Damaged Goods (32 page)

“I understand your problem,” Gadd agreed. “My problem is that you could be bullshitting here, trying to run a scam. Seeing as we’re the ones with the money …”

Archer’s eyes dropped. He chewed on his lower lip for a moment, then sighed. “I guess if you gon’ cheat me, there ain’t nothin’ I can do about it.” He paused as if reconsidering his own conclusion. “But you did say no conditions?”

“Where is he, McNabb?” Moodrow pulled out his folding money, counted off five twenties.

“Boy’s in the morgue, sir. Cops found him in that park by the river. I was up there collectin’ bottles and I seen it all. It was that boy in the pitcha, sure as shit.”

A
FTER A QUICK PHONE
call to Jim Tilley at the Seventh Precinct, Moodrow passed the hundred to a now-beaming Archer McNabb, then led his partner to the parking garage on Seventy-eighth Street where they picked up Moodrow’s Chevrolet. They walked in silence, drove in silence, each locked into a personal chain of consequences flowing from Archer McNabb’s revelations. It wasn’t until Moodrow had parked the car in front of the triple-X bookstore below Gadd’s office that either chose to reveal the nature of those consequences.

Gadd began the conversation by dancing away from the issue. She gestured at the trucks, everything from eighteen-wheelers to minivans, and the workers unloading them. Her Sixth Avenue office was in the middle of New York’s wholesale florist district and, like the Gansevoort meat packing district to the south and the Hunts Point produce market in the Bronx, boomed at night when everybody else had gone home.

“The pickups begin after the delivery trucks leave. Altogether, it goes on until six or seven o’clock in the morning.” Gadd took a pack of Newports out of her purse, fiddled with the box for a few minutes, then put it back. “You ever hear of white noise?”

Moodrow dredged up a rueful smile. Yes, he’d
heard
of white noise. He wasn’t so ancient that he’d lost touch altogether. Meanwhile, he had no idea what it was or what it was supposed to do.

“White Noise,” he finally declared, “is the name of a neo-Nazi rock group. Operates out of Illinois. They’re on tour even as we speak, playing the hot spots of East Germany.” Then he remembered that there was no longer an
East
Germany and quickly changed the subject. “We could still go back to the West Side tomorrow, show Sappone’s mug shot around, maybe get lucky.”

Gadd shook her head. “For all the above-named reasons, Moodrow. The ones you spelled out a couple of hours ago when you explained why we were showing Wescott’s picture instead of Sappone’s.” She rolled down the window, took a deep breath. The air was faintly damp, though still warm.

“I won’t argue the point,” Moodrow replied. “Tomorrow morning, when the story breaks, everybody in the neighborhood’s gonna be looking for Jilly. If he killed his partner, he must have had a way out of there.”

“Still, we were
right
about Sappone living on the Upper West Side.” Gadd fished out her Newports again. This time she took a cigarette and lit it up.

“Yeah, there’s that.” Moodrow pinched the bridge of his nose between thumb and forefinger. Events were running out of control; they were moving under their own power. He had the sudden conviction that he and Gadd (yes, he admitted to himself,
he
and Gadd) were going to spend the next week or so trying to catch up. As a cop, he’d been inside the scenario many times. Feeling like a UN observer trapped in a war zone.

“I ever mention I play the horses?”

Moodrow turned and smiled. “Not that I remember,” he said, adding, “and I’ve got an unholy memory.”

“Well, I’m good at it. Very good.”

“Does that mean you win?”

“The vig is too high.” She waved the idea away with a sweep of her cigarette. “The track takes seventeen percent off the top. It’s hard to overcome.” After a moment, she shifted her weight so that she was facing him. “I’m gonna go out there tomorrow afternoon, sit in the sun, think about what I want to do with Jilly Sappone. You wanna come, you can always find me on the third floor of the clubhouse. I hang out near the head of the stretch.”

“You’re not looking for a lift?” Belmont Racetrack was just inside the Nassau County border of Queens.

“I do the racing form on the train.” She grinned. “What can I say? I’m superstitious. Wouldn’t mind a ride home, though.” Gadd slid down in the seat, pushed her feet up against the firewall. “Tell me about Carmine Stettecase. I mean if Carmine’s in the middle of all this, maybe I should know a little more about him. Before I do something terminal.”

