Paradise City

by Lorenzo Carcaterra

  “I don’t suppose you’d let me drive around the city on my own?” Lo Manto asked Fernandez, both of them sipping hot black coffee from a pair of Law & Order mugs. “You know, check out the sights, maybe even go to a Broadway show.”

  “You know me,” Fernandez said. “I love to see my friends have themselves a good time. But I always find it’s better to see this city with someone who knows it pretty well. Point things out you might miss on your own. At the same time, that person can also steer you clear of any trouble spots you might walk into by accident.”

  “Will my new friend have a badge and a gun?” Lo Manto asked. He rested the mug on the edge of the captain’s desk, scanning the room, gazing at the vast collection of baseball memorabilia that crowded the shelves and cabinet tops.

  “Yes,” Fernandez said. “But you won’t. You can leave both of those with me, just like I did with you when I came to Naples. I couldn’t nail anybody there. You can’t bust anybody here. We don’t have to like all the rules, Gianni, but some we have to follow and this is one of them.”

  “How good?” Lo Manto asked. “If I have to have a shadow, I want one that can keep up with me and not get lost in a small crowd. I have to move my way and at my pace and I won’t have the time to look over my shoulder to see if the ghost is still on me.”

  “She’ll be there,” Fernandez said, his voice filled with assurance and confidence. “This kid’s got the chops to give even a hard-ass like you a fast turn. And if you do run into any kind of trouble, she’s going to be the one you most want covering your back. Other than me.”

  “How much does she know?” Lo Manto asked. “About me and about why I’m here.”

  “I told her just the skeleton,” Fernandez said. “You’re a detective from Naples, and you’re here for a few days trying to help us find your missing niece. She doesn’t know anything about your background or even that you and me are friends. I figure you can fill her in on whatever parts of that you want to tell. Give you both something to talk about when you’re stuck in rush hour traffic.”

  “Does she know I speak English?” Lo Manto asked, standing and turning away from the captain, staring through the thin glass window at the squad room, crowded now with teams of detectives working the phones and interviewing potential witnesses and prime suspects.

  “She didn’t ask,” Fernandez said, getting up from behind his desk and standing next to his friend. “But my guess is she figures you don’t. You want to play with that or not, I’ll leave that up to you.”

  Lo Manto kept his head down, long hair flopping across his eyes, and then glanced over at Fernandez. “Do you think my niece is still alive, Frank?”

  Fernandez ran a hand across his close-cropped salt-and-pepper hair, styled to match the mustache of the same color. He kept his hair that way, rather than dye it or let it run long, in order to hide the fact that he was, at thirty-five, much too young to hold the rank he carried. Despite his youth, Fernandez knew the reality of the city and its unsparing harshness, especially when directed toward the most innocent of victims. And he also knew he could never lie to Lo Manto, whom he considered both a close friend and a great detective. “I wouldn’t have let you come here if I felt otherwise,” he said. “I wouldn’t have wanted you to be here when we found her body.”

  “Does your information back up what Bartoni’s street eyes told him?” Lo Manto asked. “Or does he come up short somewhere?”

  “That old badge has some good sources,” Fernandez said. “I wish to hell I knew who they were. Could use them to help plug up some of my other empty cases.”

  “It might not be a lift and it doesn’t look like it’s a sell,” Lo Manto said. “We would have heard from someone by now if it had gone that way.”

  “She’s definitely not a sell,” Fernandez said. “I had my crew on that from the second I heard. Nothing’s moved on the street fitting her description or age group in the last week. We also ran checks on all the skin sellers, put them through the ringer, from VICAP to fingerprints, and there’s nothing and no one who matches up with Paula. So we’re pretty good there. I’m with your boss all the way on this. I peg it as a lift.”

  “With me, not money, as the ransom,” Lo Manto said. “If I was looking to pull a kidnap, I’d try to get back something worth a whole lot more than a cop from Naples.”

  “You cost the Camorra a lot of money all these years,” Fernandez said. “Frankly, I’m surprised they’ve waited this long to make their move. The way you been hitting their operations, both here and in the old country, you’re like an all-night ATM sucking off their savings. It’s bad for business, and when this crew gets their business touched, they like to touch back.”

  “This new partner of mine,” Lo Manto said.

  “Jennifer Fabini,” Fernandez said. “Works plainclothes narcotics. Or did until you came to town.”

  “How’d she take the news?” Lo Manto asked. “About her baby-sitting job?”

  “Other than demoting her back down to uniform, I can’t think of anything that would have ticked her off more,” Fernandez said with a laugh. “There was a lot of pissing and moaning about having to diaper-change a wop cop looking to act tough in the big city. Then she stormed out of my office and headed down to the gym. Let the heavy bag pay the price of her anger.”

  “Doesn’t sound like it’s going to be love at first sight,” Lo Manto said, opening the door leading out of the office.

  “I’ll be happy she doesn’t shoot you at first sight,” Fernandez said. “But give her time. If I’m right about her, she’s going to end up as good a cop as you and me. With an outside shot at being better.”

