Keeplock: A Novel of Crime (37 page)

The cat curled up on my lap and fell asleep with its motor running. I ran a finger along a particularly gruesome scar that ran from the base of his tail to his shoulder blades. He responded by arching his back and turning his purr up a notch.

“You’re stupid, cat. You’re rubbing up against me like I was your momma. Only problem is I’ll be gone in a couple of days and you’ll have to go back to eating maggots out of garbage cans.”

I think he was asking for a lawyer.

It was well after dark when Condon finally showed up. I could make out a lighted window across the yard, but just barely. If it wasn’t for the glow of the candles in the next room, I wouldn’t have been able to see anything
but
the window. As it was, the few pieces of ragged furniture were merely shadows against the darker flat shadow of the far wall. The only real light came from the hole between the two apartments. It was a beacon, a guide, and I was pretty sure Condon would go toward it.

I don’t know anything about the size of the dog in the lower apartment, but I guarantee he was loud enough to be a lion. I lifted the cat off my lap, put him on the floor, and drew my weapon. A minute later the fire escape began to rattle and Condon’s bulk appeared in the window. I’d been up and down fire escapes many times in the course of a long career. You need a very light touch to keep all that metal from vibrating. Condon didn’t have it.

He stayed out on the fire escape for a long time. I could hear him panting, despite the rain. And I could see the small revolver he held in his hand. He must have been desperate to come at me like this. To come head-on into the distinct possibility of a setup.

I was tempted to take him as he came through the window but I couldn’t be sure he was alone. There was no hurry, either. Condon was already trapped by his own mistakes. He should have shot me down in that garage. Now, with no access to the might of the thirty-five-thousand-man New York Police Department, he was just another assassin, an amateur taking a professional’s risks.

An
obese
assassin, at that. He could barely squeeze his fat butt through the open window, and when he dropped to the floor, he grunted like a pig. I kept one eye on the window, looking for a silhouette, but the window remained empty.

Maybe I’d hurt Rico more than I thought. I suppose there was always the possibility that he was waiting in the alley or in front of the building, but it didn’t seem likely that Condon would have come up the fire escape if Rico, fifty pounds lighter, could have done it.

Condon began to inch his way across the room. He went straight for the light, stopping just short of the rectangular glow cast by the candles. I came up over the top of the couch and put the PPK’s sights on his head. It was time to shit or get off the pot, but I continued to wait. I waited until his head and shoulders disappeared into the next room, until he was thoroughly stuck.

“You don’t wanna move, Detective,” I said quietly. “You don’t wanna move at all.”

He took the hint, freezing in his tracks. “Jeez, Pete—”

“Forget ‘Jeez, Pete.’ Forget any excuse of any kind. What you’re gonna do is back into the room. And when your hands appear, they better be empty.”

Stuck in that hole, he couldn’t very well spin and fire the way he’d been taught at the police academy. Condon was trapped and he knew it. He slowly inched his way back into the room, then turned to face me.

“Don’t kill me, Pete.”

“Stand up and do exactly what I say. I wanna warn you that I’m very nervous here and if you make any quick moves, I’m not gonna wait around to see what happens next. I’m gonna blow your fucking head off.”

“All right, all right. Please, don’t get crazy. We can work this out.”

“Take off your coat. Do it with one hand and do it slowly.” I waited until he finished, then ordered him to do the same thing with his jacket, then his shirt, then his pants. Sure enough, he had a small revolver neatly tucked into an ankle holster.

“Kneel down with your back to me. Draw the piece with two fingers. Slide it across the floor.”

The tension was so heavy the room appeared to be vibrating. Condon must have been sensitive enough to understand my feelings, because he pulled the piece as if he was handling a bottle of liquid plutonium. When he finished, I had him kick his clothes out of reach, then turn to face me.

“Why’d you do it?” I asked, finally drawing a deep breath. “Why?” The answer, money, was too obvious to say out loud. Condon simply stared at me, his fat jowls, for once, motionless.

“Well,” I finally said, “enough chitchat. I have some good news for you. Some good news and some bad news. The good news is that I’m not gonna kill you. The bad news is that you’re gonna make a full confession.”

I took the minirecorder out of my pocket and laid it on the floor between us. “Start with Eddie Conte. What you knew about him and how you began your investigation. Don’t leave anything out. Do it as if your life depended on it. Which, of course—”

“Pete, I’m cold. I’m freezing my ass off.”

