I got home to my apartment about three, showered the sticky grit off my skin and crawled into bed. I still wasn’t used to sleeping by myself back then and I lay awake awhile, puzzling the whole thing through. Get a cop alone, find him on a day he wants to be honest, he’ll tell you the cases that bothered him most always involved a suspect who someway, somehow, reminded him of himself. And I knew Mike Gallardi pretty well, I thought. Down deep, where it mattered, he was weak. That’s why he liked power, not just over Rhonda but the people he robbed—gunpoint, the terror in their eyes. Do what I tell you. Like a cop, or his bent idea of one: a guy who gets what he wants, even hammers his wife, and never pays. I was going to change that. I’d be the one who finally made sure he suffered, if only for the chance to tell myself I was different. I was better.
Eventually, I drifted off and dreamed I stood in the doorway of a house off in the desert somewhere. A wounded dog limped toward me through the moonlit chaparral. As it drew close, I looked into its eyes, and saw my son looking back at me.
The next thing, the phone was ringing.
It was Rooney. “I don’t know what to say, Nick. Appelbee’s got hit this morning, eight o’clock.” Some throat-clearing. “Just like you said.”
I rubbed my face, checked my watch. Eight-thirty. “How much?”
“Twelve grand.”
Hardly a take worth risking your freedom for, I thought. But this wasn’t just about money. I wondered if Mike had driven back alone, or if he’d dragged Rhonda along with him again. And maybe she didn’t feel bullied at all. Maybe, for the first time in a long, long while, she felt married.
“We’re never gonna catch this guy without a wire.” I was laying out my case to John Tally, the county attorney. “He’s getting cocky, cocky crooks get sloppy and that’s when people get hurt.”
Tally tented his hands, rocking in his chair, sunlight flaring in the windows behind him. An ASU man, politician to the bone, he was tan and fit, pompous, cutthroat. “I’ll approve a wire,” he said finally. “And a task force, but I want hard numbers on bodies.”
“Phoenix and Tempe’ll pony up ten men apiece,” I said, guessing. “Scottsdale and Mesa half that each, an even thirty.”
“You’re lead agent,” he said pointedly. “Team up with Tom Kolchek for the wire affidavit. And don’t be fooled by his looks. He’s the smartest guy I’ve got.”
I stood up to leave. “I want to call off the surveillance, make the target think he’s in the clear.”
Tally glanced up, like I’d already become a bother. “I told you,” he said. “You’re lead agent.”
Tally was right, Kolchek looked like your Uncle Monty—thick all over with thinning hair and sad-sack eyes—but he was one of the sharpest cops I ever worked with. The affidavit came to a hundred pages and was airtight, detailing every job, how Mike came to be our suspect, the ensuing surveillance, the continuing robberies, everything. We argued that, given Rhonda’s new accomplice role, phone communications between the house and the restaurant could prove fruitful. The judge granted us thirty days for the wire, with a re-up possible for another thirty if the need arose, which would carry us through the holidays. But if we didn’t have results by then, tough. We’d have to bag up and go home.
We notified the phone company of our target lines and anticipated start date, so they could build the parallel circuits for the wiretap. Two days later, they called back to tell us Mike had disconnected his home phone. He’d done it the same day we submitted the affidavit.
Kolchek hung up and sat there, thinking it through. Finally, in an oddly sunny voice, he said, “We’ll bug his house.”
“You don’t get it,” I told him.
“I get it,” Kolchek said. “So? We tighten the circle of who knows what, rewrite the affidavit, wire up his house. Maybe we’ll get lucky. You get any better ideas, let me know.”
I didn’t get any better ideas, of course. And every time I tried to imagine who might be tipping Mike off, I could never convince myself I had the right man. Cavanaugh was the first and obvious choice, given how long he’d stuck up for Mike, but he was a hard cop and I’d seen the betrayal in his face before the Applebee’s job. Besides, like he’d said, fifty cops would vouch for Mike in a heartbeat—any one of them could be our leak.
