"The Sons of Mount Carmel" Chapter 4 (An NYPD Murder Mystery Novel)

CHAPTER 4

Toni and Geddes were accelerating on the Cross-Bronx Expressway en route to Bronx borough headquarters—also the home of the Bronx Homicide Squad; both housed in a police precinct stationhouse built in the ‘1970s. Father Gonzalez was thought to have been shot at the rectory sometime after 6 p.m. Only one shot had been fired. No other spent shell casing or bullets were found: only the round that exited from Father Manny’s skull. They blew past the chain of tenement buildings that lined the Cross-Bronx Expressway.

Toni grew up in a pre-war elevator building on the Grand Concourse in the Fordham section of the Bronx and went to public schools. In those days, she was called by her actual name, Antonia. She was named after her grandmother—her mother's mother.

She'd always been a bright kid but didn't do well in school. Except for athletics and music she was a poor student. It may have had something to do with the unmanageability of her home life. Her father had progressively surrendered to alcoholism after her mother's sudden death due to a brain aneurysm: she was only four years old. Her high school teachers always told her she had tremendous potential, but she wouldn't or couldn't apply herself. That all changed when she barely graduated from high school and enlisted in the United States Marine Corps.

Toni Santiago excelled as a Marine. She proved to be a fast learner and took to military life with ease graduating number one in boot camp out of a platoon of over sixty other women. This earned her the honor to pick just about any military occupational specialty she wanted. She chose the military police.

Being an M.P., as it turned out, was another natural fit for her. She no longer had trouble focusing. She had found nurturing and sustenance within the disciplined lifestyle of the Marines. In fact, she'd thought seriously about making the Marine Corps a career, but about a year before Toni had been discharged—while stationed on Okinawa—she fell in love and became engaged to a Marine from Helena, Montana. She believed she had every intention of relocating to Montana when they were both discharged, except, when that day came, he broke off the engagement and fled back to Helena without her. She hadn't heard from him since, which turned out to be okay. Deep down she always knew (and maybe her Montana marine knew too) that she would become a New York City cop, just as her father had been. 
    
Minutes after they’d gotten back, Toni watched Ryan walk into the squad room. He was showered and shaved. Toni recalled again that she’d recently come to intimately know her forty-three-year-old boss. He was almost six-foot, with a still lean athletic frame, natural tan, and short cropped curly dark hair, with just a touch of gray at his sideburns. She winced.

There were about twenty-five detectives milling about: speaking on the phone, speaking with each other, typing up reports—a blur of movement and sound. Normally the squad would have had six detectives covering the shift, but the entire Bronx Homicide Squad had been called in—which amounted to twenty-four detectives, a sergeant, and a lieutenant—and put on overtime. Not that the promise of extra money drove them. They would do whatever it took to track down Father Manny's killer.

Through the partially open horizontal blinds of Ryan’s glass-encased office, the hefty silhouette of the Chief of Bronx detectives could be seen: Deputy Chief Buddy King.

“The chief just got here, Loo,” Toni said as she and Geddes approached him from behind.

Chief Buddy King was the image of the prototypical big-city chief of police. He was six-four, about two hundred and seventy-five pounds, with a gut that projected out about half-a-foot from his rib cage. The way the chief’s gut stuck out always looked unnatural to Toni like a breast implant the size of a basketball.

Ryan and King had been radio car partners twenty years earlier when Ryan was first assigned to a Harlem precinct as a rookie. Buddy King had about ten years on the job at the time and broke Ryan in.

“What’s the crime scene look like?” Ryan said to Toni.
“Doesn’t look like robbery.”
“Nothing stolen?” Ryan said, as Chief King stepped from the office and waved him in, leaving the door open and took the seat at Ryan’s desk.
“Nothing so far,” Geddes said. 
Toni said, “We got to get back to do a detailed inventory. We wanted to check-in with you first. Crime Scene should be wrapping up, so, now we’ll have the run of the place.”

“You caught this, Toni?”

Toni knew how scattered Ryan must still be from the shock of Father Manny’s murder. She’d told him—as they all stood on his lawn—she’d caught the case. She wondered if he’d asked just to confirm she’d caught it through normal rotation and had not been specially assigned to it by Sergeant Tazzo, his second-in-command. Ryan had the authority to change whoever caught any given homicide. She wondered if he wanted her on it or not. Toni had half as much time in the department as the next junior detective—with eight years—and only two years in Bronx Homicide, but she proved to be one tenacious investigator.

