Damaged Goods

by Stephen Solomita

  Each of the vans would have to be fully staffed: a driver, a chemist, four very trusted shooters armed to the teeth, one of Carmine’s lieutenants to handle the money. Twenty-one psychopaths, as Tommy had come to learn, all assembled and ready in exactly the same place at exactly the same time, made for one hell of a personnel problem. If left to their own devices, each would play the big monkey, strut like an aroused tomcat looking for a battle, descend into a chaos that mirrored his inner life. Control would require a minute-to-minute effort by Carmine and the boys.

  The vans would leave from Little-Dominick Guarino’s lumber yard on East 119th Street. Assuming the deal went down as expected, the van making the actual pickup would return to a garage on Eagle Street in Greenpoint, Brooklyn. The heroin would be divided up, then delivered, one piece at a time so as not to jeopardize the whole load. That process would require at least two days of incredible tension; everything would have to be guarded, including the guards themselves.

  I wanna bring the money to the house. All of it.

  Tommy sat up, his flagging interest suddenly revived. The money in hand, about three-quarters of the total needed to pull off the deal, had been stashed in several locations.

  It’s botherin me havin it scattered. Too much risk. I mean why did I build my brownstone like Fort Knox? Why do I gotta take a chance when I could have it right under my nose?

  One floor above Tommaso Stettecase, in a two-bedroom apartment crammed with very old, very dusty furniture, an apartment lit by 25-watt bulbs, an apartment without a working refrigerator, Josie Rizzo dialed the phone number given to her by Karl Holtzmann. She was sitting at the edge of her bed, on a gray sheet, chewing a croissant taken from Carmine’s busy kitchen.

  “Ewing.”

  “Go get Gildo.”

  “Mrs. Rizzo?”

  “You get Gildo, now.” While she waited, Josie tapped her foot against a carpet worn past the point of threadbare and imagined the reels of the tape recorder as they turned, gathering Carmine’s doom, four stories below. The day was drawing closer, her own personal day of judgment. She could feel the powers gather, a dark army, irresistible, an army of demons eager to claim the spoils of war. To drown itself in blood.

  “Aunt Josie?”

  “Yeah. Where they take you, Gildo?”

  “I don’t know. There’s nothin’ out the window but trees.”

  Josie knew the agent would be listening. That’s what the FBI did best. That was why they’d prepared a signal. When she needed her nephew, she’d be able to bring him to her side. Josie had no illusions about the witness protection program, no faith in the promise she’d exacted from Kirkwood and Holtzmann. Sooner or later, they’d have to erase the dark shadow falling across their moment of triumph. All she’d bought was time.

  “How they treat you?”

  Jilly’s laughter flowed into her ear. “First thing I got in the car, Ewing banged me with a taser, one of those electric guns. I don’t know how many volts, but it put me out for a minute. When I woke up, I had enough chains around me to sink the Staten Island Ferry.”

  “Whatta you expect, Gildo? They see a man like you, they wet their pants.”

  “And, me, I’m such a sweetheart. I can’t understand it.” He laughed again. “They got me stuck in a corner of the house with a bed, a toilet, a television. It’s a hundred percent locked off, plastic windows that don’t open, like in a bank, if you could believe that. They pass my dinner through a food slot.”

  “You all by yourself? They don’t come inside?”

  “All by my little lonely self, Aunt Josie.”

  “That’s good,” Josie said before remembering Agent Ewing’s big ears. “All by yourself, you won’t get into no trouble. Remember, you gotta practice bein’ a good boy, Gildo. For when they put us in the program.”

  “At least he’s off the street,” Karl Holtzmann said.

  “We’ve bought a little time, Karl,” Abner Kirkwood responded. “The game has been postponed, not erased from the schedule.”

  They were walking on the north side of Washington Square Park. To their right, across the street, a row of identical brick town houses glowed a soft red-orange under the spring sun. On their left, dealers selling upscale reefer and powder cocaine worked the area just in front of the monument, a great memorial arch in honor of the first president’s inauguration.

  Kirkwood waved a hand at the town houses. “Greek Revival,” he announced, “built in the 1830s. The finest examples in the city.” He stopped walking, put a hand on Holtzmann’s arm. “You know anything about the history of New York, Karl?”

