Criminal Conversation

by Ed McBain

  “No.”

  “Or Connecticut?”

  “No.”

  “He’s mob-connected,” Lowndes said, “he can buy phony licenses a dime a dozen.”

  “What you’re saying is we don’t know where he lives yet.”

  “That’s right.”

  “And if we don’t know where to find him, we can’t begin tailing him.”

  “Well, yeah.”

  “Have you checked for any parking violations?”

  “I’ve got that call in now,” Regan said, nodding. “If he’s driving the Acura, he has to park it every now and then. And this is a guy with no respect for traffic laws …”

  “Three speeding violations out there,” Lowndes said.

  “So he’ll park the car wherever he feels like it.”

  “When did they say they’d get back?”

  “You know those guys. They get thousands of scofflaws, what’s the big deal?”

  “Let’s try ’em again now,” Michael suggested.

  Regan looked at his watch:

  “Be a good time,” he said, and went to the phone. “What’s that extension again, Alex, you remember? At Parking Violations?”

  “Three-two-oh,” Lowndes said.

  Regan dialed. Michael hit the speaker button. They listened to the phone ringing on the other end, once, twice, three times, again, again …

  “Gone home already,” Lowndes said.

  “At four-thirty?” Regan said.

  “Parking Violations, Cantori.”

  “Sergeant Henderson, please.”

  “Who’s this?”

  “Detective Regan, DA’s Office Squad.”

  “Second.”

  Regan shrugged.

  They waited.

  “Henderson,” a voice said.

  “Sergeant, this is Detective Regan, I called you yesterday about this Acura we’re trying to trace for the Organized Crime Unit? Connecticut plate on it?”

  “Yeah?”

  “I’m sitting here with the deputy unit chief, and he’s wondering if you’ve made any progress on this.”

  There was a silence on the line.

  “He’s on the speaker now, in fact,” Regan said.

  “Hello, Sergeant,” Michael said. “This is ADA Welles, how’s it going?”

  “We’ve been jammed here,” Henderson said. “The holidays.”

  “I can imagine,” Michael said. “And. we hate to push you on this, but it’s a matter of some urgency.”

  “They’re all a matter of some urgency,” Henderson said drily.

  “I’m sure they are. But do you think you can kick up your computer, see if you’ve got anything on this particular car? We really would appreciate it.”

  “Give me the number there,” Henderson said.

  He called back in ten minutes.

  “Blue 1991 Acura Legend coupe, Connecticut registration, vanity plate FAV-TWO, registered owner Andrew Faviola, address 24 Cradle Rock Road, Stonington, Connecticut.

  “That’s the car,” Regan said.

  “I’ve got fourteen parking violations since September of last year. What do you need?”

  “Locations,” Michael said.

  “Four of them are outside a restaurant called La Luna on Fifty-Eighth and Eighth.”

  Michael nodded.

  “What about the other eight?”

  “Various locations in Manhattan and Brooklyn.”

  “How are they listed?”

  “By building.”

  “Where the car was parked?” Regan asked.

  “Yeah, the address it was in front of.”

  “Any other repeaters?” Michael asked.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Any other places he parked more than once?”

  “No, these are all different addresses.”

  “Any streets repeated?”

  “Let me see.”

  There was a long silence.

  “Yeah, we got three addresses on the same street.”

  “What street is that?” Michael asked.

  “It’s an avenue, actually.”

  “Which one?”

  “Bowery. In Manhattan. But the addresses are pretty far apart.”

  “Can you let us have them, please?”

  “What’s your fax number?” Henderson said.

  The apartment was above a tailor shop on Broome Street, just two blocks off Bowery. The tailor shop was on the ground floor of the building: The upper three stories had been remodeled as a triplex. From the outside, you saw a four-story brick tenement covered with the soot and grime of at least a century. On the inside, the apartment consisted of an entry and living room on the floor above the tailor shop, a kitchen and dining room on the second floor, and a bedroom on the third floor. There was a lot of expensive cabinetry and hardware in the apartment. Andrew’s father had contracted the remodeling to one of his own construction companies, and they’d done a quality job because they’d realized exactly for whom they were working.

