“About ninety minutes. When we finished we took a shower together in the bathroom in the back. Then, as we were leaving the plant, all hell broke loose.”
“When you first entered the plant did you see any cars parked there?” Gebheart asked.
“No. The Jersey cops think we walked in on a burglary,” Stuart said.
“You wouldn’t be lying to us, would you, Lou?” asked the chief of IAD.
“I don’t lie to my bosses, Chief,” Stuart said.
Hartman motioned wearily for him to leave. Flieger followed him out, leaving the others to thrash it out. In the hallway the IAD chief grabbed Stuart’s sleeve. “Maybe the others bought it, but I didn’t!”
Danny Lupo hung up the phone, a smile riding his face. He leaned back in his chair, resurrecting the times he and Angela had screwed on top of that table. So she’s still into that shit, he thought, visualizing her gyrating body. Suddenly the story Stuart told to the department boss made sense. It’s just far out enough to be my old Angela, he thought. He looked at Frankie Bones.
“Hartman says it’s okay. Take fifty K and give it to Hippo for Angela. Have him pick up the shipment. But just to be on the safe side, call Camacho and tell him we’re flying the shit to Chicago, then get in touch with our friends at Newark Airport and arrange a charter flight.”
“You sure about this, Danny?”
“Yeah, I’m sure,” he said, extracting a cigar from the humidor. “But tell Hippo that if it don’t look right or feel right when he goes to pick it up, he should haul ass outta there!”
18
At six o’clock that Friday morning, Lieutenant Ken Kirby drove away from his Syosset home after telling his wife he had an early surveillance on a cop who was trading cocaine for sex. His wife had reached the point in her marriage where she didn’t believe a word he said.
Traffic was light on the Northern State Parkway, and he arrived at his new girlfriend’s Kew Gardens apartment at six-forty. His blond, twenty-five-year-old friend, with three years on the Job, was his best find to date. She loved to fuck; the only thing she wanted from him was help in getting off the street, preferably into one of the Big Building’s “nothing to report” detective units.
She greeted him at the door wearing a skimpy batik-print shift and pulled him into the bedroom, where she helped him rip off his clothes. They spent the next forty minutes in bed, then showered together and had breakfast in her tiny kitchen, which had a window with an uninspiring view of Union Turnpike.
Kirby arrived at 315 Hudson Street at eight forty-five. The last person before him had signed in on the command log at 0805. He signed himself present for duty at 0806. As he walked toward the elevator, he looked scornfully at the group of cops waiting to enter the snakepit.
He got off on the fourth floor. The large space was filled with three rows of glass-partitioned offices. The walls were painted pea green. Rows of fluorescent lights stretched across the ceiling. Half of the office cubicles were empty. Those spaces occupied by women had plants and other personal touches; the cubicles occupied by men were sterile, save for an occasional family picture.
Kirby’s cubicle was in the middle of the last row, to the right of the elevator. He walked in and looked with annoyance at the pile of department mail on his desk. He pushed his chair back and looked under the metal desk at the sign pasted to the side that read BETTER TO BE ONE OF THE HUNTERS THAN ONE OF THE HUNTED. He smiled and pushed closer to the desk.
A note from his captain was taped to his green desk blotter, reminding him that he was four months behind in his monthly activity reports. He grabbed the note, balled it up, and tossed it into the wastebasket. He opened the envelope on top of the pile and dumped out the contents. When he saw what came out, his bored expression gave way to one of uncomprehending fear. He read: “We got your prints on the mug shots and on the request form. We have you entering Headquarters on the same date and time the mug shots were ordered. And we have a tape of you discussing Andrea Russo’s hit with Paddy.”
When the words in Stuart’s note sank in, he muttered, “Oh Christ,” as cold dread spread through him. He sat upright, almost paralyzed by his fear. He looked up and saw his face reflected in the glass. He recognized the terror. He’d seen it many times in the faces of prey he’d stalked over the years.
