I drove north from the diner, up into Connecticut, to a rest stop on I-95. There was someone I needed to speak to, and I didn’t want to use a phone within twenty miles of where I was staying. At some time during my last bit, the cops had installed a system that traces the caller’s phone number before the phone is even answered. There was a lot of talk about it among the professors in the crime university known as the Cortlandt Correctional Facility.
Condon had given me a business card with two numbers on it. The first went directly to his desk at the precinct. I didn’t know where the second went, but I assumed it was to a place where Condon could talk to his snitches without being overheard by other cops.
I dialed the precinct number first and was told that he was off-duty. No surprise. I dialed the second number and Condon picked up on the first ring.
“Yeah?”
“It’s Pete Frangello.”
“What happened to you, Frangello? You go crazy or what?” The words came without hesitation. I could imagine him rehearsing his approach just in case I didn’t get out of town.
“You and Rico took me by surprise. What could I do except react?” I kept my own voice apologetic. “How’s Rico doin’?”
“He’ll live. Where are you? We have to get together.”
“I can’t do that.”
“Why not, Pete?”
“Because if I do you’re gonna kill me.”
He hesitated a moment, trying to decide if bullshitting me was worth the effort. I felt like I was inside his mind.
“I can understand why you might think that,” he said, “but we have to work this out. If we don’t, we’re all gonna go down.”
“Great, let’s work it out.” I gave him almost a minute to come up with a way to work it out, but he obviously couldn’t. “That’s what I thought. That’s exactly what I thought. Look, Condon, the way I see it, between you and Eddie I’m gonna be lookin’ over my shoulder for a long time. I don’t see any way out of it unless I get somebody off my back. What I’m thinking is that my best move is to contact a lawyer and lay out the whole thing. I’m thinking that if I give the money back and testify, they’ll put me in the witness protection program.”
I hung up and drove back to the motel. On the way, I stopped at a mall, found a Newmark & Lewis, and bought a minirecorder and a package of cassettes. What I was looking for was a way out. Something besides killing two cops and running for the rest of my life.
THIRTY-FIVE
I WAS TIRED AND I wanted to go to sleep, but there was one more thing to be learned that night. I flipped on the TV and tuned in Channel 5 for the local news. The anchorman led off with the Pope, detailing his triumphal procession through the slums of Harlem and the Bronx, then switched over to the armored car heist. The footage included a black body bag sliding into a medical examiner’s van and a statement by a Chapman Security spokesman who estimated the loss at three million dollars, roughly three times the actual take.
I expected all that, including Chapman’s insurance scam. What I was looking for and what I didn’t find was any mention of a dead cop. Condon and Rico had taken Avi before he’d pulled off the assassination, which was good news for me as well as them. The NYPD would assign five or six detectives and a dozen patrolman to investigate the Chapman ripoff. If a cop had been killed, the task force would be ten times as big.
I shut off the TV and went into the tiny bathroom to wash my face and brush my teeth. Looking in the mirror, my mouth filled with white foam, I wondered why Condon hadn’t let Avi go through with it before they’d taken him. Maybe they had scruples when it came to killing cops. A security guard? Fine. A piece of criminal shit? Great. A parole officer? No problem. But a cop could never kill another cop. That would be dishonorable.
I slept so soundly that I couldn’t pull myself out of my dreams.
We’re in the parking lot behind Stern’s. All of us—Condon and Rico as well as Eddie, Avi, Tony, John, and myself. When the guard inside the truck finally opens the door, I see that it’s Ginny and that, all along, she’s been keeping me from the treasure.
“Shoot the bitch,” I order.
The shotgun roars and then I’m running. I’m on a street in Manhattan, cutting through tenement backyards, running without fatigue and without result. I can’t shake my pursuers. Even though I never see them, I know they’re closing in on me.
Eddie’s face appears next to mine. “Ya fucked it up, cuz. Ya always gotta do shit ya own way. You could never follow nobody’s orders. Now whatta we gonna do?” He’s gone before I can answer.
I’m in a room with Armando Ortiz, snorting line after line of cocaine. My heart is beating a thousand times a minute.
“Let’s do it,” I say. “Let’s just go and do it.”
“One more line, man. Do another line an’ we’ll be ready for tha’ shit.”
“Now, motherfucker,” I shout. “Let’s cut this crap and do what we gotta do.”
I’m sitting behind a long oak table in a Manhattan courtroom, my lawyer beside me.
“Here comes the bullshit,” he whispers.
The door opens and Ginny comes through. She’s sitting in a wheelchair. A fringed cotton throw covers her lap. She appears grim but determined.
“This ain’t gonna be good for us,” I tell my lawyer.
He chuckles. “Next time try takin’ better aim.”
The prosecutor rises slowly, then approaches the witness.
“Ms. Michkin …”
“Please call me Ginny.” She looks down at her hands, then smiles bravely. “I’m very nervous,” she says.
“Perfectly normal, Ginny.” The prosecutor turns away from her to face the jury. “Now, Ginny, do you see the man who shot you in this courtroom?”
“Yes, I do.”
“Would you point that man out?”
