He was going to be all right, was Abby Horowitz.
Francis Kearney was a slightly more refined version of his brother Thomas, but only slightly. He was younger and his alcoholism hadn’t had as many years to progress, so perhaps by the time he was Tom’s age, he’d look like shit, too. Both, though, were belligerent and sullen and snarling. They both were also at the meeting, on time. We didn’t bother with the niceties—no offering of refreshments, no introductions and handshaking. They were offered seats but both preferred to stand, which was fine by me. I hoped they wouldn’t be there long enough to need to sit.
“You, Thomas Kearney, are going to pay the insurance claims to Ravi Patel and Jawal Nehru By the close of business today.”
“Fuck you.”
“It’s you, both of you, who are going to be fucked,” Abby said, emerging from behind the screens with an armload of paper and a DVD, which he inserted into the player.
“That’s the fuckin’ lawyer I told you about!” Thomas said to Francis. “You ain’t no fuckin’ lawyer!” he yelled.
“I certainly am,” Abby said. “Now listen carefully while I outline the legal case against you.” And when he finished outlining it, holding up pieces of paper along the way that proved everything he was saying, Thomas had nothing more to say, and Francis had yet to utter the first word. “Now, as Mr. Rodriquez said, you’re going to make good on the insurance claims of Mr. Patel and Mr. Nehru today or this information goes to the District Attorney tomorrow morning.”
Nobody said anything for a very long moment. Thomas was shaking, he needed a drink so badly. Francis finally roused himself. “And suppose we don’t?”
Yolanda waved the television remote at the Kearneys to get their attention then pointed it toward the screen and hit the button. The faces of the Kearneys’ nephews filled the screen. Then Yo turned up the volume and Thomas reached into his pocket for the half pint of hooch he kept there. He downed half of it in one long gulp. Yo switched off the TV. “The paper goes to the DA and the videotape goes to the police,” she said.
“And if we do what you want, pay those claims, do we get that file and the tape?” Francis was doing all the talking now.
I looked at Thomas. “Is he going to be able to take care of the checks?”
Francis looked at Thomas, too. He stood up, snatched the half pint bottle away with one hand and slapped the shit out of his cousin with the other. “He’ll take care of it.”
“Then you’ll get the file and the tape.”
“When, exactly?” Francis wanted to know.
“When Mr. Patel and Mr. Nehru tell us their checks have cleared,” Yolanda said.
“Why do you want to protect them, help them?” Thomas was slurring his words and his eyes were pink and he whined the question, but the hatred was palpable.
“Why do you want to hurt them?” Yolanda asked, her fury barely under control.
The Kearneys looked at her, hatred, anger, confusion merging with the years of alcohol abuse to blur their features. “Because they’re un-American,” Francis finally managed.
“They’re not the ones who are,” Yo said quietly, and turned away, headed for her den.
Abby clapped his hands together and rubbed them back and forth. “So, if you have no more questions, gentlemen, we’ll have to ask you to leave. We’ve other business to take care of.”
If Francis Kearney had had the nerve he’d have popped Abby right in the chops, but guys like the Kearneys only had behind-the-back kind of nerve. They looked down on Tank but he was the only one of them in that family with enough nerve to look somebody in the face and do them dirt. The Kearneys left and Mike got the air freshener from the bathroom and sprayed the room. Yolanda called our clients and told them it was possible that they’d get their insurance claim checks that afternoon, and asked them to call the moment they did. I knew without her telling me that she’d ask for some numbers off the checks, and she’d ask for some numbers off their bank accounts, and then she’d do that thing she did to credit the Patel and Nehru accounts with their insurance claim money before the checks ever left their hands.
We were satisfied with the work we’d done, but not yet pleased. Abby and Yolanda, thanks to the information on Bill Calloway’s flash drive, had managed to penetrate Big Apple’s data base and were looking for denied claims. We had gotten an idea from Casey and McQueen how many calls they’d made to Homeland Security and how many fires they had set. We’d be pleased with ourselves when we’d been hired by the people the Kearneys had cheated out of their property to pressure Big Apple Insurers into reimbursing them. Abby was sure we could make the case that the company was complicit in the illegal acts because we had Bill Calloway’s memo to Kearney’s boss suggesting that Kearney was up to no good. But this process would take time; maybe a lot of time, as in years. So, in the short term, we’d settle for being satisfied, and move on to the next item of business.
