by Norman Green
Fallon grimaced at Number One again. “Okay, that’s two,” he said. “Come with me.”
“Lieutenant Fallon?”
“Yes, ma’am?”
“How come you guys couldn’t just ask me this like seven hours ago?”
“The ways of the federal government are deep,” he intoned, “and past understanding. But when they’ve failed, we go back to what we know.”
“I see.” On her way out of the room she stared into Number One’s eyes, mentally added him to her list, the names of those whom God would surely not let die before she got her chance at a little payback.
The cold wind howled in off the ocean and roared up Bay Parkway. Al headed for the warmth of a Dunkin’ Donuts joint, but she felt the gentle pressure of Sarah’s hand on her elbow so they continued in frozen silence for another block until Sarah guided them through the front door of a Zabar’s Bakery. Al found a seat behind a rickety table, sat shivering, clutching her thin jacket around her while Sarah waited at the counter. A moment later Sarah was back with coffees and a bag full of chocolate croissants. Al took the plastic lid off, wrapped her hands around the tall paper cup. “Happened to your diet?” she said.
“Screw the diet,” Sarah said.
“That’s the spirit. Fallon told me you did okay, lawyering up so quick. What was it he said? ‘You might have something there.’ Pretty high praise, coming from a guy like him.” She watched the anger flare in Sarah’s eyes.
“Fuckers,” Sarah said. “They treat you like you’re a piece of dog shit, and then they wonder why everybody fucking hates them.” She shook her head. “I know, they’re all heroes now . . . Which one was Fallon?”
“Older guy, heavy, blue eyes. NYPD, not federal.”
“I don’t think I saw him.”
“He saw you. Said they couldn’t rattle you.”
“First thing you learn, right?” Sarah looked down into her coffee. “Fucked-up-family rule number one: don’t tell ’em shit.”
“Whatever. You did good.”
“Thanks.”
“You really have a lawyer on speed dial?”
“No. I called my mother, actually, and she called her cousin.”
“He a lawyer?”
“She. Yeah, but disbarred, on account of conspiring to have a jury member’s wife beat up. But she called some guy she works with, and, you know. You know how it works.”
“Yeah. I do.”
“What the hell did they want?” Sarah looked up from her coffee, stared across the table at Al. “What the hell was this all about?”
“Frank,” Al said.
Fifteen
“I don’t get it,” Sarah said. “Not for nothing, okay, I mean I did love the man once upon a time, but Frank was never worth following with no helicopter, not on the best day he ever had.”
“They weren’t following Frank, they were following us. Me and you,” Al told her. She wasn’t warm yet, but the coffee was helping.
“You get what I’m saying. It’s Frank they’re after. Who are those guys, anyhow?”
Al shook her head. “I’m still not sure. Bobby Fallon is NYPD, no question of that, and he’s older and smarter than all of those other guys, but I got the impression it was him working for them instead of the other way around. The cops that hauled me in were from the local precinct right there in Bushwick, but those two goofballs who came after us weren’t NYPD, no way. And that was not an NYPD chopper.”
“Do you think they could have been FBI?” Sarah said. “What the hell could Frank have done . . .”
“I don’t think so,” Al said. “They ran that interrogation like they just read the manual yesterday. They kept accusing me of assaulting federal agents, but when I asked Fallon about it, he wouldn’t answer.”
“The other thing I don’t get,” Sarah said. “What’s up with the surveillance? What could you and I be doing that’s worth whatever it costs to have, what, three guys following us around?”
“Three that we know of,” Al said. “Plus the cost of the helicopter. Do you suppose they got home movies of you boinking J. Austin Smits—”
“Ohmygod,” Sarah said, turning pink.
“—the famous sculptor? I gotta check YouTube the first chance I get.”
“Ohmygodohmygod,” Sarah said. “You don’t think . . . Wait. There was no helicopter. We were out in the middle of nowhere for crissake, there was nobody there but us. You’re a dog.”
