Rico Steele inhaled his Winston deep into his lungs and blew the smoke out his half-open driver side window. “I’m tired of sitting, Stone.”
“It isn’t cold enough, you got to have the window open?” his partner asked. He sipped his coffee, made a face, and turned the collar of his leather coat up around his ears. “What the hell kind of weather is this for September? What the hell ever happened to global warming?”
“Maalox,” Steele said.
“What? Maalox what?”
“It’s true. They found out that global warming was being caused by cows farting and burping. So they feed them Maalox now and it stopped. We’re going to have a freaking ice age, because freaking cows don’t freaking know how to freaking behave themselves. Meanwhile, every time you take a deep breath, you’re inhaling cow farts.”
“It’s better than inhaling your damned cigarette smoke,” Stone said. “Being with you is like living in a coal mine. A coal mine filled with farting cows and smoking degenerates.”
“Oh, shaddup, all you do is complain. I’m getting tired of you,” Steele said.
“Maybe if you had heat in this damned truck of yours. Don’t know why you bought a truck anyway. Who needs a truck in New York City?”
“It’s not a truck. It’s a compact SUV.”
“You’re a terrorist. I heard it on Fox News. Out in California, they say anybody who drives an SUV is a terrorist and supports Al-Qaeda,” said Stone.
“How the hell they figure that out?”
“Because of gas, Steele. What do you get, three blocks a gallon? Because of you and all the other terrorists, we’ve got to buy oil from the Arabs. And all that money goes to Osama bin Laden’s boys.”
“That is such crap,” Steele said. He tossed his cigarette out the window and drummed his fingers on the steering wheel of the gray Hyundai Santa Fe. He wondered if it was true that Arab oil money financed terrorism. Stone had been his partner on and off the job for twenty years and while he did like to bust Steele’s chops, he also knew a lot of things that other people didn’t know. Maybe he would get rid of the SUV when the lease was up; maybe it was time for a motorcycle.
He stared across the street at Irving Jerome’s office building. It had a little more personality than its neighbors. They were glass and steel monstrosities but this building was stepped like a wedding cake, a series of boxes stacked big to small as you moved up. Jerome’s office was on the bottom level of the third box from the top, with a little balcony outside, and very easy to see into from across the street where he and Stone had observed the crooked lawyer for the last two weeks.
Jerome was in early every day and then off for the opening of court. Almost as soon as Jerome was gone, his receptionist left the building too, usually for no more than half an hour.
It would be time enough, Steele hoped.
He looked across at his partner. “You know who I’d like to bang?”
“Let’s see. Yesterday it was Winona Ryder and Ashley Judd. Who’s the object of your affections today?” Stone asked.
“Ryder and Judd, only in a threesome. One on one, I’d like to bang Ruby Sanchez.”
“Get out of here,” Stone said.
“What’s wrong with that? She’s beautiful and she’s got a great ass.”
“Exactly. And that’s why she won’t have anything to do with you.”
“Why? Why won’t she have anything to do with me?” Steele said.
“Because you are a big funny-looking white guy. She takes a look at you and she sees this guy wearing dopey red-and-white basketball shoes and high-water pants and driving a truck and she says to herself, this guy is just country. Seriously, what would she want with you? She takes you back home to meet mama and she gets laughed out of the hood. Do yourself a favor. Keep sniffing after Winona and Ashley. Maybe you can take Winona shopping someday. Whatever she steals, you can stick in the back of the truck.”
Steele lit another Winston. “Maybe you can put in a good word for me with Ruby. You know, one black humanoid to another.”
“Not a chance. I like Ruby too much for that. Besides, if Gorman ever found out you were sniffing around her, there’d be hell to pay.”
“Aaaaah, I’m not afraid of Gorman.”
“That’s just proof of how dumb you are,” Stone said. “Wait. There he is.”
As the two men looked out the window across Park Avenue, Irving Jerome left his office building, stepped to the curb and hailed a cab.
“Let’s go,” Steele said.
“Wait five minutes for the girl to leave. And listen, we’re in there and we’re out. We’re not going to shoot anybody or get in a fight or do anything stupid. Let’s see if we can find something that pins Jerome to buying off a juror. That’s all we want.”
“Well, I’m glad of that,” Steele said. “I’m so tired of always winding up in trouble because you’re like a crazy man. There she goes.”
