by Blake Banner
We watched each other for a long moment. I asked him, “You want to toss around a few ideas about whom I might talk to in the Feds?”
He grinned at Dehan. “You gotta love this guy. Who else says ‘whom’ these days? Whom would you talk to? How the hell should I know? You don’t got no contacts in the bureau? Pfff… just off the top of my head, you might try Paul Harrison. I vaguely remember he was involved at the time.” He made an impatient face. “But hell, John! That was ten years ago. And I’m getting old. I don’t want Feds and the Mob knocking on my door at my age, you know what I’m telling you?”
I nodded. “I hear you, Sam. No worries. I’m sorry you couldn’t be more useful. Shame this was such a wasted fucking trip.” I smiled at him, and he smiled back. More seriously, I said, “Thanks, Sam. I won’t get you involved.”
I stood and he showed us out. At the door he said, “Stop by sometime. Have a beer. You won’t crack it, but if you do, come tell me about it.”
I told him I would, and we left.
Two
I called the bureau from my car. They eventually put me through to Special Agent Paul Harrison.
“What can I do for you, Detective Stone.”
“I’d rather discuss it in person, if it’s all the same to you, but broadly, it concerns a cold case that might involve the Mob. I figured you could give us some guidance.”
He was quiet for a moment. Then, “You asked for me personally, Detective Stone.”
“I was told you were indirectly involved in the cold case.”
“Mind telling me what the case was?”
“Not at all. I’ll tell you all about it, when we meet.”
“Who gave you my name?”
“Nelson Hernandez. Is there a reason you don’t want to meet, Special Agent Harrison?”
“No, not at all. Can you make it today?”
“I can be there in an hour.”
“Okay, call me when you’re arriving. I’ll meet you downstairs.”
I put down the phone and looked at Dehan. “Comments?”
The Jag growled the way only a Jag can, and we pulled out into the traffic.
“Why didn’t he do this ten years ago?”
I nodded. “You got any pets, Dehan?”
She stared at me. “Pets? Yeah, I got two rats. They live under the floorboards. I call them Bill and Hillary, and I feed them live Realtors and the occasional journalist.”
I laughed. “Boy! Just press any button and you go, huh?”
“What kind of dumb-ass question is that? Do I got pets?”
“Okay. You’ve got two rats that you feed living Realtors to. What’s Sam got?”
She sighed, nodded, and spread her hands. “Yeah, okay. He’s got pussycats.”
“Lots of them. And they are probably called Mr. Fluffy and Mrs. Cuddles. He was a couple of years from retirement and somebody advised him not to waste his time on a case where there was no material evidence, and above all, the witnesses were too shit scared to come forward.”
After a while she said, “Yeah. You’re deep. You see that in Mr. Fluffy and Mrs. Cuddles.”
“Nah…” I smiled at her. “I just left my anger at home with my attitude. Anger clouds the mind, little grasshopper.”
“This the kind of shit that makes you a dinosaur?”
“Yup.”
Special Agent Paul Harrison met us in the lobby and led us straight out again onto Broadway. We walked down Duane Street and onto Lafayette, toward Foley Square and the Thomas Paine gardens. He was a big man with slow, deliberate movements and intelligent eyes.
“I am extremely curious, Detectives,” he said as we walked, “to know what this is all about and why you think I, in particular, can help you.”
“We would like to speak to Morry ‘Pro’ Levy,” I said.
There was a trace of amusement on his face. “I am sure there are a lot of people who feel that way.”
We crossed Lafayette, weaving through the cars, and walked toward the gardens. I said to Harrison, “Do I look twenty-two to you?” He eyed me but didn’t answer. “’Cause, if I was fresh out of college I’d be about twenty-two, right? How many Feds do you think I’ve dealt with in the last twenty-eight years? You think I have nothing better to do with my day than waste my time pissing in the wind on Broadway?” He drew breath to answer, but I didn’t let him. “Do us both a favor, Harrison, don’t insult my intelligence by patronizing me, okay? If I’m here talking to you it’s because I have a good reason to think Pro will see me. And if you haven’t the intelligence to see that, the only person wasting anybody’s time here is you. Have I made myself clear, or do I need to explain any of that?”
