by Lou Manfredo
McQueen laughed. “A.D.A.s and cellmates. Talk about strange bed-fellows.”
Rizzo laughed back. “Imagine that? An A.D.A. and a cellmate, the same kind of whore, far as we’re concerned.”
“Yeah, but Joe, if they’re whores, what does that make us?”
Joe nodded and reached again for the Chesterfield. “Pimps, my boy, flaming,royal, fuckin’ pimps!”
They laughed and looked back down at page thirteen.
Geanna Fago, Brooklyn.
TUESDAY NIGHT they sat in the Impala. The darkness of Seventy-sixth Street enveloped the car. It was a cold, moonless night in early December and the weather had turned seasonal. It was very cold inside the car. Rizzo had forewarned his young partner.
“Wear long johns under your street clothes. Two pairs of heavy socks and warm shoes or boots. Bring gloves and a hat, if you’ve got one.”
“Joe,” Mike had said, “we’re not going to Alaska. It’s thirty degrees outside, not thirty below zero.”
Rizzo had nodded. “Right. And you sit in a car for a few hours without moving, you freeze your ass off. Believe me. This ain’t your blue-and- white radio car, you got the motor running all night and the heater going. This is a residential block on a weeknight. You run a motor parked in front of somebody’s house, everybody’s looking out the window to see what’s up. They’ll be calling the cops on us. Listen to me. Dress warm.”
Now, by nine o’clock, the wisdom of Rizzo’s words were no longer lost on the young detective. Despite his compromised clothing, McQueen felt chilled to the bone, shivering visibly every so often.
“See?” Rizzo would say at each and every shiver.
By nine-fifteen McQueen was squirming in his seat and preparing himself to prove Rizzo right on yet another point. Rizzo noticed the squirm and smiled as he made it easy for his partner.
“You about ready for a Snapple bottle, kid?” he asked casually.
Despite himself, Mike laughed aloud. “Yeah, you old hump. Where are they?”
“Right where they should be. On the floor in the back. I hope you got good aim, ’cause piss on the carpet really stinks after a few days. Believe me.”
They had shut down the interior lights, so Mike went to the backseat and picked up one of the empty Snapple bottles Joe had brought along. The wide expanse of the bottle neck seemed right. He arranged himself precisely and urinated into the bottle.
When Joe heard it, he turned slightly in his seat and said casually over his shoulder, “Bet it ain’t so amusin’ now, huh? I’m not so funny now, right, bringing along those bottles?”
McQueen emptied his bladder, cursing the two cups of coffee he had drunk before leaving the squad room that eve ning. When he finished, he gingerly replaced the twist-on cap, tightly. He found himself unconsciously warming his hands against the now tepid glass of the bottle.
“What’ll I do with it?” he asked Joe.
“Hold on to it. Tomorrow we’ll slip it back into the soda case, next to the apple juice.”
McQueen ignored Joe’s chuckles and braced the bottle on the floor, against the rear seat.
They sat in silence, each watching the darkened front porch of the two-family home, fifty yards before them across the street. Nothing stirred. The cold street was deserted. McQueen idly watched a nearby home’s window as it flickered and danced with shifting light patterns from a tele vi sion screen, dull gray rays counterpointing the reds and greens and sparkling whites of the Christmas decorations most houses displayed. He glanced at Rizzo’s profile and noticed how the man’s gaze rarely left the car’s side-view mirror or the house where Geanna Fago lived. It had been a long day for Rizzo. Despite their scheduled start time of four p.m., he had arrived at Fago’s house by noon. Earlier that morning, he had learned, through a contact at the phone company, that a line was currently active for a Geanna Fago at the address they now watched. It was a two-family home located only four blocks from the scene of the burglary. Rizzo had gone to the house to interview the el der ly landlord that afternoon. Yes, Fago lived upstairs. No, she wasn’t home right then, she was at work. Yes, a man did spend a lot of time there. In fact, the landlord suspected the man had been living there full-time for the past two or three weeks. What was his name? The landlord didn’t know, but he had heard Fago call him “Tony” a couple of times. The man did not like either of them, Rizzo discerned.
Rizzo produced the color mug shot of Anthony Donzi. Yes, the landlord said, that’s the guy. No, he wasn’t there right now. He had left a few hours ago. He’d probably be back that night. Usually came in about six or seven o’clock.
