by Ray Celestin
The man thought. Michael could see behind his eyes he was evaluating the situation.
‘I wanted to talk to you.’
‘Well, you got a damn strange way of going about it, son,’ said Michael.
The man didn’t look het up, coiled, like he was following Michael to attack him. Something else was going on. Maybe he’d followed Michael to see how long he’d be gone – if he saw Michael disappear down a subway entrance, hop in a cab, maybe he would have gone back to the apartment and ransacked the place.
‘Can I put my hands down at least?’ the man asked.
‘’Fraid not,’ said Michael. ‘I’m not as fast with one of these things as I used to be. You’re gonna have to keep ’em up. Now you going to tell me what you’re up to?’
The man paused.
‘You’re looking for a drug pusher named Gene Cleveland,’ he said. ‘So am I. I was thinking we could compare notes.’
‘That’d depend on why you’re looking for him.’
‘’Cos I’m really looking for one of the other men who’s after him. A hired gun called Faron.’
‘And why are you looking for him?’
‘He killed my sister.’
The man stared at Michael a moment before continuing.
‘It’s a long story,’ he said. ‘Could we talk about it somewhere warmer?’
Michael wondered if this wasn’t all a ruse, if the tailing was deliberately sloppy, if the man didn’t already have associates breaking into Michael’s apartment, stealing the case documents. But something about this man suggested he was working alone, and that he was desperate, and that he really did need Michael’s help.
‘You got a name, son?’ Michael asked.
‘Gabriel,’ the man said. ‘Gabriel Leveson.’
There was a bar just around the corner. They stepped inside and Michael was glad to be back somewhere warm. The place was mostly empty, and the few people in there were slumped in front of schooners watching the television the owner had set up at the end of the bar. Michael stopped to stare at it; a television set was a strange enough thing, but one in a bar seemed ludicrous.
They ordered beers, sat at a table, turned to look at the tiny gray screen. It was filled with the image of a wrestling ring; two gray blobs in the center of the ring circled each other, lunged.
‘Do the bars in Chicago have TV sets in them?’ Gabriel asked.
Michael shook his head. ‘No. But they will do. How’d you know I’m from Chicago?’
‘I know all about you and your partner,’ said Gabriel. ‘I asked around. The two best detectives ever to work Chicago. The First National heist, the Brandt kidnapping, the McCulloch murder.’
‘That was all a long time ago.’
Michael took his cigarettes out, offered one to Gabriel. They lit up.
‘How’d you find out I was looking for Cleveland?’
They’d done their best to keep their tracks covered, yet clearly there’d been a breach. And a breach meant they might have put Tom in further danger.
‘Friend of a friend that works Narcotics,’ said Gabriel. ‘He heard you were making enquiries. I put two and two together.’
Michael thought about what Carrasco had told him, that he’d asked someone in Narcotics for info on Cleveland. He wondered how wide the breach was. He needed to speak to Carrasco about it.
‘I think I know who killed those people in the hotel,’ said Gabriel finally.
‘And who would that be?’
‘A gun for hire by the name of Faron.’
‘The man who killed your sister?’
Gabriel nodded.
Michael could see he was summoning up the resolve to dredge up something awful. He took a long drag on his cigarette and told him a long tale about his sister being murdered by Faron, of Faron disappearing, of Gabriel spending years looking for him, and how a few days earlier, he’d heard Faron was back in town. Had been hired to kill Cleveland.
Gabriel told him a lot of things, but none of them helped Michael out much except confirming the timeline of Faron’s movements that he and Ida had already established.
‘So, that’s what I know,’ said Gabriel. ‘Maybe you can repay the favor.’
Michael paused, sighed. ‘I’m not sure I can do that,’ he said. ‘Not just yet. We think the police colluded in covering up the hotel murders. Which leads us to think there might have been Mob involvement, too. So you can understand I’m a little wary when a mobster turns up in the middle of it all offering assistance.’
‘Who’s to say I’m a mobster?’ Gabriel said.
‘Son, I’ve worked in the underworld more than fifty years. You’ve got it written all over you.’
