Criminal Conversation

by Ed McBain

  “Withholding Evidence from a Spouse, class E felony punishable by …”

  “Move you,” he said.

  “I love you, too. Please hurry down here.”

  “As soon as I can, honey. What are your plans for tonight?”

  “It’s my sister’s last night …”

  “I know.”

  “Yolande’s feeding Mollie right this minute. Heather and I are going into Gustavia for dinner, like grown-ups.”

  “What are you wearing?”

  “Later? Or right this minute?”

  “Which would I like better?”

  “Right this minute. But I haven’t got time.”

  “Tell me, anyway.”

  “Lacy white bra and panties.”

  “Mmmm. High heels?”

  “Not yet. Call me later, we’ll talk dirty.”

  “What time?”

  “Everyone should be asleep by eleven or so.”

  “Why don’t you call me?”

  “Okay. You’d better be alone.”

  “I’ll be waiting.”

  “Me too.”

  “I love you.”

  “I love you too,” she said.

  “Later,” he said, and hung up.

  There was laughter down the hall.

  The place was so empty, it seemed to echo. About all that was happening in the criminal courts this week were a handful of arraignments in AR One and AR Two, and the processing of new arrests in the Complaint Room. Aside from a skeleton staff necessary to keep the wheels of justice barely grinding, the big gray complex on Centre Street was virtually devoid of personnel. Michael sat alone before the computer in the sixth-floor office. The calendar on the wall read December 28, the digital clock on his desk read 6:37 p.m. He’d give it a few more hours and then quit for the day, take a taxi uptown to Spark’s for a good steak. He felt as if he were the last man alive in a city demolished by the bomb. The laughter down the hall was gone now. There was the click of high-heeled shoes on the marble floor outside, fading. He turned back to the screen again.

  Not all of the Faviola tapes had been computerized. There were more than eight thousand hours of conversation, and of these only a bit more than half had been transferred to computer disks since the trial ended this past August. The process was somewhat lackadaisical. Before the trial, the U.S. Attorney had incessantly sifted and resifted each and every conversation. The accumulated evidence had been used to send Anthony Faviola away forever, but there was nothing more that could be done to him. In fact, when Michael made his call to the Feds, they’d asked him what the hell he wanted with all that stuff? He told them he was doing background research, and they’d let it go at that. No one had expected any real explanation; everyone in law enforcement was well aware of the keen competition among agencies. Which was one of the reasons Sarah was in the Caribbean and Michael was here in New York looking for any reference to a person named Lena.

  I’ll see what I can do, Palumbo had said. I’ll talk it over with Lena, and get back to you. That’s the best I can say right now. No promises.

  Everyone in the DA’s Office felt certain that the moment Anthony Faviola got sent west, his younger brother, Rudy, took over as the new boss of the family. But Palumbo hadn’t said he’d talk it over with Rudy. In fact …

  Michael switched on the tape again.

  “Rudy, huh?”

  “If you could talk to him …”

  “Where you been, Jim?”

  “What?”

  Something derisive in Palumbo’s voice.

  Where you been, Jim?

  And then saying he’d talk it over with Lena.

  So who the hell was Lena?

  Frankie Palumbo was married to a woman named Grace. He had two daughters, one of them named Filomena—after his mother—and the other named Firenze, after his grandfather’s birthplace in Italy. Frankie was fifty-two years old and had never been to Italy, big surprise. There was no one named Lena in Anthony Faviola’s family. Nor in Rudy’s. Not a Lena in the carload.

  So who is Lena, what is she? Michael wondered. And what the hell am I doing here in New York three days after Christmas, chasing Mafia ghosts on a computer, because my boss, my own personal boss of all bosses, thinks that if Rudy Faviola is not currently running the show, then we’d better learn damn fast who is.

  Lena.

  Michael fantasized a voluptuous dark-haired woman of indeterminate Mediterranean origin. Lena. And the swan? Oh? No kidding? In college, before he’d met Sarah, his taste had run to poetry and to dark-haired women … well, even though he’d known better, he’d still thought of them as girls, actually. He was now thirty-six, this was back during the seventies; Betty Friedan had published her Feminine Mystique a decade earlier, and Erica Jong had just begun telling the world about her ten thousand and one orgasms.

