Cutter (12 page)

‘I thought I got a shake, Jimmy P.’

I watched his eyes as he raised them from the red-checked tablecloth.

Jack and Doc were watching him closely now.

‘Word is that there’s a guy selling very hard-to-get items to overseas buyers. He’s using some of our people to help him make contacts. I mean, the source I got was kinda vague about the details, you unnerstan, but the kinda cash this guy’s makin’ does draw attention to certain people. And I can’t tell you my source, cousin, because it would fuckin’ get me killed.’

‘You got any idea how he’s moving his goods?’ Doc asked.

The big-bosomed waitress returned with our pitcher of beer and four glasses. Jack had lost his interest in her, but Billy was watching her breathe. It was like he had his eyes pasted to her chest.

‘Maro
n,’
he murmured.

‘So?’ I asked him again. 

‘Somethin’ to do with computers.’

I looked over at Doc. We needed to fill Jack in about McGinn, our computer nerd.

‘They got some kinda code they use over that fuckin’ Internet, you know?’

‘What code?’ Jack asked him.

‘Shit, I don’t know - I dropped out after the tenth grade. All I know is that you want to look for Imperial Products of Bridgeport.’

‘That’s the listing they’re hiding behind?’ Doc queried.

‘If I get any deeper, Jimmy P, you’ll be my pallbearer ... It’s all I got. I ask any more shit and they’re gonna know I’m passin’ it on.’

‘Okay, Billy. That’s good. We don’t want you dead,’ I told him.

‘We’re stil
l
famili
a
, Jimmy P. Even if you got a really shitty way to make a fuckin’ livin’.’

‘Yeah, we’re still family, Billy. And you gotta take care of yourself. You did good, partner. Let me buy you a pitcher of your own.’

‘Fuck, no. I get hammered, I’ll flop the fuckin’ lift at work on top of my dumb ass. I got to eat and run. This is a long drive from the shop.’

The overripe server again showed up with our order, and Billy and Jack Wendkos scoped her every wiggle all the way back to the kitchen. Jack got up and caught the chestnut-haired beauty before she could return to her station. She was smiling and Jack was smiling, and then Wendkos returned to the table.

He sat down and began to eat.

‘Well?’ Doc wanted to know.

‘She’s gay,’ Jack said through a mouthful of deep pan.

‘You’re fuckin’ strokin’ me!’ Billy bellowed.

‘Yeah. I am,’ Jack replied.

Doc let out a belly laugh. I had to join him.

Then the blush left Billy Cheech’s cheeks.

‘You fuckin’ cops. You’re always fuckin’ with people.’ 

Chapter Eleven

The computer nerd prevailed. We got the call from Matty McGinn on a Tuesday morning just as Doc and Jack and I were about to go off duty from midnights. The kid’d been up all night with the information we received from Billy Cheech, and he didn’t let go until he found it.

We walked into Computer Services at 7.12 a.m. Matty looked as fresh as if he’d just arrived at work, but I knew he had been around his computer for going on sixteen hours.

‘I found it just two hours ago. I tried to get a hold of you on the street, but they said you were doing surveillance,’ McGinn told the trio of us.

‘What’d you find?’ Doc wanted to know.

Jack Wendkos was standing behind the red-headed kid, looking over his right shoulder.

‘Imperial Products of Bridgeport has a very specialized clientele. They sell goods that are available nowhere else — except, I think, in southeast Asia on the black market. So they’ve got no competition ... It took me three hours to get past their code. See, they front themselves by saying they’re selling ceramic works of art. You know, junk stuff you’d put on your coffee table or whatever. But when you get past the first series of phony pitches, and when you continue showing interest in them, they start with a series of questions that find out what you’re really interested in. They ask you if you’d like to see a brochure of what they have to offer. And you have to see that brochure in person. They won’t present it on the Internet, naturally. So I set up a meet with one of their ‘representatives’ for Thursday afternoon. Two o’clock, at Brookfield Zoo.’

McGinn looked at us as if he’d just watched his young wife deliver a healthy set of twins.

*

The ‘representative’ was supposed to meet us at the giraffes. Someone was supposed to show up wearing a kelly green windbreaker — that was Jack Wendkos. Doc and I and twelve plainclothes detectives were going to surround whoever showed up, and there were another ten patrol cars waiting outside the zoo. They would be charging in on my command.

It was late fall. Almost closing time for Brookfield. It had become a bit cold for most of the animals to survive outdoors, and they were shutting the place down until spring.

We were all dressed as casually as possible. But we had to wear jackets to cover our weapons, as always. I had my Nine under my black windbreaker, and I had the .44 Bulldog strapped to my left leg, just below the knee. And I was carrying a switchblade in my left-hand jeans pocket, contrary to department policy.