  Holtzmann sniffed once. “I’m from Minnesota.” He ran his fingers over the lapels of his suit. As if the subject was somehow distasteful.

  “Once upon a time, we kept the scum penned up, like any other plague.” Kirkwood gestured to the dealers. “We locked them into the Five Points, the Tenth Ward, the Lower East Side, let them do whatever they wanted to each other as long as they didn’t come out. That’s what Theodore Roosevelt meant when he said real law was found at the end of a nightstick, not in a courtroom.”

  “That day is long gone, Abner.” It seemed, to Agent Holtzmann, as good a response as any.

  Kirkwood shrugged his shoulders. “The Warren Court’s work, of course. They tossed out the loitering laws, said a human being in the United States of America has the right to go anywhere.”

  Holtzmann winked. “The Supreme Court made a slight mistake. It assumed that every bipedal hominid is human. We know better.”

  “That’s right, Karl.” He set off again, strolling from the shade of an ancient catalpa into bright sunlight. “And when you think of Jilly Sappone, you might want to remember what you just said. That way you won’t feel so bad when you have to kill him.”

  “Kill him?” Holtzmann fought an urge to laugh out loud. It was easy for a punk like Abner Kirkwood to talk about murder, but when the time came to splash the upholstery with Jilly’s skull and brains, Abner would piss his pants like any other raw recruit on his first battlefield. By then, of course, it would be much too late. “Oh, by all means.”

  TEN

  MOODROW, HAVING THUMBTACKED A note to his door, was up on the roof when Ginny Gadd made her appearance at six o’clock in the evening. He was sitting in the shadows with his back against the brick tower enclosing the stairwell, this in deference to crazed snipers like the one who’d scared the crap out of him a few days before. There being no skyscrapers on his part of the island, the sun, though dropping in the west, still flooded most of the roof, silhouetting anybody foolish enough to stand around. Neither Moodrow, nor his neighbor and landlord, Manny Ochoa, were foolish.

  Manny, as he pulled on a thirty-two-ounce Michelob, was going on and on about the “old days,” the glorious Fifties when he’d run with the Crimson Lords. Yes, he admitted (as he had to Moodrow many times in the past), he, like all his buddies, had carried a switchblade. Once, he’d even tried to build a zip gun in the basement, though that particular experiment had literally blown up in his face. But neither he nor his macho pals had robbed old ladies, fired semiautomatic weapons into crowds of schoolchildren, sold poison to their own community. Instead, they’d battled it out with rivals in playgrounds and parks, defending turf and honor, moving on to jobs and families when they grew into full “hombria.”

  “You see what I’m saying here? I was el echao pa’lante, the one who went first into the fight, but I was never an abusador. I did not smash my mother to the ground for dope money.” He spread his arms out. “And now I have all this.”

  Moodrow grunted his agreement, though he wasn’t so sure about “all this.” Manny spent his days driving a truck for UPS, his nights working on his building. He did virtually everything, from boiler repairs to mopping the stairwells to evicting drug dealers at the point of a 12 gauge. This worked out well for his tenants, but it meant a life of endless toil for Manny. Still, if Manny was happy with what he’d accomplished in his fifty or so years on the
planet, who was Moodrow to criticize?

  “One time, you know, ever’body come up to the roof in the summertime.” Manny waved again, indicating the tenement rooftops surrounding his building. “You know what I’m sayin’, hombre?” He tapped Moodrow on the shoulder. “They came up to eat their dinners, to have a few beers, to sleep when it was too hot to sleep in the house. Remember when every roof had a pigeon coop? Huh? Now you look around, you don’ see nada.”

  Guinevere Gadd, as if she’d heard Manny’s declamation and wanted to issue a personal denial, took that moment to step into view. She nodded to the two men, said, “I got your note,” then, no fool herself, stepped into the shadows.

  Moodrow hauled himself to his feet. True to his word, he’d spent most of his day sleeping, the insistent ring of the telephone rousing him just after five o’clock. He’d answered to find a very pissed-off Betty Haluka. She and her clients, it seemed, had waited all day for a city attorney who never showed up whereupon she’d asked for a default judgment. The administrative law judge (shorthand, according to Betty, for incompetent clubhouse flunky), had responded by granting the city, without explanation, a six-week postponement. Meanwhile, the tenants lived in hell.