  Michael was twenty-one when he met the first blonde he’d ever dated, the last girl—or even woman—he’d ever date again because that blonde happened to be a nineteen-year-old junior named Sarah Fitch whom he married a year later, after he’d graduated with his B.S. degree, and while she was still in her senior year. His parents helped him through law school—it was a matter of pride that he’d later repaid them every cent—until Sarah herself graduated with a B.A. and got a license to teach English, which she’d done here and there all over New York while he trudged uptown to Columbia. She still taught at the Greer Academy, where she’d settled in some eight years ago, after getting her master’s from NYU. He was always surprised when a woman obviously in her late twenties stopped “Mrs. Welles” on the street and told her how much she’d enjoyed being in her class. Well, Sarah was thirty-four now. She’d started teaching when she was twenty-three; those sixteen-year-olds back then were now in their late twenties.

  Lena.

  Maybe it wasn’t a woman’s name at all. No woman behind the throne here, no woman whose advice was earnestly sought. Maybe it was a man’s family name, maybe the Lena with whom Palumbo had to talk it over was a Johnny Lena or a Joey Lena or a Foonzie Lena. If so, had his name ever cropped up in the hundreds of conversations between the Brothers Faviola at all hours of the day and night? Many of these conversations were in crude code. The mob was ever alert to the marvels of electronic surveillance. When they weren’t talking what sounded totally innocuous to anyone listening but which obviously had great import to the chatterers themselves, they were turning on record players or water taps or showers or television sets to obscure whatever they were saying in plain English laced with a few bastardized Italian expressions like boff-on-gool and stroon-zeh and mah-nedge and jih-drool and mool-een-yahn. The U.S. Attorney had nailed Faviola on four murders because he’d been stupid enough to believe the place he was calling from was inordinately safe: his mother’s house in Oyster Bay. Who would have thought those sfasciumi could have got into Stella Faviola’s fortresslike, fenced-in, gray stone mansion on the North Shore, there to install their insidious listening devices?

  Lena.

  Earlier this evening, Michael had kicked up FAVIOLA, RUDY on the computer, and then he’d typed in LENA and hit the SEARCH key, and lo and behold there was not a single LENA, uppercase or lower, to be found. As a lark, he’d typed in LEDA and hit the same search key, and got nothing there, either, small surprise. This meant that in none of Rudy’s conversations with his brother had the name Lena, or for that matter Leda, been uttered—at least not on the tapes that had already been computerized.

  Michael was praying there’d be something on the computer. He did not relish wading through thousands of pages of typed transcript, reading the remainder of the conversations word for word.

  He decided to go straight for the jugular, do a wider search of the entire file, which was broken down into month-by-month folders starting in September of 1991, when the federal surveillance had begun in earnest. He called up each fo
lder in turn, scanning them for the name Lena. Nothing for September or October of ’91. Zilch for November. Lots of Christmas talk in December, and a few near misses when the computer gave him first polenta, and then lenona, both of which contained the letters l-e-n-a in succession—close but no cigar. He went back to the drawing board, clicked the little box for Exact Match, and typed in the name with a capital L followed by the letters e, n, and a in lowercase. Lena. Once more unto the breach, dear friends.

  Nothing for January of 1992.

  Nothing in February, either.

  The computerized stuff ended with the conversations taped in March.

  There was no Lena mentioned in that month, either.

  With a mountain of transcripts looming before him, Michael went back to the little box he’d earlier clicked for an exact match, and canceled the command. He started again with the folder for January of ’92, searching for the letters l, e, n, and a in any combination in either upper or lower case.