  “If she’s that good, then she’s got a good reason to be pissed,” Lo Manto said, shaking his friend’s hand. “I wouldn’t want to waste my days and nights baby-sitting a wop cop, either.”

  Jennifer Fabini stood in the bathroom, cold water dripping off her face, and stared into the steam-smeared mirror, dark eyes lit with anger. Behind her, she could hear the low talk and loud laughter of three other policewomen dressing for work. Fabini had on black jeans, black running shoes, and a thin black bra. Her blond hair was brushed back and pulled into a ponytail. She wiped her face dry with a white cloth towel and gazed at her reflection, for the very first time feeling old and trapped in a job she loved.

  Fabini was two weeks shy of her thirtieth birthday and had been on the job seven years, the last three as a third-grade plainclothes detective. She knew, from the day she took the police exam, that everything she did on the job would be measured in some way against her father’s talent and skill. So she worked both the job and her body hard, doing her best to minimize the questions and ease the doubts that came with being Sal Fabini’s only kid. Jennifer ran for an hour every day, often around the dirt track near Riverside Drive, a few blocks from her cramped one-bedroom, third-floor walk-up. She also kick-boxed regularly and was one belt shy of black in karate. She stood five-foot-five and weighed a solid 115 pounds, but knew she could take down men twice her weight and inches over her height. And when she ran into a situation where a physical confrontation was not possible, she took them with a bullet. Her range scores had her at the top of her grade, her aim curving higher at far range, the better and more difficult standard for accuracy.

  She worked hard at being a good cop, living with the weight of her father’s immense shadow, which filtered down to even the youngest of rookies. She put in extra hours, working a case until it was broken, going beyond the time clock and staying on a possible suspect all night if needed. She kept her mistakes to a minimum and made it a point to learn from each one, knowing that every error she made would be magnified simply because of her father’s history. She took classes at John Jay, focusing on new modes of detection, zoning in on the advances made in both forensics and DNA technology. She read thrillers and law books, took yoga to keep her body flexible and her mind sharp, and read old files on solved cases to study how the detectives pieced together the information and
cracked the crime. She didn’t smoke, preferred red wine to white, and hated to dance. She surrendered to only one vice—watching late-night cable reruns of old police shows, which she did sitting in the four-poster bed that ate up most of the space in her tiny bedroom, her cat Milo by her side and a pint of fat-free chocolate sorbet on her lap.

  Physically, Jennifer was a blend of her father’s dark, handsome features and her mother’s sheer Scandinavian beauty. She was asked out often by the detectives she worked with and those she met while killing time in the dim halls of 111 Centre Street, waiting to give testimony. She always found it easy to say no, holding strong to her desire never to date a cop. The majority of those who asked were either married or rebounding off a failed one, which made them easy candidates to brush off. Most cops make horrible husbands and even worse boyfriends, with only a rare handful able to shake off the burdens of the job and relax in the company of a woman. And if that woman also happened to wear a badge and carry a gun, it made the task that much more difficult. One of the reasons, Jennifer quickly learned, that so many female cops dated other cops was the reluctance of those not on the job to do so. “As soon as we took on this work, our chances of getting laid were brought down to fractions,” her closest friend in the department, Connie Dutton, an eight-year veteran recently promoted to sergeant, once told her. “You go out with a cop, you gotta hear about the wife he can’t deal with anymore or the ex-wife who never understood him or his work. All the usual cliché shit. And meantime, the only reason he’s selling any of this to you is to get you into bed where maybe, if he’s not too drunk or too stoned, he can deliver the goods to at least make one part of the night worth it.”

  “But the ones who aren’t on the job don’t seem at all interested,” Jennifer said. “That’s been my experience, anyway.”

  “Why should they be?” Connie said. “Men are as insecure as infants to start with. Then, here we come along, chicks with guns, badges, and attitude, and it scares the hell out of them. They don’t know what to say or how to deal with broads like us. Think about it. We can shoot them, arrest them, or just plain kick their ass if we set our minds on it. And you know how the job makes us judge everybody we meet, and not always in a good way. So we meet an investment banker or a lawyer, well, we’re thinking he must be ripping somebody off. We hook up with a newspaper or magazine guy, we figure him for a wannabe looking for an angle to make some dough with some publisher. We meet a doctor and we figure him to have botched some operation along the way or working some insurance scam that’s going to take us down with him.”

  “So how’d you land a guy like Joe?” Jennifer asked.

  “I caught some luck, I’ll admit to that,” Connie said. “We both go to the same church and sing in the same choir. Turns out we knew each other when we were kids, grew up in the same neighborhood in Brooklyn. Only he remembered me and I couldn’t finger him out of a lineup. Anyway, he’s a good man, happy at his work with Con Ed and happy with me as the woman in his life. And he’s cool with what I do except for the worry end of it. But that’d be true with anybody that cared.”

  “Maybe I should start going back to church,” Jennifer said. “Even join the choir. Who knows who I’ll meet.”

  “These days, your choice comes down to one of two,” Connie said. “A good man looking to give praise to the Lord or a pedophile trying to steer clear of somebody like you.”

