The Disappearance of Penny Read online

  “We’re betting on people here, not horses. Bet?”

  “Okay, you’ve got a bet.”

  “Did you follow me here?” I asked.

  “Nope.”

  Louie was almost to the six furlong pole, but one of the cops who had very long legs was catching up to him fast. The other three were strung out behind them.

  “Why’d you come here, then?”

  “I sat down and thought like a detective for once,” he told me.

  “Meaning?”

  “I asked myself, where would a jockey hide out?” He waved his arm in a wide arc and said, “What better place than a track that was no longer in use?”

  “Elementary,” I commented.

  “Exactly.”

  The cop caught Louie just shy of the pole.

  “Ten bucks,” Diver told me.

  “See why I don’t bet?” I asked him, paying off.

  The cop cuffed Louie and started walking him back. The other three cops stopped and turned to stagger back.

  New York’s finest.

  “Your finest look out of shape, “I told him. Then I looked at him and was about to comment on his shape when he said, “Don’t say it.” He turned and called to his partner, “Hey, Bobby.”

  “What?”

  “Want to make sure he knows his rights? I don’t know if any of those guys can read any better than they can run.”

  “Gotcha,” Stapleton answered, easing over the rail and walking out to meet them.

  “Besides,” Diver continued, “those guys are Nassau cops. We radioed ahead for them to meet us here.”

  “I see. What are you going to charge him with?” I asked.

  “Homicide, what else?” Jackson answered.

  I shook my head.

  “He didn’t kill Penny Hopkins,” I told them.

  Jackson took Melendez’s gun from my hand and said, “Well, we’ll run a check on this gun and see if it matches.”

  “Even if it does, he still didn’t kill her. He didn’t pull the trigger.”

  “Okay, hotshot,” Jackson asked, “who killed her?”

  “Yeah, Hank, who?” Diver added.

  I looked at them and, admittedly, I milked the moment for all it was worth.

  “Nobody.”

  “What the hell are you talking about?” Jackson demanded, angrily. “It’s his gun.”

  “He didn’t kill her, Jackson,” I insisted.

  Then I added, “He only buried her.”

  CHAPTER FORTY-NINE

  While Melendez was transported to wherever — I still don’t know if he was taken to Manhattan, Staten Island or Nassau — Jackson, Diver, Stapleton and I went back to Island Downs, pretty much under my leadership.

  Once we got there we split up, with Jackson going with me to find Benjamin Hopkins. We found him in his office.

  “Mr. Hopkins, we have some news for you,” Jackson told him as we entered his office. Jackson had specifically asked me to allow him to do the talking early.

  I had explained my theory to the three of them on the way, and I felt that when Melendez talked, he would substantiate that theory. In any case, the three of them bought it.

  “You’ve arrested him?” Hopkins asked hopefully.

  “Arrested who, sir?” Jackson asked.

  “Why, Lassiter, of course,” Hopkins answered. “It was pretty obvious all along that he killed her, I’m just surprised that you professionals took so long to realize it,” he added, with contempt.

  The door was still open and from outside came a voice saying, “You’re crazy Benny.”

  It was Lassiter.

  While Jackson and I had gone directly to Hopkins’ office, Diver and Stapleton went to get Lassiter. Now we had them both in the same room and the sparks were threatening to fly.

  You could feel the hatred hanging thick in the air.

  “I didn’t kill Penny, you old fool. I didn’t even care about her, why would I kill her?” he demanded.

  “You killed her, you bastard, just to keep her from coming back to me! Murderer!” Hopkins screamed.

  “Hold it, both of you!” Diver shouted angrily “Po, here, wants to explain something to you. If it was up to me, I’d just kick the shit out of both — ”

  “How dare you — ” Hopkins began.

  “Who do you think — ” Lassiter started.

  “Shut up!” Stapleton shouted as loud as he could, shocking Jackson as well as Hopkins and Lassiter.

  “Go ahead, Hank,” Diver told me.

