Read Online Bad to the Bone by Stephen Solomita - Free Book Online Page A

straight uptown. The next stop was a Greek delicatessen in Astoria, Queens, because Betty insisted that Greek olives were more Italian than Italian olives. She’d also decided to surround the antipasto with stuffed grape leaves, but she kept that anomaly to herself.
    “What do the cops think?” Betty asked. “You said you spoke to them.”
    “The cops say no crime was committed. Every other question gets an ‘I don’t know.’ How did she get to the Bronx? Where did she spend the twenty-four hours before she was found? Where did she spend the last two years before she was found? How did she support herself? Who did she associate with? Same bullshit: ‘I don’t know.’ After the old lady started busting chops, they sent a detective over to Hanover House. He interviewed Davis Craddock who says Flo Alamare took her kid and walked out of the cult two years ago and hasn’t been heard from since.”
    Betty shook her head in disbelief. “Didn’t they check phone records? Credit cards?”
    “Not until after the lawyer got involved. His name is DeVilio, by the way. When the lawyer started screaming about lawsuits, the detectives put a trace on all the paper, including motor vehicle records and tax returns. Flo Alamare had a driver’s license with Hanover House as the address, but it was three years old and maybe she forgot to file a change. Other than that, nada .”
    “Then Connie Alamare was right. Flo must have been in the commune when this happened to her. If she was living on her own, she would’ve at least had to pay taxes.”
    “Unless she was living with another rich junkie. One who was rich enough to support her, too.”
    Moodrow inched the Mercury up to the toll booth on the Triborough Bridge. The toll was $2.50 each way, about five times as much as it took to keep the bridge in repair. The surplus, the profit, was used as a subsidy for the buses and subways. Somehow, the politicians, city and state, had decided that driving a car into Manhattan was an immoral act, like drinking alcohol, so immoral that any tax was justified. A year earlier, Moodrow would have flipped his badge and been allowed to pass without paying, one of a number of perks available to cops. Now he forked over the toll like everybody else.
    “The thing about the Hanoverians,” he began, once they were moving across the bridge, “is that they’ve always kept themselves away from what was happening on the street. That part of the Lower East Side was dope heaven when they started their commune. Heroin, cocaine, speed, acid, dust. Meanwhile, the Hanoverians went around looking like office workers. Even the kids were turned out. The antidrug thing was one of the fronts they put up to curious reporters. Here they lived in the middle of the drug war and they kept themselves straighter than straight. I’m gonna go out and talk to some of the people I used to know on the street, but I doubt very much if things have changed.”
    They came off the bridge at 31st Street in Queens. A quick left turn would take them directly to Mediterranean Foods, but the signs hanging from the el were clear. Moodrow would have made the turn anyway, if he was still a cop, counting on his badge to get him through, but now he feared the forty-dollar ticket like any other civilian.
    “What about the kid? What’s his name?”
    “Michael Alamare.” Moodrow pulled the car alongside a fire hydrant. The Greek store was just up the block, but Betty made no move to open the door. “Kids are another problem altogether. Kids don’t leave paper trails. No driver’s license, no credit cards.”
    “What about doctors? He must’ve been to see a doctor within the last couple of years. I mean that’s the whole thing, isn’t it? To place Flo or her son inside the commune within the last two years? That makes Davis Craddock into a liar.”
    “Making a false statement to a cop,” Moodrow continued, “is at least a misdemeanor. It’s a wedge we can use to find the