Simple Intent (13 page)

Even hung-over, she was beautiful. Reilly couldn’t bring himself to give her a hard time. “Maybe I can help.” He held up a small blue package labeled, “Morning Relief”, a bottle of acetaminophen and tea bags. “Reilly’s remedy.” 

He went to the kitchen. It was clean and organized with healthy green plants everywhere. He put the kettle on and filled two water glasses, pouring the powder from the blue package into one. 

“Oh, my head.” Sailor moaned from the other room. “I thought good champagne wasn’t supposed to give you a hangover.” 

“Here.” Reilly returned with the water, shook out three pills into Sailor’s hand then looked at her and added a fourth to the pile. “So, what happened to you last night? I lost track of you after the loony tunes dude.”

Sailor shot him a look. She liked Jeremy, hadn’t seen a body like that since her dad took her to Greece. Jeremy was different. He actually looked into her eyes when he spoke to her. She drank the powder water, knew Reilly was waiting.

“I got Deluca to take me back to his place. The mickey in the drink took a little longer than you said.” 

Reilly raised his brow, Sailor pretended not to notice. “Oh, and I’ve got the film from the camera. I was going to take it to the one-hour photo, as soon as I stop seeing double.” 

“I can take it.”

“Thanks, Ry.” She smiled. “That would be great.”

The kettle whistled and Reilly called from the kitchen, “So, what’s Deluca’s place like?” 

Sailor described the high-tech electronics and sound system, the modern furniture, the view of the marina. She told him almost everything that happened. He brought the tea and noticed Sailor had switched to just stating the facts. Where the files were. How the computer was set up. 

She gestured to a stack of wrinkled papers on the coffee table. “I found those jammed into his shredder.”

Reilly picked them up, shuffled through them then shook his head. “Am I supposed to know what this means?”

“I wish you did, Reilly.” Sailor yawned. “I wish you did.”

Reilly watched her fall asleep. The tea did its job. He wanted to kiss Sailor’s forehead, smooth her hair back and feel her breath on his cheek, but instead he draped the chenille throw over her and twisted the blinds shut. He grabbed the roll of film and cleared away the cups and glasses. He paused to smell the miniature roses she’d planted in a casserole dish.

At the door, Reilly looked back at the sleeping figure on the couch and whispered, “So maybe Fast Eddie isn’t so fast after all.”

High in the air over New York, Doc and Maria made love in the tiny cabin of the private jet. Afterward, getting dressed proved more difficult than getting undressed, but they worked well together, silently bending down, zipping up and sorting shoes. It was a choreographed play of politeness and grace. Grown-up love was so much neater than the hurried spasms of youth. Not less complicated, just a lot more reserved.

“We’ll be home soon,” Doc said. “Do you have plans for the rest of the weekend?” 

“Plans? No. I had Sonja clear the calendar. The Cape will have to do without me for a few days.” She smiled. “Besides, I wasn’t sure if the weather would hold. I know how you hate to fly in the rain.” 

“That would have been nice.”

“What’s that?”

“Me and you, stranded in a hotel room in Philadelphia for the whole weekend.” Doc smiled and drew Maria into his arms. He bent to her ear. “I love you.”

Maria answered him with a kiss, trying to tell him she wasn’t the same girl she’d been, that she was sorry for keeping secrets and that she finally deserved him. Unspoken words passed from her head to her mouth to her lips to his, like an urgent Morse code, dots and dashes of lip and tongue.

Deluca woke up on his couch. What the fuck? He felt around. His shirt was undone, his pants were in place, zipped and buttoned. His head hurt. He remembered escaping the party with Sailor. Then what? The rest of the night was unclear. The stereo was on, tuned. There were champagne glasses, one with a lipstick smeared rim, and an empty bottle in the ice bucket. If she was good enough for the Dom, why isn’t she here? And why am I on the couch? “You’re losing it, Eddie.” He hated losing.

After two hours of housework and a chat with her daughter Holly, Gina placed the call she’d been avoiding all day. 

“Hello?” 

Gina thought she had a wrong number and almost hung up. The voice sounded like Aunt Jeannie, not Hiram Berger.

“How are you feeling today, Detective?”