  After five minutes of grunting agreement, Moodrow had finally gotten his chance. He told her about Gadd’s unexpected arrival, the promise he made, adding, “Don’t ask me why, because I don’t know.”

  “If she’s feeling as bad as you say,” Betty had suggested, “maybe you’re just sorry for her.”

  Maybe he was, but just now, looking into Gadd’s eyes, he couldn’t find a glimmer of suffering. She seemed buoyant, if not actually confident.

  “You ready to get going?” he asked.

  “Yeah,” she said, “I got something to tell you.”

  “This I already figured.”

  They were headed uptown on Avenue C, the windows rolled down to let the heat out, when Gadd finally decided to explain. “I followed Josie Rizzo this afternoon.”

  Moodrow, though he cringed inwardly, held his peace, deciding to let her get it out before he explained the obvious.

  “You gave me the description, right? I mean it’s hard to miss a six-foot-tall grandma in a black dress with her eyes pinned to the sidewalk. I tell ya, Moodrow, she never looked up or around, not once. Like she thought she was invisible.” Gadd lit a Newport, blew a stream of blue-gray smoke out the window. “Soot for the soot,” she observed, before resuming. “Now, mostly, Josie went from shop to shop. A butcher on Elizabeth Street, a bakery on MacDougal, a dry cleaner on Sixth Avenue, a druggist on Eighth … right into the West Village where she dropped a small package into a padlocked metal box in a little courtyard on Grove Street.” She smiled, leaned toward Moodrow, almost whispered, “Wouldn’t you like to know what was in that package? Wouldn’t you like to know if it was a tape recording?”

  “Tell me you didn’t break into that box?” Moodrow, to his surprise, was nearly whispering himself.

  “No, not yet.” Gadd settled back into the seat. “But it’s what we thought, yes? That Josie was ratting on Carmine Stettecase?”

  Moodrow pulled up at the Fourteenth Street stoplight, put the car into neutral. “Gadd, do you have any idea what Carmine would do if he found a private eye following his mother-in-law? You know what he’d have to assume? Remember, you’re not a cop anymore.”

  Gadd chose not to answer the question. “There was nobody else around, Moodrow,” she insisted. “Not even the feds. Anyway, now that I know what she’s doing, I don’t have to follow her. The slot on that box was just big enough to handle a tape cassette.”

  The light changed and Moodrow slid the car back into gear. “So, tell me how this helps you? To know what you already knew? Remember, if you break into that box, it would be obstruction of justice. The feds would have a legitimate beef.”

  “Not if they don’t find out.” She jabbed the cigarette between her lips. “I know a trick with a nylon stocking that’ll open most padlocks within a few seconds.”

  Moodrow, with no ready response that didn’t sound like pure nagging, pushed the car west on Fourteenth Street past Union Square, maneuvering the Chevy around double-parked trucks and cars turning in the intersections. He let the traffic, just heavy enough to require his attention, absorb him until he finally caught up with the commuters a few blocks from the Lincoln Tunnel on Tenth Avenue. Stopped dead, he turned to Gadd, asked, “Exactly what do you—or we—hope to accomplish by knowing the content of that—or any other—tape recording? Assuming what Josie put in that box is a tape.”

  “I like the scenario we laid out this morning.” Gadd tossed the cigarette butt out the window. “Josie wants her nephew out of jail, the board turns him down, Josie goes to the feds, the feds spring Jilly. It fits the facts, right? But that’s the past and what we didn’t do was project the chain into the future.” She turned to him, her face dead serious. “Jilly kills a child before the feds have their case wrapped up. He becomes public enemy number one, but that doesn’t mean Josie doesn’t love him anymore. No, what she does is put the squeeze on the FBI. She forces them to protect her nephew. Which they are doing even as we speak.”

  Gadd waited a moment, then, when Moodrow didn’t reply, continued on. “The house where Jilly and his partner were living? The cops found nearly seven thousand dollars taped behind the bureau. Plus, the closets were full of clothes. I ask you, Moodrow, how come Sappone, if he’s broke, if he doesn’t have a change of underwear, hasn’t done something really stupid? You think he just vanished? Maybe committed suicide by jumping off the George Washington Bridge?”