  Jennifer tossed a starched white T-shirt over her head and stuffed it into her jeans. She walked over to her open locker, nodded to a uniform officer ten minutes shy of starting her shift, and reached for her gun and hip holster.

  “Got something good working?” the officer asked her.

  Jennifer knew the cop by face but not by name, and up to now had never exchanged anything beyond an occasional hello and a wave. “Not really,” Jennifer said. “The captain asked me to hand-hold a detective in from Italy for a few days. Make sure he doesn’t get lost in the crowd or, even worse, mugged.”

  “He good-looking at least?”

  “Don’t know,” Jennifer said. “I’m supposed to meet him in front of the house in about fifteen minutes. Doesn’t much matter, though, whether he is or he isn’t. I’m not looking to go there.”

  “You think he speaks English?” the young officer asked.

  “At best, I’m in a Chico Marx situation,” Jennifer said. “At worst, not a word other than pizza and pasta.”

  “Why is he here?” the officer asked.

  “He’s looking for his niece,” Jennifer said. “Here to help us out if he can. And get to see some of the sights while he’s doing it.”

  “You don’t sound happy about the detail,” the officer said.

  “You’re right, I don’t,” Jennifer said. “But maybe I should be. It’s been a while since I took a ride on the Circle Line, went to the Statue of Liberty, took the elevator to the top of the Empire State Building. They always say the one city you never really get to see is the one you live in. Well, now, here’s my chance.”

  “I’d trade places with you in a heart tick,” the young officer said as she put on her police cap and turned to walk out of the locker room. “I have to spend the next eight hours, maybe even twelve if I catch some OT, making sure a couple of high-enders from the UN don’t catch a bullet going from their limo to the Plaza for a meeting with another group of big swingers.”

  “Maybe I’ll stop by,” Jennifer said, waving good-bye to the young officer. “I’ve never been inside the Plaza. My Italian shadow might like it too.”

  “You could share a Breakfast at Tiffany’s moment,” the young officer said over her shoulder, the thick wooden door slowly closing behind her. “If nothing else, it’ll make the time go by.”

  Jennifer stared at the door, jammed her hip holster into place, and put on a thin black leather jacket. “I hated that movie,” she said.

  10

  PETE ROSSI SAT across from the teenage girl and placed a cold bottle of Snapple iced tea by her side. The girl glanced at the bottle and then looked back up at the man. She was exactly what he expected her to be—just a few years older than his own daughters, slightly defiant in her manner, the tremble in her hands the only hint she was concerned about her plight. “You’re going to be here for a few days,” Rossi said. “But I don’t want you to worry. Anything you need or want, someone will make sure you get. You’re also free to leave the room and go outside, play in the sun, or walk around the property. There’ll be somebody with you, but that’s just for your safety.”

  “What do you want?” the girl asked.

  “I don’t want anything from you, Paula,” Pete Rossi said.

  “Then why am I here?” the girl asked. She looked around the big room on the second floor of a large, well-maintained house. It was a girl’s room, much like the one she had with her visiting family, but filled with much more expensive furniture. She was angry at herself for having ended up in such a situation, breaking every rule her uncle had tried to cram into her, his wasted lessons repeated over and over, warnings never to fall for any line given her by a stranger gone unheeded. It was an old trap and she fell into it as easily as if she were a child in diapers. She believed the sincere young man behind the wheel of the shiny new black car. She trusted him when he told her that her mother in Italy was ill and she needed to get in with him and be rushed back to her host family, who would then book her on the first plane to Italy. He told her he was a nephew, the one she was supposed to meet at next Sunday’s dinner, sent for her because everyone else was so busy making arrangements for her to leave.

  She got into the car, surrendered to his concern, put on her seat belt, and heard the snap of the doors as they went on auto-lock as soon as the gears shifted. The man never raised his voice, not even when Paula watched with quiet panic as the car veered off the New York streets and onto the north ramp of the West Side Highway, heading toward the safety of the suburbs. He looked over at her several times, always with a nod and a smile on his face as he kept to t
he speed limit and easily switched from one lane to another. They drove for well over two hours, past the constantly ongoing roadside construction that seemed as much a part of New York life as traffic and potholes, the tall office buildings and apartment complexes disappearing in the distance, replaced by thick trees and suburban sprawl.

  The man, thin, handsome, and well dressed, answered all her questions in a low-key and professional manner. He didn’t raise his voice or move his hands in a threatening way, doing his best not to frighten the girl any more than she was. “Why are you doing this?” she asked at one point, mindful to keep her hands on her lap and her eyes fixed on the driver.

  “We’re just going for a ride,” he said, keeping his focus on the road. “No one wants to hurt you and no one will. I know it’s hard, but you should just try and enjoy the trip. It won’t be long, we’re just about there.”

  “It’s not going to do you any good to ask for money,” Paula said. “We don’t have that much to give. I don’t come from a rich family.”

  “Don’t concern yourself with any of that,” the man said in a reassuring voice. “Just keep thinking that everything is going to work out, and believe me, it will.”

  “Believe you?” Paula said, not hiding the anger in her voice. “I made that mistake once, remember? I’m not going to make it ever again. And you can believe that.”