by Eric Rill
“Better? Why? Because my old man has money? All that makes me is a member of the lucky sperm club.” Grant stopped and turned around. “Virgil, you see all these people sitting out on their porches…”
“These porch monkeys didn’t have the same opportunities you did,” Parks retorted.
“Or the heartache,” Grant said.
“Look, I don’t want to get into your family shit,” Parks said, stooping down to pick up an empty beer can and tossing it into a trash can. “I can only tell you that my dream in life was to be a lawyer, but we were so dirt-poor that I couldn’t even get to college, let alone law school. The only way out of the Bottoms for me was to become a cop. Believe me, if there had been any other way, I would have done it.” A stint in the army had left him with a swath of stitches across his lower belly, thanks to an enemy soldier’s blade; a knee that constantly throbbed from his getting heaved off a chopper by an overzealous platoon leader at fifty feet over a mountain range in some godforsaken place he couldn’t even pronounce; and a raging anger toward a government that had sent him to the front lines without enough supplies.
“Nothing wrong with the Bottoms,” Grant said. “And nothing wrong with most of the people here. They’re probably happier than all those clowns across the river, clawing at each other to make it to the top. My father’s at the top. You think he’s happy? Shit! He’s more miserable than I am—only he doesn’t want to face it!”
“You don’t have a clue about how bad these people have it, do you?” Parks said. “You’re here for some R&R. You’ll split one day—go back to the good life—but they’re stuck, Nick. Stuck!”
“There’s nothing back there for me anymore,” Grant said as he watched a man lob an old tennis ball to his son.
“You’ve got a father who cares about you.…”
“I’ve got a father who ran my mother off, who never accepted my wife because she wasn’t from the right family, and…”
“And what?” Parks asked, noticing Grant’s hands shake.
“It’s not important now,” Grant said, still staring at the man and his son.
“Your father is a good man. Maybe you should appreciate him more.”
“Don’t lecture me, Virgil. I don’t need that crap from you.”
“You need help, man,” Parks said, his muddy brown eyes narrowing. “We’ve all seen you scoring rocks from Darius and Scooter. So far, we’ve turned the other way, but one of these days it may not come down that way. I don’t want to see you busted.”
“I’m clean, Virgil.”
“How long is that going to last?” Parks asked. “Two weeks? A month?”
9
Nick Grant hiked up West Rich Street toward Main Street Bridge. On the other side of the Scioto River, against a backdrop of downtown high-rise office buildings, stood Miranova and the Waterford Tower—luxury condos with doormen and fancy tenants, tucked away on a private street hanging high over the water’s edge. Between them, facing the railroad tracks, was the Langham—an older apartment complex with two eighteen-story towers that faced each other across a cement courtyard. Grant zipped up his windbreaker against the autumn chill, oblivious to the cars screaming by, and started over the bridge. A funeral cortege approached from the opposite direction. He shuddered as he backed up against the bridge’s concrete railing, his mind flooded with memories of that terrible day.
Grant had sat sandwiched between his parents in the first limousine, staring through wet, bloodshot eyes at the hearse in front of them.
“I still think we should have buried them both,” his father had said. “Why in God’s name would you want to cremate someone?”
“Jesus Christ, enough! It’s not your wife and child,” his mother fumed.
“Look, will the two of you stop fighting? I can’t stand it anymore,” Grant yelled.
The car pulled up in front of an ornate stone structure. Grant watched from the backseat as two men slid the tiny coffin out of the hearse and set it down on a gurney covered with black velvet before rolling it through the open doors. He got out and followed his son’s casket into the building, taking a seat on a hard wooden pew in the first row. The minister recited a few prayers and then the family stood, one at a time, and walked up to the casket to say their goodbyes.
Grant nodded to one of the funeral home employees, who opened the coffin. He involuntarily jerked back, just as he had a few days before when he had said his goodbye to Marcy. He took the baseball glove he had bought for Billy the day of the fire, still wrapped in colorful paper with a fat blue ribbon around it, and placed it inside.
