Damaged Goods (16 page)

“Jackson?”

“Yeah, Jilly.”

“Where’d ya get the cereal?”

“At the 7-Eleven right down the street.” Jackson-Davis grinned his proudest grin. “Little children need a good breakfast. I seen that on
Sesame Street
this mornin’.” He pointed at the battered television set. “Right there on that TV.”

Jilly took a deep breath. “And what’d ya do with the kid while you were gone?” Though he knew better, he was hoping Jackson had locked the brat in the bathroom. Or tied her to the bed. Or beat her into unconsciousness.

“Why, I took her with me, Jilly. And she was such a
good
girl.” He rubbed the top of Theresa’s head. “She didn’t make nary a goldarn peep.”

“I’m really glad to hear that, Jackson, but there’s somethin’ I just gotta say, somethin’ I think you should keep in mind. It goes like this: If you take that little cunt outside again without my permission, I’m gonna get myself a big ol’ butcher knife and cut her into a hundred pieces. Then I’m gonna make you count the pieces. Before I make you
eat
them.” He gave Jackson-Davis a minute to absorb the information before continuing. “Now pack up your shit and put it in the car. It’s moving day and we got a lot to do.”

Stanley Moodrow knew exactly what he wanted from his marriage of convenience to Guinevere Gadd. He wanted her to drive the car while he discussed reality with Carlo Sappone. Once this simple objective had been realized, he fully intended to sue for an immediate and unconditional divorce.

That didn’t mean he disliked her. Or that he resented her intrusion into a case he considered his own. Or even that he didn’t honestly admire her determination. Moodrow had spent virtually all his thirty years in the detectives working by himself. The joys of partnership, as much a part of cop mythology as chasing down the bad guys or hating the politicians, were almost unknown to him.

Perhaps if he’d had just a bit more experience, Moodrow might have understood the nature of the bonding process a little better. He might have known, for instance, that far from taking place while standing shoulder to shoulder in a tenement hallway, true partnerships are formed in the void created by long hours of boredom, hours that can only be filled with words.

They were parked in the back of an Exxon station at the intersection of William Floyd Parkway and Winston Drive, staring out across a manicured lawn at the front entrance to a small, split-level house that might have been the clone of a half dozen others lining both sides of the street. It was a perfect spot for a surveillance. Stuffed between a battered delivery truck and a fenderless Volvo station wagon, Moodrow’s dirty black Caprice was about as conspicuous as a cockroach in a welfare hotel. Moodrow had secured the space by flashing his PI license and a twenty-dollar bill at the station’s manager.

“A divorce thing, you know.” He’d followed the explanation with a shrug and a leer. The station manager had responded with a wink and a snatch at the double sawbuck.

Gadd had handled the rest of it by calling the house from the Exxon station’s pay phone. She’d gotten as far as “Valente’s Vinyl Siding” before Sappone had cut loose with a string of curses and hung up. That put him in the house, but it didn’t tell them who, if anybody, was in there with him.

“What we gotta figure,” Moodrow had explained, “is that Carlo, like any other drug dealer, is livin’ in a fortress. Which translates into us not goin’ in after him. We gotta wait for him to come out, no matter how long it takes.”

Gadd had nodded wisely, then handed Moodrow a napkin. “You’ve got jelly on your chin. And on the tip of your nose.”

“What, no powdered sugar?”

“The powdered sugar’s on your lap.”

The next two hours had passed fairly quickly. They’d stared at the door as if their mere arrival on the scene would draw Sappone into the open. Moodrow, though he knew better, was no more able to control the reaction than his partner of the moment. That was how much he wanted Carlo Sappone.

“You know,” Gadd finally broke the spell, “considering our boy’s occupation, we have to figure he’s probably not coming out before dark.” She glanced at her watch. “And it’s only four o’clock.”

“So whatta ya think we should do, break for dinner?”

“Actually, I was thinking more along the lines of a trip to the lady’s room.”

Moodrow shook his head. “I don’t know, Gadd. That’s not in the true cop tradition. Mostly, we just use an empty coffee container.”

Gadd responded by opening the door. “If you’re not here when I come out,” she said, “I’ll catch a cab.”

She returned with two cans of Pepsi and a small bag of potato chips. Moodrow grunted his thanks, popped the tab, grabbed a handful of chips.

