How would she tell her mother?
Beaver was not the only magazine for which Cibella Borges—the tabloid “Naughty Nina”—had posed. Her lawyer had telephoned.
“They’ve got the others,” he said.
He didn’t need to mention them.
She was guilty twice more. “Guilty?” she asked herself. “Guilty of what? I’ve broken no laws!”
What she had broken was the hard-line rule that no female cop in New York can break. Perhaps no other city in the country is more conservative in the matter, oddly enough. Cibella Borges had broken the rule.
She had posed nude in two erotic lesbian scenes for Pub magazine, which was selling briskly with its replated cover featuring “Naughty Nina like you’ve never seen her before,” and a crudely done lesbian skin magazine, Girls on Girls.
Cibella Borges knew she was alone. Very alone.
He had to have them paged in the lobby of the Milford Plaza, the big new Times Square hotel that advertises enormously in out-of-town magazines appealing to people from places like suburban Indianapolis who want to give their regards to Broadway by staying in a hotel that looks just like a hotel on some suburban Indianapolis freeway strip, but he got them all right. He recognized the voice of the redhead.
“Detective Lauver, Nineteenth Precinct,” he said.
“Yes?”
“I’ve reached Angelo. He’s supposed to come in at four o’clock this afternoon, with his lawyer. Could you come by then for the identification?”
“Identification?”
“Don’t worry. We’ll do it through a two-way window. He won’t be able to see you.”
“Well … well, we—”
“What is it?”
“We’re leaving.”
“I see.”
“Well, I’m sorry.”
“You’ve leveled some pretty serious charges, you’ve taken up my time. What is this?”
Lauver thought he heard her crying.
“Why don’t you postpone your flight home?” he asked.
“Oh, no. Not now. We just couldn’t. Look, I’m sorry. It … Can’t we identify him from pictures or something? From back home?”
“Won’t stand up in court.”
“Oh.”
“You sure you want to leave?”
She cried, then said yes and hung up.
Lauver figured as much. Something very fishy about this one, although he didn’t trouble to figure why. Maybe some of it happened, just like they said; maybe Angelo held some threat for them still, something they weren’t telling; maybe a lot of things. One thing was for sure, though. None of it was police business, no matter that Angelo was rattled enough to have taken off somewhere. Lauver had reached his brother, his partner in the small limousine business he operated, and his brother had arranged for the lawyer to call the cops. The lawyer knew Angelo’s whereabouts but wasn’t volunteering. Lauver wasn’t asking, anyway.
The taxi driver said he sure would have remembered any shots that might have gone whizzing through his cab—if it had happened like the girls said. He had a vague recollection of a black limousine that drove parallel to his cab at one point in the evening, but he paid no particular attention to it. Yes, there was a crack in one of the rear windows in his cab, but it had been there for months. He promised Lauver to have it repaired.
Angelo’s lawyer asked about the presence of the girls. Lauver didn’t answer, exactly. It didn’t take a genius lawyer to figure out that three scared girls from Indiana wanted nothing more to do with his client and it didn’t matter what had happened.
Angelo was about as likely to show up at the Nineteenth Precinct PDU for questioning and identification by complainants as the Vatican was ready to announce the Pope’s engagement.
“It’s a trap and he knows it and he’ll never show up,” Lauver said.
He stuffed all his little notes into a manila folder and shuffled it off to the side of his desk.
“That’ll be that,” Lauver said. “A million stories, like they say, and this has been one that falls apart. It happens.”
Whatever he did, Angelo got himself a gift of time. More than likely, he knew it.
Monahan sat in the unmarked Chevy with LaGravanese beside him, taking up most of the seat, what with his newspapers and his books, the “Racing Form,” a plastic bag full of cookies and apples, a crossword puzzle magazine and a thermos of coffee. LaGravanese wore a light topcoat and a hat over a shiny suit. It made him look like a man of 1948, with all the dash and taste of a man who’d spent half a career in postal management.
