“Mrs. Kalkadonis has been through a terrible tragedy.” Gadd had begun the conversation by stating the obvious. “She needs to start the healing process.” Another incontrovertible truth, followed quickly by the kicker. “Surely, you can spare fifteen minutes to help her understand what happened to her daughter.”
Later, she’d casually mentioned the media swarm outside Ann’s apartment house, the calls from Hard Copy and Inside Edition, using the veiled threat as a clincher. Dumont would almost certainly try to stonewall her as he’d stonewalled the press, but he didn’t have the balls to refuse to see her. A refusal would probably make the local news on all three major networks.
As she crossed the Delaware River and slid up to the tollbooths on the far side, Gadd’s thoughts turned to Stanley Moodrow He’d be home by now, in his Lower East Side apartment. Betty would be fending off the reporters, trying to resist the urge to rip the phone out of the wall. Journalists were like cops. They never gave up.
The clerk at the booth took her dollar, smiled, said, “Thank you.” In New York, they charged three dollars each way and the clerk begrudged you change for a twenty, looked actually put upon, as if dealing with human beings wasn’t part of his job description.
The question, she asked herself as she accelerated away from the toll plaza, is why, aside from borrowing his car on occasion, I give a damn about Stanley Moodrow. If he wants to wallow in guilt, hold himself responsible, why should it matter to me?
She recalled sitting in that intersection, waiting for the light to change, Moodrow slamming the gas pedal to the floor, fishtailing into the turn. Her first reaction, grabbing the dashboard and the seat to stop herself from sliding into the door, had occupied all her attention. By the time she put it together, realized that Sappone had to be in the car ahead of them, Moodrow was slamming on the brakes and …
You promised not to think about the rest of it, she reminded herself. You decided to keep your mind on the job until it was over.
What she wanted from Moodrow, she finally decided, was his confidence. She wanted the Stanley Moodrow who first walked into her office, knowing exactly what he wanted. Her decision to punish the bad guys, that was all well and good, but Moodrow was the one who actually found Sappone. There was no doubt about who’d been using whom. Without him, she’d still be in her office, bullshitting the Foundation.
Here’s what’s really happening, she told herself. Right now the reporters have a better chance of getting to the truth than I do. They could use the Freedom of Information Act, demand the parole board records, write their stories a year or two down the line when the information comes through. Meanwhile, I’m gonna waste the next ten hours trying to get the truth from a bureaucrat. Like running the Iditarod Sled Race with a team of South Bronx cockroaches.
Two hours later, Ginny Gadd knew exactly how Jilly Sappone got out of jail. After introducing herself to Arnold Dumont’s secretary and a very short wait (short enough to make her actually suspicious) she was shown into a large office. She noted the beige carpeting, the sturdy wooden desk in the center of the room, the two upholstered chairs in front of the desk, and decided that Dumont’s assistant commissioners probably made do with tiled floors and metal furniture. That’s if they had offices at all, if they weren’t part-timers.
Then a door at the back of the office swung open and FBI Agent Bob Ewing stepped inside. He flashed her a welcoming smile, a grin, really, so filled with self-love as to be actually repulsive.
“Ms. Gadd.” He extended a hand, crossed the room swiftly. “We meet again.”
Gadd, a grin of her own spreading across her face, took his hand. She started to speak, then changed her mind, deciding to listen for a change, hear what the man had to say.
Ewing motioned her to sit, then plopped down into Arnold Dumont’s leather chair. “We need to talk,” he announced.
“About?” Gadd held herself still, like a child awaiting an unpleasant surprise.
Ewing’s smile vanished. “About your pretending to represent Ann Kalkadonis.” He laid his fingertips on the table, leaned slightly forward. “As you know, we’re still protecting the Kalkadonis family, still have a presence inside their apartment. I spoke to Ann Kalkadonis this morning and she has no idea what you’re doing.” He tapped a forefinger against his chin, shook his head. “You know something, Gadd, I don’t have any idea what you’re doing, either. Maybe you can explain it to me.”
