Neptune Avenue Read online

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  THE ROOM WAS SHAPED like a huge wood-paneled fish tank, and it was chilly, with an antiseptic smell. The ceiling was high; if it were lower, the proceedings might have felt too human, hardly the desired effect here in Brooklyn Supreme Court. Jack slipped into the back row of the public gallery, an uncommon experience for him. (He had been inside such courtrooms many times, but he usually sat up on the witness stand.) Now—here on the first day of his two days off—he had the time to take in random details, like the scuffed linoleum floor and the back of the pew in front of him, covered with graffiti scratchings: Cherry. Poppa D. And that great old standard, Fuck You.

  The jurors were not dressed for a noble proceeding: they looked as if they’d been plucked off a Brooklyn sidewalk. The judge, a tall, handsome black man, sat back in his leather throne with one hand splayed over his face as if he was getting a bad headache, perhaps inspired by the schleppy defense attorney, who stood next to the jury box anxiously shuffling his notes like an actor who had forgotten his lines.

  At the prosecutor’s table sat the assistant district attorney Jack had come to speak with; all he could see now was that she was tall and that she had gracefully graying hair. He had looked up the name given to him by Eugenia Lelo and found that this woman had prosecuted the man three years ago. Jack was eager to confront him, but he knew it was better to do some homework first.

  The witness on the stand was a patrol cop, a young guy with gelled, spiky hair who sat up at full attention, like some kind of wary woodland animal. As his testimony proceeded, Jack learned that he worked the Sixty-second Precinct—Bensonhurst—an Italian neighborhood with a growing population of Asians and Russians, one of whom sat in the loneliest seat in the house. The defendant was a small Russian man with a bald spot and no visible neck—that was all Jack could see from behind.

  The charge was fraud. The cop had been driving on the Shore Parkway when he came upon the defendant, parked at the side of the road in a rear-ended car, which also contained three other Russians. Behind it sat a crumpled car occupied by a frantic Korean woman. The Russkies claimed she had been negligent in her driving.

  The defense attorney searched for his next question. The judge asked a court officer to lead the jury out. Then he scowled down from the bench.

  “Counselor, I spent part of my weekend looking over the papers for this case. I don’t know what you’ve been doing, but you’re wasting the court’s time. I’m going to adjourn until tomorrow morning, and I hope you’ll have a better handle on your case by then.”

  The lawyer started to sputter an excuse, but the judge cut him short and stomped out. As soon as he was gone, the lawyers and court officers abandoned their serious faces; they got all cheerful and buddy-buddy, even the defense attorney and the prosecutor, who Jack was now free to approach.

  ANNETTE O’DEA WAS A tall woman, handsome, in her midfifties. She wore a navy blue business suit, not too fancy—it wouldn’t do to make a jury think the prosecutor was hoity-toity. Around her neck sat one of those kerchiefy things that was supposed to be the equivalent of a man’s tie. She looked prim—until she opened her mouth.

  “The poor bastard went out and got himself some cheapo shyster instead of going to the usual firms,” she said in a gravelly voice, shaking her head as she and Jack stepped out of the elevator.

  He nodded. The Russians had the lawyers they went to, the Dominicans had theirs, and so on through the tribes.

  They came around past the X-ray security check and walked out of the building into a fiery hot afternoon. Despite the blast of heat, the prosecutor lit up a cigarette and inhaled as if the thing contained emergency oxygen. Over the tops of the old stone buildings that huddled together in downtown Brooklyn, thunderclouds were moving in. O’Dea looked up and snorted.

  “The judge just wanted to wrap things up in time to beat the rain home.”

  Jack smiled. Decades of dealing with the legal system had taught him how the supposedly grave, impersonal courts were actually administered by a bunch of very human, crotchety individuals.

  They crossed a stone plaza filled with pigeons and office workers sneaking cigarette breaks. Jack hurried to keep up as the prosecutor strode across busy Court Street. She navigated through the heavy sidewalk traffic and veered onto Montague Street, the main commercial strip of Brooklyn Heights. She turned to him. “I almost feel sorry for the defendant, but I don’t.”

  “Because he’s guilty?”