  I addressed both men, father and possible lover, a point which was still unclear.

  “You’re both pretty pathetic excuses for human beings, you know that?” I asked, starting slowly — but that was okay. Pretty soon I was really going to get rolling.

  “All that girl wanted from either one of you bastards was a little love, but all she was to you was something else to fight over, to compete for. You never once thought about her feelings, her welfare. I’ve been saying this all along: you’re both sick!”

  “I told you — ” Hopkins tried to say, but I gave him no chance to talk. He didn’t deserve one.

  “I know what you told me!” I snapped. “You told me a big sob story about how your wife died in childbirth and you, big man, big-shot trainer, you blamed an infant girl for that, so you haven’t had any feelings for her since then.

  “Now, I know that Penny had some problems, emotionally and possibly even mentally. Perhaps it was a result of that guilt that you heaped on her. She may not have been retarded, not in the true sense of the word, but she was perpetually a little girl, naive, even gullible. Psychiatric help might have corrected that, but you didn’t care so you just let it go. She deluded herself that you both loved her and that it was her fault that you were enemies. She was just too … too simple to see it any other way. That didn’t help her mental state either.”

  I stepped closer to Hopkins and asked, “Did you even think about taking her to a doctor?”

  He just shook his head, slowly.

  “No, you figured, let it be part of her punishment.”

  Now I turned to Lassiter.

  “You, big lover, you went to bed with her, didn’t you? Kept her around because she was good in the sack?”

  He straightened up, looked at Hopkins, and said spitefully, “Yes, that’s right.” Then he decided to play at being magnanimous and added, “But let’s not get embarr — ”

  “Embarrassing?” I interrupted him. “You want to be embarrassed, big man?” I asked. “How about explaining how you could take anyone to bed when you’ve been impotent for the past two years?”

  He looked like I had just kicked him in the balls. It took some time for him to recover, and then he made some lame attempts at denying it.

  “Don’t bother,” I cut him off in the midst of his protestations, “we don’t even care about that, or the fact that you’ve taken to beating women to satisfy your need to feel like a man.”

  Again, he looked like I had hit him in the groin.

  “You treated her like one of your horses, never showed her any affection, but simple as she was she believed that you loved her, probably because you had told her as much, just to try to ‘win’ her from her father.”

  Now I addressed both men again.

  “You both pushed and pulled at her until finally you tore her apart. Do you know who killed that girl?” I asked them. “I’ll tell you who killed her.” I pointed to Lassiter and said, “You did, “and then, before either of them could comment, pointed to Hopkins and added, “And you did. You both killed her.”

  “That’s preposterous!” Hopkins snapped.

  “Ridiculous!” Lassiter added.

  I didn’t bother explaining to them about the movie, but this was where it came in. In the film, the young girl had been killed as the result of an accident, thereby bringing the two men in her life together, to share their grief.

  Well, gullible Penny figured, why not bring her two men together that way? If she we
re to die, she thought, they would have nothing to fight over, would be brought together by their mutual grief.

  So she went to Louie for help. As a member of a gun club, he could get her a gun, and with that gun —

  “She shot herself,” I told them.

  “What?” they exclaimed, almost in unison.

  “You heard me, you bastards. That girl killed herself hoping that with her dead the two of you would quit fighting and maybe even grieve together.”

  They remained silent for a few moments, and then Lassiter broke it.

  “She was crazy,” he said, and I stepped in and hit him harder than I can ever remember hitting anyone. He went over Hopkins’ desk backwards and nobody bothered to try and help him up.

  “Do you feel the same way?” I asked Hopkins. He stepped back, hands raised in front of him, but made no attempt to answer.

  My guess was this: Louis agreed to help Penny by getting her the gun, in return for which she would sleep with him at his apartment, hence the condom that was left on the bed. He knew he’d never have a chance otherwise, and though he loved her — or thought he loved her — he gave her his gun and went out to the meadow with her. Now maybe he was supposed to do it and couldn’t, or maybe he really didn’t realize what she was up to until she started to turn the gun on herself. There was probably a struggle as he tried to take the gun away from her, and it went off, or fell to the ground and went off. Either way, Penny’s goal was accomplished.

