Mean Streak

by Carolyn Wheat

  “I didn’t know you were AA,” I said as I lowered myself onto one of the folding chairs.

  She nodded. “Almost two years. I’m in charge of opening the room for the Tuesday meeting,” she explained. “Because I work so close by, I guess. And it’s one of the things you do in the program—you do service.”

  “Where do you work?” I asked, still trying to put her more at ease.

  “I work for General Services,” she replied, naming the New York City agency responsible for purchasing. It was housed in the Municipal Building, on the other side of the plaza. “My office is all the way up on the nineteenth floor,” she added. “My boss has a great view of the harbor from his window.”

  “It was a good idea, coming in here,” I said.

  She gave a small laugh that echoed hollowly in the big room. “I guess I picked it because I’ve said a lot of things in these rooms that were pretty hard to say to another person. I thought maybe it would help me talk to you if I was in a place where I felt safe.” She took a deep breath and said the words I’d hoped to hear. “I don’t want Dwight to take the rap for Eddie.”

  My conscience gave me a little stab; in truth, she wasn’t really safe with me. I had a client and an agenda, and I had just arranged to serve a subpoena on her husband. I decided it would be all right to continue this conversation if I made these facts as clear as possible.

  “Look, I represent Matt Riordan,” I reminded her. “I can’t give you legal advice, but I can sure as hell advise you to find an attorney you can trust, and put yourself in his hands.”

  “You really think Dwight needs a lawyer?” She might as well have been asking a doctor if her husband needed brain surgery.

  “Yes,” I said. “Especially if he’s thinking of coming forward to testify against Eddie.”

  “I’ll tell Dwight what you said,” Annie replied. She gave a small sigh and went on. “He was so excited when he got the promotion and the assignment to Narcotics.” Her voice softened at the memory. “I got all dressed up and went over to the ceremony at One Police Plaza.”

  She stopped and looked down at the chapped hands in her lap, then glanced up at me shyly. “I’ve been going down there ever since I was a kid,” she explained. “When my dad made sergeant, my mom dressed us kids up and we took off school to see him in his uniform, shaking the police commissioner’s hand. I forget who it was back then, but it was a good long time ago. Then we all had lunch over in Chinatown with one of Dad’s buddies and his family. It was a real high point; Dad has the promotion photo on his desk at home to this day.”

  “Is your father still on the job?” I asked, careful to word it the way an insider would. Annie Straub was a cop’s daughter; that meant something, but I wasn’t sure what.

  “My dad retired six, seven years ago. But he was real proud of Dwight when he made detective. He liked for Dwight to bring his buddies over for barbecues and football games. He liked Eddie—liked him a lot.” There was a wistful quality to her voice; had her father liked Eddie Fitz, the outgoing party boy, better than his own son-in-law?

  It was worth a shot. “How does your husband get along with your dad?”

  “Fine.” She said the word quickly. Too quickly. I said nothing, hoping the silence would become uncomfortable enough for her to want to fill it.

  “He likes Dwight,” she finally said, lowering her eyes as if ashamed to betray her husband, “but I think Eddie reminded my dad of the way he was when he was a young cop. Eddie took chances, whereas Dwight is more—I don’t know, careful.”

  “And careful is not something your father values?”

  Her lips twisted in rueful disdain. “Oh, he says he respects Dwight. He talks about how different it was in the old days, how a college guy couldn’t hope to be a good cop back then, but now they need all the education they can get. But underneath, he thinks balls are better than brains. And if there’s one thing Eddie Fitzgerald has, it’s balls. Big brass ones that clank when he walks.”

  Something in the set of her jaw put me on the alert. I took another wild shot. “Did Eddie ever come on to you?”

  Her hand jumped to her bosom in an instinctive, protective gesture. “How the hell could you—” She broke off and gathered herself together. “It was at a party at our house. It was in honor of some guy’s promotion. Eddie was at least half in the bag. He was drinking more than usual,” she said, raising her eyes to meet mine, “because he was being sent to Psych Services and it was making him crazy.”

