Pigtown

by William J. Caunitz

“Holiday’s one of the bagmen, I’m the paymaster. Every month I wire the money into accounts in the Cayman Islands. I have the names, account numbers, and amounts going back to 1969 of all retired, dead, and active members of Knight’s Roundtable.”

  “You have all these records?”

  “All on a nice floppy.”

  “Why did Lupo store drugs at the Albertoli plant instead of shipping them directly to Chicago?”

  “Danny thought it was safer to use it. That way if the cops hit one stash house they wouldn’t have cleaned him out. He’s always switching his mode of transporting and storing drugs.”

  “Where is his regular warehouse?”

  “I’m not sure. He moves around a lot. But last year one of our front companies bought a factory in Queens. I wouldn’t be surprised if he uses it as his main stash house.”

  Stuart walked over to the wide steps leading to the beach. He climbed down and sat on the next-to-the-last rung, digging his heels into the cold sand.

  Marino came and sat beside him. “Do we have a deal?”

  “Yeah, Carmine, we got a deal.”

  Marino reached into the right side pocket of his tweed sports coat and brought out a computer disk. It had a yellow Post-it stuck to the top of it. He passed it to Stuart, saying, “The factory’s address.”

  “What made you so sure I’d play?”

  “You had to. You’re an honest cop. And if you don’t get them, you’re a dead man, and you know it.”

  Stuart watched the waves hurling toward the shoreline. They hammered the shore in rapid succession. The roar of the collision pounded in his ears. He looked at the man next to him and asked, “Why was Beansy killed?”

  “The Rastafarians didn’t want to contribute to the fund. Beansy called a meet to try and talk some sense into them. They got into an argument, and Gee shot him.”

  Stuart sighed. “So that’s what it was really all about.… Does Madeline Fine or Lupo’s wife know about Franklin Investment’s side business?”

  “They don’t have a clue.”

  They stood and climbed back up. “Have a good life, Lieutenant.”

  “You too, Carmine.” He watched as the accountant walked across the boardwalk and disappeared down the ramp leading to the street. He realized that he was gripping the disk tightly in his hand. He looked down at it, hoping that when he ran it he would not find Patrick Sarsfield Casey’s name listed. A rush of cold air ruffled his hair just as his beeper went off.

  21

  A black panel truck sped north along Lake Shore Drive. In the east, Lake Michigan glittered in the gathering twilight. On the slopes to the west, high-rise apartments rose like stately sentinels charged with guarding the great lake.

  The truck sped past Soldier Field.

  In the back of the Albertoli plant in Jersey City, Stuart slid the manila envelope off the seat and got out of his car. He walked over to the unhitched trailer. Bending low, he pressed the red button on the chassis. An aluminum stepladder dropped down from the underbelly. He climbed up into the DEA command and control trailer. He pressed the button on top of the steps, and the ladder folded up into a compartment. A sliding panel came out of the underbelly, covering the opening.

  DEA agents manned the consoles. The CD-ROM drive projected Chicago streets up on the wall, while next to them simultaneous pictures of the black truck speeding along Lake Shore Drive were being beamed to the C&C trailer by surveillance vans in Chicago.

  Driscoll and Garibaldi were standing on the far wall, watching the video. A halo of cigarette smoke surrounded Driscoll.

  “What’s happening?” Stuart asked.

  “They had a chartered Gulfstream Four waiting at Newark. They flew into Midway Airport and offloaded the shit into that truck,” Driscoll said.

  “They’re turning into Halstead Street, entering Greek Town,” one of the console operators responded.

  “What about the New York contingent?” Stuart asked.

  “They’re all inside the truck,” Garibaldi said.

  The black truck pulled into the curb across the street from a decrepit warehouse that appeared to be deserted. Its three stories had a flat roof and a peeling gray brick facade. A faded sign above the entrance read “Fenimore Brothers 1897.” The curb cut led to a large wooden door with crossed support beams. To the right of it was a gray metal door that looked to be the employees’ entrance.

  The truck waited.

  Traffic was light. An oil truck passed. A motorcycle sped into Morgan Street.

  A telescopic lens zoomed in on the man in the truck’s passenger seat.

