Catch Your Death

Seventeen Years Ago

‘Shane,’ said the salt-and-pepper-haired homicide detective, leaning in across the rickety old table to crowd the teenager, ‘if you know anything about Jessica Toakase’s murder, now is the time to tell me.’

Eighteen-year-old Shane Reese rammed the heel of his hand into his red-rimmed left eye, as if he could grind away the situation he was in. He’d been in the interrogation room for an hour, still in his pajama pants, answering the same questions over and over again. The older detective would ask questions, while the younger one with the huge bushy mustache sat at a computer and typed what was being said.

Shane had been in his bed when his mom came into his room at eight fifteen, saying that police were at the house. Maybe if his dad had been home and not at the fire station he wouldn’t be here now. All he wanted to do was get out of police headquarters, away from these detectives, and find his friends. Were they talking to the police as well? For all he knew, they were already in the other rooms he’d passed as the detectives led him through the Homicide office.

He’d seen a lot of closed doors.

Shane swallowed hard before he answered. There was a lump in his throat that wouldn’t go away. ‘I don’t know anything else,’ he insisted. ‘How many times do I have to say it?’

The older detective lit a cigarette, even though there was a no smoking sign directly above his head. Other than that sign, the walls were bare, painted industrial gray. A window across from him was cracked half-open to a view of a red brick wall.

They’d sat him down at a long scratched-up table with metal legs and a plastic top made to look like wood. The only other furniture in the room were three chairs: the one he was occupying, the one the detective was perched on, acting as if he was ready to pounce, and the one the mustached detective sat on in front of the computer monitor and keyboard on the other end of the table. Mounted up in the corner of the ceiling, a video camera pointed right at him. He’d passed a handwritten notice taped to the wall on his way into the room stating that any and all conversations may be recorded.

The wall behind the detective was a big mirror. Shane assumed another detective was watching him through it. Every time he glanced at it, he had to look away quickly. He wasn’t handcuffed, but between his image in the glass and the camera he felt trapped.

Salt-and-Pepper exhaled a cloud of smoke that seemed to hang in the air in the closed room. Shane stifled a cough. The detective offered the pack to Shane, who shook his head. Ashing the cigarette in an empty Pepsi can on the desk, he told the teen in his gravelly voice, ‘This is some serious shit, kid. Maybe the most serious shit you’re ever gonna have to deal with. Jessica was murdered. And then dumped in the river like garbage. In my twenty-three years on the job this is one of the worst scenes I’ve ever had to work.’ He slapped a hand to his chest. ‘Because I have a sixteen-year-old daughter. And to see that little girl, just graduated from high school with her whole life ahead of her snuffed out, well, that makes this personal for me. And if you have to tell me about yesterday a hundred times, then you’re gonna tell it a hundred times. So spare me your righteous indignation and tell me again, when was the last time you saw Jessica Toakase?’

On the desk, next to the Pepsi can, Shane could see a manila folder marked ‘Crime Scene Photos’. A picture stuck out from the corner. Shane could just make out a foot lying on what looked like a blue plastic tarp on the ground. The skin was white and mottled with splotches. Bile rose up in his throat. The detective noticed Shane looking at the photo and quickly stuffed it back inside, out of sight. A shudder ran through Shane as he tried not to throw up, making him crumple forward a little in his hard plastic and metal chair. ‘I last saw her at around six thirty at Memorial Park. I had a baseball game earlier at the diamonds there and I was hanging around, waiting for my girlfriend’s shift to end. They worked the concession stand together.’

‘But you never saw Jessica after you left with your girlfriend last night, correct?’

Shane kept his eyes down. ‘We didn’t leave together. I walked her to her car, held the door open for her, then kissed her on the cheek and watched her pull out of the parking lot. Then I hopped in my car and went home.’

