Shoot the Moon

by Joseph T. Klempner

“And what might that consist of? An ounce of sinsemilla?”

  “How about nineteen kilos of heroin?” Riley asks her.

  “And remember,” Abbruzzo adds, “our information is that it’s pure.”

  “Right,” Kennedy says. “And that was the anonymous identified dead kid who told you that, if I remember correctly.”

  Abbruzzo reaches into his jacket pocket and comes out with an audiocassette. “Listen for yourself,” he says, tossing it onto Kennedy’s desk.

  Kennedy pries off the lid of her coffee container and sits down. Out of habit, she blows on the coffee to cool it before taking the first sip. It turns out to be an unnecessary precaution. “Set it up,” she says, pointing to a tape player by the window.

  Soon all three of them are seated with their coffee containers, listening to the voice of Michael Goodman, aka the Mole, as he speaks with an outside caller who identifies himself as Vinnie.

  GOODMAN: Hello?

  VINNIE: Hello. This Mikey?

  GOODMAN: Yes, this is Mikey.

  VINNIE: This is Vinnie. Carmen’s brother.

  GOODMAN: How do you do?

  VINNIE: I do good.

  GOODMAN: Is there a problem?

  VINNIE: No. No problem at all.

  GOODMAN: Everything was okay?

  VINNIE: Everything was wonderful. That book was terrific. That’s why I’m calling you.

  GOODMAN: I’m glad you liked it.

  VINNIE: Yeah. I’ll be ready to do some more reading pretty soon. Maybe you can tell me how many more books are in that particular series.

  GOODMAN: That particular book was one of four volumes, just as your friend requested. There are thirty-five volumes to a . . . a series.

  VINNIE: And how many serieses are we talking about here?

  GOODMAN: Altogether, I understand the publisher has nineteen left. Less that one book, of course.

  VINNIE: [Whistles] An’ they’re all as exciting as the one I read?

  GOODMAN: Every one’s a classic.

  VINNIE: Whattaya say we get together and talk tomorrow afternoon, Mikey boy? Just you and me.

  GOODMAN: Sounds okay.

  VINNIE: How ‘bout right in front of the library? You know, the main one, with the two big lions and all those steps?

  GOODMAN: Sure.

  VINNIE: Three o’clock okay?

  GOODMAN: Two’s better.

  “What was that last thing he said?” Riley asks.

  “Nothing,” Abbruzzo says. He’s just realized for the first time why they missed the meeting Saturday, but now isn’t the time he wants to talk about it.

  But Riley doesn’t get the message. “Did he say ‘together’?” he asks. “Fuckin’ guy’s always mumbling. Was that ‘together’ or ‘two’s better’? Play that last part again, will ya, Ray?”

  “Later,” Abbruzzo says.

  If Riley’s a bit slow to comprehend things this morning, Kennedy isn’t. “You missed the meet,” she says. It’s spoken somewhere between a question and a statement.

  “Yup.” Abbruzzo nods.

  “The guy’s so fuckin’ sneaky,” Riley explains. “You just heard how he changed the time at the last second, just to throw us off?”

  Kennedy and Abbruzzo exchange glances.

  “Now what?” she asks him.

  “I was hoping we could get an order to bug his place.”

  “So that explains the coffee.” Kennedy smiles.

  Michael Goodman figures the money orders he mailed out Friday morning should’ve arrived at their destinations by now, so while Kelly reads Stuart Little to Carmen, he calls the MRI place and schedules the new test, the one with contrast.

  “How about tomorrow at three?” they ask him.

  “Tomorrow at three will be good.” Good being a relative term, he tells himself. He decides he won’t tell Kelly until tomorrow. No reason for her to have to think about it all day and spend half the night worrying herself sick.

  He looks over at her. She’s sitting in Carmen’s lap now, listening as Carmen takes her turn reading Kelly’s favorite part.

  “In the loveliest town of all,” Carmen reads, “where the houses were white and high and the elm trees were green and higher than the houses, where the front yards were wide and pleasant and the back yards were busy and worth finding out about, where the streets sloped down to the stream and the stream flowed quietly under the bridge, where the lawns ended in orchards and the orchards ended in fields and the fields ended in pastures and the pastures climbed the hill and disappeared over the top toward the wonderful wide sky, in this loveliest of all towns Stuart stopped to get a drink of sarsaparilla.”

