Criminal Conversation

by Ed McBain

  “Does he know we want an answer?”

  “He knows that, too. Andrew, I told you, they don’t care.”

  “Where’s he staying?”

  “He’s got houses all over these islands. He stays where he wants to stay.”

  “Where’s his house on this island?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “I thought you’ve been talking to him.”

  “I have.”

  “And you don’t know where he’s staying?”

  “If you’re Alonso Moreno, you don’t send out cards with your address on them.”

  “How do you get in touch with him?”

  “Through a waiter at the hotel. I tell him I want a meet, he phones Moreno, sets it up.”

  “Where have you been meeting?”

  “On a boat. They pick me up on the dock in Gustavia.”

  “Tell your waiter friend I want to see Moreno personally.”

  “He’ll tell you to go fuck yourself, Andrew.”

  “Tell him, anyway,” Andrew said, and smiled.

  There was something chilling about that smile. It reminded Willie of Andrew’s father when he was young.

  “I’ll see what I can do,” he said. “When do you want this?”

  Because Frankie Palumbo of the Faviola family in Manhattan was out of the goodness of his heart willing to listen to still further bullshit about this deadbeat thief who was somehow related to Jimmy Angelli of the Colotti family in Queens, he was the one who chose the location for the sitdown.

  Lucy Angelli got the information from her cousin and immediately called Dom Di Nobili to tell him when and where the meeting would take place. She also told him that his presence was not called for; his fate would be determined privately by the two capos. Dom immediately reported the time and place to Michael.

  It was bad news that they didn’t want Dom there when they talked; this meant they couldn’t send him in wired. But the DA’s Office, the FBI, and the NYPD conducted routine, long-standing surveillance on a day-by-day basis, and there were bugs already in place at many wiseguy hangouts where business was conducted. Michael made some calls to see if the Ristorante Romano on MacDougal Street was one of them. It was not. This meant they had to start from scratch.

  Costumed as a quartet of New York’s Bravest, wearing firemen’s gear and carrying hoses and axes and all the other paraphernalia, four detectives from the DA’s Office Squad honored the place with a visit on Christmas Eve, ostensibly to extinguish a small electrical fire that had mysteriously started in the restaurant’s basement. During all their chopping and hacking and spritzing and shouting and swearing down there, they incidentally managed to tap into the restaurant’s telephone lines to provide a power source for the Brady bug they buried in the basement’s ceiling—and consequently the floor of the room above. This self-contained transmitter was the size of a half-dollar, and it was now positioned directly under the prestigious corner table Frankie Palumbo favored on his visits to the place. The owner of the Ristorante Romano tipped the “firemen” four hundred dollars when they left, this because he knew firemen were bigger thieves than anybody who came to the place, and he considered himself lucky they hadn’t helped themselves to the stolen twenty-year-old Scotch stacked in cases along the wall opposite the fuse boxes and telephone panels.

  At three thirty on the afternoon of December twenty-eighth, while Sarah and Heather and Mollie splashed in the warm lucid waters off the house on St. Bart’s, Michael sat in a parked car with an ADA named Georgie Giardino, the Rackets Bureau’s most ardent mob-watcher.

  Georgie’s grandfather had been born in Italy, and lived in America for five years before he got his citizenship papers, at which time he could rightfully be called an Italian-American. In Georgie’s eyes, this was the only time the hyphenate could be used properly. His parents had been born here of Italian-American parents, but this did not make them similarly Italian-Americans, it made them simply Americans. The two men meeting in the restaurant today had also been born in America, and despite their Italian-sounding names, they too were American. In fact, neither Frankie Palumbo nor Jimmy Angelli felt the slightest allegiance to a country that was as foreign to them as Saudi Arabia. Even their parents, similarly born in the good old U.S. of A., had little concern for what went on in Italy. Most of them would never visit Italy in their lifetime. Italy was a foreign country where, they’d been told, the food wasn’t as good as you could get in any Italian restaurant in New York. This was not like the Irish or the Jews, whose ferocious ties to Northern Ireland and Israel would have been considered seditious in a less tolerant land. The irony was that although these hoods called themselves “Italians,” they were no more Italian than Michael himself was. Or, for that matter, Georgie Giardino.

