The united states attorney for the Southern District of New York, Raymond Sullivan, pushed his half-eaten plate of corned beef and cabbage away and wiped a thin mustache of beer foam off his upper lip with a napkin. Al, sitting opposite him in the darkened bar, stubbed out a Marlboro and looked around in vain for a waitress.
"You didn't eat," said Sullivan.
"I try not to eat anything comes out of a steamtable," said Al. "You know how long that shit sits there?"
"They put it up fresh every day he says," said Sullivan.
"Sits there under those light bulbs, people hockin' and sneezin on it. Shit grows under there. Like a petri dish."
"It's not that bad. You exaggerate."
"What I wanna know is—who do I have to fuck to get a beer around here?"
"Here she comes," said Sullivan, indicating a ruddy-faced blond woman with big hips headed their way.
"All done with that?" she asked Sullivan. "Can I get anything for anybody else? Some dessert? Coffee?"
"I'll have another Bass," said Al, curtly.
"Anything for you, sir?" she asked Sullivan.
"Same for me," he said.
After she had returned with their drinks, emptied the ashtray, and left with their empties, Sullivan leaned forward, elbows on the table, and inquired in a hushed voice, "So what's happened?"
"What happened," said Al, "is a couple of our local geniuses supposed to be watching the restaurant go chasing Tommy Pagano halfway across town to some shooting gallery on the Lower East Side. They leave their post, they follow him over there in the surveillance van and then they collar him when he comes out. Oh, they called in first, spoke to some pimply-assed AUSA and told him they got Tommy Pagano comin' outta there and he's gonna be dirty. Problem is—it ain't Tommy Pagano, it's somebody named Michael Ricard. He's the chef down there."
"They didn't get some ID?"
"By this time, they had such a collective hard-on they didn't bother to look."
"How did they—"
"Detective Rizzo says he left the photos home that day. He says he was sure it was Tommy, he just got mixed up."
"Son of a bitch," said Sullivan.
"They were pretty pissed off when they found out. They must have been 'cause they scared the shit out of him. By the time I got down there the guy was ready to deal his own mother."
"So he's agreed to work with us. Is that necessarily a bad thing?" asked Sullivan.
"It's a colossal fuck-up," said Al. "What's this guy gonna tell us we don't already know? What's he gonna tell us we're not hearing from the other guy? I got one fuckin' flake on the payroll already I gotta worry about. I need some junkie dirt-bag?"
"So why didn't we just throw him back?"
"We have to keep him. We couldn't have him running around talking about how two detectives just happened to see him coming out of the restaurant and decided to follow him across town. He's been around, this guy. He's not stupid."
"So why didn't they just say they saw him coming out of the building. They just happened to be there."
"That's what they said they said, the detectives. But who knows? They were starting in on the pitch right after they got him in the van. They called him Tommy for Christ's sake. There's no way they get the toothpaste back in the tube. We have to keep him now," said Al.
Sullivan winced. Al took a long drink of ale.
"Anyway, I talked to him. Why not? I can always use a new friend, right? Right away he wants to give us Harvey. Harvey cheats on his taxes, he says. Harvey's got something sinister going with Sally Wig. Harvey meets with strange men in suits. Yawn."
"So he didn't tell us anything useful?"
"Well, he says he's good friends with young Tommy. He says they're close. Says Tommy's a good kid, doesn't even like his uncle, says he's embarrassed by him."
"I don't blame him," said Sullivan. "Anything else?"
"One point of casual interest," said Al. "Seems they got two kinds of dinner checks at the Dreadnaught—You got your white ones and you got your off-white ones. End of the night, Harvey throws all the off-white ones in the garbage."
"So your dentist friend is skimming," said Sullivan.
Al shrugged. "Personally, I don't give a shit. He's a restaurateur, right? If he didn't steal it would look suspicious."
"So like it or not, since this chef fell in our lap, we have to keep him," said Sullivan.
"He's ours now. For better or worse," said Al.
"What a mess."
"I tried to make the best of a bad situation," said Al. "I told him, he's such good pals with Tommy he can get next to him for us. I reminded him of the thousand and one delights of a detox out at Riker's. We had a nice talk. I told him to go back there and concentrate on Tommy. I said I don't care if you have to suck his dick for him but get close to him."
"What does Tommy get us?"
