THE LAST THING A near-exhausted Carmine Stettecase expected to find as he entered his darkened study at a quarter to five on the morning of his personal liberation was his nerdy son, Tommaso, pursuing a little liberation of his own. Yet there he was, a shadow within a shadow, strapping Carmine’s three-million-dollar trunk onto a chrome luggage carrier.
“Tommaso?”
“Don’t move, Pop.”
Carmine squinted, tried to peer through the darkness. He couldn’t really see the gun in Tommaso’s raised hand, but he decided to stop anyway. Carmine, having spent a good deal of his life on the right side of a weapon, had a great respect for firearms.
“Can I turn on the light, Tommy? So’s we could talk about what you’re doin’ here?”
“Okay, Pop. Just shut the door.”
At first, Carmine could do no more than blink, then his eyes adjusted to the light and he saw that Tommaso did indeed have a gun clutched in his bony hand, a big, fat revolver, probably a .44. Worse yet, Tommaso’s bony hand was shaking uncontrollably and the hammer was cocked.
“C’mon, Tommy, take it easy. You could see I’m not strapped.” Carmine’s gray silk pajamas encased his body like a sausage skin because of all the pre-deal eating. They were definitely tight enough to eliminate the possibility of any concealed weapon larger than a hat pin.
“Stand over against the wall, pop, while I finish.” Tommaso waited for his father to comply, then put the revolver on Carmine’s desk. Though he hadn’t held a gun in twenty years, Tommaso knew the report of a large-caliber pistol would bring his mother running and he didn’t want to kill his mother.
“This okay, Tommy?” Carmine, over his initial shock, fought a rising anger. There was a time in his life when he’d have taken the pistol away from Tommy, taken it away and rammed it between his son’s narrow cheeks. Unfortunately, that time was twenty years and a hundred pounds ago. “You know you can’t get away with this. I’ve got two guys watching the house. Whatta ya think they’re gonna do if they see you walk out with that trunk? I mean it’s five o’clock in the morning, Tommy. That’s a hard time to sneak.”
“I told them to go home.” Tommaso pulled the carrier’s straps tight around the trunk, then hooked them into the crossbar. “Last night after you went to sleep. I told them you said they should go home and get some rest before the big day.”
Carmine’s jaw dropped. “What do you know about the big day?”
“I know everything, pop. When, where, who, how … everything.”
“You bugged me, you cocksucker.” Carmine, overwhelmed, took a step forward. He was ready to go to war until his son picked up the revolver. Then he stopped, began to tremble, raised a single accusing finger. “How could you do that to your father?”
Tommaso shrugged, put the revolver back on the desk. “I just wanted to be there.” He tilted the luggage carrier back, then recentered the strap. “It was so easy, pop. I waited until you and mom were out, then wired a transmitter into the base of the chandelier.” Rising to his full height, he turned to face his father. “But I never meant to do you any harm until you kicked me out. That wasn’t right, pop. All these years you been keepin’ me in the house and now you wanna dump me.” Tommy let the carrier down and folded his arms across his chest. “It’s just not right.”
Carmine, unable to come up with a counterargument, shifted his weight nervously and wished with all his might for an oven-warmed cheese Danish. There was no way he could let that trunk walk out the door with his son and he didn’t want to die on an empty stomach.
“Tell me something, Tommy.” Carmine tried to keep his voice gentle, let the force of his argument drive the message home. “Where the fuck are you gonna go? You ain’t hardly been out of the house in years.”
Tommaso shook his head. After all this time, his father still didn’t get it. Alone, locked into his little room with the door shut and the drapes pulled tight across the window, he could travel at the speed of light. Computers into computers into computers, an entire world connected by tiny fibers. He had friends everywhere.
“I guess I’ll have to try to get along the best way I can, pop.”
“And Mary? Your wife. What about Mary?”
Tommaso smiled softly. Being rid of Mary was the best part. “Mary has her mom,” he said, as if the naked fact had some practical application. “Look, I gotta get goin’. I rented a car and it’s parked illegal. If I don’t get a move on, I’m definitely gonna get a ticket.”
Carmine tried to muster a next step that wasn’t suicide and didn’t sound like begging. Unable to do so, he decided to beg.
“Tommy, please,” he whispered, “that’s not my money.”
“I know that,” Tommy interrupted. He tilted the carrier back and gave a little push. The wheels turned reluctantly, with the heavy trunk threatening to slide off at any moment. “Damn it,” he said, as he let the carrier drop with a little thump and began to retighten the straps.
“But you don’t know why you can’t take it. Understand? You don’t know why.” Carmine wet his lips. His hands began to weave in front his face. “You can’t take it because I can’t pay it back and the people I got it from … Tommy, they’ll have to kill me.”
“I don’t see it that way, pop.” Satisfied, Tommy picked up the gun and pointed it at his father. His hands were much steadier now. For the first time in his life, he wasn’t afraid. “See, all those investors want is dope. Which you can still get from On Luk. You just can’t pay for it.”
Carmine’s hands stopped moving while he thought it over. At first glance, it sounded like a way out that wasn’t either suicide or begging. It sounded like a way to buy enough time to run down his son, exact a little cold, Sicilian revenge.
“You sayin’ I should rip the Chink off?”
“I been thinkin’ about it for a couple of days and I don’t see what else you could do. Unless you manage to find me in the next eight hours.” Tommaso waved the revolver in a little circle. “Turn away from me, pop.”
“Tommy …”
“Please, I don’t wanna kill you.”
Carmine sighed and turned. Facing the wall, he fought a nearly overwhelming desire to spin around. He could feel his son approaching and he didn’t want to know what was going to happen next. Now that he had a way out, it didn’t matter.
Tommaso, smiling at his father’s apparent resignation, pulled a stun gun from his pocket as he walked across the room. The catalog he’d bought it from (available, of course, through CompuServe and Prodigy) had promised that its 40,000 volts would override an attacker’s nervous system, removing voluntary muscle activity for as long as fifteen minutes. Even allowing for the manufacturer’s (not to mention the retailer’s) inevitable exaggeration, that would be more than long enough.
Though she was awake and dressed at five o’clock, Josie Rizzo was totally unaware of the quiet rip-off taking place three floors below. She did hear the front door squeak open, then clank shut, but she didn’t get up out of her chair, walk over to the window as she would have as little as twenty-four hours before. These people, she’d decided, as if they’d been reduced to the status of neighbors, the people downstairs, were no longer part of her life. And that included her daughter, Mary. Maybe, if the family could afford it, they’d continue to live together after Carmine went to jail. Maybe she’d stay here as well. But she had shed them, now and forever, and she felt as light as the dust that floated through her open window.
That didn’t mean, however, that she was entirely at peace. There was still the matter of her nephew, Gildo. If the FBI had him, if he hadn’t managed to get loose, it would definitely cast a shadow across the festivities to come. Not much of a shadow, to be sure, but the image of Ann Kalkadonis alive and walking the same streets as Josie Rizzo didn’t sit well. Ann had been punished, no doubt about it, but Ann was the greatest of the betrayers. If she hadn’t brought those bloody clothes into the precinct, hadn’t sold out the husband she’d sworn to love, honor, and obey, the cops would’ve seen through Carmine’s bullshit and Gildo would not have gone to prison. It was really that simple.
Meanwhile, there was nothing Josie Rizzo could do but stay in the apartment, wait for the phone to ring. By the time it did, more than two hours later, she’d gone through six cups of coffee, been to the bathroom four times, and was very, very pissed.
