GOODMAN: I’ll make it a point to be.
VINNIE: Good, you do that. And Mikey boy?|
GOODMAN: Yes?
VINNIE: No funny stuff, okay?
The phone goes dead.
“Shit!” Harry Weems slams down the phone. He’d hoped the conversation would last for eight or ten minutes. That might have given the responding unit a chance to get to the restaurant in time to see who was on the phone, or at least who was coming out of the place looking as if he’d just used the phone. One time, Weems had been able to find out who had used a pay phone last by yelling out that the quarter had ended up in the coin return slot, then waiting to see who claimed it. Guy who claimed it ended up doing five years, too - either because he was really the one who’d made the call or because he was greedy and tried to steal the twenty-five cents. Whatever.
But Goodman stayed on the phone less than a minute, making it impossible for anyone to get there in time to get a look at this Vinnie guy.
On the other hand, they have learned that the exchange is scheduled to go down at eight o’clock tomorrow night. And while they don’t know the location yet - other than “downtown somewhere” - they should have that by noon tomorrow.
The door opens, and Ray Abbruzzo comes in and joins them. “How’d you do?” he asks them, still shivering from the cold.
“No luck on IDing Vinnie,” Weems says.
“But we did get the details of how the deal’s going to go down,” Riley says.
“Good work.” Abbruzzo seems genuinely pleased. “When’s it set for?”
“Eight o’clock tomorrow night.”
“Where?”
Riley checks the notes he made of the conversation. “Uh . . . someplace downtown.”
“Great,” Abbruzzo says. This time, there’s not the slightest suggestion of pleasure in his voice.
Goodman is back home in time to finish his tuna casserole.
“Where’s that party you’re supposed to be going to tomorrow night?” he asks Kelly.
“I already told you,” she says.
“I know,” he admits. “But tell me again.”
She shoots him a look that says, Grown-ups, but she gets up and finds the invitation. “‘Two hundred West Tenth Street,’” she reads. “‘Corner of Sixth Avenue. Apartment Six B. Six to nine p.m.’ Janie says there’s a parade that goes by, and we’ll be able to see it from her living room. Neat, huh?”
“Very neat,” Goodman says. A Halloween parade? Must be something new. Probably a dozen weirdos running around in silly costumes.
“Me and Carmen bought material to make me a costume,” she says.
“Carmen and I,” he corrects her.
“No, you’ve got to carve the pumpkin. Remember?”
“I remember,” he assures her.
“And give it a scary face.”
He nods.
“Not too scary.”
With no developments expected for another eighteen hours, Abbruzzo all but shuts the plant down. He figures they can all use a good night’s sleep before getting ready to cover the deal tomorrow evening. He leaves one of the newly assigned men on duty, with instructions to beep him right away if anything out of the ordinary happens. Then he calls Lieutenant Spangler at home to get permission to requisition the MOUSE for tomorrow evening.
“Okay,” Spangler says. “But don’t forget to put in the paperwork for it.”
“Right,” is what Abbruzzo says. What he thinks is, This job really sucks - you want to use a stupid van to make a legitimate collar, you gotta ask permission to request it. And God forbid you don’t submit the proper fucking forms in triplicate or quadruplicate or whatever, some stiff from IAD is going to have your ass on the carpet first thing Monday morning, accusing you of using police property for personal business.
“Anybody need a drink?” he asks.
There is a chorus of “Yeahs.”
Goodman sits at the card table, trying to carve a not-too-scary jack-o’-lantern. He’s never seen so many pits in his life. They’re all over the place - on the table, under the table, in his lap, down his shirt. Pop-Tart seems amused by them at first, but soon becomes overwhelmed by the sheer number of them.
“Save those,” Carmen says from the bed, which she and Kelly have opened up to use as a work surface for their costume making.
“Save what?” he asks. “The pits?”
“They’re not pits,” she laughs. “They’re seeds. And I want to season them and bake them. They’re delicious.”
Pop-Tart hops up onto the bed and begins attacking the material Carmen and Kelly have stretched out there.