For a second Gabriel’s veneer disappeared, that sense all mobsters had of being comfortable in their own skin, at ease in the society they had rebelled against.
‘Unless you give me something more than I already know,’ said Michael, ‘I’m still not sure I can trust you.’
Gabriel nodded, took a sip of his beer.
On the television at the end of the bar, one of the gray blobs was counted out and a tinny cheer rose up.
‘The man behind the Palmer Hotel hit was Vito Genovese,’ said Gabriel.
‘Genovese employed Faron to kill Cleveland?’
Gabriel nodded. ‘Find and kill him,’ he said.
Michael thought. Faron had been employed by Congressman Helms, not Vito Genovese. What Gabriel was saying completely contradicted everything Michael and Ida had come up with.
‘You sure about that, son?’
‘I ain’t got proof,’ he said. ‘But that’s how it’s looking from here.’
‘And why does Genovese want Cleveland dead?’
‘That’s what I don’t know.’
Michael took a drag on his cigarette. ‘Which of the five families d’you work for?’ he asked.
‘I work for Frank Costello.’
‘Costello and Genovese are both in the Luciano crime family,’ said Michael. ‘That puts you on the wrong side of the fence.’
‘They may be in the same family, but they hate each other. Genovese’s planning a takeover. Ask anyone in NYC. All this with your son is linked. I’m not sure how, but it is. I may be a mobster, but I’m sure as hell not working for Genovese. I can’t stand the guy.’
Michael took a sip of beer. Wondered if it was all a ruse. If Gabriel was working with Faron. If he’d come fishing for information, to find out exactly how much Michael knew, to see if it was worth their while arranging a hit on Tom in Rikers.
He wondered if he was being sucked into a gangland war, was being used as a pawn in a chess game whose players he could only guess at. He thought back to the Van Haren case twenty years earlier, to the Axeman case ten years before that. How the lines of command and conspiracy always stretched further than was fathomable. He needed to talk to Ida, to see if they could trust Gabriel, if maybe they’d got it all wrong with Helms, or if they needed to reject the man’s offer.
‘Stop Genovese, catch Faron,’ said Gabriel. ‘That’s all I want to do.’
Michael could sense something else though, an ulterior motive in there somewhere. Gabriel seemed anxious, edgy, pressured. And none of that fitted with everything else he was saying. He wondered if Gabriel was as pressed upon as Michael. If he was as desperate.
‘And if you catch Faron,’ Michael said, ‘what’ll you do with him?’
‘What do you mean?’
‘I’ve seen men like you before, son. Men with revenge on their minds. You want to kill him. If you do that, where does that leave our case? You’ll be killing the alternate suspect we need to see my boy freed. That doesn’t make us allies, it puts us in a race against each other. We need to catch Faron alive.’
‘Not necessarily.’
‘No, but it would help.’
‘Faron’s an animal,’ Gabriel said. ‘A force of nature. All I want is him stopped, and the only way to do that is to kill him. You need to realize that. If Faron d
ies because I shoot him, I’m happy. If he dies in the electric chair, I’m happy too.’
Michael deliberated, not sure if Gabriel had said the last because he knew it was what Michael wanted to hear.
‘Maybe we can work together on this,’ Michael said. ‘But I’ll have to talk to my partner.’
‘Sure,’ said Gabriel. ‘But I need an answer soon. I don’t have much time.’
‘Neither do we, son. Neither do we.’
40
Sunday 9th, 10.00 a.m.
Ida wanted to start investigating if there had been any other killings. If Helms and Faron had murdered any other people in their attempt to hide what had happened during the war. But it was Sunday. Offices were closed, businesses were closed, even the library was closed. People were away.
She spent a couple of hours going through the call logs from the Palmer Hotel that Carrasco had gotten for them, matching up the addresses and names to anyone who might be related to the case, trying to spot patterns in the calls, the numbers, the area codes, the times. She came up blank.