His attention was drawn back to the pile and its terrible implications. He began separating the forms, trying to stay cool and keep a lid on his mounting panic. He picked up the photograph of his own fingerprint chart and placed it side by side with the ninety-fives. Someone had gone to a lot of trouble to develop his latent prints on the forms he had used to order mug shots of Hollyman and Gee. It was a thorough job, nailing down thirteen points of comparison on the match of his prints. He looked at the photographs of him from the security tape; they had the date and times across the bottom.
He could hear his heart pounding. He quickly shoved everything back into the envelope and sat staring at it with his mouth open in shock. He had the uncomfortable feeling that everyone in the office was staring at him, but when he glanced around all he saw was people absorbed in their own private worlds.
He picked up the phone and dialed Holiday’s. The barmaid answered. When he asked to speak to Paddy Holiday, she told him he wasn’t around. He’d had some personal business to take care of, she claimed, and would be back around noon.
“Tell ’im it’s urgent that he call Ken.”
When he put the phone down, it was slippery with his sweat.
Paddy Holiday sat naked in bed, waiting for his friend to come out of the bathroom. His eyes roamed around the tastefully furnished room, stopping at the ornate French reproductions. The Wilson, on Seventy-second Street between Park and Lexington Avenues, was an apartment hotel with day rates. It was not open to the public. Well-heeled men and women who could not afford to be seen in less obscure hotels with their lovers, or have their sexual peccadilloes exposed, came there to enjoy a sexual respite with the partner or partners of their choice. The annual membership fee was five thousand dollars, cash.
No registration was necessary. A phone call reserved the room, and the one hundred dollars for ninety minutes’ fee was left on the night table, in cash. The building was a five-story converted town house with an underground garage with a self-service elevator that whisked clients and their friends directly to their reserved rooms.
Holiday unfolded his cellular phone and called the bar. “Anything doin’?”
“Nothin’, ’cept some guy named Ken called you, said it was urgent that you call ’im.”
As he punched in Kirby’s number he became aware of the icy fingers gripping the nape of his neck. In all the years he’d been breaking bread with Kirby, this was the first time he’d ever used the word urgent.
“Lieutenant Kirby.”
“What’s up?”
“Somethin’s wrong. We gotta meet.”
“Two o’clock, the Parade Grounds.”
He slid the phone onto the teak nightstand just as the bathroom door opened. He smiled as the transvestite came out and approached him with the fluid grace of a ballerina.
“She” was in her late twenties. Her firm silicone breasts had large pink aureolas with erect, oversize nipples. Her real sex was tucked back between her legs, held in place by a “joy string,” a thin, skin-colored plastic rope that fitted around the head of her penis so that nothing of her sex showed except a coiffed pubis sculptured into a woman’s triangle. “She” smiled at him as she crawled up onto the bed and said, “Hi, handsome.”
She knelt alongside him. “I love feeling you inside me, Paddy.”
“I feel like I cheated you. You didn’t come,” he said, kneading her nipple.
“Would you like to make it up to me?”
His breath caught. “Yes.”
She kissed him, drilling her tongue deep into his mouth. She sat up and fixed her blue eyes on his as she reached down and released the joy string. Her swollen sex sprang out from between he
r legs. She brushed her bright red nails through his hair, gently pushing his face toward her. “Make love to me, Paddy.” She closed her eyes and moaned at the first brush of his lips.
Detective Jerry Jordon pressed the Cellmate’s play button and listened to the tape of Holiday’s conversation with Kirby. He was parked across the street from the Wilson in the department yellow cab he had signed out of Motor Transport last night. He pressed the button on the right side of the steering column, and a communications panel slid out from under the dashboard. It contained a single radio that received patrol, detective, and undercover bands. A black dial enabled detectives to switch back and forth among the different bands.
From the panel, Jordon picked up a cellular phone and was about to dial the Squad’s phone number when he glanced down at the Cellmate and stopped. He returned the phone to the panel and pushed it back under the dashboard. He got out of the taxi and crossed Seventy-second Street, heading for the three-telephone kiosk on the corner of Lexington.