  “Right you are. He’s guilty as the day is long. He’s a crook and he’s incompetent enough to let me prove it. He’s a schlimazel. You know the difference between a schlemiel and a schlimazel? A schlemiel is a guy who spills his soup. A schlimazel is the guy he spills it on. Jesus, how do I know these things? I’m Irish Catholic for chrissakes.”

  She stomped on her cigarette, turned off the sidewalk, and pushed into a fancy pub. “This okay? I hope you don’t mind me eating, but I had to skip lunch.”

  “It’s fine.”

  They took a back booth, surrounded by gleaming gold railings. The prosecutor ordered white wine and a cheeseburger, then spread her napkin on her lap. “This is one advantage of eating at a nice place—I hate those cheap napkins that get lint all over your clothes. Anyhow, this defendant is a real chump. He’d have to be, to lose one of these cases.”

  Jack nodded. The law said you were automatically in the right if you got rear-ended—it was just made for fraud. The perpetrators of these scams had no fear and no shame. They’d pack a car with fellow citizens in need of a little extra cash, then go find a slow car inhabited by an elderly person or a woman, someone juries might stereotype as a bad driver. They’d pull in front of it and jam on the brakes. After the “accident,” everybody went to the doctor. The bill went to the government or the insurance company, and the settlements went to the perps—with a kickback to the collaborating doctor.

  O’Dea took a gulp of her wine. “This is what I’ve learned in twenty-three years of fraud cases: the defendants never say they were wearing high heels when they tripped on the sidewalk. They were never alone in the car, and they’ll never have sex again.” She scoffed. “Last month I had a case, the defendant actually said, ‘Because of the accident, I can only do it doggie-style with my wife.’ Mind you, they’re both in their sixties; he claims they were having sex seven times a week. I ask him, ‘Who’s the doggie—you or your wife?’ He says, ‘I can’t discuss this in front of a lady.’ I said, ‘You can tell me—I’m not a lady.’”

  Jack laughed. They traded shoptalk until their food arrived. The prosecutor dipped a steak fry in ketchup. “Mind you, I don’t wanna knock these people. A while back I hurt my hip and had to take a car service to the hospital every week. Most of the drivers were Russian immigrants; they’d been engineers, doctors, professors. … They come here, they have a hard time finding work, so they end up driving a taxi, working two jobs—and they still put their kids through college. You gotta admire that.”

  Jack nodded. His own father had been one of those honest, hardworking Russians, a stevedore on the Red Hook waterfront. (The old man had been an abusive hard drinker, too, but that was another story.)

  “Even so,” O’Dea continued, “they came from a place where you had to learn some hustles to stay alive. Some of them developed a two-tier moral system. Everybody knew it was wrong to steal from a friend or neighbor, but it was okay to get what you could out of the State.”

  She glanced at her watch, and Jack decided to start in with his questions. “What can you tell me about my Russian?”

  The prosecutor made a face. “Semyon Balakutis. Lovely human being.”

  Jack leaned forward, eager to hear about the man who had argued with Daniel Lelo. Maybe killed him.

  “First of all,” O’Dea said, “he isn’t Russian. You gotta remember that the Soviet Union was made up of about fifteen different republics.”

  “Which one was he from?”

  “I don’t remember. He might have told us, b
ut at least half of what he said was bullshit. He would lie about stuff that didn’t even matter. These people like to do that to Westerners; they call it ‘hanging spaghetti over our ears.’”

  “Do you remember what he was like? I know you’ve worked a lot of cases since then. …”

  The prosecutor set down her cheeseburger as if she had lost her appetite. “This one, I remember. He came into town from Detroit. When I picked up his case, I made some calls to the D.A. there. There were all kinds of nasty rumors floating around about the guy, but he only got charged a couple of times. One was for attempted extortion, a liquor store owner. The other was for assault; apparently he beat some girlfriend almost to death.”

  Jack frowned. “How many convictions?”

  “That’s the thing: zero. Witnesses tended to drop out. Like the girlfriend. And listen to what happened with my case here: Balakutis walked into a bridal shop on Kings Highway that was owned by a Russian and told the man he’d cut his ear off if he didn’t pony up for some protection. As it happened, the owner was friendly with the local beat cops, and he figured that this kind of shit wasn’t going to happen to him in America. He told Balakutis to take a hike.”