Jerome’s secretary, short and blonde, came quickly out of the building, belting a trench coat around her against the unseasonable chill. As she walked down the block, the two men stepped from the parked vehicle. Samuel Mason was six feet one and as black as men get. He was built like a running back with short hair and amber eyes. His face seemed to be composed of flat planes, joined together at sharp angles. His no-nonsense manner and graveyard voice, as much as his chiseled features, had brought on him the nickname Stone. As in gravestone.
Rickard “Rico” Steele was, by contrast, so white, he seemed to be his partner’s negative image. If Stone looked like a running back, Steele was built like an NBA power forward. He was three inches taller than his partner and his natural pallor and washed-out blue eyes showed his Swedish heritage. His hair was that perfect Nordic blonde and almost shoulder length. He wore khakis and a denim jacket, left open as if in defiance of the early autumn breeze. Stone, on the other hand, wore a dark suit and a black leather topcoat and carried a briefcase.
“I must look like a lawyer escorting some perp into a precinct house,” Stone mumbled under his breath as they walked across the street.
“Not even a doorman,” Steele grumbled as they walked into the building’s lobby. “A low-rent lawyer.”
They rode the elevator up to Jerome’s floor. The white painted legend on the wooden office door read simply, “Irving Jerome. Attorney at Law.”
Stone jiggled the doorknob but of course, the door was locked.
“Stand aside, you wuss,” Steele said. “Let the master at that.”
He pulled a lockpick kit from the inside pocket of his denim jacket.
“Good. You do it. If you get arrested, I’ll tell them I don’t even know you.”
“Hey, we’re ex-cops. Who’s gonna arrest us?” Steel asked.
“Just make it quick, huh?”
Stone turned his back to the door to keep watch down the empty hallway. “You know, when we were on the job, we never would have gotten anything on this guy.”
“Well, we go where the real cops can’t and we do what the real cops don’t,” Steele said. “I guess that’s why we’re called Beyond Blue.”
“Your insight is staggering, but will you open the goddamn door?”
Steele fiddled around for only a few seconds, then pushed the door open. Once inside, the two investigators were unimpressed. Even for a young lawyer and not such a big-time cop-baiter, the office would have been unprepossessing. The receptionist’s desk was cheap metal with a gray chair that looked so hard and unyielding, one might expect it to give anyone who used it calluses.
“What a dump,” Steele said. “Cheap bastard.”
But what money Jerome had saved in buying furniture for his secretary, the lawyer clearly had lavished on his own workspace. The two men’s feet sank deep into tan woolen carpet as they entered Jerome’s office.
“Damned desk’s big enough to play soccer on,” Steele said.
“He’s got an ergonomic chair,” Stone said.
“Whatever the hell that is. Maybe he can take it with him to Attica.”
Stone instantly began to open desk drawers. He was looking for ledgers, checkbooks, address books, anything that might indicate a trail of money from Irving Jerome to a Staten Island blue collar worker named Anthony Benedetto.
A month earlier, a known drug dealer had been freed in a trial in which Benedetto was on the jury. Benedetto was the sole vote for acquittal but he was so stubborn about it that eventually all the other jurors folded and set the defendant free, even though the evidence against him was overwhelming. Two days later, Paul Gorman had called Stone and Steele into his office.
The two ex-policemen were the last detectives Gorman hired. He had already signed on two other operatives and Gunny as straw boss, but Gorman wanted some people who had been “on the job” in New York City and who knew their way around the police department and its labyrinthine bureaucracy. While Gorman tended to be conservative and low-key, he understood that investigative work, especially in cases involving policemen, could be dangerous…even deadly…and the idea of having a couple of burly brawlers on the payroll, just in case, seemed to him to be a necessity.
At that same time, Stone and Steele were taking early retirement from the NYPD. Gorman read about them in a brief New York Post story, obviously written by a friendly reporter, who referred to the two detectives as “decorated hero cops,” and said they were leaving because of “too much red tape. It’s getting so cops can’t do their jobs anymore.” The article made no reference to the unsubstantiated accusations of planting evidence, or the broken jaw Steele had given one of his fellow detectives one evening just two weeks before. Reporters never get to be in cop bars where such lively discussions take place.
Gorman called them that same day and hired them the next morning, after first having Gunny make sure that there was nothing in their records that would stamp either of them as a thief or untrustworthy.
