Wet Work

by Christopher Buckley

  "How are you doing otherwise? Your stomach?"

  "My stomach is fine, Jim."

  "Don't start hitting yourself, Frank. I just asked. Oh, by the way, Mr. Kelly called from DC. He asked about you."

  "No kidding? So often when a man moves up in the world, he forgets the little people. Not Mr. Kelly."

  "Take care of the cold, okay?"

  The SAC walked off, leaving Diatri to blow his nose and sift through the personal effects of Ramon Antonio Luis spread out on his desk. The evidence clerk at the Ninth Precinct had mistakenly sent them to the FBI laboratory and it had taken two weeks to get them back, Detective Korn finally handing them over in a plastic bag held at arm's length as if it contained a live bubonic rat. A pack of Marlboros, a gold chain with the Virgin of Guadalupe, a Porsche key ring with a single key Technical Services said belonged to a Master's brand padlock, $1,200. Robbery was certainly out.

  "I'm going out, Alice," he said.

  "Okay, Frankie. Don't get shot."

  Diatri stopped. "What did you say?"

  Alice went on typing. "I said don't get shot."

  "Well, what the hell kind of thing is that to say? Jesus, Alice."

  "What's the matter with saying that? You're always getting shot. I just said, 'Don't get shot.'"

  "Couldn't you just say, 'Be careful,' or, or 'Have a nice day' or something? 'Don't get shot'? Jesus."

  Diatri stood on the sidewalk on East Eighth where Luis had died. The brown blood puddle was now just barely visible. He tapped the key ring against his palm. The last address the PD had for Luis was "Unknown."

  They found him facedown, headed west, the bullet came from behind, so we know he was walking west. Okay, clean hit, middle of the night, probably silenced since no one heard a shot, professional, possibly, though why pay a pro to pop a lower-echelon scumbag? Still, looks like a professional hit, so… a professional would be waiting for him, and where would he know to wait for him? Diatri looked down the block. NOAH'S 8TH STREET YAGHT? What was a boat doing here? Never mind the boat. The nearest building was number 316. A sign over the door said:

  THIS LAND IS OURS. PROPERTY OF THE LOWER EAST SIDE JOINT PLANNING COUNCIL.

  The door was open. Even through his cold he could smell the urine. It was a broken-down building, but underneath the accumulation of crud he saw the remnant of a parquet floor that in its day had been lovingly waxed and buffed. Families had lived in this building and raised children and filled vases with cut flowers and cooked meals and sung around the piano at night-crunch, a crack vial broke under his foot.

  He tried the doors on every floor. No one home. He found the padlock on the eighth floor. Master's brand.

  He unlocked it and, very slowly, pushed the door open, about an inch, until he saw the wire. He got down on his knees and with his nail clippers snipped it. He pushed the door open the rest of the way.

  The wire ran from the door through an eyehook to the trigger of a sawed-off twelve-gauge held in a bench vise and aimed at the knees of whoever walked in the door. He broke the gun and examined the load. Number nine shot. Skeet load. Good spread.

  The room was dark, not much light getting through the windows, which he guessed had last been cleaned when Kennedy was President. There were candles all over the place. Empty packs of Marlboros, Doritos, Oreos-the kind with extra filling. Bottles of Dos Equis Mexican beer. A Spanish-language glossy magazine open to a spread on Prince Andrew. There was a steel trunk by the sofa doing duty as a coffee table. Two pharmaceutically brown bottles on top, procaine and mannitol, dental anesthetic and baby laxative. He found the cocaine inside the trunk, about an ounce, not much, but it had the rocky texture and micaceous glint of the good stuff. People who didn't know better mistook numbness for a sign of purity; the baby laxative just added bulk-and made people have to go to the bathroom a lot. They could stretch the ounce by a third, anyway, and retail it for four thousand, more than enough, in this world, to justify shooting off someone's legs.

  Diatri was looking through the rest of the apartment when he heard the creak of feet coming up the stairs. He drew his Sig Sauer and crouched behind the door.

  "Emi?" he heard. It was a woman's voice, an old woman's, and scared. "Emi?" She pushed open the door and walked in.

