Damaged Goods (30 page)

The bath water was inevitably cold by the time the alarm sounded, but Mary, shivering and naked, always let the tub drain completely before turning on the shower. The hot water, of course, felt pleasant, but the shower was a busy time, too busy for sensory indulgence. First, she rinsed her face, then washed and conditioned her hair (all of her beauty products came from Elizabeth Arden, all had been purchased from a catalog) before cleansing her body, inch by inch, with a hypoallergenic shower gel designed for sensitive skin.

Mary, once her shower was finished, shifted into a still higher gear, moussing, then blow-drying her coarse black hair thoroughly before tossing on a robe and heading off to her dressing room. Seated at her vanity, she barely saw her reflection as she spread astringent, then moisturizer, then a liquid foundation over her face, didn’t make a single decision as she followed up with powder, eye shadow, eyeliner, mascara, eyebrow pencil, rouge, lipstick liner, and lipstick.

Her perfume came last, and that final effort seemed to exhaust her, because she never managed to open the closet, choose a dress from the two dozen that hung there. Instead, suddenly listless, she drifted into the bedroom where she sank into the recliner, raised the remote, waited for the day to finally end.

Tommy, the door firmly closed, crossed the room to his desk, plopped down in a leather chair worthy of a senior partner, jammed the earphones over his head just in time to hear his father curse the Chink. Tommy always did it this way, charging up the stairs and into his little den. Though he recorded every word, could have listened at his leisure, there was something about catching it live, as if he was in the same room, making decisions, offering opinions … Well that was why he’d bugged his father’s dining room, just to be there in his rightful place.

Tommy had read
The Godfather
sixteen times; he identified with every one of the brothers, even poor, treacherous Fredo.
Especially
poor treacherous Fredo. Which was not to say that he intended his father any harm. No, when it started, Tommy had just wanted to be at that breakfast table, shoveling food into his mouth, grunting in all the right places, laughing at his father’s bad jokes. That was why he used the same tape, day after day, recording one meeting over another until the tape finally broke.

The fuckin Chink says there’s another delay.

Tommy nodded at the chorus of grunts and groans that followed, as predictable as Josie Rizzo’s scowl.

The boat’s trapped in some goddamned port in Africa. Somethin’ about the niggers are killin’ each other and there’s nobody to unload cargo and they can’t even get refueled. Meanwhile, the Chink, who says it happens all the time, won’t name me the port or even the fuckin’ country. He’s talkin another week, maybe ten days.

Kill him, Tommy thought, forget about the deal and kill the Chink.

What we gotta do here is forget about the fuckin’ deal. Whack the Chink and write the whole thing off.

Tommy nodded. That was Guido Palanzo, who’d lost his middle son to an overdose of heroin. Guido hated the dope business, though he hadn’t turned up his nose at a chance to triple his investment in forty-eight hours. None of them had.

Carmine, I ain’t too sure I can hold onto the money for much longer. The boys’re gettin restless.

That would be Vinnie Trentacosta, always practical. The deal had called for three million cash dollars and Carmine simply hadn’t had it, not by half. So he’d done what drug dealers have been doing for decades: He’d taken front money from potential customers. That hadn’t been a problem, Carmine being who he was, but Carmine (through his boys, of course) had assured his investors that the deal would go down in a few days, maybe a week at the outside. Now it was a month later with more delay to come.

They gonna pull out?

Carmine again, his voice carrying a tinge of anger, followed by three negative grunts, then Guido Palanzo.

It ain’t that bad, Carmine. I mean what the fuck are they gonna do about it? As long as we don’t take off, they’ll sit. But, see, what with not usin’ the telephones, I’m spendin my whole day makin’ explanations to jerks I wouldn’t let suck my dick. Meanwhile, my other investments are goin’ in the tank.

A brief silence, followed by Carmine’s judicious tones.

We’re gonna wait and that’s all there is to it. Nobody’s gettin’ their money back. Much as I hate his fuckin’ guts, it ain’t the Chink’s fault that we gotta take front money. It ain’t somethin 1 could’a told him.

That being the end of that, Carmine turned the conversation to the purely practical. He intended to use three vans for the pickup. Two would head off into nowhere (pure decoys in case one of the investors got busted, decided for the witness protection program), while the third jumped off the highway on the far side of the Midtown Tunnel, circled through Long Island City, jumped back into the tunnel again.