Richard King alternated between anger, disbelief, outrage, sagging defeat, and threats of murderous revenge. He swung from emotion to emotion like an out of control pendulum. Then he wept like a child at the thought that the business his father had founded and built would be lost on his watch. “Oh, God, what have I done!”
“Mr. King, Mr. King!” I had to shout at him to get his attention. “That’s why we’re showing you this video, why we collected the documentation to back up what we think is happening—so you can take the necessary steps to stop it, and to bring the perpetrators to justice.”
He looked at me. He looked at Yolanda. He looked, in turn, at Mike, Eddie, and Abby. “But I hired him. Kallen. I hired him. Doesn’t that make me guilty, too?”
“Not if you didn’t know what he was doing,” I said.
King shot up out of his chair like he’d been fired from a cannon. “Of course I didn’t know! That’s what I’m trying to tell you! I had no idea—”
Yolanda took King by the arm and led him back to his seat. “We know you didn’t know, Mr. King. That’s why we asked you to come here for this meeting. If we thought you were involved, we’d have gone directly to the authorities, because otherwise, they’d have thought we were involved, too. Do you understand?”
King looked at her, nodded his head, then buried his face in his hands. “What should I do? Tell me what to do!”
Yolanda went to the back. I didn’t know what she was doing, but I hoped she wasn’t making more coffee. King had already had four cups and was bouncing around like a pinball. But no, not coffee, wise woman that she is. Two fingers of brandy in a little snifter. “Drink this, Mr. King, and calm yourself so we can talk.” King took a big swallow of the brandy and shuddered. Then he sipped it slowly, like the gentleman he probably was under normal circumstances.
“What should I do?” he asked again. “What do you recommend?” We told him. He listened. “You’re certain you can take this to the police and they can stop him, stop them, stop what’s going on, arrest those people, without making my building and my company look bad?” He was looking at Yolanda when he asked the question, so she answered.
“Yes, Mr. King, we can do that. We will do that.”
“All right, then. Bring the contract.” Yo brought it and King signed it. Then he brought out his checkbook and wrote a check. He was calm now, and relaxed, no doubt owing in part to the brandy, but also because he was back in his comfort zone. He was doing business the way business should be done, aboveboard and with contracts and retainers. “I feel really bad about letting that Kallen bamboozle me the way he did. Now I know why Shirley and Eileen insist on having you people run extensive background checks on all employees, not just the maids and janitors.”
“It’s not just maids and janitors who commit crimes, Mr. King.”
“Oh, of course not! I know that. But I didn’t think . . . well, I thought it was just the Mexicans that we hear so much about who are illegal aliens. I didn’t think Russians and people like that were, too.”
“Probably half the Eastern Europea
ns in New York City are here illegally, Mr. King,” Abby said. “Maybe more than half. And a good number of those are engaged in illegal activity of one kind or another.”
King gave a snort of disgust and got to his feet. “So what the hell are the Homeland Security people doing?”
“Keeping our borders safe from Buddhist monks, Hindu restaurant owners, and Sikh yoga teachers,” I said.
Since he had no idea what I was talking about, King didn’t bother to respond to that. At the door he said, “I really appreciate what you did for my business. I won’t forget it.” He shook all our hands and headed out into the world, head up, shoulders back, a spring in his step. Then he stopped and turned back toward us. “Those women. What will happen to them?” he asked, and in that moment, I liked Richard King. He was a businessman, yes; but he also was a human being.
“Social Services will take care of them,” Abby said.
