Murder in Greenwich Village

Book 3: Manhattan

by Lee Harris

Genres: Mystery; Female Sleuths; Suspense

Synopsis

“Detective Jane Bauer is a most welcome addition to the ranks of fictional cops.”
–Peter Robinson

When NYPD detective Jane Bauer and her team check in for their new assignment, they reopen a cold case that’s a real killer. Ten years earlier, police responding to a spate of late-night 911 calls from Greenwich Village discovered a young African American undercover cop, Micah Anthony, shot dead on Waverly Place. The killer left no clues, and the murder remains an inscrutable mystery . . . except for two things: Anthony had infiltrated a lucrative gun-trading operation in the city, and it seemed likely that he knew and trusted the killer.

So begins an investigation that leads Jane from Village brownstones to middle-class Queens, from wealthy Sutton Place to sinister subway tunnels, as a mastermind of murder resumes operations–and every path is mined with menace.

“Harris knows a lot about cops and a lot about women and she knows how to plot a good mystery.”
–Stephen Greenleaf

Release date: December 18, 2007

Publisher: Ballantine Books

Print pages: 304

Sample

1
 
THE WHIP HAD gotten his gold leaf. By virtue of commanding the Cold Case Squad at 137 Centre Street, which since its formation the previous fall had cleared at least three tough cases spectacularly, Capt. Francis X. Graves had been promoted to deputy inspector. Det. Jane Bauer, whose team of three detectives had been responsible for two of those cases being put to rest, learned of Graves’s good fortune on her return from her first trip to Paris in March with the man she loved illicitly and passionately, a deputy chief. Her partner, Gordon Defino, had also been promoted from third-grade to second-grade detective, and deservedly so. The third member of the team, Sean MacHovec, had earned a bump to second, but was living under a cloud because of an incident at the end of the last case, and had not received the promotion.
 
With all the changes, returning to the job after only a short time away was jolting. But the squad was doing its job and although not a permanent fixture, would continue its work, sparing the detectives a return to ordinary precinct squad activity. Results paid off. Jane herself had been moved up two grades to first after their first case.
 
Spring had been splintered. Jane had to appear in court for a long-delayed trial, thus requiring a refresher on the case. It was a nasty one, with ornery activists on both sides trying the patience of the judge and luring the various media to the courthouse, inside and out. As Jane’s testimony came to an end, Defino was called to do the same on an old case of his. Graves was worried: his best team out of commission for weeks. With his ambition, he needed a steady stream of results.
 
When the trials and vacations were out of the way, MacHovec returned from his temporary transfer to another team, which appeared devastated to lose him. Defino would have liked to have seen the last of him, even if not as strongly as the day they met. Today was a fine day in May with the smell of spring in the air, as the team sat in the whip’s office to receive their new assignment. Deputy Inspector Graves, a handsome, articulate man who frequently played police spokesman before the TV cameras, looked more gorgeous than usual, and happier. Something about a gold leaf on his shoulder.
 
“I see you’re all looking good,” he began. “Well rested, I hope. We’ve got a biggie here.”
 
“Less work than painting the house,” MacHovec said. He, too, had taken vacation time.
 
“Maybe not this time. You folks remember the Micah Anthony hit?”
 
“Oh, shit,” Defino said under his breath.
 
Jane seconded the sentiment. “The undercover cop. That was a long time ago, Inspector.”
 
“And the case is still open,” Graves said, “as you know.” The file on the desk in front of him was the tallest Jane had ever seen. It represented the work of team after team of angry investigators, angry that one of their best had been gunned down by an anonymous shooter who had left no clue to his identity, and had covered his tracks so well that he might have dissolved into the mist.
 
“Well, we did good twice,” MacHovec said in a you-can’t-win-’em-all tone of voice.
 
“Do good once more,” Graves countered dryly. “I don’t know who can heft this thing. Annie put it in three separate jackets so you don’t break your arms on day one.” Annie was the police administrative aide, and probably couldn’t have hefted the whole file herself.
 
“That it?” Defino asked.
 
“That’s it, Detective. I don’t have to tell you how important it is to clear this case.”
 
“No, sir.” Defino stood, crushed his empty coffee cup noisily, and took the top third of the file.
 
“MacHovec followed, leaving Jane the bottom third, the beginning of the case, the call to 911, the first officers on the scene, and the desperate, unsuccessful attempt to save the dying cop.
 