  The building was a corner building. The entrance to the tailor shop was on Broome Street, but its large plate-glass windows wrapped around the corner to Mott Street as well. There was a wooden door painted blue on the Mott Street side of the building. The blue door had a Mott Street address on it, and a black mailbox with the name “Carter-Goldsmith Investments” lettered on it in gold was affixed to the jamb beside the door. Inside the door, there was a staircase that led to the first-floor entry of the apartment. There was one other entrance to the apartment. This was through the back of the tailor shop, where a door opened onto another staircase that led to the rear of the apartment’s living room, adjacent to the wood-burning fireplace. The upstairs and downstairs doors to the apartment were fitted with identical deadbolt locks. Andrew was the only one who had a key that opened each lock.

  He always parked his car wherever he could find a spot. The side streets in Little Italy and Chinatown were usually impossible, but he’d been lucky finding spaces on Bowery, where all the lighting and appliance stores were. He then walked the two, three, sometimes six blocks or more to the Broome Street tailor shop. The gilt lettering on both the Broome Street and Mott Street windows of the shop read:

  LOUIS VACCARO

  DRY CLEANING

  FINE CUSTOM TAILORING

  ALTERATIONS

  A little bell over the door rang whenever anyone entered the shop. On this rainy, wet, and dismal Friday the fifteenth, the bell sounded particularly welcoming, a harbinger of the steamy embrace of the shop. As he entered, Andrew was greeted with the familiar sounds of the bell tinkling, and the pressing machine hissing in the back room, and the sewing machine humming. Louis sat working in the Broome Street window, squinting at a piece of cloth he was running under the feed dog, chewing on an unlit guinea stinker, his rimless glasses shoved up onto his forehead, his foot on the machine’s treadle. To his left and deeper inside the shop was a double-tiered row of hangered garments awaiting pickup.

  “Andrew, hello,” he said, and rose immediately and put the stogie in a small ashtray near the machine’s bobbin. Turning to Andrew, his arms wide, he said, “Come vai?”

  “Good, thank you,” Andrew said, and went to the old man and embraced him.

  Louis was wearing a sleeveless sweater over a white shirt and trousers with a faint stripe. He had made the trousers himself. He had also made the sports jacket Andrew was wearing under an overcoat he’d had tailored at Chipp. Louis had picket-fence white hair, and he always looked a bit grizzled. Andrew guessed he shaved once or twice a week, and then under duress.

  “I found a nice cloth for you,” he said. “For a suit. You want to see it?”

  “Not now, I’m expecting Uncle Rudy,” Andrew said, and looked at his watch. “Send him right up when he gets here, ok
ay?”

  “Sure. What weather, huh?”

  “Terrible,” Andrew said.

  “Is the jacket warm enough?”

  “The jacket is warm enough,” Andrew said, smiling and unbuttoning his coat. Opening it wide to show Louis, he said, “And beautiful, too.”

  “Yes, it is,” Louis said modestly.

  “I’ll be upstairs.”

  “I’ll send him up.”

  “How’s Benny doing?”

  “Ask him,” Louis said, and shrugged.

  His son was pressing in the back room.

  “I hate this fuckin’ job,” was the first thing he said.

  “You’re a good presser,” Andrew said.

  “Can’t you get me something?” Benny said.

  Tall and rake-thin, with his father’s unruly hair—coal black as opposed to the old man’s white—he, too, wore glasses, misted now by the steam rising from the pressing machine. He worked in a tank-top white undershirt and dark trousers. White socks and black shoes. He, too, needed a shave. Like father, like son, Andrew thought.

  “I’ll take anything you can find me,” Benny said. “Construction, the docks, anything, driving a truck, whatever. I’m stronger than I look, Andrew, I mean it.”