  "Hello, ma'am-aggh!" The woman shrieked and sprayed him full in the face from a hand canister.

  "Ow!" Diatri shouted. "Shit! Ow! Shit!"

  "Back!" she yelled. "Or I do again!"

  "No! Federal agent! Policia! Ow!" He groped for his ID, waving it at her.

  "Oo," said the woman. "Sorry. I think you are mogger."

  Diatri stumbled toward a chair, moaning, holding his face.

  "You okay, meester?"

  "No, I'm not! Jesus. Get water, something."

  "You wait, I get." She came back with a damp rag that looked like Egyptian mummy wrappings. Diatri took off his shirt and gave her his undershirt and wet it from a bottle of club soda.

  "You gon to arres me?"

  "Yes. Assaulting a federal officer with chemicals. Jesus. What's your name? What are you doing here?"

  "I look for my son."

  Diatri said, in a softer tone of voice, "Is your son's name Ramon?"

  "No."

  "What's your son's name?"

  "I go now."

  "No, ma'am. What's your son's name?"

  "Emiliano Ramirez. He stay here sometimes. He missing for more than two weeks. I come here for two weeks to see, but I don have key. He take me to church every Sunday but he don come. I go to Missing Persons burro. Please don arres me, mister. My sister dying of cancer. You know cancer? If you arres me, she no have no one to-"

  "Okay, okay. Look, let's-Jesus, that hurts-what is that?"

  "Mes."

  "Mace? Where'd you get-never mind. This is your son's place? Well, your son is in a lot of trouble, Mrs. Ramirez. No, not right in the eye, just, just let me have the bottle, thank you. You see what that is on the table there? That's cocaine, Mrs. Ramirez."

  "He don have cocaine."

  "You just told me he stays here."

  "No."

  "Yes, you did, Mrs. Ramirez. You just told me."

  "His friend stay here. This not his place." She looked around. "Too dirty."

  "Ramon Antonio Luis, do you know him?"

  "No. Yes. That his cocaine. Luis is bad person, not like my Emi."

  "What does your son do, Mrs. Ramirez?"

  "He work."

  "What kind of work?"

  "He work in a theater. He's good boy. Never no trouble with police. Okay I go? My sister have to have inyection."

  "Uh-uh. I'm afraid we're going to have to go talk to some people, Mrs. Ramirez."

  The old woman began to cry and suddenly Diatri was telling her it was okay and letting her wipe her nose on a corner of his undershirt.

  Diatri hadn't been inside a parish rectory in over twenty-five years. A lot had changed in the Church since then-Vatican II, a Polish Pope-but it was all depressingly familiar: the housekeeper with a hacking cough and wearing slippers because of her bunions, heavy furniture, heavy drapes, carpets that needed more than a Hoover and a warped print of a fifteenth-century Madonna who looked like she'd rather be in Philadelphia. The room in which she left him smelled of stale cigarettes, family problems and funeral arrangements.

  The priest who walked in was in his mid to late forties, athletically built, with a wide, friendly face and eyes that augered through their thick lenses at Diatri, putting him instantly on the defensive.

  "Father Rebeta?"

  "Yes." He had a strong grip. "Detective Diatri?"

  "Special Agent, with DEA."

  "Ah"-the priest nodded-"drugs. Sit, please."

  "Padre, I understand-"

  "You were in the military."

  "Uh, yes."

  The priest smiled. "Italians don't say 'Padre,' but they do in the military. Where were you stationed?"

  "Overseas. You found Mrs. Ramirez through-"

 
"Where overseas?"

  "I was in I Corps, along the DMZ."

  "Sure. Khe Sanh? Con Thien? Camp Carroll? The Rockpile?"

  Diatri started twisting Old Blue Eyes around his pinky. The priest's eyes went to the ring. Diatri put his hands on his lap, out of view. "If you don't mind, I'd like to ask you how you and Rosa Ramirez found each other."

  "No, of course." Father Rebeta told him about the strange phone call he'd received in the middle of the night. Diatri noted it took place the night after Luis was shot on East Eighth Street. The priest said that at first he was convinced it was a sick joke someone was playing, until he heard the man say, "Okay, Emiliano, I have your priest on the phone."