“Why you take so long, huh?” All in all, she considered the greeting to be restrained.
“How did you know it was me?” Jilly’s voice was calm, almost somber.
“Who else gonna call me at seven-thirty?” Actually, there was nobody else to call her at any time.
“It could have been a wrong number.”
Josie snorted contemptuously. “Enough with the nonsense. You get out okay?”
“Yeah, no problem.”
“You know what you gotta do today?”
“Let’s drop the fucking interrogation, all right? I’m not in the mood for it.” This most likely being the last day of his life, Jilly figured he was entitled to a little respect.
“I wanna hear if you got a plan. And stop with the language.”
“Look, Aunt Josie, I ain’t got the time for this.”
“When your father got bumped off, who took you in?”
“Aw, for Christ’s sake …”
“Maybe there were people lined up around the block. Huh? Begging to raise you. Maybe …”
“I’m gonna hang up.”
“… somebody else got you out of jail, somebody I don’t know, a stranger.” Josie listened to her nephew’s sigh. The soft hiss brought a smile to her face. Gildo was a good boy, a loyal boy. He’d do what was right; he always did.
“All right, Aunt Josie, I got a plan. By tonight, I’ll be out of the country.” Jilly shook his head. Escape, for Jilly Sappone, was about as likely as having the angels blow their trumpets as he marched into heaven. The charade was strictly for the pigs if they happened to be listening. And for Josie Rizzo, who’d devised it, then bludgeoned him verbally until he’d agreed to play his part.
The situation was funny enough to get him laughing into the telephone. Here he was, a man who went off at the slightest provocation, a man who went off with no provocation, a man the doctors claimed would never be able to control himself. Yet his Aunt Josie could berate him for hours at a time and all he did was hang his head, beg her forgiveness like a puppy dog after a beating. It was crazy, but it was true. It had always been true.
“What’s funny?” Josie voice was heavy with suspicion. “You got a woman there?”
Jilly flinched. He’d sent the whore back to her dope-dealing pimp less than a minute before making the call. The whore was why he hadn’t called last night.
“Nothin’, Aunt Josie. Nothin’s funny.”
Now that it was time to say good-bye, Jilly could feel his heart thumping in his chest. He took a deep breath, wondering if maybe he should do exactly what he’d said, just hang the phone up and get into the wind. That wasn’t going to happen, of course, because a promise made to Josie Rizzo simply could not be broken, but he could still wonder. As long as he didn’t do it out loud.
“I gotta go,” he finally said. “Before somebody comes lookin’ for me.
“Yeah,” Josie answered matter-of-factly. “Okay. You go do what you gotta do. And don’t fool around.”
Betty Haluka, as she threw a pearl gray pantsuit over a sparkling white blouse, added a pair of small turquoise earrings and a necklace of matching stones on a silver chain, told herself to please slow down. She’d been trying (and failing) to send herself the same message ever since Leonora Higgins’s second call. That had come three hours before, just after six o’clock in the morning and its essential message, that Stanley Moodrow was sitting, all by himself, in a cell on the seventh floor of the FBI headquarters building on Worth Street, should have been enough to alleviate her fears.
Unless, she told herself immediately after hanging up, they decide to charge him, book him, and ship him over to the Metropolitan Correctional Center in the middle of the night. Unless they decide to let him spend the night with a couple of dozen cop-hating drug dealers, teach him a lesson about power relationships.
The nature of that lesson, as drawn by her imagination, had been horrific enough to get her up and pacing. She simply couldn’t shake the urge to grab a coat, charge into FBI headquarters as if she was leading a cavalry charge, demand the immediate release of her lover and client. Joan of Arc brandishing the Constitution in lieu of a sword.
“Don’t go down there, Betty,” Leonora had patiently advised when Betty called her back. “You’ll never get past the lobby. Remember, Stanley hasn’t been charged. That means nobody you can reach will even know he’s there. Tomorrow morning I’ll try to call Holtzmann. If he won’t speak to me, I’ll go to the US attorney. If that doesn’t work, I know a deputy attorney general in DC. …”
“Leonora?” Betty had interrupted, her imagination already running away with itself. “What if they take him over to the MCC?”
“That’s a definite possibility—I won’t deny it—but what I think is there’s more chance of his being charged and transferred if you try to call their bluff.”
Leonora’s “trapped rat” scenario had been enough to keep Betty in Moodrow’s apartment until Leonora’s third call, but it hadn’t gotten her a night’s sleep. By the time the phone rang, a little after nine o’clock in the morning, she was on her fourth cup of coffee.
“I found somebody you can talk to,” Leonora had announced. “An agent named Marsha Millstein in the Division of Public Relations.”
Betty had failed to keep the disappointment out of her voice. “Leonora, that’s like talking to a very polite statue. Stonewalling is what they do. Hell, it’s all they do.”
“I won’t argue the point, but it’s a place to start. Right now, I can’t reach Holtzmann or anyone close to him.” Her voice had dropped to a whisper. “Look, there’s something big happening over there and I can’t get a handle on it.”
“Bigger than arresting Carmine Stettecase with a couple hundred kilos of heroin?”
“Maybe that’s it, but I keep sensing fear, not anticipation. Like something’s gone wrong and they don’t know how to fix it. Anyway, I called the MCC from my office a few minutes ago and Stanley’s not there.”
“Or so they claim.”
Leonora had paused briefly, looking for a polite way to frame the essential message. When she couldn’t find one, she opted for frank and to the point. “Don’t go in there with an attitude. Be Stanley’s attorney, not his lover. Remember, they’ve been holding him for less than forty-eight hours. It might be irregular, but it’s not a technical violation of his rights, not in the federal system. Try to make Agent Millstein understand that releasing Stanley is in the Bureau’s best interest.”
“In the Bureau’s best interest,” Betty repeated as she locked the door and made her way down to the street. She said it again as she walked into the Metropolitan Correctional Center and presented her credentials.
“Pardon me?” The corrections officer seated behind the low counter, a middle-aged white man with a sagging gut and deep blue-gray pouches beneath a pair of tiny ice blue eyes, seemed utterly bored. “Were you talkin’ to me?”
“I’m here to see my client, Stanley Moodrow.” Betty laid her identification on the counter, watched him pick it up, examine it like an entomologist trying to identify an unfamiliar insect, then pass it back. “You wanna spell out that name?”
“The first or the last?”
“The last.” His expression didn’t change, didn’t even flicker.
“M-O-O-D-R-O-W” Betty glanced at the man’s nameplate. “Officer McTaggert.”
“No such.”
It was Betty’s turn to say, “Pardon me?”
“No such.” McTaggert swiveled the monitor 180 degrees. “Look for yourself. He ain’t here.”
“I spoke to him last night.” Betty wondered, briefly, if lying fit the general heading of “in the Bureau’s best interest.”
“Maybe he got bailed out. You want me to check?”
“I want you to be sure he’s not here right now.”
“I’m already sure.”
“In that case, so am I. And thank you for your cheerful assistance.”
It took Betty less than ten minutes to walk the few blocks to FBI headquarters in the Federal Building on Worth Street. Inside, she received a visitor’s badge marked with her name and her ultimate destination, the FBI’s Public Relations Division on the thirty-fourth floor. The lobby was crowded with men and women heading off to dozens of federal bureaucracies, some as workers and some as supplicants. Betty, as she waited for an elevator, made a conscious effort to see herself as the latter. And not as an avenging angel.