Kolchek and I reworked the affidavit, kept the wire on the restaurant phone and asked for three transmitters for the residence—one in the living room, one in the dining room, one in the bedroom—sensitive enough, at ten thousand dollars a pop, to catch voices throughout the house. The judge signed off and Kolchek introduced me to a tech for the county attorney’s office named Pritchard, who’d go in and actually set things up.
“I’ll go with,” I told Kolchek.
“No, I will,” he said. “I’m a pretty good lock pick and we only need two men inside.”
“What about the dog?”
Kolchek cocked his head. “Dog?”
“A white shepherd,” I said. “It’s in the surveillance reports.”
“Right. I remember. What’s your point?”
“I used to work canine. The white ones are unpredictable, you don’t want to go in there alone.” That was mostly crap, but there was no way I wasn’t going with them. I wanted a look inside that house.
The next day, when Mike and Rhonda were at the restaurant, Kolchek walked up their front walk and took a Polaroid, then went to the hardware store, bought an identical door and set it up in his office, practicing till it took only forty-five seconds to pop both locks.
Meanwhile, I scoped the neighborhood for the best spot to place the undercover van. Mike and Rhonda lived in a maze-like community of townhouses grouped in quads, and the geometry of the place was all wrong; there was no place within a hundred yards of their unit to park the van and not stand out. Then I saw there was a unit for rent one quad over. We could set up the wire room in there, as long as we kept a low profile.
I hit up Tally’s office for the rent and two days later, when Mike and Rhonda and most of the neighbors were off to work, we moved our guys in. Me, Kolchek and Pritchard headed over for our entry to plant the bugs, while a ram car took up position on the street in case Mike or Rhonda came back while we were still inside the house.
When we got to the front porch, though, we found a brand new security gate with two additional locks, barring access to the door. Kolchek just stood there, staring, holding his lockpick tools. “This isn’t happening.” He glanced at his watch and swallowed hard. Inside, the dog was barking like the place was on fire.
I started heading for the back of the house. “Bet you’re glad you brought me along now.”
There was a privacy wall around the patio in back and I scaled it, dropping down onto the pavers. A sliding Arcadia door led inside, with an insert for a doggy door. I got down on the ground, reached through and flicked aside the dowel lodging the door in place. The dog realized what was happening then, and as I slipped inside he turned a corner and charged toward me, hackling up, fangs bared.
I reached frantically in my pocket for the syringe of Isoforine I’d brought along to knock him out, only to sink my thumb into the needle. I played air banjo with my hand for a second, saying something original like, “Goddamnmotherfuck,” then glanced up and saw I wasn’t the only one to miscalculate. As his paws hit linoleum, the dog lost traction, sliding toward me helplessly. Stepping forward, I caught him under the jaw with a kick so fierce he cartwheeled backwards.
“Get in the god damn bathroom!”
The dog sulked off, mewling, as I checked my thumb, hoping adrenalin would ward off any grogginess. Suddenly, I remembered my dream from weeks before—the lonely house, the wounded dog. A chirp from my radio broke the spell.
I clicked on. “Yeah?”
“We heard that, detective.” It was one of my guys in the wire room. In the background, laughter. “Punt the pooch—that what they teach you in canine?”
I switched off my radio and searched out the front door. When I go
t there I found out the security gate was locked from inside, requiring a key. “This nails it,” I told Kolchek through the grating. “Somebody’s tipping this guy off.”
“We’ll talk about it later,” Kolchek whispered, standing exposed with Pritchard on the porch. “Get us inside.”
Kolchek lacked the physique to scale the privacy wall, so I found a window in a small utility room near the back for the two men to crawl through. Once everybody was inside, we headed to the living room to set up shop. Kolchek got busy taking Polaroids of the room so we could put it back the same way we found it.
“Look at this,” I said, pointing to the couch. There were sheets, blankets, a pillow. “Christ, she’s kicked him out of bed. They’re in the middle of another fight.”
“Get to work,” Kolchek said. He was testy and pouring sweat. It dawned on me then that, despite a first-rate mind, Kolchek lacked any serious operational experience. The glitch with the locks had rattled him.
