Chelsea Avenue Read online

  As Officer Rick Carlson, Wainwright’s partner for three years, pointed his gun at him, Wainwright shot him right between the eyes from fifteen feet.

  “Any idea what used to be there?” Manny asked. Mark was driving south through Sea Bright with his lights and sirens on.

  “I think a seedy strip club, right?”

  “Yeah, connected to Murphy’s Law.”

  “Never heard of it. I do remember there being a strip club, but I was too young to go in.”

  “Murphy’s Law was a club like the Stone Pony with live bands and the locals hanging out and all of that shit. I grew up there,” Manny said.

  “You went there a lot?”

  “Actually, my family owned the place. I, physically, grew up in that building.” Manny envisioned the yellowed marquee, proudly displaying some local band that only a few had ever heard of, acting like Bon Jovi was going to be jamming on the tiny stage. “Quite a few locals worked there as well.”

  “I remember the fire that took out the boardwalk and the Haunted Mansion, but I don’t remember there being a club here,” Mark said.

  Manny nodded. “The fire on the pier got all of the media coverage, and it was a huge tragedy. The fire claimed so much that they were never able to reopen most of it, and it was the deathblow to Long Branch if you ask me. Murphy’s Law and the strip club—it was called TNT by the way—went up that night as well, but we were a few blocks away.”

  Mark took a quick glance at Manny as he drove. “It wasn’t part of the same fire, right?”

  Manny shrugged. “It doesn’t look like it, and the fire didn’t hit any point between here and there.”

  “That’s like three city blocks away. No way the fires were related,” Mark said.

  “But the fire started at the same time and engulfed the buildings here as well. Even though we lost lives in the club that night, the shots of the pier going up and the Haunted Mansion were run on the news shows.”

  “How many people died?”

  “Almost a hundred died in the club due to the smoke and fire, and two more were burned and died at the hospital. If it wasn’t for someone kicking in the side door to the club, more would have been killed. I lost my entire family in there. The club and strip club were totaled. Not a wall remained. I still own the property for what it’s worth.”

  “Doesn’t the city fine you or something for the litter?”

  “Nah, they know what happened here. They also know that I’m out here as often as possible to monitor it. Before the killings, I used to clean it up, but the weeds are too high, and some spots of the ground have such deep pits of water, you can fall in to your chest. That’s pretty dangerous this close to the beach, I would imagine.”

  “All of these murders are unbelievable. How many are we talking about since the fire?”

  “Around thirty if my list is right,” Manny said.

  “Shit.”

  “Yeah, shit. All killed on this lot.”

  “How do you know they are all related in some way? Long Branch, while not Newark or NYC, is still a tough neighborhood. I’m sure we get plenty of murders and accidents here.”

  “We do, we do. But I know for a fact that these murders are all related. I just need to find out why.”

  “How do you know?”

  “Do your homework on this one. Every one of the victims was killed on July 8th, the anniversary of the Long Branch fire. Today is the twelfth anniversary. And unless we get there quick, another three will be added to that list.”

  All Manny wanted was another drink. He could smell and feel the alcohol sweating out of him as he sat uncomfortably in Vic Tankard’s patrol car, admiring the chaos and clutter of his former boss’ mess.

  “What will it take to get you back on the force?” Tankard asked him, rummaging through the files on his front seat. “Besides black coffee of course.”

  “I was thinking another beer and sleep right now,” Manny said.

  “It looks like you’ve had two beers too many tonight, birthday or not.” Tankard found what he was looking for and handed it to Manny. “These are the reports from every murder or incident dating back to the fire, all on that date. A couple of them I’m confused about though. In 1996, a woman—”

  “Theresa Barrett,” Manny cut him off.

  Tankard smiled. “Yes, her. She wasn’t at that show.”

  “But her mother was: June Barrett. She died of cancer in 1992. In Pennsylvania.”

  “And?”

  Manny sat up, wiping his face with his hands. “It couldn’t get the mother, so it got the daughter.”