In the Bureau’s best interest, she said to herself. The Constitution will just have to fend for itself.
Moodrow was still eating his breakfast (cold cereal, cold juice, cold coffee) when two beefy corrections officers approached his cell, ordered him out, then walked him down the hall to a tiny interview room. Without explanation, they put him inside, leaving him to sit in a chair bolted to the green tile floor while they stood guard outside. Moodrow noted the mustard yellow walls, the metal table, the dirty white ceiling, and nodded to himself. While the room didn’t have the cachet of the Canary Cage in the old Seventh Precinct, it did reek of squirming, sweating mutts and the sharply focused men who pursued them. Apparently, interrogation was a facet of law enforcement the feds hadn’t managed to sanitize.
Twenty minutes later, he stood and walked over to a small mirror set into the door, stared at his reflection, wondered if his guards were just outside looking back at him. When the COs ordered him out of the cell, Moodrow had anticipated only two possibilities: Holtzmann was either going to charge him or let him go. After all, what question could Holtzmann ask in an interview room that couldn’t be asked in Moodrow’s cell? And why, it being a few hours before the big bust, would Holtzmann be thinking about Stanley Moodrow at all?
Neither question was answered by the sudden appearance of a very tall, very elegant young man. At least as tall as Moodrow and rail thin, his black, summer-weight suit draped his bony frame perfectly, dropping in an unbroken line from his shoulders to the tops of his polished wingtips. Moodrow stared at the suit for a moment, relishing his own resentment, then raised his eyes to look into the man’s face. The man’s features were uniformly strong, the bones of his face prominent. He returned Moodrow’s contemptuous gaze frankly, but without apparent aggression.
“Cooper,” the man said. “Justice Department.” His voice carried vague traces of a southern drawl.
Moodrow thought about it for a moment, then said, “Justice Department, huh? That’s an unusual last name, but I guess it’s not impossible. I once knew a guy named Bureau. He spelled it with two ns.
Cooper’s expression didn’t change. “Why don’t we sit down?” he said after a long pause.
“Why don’t you …” Moodrow bit off the rest of the message. Something was very wrong and he wasn’t going to find out what it was by playing the tough guy. “Why don’t we run through that one more time,” he said as he dropped into the chair. “Your full name and full title.”
“My name is Cooper. Buford Cooper. From the state of Mississippi.”
He smiled for the first time, a quick, broad flash of gleaming white teeth. Moodrow read the grin as supremely confident, the grin of a doctor treating a disease from which he, himself, was immune.
“And the title?”
“I’m what they call a Special Counsel.” He crossed his legs and took out a pack of Viceroys. “You smoke?” When Moodrow shook his head, he added, “Mind if I do?”
“Knock yourself out.”
Cooper shook out a smoke and lit it with a slender gold lighter. The lighter, Moodrow noted before it disappeared into Cooper’s trouser pocket, was neither flashy nor cheap.
“I’m Special Counsel to the Attorney General of the United States of America.” He blew out a stream of smoke. “Has a nice ring to it, don’t you think?”
“A wonderful ring,” Moodrow agreed. “Now why don’t you tell me what you want.”
Cooper stared at Moodrow for a moment, then took a deep breath and smiled again. “I want to know why you’re here,” he said. “No matter how stupid that sounds.”
A vague uneasiness flitted through Moodrow’s consciousness like a bat through an underground cave. “You saying you haven’t asked the man who brought me?”
“And who might that be?”
Moodrow shook his head slowly. “Don’t try to play the interrogator,” he said evenly. “You don’t have the experience to bring it off.” That brought a flush to Cooper’s tanned cheeks. “If you’re gonna answer every question by asking another one, I want my lawyer.”
“That would be Ms. Haluka. She’s in the building even as we speak. Inflicting psychological damage on a PR person.”
Moodrow giggled his appreciation. “One for you,” he admitted.
“One for me, yes.” Cooper put the cigarette into his mouth, let it rest on his lips for a moment before inhaling. “Let me put it simply,” he said. “I was in Manhattan on Justice Department business when I got a call from DC asking me to check on the status of an ex-cop being detained without charge by the FBI. Just to check, mind you, not to actually do anything about it. Now I can’t find a single agent who admits to knowing anything about Stanley Moodrow beyond the bare fact that he’s actually here.”
Moodrow leaned forward, placed his palms flat on the table. “And Karl Holtzmann?” He closed his eyes in anticipation of the blow sure to follow. “What does Karl Holtzmann say?”
“Karl Holtzmann is missing. Along with US Attorney Abner Kirkwood and Agent Bob Ewing.” Cooper tapped his ash onto the floor. “Would you know anything about that?”
It was the worst possible scenario. Ginny Gadd alone in that apartment; Stanley Moodrow in a cell, unable to even warn her; Jilly Sappone on the loose. Repressing a groan, Moodrow stared at his clenched fists. “You have to let me the fuck out of here.” He raised his head, glared at Buford Cooper as if contemplating an all-out attack.
“That’s not an answer to my question.”
Moodrow slammed his fist into the table. “Give me one good reason why I should bail you out? You arrested me without probable cause, detained me without charge, denied me the right to make a phone call or consult an attorney …”
“I didn’t do any of that.” Cooper, who hadn’t flinched in the face of Moodrow’s tirade, dropped his cigarette on the floor and slowly ground it out with the heel of his shoe. “Until a couple of hours ago, I didn’t even know you existed.”
“What’re you lookin’ for, Cooper, tea and sympathy?”
“I’m looking for a little help.”
“You still haven’t given me a reason why I should give a shit about you.” He leaned back, took a deep breath, readied himself for the actual bargaining. “Or the Justice Department or the Federal Bureau of Incompetence.”
“Perhaps,” Cooper smiled again, “because giving a shit might go a long way toward getting you out of here.” He took a white handkerchief from the breast pocket of his jacket and gently wiped his mouth. “Within, say, the next few hours.”
Jilly Sappone squatted, then sat on the gritty, tarred rooftop. Frowning, he leaned against the narrow ledge, took a sandwich bag from the pocket of Agent Bob’s forest green windbreaker, and stared at the small pile of dope at the bottom. For some reason, ever since his good-bye phone call to Aunt Josie, he couldn’t do anything without thinking it was the last time he was gonna do it. The last shower, the last shave, the last piss, the last bacon, eggs, toast, coffee. It was stupid, really, because he didn’t have to die. Captured, yeah; he was definitely gonna be captured. Even if he somehow got into that apartment, did the deed, got away, Jilly Sappone had nowhere to hide. But that didn’t mean he’d be killed, not unless he decided to put a round in his own head, let a big piece of lead chase the small one already down there, and he hadn’t made that decision. Not yet.
Nevertheless, as he dug his pinky into the heroin, scooped out a little heap, pushed it up into his nose, he heard himself say, the last snort. As clearly as if he’d spoken out loud.
The day was warm and the sun, directly overhead, poured down on the rooftop. Jilly could feel hot tar beneath his buttocks, knew he’d carry some of it with him when he finally got his act in gear. He didn’t mind, didn’t think Ann would mind, either. This being the last time and all.
He tilted his head back, closed his eyes, let the sun heat his face while the heroin worked its way through his body. Twenty minutes later, when he began to pull himself together, he was still sitting against the wall, though his chin had dropped down to his chest and he was snoring softly.
