TWENTY-TWO
“THAT HORRIBLE MATRON,” snarled Sybel. “She taped the damn thing to my nipple.” Sybel clutched her sweater at the side of her breast and yanked. Tape ripped.
We sat savoring the outdoors on a bench graffitied with Chinese characters and English obscenities in Columbus Square, a concrete pocket park behind the Criminal Court Building from which five minutes earlier we had been released, with strings attached. Technicians had taped listening devices to our bare chests. I had envisioned space-age microchips straight out of Mission Impossible, but these were nothing more than small tape recorders. Watson had buzzed about nervously re-explaining what the technicians had already told us, belaboring the obvious: flip the switch to ON when we were going in for the setup, otherwise leave it OFF to conserve the batteries; and the setup had to happen today. Never mind that we had no idea how to get in touch with Pine, even if we wanted to. As Watson had opened the last door, he came on all avuncular and trustworthy. “Don’t worry,” he had said. “My people will monitor you every step of the way.”
“Do you have any money?” Sybel asked me.
“Yes.” Watson had returned my envelope of personal belongings.
“Will you buy me a pack of cigarettes?”
I bought cigarettes and two cups of stagnant coffee from a Chinese lunch counter on the corner of Bayard and Mulberry, and the cashier wished me a nice day. I wanted time to halt while I slept for about three days, no thinking, worrying, or scheming, but first I wanted to sit on the Chinese bench beneath the lovely English plane tree and drink coffee, never mind the slack drizzle, with Sybel, the only other person in the world who shared my experience, if not my obsession. Kids played stickball on the wet cobblestones.
“I can’t go back in there, Artie. Whatever happens, I can’t go back in that cell.”
“Maybe we can think of something,” I said, but I doubted it, feeling my body sliding toward lassitude. Energy and hope waned together. What could we do? Certainly not visit Pine wearing wires.
Sybel said, “I’ve been thinking about—” And she pointed to the place beneath her right breast where her wire was taped. She pulled me close to her mouth and whispered the rest, her lips brushing my ear. She asked me why we should trust the on/off switches. What if they were phonies? What if Watson, even now, was listening in?
“Excuse me, Sybel. I’ll get us some more coffee.” Next door to the Chinese luncheonette was a Chinese electronics store, where I bought two of the cheapest and tiniest radios ever made in Taiwan. I tuned both to the all-news station—“Give us twenty-two minutes, we’ll give you the world”—handed one to Sybel, and as surreptitiously as possible, we tucked them beneath our shirts next to Watson’s ear. Hell, this was thinking. Maybe there was still hope.
“Can I take about six showers at your place before I go home?”
“Seven,” I said.
“Do you have cab fare?”
“Can you carry me to the curb?”
We didn’t need to travel any farther than that. A cab was waiting. We named our destination and headed west on Canal. Sleep gripped me by the shoulders and gently drew me back in the seat.
“Jesus!” Sybel said.
“Wha—?”
“Look who’s driving!”
Cobb! He wore a Mets cap with phony black hair spilling out from behind. “We need to have a little sit-down, you and me, but you got so-called agents hanging off you like warts, so we got to take unusual steps.”
“Why can’t you just leave us alone!” Sybel squealed, and struck the door panel with a soft fist.
“I’m sorry, Sybel, but those are my murders, and I want ‘em,” said Cobb.
“Do you know they held her incommunicado for twenty-four hours?” I demanded.
“Of course I know. Things are way out of hand. That’s why we need to have this sit-down. Sybel, I didn’t have anything to do with the way you were treated inside. I tried to stop it.”
“You failed,” she said.
Cobb, playing cabbie to the hilt, laid on the horn when the bakery truck in front lagged at the light. “By the way, Artie, Sal Loccatuchi went up and walked your dog last night.”
“He did?”
“Billie’s killer’s gonna walk, and that offends my professional pride. Cops got professional pride just like anybody else. Hey, what’s that noise?” Cobb pivoted in his seat, and I showed him our broadcast system. He grinned at Sybel and me in turn. “Smart. Smart but not necessary. They don’t work.”
“They don’t?”
“Nope. My guys set them up. They’ll record about twenty seconds, then drop dead. Mysteriously. That’s how far out of hand things are.”
“So you and the FBI are playing a game of steal the bacon, and we’re the bacon.”
