Damaged Goods (31 page)

After five minutes of grunting agreement, Moodrow had finally gotten his chance. He told her about Gadd’s unexpected arrival, the promise he made, adding, “Don’t ask me why, because I don’t know.”

“If she’s feeling as bad as you say,” Betty had suggested, “maybe you’re just sorry for her.”

Maybe he was, but just now, looking into Gadd’s eyes, he couldn’t find a glimmer of suffering. She seemed buoyant, if not actually confident.

“You ready to get going?” he asked.

“Yeah,” she said, “I got something to tell you.”

“This I already figured.”

They were headed uptown on Avenue C, the windows rolled down to let the heat out, when Gadd finally decided to explain. “I followed Josie Rizzo this afternoon.”

Moodrow, though he cringed inwardly, held his peace, deciding to let her get it out before he explained the obvious.

“You gave me the description, right? I mean it’s hard to miss a six-foot-tall grandma in a black dress with her eyes pinned to the sidewalk. I tell ya, Moodrow, she never looked up or around, not once. Like she thought she was invisible.” Gadd lit a Newport, blew a stream of blue-gray smoke out the window. “Soot for the soot,” she observed, before resuming. “Now, mostly, Josie went from shop to shop. A butcher on Elizabeth Street, a bakery on MacDougal, a dry cleaner on Sixth Avenue, a druggist on Eighth … right into the West Village where she dropped a small package into a padlocked metal box in a little courtyard on Grove Street.” She smiled, leaned toward Moodrow, almost whispered, “Wouldn’t you like to know what was in that package? Wouldn’t you like to know if it was a tape recording?”

“Tell me you didn’t break into that box?” Moodrow, to his surprise, was nearly whispering himself.

“No, not yet.” Gadd settled back into the seat. “But it’s what we thought, yes? That Josie was ratting on Carmine Stettecase?”

Moodrow pulled up at the Fourteenth Street stoplight, put the car into neutral. “Gadd, do you have any idea what Carmine would do if he found a private eye following his mother-in-law? You know what he’d have to assume? Remember, you’re not a cop anymore.”

Gadd chose not to answer the question. “There was nobody else around, Moodrow,” she insisted. “Not even the feds. Anyway, now that I know what she’s doing, I don’t have to follow her. The slot on that box was just big enough to handle a tape cassette.”

The light changed and Moodrow slid the car back into gear. “So, tell me how this helps you? To know what you already knew? Remember, if you break into that box, it
would
be obstruction of justice. The feds would have a legitimate beef.”

“Not if they don’t find out.” She jabbed the cigarette between her lips. “I know a trick with a nylon stocking that’ll open most padlocks within a few seconds.”

Moodrow, with no ready response that didn’t sound like pure nagging, pushed the car west on Fourteenth Street past Union Square, maneuvering the Chevy around double-parked trucks and cars turning in the intersections. He let the traffic, just heavy enough to require his attention, absorb him until he finally caught up with the commuters a few blocks from the Lincoln Tunnel on Tenth Avenue. Stopped dead, he turned to Gadd, asked, “Exactly what do you—or
we
—hope to accomplish by knowing the content of that—or any other—tape recording? Assuming what Josie put in that box
is
a tape.”

“I like the scenario we laid out this morning.” Gadd tossed the cigarette butt out the window. “Josie wants her nephew out of jail, the board turns him down, Josie goes to the feds, the feds spring Jilly. It fits the facts, right? But that’s the past and what we didn’t do was project the chain into the future.” She turned to him, her face dead serious. “Jilly kills a child before the feds have their case wrapped up. He becomes public enemy number one, but that doesn’t mean Josie doesn’t love him anymore. No, what she does is put the squeeze on the FBI. She forces them to protect her nephew. Which they are doing even as we speak.”

Gadd waited a moment, then, when Moodrow didn’t reply, continued on. “The house where Jilly and his partner were living? The cops found nearly seven thousand dollars taped behind the bureau. Plus, the closets were full of clothes. I ask you, Moodrow, how come Sappone, if he’s broke, if he doesn’t have a change of underwear, hasn’t done something really stupid? You think he just vanished? Maybe committed suicide by jumping off the George Washington Bridge?”

“It’s only been a few days.” Moodrow, looking for a way around the cars projecting back across the intersection from the mouth of the tunnel, pushed the Chevy as far to the right as possible. When he’d cleared Forty-second Street, gotten himself moving uptown again, he suddenly admitted that she might easily be right about the feds and Jilly Sappone. He asked himself what he would do if, in the middle of an important case, he was faced with a demonstrably insane informant.