  Frankie Palumbo and Jimmy Angelli were Americans, take it or leave it, like it or not. And like any other good Americans, they believed in a free society wherein someone who worked hard and played by the rules could prosper and be happy. The rules they played by were not necessarily the same rules most other Ameri­cans played by, but they did obey them. And they did prosper. Georgie despised them and their fucking rules. It was, in fact, his firm belief that until every last Mafioso son of a bitch was in jail, any American of Italian descent would suffer through association. That was why he was sitting alongside Michael today, freezing his ass off in a parked car two blocks from the Ristorante Romano, waiting to hear and record the conversation that would take place between two or more American gangsters in an Italian restaurant.

  The first of them to arrive was Jimmy Angelli, one of the caporegimi of the Colotti family in Queens.

  “Hey, Mr. Angelli, long time no see, what’s the matter you don’t come to the city no more.”

  The restaurant owner, they surmised.

  The city was Manhattan.

  Anyone who lived in New York knew that there was the Bronx, Queens, Brooklyn, Staten Island—and the City.

  There was another man with Angelli.

  They didn’t get his name till Angelli said, “Danny, sit over there.”

  This was while the two men were still alone. Angelli was probably indicating that his goon sit with his back to the wall, where he could see anyone coming in the front door. It did not take too many restaurant rubouts before you learned where to sit.

  Frank Palumbo and his goon arrived some ten minutes later, fashionably tardy as befitted the offended capo of Manhattan’s Faviola family. After all, some stupid cocksucker thief guaranteed by the Colotti family had shortchanged him five grand after he’d done them a favor. He could afford to play this one like the boss himself instead of one of a hundred lieutenants in the Faviola family.

  At the recent trial of Anthony Faviola, convicted and sentenced boss of the notorious Manhattan family, the U.S. Attorney had introduced in evidence the taped conversations that were the result of a yearlong wiretap surveillance. On those tapes, a man identified as Anthony Faviola had, among other things, ordered two hit men to do several murders in New Jersey. The defense called his younger brother, Rudy, as a witness and he was the first to testify that on the night his brother had allegedly made the call from his mother’s house in Oyster Bay, Long Island, he was instead at his own palatial home in Stonington, Connecticut, playing poker with six legitimate businessmen. The six men were each called in turn, and each corroborated the fact that at eight twenty-seven that night—the time at which the incriminating interstate call was allegedly made—Anthony was laying a full house on the table, aces up. The jury didn’t believe any of them.

  Anthony was now serving five consecutive lifetime sentences in the maximum-security prison at Leavenworth, Kansas. Four of these sentences were for the murders he’d ordered. The fifth had been tacked on under the federal Racketeer-Influenced and Corrupt Organizations statute—familiarly known as the RICO statute—under which murders committed in the furtherance of cri
minal enterprise were punishable by lifetime sentences.

  Anthony was locked in his cell for twenty-three hours every day, and his visiting privileges were severely limited as well because he’d been deliberately sent to a federal prison far from family, friends, and former associates. Some diehard followers insisted that he was still running the mob from inside, but from everything the DA’s Office had been able to learn, his underboss brother, Rudy, next in line and loyal to the end, was now boss—with Anthony’s blessings. Rudy was affectionately known as “the Accountant,” a nickname that had nothing to do with balancing books. When both brothers were coming along as soldiers in the Tortocello family, Rudy had built a reputation as an enforcer, a man to whom you had better account or else.