We had reached the garden and stopped. He gazed at me a moment through half-closed lids and said, “Have we finished measuring dicks, Detective Stone?”
“You tell me.”
“What makes you think Morry Levy will agree to see you?”
We had come to a row of benches, and we sat down. “We’re looking into a cold case.”
“Nelson Hernandez.”
“From information received—please don’t ask me from whom—we have reason to believe that Pro Levy might have information and also an interest in seeing the case prosecuted.”
His eyes swiveled around the park, like they were threading ideas together. “I’m going to need a little more than that, Detective.”
“Okay. We have reason to believe there may be a bent cop involved, and that will have to do. I am not prepared to say any more. If you give that to Pro, I know he’ll talk to us.”
He looked me straight in the eye. “I am astonished, Detective, that with your background and experience, you would have come here on such a mission. You should know that the witness protection program is categorical in not allowing access to any of its subjects under any conditions whatsoever, whoever you are, without exception. I am going to return to my office now, and I hope you will not attempt to follow me or speak to me. And please never raise this subject with me or any of my colleagues again. Whoever it was suggested this to you was sorely mistaken. Good day.”
He got up and strode away, back toward the FBI building, leaving Dehan and me to stare at each other. She said, “What the hell was that?”
“I think we just got our meeting with Pro.” I looked at my watch. “Come on, let’s get a hot dog.”
As we walked, she said, “This is deep.”
“Deep is your word du jour.”
“Whatever. He’s taking a message back to Pro, who is on witness protection but still in with the Vincenzo family, against bureau policy, so that Pro will have a meeting with us because he and the Vincenzos have an interest in finding Mick Harragan?”
“That about sums it up, Dehan.”
“We are being used by the Mafia.”
“They are trying to use us. Whether we let them or not is up to us.” We got to the stand and I ordered two hot dogs. I watched her a minute. She looked troubled. “You up for this?”
She nodded. “Oh yeah.”
Three
The call came at three a.m. I squinted at the screen. It said the number was withheld. When I answered, a deep voice came over the line.
“Stone?”
“Yeah. Who is this? It’s three in the morning…”
“You’re going to go to LaGuardia. You’re going to go to the Fastair desk. You tell ’em who you are. There is a plane gonna take you to see you-know-who.”
“You-know-who?”
“Yeah, you know… you-know-who. You got that?”
I rubbed my face and sighed. “Yeah, I got it.” I hung up, then swung my legs out of bed and thought of Dehan. For a moment I considered not calling her, but changed my mind. I pressed her speed dial.
“What?”
“Get dressed. I’ll be there to pick you up in twenty minutes.”
“Why?”
“We are going to meet you-know-who.”
Dehan had an apartment in an old oxblood block in the Foxhur
st district. She was waiting in the doorway when I arrived. She ran down and climbed in.
“Who would have guessed my life would become so glamorous when I teamed up with you, Detective Stone? What’s happening?”
I told her what I knew. She thought about it for a bit and said, “So nobody knows where we are, and we don’t know where we’re going.”
“Yup. But we’re still naïve enough to trust that the FBI would not set us up.”
She gave me the once-over. “What’s that, the royal we?”
“We’ll take it a step at a time. See where it leads.”
There was a pilot waiting for us at the Fastair desk. He led us out onto the tarmac and across to a small jet. As we boarded, I asked him, “Where are we going?”
He looked surprised and smiled.
“You’re boarding an air taxi and you don’t know where you’re going? That’s a first for me. I have instructions to fly you to Port Lavaca, on the Matagorda Bay. About twenty miles outside Victoria. Flight time is about three hours, so we should be there at…” He checked his watch. “Thirty minutes after eight.” He smiled at us both and added, “Cabin crew will be serving you breakfast shortly after takeoff.”