Chain up the prick in some basement, he said to himself. Close the case and leave him to the rats.

Fifteen minutes later, the car safely parked in a lot on Seventy-eighth Street, Moodrow and Gadd walked east toward Broadway. It was a beautiful evening, still warm enough for shirtsleeves. The sun, dropping fast, projected a steady blast of cool golden light along the crosstown streets, exploding in shop windows, the windshields of parked cars, even the eyeglasses of strolling pedestrians.

Broadway, running north-south, was, by contrast, locked into shadow. Nevertheless, the sidewalks were crowded; the citizens of the Upper West Side, with money to spend, were out in force. They gathered in cafés and restaurants on both sides of the avenue, drifted through a hundred small shops, buying everything from baby clothes to hand-dipped chocolate. At Eightieth Street, the windows of an enormous Barnes & Nobles superstore displayed the latest Rush Limbaugh tome next to the latest unauthorized biography of Malcolm X.

“New York ecumenical.” Moodrow announced. “Next thing they’ll be selling Cardinal O’Connor’s collected sermons at pro-abortion rallies.”

“If there’s a buyer, there’s always gonna be a seller,” Gadd replied, the display of cynicism being, in her own mind, strictly obligatory. “Say, I don’t want to play the party pooper here—and I’m not sayin’ it’s not a beautiful night for a walk through the neighborhood—but would telling me what we’re gonna do actually tear you apart?”

“Hell, Gadd, if I knew what we were gonna do, I would’ve told you long before now.”

“You gotta do better than that, Moodrow.” Gadd stopped in her tracks. “Else I’ll definitely have to shoot you.”

Moodrow watched her reflection in the window of a shop specializing in leather clothing. The name of the shop, Skins and Things, floated just above her bushy hair, its gold letters curling around her skull like a halo.

“We need help.” Moodrow turned to face her. “Going from bar to bar, from the dry cleaner to the liquor store … hell, it’d take forever.” He jerked his chin to indicate the scene in front of them. “I lived my whole life in New York, but this I never saw until about ten years ago.”

Gadd looked down the block, nodded thoughtfully. “You’re talkin’ about the panhandlers, the homeless, right?”

It was too early for the fear of crime (in this neighborhood, anyway) to make its appearance. That would come after eleven o’clock, when most of the spring celebrants were home preparing for another workday. For now, at 7:30, the only thing between the citizenry and a perfect May evening were homeless beggars, black and white, who shook their Styrofoam coffee cups, whispered their entreaties:
Spare change, spare change. Help me out, man. Help me.

Most seemed robust, young men in their thirties wearing raggedy trousers, ripped sneakers, as if they’d been drawn from central casting. A few were clearly disturbed, mumbling or shouting or crying as they made their halting way along the sidewalk. A still smaller number sat on the pavement, backs against the wall, knees drawn up into their chests, displaying signs lettered on torn pieces of cardboard: HELP ME PLEASE/I HAVE AIDS/HELP ME.

“You think they’d be willing to look for Sappone?” Gadd shook her head. “Wrong question. Do you think they’d be
able
to look?”

“Not that guy.” Moodrow pointed to a bearded young man, maybe twenty-five years old, stumbling over parked cars in the gutter. He was shouting, “I’m in the soup, I’m in the soup.” Over and over again.

“No, not him,” Gadd agreed.

“See, I’m not gonna ask them about Sappone. What I think is that Sappone’s holed up somewhere, that he’s got his partner running errands. That would be the smart way to play it, since it’s mostly been Sappone’s face on the TV screen.”

They walked half a block north, past a cheese store and a gourmet coffee shop before they were approached. Moodrow evaluated the panhandler in the usual cop fashion, doing it quickly, automatically. Black, six feet, maybe one-sixty-five; medium complexion, bushy hair, face narrow, small-featured; two-inch scar on the left eyebrow.

“Can ya help me out, bro?” The man kept his cup away from Gadd, his eyes on the pavement.

Moodrow reached into his trouser pocket, slipped a single off the roll he’d put there a few hours earlier, dropped it in the cup. The panhandler looked at the bill for a moment, then raised his eyes to meet Moodrow’s for the first time.

“I’m lookin’ for somebody,” Moodrow said before the man could begin to thank him.

