In the old days, they used to spend their Fridays bouncing around discos and clubs. She liked it better now. It was more intimate, and she enjoyed pretending for one night a week that he was hers.
She opened a bottle of Valpolicella and was warming a fresh loaf of bread in the oven when she heard a car pull up outside and ran to the window. When she saw him sitting in the passenger seat, she crossed into the living room to put the latest Carreras, Domingo, Pavarotti in Concert CD on the player.
“You want us to wait?” the goon behind the wheel asked Frankie Bones.
“Drive up to the corner and park,” he said, opening the door.
Walking up the pathway, Frankie Bones heard the music and began conducting with his right hand. Mary opened the door and greeted him with a big kiss, tilting her pelvis into him, saying, “Think I’ll get lucky tonight?”
“You can bet on it.” He mimed Carreras singing. “Beautiful. Beautiful.”
“I made risotto and osso buco.”
“I can smell it. I’m starvin’.”
“Then let’s go eat.” She walked ahead of him toward the kitchen.
Pavarotti was singing “Recondita armonia.” Still conducting with his left hand, Frankie Bones slid Holiday’s .38 Colt from under his coat and shot her once in the back of the head. Her forehead exploded. She toppled forward onto her stomach, splaying awkwardly across the kitchen threshold.
He stepped over her and walked to the stove. After bending down to smell the food, he went over and picked a plate off the table. Filling it with risotto, which he noticed was not quite beginning to dry out, and a big veal shank, he sat down and savored the food, the wine, and the music.
He was going to miss his Friday night dinners.
23
The darkened warehouse on the south side of Borden Avenue, just off Twenty-seventh Street, was squeezed between the Long Island Expressway’s overpass and Hunters Point Avenue in Long Island City. It was a squat two-story building, attached on both sides to other warehouses. A ginkgo tree in a tiny plot of dirt decorated the curb in front of the building.
It was nine-forty Friday night, and this industrial area of Queens was deserted, save for the occasional car driving along Borden Avenue, heading for the entrance to the Midtown Tunnel. The detectives were parked a block away on the north side of Borden. Kahn sat behind the wheel, Stuart in the passenger seat, and Borrelli in the back. They were waiting for Jones to come back from night court with a signed search warrant with a provision for surreptitious entry. When Stuart had told Jones to apply for the warrant, Jones had asked him, “What about reasonable cause?”
“Tell the court that Joey Montie, AKA the Hippo, rolled over in Chicago and spit up Lupo’s stash house.”
“Has he?”
“Not yet, but he will.”
“What do you want me to use for exigent circumstances?”
“The usual,” Stuart had replied. “‘Property sought may be quickly and easily destroyed, and giving notice would endanger the lives of the executing officers.’”
“I’m on the way,” Jones had said, reaching for the door handle.
After watching the warehouse for a few minutes, Borrelli said, “That place looks deserted to me.”
“I checked with telephone security,” Kahn added. “There’s no phone listed at that address.”
“Lupo doesn’t believe in unnecessary expenses,” Stuart said.
“I don’t see any lookouts,” Borrelli said.
“This area is DOA at night,” Stuart said.
The car phone rang. Stuart snatched up the handset. “Yeah?”
“Bad news,” Driscoll reported from the command and control trailer. “The media found out about the raid in Chicago. CNN already aired the story.”
“Do they have names?”
“Camacho and his people. They don’t know about the New York crew.”
“Any word from D.C. on those bank accounts?”
“They’ve come up with the password on some of them and invaded the accounts. It’s only a question of time until they break into the others.”
“Where are Lupo and Frankie Bones?”
“They’re at an engagement party for Lupo’s daughter. I’ve got my people on them. What about the stash house?”
“We’re sitting on it, waiting for one of my men to come back with a search warrant.”
“Stay in touch.”
Stuart had just returned the handset to its cradle when the phone rang again. “Yeah?”
