Keeplock: A Novel of Crime

by Stephen Solomita

  Somewhere along the line, we began to talk about the future. In a week or so, I’d be out of the jam, but I’d still be on parole. Ginny and I had gone to see Simon together and he’d made his position quite clear. The state was demanding “intense supervision” and that was what the state was going to get.

  “The fact is, Pete, that you committed a felony the day after you got out of Cortlandt. The cops may be willing to overlook your indiscretion, but as far as the parole board is concerned, you’re still a dangerous, violent, high-risk sociopath. I’m putting it bluntly because I don’t want to be misunderstood.”

  Ginny had taken up my defense. Not that it did any good, but Simon let her talk herself out.

  “Words ain’t gonna do it, Ginny. Deeds are gonna do it. The only way Pete can prove he’s an ex-criminal is to stay clean for a long, long time. The next five years, to be exact.”

  “And if he’s violated for some petty bullshit, what do you think will happen to him in jail?”

  “The same thing that’ll happen if Eddie’s people catch him on the street. Look here, Ginny, you knew what Pete’s life was like and you had ten years to get it out of your system.”

  “It was the system that kept him inside me.”

  Simon hadn’t responded because he hadn’t understood what she was talking about. As for me, I’d enjoyed the conversation immensely because the dialogue was so familiar. It was like watching one of those crappy sitcoms where you know the punch lines in advance. I’d had a reason for bringing Ginny with me to see Simon and it had nothing to do with begging him for some slack. I wanted Simon to know every detail of my devil’s bargain with the good detectives and I wanted a witness to his knowledge.

  Simon was a decent guy, even though he was pissed off. If worst came to worst, he’d go to bat for me. But that didn’t mean he’d be willing to confront the system head-on. It didn’t mean, for instance, that he’d stand up in court and accuse two New York City detectives of perjury. He might or he might not, and I wasn’t willing to take the chance. Ginny’s presence was an insurance policy.

  I’d told her that before we went. I wasn’t holding anything back. We were co-conspirators in each other’s lives.

  “I don’t trust the cops. My name won’t appear on any of the warrants. The phrase they use is ‘confidential informant.’ Not that Eddie won’t figure it out sooner or later, but we’ll have enough time to get our butts out of Flushing before anyone comes looking for us. Only suppose the four of them decide to plead it out. Suppose the prosecution doesn’t need my testimony. I can’t be sure that Condon and Rico won’t take the opportunity to put one more perp where he belongs.”

  “What about parole?” she asked. “You could be violated if they charge you, even if they don’t get a conviction.”

  I leaned over and kissed the tip of her right breast. She responded by shoving me away.

  “I want an answer,” she insisted.

  “How does the song go? The answer is ‘blowing in the wind.’”

  “You can forget about ‘blowing’ until you tell me what’s going on.”

  “Okay. I’m not worried about what Simon will do within the parole system. He can manipulate the board without exposing himself. It’s not the same as testifying in open court. Look, Ginny, if I was a Vegas bookie trying to calculate the odds, I’d have to make it ten-to-one against something going wrong. Most likely this whole thing’ll come off smoothly. Eddie, Parker, Avi, and Morasso will be arrested and go to jail for the rest of their useful lives. Condon and Rico will cut me loose, just like they promised. Even Simon’ll come through. Yeah, he’ll play that ‘intense supervision’ crap just to show me how tough he is, but after a couple of months he’ll ease up. He knows I can’t go back.”

  “One more question, all right?”

  “Ask away.”

  “Right now I’m holding you down and threatening to tear your balls off. Is that correct?”

  “Yes.”

  “So how come you have an erection?”

  “That’s two questions.”

  “With one answer.”

  The jokes ended a week before the job was scheduled to go off. All three New York newspapers put the Pope’s impending visit on the front page. That’s when it became real. In the planning stage, battles are little more than clouds moving across the sky. You have a map and a few models (Parker with his computer; Avi with his guns) which you manipulate this way and that, looking for the most efficient dance. Then something happens, something as real as the beaming face of Pope John Paul, and the abstract suddenly becomes tangible. You can reach out and touch the tension.