“The last nod,” Jilly said without opening his eyes. Laughter bubbled over his tongue and lips, seemed to dribble out of his mouth, the sound wet and ugly even to himself. Christ, he thought, I gotta get moving.
But he didn’t move, not until he heard the door to the roof squeal on its hinges. Then, as if someone had thrown a switch, his eyes were open, the automatic in his hand, his brain on full alert.
“Don’ shoo me, bro. Don’ shoo me.”
Jilly stared at the man in the doorway for a moment before dismissing him as a junkie looking for a place to fix or something to rip off. No surprise in a building like this. “You got business with me?” he asked.
“No way.” The man took a step forward, his eyes riveted to the barrel of the gun. “I don’t even know nobody’s up here.” He opened his clenched fist to reveal several bags of dope. “I gotta get off, bro. I’m sick.”
Jilly flicked the automatic in the general direction of Second Avenue, said, “Take it somewhere else,” watched the junkie half trot across the rooftops. When the man was several roofs away, Jilly dragged himself to his knees and turned around to peer over the low concrete parapet at a twenty-story apartment building across the street. The building, of white brick and studded with balconies, was solidly middle class and fronted Third Avenue at the corner of Twenty-seventh Street. Another, almost identical structure, faced it from the west side of the avenue. From each of these buildings, a string of five-story brick tenements radiated east and west along Twenty-seventh Street like the tendrils of a spreading cancer.
There was dope in virtually every building, even in those where the landlord bothered to repair the broken locks and mailboxes. Some, like the one Jilly had used to get to the roof, were almost entirely given over to the trade. At least half the twenty apartments, though unrented, served as shooting galleries, crack dens, or both. Four or five others were occupied by prostitutes who worked the lower end of Lexington Avenue a block to the west. The remainder housed working families whose economic survival depended on low rent.
Jilly, like every other committed druggie, had an infallible nose for dope. When he’d first smelled it out, on the day he’d been released from prison, he’d immediately filed the information away for later use. Then he’d ripped off Patsy Gullo’s heroin and almost forgotten about Twenty-seventh Street. Almost.
As his head began to clear, Jilly focused his attention more sharply. With his eyes raised a few inches above the low wall, he could see the south side and back of his ex-wife’s building, as well as two cops parked in a brown Caprice on the west side of Third Avenue. The cops were making no effort to conceal themselves, sitting there with the windows open, elbows hanging out, as if their view of the front door guaranteed Ann Kalkadonis’s safety.
Jilly, of course, had never expected to go through the lobby. He was interested in a narrow strip of concrete running along the back of the building to a service entrance in the basement. If he approached this ramp from the north side of Twenty-seventh Street, the cops wouldn’t be able to see him or the door at the bottom. At least not the cops parked on Third Avenue. Thinking it over on the trip from his motel room, Jilly had figured that windowless steel door would be his biggest problem. If it was locked, which it usually was, he’d have to stand around, make himself a perfect target while he waited until somebody opened it from the inside.
Jilly put his palms on the ledge, pushed himself up a little higher, and laughed out loud. “My lucky day,” he said, then quickly amended the statement. “My last lucky day.”
Somebody had tied the wide-open basement door to a faucet on the wall of the building, that somebody undoubtedly being a representative of B&A Moving and Storage whose truck was parked at the curb. As Jilly watched, smiling to himself, two burly men came through the opening, one after the other, each pushing a dolly loaded with household furniture.
Once Jilly started moving, his body decided to wake up, get with the program. By the time he reached the second floor he was taking the steps two at a time. He paused in the hallway for a moment, inhaling the stink of piss and mold as if it was an aphrodisiac, then came out of the building, took a right without glancing at the cops, and began to walk east toward Second Avenue. Halfway down the block, he crossed the street and headed back the way he’d come. His right hand, despite the need to appear as natural as possible, remained by his waist, ready to dip beneath Agent Bob’s jacket. There was always the chance that the cops or the feds had another team out there, one he hadn’t spotted. If that was the case, he was determined to bust a few caps before he packed it in.
As he approached the moving truck, Jilly kept his eyes focused on the fat man standing inside, half expecting him to turn, weapon in hand, shout, “Police, motherfucker. Keep your hands where I can see ’em.” But the man continued to pack a mix of furniture and taped brown boxes into the front of the truck, ignoring him altogether. The same was true of the two cursing workers struggling to pass an enormous leather couch through the basement door.
“It don’t fuckin’ go, man,” the taller of the two said as Jilly slipped past. “We’re gonna have to take it out the fucking front.”
“I’m not gonna put it back in that elevator,” the second man replied. “And I’m not walkin’ it up them stairs, neither.”
They continued to argue, ignoring Jilly who stopped a few feet away to consider his next move. He was standing at one end of a wide corridor running the full length of the building. A series of doors on either side led to the boiler and compactor rooms, various storage areas, the building’s communal laundry, the super’s little office, and the elevators. Jilly had been this way on his first visit, but he’d come through fast, looking for those elevators and nothing else. Now he needed to get his bearings.
“Could I help you?” A short, broad-shouldered man wearing a blue cotton uniform stepped out of a room twenty feet away. He was standing in the middle of the hallway, feet wide apart, a fuck-you sneer plastered to his face. “You a tenant?”
“I’m lookin’ for the super.” Jilly forced himself to smile. He could feel the molten core at the base of his personality begin to bubble upward, knew that if he didn’t close the furnace door, it would own him.
“Whatta ya want him for?”
“I’m a salesman. You know, janitorial supplies, like that.”
“We got somebody.”
“Are you the super?” Jilly’s hand was already moving toward his waist.
“Uh-uh.” The man held his smirk for a moment longer, then relented. “Last door on the left.”
“Thank you.” Jilly, momentarily disappointed, consoled himself by deciding to retrace his steps when he finished with his wife, pay the man a last visit. Then, smiling, he squeezed past his interrogator and walked down the hall to the super’s office where he found an elderly black man, telephone in hand, sitting behind a battered wooden desk that seemed to fill the tiny room. The man was tall and wiry-strong, with a prominent forehead made even more prominent by a raised scar that ran over his left eye like a second eyebrow. He glanced up as Jilly entered, then returned to his conversation.
“I’ll have someone up after lunch, Ms. Carozzo. I don’t have nobody right now. Remember, this here’s the third time you plugged that drain in the last two weeks.” He rolled his eyes, muttered an occasional “yeah” as he listened, finally said, “Ya’ll wanna blame the plumbing, that’s fine with me, but last time we took a tube of Crest outta the trap. You tole me your little boy done flushed it down there.” He paused again, listened briefly, then ran his fingers through his snow white hair. “After lunch, Ms. Carozzo. First thing.”
Jilly, fighting an urge to lick his lips in anticipation, glanced at a nameplate lying on the super’s desk. Originally of white letters on a black background, it was now so gray and dirty that it took him a moment to read the words, Leuten Kitt.
“You lookin’ at the name right? My mama called me Leuten because my father was in the army. Leuten is short for lieutenant.”
“No shit?”
“If I’m lyin’, I’m dyin’.” He flashed Jilly a friendly smile. “Now what could I do you for on this fine, fine morning?”
“You could answer a simple question.”
“I’m listenin’.”
Slowly, as if reaching for his business card (which he was, in a way) Jilly slid a hand beneath his jacket, pulled Agent Bob’s automatic, pressed it against the tip of Leuten Kitt’s nose. “The question of the hour,” he said, “is do you wanna live or do you wanna die?” He cocked the hammer by way of driving his point home, then quickly added, “Don’t be shy now. Because you ain’t got the time to think it over.”
