14
FROM THE OTHER SIDE of the door I could hear the muffled sound of a busy office, typewriters clacketing, phones ringing, voices shouting from one desk to another. Inside the small, battleship-gray room it was just me and Detective Griffin.
Detective Griffin was a pasty-faced, donut-shaped man with deep dark swaths beneath his eyes. He grunted as he paged through the Daily News, occasionally throwing out bits of gossip he seemed to take great delight in. “Hey, can you believe this stuff?” he would say before he’d read to me from the lurid middle pages of the tabloid. Then he would let out a great, noisy groan of weariness. I was in that small, stuffy room in the DA’s office to examine a stack of files and two large cardboard boxes of physical evidence, the whole of the basis for Slocum’s indictment in Commonwealth v. Moore and Concannon. The evidence had been signed out from Room 800 in the attic of City Hall by Detective Griffin, personally, and he was there to make sure I didn’t walk away with any of it.
“Hey, can you believe this stuff? Listen,” said Detective Griffin. “That guy Bobbitt, whose wife sliced off his peter, right, he’s stripping now in some gay strip joint. His new girlfriend, some Penthouse Pet, is ripping off his G-string with her teeth while the guys all cheer. He says he’s getting sensation back a millimeter a month. It’s like he’s proud it got wacked. Can you believe that guy?”
I could, yes.
The detective stretched his arms out wide and yawned. “Geez, I’m tired.”
This is what the evidence I was looking at showed. On the night of Bissonette’s final beating a young homeless man, only slightly psychotic, while digging in a dumpster for a late-night snack, had seen a black limousine pull up to the back of Bissonette’s. He didn’t see who got out of the car, but Michael Ruffing did. Ruffing and Bissonette were alone, closing the club, when, through a window, he saw the limo pull up and Concannon and Moore get out. This had all happened on Henry’s night off, and Henry’s alibi had checked out, so it was apparently Concannon who had been driving. Before the two could come in the club Ruffing left through the front door, hoping to avoid a confrontation. Inside there had been some sort of discussion, a few drinks had been poured, and then a fight broke out. Bissonette had gone behind the bar, supposedly to reach for a gun taped beneath the counter. His fingerprints were on it. One of the two visitors had grabbed a Mike Schmidt autographed bat from off the wall and knocked Bissonette down with it before Bissonette could grab the gun. He had proceeded to beat Bissonette with the bat all across his body, fracturing bones in both his arms, his fibula, his patella, his coxae, five ribs, and his skull, leaving a five-inch dent in the side of his head. The medical records were voluminous and ugly. Even through the technical jargon, the savagery of the beating was clear. When the paramedics found Bissonette he was covered with blood and vomit. They intubated him immediately and put him on a respirator the moment he arrived at the emergency room. He never regained consciousness.
A tough way to go for such a nice guy, I thought. Even if he couldn’t hit a slider.
The assailants had apparently not rushed to leave after the beating. The bat had been cleaned of fingerprints, the glasses from the drinks had been rinsed. Everything had been sanitized while Bissonette was undoubtedly moaning and breathing with difficulty through the blood and vomit. In my mind I saw Chester Concannon casually wiping the bar with a rag as Bissonette struggled to stay alive behind the bar, his breath rising and falling in a horrific slurp. That would be just like Chester, I thought, not wanting to leave a mess, such a polite young man.
The two men had left no fingerprints, not even on the doorknobs, all wiped clean, but one of them had stepped in the blood and vomit by accident and so the freshly mopped floor had revealed his stride from the bar to the back door. Forensics hadn’t been able to get a shoe size from the partial markings, but the stride was consistent with a man the height of Chester Concannon. A security guard in a nearby store had noticed a long black limousine pulling out from Bissonette’s about twenty-five minutes after Ruffing had reported Moore and Concannon arriving. It had been a brutal twenty-five minutes.
Along with the evidence of the murder were the same reams of financial documents that the feds had given Prescott and Prescott had given me, records supposedly showing the flow of money from Ruffing to Concannon to Moore to CUP, half a million dollars passed around like pastries. And then the flow abruptly stopping. This was motive evidence, to show why Moore and Concannon had deigned to beat Bissonette into his fatal coma, and the pattern was damning. There was money, then the money stopped, then there was the murder. Only about half the $500,000 supposedly delivered was accounted for in the documents, but that didn’t seem to matter much, really. Especially with those phone conversations between Moore and Ruffing, all on tape, all recorded in high fidelity, the most damning carefully transcribed by the DA’s office.
Moore: You listen, you shit. You talk to Concannon, right? I ain’t no hack from Hackensack, we had a deal. A deal. This isn’t just politics. We’re on a mission here, Mikey, and I won’t let you back down from your responsibilities. You catch what I’m telling you here? You catch it, Mikey?
Slocum thought he had caught it perfectly.
The boxes filled with the physical evidence were most interesting to me because they weren’t in the materials given me by Prescott. The Mike Schmidt autographed bat, an Adirondack Big Stick with the sharp red band just above the handle, was safe in a large plastic sack. I gripped it through the plastic, stood, and took a swing. Detective Griffin looked to be drowsing to sleep into his paper, as if he wasn’t watching me, but when I swung he ducked. It was a little heavy but perfectly balanced: a Hall of Fame bat.
“What’s a Mike Schmidt autographed bat worth these days?” I asked Detective Griffin. “Three, four hundred dollars?”
“Don’t even,” he said as he turned the page of his paper and yawned.
In the label, where Schmidt’s name was burned into the wood, there were still flecks of blood. The laboratory had confirmed that the blood was Bissonette’s. The rinsed glasses were also there, as well as the rag that had been used to clean the bar. It was stained the dull maroon of dried blood. Bissonette’s bloodied clothes, sliced to shreds when removed in the ER, were in one bag; his Gucci loafers, stained with blood and vomit, were in another. His wallet had $230 in ten dollar bills. His key ring was heavy with keys of all shapes. There were four empty crack vials found in his pocket.
So the second baseman was no boy scout after all. I immediately checked back with the medical records but found that there was no cocaine in his blood when he came into the hospital.
And then there were the photographs. The first looked like a pizza where the cheese and sauce had kind of slid off to the side. With a quiet shock I realized it wasn’t a pizza at all, it was Bissonette’s face after the beating. The rest weren’t any more pleasant.
I was starting to open the second box when Slocum came into the room. He swung a chair around and straddled it so that his powerful forearms rested on the chair back. “Don’t go racking your brain over who did it, Carl,” he said. “We already know and we got them nailed.”