ANY RESIDUAL ANNOYANCE MOODROW might have been nursing vanished the minute he opened the door. Leonora Higgins was absolutely resplendent in a gold double-breasted jacket with jet-black panels on either side, a black skirt that fell to mid calf, and a scoop-necked silk blouse. Understated gold earrings complemented the amber beads worked into her long jheri curls, while a string of polished black stones—onyx, Moodrow guessed—gleamed quietly against her deep brown throat. If she hadn’t been carrying a briefcase, Moodrow would have taken her for an uptown matron come to the slums in search of a cheap thrill.
“Very nice, Leonora,” Moodrow said as she passed. “But you better dump the curls if you wanna be District Attorney. Unless you plan to campaign by scaring the ethnics. Which strategy would be a big mistake.”
All three understood the comment. It was impossible to win borough-wide office in Manhattan with the support of a single block of voters. Black candidates needed white liberals and a decent piece of the Jewish vote; white candidates had to hold their own in line while appealing to conservative Latinos, to Cubans and South Americans.
“Doesn’t matter,” Leonora said. “Morgenthau’s gonna run again.” Robert Morgenthau was the Manhattan district attorney and would continue to be until he quit or died. “But I’m only forty. I can wait.”
“Forty?” Betty stared at Leonora’s unlined face and shook her head. “It doesn’t seem possible.”
“Is that a compliment?”
Betty, to their mutual surprise, took the question seriously. “It’s more than the beauty, Leonora, though I admit I’d kill for those eyes. It’s the energy, the optimism. I don’t think I’ve ever seen you down.”
Leonora eyed Betty speculatively. “Something’s bothering you, Ms. Haluka. And, being a former FBI agent and an experienced trial lawyer, I think you want to tell me about it.”
Moodrow spent the next twenty minutes pretending to watch the Yankees pound the crap out of their ancient enemies, the Boston Red Sox, while he listened to Betty unburden herself in the kitchen. There was nothing, Moodrow knew, Leonora could say to make it better. Betty had to go through it, accept the pain, and come out the other side. He’d done it often enough in his own life, most recently eight years before when Greta Bloom, who’d been his friend and mentor for almost fifty years, had taken nine months to die of a stroke.
For Betty, of course, the process was just beginning and Moodrow knew she was now more frightened than sorrowful, that she was still hoping for a miracle, hoping some steely-eyed surgeon with the hands of a concert pianist would put Marilyn back together.
“Mr. Moodrow?” Betty was standing in the doorway. Her eyes were moist, her mascara smeared. “The doctor will see you now.”
Moodrow let her pass without saying a word. He waited until the door to their bedroom closed behind her, then entered the kitchen and sat down.
“I know I came at a bad time,” Leonora began.
“This is true.”
Leonora flashed a dazzling smile; a shake of her head rattled the beads worked into her braided hair. “Stanley, you’re a prick.”
“This is also true,” Moodrow conceded. He spun on the chair, took a bottle of Wild Turkey from the cabinet behind him, poured three fingers of bourbon into a glass. “Actually, I gotta thank you. Betty needed to talk about her troubles and what I am, I guess, is good for other things.”
“That’s not true.”
Moodrow waved her off. “For now, it’s true.” He sipped at his drink, let the smoky liquid sit in his mouth for a moment before swallowing. “I don’t wanna be abrupt, Leonora, but as you can see, I got other things on my mind. So, as they say in the hood, whassup?”
“Maybe I ought to come back tomorrow. This is fairly complicated.”
“Leonora, you wouldn’t be sitting here if I was the one who picked up the phone. Meanwhile, Betty invited you, so I can’t very well kick you out.” He spun the glass on the table, looked down at his hands. “Maybe your timing wasn’t so bad, after all. Right now, I’m lookin’ for work.”
“Don’t jump to conclusions. You might change your mind before I’m finished.” Higgins took a folder out of her briefcase, laid it on the table. “As you know, for the last several years I’ve been working as an unofficial liaison between the shelters for battered women and the Manhattan DA’s office. I help get orders of protection, push the cops to look for the husbands, talk to sentencing judges. It’s strictly voluntary, of course. I do it on my own time.”
“For the brownie points?” Moodrow couldn’t help interrupting.
“That’s part of it,” Higgins admitted, “but it’s also something I believe in. Most of the women I see have been in abusive relationships for years. They really don’t believe that law enforcement is on their side. Maybe that’s because they all have stories about cops looking the other way.” She paused for a moment to stare into Moodrow’s eyes.
“There’s two sides to that story,” Moodrow responded evenly. “The other side starts with assaulted women who swear out complaints, then don’t show up to testify. I’ve had women attack me when I went to arrest their husbands. Women beaten so bad they should be in a hospital coming off a couch to jump on my back. Most cops, male or female, become cynical after a while. Just like the victims.”
Leonora put her briefcase on the floor. “I didn’t come here to argue, Stanley. Let’s say my job is to confront that cynicism, to encourage both sides.”
“I’ll drink to that.” He raised his glass, drained it, waited a moment for the alcohol to wash through his body before continuing. “And I thank you for not asking what happened to my head.”
“If you’re referring to that bandage on the back of your skull, I was hoping you’d tell me on your own.”
“No chance. I’ve been to confession three times in the last four hours and my sins, as they say, have been forgiven. Let’s get down to business.”