  In January, he got Anthony talking to someone about a new calendar for the year, obviously a code. Calendar. Later that month, he got him asking about a dry-cleaning delivery, probably another code, the letters coming up in the sequence l-e-a-n this time. Still later in the month, Anthony inquired about the price of a Macintosh Ilsi from a store called Computerland. In March, the last folder in the computer file, there was only a single l-e-n-a combination, in the name Leonard, whoever the hell he might have been. Michael still didn’t want to tackle those forbidding transcripts. In the possibility that he or Georgie had heard the name wrong, he widened the search so that the computer would call up anything even closely resembling the name Lena. If, for example, a transcribing typist had misspelled Lena as Lexna or even Leyna or Lina or Lema, chances are the computer would yank out the word unless it was really too preposterously distant.

  He hit the SEARCH key.

  In the folder for December of last year, Anthony had told his dear Rudy that he still hadn’t bought Leno anything for Christmas.

  Leno.

  Not Lena.

  Leno with an o.

  There were no other mentions of the name Leno in any of the conversations already computerized. Michael would have to hit the transcripts, after all.

  Sighing heavily, he shut down for the night and looked at his watch. Quarter past eight—my, how the time does fly when you’re having a good time. He was ravenously hungry.

  Heather had chosen the spot, a hotel restaurant with a poolside piano bar and a terrific view of the harbor. When they walked in, Heather in pink, Sarah in white, the piano player was doing a medley of Cole Porter tunes. He nodded in their direction and immediately segued into “I Get a Kick out of You,” which seemed a bit obvious to Sarah but which her sister seemed to appreciate nonetheless. They were shown to a table on the terrace, overlooking a wide curve of harbor with twinkling dockside lights and bobbing boats and beyond the dark water a cluster of softer yellow lights in the rolling hills. The night was soft. There was the sweet scent of frangipani on the air.

  “I want something tall and dark and very strong,” Heather said to the waiter, and smiled and added, “To drink, that is,” compounding the felony. At his suggestion, she ordered a concoction called “Pirate’s Flagon,” which he said had seven different kinds of rum in it. Sarah ordered a Beefeater martini, on the rocks, couple of olives, what the hell. After two of those, she felt like calling Michael straight from the restaurant, tell him she’d taken off her lacy white panties in the ladies’ room and was now standing in white, high-heeled, ankle-strapped sandals at the wall phone, naked under her white pleated dress, what did he intend doing about it, huh? Instead, she ordered the fish special of the day, a red snapper papillote. Heather was looking a bit glassy-eyed after her seven kinds of rum times two. She ordered the curried goat and avocado in Antilles sauce. The waiter suggested a dry white wine—French, of course, what else?—and they were halfway through the bottle when the two men they’d seen on the beach earlier today walked in.

  “I’ll take the young one,” Heather said.

  “I’ll take Michael,” Sarah said.

  “Michael’s ten thousand miles away.”

  “Then I’ll take the young one,” Sarah said, and both women giggled like schoolgirls.

  “Actually, the one with the white hair is better looking,” Heather said, looking over toward where the men were being seated at the other end of the curved terrace.

  “Gray hair,” Sarah said.

  “Looks white to me. Handsome as sin.”

  “How’s the curried goat?” Sarah asked.

  “Much better than the shrimp fricassee I had the other night,” Heather said, and glanced again toward where the men were now ordering drinks. “Do you think the white-haired one would like to fricassee me? I sure would like to fricassee him.”

  “Gray-haired,” Sarah corrected again.

  “The young one has big ears,” Heather said.

  “The better to hear you,” Sarah said, lowering her voice and raising her eyebrows in warning.

  “Clark Gable had big ears, you know. He was famous for his big ears,” Heather said. “Did you know that men with big ears are supposed to have big dicks, too?”

  Sarah almost choked on her fish.

  “That’s the truth,” Heather said.

  “Anyway, it’s noses,” Sarah whispered.

  “What is?”

  “If you have a big nose, you’re supposed to have a big penis.”

  “Did Pinocchio have a big penis?”

  “Did Dumbo?” Sarah asked, and both women burst out laughing again.

  “They’ll throw us out of here,” Heather said, covering her mouth with her napkin, trying to stifle the laughter.