“I knew the guy at Woolworth’s was making a mistake,” Carmen says. “We brought him this roll of black satin marked five-ninety-five, and he just rang it up. It was supposed to be five-ninety-five a yard. That’ll teach them to let men work in responsible positions.”
“We’ve got miles of it,” Kelly shouts, rolling it onto the floor, where Pop-Tart pounces on it.
“Wouldn’t it have been the honorable thing to point out the poor fellow’s mistake to him?” Goodman asks.
“Honorable shmonorable!” Carmen says. “It’s not his money.”
“Honorable shmonorable,” Kelly giggles.
And it occurs to Goodman: Who am I to talk?
It’s after ten by the time they’re finished. Goodman has created a respectable jack-o’-lantern, complete with a Chanukah candle. Kelly is a very convincing witch, all in black satin: a tall peaked hat, a floor-length cloak, and black tape to produce the illusion of thigh-high boots. A broom completes the outfit. Almost.
“Can I bring Pop-Tart?” she begs. “Pleeeease?”
“It’ll be much too cold out,” Goodman tells her.
“Maybe we could take a cab?” Carmen suggests.
“Who’s side are you on?”
“My side!” Kelly squeals, hugging Carmen. “My side! My side! My side!”
“And who wound you up?” Goodman asks. “We’ll see about it.”
“That means yes,” Kelly whispers to Carmen.
“It means we’ll see,” Goodman tells her. “When did I lose control around here?” he wonders aloud.
Cleanup is next. Carmen and Kelly gather up bits and pieces of material, while Pop-Tart makes an occasional charge. That leaves Goodman to crawl around on his hands and knees in search of pumpkin seeds. They’re covered with stringy yellow stuff, which makes them slimy and hard to pick up. There are so many underneath the table that his hands fill up.
“Hand me that bowl over there, would you?” he asks whoever’s in earshot.
“Here.”
He feels the bowl against his left shoulder. With both hands occupied, he has to lower himself to the floor before turning to reach behind him. It’s a strange position he finds himself in - underneath the table, looking upward. But it’s the only position from which he can see the bowl.
And something stuck to the underside of the tabletop.
But to Goodman, given the distance, the awkward position he’s in, and the poor lighting under the table, it looks like a piece of used chewing gum. He’s about to say something about it to Kelly, but then it occurs to him that it might have been Carmen who stuck it there.
“Are you going to take the bowl, or what?” Carmen’s asking him.
He takes it from her hand, empties the seeds into it, and crawls out from under the table.
“It’s story time,” Kelly announces, already under the covers with Larus and Pop-Tart. He forgets about the gum.
The Ballerina Princess (Continued)
Now it came to pass that the Ballerina Princess received an invitation to a ball-
“A ball?”
-which happens to be another word for a fancy party where the guests all get dressed up in strange and beautiful outfits, which are sometimes called costumes.
Because the Ballerina Princess was so beautiful, she decided that for once it would be fun to go dressed up all in black - a black hat,
a black cape, even long black boots. And on her face, she wore green and yellow makeup. By the time she was ready to go, she was so ugly that she was scared to look in the mirror, for fear that she might cause it to crack.
“Did her cat go with her?”
“Quiet, you,” he says. “I told you we’d see about that.”
“It’s only a story, Daddy,” she reminds him.
At the ball, nobody had any idea who the girl dressed all in black was, but everyone agreed that she was the ugliest, scariest, most evil-looking creature they’d ever seen. In order to figure out who she was, they decided to wait until the end of the ball - to see who came to pick her up.
At the stroke of nine, the doorbell rang, and all the other children ran to see who the two people were who’d come to pick up the little girl. But, to their surprise, the man and the woman at the door were dressed up in their own costumes, and even as they reclaimed the little girl and fled off into the night with her, not a soul knew who they were. Or who the little girl was.
“Ever?”
“Ever.”