“Come on,” Al said. “They don’t have to be anywhere near you, they could record you from a satellite. You got to catch up with the times.”
“Oh, shut up,” Sarah said, going from pink to red. “You were just . . . I don’t care. I ain’t gonna be a nun for the rest of my life. I waited long enough already.”
“Are you serious?”
“I like Jake,” Sarah said, a bit defensive. “He’s nice. I mean, I don’t understand why I always wind up shopping in the dented-can store, but I don’t care, I like him.”
“Wow,” Al said. “Good for you. I guess you’re pretty sure he didn’t off his father.”
“Yes. Thank you. Where were we? Oh yeah, we were trying to figure out why these guys from Cleveland or whatever spent all day sweating you instead of just telling you what they wanted. What do you think?”
“Well, they weren’t NYPD and they didn’t know what they were doing. I just wonder how long it took Fallon to persuade them to let him talk to me.”
“What did you give Fallon?”
“He wanted to know what happened at Costello’s, so we talked about that. He wanted to know what I came up with at Frank’s apartment. I told him what I found. I know they were there after I was, but I’m guessing they’ll go back and look again, and they’ll work the building super over a little better than they did the first time. They didn’t know anything about Palermo Imports or Paolo Torrente, either. They got all hot in the pants when I started talking about that, and about a half hour later Fallon handed me off to two other gerbils, and I went around in circles with them for a while.”
“Did you give up TJ?”
“You know something? I told them I was there with my boyfriend, and they weren’t at all interested in him. Now that I think about it, these guys act like they’ve already got everything they need on Frank, now they just wanna grab him.” She looked at Sarah. “I feel like a rat.”
“Don’t,” Sarah said. “Listen, if these guys can afford a helicopter, then they can afford whatever it takes to find Frankie, which means they’ll probably turn him up quicker than we can do it. And whatever he did, that’s on him, not me.”
“So what do we do now?” Al asked her.
“Look at what they did just because we were at Costello’s with Frank. I bet they told you to leave this alone before they let you go, didn’t they? Did they warn you off?”
“They reminded me how much trouble they could cause for us.”
“We could let it go. If they find Frankie, fine, at least I know where he is or what happened to him. If they don’t, they’ll get bored and go away, and then we can pick it up again. In the meantime, we got bills.”
“Insurance,” Al said.
“Yeah. And it ain’t gonna be cheap,” Sarah said.
“You don’t really want to drop this, do you?”
“No. But I don’t wanna be selfish about it, either. We can’t afford for either one of us to go to jail for screwing up a federal investigation. Or God forbid, even worse, get hurt or something.”
“You know what, Sar, if I thought these guys knew what they were doing, I could think about letting it go. If they were for real, maybe they would have a better chance of finding Frank, but they don’t look to me like pros at all. Have they called you or your lawyer since they let you walk?”
Sarah shook her head.
“You see what I’m saying? They should be all over you,” Al told her. “Whether you wanted to help them or not, they should have two or three guys assigned full-time to making themselves the best f
riends you ever had, they should be shoveling your sidewalk and everything. And they haven’t even called?”
“No.”
“You see? I don’t think we should back off yet.”
“All right. I’m gonna go back to the office and finish my paperwork, and then I’m gonna go back out there. Just do me one favor, okay?”
“What’s that?”
“Be careful.”
“Yeah. Will do.”
They had given Marty a new wheelchair, one with drive wheels so he could push himself around. Al figured that the chair, together with the vindictive look on his face, was a sign that he had turned some sort of corner and was now on the road to recovery. And even if he wasn’t, on a guy like Marty, spite looked better than self-pity. “I wondered how long it would take,” he said.
Al decided to feign innocence. “How long what would take?”
“Don’t try to bullshit me,” he said, sneering. “You’re in trouble now, so you’ve come crawling back to see if I can bail you out. Ain’t that right.”
She sat down in one of the empty chairs in the dayroom. “I’m not in any trouble, Marty.”