Grant sprinted the rest of the way over the bridge, slowing down only when he reached the lobby of the north tower of the Langham. “They said my ID would be ready today,” he told the superintendent as he tried to catch his breath.
Jimmy Flinker, a Vietnam vet and retired steelworker, looked over at his logbook. “The courier hasn’t been here yet. Pick it up on your way home,” he said. “You getting the hang of it?”
“I hope so,” Grant said. “I’m going up alone today.”
Grant took the elevator up to the top floor of the north tower and then climbed the service stairs to the roof. He flipped on the light in the maintenance shop, filled a large blue pail with warm water and soap, picked up a chamois, a T-shaped squeegee with a rubber blade, and a mop with a short handle, then headed back to the roof. A red track that looked like a roller-coaster rail wrapped around the perimeter of the building below the parapet. He stepped out onto a steel mesh flooring just above the track. Then he lowered his gear through a hole in the mesh, letting it drop into a steel cage that was affixed to the track, and carefully stepped down into the cage.
There was a control panel on the left side that operated the cage. A flip of the blue switch moved the cage horizontally to the left. The yellow one moved it to the right. A black one moved it down, and a green one up. A red alarm button on a separate panel rang in the lobby and the superintendent’s office. The cage was two feet square, just wide enough to turn around in. The steel safety bar came up to Grant’s chest.
He glanced down at the courtyard and flipped the black switch. The whine of the electric motor was all he could hear as the cage nudged slowly toward the first window. The shade was pulled down. The tenants on the top two floors had been informed that the windows would be washed sometime after ten o’clock that morning. He dunked the mop into the foamy water and applied it to the window, moving his wrist in an arc movement that his boss had taught him ad nauseam over the past week. He smiled to himself—he had graduated from Oberlin with honors and still needed a week to figure out how to clean a window.
Steve Marron hadn’t had to press him very hard to take the job. Grant knew he had to get away from the paralyzing depression that gripped him whenever he was holed up inside his house. And this way, up here in the silence at the top of the world, he had lots of time to think, without giving in to the temptation of Darius’s crack.
The first time he tried to score outside the Boys and Girls Club on South Gift Street, Darius stuck him with a “jimmy rock” in a sandwich Baggie, figuring Grant was a honky from the suburbs and wouldn’t notice the difference—and he was right. But then Scooter, who saw the deal going down from across the street, told him he had paid five dollars for a buck’s worth. He started dealing with Scooter, graduating from five-dollar rocks to twenty-five-dollar footballs. That was until Darius and his friends put Scooter out of commission for a week with a busted jaw and three broken ribs. After that, Scooter didn’t mess around with any of Darius’s customers, and Grant went back to dealing with Darius.
Grant put the mop back into the bucket and used the same arc movement with his wrist to guide the rubber-bladed squeegee over the window. Then he took a chamois from his back pocket and blotted out the remaining streaks. He looked at his watch. It took him just over four minutes to finish one window. His boss had told him he’d be down to less than a minute by week’s end. And he’d better be, because the boss had a
lso told him he had to finish the outside of each tower in thirty days, do the inside windows four times a year, and somehow get the lobby done once a week in between. He flipped the blue switch and moved on to the next window. A family was having a late lunch. Grant held on to the safety bar as a wave of nausea washed over him. Marcy’s and Billy’s blackened faces stared him down. He knew that when they finally disappeared, it wouldn’t be for long—it never was.
He wiped the sweat from his face and looked down at his watch—another hour to go. He wondered whether Darius would be outside the Boys and Girls Club, and, if so, whether he would be strong enough to keep on walking.
10
A beat-up Honda Accord drove through the open gates of the Langham and pulled into a parking space covered with dead leaves. The driver, a tall man with a shock of red hair, dressed in a pair of faded jeans and a sweater that hung over his gawky frame, pulled two duffel bags out of the trunk and hauled them across the brick-paved roadway into the lobby of the south tower. He stepped into the open elevator. Exiting on the fourth floor, he stopped at Apartment 410 and rang the bell. A few seconds later, the door swung open. Tommy Castellano nodded as he took the sealed bags from the courier and closed the door.