“Now I can add the crumbs to the powdered sugar.” He waved the can in a small circle. “Like a mixed message for my dry cleaner.”

“Don’t forget to grind it in.”

Moodrow chewed on the potato chips until they reached the consistency of wet plaster, then washed the lump down with a few ounces of soda. “So, tell me, Gadd, how long were you on the job?”

Gadd straightened. “Four years. What about you?”

“Thirty plus. It makes for a nice pension.” He finished the Pepsi, tossed the can into the scavenged Volvo. “So why’d you quit?”

The back door of Carlo Sappone’s house opened, freezing the question. Then a tiger-striped cat stepped onto the tiny porch, gave a soft meow, and leaped into the shrubbery.

“Think we should pick him up?”

Gadd’s question was meant to change the subject. At least, that’s the way Moodrow read it. He thought about letting her off the hook, finally decided that he liked her enough to want the answer.

“Nah, looks too tough for us. Probably ask for a lawyer.” He opened the glove compartment, then closed it again without taking anything out. “I was in the detectives for twenty-eight years. Right up until the bosses decided to make me a Community Affairs Officer. It wasn’t a deal I could refuse, so I put in my papers.”

Gadd knew he was prodding her and she resented it. She wanted to tell him to mind his own business, that they were using each other and he knew it, that their temporary partnership didn’t call for shared intimacies. But she couldn’t imagine sitting next to him for the next several hours wrapped in a bad attitude. That would be worse than allowing herself to be manipulated.

“It’s not that simple,” she finally said.

“Pardon?”

“Why I left the job.” She paused, tempted to leave it like that, then realized that once she’d opened the subject, she couldn’t close it off again. A second realization followed quickly: She’d explained it to herself a thousand times, tried to share it with her husband and her friends, but never with another cop. Despite the fact that only another cop could possibly understand it.

“It wasn’t something I really decided to do,” she said. “I went out on vacation and never came back.”

“Just like that?” Moodrow resisted an urge to turn and face her. “On impulse?”

“It’d been coming for a long time.” Gadd took a moment to put her thoughts together, to decide just how much she wanted to let out. “What you can’t know,” she finally said, “is what it’s like to be a cop and a woman. You understand about
us
and
them,
right?”

Moodrow nodded.
Us
was any cop below the rank of lieutenant who happened to be sitting next to you.
Them
was every other human being on the face of the Earth.

“
Us
and
them
is what makes it work for cops. That sense of being surrounded by enemies.” She waited for another nod. “The first time I found a dildo in my locker, I shrugged it off. I figured I had to take it, rookie hazing, boys’ll be boys, all the bullshit. Same for the spread-eagled centerfolds pushed through the vent slots. I’m not saying I liked it, mind you, or even that I thought it was okay. See, I’d heard that black cops sometimes find bananas or toy gorillas or even watermelons in their patrol cars, and they don’t quit.” She stopped, took a sip of her Pepsi, set the can between her feet. When she resumed speaking, her voice was tinged with anger. “The truth is that I expected it to end. You get the point, Moodrow? Like, sooner or later, I’d be in their club and the bullshit would stop. Only it didn’t happen. And the joke is that I was three years into the job before I got the point. That was the night my partner, Harry O’Neill, asked me to toss a car we’d pulled over on a routine stop while he kept an eye on the two bad boys spread over the hood.

“I went through the interior first, between the seats, the glove compartment, like that. Then I popped the trunk and walked around to have a look. What they’d done was stuff a blow-up doll in there, with the head jammed under the spare tire and the legs spread out, and me, when I looked inside, I thought I saw the gaping genitals of a spread-eagled DOA. I was going for my service revolver when the laughter finally got through to me.”

“It was your partner set that up?” Moodrow, unwilling to face the woman sitting next to him, kept his eyes glued to Carlo Sappone’s front door.

Gadd shrugged, her anger fading. “Harry was a drunk with seventeen years on the job. I think he felt bad, but it wasn’t something he could admit.” She finally turned to face Moodrow. “Anyway, that’s not the point.”

Moodrow, facing the inevitable, let his head swivel until he was looking into her eyes. “The point,” he said, remembering his own problems with the job, “is that you could never be
us.
As opposed to
them.
”

“Yeah, but that didn’t mean I didn’t have options.” She put her hands between her knees. “I knew women on the job who cultivated a ‘don’t fuck with me’ attitude, who’d file a sexual harassment grievance if a male cop looked at them cross-eyed.”