“Oh, shit. Don’t talk so loud. Do me a favor, G. Come over here and shoot me. Please?”

Gina stifled a laugh. She had given up hard liquor years ago. “Poor baby. Do you need anything?”

“Yeah, a new head, smaller and lighter. Oh, God. I don’t feel so good.”

Gina heard the phone drop, then running footsteps and retching. She winced and gingerly hung up.

She’d always dreamed of the perfect man, someone to share her life with. A man who was well-read, yet not snobby; well-liked but not narcissistic; good-looking, but not too vain. Hiram Berger was none of those things, and Gina wondered—not for the first time—why she was still with him.

Sailor wondered if she should call first or just show up. She didn’t want to interrupt if he had company, but she wanted to show him what she’d been doing all afternoon. She picked up the phone and hit redial.

“Hello?” Reilly said.

“How’s my hero?”

“How’s the helpless victim?”

Sailor laughed. “Better.” 

“I got the pictures.”

“Really?”

“And Chinese.”

“Kung Pao?”

“Absolutely.”

“When?”

He said, “How about now?”

“On my way!”

With a bottle of Pinot Grigio under one arm and a bag from Jade Garden, Reilly was at Sailor’s door in less than three minutes.

They ate while Reilly messed with the photo disk. He enlarged and cropped, then printed out pictures of Berger and his party pals. Sailor pinned them to the dining room wall next to a magnetic dry-erase board. She’d written: Bentley, King and LeChance on one side and Berger, Deluca and Gallo on the other. There were more names underneath with strings on magnets connecting them.

Reilly pointed to Maria’s photo. “Who’s the fashion plate? She looks a little out of place.”

“That’s Maria Chetta.”

Reilly shrugged. The name meant nothing to him. 

“She’s pretty big East Coast money according to Jeremy.”

“Jeremy?”

“Yeah. I asked him about as many people as I could, until he started getting suspicious. Then today, I ran the names through an internet search.” She pointed to the white board. “That’s what I got. Chetta’s heavy into local politics and charities in Massachusetts. She owns an import business called Angelina. The lady in the rainbow sausage dress is Kate Shanahan.”

“The wife of The Honorable E. Patrick ‘Pay-me-and-I’ll-throw-it-out’ Shanahan.” 

“Reilly!” Sailor laughed. 

“And who’s he?” 

Sailor shrugged, squinting across the table at the picture of Doc. “I don’t know. But he’s nice arm candy.”

“Arm candy? I think I’m offended.”

Sailor chuckled. “You’ll get over it.” She leaned in, digging her chopsticks into Reilly’s take-out container. She looked at him. For a second, Reilly thought she was going to kiss him, until she said, “Is that the tofu delight?” 

“Uh, yeah.” He let her have the container and watched her eat, wondering where she put it all. She didn’t seem to have an ounce of fat on her, at least not in the wrong places. 

Sailor gestured to the empty spaces under some of the photos. “Maybe we’ll be able to fill in some of those blanks after tomorrow.” 

“Tomorrow?”

“Reilly, don’t tell me you forgot Graterford? The prison? Banning?”

“That’s tomorrow?”

Sailor nodded. “Banning said Ray Bentley’s one of the ten we’ll see. It’s going to be a very interesting day.”

Interesting wasn’t the word Reilly would have used. “I guess I must have forgotten to check my ‘Today I go to Prison Calendar’.”

Sailor laughed. “Oh. One more thing.” She pulled a computer disk in a green sleeve from her pocket. 

Reilly looked at it. “And, this is?”

“Let’s just say it wasn’t a terrible night with Fast Eddie, and I am so glad he didn’t upgrade to Windows ME.”

Reilly smiled. He slipped the CD from the packaging and spun it on the table. “What’s on it?”

“Not sure. It’s like the papers from the shredder: initials, dates, abbreviations. There’s more, but the encryption will be harder to break.”

The disk clattered to the surface, wobbled then stopped. Sailor looked through a stack of papers, chose one and slid it to Reilly.

“This is the print-out.”

He glanced at the sheet, “What do you think it is?”

“I don’t know. It could be case files or a client list. What I can’t figure out is why Deluca would have it encrypted on his home computer?”

