Damaged Goods (38 page)

The conversation began with a chat. Moodrow asked if the inspector had recently heard from somebody named Allen Epstein. Cohen replied that he’d visited Tampa in March, that Epstein and his wife were “hale and hearty.” Epstein apparently had taken up the game of golf and was on the links three times a week. His unnamed wife, referred to as “the missus,” drove a van for Meals-on-Wheels. It was, Cohen finally pronounced, “a retirement to envy.”

An obligatory moment of silence was officially ended when Inspector Cohen cleared his throat and dropped his eyes to Moodrow’s.

“You can’t accuse me of not having respect, Moodrow. We came on the job within a couple of years of each other, stayed on the job when others fell away. I both understand and appreciate your term of service.” He paused long enough to force a nod from Moodrow, then said, “And you, Moodrow, cannot claim ignorance of the job and how it works. I’m not going to ask you how you discovered the apartment, because I don’t want to know, but, once discovered, you were obligated to hand the information over to the detectives working the case.”

Cohen’s voice was warm and soothing, the tone of a patient father instructing a wayward child, but the expression on his face remained fixed, as if he was posing for a formal portrait.

“Again, out of respect, let me tell you that we’ve assigned the task of finding Jilly Sappone to a ten-man unit working out of Major Cases. This in addition to showing his face at every roll call in all five boroughs. Obviously, we’ve failed to capture him, but that doesn’t mean we aren’t trying.” Cohen took out an unfiltered Chesterfield, tapped it on the desktop before lighting it, then looked at Moodrow expectantly.

“Tell me something, Inspector,” Moodrow said. “You think the FBI’s protecting Jilly Sappone? Maybe in return for Josie Rizzo’s cooperation in their investigation of Carmine Stettecase?”

“I really hope so,” Cohen mused. “If it should ever come out …”

He chuckled manfully. “But I don’t want to know it for a fact. Co-conspiracy plays no part in my career strategy.” He flicked his ashes onto Lieutenant O’Bannion’s desk, then fired off the salvo he’d come to deliver. “There are people out there who think I should arrest you, that you’re indictable. And not only the FBI. I’m getting pressure from the mayor’s office, too.” His voice dropped a full octave as he leaned across the desk. “Believe me, it’s not something I want to do. But it’s not something I
won’t
do, either.” He straightened up, puffed contentedly on his cigarette. “You might want to know the task force ran down that car rented by Jilly Sappone, found it in a long-term parking garage on Ninety-sixth Street. Found an arsenal in the trunk as well. Even as we speak, the garage is under a twenty-four-hour stakeout. Sappone’s apartment too, of course.”

Cohen stood abruptly. He looked at Gadd for the first time. “Congratulations, Ms. Gadd, for getting to the parking garage first. The attendant, by the way, remembered you well. Something about your ears drew his attention.” He crossed the room, opened the door, stepped through, then turned. “Do yourself a favor, Moodrow. Find some quiet bar, have a few drinks, ask yourself exactly what you’re doing here. Me, I’ve examined your position closely and I can’t see an upside anywhere.”

B
Y THE TIME GINNY
Gadd reached her apartment-office, two hours and that “few drinks” later, she was ready to agree. Not that she was driven by fear. Inspector Cohen’s threats meant less than nothing to her. After all, it wasn’t like she was still a cop and at the mercy of the job. As a private citizen, she had rights. Like any other criminal.

That was the essential message she’d conveyed to Moodrow over her first Bloody Mary. He’d nodded wisely, then, concession by concession, forced her to admit they had no place to go, that the investigation was over, brought down by circumstances beyond their control. The job had Sappone’s car and apartment under surveillance, she couldn’t get back into the tape box, the deal was going down in less than seventy-two hours.

“Maybe,” she’d suggested, “we should visit Holtzmann, threaten to warn Carmine. Maybe we can trade our silence for Jilly Sappone.”

“And exactly what,” Moodrow, the rim of his glass suspended just in front of his mouth, had replied, “would we do with him?”

“Administer a good caning. Before we throw him out the window.”

Moodrow had managed a smile, then drained his glass. “I’m feeling pretty good, almost back to normal. Now I wanna put it behind me.” He’d raised his eyes to meet hers. “Everything, Gadd, including Theresa. I’m an old fart and I need my rocking chair.”

Gadd, surprised, had sipped at her Bloody Mary, taken a moment to chew on the small chunks of horseradish. “Which rocking chair, Moodrow,” she’d finally asked, “the one you broke over that mutt’s head?” When he didn’t respond immediately, she’d added, “Kind of mean-spirited for a senior, don’t you think?”