Castellano set them down on the floor, walked over to the window, and pulled back one of the louvers of the venetian blinds. He waited until the man got back into his car and drove out onto Civic Center Drive. Then he opened his door again, peered out into the hallway, and grunted as he picked up the bags and then took the service stairs down to Apartment 306. Castellano fished for his keys, opened both locks, and flicked on the lights, dropping the bags beside a large safe on the bedroom floor. He turned the dial clockwise to 16, then left to 4, and then right to 33. The familiar click sounded. He yanked open the steel door, pulled the packages over, and shoved them into the safe, closing and locking it. Finally, he reached for the phone and dialed. “It’s here,” he said, before hanging up and leaving the apartment.
A few minutes later, Angela Ferraro opened the apartment door and went into the bedroom. She unlocked the safe and lugged the blue duffel bags along the stained wool carpet into the living room, glancing quickly at the tiny hole in the ceiling, where a fish-eye lens was connected by fiber optic to a miniature video camera hidden next to an air-conditioning duct between the two floors. She crossed behind it and opened the drapes. Sunshine spilled into the darkened room as she emptied the contents of the first duffel. Several brown bags fell out onto the floor. Angela opened each one and took out a coded sheet and then the money inside, dumping the contents of each one into its own pile. Each brown bag contained thousands of bills in various denominations. She shook all the bags until they were empty. By the time she finished with both duffels, she was almost knee-high in U.S. currency. Then began the onerous task of separating the bills from each brown bag into piles of ones, fives, tens, twenties, fifties, and hundreds—flattening those that were crumpled—and keeping the contents of each bag segregated from the next. She counted each bill and put her tally from each bag on a sheet that she retrieved from the safe, along with a code designating the origin.
Angela picked up the phone on the first ring. A few seconds later, she replaced the receiver, closed the drapes, and left the apartment, taking the service stairs up to Apartment 410. She sucked in some air and knocked. Tommy Castellano opened the door. A silk jersey with wide horizontal stripes made his flabby chest appear even larger. “Sit over there on the couch,” he ordered.
“So, what’s this all about?” Angela asked, sitting down on the far corner of the red velvet sofa.
“Just got a call from the bank. Last Friday’s was short,” Castellano said, his large hands resting on his hips. “Almost a hundred!”
“That’s impossible!” she said, her eyes stuck on Castellano. “Who took it down?”
“Same cop who takes it all the time.”
“And this is the first time it was short?”
“Sometimes two or three—max five grand,” Castellano said. “But I always figured that it was just sloppy bookkeeping—you or them—cost of doing business. No big deal. But a hundred grand is a big deal!”
Angela hesitated for a moment. “It was all there when I put it back in the safe. I double-counted it like I always do.”
“Yeah? Well, the banker said he counted it twice, too.” Castellano sank back into a La-Z-Boy opposite Angela. “So, who am I supposed to believe?”
“You’re not suggesting that I had anything to do with it,” Angela said in a controlled but tenuous voice.
“Look, you got the job because you was vouched for by one of the Big Man’s lieutenants up in Cleveland. So my first thought is it couldn’t be you.” He reached into his pocket and pulled out a pack of chewing gum and shoved two pieces into his mouth. “And the banker has been cleaning the family money for a long time—and I never had no trouble with him before.”
“Always a first time, Tommy.”
“Could say the same about you, Angela.”
“What about the cop? What’s his story?” Angela asked.
“He’s been running cash for the family since before I got down here—and he’s connected.”
“We both know that means shit. What’s his name?”
“You ask too many questions,” Castellano said.
“So, what are you saying?” Angela asked.
“Maybe this guy made a mistake when he vouched for you, Angela. Maybe his thinking ain’t as clear as it was when he was younger. Know what I mean?”
“I don’t think he’d like to hear that,” Angela said.
“You threatening me?”
“Hell, no, Tommy,” she said. “Just making a statement. That’s all.”
