GRAVESEND
A Crime Novel
J.L. Abramo
“In our top five for best of 2012 is J.L. Abramo’s Gravesend. The discovery of a boy’s body on the roof of an apartment building sets off a chain of events that will tie together a group of people in profound ways. Homicide Detectives Samson, Vota and Murphy of Brooklyn’s 61st Precinct link the body to that of another boy; with no solid clues. As each detective works the case, each is also torn by other cases and other traumas; some very close to home. This is a remarkable book that will tie you in knots as you wait to see how it all plays out. A truly exceptional novel.” — Crimespree Magazine
“J.L. Abramo’s new novel Gravesend is a blurb-writer’s dream: compelling, electrifying, believable. It has scary action but is filled with likeable and well-drawn characters. The parts that are grim are leavened by comic relief which is never heavy-handed. It’s probably a lot like how a real-life homicide squad would banter in order to cope. Abramo wishes to explore how people react to adversity and succeeds admirably.” — John Dantzler, oo-author of Hiking South Carolina.
“If you are looking for a solid straight-up police procedural, Gravesend fits the bill like a favorite t-shirt … or more accurately … like a pair of bloody examination gloves. No punches pulled in this one.” — Kenneth Wishnia, Author of The Fifth Servant.
“Written by a son of Brooklyn, Gravesend is a novel filled to the brim with characters with heart, humor, compassion, excitement, pain, hate, love, revenge, fear, and courage. It is a page turner that moves with the pace and power of some of the best crime novels you will ever read.” — Stageplay, Denver
“J.L. Abramo’s Gravesend raises the bar for gritty police procedurals in this fast paced thriller. The action never stops as Brooklyn Detective Lieutenant Samson juggles mob wars, murders and mayhem during a search for a biblically obsessed killer.” — Bill Moody, author of Czechmate: The Spy Who Played Jazz.
Copyright © 2012 by J.L. Abramo
Down & Out Books edition: February 2014
All rights reserved. No part of the book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote brief passages in a review.
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TABLE OF CONTENTS
Cast of Characters
Gravesend
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Other Titles from Down & Out Books
Preview from Richard Barre’s The Ghosts of Morning
Preview from David Housewright’s Finders Keepers
Preview from Terry Holland’s Chicago Shiver
To Brooklyn
We shall not cease from exploration
and the end of all our exploring
will be to arrive where we started
and know the place for the first time.
—T. S. Eliot
CAST OF CHARACTERS
JAMES SAMSON—Detective Lieutenant, NYPD, 61st Precinct
ALICIA SAMSON—his wife
JIMMY, KAYLA and LUCY—the Samson children
LOU VOTA—Detective Sergeant, NYPD, 61st Precinct
JOE CAMPO—a grocer
BILLY VENTURA—a victim
PAUL and MARY VENTURA—his parents
STAN LANDIS—a uniformed officer, NYPD, 61st Precinct
THOMAS MURPHY—Detective, NYPD, 61st Precinct
DR. BRUCE WAYNE—Medical Examiner, City of New York
MARINA IVANOV—Detective, NYPD, 60th Precinct
LORRAINE DiMARCO—a criminal defense attorney
VICTORIA ANDERSON—a law student, Assistant to Lorraine DiMarco
BOBBY HOYLE—a murder suspect, Lorraine DiMarco’s client
KELLY—Desk Sergeant, 61st Precinct
SALVATORE DiMARCO—Lorraine’s father
FRANCES DiMARCO—Lorraine’s mother
TONY TERRITO—a dealer in automobiles
VINCENT TERRITO—Tony’s father
BRENDA TERRITO—Tony’s daughter
DOMINIC COLLETTI—a Mafia boss
SAMMY LEONE—Colletti’s bodyguard
SONNY COLLETTI—Colletti’s older son
RICHIE COLLETTI—Colletti’s younger son
ANNIE—a homeless woman
FRANK SULLIVAN—a homeless man
SUSAN GRAHAM—an innocent bystander
MITCH DUNNE—a proprietor
GABRIEL CAINE—a patron of Mitch’s Coffee Shop
KEVIN ADDAMS—a victim
GEORGE ADDAMS—his father
SANDRA ROSEN—Detective, NYPD, 63rd Precinct
MICHAEL MURPHY—Detective Murphy’s younger brother
MARGARET MURPHY—Murphy’s mother
SERENA HUANG—a journalist
STANLEY TRENTON—Brooklyn Chief of Detectives, NYPD
ANDREW CHEN—Detective, NYPD, 68th Precinct
ROBIN HARDING—Dr. Wayne’s assistant
RIPLEY—a senior FBI agent, New York City Field Office
WINONA STONE—a junior FBI agent, New York City Field Office
KYLE and MICKEY RIPLEY—Ripley’s children
VICTOR SANDERS—a dealer in stolen pharmaceuticals
EDDIE CONROY—a maintenance man, Our Lady of Angels Church
FATHER DONOVAN—Pastor, Our Lady of Angels Church
AUGIE SENA—a barkeep
STEVIE TERRITO—Tony’s cousin
THERESA FAZIO—a receptionist at Titan Imports
DR. ROWDY BARNWELL—a neurosurgeon
DWAYNE HARRIS—a dealer in narcotics
ANDRE HARRIS—his brother
STUMP—an informant
MICHAEL DAVIS—a uniformed rookie officer, NYPD
HARRY JACOBS—Internal Affairs Bureau, NYPD
MARTY RICHARDS—Internal Affairs Bureau, NYPD
RALPH—Murphy’s best friend
Back to TOC
PROLOGUE
THE TRANSGRESSIONS
And they went off the road there with the purpose of stopping for the night in Gibeah and he went into the town, seating himself in the street, for no one took him into his house for the night.
