Bad Business (35 page)

Augustine was still ranting as the cops dragged him away and shoved his head down into the back of a cruiser. Gibbons wondered why he was openly acknowledging his association with the Sicilians. Had he really snapped, or was he already building his insanity defense? You could never tell with Augustine. He was a clever bastard.

A rookie cop muscled his way through the crowd, holding a roll of masking tape over his head. He handed it to another cop who knelt down and taped up the slits in the gray plastic so they wouldn't lose any more evidence. The two of them rolled up the rug then and hoisted it on their shoulders, carrying it away. With all the noise and confusion around them, the departing rug made Grand Street look like your average day in a Turkish bazaar.

Gibbons looked over at the tenement where Zucchetti and Salamandra grimly watched their eighty million sailing away. The fat man leaned over and whispered into the big boss's ear. The old man jutted out his lower lip, shrugged, and shook his head. Then they both went back inside. Gibbons looked up at the building. Someone was pulling a shade down in one of the windows on the third floor. On the telephone pole right outside, a big candy cane swayed in the wind, the silver garland blowing and shimmering like crazy.

“. . .It is cold and it is wild here in Times Square. We're exactly sixteen minutes away from midnight, when the big red apple you see on your screen now will drop and usher in the New Year.”

The camera switched back to Dick Clark standing on some rooftop over Times Square, holding a microphone and freezing his ass off.

“I never liked that guy,” Gibbons said as Tozzi handed him a fresh beer.

Tozzi sat down next to him on the couch. “Why's that?”

“I dunno. I just never liked him. I mean, what does he do that's so wonderful? He's a no-talent.”

Tozzi sipped from a bottle of Rolling Rock. “He's a producer. He
discovers
talent. That's how he got so rich.”

“So what? Being rich doesn't make him worth watching on TV.”

“So whattaya want me to do about it? Change the channel. You want Guy Lombardo and his Royal Canadians?”

“Guy Lombardo is dead.”

“Oh, I'm sorry to hear that.”

Tozzi was grinning at him behind his beer bottle, and Gibbons knew what he was thinking. Tozzi thought he was a dinosaur. He thought “old guys” like him were supposed to like Guy Lombardo and Lawrence Welk, that kind of crap. Well, the problem with guys Tozzi's age, the “baby boomers,” was that they thought their generation was
it
. Anyone who came before them was from the horse-and-buggy era, and everybody who came after was just a footnote to them. Gibbons swigged his beer and decided he wasn't even going to bother responding to this asshole. It was New Year's Eve, and they were at Lesley Halloran's house. He wasn't going to get started with Tozzi now. It wasn't the time or the place.

Tozzi slumped down in his seat. He had the remote in his hand. “You ever see MTV, Gib?”

“You looking for trouble tonight or what?”

“No. I was just thinking I'd show you what's going on in the rest of the world.”

“I know a hell of a lot more than you ever will.”

“C'mon, Gib. You don't have to be so hostile. It's New Year's.”

“Yeah, you're a real wiseass now, but you weren't so smart when you got yourself suspended.”

“You sayin' it was
my
fault I got suspended? I didn't ask Augustine to frame me.”

“No, but you left yourself wide open for it. You and your big mouth. You made yourself an easy target.”

“Whattaya talking, easy target? If it wasn't for me, Augustine'd still be out there, doing his little deals with the Zips. He's not gonna get away with shit because of me. He's gonna do time. Hard time.”

“No thanks to you.”

“Hey, listen. I'm the one who found the heroin. I kept it on ice so we could burn him with it.”

Gibbons sat up and glared at his partner. “Wait a minute,
wait a minute.
You
found the heroin? The hell you did.
I
figured out it was in the rug. I
told
you where it was.”

“Yeah, but who stuck his neck out—?”

“Are you two arguing again?”

Lesley came out of the kitchen with Lorraine. They were bringing out a bottle of champagne and four tall flute glasses.

“They're constantly at each other,” Lorraine said in a tired voice. “It's a wonder they haven't killed each other by now.”

Tozzi shook his head. “You don't understand, Lorraine. You never have. This isn't fighting. If we were fighting, you'd know it.”

“Yeah, 'cause I'd win,” Gibbons said.

“Bullshit, you would.”

“Look, Toz, you're just p.o.ed because I broke this case and saved your ass, and you just don't want to admit it.”

Tozzi sat up and leaned into Gibbons's face. “Now you really are looking for a fight, Gib.”

Lorraine plopped down on the couch between them. “You have to separate them when they get like this,” she said to Lesley. “They're like kids.”

Lesley laughed. It was the first easy laugh Gibbons had heard out of her since the incident on Grand Street. She'd been nervous and ill at ease all evening, sort of like Mary Tyler Moore, smiling too much, trying too hard to act natural. She'd been through a lot, and it wasn't over. Patricia was having nightmares, getting up in the middle of the night, wandering around and crying, looking for her mother. Lesley took the kid to a shrink, but the doctor said they were lucky, her trauma actually could've been much worse. Nemo had conned her into taking some cold medicine for kids to calm her down after he kidnapped her. They found the bottle in the van. Patricia had slept through most of the ordeal. Gibbons wondered, though, how she'd react to the hunchback of Notre Dame if she ever happened to see the movie on
The Late Show
some night.

Lesley poured out two glasses of champagne and handed one to Lorraine, then wiggled in next to Tozzi, wrapping her arm around his. Gibbons hadn't particularly liked Lesley when he'd first met her, but she turned out to be all right. Like most people, her bitchiness was just a cover for her little insecurities. Actually she even looked better now. She was small, and Gibbons had never seen much in small women, but she was an exception, a fine-looking woman with smarts on top. Too good for Tozzi.