“Yeah, it’s her case, boss,” Sergeant Vic Tazzo replied for Toni walking up to them. Tazzo was a dapper second-whip. Clean-shaven, well-groomed, single man in his late 30’s. He had a couple Armani suits.
“All right,” Ryan said, pointing to his office. “Let me talk to the chief first.”
Tazzo held Ryan’s arm for a moment and said, “Sorry about Father Manny, Loo.”
“Thanks, Vic.”
“Nobody’s leaving until we break this.”
“Thanks, Vic,” Ryan repeated and stepped in the direction of the kitchen. “Let me grab a cup of coffee before I head in.”
Toni could tell Ryan needed an extra couple seconds to cut off the sudden sting building-up in his eyes.

Ryan stepped into his office.

“How you holding up, Ryan?” King said as he stood up from Ryan’s desk and came around the front.
“I’m all right, Buddy,” Ryan said, as he stepped around the chief and behind his desk. Chief King patted him on the back as he passed.
“A terrible shock,” King said. “Just terrible.”

Ryan absently took a moment to leaf through the messages on his desk as if he was alone. The chief then stepped over to the brown leather sofa in his office—leaving the desk chair for Ryan. The sofa, everybody in the squad knew well, was a Godsend after putting in the first twenty-four hours to break a fresh homicide, and there was no hope of heading home anytime soon.
Chief King dropped into the sofa.
The whoosh-sound of a substantial adult male, dropping into a leather sofa seemed to announce that their exchange could begin. 
"When'd you see him last?   
“Yesterday,” Ryan said, “at Mass. I came down with Jocelyn and caught the eleven o’clock mass with him. We spoke with him for a few minutes after. He seemed tired to me, but in good spirits.”

Ryan looked down at his shoes.
“Listen, Ryan, there’s something I gotta talk to you about.”
Ryan’s head shifted up quick, and with a loud voice said, “Don’t even think about it, Buddy. I know where you’re going. My squad has this case and I run this squad.”
Toni's head—as well as the civilians being interviewed in the squad room, shifted to the volume of Ryan's voice, but the other detectives pretended to not hear a thing.

Chief King stayed put and patiently looked at his former patrol partner for a few seconds, then stood up and went to look out the second-floor window with his back to Ryan. Ryan had that view memorized. A string of five-story tenements with a African-American hair salon, Hispanic bodega, Chinese take-out, and Korean dry cleaners on street level. And if you squinted you could see deep into a narrow alleyway—between two of the buildings. There was always laundry hanging from a few of the fire escapes even though there was a laundromat around the corner.

King turned to face Ryan, “The Padre was your close personal friend. You two were buddies as kids. This is too important. We need to keep our emotions in check. You know what I mean; we can’t let ourselves get jammed up and make mistakes.”
“Listen, Buddy, what’s this ‘we’ crap?” Ryan said and pushed his office door shut.

Ryan walked up to face Chief King at the window. “It’s ‘I’ need to keep my emotions in check, and I will. You think I’m going to let anything mess this up? This will be done by the numbers, I guarantee you that. I’m not going to let his killer walk on this. Not a chance.”
Toni deliberately sat right outside Ryan's office door and had no trouble hearing every word.
“All right, all right, Ryan. Just remember that he was a priest. Nobody cares except us that he was your friend. All that anybody out there cares about is that he was a priest. That’s all the Archdiocese cares about, that’s all the Mayor cares about, that’s all the Commissioner cares about, that’s all the public cares about. We can't afford to fuck this up."
Ryan looked at the chief carefully for several moments himself and said, “All right. I understand that, Buddy. And I understand your position. All right. You can take my word on this. I can handle it.”
“All right,” King said, and both sat silently captured by their own thoughts.
Ryan finally spoke up.
“You know, he loved being a priest, just loved it. And he was great at it, Buddy. The school reading scores were in the top ten percentile of the Archdiocese for three years straight. The only South Bronx Catholic school with that record. He was real proud. Real proud of those kids.”
King nodded.
“Did I ever tell you how I first met Manny?”
"No, Ryan," King said and shifted in the sofa to get comfortable. “How’d you guys meet?”

