Damaged Goods

by Stephen Solomita

  A rush of desire washed through his body before centering itself just below his belt. He took it as a powerful indicator of his rapidly improving health.

  “How much time do you have?” he asked. “Exactly.”

  “Do I recognize that special tone of voice?” Betty gave her butt a shake, then rose and looked into his eyes. “I’ve got ten minutes, Stanley. You feeling energetic this morning?”

  Their quickie turned into a full thirty minutes of very slow, very tender sex, followed by a lingering breakfast. Neither wanted to separate, even for the day, reacting as if they’d survived a natural catastrophe. As if they’d already counted their losses, come to realize they had each other and that was miracle enough.

  “I’ll have to take a cab,” Betty said as they exchanged what was supposed to be a final kiss. “If I’m going to be on time.”

  It was a joke, a New York joke, and both understood the punch line. The chances of finding a cabbie willing to take her to Brooklyn at the height of the morning rush being something less than zero out of a hundred, there was only one way she was going to make it to court on time.

  “Why don’t I drive you?” Moodrow asked. “Being as I’ve recovered my virility, I can’t really think of a valid reason to hang around the house all day. Much as I’d like to.”

  By the time Moodrow reversed field and swept over the Manhattan Bridge onto the Bowery it was a little after ten o’clock and he was a step away from utter exhaustion. He managed to pilot the Chevy north to Houston Street, then east to Avenue C where he had his first break of the day, a parking space on the corner of Fourth Street. The car safely stashed (an error would mean a tow to the DMV pier on West Thirty-ninth Street and $200 in fines and charges), Moodrow walked along Fourth Street to find Ginny Gadd sitting on his stoop.

  “Christ,” she said as he approached, “I thought, you being sick and all, I’d find you home at nine o’clock in the morning.”

  Moodrow answered by plopping down next to her. “You telling me you’ve been sitting here for an hour?” Despite his own fatigue he noted her disheveled appearance, deciding she looked even worse than she had at the hospital. It took him a minute to recognize the emotion that followed as simple compassion.

  “I wanted to tell you what happened at the parole board.” She shook her head, then lit a Newport. “It was fucking unbelievable.”

  Moodrow pointed to the cigarette. “That something new?”

  “Something old, actually.” She took a drag, blew out the smoke through her nose. “We have to do this on the stoop? Because if that’s the case, I’m gonna go pee in the alley.”

  Moodrow grabbed the railing above his head and hauled himself to his feet. He stood there a moment, considering how the fatigue came up on him without warning, admiring it almost. First he felt good, his old self, as if he’d never been in the hospital. Then, seemingly without transition, he was near collapse, 265 pounds of sausage meat jammed into a cheap suit.

  “You all right?”

  Moodrow turned and began to climb the stairs. “Now there’s a question,” he called over his shoulder, “I’ve really come to hate.”

  He felt better by the time he got into his apartment, his fatigue replaced by ravenous hunger at the sight of his refrigerator. The pattern was becoming familiar.

  “You want a liverwurst sandwich? On a stale bagel?”

  “I don’t eat red meat.” She was standing right behind him.

  “Then you’re in luck, Gadd. Liverwurst is gray, not red.” He opened the refrigerator, began to toss jars and packages onto the kitchen table. “So, what happened with the parole board?”

  “I never got to the parole board.” She sat down, crossed her legs. “You know the two feds assigned to guard Ann Kalkadonis?”

  Moodrow tapped a bagel against the edge of the sink. It made a soft thud instead of the expected clunk, proof, as far as he was concerned, of its fitness to enter his stomach. “Sure, Ewing and Holtzmann with two ns.”

  “You remember that? Right off the top of your head?”

  “I used to think a good memory was a blessing.” He cut the bagel in half, began to pile on the ingredients—liverwurst, Bermuda onion, sliced tomato, an inch of mayo, two small hot peppers. Finally satisfied, he scooped several tablespoons of coffee into the basket on his percolator, added water, then set the percolator on the stove. “Okay,” he announced, his mouth already opening for the first bite. “I’m ready for the story.”