“Lou, cleaning people found Paddy Holiday in the bar’s kitchen with a meat cleaver in his head,” Jerry Jordon said.
“‘Round up the usual suspects,’” Stuart said.
“What?”
“I heard a cop use that line in a movie once. I always wanted to get to use it. Who’s on the scene?”
“Me and Hector Colon. There’s no physical evidence other than the cleaver, and no witnesses.”
“Clean up the mess and do the paper. Where’s Whitehouser?”
“He signed off duty at seven-thirty.”
“If you should come up with anything, let me know.” He punched “End” and rested the handset on his lap. He looked at Kahn and said, “I want you and Joe to do a walk-by. Pretend you’re lovers.”
“Okay,” Borrelli said.
Stuart waited until they had gone before he pulled out Ken Kirby’s phone number, which he’d copied off the papers Suzanne had given him. He punched in the number. When he heard Kirby’s voice come on the line, he bit back his anger and said in a friendly tone, “How ya doin’, Ken?”
“What d’ya want, Stuart?”
“The bad news is they whacked ol’ Paddy with a meat cleaver. The good news is they didn’t get you, yet.”
“Paddy’s dead?” Kirby was clearly shocked.
“As I see it, you got two options. You can get on the horn and ask the local gendarmes to protect you until I come to arrest you, or you can make a run for it. Of course, Lupo’s hitmen are probably waiting outside for you now. And even if you did manage to escape them and me, you’re going to be broke. We got into your Cayman Island bank account, which means that the IRS is also going to be hunting your ass. See ya ’round, Kenny.” Stuart disconnected and then watched Kahn and Borrelli duck into the shadows across from the stash house.
Kirby stared at the phone. His face was calm except for the sudden uncontrollable tic in his right eye. He let the receiver fall from his hand and stood in the playroom, dimly conscious of the movie on television. He left the room and went into the second-floor bedroom. Except for muted sounds from the television, the house was quiet. His wife had gone to a movie with her girlfriends, and the children were asleep.
He closed and locked the bedroom door, walked over to the dresser, and took his shield and .38-caliber S&W Chief out of the top drawer.
He sat on the bed, staring trancelike at his shield, remembering his first tour on the street: a one-arm post on Lexington Avenue, patrolling only the west side of the street. He recalled his first free meal, lamb chops with French fries and a salad. He stared at his shield for a long time before he stuck the gun barrel into his mouth and fired.
Kahn and Borrelli stood in the darkness, checking out the warehouse. Borrelli slid his arm around her waist. She pushed it away. “We’re supposed to be lovers,” he said.
“Just let’s pretend, Joe.”
“Helen, I’d like to take you out on a proper date.”
Her eyes smiled at him. “Peking duck?”
“Yeah, but without any ‘get acquainted’ sauce over it.”
“Sounds good to me, Joe.” She touched the back of his hand with hers, smiled, and said, “We’re supposed to look like we like each other.”
He wrapped her hand in his.
The warehouse fronted Twenty-seventh Street. The detectives could not see any identifying company signs. A large double door in the front was padlocked. A high metal fence crowned with razor wire stretched behind the warehouse.
“Because we don’t see anything doesn’t mean nobody’s inside,” she said.
He made a move to take her into his arms.
“We’d better get back, Joe.”
“Yeah, you’re right.”
Jones was sitting in the back of the car, tapping the search warrant against the headrest, when they returned.
After they climbed back in the car, Stuart asked them if they’d seen any signs of movement inside the warehouse.
“Nothing,” Kahn said.
“The question now is, how are we going to get inside that building?” Borrelli said.
Stuart grabbed the handset and phoned Driscoll in Command and Control. “Any changes?”
“Camacho and the Hippo turned. They’re spilling their guts.”
“Where are they questioning them?”
“In the Federal Building.”
“Will you phone your people in Chicago and ask them to ask Camacho and the Hippo if they know the location of Lupo’s drug warehouse?”
“Hold on.”