The detective’s crisp white shirt was unbuttoned at the neck. Thick gray hair curled up from the opening, almost to his Adam’s apple. Shane watched it bob up and down as he spoke, feeling like every time he looked the detective in the eye, the man was dissecting him. ‘I’ll repeat the question. Did you see Jessica after she stormed off by herself at six thirty last night?’

All the air seemed to disappear from Shane’s lungs. ‘No.’

‘Because you got in a heated argument with her, right?’

‘It wasn’t like that. She was my friend,’ Shane insisted, raising his voice a little. ‘I didn’t kill Jessica.’

The detective exhaled another cloud of gray smoke. ‘So where were you exactly when Jessica Toakase disappeared?’

Outside the window that faced the brick wall a small green leaf flitted by.

The younger detective with the big mustache made a notation on the statement form that Shane Reese looked away and hesitated before he answered.

ONE

Now

There was an old saying in the Cold Case Homicide office: never be the person to answer the phone first thing on a Monday morning.

Buffalo Police Detective Lauren Riley had forgotten what day it was when she snatched up the receiver on her desk. She and her partner, Shane Reese, had come in for overtime the day before and it had thrown off her internal calendar. When the caller started talking without even saying hello, she knew she should have let it go to voicemail.

‘My ex-old lady set up a guy for a mob hit. It happened in 1988 or 89, I think.’ The voice on the phone sounded agitated and put out, as if Lauren had called him about an offer for an extended warranty for his vehicle, rather than him calling the Cold Case office to give them information on a homicide. ‘They found him duct taped to a tree behind Baro’s Pawn Shop off Military Road in Riverside.’

‘I know the case,’ Lauren replied, pen hovering over the yellow legal pad on the desk in front of her. ‘Julian Fatta.’ She bit back the urge to correct the man on calling someone his ‘old lady.’ It had always been one of those phrases that pissed her off. And while this man sounded much older than her forty-one years, she doubted he ever called his significant others anything else. The restraint in her tone of voice made her partner look up from the iPad he was working on across from her.

Reese cocked an eyebrow at her as the caller went on. ‘Do you know she got fifty thousand dollars to keep him at his shop after closing time until one of the Magory brothers showed up? She was there when Salvatore Magory beat him to death, then took him out back behind the shop and taped him to a tree with his hands over his head. That was a warning to anyone else who might want to skim a little off the top of their money-laundering scheme.’

The Magory family had been high up in the Buffalo mob food chain from the Fifties all the way to the late Nineties. Then the patriarch, Paul, decided he wanted to go legit and move to Florida. He’d realized that their rackets had been declining for years and they could make good money from their legitimate businesses without the risk of going to jail or getting wacked. There was an entire file cabinet dedicated to mob-related cold cases in the office.

‘Can you elaborate on who she is?’ Lauren was familiar with the file. She was familiar with almost all of the mob-related cases. None had been cleared with an arrest since she’d been in the Cold Case Unit, even though every single case she had looked at had a suspect named. She tapped the end of the pen against her lips. Knowing who did it and proving it were two very different things.

‘Shirley Gizzo.’ The older man made a HRUMPH noise on the other end of the line. ‘That bitch went out for a steak dinner afterward. She was together with Julian for five years and didn’t bat a false eyelash while he was getting beaten to death in the backroom of the pawn shop. She’s a real piece of work.’

The niece of a made man, Shirley Gizzo was an infamous mob hanger-on. Lauren refused to use the word ‘moll’ to describe her. She believed that glamorized what Shirley really was, an opportunistic gold digger who seemed to always be in the background of the mob cases that came in during the Eighties. Her name had popped up in a couple of the files. Lauren was actually a little surprised to hear that Shirley Gizzo was still alive. Even with her tenuous connection to the mob through family, her lifestyle choices hadn’t been conducive to longevity. But, Lauren thought, a woman like Shirley is a survivor. Fatta got whacked and she moved on to the next guy who could give her status. It was Shirley’s MO.

‘Can I get your name, sir?’ Lauren asked, her icy blue eyes traveling to Reese’s face. He was pitched forward, hanging on her every word.