  “What’s sarsaparilla?” Kelly asks, though Goodman’s told her each time they’ve come to the word.

  “It’s what people used to drink long ago,” Carmen explains. “Way back, before there was Juicy Juice.”

  Composing the affidavit for the bug turns out to be harder than any of them anticipated. Like the wiretap order, the bug order is an eavesdropping warrant. The first application had to establish, among other things, that conventional investigative techniques had failed and were likely to continue to fail. Now this second application must demonstrate that conventional techniques still aren’t enough, even when coupled with the wiretap.

  “How do we get over that hurdle?” Kennedy wonders. “Especially when you bring me a tape that proves he talks on the phone?”

  “He’s stopped talking?” Abbruzzo tries.

  “Yeah,” Riley agrees. “The Mole muted up.”

  Kennedy ignores him. “How can you be so sure?” she asks Abbruzzo.

  “He said so. We heard him say it on the phone. ‘No more talkin’ on the phone,’ he said.”

  “Do you have that conversation on tape?”

  “No,” Abbruzzo says, looking her squarely in the eye. “We were right in the middle of changing tapes when he said that. Missed it.” Ray Abbruzzo takes special pride in his ability to maintain eye contact at all times. Once he convinced a murder suspect that in addition to being a detective, he was also an ordained Catholic priest. Got the guy’s confession, too. Then, at the suppression hearing in court, he denied that he’d ever said that. Under oath. All the time, looking the defense lawyer right in the eye.

  The papers are drawn up by noon, then approved and signed off on by 12:30.

  “Any chance we can get some judge to do this before the one o’clock break?” Abbruzzo asks.

  “If we hurry,” Kennedy says.

  “Some judge” turns out to be the Honorable Leslie Crocker Snyder, who sits in part 88 and presides over some of the most serious narcotics cases - and the murders, assaults, and gun possessions that seem to accompany them - in the court system.

  Judge Snyder is an attractive woman with long blond hair that may or may not get occasional help from a colorist, now that she’s reached fifty. She is smart and hard-working. A former prosecutor - some of her critics would argue that the former could be dispensed with - she’s made no secret of her aspirations to become police commissioner or district attorney, and she will appear on just about any panel show that has a camera and a spare microphone. Off the bench, she is warm and friendly, displaying a ready sense of humor that includes the ability to laugh at herself. But as soon as she puts on her black robe, the warmth dissipates, the friendliness disappears, and the humor develops a decidedly caustic aspect to it: She becomes a defendant’s worst nightmare. Accordingly, she is a prosecutor’s best friend, and the judge to see when you need an eavesdropping order signed. Even at quarter to one.

  Maggie Kennedy, being an experienced assistant district attorney in the Special Narcotics Prosecutor’s office, knows all this, so it’s no accident that she’s brought Ray Abbruzzo to part 88.

  Judge Snyder reads the papers carefully. She wants to make sure that the allegations in them add up to probable cause and also demonstrate an exhaustion of conventional investigative techniques. She reads them carefully because, should the bug eventually le
ad to a major seizure of drugs, she doesn’t want some clever defense lawyer to get those drugs suppressed because the allegations weren’t sufficient.

  What she doesn’t pause to worry about is whether or not the allegations themselves happen to be true. Now, in Judge Snyder’s defense, her particular New York City is some light-years removed from the underbelly inhabited by those who use, sell, or seize illegal drugs; and the possibility that police officers occasionally bend the truth may be truly too difficult for her to fathom. In any event, in Leslie Snyder’s rather narrow interpretation of the law, such an inquiry simply isn’t required of her. The statute permits her to assume the truth of the police officers’ allegations, and she’s delighted to cloak herself with that permission.

  Now she signs the order and smiles at Abbruzzo. “Good luck, Detective,” she says.

  “I can drop her off at her grandmother’s,” Goodman tells Carmen as he gets ready to leave for work.

  “You just try it,” Carmen says.

  “You just try it,” Kelly chimes in.

