Rizzo's War

by Lou Manfredo

  Now Rizzo reached over and pressed the “stop” button of the recorder, and the tape switched off into silence.

  “And that,” he said, reaching for his cigarette pack, “was the Honorable Alexander Simpson and Jason Miller, Brooklyn’s newest judges, live, on tape, shelling out fifty thousand dollars apiece. They pay their bribes, then get the party’s endorsement for fourteen-year terms as Supreme Court justices in the county of Kings.”

  McQueen shook his head. “County of Crooks, more accurately.”

  Rizzo sighed. “Well, only some judges, not all of them. But that other shit they were talking about, the suppliers and ser vice providers, those are city wide contracts Daily’s selling. Everything from private sanitation to hospital supplies. Unbelievable: day-care centers, homeless shelters, drug programs, this guy had the whole city up for sale. And anybody who wanted the party’s endorsement, anybody who wanted to get anywhere in Brooklyn politics, had to go to this guy and cut a deal. And there’s Daily, taping it all.”

  “Why, Joe? Why tape it?”

  Rizzo shook his head. “That’s not the question, Mike. The question is, how did Rosanne get her little hands on it? And if Daily knew it was missing, how could he not figure she had it? And if he suspected she took it, how could he be stupid enough to use cops to track her down?”

  Joe shook his head. “It makes perfect sense for him to tape his crooked deals. He figured if anyone ever did give him up, if the feds ever did get wise to him, he could negotiate. If they grabbed him, he’d say, ‘Hey, I’m just one guy. I can give you contractors, district attorneys, judges, city council members, state assemblymen, I can make you a star, the next Rudy Giuliani.’ He must have a pile of these tapes stashed away someplace. There isn’t a United States attorney in the country who wouldn’t cut a deal for that. That’s why he taped it. That and maybe to squeeze a few of these scumbags if they tried to push him around some time in the future.” Joe grinned broadly. “He just never figured Rosanne would get her hands on it. I’d like to see him try to fuck with her while she was holding this little chestnut.”

  McQueen reached out and hit the “eject” button on the player. Idly, he turned the tape over in his hand, reading the date inscribed on the small label in Rosanne’s childish hand.

  “Remember when we met with him, Joe?” McQueen asked. “You guys started sucking on those cigars? When Daily noticed the smoke was bothering me, he reached under his desk and switched on a smoke eater. He said he used it when he met there on po liti cal matters.”

  Rizzo nodded. “Yeah, I remember. He must have had two switches down there, one for smoke and one for tapes. A regular Tricky-Fuckin’-Dick, he is.”

  They sat in silence for a moment, each with their own thoughts. Then Joe spoke up.

  “Ironic, ain’t it?” he said with a smile. “Daily made this tape for insurance. So he’d have something to bargain with if he ever got jammed up. So what happens? His daughter grabs the tape for the same reason. Insurance against him. So the very thing he figured would protect him jumps up and bites him on the ass.”

  Mike shook his head. “This doesn’t make any sense, Joe. The money, the hundred grand, he probably figured that would be mostly gone. And even if it wasn’t, he could always deny it was his. Who would believe Rosanne? No, that money wouldn’t prove a thing, even if she still had it all. But this tape. That’s something else. And wherever he’s got the rest of them, if there are any more, the feds would eventually find them. Hell, his lawyer would probably hand them over, cut a deal, like you said. But he couldn’t afford to let this first one get loose. It just doesn’t make sense.”

  Rizzo, secure in the knowledge that they were the only two in the house, lit a Chesterfield. As he did, he picked up Rosanne’s newly found diary.

  “Let me see that tape,” he said. Glancing at the date on the cassette, he flipped open the diary. As he smoked, he slowly thumbed through the book.

  When he came to the diary entry made on the date of the tape, he stopped. Reading the broad, florid strokes of Rosanne’s now familiar handwriting, Joe smiled slowly and looked up into his partner’s eyes.

  “It makes sense now, Mike,” he said. “This kid may be screwy, but she sure as hell isn’t stupid.”

  “Why?” Mike asked. “You find something?”