  I was at Eddie’s when I first saw the headline: POPE ARRIVES WEDNESDAY. A formal portrait, head and shoulders, covered the front of the tabloid.

  Parker came down the stairs as I turned the pages.

  “Every detail’s falling into place,” he said happily. “Things couldn’t be better. Did you see the schedule?”

  “The Pope’s?”

  “Yeah.”

  “I was just looking it up.”

  “Don’t bother. The big putz is doing a mass at Yankee Stadium next Saturday.” Parker had been a Presbyterian in his former life and had a longstanding dislike for the Catholic Church and its ceremonies. “Every Irish cop in the city’ll be there praying. The Puerto Ricans and the guineas, too. It couldn’t be better for us. Ya know how he’s getting up to the stadium?”

  “Gee, John, I don’t.”

  “A motorcade.” He paused for effect. “Through fucking Harlem and the South Bronx. They’re gonna have to call out the National Guard to protect him.”

  “It’s like he’s workin’ for us, cuz.” Eddie strode into the room and put his arm around me. “I mean, did you ever see a better job than this one? Ever in your fuckin’ life?”

  I shook my head sincerely. “If I was ever involved in a sweeter deal, I don’t remember it. It’s like they’re giving us a gift.”

  “Wait,” Parker said, “it gets even better. I went into the computer today. To get the final schedule. Listen to this. Chapman Security has six new vehicles on order, all GMCs. That is, the chassis are manufactured by General Motors. The bodies are custom made by an independent outfit named Secure Coachworks. Secure was supposed to deliver the new vehicles on Tuesday, but they’re behind schedule. Meanwhile, Chapman has six trucks that are barely running, two of which are coming out of service whether the new vehicles arrive or not. Their schedules are being distributed among the rest of the fleet. For instance, truck 345, our target, is making three extra pickups in Fresh Meadows, a big drugstore on 188th Street, and two movie complexes on the Long Island Expressway service road. The complexes have a total of twelve theaters between them.”

  “You got all this out of the computer?”

  He looked at me with disdain. “It’s not like it was written down the way I told it. I put it together piece by piece. Like, when I saw that three pickups had been added to 345’s schedule, I started looking for a reason. I went to the overall schedule and found two fewer trucks than usual. So I went to Maintenance and—”

  “Enough,” I said. “I get it. People don’t leave paper trails anymore. The trails are electronic.”

  “Big trails you don’t need an Indian to follow. When companies start using computers, they tend to put everything in the memory. I went into the cargo file and found records of prior pickups for every company on 345’s schedule. It’s really nice the way they broke it down into cash, coins, and checks. If we get any kind of break, we’re looking at well over a million dollars.”

  Eddie took me into the office just before lunch. He locked the door and took a small 9mm automatic out of the desk drawer, a Walther PPK.

  “I changed my mind about Morasso, cuz,” he announced. “I want you to bang him out after all.” He waved a hand in my face. “Don’t interrupt me. The first thing is that I’m gonna be drivin’, so somebody’s gotta be ready in case Morasso gets outta hand. Also, Avi’s gonna get to th
e Bronx before us. He’ll be waitin’ when we pull up. I ain’t gonna say I don’t trust Avi, but life is full of traps. The reason they call ’em traps is because they’re designed so you don’t see them coming. Me, I like to keep my eyes open all the time. What I want is to know that after we finish the job, Morasso’s gonna be covered every minute. He’s got a double hard-on, one for you because of what you did to him and one for me because I brought you here.”

  “I get the point, Eddie. And I don’t really have a problem with it.” What problem could I have? We were never going to get that far, anyway. As long as Eddie didn’t try to take the gun out of my hand, I was ready to go along with anything. “But what I wanna know is why I can’t use the piece I already have.”

