Damaged Goods (22 page)

“How about another chance?” The words were out before he could call them back.

Betty moved closer to the bed. “Was that why you asked him when the fever started?”

“Yeah, well …” He took a deep breath and let his head drop onto the pillow. “I’m trying to figure out why I did what I did. Why I chased him.”

“How could you know Sappone was going to do …
that
?”

Moodrow felt his eyes begin to close. “You remember,” he said, his voice reduced to a whisper, “when the FBI attacked that cult in Texas? When the compound went up in flames and all those children died? Afterward, the feds claimed the fires were deliberately set, but that was just a diversion. When you pressure a crazy man, you have to expect a crazy reaction. Jilly couldn’t run away from me and he couldn’t surrender, so what he did was take the only way out. The only way out for a
crazy
man. Meanwhile, he stopped me cold and got away.”

“Maybe you should tell me exactly what happened. Remember, I was in Los Angeles at the time.”

Moodrow looked up. Betty was smiling at him, a good sign, no doubt. Pausing occasionally to order his thoughts, he worked his way through the events leading up to his and Sappone’s mutual recognition. The words came more slowly as he went on, but he was determined to get the whole story out. Knowing the longer he waited, the harder it would be.

“It was just bad luck,” he concluded. “Me and Jilly coming into that intersection at the same time. But it didn’t have to end the way it did. I should’ve let him go.”

“I think you need some rest, Stanley.” Betty lowered the bed down without asking permission. “But you might want to consider this. Neither Jim nor Leonora blame you; in fact, they were both amazed that you actually found Sappone.”

“What about Ann? Ann Kalkadonis.”

“She released a statement to the press. You weren’t mentioned by name, but she said she was satisfied with the police effort. From what you just told me, the police weren’t involved, so I guess she must’ve been talking about you and your partner.”

“What she told the vultures doesn’t have to be the truth. You have to give them something or they’ll never leave you alone.”

“Good point, Stanley. Because somebody released your name to the press and the hospital security already caught a reporter trying to get into your room.”

Later that same night—it could have been any time after visiting hours, though it had the feel of early morning—Moodrow woke up to a room lit only by the monitor behind his bed and a dim, shielded bulb over the closed door leading to the nurse’s station. His strength was clearly returning, enough so that rather than remain imprisoned in his own thoughts, he seriously considered the pros and cons of checking himself out of the hospital.

A tug on the heavy plastic tube jammed into his penis demonstrated the clear impossibility of that impulse. There was something holding it in place and he couldn’t very well carry a bag of urine under his coat, the ultimate kinky flasher. That was assuming he had a coat, or any other clothing, in the hospital.

He pulled himself to a sitting position, found the switch that controlled his bed, kept pressing buttons until the head rose. He wanted to swing his legs over the edge of the mattress, but the rails were up on both sides and he couldn’t find the release. Never a quitter, he kept trying until the pulse monitor sounded an alarm. Nurse Rashad entered a moment later.

“I thought I told you not to get out of that bed.”

“Does it look like I’m out of the
fucking
bed?”

“Don’t run your mouth to me. I’m your nurse, not your wife.”

His anger having fled as suddenly as it had appeared, Moodrow offered a quick apology. He didn’t know what had provoked his reaction, but it clearly wasn’t Nurse Rashad.

“Are you hungry?”

Moodrow took the question to mean she was making an apology of her own. “No, not really.”

“I’ve got some cold orange juice in the pantry. In case you’re thirsty.”

He shook his head, let himself fall back against the sheets. “What time is it?”

“It’s three-thirty.”

“In the morning?”

“That’s right.”

“How long have you been on?”

“Since four o’clock in the afternoon. I’m working a double shift, sixteen hours.” She smiled, shrugged her shoulders. “What could I say? I’ve got two growing MasterCards and an aging grandmother to support.”

Nurse Rashad was gone before Moodrow remembered to ask for a sleeping pill. He spent a minute looking for the call button, then, when he couldn’t find it, resigned himself to the inevitable. Moodrow had joined the NYPD in 1953, been promoted to the rank of detective five years later. Cold factual analysis was as much a part of his ordinary life as washing his hands before lunch or brushing his teeth in the morning. He might avoid it with Betty or Nurse Rashad for company, but not at three-thirty in the morning, not alone in a darkened room.