  My own eyes must have reflected something of what I was feeling, because Annie gave a quick, mirthless laugh and said, “Why am I making excuses for him? He was drunk and he came into the kitchen and started groping me. What really pissed me off was that he made damn sure Dwight saw what he was up to. He cornered me in the kitchen and stepped too close and put his hands all over me. And all the time Dwight was in the living room, right where he could see what was going on.”

  “What happened?” I had visions of the night ending with .38 specials at dawn. The way many a cop party has ended.

  She saw where my thoughts were going and shook her head. “Dwight came in and said something to Eddie. Eddie just laughed and said he couldn’t help himself, I was so beautiful he had to make a move or Dwight would have felt insulted. It was total bullshit and I could see Dwight didn’t like it any better than I did, but he laughed it off and the two of them went out into the yard with a bottle and two glasses.”

  “Eddie sounds like a real prince,” I remarked.

  “Prince of Assholes,” she muttered, then grinned like a teenager.

  “If you feel that way about him,” I said, echoing Matt’s words of the night before, “why not help bring him down?”

  “That’s just what I want to do,” she said with a grim smile. “But I have to be sure it doesn’t hurt my Dwight,” she added, her jaw tight.

  I couldn’t honestly see a way that this whole situation wouldn’t hurt her Dwight, no matter what he did or didn’t do, but I didn’t tell her that. What I did instead was repeat my earlier advice. “Get a lawyer. Right away.”

  She nodded and swallowed hard. “I never thought the day Dwight was promoted that it would end like this.”

  The food booths were right outside the church; I decided I had time for a quick slice of pizza before I met Matt. I got on line and in short order had a triangle of crust dripping with cheese in my hand. I leaned well forward as I bit into it, not wanting oil spots on my new designer clothes.

  I decided I also had time to serve my own subpoena. I finished the slice and strode across Centre Street to 26 Federal Plaza.

  Warren Zebart looked up with a scowl when I walked into the bullpen office where he sat in his shirtsleeves. “What do you want?” he said in a tone that could only be called a growl.

  I gave him an innocent stare. “What’s the matter?” I asked. “Aren’t you used to dealing with the public in here?”

  “You’re not the public, Ms. Jameson. You’re a lawyer and you ought to go through the proper channels.”

  “Proper channels are for lawyers with money,” I replied with a smile I tried hard to make conciliatory. “I thought I’d save time and bucks by serving my own subpoena.” I set my briefcase on the edge of his desk without asking permission and clicked open the brass fasteners. His scowl deepened; every move I made signaled my intention to stay as long as I wanted.

  I pulled out the subpoena and handed it over. He could have taken it without glancing at the documents called for, but I was banking on his natural curiosity.

  He skimmed the subpoena. “What do you want this stuff for?” he asked.

  “At the risk of sounding rude,” I replied, “all you have to know is that the judge signed it earlier this morning.”

  I pushed my luck. “Hell, we both know TJ was killed because of his involvement with Eddie Fitz. The NYPD was called off the investigation on the grounds that TJ was a witness in a federal case. I’m going to get this stuff; the only question is when
. I guess I’m wondering why I can’t have it now—if the Bureau has nothing to hide.”

  He gave it some thought. His lower teeth reached up and grabbed the ends of his graying mustache. He nibbled a bit and then stood up. “I’ll have to make some phone calls,” he said.

  “I can wait,” I replied, making ready to sit down in the straight chair next to his desk.

  “Not here,” he said firmly. “You can sit in the waiting room.”

  The waiting room consisted of one row of welded-plastic chairs in royal blue and a glass coffee table laden with outdated magazines. It looked like the office of a singularly unprosperous dentist. I picked up an ancient New Yorker and thumbed through it, looking for the cartoons.

  Zebart summoned me back into the sanctum some fifteen minutes later. “Lazarus said I should give you everything,” he told me, his tone considerably more affable.

  “He also said he wouldn’t mind if I shared my own theory of the case with you,” he went on.

  “That’s very generous,” I said, my mind racing to figure out what the catch was.

  It wasn’t long in coming. “See, the thing you’ve got to remember,” Zebart said, his tone still eerily conversational, “is that when this TJ character was killed—not when his body was found, you understand, but when he was actually killed—your client had more reason to worry about him than Eddie did.”