He shifted his gaze to Lorraine's profile as she watched Dick Clark on television. She was looking great tonight with those combs in her long dark hair. He'd never seen her in this slinky dress, even though she swore she'd had it for years when they were getting dressed this evening. She was showing a lot of leg, one knee over the other, bouncing her high heel under the coffee table. Yeah, she was looking good tonight. Not many women look this good at fifty-one. Not many look this good at twenty-nine. She couldn't possibly be related to Tozzi. She was too classy. They must've found him in a garbage pail floating down the river.

“You don't really believe that, do you, Gib?” Tozzi leaned past Lorraine.

“What?”

“That you're the one who made this case.”

“Of course I believe it.”

“Get outta here.”

Lorraine elbowed her cousin back into the couch. “Will you two stop it? If you want to know what I think, I think you both screwed up because you didn't get Zucchetti.”

“Well,” Tozzi said, already on the defensive, “Zucchetti never touched the rug. We had nothing to connect him with it. He kept himself insulated from the actual drug operations. All the big bosses do that.”

“Yes, but he's the big fish. He's the one you needed to get to stop the heroin pipeline. Right?”

“You're absolutely right, Lorraine, but the evidence just isn't there to bring charges against him.”

Lesley put her glass down on the coffee table. “I feel a little guilty saying this and I know I shouldn't feel this way, but in my heart I don't feel that badly toward Zucchetti. He did save Patricia.”

“Yeah, that's the funny thing about these old-time mob guys,” Tozzi said. “Unlike the current generation—the jerks like Nemo—the old-timers really are ‘men of honor.' They have a set code of rules and they do seem to live by them.”

“You've seen too many reruns of
The Godfather
, Tozzi. There's nothing noble about these people. They're slime, they're bad guys, pure and simple.”

“I disagree, Gib.”

“Because you're an idiot.”

Tozzi waved him away. “You believe what you want to believe. Friggin' hardhead.”

“So what'll happen with the Figaro Connection case now?” Lorraine cut in. “I know the judge declared a mistrial because of Augustine's involvement with the Sicilians, but is that the end of it?”

Gibbons shook his head, rolling it against the back of the couch. “They're gonna retry it, but with a couple of new faces, Nemo and Augustine. And a new piece of evidence, the rug with the forty kilos in it.”

“But there will be one face missing when they retry Figaro,” Lesley said. “Mine. I've informed Mr. Salamandra that he should seek other counsel.”

Gibbons grinned. He was liking her even better.

“How do you think he'll make out the second time around?” Tozzi asked.

“He's in a much worse position now because Augustine had the rug delivered to his address. On the other hand, he may be more inclined to plea-bargain this time. I suspect he'll turn on Augustine for consideration in his own case. The U.S. Attorney's office will certainly go for it. Augustine's
the one they really want to put on the gallows to show the public that they don't go easy on their own. Salamandra's just another fat mobster like all the others who show up in the papers every couple of months. People forget about guys like him very quickly. But Augustine's a star, a fallen angel. He's
got
to be punished. Unfortunately, Salamandra may walk away with a relatively light sentence if he testifies against Augustine. I wouldn't be terribly surprised if he didn't have to serve any time at all.”

“Bastard.” Gibbons tipped the beer bottle against his lips.

“What about Nemo?”

“That piece of filth?” Lesley's voice turned contemptuous at the mention of her daughter's kidnapper. “I hear he's been spouting like an open fire hydrant for the government prosecutors. He's telling them everything they want to hear about Augustine: how Augustine admitted to him that he killed Giordano, Marty Bloom, and the two agents, how he introduced Augustine to Zucchetti and Salamandra on a farm somewhere in Sicily, how Augustine forced him to kidnap Patricia.” She stopped for a second. You could feel her blind anger. “Just like Salamandra, he may end up walking because he's going to testify against Augustine. I heard that he even told them about some kind of ritual murder Augustine was involved with at that farm meeting. Supposedly the Sicilians wanted Augustine to prove himself, so they had him strangle an Italian magistrate they had kidnapped. The Italian authorities want to extradite Augustine and try him over there for that murder.” Lesley shivered with rage. “Nemo's going to be portrayed as the poor victim of his addiction. The little bastard's going to get away with it.”

“No, he's not,” Tozzi said. “Kidnapping is a federal rap, you know that. The Bureau is mounting a separate case against him. He may slide by on the drug charges, but he'll do time for kidnapping Patricia. Don't worry about it.”

Lorraine furrowed her brow. “But do you really think Augustine will go to jail? People like him don't go to jail.
Maybe one of those country-club facilities, but not a real jail.”

Gibbons shook his head. “Wall Street guys go to the country clubs, the white-collar criminals. Augustine's going up for murder one. He may be acting like his shit don't stink now, sitting in his fancy town house with the silver tea set on the glass coffee table, telling Barbara Walters that this is all a ridiculous perversion of justice and that there's no case against him, but believe me, he's fucked, and these hoitytoity interviews he's been giving aren't helping his case any. Ballistics matched the slugs found at Uncle Pete's house to the two Glocks he was carrying when we busted him. All I can say is, he just better get used to going to the john without a toilet seat because that's how he's gonna be doing it for the rest of his life.” Gibbons glanced at the TV screen, the big lighted apple in Times Square. “Yeah, ol' Tom will be watching Dick Clark ringing in the new century from his cell—the new century and then some.”

“How about Jimmy? Will he be facing any charges? He was Augustine's henchman.”

Gibbons grit his teeth whenever he heard Lorraine say “Jimmy.”

Tozzi took his feet off the coffee table. “McCleery? He was just one of Augustine's loyal spear-carriers. He did whatever he was told, and Augustine never made him do anything that was illegal.”

“He wouldn't have known it if Augustine had . . . the dumb mick.”