Keeplock: A Novel of Crime (22 page)

I grinned and she answered my smile. The question was so naive. “It’s not that events work to keep me what I’ve always been or that I simply can’t get my shit together. It’s that events work to keep me what I’ve always been
and
I can’t get my shit together. But I’m trying. I feel like a high jumper standing in quicksand, but I’m trying.”

That was the second lie.

Ginny stood up suddenly. “I’ve got to get ready for work,” she announced.

“I gotta be places, too.”

“Come back tonight. Have dinner with me.”

The question hung in the air for a second, then dove for my crotch. In retrospect it seems funny, but the truth is that she already had my heart, so there was no other place for the question to go.

“I’m living at a shelter and I have to sign in by ten o’clock. Simon’s orders.” The third lie. “I might be able to come over for a couple of hours, but I can’t promise.”

“You’re already involved with something, aren’t you?” She waved her hand back and forth as if erasing the question. “Never mind. It doesn’t matter. I don’t want to reform you. That’s gone forever. I just want to be with you. The men I’ve gone out with don’t understand. It’s not their fault, but when I’m sitting across the dinner table, I feel like a peeping Tom looking through a keyhole. I want to be with someone who knows what happened to me. And what it means.” The tips of her teeth clicked together and she stuck her chin out. It was her determined look. The one she’d always put on when she took a stand. I got up and crossed the room. “I’ve got a problem—a
big
problem—and I’m trying to work my way out of it. Right now it doesn’t look like there’s any escape. What I’m trying to say is don’t count on a long-term relationship. Settle for what you can get.”

I got to Eddie’s about nine-thirty. Annie opened the door and announced that the master wanted me to report immediately.

“He’s in the office,” she said. “You remember where.”

I found him sitting at his desk. He seemed almost jovial as he waved me to a chair.

“Siddown, cuz. You sleep good last night?”

“Like a baby.” I assumed he was asking me if my tour of inspection had reassured me, but when I started to get into it, he interrupted me with a wave of his hand.

“You didn’t sleep on Cherry Avenue, did ya?”

“What?”

He’d caught me off-guard and he knew it. He grinned like a kid in a pile of chocolate bars.
Stolen
chocolate bars.

“Avi told me what he told you about the old girlfriend. Ginny Michkin. Funny thing about Avi—he never forgets anything. Make a great fuckin’ witness. I looked the girlfriend up in the phone book. There was only one Michkin. G. Michkin on Cherry Avenue.”

“You disrespected me, Eddie. You shouldn’t have done that. It wasn’t right.”

The tone of my voice brought him up short. He gave me a hard look, realized it was having no effect, and dropped back into his old-buddy stance. All in the space of a few seconds.

“I got a responsibility to the rest of the guys, cuz. How would it be if I let everybody run around on their own? I gotta
control
the situation. And what
you
gotta do is understand.”

“That right, Eddie?”

“What else could I do?”

“You could stop disrespecting me.”

“Look, cuz …”

“Maybe Avi’s happy with his guns. And maybe Parker’s too stupid to know better. And maybe you don’t have a choice with Morasso. But I’m not your fuckin’ dog. I’m not gonna sit up just because you wave a biscuit. I’m not gonna cringe when you raise your voice. And, most of all, I’m not gonna kiss your ass because you happen to think you’re fucking Napoleon.”

“Cuz …”

He leaned forward, trying to pin me with his eyes while his right hand slid toward the desk drawer. I grabbed the edge of the desk, pushed it over on top of him, and followed it with my full weight. The drawer popped out and the expected piece, an S & W .38, rolled onto the carpet. We both went for it, but Eddie was closer, so I evened the contest by kicking him in the gut as hard as I could. He doubled over and the revolver was in my hand and pointed at his head before I even considered what I was going to do with it.

“Don’t. Don’t.” Eddie’s eyes were bulging out of his head. He thought I was going to kill him and I’m not sure I wasn’t. I kept the gun to his head for a long time. My finger pulled on the trigger hard enough to move the hammer back.

“For god’s sake, cuz, it ain’t enough to kill about.”

He was right. It wasn’t enough reason to kill. I eased the hammer down, then stood up over him. “Avi’s got guns. You’ve got guns. Now I have a gun.”

