Criminal Conversation

by Ed McBain

  “I know you had nothing to do with this,” he said, and took her in his arms.

  “Serve you right if I did,” she said, sobbing.

  From where Regan and Lowndes sat listening in the room on Grand Street, they heard only her muffled sobs now, and figured she was weeping into his shoulder. But they had heard and recorded all of the earlier conversation as well, because whoever had yanked out the Bradys and the slave had missed at least the one-watt transmitter Freddie Coulter had installed as a wall receptacle last February.

  Heather looked as if she were already flying. Her new haircut was swept back and away from her face to give an appearance of windblown flight. In exactly forty minutes, she would be boarding the plane to the Dominican Republic, where she would get her overnight divorce before flying back to New York the day after tomorrow. She was in constant motion already, though, tapping her fingers on the tabletop, jiggling her foot, spasmodically sipping at the gin and tonic she’d ordered.

  “I wish you were coming with me,” she told Sarah.

  The sisters sat in a small lounge near the security gate. There weren’t many people flying to the Caribbean this time of year. Most of the passengers moving through the X-ray machines looked like natives going home.

  “I keep asking; myself why I’m the one doing this,” Heather said. “Why isn’t Doug going down for the divorce? He’s the one who wants to marry Miss Felicity Twit in such a hurry, isn’t he? He’s the one yearning to be so goddamn free of me. But on the other hand, there’s something fitting about my being the one who does the actual thing, who gets the actual papers signed and sealed down there. I’m the aggrieved party, do you see, Sarah?”

  “Yes,” Sarah said, and wondered if she should tell her sister about Andrew and the awful situ—

  “I don’t want people thinking Doug’s the one leaving me because of something I did,” Heather said. “He’s the son of a bitch who broke the contract, the covenant, whatever. He’s the one who fouled the marriage bed, Sarah, not me. If he went down to Santo Domingo, people would think I’m so reluctant to give him the damn divorce, he’s got to run down there himself to get it. Am I making any sense to you?”

  “Yes, I understand completely,” Sarah said.

  Everywhere around them urgent messages erupted from hidden speakers, announcing arrivals and delays, boardings and departures. Sarah wondered if on a Sunday like this one, she would soon be sitting in this lounge again, sipping drinks with her sister, who’d be seeing her off instead. Or would Michael, as the injured party, be the one to fly south for the divorce?

  The injured party.

  She wondered who, after all was said and done, would truly be the injured party.

  She could think of no one but Mollie.

  “. . . laughing at me,” Heather was saying. “That’s the one thing I couldn’t stand. She’s so young, you know, that’s the thing of it. I wouldn’t have minded so much if he’d chosen someone closer to his own age. But nineteen? Jesus! Well, she’s twenty now,” Heather said, and sighed deeply. “Twenty to my thirty-two, where’s the competition? Closing fast on thirty-three, in fact. You don’t know how lucky you are, Sarah.”

  “Heather,” she said, and paused, and then said, “There’s something I ought to tell you.”

  Heather looked at her over the rim of her glass.

  “Michael and I …”

  “No, please don’t,” Heather said. “That’s all I need right now. Please, Sarah, no.”

  “All right,” Sarah said, and picked up her own drink, and looked away because she was afraid she might burst into tears. Heather kept staring at her across the small round table.

  “What is it?” she asked at last.

  “I don’t want to burden you.”

  “You’ve already burdened me. What is it?!’

  “Trouble.”

  “What kind of trouble? Tell me.”

  Sarah told her.

  Heather listened intently, one eye on the clock. The airline announcements riddled Sarah’s recitation, making it difficult for her to complete a single sentence without being interrupted by what sounded like bulletins from the front. Heather finished her drink. She did not ask for another one. She listened wide-eyed to what Sarah was saying, her face expressionless, only the eyes revealing a mixture of horror and disbelief. A final boarding announcement exploded like a mortar shell, but Sarah was finished now. She sat looking down at the wedding band on her left hand.