‘I’m the asshole who paid for her boob job. I just gave you what you need to know. Now go do your job.’ The caller hung up.

Reese leaned back in his creaky chair and put his feet up on the desk. The Cold Case Unit was an office within an office, a room along the long hallway that made up the homicide squad, with each crew having their own separate space. Their crew was made up of Reese and Riley, Major and Avilla. However, Reggie Major was using up his vacation time in anticipation of retiring in a month, and Hector Avilla had come in early to chase down a lead in an old liquor store robbery gone bad, leaving Reese and Riley in charge of returning all the phone messages that had come in over the weekend. Lauren had returned exactly one before being interrupted by the disgruntled caller. It was 8:11 in the morning.

‘Who’s slipping us tips on the Julian Fatta case?’

‘He wouldn’t leave his name.’ She scribbled her notes as fast as she could before she forgot anything. ‘He said Salvatore Magory beat Fatta to death.’

‘I think I got the gist from your end of the conversation,’ Reese said. Old-fashioned landlines made it harder to hear both sides of a conversation than cell phones. It seemed every time Lauren stood in a checkout line at a store, the person behind her had to have an in-depth conversation with their best friend on a ridiculous number of personal tragedies. And always, both sides of the conversation rang out loud and clear.

‘That’s been the word on the street since it happened.’ The skepticism in Reese’s voice was evident. ‘Even the paper at the time named him as a suspect.’ Lauren knew he didn’t put much faith in mob tips. Not one had panned out since he’d been up in Cold Case. He was convinced the callers were mostly armchair detectives regurgitating what they read in online forums. Lauren had to remind him from time to time that if you shake every single tree, eventually a coconut is going to fall out.

‘They didn’t say Shirley Gizzo was an eyewitness though.’

Reese let out a low whistle and dropped his feet back on the floor. ‘No, they did not. She was at the bar in the Cranston case when Pauly Gates was gunned down outside and was the alibi for Jimmy the Pig in the Barberi homicide. If memory serves, Shirley wasn’t even mentioned in that file.’ When Reese had first come up to Cold Case, their captain at the time had made him go through all the mob-related files and make copies for the feds who were trying to put together a RICO case against a couple of key players. The case fell apart, but not before Reese had become intimately familiar with every mob hit in the past fifty years.

He got up and crossed the room to a huge olive-green cabinet. Twisting the handle, he threw the doors open, revealing box after box labeled in green writing, Reese’s own personal filing system designed to denote organized crime cases. ‘Fatta, Fatta, Fatta,’ he mumbled, his finger dragging down from one box to the next. Lauren knew they had exactly fifteen unsolved mob cases going back to 1975. The older ones were archived.

‘Here it is.’ Reese turned back, waving a thick manila file at her. It wasn’t the original. Reese had all the originals stored away in the file room under lock and key and video surveillance. It was one of the copies he’d made for the RICO case. He took it over to the mess table and started to pull pieces of paper out, one by one, arranging them in separate piles, all the while muttering under his breath.

Lauren watched him work furiously for a moment, then walked over. Reese was a ball of nervous energy when nothing was going on; throw a hot lead at him and he exploded into action.

‘Here’s the medical examiner’s report,’ he said, angling it up in the left-hand corner. ‘Statement, statement, evidence report, neighborhood canvas, statement.’ He quickly and methodically sorted every piece of paperwork, talking his way through the process.

The mess table was simply a plastic and metal folding table, the kind used for basement church party planners to set crockpots on or to display your treasures in your driveway during a garage sale. Some long-retired detective had brought it in before Lauren had transferred to Cold Case and Reese had made sure it survived the move from the old headquarters building. Hector and Reggie didn’t use it as much as Reese and Riley, but every cop had their own way of doing things.

Reese examined a statement, let it drop back on its pile, then picked up another report. ‘Nothing,’ he said, putting that one down and grabbing another. ‘No mention of the infamous Shirley Gizzo anywhere.’

