Damaged Goods

by Stephen Solomita

“No. And they didn’t get a positive ID either. What they did get was a spent nine-millimeter casing and a blood trail.”

  Moodrow scratched the side of his face, remembering the advice he’d given Ann Kalkadonis. He told himself not to let it go to his head, that he could win every battle and still lose the war.

  “Why didn’t you tell me this when you came in?” he asked.

  “It was supposed to be a surprise.” This time Jim Tilley’s grin was genuine. Moodrow was his mentor and his friend, a pair of roles that held any number of contradictions. “But I think your lecture threw off my timing.”

  Moodrow sat down. “I’m worried about you. You haven’t been looking good.” It was that simple.

  “That’s fine, Stanley, but your solutions are out of date. There’s no ‘pick and choose’ anymore. The bodies come too fast. You remember the forty-eight-hour rule? The one that says if you don’t clear a homicide in the first forty-eight hours, you’ll never clear it?” He waited for Moodrow to nod. “Well, Stanley, the forty-eight hours you worked with is now down to forty-eight minutes. In ten years, it’ll be forty-eight seconds.”

  Moodrow started to respond, but Tilley waved him off. “Down to business, right?” He spread six photographs across the table. “I spoke to four deputy wardens yesterday and got three responses. From Attica, Clinton, and Greenhaven. The way I hear it, Jilly didn’t have a lot of friends.”

  FOURTEEN

  BY THE TIME STANLEY Moodrow passed the photo of Jackson-Davis Wescott to Ann Kalkadonis, he was absolutely sure that Wescott was Jilly Sappone’s partner. So sure, that he intended to assume the fact, even if Ann failed to make a positive ID. He needn’t have worried. Ann Kalkadonis, with Patricia looking over her shoulder, took a single glance, then handed the photo back to Moodrow.

  “That’s him,” she said.

  It was eight o’clock in the morning, a little too early to be ringing doorbells, but as long as Moodrow could bring himself to wait. He’d been staring at Wescott’s blank, open face since Jim Tilley had left for the precinct. The other photos had gone back into a manila envelope, so far off the description given by Ann Kalkadonis and Buster Levy as to be unworthy of consideration. Meanwhile, Jackson-Davis, an innocent smile plastered to his face, had beckoned like the scent of game to a hungry fox.

  “His record fits,” Moodrow answered. He was hoping to leave it at that. The details, the borderline retardation, the attacks on women, the violent sexual fantasies lovingly detailed by a prison psychologist who’d recommended against parole, were far too grim for the mother of a kidnapped child.

  “How does it help you?”

  Moodrow looked up at Patricia Kalkadonis, noted the dark, piercing eyes and sharp, straight nose. Under other circumstances, he realized, he might tell her how much she favored her old man.

  “This guy,” he gestured at the photo, “Wescott, knew your father in prison. He came out fourteen months ago, made three visits to a parole officer in lower Manhattan, then disappeared. I have to assume he set things up, got the apartment, the guns, the car. Hopefully, the local merchants will recognize his face where they might never have seen your father’s.”

  The last part was true enough, the part about the merchants. But with an IQ in the mildly retarded range, Wescott hadn’t set anything up. No, that task must have fallen to somebody else, to the only somebody else available, Josephine Rizzo.

  “Jilly Sappone is not my father,” Patricia said after a moment. She crossed her legs, let her hands drop down to rest on her knee. “No more than he’s my mother’s husband.”

  Moodrow, not knowing what to say, looked over at Ann Kalkadonis who managed a weak smile and a shrug.

  “It doesn’t matter what you think.” Moodrow met Patricia’s eyes, held them tight. “Not as long as Jilly Sappone is walking around.” He stood up, touched the back of his head. “Look, I cut myself a couple of days ago and it seems to be . ..” He hesitated momentarily, then giggled. “It seems to be oozing. Nice word, right? Meanwhile, being as the cut’s on the back of my head and I can’t see it, I gotta make a trip to the emergency room.”

  “I’ll check it out.” Patricia Sappone was on her feet before she remembered that Moodrow was more than a foot taller, that her head barely came up to his chest. “I’m pre-med, worked in emergency rooms since I was sixteen. There’s something I want to ask you, anyway.”