King nodded in satisfaction and left us almost as pleased with ourselves as King was. Before we met with King, Abby had gotten assurances from Deputy Chief Spade that he personally would take charge of the investigation into Kallen’s operation because he thought that there most likely was more than one such set up, and that no matter what turned up, the Avenue B building and KLM Management wouldn’t get splattered when the shit hit the fan. But Spade couldn’t promise that he’d shut down the operation right away, which meant that the legal and law-abiding tenants of that building would have to endure Boris and his KGB mentality for a while longer. I understood Spade’s position: If he shut down the Avenue B operation immediately, Kallen probably would roll up the other components of his operation. Which is why I worked for clients and not the cops: I wanted the Avenue B residents not to have to endure another hour of Boris and his sleazy johns. And if the women in those apartments truly were sexual slaves, I wanted them not to have to spend another moment enduring physical, emotional, and psychological abuse and torture. But we’d made the deal we’d made and I’d have to live with it. Didn’t have to like it, but I did have to live with it, as peacefully as I could manage.
The five of us probably looked as if we were being led to our executions as we got off the subway at its last stop. None of us had been to Manhattan’s tip since that horrible day in September of 2001. None of us had been able to look, up close and personally, at the hole in sky where the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center had dominated the landscape. Mike and Eddie and I had talked a lot about how we’d love to get our hands on some terrorist son of a bitch intent on doing harm in or to our city again—some crazy suicide bomber looking to become a martyr. But in truth, how would we know what one looked like? We were above ground, looking north, back toward the city, instead of south, toward the water. As if on cue, we all turned toward the empty space and still no one spoke because there was nothing to say. I was thinking, though, what I’d do, if I got the chance, to get close enough. . . .
Chapter Fifteen
Yolanda, Sandra, Jill, and Arlene had joined forces to throw an engagement party for Connie and me at Jill Mason’s place. Jill had the penthouse loft in a SoHo building that could have—should have—been featured in one of those magazines that depicts how the really rich really live. I’d been there once, in the dead of winter, and while I’d seen how truly magnificent the place was, I hadn’t seen the rooftop garden. I also hadn’t seen these people that I knew and cared so much about dressed elegantly, in an elegant setting, celebrating anything. That they were celebrating me, that all the stops had been pulled out for me—on the other hand, maybe it was for Connie, and I could stop trying to find words to express emotions I didn’t know I had.
Arlene’s restaurant catered the affair, but Arlene and her son Bradley and her daughters and their husbands were guests. Raul Delgado, in a white dinner jacket, was the banquet master, easily and adeptly overseeing a staff of a dozen. He looked like a movie star from one of those 1950s high glamour pictures, suave and cool.
Sandra Gillespie, who’d been a dancer for twenty years and who always was regal and beautiful, was more elegant and gorgeous than I’d ever seen her, and I’d seen photos of her in performance. She was as happy for me as Yolanda was; so happy that she’d brought her grandmother to the party, which was a statement in and of itself. Well into her seventies, and maybe even eighty, Mrs. Gillespie was regal and elegant herself, and she greeted me with genuine warmth and affection, and greeted Connie the same way. She had helped me out on a case a few months ago and had been kind and polite to me, but I hadn’t known that she really liked me.
I met Jill Mason’s parents for the first time. They, too, were quite elderly and I knew from conversations with Jill that both senior Masons were infirm, but they were bright and cheerful this night, and obviously having a good time.
For the first time I saw evidence in Carmine and Theresa Aiello of the benefits the money their familial connections must bring. Carmine’s suit, shirt, and shoes were Italian and so well made that he looked a foot taller and fifty pounds thinner; and Theresa’s dress, one of those filmy summer things that look as if they were made by magic instead of with material and thread, certainly hadn’t come off anybody’s rack in anybody’s department store.
Mike and Helen Smith, and Eddie and Linda Ortiz, people I’ve known and seen for years, looked like strangers, like people in a glossy magazine spread advertising yachts or island retreats. Eddie looked strong and robust again though he still tired easily and occasionally looked a little sad; twenty years as a New York City cop and he’d never been shot and then, on a job with me. . . . And we met Abby’s wife, Lisa, a tall, raven-haired beauty who laughed as easily as he did and who, like her husband, never met a stranger. My parents and Connie’s parents, who had been stiff and formal with each other, even relaxed and loosened up when introduced to Abby and Lisa and then were overrun by Abby doing nothing but being himself. I could see how his arrest record was what it was: He simply out-talked the white-collar criminals he was after.