“What I need to know,” Moodrow said as he plucked a jelly doughnut from a greasy paper sack and bit into it, “is why, you being a politician, the FBI would give you the time of day?” He popped the lid on a container of coffee and sipped at the steaming liquid. “Any more than a New York cop would give the time of day to a deputy mayor.” A half hour had gone by since Special Counsel Cooper’s unexpected appearance and Moodrow still wasn’t sure what the man wanted to hear.
Buford Cooper toyed with the crease on his trousers for a moment, then raised a pair of lazy blue eyes to meet Moodrow’s unwavering stare. “Well, they won’t,” he admitted. “Give me the time of day, I mean.”
“Then how’d you get to me?”
“I took advantage of the chaos.” Cooper stood up, pulled off his jacket, folded it carefully before laying it on the table. “With the commander in chief among the missing … Well, let’s just say none of the ranking officers wanted to tell me an outright lie. Not when I already knew you were here.” He walked to the far wall, faced it as if looking out a window. When he spoke again, his tone was almost wistful. “We’ve been under pressure since the day we took office. One scandal after another, most of them pure bullshit. I suppose we can deal with another political crisis—we’ve certainly had enough practice—but it would be nice to see it coming.”
“Pardon me if I don’t cry in my coffee.” Moodrow had always reserved a special position on his mutt list for professional politicians. “Tell me how you plan to get me out of here. Being as you have no direct authority over the FBI.” Determined to maintain an external calm, he resisted the urge to turn and face Cooper. Instead, he finished his doughnut in a single, gargantuan bite, then, one at a time, licked his fingers clean.
Cooper replied without hesitation. “Assuming that I’m satisfied with your story, I plan to simply walk you out.” He strolled back to his chair, sat down, shook a Viceroy out of a half-empty pack. “There’s no paperwork on you, none at all. Theoretically, even as we speak, you’re not here.”
Moodrow contemplated the bag of doughnuts for a moment, wanting to reach in, mask his anxiety by stuffing his mouth. Instead, he rolled up the edges of the bag and pushed his coffee away. “You a lawyer?” he asked.
“Of course.” Cooper followed the admission with a faint smile.
“Then you can understand me when I say I’ve got a very circumstantial case here. One that couldn’t be proven beyond a reasonable doubt in a court of law. At least, not by me.” He waited until Cooper nodded his understanding, then continued. “You aware of the narcotics bust that’s supposed to go down today?”
“Assume I don’t know anything,” Cooper replied. “Because I don’t.” He lit his cigarette and leaned back in the chair.
“In that case, we’re gonna have to back up a little.” Now that he’d made the basic decision, Moodrow wanted to tell the story completely—knowing that if he didn’t, Cooper, despite the buddy-buddy manner, would have him going over the details for the next twelve hours. He began with Jilly Sappone’s father and the injury to Jilly, worked his way through Josie Rizzo and her daughter’s marriage, Carmine Stettecase’s problems with Jilly, and the frame-up that sent Jilly to prison.
“The board turned Jilly down when he came up for parole,” he concluded, “then reversed itself when Karl Holtzmann, or maybe his boss, intervened because Josie Rizzo was supplying the FBI with information on Carmine Stettecase and a huge dope deal Carmine was setting up.”
Cooper started to speak, then changed his mind. He signaled Moodrow to continue with a languid wave of his cigarette.
“What I’ve told you so far, that’s the good news.” Moodrow picked up the bag of doughnuts, weighed it in his palm for a moment, then returned it to the table with a little sigh. “On the day he got out of prison, Jilly Sappone teamed up with a former cell mate, Jackson-Davis Wescott. They kidnapped a child on the first day, then committed at least three murders together, one of which I personally witnessed. A few days ago, Wescott turned up in Riverside Park with a knife in his ribs and Jilly Sappone disappeared. I’m saying that Karl Holtzmann and Robert Ewing and the US attorney you mentioned decided to protect Jilly Sappone, at least until after they took Carmine down. I’m saying something went wrong and now Jilly Sappone’s on the loose.”
The silence that followed was entirely obligatory and both men knew it. Cooper, his eyes nearly closed, puffed on his cigarette as if he didn’t have a care in the world. Moodrow, watching him, knew the question to come and was busy preparing an answer that would satisfy Buford Cooper without exposing Stanley Moodrow or Ginny Gadd to the possibility of criminal prosecution.
“You haven’t told me,” Cooper finally said, “your part in …” He spread his hands, smiled again. “In all this.”
Moodrow tapped the metal tabletop with the side of his fist. “I’m a licensed private investigator and I was hired, for obvious reasons, by the mother of the kidnapped child. The story I just told you was pieced together in the course of my investigation. Holtzmann was afraid I’d go public before he arrested Carmine Stettecase, so he decided to put me in a cell for the duration, to stash me like he stashed Jilly Sappone.” Moodrow began to fumble with the bag of doughnuts. Now that he’d clearly stated his case, he felt entitled to a reward. “Tell me,” he asked, “what are you going to say when the bodies turn up?”
Cooper ignored the question. “I’m hearing an awful lot of speculation here,” he said.
Moodrow shrugged, mumbled, “Time will tell,” and swallowed hard.
“I suppose it will.” Cooper sat up in his chair. He glanced at his watch, shook his head, muttered, “Welcome to hell,” as he rose to his feet. “I’m going to ask you to sign a release before I let you go.”
“A release?”
“Basically stating that you were here of your own free will, that you do not now and will not in the future hold the FBI or any individual employed by the FBI responsible for your incarceration.”
“That would be a lie.”
“True, but it would at least take care of one of the several dozen problems we’re going to have to address when … when the bodies turn up.”
Moodrow stood and leaned across the table. Unable to control his joy, he giggled in Buford Cooper’s face, then quickly apologized. “What could I say, Cooper? I guess I’m just an emotional guy. Now, where the fuck do I sign?”
What Leuten Kitt said, with his mouth, was, “Yessuh, I wants to live,” but what he said to himself was, Another white man with a gun.
Leuten Kitt knew quite a bit about white men with guns, having spent virtually all of his third decade at Angola State Prison in the great state of Louisiana. There were no gray stone walls at Angola, just swamps and forests and lots of shotgun-toting white men. Of course, all that was twenty-seven years ago and he’d put his life together since then—come up north, gotten married, raised a family—but the lessons he’d learned in those nine years were never far away.
“You know who I am, nigger?”
“Nossir.” That was one of the most important lessons. Yessir, Nossir and bide your time.
“Get up and come around the desk.”
Kitt rose slowly, careful to keep his hands in sight. He walked over to Jilly Sappone, turned his back, submitted to a thorough frisk.
“You ready for the deal, Sambo?”
“Yessir. Ready for anythin’ y’all say.”
“I’m goin’ up to 14D. You know who lives there?”
“Yessir.”
“Turn around and look at me.”
“Yessir.”
“Who lives there?”
“In 14D?”
“You play the dumb nigger with me, you’re gonna be the dumb, dead nigger.”
“Kalkadonis family lives there. In 14D.” Leuten didn’t need to look into Sappone’s eyes to see the fire stoked at the back of the man’s brain. Jilly’s voice was enough to convince Leuten Kitt that death was right around the corner.
“And who am I?”
“You …” The way Leuten saw it, he had a big, big problem. The Kalkadonis family had pulled out and the apartment was empty and Jilly Sappone didn’t seem like the kind of man who could deal with disappointment. “You the man took the baby.”