  “That’s Ernesto Camacho,” Driscoll said.

  Stuart studied the man with the straight brown hair pulled back across his head and tied into a ponytail. He had a small gold loop in his right ear. His eyes were a frozen wasteland. “He looks like a mean bastard.”

  “He likes to kill people,” Driscoll said.

  “A sweetheart of a guy,” Garibaldi said.

  “And cautious,” Driscoll said, watching the idling truck.

  “You think that’s the warehouse?” Stuart asked Driscoll.

  “Probably. They’ll plant there for a while to check out what drives by. Then they’ll drive inside and unload,” Driscoll said.

  “I don’t see any lookouts,” Garibaldi said.

  “Drug operations in the inner city have lookouts up the kazoo,” Driscoll said, “but they don’t like to use them on their warehouses. They figure they’d attract too much attention. Most of them don’t even use video monitors for the same reason. But you can bet your paycheck that there’re a couple of heavily armed guards inside.”

  “Those pictures are good,” Stuart said. “How far away are your camera trucks?”

  “I don’t know,” Driscoll said. “They could be parked two, three, five miles away and still get those pictures.”

  Stuart looked down the aisle at the computers. “Can your computers tap into offshore bank accounts in the Cayman Islands?”

  “Yes. It’s easy to get into their database, but to access accounts is another story. Ordinarily we don’t have much luck. In order to violate an account, you need the account number and the password. Sometimes we can buy an account number from a bank official, but the password, that’s a different story. The people we go up against are sophisticated trafficantes and money launderers; they don’t use their kids’ birth dates or their parents’ wedding date as passwords.”

  “They’re moving,” Garibaldi called out.

  The garage door opened and the black truck swerved away from the curb and sped across the street into the warehouse.

  A male voice came over the DEA radio network. “Unit Five, give us a look inside that warehouse.”

  “Unit Five, ten-four.”

  Seven minutes passed before Stuart saw the homeless woman pushing her shopping cart along Chicago’s West Randolph Street. Her long, matted hair stuck out from under a black-brimmed hat that had a large cloth sunflower sewn onto the front of the dome. She wore a dirty brown flare skirt over blue jeans and an olive-green army fatigue jacket. The shoelaces on her worn Timberland boots were knotted in several places. She pushed the cart up to the warehouse’s smaller door and took out a cardboard lean-to. She opened it up and fitted it into the doorway. She crawled inside.

  DEA Agent Rebecca Barton stretched out inside the lean-to, her back to the street. She opened her jacket and removed a viewing screen eight inches long and eight inches wide. She took a long cable out of her pocket and plugged it in on the side of the viewing screen. The cable’s diameter was the size of a piece of string, with a fiber-optic lens at the tip. The handheld viewing machine was powered by an internal power pack. After switching on the machine, she began inserting the cable through the keyhole.

  The cavernous warehouse interior dwarfed the men standing around inside. Pallets of cheese wheels stood in the center of the floor. Two of the pinky-rings from New York and two other men were busy unloading the cheese from the truck. Hi
ppo and Camacho were standing by the pallets, talking. Three other men lounged near a wooden staircase without a banister.

  Agent Barton whispered into her sleeve microphone, “I count nine altogether. Six are standing around the truck in the center of the warehouse, and three more are by a staircase in the left rear.”

  Her control, who was a block away inside the oil truck that had passed before, radioed to the receiver plugged into her ear, “Do you see any automatic weapons?”

  “The guys at the staircase are toting M-16’s. I don’t see any weapons on the others.”

  “Get out of there.”

  Stuart watched as the bag lady climbed out of the cardboard shelter, folded it, stuck it back into her shopping cart, and pushed off down the street.

  Inside the unhitched trailer, Stuart, Driscoll, and Garibaldi watched as the bag lady turned the corner. They could not see the DEA agents on the wall of their trailer as they cordoned off the streets around the warehouse. They stood looking at the picture of the box-shaped building, waiting for the next move.

  The flow of traffic around the warehouse ceased.

  Stuart checked the time.