  Sitting in the parked car now, Michael and Georgie were hoping to hear something that would connect Rudy Faviola to the dope deal that had gone down outside a takee-outee restaurant in Chinatown. Six ounces of cocaine was an A-l felony. If they could tie this to an additional felony and a misdemeanor, each committed within the past three years, then under Section 460.20—defined as the Organized Crime Control Act—they might be able to send the new boss out to Kansas, too, Toto. Well, not quite. Anthony Faviola was serving federal time; an OCCA offender would be sent to a state prison.

  “How you doin’, Jim?” Palumbo said. “You been waitin’ long?”

  “Just a few minutes,” Angelli said. “You’re lookin’ good, Frank.”

  “I could stand to lose a few pounds,” Palumbo said. “Over there, Joey.”

  Indicating a chair for his goon, no doubt.

  The men ordered wine.

  The bug recorded the ritual Mafia foreplay.

  The inquiring after one’s health and one’s family, the show of respect, esteem, and admiration.

  Ta-da ta-da ta-da, as Jackie Diaz had put it.

  The men did not order lunch.

  Palumbo got down to brass tacks almost immediately.

  “What do you suggest we do with this asshole you sent us?” he asked.

  “I never even met the stupid fuck,” Angelli said.

  “So that’s who you recommended me? Somebody you never met?”

  “I was doing a favor for my cousin.”

  “Some favor you done me, he fucks me out of five grand.”

  “You’ll get the money back, Frankie.”

  “When? How?”

  “That’s what I want to work out with you.”

  “You work it out with me, you think it’s gonna fly, huh?”

  Advertising-agency talk.

  “I’m hoping it will.”

  “I still ain’t heard what you plan to do. All I know is somebody’s got five thousand bucks of my money. And from what Sal tells me, there’s another fifteen grand kickin’ around out there, plus interest. So who is this jih-drool, you’re goin’ out on a limb for him? We got good relations, this asshole’s gonna fuck them up, we ain’t careful.”

  “Which is why we’re here,” Angelli said. “To make sure that doesn’t happen.”

  “Anybody else, it’d already be too late for talk. The man would be gone.”

  “I know that.”

  “We go back a long way, Jim …”

  “I know that, too. That’s why I’m here today, Frank. To ask that we don’t let this thing get out of hand. We don’t do anything foolish could cause trouble between the families. We don’t want that, and we’re sure you don’t want that, either.”

  “Who is this asshole, anyway, the fuckin’ Pope you’re defendin’ him this way?”

  “My cousin’s in love with him, what the fuck can I do?” Angelli said.

  “Does she know he’s married?”

  “She knows. But he’s gettin’ a divorce.”

  “Yeah, divorce my ass.”

  “That’s what he told her.”

  “How we gonna make this right, Jimmy?”

  “How do you want it to go, Frank? You’re the one got hurt here, you tell me.”

  “I’m glad to hear you talking this way.”

  “What’s right is right,” Angelli said.

  “I don’t know what to tell you. This is money that was stolen, you understand? I go higher with this, I know just what I’m gonna hear. Stolen money? Hey, come on. You know what to do, why you even bothering me with this? That’s what I’ll hear.”

  “I thought,” Angelli said, and sighed heavily. “I thought … we all go back a long way. You, me … Rudy. Other families, there’s been trouble, but us, never. That’s ’cause there’s always been the proper respect, am I right, Frank?”

  “Till now.”

  “No. No, Frankie, don’t say that, please. This isn’t a matter of disrespect Colotti to Faviola, it ain’t that at all. This is a jerk we’re dealin’ with here, a man with no sense. Di Nobili’s a fuckin’ jerk, I admit it, I told my cousin what she sees in this jerk is beyond me. Women, what can I tell you? He’s a jerk, he’s a loser, he’s a fuckin’ thief, he’s all these things, I agree with you. But he’s also somebody not worth botherin’ with, you follow me, Frank? We can settle this without goin’ the whole nine yards. It don’t have to be that drastic, you understand what I’m sayin’? It ain’t even worth Rudy’s time to be thinkin’ of something so drastic. What I thought is if you talked to him, he might find it in his heart to give this jerk a break. That’s all I’m askin’. Figure out a way for this jackass to work it off. The fifteen, the additional five, take it out of his fuckin’ ass, work his ass off till he pays it all back.”