“Very good.” Sappone stepped back. “Now what’s gonna happen here is we’re goin’ up to that apartment and you’re gonna get me inside. You with me so far.”
“Yessir.”
“So, how ya gonna get me in?”
“With my keys.”
“Wrong answer, monkey. Try again.” When Kitt didn’t respond, Jilly continued. “If I was gonna use the keys, why the fuck would I need you to come upstairs? I could just kill your black ass right here and now.” He raised the gun several inches, forcing Kitt to look into the barrel. “So, let’s try it again. How you gonna get me in?”
Leuten stared at the weapon for a moment, then moved his eyes a few inches to the left. He could still remember the first time he’d looked into the barrel of a guard’s shotgun, still feel the sudden hot rush of urine through the hairs on his thigh. “I gots to tell ’em some-thin’. Make ’em open the door.”
“And who says you people can’t learn?”
When it became obvious that Sappone expected a reply, Leuten said, “Ain’t nobody says that.”
“Nobody except everybody.” Instead of laughing, Sappone grunted. “Now, what are you gonna tell ’em?”
“Tell ’em there’s somethin’ wrong and I gotta get inside.”
Jilly, his expression fixed, stepped forward and cracked Leuten Kitt in the mouth. He listened to the echo for a moment, savored the obvious pain in Kitt’s eyes, then said, “I don’t wanna hear the fuckin’ stall. Understand me?”
“Yessir.” Leuten fought the urge to touch his face, see if his teeth were still there. “Yessir, here’s what I tell ’em. I say, ‘Ma’am, we done got a leak in the bathroom ceiling downstairs and I need to come inside, check the pipes. Won’t take but a minute.’ ”
Sappone nodded. His eyes were blazing now, his mouth twisted. Once those locks were thrown, even if a cop answered, he was definitely gonna get inside. Shoot through the door and keep on shooting until it was over, one way or the other.
He took off Agent Bob’s windbreaker, folded it in half, then draped it over the hand holding the gun. “You got grandkids?”
“Yessir.”
“Then remember what I’m tellin’ ya here.” He stepped back to let Kitt pass in front of him. “If you’re thinkin’ about how you’re gonna make a break soon as we leave this room, think again. You get more than two feet away from me, them brats are gonna have to grow up without a grampa.”
With nothing more to be said, Leuten took a tentative step forward.
“Ain’t you forgettin’ somethin’?”
Jilly voice stopped him as if he’d run into a wall. “Sir?”
“The keys, nigger, the fuckin’ keys. In case they’re not home.”
Forgetting the keys being Leuten’s only strategy, he cursed Sappone inwardly. “Yeah, you right,” he said. “They in the drawer.” He walked back to the desk, careful to keep his hands in sight, and removed an enormous ring of keys. Without being asked, he flipped through the ring until he found the pair for the Kalkadonis apartment. Then he walked past Jilly Sappone and out into the hall.
“Straight to the elevators. No stops, no conversation.”
Leuten, as he walked down the corridor, was hoping to find the small room that housed the building’s three elevators completely empty. Sooner or later, the way he read the situation, he was going to have to make his move and the elevator seemed as good a place as any. If Sappone sent him in first, he could step to the side, press the button that closed the doors, maybe …
The sound of a child’s voice cut through Leuten’s speculations with the finality of a meat cleaver. Vroooom, vroooom, vroooooooom. A moment later, he glanced through the open doorway to find his worst fears confirmed. A short, heavy woman pulling a shopping cart filled with carefully folded laundry was jabbing her rigid forefinger into the elevator call button while a young boy on a tricycle whizzed back and forth just behind her legs.
“Afternoon’ Miss Green.”
The woman turned and smiled. “Good afternoon, Leuten.” She glanced at Jilly Sappone, then back at the super, then down at the ground.
“Kinda hot today.” Leuten moved a few inches to the left. He could feel Sappone tense up and was trying for enough room to swing an elbow in case the man decided that Myrna Green had recognized his famous face, that the only remedy was blood and bullets.
“Well, summer’s here.” Myrna Green smiled up at Jilly Sappone. “Are you moving in?” she asked.
Leuten Kitt heard Jilly Sappone release the breath he’d been holding and figured it was gonna be okay, at least for now. Then Jilly said, “I’m thinkin’ about it,” and the elevator arrived. Leuten stepped inside and pressed the button that held the doors open.
“All aboard,” he said, his voice as cheerful as he could make it.
Myrna Green tugged the shopping cart into the elevator. “C’mon, Tommy,” she called to her son. “And take it easy.”
Tommy responded by crashing his trike into the elevator’s rear wall, producing a hollow boom that he apparently found hilarious.
“How many times do I have to tell you about that?”
Leuten pressed the buttons for the third and fourteenth floors. He could see Jilly Sappone’s face now. The man’s eyes were blank, unfocused, the eyes of a lizard waiting for a meal to happen by. They stayed that way until the doors opened on the third floor and Myrna Green stepped into the corridor.
“Let’s go, Tommy.”
When Tommy showed no inclination to leave the elevator, Leuten again pressed the button that held the doors open. Sappone was looking straight at him, the lizard with a fly in sight.
“I said now, Tommy. Or you can forget Animaniacs.”
With a final whoop, Tommy backed his tricycle in a half circle, then flew out the door, spun around the shopping cart, and headed off down the hall.
“Ever since his father and I divorced … I don’t know. I think I’ve lost control.” Myrna Green tossed Jilly a last, sidelong glance. “Good luck with the apartment,” she said. When he didn’t respond she turned to Leuten Kitt. “You have a good afternoon, Leuten.”
Leuten released the button, called, “You too, Miss Green,” through the closing doors.
“You done good, nigger.” Jilly Sappone moved to the far corner of the elevator. “No shit, man. You saved the bitch’s life. The kid’s, too. Now it’s time for you to save your own.”
“Yessir,” Leuten replied automatically. Not wanting to be shot down like a dog, he still intended to make some kind of a move. Only now he was pretty sure that he and the dog were gonna end up in the same place, move or not.
“Because, say I get what I want, I’m gonna let ya slide. You hear me?”
“Yessir.” What Leuten heard was the lust in Jilly Sappone’s voice, the lust for blood. He’d heard that call many a time down at Angola. The cry of an animal that liked to hurt.
The elevator came to a halt and the doors slid open. Jilly Sappone tossed the jacket over his shoulder, exposing the automatic in his hand. “Take a look down that hallway,” he said. “Tell me exactly what you see.”
As Leuten moved into the doorway, he felt Sappone come up behind him, hook a finger in his belt. “I don’t see nothin’,” he said, quickly adding, “but a empty hall with doors.”
“That’s good. That’s very good.” Sappone pressed his knuckle into the base of Leuten’s spine. “Because I’m real, real hot for this and if you fuck it up for me I’m gonna …”
“Yessir, I gets the message and I’m goin’ do just what y’all say to do and nothin’ else. Soon as y’all tell me what it is.”
“I want you to go straight to that apartment, 14D. I want you to stand in front of the peephole, ring the bell, let ’em know it’s Uncle Sambo and not Jilly Sappone standing in the hall. I want you to get that fucking door open any way you have to.” Sappone paused momentarily, then said, “This is my last time, man.” Like the statement explained everything Leuten needed to know.
