Wednesday, June 19
MALLOY STOPPED IN FRONT of the column of mailboxes numbered 108. They ran floor to ceiling. He had to relax his knees just a little, and stoop before he could see into the boxes in the E row.
The window of 108-E showed him three envelopes still undisturbed, still lying diagonally across the box.
It had been boring enough tailing Delancey, he thought, but at least Delancey had moved. Tailing a mailbox was the pits.
He straightened up and turned.
Two girls in jeans and Yo-quiero-la-Habana T-shirts were standing at the counter, giggling in Spanish, not noticing him.
He pushed open the glass door and stepped again into the steambath of West Forty-eighth Street. He stepped around a mumbling knot of crackheads. They’d been there all afternoon, never moving from that spot, handing dirty dollar bills and crack vials back and forth, about as inconspicuous as a lighthouse.
He watched them laughing and grinning and swaying and moving as if it were all a dance, as if all of life were just a question of feeling the beat and putting your foot in the right place at the right time.
A Cuban-Chinese bodega-deli across the street caught his eye. He went in. The little old lady at the counter wore a peasant-style scarf and with her bright eyes distinct as new blooms on a tough old trunk, she looked like a 350-year-old bonsai.
He pointed to the pot gurgling on the coffee machine.
The old woman placed a styrofoam cup of coffee on the counter. She slid a sugar dispenser and a pint carton of milk toward him.
He put a dollar bill on the counter.
The old woman shook her head and pushed it back.
He flashed that she didn’t want to take money from a cop. Which meant, among other things, that he must be pretty obvious.
I’m not going to go through this again. He left the money on the counter and ambled toward the window. He studied the hand that was holding the coffee. The hand was trembling badly. Either his blood sugar had dipped or vodka wasn’t the greatest lunch for a working cop.
His free hand took a little plastic prescription bottle out of his pocket. His fingers worked the top off and a rainbow of pills spilled into his palm. He jiggled his hand till two black pills separated from the others.
The two black pills went into his mouth. He chased them with a slug of coffee. The lady narc who had sold him the pills swore they didn’t show up in urine tests, but you had to drink coffee—lots of it.
He glanced toward the window. Traffic was crawling around Con Ed-generated potholes and the firebombed carcass of a green Honda Accord. Even with the door of the bodega shut and the air conditioner rattling in the transom, he could hear horns blaring at the pushcarts that sold paper cups of shaved ice and syrup.
Pedestrians were jaywalking as though they were exercising a constitutional right. Wherever Malloy looked he saw people breaking one law or another: peddling stolen goods, making drug deals, getting high, dancing to the beat and yowl of Latino boom boxes, dozing, cruising for sex—and none of it seemed to be a big deal to anyone.
It made Carl Malloy wonder if his existence made any difference at all, if he had any power to influence the movement of the smallest molecule in the universe. Sometimes he felt too old, too hot, too tired for this kind of work. Sometimes he wished he could just walk away from it.
At that instant he registered something out there in the street. A woman heading down the sidewalk had caught his eye. Maybe twenty-four years old. Five feet ten. Black, with the body of an anorectic, swiveling through the crowd. She was wearing a man’s black shirt and black slacks and a wide black belt studded with colored stones that marked the exact moment in each step when her weight shifted from one hip to the other. She had long, slightly waved hair and she was wearing huge dark glasses.
She slowed at a newsstand and bought a paper.
Now she was walking past the maildrop. Two storefronts beyond Mailsafe she stopped. She turned, doubled back, caught the door of Mailsafe just as the two giggling Spanish girls were coming out, and walked right in.
Malloy could see her through the window. She was standing by the counter, and she was going through her newspaper, pulling out unwanted pages and dropping them into the wastebasket.
Now she was crossing to the mailboxes. Little glints of metal and glass sparkled off the wall of locks. She went toward the 108 column. Her body blocked Malloy’s view.
Her hand stretched out. He could see her wrist twisting, engaging the whole arm, and then the hand reappeared, and it was holding three envelopes.
Malloy gulped his coffee and was out the door in two strides, halfway across the street in the next three, and then he was at the door to Mailsafe.