“Actually, I was afraid you were gonna shoot him.”

“And there’s nothing the matter with your eyesight, either.”

The conversation had jumped from topic to topic after that, from Moodrow’s early days in the job, to computer investigation, to Moodrow’s relationship with Betty, and Gadd’s current lack of attachment. It had continued to jump during the short ride to Gadd’s office on Sixth Avenue as each, there being no compelling reason for them to meet again, tried to frame a proper good-bye.

But the proper good-bye, whatever it was meant to be, was rendered meaningless by the scene in front of the porno shop below Gadd’s office. Bishop Peter McLoughlin, a bullhorn to his lips, was leading several hundred of the faithful in prayer while a squad of bored cops lounged against blue police barricades and stared blankly at the forest of placards in front of them. On the opposite side of the avenue, several network camera crews, looking as bored as the cops, clustered around large vans and dreamed of police riots, bloody nuns, overturned cruisers. As it was, they’d be lucky to get fifteen seconds of airtime.

Moodrow, stymied by the traffic, pulled over to the curb a block away from the action. Gadd opened the door, then turned to face her soon-to-be ex-partner. “Moodrow,” she said, “you were raised Catholic, right?”

“Yeah.”

“Is the priest at the beginning or the end of that rosary he’s holding?”

“He’s just getting started.”

She nodded, sighed, then stepped out of the car. “Whatta ya say, when they take Sappone, we get together for a drink?”

“Sounds good to me.”

Gadd tapped the roof of the Chevy, then turned away. As she marched up the street, listening to the chant of the crowd, a wave of depression so purely physical it threatened to root her feet to the sidewalk rushed through her body to center itself in her heart. It wasn’t the first time she’d been there and on some level she knew it would pass. Like a toothache or a broken arm.

She had to detour into the street to avoid the crowd, then duck between police barricades before she reached the safety of the stairwell leading to her office. The crowd booed and hissed as she approached the padlocked and shuttered bookstore, then cheered when she entered an adjoining door. As if their presence had directed her footsteps.

Enough with the self-pity, she told herself. It’s time for a shower. A shower and a shave.

The light on her answering machine was blinking steadily, a fact she noted, but ignored. Across the room, the monitor on her ancient IBM, which was never shut down, glowed a pale, luminescent green. Gadd ignored the monitor, too, though she knew she’d finish her evening sitting in front of that screen, pounding away at the keyboard. Maybe she’d work up an invoice for the Haven Foundation, see if they’d like to pay for her failure. Or take a trip on the Internet, see if it was possible to be lonely in cyberspace.

She undressed quickly, tossing her clothes on the overstuffed chair in her bedroom, then stepped into the bathroom, turned on the light, and stared at her reflection in the mirror. Wondering why it always came to this, why every failure in a woman’s life eventually worked its way down to physical attraction. She’d failed to save Theresa Kalkadonis, failed to capture Jilly Sappone, failed at her marriage, failed in her career. Now she had wrinkles at the corners of her eyes, frown lines at the corners of her mouth, ears like demitasse cups stood on edge.

And (of course and most especially) her breasts had surrendered another inch to the force of gravity.

“Fuck you,” she said, stepping into the tiny shower stall and turning on the hot-water tap. The stream that hit her was lukewarm, the building’s owner, Pietro Marizi, having, as usual, shut down the hot water when he closed his porno shop. Gadd’s use of her office as a residence was a technical violation of the building code, an excuse for Marizi to pretend his tenant went home every night. By eleven, the water would be actually cold.

Gadd lathered herself carefully and thoroughly, covering herself, from her forehead to her toes with a lotion-fortified soap from the Body Shop, then slowly rinsed. Her hands moved across her skin automatically, leaving her mind free to ponder old losses, the pattern itself more ritual than thought. Her father came first. God, how she’d loved him, blindly defending him when he gambled away the rent money, the food money, looted the checking account for the twentieth time. Her reward, bestowed when she was ten years old, had been to arrive home from school one afternoon to find him gone, run out not only on his family, but also on a loan shark named Joe Alonzo who fully expected the family to honor its obligations.

Louise Gadd was still paying off fifteen years later, the year her daughter graduated from the police academy and canceled the debt with a single visit to Joe Alonzo’s “office” in a Woodhaven diner. Instead of a weekly interest payment, Ginny had brought her badge and her gun and a pure determination that Joe Alonzo, ever the realist, had no difficulty recognizing.

