Angel Face

by Stephen Solomita

  Bobby Ditto holds the phone away from his ear. He never should have taken the call – he’s got way too much on his mind. But Dealie told his secretary that it was an emergency, so when he tried to back off, Evangeline shook her head, folded her arms across her chest and nearly shouted, ‘No way, Bobby. The woman’s nuts, as in whacked-out crazy. You handle her.’

  Dealie is short for Delilah, Bobby’s ex-wife, now living in depressed Las Vegas. Back when Bobby was sixteen and horny enough to hump a goat, Delilah had lived up to her name. Not so after she became pregnant, after they married, after she dropped the first and the second little rug rat. Not after she gained sixty pounds, after she developed a fondness for roulette wheels and designer wardrobes. Bobby has a girlfriend – a mistress, really – stashed in Rego Park, a half-hour from his Howard Beach home. He doesn’t intend to let her get five minutes closer.

  The emergency of the week concerns Bobby’s oldest, George, age thirteen. Little Georgie’s been fighting in school again, been suspended again, and is again being threatened with outright expulsion. The problem’s Bobby’s fault, of course. If he’d been there for his family, if he’d been a real husband, a real father, little Georgie would be a candidate for Pacifist of the Year.

  Bobby Ditto allows Dealie five solid minutes of abuse before he interrupts. ‘You need to get to the point,’ he tells his wife. ‘I got business here, business which I need to conduct if I’m gonna keep sendin’ that good old child support every month.’

  Wrong tactic. Before she finally gets to the point, Dealie unloads a torrent of accusations centered on his missing a payment two years ago.

  ‘Georgie needs a private school, Bobby, along with serious counseling. And I’m not talkin’ about some jerk from the Board of Education. I’m talkin’ serious here. As in real fuckin’ serious.’

  ‘When you say private school, do you mean like Catholic school?’

  ‘No, I’m talking like a military academy in Arizona that specializes in problem kids. They got the program and the counselors.’

  At this point, Bobby’s supposed to inquire into the costs, but he’s not biting. Bobby’s thinking maybe he’ll take his kid for the summer. That would be the cheapest way out. But, no, the last time he saw his children was Thanksgiving, and he liked them about as much as they liked him, which wasn’t much at all. Plus, there’s always the possibility that Dealie blew the rent money in one of the casinos and her landlord’s threatening to evict her. Dealie lies at the drop of a roulette ball.

  A blinking red light on Bobby’s desk offers the perfect excuse to end the conversation. ‘I gotta go,’ he tells his ex, which is true. ‘Call me next week, give me an update.’

  ‘But I’m not finished,’ Dealie wails.

  Bobby hangs up, but not fast enough to escape a parting threat: ‘I’ll call ya tonight.’

  The flashing red light alerts Bobby to an incoming call on his personal phone, which he never answers. He jots down the number on the caller ID screen, picks up a throwaway cellphone that can’t be traced to him and heads off. This is the bad news about the bunker. The walls are too thick for cellphones. If he wants to make or receive a call, he can try the basement outside the bunker, which sometimes works, or go to the yard where the company trucks are parked at night.

  Bobby heads for the yard, passing through the outer basement where Donny Thorn greets him with an enthusiastic nod. Thorn’s two companions, Albert Zeffri and Nino Ferrulo, look up, their expressions anything but happy. Ruby’s death left the crew with a vacuum each had hoped to fill. Meanwhile, Zeffri has the brain of a frog and twenty-year-old Nino has yet to master his impulses. Bobby knows for a fact that the kid’s been knocking over liquor stores. And not because he needs the money.

  The beautiful spring day catches Bobby off-guard and he stops in his tracks, disoriented. The sky is bright blue and sprinkled with small puffy clouds. The sun is warm enough to erase all memory of a truly miserable winter. For just a second, he imagines himself on Jamaica Bay, the small lush islands covered with grass and brush, the SunDancer bobbing, a hooked bluefish fighting to the bitter end. Maybe there’s a broad along, somebody new, and a cooler full of beer, and a light breeze, and a blazing sunset.

  Bobby shakes his head in disgust. Given everything that’s happened over the past couple of weeks – given Ruby and Ricky and Paulie and the Chink, not to mention Paulie’s fucking kid whose name he can’t remember – this is no time for daydreaming. He punches a number into the cellphone and raises the phone to his ear. The man who answers, Elvino Espinoza, speaks English with only a trace of a Spanish accent.