Gadd ran her fingers through her hair, glanced around the room. She was still on her feet. “You recording this conversation, Agent Ewing?”
Ewing didn’t turn a hair. “Why do you want to know?”
“I was hoping you’d give me a copy of the tape.” Gadd recalled an incident from her years on patrol. A kid, maybe ten or eleven, had come running up to the cruiser she shared with her partner. He’d begun to babble about a mugging, the words running together like city traffic through a long tunnel. Suddenly, she’d realized that everything he said—his name, his age, where he lived, the crime—was a lie. Sure enough, the minute her partner asked for ID, the kid pivoted, tossed them a finger, sprinted off down the street.
“Clever.” Ewing tossed her a grudging nod. “But somehow I don’t find this situation all that funny, Ms. Gadd. Especially when I consider the net effect of your meddling to date.” He paused, obviously expecting her to continue. When she didn’t, when she maintained her slightly quizzical, slightly bemused expression, he shifted uneasily in his chair. “I didn’t want to make this unpleasant,” he finally muttered. “I wanted us to come to an understanding.”
“Why don’t we cut to the threats, Agent Ewing. Save some time.” The smile dropped away, replaced by an inner rage that came upon her so swiftly she felt it as pure heat before she became aware of its emotional content. Her jaw tightened down as if clamped and she felt herself actually rise up as her buttocks and thighs contracted. Her hands, when she looked down at them, were balled into white-knuckled fists.
“Are you all right?”
Gadd forced herself to take a breath, say, “Perfectly.” A moment later, she felt the anger drop away, like a criminal through the trapdoor of a gallows. As her chest relaxed and her breathing returned to normal, she wondered when it would return. Would she welcome her anger, nourish it? It had comforted her, in a way, had relieved her of other burdens.
“What you’re doing is perilously close to obstruction of justice.” Ewing, apparently having taken her at her word, was sitting back in his chair. His steepled fingers lay against the collar of his white-on-white shirt.
“Bullshit,” Gadd replied. Her voice, she noted, was satisfyingly flat. As intended. “One, since I haven’t been fired, Ann Kalkadonis is still my client. Two, I’m under no obligation to inform my client of my every move. Three, Ann Kalkadonis is very interested in how Jilly Sappone got out of prison. If you don’t believe me, ask her.”
It was Gadd’s turn to pause and Ewing’s to hold his peace. “All right,” Gadd said, acknowledging the move with a slight smile, “let’s make this short and sour. If you’re here to beg me, then beg me. If you’re here to threaten me, then threaten me. Take it to the bank, Ewing, I got a million things to do and I don’t have time for your fed bullshit.”
Ewing shrugged his shoulders, a gesture Gadd interpreted as, Well, I tried, didn’t I?
“You’re interfering with an ongoing federal investigation.” He raised a hand. “No, don’t stop me. If you don’t get out of the way, your investigator’s license will be suspended. If that’s not enough, if you continue to persist, your license will be revoked altogether.” He stood abruptly. “Look at yourself, my dear. You couldn’t make it as a cop. You couldn’t make it as a wife. What will you do if you can’t make it as a private investigator? There are things here you don’t understand.”
Gadd looked up at him, as she knew she was meant to do. “Well, you’re thorough, I’ll give you that, but the fact is that you and your bosses are responsible for letting Sappone out of jail.”
She stood, took a step toward the agent. “What would you do if I told you I was recording this conversation? Would you attack me, maybe rip the wire from my prostrate body?”
“You’ve been reading too many bad novels.”
The words were defiant, but Ewing’s complexion, Gadd noted, now matched his shirt. There was anger there, too, of course, but his (and, by extension, the FBI’s) impotence jumped out at her.
She turned, crossed to the door, then spun around, her exit lines carefully prepared. “I’ve seen his prison records. Jilly Sappone’s. Makes for good reading, now that I know who got him out.”
Unfortunately, Ewing’s preparation included a parting shot of his own. “Wasn’t killing the child,” he called to her retreating back, “enough for you?”