Doc carried two pieces as well. A Nine in his shoulder holster and a .38 Police Special in a holster at the small of his back. He carried a blackjack in his pants pocket too. Jack was armed with a Nine at the shoulder and another Nine on his opposite hip. We didn’t arm ourselves quite as heavily for a standard tour of the streets, but The Farmer had everyone behaving a bit more cautiously than usual.

It was an overcast day. There was a hint of precipitation in the air, as the weather guy might say. At least there wouldn’t be any sun glaring in our eyes if we had to use any ordnance on this cutter.

And it might not be The Farmer who showed up. He might send a rep, just like the Internet message said. I don’t know why, but I had the impression this guy worked solo and that he was going to be here in person.

Doc walked over to the concessions and bought a hot dog. We were making our way slowly toward the area where they housed the giraffes. I had taken my kids here twenty times, at least. But every time I returned, there was a new wrinkle. They added something I had never seen before. The dolphin house was off to our left, at the center of the park. There were shows indoors with the porpoises every half-hour, but those events might have been canceled after the summer became the fall. I couldn’t remember.

The lions and tigers and bears (oh my) were ahead of us, and behind them were the long-necked varmints we were looking for.

Wendkos, with his bright green windbreaker, was directly in front of us. He was eating popcorn and trying to become unnoticeable. Which was hard for him to do, especially with the female population. As I said, he had Hollywood looks, and women were constantly mistaking him for Val Kilmer or for some other blond La La Land hunk. Since he’d separated from his wife, I assumed he’d been leading a very active social life. He never talked about women, however. Too bad, because everyone in Homicide wanted to know if he’d scored with the well-built waitress we saw at the pizza joint. Doc had made a legend of that young woman’s mammaries by now, and it was like a continuing series on TV, finding out if Jack ever got his hands on her goodies. He didn’t talk, though. Said it was wrong to talk about ‘private matters’. He was pissing a lot of coppers off. Many of us lived very vicariously.

We approached the bears’ enclave. The polar bears lay on the concrete, undisturbed by the plainclothes policemen who ambled past them en route toward the lions and tigers.

‘Let’s go by the monkey island,’ Doc pleaded.

He smiled and took the last bite out of his hot dog. Then he slurped down the ice in the bottom of his Coke cup.

‘I love to watch them abuse themselves. I swear they do it to insult us human critters.’ Gibron smiled.

‘I do not understand your amusement at watching some ape pound sand in public,’ I told him. ‘You want to see a bunch of whackers, go down to City Lockup around 11.00 p.m. The jailers have to wear earplugs.’

‘Ah bullshit, guinea.’

‘Nah. I swear that’s what they say —’

‘There are the giraffes. Right ahead,’ Doc said. The smile was off his face.

These animals were housed on the eastern edge of Brookfield. We had guys heading toward them from the north, south, and west. The cars were parked just beyond the giraffes, on the east perimeter. There were fifteen-or twenty-feet-high chain-link fences that separated man from beast here. I saw the other coppers walking slowly toward Jack Wendkos. But they stopped short to give the man in the green coat some space. We saw no one else in front of that tall barrier.

The giraffes were elegant and awkward, all at once. They stared very interestedly at Jack and at the rest of us who stood twenty and thirty yards behind Wendkos. The other plainclothesmen started to move about, to appear as though we were not congregating behind the man in green. Doc and I sat down on a bench, with Jack thirty yards off to our right. The other police were walking past Wendkos and the giraffes and were about to make a cordon around the area so that a crowd didn’t form around the homicide detective.

There was still no one else in front of the long-necked creatures we had come to observe. Until a woman with a baby carriage approached from the west. We couldn’t see what was in the stroller. There were blankets piled on top of whatever it held.

Doc nudged me and I nodded.

‘It is two minutes after two,’ he whispered.

Doc talked quietly into the tiny microphone on his jacket collar. It was about the size of a pimple, and it was the same color as his windbreaker. We all had the small audio phones, flesh-colored, inserted in our outer ears. He was telling all of us to watch the woman.

‘She might be carrying, under those blankets. Nod if you hear me, Jack.’

Wendkos’s head bobbed very subtly, but he kept staring straight ahead at the giraffes.

The woman with the stroller came up behind our man. She tapped him on the shoulder.

‘Would you happen to have a light?’ she asked him.

We could hear her clearly. Jack’s microphone was hidden beneath the flap of a collar on his kelly green jacket.

‘No. No, I’m afraid I don’t smoke. Don’t you think it is kind of dangerous to smoke around a little guy?’ he asked the woman.