Pritchard hooked up his transmitters to the phone lines. Even though the service had been cut off, the wires still held voltage. We set them up in the three different rooms as planned, and Pritchard asked me to contact the wire room to see if we were live. Only then did I realize I hadn’t switched my radio back on after that crack about my canine prowess. When I flipped the button, a voice came through almost screaming. “Jesus, Boghossian, where’d you go? We’ve been trying to contact you for ten minutes. The wife’s on her way, just west of Pepperwood. You’re lucky she stopped for smokes. Move!”
We rushed to test the transmitters through the wire room and got an all-clear. Kolchek’s hands shook so bad from nerves he couldn’t screw the plates back on the phone plugs, so I took the screwdriver from him, told him to pack up with Pritchard, I’d close up.
They scrambled out the utility room window and I locked it behind them. Turning back to finish up, something caught my eye, something I’d overlooked before.
On a shelf near the door, a small day pack rested among some other odds and ends.
We had no warrant to search the house or its contents, but I took the day pack down regardless and opened it up: A ski mask. A pair of black garden gloves. A .38 snubnose and a dozen plastic cuffs.
There was a desk in the room and I laid the contents out, retrieved the Polaroid from the dining room and took a picture. This was a trophy, not evidence—I wouldn’t even tell anybody about it, let alone show them the picture. The whole investigation might vanish down a hole if guys started jabbering. I packed everything up again and put the day pack back where I’d found it, but then my curiosity got the best of me and I searched the desk. In the bottommost drawer, I found a snapshot—Mike with Cavanaugh, up in the mountains somewhere. They were hunting together, carrying shotguns, the best of friends from their smiles. Rhonda, I guess, had snapped the picture. I took another Polaroid. This too, of course, wasn’t evidence, and I told myself it didn’t really prove anything. It was just a reminder—my reminder—of what I might be up against.
I ran back to the dining room and was just about finished putting things back in place when the voice came through my radio again: “Boghossian, she’s at the corner.”
I barked into the mouthpiece, “Ram her!”
I was making one last check, comparing where everything was with the Polaroids, when I heard the collision outside. It was about fifty yards from the house, some undercover cop plowing into Rhonda’s back end at the stop sign. I opened the bathroom door and told the dog to stay, then headed toward the patio, fit the doggy door insert into place and reached through and slipped the dowel back onto the runner.
Through the glass of the sliding door, I saw the large white dog slink into view. Our eyes met. He flinched a little, tail lodged between his legs. Ashamed, like everybody else.
It was up to the boys in the wire room now. I checked in as often as I could, but the days went by, nothing. Mike knew we’d been in there—tipped off by Cavanaugh, I supposed, something I had to keep to myself. Besides which, just like I’d thought, Mike and Rhonda were in a tiff, the two of them seldom speaking.
As time passed, though, I felt strangely encouraged. I knew the dynamics of the simmering fight. I heard the cues—the caustic one-liners, the icy silences. Somehow, some night, something would set them off. And the words would come boiling out, things they’d regret forever.
As it turned out, that night came right before Thanksgiving. And the somehow and something of it proved, to my way of thinking anyway, too apropos.
The surveillance team trailed Mike to a porno arcade near the airport. We’d watched him visit smut shops and strip clubs all over the valley, not sure if he was casing the places or had just grown tired of not getting any at home. This time, though, according to the cop watching from the parking lot, Mike came out wobbly.
“I may be wrong,” the radio voice reported, “but I think our boy just had himself a little love.”
When Mike got home he wasn’t inside five minutes before he launched into Rhonda—a fight over nothing, but so blistering everybody in the wire room shuddered. When one of the cops reached out to turn off the recorder, though, honoring the minimization guidelines, I told him, “Wait.” We’d gotten our first lead in this case after a brawl between these two. I could justify listening on the grounds there was a reasonable expectation that, in their fury, one of them would say something useful. Accusing.
