Damaged Goods (10 page)

Moodrow stepped out of the Gemini Lounge and into a slow, steady rain. He stopped under the restaurant’s canopy, watched the raindrops splash onto the gray pavement, and smiled to himself. Somehow he’d missed the gathering clouds, the weather forecasts, the prepared and practical citizens with their furled umbrellas. It was a familiar story. All through his NYPD career, important cases (important by his standards, anyway) had devoured his concentration, demanding his full attention, leaving no room for day-to-day considerations, for the merely mundane.

He wanted to grin madly, shout, “I’m baaaaack,” like the kid in the ghost movie, but held himself in check. Remembering that the world had its ways—like a cold, steady rain or a phone call from the west coast—of asserting its own claims. He was standing on the corner of West Broadway and Prince. The offices of Ginny Gadd, private investigator, were on Sixth Avenue, near Twenty-eighth Street, a good three miles away. There was always the Sixth Avenue subway, but if he had to walk over, he’d ruin his suit, the package he carried under his arm, and the first impression he hoped to make. On the other hand, with virtually no hope of finding a taxi in the rain, he wasn’t about to hang around with his hand in the air.

After a minute or two, he accepted his fate, took the only course open to him. He turned and knocked at the door of the Gemini Lounge.

“Whatta ya want?”

The gorilla in the two-grand suit glared down as if he’d never seen him before, and Moodrow, his first impulse tempered by need, carefully repressed the urge to drive a fist into the man’s hanging ribs. Instead, he worked up a thin, apologetic smile.

“Hey,” he said, “ya think Carmine could lend me the use of an umbrella?”

M
OODROW, HIS BORROWED UMBRELLA
having surrendered to a sudden gust of wind on Twenty-fourth Street, dripped steadily onto the clean tile floor of Gadd Computer Investigations, Inc. He was sitting on a preformed plastic chair, sliding, really, on the wet seat while he tried to maintain a reasonably dignified equilibrium. He needn’t have bothered. Ginny Gadd, having passed her few years in the NYPD behind the wheel of a Harlem-based patrol car, had seen far worse.

“Cream and sugar?” She turned to the enormous man perched on the small chair, a pot of coffee in one hand, and watched him watching her. Knowing his penetrating stare was standard cop procedure, something this old dinosaur had mastered so long ago it’d passed into pure habit. While still on the job, she’d hated that look, feeling (often correctly) that the evaluation was already tainted by the simple fact of her gender.

“Both, please. Light and sweet.”

“Does that mean two, or three sugars?”

“Two.”

She’d been right about Moodrow’s stare. It
was
pure habit, his evaluation as automatic as strapping on his shoulder rig before leaving his apartment in the morning. Even as he accepted her coffee, he notched her appearance in typical cop fashion: somewhere between twenty-five and thirty; five feet, two inches tall, 115 pounds; thick dark hair cut short and swept across the sides of her head; features small and neat except for a pair of large, slightly jugged, ears. He ignored the merely transient, the blood-red blouse and the charcoal skirt, the ankle-high boots and the hoop earrings.

“Thanks. The wind cuts right through you when you’re wet.”

He watched her walk back to her desk, noted the muscular, bouncy gait and suspected an underlying confidence that matched it.

You gotta be careful, he told himself. Because she can be insulted real easy and you need her.

“So what’s up, Moodrow?” She sat in the leather chair, laid her palms on the armrests, and crossed her legs. “What can I do for you?”

He reached into his jacket pocket, produced a second copy of Jilly Sappone’s mug shot. “I thought you could use this. It’s five years old, but it’s better than nothing.”

Gadd unfolded the wet paper carefully, laid it down on the desk blotter. “You look at a mug shot,” she observed, “and sometimes you think you can draw the man right through the paper. That’s how bad you want him.” She glanced up at Moodrow, gave him a chunk of her own cop stare. “But you didn’t come up here to give me a picture.”

“True.” He drained half the coffee. “I knew Jilly Sappone,” he said, “back before he got sent up. He was always crazy, always liable to go off without notice, but he wasn’t stupid. What I’m gettin’ at is this: I think Jilly planned it out. And I think he started long before the parole board cut him loose.”

