The first stop I made after getting myself together was to the city morgue. During my call with the Bellestones I had let them know that I would take care of whatever I could from here to save them the trouble of traveling. From my home office I faxed Mr. Bellestone a release form and told him to fill it out and fax it to the coroner’s office.
Because a body needs to be released to a living person I showed up and took possession of Amber. Basically this involved letting the coroner know where her body would be shipped to and signing an affidavit that stated there would be someone at the other end to pick it up. Another call to the Bellestones let them know that Amber was headed home and when she would arrive.
My next stop, and the only one I was really dreading, was to South Broad Street; NOPD Headquarters. Don’t get me wrong, I had served with distinction. My love for the city came through in the way I performed my job. I just didn’t want to go into HQ. I knew too many people and due to the circumstances surrounding my early retirement, too many people thought they knew me. Somebody would inevitably need to explain to a rookie who I was and what had happened and that was always awkward.
No one, including me, likes being reminded that their partner was setting up protected drug buys for gang members. To top it all off, instead of just taking it like a man – getting arrested, doing his time – my partner decided to literally shoot me in the back and tried to blame it on the very gang bangers he was getting paid to protect.
It didn’t help my ex-partner’s cause that he didn’t kill me when he had the chance or that gang members don’t like being blamed for attempted murders they don’t commit; especially when the victims are cops. When I got taken to the hospital I had let my supervisors know who shot me but by the time the NOPD got to his house, the thugs had had their revenge. The only clue Internal Affairs was able to find was a blood splattered Gucci loafer wedged in his door.
While all of that drama made it ridiculously difficult to get in and out of HQ without drawing attention, it did make it easier to get info when I needed it. Everybody wanted to be able to say that they helped the hero. After the bus let me off on South Broad I walked into HQ and flashed my ID to the rookie manning the front desk. When I told her who I was and that I needed to see Detective Alvarez in Homicide the desk rook asked me if I had an appointment. I could have lied and said yes but I knew from experience that rookies hated being lied to, even if the rest of the department thought you were a hero.
“No, I don’t have an appointment. I just need to see her about something.”
“Well, Mr. Fisk,” the rook said, looking me up and down and smirking at my faded t-shirt and cargo khakis, “I don’t really care what you need to see her for, if you don’t have an appointment you need to have a seat until I can find her.”
I know the deal with working the desk: In the most recent police academy graduating class, the young woman in front of me had graduated with the lowest grades. Either that or she had pissed off one of the instructors, who were all ranking officers, and that instructor was now her supervisor. The way she was treating me led me to believe her mouth had gotten her in trouble.
I could have pitched a fit and cussed the young cop out so bad she probably wouldn’t have shown up for work tomorrow but I knew that wouldn’t get me anywhere with her. She was probably just pissed about riding the front desk and needed to take her frustration out on someone. And that someone just happened to be me so I walked over to the waiting area and plopped myself down between an Asian lady with snotty-nosed twins and an obviously homeless man who needed a shower ASAP.
When I settled myself into the chair and looked back toward the front desk I caught the rookie rolling her eyes as she punched in Alvarez’s extension, slowly.
“That chick’s a bitch,” came a gravelly voice to my left. I turned and found myself looking into the bleary eyes of the homeless guy. The filth was so thick on him that I couldn’t tell if he was black or white.
“She’ll figure it out soon enough. What are you in for?”
The homeless guy started wheezing and I hoped to God that he was laughing because I was not going to give him mouth to mouth. “I gots some info-mation. The po-leece gone wanna hear it, believe me.”
“Oh, I believe you, brother, I believe you.”
As the homeless guy started to wheeze again I happened to look up in time to see the expression on the desk rookie’s face change drastically; she must have found Alvarez. She came from behind the desk and came toward me at a fast walk. I stood as she approached.
“Detective Sergeant Alvarez says I’m to send you right up…”
“Is that all?”
I knew what was coming next and I could see the rookie squirming with displeasure.
“She says I’m to give at least one person who looks like they need a meal ten dollars, and you’re to confirm it.”
I didn’t want to rub it in so I stifled my laughter. Anna Alvarez and I went way back. We had been in the academy together and she had been my first partner. Our career paths had diverged markedly though. I had enjoyed working the street, getting out of the cruiser, meeting the business and home owners in my bailiwick, feeling the vibe of the city from street level; I had been an old-fashioned beat cop and I loved it.
Anna, on the other hand, had higher aspirations. As soon as she joined the force she did everything in her power to advance up the ladder. I remember driving all over the city while she rode shotgun and studied for every sergeant exam that came up. In spite of our differences our partnership had worked, mainly because we were honest with each other. She knew I loved working and I knew from the first that she wanted to advance. That transparency in our relationship had made us great partners and great friends.