  “I never got to see Arnold Dumont. I announced myself to his receptionist, got shown into his office, but he wasn’t there. Instead, I found Agent Bob Ewing. He told me I—we—were obstructing justice. Threatened to have our licenses yanked.” She was lying, of course—Ewing had spoken to her as if she’d found Sappone all by herself—but Moodrow needed motivating, that was obvious. Exploiting what she assumed to be the standard cop disdain for the FBI seemed as good a place to start as any. “I mean you gotta believe they were the ones who got him out of prison. That means Holtzmann, or somebody above him, read that report, the one that says Jilly Sappone’s brain is damaged, that he can’t control himself, and opened the prison doors anyway.”

  “And you think they have to be punished for that mistake? Punished by you, personally.”

  Gadd sat back as if she’d been slapped. “You saw what happened.” When her words had no apparent effect on Moodrow, she stumbled on. “I know why they did it. They traded one life for another, let Sappone go on a rampage so they could make a big bust somewhere down the line. That doesn’t mean it’s right. That doesn’t mean they shouldn’t have to take responsibility.”

  She stopped abruptly, folded her arms across her chest, watched Moodrow patiently chew, then swallow. His face, to her disgust, was dead blank, as if his features had been arranged by a child. She took it as a typical expression of paternal male arrogance.

  “I’ve done it myself, Gadd.” He took another bite, mumbled, “I’ve had it happen to me.”

  She waited for him to swallow before asking, “Done what?”

  “Let snitches off the hook when I could have put them in Rikers. Most of the time it worked out all right. Sometimes it didn’t.” He looked at Gadd, then back at the remains of his sandwich. “I can’t stop eating. Don’t take it personal. I’ve been hungry ever since I woke up in the hospital.”

  “By all means, fill your face.” She waved him on.

  Moodrow took a small bite. “If it wasn’t for my snitches, you could cut the busts I made in half. Meanwhile, sometimes they did horrible things to innocent people.”

  Gadd folded her hands and laid them on the table. “This isn’t sometimes, Moodrow. They read Sappone’s prison record, his medical records; they had to know what he was gonna do. You can’t call a near certainty a calculated risk.”

  Moodrow looked down at his empty plate and sighed. “Add it up. Sappone was never the feds’ snitch. After fourteen years in the joint, there was nothing for him to tell which means that somebody on the outside cut the deal. Now the only human being on the planet who gives a shit about Jilly Sappone is Josie Rizzo and Josie Rizzo only has one thing to trade.”

  “Carmine Stettecase.”

  “That’s what Ewing was trying to say. If you expose the FBI, tell the reporters who got Sappone out and why, you let Carmine Stettecase go free.” Moodrow got up, went to the cupboard, pulled two mugs off the middle shelf. “Right now, Carmine thinks the parole board fucked up. Why should he think anything else? Remember, Sappone was inside for more than fourteen years. It’s not like Jilly came out in the middle of his sentence.”

  He filled the mugs, dropped one in front of Gadd, waited for her to respond. When she didn’t, he tried again to reach her. “How does exposing the FBI for a bunch of jerks help anyone? It doesn’t bring …” He took a deep breath, said the name for the first time. “It doesn’t bring Theresa back to life. It doesn’t ease her mother’s suffering. What’s done is done and we just have to live with it.”

  He
turned in the chair, opened the refrigerator door, and took out a container of half-and-half. Determined not to be first to speak, he poured half-and-half into his coffee, added two spoons of sugar, stirred judiciously while he considered the part he’d left out.

  Moodrow had lived with the blue wall of silence for thirty-five years, had never ratted on a fellow officer though he’d known his share of bent cops. To his credit, he took no pride in his failure to act, didn’t pretend to fully understand his own motivations. But he could remember the Knapp Commission of the Seventies, the way the job had been ravaged by the media. The end result had been a thoroughly demoralized New York Police Department, not an honest one.

  Of course, the essential mistake made by the FBI and the US Attorney (that was something else he’d left out, the Justice Department’s near-certain involvement) had no criminal overtones. He couldn’t really equate it with cops who took payoffs from drug dealers. But at the same time, he couldn’t deny that springing Jilly Sappone carried a stink of pure arrogance. Nor could he deny that Ewing, Holtzmann with two ns, and whoever was running them deserved to be punished. For the crime of terminal stupidity if for no other reason.