  The prosecutor grimaced. “One afternoon the desk sergeant at the Six-one is doing some paperwork, and he looks up to see the guy stagger in holding a wad of paper towels to his bloody ear. What was left of his ear. The guy was all primed to testify. At that time I was doing some work with an Organized Crime task force. We pulled Balakutis in; the shop owner picked him out of a lineup. Open and shut case, right?”

  She pushed her plate away. “We get to trial, and the owner’s up on the stand, and Balakutis is staring at him, and the guy starts shaking, literally shaking. Out of the blue, he says that he accidentally got his ear caught in a window fan. A freaking window fan.” The prosecutor shook her head, remembering. “We brought in the desk sergeant, who testified that the man had fingered Balakutis. We got a medical expert, who said there was no way the shop owner’s injuries could be consistent with damage caused by a fan. We threatened to charge our wit’ with perjury. Nothing helped; he wouldn’t budge.”

  “What’d you end up doing?”

  “What could we do? We dropped the case.” Jack sat for a moment, digesting this information. He leaned forward, resting his elbows on the table. “Let me ask you something: in the course of putting it together, do you remember if the name Daniel Lelo ever came up?”

  The prosecutor shook her head again. “Why? Who’s he?”

  Jack pulled out his wallet to pay the check.

  “Somebody who might’ve run into a bigger window fan.”

  CHAPTER NINE

  DOUGHNUTS.

  Hundreds of them, arrayed in rows. Sprinkled with jimmies. Dusted with powdered sugar. Glazed with icing. Crusted with coconut. Crullers. Bear claws. Doughnut holes. Jelly doughnuts. Chocolate doughnuts. Old-fashioneds. They looked as if they might get up and dance, like extras in some old musical.

  “It’s lucky we’re not in uniform,” said Linda Vargas. They stood in a short line, scoping out the environs.

  Jack turned to her with a puzzled expression. “Why?”

  His colleague nodded toward the big glass cases full of doughnuts. “I’d hate to reinforce a stereotype.”

  This was the last place Jack had expected to find Semyon Balakutis. He was not given to romanticizing hoodlums, not after decades as a cop, yet he would have expected to encounter the man in some more impressive environment. A gloomy lair of an office; two big goons in the background, one lone lamp casting a circle of light on a massive old desk … He glanced around. The store, just off Kings Highway, could not have been brighter, more forcedly cheery. Pink everywhere. And orange.

  Vargas shook her head. “I still say you’re crazy, coming in today. I’ll tell you one thing: if this was my day off, I’d be out at the beach with my honey and a big pitcher of sangria.”

  Jack just shrugged.

  Vargas eyed him. “How’s your social life these days?”

  Jack thought of Michelle—sour memory—and then he thought of Zhenya Lelo, the other night. “It’s slow.”

  The girl behind the counter was a skinny little thing dotted—like a doughnut—with bright pink acne. When the last customer paid and moved away from the register, Vargas stepped forward and addressed her. “We’re here to see Mr. Balakutis.”

  The girl pushed back her little polyester cap and frowned. “Um, I think he’s at the bank? But he said he’d be back soon?”

  Vargas turned to Jack and shrugged. They got a couple cups of coffee, then sat at a corner table to wait.

  “Where’s your new partner?” Jack still hadn’t met the precinct detective assigned to the case.

  Vargas shrugged again. “He’s got a court appearance today. He seemed happy about it. I bet he wishes Daniel Lelo had got himself whacked over in Sheepshead Bay.”

  Jack nodded; that would have put the homicide in the jurisdiction of the Sixty-first Precinct. He couldn’t blame the detective for not wanting the case; sometimes Brighton Beach felt so confusing that you might as well have been trying to work a case in a foreign country. With his own background, he reflected, maybe he should have known more about the Russians, but the neighborhood was as opaque to him as to everybody else on his squad. Luckily, despite all the hoopla about Russian mafia, the murder rate was very low, and it had dropped by half in the past decade. Of course, this was no consolation to Daniel Lelo.