  ‘Good to hear your voice again,’ he says.

  ‘You, too.’

  ‘We’re looking at the weekend. I’ll come by to say hello on Friday morning.’

  And that’s it, short and sweet. The deal will be consummated on the weekend, probably late at night. Exact time and place will be revealed to Bobby on Friday morning. Be ready.

  Bobby folds up the cellphone and puts it in his pocket. Attracted by the scream of wood on a saw blade, he glances across the street at a custom woodworker’s small factory. The owner’s name is Abel Kousamanis, a Greek immigrant who styles himself a furniture artist. There’s a limo parked in front of Abel’s shop and Bobby can see him through an open truck bay, talking to a woman in a blue business suit.

  Back to the cave, Bobby tells himself. He looks around him, at a truck backing through the roll-up door on the front of the warehouse, at a forklift pulling an enormous roll of carpet from the back of a trailer. Bobby’s workers are really hustling. That’s because it’s after four o’clock and they won’t be going home until the trailer’s unloaded.

  Bobby, as he trudges off, never thinks to look up at the roof where Carter’s crouching next to a ventilation pipe, only his forehead and eyes exposed. Good thing. If Bobby had looked up, if he’d spotted Carter, he’d already be dead.

  TWENTY-TWO

  Carter finally makes an appearance at the East Village apartment a few minutes before midnight. He finds Angel and Solly Epstein seated at a dining room table covered with files and cartons of Chinese food. Angel’s hopeful expression fascinates him, as always. She’s relentlessly optimistic. But he’s got little good news, though he takes her in his arms when she crosses the room in search of a hug. Epstein’s grinning from ear to ear as his eyes occasionally drift to Angel’s well-rounded buttocks.

  Released, Carter picks up a pair of chopsticks and a microwave-safe container of beef in black bean sauce. His instructors would have called it opportunistic feeding. Take your calories and your sleep whenever and wherever you can – you might be a long time finding another chance. Carter hasn’t eaten since they left the apartment in the morning.

  ‘Anything good?’ Epstein asks. ‘You’ve been gone a long time.’

  Carter responds by snatching a container of rice. He brings the container to his lips and shovels cold rice into his mouth with the chopsticks. The black bean sauce was highly spiced. His tongue is on fire.

  ‘I told them extra hot,’ Angel explains.

  ‘Thanks for sharing.’

  ‘Maybe I should go first,’ Epstein says. ‘What I have to say won’t take that long.’

  Carter accepts a glass of water and nods. ‘By all means.’

  ‘You said to look for a soft spot. We only found one, a kid named Levi Kupperman who sweeps the bunker for listening devices. This information comes, by the way, from Ruby Amaroso. I didn’t work with Ruby, or with the joint task force investigating Benedetti, but I do know that Ruby was facing a couple of hundred years on federal narcotics charges. It seems he was dealing on the side and wasn’t as careful as his boss. Bottom line, he had every reason to tell the truth.’

  Epstein pauses long enough to sip at his beer. He looks from Angel to Carter, finds both attentive, then continues. ‘Kupperman’s a cocaine addict. The way Ruby put it, “I’m givin’ him a year, at the most, before his brain is totally fried.” Junkies can be rea
ched by withdrawing or bribing them with their drug of choice, or with some combination of the two. That makes Kupperman a weak spot.’

  ‘If he can find bugs, he should be able to plant one.’

  ‘Planting a bug is the easy part,’ Epstein explains. ‘Look, there are two general types of eavesdropping devices. The first transmits a signal in real time. You sit outside the bugged site with a receiver and you hear everything that goes on. That won’t work in the bunker, which was designed to defeat transmitters. The second type records information on a chip and you have to go back to retrieve the device. Even assuming another trip is feasible, how do you know if anything significant was recorded? You could end up with a five hour conversation centered on broads and baseball. Keep in mind, you take a certain risk in approaching Kupperman. He might run back to his boss.’

  Carter glances at Angel. He notes the still hopeful look in her dark blue eyes and has to resist an urge to caress her. Still, he doesn’t try to sugar-coat the problems.

