He put the collar of his sports jacket up against the cold, and turned back around the other side of the block. He had grown up just four streets away, and childhood games had provided him with a knowledge of every nook and cranny. Stickball. Kick the Can. Ringolevio, where one team had to run and hide…He squeezed between two fences, ran down a little weed-filled path, and made it across the middle of the block. Panting, he paused to regain his breath, and then peeped out between two abandoned houses. (He half-expected someone to grab him and chant “Ringolevio-One-Two-Three!”)
Fifteen yards up the cobbled street, Tommy Balfa stood next to the open window of a black SUV talking to the driver. He turned to scan up and down the empty street, and then reached out as something was passed through the window. A bag or package of some sort—it was hard to make it out in the failing light.
As the other car pulled away into the deepening dusk, Balfa opened the back door of his own car and tucked the object behind his seat.
JACK WAS WAITING FOR the detective when he returned to the station house. Balfa didn’t spot him when he pulled into an angled parking slot between two squad cars; didn’t notice him until Jack yanked open the passenger-side door and slid into the front seat.
“You should have put it in the trunk,” Jack said.
Balfa looked over, wide-eyed. “What? What are you talking about?”
Jack reached back between the seats.
Balfa grabbed his arm. “Fuck off, Leightner.”
They were right in front of the station house. Cops were trotting up and down the stairs, walking down the sidewalk. What would they do if they saw two detectives tussling in the front seat of a parked car?
“Come on, Tommy,” Jack said calmly. “You can let me see what’s in there, or we can show your boss. It’s up to you.”
A young policewoman saw Balfa and gave a friendly wave. The detective considered his position for a moment, then released his grip on Jack’s arm. He sat back stiffly Jack reached down behind the seat. He pulled out a small, heavy gray plastic bag. Keeping one eye on the other detective, he opened it and glanced down. Stacks of money, wrapped with rubber bands. Big denominations.
“Usually,” he said, “we give the informants the money. I don’t think I’ve ever heard of it happening the other way around. Why don’t you tell me what the hell you’re mixed up with here?”
Balfa sank forward until his forehead rested against the wheel. “Fuck,” he muttered. “Fuck, fuck, fuck.”
CHAPTER twenty
“I’LL GIVE THE MONEY back,” Balfa said. “I’ll turn these guys in.” He was leaning forward, desperate, hands reaching out across the table.
The two detectives sat at the far back table of Ferdinando’s Foccaceria, an old tin-ceilinged neighborhood restaurant just a couple of blocks away, at the edge of Carroll Gardens. In the early evening, before the dinner rush, the place was almost empty. Old photos of Naples hung on the walls, forlorn men standing next to fruit and vegetable stands, looking out from the beginning of the last century.
Jack crossed his arms, skeptical. “You’ll turn what guys in?”
Balfa looked pale. “I’d rather not get into that right now.”
Jack frowned. “Come on, man—I told you I’d hear you out, but I’m not in the mood for any more bullshit.”
Balfa picked up his napkin and twisted it anxiously. “It’s nothing really bad. I swear to you. No drugs, no violence, nothing like that. I’m just in kind of a situation. I’m gonna work it out.” He leaned forward, face contorted. “I’m asking you for a break here, Jack, and I know that’s a shitty position to put you in. But the money’s not for me.”
Jack scoffed. “Who’s it for, then?”
The other detective seemed to crumple before his eyes. “I know you don’t like me.” Jack started to say something, but Balfa held up a hand. “You probably won’t believe this, but normally I’m a good cop like you—everything by the book.” He looked up. “Are you married?”
Jack just stared at him. “The money, Balfa. Who in the hell is it for?”
The other detective looked down at the table. “My wife and I, we used to have it really good. But now we’ve got a big problem.”
Jack gave him a skeptical look. “What kind of problem?” He was thinking of the redhead he had seen dropping Balfa off near the station house, but the detective looked stricken, and when he spoke, his voice was raw.
“It’s my daughter, Tiffany. She’s nine. Three years ago she was diagnosed with non-Hodgkins lymphoma. It’s a form of cancer. We got her some excellent treatment and it went into remission, but now it’s back. Stage Four. The doctors have given her chemo, radiation, the works. They say there’s nothing else they can do.”
Jack stared at him. He wanted to ask why, if the man’s own daughter had cancer, he couldn’t have cared more about the boy who had drifted ashore in Red Hook, but now didn’t seem to be a good time to press the point.
Balfa looked up at him, eyes filled with pain. “My daughter knows, that’s the thing, she knows. And she’s so fucking quiet about it. She sees that this is making things difficult between me and my wife, and so she just stays quiet. You wanna talk about hell on earth? You put yourself in my shoes, Jack. You try to look your own child in the face.”
Jack frowned. “You’ve got health insurance from the job, obviously. What do you need the money for?”
Balfa sighed. “My wife and I heard about a new treatment. In Europe. Over here the FDA hasn’t approved it yet, so the insurance bastards won’t pay for it. We need to get her over there, give her this chance. I don’t have squat for savings. I had no other way to do this, Jack, I swear to you.”
