IT’D BEEN A PERFECTLY miserable morning, but it was over, now, and Stanley Moodrow was determined to put it behind him. He and Betty had arrived at La Guardia Airport’s Delta Terminal forty-five minutes before her plane’s scheduled takeoff only to face the usual indefinite delay. For the next two hours, he’d perched on a hard plastic chair, balancing a coffee container and a glazed doughnut on one knee while he listened to her talk about Michael Alamare, the five-year-old boy she’d risked her own life to save. The usual airport mix of scruffy college kids, briefcase-toting executives, and immigrant families lugging taped boxes and young children had swirled about them, coming and going in response to the public-address system. Yet, despite the buzz of conversation, a buzz that at times threatened to become a roar, they’d somehow created a space that was entirely their own, a space into which nothing could intrude.
Except, of course, Moodrow’s guilty conscience. And it wasn’t just the half-truth he’d pushed on her the night before. No, far worse, even as he’d listened to her, as he’d sympathized, nodded at the right moments, taken her hand, kissed her good-bye, a part of him was lining up a strategy that led from Leonora’s unexpected appearance to the apprehension of Jilly Sappone.
What it is, he told himself as he walked through the doors of the Seventh Precinct, is that I’m just not what you call a sensitive type. After forty years in the crime business, I’m a hardened urban warrior. My psychic armor is …
“Hey, Moodrow, you turn fuckin’ senile or what?”
Moodrow stopped short, realized that he’d giggled out loud. He looked over at the desk sergeant, a twenty-year veteran named Martin O’Dowd, and shrugged.
“I wouldn’t deny it. What’s doin’, O’Dowd?”
“Ya mean, since the last time you were in here bustin’ balls?” He laughed shortly. “What’s doin’, Moodrow, is crime and punishment. The same doin’ that was doin’ when you were doin’. If ya get what I’m aimin’ at.”
Moodrow nodded, took a deep breath, remembered that when he was still a cop he’d despised the house, avoiding it for weeks at a time. Now, he sucked at the mingled odors of anger and despair, disinfectant and mold, sweat-soaked crack addicts and homeless men who hadn’t seen a shower in months. He lapped them up like a sick junkie looking for his get-well fix.
“Jim Tilley around?”
O’Dowd shook his head. “Tilley caught a multiple up in Stuyvesant Town.”
“That’s out of the precinct.”
“Hey, you wanna listen or you wanna tell me the fuckin’ sky is blue?” O’Dowd paused briefly to drive his point home. “Detective Tilley said you should get your ass up there, said it could be related. The scene is on Avenue C, near Sixteenth Street.”
Moodrow took a last sniff, then stepped back into the sunlight. He looked around for a cab, but the yellows had their off-duty signs lit and there wasn’t a gypsy to be seen. In an earlier time, of course, he’d have simply hitched a ride in the first patrol car to come along. Now he’d have to hoof it.
He walked north, under the Williamsburg Bridge and up Pitt Street toward Houston. Pitt Street was a notorious drug center, even by the standards of the Lower East Side. The junkies called it a twenty-four/seven spot, meaning it was open twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. No matter what, no matter when—if you had the bank, you could always get well on Pitt Street.
“Yo, coke, crack, dope, smoke.”
“Jums, baby. The sweetes’ the bes’.”
“Got the baaaad shit, here, bro. Take the worl’ offen yo chest. Give you a positive mutha-fuckin’ attitude.”
Moodrow ignored the offers, avoiding eye contact without looking away, demanding his space, but offering no disrespect. It was a trick everybody in the neighborhood, male or female, young or old, tried to learn. To be neither predator, nor prey, a true noncombatant. For the very young, the disabled, the elderly, for anyone who couldn’t maintain the fiction, it was, of course, pure hell.
Everybody blamed the cops, and not without reason. After all, if the dealers would hawk their wares to a sixty-year-old white man in a business suit, they wouldn’t shrink from an undercover cop in a sweatshirt. So if mutts weren’t arrested, if they weren’t punished, it was because the cops were corrupt, or lazy, or …
The truth was a lot sadder. The NYPD made nearly twenty thousand felony drug arrests every year, busting users and dealers alike, while the prosecutors and judges did their level best to send them to jail. None of it had more than a temporary effect on the drug business, the number of dealers and addicts remaining virtually constant from year to year despite the billions spent on law enforcement. Coping with that reality, if you were unfortunate enough to live in a drug-saturated neighborhood, was a simple fact of life.
But where, Moodrow wondered, did that leave him? He had the money to move out. If he chose to stay on the Lower East Side because he’d lived there all his life, there was no way he could whine about it. Besides, it wasn’t Stanley Moodrow who’d been stuffed into a trash basket.
He was crossing Thirteenth Street when he caught his first glimpse of the Avenue C crime scene—just the flashing lights of a cruiser dyeing the brick a deep, rich crimson. It was enough to push every other consideration into the background. He picked up the pace, drank in the scene as he closed the distance.
The crowd was small, a few pedestrians, a knot of Con Ed workers in blue hard hats, several print reporters trying to edge close enough for a shot of the bloodstained sidewalk. A half dozen patrol cars—their lights flashing, radios screaming, doors open—were nosed up against the yellow crime-scene tape. Behind them, four black Dodge sedans formed a protective half circle, effectively blocking southbound traffic while forcing the curious to the east side of the avenue.