  The priest said, "And the confession I heard, that could not have been a joke. I went to the police and told them. They told me it must have been a joke. The only thing I could think of was to go to Missing Persons and see if anyone had reported a missing Emiliano. They said they didn't give out that information but I made a pest of myself and sometimes"-he tapped his Roman collar-"this is good for something, and eventually they let me see their list. There were eight missing Emilianos. I was able to narrow it down to five on the basis of the date of the call, and after going to see the five people who'd reported missing Emilianos I came to the conclusion it was Mrs. Ramirez's son, Emiliano."

  "And you reported this back to the police?"

  "Yes."

  "And-"

  "And they couldn't have cared less. I got a lecture about their case load."

  "What convinced you it was Mrs. Ramirez's son?"

  "Intuition-and the time frame, I suppose," said the priest. Diatri caught it, a slight upward flicker of eyeball.

  "This other voice," said Diatri, "it called you Padre, like I did?"

  "Yes."

  "Tell me about his voice."

  "Deliberate, intelligent, commanding. Accustomed to being obeyed. Rather calm. His syntax was revealing."

  "His what?"

  "Choice of words."

  "What about his choice of words?"

  "He said, 'Got a man here gonna die.' He didn't say, 'I'm going to kill a man.' There's a difference, isn't there? Look at the way that first sentence is constructed. As though the man's death is an action independent of his own agency. As the saying goes, hypocrisy is the homage that vice pays to virtue."

  "Seems to me you're hanging a lot on this syntax."

  "Everything hangs on grammar, Frank. Everything. The soul reveals itself through language. Do you remember when Nixon started using 'we'? Everyone said he was being pompous, using the royal 'we,' but that wasn't it at all. It was the two Nixons talking, his superego splitting away from his self. He was talking, without realizing it himself, about the two Nixons."

  "One was plenty. We're getting a little off the track here, Padre."

  "Not really. Not really. I've spent almost twenty years of Saturdays sitting in a black box listening to people spill out their souls through words. I have an appreciation for the words they choose. Like a blind man, I suppose."

  "I get to see their faces when they confess," Diatri said. "That way I can tell when they're pulling my chain."

  "Oh"-Father Rebeta smiled back-"I can tell too."

  "So what about the voice?"

  "It was Southern, actually more Southwestern. Sharper, some twang to it. Texas maybe, Arizona, New Mexico. Someone from the Deep South would say, 'Got a man here gonah dah.' He said, 'gunna die.' It's a tighter diction, less elasticity, it snaps back faster. Also, his use of 'Padre' would be consistent with that. Unless, of course, we're talking about a military man, like yourself. But we're ignoring the more important aspect of it, aren't we?"

  "If you say so." Must be a Jesuit.

  "Why would a man who was about to whack another man in cold blood go to the trouble and risk of calling a priest in the middle of the night to hear his confession?"

  Diatri said, "Because he's a Catholic himself."

  "Yes, exactly."

  "But if he's about to kill this guy, why does he care about giving him confession?"

  "You tell me."

  "No," said Diatri, "you tell me."

  "It's obvious, isn't it? Because he's compassionate."

  "He's about to kill the guy and he's compassionate?"

  "Think it through."

  "Are you a Jesuit by any chance?"

  "I was, yes. But I'm diocesan now, as you can see."

  "Uh-huh. Well, you're doing fine, so why don't you think it through."

  "Okay." The priest smiled. "A Catholic would almost certainly know that sacraments cannot be administered over the telephone. The Church has changed a great deal, despite our current Pope, but she has not yet reached the point of Reach Out and Forgive."

  "So?"

  "So, the man who placed the call, knowing it didn't count, was doing it anyway, presumably to make the man he was about to… whack… feel better."

  "Okay. Go on."

  "On the other hand, though the confession was not, strictly speaking, valid, the very fact of the man's desiring confession would constitute volition-the desire for forgiveness. And as you no doubt recall, desire is nine-tenths of the law."

  Diatri smiled. "So he's looking eight to ten centuries in Purgatory instead of a million consecutive life sentences in the Hot House?"

  "We don't speak of 'Hell' the way we used to, Frank. We speak of Separateness."

  "What did he tell you during this confession?"