She called Michael and Louis but they were both out, so she went for a walk, a long one that took up most of the day, that led her all the way downtown, to the Brooklyn Bridge. She walked to its middle and stood watching the boats passing across the surface of the river below, ocean liners and pleasure craft, tugs, ferries and lighters. In the distance the giant cranes of the Brooklyn Naval Yards towered into the sky, the scores of ship-builders’ yards that ran the length of the waterfront.
She watched the couples strolling past on the bridge, the cyclists, the people in their church clothes, the gulls arcing above. The city seemed to be alive with a different energy, a more relaxed Sunday spirit. She wondered if this was what her weekends would be like if she moved to California.
She returned to Midtown, through the multicolored confetti of Times Square, dull and shimmering in the cold. She watched a movie on Broadway. A crime film. One of a dozen on at the cinemas there.
She came back to the hotel late, to a message that Michael had called.
She called him back.
‘I had a visit this afternoon,’ he said. ‘From a Gabriel Leveson. You heard of him?’
He told her all about it and they discussed what to do, whether they should trust the man. Michael seemed like he wanted to. Ida urged caution, not sure if they were desperate enough just yet to start comparing notes with a mobster. They talked about the breach in Narcotics and how much danger that put Tom in. They talked but came no closer to an agreement, deciding only to reconvene in the morning.
She called Jacob over in Berkeley and managed to get through to him.
‘How’s it going?’ she asked.
‘Good, Mom. But busy. Real busy.’
They chatted a while and she was warmed to hear his voice, but the warmth cooled almost as soon as she put the phone down, and the distance reasserted itself.
She took a bath, got into bed, stared at the ceiling, thought about her day spent adrift in New York. Untethered as a ghost. The loneliness both kept her awake and made her feel tired. How was that possible?
She must have fallen asleep at some point because she woke to the sound of ringing, to daylight streaming in through a gap in the curtains.
She picked up the phone.
‘Hello?’ she said, groggily.
There was a rustle of static then a male voice came on the line.
‘Ida? It’s Adrian.’
The man who’d offered her the job in LA.
‘Adrian, hello.’
‘I woke you, I’m sorry.’
‘It’s fine.’
She checked her wristwatch on the bedside table.
‘I was calling with good news,’ he said. ‘You passed security clearance. You’re in. I had to pull some strings, but it happened.’
Ida wasn’t sure how to reply. ‘That’s great. Thank you.’
‘You don’t sound all that pleased.’
‘I’m sorry … I just woke up.’
‘No problem.’
There was silence on the line for a few seconds.
‘I’ve still not got a firm acceptance from you,’ he said.
‘I’m sorry, Adrian. I still haven’t decided. The case I’m working on has taken over and I’ve just not had time.’
‘I see,’ he said.
There was another silence, even more awkward this time.
‘The job sounds great,’ Ida said eventually. ‘It really does, but … just give me some more time to think about it?’
‘Sure,’ he said. But she could hear the wariness in his tone.
After she put down the phone a sense of panic gripped her, of things spinning out of her control. She quickly called the office in Chicago to see how things were going, was disappointed when they told her everything was fine.
She got dressed and headed downtown.
An hour later she was walking through the lobby of the Manhattan Criminal Court. It was full of people, their footsteps and conversations filling the space with an echoing noise that was at once shrill and diffuse. The bustle reinforced Ida’s belief that law courts were not so much spaces where justice was dispensed, as they were market places; great bazaars where the economics of the legal system were worked out. Where the people who profited from crime, really profited – the judges, lawyers, DAs, police, bondmakers, bailiffs – descended like a flock of gulls to feast on the unfortunates caught in the net, where the first order of business was to process the money, and then the paperwork, and last of all the people.
She checked the calendar, found Tom’s lawyer’s name. Len Rutherford, counsel for the defense in an arraignment. The lawyer who was refusing to answer her calls. The lawyer they were about to sack, regardless of how close they were to a trial date.
She walked through a maze of corridors, found the courtroom, sat in the public gallery. The case involved a stabbing at a bar on the Lower East Side. Rutherford’s client, a sullen-looking Irishman, pled guilty. Rutherford made no attempt to convince the judge his client wasn’t a flight risk; he spent most of the time looking at his watch. The judge set bail. The defendant shuffled out. It was all over in the space of a few minutes.