“Now, ya see, Condon, that’s exactly what I was talking about. If you said that
after
we started taping, it’d look like I was torturing you in order to make you confess falsely. If I can’t get a
convincing
statement out of you, then I have no reason to leave you alive. Are you beginning to catch my drift?”

Condon, now that he was sure I wasn’t going to shoot him on the spot, appeared to accept his helplessness. As for me, I had a job to do and a guy named Avi Stern to worry about. I wanted to finish with Condon, then get the hell out of the Lower East Side.

“What are you gonna do with it, Pete?” Condon’s voice was reasonably firm, which was all to the good.

“With what?” I said innocently.

“The tape. Are you gonna hand it over to the press?”

“The
press
?” It was funny. He was more worried about publicity than his own life. “I have a lot of things on my mind, Condon. I have Eddie Conte and Avi Stern and thirty-five thousand cops to worry about. Eddie and Avi? They’re
my
problem. The cops? Well, if
I
go down, you and your buddy, Rico, are goin’ down with me. Now let’s do it.”

I picked up the minirecorder and fingered the button. “I want you to start with Eddie Conte. Tell me exactly how you found out about him. And don’t worry about protecting your informants. Worry about protecting your life.”

My finger tightened on the trigger as I pictured Simon Cooper baby-sitting his kids. Worried about popcorn spilling on the rug, about vacuum cleaners and orange juice. The reaction was completely spontaneous. It surprised me as much as it surprised Condon.

“Pete, please. Please don’t—” His eyes were wide with terror. He knew just how close he was.

I flicked the switch on the minirecorder and set it down. Condon began without prompting, and to give the bastard credit, he went through it without leaving anything out. At first, all he and Rico had wanted was a prestigious collar, but after I detailed the size of the robbery, they’d gotten greedy. Simon Cooper had been their biggest problem. They’d made an attempt to bring him into their scam, but he’d refused outright. Rico had murdered him with a throwaway piece they’d taken off a street junkie.

It took Condon about fifteen minutes to run through the whole thing. When he was finished, I shut off the tape recorder and slipped it into my pocket.

“One more question, Condon,” I said. “Why didn’t you kill me when you had the chance? Hell, why didn’t you kill
all
of us?”

Condon sighed and looked over at his shirt and pants. “Pete, it’s really cold in here. I’m freezing.”

“It’s a lot colder in the grave. Which is where Simon Cooper is. You make one move toward your clothes and you’re gonna join him. Answer the question.”

“We talked about it for a long time. At one point, we made up our minds to do it, but then we couldn’t get our hands on a silencer. Not without attracting attention. I mean, how could we be sure the mutt who sold us the silencer wouldn’t turn out to be some other cop’s snitch? We were carrying AK47s, Pete. There were people out on the street. Citizens. If they heard the shooting (and they’d
have
to hear it), maybe they’d come to investigate. Or maybe somebody would get a plate number. Or dial 911. Rico said we should force everybody into the back room, then do it like a mob hit, but I didn’t think—” He stopped for a moment, then bit the bullet. “I didn’t think four prison-hard criminals would allow themselves to be executed. I told Rico that we had to control the scene. We couldn’t even be sure that one or two of you didn’t have a backup piece. Things could get out of hand in a hurry, especially if Tony Morasso went crazy. Which he finally did.”

“So you decided to settle for killing
me
?”

He looked down at the floor. “Yeah,” he admitted. “That was the deal. You were the only link. Without you, there’d be no way for Eddie to find us. It wasn’t something we wanted to do, but we didn’t have any choice. I swear it, Pete.”

“Is that the way it was with Simon? Did you say, ‘Sure, he’s got a wife and two kids, but we gotta do what we gotta do?’ Are you saying the same thing about the security guard Tony Morasso killed?”

Condon raised his head and took a deep breath. He was just about to speak when his head exploded. I saw it clearly. Saw a thick mixture of pink and gray tissue stream across the room, then heard what I took to be the crack of a lightning bolt. Instinctively, I turned toward the sound. It was pouring rain and at first I couldn’t see anything. Then lightning flashed in the distance, silhouetting a man bent over a small suitcase. The man held the barrel of a rifle in one hand, the stock in the other.