Jack stared at the detective. He seemed so sincere, yet he had already lied a number of times. “You trying to jam me up, Tommy?”
“How do you mean?”
“Stand up,” Jack said.
“What?”
“Stand up. I want you to go back to the bathroom. Leave the door unlocked. I’m gonna meet you there in thirty seconds.”
“What are you talking about?”
“Do it.”
Balfa looked confused, but he got up.
Jack sat for a moment. Then he got up and crossed over to the bathroom.
“Take off your jacket,” he ordered.
“What?” Balfa said.
“Take off your jacket. This has IAB written all over it.”
After a number of notorious scandals, the Serpico thing and a number of others, the NYPD had tightened ship. Of its 55,000 employees, 650 worked for the Internal Affairs Bureau. Every year, they conducted a thousand integrity tests. It could be a fake 911 call where you showed up and there were some drugs left out in the open, or a traffic incident where somebody would offer a bribe, or a more elaborate setup. They might rent out an apartment, say it belonged to some drug dealer, plant some cash, call you in with a fake tip, and watch you on hidden monitors. They conducted the tests in every precinct, and the subjects were selected at random. Highly decorated veteran cops were not exempt.
Balfa shook his head. “You’ve got it all wrong.” He took off the jacket.
Jack patted him down.
No wire.
They returned to their table. Over by the espresso machine the waitress, a middle-aged woman with heavy orthopedic shoes and a seen-it-all face, was giving them a wry look.
Jack sat and stared at the other detective for a while. Balfa looked like he was about to collapse with anxiety.
Jack sighed. Ran a hand over his face. Sighed again.
“I made a mistake,” Balfa said. “But I’m gonna straighten it out. I’m gonna fly right. Tell you what: You can even hold on to the money.”
“No way,” Jack said. That was the last thing he needed, to get directly implicated like that. “Who are these guys?” he asked. “What did you do for them?” Before Balfa could answer, he held up a hand. “Never mind. Don’t tell me right now.” Maybe it was best that he didn’t know. For legal rea
sons, in case he ever got questioned under oath…
Balfa looked like he was about to cry. “Jack? What are you gonna do? Will you at least think about this a little? Don’t even consider me; I’m just asking you to think about what’ll become of my daughter…Just take a day or two to think about it. Will you do that for me?”
Jack scowled. “I don’t need this. I don’t need this at all.” He looked away. “I’ll think about it. I can tell you right now that I’m not gonna just let this slide, but maybe there’s some way we can still get you out of this mess. It doesn’t look very likely, but we’ll see.”
His beeper went off. He glanced down and read the message. It was Sergeant Tanney, probably wondering why he hadn’t checked in. He stood up. “I have to go. I need to think about this.” He pulled out a couple of dollar bills for the coffee. “Sit tight,” he told Tommy Balfa. “Don’t do anything stupid.”
CHAPTER twenty-one
JACK LOOKED UP. MICHELLE had just said something to him, but he had no idea what it was.
“I’m sorry?” he said.
She gestured down at the dinner table, at the dinner she had prepared for them, chicken and a salad and wine. “I said, ‘Is something wrong with the food?’ ”
“Of course not,” he said. “It’s delicious.” As if to demonstrate, he cut off a piece of chicken breast, dabbed it into the gravy, and popped it into his mouth. And then he was drifting away again. Was it Internal Affairs, he wondered? It didn’t make sense. The setup, if it was a setup, was just too unclear, too muddy for a random test; they couldn’t have known that he would follow Balfa. Something was definitely wrong, though. The detective had lied before, about where he was going, about his “informant.” This new tale about the sick daughter—Jack supposed it was within the realm of possibility, but it could easily be more of the same, bullshit piled on top of bullshit. He frowned at the notion: Would the guy actually have the gall to make up a fatal illness for his own daughter?
“Jack?”
He looked up. Michelle was staring at him again.
“Is something wrong?”
“No,” he said. “It’s a work thing.”
“What happened?”
He started cutting the rest of his chicken into small, neat pieces. It was one thing to joke about some case that was all wrapped up, turn it into a dinnertime story, but this was too personal, too fucked-up. “It’s nothing,” he said. “Just a problem I’m having with a detective in Carroll Gardens. It’s fine,” he added, though it was anything but.
He considered his options. He could sit tight, mind his own business, hope that IAB was not looking his way, but there was no way he was gonna do that. If he was gonna turn a blind eye to bad business, why bother being a cop in the first place?
He could take it to Balfa’s boss, spell out everything he had seen, let the chips fall where they might. Maybe, like Sergeant Tanney had said, there were just two kinds of problems in the world: my problems, and not my problems. Maybe he should just set this in someone else’s lap, let them deal with it. That didn’t feel like much of an option, either. Right out of the Academy, every rookie learned that the crime-fighter’s code coexisted with a fundamental law: The Blue Wall. You stood up for your brothers. You didn’t rat anybody out. File under Life’s Little Ironies: It was the same way that criminals looked at things.
You were supposed to fight the bad guys, and never jam a comrade up—sometimes the two rules smacked up against each other, and then what did you do?
