Keeplock: A Novel of Crime (9 page)

“These guys ain’t punks, cuz. They’re puttin’ up with Morasso’s shit because the job is good, but how much could they take?”

I was supposed to control Tony, to shepherd him through the job, then kill him when we made the split. “Sooner or later”, Eddie’d explained, “this fucker is gonna get popped for goin’ off. I don’t trust him not to rat us. I also don’t trust him not to shoot off his mouth in some bar. He’s a weak link, cuz.”

As if we were so tough that murder was no more than a business decision.

The city was alive and breathing all around me as I walked back to the Foundation. The whores stood on every corner, whispering their promises. The junkies eyed me through cloudy eyes. Prey or predator? I could see the question flick through their minds. I had fifty dollars in my pocket. The rest was tucked into my underwear behind my balls. It doesn’t matter how tough you are. A hundred-pound junkie with terminal AIDS is as big as an elephant if he’s holding a gun. Fifty was enough to keep the muggers happy if they decided to move on me.

On the corner of Ninth and 29th I stopped to watch a pimp in an ankle-length fur coat and jet-black shades slap one of his whores around. “Bitch! Bitch! Bitch!” The one word, repeated over and over again, the sum total of all the information he wanted to communicate.

I imagined him on one of the galleries in Cortlandt, pissing his pants as the Squad came to get him. The Squad never walks onto a gallery, even if there’s no immediate danger. They run, their boots pounding on the concrete floors. They run to your cell, drag you out, and haul you off to the privacy of the tunnels below the cell blocks. “Piece of shit! Piece of shit! Piece of shit!” Swinging their clubs. Communicating a single message.

As if on cue, two ragged junkies left the shadows of a doorway, threw the pimp up against the side of his Lincoln, and produced badges. Five minutes later two squad cars pulled up, lights flashing. The Lincoln was searched, the pimp arrested, and the whore bundled off to Midtown South where she would probably refuse to sign a complaint.

On impulse, I decided to call Simon Cooper. There are phones on every corner in midtown Manhattan and I only had to walk three blocks to find one that worked. The young man standing next to it, a beeper on his hip and a half dozen gold chains on his neck, shook his head.

“This phone is in use,” he announced, not even bothering to take the receiver off the hook. Not even bothering to look at me. The rest of his crew were sitting in a car across the street, watching with blank eyes. When I went into Cortlandt, the kids were still using shanks and Saturday night specials. Now they carried 9mm automatics and M16s. Up on the courts, we used to talk about the new breed. The word on the street was that they were savage beyond anything we had known. They were crude and merciless and rich.

I walked on by and was rewarded for my temperance with a working phone on the next corner. Simon answered on the third ring.

“Simon?”

“Yeah.”

“It’s Pete Frangello.”

“Oh, shit.” It was a few minutes after ten and the last thing Simon Cooper wanted to hear was my voice.

“You said I should call you.”

“I said you should call me
first
. The only kind of medicine I practice is
preventive
medicine.”

“It’s hard to talk about this over the phone, Simon. What I’m looking for is a way out. They want me to be a rat and I don’t think I can do it.”

He took a few seconds to consider it, then sighed into the mouthpiece. “I’m baby-sitting,” he said. “My mother-in-law’s sick, as usual, and my wife’s in Washington. I can’t get out of here tonight.”

“All right, Simon, maybe I’ll see you in the office on Monday.”

“Wait a fucking second.” He was obviously pissed off. What had he done to deserve me? “Man, my wife’ll kill me if she finds out about this. Can you get down to 14th Street? I’m in Stuyvesant Town.”

“I don’t wanna bother you in your home …”

“You didn’t mind bothering me to go meet you somewhere. Get your ass over here and let’s see if we can work this out.”

He gave me the address, then hung up. I grabbed a cab and was standing outside the complex ten minutes later. Stuyvesant Town is a huge, middle-class housing development near the East River. With its own parks and tree-lined paths, it has the feel of an oasis in a desert. A heavy contingent of rent-a-cops keeps it that way. The entrance to Simon’s building was across from a deserted children’s playground. The wind had picked up a little and one of the swings was creaking softly as it swayed back and forth.

Simon answered the door with a toddler in his arms and a young boy clinging to his leg. He stepped back to let me inside. “The baby’s almost asleep. I’m gonna put her in her bed and see if she’ll stay there. Find a chair in the living room. I’ll be right back.”