  “When did this start?” Heather asked.

  “St. Bart’s.”

  “Not the handsome kid under the angel’s-trumpet?”

  Sarah nodded.

  “What do you plan to do?”

  “I don’t know yet.”

  “Does Michael suspect?”

  She had left a few salient points out of her story. She had neglected to mention, for example, that Andrew Faviola was a criminal and that Michael hoped to put him behind bars. She had also left out the part about the eavesdropping warrant. She had not told her sister that every word she and Andrew uttered in that third-floor bedroom was recorded by detectives. Telling her sister she was having an affair had been bombshell enough. Heather still looked as though she’d walked into a wall.

  “I don’t think he knows,” Sarah said. “Yet.”

  “Do you plan to tell him?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Sarah, this kid’s asked you to marry him! You’ve got to decide one way or …”

  “He’s not a kid. He’s twenty-eight.”

  “Just a bit older than Felicity Twit, “Heather said, and grimaced. “Do you love him?”

  Sarah hesitated for what seemed a very long time.

  Then she said, “Yes.”

  The loudspeaker erupted again, announcing the boarding of American’s flight five eighty-eight to Santo Domingo. Heather picked up her carry-on.

  “I’ll get this,” Sarah said, and took the check from the table.

  “You know where I’m staying,” Heather said, and leaned over to kiss her on the cheek. “If you want to talk, call me.”

  “Okay, honey. Be careful.”

  “Wish me luck,” Heather said, and gently touched Sarah’s face, and slung the carry-on over her shoulder, and went swiftly toward the security gate.

  Sarah watched as she put her bag onto the moving belt and then stepped through the detector frame. She remembered suddenly a playhouse she and her sister had built of branches and twigs when they were respectively eight and six years old.

  “It has no door, Sarah,” Heather had complained.

  Her sister stepped through the doorless frame now, moving toward her bag on the other end of the belt, slinging the bag again, and then stepping out briskly into her future.

  Sarah watched her until she was out of sight down the long corridor.

  A river ran through the property upon which Anthony Faviola had built his sprawling Connecticut estate. There were trout in the river, but Tessie Faviola would not allow anyone to fish for them. That was because she personally fed the fish every day, and she felt it would be unfair to first throw bread in the water for them and then bait a hook and take advantage of their tameness. Tessie also felt it was unfair that her birthday always followed so closely after Mother’s Day. It meant that unless they were reminded, some people might forget a gift on one or the other of the two reasons to celebrate her existence. Petey Bardo’s personal opinion, Tessie was a tyrant. All fuckin’ mothers were tyrants, you wanted to know, his own included.

  It was still chilly on this third Sunday in May, so Petey was wearing a brown woolen sweater over his brown swimming trunks. Bobby Triani, sitting beside him on the dock, dangling his feet in the very cold water, was wearing a snug blue swimsuit and a white mesh shirt, his muscles bulging. Bobby was smoking. Petey had quit smoking three years ago, when he’d suffered a mi
ld heart attack. He still believed the reason he’d been passed over for underboss was the fuckin’ heart attack. Rudy drops dead of a heart attack, they’re gonna fill his shoes with somebody else has heart trouble? No way. Instead, they gave it to Bobby here, who didn’t know his ass from his elbow about the business, except where it came to stolen property.

  Petey found it difficult to be near people who smoked, but he said nothing about it now because there were more important things to discuss with the fuckin’ underboss. The women were all up at the house, cooking, running after the kids. Andrew was up there, too, bullshitting more with his cousin than with his own two sisters, as usual. Ike and Mike, they look alike. Petey sat shivering in bathing trunks and a woolen sweater, and thinking the only good thing about a fuckin’ brook, you knew it wasn’t bugged.

  “I think it’s dangerous the way Andrew’s treating this so lightly, “he said. “It’s one thing he found the bugs and yanked them out. It’s another how it could’ve happened.”

  Bobby nodded.