Stuart could hear Driscoll talking to someone. A few minutes went by before the DEA agent came back on the line and said, “They don’t know.”
“Are Lupo and Frankie Bones still at the engagement party?” asked Stuart.
“Yeah. They just might not have gotten the word on Chicago.”
“Maybe. But we gotta assume that they did. I’ll call you later,” Stuart said, and, holding the handset, looked at the warehouse. “I figure the Burglars are the way to go on this.”
He scrolled through the telephone menu until he came to Electronic Intelligence, then pressed the send button. When the sergeant on EI’s operations desk came on the line, Stuart identified himself and put in an urgent request for a surreptitious entry team, otherwise known in the Job as the Burglars.
The sergeant logged the search warrant’s number, date and time of issuance, location to be searched, items authorized to be seized, and the name of the issuing magistrate. He gave Stuart a log number and told him a team was just finishing up a job in Forest Hills and would meet him in a little while.
Sixteen minutes later an unmarked station wagon pulled up alongside the category one car. A detective dressed in work clothes got out and walked around to the passenger side. Stuart whisked down the window.
It was tradition in the Job that the whip sit in the passenger seat, so the detective knew it was Stuart. “How ya doin’, Lou? I’m Sergeant Joe Grossman. Whatcha we got?”
“That warehouse,” he said, pointing.
“You wanna storm inside or sneak inside?”
“Sneak.”
Grossman studied the problem. All the windows on the two-story building had grates over them. The buildings on either side of the warehouse were two stories also. Grossman said, “All of these warehouses have skylights on their roofs. Using ladders, we can get you up onto the adjoining roof and open the skylight for you. But that would mean climbing down two stories into a darkened warehouse. That’s noisy and dangerous.”
“What do you suggest?” Stuart asked.
“I think your best shot is to have us take out one of the first-floor windows.”
“But they’re set pretty high above the floor inside,” Stuart said.
“That’s right. You’d have about an eight-foot drop, maybe a little more,” Grossman said.
“Let’s do it.” Stuart grabbed the car’s phone and called the communications unit. He informed them that plainclothes units were effecting a court-ordered surreptitious entry at that location. He then notified the desk officer at the One Oh Eight, a precaution to avoid the possibility of uniform cops responding to a report of a ten-thirty, a burglary in progress.
The detectives quietly approached the warehouse. Grossman and one of his detectives raised two aluminum ladders padded with sound-suppressing rubber to a first-floor window fronting Twenty-seventh Street. The window was about ten feet above the sidewalk. The Electronic Intelligence detectives climbed up while the others waited below. Grossman hung a cloth overnight bag on a hook on the side of his ladder and checked the window out for alarms. When he saw none, he reached into the cloth bag and took out a butane-fueled miniblowtorch about four inches long. He lit it; a tongue of flame leaped out of the nozzle. Grossman directed the blue ribbon at the right-hand corner of the grille.
Stuart watched as the flame sliced through the steel. Within three minutes the grille was carefully and quietly removed and lowered to the detectives below.
Grossman took out two window holders that consisted of a foot-long aluminum bar with rubber plungers attached on both ends. He handed one to the detective on the other ladder. One Burglar suctioned his bar to the top of the windowpane; the other took the bottom. With the pane of glass secured, Grossman took out a glass cutter with a blade made of industrial diamonds and silently ran the blade around the edge of the glass. When the pane had been cut through, the detectives lifted it out of the window and, in sync, climbed back down, holding the pane between them.
Stuart and Jones climbed up the ladder. Stuart cast the beam of his Mini Maglite into the building. The large space was empty. He played the beam of light around the interior. The warehouse appeared to be abandoned. He turned off the light and climbed through the opening. Gripping the window ledge with both hands, he lowered himself down. He was about five feet off the floor. He dropped down and fell to his knees, sweeping the cavernous space with his nine.
Jones dropped down beside him. Had Carmine Marino been mistaken? he wondered, pricking his ears for any sounds.