—Judges, 19:15
1
Mid-January. Well past midnight.
He moans in his sleep.
His wife tries to wake him gently; using soft, steady pressure to his shoulder.
Her efforts interrupt a bad dream.
Another terrible dream.
The dreams have been recurring more frequently as more time passes since the day he lost his job.
Bad dreams.
Nightmares, manifesting the fear, have crowded his waking hours as well; the terror of
not being able to provide for and protect his family.
He wakes gasping for breath, for words.
“What’s wrong?” he asks, choking on the question.
“It’s Derek. He’s been vomiting all night and he’s burning up with fever,” his wife answers. “I called the doctor. He said we should rush Derek to the emergency room. He said that he would meet us there.”
“Get the boy ready. I’ll take him over myself,” he says, throwing off the bed sheet and blanket. “You need to stay here with the baby.”
2
Coney Island Hospital is a fifteen-minute drive; there will be little traffic on the Belt Parkway at this hour.
His wife straps the five-year-old boy into the child seat in back as he climbs behind the steering wheel of the relic they call an automobile.
“Call me.”
“I will,” he promises, and pulls away from the curb toward the parkway entrance at 65th Street. He gazes across the underside of the Verrazano Bridge as he races past the Fourth Avenue exit. The boy has cleverly managed to free himself from the restraining belt of the child carrier.
The other car comes from out of nowhere, barreling into the right lane from the Bay Parkway entrance, smashing into his right quarter-panel. His car spins a hard ninety degrees. He desperately tries to brake, but he is unable to avoid crashing head-on into the chain-link fence separating the parkway from the service road. The impact bounces his forehead off the steering wheel.
The boy lies on the seat beside him after hitting the dashboard on the passenger side.
The boy is bleeding from a wide gash above the eye.
The small body looks terribly broken.
He tries to start the car with no success. He tries to locate the other vehicle. The other driver has stepped out of the second car and is slowly walking toward them. The man suddenly stops and quickly turns away. He watches in stunned silence as the other driver climbs back into the second car, rolls slowly past them and then speeds off.
The license plate on the BMW reads TITAN1.
He is terrified at the thought of leaving the boy there alone, but he is afraid to move the battered body. He removes his own coat and uses it to cover and protect the boy from the bitter cold.
He viciously tears a sleeve from his own shirt and wraps it around the boy’s head, trying to slow the bleeding. He jumps from the car, runs to the exit and up to the service road. The area is dark and isolated. There are only retail businesses here, shut down for the night. He turns onto 26th Avenue and runs under the parkway toward the nearest house.
It is nearly three in the morning; he has not shaved for two days. His shirt is roughly torn. He beats on a door for help, crying that his son is hurt badly, and he needs to use a telephone. The woman on the other side of the door will not let him in. She is alone she says, her husband out of town. He pleads until he can hear footsteps moving her back into the depths of the house. He cries out after her, begging her to call for an ambulance to the scene of the accident. He looks at the house address and then turns from the door not knowing what to do, where to go.
A yellow taxicab approaches, heading in the direction of the parkway. He waves his arms wildly, like a madman. He is becoming a madman. An off-duty sign quickly lights on the roof of the taxi as the cab speeds past him.
The number on the rear of the cab is 4354.
His head is filling with numbers.
He runs back to the car. The boy is still breathing. He finds an old blanket in the trunk. He carefully wraps the boy, lifts the body out of the car and begins walking blindly in the direction of the hospital.
A panel truck approaches from behind, slows briefly and then drives on. The lettering on the side of the truck reads Addams Dairy. There is a white bumper sticker on the rear with two words in bold black lettering.
Got Milk?
His head is filling with words.