  ‘There’s a yard next to the warehouse where they park company vehicles overnight, including the armored Expedition. Attaching a GPS device to the SUV will be easy. If I can defeat the alarm, we can also bug the interior.’

  ‘You got into the yard?’ Epstein’s tone is admiring. The chain-link fence surrounding the yard was topped with razor wire.

  ‘The warehouse isn’t well-protected. There are security cameras in front of the roll-up doors and the office door, but not in the back of the building. I was able to access the roof while the warehouse was still open. It would be easier at night when the neighborhood’s more or less deserted.’

  Carter picks a dumpling from a container, dips it in a brown sauce that might or might not have been intended for that purpose, and slides it into his mouth. He chews slowly, his eyes on Epstein. The cop appears to be impressed, but accessing Benedetti Wholesale Carpeting was no great feat. Compared, say, to operating for a week in the hinterlands of Yemen.

  ‘Look, I don’t have much in the way of good news,’ he finally says. ‘I was able to enter the warehouse through a skylight shortly after the business closed for the night. By then, Bobby and the man we saw with the suitcase—’

  ‘That would be Marco Torrino,’ Epstein interrupts. ‘He’s called “the Blade” because of his nose.’

  ‘OK, Benedetti and Torrino left together a little before six. But not the three men we saw with Torrino in Kingsbridge. They stayed behind.’

  ‘How do you know they didn’t leave before we got to the warehouse?’ Angel asks.

  ‘Because I came down those narrow stairs that Solly described. There’s a locked door at the bottom, a very flimsy door as it turns out, but I could hear a television going, a woman’s voice screaming, “Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. Yes, yes, yes. Give it to me. Give it to me.”’

  Angel and Solly both laugh, as Carter intended. Then Epstein asks, ‘How did you get into the building?’

  ‘There are two skylights on the roof, neither locked down.’

  ‘And you what? Flew down and back up?’

  ‘Actually, I gave up on superpowers a long time ago.’

  ‘So, how’d you do it?’

  ‘I went to a hardware store and bought thirty feet of rope.’ Carter pauses, but Epstein’s out of questions. ‘Look, I can probably neutralize the men inside the basement, but if the money’s locked in a safe, we’ve shown our cards for nothing.’

  ‘Maybe it’s just sitting there,’ Angel suggests. ‘In the suitcase.’

  ‘A little information,’ Solly interrupts. ‘According to Amaroso, the basement’s divided in half. The part at the end of the stairs is used for storage. The bunker’s at the other end of building. According to Ruby, it’s protected by a thick wooden door consisting of two slabs of oak and an electronic lock that reads a bar code imprinted on a key card. I’m not saying the bunker can’t be penetrated, but you’d be a long time getting past that door.’ Epstein glances at his watch. ‘Time to call it a night. I’m on vacation as far as the job’s concerned, but there’s no vacation from your family. I better get home.’

  ‘I’ll walk you to your car,’ Carter says, already heading for the door.

  The East Village sidewalks are quiet, even on Avenue A in the heart of the club scene. It’s after midnight and tomorrow’s a working day. A few smokers stand outside the clubs, indulging their ten-dollar-a-pack habits. On the street, a horde of empty cabs flies past, reminding Carter of a military convoy double-timing through hostile territory.

  ‘So, what’s up, Carter? What couldn’t we talk about in front of your girlfriend?’

  ‘Your family’s up.’

  Epstein eyes his companion, but Carter’s expression reveals nothing. In his plaid shirt, brown pants and scuffed athletic shoes, he appears entirely inoffensive. ‘Say that again.’

  ‘Face the facts, Solly, we’ve lost the element of surprise.’ Carter pauses for a moment. ‘This business started as a quick snatch-and-run in Kingsbridge. With a little luck, we could have entered the apartment when the resident …’

  ‘Vincent Pugliese.’

  ‘Pugliese, yes. We could have stolen the money when he was out of the apartment, there and gone. That’s not the case now.’

  Epstein leans against his car. There’s a slight chill in the air and the skies above are streaked with flat clouds the color of soot in a fireplace. Like any other New York cop, Epstein’s spent enough time on the street to predict the weather more accurately than most TV meteorologists. It’ll rain tomorrow, all day.

  ‘How do you think they got on to us?’ Epstein asks.