Ryan was sitting in his third-grade class at Mount Carmel School and Manny was introduced as their new classmate and assigned to sit next to him. During their milk and cookies break, Ryan heard that Manny had moved into a building on the west side of Mount Carmel Park. Ryan lived on the Southside. Manny's parents had brought him to school first thing after arriving in the middle of the night from a seventy-two-hour hike that had started in Miami. Manny was still in the clothes he'd traveled in, not yet suited up in the traditional Mount Carmel Catholic School uniform: of a white shirt, sky blue tie with the school’s emblem, and navy blue pants.
Manny looks at Ryan with these panic-stricken eyes—he hadn't washed the sand from his eyes—and a milk film smeared across his upper lip and said. ‘Aren't you scared living across the street from a cemetery?'
“ ‘That’s not a cemetery,’” Ryan told Manny. ‘That’s Mount Carmel Park.’ ”
Ryan grinned. “Manny thought the park was a cemetery. That’s the first time we met.”

Toni would’ve taken the case away from Ryan without a second thought. She knew it was a mistake to keep any detective personally acquainted with a homicide victim working the case. Except it wasn’t her place to say so. But she wondered how Ryan could stay detached. If it wasn’t because the chief and Ryan went back so many years, he would be off the case, post-haste.

But whom exactly did she think she was to have an opinion on that anyway, she thought, closing her eyes shut for a moment. She was more than personally acquainted with her boss. Didn’t that affect her ability to do her job?
Ryan opened his office door and waved Toni, Geddes and Sergeant Tazzo in, looked back at King and said, “I got this, Buddy.”

Ryan went back to his desk chair. Toni, Geddes, and Tazzo took the three rigid department issue chairs in front of the desk.

Ryan addressed the group. “What do we got?”

Before Toni got it started, she’d noticed Bronx Homicide number 147 had been added by the squad’s civilian administrative aide to the bulletin board on Ryan’s office wall: Gonzalez/Manuel, M/H/43.

“No forced entry, as far as we can tell so far. But we’re heading back to do a full scan of the rectory.”
“Anybody have anything to say?”
“We talked to the other priest at Mr. Carmel,” Toni said. “Father Gribbons,”
“Where was he?” Ryan said.
“Retreat,” Toni said. “Returned to the rectory about 6:30 a.m. He found the body and called 911.”
“Kind of early to get back from a retreat,” King said rhetorically. “Where was it?”
“Massachusetts,” Toni answered. “Clarence, Massachusetts.”
“Clarence, Massachusetts. I know that place. It’s a Trappists monastery. I went to a couples retreat there myself about ten years ago with the wife. That’s about a four-hour drive. He’d have to leave at 2:30 in the morning to get to the rectory by 6:30 a.m.”
Toni nodded.
"Except," Chief King said, looking up at the ceiling, "it's possible if he left right after their early morning prayers." King looked back down at the others. "Their morning prayer is at 2 a.m," King said. "It's a hell of a thing. Those Trappists wake up in the middle of the night, go to the chapel and chant a few prayers then go back to bed until five-thirty or so when they get up to start their day. I made those prayers once over the weekend. Jen, my wife, didn't budge from bed." 