Higgins picked up the file, glanced at it briefly. “Two days ago, the Department of Corrections released a prisoner serving fifteen to life for murder. Seven or eight hours later, this prisoner turned up on the Lower East Side with a partner. They held up a plumbing supply store on Ludlow Street, then went to the apartment of the prisoner’s ex-wife where they assaulted the wife, sexually and physically, then kidnapped the wife’s four-year-old daughter. The wife is in Kings County Hospital. She’s conscious and she wants her child back.”
“Is that where I come in? You want me to find the kid?” Moodrow’s head had finally stopped hurting.
“I don’t think that’s the question you want to ask.”
“You’re right.” Moodrow read Leonora’s expression as a mix of determination and curiosity, her gaze as the gaze of a born prosecutor. The political wanna-be had vanished. “The question I want to ask is real simple. Why me? Why not the cops? Why not your old buddies at the Federal Bureau of Incompetence?”
Leonora leaned over the table. “I came to you, Stanley, because, with one exception, you know all the parties. You know the wife, the child, and the perp. You know all their friends and all their associates.”
“Spill it.”
“The wife’s name is Ann Kalkadonis, the daughter’s name is Theresa-Marie, the ex-husband’s name is …”
“Jilly Sappone.” Moodrow noted Leonora’s quick grin. Her large, even teeth reminded him of a closed trap. “How long was he in prison?”
“Fourteen years.”
“I can’t believe they let him out.”
“That’s part of the puzzle, Stanley, because the parole board turned him down last September, then reversed itself. He was paroled directly out of the Southport Correctional Facility.”
“Southport? That’s the maxi-maxi prison, right? The new one?”
“It is.”
“I thought they only put you there if you were too crazy to be anywhere else.”
“You thought right, Stanley. According to the Department of Corrections, Jilly Sappone committed more than a hundred acts of violence before they shipped him off to Southport.”
Moodrow poured himself a second drink, took a moment to sift through his cop’s memory, to let the bits and pieces rise to the surface. “Jilly Sappone, best case, leads to Carmine Stettecase through his aunt, Josephine Rizzo. Her daughter, Mary, is married to Carmine’s son, Tommaso. Carmine is pretty big on the Lower East Side, but not big enough to fix the parole board. Maybe he reached up the ladder, called in some markers. But it still doesn’t make sense, because …”
“Look, Stanley, whatever happened up in Southport is dead and done. It’s irrelevant, because Jilly Sappone will never see the outside world again.”
“Aren’t you getting ahead of yourself? You haven’t got him yet.”
Higgins smiled, flipped her right hand, palm up, into the space between them. “Well, that’s why I’m here, isn’t it? The child, Theresa, isn’t related to Jilly Sappone. Jilly hasn’t demanded ransom, either. So, why did he take her?”
“Three reasons.” Moodrow took Leonora’s glass, refilled it from a bottle of chardonnay in the refrigerator. As he closed the refrigerator door, he recalled a time, before he met Betty, when the only thing in his refrigerator was ice. “First, he’s crazy. Second, he’s stupid. Third, he hates his wife. Jilly has what the shrinks like to call ‘poor impulse control.’ Most likely, he didn’t plan on taking the kid. It just happened.”
“And how long will he keep her?”
Moodrow shook his head. “Save the guilt for a jury, Leonora. I know what the stakes are.” He stared down into his glass, tried to reconcile the contradictions. The last really dangerous animal he’d hunted was Davis Craddock, the cult leader. How long ago had that been? Four years? Five? It seemed like a hundred.
“Jilly Sappone,” he finally said, “will try to kill you, me, or anyone else who comes after him. How can I ask Betty to carry that baggage? It’s gonna be hard enough out in Los Angeles.”
“I’m not asking you to capture Sappone. Just to help find him.”
“And suppose I get close. Suppose I get close and he’s still got the kid. You want me to drop a dime, call the cops, hope they don’t fuck it up?” He stopped abruptly, waited for some kind of a response. When he realized that Leonora had nothing to say, he continued. “A little history lesson. Carmine Stettecase went into business just about the same time I went into the cops. Which was just about the time the Italians started moving out of the city. By the time Jilly Sappone came along, Carmine and his partner, Dominick Favara, now dead, were running the rackets on the Lower East Side. I mean all the loan sharks, pimps, bookies, and heroin dealers paid him tribute. Jilly, meanwhile, had a rep for being the wildest kid in a very tough neighborhood. By age sixteen, he’d been up in Spofford twice, the last time for a year.”
Moodrow paused again. He was going on too long, dragging it out because he didn’t want to see her leave. Because he didn’t want his “no” to become final. “What I’m getting at is this—Dominick and Carmine were Jilly’s role models. Without them, he was just another terminal psychopath and he knew it. So when Carmine’s son married Jilly’s cousin, Jilly asked him for a job. It was only natural, right? And it was only natural that Carmine, who has a sentimental attachment to the old neighborhood, set his new relative up to collect the vig for a connected loan shark named Paulie Marrano. Now, it’s a funny thing about collecting money from deadbeats with dope or gambling habits. You gotta be strong, but you can’t forget that dead men don’t pay you back. Likewise if you get ’em so shit-scared they figure the cops are their only hope. Unfortunately, Jilly was unable to grasp the subtleties. Maybe he figured that being in the family, he was immune to discipline. Or maybe he tried, but he just couldn’t control himself. Whatever way it went down, Jilly Sappone became a royal pain in the ass. He fought with everybody, killed at least three people, though …”
Moodrow, as he picked up his glass, saw Betty out of the corner of his eye. She was standing in the doorway, her face a closed, neutral mask. He started to get up, thought better of it, suddenly realized that this is what he’d been waiting for all along. That Betty Haluka, unlike himself, wasn’t obliged to say, “No.”