“Right, I see.” The man stepped back, nodded thoughtfully. He pulled the cup into his waist, shielded it with his free hand.

“What’s your name?”

“That dollar,” the man replied evenly, “it’s real nice and all, but it don’t buy you my name.” He hesitated. “You too old to be a cop.”

“You got that right. I’m not a cop, which means I don’t want something for nothing. Anybody spots this guy and gives me a call, it’s worth a hundred bucks.”

Gadd stepped forward. “That’s
if
we find him. Bullshit phone calls will be handled with all due belligerence.”

The man nodded, extended his hand. “My name’s Dwight. What’s this dude look like?”

Moodrow handed over Jackson-Davis Wescott’s mug shot. He wanted to keep things as simple as possible.

“The peculiar thing about this guy, he’s about thirty-five and he’s got white hair and freckles. Not gray hair, but white. Platinum blonde, like Madonna.”

“Sounds like Alabama white trash.”

“Mississippi.”

“Can I keep this?” He smiled for the first time.

Moodrow shook his head. “I can’t take a chance. The posters end up on the street, my man is liable to stumble across one, know somebody’s looking for him.”

Dwight gave the mug shot back to Moodrow. “I take it this ain’t an exclusive you’re givin’ me.”

“The race goes to the swift, Dwight,” Gadd responded, shoving a business card into the man’s outstretched hand. “But we’re a hundred percent sure he’s living somewhere on the Upper West Side. And you can’t miss him,” she added. “If you’re walking around with your eyes open, there’s no way you can miss him.”

The essential message delivered, Moodrow and Gadd simply walked away, leaving Dwight to stare at the phone number on the card. They were in for a long evening and both knew it. There were hundreds of beggars to speak to, dozens of blocks to walk, not only on Broadway, but on Columbus and Amsterdam Avenues as well. It would take days to cover the whole area.

Gadd started to say something about Moodrow’s grand strategy being a long shot, then realized they had no other line of approach, not unless they found another Carlo Sappone.

“Whatta ya say to this, Moodrow. Whatta ya say we kidnap Josie Rizzo, beat it out of her.”

“I’d say you’ve been watching too much television.”

“You didn’t say that about Carlo.”

“Carmine would have to kill you, Gadd. He might want to give you a reward, especially if she never came back, but what he’d do is protect the family honor.”

“Not if Josie didn’t tell him.”

A few minutes later, they decided to separate. Moodrow crossed the street, then turned north and began to work. He and Gadd kept each other in sight, a mutual protectiveness that was entirely unnecessary. Nobody refused the dollar, nobody refused to look at Wescott’s photo, nobody refused a business card. A hundred dollars was clearly more money than any of these men had seen in a long time.

When they reached Ninety-sixth Street, the somewhat arbitrary northern boundary of the Upper West Side, Moodrow recrossed the street to meet his partner.

“Gets old in a hurry,” he observed.

“No doubt about it.” Gadd lit a cigarette, then checked her watch. It was nearly ten o’clock. “If we hurry, we can get down to Lincoln Center before the concerts let out.” She looked up at him. “You doin’ okay?”

Moodrow shrugged. “We have to walk in that direction to pick up the car. I’ll see how I’m feeling when we get to Seventy-eighth Street.”

They didn’t get two blocks before an elderly black man limped over to them. He was wearing a knit cap and a heavy, hooded parka. The wool cap had come partially unraveled, revealing a bald, leathery scalp.

“Sir, please.” He was polite, but firm. “My name is Archer McNabb, sir. I was wonderin’ could I speak to you.”

“Fire away,” Gadd said. She looked at her watch. “But make it fast. The fat lady is singing down in Lincoln Center even as we speak.”

The man looked at her for a moment, then chuckled. “That’s a joke,” he said. “But, see, reason I’m stoppin’ y’all is because I heard you’re searchin’ after the boy with the white hair. That right?”

Moodrow took the mug shot out of his jacket pocket and handed it over. Archer McNabb looked at it for a moment, then passed it back.

“I understand y’all are payin’ a hundred dollars to find the boy. That right?”

“Yeah.” Moodrow, looking into the man’s eyes, knew he’d found Jackson-Davis Wescott. He’d found him and it wasn’t going to do either him or Ginny Gadd the slightest bit of good.

“Ain’t no
conditions,
right? Jus’ find him and you pay up.”

“You know where he is?” Gadd asked.

“Yes, ma’am,” he replied. “But see, thing about it, I ain’t exactly sure you’re gonna give me no money.”