“Yes, Miss Albertoli, it makes sense.”
“Will you stop with the ‘Miss’ routine? My name is Angela.”
“I’m Matt.”
She raised her glass to her mouth and sipped wine, peering at him. Her coral lips left a thick print on the rim of the glass.
“So what’s this all about?”
“A certain Frankie Bones Marino, who you probably remember from your old neighborhood, just got a large number of hollow containers made up. From the way they were described to me, they sound very much like the shape of those cheese wheels I saw at your plant. So, I got to wonder what the wiseguys need these things for.”
She looked at him with mild surprise and said, “What’s that got to do with me?”
“That depends,” Stuart shot back, “on what you have to do with Danny Lupo.”
A slight frown of worry darkened her face. “First you, Lieutenant. What are these imaginary containers you’ve never seen going to be used for?”
“To conceal drugs, I think.” He sipped a little wine. “Florida, California, and New York are the main ports of entry for drugs coming into the country. But New York is the main entry port for a new, powerful version of an old standby drug.”
She lit another cigarette, her hands shaking slightly. “What drug is that?”
“China cat, heroin. It’s grown and harvested in the Golden Triangle. It’s then shipped to Italy, where it’s processed and shipped to New York. The trade in this crap is almost exclusively among the wiseguys, Chinese gangs, and a smattering of ex-KGB thugs operating out of Brighton Beach, Brooklyn. Uncut it’s almost pure and can be snorted, which causes it to be considered chic by all the schmucks among the rich and famous.”
“How much money do you think is involved?”
“Depends on how much they can stuff into one of those wooden containers. Last I heard, the wholesale price for a kilo of China cat was one hundred sixty K.”
“I bet they’d get thirty, forty pounds into one if it’s the size of a cheese wheel, right?”
“Yeah, and then multiply that times the number of wheels.”
She did some mental calculations. “That’s a whole lot of money. What makes you so sure that I’m somehow involved in any of this?”
“Because if I were Danny L, I’d look for someplace to stash the stuff before I had to ship it. And what better place could I find than a cheese factory run by an ex-lover I was able to con?”
She looked away from him abruptly and said in a low voice, “I don’t think I want this conversation to go any further.”
He watched her, weighing his next words carefully. “Angela, don’t let that bum destroy everything you and your family worked so hard to achieve. We’re on to him now. If we find that crap inside your factory, we’d have no options. We’d have to take you down with him.”
She turned and looked him in the eyes for a long moment. “I’m going to tell you a story about some liquid milk and about some cheese that’s headed for Chicago.”
The factories along Rangoon Street were completely dark when he stopped the car well away from any of the few street lights and killed the engine. The Albertoli plant was across the street; three freight cars stood on the siding next to it.
“When was Lupo’s last shipment of cheese?” he asked, staring at the plant across the street.
“Yesterday. They don’t keep them here long. More came in today, but they’ll be gone by tomorrow.”
“I don’t see any security.”
“They’ve only been around when the milk truck was parked in back.”
“How many guarding it?”
“Four guys in two cars.”
“What kind of alarm systems do you have?”
“Motion sensors and a silent alarm hooked up to the Jersey City police.”
“How long to shut down the alarm system?”
“Thirty seconds after I enter the building.”
“Give me the keys and the shut-off code, I’m going inside.”
She put her hand on his arm. “I’m going with you.”
“I want you to wait here.”
“You’re not going to be able to navigate around inside in the dark. You’ll be stumbling all over the place, making one helluva racket. Those goons will be on you in a second.”
“Okay.” He reached across her lap and opened the glove compartment. The interior light did not go on. He took out a Mini Maglite and quietly opened the car door. The car stayed dark.
“What’s with the inside lights?”
“Detectives unscrew the interior bulbs of department cars so they can sneak up on people in the dark.”
They crept along the railroad siding until they reached the back of the first boxcar. They stood still, their eyes searching for any movement, their ears alert. They saw nothing to concern them; they heard only the normal sounds of the night: the hum of traffic in the distance, a plane descending to Newark Airport.
She took hold of his arm, balancing herself as she bent to take off her high-heeled shoes, whispering, “I can screw with them on, but I can’t run.”
They darted across the street to the plant’s front entrance, where she handed him her shoes and took her key out of her pocketbook. She inserted the key and mouthed, “Ready?” He nodded. She unlocked the door and ran inside to the left, over to the keypad on the wall. He rushed in behind her. Standing to her right, with the Maglite cupped between his hands, he played the light over the keypad. She punched in the code.
Some faint light from the street revealed the dim outlines of desks and computers. They waited, allowing their eyes to grow accustomed to the dark. She slipped her hand in his and guided him through the front office toward the door leading inside the plant. As they passed the conference room, she glanced in at the silhouette of the oval table and thought of the things she and Daniel Lupo used to do on it. She cursed him under her breath. He wasn’t going to mess her this time.
They slipped inside the plant and its sharp smell of cheese. Dark profiles of forklifts stood around the floor. She led him to a barred window that looked out over the rear parking field.