He listened to a monitor alarm sound in one of the other rooms on the ward, heard the distant wail of sirens on First Avenue. Background music to the scene he had to reconstruct. His eyes closed briefly, then opened to stare at the blank orange wall across the room as he visualized an intersection in Suffolk County.

When he could see it clearly, the traffic lights, the cars rushing by on the Long Island Expressway, Gadd sitting next to him, he began to work with his own mood. Remembering that he was annoyed with himself because they’d taken the long way around instead of making a U-turn on … He couldn’t recall the name of the street for a moment, but then it came back to him, Middle Island Road in the town of Medford. They were stopped there, at the intersection, and despite his annoyance, he was very excited, very pleased with himself because every decision he’d made that day had brought him a step closer to Jilly Sappone. Because he’d done everything right.

Moodrow had a prodigious memory. He wasn’t sure if it came by way of a Catholic school education or if he was born with it, but either way, he truly believed his memory to be the single attribute separating him from other NYPD detectives. He remembered everyone he met, good guys, bad guys, and noncombatants, had an internal file of mug shots and brief bios to go along with them. Even after thirty-six hours of near delirium, he could see the two cars, an ancient, rusted Cadillac and a small Toyota, turn left onto the Long Island Expressway service road, see the Taurus sliding up to the intersection.

The seating arrangement, two adult males, one in front, one in back, had intrigued him and he’d examined the men closely as the car rolled by. That was when he and Sappone had recognized each other. There’d been that moment of shock, of suspended animation, then the small Ford had careened across the intersection.

There’d been no time for calculation, for any weighing of profit and loss. Moodrow was on unfamiliar territory, a few seconds and Sappone would be gone, lost in the maze of some residential development. So, what he, Moodrow, had done, before he even considered the child, was give chase. What he’d done was confirm his identity by coming up on Sappone’s bumper, then slamming on the brakes.

He didn’t take it any further. What was the point? Every significant event had occurred in that intersection, every important decision had been made then and there. He shook his head, took a deep breath, then returned to the scene. Again, the Taurus rolled up, again his attention was drawn to the two men in the car. Sappone had been staring straight ahead, maybe focused on home, only a few blocks away, then he’d turned and their eyes had locked.

What he, Moodrow, should have done was hide his face, maybe turn to Gadd, lower his head, whisper, “That’s Sappone, don’t look at him.” Anything but sit there with his mouth open, dumbfounded, like the time Father O’Shea caught him masturbating in the rectory bathroom.

It didn’t sound much like delirium, he finally decided. In fact, it didn’t sound
anything
like delirium. Picking up on the odd seating arrangement was not the act of a deluded man, a man lost to fever. No, the simple truth was that he’d reacted too slowly. And not once, but twice. After he came up on the Taurus, he’d remembered Theresa Kalkadonis all right, remembered her in time to jam on the brakes, but not, of course, in time to actually save her life.

C
ARMINE STETTECASE LIKED TO
think of his row house on East Tenth Street, between Second and Third Avenues, as “my brownstone.” In the most literal sense, he was entirely correct—located in the middle of a block of renovated town houses, the five-story building did, in fact, retain its original facing of milky brown, New Jersey quarried sandstone. That, however was its
only
resemblance to the 1861 town house constructed in the emerging Italianate style for
Braumeister
Willem Bauer and his large, extended family. Not that Carmine—who had as much respect for tradition as anybody in the organized-crime business—had been the one to butcher 671 East Tenth Street. Far from it. In his own mind, he was the one who’d restored the structure, if not to its original glory, at least to solid, middle-class respectability.

The butchery had been accomplished a year after WWII, when Martin Tighe, a small-time landlord (formerly slumlord, this being his big move up) bought the building from the heirs of Miss Octavia Shankman, an octogenarian who’d maintained herself (and her middle-class sensibilities) by cleaning and cooking for six respectable female boarders. Tighe, in the habit of predicting the postwar housing crunch to anyone who’d listen, began by dumping the tenants, none of whom had had the foresight to secure a lease. New York, at the time, was locked into a rigid system of rent control; serious landlords either built new or bought empty. Tighe, the way he figured it, had bought empty, and the courts had backed him up.

