Ken Bruen - Bust

The next day Bobby took a bus uptown to visit his mother at the Jewish Home for the Aged, a nursing home on 106th Street. He’d moved his mother up there last year, from a nursing home in Brooklyn, because it was only seventeen blocks from his apartment and he wanted to visit her more often.

For a while, he went every day, bringing her ice cream and Chinese food and getting one of the orderlies to wheel her out to the garden so she could get some fresh air. But then his mother had another stroke, a bad one, and now she just slept most of the time. Bobby still visited her three or four times a week; he would’ve gone more often, but it was too depressing to see her so out of it. He was afraid that when her time came and she died that was how he’d remember her – with her eyes closed and her toothless mouth sagging open.

As usual, his mother was in bed asleep. Her body had shriveled, especially on her left side. She’d always been short, but under the blanket she looked like she was four feet tall. There were tubes connected to her arms, meaning she probably had another infection. Bobby was gonna raise hell, find out why nobody called to tell him, but he knew this wouldn’t do any good. It would just get him all worked up and his mother would still be lying in bed like a vegetable. Sometimes Bobby thought his mother would be better off dead and he even thought about taking her home and shooting her.

More and more, he just wanted to shoot somebody, go postal, let them know how goddamn angry he was.

He might’ve done it too, offed his Mom, except she was Catholic and he knew she wouldn’t want that. She was probably already pissed off at him for putting her in a Jewish nursing home. But, hey, she was past complaining.

Bobby shook his mother’s arm until her eyes opened. She couldn’t smile anymore, but Bobby could always tell she was happy to see him. The dribble from the corner of her mouth could be a sign of happiness, he figured. Like she was trying to smile.

After sitting next to her for a while, Bobby took the elevator down to the cafeteria and bought a little container of ice cream. Then he went back up to his mother’s room and shook her awake. She turned toward him, but this time only one of her eyes opened.

“Look, Ma, I got your favorite – vanilla.”

His mother turned away, like she was angry, but Bobby kept the little wooden stick with the glob of ice cream on it in front of her face until she turned back and started eating it. Some ice cream dripped down her chin and Bobby wiped it off with the sleeve of his shirt. He took a lick himself and that shit wasn’t half bad.

When she finished eating, Bobby stayed with her a while longer, watching her sleep. Then he realized that it was past one o’clock and her soap operas were on. He turned on the TV in front of her bed to channel 7 and cranked the volume. He leaned over the bed, kissed her, and then left the room quietly.

When Bobby got back to his apartment he realized he had nothing to do. He would’ve gone to Central Park with his camera and scouted for some new prospects, but it was getting cloudy outside and the air felt like rain. Maybe he’d just go out to the video store, check out the new releases, pick up some food at the supermarket, and then come back home and call it a day.

Bobby came back from the supermarket and cooked himself dinner – baked beans, powdered potatoes, and two cans of Beefaroni. Even Def Leppard couldn’t get him out of his funk. When the Def couldn’t crank you, it was way past time to shoot someone.

While he ate he stared at the pictures of Mr. and Mrs. Brown, thinking that the guy was starting to look familiar again. He didn’t know if he was imagining it – maybe it was just that he was staring at the pictures for so long, of course the guy was starting to look familiar. But, no, there was more to it than that. Bobby had seen that face before. Then, suddenly, it clicked. He wheeled out to the hallway, to the incinerator room, and when he didn’t find what he was looking for there, he rode the elevator down to his building’s basement. In one corner, the porters stacked the old newspapers they picked up from the recycling bins on every floor. Once a month they’d tie them up and cart them off, but recycling day must have been a couple of weeks off because the pile was pretty big. Bobby fished through the papers until he found the week-old Daily News he was thinking of. But he didn’t really get excited until he turned to page three and saw the big picture of Mr. Brown, and the story of the two women who were murdered on the Upper East Side in this very expensive-looking townhouse. Max Fisher, the article said, was the founder and CEO of NetWorld…

Bobby took the paper with him back to his apartment. Suddenly, Leppard sounded okay again. Thanks to a millionaire named Max Fisher, Bobby was back in business.

On May 12, 1989, Alexis Morgan, a thirty-six year-old former model, was walking her two pet chihuahuas through a secluded path near Belvedere Castle in Central Park when she was brutally stabbed to death by a mysterious assailant. The single wound to her throat had nearly decapitated her, and police believed she was grabbed from behind and cut with a large knife or machete. There were no witnesses to the attack but several people reported seeing “a suspicious white man” in the area minutes before the killing and hearing her chihuahuas barking moments afterwards.

Although he didn’t fit the description of the “suspicious white man,” Ms. Morgan’s husband Henry, a wealthy real estate mogul, was a prime suspect. The Morgans had had a stormy two-year marriage, marred by loud public fights and Mr. Morgan’s accusations that his wife was having an affair. While Mrs. Morgan’s pocketbook was stolen in the attack, police believed this may have been “a decoy,” to make it appear as if robbery had been the motive.

Mr. Morgan had a rock solid alibi – he was playing tennis with a friend at the Wall Street Racket Club at the time of the murder, and the friend and workers of the club vouched for him. However, the police still didn’t rule out Morgan completely. They believed he may have hired someone to kill his wife. They created a composite sketch of the suspect and began a citywide manhunt for the killer. A few weeks later, police tailed Morgan to a meeting at a diner in Chelsea with Vinny “The Blade” Silvera, a killer known to have connections to the mob. Later that night, Silvera was brought in for questioning, but wouldn’t confess to anything. Morgan was arrested separately. Under heavy interrogation, Morgan – who had his own business links to organized crime – was told that Silvera had confessed and then Morgan, falling for the ploy, promptly gave a taped confession, implicating Silvera. Both Morgan and Silvera were tried and sentenced. A few months later, Morgan was found beaten to death in a bathroom on Riker’s Island.

Of course there were many obvious differences between Alexis Morgan’s murder and the recent murders of the two women in the East Seventy-fourth Street townhouse, but there were many similarities as well. In both cases, robbery was the apparent motive. In both cases, the victims had been killed brutally, as if murder was the sole intention. And in both cases the husbands had convenient airtight alibis.

Kenneth Simmons, Detective Investigator at the 19th Precinct, had had nothing to do with the Alexis Morgan case. He was only in his second year on the force in 1989 and he was still spending most of his time doing clerical work. But, like everyone else who lived in the city at that time, he had followed the details of the case closely in the news. Several years later, at a promotion ceremony at One Police Plaza, he met Lieutenant Anthony Santana, who had broken the case, and Santana filled him in on many of the details. In particular, Kenneth recalled how Santana had told him that he would have broken the case much sooner if it weren’t for all the media hype. “It was like a zoo,” Santana said. “The suspects always knew they were being watched twenty-four hours a day.” He believed that if Morgan didn’t know he was being watched, he would have led them to Silvera much sooner. Santana said, “You can’t shoot a deer when he hears your footsteps, you gotta sneak up on the fuck, know what I’m saying?”