Rizzo called McQueen and had gotten him to come in early as well. By three o’clock they were back at 360 Adams Street, the Supreme Court building, waiting for a judge to read their affidavits. The judge placed them under oath, questioned them, and then signed an arrest warrant for Anthony Donzi, for one count of burglary and one count of animal cruelty at the Simione residence the week before. Then he signed a search warrant for Geanna’s apartment.
Here they sat, Donzi’s picture taped to the dashboard before them, the arrest and search warrants tucked inside the breast pocket of Rizzo’s overcoat. McQueen glanced at his Timex.
“You’re sure this landlord didn’t drop a coin on us? Sure he’s legit?”
Rizzo rubbed his eyes. “Positive. Salt-of- the-earth type, retired fireman. He’s not too fond of Geanna, and he hates Donzi. Don’t worry, they’ll show. Maybe they went out for dinner or a few drinks, whatever. They’ll show. If they don’t, we come back tomorrow. They ain’t going nowhere. Relax.”
With that, a car passed them on the one-way street. As it reached the house, brake lights glared, and the car veered sharply left and into the driveway. Mike had run a DMV on Fago and Donzi that afternoon: it was her dark red Escort. A man was driving.
The landlord didn’t own a car and had told Rizzo that he allowed Geanna to park in the driveway for a forty-dollar- a-month surcharge on her rent. Rizzo grunted with satisfaction as he saw Donzi step out from the driver’s side. Geanna exited the opposite side, and together they climbed the front steps. Rizzo and McQueen watched as she unlocked the front door and entered the house.
“Seems a little unsteady on his feet, old Tony does,” Rizzo murmured. “Must be a little drunk. Maybe he’ll be looking for a fight and I can crack his fuckin’ skull for him.”
McQueen picked up the Motorola from the seat and gently keyed the send button.
“Dispatch, one-seven, Six-Two notifying for backup at the location, k?”
“Ten-four, one-seven, will advise Six-Two backup at the location, k?”
“Copy, dispatch, ten-four.” He went off the air and tucked the radio into his belt. Surprisingly, he found he had to urinate again.
“Now we wait,” he heard Joe say, more to himself than to McQueen.
And so they sat in the now strangely comforting darkness of the car and waited. McQueen glanced at the suddenly stony profile of Rizzo and decided not to speak. Instead, he found himself reflecting on the impressive reach the older detective commanded.
All the complex arrangements had been made with two simple phone calls by the se nior detective. After securing the arrest and search warrants, they had returned to the squad room. McQueen had sat passively opposite Rizzo at the maddeningly cluttered desk. He waited as Joe first called the commanding officer of the Brooklyn Emergency Ser vices Unit and then the chief of Central Dispatch Operations.
“I’m going down to see Pete,” Rizzo said as he hung up the phone. “Wait here a minute.”
“Pete,” McQueen knew, was Sergeant Peter Hansen, the supervising officer of the precinct-level communications unit. Rizzo was gone for less than twenty minutes, and when he returned he dropped into his chair with a broad smile.
“We’re all set,” he reported. “Here’s the deal. To night we go sit on Geanna’s little love nest and wait for her to come home from work. Then we wait some more for Donzi to show up. Once they’
re both tucked inside for the night, we radio dispatch, identify ourselves, and tell them to send the cavalry. Dispatch will notify the Six-Two communications desk and they’ll call in E.S.U., which I’ve got on stand by. Then they’ll send the sector car out to assist. Everything official, by the book. Friend of mine at E.S.U. promised me four guys with a battering ram. Counting us and the sector car, that’s eight bodies. We bust in the door, shove the arrest warrant down Donzi’s throat, the search warrant up Geanna’s ass, and that’ll be that. Only one more call I gotta make.”
And with that call, Joe’s reach in the department was made clear to McQueen. The young cop recalled the ease with which Rizzo had arranged for the fingerprint team on the Simione burglary, the way the court house doors had swung open wide for him and half a dozen other examples. Rizzo truly understood, perhaps even better than he himself realized, the exquisite power of the favor, the special treatment, the subtle weight of a due-on- demand obligation.
