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.”
“Hey, Larry, can you believe this stuff?” said Detective Griffin. “Listen. These idiots were screwing on a subway track in New York and like, what do you expect, but the train runs over them. Now their lawyer’s suing the Transit Authority. Can you believe that? Lawyers are such pigs.”
“How you doing, Doug?” Slocum asked the detective. “You look beat.”
“I’m fresh off last out,” said Griffin. “All night at a crime scene. Nothing new. The perp’s wife was squawking at him about his drug use, so he shoots her, takes her upstairs, and shoots her again just to be sure. Sells the gun for a hundred bucks, buys more crack, and sets himself up downstairs, smoking, watching TV, eating takeout Chinese while the wife is up there bleeding. Took her three days to die.”
“Jesus,” I said. “That’s brutal.”
Detective Griffin stood, hiked up his pants, and groaned. “Shit like that happens every day. Look, I got to take a dump.”
“I’ll watch him,” said Slocum.
“What about those crack vials they found on Bissonette?” I asked after Griffin had left.
“Ruffing says they found them every night in the bathrooms.”
“At a high-class joint like Bissonette’s?”
“The drug doesn’t care how much money you got,” he said. “But Bissonette wasn’t using or selling. His blood was clean and the vials were empty, but had traces of the drug in them. Sellers don’t keep the vials, they go with the drug.”
“What’s this second box?” I asked.
“Stuff from Bissonette’s apartment. Check it out, you’ll love it.”
I opened the box and suddenly understood why Bissonette was such a favorite of the fans. At least some of the fans. What I pulled out of that box was enough to make Hugh Hefner blush. There were all manner of sex toys, appropriately bagged and numbered. There were shackles and ropes and dildos of varied lengths and widths and surfaces, there were vibrators, there were belts of leather and underpants of leather, there were strange harnesses, there were sadistic metal instruments that looked like something out of an alien dentist’s office. Not bagged were the videos and sex magazines and photographs from a Polaroid camera.
“Our Mr. Bissonette got around,” I said.
“Anyone you recognize?” asked Slocum.
“Not likely,” I said, though I did review the photographs one by one. They were blurred and the shots were off center; the camera had been set above and behind the bed and obviously operated by remote control. They were all of a well-built man, ponytailed, with the familiar ballplayer’s face, having sex with women, sometimes just one, sometimes more than one. In many the heads of the women were obscured, showing only long legs, thin arms, bustiers, a tangle of swollen body parts. And in some there were other men.
“Didn’t know he was a switch hitter, did you,” said Slocum.
“It wasn’t on his baseball card,” I said, still looking through the photographs. One caught my eye, a long pale woman with dark hair stretching her body across his, her back arched, her thin butt riding high as Bissonette worked from below. She was reaching back with her arm and squeezing his balls. There was something familiar, tasty about the woman.
“Maybe it was a jealous husband who did him in,” I suggested.
“Give it up, Carl,” said Slocum. “No jealous husband here. The murderer was too careful for a crime of passion. Besides, we have the IDs.”
Quickly I shuffled the photos so it wouldn’t look like I was concentrating too long on any one. In my shuffling I brought back the picture of the long pale woman. This time I saw it clearly, what I had missed before. I shuffled the pictures again and put them back.
“If you take away Ruffing’s testimony,” I said, “all you got is a black limousine and some guy about Concannon’s height.”
“And if you take away the Atlantic we could walk to London. We have motive, we have opportunity, we have eyewitness identifications, we have two convictions here.”
“What’s this?” I said as I pulled out the final object in the carton, a wooden box the size of a head, painted black with Chinese designs inlaid with mother-of-pearl.
“That’s his love chest,” said Slocum. “Open with care.”
Slowly I lifted the lid.
“Jesus,” I said. “He might not have been a boy scout, but he was sure as hell prepared.”
Inside the box were hundreds of loose condoms in different colors and shapes, lubricated, unlubricated, some of genuine goatskin. The little packets glistened in their foil wrappers and looking at them was a little like looking at a display window of a candy store. Beneath the layers of condoms were stacks of casino chips, heavy, in black and gold colors. There were hundred-dollar chips from Bally’s and Trump Plaza and Resorts, over a thousand dollars’ worth, and a series of heavy gold and green chips without a casino’s name printed on them, just the head of a wild boar embossed in gold. There was a small pot of ointment that smelled of sweet and spice, like liniment, with pictures of tigers on the outside. And there were little pipes with screens and a glass tube and, most interesting of all, a goldenrod colored paper slip with the words “Property Receipt” on top and a date stamp. It was signed by our Detective Griffin and indicated that the lab had been given one glassine bag of a chunky, off-white substance.