  "You know I can't tell you that, Frank."

  "Why not? You said it wasn't a valid confession."

  "No, but given the man's volition, I would treat it as such nonetheless. But nice try."

  "That's very disappointing, Padre."

  "I can tell you that his life had not been a paradigm of sanctifying grace."

  "Well, that really narrows it down for me, especially in New York City. So many paradigms of sanctifying grace walking around."

  "I am trying to help."

  "Let's recap. You think you got a telephone call from a Southwestern Catholic compassionate guy who was about to kill a Hispanic scumbag named Emiliano. Does that about do it?"

  "I'm certain he didn't mean for me to hear him say the man's name. I heard a phone tone just before that. I think he meant to put me on hold and pressed the wrong button. He said other things, but I couldn't hear."

  Diatri leaned back in his chair and stared at the priest for a moment's effect. "Why don't you just tell me what it is you and Mrs. Ramirez are holding back."

  They stared at each other for a good half minute. Finally the priest said, "On one condition."

  "This is a federal investigation, Padre. No conditions."

  "In that case, I can't really say."

  "All right. I'll consider it."

  "Consider it?"

  "Favorably."

  "In that case. Two days after I got the phone call, Rosa received an envelope through her mail slot containing ten thousand dollars. Five hundred used twenty-dollar bills."

  "Funny how she neglected to mention that little detail to me. Does she still have the envelope?"

  "No. I asked. She burned it. But there were no markings."

  "That's really too bad. What about the money?"

  "Spent. She bought a new television-"

  "Great. Little Emiliano missing and she's the Queen of K Mart."

  "-for her sister, who's dying of pancreatic cancer. That's one of the worst kind. The rest she's using on getting her into a private hospice out in Flushing."

  Diatri stood up. "Thank you, Padre."

  "Frank, may I ask you something?"

  Frank. "Yes."

  "Do all priests make you nervous, or is it just me?"

  "You don't make me nervous."

  "Then why have you been doing that with your ring the whole time? By the way, is that Sinatra?"

  "It's, I gave up smoking. It's something to do with my hands."

  "No it isn't." The priest smiled.

  At the door, Diat
ri said, "If they got word there was going to be a major battle, they would fly in two things. Frozen steaks and priests. We could always tell when the shit was going to hit when we saw the frozen steaks and the priests. I haven't had a steak since January 1968. And I used to love steaks." Diatri shook his hand. "Thank you for your time, Padre."

  13

  "You want to cut?" said Felix.

  Charley grunted no and said he wasn't going to play another hand if it was going to be another goddamn game with eighteen goddamn wild cards. He was half crazy from the waiting. Two weeks in the Everglades Suite-to hell with the vaulted ceilings and the great view-had him pacing like a stuck lion. A cage is a cage, even if it is Spanish Revival. Two weeks of waiting on a scared-stiff doper to come out and play. Two weeks of waiting, of playing poker, an eternity to a man like Charley. He was so bored he said he was thinking of buying Eastern Airlines just to have something to do.

  "Why can't you just deal straight poker?"

  "Because it's dealer's choice and I'm winning. I'm up $16,400. Nines, threes and sixes wild. Four, you get an extra card, cost you half the pot. Arrange 'em and roll 'em."

  "That's whorehouse poker," said Charley. "And I'm not going to play it."

  "All right," said Felix. "Then pay up."

  "Just deal."

  They rolled over their cards one by one and bet. Felix said, "Six kings." Charley shook his head the way he might at a tax increase. Felix pulled his chips over and methodically stacked them into the neat piles that annoyed Charley, who let out a cloud of disapproving cigar smoke and went and stood on the balcony. The lights of Key Biscayne glittered across the water.

  "What about a tunnel?" Charley said. "We rent the house across the street and go in under the wall, under that minefield he's got. Minefields, in downtown Miami. What's this country come to, Felix? We go up into his bedroom and catch him with his pants down. Use some of that stun gas."

  Felix finished stacking his chips. "Let's give it another week, boss."

  "No, I'm sick of waiting. You tell Rostow and the boys we're going to meet right here tomorrow morning, ten A.M. We're going to meet right here and we're going to discuss a tunnel."