“If it was you, Angela, I’ll be real disappointed,” Castellano said, making his hand into the form of a gun, pointing it at her, and pulling the trigger. “Know what I mean?”
11
Maggie put the binoculars down on the sill and tugged the drapes a few inches so that they closed completely. “Looks like our friend’s on his way down with the duffels,” she said. The FBI had rented Apartment 403 in the north tower, the last one available with any kind of view of Castellano’s apartment. At the beginning, they would watch him take the duffel bags from the courier and he would disappear for a while before returning to his apartment. So they dispatched an agent dressed as a maintenance man across the courtyard to the south tower. He missed Castellano the first time, but a second trip revealed that he had taken the service stairs and dropped the duffels off in Apartment 306.
“For Christsakes, Maggie, we’ve got this guy dead in the water!” Gary Roskind said, running his hands through his dyed black hair.
“We need more than Castellano. We need to take Pascale and the whole operation down.”
“We already have the address where they drop the cash off and the bank they’re using to squirrel it away. Why can’t we just bust them?”
“We don’t have enough on them yet,” Maggie said. “We have Grant on the hotel side, but nothing on the gold bullion company. Knowing they use that business as a front—with no deliveries, no mail, and no visitors—is one thing. Proving in a courtroom that they’re structuring and running a money-laundering operation is another.” She lit a cigarette and blew a steady stream of white smoke into the air. “This time I’m going to personally follow up on both the company and the bank before we do anything. I can’t afford to screw this one up.” She remembered the dressing-down that Rigby had given her on the Diederick case—a case that had blown any chance she had of taking over for him when he retired.
Leo Rigby had stormed into Maggie’s office, his already-ruddy complexion redder than she had ever seen it. “What the fuck is this, Maggie?” he had said, slamming down a memo marked “Urgent” from the assistant director in Washington. “You were supposed to hold off on Coetzer until they raided the New York warehouse. Now, they’re onto us, the AD is pissed, and we’ve lost any hope of nailing Diederick.�
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“You told me—”
“I told you to fucking wait until you got orders from me!” Rigby fumed. “But no, you had to show everybody how quickly you could make a bust.”
“Christ! I hauled in three South African kingpins and a six-million-dollar stash,” she retorted, her face becoming almost as red as his.
“No! All you nailed were three wannabes who happened to be transporting the money. Diederick is the only kingpin, and he’ll never set foot on U.S. soil again.”
Maggie began pacing the living room. “Castellano’s bringing in tons of cash every week and the bank’s not filing any forms with Treasury. My guess is one of the big shots at the bank has been ‘contaminated’ by the Pascale family,” she said. “I’ve asked for a subpoena—”
“Christ! That will only tip our hand!” Roskind exclaimed.
“I figure that will flush them out—force them to move. Otherwise, we’ll be sitting on this case until we retire.”
“What good is a subpoena when the Right to Financial Privacy Act won’t let them divulge how much cash is sitting in the accounts even if they wanted to?”
“You have to thank those bleeding-heart liberals in Washington for that,” Maggie smirked, butting out her cigarette. “Anyway, we can still get all the other information about the accounts—like names, addresses, et cetera.”
Roskind slapped his forehead with his open palm. “Maggie, we know all that, for Christsakes!”
“We think we know it—and maybe we do—but this time we’re going to go by the book and make sure.”
*
Maggie pulled the red-and-white truck up outside a three-story stucco building on Bryden Road, just east of I-71. The area manager for Midwest Couriers had cooperated with the Bureau in the past, so he hadn’t been surprised by her visit earlier in the morning—only by her insistence that she needed a delivery truck and a uniform before noon. She checked to make sure the pinpoint camera in her jacket lapel was securely fastened. Then she stepped out onto the curb, walked up to the metal door, and pushed the buzzer. A heavyset man with a thick gold chain hanging from his hairy neck opened the door. “I’m not sure I have the right address,” Maggie said, looking down at the waybill. “Says here it’s for a Michael Napoli at Polar Bullion, Inc.”