SIX
THE PARADE BEGAN SHORTLY after Stanley Moodrow came home to his Lower East Side apartment. Leonora Higgins arrived first, in the early afternoon, bearing a box of dark chocolate almond clusters from Le Chocolatier on Park Row. Moodrow, surprised, accepted the gift tentatively, then, suddenly ravenous, jammed one of the clusters into his mouth.
“You remember Johnny Katanos?” Leonora asked.
“I think I lost a few pounds,” Moodrow mumbled. “In the hospital.” He was growing stronger by the minute, could actually feel strength returning, the way a long drink of water relieved thirst after a serious workout.
“Katanos was a terrorist, right?” Betty asked. Having carefully orchestrated the afternoon’s program, she wasn’t about to let Moodrow’s appetite prevent his receiving the essential message.
“That’s right, one of the worst ever to hit this country.” Leonora reached forward. “Stanley, you think I could have one of those? Before they disappear into your bloodstream.”
She was wearing a dark brown dress, dark enough to complement the semisweet chocolate clusters, and a matching bolero jacket. Moodrow found the outfit a bit somber, despite the gold sunburst pinned to her breast; Leonora’s tastes usually ran to the warmest end of the scale. He wondered, briefly, if this was her sick-friend outfit, then shoved another piece of candy into his mouth.
“So what about him?” Betty asked. “About Johnny Katanos?”
“He’s been transferred to a mental hospital. A complete breakdown, apparently.”
“What does ‘complete breakdown’ mean? Does he hear voices?”
“It means, according to my father’s sister’s nephew, who works in the federal penal system, that Johnny Katanos covers himself, his cell, and any corrections officer who comes too close with his own feces.”
Moodrow, his mouth too full for actual speech, nodded indifferently. Once upon a time, he’d hunted Johnny Katanos with the blind determination of a starving wolverine, had put a gun to the man’s face with every intention of killing him. Leonora had prevented the murder with a bullet of her own.
“Seems like another century,” he finally said.
“It was six years ago,” Leonora countered. “And half the cops in New York City were looking for him. Not to mention the FBI.” She snatched another piece of chocolate, nibbled at the edges before continuing. “You took him down, Stanley. All I did was follow you.”
Moodrow glanced at Betty, found her looking away, embarrassed. “I don’t recall issuing a denial,” he finally said. “But if you’re after a confession, you’ll have to beat it out of me.”
Leonora made her good-byes half an hour later. It was a working day and lunch was definitely over. Moodrow saw her to the door, accepted a gentle kiss on the cheek. A complex of emotions—anger, gratitude, amusement—coursed through him as he closed the door and turned back to find Betty seated at the kitchen table.
“I’m writing a shopping list, Stanley. I have to go back to Brooklyn tonight and I don’t want you making an icecream run to the bodega. If you’ve got any secret cravings, better get them out in the open.”
“Secret cravings?” Moodrow shook his head. “I don’t know whether to kiss you or spank you.”
Betty looked up, fluttered her eyelids. “Couldn’t we do both?”
Moodrow nodded thoughtfully. “I am feeling better,” he admitted. “Let’s try for tomorrow morning.”
Twenty minutes later, the second wave hit the beach. Two NYPD sergeants, Manny Pissaro and Paul Malone, both thirty-year men, knocked at Moodrow’s door. Cops bearing gifts, they waved a quart of Wild Turkey bourbon in his surprised face.
By the time they left, half the bottle and fifty rehashed cases later, Moodrow was too tired to do more than stagger into the bedroom and fall asleep. Betty found him, fully dressed, when she returned from her shopping. She looked at him for a moment, thinking that it didn’t seem fair. His face was up by the headboard, his short hair actually brushing the wood, while his feet stuck out several inches beyond the mattress. With his arms spread wide, his shoulders seemed to span the full width of the bed.
People that big, she decided, aren’t allowed to be vulnerable. They’re not supposed to make mistakes. If they do, if they fuck up royally, they’ve got to deny it, make excuses, point the finger elsewhere. Fallen heroes are a dime a dozen.