  At that point he panicked, realizing that she was dead, killed with his gun. He buried her, just the opposite of what she wanted. That was the reason he was so dirty when Ray the bartender saw him in the lounge. He had just come from burying her, was confused, even to the point of ordering a drink he badly needed, in Spanish. Once he drank the booze and looked around him he panicked again and ran from the lounge and right into hiding.

  He didn’t kill her, but he was still an accessory, and was still guilty of tampering.

  with the evidence. He would still have to go to trial, in the eyes of the law as guilty as if he had pulled that trigger.

  The real killers, on the other hand, the two bastards who drove Penny Hopkins to do what she did, drove her to what she thought was the only way to solve her problem, would get off free.

  Lassiter worked his way back to his feet, bleeding from the mouth. His jaw might have been broken, from the looks of it, but I didn’t really give a shit at that point.

  “You two are the real murderers,” I told them in disgust, “and the law can’t touch you. I hope you’re both very proud of yourselves today, because I’m going to see to it that the word is spread, I’m going to do what I can to see that, in some way, you pay for what you did to that girl. You have to pay, you can’t be allowed to get away with this.”

  “You are all witnesses,” Hopkins shouted at the three police officers. “This man is threatening me.”

  He was indignant! I couldn’t believe it. If Lassiter had been able to speak — and by this time I was pretty sure that his jaw was indeed broken — he might have expressed the same indignation.

  “Threat?” Diver said, turning to his colleagues. “Did you guys hear a threat?”

  “I didn’t hear anything,” Stapleton answered, looking at Jackson. “Did you?”

  Jackson was confused, but went along with it, shaking his head.

  “I think we had better get this one to the hospital,” Diver said, indicating Lassiter, who was staring at me murderously, unable to speak. He was supporting himself with both hands flat on Hopkins’ desk.

  “Sure, that was a nasty fall he just took,” Stapleton added. “He might have seriously hurt himself.”

  “He should be more careful,” Jackson added, getting into the swing of things.

  I walked out quickly, because at that point I was very eager to have Hopkins accompany them to the hospital — as a patient.

  I caught myself thinking of a chessboard as I walked away.

  Penny had thought of herself as the queen on their board.

  I was glad she had never discovered that she was just another pawn.

  CHAPTER FIFTY

  Two days later I was in Debby’s, working my way through my third beer when Diver walked in. It was just after midnight, so I guess he had just finished his tour of duty.

  He took a stool next to me and said, “You were supposed to stay in touch, remember?” He was kidding, because it was a phrase we had used very freely over the past week.

  “It’s all over,” I told him.

  “Almost.”

  Debby came over at that point and asked him, “Would you like something?”

  “Please, I’ll have a beer,” he told her. He watched her walk to the tap and pour it, then watched her walk back and place it in front of him.

  “Are you okay, Hank?” she asked, meaning my beer situation.

  “I’m good, Deb, thanks.”

  She walked to the other end of the bar, not to serve a customer, but so she wouldn’t overhear anything we had to say. She was not one to eavesdrop, intentionally or otherwise.

  “My God,” he said, admiring her, “I wish I was your age. She looks like an angel.”

  “She is,” I told him.

  He sipped the beer and commented, “Man, that’s good.”

  “You’re two behind me,” I informed him.

  “You still upset?” he asked me.

  “Only when I think about that girl putting a gun to her head and pulling the trigger, which is only when I’m awake. When I’m asleep I just dream about it.”

  “It’ll pass,” he told me, confidently.

  “Will it?”

  “You’ll make it pass, Hank. You’ll put it behind you and forget about it, because we’ve got to go on living, no matter what happens around us. For the most part, we forget the bad things, except on cold, rainy nights when we’re all alone,” he added, looking pointedly in Debby’s direction.