Two cars were parked next to each other with their rear bumpers up against the chain-link fence separating the plant from the sloping hills behind it. The driver of the car on the right tossed out a cigarette; it hit the concrete in a brief shower of sparks and died.
“No tanker truck, so what are they doing out there?” she whispered, and, bending low, guided him over to the refrigeration unit, where she pushed aside the thick vertical slats. They ducked inside. The sudden cold made him sneeze. He played the beam of the Maglite around.
“Daniel’s cheese is under that tarpaulin.”
He threw off the canvas cover, revealing six stacks of what looked like wax-coated cheese wheels. Each pile was ten wheels high. “If these things are stuffed with China cat, you’re looking at over …” His face set as he did his mental calculations and said, “Jesus, it’s gotta be over a hundred million dollars. How many loads did he ship so far?”
“One that I know of.”
“I thought only soft cheese was stored under refrigeration.”
“It is. Daniel suggested that we put his stuff here to avoid a mix-up with my cheese wheels. Now I see what he was really worried about. He didn’t want anyone getting a close look at this stuff. That explains the guards, too.”
Stuart rapped his knuckle on one of the top wheels. It did not ring hollow. “It even smells like the real thing. Do you have something that will cut into this wheel?”
She put her pocketbook and shoes on top of a box of soft cheese and walked to the back of the unit, where she rummaged through tools spread over a shelf bracketed to the wall. She picked up an instrument with a cylinder blade about ten inches long with a half-inch diameter. She placed the blade end against the side of one of Lupo’s wheels and, using both hands, pushed it into the mold, slicing easily through the wax. The blade stopped when it reached the balsa wood, so she drew the
blade back a little, tightened her grip on the handle, and pushed it in harder, cleaving the wheel’s wall, penetrating a plastic bag of heroin.
She withdrew the instrument carefully. As she pulled the cylinder blade out of the mold, it caught on a jagged edge of the wax covering, causing the white powder inside the cylinder to spill onto the floor. She cursed and thrust the blade back into the wheel. This time she withdrew the blade and dumped the contents of the hollow cylinder into her palm. Shivering from the cold, she hissed, “I hope he gets cancer of the balls.” Looking at the mound of white powder in her hand, she added, “He knew just how hard it had been for us to live with having Beansy Rutolo for an uncle, and he goes and stores drugs in my plant. I’d like to kill him.”
“Why don’t we fix it so he ships real cheese?”
She smiled. “I’m beginning to like you, Matt Stuart. Wait here,” she said, and pushed her way out through the thick plastic curtain. She returned a short time later with a hand jack.
He lifted two wheels off the stack onto the hand jack, then three more. “Where is your loading platform?”
“Follow me.”
They stole out into the plant, savoring its relative warmth after the chill of refrigeration. Bending low, she led him to the left, deep into the shadows and away from the window overlooking the parking field. She veered right, cutting across the floor and out onto the platform of the loading bays. “We’ll stash them here between these two piles that are being shipped in the morning.”
He lifted the phony cheese wheels off the hand jack and stacked them between crates awaiting loading. Then they made repeated trips back to the refrigeration unit until they had moved all of Lupo’s treasure out to the loading dock.
After Stuart had stacked them carefully on the loading platform, he asked Angela where her cheese wheels were stored. She took his hand and led him through the cutting room, where wheels were grated and turned into wedges, and into the large storage area.
As he started to put the forty-pound wheels on the hand jack, he felt sweat coursing down his back and under his arms. He took off his suit jacket and placed it over a crate. A half hour passed before they had stacked the real cheese inside the refrigeration unit and placed the canvas cover back over the six stacks of cheese wheels.
“Tomorrow morning two of my detectives will show up here in a truck and pick up the phony wheels. They’ll be invoiced as evidence with the police property clerk. Will you type up a phony invoice for the stuff on the platform so nobody working for you gets wise?”
“Absolutely.”
They crept back into the front office, where she typed up the shipping order and invoice for the fake cheese by the light from Stuart’s Maglite. They then went back inside the plant and out onto the loading bay, where she slapped the invoice and shipping order onto one of the wheels.
“Let’s get out of here,” he said.
“Aren’t you forgetting something?” She smiled. “I left my shoes and pocketbook in the refrigeration unit, and you left your jacket in the back.”
He grinned back at her and said, “Guess I wasn’t cut out to be a burglar.”
17
Holding Stuart by the hand, Angela guided him back through the darkened plant into the cutting room, where he snatched up his jacket and said, “Let’s get your shoes.”
She led him back inside and over to the refrigeration unit. As she pushed aside the plastic slats, she knocked over a stack of empty two-gallon wax solvent cans. The noise was like a bomb going off.
“Hey, somebody’s movin’ around inside,” said the fat driver of the car parked on the left, sitting up and focusing his gaze inside the plant.
“I heard it, too,” said the man next to him.
The fat driver grabbed the cellular phone lying on the seat. He punched in Frankie Bones’s home phone number. When Frankie Bones answered, the fat man said, “This is Joe Bite. Somebody is poking around inside the fucking cheese factory.”
“You sure?” Frankie asked, his voice thick with sleep.
“Yeah, I’m sure. Whaddaya want us to do?”
“Find out who’s inside and what they’re doing there.”