Spike Schwartz is the lone police officer on duty at the plant. Spike’s full name is Adalberto Schwartz. He’s a Puerto Rican Jew, and he’s been called “Spike” ever since seventh grade, when somebody figured out you could compress two ethnic slurs into a single syllable. The nickname stuck. Spike and his wife - her name is Norma, though she’s referred to by her husband’s friends as “the Spikestress” - are the proud parents of six-week-old twin boys. People keep assuring Spike that, with a little time, the babies will adjust to each other and get themselves onto the same feeding schedule, more or less. So far, it’s been less. Spike arrived for work this evening on less than three hours of sleep over the last thirty-six.
Spike’s a good cop, and he tries his best to stay alert and monitor the electronic equipment properly. But no phone calls come in at all, and the only thing the bug seems to pick up are dishes being washed and some goofy guy telling a story about a ballerina who dresses up like a witch.
By 2100 hours, Spike’s starting to yawn.
Goodman lies awake in his spot on the floor that night, watching the shadows cast by the candle burning down in the jack-o’-lantern.
Tomorrow, he thinks. Tomorrow he becomes a certified, blue-ribbon, wholesale narcotics dealer. He wonders if there’s still time to pull out of it, to tell Vinnie that he’s changed his mind, or chickened out, or whatever. He thinks about the guy he saw staggering around on 161st Street this afternoon, thinks about Russell. He thinks about the Resurgence of Heroin.
The same old dilemma comes back to him. He knows it’s wrong to be putting the drugs out onto the street. But he also knows now that Kelly, even if she’s to continue getting better, is going to require expensive medical attention for the foreseeable future - medical attention he means to provide for her, no matter what.
“Are you awake?” Carmen’s voice.
“Yes.”
“I kinda figured you might be,” she says. “Want company down there?”
“I’d love some.”
Then she’s next to him, all warm in an old flannel shirt of his.
“I need to ask you something,” he says.
“Ask.”
“If anything happens to me, will you - would you look after Kelly? You know, see that she gets to her grandmother’s?”
“That’s it? Just like that?” There’s a sharp edge to her voice.
“What do you mean?”
“I mean, think what you’re saying.” She’s up on one elbow, face-to-face with him. “The kid’s six years old. Her mother died. She’s sick, maybe real sick. What do you think happens to her if she loses her father now?”
“I-”
“‘Look after Kelley’? ‘See that she gets to her grandmother’s’? This isn’t some rag doll you’re talking about, Michael. This is a child, a little girl, and she’s not going to survive losing you.”
He puts a hand on her arm. “I don’t intend on losing me, either,” he says, trying his best to sound self-assured. “I’m just saying those things in case.”
She lies back down and says nothing more. He watches the orange light flickering across her face. It plays tricks with her features, making her nose look long one moment, short the next. For a while, it hides the tears that well up in her eyes. But only for a while.
He says nothing. He’s never known what to say when a woman cries - not to his mother, when his father finally lost his long battle to cancer; not to his wife, when their occasional arguments would bring her to tears; not now to this woman who lies next to him.
“You can’t do this, Michael,” she says softly.
“I’ve got to.”
“You can’t.” The urgency of a moment ago is gone from her voice, replaced by a flatness. She says the words not so much as though she seeks to persuade him, but more to let him know that she’s in a better position to understand how things really are - as if she knows something that he doesn’t.
So he asks her. “Why not?”
“You just can’t.”
“Why?”
“Because Vinnie’s a federal narcotics agent.”
“No way,” he says. Part of him is sure she’s joking. The other part of him involuntarily pulls his hand back from her arm. “What makes you think so?”
“I don’t think so,” she says. “I know so.”
“How can you know that?”
The tears well up again, only this time there’s no stopping them. They overflow, producing long streams that run down her cheeks. It’s awhile before she answers him, but finally she does.
“Because I’m one, too,” is what she says.
Several minutes pass before Goodman’s able to speak. He wonders if this is what it feels like to get hit with a sledgehammer.
“You’re a DEA agent?” he asks dumbly.
“Yes,” she says. “Or at least I was until this moment.”
“I don’t believe you,” he says. “You’re just saying this so you can talk me out of going through with the deal.” But even as he says the words, he knows he’s grasping.
