“As long as I been at it, I still get excited. Old war-horse smellin’ cordite. Nothing’s certain—may be nothing; but it also may be something.
“Well, next day, almost quittin’ time, turns out it is something, definitely worth looking into. And so first thing inna morning, gonna take a deeper look.
“This’s when I run into Stoat, on the way out that night. He’s on his way out too, something with the wife or something—he’s in kind of a hurry. But I think this’s hot, something that he should know about. I should bring him up to speed, so he’s aware of where I’m headed.
“Now, I know he hasn’t seen the second two-oh-nine, the interview with Bob. Be better if he had—have less to explain—but I know he hasn’t. I just finished dictating it to Ginny. As fantastic as the kid is, she ain’t got it typed up yet. Still, he oughta know I got this stuff, be abreast of it, so I do the best I can. Give him a quick fill.
“The first thing’s to make sure that he read the one with Abe. Otherwise he’s got no context, and he’ll never understand. So I ask him, did he get it?
“And he says ‘Yep.’ Proud of himself, how efficient he is, which of course he always has been. Efficient’s always been his hallmark, every desk he’s been assigned, all through his career. Every kind of work he did, before he came up here and he got the squad? The reason wasn’t that he knew a thing about the mob; it was that he was efficient. Which in every instance, matter what his title was—and I know, because when I found he’s gettin’ this job, for which he’s not qualified, well, I looked the bastard up. Find out what experience he’s got that’s better for chief, OCS, than workin’ OCS.
“Movin’ paper’s what it was. Movin’ fuckin’ paper. From the box on left side of the desk, where he found it inna morning, to the box on the right side when the quittin’ whistle blew.
“Which of course is not enough—no field experience at all. But in his case it was. Because apparently when it comes to pushin’ paper, man, this guy has got no equal. He’s the very best on earth. Except for the one shuffler who’s even better at it, and that’s the guy above him who decided eighteen years of moving paper’s the best training and experience that there is to head up an organized-crime squad in a major center of La Cosa Nostra.
“So, yep, Stoat has read read my two-oh-nine on Abe. ‘It was on my desk this morning, got to it this afternoon. I’ll be very interested, see where this thing leads.’
“ ‘Okay,’ I say, a sigh relief, but I’m not really thinking. ‘Now like I said in it, the next thing I was gonna do, I contacted Bob today. Bob’s a really plugged-in guy—nothin’ major happens ’thout him knowin’ least one guy that’s involved in it.’
“Doin’ a little sellin,’ here, because as you and I both know that Stoat’s the kind of guy who’s always thinkin’, ‘Taxpayer dollars bein’ spent here. Got to be sure this is guaranteed bonus points down at Seat of Government, Best Allocation of Resources.’ So I’m givin’ him a pitch.
“ ‘And on the basis what Bob told me I have got a good idea I am gonna find tomorrow when I call another guy I also know about a hundred years—used to be Manhattan PD, worked the DA’s office, let’s say his name is Charlie—now with New York insurance office of the central clearing house, and I tell him that I bet they’ve had a doozy of a recent major claim in the garment business, right? High-priced women’s suits and dresses. And if he hasn’t seen it—which he may not’ve yet because this information’s smokin’; these national retail chains’ve got layers and layers and layers ’tween the warehouse and front office; people that he talks to may not have the word themselves that the goods’re really gone—he is gonna pretty soon. And get him started checking on it, see what he comes up with.
“ ‘Because if Charlie tells me what I’m pretty sure he’s gonna tell me, we get on the horn tomorrow, I think I know where we find about eight hundred thousand dollars’ worth of Calvin Klein, DonnaKaran, Ralph Lauren, and AnnTaylor women’s clothes. So goddamned hot they’re barely outta sweatshops where the kids sewed them together. Not even tagged yet, Worcester distribution hub, the chain where they were headin’ when the wise guys cut ’em off.’