I sat and Dehan sat opposite me across a small table. She said, “I feel like James Bond. Did you bring your tux? Next thing we’ll be sipping martinis and assassinating Third World presidents.”
I smiled. Dehan had a sense of humor. Who knew? She caught my look and said, “There is a serious side to this, Stone.” I nodded. She went on, “The bureau isn’t paying for this jet.”
“Nope, the Mob is.”
“When the Mob lays it on like this, they expect something in return.”
“Which begs the question, are the Feds in an uneasy truce with Vincenzo, or is Harrison in bed with them, along with Sam?”
We were taxiing toward the runway, and I knew what was coming next. We stopped and the engines started to scream. She said, “Tell me where you stand.”
We began to move, and next thing we were hurtling down the runway and the earth was falling away beneath us. Outside, the eastern horizon was turning a gray blue over the Atlantic, and to the west the billion lights of New York and New Jersey echoed the heavens in their spray of stars.
“I stand where I have always stood,” I said. “I live in the house my parents left me. The biggest expense I ever had was bringing the Jag over from England. The opportunities have been there, as they will be for you”—as they were right now, today—“but that’s not who I am. I don’t belong to anybody.”
She stared out at the vast ocean with no particular expression. After a while, a pretty hostess brought us scrambled eggs and coffee. Dehan ate hungrily while I sipped the strong black brew.
When she’d finished, she sat back and drained her cup.
“Is that why you never married?”
I smiled at her. “Mind your own goddamn business.”
We sat in companionable silence for a while, and I leafed through a magazine. Without looking at her, I asked, “How about you?”
“Same answer.”
We touched down at eight twenty. It was just an airfield. It was in the middle of a huge plain that was, in turn, surrounded by flat lands that seemed to go on forever. We taxied to a hangar where we were met by a young guy in Bermuda shorts and a shirt that would have been more at home in Miami. His face would have been more at home in Naples, but that didn’t stop him from wearing a Texan hat. He took our bags and led us over to a Jeep Cherokee. He didn’t say much, but he was chewing gum and driving at the same time, so maybe he wasn’t good at multitasking.
We took a roundabout route across an endless landscape of flat fields to a town called Placedo, where we turned north and drove for about twelve miles in a perfectly straight line until we came to what at first looked like a small town but turned out to be a ranch called Las Salinas. It had a twelve-foot electrified fence, CCTV, and a remote-controlled gate. Our driver stuck his face out the window so they could see it was him, and the gate rolled back.
We followed a driveway for a couple of minutes. On the right I could see eucalyptus groves and palm trees surrounding a tennis court and a swimming pool, a short walk from a large, three-story Spanish villa surrounded by lawns and gardens and shaded by trees.
We pulled up in front of the house next to a Bentley and a Ferrari. A guy in an Italian suit came trotting down the stairs to greet us as we climbed out and slammed the doors.
“Detectives Stone and Dehan. I am Vito.” He gave a little bow to Dehan that was supposed to render her defenseless and make her knees turn to Jell-O. Instead she indicated the house with her head and said, “The witness protection program paying for this?”
His smile became frigid. “Morry is out back, by the pool. Would you like to follow me?”
I said, “I’d love to.”
Pro was very tall and very thin and had very big hands. He was sitting at a white table under a parasol by a second smaller pool that was built into the terrace at the back of the house. This one was only two hundred and fifty square feet. The other one was the big one. He was wearing floral Bermudas and a shirt with parrots on it. His face was hidden by big black Wayfarers, and he was drinking something large, colorful, and complicated. The thing here was obviously to pretend that instead of hiding in Texas, you were living large in Miami. He didn’t get up to greet us because that would have been demeaning to his dignity, but he did smile in a way you could describe as expansive, and gestured to a couple of chairs at his table. When he spoke, his voice was deep and slow.
