Four Walls Read online

  "Apparently not." Flack looked around, caught Doris's eye, and gave her a friendly wave. Doris just rolled her eyes and went back to reading the Post.

  "She's crazy about you," Sullivan deadpanned. "I gotta get the ferry. Be good, Donnie."

  They left the diner, Sullivan headed to the ferry terminal, Flack headed to his car. He pulled out his cell phone and turned it back on. He didn't turn it off very often, but he hadn't seen Sullivan in way too long. Just once, he wanted to get through a meal without being interrupted.

  Only a cop would consider three cups of coffee a meal.

  But then, Flack had been living on coffee lately. He had to do something to swim upstream against the sleepless nights. The pain was worse when he was lying down.

  Miraculously, there were no messages on the phone. Somehow, he had made it all the way to seven in the morning without the NYPD requiring his services.

  Flack didn't anticipate that state of affairs surviving to his lunch hour.

  2

  DINA ROSENGAUS HATED THE morning shift.

  It wasn't the getting-up-early part. Dina had always been a morning person, both back home in Russia when she was a little girl and since coming to the United States as a teenager. And it wasn't even every morning shift. Wednesdays, Saturdays, and Sundays were fine.

  The other four days of the week, though, the morning shift was a nightmare, thanks to some ridiculous concept known as alternate-side-of-the-street parking.

  In order to keep the streets clean, the city of New York designated two-and-a-half-hour blocks during the day when one side of the street had to be clear of parked cars so that the street sweepers could come through.

  That was the theory, anyhow. Dina couldn't recall ever actually seeing these mythical street sweepers.

  Dina worked at Belluso's, an Italian bakery and cafй in the Riverdale section of the Bronx-in fact, it was located on Riverdale Avenue, right in the neighborhood's primary business district. Riverdale was predominantly Jewish-that was why Dina's family had moved there-and Dina had been surprised to find an Italian bakery there, but the place was popular. They served cookies, cannoli, pastries, coffee, tea, bread, and more. You could come in and grab something to go or sit at one of the round tables for as long as you wanted. Salvatore Belluso, the owner and Dina's boss, always said that he wanted people to feel like they were in a cafй in Florence and encouraged customers to stay as long as they pleased. He even had a clock upstairs with the hands removed to symbolize that it didn't matter what time it was.

  But it did matter to Dina what time it was when her shift started. Parking in the area was hard enough under the best of circumstances, but on weekday mornings, several spots were unavailable between 7:30 and 8:00, and several more were off-limits between 9:30 and 11:00. That made parking nigh impossible. Sure, all the spots were legal when she arrived at a little before seven to open the bakery, but they wouldn't be for long, and Mr. Belluso didn't like it when you left the counter to do "personal things." Not getting a ticket apparently qualified as personal. One time, she had to park seven blocks away-she might as well have left the car home.

  Today, though, she was lucky. Someone was pulling out of a spot on Fieldston Road, a one-way street that ran alongside Riverdale between West 236th and West 238th. (There was no West 237th, at least over here. This made even less sense to Dina than alternate-side-of-the-street parking, but she'd learned to accept it.)

  She had begged Mr. Belluso to keep her mornings limited to the weekends-or to Wednesdays. For some reason, there was no alternate-side parking on Wednesdays. But Dina hadn't been there long enough; Maria and Jeanie had Wednesday mornings, and the competition for weekend spots was fierce. Most of the girls who worked there (Mr. Belluso only hired female high school and college students to work the counter) wanted the weekend also, since they didn't have school. To some extent, Dina was a victim of the schedule, as most of her summer-session classes at Manhattan College were in the afternoon.

  As she turned the corner onto Riverdale Avenue, a bus pulled up to the stop right in front of the bakery. The back door whooshed open and four people stepped out, one of whom was Jeanie Rodriguez.