Ida left the court, waited for the lawyer in the corridor outside.
‘Mr Rutherford,’ she said.
He turned around, looked her up and down, smiled. ‘Yes?’
‘My name’s Ida Young,’ she said. ‘I’m the private investigator hired by the family of Thomas James Talbot.’
The man looked blank before realizing who she was.
‘Of course,’ he said. ‘If you don’t mind, I have another hearing to go to. Please call my office and we can arrange a meeting.’
He turned and strode down the corridor.
Ida followed.
‘I’ve left numerous messages at your office,’ she said. ‘And I checked the dockets, your next court appearance isn’t till this afternoon.’
‘I see’ he said, the irritation plain in his voice. ‘What do you want, Mrs Young?’
‘I wanted to discuss the case with you,’ she said.
‘My duty is to my client,’ he said. ‘I don’t have to share information with you.’
‘You don’t have to,’ she replied. ‘But it would help.’
‘Hardly.’
They reached the end of the corridor. Rutherford stopped and opened the door for her.
She nodded her thanks and they stepped through into the echoing lobby.
‘The boy needs to plead guilty,’ said Rutherford.
‘He’s innocent.’
He scoffed. ‘I was almost of that opinion when I took on the case, now I’m convinced of his guilt. Regardless, it’s beside the point. A guilty plea and I can bargain down his sentence. He’ll leave prison with some of his life still left. I know the juries in this town, Mrs Young. He gets in that courtroom with a not-guilty plea, he’s as good as dead.’
‘There’s enough there to see him freed.’
&nb
sp; ‘Such as?’
‘Such as the prosecution has failed to find a single eyewitness or establish a coherent timeline,’ she said. ‘Their versions of events is far-fetched, bordering on ridiculous, and completely undermined by the fact that the murder weapon was never recovered. The evidence gathering was incompetent at best, and prejudicial at worst. The chain-of-evidence brief is riddled with inconsistencies. The whole case is based on supposition, secondary evidence and race bias. Any half-competent defense lawyer with enough funds and time could have this case thrown out before it even reached trial.’
The last wasn’t true, and both of them knew it, but Ida had gotten carried away; something about Rutherford irked her, his indifference, his sense of superiority.
He arched an eyebrow. ‘That’s all as maybe,’ he said. ‘But none of that matters, Mrs Young. Because when it gets to trial, all the jury’s going to see is a Negro who killed a woman and a white boy. A Negro who was caught red-handed. Literally. A thoroughly unsympathetic character.’
‘A war veteran and a doctor,’ Ida countered. ‘A man who spent his life helping people and was damaged by his service.’
Rutherford scoffed. ‘It seems you’re not in possession of all the facts.’
They reached the exit. He held up a hand and they stepped through the doors onto the steps outside the courthouse. He put his briefcase down, pulled a pair of gloves from his pocket. Ida buttoned up her coat against the cold.
‘I spoke with a friend of mine on the prosecution. They managed to get hold of Thomas’s army service record. Late last week.’ Rutherford spoke slowly, sliding the black leather gloves onto his hands. ‘Thomas was blue-slipped out of the army. You’re aware what that’s a euphemism for? Homosexuality.’
He stared at her. Ida felt a sickening mix of disappointment and bewilderment rush through her.
‘They also added his former landlady to the witness list. I had a look at her statement. He was thrown out of his last apartment after being caught indulging in his vices. That’s how he ended up at the Palmer Hotel,’ Rutherford said.
‘Can you imagine what the prosecution will make of all that? A man of his proclivities cutting up a woman and a young, white boy? They’ll say he was a pervert. Twisted. A drifter. Thrown out of the army and out of his apartment he decided to take his revenge on society. Or how about another motive – the hotel worker found him in flagrante delicto and at the prospect of being thrown out once more, he flew into a murderous rage. They can twist this a million ways, Mrs Young, each scenario worse than the next.’