  Moodrow, old-fashioned enough to equate a trip to the hospital with a near-death experience, allowed himself to be led past two disgusted FBI agents (the same pair who’d disputed his right to an unsupervised visit with his client) and into the bathroom. He sat on the commode, let Patricia tear off the bandage while he considered what, if anything, he owed the agents. After all, they were covering the actual kidnapping and Wescott’s photo might be invaluable, assuming they didn’t already have it. On the other hand, like all city cops, active or retired, he hated everything about them, from their casual arrogance to the conservative cut of their vested suits.

  “Who sewed this up?” Patricia dumped the old bandage in the trash can beneath the sink.

  “A friend of mine.”

  “What’d he use, rope?” She probed the edges of the wound with her fingertips. “I’m just kidding. Actually, he did a decent job, whoever he is. Once it heals, it won’t reopen. Leave a hell of a scar, though.” She wrapped a towel around his neck, then opened a package of sterile gauze pads and held them under the hot water in the sink. “You’ve got a little infection going here. No surprise on a ragged tear like this. Are you taking antibiotics?”

  Moodrow remembered the penicillin in his sock drawer for the first time since putting it there. “I had some penicillin, but I been so caught up in things, I forgot all about it.”

  Patricia rummaged through the medicine chest for a moment, then turned to him with a small brown vial. “Take a couple now, then one every four hours or so. It’ll hold you over until you get home again.” She waited for Moodrow to chase the two white tablets with a cup of water, then began to clean his wound. Her fingers moved swiftly and confidently as she washed the jagged gash. “You don’t wanna let this get ahead of you,” she said.

  Moodrow shrugged, what was done was done. “Didn’t you have a question you wanted to ask me?”

  “My mother said you were the one who told her to bring me back to New York. Before that, we’d both assumed I’d be safer out of the city. Even the FBI thought so.”

  “Well, you could say I had a big advantage, being as how I knew Jilly and his Aunt Josie. You were still pretty young when your mother took you away from all that. As for the Federal Bureau of Incompetence, they don’t know the first thing about the streets. It’s not their fault, really, but that’s the way it is.”

  Patricia continued to work, first covering the wound with thick bandage, then taping it down. When she was finished, she backed away to lean against the door.

  “That wasn’t the question I wanted to ask,” she said.

  Moodrow turned to face her. “I didn’t think it was.”

  “I want to know why they let him out. I want to know why they didn’t kill him in the first place.” Her mouth narrowed as her anger came to surface; her hand rose in a fist. “He killed before and now he kills again. How can that be?”

  Moodrow took a deep breath. He started to speak, but she cut him off with a wave of her hand.

  “The parole board sent my mother a letter. Parole denied is what it said. That was two months ago. Does it make any sense to you? I need to know why he’s out. I need to understand the kind of justice that allows a killer to kill again.”

  Moodrow was still considering the question as he made his way to a fenced parking lot on Thirteenth Street near Avenue A. The gloom of the previous night, driven by sharp northwesterly winds, had vanished; the sky above him was a deep, pure blue, the air he breathed clean and cool. Even the ancient tenements and storefronts gleamed. The city’s peculiar geometry, the brick and limestone, windows and doors, sidewalk squar
es and long narrow streets, jumped out as if its sharp edges had been deliberately etched by the intense May sunlight.

  Despite his preoccupation, the effect wasn’t lost on Stanley Moodrow. No, he recognized the beauty, all right, and he recognized the irony as well. Spring renewal in a city that had given up on itself? That had separated out into ethnic and racial enclaves? It seemed almost sacrilegious, as if the cold wet New York winters had no right to end.

  “Hey, Moodrow, wha’chu doin’? You need the car?”

  “Yeah, I’ll be gone all day.”

  Moodrow watched Walberto Quintera slouch over to the tiny shack in search of his keys. Still half boy (in Moodrow’s eyes, anyway) at age eighteen, Walberto wore his X-cap with the bill turned defiantly to the back. The crotch of his oversize coveralls dropped almost to his knees, his sneaker laces were untied, and the tails of his plaid shirt hung fore and aft like the flaps of an urban loincloth. He seemed every inch the ghetto warrior, the kind of macho Latino who made the old ladies of the Upper East Side cross the street to avoid his shadow.