  Jeanie was an undergraduate student at Lehman College, planning to be a nurse. They made an odd pairing. Jeanie was small and compact, whereas Dina was tall and broad shouldered. Jeanie's hips were modest and sexy; Dina's were wide and ungainly. Back in Russia, she'd have been considered healthy; here in the States, they seemed to want their women to all look like Paris Hilton. Jeanie was better-looking than Paris Hilton, though, in Dina's opinion. She had a bright face; olive skin that looked much better than Dina's pale complexion; and small, long-fingered hands, whereas Dina's were short and stubby.

  The only thing that kept Dina from despising this skinny, pretty, perky young woman was the fact that she was also the sweetest, nicest person Dina had ever met. When Dina had started at Belluso's four months earlier, Jeanie had been very patient with Dina, especially since her English still wasn't as good as Dina wanted it to be.

  Jeanie was also the most senior of the six girls who worked at Belluso's and had become the unofficial manager of the store. (Making her the official manager would have required that Mr. Belluso pay her more.) That meant she was the one Mr. Belluso trusted with the keys, so Dina was very glad to see her coming off the bus just as Dina arrived. If she hadn't, Dina would've been stuck outside waiting in the heat. It was already unbearably hot this morning, and she knew it was going to get worse as the day went on. The one advantage to being on the morning shift was that she missed what one of the regular customers called the fly-under-the-magnifying-glass effect. Belluso's had a huge picture window that faced west, and in the late afternoon, the sun blared in, raising the temperature in the place higher than the cheap air-conditioning system could handle.

  "Hey, Dina, what's up?" Jeanie said in her perky little voice as she stepped off the bus. She was wearing, as usual, all pink: light-pink Hello Kitty shirt, hot-pink shorts that came up to the top of her thighs (she had the legs for it; Dina was embarrassed to show her own thighs in public and wouldn't go out in shorts that short if you put a gun to her head), and pink flip-flops.

  "Okay. I just arrived," Dina said. "How are you?"

  "Slept through the alarm. Thank God for Goldie."

  Dina smiled. Goldie was Jeanie's dog, a golden retriever. "Your backup alarm?"

  Jeanie chuckled as she rummaged through her purse. "Yeah. If I'm not up by quarter after six, he's all over my face with his tongue." She shuddered. "Kinda like my ex-boyfriend."

  To that, Dina said nothing. The only ex-boyfriend she had was the boy she left behind in Russia. She still missed Sasha. Of course, she'd been hit on quite a bit since coming here, both in college and at the bakery. The one guy who was there all the time, Jack something, he was an outrageous flirt. Dina had been flattered until she noticed that he flirted with everyone else, too, which took a lot of the fun out of it. Still, his compliments certainly seemed genuine.

  But nobody had seriously caught her interest. In fact, most of the ones who hit on her here, including Jack, were a lot older. In Dina's experience, older men never treated younger women with respect.

  Jeanie finally excavated the key from her purse and inserted it into the lock, turning it to the right.

  The key made a thunking noise and stopped before it could go all the way around. "What the hell?" Jeanie said with a frown. She turned the key back around and pulled it out.

  Then she pulled on the door, and Dina was shocked to see it open. The door had never been locked the night before.

  Dina looked up. The lights were all out, like they were supposed to be-but the door was open? That didn't make sense.

  "Who closed last night?" Jeanie asked.

  "How should I know?" Dina asked back.

  Jeanie shook her head. "Right, you weren't working yesterday." She closed her eyes. Dina imagined she was visualizing the schedule. "It was-right, Maria and Annie."

&
nbsp; That surprised Dina. Both Maria Campagna and Annie Wolfowitz were very conscientious. If it had been Karen Paulsen, Dina would have understood-that girl was what Jeanie called a flake-but not Maria or Annie.

  Dina had never liked Maria all that much. She always kept gloating about how well she was treated by her boyfriend and how he bought her so many nice things, like the eighteen-karat-gold necklace she always wore. Sasha couldn't even afford to take Dina out with any regularity, much less buy her presents, expensive or otherwise.

  So, perhaps uncharitably, Dina hoped it had been Maria who'd forgotten to lock up.

  When they entered the bakery, Dina moved around to the back while Jeanie went to turn on both the lights and the air-conditioning. Dina planned to get the cappuccino maker going, then start taking the cannoli out of the refrigerator in the back.