“Seven One Squad, Jones.”
“Is the boss around?”
“He left the c of d’s office a little while ago. He said he was stopping off at the Pension Bureau, making one more stop, and then coming back. Whaddaya got?”
“I got the retiree shacking up with a transvestite. He called Kirby on his cellular. It seems the lieutenant needs an urgent meet. They’re getting together at two in the Parade Grounds.”
“He musta got the boss’s little present. I’ll get on the horn to Electronic Intelligence and get a ‘stage crew’ ready.”
“Calvin, we got a slight problem there,” Jordon said, keeping a watchful eye on the department taxi. “In order to get a stage crew we need a court-approved order to wiretap, and in order to get that we gotta go before a judge and show reasonable cause. Where we gonna get our reasonable cause from?”
“I’ll think of something. You stick with the retiree.”
Jones hung up the phone, looked up at the Malcolm X poster on the wall by his desk, and said, “Whadda we gonna do, brother?”
Borrelli answered his phone, listened a while, and then, covering the mouthpiece with his hand, said to Jones, “Calvin, Plaintiff’s on the line. She said her dog isn’t eating right and wants to take him to a dog psychic to find out why. Wants you to pay for it.”
Jones got up calmly and walked over to Borrelli. He took the phone out of his hand, hung it up, and went back to his desk. When he sat back down, he noticed Kahn standing by her desk, talking on the telephone. She was wearing a tailored black pants suit. Whitehouser was leaning back in his chair, watching her. Borrelli had already picked up on Whitehouser’s look and was glaring at him, ready to pounce if he made a move toward Kahn.
Whitehouser probably can’t get it up, Jones thought. He looked over at Kahn and said, “Helen, let’s you and me go for a ride and dig up some reasonable cause.”
The old man in the wheelchair sat alone by the window, staring blankly out at the Atlantic Ocean. His skin hung loose around his neck and face, and his thin white hair reached down to his shoulders. Stuart was shocked at what the years had done to him. Every other old person in the fourth-floor dayroom of the Golden View Nursing Home on Shore Front Parkway in Rockaway Beach, Queens, sat in their wheelchairs, watching a game show on the big-screen television.
As a young detective, he had seen Arthur Knight at many retirement and promotions parties, long after the former chief inspector had retired. Even though Knight had been way into his sixties then, he’d still been a handsome, robust man with broad shoulders, a thick head of wavy hair, and a thunderous laugh. The man Stuart remembered was a man with dignity who commanded respect.
He picked up a heavy metal chair with a scrolled back and faded yellow leatherette seat and crossed the large room. He was surprised by the weight, then he remembered that all the aging Art Deco hotels along Rockaway’s beachfront had been converted into more profitable nursing homes. He planted the chair beside the wheelchair and said simply, “Morning, Chief.”
Upon hearing Stuart’s words, Knight shook his head and blinked his eyes several times, as if trying to dust the cobwebs from his brain. He turned slowly to look at the stranger who had addressed him with the honorary title “Chief.”
“It’s been almost ten years since anyone called me ‘Chief,’” he said in a creaky voice. “Who are you?”
Stuart snapped open his shield case and held it out in front of him. Knight stared at the round gold shield. The sight of it seemed to inject vitality into his frail body. His bony fingers reached out and touched it; his long, curved fingernails looked like white talons. “Where do you work, Lou?”
“I got the Seven One Squad, Chief.”
“I hear they got even more women and even fags on the Job.”
“’At’s true.”
“I’ve lived too fucking long.” He leaned close, whispered, “You wouldn’t happen to have a ‘taste’ with you, would you?”
“No, Chief, but I’ll see that you get some.”
“What squad did you say you had?”
“Seven One.”
“When I came on the Job that was a good house.”
“There are no good houses anymore, Chief, they’re all shit-houses.”
“How did you know I was still alive?”
“Pension Bureau. That’s how I knew you were here.”
“Do you have any children, Lou?”
“No.”