‘Fatta was married. It is possible she was having an affair with him at the time.’ Lauren had a passing knowledge of most of the mob cases, but she’d actually read the Fatta file a couple of years back at Reese’s urging. Reese had resubmitted all the evidence for further DNA testing and had gotten some interesting results. After months of combing over the original file, the new evidence and reinterviewing witnesses, nothing had panned out. When the higher-ups in the Bureau decided against trying to put together a RICO case, they handed all of their findings back to Reese, and he found that he didn’t have enough evidence to make an arrest in any of the individual cases either. The mob knew how to cover their tracks. The Fatta case got added to the file cabinet, where it sat getting colder by the year.

‘Shirley Gizzo wasn’t opposed to dating married men,’ Reese replied. ‘And she wasn’t opposed to doing favors for them either. She could have been dating one of the Magory brothers at the time as well. Either way, it’s not out of the realm of possibility she was involved somehow.’

‘The big question is, will she talk to us?’ Lauren asked, absently running her fingers through her short, choppy hair. ‘How loyal is she after all these years?’

‘Loyal enough to still be alive.’ He dropped the crime scene photos on his desk. ‘Still, we should take a shot at talking to her.’

Lauren took a sip of cold black coffee from her hot pink mug that said, ‘Greetings from Fabulous Las Vegas’. She’d have Reese stop for a refill at Tim Horton’s on the way. ‘Let’s go then. No time like the present.’

Walking back over to his desk, he straightened a picture of his almost five-month-old son and snatched up his keys. ‘You always said all it takes to break a cold case is one thing. Let’s see if this is that one thing.’

TWO

Shirley Gizzo had an address in Kenmore, New York, just north of the city line. ‘One square mile of heaven,’ its residents liked to joke. Lauren drove the unmarked car up Delaware Avenue, out of the city, while Reese rode shotgun.

‘It looks like she lives in that big brick apartment building across from Teagan’s Dry Cleaning,’ Reese said, staring at Google Maps on his phone.

‘That’s a nice building,’ Lauren commented as they passed strip after strip of stores and businesses.

‘Nice enough,’ he said, putting his phone back into his jacket. ‘But it’s November. And freaking cold out. Most of her contemporaries are living or snowbirding in Florida. Something’s keeping her here.’

‘She doesn’t have any kids,’ Lauren said, stopping at a red light. ‘Maybe she’s short of cash. Maybe a guy.’

‘Maybe both. Up there, on the left.’ Reese pointed to a huge stately brick apartment building that took up the entire corner. Lauren spied a man pulling out of a parking spot half a block down. It wouldn’t be a long walk, but the wind had kicked up and she’d left her hat at home. The first flakes of winter hadn’t landed yet, but you could feel them coming. The sky was a steel, overcast gray and the wind was whipping in from over the lake, ripping down the streets and through the trees, carrying dead leaves and the occasional white plastic bag along with it.

Lauren was glad Reese bit his tongue while she parallel parked. He knew it was distracting to mock her while she performed that maneuver. He’d wait until after they left to critique her on it. She also knew he didn’t want her to punch him in the shoulder. It was one of the last uninjured parts of his anatomy.

Pulling the collar up on her jacket to shield her ears as much as possible, she put the car in park and exited the unmarked vehicle. When she’d started the job almost twenty years ago, she could jump fences in snowdrifted backyards without a hat and just her thin leather gloves. No thermal gear, just the heavy black boots provided by the city. Now that she was over forty, she found herself in a state of perpetual cold, even in the summer. Her best friend, Dayla, assured her that would all come to an end once the hot flashes started. She didn’t know if she should look forward to that or dread it.

‘Says on the printout she lives in Apartment Twelve,’ Reese said, leaning forward into the wind, holding onto his Buffalo Police ball cap with his left hand so it didn’t fly off his head.