“Naturally Darren doesn’t understand a fuckin’ word I’m sayin’ to him. This is because he’s just told me he didn’t understand a fuckin’ word in the Abe two-oh-nine. That he just read. And he just told me that, but I wasn’t listening to him. All he’s seen’s what Abe said. His reaction is that he’ll be very interested, see where that’s gonna lead. But it’s not gonna lead anywhere, except to Bob, who might have something, or not. Which is what I said in it, and what I just told him I talked to Bob today. And it did. Exactly what the Abe two-oh-nine told him I was gonna do, and Bob told you exactly what your two-oh-nine predicted he might say.
“You see what I mean. You do your very best to keep Stoat up to speed, something large breaking, and already he’s falling behind the curve. By the time he catches up to what Bob said, and what Charlie says, you’ll be on your way to Dave. Already thinking about how you’re going to approach Eddie. So Stoat’s comment is inane, and you are wasting both your time telling him what happened next—he can’t understand it. He’s got no idea of process. He does not know what things mean.
“He’s never been line; always he’s been staff. He’s a freak in his job, least in my OC experience—and by nineties standards I’ve been at it a long time. He’s never been a field officer, out among the troops where the shooting’s going on. Always been at headquarters, thinking what someone he’s never met and never will is going to say, they testify before House Ways and Means, Bureau Budget for next year.
“When you were ITSMV, chasing stolen cars in Wichita; I was hunting fugitives in Houston; he was rinsing out the coffeepots at Quantico, taking CIA courses at McLean. When he came here he didn’t blow in from Seattle with a classy record on the fraud squad. He came from Washington, for seasoning, get some experience in the field—the brass’s favorite adjutant detached from HQ down to his own first real command, battalion.
“Took me a while to realize this, implications of it all. That first day I did not. That what I’d just said to him meant about as much to him as all that chaff and gibberish on the tapes that I couldn’t understand today. Doesn’t follow things as they develop, way that we do. It’s because he’s never seen things develop. All he’s ever seen’s the way cases look after they’ve developed. The way the whole fat case file looked, twenty, thirty two-oh-nines, lab tests, and everything. When it was submitted for approval, prosecution.
“Which was long after I took what Abe said, and went and talked to Bob. And then took what Bob said and called Charlie in New York. He checked and got back to me and said ‘Yeah, the clothes’re gone,’ and ‘This’s where they were when they last saw them, when they disappeared.’ Who it was that last saw them, and where they were headed next. And who’d known when they’re coming in, and so on and so on and so on, far into the night. Which meant I had to talk to Dave, and with what he had to say, I had enough to go to Eddie.
“Because we’re experienced, and know, ’thout even havin’ to think about it—you never, ever ask a guy with any weight for anything important until you already know, all right? Until you’re absolutely fuckin’ sure that he knows what you’re after. And he also knows you know, and it’s important enough to you so if he doesn’t give it to you, you’ll get it from someone else and then maybe jam him up.
“All of this’s clear to him—he’s also been around. If he doesn’t give you what you know it is he’s got, then it’s no more Mister Nice Guy. He’s dead meat with you thereafter and you will break his balls for him the next chance that you get, and every chance you get, as long as you two’re alive. So Eddie ain’t no rookie neither, and he did have what I wanted, just exactly like you figured, and he gave it up to me.
“So finally, get through going around and talking to about six other guys, finding out what they could tell you, then you had enough to say, ‘All right, okay, it’s ti
me to see our top-echelon informants.’ And tell McKeach and Nick the Frogman what you needed them to get, so that you could then write up the case report for Stoat, and after him the Special Agent in Charge and Assistant U.S. Attorney Marsh, Seat of Government and Department of Justice. And if all of them liked what you had as much as you did—as you knew they would, ’cause it was prime—Marsh would get your Title Threes from the judge, electronic surveillance warrants, and those orders would get you this.”
Farrier spread his hands, taking in the room again, the other agents stretching and rising from their chairs, the tape decks and the video-editing machines, the stacks of audiotape boxes, the rows of videotape boxes, the computers and the pads. He smiled. “Although he doesn’t know it yet, Carlo Rizzo by the balls. Carlo authorized that hijacking. Time to go for him.