She was wearing a scarf and big black sunglasses. Her knee-length black leather coat had its collar pulled up at the back to block the breeze.

‘I don’t believe in everything the government says. Do you? My aunt lived to be ninety-six, and she smoked a pack a day. I thought it was all just the paranoia of our age.’

It appeared that her lips curled upward into something like a smile, but then she abruptly pulled away from Wendkos. And just as abruptly she halted once more and turned back to the detective.

‘You know, you look a lot like …’

The microphone didn’t pick up the end of her sentence. Then she did retreat for real. She pushed the stroller ten yards, stopped again, and this time she leaned into the carriage and removed a squalling child, dressed in pink, and embraced the kid until it ceased squealing.

‘You look a lot like who?’ Doc said.

‘Liberace, sweetheart,’ Jack piped back at him. ‘Fucking woman wants to gas her own kid with her stink. We ought to arrest the bitch. Attempted murder.’

‘Hey. Cool down, big man. It’s early yet,’ Gibron said.

The other detectives continued to make a casual circuit around the giraffe enclave, so Doc and I got up and moved too. We walked back toward the concession stand because I was hungry and thirsty, having missed lunch in the rush to get everybody and everything here on time. And I was too wired to eat back then anyway. But now the boredom of the stakeout settled in, and the pangs had hit me in the middle.

I ordered a hot dog, fries, and a large diet pop. It came to six bucks. I winced at the young girl behind the cash register, but she couldn’t understand my consternation at their high prices. Doc got a drink too, and we sat at a table with a rainbow-colored umbrella.

‘Maybe McGinn didn’t give them the right high sign or whatever, Jimmy. Maybe they smelled us coming. Maybe he sniffed us out. I don’t think this on
e
want
s
to get caught.’

‘I want all you guys to pull back on Jack. Give him some room. Stay out of the immediate area until he thinks we’ve got an authentic shake,’ I ordered into my microphone. They all replied that they copied, and from here, about 150 yards, I could make out clearly that lonesome bright green jacket standing in front of a cluster of brown-and-white-dotted giraffes. We could be on top of him in ten seconds if he called out, so I knew we had to give him a wide berth.

I continued to check the locations of my coppers as I finished my expensive lunch.

‘What would this have cost at Garvin’s? Two-fifty?’ I asked Doc. 

‘You’re still living in the fifties, Beaver. Get with the program, guinea,’ he quipped.

‘Hey,’ Jack said. He didn’t utter anything else.

‘Oh-oh,’ Doc said as he stood.

‘What the fuck
.
O
h-
o
h?
’

I was trying to finish my glass of diet pop.

Doc nodded toward our man. Someone dressed in one of those sweatshirts with a hood was coming at Wendkos from the west. The coppers who were also coming at Jack from that direction had sniffed out our new arrival. They were closing toward the policeman in green and that new face at this moment. The plainclothes guys from the north were hurrying on down, too. I threw my wrapper into the trashcan, and Doc and I were hustling toward the pair.

Sweatshirt person stopped ten feet from our detective in the windbreaker. The new arrival stared straight ahead at the inhabitants of the twenty-feet-high fenced enclosure.

But we didn’t hear anything from Wendkos’s microphone.

Doc and I were fifty yards from Jack. I could see our fellow policemen closing to about the same range, so I said, ‘Stop.’ And everybody halted. The cops wandered off toward neighboring benches, but the figure in the hood hadn’t been watching our approach. He had his eyes on the attractions in front of him.

Doc and I sat on a bench that was perhaps thirty-five yards from the duo we were watching.

Doc whispered, ‘Stand there, Jack. We’re right here.’

‘It’s a woman,’ I heard Wendkos whispering back. But he didn’t dare add anything to the statement.

‘Woma
n?’
Doc mouthed, almost silently.

‘They are so graceful, aren’t they?’ a new voice began.

Wendkos turned toward the hooded woman.

‘Yes. They are.’

‘I like the jacket. It is my kind of color.’

‘You do? I wore it because I was supposed to be meeting a business partner here.’ 

‘Business?’ the female voice countered. ‘What kind of business would intrude on a lovely fall day?’

‘My business is very special. I have a customer who has very extraordinary needs, and I’m supposed to meet someone who deals in very exotic kinds of products.’

‘What company does your friend work for?’

Wendkos hesitated. He must have wondered if he was being hit on or if this broad was checking him out for references.

‘Imperial Products of Bridgeport,’ he told her. I wondered if he blinked when he said it.

She straightened up noticeably.

‘Funny you should mention that name.’

‘Why? Have you heard of them?’

Then she appeared to become a bit more animated. She turned about and looked all around her.

‘I said, have you heard of them?’

She started to withdraw.