“Here’s a better question. How does Deluca afford a million dollar condo and oceanfront property in Seaside on a MDB&S salary? And why doesn’t Deluca have to call ahead for a table at Delmonico’s?”

“Delmonico’s?’ Isn’t that Moreno’s old place? Where Jimmy The Greek was gunned down?’ 

“The same.” Reilly laughed. “Listen to you. Gunned down. I’m afraid to tell you what Shelly said.”

“Who’s Shelly?”

Reilly waved his hand like he was shooing a fly. “Just a girl from the party. Turns out she’s from my old neighborhood.” 

He hesitated, then said, “It wasn’t so different when I was growing up, kids hanging out on street corners. You hear stories. See things. I knew what bars to avoid, who owned what corner, that Friday was pay-up day. The Irish and the Italians had their own turf, and you were supposed to stick to your side of town. I knew about Lou Gallo and his crew. A bunch of low-lifes. My brother Sean lost an ear to one of Gallo’s boys in a poolroom brawl.” 

Reilly leaned back in his chair. “My Uncle Mick had an import-export business. a warehouse on the docks. Always had cash in his pockets, drove a new Caddy every year. Never seemed odd to me as a kid. Hell, I never knew what they imported or exported, never thought to ask. Didn’t hurt that he was Black Irish. He could blend with the Italians. Anyway, when Mick went to prison, his business ended up in Moreno’s hands.”

“Moreno? Not the...”

Reilly nodded. 

Sailor grimaced. “Is it true? About the head?” 

“Oh, yeah.” Reilly said. “Gallo killed him.”

“Gallo?”

Reilly shook his head, looked right at Sailor. “Gallo cut off Moreno’s head and delivered it in a pillowcase to his mother.” 

“But Gallo had an alibi. And didn’t they indict John…” 

Reilly shook his head. “According to Shelly and her cop pals, Gallo’s alibi was shit. The other guy went down as a favor to the family.” 

Sailor watched Reilly sip his wine, then set the glass down gently, speaking softer now. “Cops didn’t care. Moreno had been getting harder and harder to handle. Nobody mourned the loss. And besides, the boys said Gallo paid better.”

“What else did you get from these guys?”

“More than you want to know.” Reilly tugged on the pocket of his cargo pants and withdrew a mini recorder. “Maybe you should hear for yourself.” Reilly pressed play.

The man’s voice was easy enough to hear over the music and the background sounds, like he was used to making himself heard in such situations and liked the sound of his voice.

“You wanna hear a story about the Mikey Hiram Berger? Well, bet you never heard this one. Hey, Joe, pass the pitcher. Let me see, it was ’76 or ’77. Me and Berger got assigned to the Twenty-Sixth. We had foot patrol. Fuckin’ sucked. My dogs would ache for hours after—used to have to soak ’em in Epsom salts every night. Anyways, we was up in this high-class neighborhood, just checking it out, when we hear this banging noise. We look around and see this guy standing in a window. Naked as the day he was born. Hair all wild and shit. He’s standing there smacking his palm against the glass, smacking hard enough to bust it. We figure we ought to check it out before he spooks the old lady across the street or scares some kid, you know? So, I go to the front door. Gonna ring the bell, right? But Berger? No. He goes over to the window and stands right in front of this guy. Me? I don’t know what this wacko is on, so I’m staying as far away as possible with one hand on my stick. Then I look over and here’s Berger, playing charades with the fuckin’ guy. Pushing his hands through his hair and tugging on his shirt. He even pretends to step into a pair of pants. Sure as shit, the wacko does the same thing. He stops the banging, pushes his hair down, puts on a shirt and steps into a pair of sweats. Then Berger points and the guy answers the door, invites us in without a word. Calm as a pussycat.”

On the tape, a woman’s voice asked, “Then what happened?”

The detective continued, “I’m getting to that part. The wacko was on some bad speed or some shit. Said he hadn’t slept in a week. Sure as hell hadn’t had a shower either. Jesus! It stunk in there. Berger told the guy to take a shower, then we’d talk. Well, I figure here was where we see what he’s holding, you know? High-class neighborhood and all that. Berger gives me the nod, and I head to the garage and he goes to the kitchen. I come back with the blow and some cash, and I see Berger tying up a trash bag and heating up soup.