  Flies buzzed all over the place. Dina was looking forward to the AC driving them away.

  Oddly, the flies got worse as she came around behind the counter. And something smelled-

  She screamed before her conscious mind recognized Maria Campagna lying on the floor, her eyes open, her face pale, flies buzzing around her body.

  "What is it?" Jeanie said as she ran around to the other side of the counter. "Dina, what is it?"

  "It's-it's-it's Maria!"

  Dina had no idea how Jeanie reacted, because she couldn't take her eyes off Maria. Dina had never seen a dead body-Jewish tradition kept caskets closed during funerals. For all her uncle's dire warnings about how dead bodies lined the streets in New York, she'd never seen a corpse before, except on those police shows on television.

  Maria's body looked different from what she expected. For one thing, she figured someone who was dead would be paler. And there wasn't any blood that she could see.

  But she knew that Maria was dead. For one thing, she wasn't moving at all. Dina had never realized before just how still someone could be.

  And she had dead eyes.

  Then Dina heard a distant, tinny voice say, "911." Turning, she saw that Jeanie had taken out her cell phone-a razor-thin phone that was the same shade of pink as her shorts.

  "I'm at Belluso's Bakery on Riverdale and 236th. There's a dead body here."

  3

  OFFICER TIM CICCONE WAS seriously hungover.

  He had only gone to the bar last night intending to unwind after another long day at the Richmond Hill Correctional Facility. He'd spent half the day filling out paperwork and the other half standing out on the baseball diamond while the inmates played a ball game. Skinheads versus Muslims, and what dumbass bureaucrat had thought that was a good idea? COs like Ciccone knew that it was the same story in virtually every prison: race stayed with race. A disproportionate number of inmates in RHCF were either white men who hated black people or black men who hated white people.

  When Lieutenant Ursitti had told his shift about the ball game, Ciccone had assumed it was a joke. He'd laughed and everything. So, of course, Uncle Cal had to put him on that detail. At least the weather had been nice-only in the sixties. Perfect baseball weather, unlike today. On the drive over from his place on Van Duzer Street this morning, Ciccone nearly got baked alive. He really needed to get the AC in his Camry fixed.

  Ciccone, a lifelong Jersey Devils fan, didn't even like baseball. Unlike hockey, which was a man's game, baseball was a pansy sport. Well, except when Muslims and skinheads went at it. Greg Yoba hit a ground ball to Brett Hunt, he flipped it to Jack Mulroney-but Vance Barker did a takeout slide. Naturally, a fight broke out.

  After a day that included an outdoor brawl, Ciccone had desperately needed a drink. He'd been born and raised on Staten Island, and he never wanted to live anywhere else. It was far enough away from the rest of the city that it felt like the suburbs, but close enough that he could go into Manhattan and take advantage of all the cool stuff you could do in a big city. Like any good suburb, his neighborhood had a bar where everybody knew everybody else. In this case, it was the Big Boot. It catered to goombahs like him-Italian-Americans who'd lived on Staten Island since the big immigration wave in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries-and was right around the corner from his apartment, so it was within stumbling distance of home. Ciccone figured he'd have a few beers at the Boot and call it a night.

  That was before Tina DiFillippo walked in. Ciccone hadn't called Tina for weeks, and Tina wanted him to make it up to her. So he did shots with her throughout the night: Jдgermeister, Harbor Lights, and some other things that Ciccone could no longer remember.

  He didn't remember taking Tina home, either, but there had apparently been sex, based on the used condom he'd found on the floor.

  Eventually, Ciccone would regret being too trashed to remember the sex. Right now, he just wanted someone to get the brass band the hell out of his head.

  Ciccone had already downed enough coffee to float the ferry, and he still could barely keep his eyes open. But he did his usual routine, hoping to hell that Uncle Cal didn't notice anything.

  First up was shaving. Ciccone had always thought allowing the inmates to shave was kind of stupid. Let the assholes grow beards; it wasn't like they needed to look good in here. But a lot of these guys had parole hearings, so they had to look their best, and besides, not letting inmates shave was the kind of stupid thing lawyers liked to sue the state over.

