Damaged Goods (28 page)

Still, the heat worked in their favor, a fact that Jilly Sappone was quick to recognize (and which went right over his partner’s head). The few citizens on the residential streets of the Upper West Side moved swiftly, purposefully, eyes locked on the pavement before them. Only the inevitable panhandlers bothered to scrutinize on-comers, but their media-free horizons were limited to give or not give. They had no interest in kidnappers and murderers.

Jilly Sappone led Jackson-Davis west toward Riverside Park, a block-wide strip of grass, shrubs, and playgrounds running along the Hudson River, from the upscale white neighborhoods just above Lincoln Center to 125
^th
Street in the heart of black Harlem. Like every other green space in New York, Riverside Park was a summertime refuge for the poor and the middle class. Cabin fever is a term usually associated with the severe winters of the far north, but to citizens trapped in air-conditioned spaces for weeks at a time, the urge to get outside at any cost is very real. This is especially true for the wives, nannies, and weekend fathers charged with the care of small children.

“Hey, Jackson, tell me what ya think of this.” Jilly Sappone’s eyes, shadowed by the bill of his Mets baseball cap, swept the street, from side to side, like a metronome. He was aware of the Colt’s weight pulling at the waistband of his jeans, knew exactly how long it would take to jam his hand beneath his shirt, get the show on the road. “Maybe this time we could snatch a boy instead of a girl. Variety’s the spice of life, right?”

Jackson-Davis wanted to run. He wanted to tear out of there, fly across the city, race all the way back to Ocobla. He wondered, idly, if anyone he knew would still be there. Maybe his daddy or old Betty-Ann. He was sorry, now, for what he’d done to Betty-Ann, wished he could take it all back, start over again.

“It’s a free country,” Jackson whispered. His old pa used to say that all the time. “It’s a damn free country.”

“Say what?” Jilly drew a deep breath, let his eyes close momentarily. He felt exhilarated, almost buoyant, like he was stepping into a prison yard for the first time.

Hey, all you pigs out there, he thought, here I am, Gildo Sappone. Kill me if you can.

“It’s a damn free country,” Jackson repeated. He looked at Jilly for a moment, then said, “My ol’ pa used to say that.”

“Yeah, well your old man was right. At least this time. See, what we’re gonna do is take what we want. Just like it was free.”

As they approached West End Avenue, Jilly slowed. Two men and a middle-aged woman holding a small brown dog in her arms stood on the corner waiting to cross the street. As a matter of pure reflex, each had given Jilly and his companion a brief, sidelong glance. Jilly watched their faces, looking for any sign of recognition, but the group had apparently pronounced him safe. When the light changed, they crossed the street, then turned south.

Jilly continued west for half a block, then stopped suddenly. “Jackson, I just got a
great
idea. Why don’t we take a kid and a kid’s fuckin’
mother
?” He started walking again, noting that Jackson-Davis followed alongside, a whipped puppy chained to its master. “So whatta ya say? Want a mommy, too?”

At that moment, though he didn’t break stride, Jackson-Davis returned to his mother’s side, the scene dominating his consciousness with the force of a dream. He was standing in the doorway of Reverend Luke’s bedroom, watching his old pa aim one last kick at his old ma’s face. Even at age nine, slow as everybody said he was, Jackson knew his ma was already dead. That was because she’d gone and peed on the rug. There was no way his old ma would pee on the rug unless she was dead.

“I don’t hear ya, Jackson.” Jilly put a little edge in his tone, figuring Jackson would respond out of habit.

“I don’t want no mommy.”

“Ya sure?” He pulled Jackson into the shadow of a doorway, slid a folding knife out of his back pocket. “Don’t ya wanna use this? Huh? Don’t ya wanna do what comes natural?”

“No, I don’t.”

Jilly shrugged his shoulders. “Whatever suits ya, boy.” Just as if he didn’t know what would happen if he put Jackson-Davis in the same room with a helpless woman.

As they crossed Riverside Drive and entered the park, Jilly glanced south at the Soldiers and Sailors monument a block away. Faced with white limestone, the monument rose, a narrow cylinder, sixty feet above the intensely green lawn. Jilly stared at the circle of Corinthian columns for a moment, then let his eyes travel upward to a domed crown from which six muscular eagles, their wings outspread as if about to take flight, guarded the island of Manhattan.

“That’s Grant’s Tomb,” he announced. “Yeah, definitely. Grant’s fuckin’ Tomb.”