While LaGravanese spent the hours occupied with his food and other diversions, Monahan mostly spent the time thinking how much he hated the guy.
The hatred was an immediate thing. LaGravanese shook his head, said hello and then the very next thing out of his mouth was an insult.
“Too bad you fucked up the first time, Monahan …”
Monahan had put out a fifty to a couple of stoolies and it didn’t pan out. That’s all. It happens.
But territory is territory, boys will be boys and cops will be cops and LaGravanese, when he heard about Monahan’s early morning stakeout and how it didn’t yield Kano, was mad as hell that he wasn’t called in on the job. LaGravanese had been gunning for a guy called Kano from East Harlem for a year.
“… But look, leave us cooperate on this venture and maybe we can get somewhere together, eh?” LaGravanese smiled and made noise about it and his chins shook. Monahan didn’t have any choice in the matter. His lieutenant, like any lieutenant, liked to cooperate with the city-wide units because one day maybe he’d command one of those city-wide units because he’d cooperated so beautifully.
So Monahan and LaGravanese had picked up Moses the snitch and his pal Orange Lips, too, and sweated the two. But Moses stuck to his story and Monahan felt a little better about the situation when LaGravanese gave an approving nod later on when they were alone.
“I tole you what I know and you pay me the fifty and that’s that, man. I ain’t bargainin’ for no trouble and I don’t want your damn money, neither,” Moses said.
“Shee-it, he’s bein’ square, man,” Orange Lips said.
“So how come he didn’t show like you said?” Monahan asked.
“How the hell do I know? I’m just a no-count nigger, man, far’s you’re concerned. Hell, maybe your man knows somethin’.”
“If he knows you took a tip, Moses, we’ll bust you for being an accomplice.”
“Think I don’t know that?”
There was no point to questioning Moses further. He was dead certain that Kano used the filling station in question and seemed genuinely surprised that he hadn’t shown, since his past behavior had been so regular.
Kano was a smart son of a bitch, Monahan thought. He pays attention to the details. He uses a filling station so long as everything goes right. One thing is out of place—like the fact that Moses isn’t working there anymore—and he changes his patterns.
“All is not lost,” LaGravanese told him when they left Moses’ dump over the fish shop on East 117th Street. “I think he’s telling us straight. I believe him, just like you.”
“So what do we do?” Monahan asked.
“We stake him out again. I want this guy bad.”
They were agreed.
And now they waited. LaGravanese got on Monahan’s nerves.
“Know what a three-letter word for Guido’s high note is?” he asked Monahan. He held the stub of a pencil over his crossword magazine.
“Don’t ask me that stuff.”
“You don’t know, do you?”
“You asking or telling?”
“I’m telling. You never know when you might want to take this up as a hobby, like me.”
“Why don’t you shut the fuck up?”
“No need to get tense, Monahan. How’s about a joke?”
“You married?”
“No.”
“No kidding.”
“So t
here’s two guys, sort of like us. Best friends, but they split up. Mike, he goes upstate and buys a little farm. And George, he stays back in the city, right?”
Monahan stared out the windshield and noticed for the four thousandth time or so that the gasoline vapors trapped between two of the pumps shimmered in purple and yellow when the light was just right.
“Years pass and Mike and George just don’t get around to seeing one another. Just Christmas cards, that sort of thing. And then one day, George decides to go on up into the country to see his old pal and how he’s made out with the farm and his wife and kids and all …”
“Is this going to take long?” Monahan asked.
“Shut the fuck up yourself. As I was saying, George decides to go upstate. So, he rents himself a car down in the city and one fine morning bright and early he takes off.
“He drives all day and into the early part of the evening, but he makes it to Mike’s farm and Mike’s just happy as hell to see him and the two old friends spend a great night in a big old country kitchen drinking and telling stories and catching up on old times, that sort of thing.