  “On second thought, I don’t think I’ll try it,” Goodman decides.

  “I love Carmen,” Kelly announces, throwing her arms around Carmen.

  “I love you, too, sweetie,” Carmen says, returning the hug so hard that Kelly squeals. They both look over at Goodman.

  “I just wish you two would learn to express your feelings a little,” he says. “What do you want for dinner?”

  “Pizza!” Kelly shouts.

  “Pizza!” Carmen echoes, laughing.

  “I guess that’ll teach me to let a couple of kids be in charge,” Goodman says. Then he’s out the door and off to the Bronx.

  At the plant, Weems and Sheridan have been joined by two members of the OCCB technical team, DeSimone and Kwon. They’ve been assigned at the request of Detective Abbruzzo, who called in this morning from Maggie Kennedy’s office, the moment she’d agreed to apply for permission to bug the Goodman apartment.

  “There goes the Mole,” Sheridan says, lowering his binoculars.

  Weems checks his watch. “It’s twelve-twenty-five,” he says. “He’s going to work, won’t be back till seventeen-forty-five. Now if only we could get the girls to leave.”

  “How much time do you guys need?” Sheridan asks.

  “Studio apartment?” DeSimone asks. “We can be in an’ out in thirty minutes.”

  “As long as we don’t have trouble with the locks,” Kwon adds.

  “I remember one time we wanted to bug some wiseguy’s home out on Staten Island,” DeSimone says. “Only his old lady would never leave the place. Seems their marriage was falling apart, and she was afraid to go out, thought he might change the locks on her and never let her back in. So finally we had to sneak into the basement, light some newspapers on fire to smoke ‘em out. Then we waited for the firemen to show up, and went in with them. Lucky thing they got there when they did, too, cause the goddamn paneling caught on fire. We almost burned the whole fuckin’ house down!”

  They all have a good laugh over that.

  It’s business as usual at the Bronx Tire Exchange. Having just worked Friday, Goodman has less to do than he ordinarily would. He brings things up-to-date, then uses the latitude given him by Manny to set up yet another checking account. This one he calls Larus International and opens it with $25, which he draws against Bronx Tire Exchange, Special Account. Not much of a balance, but you’ve got to start somewhere. He phones the bank, and because Bronx Tire is a good customer, they promise to have checks and deposit slips printed up the next day and delivered by priority mail.

  “So what’ll it be, kiddo?” Carmen asks Kelly. “The park, the zoo, the museum?”

  “It’s cold out,” Kelly says. “Have you ever been to the Planetarium?”

  “Never,” Carmen admits. “You?”

  “Me, too. Never.”

  “Well, put on your space shoes, girl - we’re going where no woman has gone before!”

  Kelly finds her sneakers and begins lacing them up. “Is it scary?” she asks.

  “I don’t know,” Carmen says. “But if it is, we’ll start screaming, they’ll have to give us the heave-ho, and then we’ll be outa there. Deal?” “Deal,” Kelly agrees.

  “Lookathis,” says Sheridan, holding the binoculars, so of course no one else can see.

  “What?”

  “The kid and the chick are outa the crib.”

  “Okay,” Weems says. “You take ‘em. And if they get more than a half an hour away, call us and let us know, and we’ll go in.”

  “How come I never get the fun jobs?” Sheridan whines.

  “‘Cause I got six years and fifty IQ points on you, that’s why.”

  “Great. You guys get to sneak into the Molehill, while I gotta spend the afternoon freezing my balls off, following the broads.”

  The “broads” take the Lexington Avenue bus down to Seventy-Ninth Street, then the crosstown to Central Park West. Kelly spots the dome of the Planetarium from the bus.

  “There it is!” she shouts.

  The good news is that there appears to be no line at the doors. The bad news becomes apparent once they get close enough to read a small sign on the center door.

  CLOSED FOR REPAIRS

  “The nerve!” Carmen says.

  “They could at least say, ‘Sorry, Closed For Repairs,’” Kelly observes.

  “So much for outer space, kiddo. What’s your second choice?”

  “How about the museum?” Kelly suggests. “It’s right around the corner.”

  “The museum it is,” Carmen says.