It was Avi Stern come to get his revenge, and if I’d been the one sitting near the window, he would have succeeded. The room was barely lit, a few candles providing the only illumination. Avi, seventy or eighty feet away, had fired at a shadow.

I continued to stare at the window, catching Avi’s silhouette in half a dozen flashes. I couldn’t tear my eyes away, couldn’t make my brain work. It wasn’t until he closed the suitcase and stood up that I began to think.

What I wanted was for Avi to pack his bags and leave, but I knew that wouldn’t happen. He was convinced that he’d killed me. If he wasn’t, he would never have broken down the rifle. Unfortunately, there was still the money. Avi, the sound of his assassination covered by the storm, wouldn’t abandon ship until he’d made an attempt to find the loot. Maybe the money wouldn’t be in the room, but it was certainly possible that he’d find a receipt or a key that’d lead to the three million dollars claimed by Chapman Security.

I pulled a chair across the room and left it between the window leading to the fire escape and Condon’s body, then crawled back behind the couch. I hoped the chair would block Avi’s view long enough to get him into the room. Seconds after I settled down, I heard Radar go off a few floors below. The dog went berserk, growling and barking furiously. A moment later, Avi’s head appeared in the window.

He bore no resemblance to the fat detective who’d gone before him. Avi moved with the silent grace of a snake after a mouse. He slid into the room, an automatic in his right hand, his eyes darting around the room. I knew I wasn’t supposed to warn him. I was supposed to lay the sights of my 9mm on his skull and give him what he’d given Condon.

But I didn’t do it. I wasn’t a killer and I didn’t want to be a killer. There are any number of pure assassins in the Institution. Men who’ll commit murder for a few cigarettes or simply to build their own reputations. The simple truth was that I wasn’t one of them. Despite the macho. Despite the tattoo. Despite the need to survive.

That
didn’t
mean that I was about to unload the gun and beg for mercy. No. I sighted down on the broadest part of Avi’s back, ready and willing to pull the trigger in self-defense. “Please, Avi,” I said as calmly as I could. “Please don’t make me kill you.”

His head turned toward me, but the hand holding the automatic remained motionless.

“Please, Avi,” I repeated. “Drop the gun and kick it away.”

It was very dark in the room. And I was very scared. I couldn’t make out Avi’s features, but I could sense the wheels turning in his head. I drew back the hammer of my weapon. Just to give him one more thing to consider.

“Not to shoot,” he said, dropping the automatic. He kicked it across the room, then turned to face me.

“Wrong way, Avi. I want to see your back.”

I waited until he complied, then came up behind him and smashed the 9mm into the back of his skull. He dropped like a rock, completely unconscious. I went through his pockets, found no other weapons, then dug out Condon’s handcuffs and cuffed Avi’s left wrist to a floor-to-ceiling pipe.

A few minutes later Avi awakened. He moaned several times, then sat up and looked around.

“You should have joined police,” he said. “Handcuffs are very tight.”

“Where’s the briefcase, Avi? The one with the rifle in it.”

“Why should I say this to you?”

I leveled the gun, but the threat only made him laugh.

“One thing I now know. You are not killer. You cannot kill.”

“Maybe you’re right,” I admitted. “But the fact that I won’t kill doesn’t mean I won’t hurt. It doesn’t mean, for instance, that I won’t hurt
you.
I’m not real interested in hanging around here any longer than necessary. If you don’t tell me where the briefcase is, I’ll dig up a knife and cut your fucking toes off.”

He took a moment to think about it, then shrugged. “Briefcase is on fire escape.”

I retrieved the case, carefully wrapping my hand in an old rag before touching it, and set it down a good distance away from Avi.

“This man is who?” Avi asked, pointing at Condon.

“He’s the man you killed, Avi. Just another notch on the gun, right?” I waited for a reply, but he merely snorted his contempt. “That lump of meat used to be a cop,” I continued. “His name was Condon.”

“A cop?” Avi’s voice registered his surprise. It didn’t make any more sense to him than it had to me.

“What difference does it make? I don’t wanna bother explaining, because Condon isn’t my problem anymore. My problem is
you.
I’ve taken care of Eddie and Parker. Morasso is dead. You’re the only one left and I can’t live with the idea that you’ll be trailing me for the rest of my life.”