  “Nice lecture,” I complimented him, then relented a bit and added, “and you’re probably right. Thanks.”

  “Don’t mention it. Interested in the aftermath?” he asked.

  “As soon as I get another beer,” I told him. I got up, walked to the tap, leaned over and filled my mug myself. I was really starting to feel at home at Debby’s. She smiled at my self-service and I winked at her.

  I went back to my stool. “Okay, shoot.”

  “Melendez told us the story pretty much the way you did. He was supposed to pull the trigger and then discover her, but he couldn’t do it. He says she didn’t blame him, simply took the gun from him and did it herself. Then he panicked and buried her. Oh, by the way, he was the one who tried to run you down outside of Hopkins’ house.”

  “Louie?” I asked, surprised.

  “He wanted me to apologize to you for him. He says he was just trying to scare you, because he had heard you were looking for him. He thought you were trying to catch him for Penny’s murder.”

  “Did he follow me there?” I asked.

  “No, he said that he went to Penny’s house with intentions of breaking in and taking something of hers, I guess as a memento. When he came down the block he saw you getting out of your car. He recognized you because he had heard you were looking for him and had gotten your description, so that he could avoid you. After you went in, he parked his car and waited for you to come out. He was really concerned that you know that he didn’t mean to hurt you. You know, “he added, “he’s really harmless.”

  “I know.”

  “Imagine,” he said, “him trying to scare you.”

  “Imagine,” I said, “he succeeded.”

  “Yeah”

  He started to signal Debby for another beer when I told him, “I’ll get it.”

  I filled his as I had filled mine and handed it back to him.

  “That blonde has got the most beautiful face I ever saw,” he commented.

  “Hey,” I said, waving my hand in front on his face, “aftermath, remember?”
/>   “Yeah, sure. We did a print check on Brinks. Turns out his real name is Georgio Bronccieri, out of Chicago.”

  “DeLillo?”

  “That’s the word we got.”

  “You check with the Chicago RD?” I asked.

  “Yeah. They say Bronccieri handled most of DeLillo’s sports fixes for two years, then suddenly left Chicago at the beginning of the year. He resurfaced here. They figure and we agree that DeLillo sent him here to set up a new operation at Island Downs. Looks like you got there before we did with that assumption.”

  “What does Spencer say?”

  He shook his head. “That old man is a mass of nerves, right now. He says he got the word from Chicago that a ‘Gordon Brinks’ was going to be his new trainer. Needless to say, he always took the word from Chicago as law.”

  “How did he get hooked into working for DeLillo?” I asked.

  “Who knows. Even he can’t pin it down. One day DeLillo was just there.” I sipped my beer and swirled it in the glass.

  “Then Donero is clean?”

  “I’m not finished,” he scolded me. “We did a check on DeLillo, a thorough one. He was born in Italy to Leonardo DeLillo and his wife, the former Angelina Benedetti. That was nineteen nineteen. In nineteen twenty-two, Mr. DeLillo was killed in an accident.”

  “What kind of accident?”

  “He was machine-gunned by a rival family.”

  “I’ve heard that sort of thing was going around then.”

  “Anyway, Mrs. DeLillo and her two-year-old son, Angelo, came to America — ”

  “Climate in Italy get unhealthy, did it?” I asked.

  “Will you let me tell it?”

  “Sorry.”

  “Mrs. DeLillo came to America and met a man in nineteen twenty-five. They got married, and in twenty-seven she gave birth to another boy, and they named him William, after her second husband’s father.”

  “Wait a minute, wait a minute,” I told him, “I think I’m starting to catch your drift. Don’t tell me, let me guess. In twenty-five the former Mrs. DeLillo became Mrs. Donero.”

  “You got it.”

  “Hot damn! They’re brothers. Angie DeLillo and Willy Donero are brothers!”

  “Half brothers,” he corrected. “And Brinks/Bronccieri works for DeLillo.”