The voices kept rising, more and more shrill and cruel. And sexual. One Mormon on the wire crew blushed, but everybody kept listening, each of us wondering what we should do if, at some point, one of them tried to kill the other. And yes, finally, we heard scuffling. I reached for the phone to dial dispatch as I heard Rhonda stammer oddly, “M-Mike, n-no. No!” The yelling turned to muffled cries, then rhythmic, whimpering moans. Gradually it dawned on us that Mike had decided on a little show‘n’tell, to demonstrate for Rhonda what had happened earlier that night, during his encounter at the porn hole.
“One good pipe cleaning deserves another,” somebody cracked.
“Turn off the machine,” I said, knowing we’d get nothing of any use now. Adding insult to injury, Mike moved back into the bedroom that night. So that’s how you make your marriage work, I thought, hating him even more.
The first thirty days played out, no results. We got an extension but none of the departments would pony up the manpower like before. They put rookies on the line-of-sight details. Once, after letting one tail car pass him, Mike chased the cop all the way down Central Avenue, flashing his brights, just to embarrass the kid.
Meanwhile the wire crew was going batty listening to nothing and more of nothing. We were back where we’d started—we’d never catch Mike Gallardi except red-handed, coming out the back of a restaurant. And everything we knew about him said, if that happened, he’d make us kill him.
“The man’s gonna be dead by Christmas,” someone quipped, and it became the unofficial slogan of the whole operation, until I told everybody to knock it off. “If you’re right, and we take him out, you don’t want to have to explain that little mantra to Internal Affairs.”
Given where we stood, though, I decided it was time to tickle the wire. I went to Tally again, told him we needed to put some pressure on the couple, inflict a little fear.
I showed up at Rhonda’s front door when surveillance confirmed Mike was at the restaurant alone. I came in a marked unit, the strobe spinning out at the curb, and the uniform who’d driven stood with me on the porch. No more avoiding the neighbors—we wanted their attention now. Inside, the dog went off when the doorbell rang, then went still, dropping his tail, when he saw me beyond the grating.
Rhonda deadpanned, “Gee, if I didn’t know better, I’d think you and the dog knew each other.”
I pulled the subpoena from my jacket pocket and gestured for her to open the security gate. “Rhonda Gallardi, you’re to appear before the grand jury on December 5th. You’re not to discuss your scheduled appearance or the subject matter of your testimo
ny with anyone except your lawyer—not even your husband. Understood?”
She looked taken aback but hardly stunned—some fright in her eyes, but a baiting grin too. I wondered if that was how she looked right before Mike hit her.
“What if I don’t open the door?”
“I’ll just set it down on the porch here. Either way, you’re served.”
The grin faded a bit, her fear quickening into anger as her eyes checked the cop behind me, then slid back. “This is harassment.”
“Guess how many times a day I hear that.”
“Because you’re a prick?”
I nodded for the cop to head back to the car. Once he was out of earshot, I said, “Know what I think? You’ve been trying hard for a long time to make things work—your restaurant, your marriage. I admire that. But the point where things were gonna change is gone for good.” I stuck my hands in my pockets, to look harmless. “You want to turn that around, now’s the time.”
Women who’ve been hit more than once have a look—sad and yet defiant, almost mocking, but defeated all the same. Come on, I thought, invite me in, talk to me. I knew, given the chance, I could open her up, end this thing. But her eyes turned hard and far-away again. “Leave your papers on the porch,” she said, then shut the door.
In the wire room, we listened when Mike came home that night. Apparently, what I’d said registered, at least a little, because the good wife unloaded.
“No more! I’m done.”
“Shut up, Rhonda.”
“I’m not gonna lie under oath for you! I never wanted—”
“I said shut the fuck up, Rhonda!”
The sound of scuffling came again. I grabbed the phone to dial dispatch. But a minute later, they were outside the house, walking the dog. The perfect couple—Mike with his arm around Rhonda’s shoulder, holding her close, loving, protective, whispering into her hair.
Rhonda got coached well for her grand jury appearance. All her answers reduced to: I don’t remember. I’m not sure. I don’t think so. I don’t know.
Killing Yourself to Survive: Stories Page 11