  “Riordan? Riordan didn’t even know there was a TJ until we started hearing rumors.”

  Warren Zebart’s mouth grimaced into a nasty smile. “That’s what he wanted you to think, Counselor,” the FBI man said, “but TJ worked for your client’s client, remember. He was Nunzie Aiello’s front man in the ghetto. Do you really believe your client didn’t know Aiello had a partner?”

  I got the point. I knew I was getting the point because my stomach sank into my pumps. “You were going to put the squeeze on TJ to nail Riordan for suborning perjury in the Nunzie Aiello case.”

  “No, Ms. Jameson,” the agent said with a mock-mournful shake of his head. “I was going to put the squeeze on TJ to nail your client for murdering Nunzie Aiello.”

  “You can’t seriously believe—”

  “Oh, but I can,” Zebart cut in. “I can and I do. Nunzie Aiello was killed in almost the same way Donatello Scaniello bought it three years ago. Maybe you didn’t take much of an interest in the case at that time. Maybe you don’t recall the particulars. Let me refresh your memory.” Zebart was enjoying this; there were little flecks of spittle at the edges of his mouth.

  “See, Donatello was killed the same way. Two bullets, one in the head, one in the mouth. And they mushroomed inside the body like hollow-points. Makes it hard to get a match. The bullet deforms as it travels. Only in Donatello’s case, the bullets weren’t hollow-points, they were hollow-base. The killer put them in backwards; the damned things exploded in the body and left Ballistics with a lump they couldn’t possibly match. Same thing with Nunzie. Hollow-base bullets put in backwards. Now,” Zebart continued, warming to his theme, “this was a little fact the Bureau managed to keep from the press. We didn’t tell a soul about those bullets, just said they were deformed. Any citizen reading the account would have thought ‘hollow-points.’ Only someone who knew the precise details of the Scaniello hit would have known to reverse hollow-base bullets. It was a copycat hit, and that means only someone who really knew the inside story of how the Don died could have copied it.”

  “Fine,” I replied, “but how does that lead to Riordan?”

  “We have tapes,” the FBI man said with an affable smile, a smile that told me how much he was enjoying this. “Tapes of Frankie Cretella and his goombahs sitting around shooting the shit. Somebody brings up Nunzie, asks Frankie C. what he’s going to do about Nunz talking to Lazarus, maybe bringing down Matt Riordan. And you want to know what Frankie says?”

  I wasn’t sure that I did, but I nodded anyway. “He says, ‘So the feds take down my lawyer. Big fucking deal; lawyers are a dime a dozen—no, make that a nickel a dozen. Fuck, a nickel for two dozen. So I’ll hire me another boy. What do I care a mick like Riordan takes a bath?’”

  Zebart’s smile showed cigarette-stained teeth. “Some loyalty, huh? That’s what Riordan got for twenty years of getting Frankie C. out of jams. And that left your client high and dry; Nunzie was going to put him away, and Frankie the Crate wasn’t going to do jackshit about it. See,” the agent went on, “as far as Frankie was concerned, Nunzie was just a gofer. But one of his little jobs was to carry messages between Frankie’s goombahs and their lawyer, meaning Matt Riordan. Put those messages together and you have solid proof that your client wasn’t just a lawyer representing individuals—he was the lawyer for an illegal organization.”

  “House counsel for the Mob,” I murmured, echoing the damaging words Judge Schansky had used when he bounced Matt off the last Cretella case. This was sounding too plausible for comfort.

  “So there was only one thing for Riordan to do,” Zebart continued, “and he did it. He hit Nunzie himself, and he made it look as much as possible like a Mob hit.”

  “You can’t really believe this,” I protested. Some corner of my mind was aware that this was a truly weak defense, but I hadn’t had time to assimilate all the information and innuendoes that were piling up around me.

  “As I said, Counselor, I can and I do. And what’s more, I believe that Riordan was so pleased by his success in wiping out the Nunzie Aiello threat that he did the same to TJ. And there may not be anything I can do about it,” he went on, “but it might interest you to know that I’m not the only one who’s noticed the similarities between the two murders.” He smiled his wolfish smile and popped a cassette into the tape player on top of his desk. He whirred it on fast forward, then pushed the Play button.