For Moodrow, the scene had a timeless quality. He evaluated the chaos as he approached, found it to be controlled, the uniforms and the detectives standing outside the tape while a forensic team gathered evidence.
“Hey, pop, you goin’ somewhere?”
Moodrow pulled up, remembered that he wasn’t a cop anymore, that the miniature badge and the ID card declaring him RETIRED wouldn’t mean squat to the young patrolman holding the small spiral notebook.
“You the recorder?” The job of the first patrolman to reach any crime scene was to seal it off, then record the name of anyone, from the sergeant to the commissioner, who entered.
“Yeah. You a cop?” His face registered open disbelief, one blond eyebrow rising into the shadow of his cap.
“Retired. I’m lookin’ for a suit named Jim Tilley. You register him on the scene?”
The patrolman ran down the list of names on his sheet.
“Yeah, he came in thirty minutes ago.”
“You wouldn’t know where he is now?”
“He didn’t leave me his schedule but I hear they got a second stiff inside the complex. Found her dead when they went to notify this one’s next-of-kin. Maybe your man dropped in to have a look. The ME’s still up there.”
Five minutes later, Moodrow stepped out of an elevator at 1277 Avenue C, to confront still another patrolman. This one had dark red hair and a thin mustache but, to Moodrow, he looked exactly like his brother. He looked like a baby.
“I’m trying to locate Detective Jim Tilley. He inside?”
The cop glanced at his book. “Yeah, I’ll get him.” He leaned back through the open doorway, yelled, “Detective Tilley. You got a visitor.”
Jim Tilley appeared a moment later. He smiled apologetically as he explained why he couldn’t get his friend inside. “It’s not my squeal, Stanley. I’m a beggar here, myself.”
Moodrow nodded thoughtfully, just as if the smell of blood drifting through the open door wasn’t calling to him like the sirens called Ulysses. “I understand. What’s the connection with Sappone?”
“The victim inside is Carol Pierce. She was a witness in the case that put Sappone away.”
“No shit. And the one outside?”
“Her boyfriend. Guy named Patsy Gullo.”
“Gullo works for Carmine Stettecase.”
Tilley leaned back against the wall. He pulled a stick of chewing gum from his shirt pocket, took his time getting it into his mouth. “What can I say, Stanley? I’m impressed. Is there anybody you don’t know?”
Moodrow shrugged. “Look, Betty’s plane was delayed and I have to meet Leonora at the hospital in a half hour. Why don’t we get down to business. Do you have a witness who can make Sappone?”
“Are you kidding? We got a balding white male between twenty-five and forty-five years of age. Five-six to six feet tall. Hair gray or blonde or brown. Driving or being driven in a white, blue, or light green Toyota, Chevy, Nissan …”
“Okay, Jim. I heard enough. What about Carol Pierce? I can smell the blood from out here.”
Tilley looked serious for the first time. He spoke through pinched lips. “The prick took her apart with a can opener. He taped her mouth and hands, then dragged her into the bathroom. There was no sign of a struggle.”
“That’s not Jilly’s style.”
“Maybe not. Gullo was taken out with a single shot to the head. A pure mob hit.”
Moodrow touched the bandage on the back of his head. The wound was healing, the stitches pulling tight. “Sappone had a partner when he took Buster Levy. It’s gotta be someone he knew in the joint. Anybody working on that?”
“Yeah, me. I got a call in to the warden’s office in Attica. Prisoners don’t mingle with each other at Southport.” Tilley pushed himself away from the wall. “Look, I got no reason to hang around here. Give me a second to say good-bye and I’ll drive you over to the hospital.”
“I got a question,” Moodrow said, “that keeps coming back to me.” He was sitting next to Jim Tilley, staring down at a prison photo of Jilly Sappone. Taken five years ago, it revealed a cleanshaven, balding man with a sharp, bent nose and a thick, prominent chin. “How did Sappone get out of prison? Leonora told me the board turned him down, then reversed itself. How often does that happen?”
Tilley pulled the Dodge out in front of a taxi, endured the blaring response. “Don’t know, Stanley. I just get ’em into prison. Letting ’em out isn’t up to me.”
“Yeah, fine.” Moodrow continued to stare down at the photograph. He traced the lines on Sappone’s brow, from the edge of his forehead to the sharp delta between his eyes. “Look, I’ve got a bad feeling about the parole board.”
“You think somebody reached them?”
Moodrow shook his head. “The problem is I can’t see who or how. Carmine wouldn’t do it, even if he had the muscle. And if Jilly ratted to get himself an early parole, why hasn’t anyone been arrested? Where’s the Grand Jury investigation?” He paused for a moment, shook his head again. “I wanna play it safe. Don’t tell anybody at the house where Ann Kalkadonis is staying. The hospital or where she goes later. Nobody.”
“Might be too late for that.” Tilley passed on the details of Sappone’s phone call to the two agents, Ewing and Holtzmann. He made no attempt to convey the quality of the experience, mentioning Sappone’s Jekyll-and-Hyde mood swing in the same matter-of-fact tone he used to state the man’s final demand. “The fibbies decided they had to tell her. They want to cover their asses, let the victim make the final decision.” He glanced at his watch. It was nearly two o’clock. “They’ve most likely been and gone by now.”