“Did they get what they wanted?”

“That’s a good question. I mean they still found porno in their lockers, but nobody, not even the lieutenant, got in their faces.” She rolled down her window, took a deep breath. “
Us
and
them
is what makes spending a third of your life wallowing in other people’s misery halfway bearable. Without it …”

Moodrow nodded sympathetically. Just as if he hadn’t spent most of his NYPD life nurturing an outsider self-image. But, of course, he realized, the label hadn’t been forced on him. It’s one thing to refuse an invitation to the prom, another to be blackballed just because you don’t have a dick.

“What I finally decided,” Gadd resumed, “is that I’d be better off on my own.” Her eyes returned to Carlo Sappone’s front door even as her shoulders dropped into their natural set. “And now I have to deal with the boredom.”

T
HERESA KALKADONIS WASN’T GOING
to cry anymore. She was sure of that, sure the crying time was past. That was partly because she wasn’t thinking about her mother, about wanting to go home, and partly because Uncle Jilly had changed. Now, he mostly sat next to her with his chin on his chest, eyes all droopy, like Mackie, her stuffed dog.

Theresa wondered if Mackie was lying between the pillows on her bed. That was his place. She hoped mommy would take good care of him, now that she couldn’t do it herself. Now that she had put her old life behind her.

“Good-bye, Mackie.”

She didn’t mean to say it out loud, but she must have, because Uncle Jilly was suddenly looking down at her.

“Didn’t I tell you about cryin’? Didn’t I?”

The words came slowly, bubbling out like the water in Theresa’s bathroom sink when the toilet was filling up. Theresa wondered if she was supposed to answer. When Uncle Jilly was real angry, it was better not to say anything. Saying things didn’t help. Only she couldn’t hear any anger now, so maybe he really wanted to know, maybe he forgot what he said before about crying.

“She ain’t cryin’, Jilly.”

Theresa looked up. Uncle Jackson was staring at her through the rearview mirror. He tossed her a big wink.

“Then what’s she doin’, Jackson-Davis, fartin’ through her mouth?” Jilly laughed at his own joke, a rough snort that quickly worked its way from his nose down to his chest where it ended in a phlegmy cough. Theresa watched him roll down the window and spit, then dropped her eyes to her lap when he turned back. “So what were ya doin’, Theresa? Fartin’ through ya mouth?”

She could feel him looking down at her, though she didn’t move her head. When Uncle Jilly took his medicine, his eyes were like the eyes of Mr. Cambesi’s pet snake. You couldn’t tell what they were seeing. She guessed that was better than before, when Uncle Jilly didn’t have any medicine, but his snake eyes still frightened her.

“Doggone, Jilly, she’s just a little kid. She probly ain’t even
heard
of fartin’. I swear to the good Lord above, Jilly, you shouldn’t be usin’ that language.”

“Swear to
who,
Jackson?”

“To the good Lord.”

Theresa raised her eyes, knowing, somehow, that Uncle Jackson was drawing Uncle Jilly’s attention away from her and toward himself. That’s what he always did when Uncle Jilly got mad at her, and this time it was working. Uncle Jilly’s mouth was right next to Uncle Jackson’s ear and he was scratching the back of Uncle Jackson’s neck with his middle finger.

“Tell me something, Jackson.”

“Sure, Jilly.”

“Do you remember when you were in the room with Carol Pierce?”

Theresa could see Uncle Jackson’s face in the mirror. He had that pouty look he got when Uncle Jilly was making fun of him. The one mommy said would stay there all the time if Theresa put it on too often. Like he was gonna cry.

“Yeah, I remember.”

“You remember what you did to her?”

“That was different.”

“Different than what?”

Uncle Jackson shook his head—as if Uncle Jilly’s finger was a bug he wanted to make fly away—but he didn’t answer.

“What I wanna know, Jackson,” Uncle Jilly whispered, “is if the good Lord above was watchin’ you when you worked on Carol Pierce?”

Theresa couldn’t put any images together with Uncle Jilly’s words, but she knew he was saying something important, something her new life required her to learn. So she concentrated real hard—just like she did when she was reciting her ABCs—and tried to picture Uncle Jackson at work.