“The next morning, Mike’s wife has fixed them a big meal of sausages and eggs and potatoes and George is as happy as a guy with a foot-long rod in a convent. So Mike says to him, ‘How’s about I show you around the spread this morning?’ And George says, ‘Yeah, I’d sure like that.’
“So off they go out from the house. Mike loans George a pair of his spare boots and they’re wandering around the barnyard and Mike’s giving him the big guided tour, like his farm’s some damn Disneyland attraction.
“Then George notices this very peculiar thing coming at him. It’s a huge pig with a wooden leg.”
LaGravanese waited to see if he’d hooked Monahan yet.
“A pig with a wooden leg?” Monahan asked.
“Yeah, you heard me. So, naturally, George can’t take his eyes off this pig with the wooden leg, partly because the pig’s standing right beside him looking up at him. George starts to say something, but Mike interrupts him.
“‘Hey, pal,’ Mike says. And he’s pretty stern when he says this. ‘One thing you don’t do around here is make fun of my pig, got it? That pig has saved my life, twice. So you don’t make fun of it, okay?’
“And George says, ‘The pig saved your life? How?’
“‘Yeah, he saved my life twice,’ Mike tells him. ‘The first time, I was out on the tractor plowing up the south forty out there and what I didn’t know is that some of the bolts were coming loose under the seat, what with the strain of all that jolting up and down and pulling this big old combine hooked up to the tractor. Anyway, the seat gave way and I spilled off and as I fell down I lost control and hit the gear shift the wrong way and the tractor keels over with me. I was trapped there on the ground, in a big rut in the soil and I was half buried and my leg was broken and I could barely move and those big combine blades were coming at me and I thought it was curtains, boy.
‘“But I’m here to tell you, my pig back in the barnyard sensed danger. Don’t ask me how, but he did. So he comes running out onto the field from the barnyard and he right away sees what sort of terrible trouble I’m in and he burrows into the soil with his snout and makes a sort of tunnel for me to crawl up, and he even helps me by standing there so I can grab onto his shoulders and pull myself to safety—just in the nick of time!’
“George says, ‘And then he saved your life a second time?’
“And Mike says, ‘He sure did. It happened not long ago, in fact. We were all sound asleep, it was the middle of the night and the pig saved me and my wife and the kids. Trouble was, something was left burning on the stove and the curtains caught fire in the kitchen, and the fire just spread through the house, with the smoke and all. The pig sensed danger again and he ran to the house and he started banging his snout against the bedroom window where the wife and I were sleeping. Well, we didn’t know it then, but we were pretty overcome by smoke, so the pig had to work really hard to wake us, but he kept at it until he did.
“‘Well, he got us up and we managed to get the kids out, then the volunteer fire department came and we managed to get the fire stopped and we saved most of our things.’
“Mike is just standing there in the barnyard looking down lovingly at his pig with the wooden leg—”
Monahan stopped him by slamming an arm across his wide chest. “Hey! He’s coming!”
Across the street from where Monahan and LaGravanese were staked, a white Lincoln Continental driven by a dark-skinned Hispanic pulled into the filling station. There was a woman in the passenger side of the car.
Monahan’s shoulder dipped as he reached for the ignition key to start up the Chevy. LaGravanese reached for the radio mike.
The two cops had barely moved. But Kano saw it and was alerted.
He saw it and he made them.
The Lincoln’s huge back tires bit down hard into the pavement as Kano floored the accelerator. The big car roared out of the filling station apron like a fighter jet leaving the deck of an aircraft carrier.
“Some machine,” Monahan shouted. “Jesus Christ, how in hell are we going to nail him?”
He jerked the Chevrolet into gear, stalled it and restarted it. Slamming a fist into the dashboard, Monahan cursed at the top of his lungs, bouncing up and down on the seat as the police Chevy sped after Kano’s Lincoln.
LaGravanese picked up the battery-powered cherry top flasher and rolled down a window to fasten the magnetic plate to the top of the Chevy. Then he picked up the microphone and held it to his face for several seconds, before turning to Monahan, red-faced and still cursing.