  “It’s only been a few days.” Moodrow, looking for a way around the cars projecting back across the intersection from the mouth of the tunnel, pushed the Chevy as far to the right as possible. When he’d cleared Forty-second Street, gotten himself moving uptown again, he suddenly admitted that she might easily be right about the feds and Jilly Sappone. He asked himself what he would do if, in the middle of an important case, he was faced with a demonstrably insane informant.

  Chain up the prick in some basement, he said to himself. Close the case and leave him to the rats.

  Fifteen minutes later, the car safely parked in a lot on Seventy-eighth Street, Moodrow and Gadd walked east toward Broadway. It was a beautiful evening, still warm enough for shirtsleeves. The sun, dropping fast, projected a steady blast of cool golden light along the crosstown streets, exploding in shop windows, the windshields of parked cars, even the eyeglasses of strolling pedestrians.

  Broadway, running north-south, was, by contrast, locked into shadow. Nevertheless, the sidewalks were crowded; the citizens of the Upper West Side, with money to spend, were out in force. They gathered in cafés and restaurants on both sides of the avenue, drifted through a hundred small shops, buying everything from baby clothes to hand-dipped chocolate. At Eightieth Street, the windows of an enormous Barnes & Nobles superstore displayed the latest Rush Limbaugh tome next to the latest unauthorized biography of Malcolm X.

  “New York ecumenical.” Moodrow announced. “Next thing they’ll be selling Cardinal O’Connor’s collected sermons at pro-abortion rallies.”

  “If there’s a buyer, there’s always gonna be a seller,” Gadd replied, the display of cynicism being, in her own mind, strictly obligatory. “Say, I don’t want to play the party pooper here—and I’m not sayin’ it’s not a beautiful night for a walk through the neighborhood—but would telling me what we’re gonna do actually tear you apart?”

  “Hell, Gadd, if I knew what we were gonna do, I would’ve told you long before now.”

  “You gotta do better than that, Moodrow.” Gadd stopped in her tracks. “Else I’ll definitely have to shoot you.”

  Moodrow watched her reflection in the window of a shop specializing in leather clothing. The name of the shop, Skins and Things, floated just above her bushy hair, its gold letters curling around her skull like a halo.

  “We need help.” Moodrow turned to face her. “
Going from bar to bar, from the dry cleaner to the liquor store … hell, it’d take forever.” He jerked his chin to indicate the scene in front of them. “I lived my whole life in New York, but this I never saw until about ten years ago.”

  Gadd looked down the block, nodded thoughtfully. “You’re talkin’ about the panhandlers, the homeless, right?”

  It was too early for the fear of crime (in this neighborhood, anyway) to make its appearance. That would come after eleven o’clock, when most of the spring celebrants were home preparing for another workday. For now, at 7:30, the only thing between the citizenry and a perfect May evening were homeless beggars, black and white, who shook their Styrofoam coffee cups, whispered their entreaties: Spare change, spare change. Help me out, man. Help me.

  Most seemed robust, young men in their thirties wearing raggedy trousers, ripped sneakers, as if they’d been drawn from central casting. A few were clearly disturbed, mumbling or shouting or crying as they made their halting way along the sidewalk. A still smaller number sat on the pavement, backs against the wall, knees drawn up into their chests, displaying signs lettered on torn pieces of cardboard: HELP ME PLEASE/I HAVE AIDS/HELP ME.

  “You think they’d be willing to look for Sappone?” Gadd shook her head. “Wrong question. Do you think they’d be able to look?”

  “Not that guy.” Moodrow pointed to a bearded young man, maybe twenty-five years old, stumbling over parked cars in the gutter. He was shouting, “I’m in the soup, I’m in the soup.” Over and over again.

  “No, not him,” Gadd agreed.

  “See, I’m not gonna ask them about Sappone. What I think is that Sappone’s holed up somewhere, that he’s got his partner running errands. That would be the smart way to play it, since it’s mostly been Sappone’s face on the TV screen.”

  They walked half a block north, past a cheese store and a gourmet coffee shop before they were approached. Moodrow evaluated the panhandler in the usual cop fashion, doing it quickly, automatically. Black, six feet, maybe one-sixty-five; medium complexion, bushy hair, face narrow, small-featured; two-inch scar on the left eyebrow.