“And I was looking forward to coming back,” MacHovec said, dropping into his desk chair. “This is a dead end. I should’ve stayed home and given the house another coat.”
 
Defino, dropping his cup in the trash basket, concurred. “I remember when the call came in. I was on midnights that week, twelve to eight, riding in an RMP with my partner, Pinkie. Long time ago.”
 
“You sound like a couple of dreamy high school girls,” Jane said. “I was in the Six that night making a good collar. The desk sergeant told us about it when we brought the perp in. Let’s get going before you guys start crying.” Newly in the Six at the time, she remembered, and newly in love with Lieutenant, almost Captain, Hackett. Defino was right—a long time ago.
 
It had been a headliner in every paper, even the Times. Det. Micah Anthony was six-one, thirty, black, and a former amateur boxer who worked with poor kids on his days off. He left a wife so beautiful that she was photographed from all possible angles, her skin several shades lighter than her husband’s, and her belly big with their first child, a boy born three months after his father’s death.
 
Micah Anthony’s family was strict and religious, every child with a name from the Bible. His father worked as a janitor in an office building in Manhattan and his mother taught in day care. One child in the family had died of a gunshot wound years earlier, before the term “drive-by” had been coined. After the killing, Micah made up his young mind to be a cop.
 
The family lived in Harlem, in a ratty walk-up that they often talked about leaving but never did. Micah was the first to make the move. With a regular paycheck from the job, he found an apartment in the West Thirties, a walk-up like his family’s, but in better condition. While living there he met his future wife and married her. They worked for a few years before she became pregnant: she as a model, bringing in enough income that they had a deposit down on a house on Staten Island at the time of his death. A month after the funeral, she moved in, telling reporters it was what they wanted for their child.
 
After the baby was born, she stayed out of the news for a year, then took up causes for cops, for black cops, and for the kids her husband had coached. Even now, about ten years later, her face and her name appeared occasionally on the news or in a small piece in one of New York’s daily papers.
 
All this Jane knew without reading the file. Every cop in New York knew it. As an earlier generation could pinpoint exactly where they were when JFK was shot, cops of Jane’s vintage knew where they were when Micah Anthony was hit. He had been working undercover, investigating the movement of handguns into and within the city, infiltrating a group of “businessmen” who were buying and selling the weapons. He had phoned in his location at ten thirty that evening after a crucial meeting in a house in the West Fifties, about as far west as there were buildings, and said he was going home. A few minutes later he called his wife from the same phone to tell her the same thing. Their apartment was about a mile south of where he stood to make the calls, but he never got home that night. At two the next morning, two shots awoke residents of Waverly Place just west of Washington Square Park in Greenwich Village, a historic and arty area of downtown Manhattan. Three calls came in to 911 almost at the same moment reporting the shots, and radio cars from the Six screamed to the scene. Micah Anthony did not survive the night.
 
The bottom line was there was nothing: no DNA, no prints, no shells from the Colt .357 Magnum, no marks on the body, no car reported to have torn away from the curb. Anthony had no connection to the Village. His family lived in the middle of Harlem, seven or eight miles north of where he was shot, and they hadn’t seen him for a couple of weeks. His old friends hadn’t seen him; his wife had barely seen him and had worried daily about his safety.
 
Reluctantly, the detectives on the case speculated that he had a girlfriend in one of the brownstones on Waverly Place, someone he had visited after making his last two phone calls, although the medical examiner found no evidence of recent sexual activity. Perhaps the shooting was related to a lovers’ dispute, not his police work. A meticulous canvass of the neighborhood with attention to the young women who lived there turned up nothing, and his wife, Melodie, not really a suspect, was at home when the police came to her door. A record of calls from her telephone indicated she had made several to her husband’s lieutenant during the night, fearful for his safety when he failed to return home after calling her.
 
It was a case with one body, two bullets, and no leads. The three men Micah Anthony had spent a couple of hours with at the crib in the West Fifties were hauled in, questioned “continuously and roughly,” said their attorneys, and indicted for possession of guns found in the apartment but not for his murder. The evidence was not strong enough for a solid case, and two of them walked, disaster following disaster. From what Jane remembered, every human being who had touched Anthony’s life was questioned, down to his kindergarten teacher. What, she wondered, would be left for the three of them ten years later?