  Four vans drove up to the front of the warehouse. DEA agents, wearing flak jackets with the initials DEA emblazoned across the front and back, piled out. All of them were armed with M-16 automatic rifles with grenade launchers mounted under the barrel. Two agents moved swiftly to the doors and molded plastic explosive onto the hinges. When they finished, they ran back behind the vans. All the agents knelt and put on gas masks.

  One agent held a square black box that fitted into the palm of his hand. A red light blinked above a black button in its center. He pressed the button. The doors flew off their hinges. The agents rose quickly to their feet and fired canisters inside the building.

  Watching this happen, Stuart looked at Driscoll and asked, “Tear gas?”

  “Tear gas with a vomit injector. They’ll be heaving their guts up all over the place,” Driscoll said, watching the gas billowing out of the doorway.

  Joey Hershey Bar staggered out first, gasping and puking. The Hippo crawled out on all fours, retching. Camacho ran out of the warehouse, rubbing his burning eyes and throwing up streams of chunky yellow vomit. Agents wearing gas masks disarmed them quickly and handcuffed their hands behind their backs.

  Stuart walked down the aisle and stopped in front of the first computer console. Driscoll came over to him.

  Stuart said, “Can we keep what just happened in Chicago out of the press?”

  “We can try. We’ll take the prisoners to a federal building, have a doctor check them out, do the paper, lose the paper, do the paper again.” Driscoll looked at his watch. “It’s eight forty-five. I’ll try and buy you twelve hours.”

  “Thanks, Jimmy.” Stuart walked over to the console next to the staircase and picked up his folder. He reached in for the personnel papers that Suzanne had given him on the members of Knight’s Roundtable and the disk Carmine Marino had given him earlier. “I need to see what’s on this disk.”

  Driscoll took it from him and handed it to an agent working the console, saying, “Harry, see what’s on this.” The console operator took the disk and slid it into the slot.

  As names, dates, amounts, and account numbers began to scroll onto the screen, Stuart felt his heart pounding. The long list contained the names of dead and retired members. Only five were currently in the Job. The chief of detectives, Kevin Hartman, was the highest-ranking current member on the list. Gebheart, the detective divisions XO; Ken Kirby; Aaron Flieger; a captain in Personnel Orders. He shook his head in a mixture of disbelief and sorrow. He scanned the list quickly, looking for Patrick Sarsfield Casey. The name wasn’t there. “Will you print that out for me, please?” he asked the operator.

  “You got it,” the operator said, and pressed a couple of buttons, activating the laser printer on the side of the console. He picked up the printouts and handed them to Stuart.

  “Thanks,” Stuart said. He looked around for Driscoll and saw him talking on the telephone. Video transmissions from Chicago had been discontinued, along with the CD-ROM drive’s enhanced scale of Chicago’s streets. The wall suddenly looked naked.

  Driscoll hung up the phone and came over to Stuart and Garibaldi. “That was Chicago on the line. The cheese wheels stored inside the warehouse were filled with China cat. They figure we grabbed somewhere in the neighborhood of a hundred eighty mil street value.”

  “We need those guys to roll over on Lupo,” Garibaldi said.

  “They’ll roll,” Stuart said, handing Driscoll the printout with the names of crooked cops and their account numbers. “Can we check these account numbers with the Cayman Islands?”

  “Mind a suggestion?” Driscoll asked Stuart.

  “No,” Stuart said.

  “We could spend all night searching for passwords to break into those accounts and still not come up with anything. Why don’t you give me everything you have, and I’ll fax it all to our encryption unit in D.C. We have top code breakers and they use very fast computers. Let’s let them come up with the passwords. It’ll be a lot faster.”

  “Makes sense to me,” Stuart agreed. He took the disk back from the console operator, thanked him, and slipped it into his pocket. He looked at Driscoll and said, “I’m out of here.”

  “Where you going?”

  “To dish out some payback.”

  22

  Paddy Holiday paced the bar’s kitchen, replaying the day in his mind. That thing in the Parade Grounds had really shaken him. After he and Kirby left the Seven One squad room, they went to Toomey’s diner on Rogers Avenue. Holiday had to spend almost an hour convincing Kirby that the tape of their conversation was no big deal. If it was, Stuart would have arrested them.

  Kirby told him he was going to throw in his papers and retire. Holiday suggested that he file for three-quarters. “Our friends will push it through for you.”