  The macho part was true enough. Walberto, like most of the Puerto Ricans Moodrow knew, would fight at the drop of an insult. The rest of it, however, was pure fiction. Walberto worked in the parking lot from six in the morning until six at night, shuffling cars from one space to another. Afterward, while other New Yorkers sat down to an evening of television, he rode the subway up to John Jay College on Tenth Avenue where he took courses in police science. Moodrow had come upon Walberto sitting in the shack with an open textbook on his lap any number of times.

  “See, how I figure,” he’d explained to Moodrow, “is the cops do real good. Forty grand a year and the benefits and the pension? Shit, man, ain’t no way a Loisaida Puerto Rican is gonna find no better job. Alls I gotta do is pass the exam and stay outta trouble.”

  Then why did he dress like a gangbanger, a knucklehead? Why did he listen to gangsta rap on his little boom box? Why did he roll and dip his shoulder when he walked? Why did he want to look like what he wasn’t?

  Moodrow had never asked the questions and never would. At best, Walberto would see them as an old man’s complaint. At worst, he’d find them purely insulting.

  “Man, she don’ wanna run today, Moodrow. She complainin’ like she got her curse.” Walberto eased Moodrow’s 1988 Chevrolet Caprice up to the gate, threw the car into park, and stepped out. “All them horses under the hood, man, I think they must’a went lame or somethin’.”

  Moodrow eased his body behind the wheel, slid the bench seat all the way back, and put the car in gear. He’d bought the Chevy two years ago from a body shop in Astoria that specialized in adapting used police vehicles for the New York taxi trade. Moodrow’s car had come all the way from Alabama; it sported a huge eight-cylinder engine and an ignition system that hated rainy nights.

  “Save me a space, Walberto. In case I get back after you close up.”

  The car bucked its way up to the light on Avenue A, then stalled when Moodrow took his foot off the gas. Moodrow responded the way he’d responded to thirty years of driving balky police vehicles. He flipped on the radio and patiently restarted the engine.

  By the time Moodrow pulled to the curb in front of the Academy Gun Shop on 19th Street, the car, as expected, was running smoothly. He switched off the ignition, shoved a police restricted parking permit in the front window, and got out. The series of actions had an easy familiarity, even if the reason for his visit was so far outside the normal as to carry an actual sense of betrayal.

  “Hey, Moodrow, how’s it hangin’?” David Mushnick had a box of Winchester .38 Special ammo off the shelf and on the countertop before Moodrow closed the door. “What else can I do for ya?”

  Moodrow took a deep breath. He felt like a schoolboy facing the principal as he pushed the cartridges away. “Forget the .38, Dave,” he said. “I’m here to buy a gun.”

  “Are you sure you don’t wanna think about this? You and that .38 have been married for a long time.”

  Moodrow shook his head. “I’m not dumping my .38. What I’m after is a .25-caliber automatic.”

  “Twenty-five automatics are for women and hit men.” Mushnick shook his head in amazement. “I don’t think you can pass for a woman.”

  “In that case, Dave,” Moodrow said without smiling, “I guess I’ll have to pass for a hit man.”

  FIFTEEN

  THE FIRST THING GINNY Gadd shouted when Moodrow came through her door was, “You’re late.” Followed quickly by, “What happened, you run out of rumpled suits?”

  “That’s just it,” Moodrow shouted back, “I’m late because I had to go home and change.”

  They were shouting for two reasons. First, a baritone sax, accompanied by piano, bass, and drums, was blasting its way through an extended solo. The music was coming from a back room and, presumably, could be turned down. That wasn’t true of the jackhammer ripping up the Sixth Avenue asphalt.

  “Lemme shut off the stereo.”

  Moodrow watched Gadd disappear into the back room, noted the way her butt pushed against the seat of her jeans, and decided to mention her the next time he spoke to Betty. This despite Betty’s never having a jealous moment. Despite his own unthinking fidelity.

  “That was Gerry Mulligan.” She was standing in the doorway, looking impossibly youthful in an oversize black cable-knit sweater. “With Thelonius Monk. Would you believe it? Mulligan sounds like he’s just going through the motions. Maybe he couldn’t keep up.”