Moodrow took a second to organize his thoughts. Trying to remember what he’s already told her, separate it from what he’d told Betty. Finally, he nodded and began. “Carmine is a made guy, has been for a long time, forty years at least. Where does he fit in the mob scheme of things? Well, he’s got his own gang and they pretty much run prostitution, bookmaking and loan-sharking on the Lower East Side. Add in the occasional hijacking, the odd drug deal and you have a pretty good picture. I made him for eight murders before I stopped counting. Meanwhile, I couldn’t touch him, not working out of the precinct.”

“That eat you up?”

“Not really.” Moodrow slid the front seat back, stretched out his legs. “In the job you learn to live with the possible. If you’re smart.” He looked through the window for a moment, watched an enormous tractor-trailer back into a space at the curb. “Wanna hear a funny story?”

Gadd took a deep drag, then tossed her cigarette out the window. “Desperately.”

“Carmine’s the most paranoid criminal I ever met, lives in his own brownstone on Tenth Street. That’s where he does most of his business and word on the street is that nobody gets in except his lieutenants and his family. Carmine’s only son, Tommy—he’s some kind of computer freak, doesn’t have anything to do with Carmine’s business—has an apartment in the building, him and his wife, Mary. Josie Rizzo, Mary’s mother, lives there too. But that’s it. There’s no maids, no cooks, nobody else.

“Now, I gotta admit that, so far, Carmine’s strategy is working. After all, he’s been on the street for forty years. But that doesn’t mean he hasn’t paid a price. Gadd, you could put Carmine’s life on the Oprah Winfrey Show, call it, ‘The Dysfunctional Crime Family’ Most of the people in that house hate each other.”

Moodrow twisted the key in the ignition, shut the engine down. “I’ll give you an example. Maybe eight or nine years ago, Tommy got busted in a vice raid on an S&M club in Chelsea. The cops had reporters along for the ride and somebody got a shot of Tommaso Stettecase trussed up like a turkey. Wearing a fucking
diaper.
Carmine, naturally, went nuts; he’s been sitting on the kid ever since.”

“And Tommy is supposed to be the next Don? He’s Carmine’s
only
son?” Gadd’s grin seemed to open her face, giving Moodrow a glimpse of something beneath, an underlying satisfaction.

Moodrow shook his head. “I already told you, Tommy’s not in the business.”

“Then why does he live in the house?”

“Why do people who hate each other stay married for fifty years?” Moodrow flipped up the palm of his right hand. “Tommy’s wife, Mary, is some kind of recluse. She hasn’t been seen outside the house in five years.”

“What about Carmine’s wife? She alive?”

“Yeah, her name’s Rosa. She and Carmine get along pretty well. Carmine runs a club in Soho and his wife goes there with him a couple of times a week.”

“And Josie Rizzo? What does she do?”

“Josie does all the shopping, most of the cooking and cleaning. Remember, it’s a big house, five stories, and Carmine won’t have servants.”

“It sounds like he’s got a slave.”

“In that case, Josie’s middle name must be Spartacus.”

“Yoo-hoo, Agent Ewing, sir, do you by any chance know how to play gin rummy?” Jilly Sappone looked out through the narrow iron bars of the door separating his quarters from the rest of the house. He was stoned, of course, had been since his first, straining bowel movement. Fishing the balloons out of the bowl, now that, he admitted to himself, was an ugly job. Too bad old Jackson-Davis hadn’t been around to do it.

Ewing dropped the newspaper onto his lap. “They found your partner,” he said through clenched teeth.

“My partner?”

“Jackson-Davis Wescott. You proud of that?”

“Not as proud as I am of teaching little Theresa to fly.” Sappone watched the blood rise into the young agent’s face. Ewing reminded him of all those whiter-than-white screws in all those upstate prisons. “C’mon, Agent Ewing, whatta ya say to a few hands of gin rummy? You don’t gotta open the fuckin’ door. We’ll play through the slot.”

“Go screw yourself.”

“Well, if that’s the way you feel.. .” Sappone turned on the small television in his cell. He was pretty sure Ewing wouldn’t kill him no matter what he said, not until after the feds had enough to bust Carmine. But once that was done, once Carmine was taken into custody, the boyish Agent Ewing was gonna pull out his nine millimeter, put a round in Jilly Sappone’s skull, bury him out in the woods. That’s why Jilly Sappone was in this house instead of a prison, why Agent Ewing was all by his lonesome, why the crew-cut moron passed meals through the slot instead of inviting Jilly Sappone to sit at the table.