“Don’t give me that shit, Martillo. Bobby Fallon came down to see me a couple days ago, and he wanted me to talk about you. Fallon is out of the police commissioner’s office, in case you don’t know. I don’t know what the hell you did to attract his attention, but trust me, it ain’t good news. You musta fucked up big time if you got Bobby Fallon up your ass.”
“I thought Mr. Fallon was very nice,” she told him, glad to see some of the self-righteous smugness wiped off his ugly puss. “I’ve been working this case, and it so happens that Fallon was looking under some of the same rocks.”
“I didn’t tell him anything,” he told her. “I played stupid.”
He doesn’t know how to spin this, she thought. He knows if he comes on like too much of a hard-on, I’ll walk. And if he cares about that, maybe he is getting better . . . “That shouldn’t have been too difficult,” she said.
“Oh fuck you, Martillo,” he said, but without any real heat. “What can you possibly be working on that a guy like Fallon would be interested in?”
This is it, she thought, this is where we find out if he is gonna come back to life or not. If he really wants to hear it, he’s got a shot, and if he sits there busting my chops, he’ll probably die in this place. “If I tell you,” she said, “can I trust you to keep your mouth shut?” He has to decide, she thought. He knows it and he knows I know it. So is he gonna pull himself together or does he sit here feeling sorry for himself for the rest of his miserable life?
Stiles rocked his upper body back and forth slightly, his hands clutching his armrests. He wrestled with himself in silence.
“Come on, Marty,” she said. “What’s it gonna be? You gonna help or you gonna sit here and rot?”
He looked at her, swallowed once, steeled himself. Recovery would be the more difficult choice, she knew that. It would mean a fight, a hard one and one that would last just as long as he did. Much easier to give up, grow old and bitter, immobile and useless. He swallowed again, then nodded, surprising her. “You have my word,” he said. “Tell me.”
She started with the night at Costello’s, ran through all of it, right up to her interrogation and the subsequent encounter with Fallon. He sat in silence until she was done. “Great,” he finally said. “You’ve been on this thing for days, and what are we making out of it? You and your fucking crusades, Al, I swear to God. I don’t see any way we turn one single stinking dollar on this. Who gives a shit what this guy was into? Let it go, for crissake . . .”
“Frank is Sarah’s ex,” she told him. “Like it or not, Marty, she’s one of ours. That makes it our business.”
“Al, I know you wanna do the right thing, but she answers the fucking phone, okay? She types invoices. Don’t make her out to be—”
“Yeah,” Al said. “And she also does all the hotel and bar business, Marty. I taught her how.”
“Are you nuts? Are you out of your mind? If she fucks that up, how do we keep the door open? How do we pay the rent? Have you thought about that? I know you think those mercenary type considerations are beneath you, but you have got to—”
“Hey, you know what, she’s doing such a shit job with it, Marty, she just landed Hyatt Hotels. Those ops managers love her, Marty, they love her. They think she walks on water.” Another choice, Al thought, another turning point. If he accepts her, we go forward. If he doesn’t, I walk.
The depth of her feeling surprised her.
She wondered if he knew.
He thought about it. “Hyatt,” he finally said.
“Yeah.”
He shook his head. “I never wanted a partner.”
“Nobody gets it all their own way.”
“And you figure I need you now. Both of you.”
“Why is that so awful, Marty?”
He looked around the dayroom like he was trying to find the exit. “What about you?” he finally demanded. “What about you? You two wasn’t the best of friends, if I recall correct. I hired her to take your job, and she took it, you forget about that? And look at me. I can’t even get up the steps and into the office no more. Is this what you want?”
“I told you, we moved the office, Marty. The new place has an elevator.”
“I thought you were kidding,” he said.
She didn’t respond.
“You do that for me?” he sneered.
“Look at it any way you want,” she said.
“Fucking bullshit,” he said.
“Yeah. But that’s life, Marty. It might suck, but it’s the only game in town. Take it or leave it.”