“There’s nothing I hate worse than a party pooper,” Gadd interrupted. Her dark eyebrows curled up into little tents. “But I have to tell ya, Moodrow, your opinion doesn’t exactly come as a revelation. How else could Jilly find Ann Kalkadonis seven hours after his release?”

“Okay, so we agree: Jilly had somebody on the outside collecting information. What I’m saying here is we have to assume that particular someone—maybe his aunt, Josie Rizzo, or maybe his new partner—also found him a hideout.”

Moodrow went on to detail the relationship between Jilly, his aunt, and Carmine Stettecase. “Time is everything here. I don’t know Jilly’s plans for Theresa Kalkadonis, but I guarantee they aren’t long term. Plus, there’s a good chance he’ll lose control somewhere along the way. In which case, the
plan
is gonna go out the window.”

Ginny Gadd waited patiently for Moodrow to finish, to get to the point. When he simply stopped talking, she nodded thoughtfully, leaned back in her chair, rocked slowly from side to side. The man obviously wanted something. Something she could give him. The only real question was what
she
wanted, what
he
had to give.

“You ready for more coffee?”

“I really gotta get moving.”

“No, Moodrow, what you
really
have to do is get to the point.”

Moodrow shrugged. “When you’re right, you’re right.” He leaned forward, almost slid off the wet seat.

“Sorry about the chair. Someday I’ll have a full set of leather armchairs.” She smiled, a gesture that involved her entire face. “In fact, someday I hope to have an office that isn’t over a porno shop. But, for now …”

“No matter.” Moodrow returned her smile. On the way up, he’d run a gauntlet of neighborhood demonstrators carrying picket signs: FILTH OUT/FAMILIES IN. “See, the thing about it is that me and Ann Kalkadonis put together a list of Jilly’s friends and relatives. That’s the logical place to begin, right? My problem is that the list is fifteen years old and most of the people on it have moved away to parts unknown. I need to run them down, but if I have to do it by knockin’ on doors, the game’ll be done before I’m half started.”

“And you want me to find them with the computer.”

It was a statement, not a question, and Moodrow simply nodded.

“I take it you don’t have social security numbers to go with the names?”

“No, but I might be able to get something even better. Did you hear about Buster Levy? The guy Jilly attacked before he went to Ann’s apartment?” He waited for her nod before continuing. “Buster’s a loan shark, been operating on the Lower East Side for twenty-five years. The word on the street is that he branched out into the credit-card business a few years ago. He gets active card numbers from clerks at the big department stores and makes his own plastic. What I’m hoping is that Jilly got his hands on some of those cards and used ’em. If I can match the place he used them with somebody from Ann’s list, I’ll know where to start looking.”

Gadd tugged at the gold hoop in her right ear. The earring, brand new, was supposed to be .18-carat gold, but the nagging itch told a different story. “Are you saying you can get this man—Buster Levy—to actually supply you with a list of forged credit-card numbers?”

“Yeah, that’s exactly what I’m saying.” Moodrow had no desire to reveal the bargain he’d made with Carmine Stettecase to a virtual stranger, but if she wanted to believe he was a miracle worker, that was just fine. “Not that I’m sure Jilly actually took any credit cards. Right now, it’s just a possibility. I’ll be going over to see Buster right after I leave here. Then I’ll know for sure.”

Ginny Gadd looked at the brand-new (and still unpaid-for) IBM sitting on a desk against the south wall of her office. Her ability to maximize its capacities (at least as they pertained to the field of private investigation) had given direction to her post-cop life, but the sad truth was that she was already bored. Computer investigation was purely mechanical, a series of searches proceeding from the most to the least likely to produce results. Moodrow’s list of Jilly’s relatives was a perfect example of the process. She would begin with New York motor-vehicle records, then move out to New Jersey and Connecticut. If the individuals in question had ever been licensed to drive a car, she’d have their social security numbers and an address, current or not. A search through credit, bank, and property records would confirm or update the addresses. It was that simple and that mindless.

“Tell me if I heard right, Moodrow. This afternoon you kissed off the Haven Foundation, told them to take their money and put it where the sun don’t shine. You …”

“Save the lecture, Gadd.” Moodrow stood up, began to move toward the door. “What
I
heard was that you used to be a cop. And what I was
hoping
was that you were a cop long enough to know that you can’t let civilians direct an investigation.” He stopped in the middle of the small room, went back into his jacket pocket for another sheet of wet paper. “You want the names, Gadd? Or do I have to find someone else?”