  “I wouldn’t blame them,” Sarah said.

  “I think I’ll go ask him to dance.”

  “I don’t think that’s such a good idea,” Sarah said.

  “Why not? My last night here? Kiss me my sweet, for tomorrow I die.”

  “No one else is dancing.”

  “Break the ice, what the hell.”

  “Your goat’ll get cold.”

  “Better my goat than something else,” Heather said, and grinned mischievously. “Why is it that whenever I feel like dancing, the goddamn band is playing something Latin?”

  Actually, it seemed to Sarah that the piano player was still playing Cole Porter. Something from Kiss Me, Kate, in fact. Something that sounded very much like “So in Love with You Am I,” but maybe the beat was Latin, it was difficult to tell. She looked at her watch. If they got out of here by nine thirty, ten, she could call Michael by …

  “Taxi waiting?” Heather asked.

  “No, no. Sorry, I didn’t …”

  “Am I boring you, sis?” Heather said.

  “Of course not. I promised to call Michael again, that’s all.”

  “But do I bore you? Tell me the truth, Sarah. I’m your sister, do you find me boring?”

  “No, I find you very interesting, in fact.”

  “But am I a boring person, Sarah? Tell me. Please.”

  “No, you’re a fascinating person.”

  “Then why did Doug find me boring?”

  “I never got the impression he did.”

  “Then why’d he start up with a nineteen-year-old twit?”

  “I have no idea.”

  “What do nineteen-year-olds talk about, anyway? Their trips to the record shop in the mall? Who do you think is more boring, Michael or Douglas?”

  “I don’t think either one of them is boring.”

  “I think Michael is boring.”

  “Don’t let him hear you say that.”

  “And put on my top when he gets here, I know, I know.”

  “You’ll be gone when he gets here,” Sarah said. “If he gets here.”

&nbs
p; “Don’t you find him boring?”

  “No, I find him very interesting.”

  “Don’t you find him too … lawyerly? I find lawyers very boring, Sarah. I’m sorry, but that’s the truth. Lawyers are very boring. At least advertising isn’t boring. I think Michael is attractive, but very boring. Is he any good in bed?”

  “Yes, he’s very good.”

  “I don’t see how he can be. A boring person like that.”

  “Well …”

  “Really, sis. How can a boring person like Michael be any good in bed? At least Douglas isn’t boring. Wasn’t.”

  “Well …”

  “You don’t like me talking this way, do you?”

  “Well, no, I don’t.”

  “Have you ever noticed that if we put our husbands together, we get Michael Douglas?”

  “What?”

  “Michael and Douglas. Put them together you get a handsome movie star who’s definitely not boring, that’s for sure. Do you remember him with his pants down in Fatal Attraction? Tripping all over the room with what’s her name? Meryl Streep. Have you ever made passionate love like that with Michael? Where you can’t wait to take off your clothes?”

  “That’s none of your business.”

  “You just answered the question, sis.”

  “No, I didn’t. It’s simply none of your business, what Michael and I do together.”

  “Glenn Close, it was,” Heather said.

  In fact, Sarah thought, when I get back to the house tonight, Michael and I are going to have a glorious phone phuck, how about that, sis?

  “Why doesn’t that guy play something slow and romantic?” Heather said. “I want to go dance with Whitey. See if I can talk him into a little fricassee or two. Curried goat makes a person horny, did you know that?”

  “Stop it, he’s looking this way,” Sarah whispered.

  “Whitey?”

  “No, the young one.”

  “Those are the two from the beach today,” Andrew said.

  “Which one had her top off?” Willie asked.

  “The one in pink, I think.”

  “The other one’s better looking,” Willie said.

  Andrew was thinking that women sometimes looked better when they were dressed to kill than when they were naked or even half-naked. The one who’d been topless on the beach this afternoon, for example, was now wearing a short pink sort of T-shirt dress with a gold belt and gold high-heeled sandals, no bra under the dress, and somehow this was sexier than her sitting there in just her bikini bottom this afternoon, he didn’t know why.