  “I know you are. But …”

  “I’m skinny, but I’m strong.”

  “I know that. But what would your father do without you?”

  “It’s just I hate pressing. I hate it.”

  “Does he know that?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Talk to him. See what he says. If he agrees to let you go, I may have something in the Fulton Market.”

  “Jesus, I hate fish,” Benny said.

  “Or something else, we’ll see. But talk to him first.”

  “I can’t even stand the smell of fish,” Benny said.

  “Talk to him,” Andrew said, and walked back to the door on the rear wall. Fastened to the jamb was a speaker with a buzzer button under it. He fished out his keys and unlocked the deadbolt. Flicking on the light switch in the stairwell, he climbed to the apartment’s first floor. The stairwell walls were painted white to match the back of the tailor shop. The door to the apartment was also painted white on this side. He unlocked the deadbolt on the upstairs door, opened it, stepped into the apartment, and closed and locked the door behind him, using the deadbolt’s thumb latch. The inside of the door was paneled in walnut, as was the rest of the living room. He checked the thermostat, nodded when he saw it was set for seventy degrees, and then sat down to wait for his uncle.

  In the newspaper office on the fifth floor of the school, Luretta and Sarah were working on next week’s issue of the Greer Gazette, a name both of them despised. The clock on the wall read eleven forty. Sarah and the girl both had free periods, and whatever they could accomplish now would save time for the rest of the newspaper staff after classes today. Luretta was better at headlines than most of the other girls; she had a mind that cut instantly to the chase. The one she was working on now was for a story that detailed the school’s visit last week to the Matisse exhibit at MOMA. She’d tried two ideas on Sarah …

  MISSES VISIT MASTERS

  . … and …

  MISSES MEET MATISSE

  . . . and then agreed with her when she suggested that the word “misses” sounded like what someone would expect at a school for girls somewhere in the Berkshires, but not here in the heart of New York, in a place full of sophisticated, smart …

  “Gee, thanks,” Luretta said, and flashed her wonderful smile.

  Alone in the office, the two tossed around several new approaches, all of them rotten. The wind outside rattled the windowpanes, whistled and howled in a hairline crack where the window didn’t quite meet the frame. It was Luretta who finally came up with the notion of telling what impact the exhibit had had on the girls; the story, after all, wasn’t announcing future outing, it was reporting on a past excursion.

  “Well, what impact did it have?” Sarah asked.

  “I personally found it awesome,” Luretta said. “And I don’t mean awesome as in Valley Girl, I mean goddamn awesome!”

  “In what way?”

  Get them to think, get them to explore, get them to …

  “The way all his life he kept finding new ways of doing things,” Luretta said. “Even when he was an old man, he was still saying, ‘Look at me! I’m alive!’”

  “Can you put that in a headline?”

  “Wouldn’t work,” Luretta said.

  They both fell silent.

  Out of the blue, Luretta said, “Matisse Lives!”

  “Good,” Sarah said, and nodded.

  “’Cause he does, you know,” Luretta said. “He still lives, that’s the thing of it.”

  “Yes,” Sarah said.

  They worked silently for several minutes, each bent over their separate pasteups, the clock on the wall ticking, the wind rushing the window.

  “I wish some of the kids where I live could see that show,” Luretta said. “Make them want to live, too.”

  “Why can’t they?”

  “They’re too busy dyin’,” Luretta said.

  Sarah looked up.

  Their eyes met.

  “Dope, I mean,” Luretta said. “It’s all over the streets up there. They make it so easy.”

  Sarah kept looking at her.

  “No, not me,” Luretta said. “You don’t have to worry about that. I don’t need that shit, excuse me.”

  “I’m glad,” Sarah said.

  “But it’s tempting, I’ll tell you that, Mrs. Welles. It bein’ there all the time. Easy to get, cheap as dirt. Makes you want to try it, you know? Everybody else up there is doin’ it, you say to yourself, ‘Why not me? Why not go fly with all the others?’”