“Let’s call the debt paid off.” He’d waved his hands magnanimously. “Let’s say everybody did the right thing but your old man.”

Unfortunately, Louise Gadd had long ago retreated into bitter resentment, had become a carping, supercritical hag and was happy to remain that way. To hang with her pals, Hazel and Martha, proclaiming the inevitability of pain and suffering, to verbalize a perpetual disdain that lay a hair’s breadth from outright hatred. Now, six years later, she and her daughter rarely spoke.

Gadd quickly washed and conditioned her hair, then soaped her legs and began to shave. Summer’s arrival, a time of shorts and bathing suits, being imminent, she went at it carefully, working from her ankles to her knees before rinsing off and stepping out of the shower. This time she avoided the mirror while she toweled off, only glancing at it for a moment when she brushed out her short hair.

As she left the bathroom, Gadd briefly considered the possibility of going out, hitting a few meat-market East Side bars, maybe getting lucky. But that would mean at least fifteen minutes in front of the mirror, an effort beyond her current abilities. And degrading enough, in the long run, to have consequences of its own.

She remained in her tiny bedroom long enough to pull on a pair of drawstring cotton pants and a green sweatshirt, to jam her feet into faded, corduroy slippers, then nearly ran into her office, closing the door behind her. Her bedroom/apartment, her home, with its two-burner stove, its tiny sink and refrigerator, its one chair and narrow single bed, was almost as depressing as the mirror in the bathroom. More evidence of failure, of loss. More emotional garbage for the self-pity landfill.

The light on her phone machine beckoned seductively. Work was what she needed, a remedy as solidly established in her personal mythology as chicken soup. She pressed the button, leaned over the desk to grab pen and pad. Her jaw dropped open when Patricia Kalkadonis’s voice, distorted by the small speaker, declared that she and her mother were leaving New York on the following afternoon, that they might or might not return after her father was captured, that her mother would like to see Ginny Gadd and Stanley Moodrow before she left.

“Shit.” Gadd jabbed a finger at the reset button, then repeated herself. “Shit.” She debated calling Moodrow for a moment, finally deciding to catch him in the morning, let him have a decent night’s sleep.

She walked over to her IBM, dropped down in an armless swivel chair, stared at the lit screen. The letter she’d written to Tommaso stared back as if it had been waiting for her gaze. As if her computer was alive, a patient beast eager to prove its worth.

Whatta ya think, Gadd? she asked herself. Wanna check and see if the fish took the bait?

On the one hand, she couldn’t see how seducing Tommaso could lead to Jilly Sappone. At best, it would be a path to Carmine Stettecase in whom she had zero interest and who was a couple of days away from permanent incarceration in any event. On the other hand, she was facing a very long evening and the software she’d need, Procomm, was already booted.

Five minutes later, Gadd, having identified herself, was inside the Slave School. Sure enough, Tommaso the Timid had posted a message for Amazing Grace. Gadd scanned it quickly, found the usual crap. Yes, Tommaso the Timid had long ago realized that he lacked a true commitment, that he’d been in the closet too long, that he was going to make his move very soon, that he was prepared to make a special offering to the right master.

How, Gadd wondered, is it possible to get off on this bullshit?

Sure, being tied up (or tying someone else up) has its erotic side. No doubt about it. But this crap is so damned mediocre, so lacking in imagination, it’s like watching a troupe of octogenarians do an orgy scene.

She got up, walked over to the front window, listened to the crowd outside. Funny how Bishop McLoughlin stood while most of his parishioners knelt on the filthy sidewalk. As if his actual presence rendered a show of piety unnecessary.

Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with thee.

Gadd shook her head, then returned to her computer, erased Tommaso’s message, and began to type her own into the machine.

I see you in a lace-trimmed gingham apron, your back and buttocks exposed to the corrective lash. I see you kneeling at the base of my halogen lamp, polishing out the last bit of tarnish. I see a trickle of blood on the back of your shaved right leg, a large drop of blood behind your knee. I see you in my living room, holding a drink-filled tray while your inferiors achieve sexual satisfaction. I see the years passing, your gradual acceptance of the fact that you will never, never be worthy. I see you, one cold January night when a frigid wind rattles the French doors leading to my balcony, finally crawling beneath the quilt to warm my feet against your back.

YOU WILL NEVER HAVE ANOTHER CHANCE!

Amazing Grace