Carmen doesn’t say anything right away, and for just a moment, Goodman dares to take her silence as confirmation that he’s right, that none of this is true, that he’s seen through her little ploy.
When finally she begins to speak again, it’s in an emotionally exhausted monotone. It’s the same voice he heard moments ago, when she told him he couldn’t go through with the deal. It tells him she’s way past arguing.
“My name is Cruz,” she tells him, “Carmen Cruz. I’ve been with DEA eleven months. I do undercover work. A couple of weeks ago, we got a tip that you had some pure heroin, possibly a lot of it. We checked you out, found out from the super that you were the kind of person who couldn’t bear not to let a stray kitten in. We figured you’d have the same reaction with a stray person.”
“The beating, the rape-”
“That was all an act,” she says, “a performance. Makeup, stage blood.”
Goodman fights to understand, but he can’t even begin to. “The stuff about Paulie-”
“Stuff,” she says, “lies. There’s no Paulie. I’ve never been a prostitute. Before I was a DEA agent, I was an investigator with the state police.”
“Cruz? You told me you were Italian,” he says dumbly.
“I lied,” she says, and the tears start again. “I’m half Puerto Rican, half Cherokee. They concocted the Italian bit so I could mention that I had a brother with Mafia connections. Remember my full name - Carmen Ormento Pacelli? The initials spell out cop. My partners thought that’d be a cute touch - they knew you’d never notice.”
“I never noticed,” Goodman says. He still isn’t sure she’s telling him the truth. But it’s slowly beginning to dawn on him that she must be. “And Vinnie?” he asks.
“Vinnie is Frank Farrelli. Nine years in DEA.”
“And the other guy - T.M.?”
“T.M. is Jimmy Zelb,” s
he says. “Six years in DEA. They call him ‘No Neck.’ And T.M. stands for ‘The Man.’ Another little joke of theirs.”
“‘The Man’?”
She laughs softly. “You don’t even know, do you? ‘The Man’ means the law, the police. We’ve been playing games with you, Michael. And you’re so, so-”
“-dumb-”
“-that you don’t even get it when I explain it to you.”
But, in spite of himself, he’s beginning to. “Why are you suddenly telling me all of this?” he asks.
“It’s not all that sudden, actually. I’ve been having trouble ever since the day you took me in. You were supposed to be nice - they warned me not to be fooled, said that you would be - but you weren’t supposed to be that nice. You thought I was a whore. Yet you treated me like a lady. My God, you treated me like a lover. And your daughter - I wasn’t ready for that. By the time of your meeting with T.M. at the bookstore, I had serious doubts that I could go through with it. That’s why I had to work it so that I was the one to hand him the package, not you. Otherwise, they’d have you for a sale already.”
“My God,” Goodman says, letting it all sink in. “I feel so stupid.”
“Stupid?” She’s up on her elbow again; it’s he who lies flat on his back now. “You’re wonderful, Michael. You’re caring and loving and trusting and gentle and all the things a person could ever want. We took advantage of that. I got you to bring me into your home and take care of me so that I could betray you. We’re the ogres here, not you. Can’t you see that?”
And, at last, he can. “Everything was lies,” he says. It’s not a question so much as an acknowledgment.
“Not everything,” she says in a voice barely above a whisper. “Thinking you’re wonderful wasn’t a lie. Learning what it feels like to be cared about wasn’t a lie. Falling in love with your daughter wasn’t a lie. Falling in love with you hasn’t been a lie.” She lies back down. The light from the candle continues to play on the contours of her face.
For Michael Goodman, there is a cruel, terrible irony in this last remark. Short of Kelly’s recovery, nothing in the world could have made Goodman happier than to hear this woman lying next to him profess her love for him. It’s something that he hasn’t even dared to think about, much less bring up in conversation. But now that he hears her utter the words, the circumstances in which they’re spoken rob him of any pleasure he might otherwise have taken from them. He lies on his back, feeling totally exhausted - deflated, as though everything’s been sucked out of him.
Shoot the Moon Page 31