As Leuten Kitt followed Sappone’s directions exactly, walking down the hall at a steady pace, stopping directly in front of 14D, pressing then releasing the bell, a plan began to form in his mind. Ann Kalkadonis had called him the morning before and told him she was leaving New York. Later in the day, he’d seen Ann and her daughter, both carrying luggage, go out through the lobby. That meant the apartment was going to be empty and Sappone was going to be very disappointed, like a kid without a Christmas present, a kid with a gun. What he, Leuten Kitt, had to do was convince Sappone that if just hung around for a while, his wife and his daughter would come back.
Without waiting to be asked, Leuten again rang the bell, this time holding it down for several seconds. Then he let off, cocked his ear to the door and pressed it again. “Don’t seem to be nobody home,” he said, trying the words out as a kind of experiment before pounding on the door with his fist. “I seen ’em goin’ out, Mrs. Kalkadonis and her daughter, round ten o’clock. Figured they’d be back by now.”
“Shut the fuck up,” Jilly whispered. His head swiveled back and forth, checking the hall, then he began to back away from the door, stopping midway between his wife’s apartment and the apartment to the north.
Leuten meekly followed. Figuring that he and Sappone were going to be together for quite a while, that all he’d bought was time.
“Whyn’t you tell me this shit before?” Jilly’s eyes were on fire. The gun trembled slightly in his hand. “If you’re tryin’ to play some dumb spook game …”
“I jus’ figger they be back.” He paused, started to raise his eyes to meet Jilly’s, then remembered and yanked them down to Sappone’s chest. “See, what I’m sayin’ is they was pullin’ one of them carts. You know, like they was goin’ to the supermarket.” He was shifting his weight from foot to foot, aware of it, but unable to stop himself. A little voice inside his head was calling mama, mama, mama from what seemed like a great distance. Working around and through his thoughts with a will of its own.
“What about the cops? Where are the goddamned cops?”
Leuten, caught unawares, took a second to think it over before replying. “Well, they out in front. I seen ’em this mornin’ when I was fixin’ the stoop.” He shrugged, his shoulders so tight it felt like he was pulling them up out of the mud. “As for inside the house … well, like I don’t live there or nothin’, but I ain’t seen no cops around the apartment in some time.” He paused again. “If they was in there, why wouldn’t they be answerin’ the door?”
Jilly’s pent-up breath whooshed out of his chest for the second time. His eyes closed for a moment, then popped wide open. “I want you to ring the bell again. If nobody comes, use the keys.” He raised the gun a few inches. “Push the door open, but don’t move a fucking inch until I tell you. Remember, if there’s somebody waitin’ in there, if it’s a trap, you’re gonna go first.”
Leuten didn’t bother to say, “Yessir.” He walked over to the door, feeling for the keys as he went, and gave the bell a short, sharp jab. A few seconds later, he opened the two locks and pushed the door back to reveal a narrow hallway.
“Say somethin’.” Jilly stepped forward, taking Leuten’s shirt in his free hand.
“Maintenance,” Leuten called. “Anybody inside?”
When there was no reply, Jilly shoved Leuten through the doorway. “Keep callin’, keep movin’. We’re gonna look in every room, every closet. Startin’ with this one in the hall. You’re gonna open the door, move the clothes around, make sure nobody’s hidin’ inside.” He ground the barrel of the automatic into Leuten Kitt’s scalp, drawing a trickle of blood in the process. “Let’s move.”
“Maintenance. Maintenance.”
Leuten kept repeating the word as he walked to the hall closet, opened the door, leaned inside, rummaged through the coats and jackets. Sappone was draped all over him, a second skin, and both of them were entirely focused on the dark shadows inside the closet. That was why, Leuten figured later on, neither one of them heard Guinevere Gadd come up behind them.
“You feel that, Jilly Sappone? You feel it?” Gadd’s voice froze both men. “That’s my .38 pushed into the base of your skull, with the barrel angled up at 45 degrees. You move and you’re fucking dead.”
What Leuten Kitt figured was that he was the one who was dead. And he wasn’t encouraged when Jilly Sappone snarled, “I’ll kill the nigger. I ain’t kiddin’. You don’t back off, I’ll kill the nigger right this minute.”
Gadd’s answer only made it worse. “So what am I supposed to do now, Jilly, arrange for a helicopter and five or six million bucks in untraceable bills? You wanna shoot him, go ahead. I’m not a cop and the man doesn’t mean shit to me.” She made a half-strangled sound that Leuten took for a laugh, then said, “I beat the shit out of your Aunt Josie this morning.”
Leuten didn’t waste any time trying to figure out what that meant. He grabbed at Sappone’s gun with his right hand, managing to get it away from his head a second before it went off, then slid his left hand behind his own buttocks and into Sappone’s groin. Then he squeezed, yanked, and prayed.
A few seconds later, when Leuten found the courage to open his eyes, Jilly Sappone had stopped screaming.
“You could let go of his balls now,” Gadd said. “He’s unconscious and I wanna put cuffs on him before he wakes up.”
Leuten, panting like a rescued swimmer, pushed Sappone into the hallway, noting the blood running from the man’s head with some satisfaction. “I didn’t hear you hit him.”
Gadd knelt on Sappone’s back and quickly handcuffed him. “Christ,” she said, looking up at Leuten Kitt, “I been waiting a long time for this.”
“I don’t mean to change the subject, lady, but what you said before, about me not meaning shit to you? That mighta got me killed.” Leuten, much to his surprise, was holding Sappone’s automatic in his right fist, holding it by the barrel. He stared at the gun for a moment, then reversed it in his hand.
“The way I see it,” Gadd replied evenly, “you’re alive and Sappone is on the floor wearing handcuffs. You oughta be grateful.” She got up and closed the front door. “I’m gonna go in the kitchen, look around for some tape. You think you can keep the beast subdued?”
“Lady, you’re crazy.”
“That’s not an answer.”
“The man’s in handcuffs.” Leuten felt some of the tension run out of him as he spoke the words. Yes, the man was in handcuffs, the man who wanted to kill Leuten Kitt, the man who did kill Theresa Kalkadonis. Leuten had six children and nine grandchildren and loved every one of them. His initial relief at finding himself alive began to dissipate. What rushed in to take its place was pure rage. He dropped the barrel of the gun to a spot just in front of Sappone’s left ear, his attention so focused he might have been staring through a telephoto lens.
“Don’t do it.” Gadd’s tone was matter-of-fact, like she didn’t care all that much one way or the other.
“Gimme a reason.”
“Because I’ve got something better in mind. Or, at least, slower.” She touched Kitt’s arm. “You gotta trust me here.”
“Two minutes ago you told this scumbag to blow me away. Now you want me to trust you?”
“At least you know I’m honest.”
She was gone before Leuten could respond, leaving him to care for Jilly, who’d begun to moan and shift his weight.
“Just stay down there, motherfucker,” Leuten said after a moment. “Else I’ll turn that crazy bitch loose on y’all.”
“What crazy bitch?”
Leuten turned to find Gadd standing right behind him. She was holding a ball of twine in her hand, offering it to him like it was an apple. “You wanna stop sneakin’ up on people?”
“I’ll give it some thought.” She pressed the twine into his hand. “Do me a favor and tie him up, starting from his ankles. For what I got planned, he can’t be moving around.”
Leuten was about to tell her to do it herself, then changed his mind. Looking into her eyes, he could see a mix of fear and anger and, behind both, a childish pleasure. Like she and Leuten were about to play a trick on the grown-ups.