“I keep forgetting the damn Ten Code!” LaGravanese said.
“Never mind the fucking code!” Monahan sped past a taxicab and the driver shouted an unintelligible curse at him, waving his fist. “Just say what you mean!”
“Okay,” LaGravanese said.
“Go ahead, Special Unit Five-Nineteen,” the dispatcher’s voice said.
“We’re in hot pursuit of a white Lincoln Continental, New York plates, no numbers available, east from Lexington Avenue on 118th Street in the Two-Three, out of sight. Request uniform backup, all eyes of anticrime units. Over.”
The Lincoln had fully three blocks’ lead distance on the unmarked Chevy with the flashing red light. Kano was some smart operator, Monahan muttered. He knew full well he wouldn’t have to move fast beyond a quick exit from the filling station. He knew he could rely on the fact that at some time in the recent past, New York City motorists became largely unconcerned about the matter of emergency vehicles, blithely ignoring sirens that signaled them to pull off to the side of the street so that a squad car in hot pursuit—or even a fire truck—could travel at maximum speed through a crowded city.
If a guy like Kano, who knew he had to be careful in his travels, simply did a little minimal planning in terms of sticking to efficient routes, he could proceed calmly through traffic without arousing anyone’s attention.
Of course, it was supposed to be the other way around. A police car with a flashing red light once upon a time parted traffic like a hot knife through butter. No longer. Private cars simply don’t bother yielding and precious seconds are lost this way.
Monahan was pushing the Chevy hard and it was sometimes all he could do to keep the front wheels under control as the car slammed over potholes up First Avenue. The sweat was pouring off Monahan’s brow as he stayed with the patch of white he tried to keep in view, way up the avenue. He said about a hundred Hail Marys as he alternately pumped the gas pedal, then the brakes, hoping to God he wouldn’t cut down some innocent pedestrian or slam into another car.
A couple of blue-and-whites, lights flashing and sirens screaming, appeared nearby and Monahan’s grip tightened on the wheel. The marked cars would run the interference for him. He had a real chance.
“There he is!” Monahan shouted.
About four blocks up the avenue, the flash of white made a
fast, squealing turn onto an eastbound side street. Monahan jumped up and down on the seat and ground his foot into the accelerator. His head hit the ceiling of the Chevy. “We got him!” he shouted. “He’s got nowhere but the river to hit from here!”
Monahan weaved his way through the sparse traffic of First Avenue in the 130s, infuriated by drivers of private cars who wouldn’t move fast enough—or at all. It seemed like hours before he reached the corner where he thought he spotted Kano turn, though it was only a few minutes.
Then the flash of white again as Monahan turned.
The front of a car nosed past a parked mail truck, screeched to a halt as the Chevrolet roared toward it. Monahan very nearly smashed the Chevy into the fender of a white Plymouth.
“Damn!” Monahan shouted.
He looked into the rearview mirror. Four blue-and-whites were behind him, all of them doing the best they could to keep from colliding with parked vehicles and curbside piles of garbage as they skidded to a halt.
Monahan pounded the dashboard with both fists. Then he wheeled the Chevy around and headed back out to First Avenue and sped further uptown, knowing full well he’d lost Kano again.
Kano and the Lincoln had simply disappeared. Somehow, Kano had found a way.
No doubt, Kano would have the Lincoln repainted and replated and he would start using a different filling station. And no one in whatever blocks Kano had managed to pull off his miraculous escape would have seen anything.
Monahan and LaGravanese both pounded the dashboard. Both knew what it would have meant if they’d been able to run down Kano. Commendation. Promotion. Maybe a command of their own just before they put in for retirement.
They headed back downtown, below the Ninety-sixth Street line between the Twenty-third and Nineteenth precincts, immersed in the blackest cop gloom. They’d had their man in sight, they lost him and that was that for now; they’d done all they could. So why did they feel like a couple of flatfeet in a Mack Sennett movie?
Precinct 19 Page 19