  Rizzo nodded and pulled deeply on his cigarette. “Yeah, it’s right in here. That’s why she took this diary with her. She couldn’t afford to have the old man find this one. And that’s why she tore a page out of the diary we found in her room. It must have mentioned her knowing Daily was a crook.”

  McQueen leaned across the desk and looked at the page.

  “What is it?” he asked.

  “This tape is just a copy. Rosanne left the original tape right where she found it. Seems that the night these two characters stopped by Daily’s house to pay their way to judicial respectability was the night of the Demo cratic Club’s annual dinner dance. They were all getting together to celebrate the legacy of Franklin Roo se velt and John F. Kennedy and pat each other on the back. So Rosanne waited for them to leave, then went into her father’s office. She had a key to the desk, remember? And the combination to the wall safe. That’s what she told The Surgeon. Well, Daily had no time that night to secure the tape in what ever bank box he uses, so he tossed it into the wall safe along with the cash they had just handed him. Now, little Rosanne cracks the safe, grabs the money and the tape. She unlocks his desk, takes out a blank cassette, and uses his own machine to copy the original, which she then puts back into the safe.

  “After that, she packed a bag and headed off with the gorilla to Dutchmen country. And somewhere along the line, she dropped the stuff off to Father Charles.”

  McQueen nodded. “So the old man figured she just took the cash.”

  “Yeah,” Rizzo said, crushing out his Chesterfield in a coaster on the desk. “There was probably lots of stuff in that safe. He saw it hadn’t been disturbed, figured the kid was just a crazy pain-in- the-ass anyway, not a real threat, and he figured he would confront her for the dough. But when she disappeared, he had to deal with his wife and his po liti cal image, which both demanded he play the concerned daddy and look for the kid.” Rizzo leaned back and smiled. “A real prick, this guy, wouldn’t you say?”

  Mike laughed without humor. “Is there any politician who isn’t?” he asked.

  Rizzo’s laugh was genuine. “Not these days, Mike, not these days.”

  After a long, thoughtful silence, McQueen spoke up. “So you figure this is definitely federal, Joe?” he asked.

  “Absolutely,” Rizzo said, lighting another Chesterfield. “We can’t trust the department on this, half the inspectors at the Plaza probably owe their jobs to this guy, either directly or indirectly. The D.A.’s office is no better. They probably bought their jobs, too. The county D.A.’s are elected, but whoever the bosses pick for the Demo cratic nominations always win the election, same as with the judges, especially in Brooklyn. If we run with this ball, we go straight to the feds, right over to the U.S. Attorneys Office on Cadman Plaza.”

  McQueen expelled air from his lungs. “What a fucking mess,” he said. “And me right in the middle of it. I always tried to stay clean, Joe, avoid problems. Now look at this shit.”

  Rizzo dragged on his cigarette and blew smoke off to the side, away from McQueen. When he spoke, he kept his voice gentle.

  “Look, Mike,” he said. “I’m not going to lie to you. We do this, even if we can figure a way to do it indirectly, the brass may know it was us, or at the very least strongly suspect that it was us. You better know that going in, before you decide how we play this.”

  “I know,” McQueen said, his voice somber with an almost painful sadness. “All that keeping my nose clean, Joe, out the window. My career is done, here. Done.”

  Rizzo smiled. “Kid,” he said, “do you really believe that you’ve kept your nose clean? ’Cause if you had, and if you continued to, the bosses couldn’t touch
you. But let’s reflect here for a moment, Mike, on this clean nose of yours. See, there are too many rules, too many gray areas on this job and in this society and in this life, for anyone— anyone—to keep a clean nose. Especially a cop.”

  McQueen raised his eyes to Rizzo’s and listened. Then Rizzo explained.

  He explained how, in the eleven short months they had worked together out of Mike’s seven-year career, McQueen had lied about Peter Flain’s death in the toilet of the Keyboard Bar, dated the victim in an active criminal investigation, dined at a precinct restaurant at a reduced price and then later provided a private escort for the restaurant’s own er.

  Joe reminded Mike how they had overlooked the underage drinking and probable police corruption at McDougal’s bar, submitted exaggerated overtime bills throughout the investigation, ignored evidence of crimes by the Hell’s Angels and The Dutchmen, and even agreed to facilitate a criminal communication between The Dutchmen and the local mob leader Louie Quattropa.