  “I don’t mean any disrespect to him …”

  “Yeah, yeah,” Bobby said, and waved this aside with the hand holding the cigarette.

  “But I really think we should find out who these broads are he’s boffin. What I’m worried about,” he said, glancing at the fish darting below, “is that they got in there once, they can get in again. We got heavy stuff comin’ down the pike very soon, Bobby. Even if we change where we meet, if one of Andrew’s girls is workin’ for them, those cocksuckers’ll follow us wherever we go.”

  “Yeah,” Bobby said.

  “They got somebody in there boffin’ Andrew, they can put bugs in wherever we go, hear everything we’re saying.”

  “They ain’t allowed to do that, are they?” Bobby asked.

  “Do what?”

  “Let a cop sleep with somebody? I’ll bet there’s a rule about that. About an undercover sleepin’ with somebody. It’s the same as a vice cop takes off his clothes in front of a hooker, the bust goes out the window.”

  “Who says it has to be a cop?”

  “I thought you said an undercover.”

  “No, I said whoever he’s boffin’. It could be somebody they flipped,” Petey said. “A hooker, a junkie, somebody they got the whole nine yards on, she’ll go down on the Pope, they ask her to.”

  “Yeah, that’s possible.”

  “She’s in there workin’ for them, they’ll be under our skin forever,” Petey said.

  “You know,” Bobby said, “I told him we should ask around …”

  “I know you did.”

  “Find out what’s what.”

  “I know.”

  “He said forget it, he’d do his own askin’.”

  “I know.”

  “He’s the fuckin’ boss,” Bobby said, and shrugged.

  The men sat in silence on the riverbank. Trout splashed in the water. From far above them, the children’s voices came rolling down the sloping lawn. Petey dipped one foot in the water. It was freezing cold. This wasn’t even the end of May; summer was a long way off.

  “The other hand,” he said, “sometimes you gotta do things are for the boss’s own good.”

  The garage where Billy Lametta kept the company car was on Delancey Street, over near the East River. Bobby found him there the very next day, in his shirtsleeves, the sleeves rolled up, polishing the Lincoln, a cigarette dangling from his mouth as he worked. Bobby admired people who still had the courage to smoke.

  “Hey, Billy,” he said, lighting up a cigarette himself. “How’s it goin’?”

  “Okay, Mr. Triani,” Billy said. “How was your weekend?”

  “Very nice,” Bobby said. “We went to the country.”

  “Great day for the country.”

  “Beautiful,” Bobby said.

  “So what brings you down here?”

  “Few things I wanted to talk to you about,” Bobby said.

  The polishing cloth hesitated for just an instant. Billy was wondering what he’d done wrong to rate a visit from the underboss.

  “Always glad to see you,” he said, and resumed running the cloth over the shiny black metal of the Lincoln. But he had begun sweating.

  “First,” Bobby said, “I know this ain’t Christmas, but you been doin’ a good job, and there’s nothin’ wrong with a little bonus in May, is there?”

  He reached into his jacket pocket and took from it a fat roll of bills fastened with a rubber band. The outside bill was a C-note. Billy could see that at once.

  “Gee, hey, that’s nice of you, Mr. Triani,” he said, “but Mr. Faviola takes good care of me, you don’t have to worry.”

  “Get yourself a new suit, whatever,” Bobby said, and nudged him with the roll of bills.

  “No, really, I wouldn’t want Mr. Faviola to think …”

  “I’ll tell him about it, don’t worry. Here,” he said. “Take it. It’s two thousand bucks.”

  Billy’s eyes widened.

  “Take it,” Bobby said.

  Billy hesitated.

  “Go on, take it,” Bobby said, and tucked it into Billy’s shirt pocket.

  “Well … thanks, Mr. Triani, I appreciate it.”

  “Hey,” Bobby said, and grinned expansively.