I picked the desk up and sat in front, pulling my chair up close enough to conceal my left knee. It was shaking uncontrollably.

“I’m not walkin’ away,” I said. “You got me in here and I’m goin’ through with it.”

I watched him pick up his chair and put it behind the desk. As the fear dropped away, he became enraged. It was so predictable. Sooner or later, probably later, he would try to balance the scales. It was the only honorable thing to do.

“Maybe I been too hard,” he said after he got control. “Like I known you for a long time and I shoulda figured that you gotta have your head. Sometimes ya get so involved in a situation that ya don’t see the obvious.”

“You know what’s obvious, Eddie? What’s obvious is that you planned the best job I’ve ever seen. I went out there yesterday hoping I’d find something wrong, but I didn’t. The fucking thing is perfect.”

He looked at me for a long time, obviously surprised by the quick switch. “You seem pretty sure of yourself.”

“What I’m thinking is that if you want me off the job, you gotta whack me. There’s nothin’ else you can do. Leaving me alive is like sleeping with a time bomb under the mattress. So if you wanna get rid of me, you gotta whack me, but that makes even more problems, because I’m not easy to kill and I’m gonna be watching my back. Now look at it from my point of view. If I walk away from this job, you’re gonna send Avi to pull my ticket. Avi’s a fucking pro. He knows how to use weapons that I never heard of. Sooner or later he’ll probably get to me. Face it, Eddie, ain’t neither one of us going anywhere. If you respect me, we’ll do the job and we’ll all be rich. If you don’t, everybody loses.”

He answered me by grinning and rubbing his stomach. “What’d you do, learn karate after I left? If I start pissin’ blood, I ain’t gonna be in a good mood tomorrow.”

“Guns motivate me.” I tossed Morasso’s heroin supply on the desk. “Here’s Tony’s medication.”

“Good, the prick’s already screamin’ for it.” He tucked the dope into a shirt pocket. “You ready to go to work?”

W
E WENT BACK AND
forth over the details of the job. I kept at it diligently, respecting Eddie’s obsessive nature. He’d been the same way up in Cortlandt, worrying details to death. He’d also been very successful, working scheme after scheme without ever, to my knowledge, catching a keeplock or, worse, being sent to the box. This time he was considering ways of disguising the two of us while we were taking control of the loading docks. We couldn’t very well come out of the van wearing ski masks, but we didn’t need to leave five eyeball witnesses behind, either. If one of the workers picked us out of a mug book, the cops would put our shit together in a hurry.

I played along, but for all my apparent attention, my mind was on other things. I was thinking about Ginny and all the reasons why she didn’t want me in her life. Ginny claimed to need a man she could relate to, a fellow “outlaw,” but what she really needed was the company of other victims. Some kind of victims’ support group would ease her isolation. There’s plenty of that kind of thing for criminals, both in and out of the Institution. You sit there and tell the others about all the vicious things you’ve done to society and somehow you feel better. You don’t stop committing crimes, of course, but you definitely feel better.

Ginny would feel better, too. And, like me, she would return to her normal life. All I had to do was put the idea in her head, then remove myself from her company. But I didn’t really believe I would (or could) do it. I wanted her so bad, my heart jumped whenever I thought of her. Ginny claimed that her experience on Rikers Island had left an emptiness that she couldn’t fill. I also felt that something was missing, but I thought I could fill the empty place with Ginny.

Annie called us in to lunch at twelve o’clock. The boys were already seated when Eddie and I came into the kitchen. Parker looked happy to see me and Morasso was positively ecstatic, but Avi merely grunted and went back to his franks and beans.

After lunch I went up to Parker’s den and resumed my conquest of the subterranean depths. Somehow, my skills had eroded over the prior twenty-four hours and I couldn’t get past the second level of the game. Parker, on the other hand, slaughtered monsters with all the nonchalance of Fred Astaire putting a move on Ginger Rogers.

“This is a great game,” he told me, “because it illustrates human thinking at its most irrational. The Lizard People have their own society. They live underground and they never bother human beings. We’re down there trying to steal
their
treasure, yet we think of
them
as evil monsters.”