The custom that was now pissing off the rookie had started with me. Every week I would insist to Anna that we buy at least one homeless person a meal. Not fast food either but a real sit down meal at a restaurant where the table came with silverware and a waiter or waitress. Her only qualification was that the recipient of our charity was not allowed to eat at either of our houses. I told her that was fine with me and, during our years of working with each other we alternated weeks, finding a homeless man or woman or kid and taking them with us to lunch or dinner during our shift. The tradition stuck with both of us even after Anna got promoted and I got new partners. On occasion we would even run into each other at the same restaurant with our respective “guests.”
Turning to look at the guy with the “info-mation” I told the rookie, “there’s your man,” and I watched as she gave him a ten dollar bill out of her own pocket.
The homeless guy, probably wondering what the “bitch” was up to, hesitantly took the money, stood up and scurried out the front door.
“There now,” I said to the rookie, “doesn’t that make you feel better?”
“Not really. He’ll probably just waste it on booze or drugs.”
“What’s your name, officer?”
Calling her officer had the intended effect and I watched her swell with pride.
She turned slightly so I could see the name plate on her shirt, “Jones.”
“Well, Officer Jones, let me tell you something.” I pointed after the man who had just left. “What that gentleman does with that ten dollars is none of your concern. He could walk out the door and within five minutes have spent it on drugs or booze or a prostitute or whatever and it would make no difference. That money made him happy, that’s why Serve is included with the word Protect in the NOPD credo. And that’s what should matter to you most.” I felt myself starting to preach and realized I didn’t care. “Without even knowing his story I can tell you that man was just like you once: Full of piss and vinegar and with the world by the balls. Don’t be fooled into thinking you’re better than him because you have a job and a place to live, because that,” again I pointed toward the door, “that can happen to anybody.”
“Yeah, well, it still sucks that I’m out ten bucks.”
After letting Officer Jones get back to her desk I made my way up to the third floor and set about finding Anna. Up here I was relatively safe from having to see cops I knew. Road personnel hung out mainly on the ground floor and would only venture this high up if they were tasked with dropping off paperwork of some kind to a detective or an upper level supervisor.
The elevator opened onto a hallway that went left and right. Directly across from me was a double door that led to a large glass walled room. Through the glass I could see a sea of cubicles surrounded by a wall of windows. A sign to the right of the door informed me that, among other personnel, the detectives and detective sergeants could be found inside the glass room. I pushed through the doors and looked around, trying to get my bearings.
My trouble was, the last time I spoke to Anna she was a detective but she wasn’t a sergeant. After Katrina, HQ had been remodeled and I no longer knew where the detective sergeant’s office was. Before the storm the detectives had been on the third floor and Anna had mentioned previously that she was still up here. But other than that I was lost. As it was ten in the morning on a weekday, the place was a virtual ghost town. The only people around were the civilian employees and those were few and far between.
I was just about to stop looking and start yelling when I saw a familiar dark-haired ponytail pop up over the edge of a cubicle about halfway across the room. Anna had a phone to her ear but when she saw me she threw a hand up and waved me over.
As I walked across the room I couldn’t resist glancing into the cubicles I passed. There was nothing remarkable; just the standard memos, family pictures, comics and Katrina and New Orleans Saints posters tacked to cubicle walls.
About two-thirds of the way to Anna a name caught my eye, “Son of a bitch.”
Anna, done with her phone call, heard me as she approached, “What’s up?”
This name here, Reginald Clark. Is this the same kid I trained before I got stuck with Chabotte? He made detective?”
“Yeah, that’s him. Reggie. Kid’s on the fast track although he wants to leave the force. As a matter of fact he’s in class right now.
“What’s he want to do?”
“Psychiatry. He’s in his last semester at Tulane.”
I shook my head, “Unbelievable.”
“So…,” she trailed off as she turned to look at me. “Long time, no see.”
“Yeah. Maybe too long?”
I hadn’t seen Anna in almost two years and her appearance had barely changed in that time. She was taller than me by about two inches and she still wore her glasses perched on top of her head when she wasn’t using them. The ponytail she wore her hair in was a trademark and her tan complexioned face hadn’t aged a day. The only difference I noted was that her eyes looked more tired.
The last time I had actually seen her was at her one-year wedding anniversary party. I stayed late and we had a few laughs over old times. I had enjoyed myself and her husband was cordial but I could sense that something had changed between her and me. The only word to describe it was weird. In the end I promised to stay in touch but aside from sending holiday cards and the odd call when I needed info about someone I was investigating, I hadn’t really spoken to her.
I stood there feeling uncomfortable and waiting for her to break the silence. I was about to just tell her to forget it but she spoke first.
“You really should call, Hi. It’s been a long time and…well, I’ve missed you. I just… You know, we had something once and I’m really sorry that I lost it.”