  Gadd, for her part, sipped at her black coffee and studied the room as she tried to form some response to Moodrow’s last words. Nothing appropriate jumped into her mind. Instead, she decided that what she wanted, right at that moment, was Moodrow’s kitchen with its tilted stove, noisy refrigerator, and worn metal cabinets. She wanted busted tiles on her floor, a cheap Formica table with rickety vinyl-covered chairs, an ancient percolator that spewed steam into the air. She wanted a life.

  “I’m tired, Moodrow,” she announced. “I feel like I’ve been run over.”

  “I know.” Moodrow lifted his mug into the air, waved it vaguely over the table. “It’s hard to lose.” He wanted to add especially when you hold yourself responsible, but decided the claim sounded too much like self-pity, an emotion he especially hated.

  Gadd lit another cigarette. “Look, even if I buy what you’re saying, that still leaves Jilly Sappone and his retarded partner.” She blew out a stream of smoke. “Plus there’s Josie Rizzo. I get the feeling she sent him out there to do what he did.”

  Moodrow nodded his appreciation of her insight. “Sappone went directly from his prison cell to Ann’s apartment. The only way he could have known where she lived is if Josie told him. I didn’t give it a lot of thought, because the only important thing was finding Sappone before …” He smiled, spread his hands apart. “I don’t see any way to get to Josie Rizzo. The FBI’s gotta be protecting her.”

  “Then maybe you oughta take a closer look.” Gadd sat back in the chair, waved the smoke away from her face. “If you wanna punish somebody, you have to take something from them. Their money, their liberty, their lives, whatever. Ask yourself what you can take away from Josie Rizzo, what she loves more than anything else in the world.” She smiled then, as she watched Moodrow nod reluctant agreement. “That’s why you have to help, Moodrow. That’s why you have to help me find Jilly Sappone.”

  “Very dramatic, Gadd, but we’ve been over this already. If losing her nephew is Josie Rizzo’s punishment, then consider justice done. Whether we do anything or not.”

  “Does that mean you’re gonna cop out?”

  “No,” he admitted. “But it does mean that I need my beauty sleep. Come back around five o’clock, after my nap, and we’ll take a ride uptown. See what’s happening on the West Side.”

  NINE

  TOMMY STETTECASE TOOK THE stairs two at a time, all three flights from his father’s dining room to the second floor of his own apartment. He did it without drawing a deep breath, slamming into the bedroom to find his wife, Mary, sitting on a recliner in front of the TV The recliner’s crushed-velvet upholstery was a deep blue-black, as deep as the New York sky just before the sun drops behind the Jersey bluffs. Two enormous orange poppies, connected by winding green stems, curled over the darkness, a pattern that echoed itself in the heavy drapes covering the windows, the down quilt covering the bed, and a chaise covered with Tommaso’s dirty clothes. All were set against a shag rug the color of drying venous blood.

  Tommy didn’t notice the poppies or the carpeting. Truth to tell, he wouldn’t have noticed his wife if she hadn’t literally reeked of White Diamonds. The cloying odor stopped him just long enough to think the words “poor Mary” before plunging into the back room, the one originally meant for the children to come (who never came).

  Poor Mary didn’t acknowledge her husband’s presence, either. She was resting, near exhaustion, from her effort to get ready. Each morning, after a cup of coffee and a glass of lemon juice in warm water, Mary began what Tommaso had come to call “the rite.” She started with a steaming bubble bath, hot enough to redden her skin, into which she poured several capfuls of bath oil. While she was in the bath, letting the oil seep into her pores, she covered her face, from hairline to chin, with a facial mask, closing her eyes for the required half hour while a clock on the edge of the sink ticked off the minutes.

  The bath water was inevitably cold by the time the alarm sounded, but Mary, shivering and naked, always let the tub drain completely before turning on the shower. The hot water, of course, felt pleasant, but the shower was a busy time, too busy for sensory indulgence. First, she rinsed her face, then washed and conditioned her hair (all of her beauty products came from Elizabeth Arden, all had been purchased from a catalog) before cleansing her body, inch by inch, with a hypoallergenic shower gel designed for sensitive skin.