  He took a short, narrow cylinder out of the desk, a silencer, and screwed it into the barrel of the automatic. “We don’t need to be makin’ a lotta noise just when we’re about to enjoy the fruits of our fuckin’ labor.” He pointed the 9mm at the back of a couch and pulled the trigger. The sound was a good deal louder than the “poof” you hear in the movies, but it was nothing like the roar of a .38 going off in an enclosed space. The bullet, on the other hand, went right through the back of the couch and embedded itself in the wall.

  We made the exchange and went into lunch a few minutes later. As if on cue, Morasso decided to act out. He’d been a good boy all week, snorting his dope and switching back and forth between Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and Popeye, but halfway through the soup he lost his cool.

  “Tell him to stop slurpin’.”

  “You talkin’ to me?” Eddie asked. There was no give in his voice.

  “Tell the little faggot to stop slurpin’. I can’t eat when he’s slurpin’ the fuckin’ soup. It’s disgusting.” He jabbed his spoon at Parker. “We don’t need this fucker now. What’re ya keepin’ him around for?”

  “We didn’t need you from the beginning,” I said quietly.

  He looked up at me in surprise. Maybe he’d forgotten I was there. It’s hard to know what goes on inside a psychotic’s mind. One thing was certain, though. Morasso was feeling the tension. By the day of the job, he’d be seething.

  I picked up the bowl of soup in front of me and sucked down several mouthfuls. Slurrrrrrrrrrrrppppp.

  “Ahhhhh, that was good.” I put the bowl on the table and stared over at Tony. He thought about it for a moment (I could tell he was thinking because his eyes went blank), then returned to his food.

  TWENTY-SIX

  TOWARD THE END OF that first week, I began meeting Condon and Rico in a small coffee shop on Second Avenue in the Twenties. It was usually the last stop on what was getting to be a series of very long days. I’d start at six in the morning with a drive to Ginny’s place in Flushing. She’d still be in bed when I arrived, her body warm and flushed with sleep. I’d begin tossing my clothes as soon as I closed the door, then slide under the covers. Her landlord wasn’t sending up heat, now that it was officially spring, but we made plenty of our own.

  By nine-thirty, Ginny would be in her office and I’d be walking into Eddie’s Woodhaven apartment. The days were full of the usual bullshit. Avi was still trying to decide what rifle to use on the cop and Eddie was pushing him to make an immediate decision.

  “No last-minute problems, cuz,” he’d lecture. “Ya gotta make a choice and live with it.”

  “The rifle must be right for job. It is not for me to work in half-assed manner.” Avi’s voice would be calm, almost placid. He was the only one of us who seemed immune to the spreading tension.

  After dinner I’d make an exit and drive to my nine o’clock meeting with Condon and Rico. I kept expecting them to provide me with details and they kept asking more questions. As my answers were always the same, it got to be pretty boring. By Monday, five days before the job, I began to lose my cool.

  “I been watching for signs of a stakeout at Eddie’s place, but I don’t see anything. You going into this blind?”

  “You don’t ask questions, you answer them.” Condon was still playing it tough.

  “You expect me to just walk through it without knowing when you’re coming in?”

  “I expect you to do what you gotta do to stay out of jail. That’s why you’re here. That’s why you’re rattin’ out your buddies.”

  “Bullshit. There’s at least a good chance that Eddie and the boys won’t go down without a fight. Especially if you fuck it up on your end. You know what I’m gonna do when the bullets start to fly? You know what I’m gonna have to do? I’m gonna have to start shooting, too. How can I get out of it? Now suppose one of your people gets hit. Or even killed. And there I am, firing away. What you said about staying out of prison is right on the mark. For me, those’re plans A, B, C, and D. I wanna know when and where, so if shit happens I can remove myself from the scene. Does that make sense to you?”

  “Why don’t you stop playin’ the tough guy?” Rico asked. “It’s gettin’ a little tired.”

  “You keep me in the dark, I’m gonna fly.”

  “Say that again?” Condon’s face was even redder than usual. I’d finally caught his attention.

  “If you don’t let me know what’s going on, I’m gonna take what money I have in my pocket and get in the wind. Like a magician—one minute I’m here and the next I’m gone. Suicide is not part of my career path.”