“Steal the bacon. Yeah, I remember that. Those fucking college boys don’t care about my murders. They think they got a shot at the wiseguys, get promoted off the street, as if they ever been on the street. The street is mine. The college boys think Pine’s gonna turn over as easy as Jay Kiley did. Do you folks know what went down in Moxie, Florida?”
“I do. Sybel doesn’t, because she was in jail having her civil rights denied.”
“The college boys get word that this asshole Jay Kiley’s down in Moxie asking a lot of questions about Harry Pine, and they lean on him. It comes out Kiley’s working for one Billie Burke. But then she gets killed. That’s where you come stumbling in. When Sybel told them about the photos, they sent Kiley out to Shea to buy them from you, then make Kiley use them to set Harry Pine up, get it? But you told Kiley to fuck himself.”
“You mean Kiley was wearing one of these wires when he met with me?”
“Sure. You dicked up their plan—until Ricky Ricardo gets whacked in front of your place. Then they got an excuse to lean on you directly, make you set up Pine. Get a stupid idea and stick with it no matter what, even if it means stepping all over my murders with their Bass fucking Weejuns.”
“What happened to Jay?”
“Disappeared. Maybe we’ll find his body, maybe not. Maybe he got smart and moved to Singapore, but smart doesn’t seem his style. Kiley used the Moxie dirt to blackmail the doctors, while Billie used it to blackmail Harry Pine. That about the size of it?”
“I don’t know.”
“You don’t? I think you do. The college boys think just lay a few half-assed murder charges on Pine he’ll sing about his wiseguy bosses. Get Mr. Big or some shit. Here’s Pine, a big war hero, he’s gonna fall apart in front of some college boys with their dorks caught in their zippers? Right. Am I going too fast for you? You happen to know Pine’s a big Mafia pilot?”
“Yes.”
“Pretty knowledgeable guy.”
“Sybel doesn’t know about that, because she was being held—”
“Yeah, yeah, I know.”
“Let me ask you something,” said Sybel. “Suppose Harry Pine decides we’re a problem for him. What do you think he’d do?”
“You’d probably go the way of Jay Kiley.”
“Yeah, and that would be good for the college boys, wouldn’t it? As a way to get to Pine. How do we know that’s not their plan? And how do we know that’s not your plan?”
“Come on, Sybel, I represent the NYPD, not the FBI. We don’t set up our own CIs. See, Pine’s got some problems I mean to exploit. There’s a drug war brewing between the wiseguys and the spics. Used to be the wiseguys ran that show, but now the Colombian gentlemen are getting too big for their sombreros, and the wiseguys are getting edgy. How’s that Pine’s problem? Because he’s got two Colombian rats in his organization. No, one Colombian rat, now Ricky Ricardo got capped.”
“Jones?”
“Yeah, Jones. I want you—wearing my wire—to go tell Pine about Jones. Tell him you overheard the college boys talking about it before they released you. That’s how I got it, the fuck-ups. He’s going to have to get rid of Jones. Then I get rid of him.” Cobb dangled two tape recorders, identical to those taped to our nipples, over the backseat. “You wear these, tell Pine about Jones the rat. That’s all there is to it. My guys will be behind you every step of the way. We’re not incompetent buttholes like the college boys. Except for Billie’s note. You give me that and I’ll get her killer.”
“We want two things in return,” I said.
“Yeah, what?”
“I want you to leave Leon Palomino alone. That’s one.”
“Why’s that? Because he saved your life gunning Ricardo?”
“No.”
“That might be tough. Since the college boys put a tap on your phone, they know he burned down the store and about your meeting at Shea. They set up to arrest him there, college-boy dragnet, only Palomino beat the shit out of three so-called agents and escaped.” Cobb giggled almost boyishly.
“Leave Sybel out of this entirely. That’s two.”
“What are you, some kind of hero?” she asked.
“There’s no need for you to go to Pine,” I said to her. Then to Cobb I said, “Sybel’s going home to her daughter or there’s no deal.”
“Jeez, you really got me this time.”
Sure. I really had him. I leaned back in the seat. Sybel took my hand in hers. “What’s a CI?” she asked.
“A CI? That’s what you are. A confidential informant.”
Artie Deemer, CI, RIP.