The tour officially over, Jilly turned his attention to a busy playground at the foot of a steep hill a hundred feet away. The mothers and the nannies were sitting on wooden benches (separate wooden benches, of course); they looked wilted, ready to pack it in. Meanwhile, their brats were tearing from the swings to the sliding pond to the sandbox, shrieking at the tops of their lungs.

Jackson watched the scene as closely as his partner. From this distance, the children in their bright summer clothes seemed to be playing a single game. Somehow, their joy sapped the last bit of his strength, left him feeling as if he’d been the victim of some long-ago crime. That what he knew was going to happen to him had already happened.

“Tell ya what, Jackson.” Jilly nudged his partner forward. “Let’s go in them bushes. Hide there till we decide who we want.” As he followed Jackson into the darkness beneath the shrubbery, Jilly slid the knife out of his back pocket and thumbed the blade open. He’d never used a knife before his first bit in Sing-Sing, preferring an automatic and his bare fists. But there were no guns in the joint and no way to survive without a weapon, so he’d carried a shank, learned how to use it quickly and silently.

He recalled snuffing a con named Rolando Meara at the weekly movie for a vial of morphine tablets smuggled out of the prison hospital. Though the room had been full of prisoners, though guards stood in every corner, the act of killing had gone unnoticed until the lights went up and the prisoners filed out, leaving poor Rolando to the tender mercies of a county pathologist.

“Say, Jackson, you’re a country boy. Can ya eat these little black berries?” Jilly pointed at the canopy above them. “See what I’m talkin’ about?”

“You saved me, right?” Jackson-Davis spoke with his back to Jilly Sappone. He was afraid now, afraid of his partner and afraid to run. If he ran, he’d be alone again. Alone as he’d been on that first night in jail when the other prisoners, black and white, had eyeballed him like he was a midnight snack in need of cooking. “Saved me from the niggers?”

“Nah, that ain’t what it was about.” Jilly dropped his left hand onto Jackson’s shoulder. “I was just usin’ ya, buddy. To carry shit for me, get it? Dope, shanks, whatever I was too paranoid to carry myself. I never gave a shit about ya one way or the other.”

Jilly let his head swivel once before driving the knife into Jackson-Davis Wescott’s back with all his strength. That was the secret, of course, to killing with a knife. You had to put everything you had into the first cut.

By the time Jim and Rose Tilley, accompanied by their two children, Lee and Jeanette, showed up at five o’clock in the afternoon, Stanley Moodrow was consciously referring to his visitors as “the Ghosts of Triumphs Past.” Rose had once been married to a man named Levander Greenwood, a terminal crack junkie who’d terrified the Lower East Side for several weeks before Moodrow, still an NYPD detective, brought him down. Jim Tilley had been Moodrow’s partner at the time, his first partner in more than twenty years. They’d been friends ever since.

Levander’s presence on the scene that night remained unspoken. He was, after all, Lee and Jeanette’s biological father. But that didn’t mean the essential message was lost on Stanley Moodrow. Levander had hated his wife, vowed revenge, would certainly have killed her if Moodrow hadn’t taken him off the scene. In some small, but very real sense, the robust Tilley clan owed its literal existence to Moodrow’s efforts.

“Uncle Stanley, I got a problem,” Lee said. He bit enthusiastically into an almond cluster, chewed thoughtfully for a moment before swallowing. “A guy in the gym, Andre Carpenter. He’s short, but he’s got these long, thick arms. When he puts them up in front of his face, I can’t get through his guard.”

Moodrow drank in the cozy domestic scene. Rose and Betty were in the kitchen, chatting it up as they put drinks on a tray. Jim was perched, elbows on knees, chin in hand, on the couch next to Lee. Jeanette, off by herself, was totally absorbed in a book. Jim, Moodrow knew, was worried about his daughter, feeling she spent too much time by herself. Meanwhile, Jeanette was holding a ninety-seven average at St. Bartholomew’s.

“You wanna know what I’d do?” Moodrow finally said. “Me, I’d step to the side and go to the body. Hit him in the small of the back if necessary. Anything to hurt him, make him fight.” He paused, then added, “That’s because I’m stupid.”

Lee ignored the final comment. “It doesn’t help me to know what
you’d
do. I need to know what
I’d
do.”

Moodrow, though he’d slept for several hours, felt suddenly tired. The whole business of stepping into the squared circle, from the endless hours in the gym to the fat, clumsy gloves, seemed actually stupid, the ultimate expression of the worst human instincts. Nevertheless, he forced himself to speak.