  So they went through a routine. The CO was given a box full of razors. He handed them to each con in his group as they went into the bath area, and then when they were done shaving, they handed them back, and the CO would put them in a plastic recycling box. In maximum security, they made the cons put the razors on magnets to prove that there was really a razor in there. Cons were fond of substituting tinfoil for the blade and keeping the razor for themselves as a weapon. It was harder to do that with a safety razor, but cons could get damned ingenious when they decided they wanted a weapon. Why they couldn't put that ingenuity into getting off the charges against them, Ciccone never understood. But he didn't give much of a good goddamn, either, especially today.

  Uncle Cal used to work in max security in Sing Sing. He thought the magnets were a good idea, and he somehow talked the bosses into shelling out for one off the books. The COs were supposed to use them every once in a while, keep the cons on their toes. Today, Ciccone was supposed to use it in light of yesterday's brawl, but the goddamn magnet made this humming noise that made it feel like someone was drilling right into his left eyeball. No way he was gonna be able to make it through the day with that thing going.

  So he didn't bother. He checked some of the safety razors at random, but otherwise, he just wanted to get the whole thing over with. Once this task was done, he had library duty, which meant air-conditioning. The humidity of the bathroom was killing him.

  If he could just make it to the library shift, everything would be fine.

  * * *

  Jack Mulroney couldn't believe his good luck. Mostly because he hadn't had very much of that type of luck lately.

  It had all started at work. How the hell was Jack supposed to know that Billy, the new supervisor, was a fag? Billy had heard Jack and Freddie making a comment-it was some stupid joke about how you don't drop a coin in front of a Jew or a fag-and Billy went ballistic. Jack got put on probation, got a letter from HR saying that the bank didn't appreciate such commentary, that it was bad for business if the customers heard such talk-never mind that it was in the goddamn break room; he'd never tell jokes in front of the customers, he wasn't stupid-and if such comments were heard again, he would be suspended.

  So he was a good little boy, did everything the fag told him to do. But that wasn't enough for Billy, oh no. He started leaving flyers in his in-box, brochures and other garbage-all gay-rights crap.

  One night, after he got off work, he went out for a walk to blow off steam before hopping the subway home. Eventually, he got tired of walking and had a serious need for a beer, and he went into the first bar he could find-some dive on Thirty-fourth. He got a Bud Light-
they had it on tap and everything-and gulped down half the pint right there. Already he was feeling better.

  Then two guys sat next to him. Crew cuts, goatees, tight T-shirts, equally tight jeans, black boots, and one of them called the other "girlfriend."

  "Jesus Christ," he said, "can't you fags get your own island or somethin'?"

  One of them-the one wearing eyeliner, for God's sake-looked at him like he was peering over his glasses, except this guy wasn't actually wearing glasses, and said, "We have our own island. It's called Manhattan."

  That was when Jack beat the shit out of him.

  It had been stupid in lots of ways. For one thing, if you were gonna beat up a fag, you shouldn't do it in public. Public meant witnesses. Goddamn ADA who prosecuted must've brought half the damn city onto the witness stand. And if you had to do it in a bar, do it in one where they knew you and might cover for you. A stranger beating up one of the regulars wasn't gonna fly.

  So Jack was stuck, especially since the DA had been on a hate-crimes kick as part of his reelection campaign, so they were going full-tilt boogie on Jack's ass.

  But at least he showed those fags what for. It was worth it just for that.

  After he arrived at RHCF, it didn't take long for Jack to figure out that he needed to pick one of three sides: the Muslims, the skinheads, or the victims. (There were also lots of gangs represented inside, but you had to have been one of them on the outside first.) No chance with the Muslims. Jack never had a problem with black people-hell, the guy he'd told the coin-dropping joke to was black, and he'd busted a gut laughing-but Jack was still too pale for them. And no way he was gonna just sit on the sidelines and be one of the fish they all stepped on.

  Besides, when they found out he was in for "fag assault," the skinheads welcomed him with open arms.