The people from Connie’s life and job blended and meshed with those from my life and job as well as Connie and I blended and meshed together. Her best friend, Carmen de la Cruz, and her husband, Miguel, started off the toasting. Carmine ended it:
“You all know Rodriquez so I don’t have to tell you anything about him. Except this: He was always worried that he wasn’t going to find the right woman. No matter what else he was doing right and good, he was always worried about that one thing. No matter what I tried to tell him—that he should count his blessings while he could.”
The roar of laughter drowned him out but he kept a mostly straight face and kept his champagne flute aloft. He looked down at Theresa and gave her a barely perceptible wink. “And since you all know Rodriquez, you know he couldn’t let well enough alone, so here he is tonight, engaged to Miss Connie de Leon.” He bowed toward Connie. “So now, paisano, I can tell you the truth. You’ve earned the right to hear it: No matter what happens to you in your life from this moment on, good, bad, right, wrong, the woman who is standing beside you, if it’s good, she’ll make it better, and if it’s bad, she’ll make it good. If it’s right, she’ll make it perfect, and if it’s wrong, she’ll tell you that. She’ll tell you that she loves you no matter what. And if you’re a smart man, Rodriquez, which I know you to be, you’ll thank her for choosing you, first thing every morning and last thing every night. ’Cause make no mistake, Rodriquez, it was her did the choosing, no matter what you think!”
This roar was even louder than the first, made so by whistles and cheers. Then Abby Horowitz grabbed his wife and started dancing, and they grabbed hands and in a moment everybody was in a circle, dancing and singing and laughing and crying on the roof of Jill Mason’s building, the whole of Manhattan spread out before us. I’d never felt so good and couldn’t imagine how it could ever get any better than this. I was fully recovered from Tank’s ass whip, owing in no small part to my living up to my promise of daily gym visits. I was stronger and more fit than ever, though I truly
didn’t intend to need physical strength for additional rounds of hand-to-hand combat on East Village street corners. I’d made that promise to Connie, and to myself. Anyway, I had my gun back—and carry permits for the two new ones—both courtesy of Ace Spade, and to the dismay and disgust of Captain Bill Delaney, who forswore never to forgive me for going behind his back.
I didn’t care what Bill Delaney thought about me. Nor did I care that the Kearneys and a good number of their relatives, including Tim McQueen, Pat Casey, and Willie-the-Tank, were looking at serious jail time. The Daily News reporter I’d fed the story to had, as I’d asked, taken a deep and hard look at how our government treats innocent people who’ve been slandered by anonymous voices on the telephone, then robbed of their livelihood and property. Good reporters, like good cops, often let the accused tell their own stories in their own words. It’s called giving them sufficient rope to hang themselves and the Kearneys amassed yards of the stuff as they expressed their outrage that the people who had destroyed two of the city’s fabled landmarks and killed their relative were allowed to own and operate businesses. Somebody had to do something about it! They hanged themselves with their words and they dangled, gasping and strangling, until the DA cut the rope and dropped the entire clan into a pool of watery shit.
The reporter did a special story on Mrs. Nehru’s return to her homeland of choice following the Homeland Security Department’s removal of her name from its Watch List. The Nehrus’ gratitude could be seen on Connie’s ring finger: An engagement ring of gold and jade that I could never have afforded without the steep (extremely steep!) discount they offered. Unfortunately our Sikh tenants decided to remain in India. Yolanda and I have wished too many times to count that we had paid more attention to them, that we had fostered stronger relations with them, so that when they were targeted as terrorists, they’d have felt comfortable confiding in us. But that didn’t happen and we’d have to live with our regrets. We’d also have to find new second-floor tenants. And speaking of tenants, those in the Avenue B apartment building still live under Boris’s thumb, though we’ve been given assurances that won’t be the case for too much longer. I plan to be there the day Kallen and Boris get busted. I want to see them get their due, which I hope is a one-way ticket back to their homeland.
A Murder Too Close Page 29