Ginny smiled again, raising two huge dimples. “Well, being as I haven’t had the foresight to dump my clients, I’ll definitely take the names. But I want something for the time I spend on the computer.”

“Like what?”

“Like maybe you could describe, in great detail, exactly what happened to the back of your head.”

I
T WAS NEARLY MIDNIGHT
when Moodrow finally stepped out of a cab in front of his Fourth Street apartment building. His head began to swivel even before he shut the door. The action was pure reflex, like a pigeon checking the sky for the silhouette of a hawk before leaving the refuge of a shaded branch. Moodrow’s gaze jumped from shadow to shadow, resting momentarily on the few pedestrians, evaluating potential threats before moving on. He remained where he was, one foot in the gutter, one on the curb, until he’d achieved what he’d often described to Jim Tilley as “the illusion of safety.” Then he walked quickly forward.

The rain had stopped an hour earlier, leaving an eerie stillness and a soft, blurry mist in its wake. Amber street lamps threw pale, self-contained spheres of light that seemed to absorb passing cars, only to spit them out on the far side. In the distance, lighted windows glowed dimly, as if suspended in the empty air.

The net effect, beautiful and threatening at the same time, like the haunted forest in a fairy tale, was lost on Stanley Moodrow. His attention, divided between his conversation with Buster Levy, the phone calls he had to make before he got to bed, and the key in his hand, couldn’t be commanded by atmosphere. He needed something stronger and he got it as he thrust his key into the lock.

The first shot, muffled by the heavy mist, could have come from anywhere. It might have been a backfiring truck on an adjoining block, or an M80 firecracker tossed off a roof. But the second, third, fourth, and fifth left no room for doubt. Moodrow dropped to the pavement, dug for his .38, tried and failed to locate the shooter. Meanwhile, the shots continued, adding quickly to ten, then twenty, before he stopped counting. They came one after another, a relentless fusillade softened by the fog, reflected by the brick and stone of the city, seeming an irreducible part of the city itself.

When the last echo died (only to be replaced in his ears by the rapid-fire drumming of his own heart) Moodrow sat up and took inventory. There were no bodies on the street, no cries for help. There’d been no ricochets, either, nothing to indicate that he’d been the target. Nothing to indicate there’d been
any
target. He knew the gangbangers, as feral as wolves howling at the moon, like to go up on the roofs to empty their AK47s, their Tech 9s, their Uzis. Perhaps it had been no more than that.

Moodrow’s judgment was confirmed ten minutes later when the authorities failed to show up. If someone had been hit, the cops and paramedics would have come racing to the scene, their revolving roof lights slashing through the fog. As it was, the gloom had simply resettled on the heads and shoulders of the few passing civilians, the hoods and roofs of the cars moving down Fourth Street.

As he turned away, a dozen confused thoughts and images ran through his consciousness. He envisioned the Lower East Side of fifty years ago, filled the streets with the rowdy companions of his youth. The rough-and-ready kids of 1945, including Stanley Moodrow, had been ready to fight at the drop of a hat. The more daring, like Carmine Stettecase, had carried switchblades and zip guns. They’d seen themselves as tough guys, worthy of their idols—John Wayne, Humphrey Bogart, and James Cagney—but, compared to the children of the Nineties, they’d been closer to Fay Wray in the hands of King Kong.

By the time he entered his apartment, Moodrow had already thrown off the incident. It was after midnight and he was very tired. There’d been a time when he could go for two or three days, when the occasional fifteen-minute nap was enough. That time was long passed and he knew it. He knew he’d need a decent night’s sleep if he was going to find Jilly Sappone.

He went to the phone, picked it off the desk, dialed a familiar number, then sat on a high-backed wooden chair. After a moment or two, he was patched through the Seven’s switchboard to Lieutenant Quentin McWhirter, the precinct whip, a man he knew well enough to address by his first name.

“Quentin, it’s Stanley Moodrow.”

“If you’re lookin’ for your buddy, you could forget about it. He’s out and I don’t expect him back until the end of his tour. A pair of mutts got into an NYU dormitory room, raped the four girls living there. It’s gonna be an all-nighter.”