  “It?”

  “Come on. Let’s not waste more time playing stupid with this. You know as well as I do something fucking weird is going on at that lot. This isn’t a mere psycho killer killing people on that day. Look at tonight. No fucking way Carlson suddenly goes batty and decides to kill two fellow cops, ignoring the one cop there that had nothing to do with Chelsea Avenue.”

  “What do we do?”

  “We? Nothing.” Manny opened the car door. “I’ve decided to drown myself in alcohol every birthday from now until I die.”

  “You can’t do that, and you know it,” Tankard said. “We need to solve this. We got a year now to figure this out.”

  ”You have a year.” Manny stood and walked away, ignoring the flashing lights, the body bags, and the uniformed officers.

  “That’s it? That’s all you got? Giving up on this now too?” Tankard barked.

  Manny turned. “Whether you thought about this or not, one of these July 8th days, my death will be part of that file.”

  Chapter 14

  July 8th 2000

  Brian Black was anything but a stereotypical gay man. For one, he worked in construction as a foreman. Sure, some of the guys ribbed him about the Village People construction worker, but it was all in fun. He’d been out of the closet before being out of the closet was in fashion, never denying who he was.

  He listened to Metallica and Guns N’ Roses, not show tunes and Liza Minnelli. He dressed like every other guy: no flamboyant scarves or pinks. He didn’t get fruity ‘girly’ drinks at the bar, preferring his Jack and Coke and a good cigar.

  Brian was also active in a semi-pro football team in Ocean County as well as riding his Harley on the weekends.

  Sometimes, his workers’ wives would set him up on blind dates with guys they worked with or knew, and it was usually a disaster. But he kept meeting new people, like tonight, kind of.

  Stood up. Shit. He sat at the bar at Ichabod’s and ordered another Jack and Coke, knowing if he didn’t eat soon, he’d be a stereotypical falling down drunk. He also had football practice in the morning. He decided that one more drink and then a stop at the nearest fast food drive-thru would suffice for a good night out.

  “Brian?” a feminine voice asked behind him. He didn’t want to turn, knowing that a stereotypical gay man with flamboyant scarves and a girly drink was here. Late. How many times do I have to say that I prefer my men like men? Just because you’re gay doesn’t mean you’ll be attracted to anything else that is gay.

  Brian turned and was surprised to see two women standing there with girly drinks in their hands. They looked familiar.

  “It is him,” the first one said. She was attractive, with horn-rimmed glasses and curly brown hair. Her friend was pretty as well, with a great smile and killer eyes.

  “It is me,” he finally said when they just stared at him. He looked at the one who had talked. “How have you been?” he finally said.

  “You have no idea who I am, do you?”

  The bartender put his drink down on the bar, and Brian half-turned and picked it up. “No clue,” he said with a laugh.

  “Didn’t think so. I’m Nancy Harnett, and this is Jennifer Jacoby. Ring a bell?”

  “High school?”

  Jennifer laughed. “Junior high. We all went to Bay Shore together.”

  “That’s no fair. There’s a statute of limitations on stuff
like this. It’s amazing that you remember me.”

  “You look exactly the same,” Nancy said. “Still tall, still handsome.”

  Brian blushed. “Thank you. Luckily, we grew up since then.”

  “We were going to sit down and eat when we noticed you. Are you here by yourself?” Jennifer asked.

  “It didn’t start out that way.” Brian told them about being stood up, and they both comforted him, asking him to join them.

  “Is this out of pity?” he asked with a smile.

  “Of course,” Jennifer said.

  “Then I accept because of your honesty and because I am starving.”

  An hour later, the three former junior high classmates were emptying their second pitcher of Budweiser and sharing a table filled with food when they grew quiet.

  “Do you hear that?” Nancy asked. “I think I need to leave.”

  “Yeah, it’s getting late.” Brian took out his credit card and waved over the waitress, handing her the card. “It’s on me.”