  “You gonna guarantee it, Jimmy?”

  “That’s askin’ a lot, Frank. I don’t even know the man. He’s a jerk my cousin’s involved with, I’m pleadin’ this for her, not for him. She’s flesh and blood, Frankie. She’s my first cousin. We were kids together, we grew up together. Like you and me. And Rudy.”

  “Rudy, huh?”

  “If you could talk to him …”

  “Where you been, Jim?”

  “What?”

  “I’ll see what I can do,” Palumbo said, but there was a note of finality in his voice. “I’ll talk it over with Le—”

  There was the sound of his chair being shoved back, thunderously close to the bug.

  “. . . and get back to you. That’s the best I can say right now. No promises.”

  “Who?” Michael asked.

  “Shhhh!”

  The men were still talking, exchanging farewells, sending regards, thanking each other for having given the time to this important matter. But the business was finished, there was really nothing more to say. Now there was the sound of more chairs being shoved back, registering like an avalanche on the bug. Then footsteps. And the distant voice of the restaurant owner calling his farewells. And the sound of a door closing. And then only the restaurant’s background noises.

  “Who did he say?” Michael asked.

  “It sounded like ‘Lena.’”

  “That’s what I thought.”

  “Who the hell is Lena?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “That name mean anything to you? Lena?”

  “Maybe it’s his wife’s name. Maybe Palumbo’s gonna talk it over with her.”

  Michael looked at him.

  “Well,” Georgie said, and shrugged.

  “This is a terrible connection,” Sarah said. “Where are you?”

  “At the office,” Michael said. “Shall I try it again?”

  “Maybe I should call you back.”

  “It’s cheaper from here, isn’t it?”

  “Let me call you back, anyway.”

  “Okay, good,” Michael said, and hung up.

  She’d been dressing for dinner when he called, and she stood now in bra and panties in the largest guest room, hers through seniority whenever she and her sister were visiting together
. There were four bedrooms in the house, all of them on the second floor, all with glorious views of the ocean. The master bedroom in particular, with its French doors opening on the sea, offered a vista to the south that encompassed miles of open water to Statia and St. Kitts. Behind the house, to the northwest, you could see all the way up the mountain to the houses surrounding the hotel on Morne Lurin, a spectacularly twinkling view at night. Sitting at the dressing table facing the window wall, Sarah dialed Michael’s office directly. Beyond the open French doors, the sun was beginning to dip toward the water, staining the sky in its wake.

  “Organized Crime, Welles.”

  “How do you do, Mr. Welles,” she said, “I wish to report a crime, please.”

  “What is the crime, ma’am?” he asked, recognizing her voice at once.

  “Reckless Abandonment,” Sarah said.

  “No such crime, ma’am. We’ve got Abandonment of a Child, that’s Section Two-Six-Oh of the …”

  “This is an adult,” she said. “The person abandoned.”

  “An adult, yes, ma’am. Male or female?”

  “Female, Mr. Welles. Very. Michael, I’m beginning to feel neglected. When are you … ?”

  “Ahhh, yes, Criminal Negligence, ma’am, Section One-Two …”

  “When are you coming down here?”

  “As soon as I can, honey.”

  “I miss you.”

  “I miss you, too. But I’ve got to keep at this. I may be onto something, Sarah. I won’t know till I dig a little deeper. Anyway, however this goes, I’ll be down for sure on New Year’s Eve.”

  “That means we’ll only be together a day or so before we have to head home.”

  “Two full days and three nights.”

  “I still don’t see what’s so important about this. Did Scanlon cancel anyone else’s vacation?”

  “Georgie had to postpone till tomorrow.”

  “Then why don’t you leave tomorrow?”

  “Then no one’d be here working the case.”

  “What case?”

  “That’s a secret.”

  “Even from me.”

  “Even from you.”