There was a baseball game on the TV in the living room. I sat down and glanced at it curiously.

“Are you a Mets fan?” the boy asked.

I hadn’t seen a baseball game in ten years, didn’t know the names of the players or how the team was doing. “Sure,” I said agreeably. “What’s your name?”

“Junior. Who’s your favorite player?”

“All of them.”

“Yeah, but which
one
.”

“Ya know, kid, your father never lets anyone off the hook, either.”

I don’t know what he made of that, but he settled back to watch the game. “They’re playing the Dodgers. That’s why it’s starting so late.”

I glanced around the room. It was cluttered and messy. Family photos crowded one wall, two framed prints hung side by side on the other. A bowl of popcorn sat on the coffee table in front of the couch. Junior was stuffing his mouth as he watched the game, washing the popcorn down with orange juice. It was a scene out of a sitcom. The middle-class family pursuing its middle-class life. After ten years in prison I found it both exotic and depressing.

“Wake up, Pete.” Simon’s voice cut through my thoughts. “Junior, you go in my bedroom. Watch the game in there while I talk to Pete.”

“Can I take the popcorn with me, Pop?”

Simon nodded wearily. “Just don’t spill it, Junior. You spill popcorn on my bed, you’re gonna clean it up. I’ve got enough to do here without pulling out the vacuum cleaner.”

He watched his son retreat into the bedroom, then turned back to me. “The kids miss their mom. They get worried when she leaves. Don’t wanna go to sleep.”

“You blame ’em?”

“I kinda wish they’d trust me a little more. I spend a lot of time with my kids.”

“Well, I trust you, Simon. That why I came here.”

“You didn’t trust me enough to give me a phone call before you went and beat somebody into the hospital. One day after you got out of prison.”

“I thought about it for a long time, but I didn’t see how you could help me. I thought I could take care of it myself.”

“You thought wrong.”

I ran it down to him in detail, describing my reception at The Ludlum Foundation, my interview later in the evening, my response the next day, and my conversation with Condon and Rico.

“You should have called me before you did anything.”

“And what would you have done? Send me over to another shelter? Don’t tell me you would have found me an apartment, because we both know that’s bullshit. I had to make myself a place in the Foundation, just like in Cortlandt. How could I know that Calvin was a snitch, that he’d go out an file a fucking complaint? Shit happens, Simon. That’s all there is to it.”

“I could’ve put you in a residential treatment program,” he said. His voice was filled with contempt.

“An RT? I’m not doing any drugs, Simon. I’m clean.”

“So what? At least you would’ve been safe. You wouldn’t have had to near kill someone over who’s gonna wash the dishes.”

The name, Residential Treatment Program, means exactly what it says. You live in a building with a hundred assorted drug addicts and participate in various work/therapy programs for six months to two years. Some of the programs allow you to leave the residence for a few hours a day. And some of them are as secure as a prison.

“What you’re saying is that I should go to jail to avoid going to jail. After ten years in Cortlandt, what you call residential treatment doesn’t look so good to me. You wanna see something funny, Simon? Wanna have a good laugh?” I took out my wallet and removed the list of phone numbers I’d been carrying since I left Cortlandt. “Those are the numbers of some of the boys who came out before me. I could’ve called any one of those numbers and set myself up with an apartment and a job. A lot of jobs, as a matter of fact. There’s one guy on that list who offered me a thousand dollars a week to ride shotgun on his coke buys. Plus he’d sell to me wholesale and whatever I made on the side would be mine to keep. He kept telling me I’d be rich in a year. I didn’t wanna do that. I wanted out of that life, so I went along with your program.
You
sent me to The Ludlum Foundation.”

He sat there for a moment before heaving his bulk out of the chair. “You want a drink, Pete?”

“No, I don’t want a drink. I want a way out of this.”

He took his time, filling a jigger with scotch, pouring it into a glass, adding ice and a little bit of water. “There’s only one answer and it’s obvious,” he said as he settled down in the chair.

“Don’t keep me in suspense.”