  He stared at the racks of doughnuts and found himself singing a tune. “Sugar, uh-uh uh-uh uh-uh, aw, honey, honey.” He squinted. “Tommy James and the Shondells?”

  Vargas shook her head. “The Archies. Jesus, don’t ever tell my daughter I knew that—she already thinks I’m the squarest thing since Lawrence Welk.” She looked at Jack over the top of her coffee cup. “So tell me, how well did you know this Lelo guy?”

  Jack shrugged. (It was a shruggy kind of afternoon.) “We used to work out in the hospital gym.”

  “Nice fellow?”

  He nodded, but changed the subject. “Did you check on whether he had life insurance?” He prided himself on doing the right thing; in homicides of a married person, you wanted to check if the spouse might have hidden motives. Despite her evident grief, Eugenia Lelo shouldn’t get a free pass.

  Vargas nodded. “He didn’t have any.”

  “How much money in the bank?”

  She shrugged. “Not much. His business seemed to be doing okay, but the guy wasn’t much on savings.”

  Jack nodded, relieved, but then was annoyed at himself for his reaction. Let’s keep this strictly professional, people. … He turned sideways, regarded another glass case. “I didn’t know they had ice cream now, too.”

  Vargas dabbed at her mouth with a napkin. “It’s a new thing. Combining businesses. They figure they get morning customers with the doughnuts and coffee, afternoon and evening traffic with the ice cream. All in one store. Makes it more profitable.”

  Jack raised his eyebrows. “How do you know that?”

  “My husband was thinking about taking out a franchise. He’s getting fed up with cranky clients and all that bidding shit.” Vargas’s husband was an electrician, a scrawny little guy. She was crazy about the man.

  “He gonna do it?”

  Vargas shook her head. “I know these places don’t look like much, but it’s not so easy to get in on this business. The parent company expects each franchisee to develop five different stores.”

  “How much money do you need?”

  Vargas sighed. “They expect you to have seven hundred and fifty K liquid, and a net worth of at least one point five mil’.”

  Jack whistled in surprise. “This looked like a pretty silly business for a bad guy to be involved with, but now I’m thinking, it would be a great way to launder some money.”

  Vargas held up her cup of coffee. “I’ll tell you what’s criminal: they sell this stuff at a markup of almost two thousand percent.”
/>   The door swung open and a stocky man came in. The detectives recognized him from his driver’s license photo. Mid-fifties, wearing a black polo shirt with a white stripe down the left side. Short-cropped hair, hooded eyes that drooped to the sides, a small, tight mouth. He had a cocky, rolling walk. Prison yard strut, thought Jack. Maybe the guy had not done time in the U.S., but that didn’t mean he’d never been behind bars.

  It was Vargas’s case, so she was the one who stepped forward and badged the man. “Semyon Balakutis? We’d like to ask you a few questions.”

  Balakutis barely blinked. “There is problem? I hev all licenses, back in office.” His teeth looked oddly small, like Chiclets, and he seemed to have too many of them. His accent was thick, but at least they probably wouldn’t need to come back with a translator. Jack stared, wondering if this was the man who had killed his friend.

  “Why don’t you show us?” Vargas said. Jack stood next to her with folded arms. They had no interest in the store’s paperwork, but it couldn’t hurt to start things off by demonstrating who was in charge.

  Balakutis led them back to a little office, where a pale, storklike man in a polyester brown shirt and orange tie sat doing some paperwork. Balakutis muttered something in Russian, and the man jumped up and edged out past them.

  There was hardly room for all three of them inside. The ventilation seemed poor back here, and the sugar smell was so intense that Jack couldn’t imagine working in it every day—it would definitely put an end to a sweet tooth. Balakutis went around behind the small desk and gestured for the detectives to sit in two molded plastic chairs in front of it. He reached out to the corner of the desk and picked up a manila file. Jack noticed the man’s flashy watch: either a Rolex or a damned good knockoff. The Russian immigrants had something in common with the black gangsta rappers of East New York or the South Bronx: a love of bling, a fervent belief that one’s worth could be measured by externals like jewelry, cars, and clothes.