This wasn’t good. I mean, I was honestly interested in seeing where this conversation was going to go but it still was not good. It was bad enough that I was messing around with Ms. Alston. The last thing I needed on top of that and the case I was dealing with was for Anna to get all sappy on me. Luckily, I was saved from responding as behind me the bell for the elevator dinged and a pair of detectives walked onto the floor. I turned slightly as one of them called out, “Hey, Alvarez, you okay?”
She looked at me for a second before she answered and I started to get nervous. Just as I was beginning to think she was going to say no, she answered the detective who had spoken. “Yeah, Jim. I’m okay.”
Before she turned around and started walking toward her office she looked me in the eye and said, under her breath, “At least I hope.”
The office she led me to was a smaller version of the main room, but without cubicle walls. Inside were six desks arranged into pairs. Each pair occupied a wall of the room and had been pushed together so sergeants sitting at them could look at each other face to face. Anna closed the office door, led me between the desks on the right and left hand walls to a pair that stood at the back of the room and pointed to the desk on the left.
“My partner’s in court on a case he had before I joined him. You can sit at his desk,” she glanced at me and smiled, “but only if you promise not to touch anything.”
Anna sat down at her desk, and picked up the phone. While she called the switchboard to tell them to route her calls to her office line I tried not to touch anything like she told me. Honestly. By the time her short phone call was over I was squeezing her partner’s stress ball and looking through his top desk drawer. She hung up her phone and stared at me until I got the point.
“Sorry.”
“You always did have to touch stuff. And speaking of that, are you still doing your urban exploration, as you call it?”
“I’m trying to cut back.”
“Since when?”
“Since I came across a couple buildings that weren’t as empty as I though they’d be.”
“Nothing like being scared straight.” She smiled slightly. “So, what do you need?”
“Listen Anna. First off, I’m sorry I’ve done such a bad job of being your friend.”
“Why don’t we start with the truth: You’ve done a piss-poor job of being my friend. But I don’t want or need to get into that right now. Want I do need to know is what do you want from me?”
“Look I’m sorry about the last couple of years okay? I admit it, I suck, but…”
“You’re wasting my time, Eddie. What. Do. You. Want?”
There was nothing to it but to jump into why I was here. When I decided to go to HQ in person to get what I needed I thought that I could begin to try to smooth things over with Anna, but that wasn’t working. I never figured she would be so pissed with me, although I understood where she was coming from.
“I picked up a case that’s giving me fits and I need some help.
“That’s why I’m here, Anna. I just need some help.”
She sighed and looked down at her desk as if she still needed to make up her mind to help me. After a few seconds she looked me square in the eye. “I can’t do this for you anymore, Hi. This is the last time. No more license plates run, no more background checks. Hell, don’t even send me a Christmas card after this unless…”
“Okay. I under…”
“…unless you can promise me that you’ll make an effort to stay in touch. If I make you promise me face-to-face do you think you can do that? For me? If I help you I need to know you won’t walk out of my life again.”
Oh, dear God, what was I getting myself into?
“Okay. You have my word. Scout’s honor.”
She stared at me as if my Scout’s honor wasn’t as good as another Scout’s honor. “Alright, show me what you’ve got so far.”
I pulled out the picture of Fasol and began. For the next twenty minutes I ran through everything I had regarding the Masterson case, beginning with the original phone call from Sheila Dobbs. I’ve got to give Anna credit, even though she was pissed at me, she listened and asked questions in all of the right places.
“What it boils down to is this,” I said at the end of my synopsis. “I need to know if NOPD has had any contact with Masterson or this Richard Fasol.” As she started typing on the computer terminal that was on her desk I quickly added, “Also, any cars registered to either one, an address for Fasol and a related persons search to see if they knew any of the same people.”
She kept typing as she responded, “For someone who I never see you sure do want a lot from me.”
“It’s what I do.”
“I know.”
I didn’t think she was joking but didn’t have time to worry about it. She got out of her chair and walked toward the door. “Be right back.”
She returned a short time later with a few sheets of printer paper.
“We don’t have much on either one,” she said as she walked back into the office. “Looks like we’ve got Masterson for three or four parking violations, but he lives in The Quarter so that’s not unusual. Fasol has a Garden District address on Coliseum and came back with a drunk and disorderly during Mardi Gras two years ago. I printed out the report and it looks like the standard sleep it off lock-up; he pled guilty the next day and paid his fines. Also, it looks like he had a friend that got hauled in with him, an Alexander D’Ercole. Let me run D’Ercole through our files but for now all I’ve got is a Garden District address for him on 1st St, a few blocks away from Fasol”
She held the pages out to me and I took them as she sat down. Looking through them I didn’t find anything more revealing than what she had told me. I wasn’t surprised to not see a report mentioning a gunshot coming from Masterson’s house last night. It was likely the caller didn’t know exactly where it had come from, assuming it had even been called in. There was one thing about D’Ercole’s address, though.