  “… really pisses me off when guys think they can pin a lotta shit on us, do things our way, mislead the public.” The voice was raspy, a caricature Mob boss.

  “Yeah, I can see where that would roast your chestnuts, all right. Some asshole making that nigger’s death look like a hit.”

  “I find out that sleazebag lawyer’s behind this, he’s gonna pay. That’s all I’m gonna say. He’s gonna know what it means to be on the business end of a hit, I find out he whacked Nunz. And if he did the nigger, too—”

  Zebart stopped the tape. “Just a taste of what your client can expect when we try him for murdering a federal witness,” he said.

  I wasn’t about to leave with defeat in the air. “If you had the evidence to indict him,” I said firmly, “you’d do it. And since you haven’t indicted him, I can only conclude that you haven’t got the evidence.”

  The FBI man’s last word chilled the air: “Yet,” he said.

  Eddie Fitz was good. The way he averted his eyes just a little when he was about to tell the jury how he’d slipped behind his corrupt partner’s back to do a favor for the shop-owner who’d given his partner a kickback. As if he didn’t want to seem like too much of a saint. Or the way he cleared his throat and spoke up manfully when admitting that he’d twice given drugs to an informant. On both occasions, according to Eddie, the junkie in question was “really sick.” The gray-blue eyes pleaded with the jury to understand how things are on the street, to set aside their middle-class prejudices and see the sweating, shaking remnants of humanity begging Eddie Fitz for just enough heroin to get them well.

  It was NYPD Blue without the television screen between the jury and their hero. A street-smart cop, just corrupt enough to get along with his brothers in blue, just hard enough to survive in the concrete jungle, not hard enough to sit still while a junkie sobs for his medicine. They’d seen it all before, in prime time.

  This time it was being brought to them by U.S. Attorney Davia Singer and her executive producer, Nick Lazarus.

  Lazarus knew was the thought that kept chugging through my brain as I watched Singer take Eddie Fitz through his paces. Eddie Fitz had done more than just turn the other way while TJ sold drugs in
his precinct: Eddie Nino, Eddie Bigmouth, was TJ’s full partner in the heroin business.

  And Lazarus had known.

  But could we prove it? Could we prove it, now that TJ was dead?

  “Detective,” Davia repeated, her throaty voice going all earnest, “you admit you gave narcotics to a known drug addict in violation of the Penal Code of the State of New York on two occasions. Is there any other act of misconduct in your tenure as a police officer that this jury should know about?”

  He hung his head for six seconds. Six precisely; I had my eye on the dial of my watch. Then he raised his head and I swear to God there were tears in the altarboy eyes.

  “No,” he said in a low whisper. He cleared his throat again. “No, and I wish to God I’d never—”

  “Objection,” I rapped out, jumping to my feet. “Unresponsive to the question, Your Honor.”

  Judge de Freitas smiled a dry little smile; his black eyes narrowed behind his half-glasses as he considered the objection. “Overruled,” he said in a tone so soft I had to lean forward to hear him. “You may proceed, Ms. Singer.”

  She was magnanimous in victory. “Thank you, Your Honor,” she said with only the tiniest smile of smug triumph.

  “Detective,” she continued in a tone of high portentousness, “I ask you to search your soul. Is there any act of misconduct, any criminal act, any unethical behavior in your past besides the two you have forthrightly reported to this court?”

  I had to object to the “forthrightly.” Once my objection was disposed of in the usual manner, Eddie Fitz gazed at the jurors, one by one. I timed it: twenty seconds. Over one second each, including alternates. It was all I could do to keep from shaking my head in admiration. If there were Oscars for Best Performance by a Corrupt Cop Turned State’s Witness, Eddie Fitz would have—

  Who cared? It was working. That was the problem—it was fucking working. Without TJ, the jurors would never know the truth behind the Hero Cop façade.

  Eddie surveyed the jurors one by one, the look in his pale eyes one of hope and concern. He looked at each of them the way he might look at his grandmother or a favorite uncle, after confessing to something he knew they’d disapprove of. Do you still like me? he seemed to ask. Please like me; I’m really good underneath.