The most amazing part was that he’d actually found Sappone, that he’d done it in less than a week. How could a spur-of-the-moment decision negate the result of that carefully planned effort? Betty had been a trial lawyer for most of her adult life. She was perfectly willing to admit (to herself, naturally) that she’d blown it any number of times, put the wrong question to the wrong witness, gotten a reply that had buried her client. What you did was live with it, go to the next case, get on with the rest of your life.
But, then, she acknowledged, I wasn’t there. I didn’t run up to find the child’s body, didn’t wait, helpless, within feet of her smashed skull, for the cops and the ambulance to arrive.
The suits had grilled the both of them, Moodrow and Gadd, for nearly four hours, taking them over each detail, again and again and again.
As she started back into the kitchen, pausing to retrieve the full shopping cart, she suddenly realized that she’d never loved Stanley Moodrow more than she did at that moment.
When Jilly Sappone answered his cellular telephone, he wasn’t surprised to hear Aunt Josie’s voice. She was the only one who knew the number. But when he listened to her outline her plans for his immediate future, his jaw dropped open. It was ten o’clock in the morning and he’d just had his first snort of the day. That was part of the reason why he didn’t hang up, the other part being that he was afraid of his Aunt Josie, had been since the day she’d come to take him out of the hospital.
“You go in the witness program,” she explained. “You go tonight with the FBI. It’s no good on the street. You stay on the street, they’re gonna kill you.” For Aunt Josie, it was a very long speech.
“This a joke?” he asked. Meanwhile, he had no memory of her laughter, couldn’t remember her cracking a smile, not even when he was small enough to look up at her down-turned face.
“I got them by the balls,” she replied. “You gonna be all right.”
Jilly didn’t ask how, just as he’d never asked her what she’d done to get him out of the joint. That was because there was only one thing she could have done.
“I got things I gotta get finished,” Jilly muttered, knowing there was nothing he could say to change her mind, that she could give him up any time she wanted. Meanwhile, in her own way, she was gonna bury Carmine Stettecase.
What I oughta be doing, he told himself, is planning out the rest of my time on the street.
“You don’t go to a jail,” she declared. “They’re gonna take you somewhere private, a house.” When he didn’t reply, she went for the jugular. “Why you gotta play the fool, huh? Always the fool. You should’a buried that kid in the ground, not throw her out in the street. I told you to kill her right away, didn’t I? I said don’t carry extra weight, she’s gonna take you down. Meanwhile, you had’a throw it in your wife’s face, had’a be a big shot, make jokes with the cops.�
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Not that he was going to admit it, but maybe he had been stupid, maybe he should have taken her advice. Only he’d never, not for a single moment, expected anyone to find him. Meanwhile, this old fart of an ex-cop had run him down like a stray dog after a warehouse rat.
“Aunt Josie, did you tell the feds where I’m stayin’?”
She snorted her contempt, blew it out through her nose like a racehorse after a hard workout. “Tonight, ten o’clock, when it’s quiet. Broadway and Ninety-one. Stay inside till then, stay quiet. Remember who you are.”
Who he was, he knew, in her mind at least, was the last male Sappone. Never mind cousin Carlo and a half dozen other male Sappones scattered throughout the metropolitan area. Meanwhile, she’d hung up and the only real question was how he was going to amuse himself for the next twelve hours.
Carmine was out of the question, of course. Aunt Josie wanted Carmine to herself. Annunziata? Now, that was a real possibility. Get up on a roof, pump fifty rounds through one of the windows, hope for the best. Unfortunately, the FBI was guarding his little honey bunch, at least according to the jerk on the six-o’clock news. They’d most likely catch a serious attitude if he blew a couple of their agents into the next universe. Make it kind of hard to surrender.
Jilly chuckled at his own joke, then tore open a bag of dope and snorted it up. He was going to have to pack the dope into a few small balloons and swallow them before he surrendered. Otherwise he wouldn’t be able to spend more than a few hours in the company of the pigs without losing control.
He was going to have to do something about the car, too, the one he’d rented. Maybe put it in a garage, pay a month in advance. Odds were, he’d need the car again before he was through, the car and the weapons in its trunk.
Damaged Goods Page 21