McQueen had watched and listened and learned as Rizzo placed the call to Detective Eddie Giambrone, across the river in the squad room of the Twenty-third Precinct.
“Eddie?” Joe said. “Joe Rizzo here. I was hoping to catch you at your desk and not have to bother you at home. You up for a little night work this evening?”
“To night, Joe? I’m leaving at six. It’s my son’s birthday, I promised him I’d be home to night. Why? What’s up?”
“It’s that Donzi thing. We’ve got a strong lead on him for tonight. We may get him.”
McQueen heard Giambrone’s grunt come through the speakerphone.
“Damn,” he said. “That’s great, Joe. I’ll call and cancel and be there, just tell me where and when.”
Rizzo chuckled and looked up at McQueen, winking.
“No, Eddie, don’t do that, go to your kid’s birthday. This is short notice, anyway; it couldn’t be helped. But it’s okay. If we get lucky and collar this joker to night, this is what we can do. I’ll use my teenage partner as the arresting detective. His arrest report will carry me and you as the investigating detectives. We’ll book Donzi and run him through arraignments on the Brooklyn burglary only. Then tomorrow, or whenever, you rearrest him in custody on your Manhattan assault. You go down as the arresting on it with me and you as the investigating.”
Rizzo paused there before speaking again. “Sound okay to you, buddy?”
Now it was Giambrone who paused. When he did reply, McQueen could hear the gratitude in his tone.
“That sounds very generous of you, Joe. Really. I appreciate it. I’ll owe you for this, Joe, big-time.”
Joe’s laugh was genuine as he replied. “You bet you will, pal. Someday, and that day may never come, I may call upon you for a ser vice. But … until then … consider this a gift on your son’s birthday.”
Now it was Giambrone’s turn to laugh. “Where have I heard that one before, Don Rizzo? It sounds real familiar.”
“Who knows?” Joe said with a shrug and a second wink at McQueen. “People have been stealing my lines for years. Maybe you heard it in a movie somewheres.”
And so now, as they sat in the Impala, McQueen felt himself smiling in the darkness at the memory.
“Joe,” he said, breaking the heavy silence in the frigid air, “you are really something.”
Rizzo turned to him with a puzzled look. “What?” he asked.
“With that Giambrone thing. The guy gets to go to his son’s birthday party without a care in the world. You grab Donzi, give Giambrone half the credit, plus let him take the arrest for the Manhattan assault. Not many guys would do that.”
Rizzo smiled and spoke with his eyes still on the house. “Yeah, well, my stats still look good, and now I got another guy in Manhattan owes me. You get screwed a little, but it’s a win-win situation for both of us.”
“I see that, Joe. You’re some cop, a regular Batman.”
Now Rizzo laughed and faced Mike before speaking. “Kid, I’d watch who I said that to if I was you, ’cause if I’m Batman, that’s gotta make you the heterosexually challenged Robin, the Boy Wonder.”
With that, a blue-and- white radio car pulled alongside them in near silence, its headlights dark. Rizzo opened the driver’s window of the Impala and waited as the passenger window of the blue-and-white slid silently down.
“Hello, Tommy,” he said to the baby-faced uniformed cop. “How you doin’ this eve ning?”
“Good, Joe. Pretty quiet. They told us you might need the sector car to night. You got a warrant, something like that?”
“That’s right. This is what I need you to do. Roll around the block and go up to Fourteenth Avenue. Wait there on the corner for the E.S.U. guys. Key the radio twice when they show up, hold them there, and then we’ll drive up and go over things. We don’t want our man glancing out a window and seeing all this activity.”
Tommy, the young cop in the radio car, nodded and hit the up button on his window.
“Okay, Joe,” he said as the window closed and the car slid slowly away.
Within ten minutes, the Motorola sounded sharply from where it was tucked at McQueen’s waist. Two distinct clicks, followed by silence. Rizzo reached forward and fired the engine. “Let’s go,” he said.
They rode past the house to the corner. Rizzo made a sharp left, drove quickly along the avenue, and then another left at Seventy-seventh Street. He sped the length of the block, jumped the stop sign, and made a third left onto Fourteenth Avenue. At the corner of Seventy-sixth Street, the blue-and- white sector car stood idling at the fire hydrant, a black Emergency Ser vice Unit panel van double-parked alongside. As Rizzo swung in behind the van, its doors opened and four imposing officers climbed out, their dark, paramilitary E.S.U. uniforms melding into the cold blackness of the night air.