  “And that’s just what you’ve done with me, Mister Clean Nose, and mostly just recent stuff,” Rizzo said with a smile. “I’m gonna take a guess here. At some point, you were rolling along in your blue-and- white, protecting the good citizens of Greenwich Village, and you spot a car going by and it looks wrong. You can’t say exactly why, but you’re a cop, and the car looks wrong. So you run the plate and it comes back clean. But by that time, you’ve been riding behind the car for a while, and you notice the guys inside are starting to get antsy, real antsy. They’re turning and looking over their shoulders, fidgeting around. Now you know the car is wrong. So you hit the lights and pull them over. Ten minutes later, you got yourself a gun collar.”

  McQueen shrugged. “Okay, something like that may have happened.”

  Rizzo laughed. “Yeah, I bet it did. Now let me take a stab here, just another wild guess at how your arrest report read. Let’s see, maybe something like, ‘At time and place of occurrence, did observe blue Ford fail to stop for stop sign on Blipity-Blip Street. During routine traffic stop, arresting officer did see the butt of a weapon protruding from beneath front seat. In fear for personal safety, did conduct search of vehicle and recovered illegal handgun, etc., etc., etc.’ How ’bout it? That close enough?”

  McQueen grinned. “Pretty close.”

  Rizzo nodded. “Damn right. But what really happened was you stopped that car for no legally permissible reason, you stopped it because you’re a cop and it looked ‘wrong,’ and then you searched them and found that gun. Good job, helped keep all the civil libertarians down on West Fourth Street safe and free to go to the ban-the- bomb rally. Good work, but pretty shitty from a constitutional point of view, and perjury to boot.”

  McQueen shrugged. “So, okay. Every cop knows the protruding gun butt story, same as the burned-out taillight and smell of marijuana stories. What’s that got to do with all this we’re dealing with now?”

  “Everything, Mike. You have a decision to make, kid. A big one. Don’t make it under the mistaken impression that you’re clean, that you’ll stay clean in the future. We break five rules a day, Mike. The only cops who don’t are the ones not doing their jobs to the slightest degree, the guys who ride around for their whole shift and see, hear, and smell no evil. The slackers, the deadbeats. To do this job right, you gotta break some rules. Period. And if some boss has a hard-on for you and wants to hurt you, he can. The only thing that keeps it in check is that the bosses do the same thing, the real bosses, anyway. They have to break the same rules. But if you get the Plaza on your ass, those bosses aren’t even real cops anymore, just stuffed-suit politicians, no different or better than Daily and his asshole buddies.”

  McQueen slumped in his seat. When he finally spoke, it was softly.

  “Joe, what are you saying? You want to let this guy walk away from this? Let him off the hook?”

  Rizzo shook his head. “No, Mike. Remember me? James Butler Bonham, at the friggin’ Alamo. I say nail the prick. But I’m twenty years ahead of you. We hit a wall, I’m out of here with my pension in my pocket. That’s why it’s got to be your decision. What ever it is I’ll live with it, but you have to make this call.”

  After a few moments passed in silence, Rizzo spoke again. He kept his voice gentle and even, allowing kindness into it.

  “Mike, I know how you feel. Listen, I’ve been very careful over the years, very careful. All the guys I’ve worked with, the ones I’ve worked for, they all knew I’d look the other way when necessary. I’ve nursed that image and it’s served me well. I always fit in, and they always left me alone, left me to do my job my way. I’ve seen cases of corruption, I’ve seen the brutality situations, and I’ve looked the other way. That’s one reason D’Antonio gave us this case, because he knew if there was something wrong about it, you were too green to bump heads on it and I’d just take the pragmatic view, just find Rosanne and walk away. They feel safe with me, and that’s fine. But I’ve always had my own standards, Mike, and this one is over my line. I don’t want to ignore it. Unless, of course, you have to, in which case I’ll understand. Believe me.”

  Joe paused and stubbed out his cigarette. He reached for a fresh one and tapped its unfiltered end against his thumbnail, then spoke again, even more softly, as he lit it.