Lauren had been to these apartments a couple of times before, when she was in the Sex Offense squad. She’d had a victim on the third floor and had been to her apartment to talk to her a couple of times. She remembered it as clean and comfortable, but not particularly homey. It was the type of apartment you rented in-between life events: saving to buy your first house, waiting for your divorce to finalize, your first apartment after college with friends. The apartments on the first floor had their entrances on the outside of the building. Lauren and Reese crossed from the public sidewalk to the walkway that encircled the perimeter, checking the numbers on the doors as they walked around the square of the building.

Number 12 ended up on the backside, facing the tenant parking lot. They bladed themselves on either side of the painted green door and Reese knocked three times with the butt of his hand-held radio.

Immediately they were assaulted with the barking of what sounded like a very small dog with a big sense of self. The noise covered over any sound of footsteps approaching the door, so when it cracked open just wide enough for the occupant to peek out, Lauren took a step back. The door closed again, the dog stopped barking and then came the unmistakable sound of a chain lock being slid open.

Shirley Gizzo stood in her doorway holding a cigarette in her right hand and a growling Chihuahua in the crook of her left arm. She blew a cloud of smoke at their faces. ‘Can I help you, detectives?’ she asked in a raspy voice that betrayed her age more than her Botoxed forehead did.

She was in her seventies, the kind of woman Lauren’s dad would have called ‘well put together’, with perfectly done white-blond hair, thick makeup that showed off every crow’s foot around her eyes, and long red manicured nails. Spray-tanned to a brownish orange complexion, Shirley Gizzo was wearing more gold jewelry with her red tracksuit at eleven in the morning on a Monday than Lauren owned.

‘Shirley Gizzo?’ Reese stepped front and center. He usually did better with women like Shirley so they’d agreed in the car that he should take the lead. Shirley’s appraising glance slowly ran Reese up and down but her slight frown signaled that his usual charm wasn’t going to be enough.

‘What can I help you with?’ She didn’t confirm or deny who she was. Lauren thought, This woman doesn’t just know her way around the block, she’s got a map of it tattooed on the back of her hand.

‘We’re detectives with the Buffalo Police Department,’ Reese forged ahead. ‘Can we come in and speak with you?’

She flicked the ash of her cigarette toward them and her little brown dog let out a menacing snarl. ‘No.’

There was no follow-up, no excuse or explanation.

‘Aren’t you even curious about why we’re here?’ Lauren asked.

She shrugged her shoulders and took a long drag off of her smoke. ‘Not particularly.’

‘It’s about an old homicide, ma’am,’ Reese said. ‘Julian Fatta.’

‘It’s got nothing to do with me. And I’ve got an appointment to get my eyebrows waxed at noon, so I’ve got to go.’ She started to close the door, then paused, looking at Lauren. ‘I should give you my waxer’s number. She could get you in right away as an emergency case.’

Lauren willed her hand to stay by her side instead of flying up to touch her unruly brows. ‘Come on, Shirley. Don’t you want to get ahead of this thing?’ she asked.

‘A little piece of advice to you, dear,’ her smoker’s voice rasped, ‘besides go to a salon and get yourself a makeover as soon as humanly possible. The things you’re asking about? They’re ancient history. Do you remember back when they found King Tut’s tomb? The head archaeologist was told it was cursed, but he opened it anyway. Within weeks he was dead. Sometimes when you meddle with things, they come back and meddle with you. Is it worth dredging up the past if all it does is stir up more trouble?’

‘Is that a threat?’ Reese asked, stepping slightly in front of Lauren. ‘Or is someone threatening you?’

‘Neither.’ She flicked the butt out onto the sidewalk, where the ember still glowed a cherry red until Reese stepped on it. ‘Just a friendly observation from someone who’s seen a thing or two. Bad shit happens when you don’t let things go. You can’t change the past. Sometimes it’s better to just move on.’

‘We can’t just move on,’ Lauren said. ‘It’s our job to find out the truth.’

‘Well, that’s a good way to catch your death, honey,’ Shirley said. ‘Go find someone else to harass.’

With that, she shut the door