“Stone, I don’t think we ever met. And Detective Dehan, the NYPD is getting easier to look at every day. Sit down. What will you drink? Coffee? This is my morning health drink. It helps to keep my liver clean. It is important to remain healthy.” He laughed as we sat. “God knows there are enough people out there who want me dead, without me giving them a hand, huh? What do you say, Stone?”
I smiled and nodded. “Coffee would be great, thanks, Pro. And thank you for seeing us. I know it’s not the norm.”
“Fuck the norm. We’re here to do business, right? Vito, bring some coffee.”
Vito left. “Are we?” I said.
“You better believe it, Stone.”
I sensed Dehan was about to speak and silenced her with my eyes. I turned back to Pro and said, “Just so there is no misunderstanding and we don’t get our wires crossed, let’s do it this way. I tell you what I want, then you tell me what you want in exchange.”
He stared at me for an uncomfortably long time. Then he said, “You telling me how it goes?”
I nodded. “Yeah.” I waited a moment, then sighed. “Pro, I’ve been here a minute and I’m already getting bored. Let’s be clear. If I am here it’s because you want something from me. So right now I’m worth more to you alive than dead. Second, if you think I am stupid enough to come down here without covering my ass, you’ve been living too long among gorillas. If we’re not back in New York by tonight, you and your friend Harrison are going to be stitching postal sacks for the next twenty years. So quit trying to intimidate me, and let’s get down to business.”
Pro chuckled. “It’s habit. I can’t help it.” He turned to Dehan. “I like to see what a man is made of.”
She didn’t answer him, but I saw something in her look and made a note to keep an eye on her when she was under pressure. She was either going to be the best partner I ever had, or a loose cannon and a fucking liability. Right then my money was on the latter.
I said to Pro, “Who killed Nelson Hernandez?”
“Jeez, Detective! Buy a girl a drink! Give her a kiss. Straight away you got your dick out!”
Vito appeared with a tray and set out the coffee on the table. He poured two cups and left. I said, “Who killed Nelson Hernandez, Pro?”
He looked into vegetable drink and made a long “Tssss…” sound. “I don’t know. That kid was getting above himself, know what I mean? We hadn’t had the Bronx for a lo
ng time. The fucking Albanians had the Bronx. But who the fuck wanted the Bronx anyway, right? Then the Mexicans start moving in. Next thing you got drugs and prostitution going down, and suddenly the Bronx is a desirable property. So we talked to the Families in New York. They said they wasn’t interested. So we went in and we started taking control, imposing some order and system…” He creased up his face like it was a disgusting shame what they found there. “You know, it was a fucking mess. Nobody knew what the fuck was going on, who was making what, where it was going. It was a disaster. So we moved in.”
“But Nelson didn’t want to play ball,” Dehan said.
“Nelson was out of his fuckin’ mind. We talked to him nice, made him a nice offer that he could live with and we could live with. The little punk says he’s gonna think about it. He’s gonna think about it. He says he has connections with the Ángeles de Satanás, some bunch of fucking bikers tied to the Sureños, and he’s got to discuss it with them. So we arrange another meeting. We’re gonna pop the motherfucker, you know. We made you a fuckin’ offer, you punk. You fuckin’ asshole. You think you can say no to the fuckin’ Mob?”
His face had gone red, and he had a vein pulsing in his head. He cleared his throat and sank back in his chair.
“Anyway. So it turns out the motherfucker set us up. Instead of us popping him, he ambushes us and takes out three of the boys. Tony, Angelo, and…” He thought for a while, making a round-and-round motion with his finger.
“It doesn’t matter,” I said. “Go on.”
“It fuckin’ matters. Frankie. It was Frankie. Anyway, so he ambushes us with superior numbers and kills four of our boys. So—and here we come to the part about what we want.”
He finished his drink, placed the glass on the table, and smacked his lips.