  “This is what I think you— we—should do. I’ll call D’Antonio to night. I’ll tell him we’ve still got some loose ends to take care of but I’ll handle them myself. We take two weeks leave. You get into that little black hot rod of yours and go see Ma and Pa McQueen down in Virginia. When you come back, you tell me how you want to handle the tape.”

  McQueen raised his eyes to Rizzo’s.

  “And the thirty-two thousand,” he said.

  Rizzo shook his head. “No, kid,” he said softly. “Forget about that. I’ll handle that. The less you have to do with it, the better.”

  McQueen felt color coming to his face as his heart rate increased.

  “How, Joe?” he asked, his voice hard-edged. “How’re you going to handle it? A visit to the Cornell bursar’s office, maybe?”

  Rizzo smiled. “I won’t take any offense to that, kid, ’cause I know you’re right to say it. But you’re gonna haveta trust me here, Mike. Trust me, or take this here box and go to whoever you figure you can trust with it. And good luck.”

  McQueen’s mind reeled and he felt perspiration breaking out on his forehead. After a few moments passed in tense silence, he spoke in soft, resigned tones.

  “What’s the plan, Joe?” he asked simply.

  Rizzo smiled, a rare gentleness touching his eyes. “Okay, Mike. You earned an explanation, but it might be better if you can say you didn’t know, you were in Virginia and …”

  “You have to tell me, Joe,” Mike said with finality.

  Rizzo sighed sadly as his smile faded. “Alright, Mike. I was young and stupid once. I guess you got the same right.”

  After a moment, he continued. “That cash doesn’t prove shit. By itself, it’s useless. Daily could deny he ever saw it, deny it was ever in his safe. Rosanne is a drug-using, drunken, bipolar teenager with a proven hatred and resentment for her father. She couldn’t convince anybody of anything. Hell, she probably doesn’t even know if there’s any cash left.”

  Rizzo paused and crushed out his cigarette. He leaned back in his seat, and this time his smile was one of satisfaction.

  “But the tape, Mike. That nails him real good. In his own voice, his and those two assholes who bought their judgeships that night in his den. It’s the tape that would have to go to the feds, Mike, the tape. If that’s what you decide we should do when you get back to New York.”

  “And the money? Where does that go?” McQueen asked.

  Rizzo shrugged. “I’m thinkin’ it goes to Manning. Remember his call to you, Mike? He said if everybody was happy at the end of this, we’d get taken care of. I want that prick DeMayo off my back and I want out of this job with the fattest pension I can get. You wanna go to the Plaza. That mo
ney buys it for both of us. I give the dough to Manning, he gives it back to Daily. All of us know the money implies Daily is crooked, but we also know it doesn’t prove nothin’. Daily doesn’t want its existence known, not just before his reelection campaign, that’s for sure. Think about it, Mike. It’s perfect. And what am I really doing anyway? I’m handing over cash recovered in an investigation to a superior officer who expressed an interest and involvement in that investigation. An investigation, I might add, that’s been outside normal channels since day one.”

  Rizzo reached for a third Chesterfield. “It’s perfect, Mike. Everybody wins.” He lit the cigarette and snapped the Zippo closed sharply.

  “Except for Daily,” he said softly. “Eventually he loses. He loses if we get that tape into the right hands.” He sat silently for a moment before continuing.

  “It’s your call, Mike. You go see the folks in Virginia.” Rizzo pulled on the Chesterfield. McQueen saw its tip burn a deep, bright orange.

  “Then,” Rizzo said softly, “when you come back, you let me know.”

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  RIZZO REACHED ACROSS THE SMALL TABLE and lifted his glass, touching it gently to an identical glass held by Louis “The Chink” Quattropa. It was the next day, early Saturday afternoon.

  “Salute,” he said.

  “Salud,” Quattropa answered as they both downed clear, thick shots of Sambuca in single swallows.

  Quattropa’s oddly colored tawny skin and almond-shaped eyes, the features that had earned him the nickname Chink, were now shadowed in the dim lighting at the rear of the Starlight Lounge. He leaned across the table as he spoke.

  “So,” he said in a deep, raspy tone, “what brings you to see me, Sergeant Rizzo? Is somebody double-parked outside? You want me to get them to move?”