  Sarah said nothing.

  “But you know, you go see this work the man did, and you realize he didn’t need crack to get high, did he? Matisse. He found all the high he needed right inside himself.”

  “Yes,” Sarah said.

  “Right in here,” Luretta said, and tapped her clenched fist over her heart. “Right in here.”

  The bell sounded, shattering the silence.

  “We got a lot done here, didn’t we?” Luretta said.

  “Yes, we did. Will you be back this afternoon?”

  “Oh, sure.”

  “Look for you then.”

  “Matisse Lives!” Luretta said, grinning, and threw a black power salute as she went out the door.

  The clock on the wall read twelve ten.

  Time for lunch.

  Sarah didn’t feel like the teachers’ lunchroom today.

  Despite the weather, she thought she might walk over to the coffee shop on Lex and Fif—

  She thought suddenly of Andrew Farrell.

  Of not wanting to take him to the coffee shop so close to the school.

  Went instead …

  The smell of strong coffee …

  The taste of rich chocolate on her lips.

  Andrew leaning over the table to kiss her.

  Quickly, she put the thought of him out of her mind.

  His uncle looked worse each time Andrew saw him.

  He would always wonder if Uncle Rudy had turned down the job because he truly hadn’t wanted it, or because he knew he had such a short time to live. He was next in line, everyone knew that. But cancer was in line ahead of him.

  Best-kept secret in the family.

  Never act from a position of weakness, his father had told him. Never let anyone know weakness is the reason for any decision. Always move through strength. Or make it seem that way.

  Succeeding his father merely because his uncle was sick would have been taken by others as assuming control by default. Andrew did not have his uncle’s s
eniority, was not a made man like his uncle, in fact had none of his uncle’s experience or training. But when Rudy Faviola, moving through strength, said he did not want the job and named his nephew as rightful successor, the announcement had all the force of an irrefutable royal command.

  Whether Andrew would in the long run be accepted was another matter. His own father had taken control of the Tortocello family by eliminating its leader. Andrew was well aware of this. He had read all the newspaper accounts of Ralph Tortocello’s murder, and he knew the same thing could easily happen to him if someone disputed his assumption of power. He was hoping the Sino­-Colombian deal would go a long way toward dispelling any such doubts. He and his uncle were here to discuss that today.

  “Willie’s been in touch with Moreno again,” Rudy said. “I got to tell you, Andrew, he’s shitting his pants down there, Willie. Moreno can do him in a minute and he knows it. He likes the Caribbean, he doesn’t want to come back up north to live. But if this thing we’re attempting doesn’t work, then we have to yank him out of there or he’s shark meat.”

  “I realize that.”

  “Moreno now has the message that he won’t be able to do business anywhere in the U.S., he don’t play ball with us. New York, Miami, New Orleans, Houston, San Diego, he’s fucked wherever he tries to sell the shit ’cause our people will be knockin’ off dealers like they’re rats in a sewer. The message’ll be, you do business with Moreno, you have to answer to us. He don’t particularly like being threatened, Andrew, but fuck him, we made him a good offer, he’s playin’ hardball. He knows you’re runnin’ this now, you weren’t just an office boy went down there to do some fishin’. He also knows you’re your father’s son, and there’s no fuckin’ with Anthony Faviola wherever he may be, Kansas or wherever the fuck. He knows all this. What he’s holdin’ out for I don’t know.”

  “What do you think it might be?”

  “A bigger slice. He knows we’ve got him by the balls, he can’t deal with people who are scared we’ll be comin’ after them, it’s simple as that. He can shove his cocaine up his ass, he can’t sell it to the people who put it on the streets. But he’s not stupid. He knows he’s letting us into his action in return for a third of what may turn out to be a tremendous market. But it ain’t a true market yet, Andrew, it’s what your father would call a perceived market, a prospective market. It’s nothing certain yet, you follow?”