“Sit it out in Rikers. No jury will convict you for what you did to Calvin. I pulled his sheet and he’s got a dozen arrests, mostly for assault and robbery. If he testifies, even a Legal Aid lawyer’ll pull him apart. What’s he gonna claim, an unprovoked attack? You told me that Calvin was doing heavy cocaine. Talk about unreliable. Pete, when Calvin gets out of the hospital, he’ll go right back into the street. No prosecutor’s gonna put a strung-out coke junkie on the witness stand. Condon and Rico are bluffing you. What you have to do is call their bluff. Go back to Rikers and sit it out.”

“How long would I have to sit there, Simon?” We both knew the answer. “It takes at least six weeks to get a hearing on a parole violation, and the process won’t even get started until the assault charge is resolved. There’s no bail for a parole violator. No way out before the hearing.”

I leaned forward. “What it is,” I said, “is that I can’t go back inside.”

“I don’t buy that. It doesn’t make sense. The way you handled Calvin proves you’re not afraid. You’ve been doing prison all your life. Six weeks is nothing.”

I shrugged my shoulders. “I can’t figure it out either. At first I thought I was afraid of the violence, but that’s not really it. The only thing I’m sure of is that I can’t live that life anymore.”

“You know I can’t help you with Condon and Rico.” He spoke softly, admitting his own impotence. “They called me this afternoon, told me they had an arrest warrant and I should be prepared to violate you. They didn’t care about your background, didn’t care if you went to jail for child abuse or tax evasion, but when I told them you were in Cortlandt, they got real interested. Then they called back a couple of hours later and told me you decided to cooperate. I think—”

“Don’t violate me, Simon.” The abrupt change of subject brought him up short. “If you don’t violate me, if you talk to the court, I have a shot at a low bail. That’s why I came over here. To ask you not to violate me if I turn Condon and Rico down. It’s my only chance.”

He shifted in the chair, crossed his legs, then uncrossed them. “If I didn’t violate you, my supervisor would. It’s an automatic when there’s an arrest. Even if you made bail before my supervisor found out, Condon and Rico would re-arrest you. I don’t know if you plan on running, but if you do, you’d be better off making your move before you get arrested.”

“Dadddddyyyyy. Daddddyyyyyyy.”

“That’s my little girl,” Simon said, as if it was some kind of a mystery. “I’ll be there in a minute, honey.” He shook his head. “I shouldn’t have waited so long to get married and have kids. This shit is too crazy for a man my age.”

“Anytime you wanna trade lives, Simon, you just let me know.”

It was nearly eleven by the time I got back to The Ludlum Foundation, an hour past the curfew. Sing-Sing was alone at the security desk in the lobby. He smiled as I walked into the building.

“You late, man.”

“Is that a problem?”

“Not with me. You wanna do a few lines?” He held up a small vial filled with white powder. “It’s bad shit, bro. First cut.”

“Look here, man. What I want is to be left alone. You understand what I’m telling you?”

He threw up his hands. “Chill, man. I know you got your own thing happenin’. And I got my thing. We jus’ two lonely bidnessmen happen to be stayin’ at the same hotel.”

I walked up the stairs to find four men in my room. Three of them were roommates, but the fourth was a stranger. He was sitting on my bed, pulling on a quart bottle of Thunderbird. I went off on him without even thinking about it.

“Where the fuck do you think you’re sitting?” I slapped the bottle out of his hand and ripped him off the bed.

“I didn’t mean nothin’, man.”

His eyes were filled with terror, but his breath stunk of cheap wine. I sent him flying after the bottle.

“He didn’t mean nothin’,” Monty said.

“Listen, you alkie bastard, nobody sits on my bed without my permission. And nobody touches my shit.” I took out a twenty and laid it on the small table next to my bed. “You see this money? This twenty disappears and I’m comin’ to
you
to get it back.”

“Oh, shit, don’t leave it there, Pete. You leave it there, somebody’s gonna take it. Nobody’ll sit on your bed. I promise. Never again.”

I picked up the twenty and put it back in my pocket. “This bed is mine for as long as I’m staying here. It’s my property, my home. You don’t enter my home or use my property without permission. I don’t wanna hear any bullshit about how you got drunk and forgot. Now it’s late and I’m gonna go to sleep. Take the bottle and find someplace else to fry your livers.”

They filed out of the room, glad to be rid of me. I closed the door behind them and washed my face in the sink. There was no good reason for me to go off on four hapless juicers. The point could have been made without violence. But I was frustrated and angry and perfectly willing to play by prison rules. If Sing-Sing had challenged me in the lobby, I would have taken it out on him.