  ‘I don’t know that they have. We saw money delivered to the apartment on several occasions. There were no guards when the deliveries were made, just Torrino. Now we see money coming out, this time guarded. Maybe there’s a deal going down and Bobby’s concentrating his capital. Or maybe he came to the same conclusion you did. Or maybe both things are happening simultaneously. I’m only sure that it doesn’t matter, either way, because the rules have changed. There’s no getting to that money without spilling blood.’

  Both men pause at the approach of three kids, two boys and a girl, none more than sixteen. The kids are Latino and they toss Epstein and Carter hard looks as they pass by. Epstein answers the challenge with a cop glare of his own, but Carter simply ignores a threat he deems non-existent.

  ‘You have a family,’ he tells the cop, ‘a pregnant wife and a child. Time to walk away.’

  Epstein thinks he should be angry, but in fact, having come to the same conclusion about the blood part, he’s relieved. ‘That’s it? You’re dismissing me?’

  ‘Not completely. I still need a tracking unit. And maybe a little help on how to install it. I assume they don’t run on batteries.’

  ‘Yeah, they do, as a matter of fact.’

  Finally, some good news. ‘How long do the batteries last?’

  ‘That depends on how often the vehicle is used. Weeks, for sure, sometimes for months. You can buy these things anywhere, by the way. They cost about four hundred dollars.’

  At the corner, a couple in search of a cab slips into a passionate clinch. When the girl attempts to back away, she loses her balance and falls into a sitting position on the sidewalk. Her drunken laughter echoes up and down the block.

  ‘I can supply the tracking unit, no problem,’ Epstein continues, ‘and I think I can bug the Ford, too, even if it is alarmed. But there has to be a bottom line, for the unit and the files. I’m sure this is something you already considered.’

  ‘Yeah, I have. Five thousand up front, Solly. Another fifteen if I bring it off. But I might take my own advice and walk away. I’m not given to assaulting impregnable positions.’

  Epstein offers his hand. ‘I can’t figure you out. One minute you’re this, the next you’re that. But I’m grateful anyway. That wife and kid? I love the hell out of ’em. My favorite home movie is an ultrasound video of the fetus in Sofia’s womb.’

  Angel doesn’t have
a ready response when Carter describes his conversation with the cop. After all that talk about blood diamonds and the hell world, Carter’s done a good deed. Two good deeds, actually, because now they won’t have to split the take with Epstein. So, maybe she underestimated him. Maybe he’s not the bad boy she took him for.

  ‘Am I next on the dismissal list?’ she finally asks.

  ‘No.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Because someone has to drive the van.’

  ‘Ah, there’s the Carter I know. Practical, practical, practical.’

  Carter proves her doubly right when he adds, ‘Cops are no good in a firefight, Angel. They usually panic and empty their weapons as fast as they can pull the trigger. If Solly had worked on a SWAT team, I would have kept him on, family or not. As it is, except for the technical part, he’s pretty much useless.’

  ‘Like I said, practical, practical, practical.’

  They’re in the apartment’s living room, sitting on a sleek leather couch that mirrors the furniture throughout the apartment. A celebration of glass, chrome and blond wood devoid of adornment, the furnishings are not to Carter’s taste, or Angel’s, either. But they’re not in it for the ambiance.

  ‘You know we’ll never get out of prison if something goes wrong,’ Carter says.

  ‘Like what?’

  ‘Like if a police cruiser happens to cruise by at just the wrong time, or an unknown witness calls them, or if I should happen to come out on the losing end of a firefight. You can plan all you want, but there’s no certainty in war, not for the individual soldier. How old are you, Angel? Twenty-three, twenty-four?’

  ‘Twenty-three.’

  ‘I think life expectancy for women is around eighty-three years. That would leave you staring out through prison bars for the next six decades. I told Solly to consider his family. You need to consider the family you might never have.’

  Angel snuggles up against Carter. On the one hand, she’s touched by his concern. On the other, he’s misjudged her badly. For one thing, blood’s already been spilled, Ruby Amaroso’s blood, and she was there to play her part. Did the gangster have a wife and children, a mother and a father, uncles, aunts, nephews and nieces? Angel doesn’t really care. She’s slipped into a place she’s been avoiding for a long time, a walk on the wild side from which (and she knows this, too) she might never return.