  Mary, once her shower was finished, shifted into a still higher gear, moussing, then blow-drying her coarse black hair thoroughly before tossing on a robe and heading off to her dressing room. Seated at her vanity, she barely saw her reflection as she spread astringent, then moisturizer, then a liquid foundation over her face, didn’t make a single decision as she followed up with powder, eye shadow, eyeliner, mascara, eyebrow pencil, rouge, lipstick liner, and lipstick.

  Her perfume came last, and that final effort seemed to exhaust her, because she never managed to open the closet, choose a dress from the two dozen that hung there. Instead, suddenly listless, she drifted into the bedroom where she sank into the recliner, raised the remote, waited for the day to finally end.

  Tommy, the door firmly closed, crossed the room to his desk, plopped down in a leather chair worthy of a senior partner, jammed the earphones over his head just in time to hear his father curse the Chink. Tommy always did it this way, charging up the stairs and into his little den. Though he recorded every word, could have listened at his leisure, there was something about catching it live, as if he was in the same room, making decisions, offering opinions … Well that was why he’d bugged his father’s dining room, just to be there in his rightful place.

  Tommy had read The Godfather sixteen times; he identified with every one of the brothers, even poor, treacherous Fredo. Especially poor treacherous Fredo. Which was not to say that he intended his father any harm. No, when it started, Tommy had just wanted to be at that breakfast table, shoveling food into his mouth, grunting in all the right places, laughing at his father’s bad jokes. That was why he used the same tape, day after day, recording one meeting over another until the tape finally broke.

  The fuckin Chink says there’s another delay.

  Tommy nodded at the chorus of grunts and groans that followed, as predictable as Josie Rizzo’s scowl.

  The boat’s trapped in some goddamned port in Africa. Somethin’ about the niggers are killin’ each other and there’s nobody to unload cargo and they can’t even get refueled. Meanwhile, the Chink, who says it happens all the time, won’t name me the port or even the fuckin’ country. He’s talkin another week, maybe ten days.

  Kill him, Tommy thought, forget about the deal and kill the Chink.

  What we gotta do here is forget about the fuckin’ deal. Whack the Chink and write the whole thing off.

  Tommy nodded. That was Guido Palanzo, who’
d lost his middle son to an overdose of heroin. Guido hated the dope business, though he hadn’t turned up his nose at a chance to triple his investment in forty-eight hours. None of them had.

  Carmine, I ain’t too sure I can hold onto the money for much longer. The boys’re gettin restless.

  That would be Vinnie Trentacosta, always practical. The deal had called for three million cash dollars and Carmine simply hadn’t had it, not by half. So he’d done what drug dealers have been doing for decades: He’d taken front money from potential customers. That hadn’t been a problem, Carmine being who he was, but Carmine (through his boys, of course) had assured his investors that the deal would go down in a few days, maybe a week at the outside. Now it was a month later with more delay to come.

  They gonna pull out?

  Carmine again, his voice carrying a tinge of anger, followed by three negative grunts, then Guido Palanzo.

  It ain’t that bad, Carmine. I mean what the fuck are they gonna do about it? As long as we don’t take off, they’ll sit. But, see, what with not usin’ the telephones, I’m spendin my whole day makin’ explanations to jerks I wouldn’t let suck my dick. Meanwhile, my other investments are goin’ in the tank.

  A brief silence, followed by Carmine’s judicious tones.

  We’re gonna wait and that’s all there is to it. Nobody’s gettin’ their money back. Much as I hate his fuckin’ guts, it ain’t the Chink’s fault that we gotta take front money. It ain’t somethin 1 could’a told him.

  That being the end of that, Carmine turned the conversation to the purely practical. He intended to use three vans for the pickup. Two would head off into nowhere (pure decoys in case one of the investors got busted, decided for the witness protection program), while the third jumped off the highway on the far side of the Midtown Tunnel, circled through Long Island City, jumped back into the tunnel again.