  They gave each other one of those significant cop looks, then turned back to me. Rico was really hot—if we weren’t sitting in a public place, I think he would have come after me—but Condon was calm enough.

  “We’re gonna take ’em in the act,” he said. “If we do it before, the only charges we got are conspiracy and weapons possession. And the only proof we got is your testimony.”

  “That’s right,” Rico echoed. “All we got is the testimony of a piece of shit co-conspirator. Juries don’t like pieces of shit.”

  “Every time I turn around,” Condon said, his finger jabbing out at me, “you threaten me with some kinda bullshit. One minute you’re gonna walk away. The next minute you’re gonna talk to your P.O. The minute after that you’re gonna punch me out. Somehow that don’t sound reliable to me. It don’t sound like your heart’s really in it. We’re gonna nail these motherfuckers in the fuckin’ act and you’re gonna be right there. That way, if you should happen to have an attack of conscience on the witness stand, the whole thing’ll fall on your deserving head. You understand what I’m tellin’ you?”

  “What I think,” I said, sipping at the inevitable cup of coffee, “is that you should save your motivations for your psychiatrist. I’m not asking you why; I’m asking you what, when, and where.”

  “We didn’t set up surveillance because there’s no safe way to do it,” Condon said. “You’re our surveillance.”

  “That’s smart.” Truth be told, I was relieved. I hadn’t been kidding about Eddie’s potential reaction to the sudden appearance of the cops. If he had any chance at all, he’d most likely fight. “What about the rest of it?”

  “Lemme think about it.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “Lemme think about it and we’ll talk tomorrow.”

  They bullshitted me again on Tuesday, taking me through all the details without giving me any hint of what they planned to do. Instead, they cross-examined me like I was a suspect in a precinct interrogation room. What was our escape route? Where was the garage in the Bronx? How would Avi get from the school to the Bronx? What would he be driving? Would he be taking the same route as the rest of us?

  “In the first place,” I told them, “there aren’t that many ways to get to the Bronx from Douglaston. In the second place, it’s not going to get that far unless you let us go through with the job, which is clearly impossible. What’s the point of it?”

  “The point,” Rico explained, “is to make sure the rat squeaks the same story every time he tells it.”

  “The point,” Condon explained, “is that why should we trust you more than you trust us? You went
to your parole officer and told him about us so you could cover your back. Why should we trust someone who don’t trust anyone else?”

  He had a point, actually. Trust wasn’t really part of our deal. So I told them about truck 345, listing each pickup and Parker’s estimate of the cash 345 would be carrying by the time it got to Stern’s, in Douglaston. “Now, what you can do is go back to Chapman Security and check their schedule. See if it matches what I’m telling you. You could also ask them, if you haven’t done it already, to look for an executive with full access who doesn’t exist anywhere else but in the soul of the fucking computer. That’ll be Parker. You should be able to find out exactly when he was in the computer and exactly what he looked at. But don’t take a lot of time with it, because tomorrow at noon that executive will cease to exist. Gone. No trace except for a few outgoing phone calls to a number that belongs to an unmarried postal worker in Queens.”

  I ground to a stop, but nobody jumped in to pick up the slack. Instead, they exchanged meaningful looks.

  “He rats good,” Rico said. “I gotta admit that he rats good.”

  “Rico’s a rat connoisseur,” Condon announced.

  “That’s right. A good cop’s gotta know his rats. Who’s got time for clues? Who’s got time for canvassing neighborhoods? What ya gotta do is go down to the garbage dump and shake the rats until one of them tell you what you need to know. That’s what we done with you.”

  They went on and on, taking every opportunity to rub it in my face. They didn’t even have the possibility of professionalism. Their egos were bound up in everything they did. Of course, my ego was right there, too. I felt it every time the blood rose in my neck and ears. My instincts told me I could take Rico out with one hand. He was nothing, an asshole trying to throw his weight around. I knew a lot of hacks like that. They shoved us around to show how tough they were. Smart cons tried not to attract their attention. If we shoved back, we were headed for a beating and the box. If we didn’t shove back, we lost face.