King shot Ryan a nondescript look. The kind of look Toni deduced one partner would toss the other in a how-about-that kind of way, sipping on a couple of Dunkin Donut coffees in a patrol car. Just catching up on the mundane details of each other’s lives at the start of the tour before shit on the street happens.
“Hell of a schedule,” King said.
Geddes said, “Maybe he left Saturday afternoon or evening; made the trip back but stayed with a friend or something for the night.”
“Yeah, could be,” Toni said. “But why didn’t he just tell us that?”
“Don’t know. But I wouldn’t read to much into it.”
“All right. It’s important to get it straight for the record,” Ryan said. “Who else?”
"We interviewed a Samantha Cohen about an hour ago," Toni said.
She picked up Ryan's face change a shade. Nobody else may have picked it up, but she did. Like a schoolboy pretending to be unimpressed by the pretty girl who’s trying to talk to him in the schoolyard, but the fleeting flushed face betrays him.
“Who’s Samantha Cohen,” Sergeant Tazzo said.
“Lifetime friend of Father Manny’s,” Geddes said.
King looked at Ryan. “You know her, Ryan?”
“I met her through Manny over twenty years ago. I haven’t seen her since.”
King looked back at Toni, “So, what’s her story?”
“She was Father Manny’s last appointment Sunday. She was in his book for 7:30 p.m. She said he called late yesterday afternoon and canceled, said she had no idea why but he seemed okay to her over the phone.”
“What’s she do?”
Geddes answered. “She’s a personal injury lawyer. We spoke to her at her apartment on Sutton Place.”
“Sutton Place, very nice,” King said with genuine appreciation. “How do you read her, Toni?”
“Well, she looked like she was broken up about his murder. She heard about it on New York 1. I don’t know if her reaction was real or show. She started to play lawyer with us. Nothing major. Just a little resistance. But I found it strange. I asked her how’d she met Father Manny and she wouldn’t say. Or claimed to not recall. I don’t buy it. You know what I mean. We all remember how we first met a person that became important to us down the road. We may not remember a lot of the details during the relationship, the times and dates are sketchy, but we remember that first meeting and how it happened. It just didn’t make sense that she wouldn’t answer.”
Toni looked at Ryan, but he averted her eyes.
“Anybody confirm where she was last night?” King asked.
“No,” Toni said. “She said she was home alone. We need to talk with the doorman or concierge on duty, see if they corroborate what she said. Take a look at their CCTV.”
Ryan looked at Toni. “Is that it?”
“No. There was a lipstick marking on a half cup of coffee sitting on the table in the rectory kitchen above the priest’s body,” Toni said.
“Lipstick?” King repeated.
“Yes, sir,” Toni said.
“Crime Scene send the cup to the lab?” Chief King said.
"Yes, sir," Toni said and pulled out a clear plastic bag with a tissue. "I grabbed a tissue Cohen blew into while we were there when she wasn't looking. We should get the r lts in a couple of days."
Chief King grinned. “Good.”
Ryan said, “Is that it?”
“Just one other thing,” Toni said, holding Ryan’s eyes for a moment then looking to Chief King. “Samantha Cohen said Father Manny had been diagnosed with pancreatic cancer about two months ago.”
“Did you know about that, Ryan?” King said.
“No. No, I didn’t.”
“Shame,” King said, shaking his head. “Fighting cancer and then murdered.”
The office was silent for a few moments.
“All right, so you’ve got this Samantha Cohen and Father Gribbons to follow-up on, and that lipstick,” King said and looked at Ryan. “What’s your gut tell you about this Lieutenant?”

Toni again looked at the small-framed photograph on the second shelf of Ryan’s bookcase—ironically in front of a collection of homicide investigations books. The photograph was of two young effervescent men in their early twenties, taken many years earlier in front of the police academy in Manhattan, one arm over each other’s shoulder. It was Father Manny and Ryan Condon at his academy graduation. He was in his new, dark blue police officer’s uniform with a shining shield on his left breast. Manny was in a black suit and white collar with a cross hanging from his neck.
Ryan finally said. “What I’m wondering right now is did Manny know he had this enemy before he got shot? Or was he a stranger to him? And if he did know this guy was a threat to him, why didn’t he tell me?”
After Chief King left, Toni, Geddes, and Tazzo got up to leave, but Ryan told Toni and Sergeant Tazzo to stay for a minute.
Geddes said, “You want the door closed?”
“Yes,” Ryan said.
As soon as the door was shut Ryan said, “I don’t want you talking to Samantha Cohen again without my okay.”
“Is there a problem?” Toni said.
“There’s no problem. Just don’t speak to her again without clearing it with me first.”

Toni held his gaze, looked at Sergeant Tazzo, then back at Ryan and recognized why he’d invited Tazzo to stay. Ryan was laying down the law, and he wanted Tazzo to be a witness. He was cutting her off from having complete access to the principals in her investigation. He was establishing something new between them. But why? She wondered. So he met Samantha Cohen twenty years ago through Manny. Cohen herself said she hadn’t seen Ryan in over twenty years. So why wouldn’t he want her to speak with Cohen again without clearing it with him? What’s it to him?