“And when we do that, then what?”
“Call me back.”
Joe Bite got out of the car. He motioned the others into a huddle on the driver’s side of his car. “Me and the Mush are goin’ around front,” Bite said. “You two wait here and grab anyone who comes out the back door.”
Angela balanced herself on a crate as she slipped on her shoes. “Let’s get the hell out of here,” she said, taking Stuart’s hand and rushing toward the door to the front office. He opened the door and she slipped past him, dashing over to the key pad and frantically rearming the system. He opened the front door and sprinted into the darkness; she followed him, slamming the door.
They ran, hunched over, along the narrow sidewalk at the front of the plant until they passed the loading bays, and then they cut diagonally across the street toward the car.
“Hey, you!” shouted a harsh voice.
“Keep going,” Stuart said.
Two shots rang out. Stuart and Angela froze. He tossed her the car keys and shouted, “Get outta here!” Then he whirled around to confront the threat.
Both of Lupo’s men were leveling guns at him.
“I’m a police officer,” Stuart said, holding up his open shield case. “Drop those guns.”
“Fuck you,” Joe Bite said, and fired once.
Stuart dropped to the ground and rolled to his left, ripping the knee of his trousers. He sprang up and ran toward the car, diving behind it just as two rounds plowed into the ground in front of him. He popped up and fired two rounds at them. One of the slugs tore into Joe Bite’s leg, toppling him to the ground, where he writhed in agony, his screams filling the night.
The other pinky-ring turned and ran back toward the plant. The second car in the rear parking lot sped out, careened right, and raced toward the running man.
Stuart ran around the front of his category one car and slid in behind the wheel. He took the keys from Angela and turned on the engine. He drove the car out of the space, aligning the grille of his car with the grille of the other car. He switched on the high beams, slapped the light onto the roof of the car, and hit the siren.
The pinky-rings’ car jerked to a stop alongside the running man. The rear door flew open, and the man dove into the car.
Stuart shoved the transmission into park and flung open the door. He slid out and, kneeling behind the door, stuck his nine into the space between the door and the doorpost and aimed the white tips of the truncated sights at the grille of the other car. He emptied the magazine. The sound of metal grinding on metal followed as the car slewed to a halt.
Stuart ejected the spent magazine and slammed home a full one.
The category one’s roof light painted the scene in strobelike flashes of red, while its wailing siren smothered the sounds of night.
“Come out with your hands empty and over your head,” Stuart called out.
Three men shakily emerged from the bullet-riddled car and stood with their hands high.
“I’m Salvatore Garibaldi, captain of detectives, Jersey City police.” He was a big man with a big voice and bushy black eyebrows on a heavy, overhanging forehead.
Eighteen minutes had elapsed since Stuart made the 911 call on his cellular and Garibaldi’s arrival on the scene. During that time, Stuart had phoned his old friend Jimmy Driscoll, the agent in charge of the Drug Enforcement Administration’s New York office, and told him what had gone down. He also told him about the unusual shipments of cheese in empty milk-container trucks. Driscoll told him that he would come to Rangoon Street “forthwith.”
Stuart, Garibaldi, and Angela were standing outside the cheese factory, watching police tow trucks hitch up the pinky-rings’ two cars. Joe Bite had already been rushed by ambulance to the hospital; his friends had been handcuffed and taken to the local police precinct. Police cars fi
lled the streets as crime scene detectives searched for spent rounds.
“Exactly what went down here, Lieutenant?” Garibaldi asked.
“Angela gave me a tour of her plant and explained how cheese was made. As we were walking back to my car, these guys appeared from nowhere and started shooting at us,” Stuart said.
“Any idea why?” Garibaldi asked.
“No,” Stuart said.
Garibaldi looked at Angela and asked, “Is that true?”
“Yes, Captain, it is,” she said calmly.
“Did you notify your department what went down here, Lieutenant?”
“Not yet,” Stuart said, watching the tow truck drive off with the cars.
Garibaldi’s disbelieving eyes locked on Stuart’s face. “You don’t really expect me to believe that bullshit story, do you?”
“Sure I do,” Stuart said cheerfully.
“Gimme a break. Four New York scumbags appear from out of nowhere and open up on a police lieutenant for no apparent reason? No fuckin’ way, José. You listen good, Lieutenant, this is my turf, and I’m gonna find out exactly what happened here.”
Stuart raised his hands in a gesture of surrender and said, “I’m working on a homicide, and I think I’m beginning to scare some people across the river.”
“Wiseguys involved?”
“Yeah. Beansy Rutolo was the hit that set off all this shit,” Stuart said.
Garibaldi jerked his thumb over his shoulder. “His family runs this plant.”
Angela chimed in angrily, “He was my uncle, and he had nothing whatsoever to do with Albertoli’s.”
“That’s not what I hear,” Garibaldi said.
“Well, you hear wrong, Captain. My family and I loathe and detest Italian criminals. We don’t find them glamorous or amusing.”
Garibaldi softened and said, “It appears we do have something in common, Miss Albertoli.”
“I’m glad,” she said, relenting and smiling at the captain.
Pigtown Page 23