Unfortunately for Agent Ewing (and whoever was running him), the FBI didn’t know shit about secure facilities. Or maybe his little cell was never meant to serve as a real prison. Maybe it was meant for rats who were safer with the feds than they were on the street. Either way, Jilly Sappone, after spending fourteen years in the worst dungeons New York State had to offer, would have only two problems getting out. The first was Agent Bob Ewing and the second was the automatic he kept within easy reach.

Jilly turned up the volume. He wasn’t really interested in the sitcom on the screen, but he wanted to move around without being heard. There was a lot of work to be done: a weapon (or weapons) to be fashioned, a strategy (or strategies) to be devised. Pleasant work, but work nonetheless.

His task, a surveillance more than anything else, was interrupted ten minutes later by the telephone.

“Yeah.”

Ewing’s exasperated tone left doubt about who was on the other end on the line. Sappone, looking at the back of the agent’s crew-cut head, actually felt a moment of sympathy. The poor schmuck was trapped, just like his prisoner. “It’s your aunt.”

“Great.” Jilly waited for Ewing to put the phone on the small platform in the door slot, then stepped forward and picked up the receiver. “Is this my dearly beloved Aunt Josefina?” No question, he was feeling
very
good.

“Sit tight,” Josie responded. “And don’t make no trouble.”

“They got me in a cell, Aunt Josie. What am I supposed to do?”

“Read a book,” she shouted. “Improve your mind.”

It was just before midnight and Stanley Moodrow, his car safely parked in the Thirteenth Street lot, was making his way down Avenue B toward his apartment. He was moving quickly, his eyes jumping from shadow to shadow. Pedestrians moving toward him were automatically evaluated, as were the occupants of the few cars moving along the street. As he turned east on Fourth Street, he saw a man in front of his building. The man, still a hundred yards away, was wearing a light sport jacket over a pair of dark trousers and Moodrow immediately registered him as nonthreatening. It took a few more strides until he realized the man had to be a reporter.

On one level, Moodrow wasn’t surprised. He’d been expecting some kind of a confrontation, had already prepared the response Betty had suggested, the one about the police
and
his client asking him to keep his mouth shut. Yet, despite his preparations, a sudden rage boiled up inside him. His face contorted, his eyes narrowing until the only thing he could see was the reporter in his path. His hands rose, then balled into fists as he widened his stride before breaking into an all-out run.

He was fifty feet away when the man turned and fled. The action, though it seemed entirely reasonable ten seconds later, confused him at first. The reporter was supposed to hold his ground, whip out pen and notebook, start blasting away. Meanwhile, he, Moodrow, was doubled over, gasping for oxygen like a gaffed fish.

No fool like an old fool, he finally told himself. As if that explained it.

Just about the time Moodrow decided to charge into battle, Ginny Gadd, alone in the small room that served as her apartment, punched out the number of a former lover turned friend, a man named Barry Lowenthal. She’d met Barry a year before at a Computer Expo in Denver; they’d shared a drink, then dinner, then met again in New York before ending up in bed. Barry, the first man she’d made love to after the breakup of her marriage, had been tender and considerate.

Two encounters later, after a pleasant lunch in a midtown restaurant, he’d casually mentioned the fact that he’d been involved in the bondage-and-discipline scene for more than a decade, that he had always been the master, that he enjoyed nothing more than the sight of a bound, helpless (though always consenting) woman.

“It’s not sadism,” he’d hastened to explain. “Not hot wax or caning. It’s about
avoiding
pain. Avoiding it through absolute obedience.”

Gadd, though she was a great believer in the principle of consenting adults getting their jollies any way they chose, felt all sexual interest drain away. She never dated Barry again, though they occasionally used each other professionally. Barry had access to the Internet system through his job at a downtown brokerage house.

“Lowenthal.”

“It’s Ginny Gadd, Barry. I didn’t wake you, did I?”

“No, what’s up?”

“I have a favor to ask.”

“Tell me you want to be chained to a rack.”

“Afraid not, but I might be willing to chain
you
to a rack. In case you decide to swing both ways.”

Barry laughed. “Not this week.”

“Well, a girl can always dream.” Gadd paused for a moment, then launched into it. “I have a guy I want to contact and I can’t approach him directly. A business matter, not personal. He’s computer literate and he was once busted at an S&M club. From what I understand, there are BBSs that specialize in kinky sex.”