  As they head back up the walkway, a man in a tan coat is walking toward them. Evidently, they’re not the only ones to be disappointed this day.

  “Don’t bother,” Kelly tells him. “It’s closed.”

  “Oh,” says the man. “Thank you.”

  The museum is open, and Kelly - who knows every square inch of it - leads Carmen around by the hand, showing her all of her favorite places.

  “I wonder what the movie is?” Kelly asks.

  “Movie?”

  “Yup. They have this giant movie screen, and if you sit up real close, you think you’re part of the movie. Like being in a plane, or underwater. It’s so cool.”

  “Then let’s check it out,” Carmen says.

  “We’re at the fuckin’ museum.” Sheridan is talking into a pay phone outside the IMAX Theater. “They’re watching a goddamn movie. You guys got all the time you need.”

  “Which museum?” Weems asks him.

  “The whatchamacallit - the National History.”

  “On the West Side? The Museum of Natural History?”

  “Yeah,” Sheridan says. “Cost me four-fifty for a cab, too. You shoulda seen the look on the Arab’s face when I jumped in and told him, ‘Follow that bus!’“

  “Okay,” Weems says. “We’re going in. You stay with the girls. They decide to rush back home all of a sudden, you do whatever you gotta do to slow them down.”

  “Sure thing. I can always throw myself in front of their bus.”

  “Not a bad idea,” Weems says.

  “Fuck you,” Sheridan says. “I hope the guy’s got a 500-pound pit bull and it bites your black ass off.”

  The giant movie screen is featuring a film about Antarctica, and Kelly and Carmen enter a full twenty-five minutes before the three o’clock showing, just so they can race down the aisle and grab seats in the middle of the very front row.

  “We’ll go blind,” Carmen complains. “That is, if we don’t die of stiff necks first.”

  “This is the only place to sit,” Kelly insists. “Trust me.”

  Carmen laughs. “Remind me never to go on a roller-coaster ride with you,” she says.

  Gradually, the theater fills up. Almost all of the seats are taken by families or by children accompanied by adults. The one exception seems to be a man in a tan coat, who takes his place in the very last row. Quite clearly, he lacks the benefit of a child
to assist him in finding the best vantage point.

  At three o’clock, the soundtrack starts and the lights begin to dim. On the giant screen, the image of an emperor penguin appears. It looks startlingly human in its tuxedo feathering, and there are “Ooohs” from the audience.

  “Look at the cute penguin!” Kelly whispers.

  Thirty rows back, the man in the tan coat can be heard to grumble, “Fuckin’ penguin,” before he’s shushed by those sitting to either side of him.

  Harry Weems checks his watch nervously outside the door to Michael Goodman’s apartment, sees it’s 1452. They were able to get into the building by slipping the downstairs lock with a credit card, but the deadbolt lock is too sophisticated for such a primitive technique. Nonetheless, it yields easily enough to David Kwon’s expertise with a set of picks.

  Once inside, the three detectives remove their shoes. Though their entry is pursuant to court order and therefore perfectly legal, the last thing they want is to arouse the suspicion of some downstairs neighbor, who might hear intruders and tip off the target of their investigation.

  Kwon snaps open a briefcase and begins removing small items.

  “No use bugging the phone,” Weems points out. “We’ve already got a tap on it.”

  Kwon carries a chair to the center of the room and places it directly underneath the ceiling light fixture. “How about a parasite right here for starters?” he asks.

  “Go for it,” Weems agrees. As Kwon stands on the chair, DeSimone hands him a tiny parasite microphone, so called because it draws its power from the electricity that feeds the light. Then he replaces the lightbulb in the fixture with a brand-new long-lasting one of identical wattage. This is a precaution to make it less likely that the bulb will burn out and require changing - and result in the possible detection of the microphone - at any time in the near future.

  “Where do you think they talk?” Kwon wonders out loud, taking in the sofa bed, the kitchen wall, and the card table.

  “The sofa’s no good,” DeSimone says. “Looks like the kind you open up and make a bed out of.”

  They settle on the table. Kwon takes a fully integrated transmitter - a unit the size of a sugar cube, containing both a microphone and a battery - and attaches its adhesive side to the underside of the card table.