  Billy was wondering what he wanted from him. He kept polishing the car. The garage was a place where a lot of so-called black cars were kept. These were either Caddies or Lincoln Continentals like the one Billy was polishing, but they were mostly owned by limo companies instead of privately. The difference between the black cars and the stretch limos was that the limos cost thirty-five an hour to hire whereas the smaller cars cost only twenty-eight. Billy was salaried, more or less; he received a legitimate check from Carter-Goldsmith Investments every two weeks. In addition, Faviola slipped him a coupla hundred bucks whenever the mood struck him. Triani had just stuffed a month’s salary into his shirt pocket.

  “Been using the car much?” Bobby asked.

  So that was it. Triani thought Billy had been using the company car for his own pleasure. But then why had he slipped him the two K?

  “Yeah, well, you know,” he said, “Mr. Faviola’s a busy man.”

  “What I want to ask you, Billy …”

  Here it comes, Billy thought.

  “You been driving many girls in the car?”

  “Hey, no, Mr. Triani,” Billy said at once, “I never use the car on my own. This is a company car, I wouldn’t dream of …”

  “For Mr. Faviola, I mean,” Bobby said, and winked.

  Billy looked at him.

  “You drive girls for him?” Bobby asked, and winked again.

  “Well, yeah, every now and then. Not too many nowadays, though. Nowadays, he’s got like a steady.”

  “You know the names of these girls?”

  “Well … yeah. I guess.”

  Billy still didn’t know where this was going. Was Triani asking to be fixed up with one of these girls? Was that what the two thou was for? Billy waited.

  “You know their addresses, too?” Bobby asked.

  “Yeah, I wrote them in my book. ’Cause they were regulars I used to pick up and drop off all the time. Nowadays, though, like I said, there’s only the …”

  “I want all their names and addresses,” Bobby said.

  “I don’t know all their home addresses.”

  “The ones you know.”

  “’Cause some of them, I only picked up after work.”

  “Give me the ones you know.”

  “The work addresses, too?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well … I better get a piece of paper from the office.”

  Billy dropped the polishing cloth on the hood of the car and walked to a corner of the garage where there was a small, glassed-in office. The drive
r of a long white stretch that looked like a wedding limo tooted his horn and came rolling in. Bobby watched a short Spanish guy in a chauffeur’s uniform get out of the stretch and saunter toward the men’s room. When Billy came back, he was carrying a pencil and a lined yellow pad.

  “Okay, let’s see now,” he said, and went to where his jacket was draped over a railing and took a black notebook from it. Thumbing through the book, he casually asked, “Why do you need this, Mr. Triani?”

  Bobby looked at him.

  Billy simply turned away, avoiding Triani’s gaze, leaned over the hood of the car, and kept leafing through the pages. “There’s this redhead he used to see all the time,” he said. “On my block, she’s the winner.” He was still thinking Triani was looking to lay one of these girls. “She lives in Brooklyn, but she works here in the city, in the Time-Life Building,” he said, and wrote the name Oona Halligan and then both addresses. “There’s also this girl in Great Neck,” he said, “her name is Angela Cannieri, she’s got black hair and tits out to here,” and wrote down a single address for her. Bobby watched as he copied more names and addresses onto the yellow pad, Maggie Dooley and Alice Reardon, both living and working in Manhattan, Mary Jane O’Brien and Blanca Rodriguez, with home addresses in the Bronx and work addresses in Manhattan, and “the only one he’s been seeing lately,” Billy said, and wrote the name Mrs. Welles on the pad, and then her address on Eighty-First Street.

  “What’s her first name?” Bobby asked.

  “I don’t know. That’s all he gave me.”

  “Mrs. Welles.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Where does she work?”

  “I don’t know. I usually pick her up somewhere around Fifty-Seventh, Fifty-Ninth, the neighborhood there.”

  “You think she works someplace around there?”

  “I’ll tell you the truth, I don’t know. I never pick her up at the Eighty-First Street address no more, that was only the first time. I usually drop her off someplace in the neighborhood there. I pick her up midtown, drop her off uptown. She’s married, is what I guess it is.”