“Until that day finally comes, all that Stoat sees is that you’ve been boring him, day after day, week after week, building this bundle of two-oh-nines six or seven inches thick, with holes punched through them, and then binding all of them together with those vicious silver fasteners that’ll cut your fingers nastier’n any razor blade you ever saw, because the cut they leave is ragged. The same kind of package that used to come down to Washington when he was there and landed on his desk one morning, with a thud, and maybe made him kind of shudder. But he did his duty—spent that whole day reading it—efficiently, of course, never mind if he knew what it meant—and bumped it out again that night.
“That’s what he’s seen going across his desk here, and gradually accumulating in the secure files when he used his key at night, and then one day I—meaning me—bucked it to him with your memo saying ‘Think it’s ready,’ and he then signed off on it. When we get through all this stuff here someday, if we ever do, what was in all those two-oh-nines and what’s on all of both kinds of these tapes—all of it’ll get presented to the grand jury, and AUSA Marsh’ll get his okays from all the people that he needs and draw up the indictments. And the USA’ll check off again and the grand jury’ll true-bill it, like all good grand juries do, and the next thing that’ll happen’ll be that the warrants issue. We’ll go out to make arrests—papers and TV that night’ll say that what we did, we “fanned out”—and Stoat still won’t understand. How the hell we did it—what all went into it.
“That’s the problem with him, and it always will be. You say ‘case’ and I hear ‘process.’ Say that same word to Stoat and what he hears is ‘product.’ He thinks when we’re having dinner with McKeach and Nick tonight, the purpose is retelling war stories, how we four’re getting Carlo. Forgetting we don’t got him yet, we’re still getting ready to.
“And the one thing that you never do with the guys like them who help you is make it seem like you believe they like what you are doing—just because they help you do it. They don’t. The reason they help you do it is because we’re doing it to somebody who’s competing with them, and therefore they don’t like them more than they still don’t like us.
“ ‘The enemy of my enemy is my friend’—that’s all it is. They help us to do it to Carlo because Carlo’s got fire power and he doesn’t fuck around, so if we will get it done and take him out it’ll be much less dangerous for them and one hell of a lot cheaper than if they do it themselves. And from their own point of view the result is just as good. We’re not friends, we’re allies, from different sides. All the difference in the world. That’s what Stoat doesn’t understand.”
“You really do not like this guy,” Hinchey said thoughtfully.
“You got that right,” Farrier said. “The asshole drives me nuts.”
“You gonna do something to him?” Hinchey said.
Farrier thought a moment. Then he said, “Maybe after we do Carlo. After that? Who knows?”
8
AT 5:35 IN THE AFTERNOON MCKEACH looked at his watch and decided he was tired of listening to Junius Walters’ husky high-pitched voice. “Walterboy”—or “Waterboy,” an option if the person saying it knew him well and he was in the kind of mood that made it all right to be funny—was 6’7” and to McKeach looked as though he was still pretty close to his playing weight.
“Two-forty, forty-five, still mostly muscle—must work out,” he said to Cistaro two hours later, fifteen minutes late, picking him up in his salt- and sand-streaked metallic blue ’86 Pontiac Parisienne Brougham at the Towers at Chestnut Hill. “Hadda work him over some, then go home, shower, change, like you and me’re goin’ onna double date with Farrier and him, the other guy, the funny name.”
“Stoat,” Cistaro said absently. “Darren Stoat.”
“Yeah,” McKeach said. “Anyway, that’s why. Hadda ask Dorothy drop my clothes inna machine, ’fore the stains set. I dunno about the jacket. Prolly drop that off the cleaners, see what they can do—if they can get blood outta suede.”
“The hell happened?” Cistaro said.
“Ahh, thing I hadda do this after—shape those fuckin’ niggers up. Didn’t go so good. Never does, you get involved in one of those things, explaining things to people know already, very well, you’re sayin’. Trouble is they also know as soon’s they admit it, it’ll start to cost ’em money. So quite naturally they’re gonna stall you, just as long’s they think they can.
“Still pisses me off when they do it, though, play those fuckin’ games. Especially this guy—I know he knows better but he did it anyway.” McKeach took his right hand off the steering wheel, leaned forward slightly, and patted the right side of his jacket twice. “Hadda hit him—he kinda sprayed around.”
“Well,” Cistaro said, “he wouldn’t go the cops, would he?”