“Hey, this is pretty neat.”
“Hmm?”
“D’Ercole’s address, 1225 1st St; he lives next door to Anne Rice. Well, he used to anyway, she moved to California a few years ago.”
Alvarez looked at me over the top of her computer, “You’re such a goober.”
I grinned like a nut and kept scanning the pages.
Anna typed a while longer and then spoke. “Alright, looks like D’Ercole has got a few speeding citations. One…two…a total of three parking violations. This is odd….”
“What’s that?”
“Last year he was caught loitering at two-thirty in the morning. He was on the property of a business in the Central Business District. The Siebenkäs Group. You ever hear of it?”
“No. What was the dispo?”
“Hold on a sec.”
Anna typed in a few commands and brought up the police report that had been written about the loitering incident. If there had been a court disposition, it would be included
“The report says the owner of the property, Andrej Hasslin, was on the premises working late. He vouched for D’Ercole, said he was an employee, and D’Ercole was let go.”
“Any other contact with D’Ercole or Hasslin?”
“Nothing else for D’Ercole, and Hasslin…,” Anna hit a few more keys and told me Hasslin was NIF, saying the acronym for Not In File as a word. “Hasslin checks NIF but that’s not odd if he has no priors. Also, if he’s a high roller, hee could have his cars and houses registered to his business for privacy reasons.”
What Alvarez had given me wasn’t much but it was better than nothing and more than I had before speaking with her. It looked like I was going to have to investigate this case the old fashioned way, by actually speaking to people and gathering clues. I hoped that Sheila Dobbs had deep pockets cause this was definitely going to cost her.
Anna asked me, “So, what’s your next move?”
“I suppose I’m going to have to knock on a few doors and see who wants to talk. I don’t know if an army of the homeless can help me with this one.”
She laughed, and it was nice to see, “Yeah, there’s no way a free lunch is going to break this case for you.”
We sat for a minute, lost in our own memories of working and being good friends together. The reverie was broken by a knock on the office door.
“Enter.”
The door opened and in walked one of the tallest men I have ever seen. I actually cringed as he walked in because I was nervous he was going to hit his head on the lintel.
Alvarez spoke to him first, “Hey. Mike, this is my old partner Edward. Eddie, this is my new partner, Mike Richards.”
I stood up, took a couple of steps toward him and reached out to shake his hand. He looked at it, looked at me and then looked over my shoulder at Anna, “You okay in here?”
She nodded her head, “Yeah, I’m fine. Though he may look like a vagrant, this is the Edward H. Fisk. He’s a bona fide hero.”
Richards looked back at me and still didn’t seem impressed. I was thinking of wowing him with some of my trademark wit, maybe something about how nice his tie was, but Anna rescued me.
“Eddie was just leaving Mike, you can relax. She turned to me, “C’mon, I’ll walk you out”
On the way to the elevator, Anna explained, “Mike’s only been my partner for a few months but we’ve been through some shit, so he gets a little protective at times. Especially since Dan and I divorced.”
I turned to face her, “I didn’t know you two were finished. I’m sorry to hear it.”
“Well, if you called once in a while for more than just an address or a background check you would know. Anyway, don’t be sorry about it, he turned out to be an ass and I’m better off.”
We had reached the elevator and I pushed the call button.
“Listen, Hi. I know it’s been a while but I get off at four. Do you want to maybe grab something to eat, talk about old times, whatever?”
This really sucked. Like I said, Anna and I went way back. We had been great partners and friends. We had also been great lovers. Not only that, we had been in love. We had made plans to settle down together and we had still kept our relationship going after she got promoted, even though that was considered taboo in the department. And then I got shot by my partner and stopped trusting people, even her. At the time she had said she understood why I needed to be alone but that doesn’t mean it didn’t hurt her to let me go. I would have liked nothing more than to talk with her and catch up but, even six years later, I still didn’t know if I was ready for something this heavy.
“I would love too Anna, but I’ve…well, I’ve got other plans for tonight.”
“Ah. A hot date.”
“No, just dinner.”
“Oh. Well, I understand. Maybe some other time? And listen, don’t forget what I said: If you ever want my help again, or help from anyone else inside this department, I better hear from you again and soon.”
I stepped onto the elevator as the doors opened, “I promise.”
She didn’t say anything else but I still don’t think she believed me. I knew her too well and she had a disbelieving look in her eyes. Thankfully, the doors closed and broke our eye contact. I shook my head, sighed and leaned against the back wall of the elevator as it began it’s descent.
“Shit.”