  “You can’t do that,” Jennifer said distractedly. She was already rising and looking at the door. She needed to leave and leave right now.

  When the waitress came back with Brian’s credit card, they were already gone.

  The Brighton Bar was packed with the local band Talk Is Cheap playing their eclectic brand of Jane’s Addiction meets Nine Inch Nails meets Living Colour. Another good Saturday night.

  Reluctantly, Jacko had to turn people away at the door. “Fire code,” he growled in his raspy voice, dancing from foot to foot, excitedly. Tonight was going to be a great haul for the tiny club. He’d been booking larger acts the past few weeks with mixed results. Nirvana and Pearl Jam, two up and coming bands from the West Coast, had played on the same weekend in May, but the crowds had been sparse. Jacko loved booking bands that he liked, but the college crowd didn’t seem to agree.

  The money still came from local bands playing in front of their buddies, drinking and partying like they were onstage at Madison Square Garden. It didn’t matter whether they were good or bad—and tonight’s band was by far a top band locally—the locals drew bigger crowds.

  Jacko thought back to having Smashing Pumpkins and Urge Overkill playing right before they both took off and drawing about a hundred total for both bands. Of course, thousands of locals now claimed they were at these shows; same with U2 playing the Fastlane in Asbury Park as one of their first U.S. shows ever. Dozens paid to see them, and thousands bragged they saw them. Same old story.

  “Got any water?” lead singer Kenny Andrew asked Jacko. The small corner stage in the Brighton was brutal because of the low ceiling and the bank of lights nearly at eye level. You could literally sweat off ten pounds during a set.

  Jacko waved at the bartender and flashed three fingers, which was his unique code that the band needed water. It was easier than fighting through the crowd. One finger meant to dim the house lights, two fingers meant turn the house lights up, and four fingers meant he was in need of a stiff drink. In all the years Jacko had been booking, those four signs were by far the most important.

  Terry Joslin, bassist for Talk Is Cheap, came through the front door, still in his work clothes from A&P, and grinned at Jacko. “I need a beer and some pussy.”

  “You’ll get water, and your pussy drummer is in the back,” Jacko remarked.

  “Fair enough.”

  Jacko had probably booked Talk Is Cheap over fifty times in the last ten years. The three-piece group had been playing in bands together on and off for nearly fifteen. Despite their ages—drummer Pete Costa was the “baby” at thirty—they still had visions of world domination, stardom, and riches. Jacko was fine letting them have the stage every couple of months, paying them a couple hundred bucks, and letting them feel like rock stars for two hours.

  Jacko checked his watch: it was almost eleven and time to get the band ready. Two very hot and very drunk college girls flashed fake IDs at the door, and Jacko let them in, remembering last Saturday night when they’d gotten so drunk they started kissing while everyone cheered them on. Jacko hoped, tonight, there would be a repeat performance. By the scattered cheers as they entered, he knew the other guys here tonight remembered the two.

  Ratso, the sound guy, approached Jacko quickly, pushing his way through the crowd.

  “Get behind the board,” Jacko yelled over the crowd and music. “What are you doing?”

  These nights ran like clockwork. At the right time, tonight being eleven, Jacko would flash one finger to the bartender, and the lights would dim, letting everyone know it was time for the band. At that same time, Ratso would let the band know it was time for them. Now, he was ruining it.

  “They’re gone,” Ratso said.

  “Who?”

  “The band.”

  “What?”

  “Yeah, the whole fucking band suddenly hit the side door out of here and left all their equipment,” Ratso said.

  “I’ll fucking kill them,” Jacko screamed over the noise.

  Despite the surveillance cameras pointing at the vacant lot on Chelsea Avenue and six officers hand-picked by Vic Tankard (men and women with no connection to Murphy’s Law, most of them too young to have gone there), the police barricades set up around the perimeter, and traffic from Route 36 re-routed west, in the early morning hours, a routine walk of the lot produced six bodies.

  “Un-fucking real,” Tankard said and threw his hands in the air.