For their part, both Stone and his huge white partner, Steele, seemed happy to have some work to look forward to. It was instantly obvious to Gorman that they had taken early retirement on almost a whim without worrying too much about how they were going to live. This was not much of a problem for Steele who seemed to be a low maintenance bachelor, but Stone had a wife. There was probably some other reason behind their retirements, but Gorman never asked about it. He didn’t have to. His connections let him know of this pair’s intolerance for lazy investigators and for the casual way that some policemen take advantage of their status. Whatever had triggered the actual decisions, he figured that as long as they were clean, it was their own business. Since then, Gorman had grown to appreciate not just their toughness and their street smarts, but also their absolute commitment to making the bad guys pay their bill. A lot of cops pretended to have that attitude, but not many really did. Stone and Steele were the exceptions.
It had been a blistering hot day in August when Gorman called them into his office. They came in as policemen so often did, suspicious and wondering about the circumstances. Usually they got their assignments from Gunny; talking to Gorman himself was out of the ordinary. And both of them were a little in awe of Gorman.
“Either of you know Irving Jerome?” he asked.
“Know of him,” Stone said.
“A dirt bag lawyer, always dumping on cops,” Steele said.
“That’s our boy,” Gorman said. “Did you read the papers over the weekend?”
Stone shook his head. Steele said, “I wanted to, Boss. I really did. I had the paper and I was trying to read it but he was jabbering so much over the coffee…he uses three sugars…that I didn’t get a chance to even read anything. I would’ve read it though if I had the chance without all the noise.”
“Oh, shut up,” Stone said. “The only thing you read is the sports page and just doing that takes you three hours.” He looked at Gorman and said, “He started the New York Post crossword puzzle once. It’s only got eight words in it and he’s been working on it for four years and hasn’t finished it yet.”
“I’m waiting to find a four letter word for African-American ingrate,” Steele said.
Gorman stifled a smile. He had been listening to their dog and pony act for the last year. The hard fact was that they had something only the very best of partners ever had, absolute, total faith in each other. He also knew that if God ever told him that he, Gorman, would have to march into hell, he could do worse than have Stone and Steele at his side.
“Let me bring you up to speed,” Gorman said and told them of the drug dealer being turned loose after a hung jury.
“For your ears alone, that juror was named Anthony Benedetto.
“And you’re not going to tell us how you found that out,” Steele said.
“That’s exactly correct. But what I am going to tell you is that this is the third time in the last year that our friendly neighborhood barrister, Irving Jerome, has gotten some goon off who should have been sent up. All three times with just one unyielding vote for acquittal.”
“He’s buying jurors,” Stone said.
“Or renting them,” Gorman said. “Look, Jerome is slick. He’s a dirt bag, but he’s a sharp lawyer. Most of the time, he wins his cases by chopping up the police witnesses against his client. A lot of times, the judge dismisses the case before it ever goes to the jury. But the ones that get to a jury always seem to get tossed.”
“You’re not a lawyer, are you, Boss?” Steele asked.
“No, thank God. Why do you ask?”
“Because this Jerome is just one crooked lawyer in a city of crooked lawyers. Why him? Why now?”
“Because after getting the acquittal last week, he filed papers with the court and the district attorney demanding that the police witness be investigated for perjury. This isn’t the first time he’s done that. The policeman involved is obviously worried and it was brought to our attention. It turns out that this Mister Jerome isn’t satisfied with just winning his cases. He hates cops and one day, somebody’s going to get killed and he’s going to figure out a way to pin it on a policeman who was just doing his job. I don’t want that to happen.”
“You know anything about this juror, Anthony Benedetto?” Stone asked.
“Just his address in Staten Island,” Gorman said, not surprised that Stone, who rarely missed anything, had remembered the man’s name after hearing it just once. He slid a piece of paper across his desk to the black detective. Stone looked at it, put it in the pocket of his well-tailored suit, and stood up.
“You have any ideas on how to do this?” Steele asked, as he got to his feet too.
“If I had any ideas, why would I have to hire you two?”
Both men grinned and nodded. “Leave it with us, Boss,” Steele said. “Irving Jerome’s ass is now officially grass.”
Gorman stood up behind his desk. “Be subtle,” he said. “Remember, nobody knows who Beyond Blue is or what we do. Let’s keep it that way.”
“Subtlety is what I do best,” Steele said.
The job was made a little easier because Benedetto, apparently exhausted after his three days on jury duty, had taken his wife on a weeklong Caribbean cruise and was out of town and thus not likely to see that two detectives were on his trail.
For the cost of a couple of drinks, Steele had found out from a pretty young travel agent that Benedetto had paid in cash for the cruise, an end-of-season special at $3,999.
Stone found out that neither Benedetto nor his wife had withdrawn that kind of money from their joint checking account. This led them to believe that Benedetto kept a stash of money hidden in his house, or somebody had put the cash to pay for the cruise in his hand.