He turns to the sound of another approaching vehicle. A tow truck has stopped at his abandoned car. He reverses direction and hurries back, the boy limp in his arms.
3
The tow truck driver drops him and the boy at the emergency room entrance off Ocean Parkway.
A nurse rushes up and grabs the boy from his arms as she shouts for a room and a doctor.
He tries to follow, but he is held back by another nurse.
He asks for the boy’s physician, insisting that the pediatrician was to meet them there.
He is told that the boy’s doctor never arrived.
Ten minutes later he is informed that his son is gone. His firstborn has died.
“We did all that we could do,” says a nurse. “The boy lost so much blood. It was too late.”
His legs go out from under him; he is helped to his feet by the nurse and a security guard. They sit him in a chair, a glass of water appears and a young doctor quickly checks his blood pressure.
“Just sit for a few minutes,” the doctor says. “You’re going to be alright.”
“Never,” he replies.
Everything, everyone, every thought is blurred.
“Is there someone we can phone?” asks the nurse.
He looks up at the woman, trying to regain focus.
“My wife,” he says weakly. “I need a telephone. I promised her I would call.”
PART ONE
UNFORTUNATE PEDESTRIANS
Hast thou that holy feeling in thy soul to counsel me to make my peace with God, and art thou yet to thy own soul so blind, that thou wilt war with God by murdering me? Ah, consider, that he who set you on to do this deed will hate you for the deed.
—William Shakespeare
ONE
It is a cold and cloudy afternoon, the first Friday in February.
The wind chill factor races across the rooftop.
Joe Campo turns away from Detectives Vota and Samson and the small body lying on the tar surface behind them. Campo gazes down at the street corner, directly across the avenue, where his wife stands at the door of their family-owned and operated food market. A pair of teenage boys take turns slapping a rubber ball against the west brick wall of the grocery.
Campo’s Food Market is the only grocery, delicatessen, newsstand and produce shop remaining in the neighborhood that is not owned and operated twenty-four hours a day by Korean immigrants or owned by Boston or Canadian entrepreneurs and operated by Indian or Pakistani clerks. Not necessarily a bad thing. Just not the way things used to be.
Little was as it used to be in Gravesend.
Lieutenant Samson stares at Joe Campo’s back and waits patiently.
Only Detective Vota looks down at the body, and then only for a moment before looking away again. He nervously works at the buttons of his coat.
“I could use my jacket,” Vota says, “to cover the body. He looks so cold laying there.”
“We’ll wait for the medical examiner,” Samson says softly, “and Landis will be back with a blanket.”
Lou Vota moves over to the northwest corner of the roof and looks down to the street entrance of the building. The small crowd they had encountered at their arrival is steadily growing.
Officer Mendez is down in the street, energetically trying to keep people back.
Joe Campo remains at the ledge, silently.
“Mr. Campo,” says Samson, just above a whisper.
“When we were his age,” Campo says, referring to the boy on the roof, “we would sneak up here to fly a kite; my friends Eddie and Carlo and me. The kite set us back ten cents at old man Baker’s Candy Store across the avenue. We would pick up a bag of penny candies while we were there, when penny candies actually cost a penny, or two for a penny. Tiny wax Coca-Cola bottles filled with brown-colored sugar water. Giant fireballs. Pink and white sugar tabs stuck on strips of waxed paper. Chocolate-covered marshmallow twists. And then we’d pick up hero sandwiches at Nick’s salumeria, before it was Angelo’s and then Vito’s and then ours. Ham, hard salami, Swiss cheese and gobs of yellow mustard on half a loaf of seede
d Italian bread still warm from Sabatino’s Bakery on Avenue S. Twenty-five cents each.”
Vota is about to interrupt; Samson stops him with a hand gesture.
Joe Campo looks out toward Coney Island, at the 250-foot tall steel framed Parachute Jump ride that had been moved from the 1939 World’s Fair to Steeplechase Park in the forties. The landmark attraction has not carried a passenger for more than thirty years.
“This apartment house was one of the tallest buildings in the neighborhood. Still is at that,” Campo goes on. “We thought if we started up here we’d be closer to the sky. One of us would have to run down to Baker’s every ten minutes or so for another ball of string, 250 more feet for a nickel. We would watch the paper kite sail toward the ocean, followed by a long tail we had made out of strips torn from one my father’s old handkerchiefs. We were sure we could fly the thing all the way to Europe, wherever we thought that was. When the long pieced-together string inevitably snapped we were positive that the kite would eventually come down to land somewhere in France or Germany.”
Detective Vota catches sight of Officer Landis waving him over.
“The street is getting very crowded. Mendez is having a time keeping everyone out,” Landis says as Vota reaches him.