"Maybe we can trade up." Al paused, leaned forward, and low ered his voice. "I had a very interesting talk about Tommy with Harvey. I looked at some pictures they got the other night. This is where we come to fuck-up number two. Last week, you remember, we got some pictures of Skinny di Milito dropping by the restaurant service entrance at two-thirty in the morning. Half an hour later, Sally comes by with a Mr. Freddy Manso. So, I ask Harvey about that and he tells me the night before, Sally calls him up and tells him he should give the porters the night off. He wants a little privacy, he says, to talk to somebody. So there's nobody else there but Sally and Skinny and Freddy. And who lets them in the door? Tommy."
"So where's the fuck-up?" asked Sullivan.
"Problem is they got pictures of everybody going in but they missed them coming out," said Al.
"This is a fuckin' nightmare. Son of a bitch. What are they, fucking sleeping out there?"
Al shrugged. "That's why I wanted Bureau guys watching the place. So we got Sally and Skinny and Freddy and Tommy getting together in the middle of the night, and they don't want anybody watching," said Al.
"I remember Skinny. We know him. A real piece of work," said Sullivan. "But what does it mean? So Sally has a party with his nephew and a couple of friends. Sally's Supper Club. Big deal."
"What makes it interesting is Freddy Manso. Freddy's not even in Sally's crew. What's Sally doing with Freddy? He's with Philly Black over the fish market. And from what I hear nobody's too fond of him over there. He's a gofer, a nobody, a wannabe. He's not a made guy. What makes the uninteresting Freddy Manso so interesting is that nobody seems to have seen him lately—and even more significant, nobody's looking."
"Ah," said Sullivan, settling into his chair. "So we think Freddy's gone. Never to return. Rest in pieces. Is that it?"
"That would be my guess," said Al. "Of course my guess would be a lot better, we had some pictures, see who came out of there."
"You know there's talk of a grand jury hearing testimony on control of the fish market," said Sullivan. "I'm not saying there is one. Just that there might be."
"Uh-huh," said Al skeptically. "So maybe somebody started to wonder about Freddy."
"Could be, could be," said Sullivan. "So now we have to play catch-up. Dig ourselves out of the shit. I'm gonna be hearing it from some people about Freddy, I can tell you that for sure. We don't know for sure anything about who, when, or how anybody left the restaurant. Is that right?"
"That's right," said Al.
"So Tommy has to be the one if we're talking about adding a homicide."
"I wouldn't want to count on it," said Al.
"But it's worth taking a run at him."
"The way things are, yeah, sure," said Al. "That's the prevailing wisdom anyway."
"Have you been listening to the tapes we're getting?" asked Sullivan.
"Yeah," said Al, glumly.
"We've got two extensions on the Title Threes for Sally's apartment already. I'm on my second on the pay phone outside the Evergreen and I don't think the judge is going to go for another," said Sullivan.
"The pay phone is giving us nothing," said Al. "A bunch of old men making bets. Bitching about their losses. We get a lot of'Did you see the guy?' 'The guy down there?' 'No, the guy from the other place,' that sort of thing. They're careful."
"And Sally's place?"
"Sally doesn't own a telephone. That's a nonstarter over there. You read the transcripts from the room bug? You should for a laugh. Hour after hour of Sally watching cartoons. He likes The Jetsons you know. Sally watching Met games. Sally farting. He does a lot of that, especially when he's alone. Sally arguing with his bimbo, asking her if she thinks he looks fat. She says he looks 'husky.' "
"Maybe we should tickle the wire a little bit," suggested Sullivan.
"You can tickle the wire all you want. Sally doesn't entertain at his place. Just the odd bimbo now and again. He has any of the fellas over, it's only for a minute, they don't talk much. You can listen all you want, all you're gonna find out is Sally's got bad gas and a crush on Judy Jetson."
"So it's got to be Tommy," said Sullivan.
"I guess. A real criminal mastermind all of a sudden, our Tommy," said Al.
"Ask your CI what he thinks Tommy's doing. What's Tommy doing in a place with a bunch of known LCN associates? Follow up on this. Tell the other one, the chef, to keep us apprised of young Mr. Pagano's activities. I want to know what the fuck is going on before this whole thing falls apart."
"What about the Brooklyn end?" asked Al. "Harvey's into them for twenty long."
"I don't know what to do about that," said Sullivan. "I was thinking that's something we can tickle Sally with at some point in the future. I don't know. If this murder thing pans out I may just give the Brooklyn DA a lay-up."
"You don't want to do anything there, right now?"
"I don't want to go down that road at this precise moment. Later. We might want to piss somebody off at some point. The Brooklyn thing might do that."
"Okay," said Al.
"Let's see what happens with Tommy. Tommy interests me."