She was coming toward him. She made eye contact and smiled. He realized he was holding the door. She glided into the street.
He scooted over to 108-E. He ducked down just far enough to see up the tunnel.
The box was empty.
He spun around. At first he thought he’d lost her, and then he saw her, at the edge of the window—heading west.
THE PHONE RANG.
Cardozo lifted the receiver and even before it reached his ear he could hear music and screaming. The music was a heavy-metal derivative of mariachi. The screaming was Carl Malloy.
“I staked the box out, a woman came. She looked kind of like the Identi-Kit drawing of Tamany Dillworth.”
“What do you mean, kind of?”
“Vince, those are lousy drawings. I followed her to Four-fifty-seven West Forty-ninth. I checked the mailboxes and there’s a Martinez in 3-F. I’m calling from a pay phone right across from the building. She’s upstairs now.”
“I’ll be right down.”
A HOT BREEZE WAS GUSTING IN from the Hudson as Cardozo hurried west on Forty-ninth Street.
Malloy was waiting on the corner of the five hundred block. He was the only man within five square blocks wearing a jacket, and Cardozo realized they must both be pathetically easy to tag as cops.
“End of the block,” Malloy said.
“Has she come out yet?”
“Not yet.”
The building was a standard, decomposing 1890s six-story tenement. They climbed the stoop. The outer door was held open by a little eye-and-hook latch in the baseboard.
Cardozo glanced at the mailboxes. The name Martinez had been penciled on a piece of brown paper and shoved into the slot of Box 3-F. A flyer from a Japanese restaurant had been folded and wedged through one of the decorative perforations.
Malloy shaded his eyes and peered through the glass-paneled door into the empty vestibule. He gave the door a little push. Like the outer door it was unlocked. No slumlord in this neighborhood would lock a front door unless he wanted to replace it every time housebreakers knocked it down.
Cooking fumes and oil-saturated smoke ripened the air of the hallway.
They started up the stairs, Malloy first. The steps tilted and several were beginning to come loose. The fluorescent tube in the ceiling flickered, creating the optical illusion that the steps were rising and falling.
On the third floor landing a cat came out of the shadow. It pressed against Cardozo’s leg. He petted the animal and felt ribs. The cat arched its back and let out a good shrill street meow.
“Hey, kitty,” Cardozo whispered, “where does Martinez live?”
The cat went straight to the door of 3-F.
Malloy leaned an ear against the door. He beckoned Cardozo. Dead silence pressed on the other side of the panel.
Overhead there was a sudden clatter of sandals slapping against steps. Cardozo and Malloy pressed themselves into the shadow. The sandals were heading rapidly up the stairs, not down. At the top of the stairwell a roof door slid open and thumped shut.
Malloy gave the door handle of 3-F a try. He took out his wallet and removed his Visa card. He slid the card into the crack between the door and the jamb. He jimmied it back and forth till there was a soft click. The door swung inward.
Cardozo drew his gun and edged around Malloy and flattened himself against the inner wall of the apartment. It took a moment to blink the darkness out of his eyes. The air was sweltering, sticky—worse than the hallway, with a thick stench of fried food.
His eyes began adjusting, and impressions started to form. He could make out a lattice of light and shade falling across the surfaces of a stove, a sink, a refrigerator.
A hallway stretched to the right, toward the street, and at the end of it light flecks leapt fitfully. In another moment Cardozo saw that a tiny current of air was stirring one of the blackout shades that had been drawn in the windows.
Cardozo nodded Malloy into the apartment. He motioned Malloy to check the back room.
Cardozo crept soundlessly to the front room. He saw that it was small, sparsely furnished, and deserted. He flicked the kitchen light switch.
In the sudden light of the naked sixty-watt bulb, the world of Rick Martinez and Society Sam began disclosing itself. A poster of Rambo shouldering an automatic rifle had been taped to the side of the refrigerator. A pack of Saffire-brand Shabbes candles sat on the drainboard. A half-dozen plates and pans had been stacked unscraped in the sink. Cockroaches had free run of the place. The floor had been overlaid with black-and-white linoleum tiles, and in places open chancres of wood showed through.