“The guy can’t hit you with his hands in front of his face. What you have to do is throw a lot of punches, not worry about getting through. If he doesn’t respond, the judges’ll have to give you the match. The important thing is not to lose your temper.”

The answer, Moodrow knew, reasonable as it sounded, wouldn’t solve Lee’s problem. Lee dreamed of being Marvin Hagler, not Pernell Whitaker. He wanted to flatten every opponent. Fortunately, Betty and Rose picked that moment to come into the living room and the conversation turned to less macho topics.

Moodrow sat back in his chair, sipped at his bourbon, let the words run over him. An hour later, as the kids cleared the table, he tugged at Jim Tilley’s sleeve and asked the question he swore he wouldn’t ask.

“Anything on Sappone? Any rumors, any leads?”

“Not that I’m aware of, Stanley. I think I already told you that I’m not working the case.”

“Yeah, yeah, I know.” Moodrow shook his head. “I just thought you might have heard something.”

“Nobody’s talking to me,” Tilley admitted. “But you’ve gotta believe Sappone’s holed up somewhere. He couldn’t just vanish.”

Once the Tilleys were gone, Moodrow assumed the ordeal was over. He went into the kitchen, began to pile glasses in the sink.

“Stanley, you’re not mad at me, are you?”

Moodrow looked up, shook his head. “That you cared enough to arrange it, that everybody showed up …” He turned back to the sink. “You know …”

Betty came up behind him, put her arms around his waist. She was about to tell him how much she loved him, to whisper it into his ear, when the doorbell sounded.

“Oh,” she said, stepping away. “I forgot.” She pushed a button next to the telephone, opening the lobby door.

“Forgot what?” Moodrow, on the way to his own door, drank in the expression on Betty’s face, a mix of guilt and glee very familiar to him. She’d done something naughty and the joke was going to be on him.

“Forgot to tell you.”

He opened the door, stepped out into the hall to find Connie Alamare, her grandson Michael in tow, walking toward him.

“Hey, chooch,” she called merrily, “how’s the head?”

“Never better, Connie.”

The worst part, Moodrow knew, was that Michael would run off with Betty the instant his grandmother let go of his hand. That would leave him alone with Connie Alamare, the Ghosts of Successes Past having become the Nightmare of Failures Present.

“Good to hear.” She swept past him into the apartment and released her grandson. Michael, as predicted, tore into the kitchen and threw his arms around Betty.

“Connie,” Moodrow said, “you want something to drink?” He smiled, waved her to a seat. “I’m thinking about hemlock for myself.”

“Michael and I will take care of the drinks,” Betty announced.

“Fine.” Moodrow, trapped and willing to admit it, took the armchair next to Connie’s.

“Look at that.” Connie jerked her chin at Betty and Michael in the kitchen. “It’s like they shared the same foxhole, right? Like they been through a war together.”

“Yes, and I saved them. It’s overkill, already.” The worst part, Moodrow decided, was that Connie Alamare was stunning. She’d gotten a face-lift six months before, looked thirty-five instead of fifty-five. With her dark complexion and razor-sharp features, she was every inch the exotic Mediterranean beauty, the heroine of her own novels, Melina Mercouri or Sophia Loren by way of scalpel and suture.

“Hey,” Connie Alamare leaned forward, tapped Moodrow’s knee, “truth is truth, right?” She ran on without waiting for an answer. “So when do you take down this
figlio di puttana?
When do you get him off the street?”

Moodrow started to tell her to mind her own business, then thought better of it. Knowing there were no words in his vocabulary strong enough to slow her down, much less stop her. “Getting Sappone off the street has nothing to do with me.” He kept his voice strong, but matter-of-fact. “I don’t have a client and I don’t represent the state. The cops’ll take care of Jilly. Them or Carmine Stettecase.” He’d said the same thing so often in the last couple of days, the words seemed to come by rote. Like the Pledge of Allegiance or the Our Father.

“What’s this about a client? Since when do you need a client?”

“Since now.”

“You can say that? After you saw with your own eyes what he did to that girl?”

Moodrow sighed. The woman had all the sensitivity of a rhino with a toothache. “It’s not like he’s gonna get away with it. The whole city’s looking for him.”

Connie sat back in the chair, folded her arms across her chest. “And what do you think’s gonna happen when some gung-ho
putz
of a patrolman stumbles across him?” She slapped the fingernails of her right hand against her chin. “You think Jilly Sappone’s gonna hold out his hands, ask for a lawyer?”