  After they left the diner, Holiday hastened back to the bar. When the barmaid told him he didn’t have any messages, he phoned Frankie Bones to see if he knew about the tape and, if he did know, to explain to him that it was no big deal.

  Frankie Bones did not answer his cellular phone. Holiday called back five times and still got no answer, thus increasing his apprehension. He wasn’t going to be able to relax until after he spoke with Frankie Bones. He knew what they were capable of doing if they felt threatened.

  His nervousness grew as the day wore on and he hadn’t reached him. At five o’clock he got rid of a few stragglers at the bar and closed up. After switching off the barroom lights, he went into the kitchen to pay bills. He picked up his phone and dialed again: still no answer. His nervousness escalated to panic. Now was the time to disappear, at least until he could figure out what was going on.

  He switched off the kitchen lights and pushed through the double doors. He froze. Frankie Bones was sitting on a bar stool, holding up a cassette. Two grinning goons stood by the entrance. Holiday became conscious of the weight of the .38-caliber Colt Detective Special under his sweater.

  “We got a little problem, Paddy,” Frankie Bones said, holding up the cassette.

  “Frankie, no problem, everything’s good, I swear.” His voice cracked.

  Frankie Bones slid off the stool. Approaching him, he said, “Whaddaya gonna tell me about this?”

  “Frankie, it’s all bullshit, I swear. Lemme explain, it’s really no big deal. That fuckin’ guy Stuart—”

  Frankie Bones punched him in the face, plowing him backward into the kitchen, where he fell against the butcher block table and crumpled to the floor. Frankie Bones rushed in after him and kicked him several times in the stomach.

  Writhing in pain and gasping for air, Holiday slid his hand under his sweater and clutched the Colt’s checkered grips. He had the weapon halfway out before Frankie Bones kicked him in the face. One of the goons grabbed his gun arm by the wrist and elbow and broke the bone over his leg. Holiday scream
ed in agony. Frankie Bones picked up the Colt and stuck it into his waistband. Holiday was still screaming as the two goons pulled him roughly to his feet.

  “I don’t got a lotta time, Paddy. It’s Friday, and Mary cooks for me on Friday, so I’m gonna ask the questions and you’re gonna give the answers. Who is this Ken?”

  “Lieutenant Ken Kirby, he’s one of my sources. He works in IAD.”

  Frankie Bones’s eyes fell to the meat cleaver on top of the butcher block table. He picked it up and idly examined its gleaming, deadly steel. “This Kirby is the guy with the detective girlfriend?”

  “Yeah,” Holiday moaned. “My arm is broken.”

  “Don’t worry about it. We’ll get it fixed for you. Where does this Ken live?”

  “Syosset.”

  “What does Stuart know about us?”

  “Nothing, really. Somehow he hooked me and Ken into those mug shots of Gee and Hollyman.”

  “When he questioned you, what did he ask you about us?”

  “Nothing, I swear.”

  “I love when guys swear. It makes me feel so, so trusting.” He looked at the cleaver. “Now, I wanna know if you got any sources inside the NYPD that we don’t already know about.”

  “No, I don’t.” Holiday was kneeling on the floor, as if in prayer.

  Frankie Bones motioned to his friends to put Holiday’s wrist on the butcher block table. Holiday tried to worm free. They pinned his broken arm to the top of the table. Holiday screamed.

  Frankie Bones rested the cleaver’s blade on his wrist. “If you’re bullshitting me, I’m going to give you a new street name, Paddy the Claw.” He raised the cleaver.

  “I’m not!” Paddy shrieked.

  “I believe you, Paddy. Now we’re gonna take you to a hospital to get your arm fixed,” he said, and buried the cleaver in Holiday’s skull. He bent over the body and wiped the handle with his handkerchief. “I’m hungry. Let’s get outta here.”

  Mary Terrella lit the candles on the kitchen table, set with her blue-and-white tablecloth with blue napkins. She had already showered and dressed. After twenty-two years, she still got deliciously nervous every Friday night waiting for Frankie to arrive. She was wearing her new black pants suit with white roses embroided up the sides of the sleeves and legs.