In the front room foam-rubber stuffing was leaking out of a foldout sofa-bed. Dumbbells and barbells had been parked against the window wall, with weight-lifting plates stacked beside them. Between the windows, in the space where another homemaker might have placed a picture or maybe a crucifix, Martinez had hung a brown leather weight-lifting belt. Sweat had mottled it darkly.
A bookcase held three books and a potted plant that looked like a seriously endangered species. A scruffy little stuffed bear sat on top of a new-looking Sony tape deck. The bear wore a cheap rosary around its neck and a wool cap with stitching that spelled Rick’s Christmas Bear. Cassette tapes had been piled chaotically on the bottom shelf. Cardozo crouched down to read the titles: there were albums by the Grateful Dead and Iron Maiden and Kiss and Devil Dolls, and there was one called Charles Manson’s Greatest Hits.
Malloy reappeared. “She’s not in back.”
“She’s not up here.” Cardozo studied two pieces of unopened mail lying on the air conditioner. A hand-written aerogram from Colombia was addressed to Mr. Ricardo Martinez, c/o Malsaf, Box 108-E, 412 West 48th Street. A stapled, mimeographed flyer from a Pentecostal church in Brooklyn was addressed to Rick Martinez, Box 108-E, 412 West 48th Street. “You said there was a third piece of mail.”
“There was,” Malloy said. “But I don’t see it.”
Cardozo held the aerogram up to the light. He could make out two layers of tiny, spidery handwriting, and the signature, tu mama.
“You have to look what he’s got in back,” Malloy said. “You’re not going to believe it.”
“Says who?”
In the back room a box spring and mattress had been stacked on the bare floor. Beyond the mattress a cork bulletin board had been fastened to an artist’s easel. Eleven front pages of the New York Tribune were displayed: one for each of Society Sam’s killings, except Dizey Duke, and one for each of his letters.
In the center of the bulletin board Martinez had placed the Identi-Kit drawing of the male Hispanic. In red Magic Marker he had drawn a five-pointed king’s crown on the head.
Cardozo walked to the bathroom. There was no light switch. He moved a hand through the dark and connected with a cord. He pulled and a naked light bulb went on over the sink. Forty watts’ worth of ash-gray light spilled over the grungy tiles and stained plumbing.
On the sink a plastic oral syringe had been placed plunger end-up in an unwashed tumbler. Beside it a shot glass held what looked like a dozen beard hairs.
Cardozo opened the medicine cabinet. A capless bottle of pink-ribbed amphetamine tablets tipped. He caught it before it could clatter into the sink. Dozens of bottles of Squibb and Geigy and Sandoz pharmaceuticals, all labeled in Spanish, clogged the shelves. There was enough stockpiled to macerate the brains of a regiment of Rick Martinezes.
A phone and answering machine sat on the floor beside the toilet. No light blinked on the machine. Apparently no messages had come in since Martinez had last replayed them. Cardozo crouched and pressed Rewind, and then Play.
There was a beep, a hang up, another beep, another hang up, a third beep, and a man’s voice.
“Hi, Rick, how are you doing? I’m phoning Tuesday, June eighteenth. Thanks for completing the pickup yesterday. You have one more pickup scheduled, the timing and the merchandise are up to you. Have fun. I’ll meet you Thursday, June twentieth, two P.M., on the path at West Seventy-first, just inside the park. Look for me on the bench. See you then.”
Malloy stood in the bathroom doorway. “I hope one more pickup doesn’t mean what it sounds like.”
THE FIRST THING that Cardozo noticed about 229 West Eighty-first Street was that the front door and the windows in all six stories had been covered over with steel plates. The second thing was that smoke had streaked most of the brick facade pitch-black.
A man was spraying down the sidewalk in front of the twelve-story white-brick apartment building next door. He averted his hose so that Cardozo could walk by.
Cardozo didn’t walk by.
“Can I help you?” the man asked. The tone of voice was more a challenge than an offer.
“I’m looking for a young woman by the name of Tamany Dillworth.” Cardozo double-checked the address she had given him. She could not have printed the numbers more clearly or decisively. “She said she lived at 229.”
“Maybe two weeks ago,” the man said. “Before the crack factory in the basement exploded and burned the building down.”