“How tight you want the boy?” He dropped to one knee, looped a strand of twine around Sappone’s ankle, tied the loose end back onto the roll.
“Tight enough so he shouldn’t even think about moving. I want the fucker helpless.” Gadd let the revolver drop to her side. “Yeah,” she half whispered, “completely helpless.”
Leuten took his time about it, drawing each loop tight before starting another revolution, letting the individual loops overlap slightly. “How you come to get behind us like that?” he asked. “Seemed like you come outta nowhere.”
“I was in the stairwell, with the door cracked open a couple of inches, when you came out of the elevator. I saw you all the way.”
“But you not a cop?”
“Uh-uh.” Gadd sighed impatiently. “My name is Guinevere Gadd and I’m a private investigator working for Ann Kalkadonis. I made arrangements to stay on after she left. Just in case Jilly showed up, which he did. There’s no mystery to it.” She sighed again. “Could we hurry this up?”
“We could if you’d hold his feet off the ground so’s I could slide the cord under him without stoppin’ every time.”
Gadd complied without hesitation, dropping to her knees. “Yeah,” she admitted, “I should’ve thought of that myself.”
“Now, lemme see if I got this right. You been sittin’ on them stairs ever since Mrs. Kalkadonis and her daughter took off. That’d be yesterday, ’round two o’clock.” He was up to Sappone’s chest now, working quickly.
“Actually,” Gadd confessed, “I was out there having a cigarette. After Ann took off, I went through the house looking for an ashtray and I couldn’t find one.” She shrugged and grinned. “People get nuts, you smoke in the house without permission. They buy extra life insurance, mail checks to the American Cancer Society, assault the smoker. I just had this picture of my client returning to a house filled with cigarette smoke. …” Gadd stopped abruptly. She watched Leuten Kitt tie off the twine just below the tops of Jilly’s shoulders, decided that Jilly looked like a bug trying to work its way out of a cocoon. “I wanted to get away from the apartment. I wanted to get away and I wanted to watch it at the same time. You know what I mean?”
“What I know is I hope you cleaned up after yourself.” Leuten stood and stretched. “What y’all plan to do with him?”
“I plan to throw him out the window. The one by the couch. I already oiled it up, just in case.”
Gadd began to slap Sappone’s face, the slaps soft, but persistent. After a moment, Sappone’s eyes opened, then closed, then opened again. He looked directly at Gadd, who was kneeling beside him, her face only a couple of feet from his own, then twisted around to stare up at Leuten. At first, he appeared to be puzzled, as if there was something he’d forgotten, something important. Then he looked down at his body.
“What the fuck is this?” he whispered.
“This is hell, Jilly,” Gadd replied without hesitation. “And I wanna be the first to offer you an official welcome.”
When Sappone responded by thrashing like a landed fish, Gadd kicked him lightly in the groin, watched him try to double over, try to bring his hands up, try and fail to protect himself in any way. “Still tender, eh? I always heard they were like that, though I wouldn’t know from actual experience.” She waited for Jilly’s eyes to come up, until she could look down into the fire, match it with her own. Then she got up and trotted off, returning a minute later with a small, white blanket.
“You recognize this blanket, Jilly?” she asked. “You ever seen one like it before?”
Sappone’s mouth worked silently, his eyes looking like they were about to explode. Gadd stared down at him, her expression cold and clinical, like a scientist examining a white rat in a laboratory. “I got this blanket from the Medical Examiner’s office,” she said, the lie coming easily. “It’s the one you wrapped around Theresa Kalkadonis before you threw her to her death. I think it’s only fitting that I tie it around your neck before I throw you to your own death.”
“Who the fuck are you?”
“Well, I’m tempted to say, Your worst nightmare. Only it’s been used too many times. So let’s try … Lorena Bobbitt on a real bad hair day.” Gadd dropped to one knee, put the center of the blanket against the top of Sappone’s head, began to work the edges around his shoulders. When he tried to bite her hand, she unholstered her .38 and tapped him lightly on the forehead. That stopped him long enough to get the blanket tied off beneath his jaw with the last piece of twine.
“Man looks halfway between a Halloween ghost and the Mummy.” Leuten was standing with his back to the wall. He knew he was only a spectator here, that whatever he’d brought to the party had been overwhelmed by Guinevere Gadd and the baggage she carried. Not that he minded. Gadd was doing just fine without him. “Now what?” he asked.
Gadd stood up, took a minute to admire her handiwork. “It’s like Christmas. You know, when you were a kid and you didn’t want it to be over.” She squatted down, grabbed the collar of Jilly’s shirt, and gave him an experimental tug. “I think I’m gonna need some help here.”
“He gotta go feet first.” Leuten stepped forward and took Sappone’s left ankle in both hands. “The way you got him tied, his feet are the only things left to grab hold of.”
Sappone didn’t really begin to struggle until his head bumped over the wooden saddle between the dining area and the living room. Then, as if someone had thrown a switch, he started to jerk uncontrollably. Gadd, though she recognized the involuntary nature of his convulsions, responded to the delay by kicking him several times.
“The man appears like he’s speakin’ in tongues,” Leuten said. “You think he’s havin’ a blessed conversion?”
Gadd listened for a moment, catching the nouns bitch, cunt, pig, whore surrounded by the usual modifier, fucking. “I think he’s having something between an epileptic fit and a temper tantrum.” When he abruptly lost consciousness, she said, “Make it a fit,” then grabbed his ankle and went back to work.
It took them another five minutes to get Jilly Sappone draped over the windowsill with his feet hanging outside. He was moaning softly and Gadd wasn’t sure he was awake. “Hey, Sappone,” she called, “you with us?” Crouching, she wrapped her arms around his shoulders, tilted him slightly, felt his torso begin to slide through. That brought a deeper moan, followed by a single word.
“Please.” Sappone drew it out, his voice rising through the octaves like an air-raid siren in an old war movie.
“Almost done.” Gadd let her weight settle back down. She looked at Leuten Kitt, started to smile, then saw Moodrow step into the room. “I don’t think you’re gonna need that,” she said, nodding at the gun in his hand.
“Doesn’t look like it,” Moodrow admitted with a shrug. “Congratulations.”
Leuten, hearing a voice behind him, jumped straight into the air, his body making a half turn before he touched down again. “Jesus Christ,” he shouted.
“Stanley Moodrow, actually,” Moodrow said without looking away from Ginny Gadd. “And this is Betty Haluka. She’s an officer of the court.”
Betty stepped out of the hallway and into the living room. She took a second to register the scene, her eyes moving from Leuten to Gadd to the open window. “I take it that’s Jilly Sappone hiding under the blanket,” she finally said. When Gadd failed to reply, she added, “Self-defense is gonna be a toughie here.”
“How’d you get in this apartment?” Leuten demanded.
“I used the keys somebody left in the locks.” Moodrow let his shoulders drop as he holstered his weapon. He was looking directly into Gadd’s eyes, reading the essential message. “You think we could talk this over? I mean, being as you’re gonna be the one doing the time, I wouldn’t mind seeing how far Jilly can bounce, but …”
He took a step forward, trying to will himself into a dead run, but she was much too fast for him. Gadd came out of her crouch, heaving Sappone up and through the window before Moodrow got halfway across the room. Then the two of them, Gadd and Moodrow, their eyes still locked, shared the terror in Jilly’s scream until it was abruptly cut off when he crashed into a redwood table set out on Sid and Myra Kupferman’s balcony ten feet below.