Crime Wave

PrologueCase file #101: The Forever Haunt It would always be his first case, his first client. Not that he needed reminding, but what made him remove the photographs and files from the accordion file he kept hiding in the back of the black metal cabinet was a recent newspaper article about an eerily familiar crime. The photographs were more than fifteen years old, their color muted, and the clippings he’d compiled over the years were torn in some places. Even now the Scotch tape was peeling off, the adhesive having lost its hold after the passage of time. It was a file that held everything he knew about his father’s unsolved murder on a Manhattan street, gunned down outside a deli on Tenth Avenue. He often looked at the file while in between cases because he still sought clues to solving it, especially as the police had long since rendered it cold. He hadn’t had a solid lead in years, really, and only a few months ago he’d renewed his inner determination to one day bring its mysteries to a satisfying end. Standing over his father’s grave as an angry teen he’d made that promise to his father, and now, at twenty-nine, Jimmy McSwain was not a man who went back on his word. Joseph McSwain, Jr., had also lived by a code of honesty, of respect for others, and he’d assured his son he would always be there for him. Until one day a stranger with a trigger finger changed all that. What caught Jimmy’s attention this morning while he sipped coffee from the local deli was an article on the fifth page of the Daily News, bad placement nearly making him skip past it. String of Deli Robberies Claims First Victim. He read on for more details. The previous crimes hadn’t been considered news before, just random incidents. Delis throughout New York City were hardly glamorous enough to send circulation figures through the roof. At least, not until someone got hurt, and get hurt they did this time, the immigrant owner shot dead last night right in front of his store. The killer had run off into the night, but the police were optimistic in finding him because of the images that had been caught on the surveillance camera. “We’ll get the perp, make no mistake about it,” Captain Francis X. Frisano of Chelsea’s 10th Precinct stated with easy confidence while standing on a street corner near the scene of the crime. Jimmy could picture the captain, addressing the press in his neatly pressed uniform, its fit snug against his cut body, his dark eyes dancing with the excitement of the chase. His handsome face revealing a devilish smile amidst a perpetual five o’clock shadow. He hadn’t seen Frisano in a couple of months, not since the Hidden Identity case, but Jimmy would see him soon because he wanted to know what the police weren’t telling the press about the deli murder. Jimmy’s blue eyes darted back to the article. According to what he read, the crime had taken place at a twenty-four-hour deli found on Eighth Avenue and 17th Street, at ten o’clock at night, a gun jammed into the face of forty-two year old owner Manjou Ghatek as the assailant demanded money. A fight ensued with the man grabbing at the cash register before making a run for it. The proprietor wrongly chose to chase after the crook and winded up taking a bullet on the street, his body dropping to the hard cement. It was the last act it would do in this world. A shiver ran through Jimmy despite the warmth inside his office. His mind pictured the bloody scene, how the blast of the gun must have shattered an otherwise peaceful summer night, not to mention that of a hard-working family. “We believe the recent strings of attacks on delis are related, the work of one man,” said Frisano. “But now he’s escalated things.” Jimmy noted that they speculated this was the seventh such robbery, and the only one to end in extreme violence. Setting aside the newspaper and taking a sip at his now lukewarm coffee, Jimmy pulled up the faded photographs of another deli, this one on Tenth Avenue and 47th Street, not far from his home, where he, as a fourteen-year-old boy, had accompanied his father on what should have been a simple run for bagels. Joey McSwain was an NYPD cop, off duty but never really so, and he’d attempted to stop an argument between two men from getting out of control, and he’d paid for it dearly—with his life. And Jimmy, his son, now a grown man and still tortured by all he’d witnessed, continued to pay for what he’d lost by always wondering why fate had stepped in to destroy a life and a family. And why the cops—his father’s own brothers in blue—had bungled the case and failed to bring about an arrest. Jimmy McSwain, sometimes rash in his daily life but always focused in the long run, might be a graduate of the police academy but he had sworn never to wear the uniform. As he said, it was always good to know police procedure, but then use it to your advantage and act on your own instincts. Working as a private investigator meant you clocked your own hours, and on your own terms. Since setting up his own office six years ago, he’d solved many cases, yet his father’s was the one where a truth continued to elude him. The evidence had dried up, but never the hurt. The deli murder from last night had just awakened a sleeping giant. And what struck most at Jimmy was the fact that in that attack, the alleged criminal was not some reckless kid looking for a bit of mischief, not according to the description provided in the article. The black and white sketch that accompanied the article had Jimmy staring at an older man with a thatch of gray hair and deep-set eyes that looked like they had seen terrible things in life. Perhaps he had been in prison all these years for another crime, only now just released and wasting little time in resuming his familiar pattern of the easy robbery, this time taking on—and taking out—a defenseless deli owner. Jimmy knew it was a long shot, near impossible to connect all those yesterdays with what was happening now. Still, that didn’t stop him from focusing on the man’s haunted face again, and this time, with his heart beating and beads of sweat forming on his warm brow inside his tiny apartment, he wondered if he was finally staring at his father’s killer. Case file #101: The Forever Haunt Case Status: Unsolved Part 1: Summer in the City