As he spoke, he pounded on the computer keyboard. Each time he pounded, another creature exploded. “If we were even remotely honest, we’d put ourselves in their place. Suppose
they
were coming to steal
our
treasure? How would we feel? The funny thing is that most of these computer games involve heroes who go out in search of adventure. They don’t defend against invasion. Just like us, they’re looking to take something that doesn’t belong to them and they feel perfectly justified in doing it. Crazy, right?”

“Actually, it doesn’t pay to think about it too much,” I responded. “If you want to be successful in the criminal business, you can’t put yourself in the place of the victim.”

What I wanted to say was, “If you can understand how a fucking lizard feels about his treasure, how come you can’t understand how a cop feels about his
life
?” But we’d been through that already, so I settled for killing lizards.

By two o’clock I’d had enough. I said goodbye to Parker and went in search of Eddie. Morasso was in the living room, watching cartoons as usual. He looked up at me through sleepy eyes. His pupils were tiny, tiny dots.

“Best go easy with that shit,” I said, still walking. “You don’t wanna o.d. before you get rich.”

“Ya can’t o.d. when ya snortin’ the shit,” he announced. “Ya gotta be shootin’ up to get an o.d.”

“Right, Tony. And you can protect yourself from AIDS by washing your cock with Listerine.”

Eddie wasn’t in his office, so I knocked on the bedroom door across the hall.

“Come in.” It was Annie’s voice.

I opened the door a few inches. She was sitting by a small, lighted vanity putting on her makeup. Her hair was still wet from the shower and she was wrapped in a large gold towel.

“Eddie around?” I asked.

“Eddie went out.”

“Yeah. Well, I’m takin’ off for the day.”

“What about Louise?”

“Who?”

“Big Momma. You remember? She’s comin’ by after dinner.”

“I’ll take a raincheck. She’ll have plenty to do without me.”

Annie leaned in toward the mirror. Even though her back was turned to me, I could see the tops of her breasts reflected in the mirror as the towel slid down to her nipples. She lifted herself off the bench slightly, moving her face to within a foot of the glass. The towel barely covered her ass.

“I thought you’d be really horny. Just gettin’ out of prison and everything.”

I was, but not for a prostitute. Or for Eddie’s wife. Annie loved Eddie. She’d waited nearly ten years for him to get out of jail. But that didn’t mean she didn’t like to sleep around. There are plenty of men who love their wives and still put it to any woman who’ll let them.

“You fucking around with Avi?” It couldn’t be Morasso. He was too crazy. It couldn’t be Parker either. He wasn’t violent enough. “Avi and all his guns?”

She turned toward me, startled. “What’d he say about me?” She was trying for indignation, but it came out scared.

“Nothing, Annie. I haven’t even spoken to him. And I don’t give a shit what you do with Avi, but I want you to stop coming on to
me
. I don’t need the aggravation and I don’t want the pussy.”

She shrugged and went back to her makeup. As I left the room, I heard her laughing to herself.

I went out and started the car, thinking how the whole scene disgusted me. In my own mind, I was through with that life. But it was a closed book that kept opening. The only way to keep it closed was to burn it. Then I remembered the .38 tucked behind my belt. It sat there so naturally that I wasn’t even aware of its presence, but if I got frisked by a cop, it would put me back in Cortlandt for the next five to ten years. I didn’t stop thinking of Terrentini until the piece was tucked behind the spare tire in the trunk.

I drove over to Queens Boulevard, parked the car, and found a telephone. Condon picked up on the third ring.

“Yeah?”

“It’s Pete Frangello.”

“You’re early.” His voice was instantly alert. Like a sleeping dog catching an unfamiliar scent in the air.

“I gotta see you this afternoon. I gotta show you something.”

“I’m kinda busy here, Frangello. Can’t it wait till tomorrow?”

By tomorrow I might change my mind again. “Well, the thing of it is, Condon, I been lying to you all along. About the bank in Staten Island and the kidnapping. I want you to come out here so I can show you what’s actually going down.”

I figured that piece of information would get him moving. It would also give him a chance to get used to the idea before he got his hands on me.

“Your games ain’t gonna do you no good, Frangello. And your attitude ain’t helpin’ either. The fact is that I’m just about ready to pull your fuckin’ ticket. Where are you?”

The waiting was the worst of it. I didn’t want them to know about the car, so I left the door unlocked and the keys under the seat, then stood on a corner for thirty-five minutes while the boys made their way out of Manhattan.