Rizzo and McQueen exited the car and met the officers on the sidewalk. The two uniformed sector cops joined them.
Introductions were made. The E.S.U. supervisor, a tall, burly black sergeant, was an old acquaintance of Rizzo’s. The name tag on his outer jacket said “Simmond.”
“Jake, thanks for coming,” Rizzo said to him.
“My plea sure, Pisan,” Jake responded, his voice surprisingly delicate-sounding coming from his broad face and imposing mass. “What you got for us this evenin’?”
“Arrest and search warrant. Guy named Donzi. Anthony Donzi. It’s a 140.25 Penal Law and a 353.A of the Agriculture and Markets Law.”
Jake’s eyes narrowed as he reached out for the arrest warrant Rizzo offered him. “A burglar? You got the cavalry out here for a burglar? What’s the matter, your grandmother off to night, couldn’t help you out?”
Rizzo laughed. “Just a little insurance, that’s all. You ladies will be back to the mah-jongg game by eleven o’clock.”
Simmond scanned the arrest warrant as he spoke. “And what the goddamn is a three whatever-whatever of the agricultural shit-kicker law? I never even heard of it.”
“Agriculture and Markets Law. A 353.A is aggravated cruelty to animals. You can do two years for it.”
Simmond shook his head and handed the warrant back to Rizzo. “Don’t even want to hear about that, Joe. Sorry I asked. I got a feeling when I write my memoirs I’ll be leaving to night out of ’em.”
“Here’s the deal,” Joe said, slipping the warrant back into his coat and taking out the search warrant. “We got a search warrant, too— all legit and legal. The landlord is cooperating, gave me a key to the front door of the house. We unlock it and go in. Up the stairs to the apartment door. It’s a ‘no-knock,’ so you guys break it and we go in. Probably two people in the four-room apartment, Donzi and a woman, Geanna Fago. He’s thirty-one, six feet even, about one-ninety. She’s twenty-eight, five-six, one-forty.”
“Weapons?” Simmond asked.
“Don’t know, probably not, but if anything, maybe a knife.”
“Let me see the search warrant,” Simmond said.
“Right here,” Rizzo replied, waving it in front of
his shoulder. As he began to put it back into his coat, Simmond reached out a large, neatly manicured hand and stopped him.
“Let me see that, Joe,” he said firmly.
Rizzo paused and frowned at the man. “You think I’m jerking you off, Jake? Is that what you think?”
Simmond laughed. “Your hand’s too damn small to be jerkin’ me off, white boy. I just need to check the address, that’s all. I like to make sure I’ve got the right door. We bust down a door at the wrong address and granny chokes to death on her dentures, I’m on Eyewitness News tomorrow. ‘Affirmative Action Negro Screws Up— film at eleven.’ I don’t need that.”
Rizzo passed the warrant to Simmond. They spoke while the sergeant read.
“Donzi may not be a pushover,” Rizzo said. “He’s got a couple of assaults in Queens and a few in Manhattan. Likes to use his hands.”
Simmond grunted and handed the warrant back to Rizzo, the address committed to his memory. “Well, is that so? Hey, McSorley, you hear that? This guy we’re gonna grab likes to fight. He’s a tough guy.”
They all looked to the E.S.U. officer named McSorley. The man stood six-four, weighed two hundred and forty-five pounds. There was not an ounce of visible fat. Despite his body armor and bulky E.S.U. outer jacket, the power of his chest and arms was very evident. He was hatless despite the cold, and his shaved head glimmered in the scant glow of a distant streetlight. His ears stood sharply out from his skull and were almost translucent. When he was spoken to, he smiled at his sergeant. One upper front tooth was missing.
“Mongo like tough guy,” he said in a monotone. “Mongo like fight.”
Rizzo glanced at McQueen and then spoke to Simmond.
“Maybe we’ll let him deal with Donzi,” he said.
Simmond chuckled. “Just keep your hands away from his mouth” was all he said.
“One more thing,” Rizzo said. “I want everyone to hear this. This is my collar, me and my partner’s. But for to night, Jake is running the show. We all look to him to make the calls. Everyone clear?”