  Moodrow nodded, gestured to the room behind Gadd. “You live back there?”

  The question drew a blush that ran up into her jugged ears. “You want to hear the sad story?”

  “Sure.”

  Gadd crossed the room, held up a blue coffee mug. “You want?”

  “Yeah.”

  She filled the mug, added milk and two spoons of sugar, then turned back to him. “You ever had a lover who moved away from you? I’m not talking about physically here.” She waited for his, “Yeah, I guess so,” then continued. “Buddy and I were college students, at Columbia, when we met. I suppose we shared the same ambitions, but that was nine years ago and I can’t remember well enough to be sure we actually spoke about it. After graduation, I went into the cops and he went on to get his MBA.”

  “A match made in hell,” Moodrow observed, taking the mug.

  “It’s funny you should look at it that way.” Gadd went back to her desk and sat down. “Because there was never any real violence, physical or psychological. Buddy went to work for Price, Waterhouse; I bounced from tour to tour. He spent his days behind a desk on the fortieth floor; I spent mine with the mutts and the mopes. I can look back now, look back and know there was never any real hope for us, but I must have fooled myself at the time because I didn’t make any preparations for living by myself. Two months after I left the job, Buddy moved to Greenwich, Connecticut. That wouldn’t have been so bad if he hadn’t taken the furniture—his furniture—with him. Or if I could have afforded the uptown apartment we shared.”

  “So you ended up here?”

  She shrugged. “I’m just getting started and I can’t pay two rents.”

  The jackhammer stopped abruptly, leaving her words to echo in the unexpected quiet. It was a silence neither was tempted to break and Moodrow took advantage of the moment to examine her more closely. Or, better yet, to examine his own growing attraction, an attraction he carefully termed fatherly.

  Her face was small and symmetrical, her features, taken one by one, unremarkable. Only her eyebrows, thick, dark crescents that swept down to frame the corners of her eyes, held any hint of character. She might have chosen to pluck them (or shave or wax them, Moodrow wasn’t sure of the process), but she’d clearly decided to let her face speak for itself. That was why, he decided, she wore so little makeup, why she projected so much confidence, despite the crappy office and the bed in the back room.

  “So what happened with the suits?” she finally said. “I fi
gured you were the kind of detective who picked a fresh suit off the closet floor every morning.”

  “And dumped orange juice on the lapels before venturing out to face the public?”

  “Tomato juice seems more appropriate.”

  “Nice.” He stood up, spread his arms wide. “This is my undercover outfit. Whatta ya think?”

  He was wearing a navy blue, Members Only jacket over a gray polyester shirt, charcoal slacks, and a pair of foam-soled Rockport Walkers.

  “Well, I have to admit you don’t look like a working cop.”

  “What’d I tell ya.”

  “No, what you look like is a retired cop who’s about to take his grandson to a baseball game.” Her mouth jumped into a mischievous grin. “The white socks give you away.”

  Moodrow sat back down. “Damn, and I was trying for sporty sophisticate.”

  The jackhammer started up again, slamming into their conversation. Moodrow sipped at his coffee, reminded himself that the city—his city—was literally falling apart. Construction sites were a permanent feature on every bridge and highway; water mains spouted like blowing whales. In the early 1980s, when the work had begun, orange signs at every site had announced the Koch administration’s good intentions: WE’RE REBUILDING NEW YORK. The signs were gone, now, but the work continued. The FDR Drive along the East River had been under repair for more than fifteen years.

  Gadd started to speak, then shook her head and got up to shut the windows. Back in her seat, the jackhammer reduced to a muffled roar, she shuffled the paperwork on her desk for a moment, then looked up at Moodrow.

  “Maybe we oughta get to work,” she said. “Being as the city isn’t gonna let us play.”

  Moodrow crossed his legs, leaned slightly forward, and let his hands drop into his lap. A narrow smile pulled at the edge of his lips as he realized just how much he’d been looking forward to this next step. As if there was no possibility that Santa would leave coal instead of presents under his tree. “Your move, Gadd.”

  She nodded, accepting the obvious. “Well,” she said, “it looks like we’ve got a hit. One of the credit cards was used.”