For Jack, his first moment of disillusionment had come with his very first assignment, out in the Sixty-eighth precinct. They had put him on nights, in a radio car with an older, cynical cop—a hairbag, as the cop slang put it—a drinker named John Flannery Jack had been eager to work the streets, to make some collars, and he kept trying get his partner to show him the ropes, but the old vet was an expert cooper: He knew every spot in the precinct where you could pull into a hidden driveway, an alley, a back parking lot…He’d say, “Wake me if anything comes over the radio, sport,” and then he’d slouch back with his hat over his face. Jack felt like a kid in the presence of the old cop, and didn’t feel like he could argue. He tried cajoling, but Flannery just told him to get out and walk around if he was so goddamn fired up. He couldn’t do that, couldn’t leave the car and the radio, so he just sat there squirming in the passenger seat, cursing his luck. What was he gonna do? Turn the old guy in? Lose the trust of every cop in the precinct? Make it so nobody would wanna work with him? He had kept his mouth shut for three months, until he finally got a chance to switch to a younger and more arrest-hungry partner.
This situation was worse because it wasn’t just about him and his partner. It also involved the man’s whole damn family.
Jack stood up. “I’ll do the dishes.”
“Really?” Michelle asked.
“Sure. You cooked.” With his ex-wife, she had done all of the household chores, but he figured that it was a new era. Michelle had her own day job, and he ought to pull his weight on the home front. It seemed only fair.
In the kitchen, he stacked the dishes in the sink and waited until the water grew hot. He held his hand under the faucet, and the feel of the water on his hands was soothing. It helped him think. He ran the sponge over the plates as he tumbled the options. If he turned a blind eye, his whole career could go down the tubes. On the other hand, if he simply turned Balfa in to Internal Affairs—and if Balfa was telling the truth about the kid—then he’d be completely ruining the guy’s family.
He turned off the water and sighed. Maybe there was a third way. He knew a good detective, an old partner, who had been called in to work for the IAB. Maybe the man could use Balfa undercover in whatever mess he was involved with, break a big case. Maybe he could help the guy turn the whole thing around…And maybe they could throw some kind of Department fund-raiser to help the girl…
First thing in the A.M., he decided, he would make a call…
“DO YOU WANT SOME water?” Michelle said later. She swung her legs over the edge of the bed and pushed her feet into a pair of fleecy slippers she had bought Jack as a little present when he got out of the hospital.
“What?” He lay staring at the ceiling, frowning.
“I’ll get you some,” she said, shaking her head.
In the kitchen, when she turned on the light, a little cockroach scurried beneath the counter, tiny legs pumping wildly. She filled a couple of glasses, but then perched on the edge of a chair for a moment. She thought of her stepfather, of a certain edgy tone in his voice, which had always seemed to be there—he didn’t need much of a reason. A familiar sourness crept into her chest.
She stood and headed for the bedroom, but detoured into the bathroom on the way. She set the water glass down on the sink and stared at her reflection in the mirror. Usually, she thought of herself as she had been in her twenties. Sometimes, though, she still felt like a little girl. She had been so young, but she had had to mother her own mother, who slowly collapsed as the love of her life, Michelle’s father, wasted away. Then he died, and her mother had disappeared into herself for a couple of years, and then came the stepfather. A man in the prime of his life, vigorous, but selfish and demanding. Michelle had finally escaped, gone off to college, gotten her degree, and then what was the first thing she had done? Found herself an older man. In shaky health. By the time he had proposed to her, they both knew he was on the way out. Emphysema. And she had married him anyhow. Something in her needed to protect men, to try to save them.
Jack coughed in the bedroom and she turned, startled. She had mothered him, too, in the hospital and after. What was she setting herself up for? She had read an article about it in a magazine. Repetition compulsion. You kept revisiting the situation, trying to make it right…She turned back to the mirror, which certainly did not reflect a little girl. Her skin was rough, weathered looking. Little crow’s-feet in the corners of her eyes.
Nobody was getting any younger.
; She shivered and returned to the bedroom.
She and Jack lay in bed for a few minutes, silent, separate, curled away from each other. And then, unexpected, she felt his warm hand on the base of her spine. He pressed it against her cool skin, then smoothed it up over her tight back muscles. He massaged them, kneaded her shoulders, brushed her hair out of the way, and firmly stroked the back of her neck. She pressed her face down into the pillow, felt the tension leaving her body with each long breath.
Suddenly she felt closer to him than she had for weeks.
Relationships were such a mysterious things.
CHAPTER twenty-two
SLEET PEPPERED THE ROOF of the car like buckshot. Several inches of snow that had fallen overnight were now rimed with ice, and Jack glanced out from his warm submarine cabin to watch passersby totter along the sidewalks, slipping occasionally and throwing their arms up like actors in some old slapstick movie.
Traffic was crawling. He glanced at his watch: He was due to meet with his old friend down at the IAB office in Manhattan in fifteen minutes, yet here he was still plodding toward the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway. He groaned; he wanted to get past this situation as soon as possible, to let someone else worry about Tommy Balfa’s screwed-up life. As soon as he got downtown, it would no longer be his problem.
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