They eliminated the first prospect by breaking into Benedetto’s house one night and spending three hours searching it. The only hard cash they found was $67 in a cookie jar in the kitchen and judging by the shabby furniture, they doubted that Benedetto had ever had $4,000 hidden elsewhere in the house.
The next point of attack was the juror’s place of employment, D’Elia’s Cartage, where he was a dispatcher for a large fleet of odd-job trucks. Benedetto was not a favorite of the workers there because he was a cousin of the boss and therefore fireproof. In fact, Benedetto had gone on the trip to celebrate his promotion to head dispatcher. And the promotion had come through right after he was finished with his jury service.
The background of D’Elia’s Cartage was their next target and it finally took a trip to the state capitol in Albany, with Stone complaining all the way about Steele’s suicidal driving, for them to learn that D’Elia’s was bought, paid for and controlled by the Cardona crime family.
This was the same crime family that employed the drug dealer who had been set free by Benedetto’s jury. But the missing link was a connection between Irving Jerome and the Cardonas. And that was what had brought them to Jerome’s office on this chilly September day.
Their idea today was not to toss the place but to find what they wanted without anyone ever knowing they had been there. That was the work they did for Beyond Blue Investigations. Find the dirt, give it to Paul Gorman, and then move on to the next job.
As Stone laid various ledgers and books on the desktop, Steele began taking pictures of the pages with a small digital camera. They expected the receptionist to be back in twenty minutes; they wanted to be gone in ten, leaving nothing behind but footprints in the carpet.
Steele finished clicking and opened the left side of the desk. “Look at this,” he said. “Courvoisier. Havana cigars. Isn’t it against the law to have Havana cigars?”
“Only in Cuba. Shut up and keep looking.”
“Bingo,” Steele said. “Look at this.” He brought out an accordion folder that was in the back of the open drawer, behind the Courvoisier. “A list of money and some names.”
Stone looked over. “Recognize any of the names?”
“Just our traveling truck dispatcher from Staten Island,” Steele answered with a grin.
“Goddam, good for you, buddy,” Stone said. “Take the pictures and let’s get the hell out of here.”
As Steele mechanically photographed the pages, he kept up a soft running commentary. “I’d still like to get Jerome’s checkbook. See if there’s been any cash transferred to either Benedetto or D’Elia’s. That would nail it.”
“If we got it,” Stone said. “And if not, we do it the old fashioned way.”
“Lean on Benedetto until he gives us Jerome.”
“Works for me,” Stone said.
Their heads snapped up as if pulled by the same string to focus on the doorknob, which was turning slowly. Stone grabbed the folder and they both darted into the nearest office. Stone pushed the door nearly closed, then crouched to look out. The trio walking through the door wore conservative suits and ties, but otherwise they must have been on loan from that World Wrestling outfit. Stone didn’t like to deal with big guys with no necks, but these guys were particularly dangerous. Their tread was light, and they weren’t talking, just looking around. The smallest guy, only a little bigger than Steele, pointed to the smaller offices while he drew a pistol and headed for Jerome’s office. The biggest guy nodded toward the room Stone and Steele were in.
Stone felt Steele crouching beside him, and heard him whisper, “We are so fucked.”
When Chastity Chiba finally closed the main office door behind her, Gorman leaned on Gunny’s desk and released a gentle sigh. “From this I have to go straight to a meeting with Ruby Sanchez.”
“It was a long briefing to get her spun up on that case,” Gunny said. “And with Ruby Sanchez and Steele and Stone on cases too, it gets to be like herding cats, don’t it?”
“Yeah, sometimes,” Gorman said, allowing himself a small grin. “But a particularly talented bunch of cats indeed, old friend. Now if there’s nothing else pressing, I really do have to go meet the most challenging of them all.”
As Gorman walked out the door, Gunny looked down at his personal notebook where he had jotted down a few words from an earlier conversation. There, in his neat printing, as precise as a typewriter, was everything he knew about the man he spoke to that morning. Gunny’s instincts told him the man was in serious trouble, so deep undercover that he had started thinking like one of them. He said he needed to talk to someone he could trust about getting out of his situation, but Gunny knew that what he really needed was an anchor, someone to remind him of his true self.
Or, he was lying through his teeth and it was a set up to bring down the head of Beyond Blue Investigations. Gunny picked up the phone and punched in the numbers to the mysterious mobster’s pager. He wasn’t ready to let Gorman put himself at risk on this one. Gunny would meet the man himself.