Once the old ladies were packed off to whatever fate awaited them, Martin proceeded to the building itself. The high stoop leading to the parlor floor went first, along with an elaborate cast-iron railing, the double oak doors, and the carved brackets supporting the stone hood over the entranceway. A new entrance was cut into what had formerly been the basement, while the old one was sealed with brick and faced with sheets of stone stripped from a demolition site in Fort Greene, Brooklyn.

For the next several months, Tighe made his nut by selling off architectural details to an interior decorator on East Seventy-fifth Street. Everything of value went—the sliding oak doors and the mahogany shutters, three rococo mantels carved from the purest white marble, a finely wrought chandelier dating back to 1843, seventy feet of black walnut molding, even the parquet floors. When the contractor was finished, when rooms originally running half the length of the building had been reduced to eleven-by-twenty-foot boxes, Tighe had his name put on New York University’s approved list for student housing, filling his boxes at a stroke while, at the same time, avoiding cumbersome leases that would have bound him to the same rent-control laws Octavia Shankman had avoided by cooking for her tenants.

The following fifteen years were reasonably good to Martin Tighe. His properties, including 671 East Tenth Street, chugged out profits with the relentless determination of the Little Engine That Could. Enough profits to support two ex-wives, six children, and a sizable gambling habit that finally exploded in 1962 when Tighe’s main bookie, Johnny Bono (with ex-wives of his own to worry about) sold Tighe’s hundred-thousand-dollar debt to Carmine Stettecase.

It might have gone badly for Martin Tighe. Carmine, not especially noted for his patience, might, for instance, have sent Jilly Sappone to collect the debt. But Carmine was beset with an obsession all his own, an obsession inspired by two prominent politicians, Estes Kefauver and Robert Kennedy, and by a series of connected mobsters (mobsters formally sworn to the law of
omertà)
willing to testify in front of television cameras.

Carmine was living in a tenement on Elizabeth Street at the time, the walls of which were thin enough to let in the sounds of newly-wed love from an adjoining apartment. As he listened to the shrieking bedsprings late at night (as he reconstructed the day-to-day conspiracies hatched in his own kitchen), Carmine imagined FBI microphones in the walls, the ceilings, the light fixtures, the television set. He imagined himself surrounded by spinning reel-to-reel tape recorders, IRS agents in glen-plaid suits, imagined a dismal future in a cold, damp cell up near the Canadian border.

A lesser man would have collapsed under the weight of his fears, but Carmine Stettecase hadn’t clawed his way up from the bottom by refusing to meet his problems head-on. The smart move, he reasoned, was to insulate himself from attack in the hope that his pursuers—if pursuers there be—would veer off in search of easier targets. The way experienced b&e artists avoided houses with big dogs, barred windows, and burglar alarms.

One solution, already taken by many of his colleagues (and by tens of thousands of other New Yorkers, it being the era of white flight), was to buy a house in New Jersey or out on Long Island or up in Westchester, a house that sat on its own lot. There were three things wrong with that idea as far as Carmine was concerned. First, he had a sentimental attachment to Manhattan in general, and to his old neighborhood in particular. Second, he hated the idea of running away. Third, he was afraid of the wide-open spaces surrounding most private homes. There were just too many potential bad guys out there, too many cops, too many jealous rivals. It was hard enough defending a single apartment front door, maybe the window leading out to the fire escape. How could you protect an entire house? They might come at you from anywhere.

Now, more than twenty years later, Carmine sat on a leather recliner in his five-hundred-square-foot living room and sipped at a glass of freshly squeezed orange juice. As he watched his wife and his son’s mother-in-law prepare the breakfast table, he realized just how lucky he’d been to run into Johnny Bono on that long-ago night.

“The worst thing about it, what’s really bustin’ my balls,” Johnny had explained after a long preamble, “is I know this scumbag could raise the bread to pay me off. All he gotta do is sell some of that property.” They were sitting inside Carmine’s restaurant, Bono chugging down 7&7s like there was no tomorrow. “But he won’t do it, Carmine. Says the properties are mortgaged out, the real-estate market’s depressed, he’s got partners to worry about. I mean the prick has a different excuse every time I talk to him, which I ain’t doin’ too often because he’s makin’ himself scarce.”