stepped
closer to Cullen. “How many times have you told me you want to win this title fight to honor your father?”

Although Cullen didn’t reply, after pounding the bag for another minute, he finally stopped, dropped his arms to his sides, and stood there panting. Finally he nodded at Bellucci. As they walked over and sat on an empty bench, McAlary got up.

“Let me see your hands,” he said.

Cullen held both gloves out to his trainer, who after unlacing them and removing the wraps, carefully inspected his hands. “No apparent damage,” he said, sounding relieved. He grabbed a clean towel from a nearby bench and tossed it to his boxer.

“I…I… keep thinking…this was my fault. Maybe, you know, maybe if I’d pushed her harder, she would’ve taken money from me for a taxi.”

Bellucci shook his head. “No, she wouldn’t have, Danny. You said Marla didn’t even let you buy her dinner. She wanted everything Dutch.”

At this point, Boff pushed off the wall and walked over. “Danny, I’m really sorry,” he said as he laid one hand on the boxer’s shoulder, left it there a few moments, then took it away.

Knowing Boff, Cullen understood that touching his shoulder was as close to expressing affection as he could do with almost anybody except his wife. He looked up at Boff and managed a weak smile. Then he hung his head down and sighed. “Man, I’ve seen too many people close to me die. First my father. Then Julio. And…and now this.” He looked up again. “I know Marla and I had only been seeing each other for a few months, but…how do I say this? Marla…she took my breath away whenever I was around her.”

Boff nodded. “When I starting dating my wife in high school,” he said, “I had trouble breathing around her, too. Still do sometimes.”

“Kate took my breath away, too,” said McAlary. “But that was because she was always punching me in the stomach when she got angry with me.” He
let out a big laugh, but no one joined him.

His wife made a face. “That’s a lot of malarkey,” she said. “Maybe I should dig up the love letters you wrote me when we first met in
Belfast and show them to Danny.”

McAlary pointed a finger at her. “Don’t you dare!”

“I believe in one letter you said, ‘When I’m around you, the whole world disappears and it’s just you and me, my love.’”

Cullen
glanced up at his trainer, who shrugged. “I was a wee bit of a flowery writer back in the day.”

“Mikey?” Cullen said. “You ever felt that way?”

Bellucci shook his head. “So far, I haven’t met nobody I’ve loved more than myself.”

Cullen punched his friend lightly on the shoulder, then stood up. “Thanks for coming, you guys,” he said. “Now it’s time for everybody to go to bed.”

Instead of driving straight home, Boff headed over to the alley where Damiano had told him Marla had been murdered. He didn’t know why he was going there. It was just one of those feelings he got from time to time. Sometime it panned out. A lot of times, it didn’t.

Getting out of his car, he walked down the alley, found the spot where she had been killed, and surveyed it carefully. Dried blood on the ground. Paint mark where the top of her head had been on the ground. Then he turned to the fence. More dried blood in front of that. He deduced that the killer had been scaling the fence when the cops gunned him down. For a few moments, he just stood there, trying to picture the scene as it had unfolded.

When he had a good feel for how it had gone down, he started back up the alley toward his car, but he was still unsure why he had come. It was an open and shut case. Guy rapes and murders girl. Cops arrive. Catch the doer trying to escape. And shoot him.

He stopped walking suddenly and backtracked in his mind. Cops arrive…. He wondered what the odds were that two cops in a night patrol car had just happened to be on the scene in time to shoot the doer. The window of opportunity they had would’ve been very small. Maybe five seconds. That was how long it would have taken for the killer to scale the fence and be gone.

As he resumed walking, an idea began to form in his head. Reaching the sidewalk, he spotted an elderly man out walking a cocker spaniel. The man was halfway up the front stairs to the building adjacent to the alley when he turned and saw Boff. He looked suddenly frightened.

“Sir,” Boff said, “could I please ask you a question?” He kept his voice low and unthreatening.

“What…what do you want?” The old man fumbled nervously with his keys trying to get one into the door lock.

“I’m Frank Boff. An investigator.”

He conveniently left out the “private” part so the old guy would think he was a cop. It apparently worked. The dog walker stopped trying to open the door and turned to him.

“I was just wondering,” Boff continued, “if you or anyone else in your building witnessed the crime committed here tonight.”

The man shook his head. “No. And I have a window overlooking the alley.”

“Which window is that?”

The old man pointed to one on the second floor near the front of the alley.

To look more like a cop, he took out his notepad and pen and began scribbling some nonsense on it. Then he looked back at the man. “At what point, sir, were you aware that a crime had been committed?”

“When I heard a bunch of gun shots.”

That surprised Boff. “You must’ve heard the siren as the first cop car arrived, right?”

Again the man shook his head. “Nobody I talked to on my floor heard a siren until later when a whole bunch of cop cars arrived.”

He stopped scribbling nonsense and wrote that down. Then he asked, “Before the other cars came, did you see colored lights flashing in your window from the first cop vehicle to arrive?”

The old man shook his head again. “No lights until the other cops arrived.” He turned back to his door and succeeded in putting his key in the lock this time. As he opened it, he said over his shoulder, “I’m glad they killed the bastard who did this. I don’t trust the courts to get justice.”

“I couldn’t agree more. Thanks for talking to me.”

The man quickly disappeared inside.

Taking out his phone, Boff made a call.

Detective Damiano.

She sounded out of breath. He smiled. Either she was exercising, or….

“It’s Boff. Is this a bad time?”

Yes
, it fucking is! Whatcha want?

“Have you talked to the two cops who shot the killer of Danny’s girlfriend yet?”

No. There’s no rush. This’s an open and shut case. Now I’m hanging up.

“Wait! Would I interrupt you from whatever you were doing—sounded like exercising—if it wasn’t important?”

He heard her sigh, and then she apparently cupped the receiver to muffle sound, but he could make out the words
Diane
and
sorry
before she came back on the line.

What’s the deal here? Why is the
Great Boffer nosing around in an open and shut?

“I’m curious how the cops happened to be so close by. Do me a favor. Find out what their patrol perimeters were tonight. Also, I’d like to know what they said when they phoned in. And finally, whether they used their siren and lamps in responding.”

He heard her sigh again, then,
And what do I get in exchange?

“I did a financial workup on Rafael. Apparently he lived an active social life.
Without
his wife. The kind of social life where an arrogant boxer with a bad temper might’ve gotten in trouble. I’ll fill you in tomorrow. Go back to whatever you were doing. Tell Diane I’m sorry.”

He hung up before she could begin swearing at him.