McKeach snorted. He turned the Pontiac right at the light on Hammond Pond Parkway. “Shit, no,” he said. “Guy’s dumber’n I thought he’d be, but not that dumb, I think. Knows I’d clip him if he did.” He laughed. “Knows now anyway.”
“So, as long’s you got it done,” Cistaro said, settling back into the seat as McKeach guided the Pontiac out of the S-curve at the bottom of the hill and took the ramp to Route 9 westbound, heading for the townhouse in Framingham. “Way I look at things like that, if you find you got a problem, makin’ people understand you, how you get it done don’t matter.
“Look at me—same kinda thing. I was prolly late myself, gettin’ down to the garage. Day I had, bein’ with the guys I hadda be with? Same kinda people, same kinda routine—pretend they don’t know what you’re talkin’ about. All they’re doin’s wastin’ time—they are gonna fuckin’ do it. You are gonna make ’em see that. Except I didn’t have to hit nobody—not that I would’ve minded, but after bein’ with those guys, I also hadda have a shower ’fore I feel like goin’ out.” He laughed.
“Fuckin’ Helen? I tell her where I’m goin’ and I’m goin’ there with you, and as many years’s we’ve been doin’ this she still does not believe me. Not one single word I’m sayin’. ‘Uh huh, you and Arthur’re going to have dinner with the FBI. Well, that makes it nice—this’s my night to go bowling with the pope and Virgin Mary.’ Every time we go to see them, she thinks we’re out scoutin’ strange.”
McKeach laughed. “Last night at the office I thought all you hadda do today was go stick a broomstick all the way up Jinks’s monster ass. Not that that’s any fun. But where the hell else’d you have to go this after?”
“Ahh,” Cistaro said, slumping down in the seat, “it wasn’t just this after—nothing any different from any other damned day—one fuckin’ thing and get that done and then go see another asshole, one right after the fuckin’ other. Before lunch I hadda go and see this airy-fairy faggot on Newberry-fuckin’ street, got the loan for ninety large off the new kid, off of Tony? Barber shop down there on Broad? That’s been a good location, ’Cept when something like this happens, customer don’t understand what he’s doin’, who he’s dealing with. Thinks he got the money from his fuckin’ mother, something, so no hurry payin’ back. Back in February this one happened. Up until three weeks ago? Everything is fine there, absoute
ly ice cream. But something then apparently goes wrong for this fairy—his soufflées don’t rise no more; things begin to turn to shit. So now the guy’s three weeks behind. Isn’t ice cream anymore.
“So I go in, way outta my way, and, this and that, and say to him, ‘What’s goin’ on?’ You know? ‘What gives?’ Like, ‘Where’s my fuckin’ money?’ And he acts like, well, I dunno, like it’s a big surprise or something, I might be somewhat concerned. He’s onna phone when I go in, talkin’ to some fuckin’ broad, and he’s the one now pissed at me—I’m comin’ in with no appointment—like I’m interruptin’ him. Just what am I doin’ there?
“Well, geez, I mean, what’m I supposed to do? He’s three weeks late. He owes us thirteen thousand bucks and change, plus the ninety underneath. I’m gonna write it off this week and next, ’til things turn around for him?. Who the fuck are these people, anyway, we’re now doin’ business with? He thinks I won’t break his knees, he’s such a classy guy? He’s some kind of a good cause?. I wasn’t such a gentleman I might get mad at him, you know? Let him have a couple good ones.
“He explains it all to me. Very patient, you know? Like I’m maybe not too bright. Maybe I don’t understand—he’s usin’ our dirty old money to bankroll this very hush-hush, very high-class, artsy-craftsy operation—Cyprus, somewhere, maybe Egypt—and then it goes through Switzerland, and then after that New York.
“I’m supposd to be impressed. Once I understand what a high-class deal this is, I’ll be so honored that him being three weeks late’ll be perfectly all right. Something I laugh off.
“Right. I know what they’re doing—some thievin’ fuckin’ Arabs, Greeks, Iranians, maybe gypsies, I dunno—they are robbin’ graves, all right? Lootin’ ancient temples. Indiana fuckin’ Jones, all so glamorous.
At End of Day Page 9