Each of the vans would have to be fully staffed: a driver, a chemist, four
very
trusted shooters armed to the teeth, one of Carmine’s lieutenants to handle the money. Twenty-one psychopaths, as Tommy had come to learn, all assembled and ready in exactly the same place at exactly the same time, made for one hell of a personnel problem. If left to their own devices, each would play the big monkey, strut like an aroused tomcat looking for a battle, descend into a chaos that mirrored his inner life. Control would require a minute-to-minute effort by Carmine and the boys.

The vans would leave from Little-Dominick Guarino’s lumber yard on East 119
^th
Street. Assuming the deal went down as expected, the van making the actual pickup would return to a garage on Eagle Street in Greenpoint, Brooklyn. The heroin would be divided up, then delivered, one piece at a time so as not to jeopardize the whole load. That process would require at least two days of incredible tension;
everything
would have to be guarded, including the guards themselves.

I wanna bring the money to the house. All of it.

Tommy sat up, his flagging interest suddenly revived. The money in hand, about three-quarters of the total needed to pull off the deal, had been stashed in several locations.

It’s botherin me havin it scattered. Too much risk. I mean why did I build my brownstone like Fort Knox? Why do I gotta take a chance when I could have it right under my nose?

One floor above Tommaso Stettecase, in a two-bedroom apartment crammed with very old, very dusty furniture, an apartment lit by 25-watt bulbs, an apartment without a working refrigerator, Josie Rizzo dialed the phone number given to her by Karl Holtzmann. She was sitting at the edge of her bed, on a gray sheet, chewing a croissant taken from Carmine’s busy kitchen.

“Ewing.”

“Go get Gildo.”

“Mrs. Rizzo?”

“You get Gildo,
now.
” While she waited, Josie tapped her foot against a carpet worn past the point of threadbare and imagined the reels of the tape recorder as they turned, gathering Carmine’s doom, four stories below. The day was drawing closer, her own personal day of judgment. She could feel the powers gather, a dark army, irresistible, an army of demons eager to claim the spoils of war. To drown itself in blood.

“Aunt Josie?”

“Yeah. Where they take you, Gildo?”

“I don’t know. There’s nothin’ out the window but trees.”

Josie knew the agent would be listening. That’s what the FBI did best. That was why they’d prepared a signal. When she needed her nephew, she’d be able to bring him to her side. Josie had no illusions about the witness protection program, no faith in the promise she’d exacted from Kirkwood and Holtzmann. Sooner or later, they’d have to erase the dark shadow falling across their moment of triumph. All she’d bought was time.

“How they treat you?”

Jilly’s laughter flowed into her ear. “First thing I got in the car, Ewing banged me with a taser, one of those electric guns. I don’t know how many volts, but it put me out for a minute. When I woke up, I had enough chains around me to sink the Staten Island Ferry.”

“Whatta you expect, Gildo? They see a man like you, they wet their pants.”

“And, me, I’m such a sweetheart. I can’t understand it.” He laughed again. “They got me stuck in a corner of the house with a bed, a toilet, a television. It’s a hundred percent locked off, plastic windows that don’t open, like in a bank, if you could believe that. They pass my dinner through a food slot.”

“You all by yourself? They don’t come inside?”

“All by my little lonely self, Aunt Josie.”

“That’s good,” Josie said before remembering Agent Ewing’s big ears. “All by yourself, you won’t get into no trouble. Remember, you gotta practice bein’ a good boy, Gildo. For when they put us in the program.”

“At least he’s off the street,” Karl Holtzmann said.

“We’ve bought a little time, Karl,” Abner Kirkwood responded. “The game has been postponed, not erased from the schedule.”

They were walking on the north side of Washington Square Park. To their right, across the street, a row of identical brick town houses glowed a soft red-orange under the spring sun. On their left, dealers selling upscale reefer and powder cocaine worked the area just in front of the monument, a great memorial arch in honor of the first president’s inauguration.

Kirkwood waved a hand at the town houses. “Greek Revival,” he announced, “built in the 1830s. The finest examples in the city.” He stopped walking, put a hand on Holtzmann’s arm. “You know anything about the history of New York, Karl?”