Borrelli and Kahn jumped down.
The detectives remained still, trying to detect any sound or movement in the warehouse. “There’s nothing here,” Borrelli whispered.
“Maybe,” Stuart said. “Let’s fan out and check this place out. And be careful.”
The four detectives spread out and walked across the floor. In the middle, Stuart stopped and raised his hand. The others halted, their ears and eyes straining. Stuart cocked his ear in the direction of the door on the warehouse’s eastern wall. He thought he heard the faint sounds of cannon and explosions. He pointed toward the door. Stuart and Borrelli crept over and put their ears up against the door. Somebody on the other side was watching a war movie on television. Stuart took hold of the doorknob and turned it slowly.
The door was unlocked. He opened it partially. The detectives stepped back while Kahn took out her compact and opened it. She placed her shoulder against the side of the doorjamb and held the compact’s mirror in front of her so that she could see past the partially open door.
“A staircase leading down,” she whispered.
The detectives crept down the staircase. Whenever they came to a bend, Kahn would use her compact mirror to peer around it. The television grew louder. The detectives stepped off the staircase and found themselves in a tiny vestibule that led into a closed door. The television was on the other side.
Stuart tried the door and cursed under his breath when he found it locked. He put his ear to the door. All he heard was the television. He motioned Borrelli and Kahn to get on the other side of the door. He gestured for Jones to take out the door. “On five,” he whispered.
Jones moved back from the door. Stuart counted to five. Jones rammed his foot against the door slightly above the lock, splintering it open. Almost shoulder to shoulder, Stuart and Borrelli leaped into the room. Two men sitting on a tattered sofa watching television swiveled their heads toward the two detectives, then scrambled for a pair of Uzi machine guns on the table next to the sofa.
Stuart and Borrelli fired rounds over their heads. “Freeze! We’re police officers,” Jones said.
The men backed off and slowly raised their hands.
The basement was half the size of the upstairs. Six pallets holding clear plastic bags of white powder were stored against the brick wall on the left. Halves of
fake cheese wheels were stockpiled to the right of the pallets, and an aluminum folding table stood in front of them.
Across the room from the stash stood a refrigerator and a yellow Formica kitchen table with four chairs in front of it. The television sat on top of one of the kitchen chairs.
The detectives handcuffed the prisoners. “You got the right to tell us whatever you wanna tell us,” Borrelli told the sullen men.
The detectives searched the place to see if anyone was hiding. They found no one.
Leaning against one of the pallets, Stuart unfolded the cellular phone they found on the sofa and punched in Command and Control’s number. When Driscoll answered, Stuart filled him in on what had happened and what they had found.
“I’ll send some people over,” said Driscoll. “They’ll start invoicing the drugs.”
“Thanks, Jimmy. I think it’s time for us to go and grab Lupo and Frankie Bones.”
“I’ll meet you at the engagement party.”
Chez Pierre was one of the many wiseguy catering halls that dominated the wedding and Bar Mitzvah business in New York City and Long Island. It was located on Community Drive in Lake Success, across the road from the Fresh Meadow Country Club. Stone waterfalls flanked the entrance to the parking lot. Fieldstone sheathed the building’s facade; slabs of black marble decorated the entrance. A black canopy trimmed in gold piping stretched out over the entrance’s carpeted steps to the curb.
The dashboard clock read eleven-thirty when Kahn double-parked alongside Driscoll’s car on Community Drive, across the street from Chez Pierre’s parking lot. Stuart got out of the car and walked around to the other side of the federal car. Driscoll got out and said, “Lupo must have three hundred guests at the party. Drop a bomb in there and you’d wipe out the Mob as we know it.”
“They gotta know what happened in Chicago,” Stuart said, looking across at the valet parking attendants.
“Maybe not,” Driscoll said. “They’ve been partying since seven.”
“Where are they sitting?”
Pigtown Page 29
