Murder in Greenwich Village Read Free Page A

Manhattan, never the same place twice. His paychecks went directly to a bank. He received city money that he signed for to do his work, flash money or buy money, depending on what he was doing at the moment. Before his last assignment, he had a great record of arrests. He was never present, you understand. That would have blown his cover.
    â€œHe was fantastic at his job. He could have gotten an Oscar for the parts he played. He gave us a steady flow of intelligence information no one else had been able to get. There were hundreds of guns involved in the last buy that never took place. When we raided the crib after his death, we found just the three guns, including a long-range rifle.”
    â€œThree,” Jane said.
    â€œRight. We traced them to weapons stolen from an armory. We never found the guns Micah was buying.”
    â€œMaybe they didn’t exist,” Defino said.
    â€œThey existed, all right. The number and type of each weapon Micah was told he could buy exactly coincided with the number of weapons of those types stolen from the armory. We just don’t know where the hell they were hidden.”
    â€œAnd you still don’t know ten years later?”
    â€œRight. They could have been in another apartment, loaded on a ship to Timbuktu, or buried somewhere. New York’s got a lot of parks and dumps. But not one of those stolen weapons has ever turned up, and we’ve made a lot of busts with guns in the last ten years.” He tasted his coffee, which was cold by now, and pushed it away. “That’s it, Detectives, the Micah Anthony story. We gave him an inspector’s funeral, a pension to his wife, and life went on. I still haven’t met another guy like him on the job.” He looked at his watch pointedly.
    They thanked him and left their cards, and he said they could call anytime they wanted to.
    â€œHow many guns were involved?” Jane asked as they were about to leave.
    â€œTwo hundred twenty-seven.” He said it as though the number had been engraved on his brain. Ten years later he didn’t have to look it up. The amount of money involved in a buy like that would be in the eighty-thousand range.
    Out on the street they turned toward Lexington Avenue.
    â€œI’d like to crack a case like this,” Defino said.
    â€œThat makes two of us.”

2
    JANE TOOK HER third of the file home with her. She had been walking or jogging to and from work in good weather for several months, but the weight of the file pointed her toward the subway. It was still necessary to walk at the other end, as she lived in the West Village, out of range of the subway. As she walked, she thought about whom she knew from her twenty years on the job who might have an insight into the Micah Anthony homicide, but she came up with no one. A man who worked as deep undercover as he did didn’t have pals he said hello to on the job, didn’t go for a beer with the guys after work, and didn’t tell tales out of school.
    She got home and listened to her messages. Her father had called and she called him back, telling him about the new case so he could experience it vicariously. He was retired and living in the Bronx in the same apartment she grew up in. His health had improved in the last few months, the heart medicines working, and he was getting around more, although she worried about him and his friend Madeleine using the subway, not to mention walking from his station to their building after dark.
    After dinner she sat with the file. Listening to Captain Bowman, she had felt a tingle of excitement replacing the initial disappointment of working on a case that no ordinary mortal could clear, and that her boss wanted cleared. The thought of recanvassing the area where Anthony was found after ten years left her cold. Even the next day’s interview with Anthony’s widow would probably be so routine, so full of practiced rehashed statements, that it would lead