  The camera footage clearly showed Brian Black, Nancy Harnett, and Jennifer Jacoby enter the lot right at the exact moment that two officers turned away. They were seen pushing and crunching through the thick weeds, yet no one heard them.

  At that very moment, the three members of Talk Is Cheap, on foot, simply stepped over the police barricades even though an officer stood not six feet from them.

  They also must have made enough noise to wake the neighborhood, yet in every sworn statement by the six officers as well as the tech guys in the van, nothing was seen.

  Both men in the van could swear that there was nothing wrong with the cameras at the time and nothing out of the ordinary. Watching the tapes live, there was nothing to see.

  Yet the next day, it was all on tape like a wrestling Battle Royale with all six people attacking one another with abandon, punching and kicking and slamming each other in to the ground, trying to drown one another in the small lakes formed on the lot and using debris, sticks, and cement blocks to hurt one another.

  The fight lasted for nearly half an hour, blood and chunks of flesh flying and coating the ground. Bones were broken and eyes gouged out, throats severed and lungs punctured.

  And the entire thing was done without so much as a cry with no one begging for forgiveness or mercy, no one grunting or trash talking, and no one saying a word as they died one at a time.

  Chapter 15

  July 8th 2001

  Manny tossed the dead flowers off his parent’s gravesite and added the new bundle, taking care to spread them out like his mother would have done.

  “I miss you,” he whispered. He missed them not seeing him grow up and finish school and become a police officer in his hometown like he’d been talking about since he was a kid. He missed their Sunday meals of pasta, watching the Giants or Jets game with his dad while it snowed outside. He missed coming home from school and going straight to Murphy’s Law, where he’d sit at the bar and do his homework while the waitresses and bartenders snuck him answers and slipped him soda when his parents weren’t looking.

  Manny was glad they couldn’t see what a mess he’d made of his life since being shot. Since he’d given up on everything and everyone, especially himself.

  “You would have loved Gina,” he said to the cold grave marker, staring at his parent’s names. “You would have yelled at me for screwing it up too.”

  The money from the fire and his parent’s life insurance kept him from living on the street, and he was actually well off on paper. Gina had left him and asked for noth
ing from him, not the house, not any support, not even the furniture. It was a clean break from him and what he’d become.

  Since that bullet, he’d fallen into a deep funk, going days without leaving the house, days without eating a solid meal, and ignoring his friends when they tried to intervene.

  He was all that was left of the Santiago clan now, and he was watching it slip away into oblivion. Someday, he’d be joining his parents in this cemetery, and passersby wouldn’t bother to glance at the Santiago name.

  Despite the warm morning, he was wearing a long coat and sweating after a long night of drinking, alone in the living room, passing out in the hallway on the way to the bathroom. He stunk of the alcohol pouring from his skin, from not bathing in three days, and not caring. His beard was scratchy and his hair unkempt, his gut now bulging from his worn clothing.

  A cop driving by would harass him for being a homeless wino up to no good. Manny imagined how embarrassing that would be, especially if he knew the officer.

  He thought of the last time he’d seen Mark Dowd and Vic Tankard and how they’d tried to help him and tried to get him to see where his life was headed.

  That had been a year ago today. A long twelve months of struggling to get out of bed, to spend one night without drinking and crying to get through it. Manny had become a walking cliché, listening to somber Springsteen and Bon Jovi songs with a bottle clutched in his trembling hands while he sat on his porch and took in the smells of home: the salty sea air, the aroma of home-cooked meals that the neighbors were preparing, fresh-cut grass, and the breeze bringing it all to him.

  And him wasting it on booze and sorrow, but passing out was the only way to keep the nightmares at bay.

  “I know I need help, Dad. I know this. I just don’t know where to start,” he finally said. He threw up his arms in disgust with his life, the small liquor bottles in his pockets clanking. A part of him wanted to pull them out and dump them, but a larger part wanted to crawl inside one of them and get this day over with.