Quickly, Angelo sorted through the mail. As soon as he came across a catalogue addressed to Jack Stapleton, he put it all back. Next, he tried the inner door. It opened with ease.
Stepping into the front hall, Angelo took a breath. There was an unpleasant musty odor. He eyed the trash on the stairs, the peeling paint, and the broken light bulbs in the once-elegant chandelier. Up on the second floor, he could hear the sounds of a domestic fight with muffled screaming. Angelo smiled. Dealing with Jack Stapleton was going to be easy. The tenement looked like a crack house.
Returning to the front of the house, Angelo took a step away to determine which underground passageway belonged to Jack’s building. Each house had a sunken corridor reached by a half dozen steps. These corridors led to the backyards.
After deciding which was the appropriate one, Angelo gingerly walked its length. There were puddles and refuse which threatened his Bruno Magli shoes.
The backyard was a tumult of decaying and collapsed fencing, rotting mattresses, abandoned tires, and other trash. After carefully picking his way a few feet from the building, Angelo turned to look at the fire escape. On the fourth floor two windows had access. The windows were dark. The doctor wasn’t at home.
Angelo returned and climbed back into the car.
“Well?” Franco asked.
“He lives there all right,” Angelo said. “The building is worse on the inside if you can believe it. It’s not locked. I could hear a couple fighting on the second floor and someone else’s TV on full blast. The place is not pretty but for our purposes it’s perfect. It’ll be easy.
“That’s what I like to hear,” Franco said. “Should we still do the woman first?”
Angelo smiled as best he could. “Why deny myself?”
Franco put the car in gear. They headed south on Columbus Avenue to Broadway then cut across town to Second Avenue. Soon they were on Nineteenth Street. Angelo didn’t need the address. He pointed out Laurie’s building without difficulty. Franco found a convenient no-parking zone and parked.
“So, you think we should go up the back way?” Franco said, while eyeing the building.
“For several reasons,” Angelo said. “She’s on the fifth floor, but her windows face the back. To tell if she’s there, we have to go back there anyway. Also she’s got a nosy neighbor who lives in the front, and you can see her lights are on. This woman opened her door to gawk at me the two times I was up at Montgomery’s front door. Besides, Montgomery’s apartment has access to the back stairs, and the back stairs dump directly into the backyard. I know because we chased her out that way.”
“I’m convinced,” Franco said. “Let’s do it.”
Franco and Angelo got out of the car. Angelo opened up the backseat and lifted out his bag of lock-picking tools along with a Halligan bar, a tool firefighters use to get through doors in cases of emergency.
The two men headed for the passageway to the backyard.
“I heard she got away from you and Tony Ruggerio,” Franco said. “At least for a while. She must be quite a number.”
“Don’t remind me,” Angelo said. “Of course, working with Tony was like carrying around a bucket of sand.”
Emerging into the backyard, which was a dark warren of neglected gardens, Franco and Angelo carefully moved away from the building far enough to see up to the fifth floor. The windows were all dark.
“Looks like we have time to prepare a nice homecoming,” Franco said.
Angelo didn’t answer. Instead, he took his lock-picking tools over to the metal fire door that led to the back stairs. He slipped on a tight-fitting pair of leather gloves, while Franco readied the flashlight.
At first Angelo’s hands shook from sheer anticipatory excitement of coming face-to-face with Laurie Montgomery after five years of smoldering resentment. When the lock resisted Angelo’s efforts, he made a point to control himself and concentrate. The lock responded, and the door opened.
Five floors up, Angelo didn’t bother with the lock-picking tools. He knew that Laurie had several dead bolts. He used the Halligan bar. With a quiet splintering sound, it made short work of the door. Within twenty seconds, they were inside.
For a few minutes, the two men stood motionless in the darkness of Laurie’s pantry so that they could listen. They wanted to be certain there were no sounds suggestive that their forced entry had been noticed by any of the other tenants.
“Jesus Christ!” Franco forcibly whispered. “Something just touched my leg!”
“What is it?” Angelo demanded. He’d not expected such an outburst, and it caused his heart to flutter.
“Oh, it’s only a goddamn cat!” Franco said with relief. All at once, both men could hear the animal purring in the darkness.
“Aren’t we lucky,” Angelo said. “That will be a nice touch. Bring it along.”
Slowly, the men made their way from the pantry through the dark kitchen and into the living room. There they could see significantly better with the city night light coming through the windows.
“So far so good,” Angelo said.
“Now we just have to wait,” Franco said. “Maybe I’ll see if there’s any beer or wine in the refrigerator. Are you interested?”
“A beer would be nice,” Angelo said.
At police headquarters, Laurie and Jack had to get ID badges and go through a metal detector before they were allowed to go up to Lou’s floor. Lou was at the elevator to welcome them.
The first thing he did was take Laurie by the shoulders, look her in the eye, and ask what had happened.
“She’s okay,” Jack said, patting Lou reassuringly on the back. “She’s back to her old, rational, calm self.”
“Really?” Lou questioned, still giving Laurie a close inspection.
Laurie couldn’t help but smile under Lou’s intense scrutiny. “Jack’s right,” she said. “I’m fine. In fact, I’m embarrassed I made us rush down here.”
Lou breathed a sigh of relief. “Well, I’m happy to see both of you. Come on back to my palace.” He led the way to his office.
“I can offer you coffee, but I strongly advise against it,” Lou said. “At this time of day the janitorial staff considers it strong enough to clean out sink drains.”
“We’re fine,” Laurie said. She took a chair.
Jack did likewise. He glanced around the spartan quarters with an unpleasant shiver. The last time he’d been there about a year ago, it had been after he’d narrowly escaped an attempt on his life.
“I think I figured out how Franconi’s body was taken from the morgue,” Laurie began. “You teased me about suspecting the Spoletto Funeral Home, but now I think you’re going to have to take that back. In fact, I think it’s time that you took over.”
Laurie then outlined what she thought had happened. She told Lou that she suspected that someone from the medical examiner’s office had given the Spoletto people the accession number of a relatively recent, unidentified body as well as the location of Franconi’s remains.
“Often when two drivers come to pick up a body for a funeral home, one of them goes in the walk-in cooler while the other handles the paperwork with the mortuary tech,” Laurie explained. “In these instances, the mortuary tech prepares the body for pickup by covering it with a sheet and positioning its gurney in a convenient location just inside the cooler door. In the Franconi situation, I believe the driver took the body whose accession number he had, removed its tag, stashed the body in one of the many unoccupied refrigerator compartments, replaced Franconi’s tag with that one, and then calmly appeared outside the mortuary office with Franconi’s remains. All the tech did at that point was check the accession number.”
“That’s quite a scenario,” Lou said. “Can I ask if you have any proof of this or is it all conjecture?”
“I found the body whose accession number Spoletto called in,” Laurie said. “It was in a compartment which was supposed to be vacant. The name Frank Gleason was bogus.”