Holtzmann sniffed once. “I’m from Minnesota.” He ran his fingers over the lapels of his suit. As if the subject was somehow distasteful.

“Once upon a time, we kept the scum penned up, like any other plague.” Kirkwood gestured to the dealers. “We locked them into the Five Points, the Tenth Ward, the Lower East Side, let them do whatever they wanted to each other as long as they didn’t come out. That’s what Theodore Roosevelt meant when he said real law was found at the end of a nightstick, not in a courtroom.”

“That day is long gone, Abner.” It seemed, to Agent Holtzmann, as good a response as any.

Kirkwood shrugged his shoulders. “The Warren Court’s work, of course. They tossed out the loitering laws, said a human being in the United States of America has the right to go anywhere.”

Holtzmann winked. “The Supreme Court made a slight mistake. It assumed that every bipedal hominid is human. We know better.”

“That’s right, Karl.” He set off again, strolling from the shade of an ancient catalpa into bright sunlight. “And when you think of Jilly Sappone, you might want to remember what you just said. That way you won’t feel so bad when you have to kill him.”

“Kill him?” Holtzmann fought an urge to laugh out loud. It was easy for a punk like Abner Kirkwood to talk about murder, but when the time came to splash the upholstery with Jilly’s skull and brains, Abner would piss his pants like any other raw recruit on his first battlefield. By then, of course, it would be much too late. “Oh, by all means.”

M
OODROW, HAVING THUMBTACKED A
note to his door, was up on the roof when Ginny Gadd made her appearance at six o’clock in the evening. He was sitting in the shadows with his back against the brick tower enclosing the stairwell, this in deference to crazed snipers like the one who’d scared the crap out of him a few days before. There being no skyscrapers on his part of the island, the sun, though dropping in the west, still flooded most of the roof, silhouetting anybody foolish enough to stand around. Neither Moodrow, nor his neighbor and landlord, Manny Ochoa, were foolish.

Manny, as he pulled on a thirty-two-ounce Michelob, was going on and on about the “old days,” the glorious Fifties when he’d run with the Crimson Lords. Yes, he admitted (as he had to Moodrow many times in the past), he, like all his buddies, had carried a switchblade. Once, he’d even tried to build a zip gun in the basement, though that particular experiment had literally blown up in his face. But neither he nor his macho pals had robbed old ladies, fired semiautomatic weapons into crowds of schoolchildren, sold poison to their own community. Instead, they’d battled it out with rivals in playgrounds and parks, defending turf and honor, moving on to jobs and families when they grew into full
“hombria.”

“You see what I’m saying here? I was
el echao pa’lante,
the one who went first into the fight, but I was never an
abusador.
I did not smash my mother to the ground for dope money.” He spread his arms out. “And now I have all this.”

Moodrow grunted his agreement, though he wasn’t so sure about “all this.” Manny spent his days driving a truck for UPS, his nights working on his building. He did virtually everything, from boiler repairs to mopping the stairwells to evicting drug dealers at the point of a 12 gauge. This worked out well for his tenants, but it meant a life of endless toil for Manny. Still, if Manny was happy with what he’d accomplished in his fifty or so years on the planet, who was Moodrow to criticize?

“One time, you know, ever’body come up to the roof in the summertime.” Manny waved again, indicating the tenement rooftops surrounding his building. “You know what I’m sayin’,
hombre
?” He tapped Moodrow on the shoulder. “They came up to eat their dinners, to have a few beers, to sleep when it was too hot to sleep in the house. Remember when every roof had a pigeon coop? Huh? Now you look around, you don’ see
nada.
”

Guinevere Gadd, as if she’d heard Manny’s declamation and wanted to issue a personal denial, took that moment to step into view. She nodded to the two men, said, “I got your note,” then, no fool herself, stepped into the shadows.

Moodrow hauled himself to his feet. True to his word, he’d spent most of his day sleeping, the insistent ring of the telephone rousing him just after five o’clock. He’d answered to find a very pissed-off Betty Haluka. She and her clients, it seemed, had waited all day for a city attorney who never showed up whereupon she’d asked for a default judgment. The administrative law judge (shorthand, according to Betty, for incompetent clubhouse flunky), had responded by granting the city, without explanation, a six-week postponement. Meanwhile, the tenants lived in hell.