“Do yourself a favor and don’t. They’ll break your heart. I worked all my life to put them through college and give them the things I never had, and what’d I get for it? They dumped me in this fucking dump.”
As he listened to Knight’s rantings, he tried to figure the best way to explain the purpose of his visit. He reasoned that any mention of Knight’s Roundtable would send Knight into a protective shell of silence, something that most successful cops start developing at the academy and usually carry with them to their graves.
I’m going to have to do some fancy dancing here, he reasoned to himself. He let Knight fume on awhile longer about his children, then cut in, “Chief, the city’s ordered a new captain’s test, and I’m going to sit for it.”
“Nothing like having those railroad tracks pinned on your shoulders, Lou. I can remember when I—”
“My problem, Chief,” he interrupted, “is that the Job won’t promote anyone to captain who doesn’t have a master’s degree. I have all my course work done. The only thing I need is a thesis. And I’d like to do that on one of the legends of the Job, Chief Inspector Arthur Knight.”
Knight looked out over the ocean, tears filling his eyes. “I’m considered a … legend?”
“Yes.”
Knight wiped his eyes with the back of his hand. “Would your thesis be on file in the academy?”
“Yes, it would. Generations of recruits would be able to study and learn from your career.”
“It’d be like being immortal in the Job.” He waved him closer with his bony fingers. Stuart became aware of a faint musty aroma. Knight assumed the cop-to-cop talking position, hand cupped over his mouth. Stuart assumed the same position.
“You know, Lou, there are certain things that I can never talk about.”
“I understand that, Chief.” His eyes swept the room. “Things like the Roundtable will never be mentioned.”
“Good. What’s past is past and done and forgotten.”
“Absolutely, Chief.” He reached into his pocket and brought out a sheet of paper on which he’d written the names of four-well-known bosses in the Job at the time of Knight’s reign, none of whom had attended the Roundtable meeting. Below the four he’d written one other name. “It’d help me by knowing how you evaluated some of the people who worked for you.”
“Who, for instance?”
Stuart read off the four names and was surprised at the clarity of the old man’s response. The first man on the list could never bring himself to act like a boss, he wanted to be one of the boys. The
second was a strong leader who never let his subordinates forget he was the boss. The third was a drunk but a skillful organizer. The fourth guy was one of those phony Holy Rollers who’d steal a hot stove. Then Stuart mentioned the name Thomas Kirby, CO Narcotics and Ken Kirby’s father. The old man looked away and muttered, “Never really knew him too well. But he was important. Smart. Maybe too smart.”
Stuart finally reached the name of the man who’d attended the Roundtable meeting with someone the log had referred to only by the initials J.A. and asked, “What about Joe McMahon, the borough commander of Brooklyn, South?”
“Joe was a competent, stand-up guy. His only deficiency was he couldn’t keep his dick in his pants. He almost caused a lotta grief.”
“What happened?”
“He was married, and he was dancing around with this policewoman. He used to bring her everywhere with him. One evening we’re having that meeting that we mentioned before, and he shows up at the hotel with this dame. I reamed his ass and sent her on her way. I mean, this was an important meeting, know what I mean?”
“What was wrong with that guy?”
“He was pussy blind. Happened to a lotta guys back then.”
Folding up the sheet of paper, Stuart asked casually, “What was that dame’s name?”
When he heard her name, Stuart managed to keep his face from betraying his shock.
When Isaac Ham walked out of the numbers joint that was in the barbershop on Nostrand Avenue, four stores off Crown Street, and saw Detective Calvin Jones leaning up against the unmarked police car, both hands gripping his scarf, he cursed. Grimacing in irritation, he walked over to the detective and said, “How long you gonna be leaning on my black ass, man?”
“I’ve come to do you a favor.”
“I get worried whenever a cop wants to do me a favor.”
“This time there is no downside.”
“I’m listening.”
“Your young friend who tried to shoot my lieutenant, has he left for Jamaica?”
“Not yet.”
“I can arrange it so that he can stay in the country. But he’d have to leave New York.”
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