“What’d I do to deserve this, will you answer me that? Two partners now, and both of them women. Christ. Somewhere my ex-wife is coming all over herself.”
“For crissake, Marty, get off the pot.”
“You’re all heart, you know that? All right all right. Christ Almighty. All right.” The muscles in his jaw clenched. “Okay already. Tell me what Fallon asked you. Word for word, if you can.”
She looked over at Stiles’s face when she was done. From the side he looked different, human in a way she hadn’t thought of him in a while. Or maybe it was the fact that she’d given him something to think about besides himself. For several moments he held the silence, rocking his upper body back and forth in his chair. Finally he coughed. “Any markings on the helicopter?” he said.
Al closed her eyes, tried to take herself back through it. “Logo on the door,” she said. “Some sort of stylized animal head inside a circle. Corporate name on the tail. Can’t remember the name. Weird name.”
“Lots of Italians in this mess,” he said. “Was it Italian?”
“I don’t think so.”
“Those guys from Kansas. They show you any ID?”
She ran back over the sequence of events. Could they all have been phony? No way, she thought. A helicopter flying at street level, even in Bushwick, would be sure to draw questions, and besides, the guys who’d picked her up had taken her straight to the station house. But . . . “No,” she said. “No, they didn’t.”
“Ya dope ya,” he said.
“Yeah. But wouldn’t that be a felony? Impersonating a federal agent? And they did it right in the middle of a police station. They had to be for real.”
He gave her a look.
“All right then,” she said. “Who were they?”
“I’ll try to find out,” he said. “But I don’t think they were cops.”
“What, then?”
He shrugged. “If they were any kind of policemen, you’d still be answering questions. Wherever those yokels come from, it’s a new one on me.”
“Was Fallon alone when he came to see you?”
“Yeah. Probably thought I woulda had too many questions if he’d brought his pals along.”
“Did you talk to him?”
His eyes flicked over at her, then away.
“I do the catatonic thing pretty well.”
“Tell me,” she said. “What is it about those guys that makes you say they aren’t cops?”
“What they asked you,” he said. “What they didn’t ask you. Even Fallon, when you come down to it, he didn’t sound like he was trying to build a case. All they really were interested in was, where is Frank Waters? Think about it, Al. Did they seem like they cared at all about the man? Were they curious about who he was? What he did? What he talked about?”
Al shook her head. “No.”
“That ain’t the way cops go through life. It ain’t the way they do business. Even if they already got something on the guy, there’s a curiosity cops have that these mutts aren’t showing me. You take your ordinary citizen, he walks into a bar, he’s looking for a beer. He goes in and gets his beer, he drinks half of it, then he looks around. Maybe. And you know, maybe not, maybe he don’t give a fuck. Maybe he just drinks his beer. A cop walks into the bar, what’s the first thing he does? He stops just inside the door. Tell me, Martillo, what’s he doing?”
“Yeah,” she said. “He’s gathering information.”
Stiles nodded. “Being a cop changes your head, it changes the way you move. Okay, you come for a beer, fine, but you ain’t Joe Six-pack anymore. Your eyes have been opened. What kinda joint is this? Who are all those guys at the table over in the corner? Is the bartender carrying? Anybody in the joint selling dope? Where’s the back door? Where’s the shithouse? Anybody in it? Anybody looking at you funny? Why’s that kid at the bar getting all fidgety? That’s all in the first half second. Then, maybe, you go and you get your beer. It’s how you stay alive.” He pointed at her. “That’s why Fallon come alone. He knew those guys wouldn’t smell right.”
It galled at her that she had missed it and he had seen it so quickly. “They weren’t interested in Frank after all,” she said. “They only wanted to know where to find him. That’s why they took off so quick when I told them about Palermo Imports.”
“They’re not trying to make a case,” Marty said. “Find the guy, put him in a box, bring him in, that’s their job description. That means you still got the edge.”