I left the motel at nine o’clock in the morning, drove down to the Store & Lock, and retrieved one of the suitcases. An hour later I was in Manhattan. Stuck in heavy traffic on FDR Drive, my mind began to drift.
I recalled a conversation with Eddie. Years ago, up on the courts. We’d come to trust each other and he was telling me about a job he’d pulled off in the Flatlands section of Brooklyn, near the airport. He’d stopped a truck carrying a load of Japanese electronics out of one of the cargo hangars. It’d all been carefully planned (at the time, Eddie’d been doing three trucks a month for almost a year) until the driver suddenly turned and started to run. Eddie had shot him in the back.
“Ya know me, cuz,” Eddie had said. “Ya know me good enough ta know that I ain’t no hard guy. I don’t wanna hurt nobody, right? Like I didn’t slap this guy around or nothin’. I took him outta the truck and told the asshole, ‘Don’t worry about nothin’. Just stand here and ya gonna be fine.’
“First time I look away for a second, he takes off. I’m tellin’ ya, Pete, the guy was screamin’ at the top of his fuckin’ lungs. He made me kill him.”
I’d been feeling pretty good at the time. A pint of prison hooch will do that to you. It’ll give you a loose mouth.
“What you could’ve done,” I’d said, “was not rob trucks.”
He’d looked at me like I was crazy, then launched into his “guys like us” speech.
“Guys like us don’t have no choice. We are what we are ’cause that’s the way the world made us. You should know who you are, cuz. I mean, take a look around. Look at the fuckin’ walls, the C.O.’s. Ya think ya gonna come outta here and be a doctor? A lawyer? I ain’t about ta push no fuckin’ broom. Not fa nobody.”
At the time, I’d put his little lecture down to prison bravado. “Sorry” is a word you save for the parole board; sorrow is dishonorable in a world ruled by defiance. But, sitting there in heavy traffic, craning my neck for some sign of an accident or a road repair crew up ahead, I began to understand that Eddie really didn’t give a shit. He didn’t see a dead truck driver, couldn’t imagine the man’s wife or his children. He’d shot a problem, not a human.
I could forgive Morasso. Morasso was crazy, pure and simple. Not only was he blind to anyone else’s point of view, he was blind to his own point of view. Tony was a mass of nerves, reacting without thought. I might want to keep him locked away in some dungeon, but it was hard to hate him. Of course, now that he was dead, it really didn’t matter.
I wondered about Condon and Rico. Did they go to mass every Sunday? Maybe they belonged to the Holy Name Society in the NYPD. Maybe they attended Novenas, made the nine First Fridays, spent their summer vacations at Franciscan retreats in the Adirondack Mountains. I’d never know for sure, but I would have bet my left hand against a C.O.’s dirty underwear that they had some way of bullshitting themselves.
Be grateful for your dreams.
The thought floated up out of nowhere. It was an interesting idea, like being grateful for leprosy.
The traffic crawled through a mile of torturous construction. First the left lane closed, then the right, then the center. The roadbed was badly chewed up and the cars were coming to a full stop at the lip of some of the deeper craters. I flipped on the Buick’s radio and caught one of the twenty-four-hour news stations. The Pope was still in town, still railing about the evil things men do to each other. I wondered if he knew that pressure from one of his cardinals had prevented the Department of Corrections from passing out condoms to homosexual prisoners.
The traffic broke up just above 34th Street and I pushed the Buick up to forty-five miles an hour, bouncing over the potholes like a two-ton Slinky. Five minutes later, I pulled off onto Grand Street and drove the few blocks to Broome and Pitt.
I was assuming that nobody was looking for me except Condon and Rico. It would be months before the cops investigating the Chapman robbery connected me to the crime, if they ever did. I had no fear of them.
I had no fear of the parole board, either. Simon’s caseload would be parceled out to other parole officers. Each client would have to be given a new reporting time and notified. That would take a week, even if they did it by telephone. Most likely they’d wait for the parolees to report on their own, then refer them to their new P.O.’s. Since I didn’t have to report at all, my case would take even longer to draw attention.
Still, I couldn’t go after Condon and Rico. The only thing I knew about them was that they were working out of the Midtown South Precinct. A precinct house isn’t the best place to stalk a cop. I did have a brief fantasy in which I spotted them from a nearby rooftop, then tailed them to a more favorable location. But I didn’t know a damn thing about surveillance, and if they left in a car I’d be fucked altogether. Midtown South is located in the heart of Manhattan. Unless you’re a cop, you can’t park on the street anywhere near it.
Much better to let them come to me, even though they’d encounter the same problems finding me as I would finding them. Worse, they wouldn’t even have a starting point. Unless I gave it to them.
THIRTY-SIX
I PARKED THE CAR in a fenced lot, got out, and found myself looking at a peaceful spring day. The sky was clear and the air warm enough to hint of the summer to come. Sunlight poured down on the tenements, encouraging the few blades of grass pushing up through cracks in the sidewalk. I walked north along Pitt Street, under the Williamsburg Bridge, then past the Gompers housing project.
When I’d begun serving my sentence, the blocks between Delancey and Houston streets were as bad as any in Manhattan. The west side of the street was lined with crumbling and, for the most part, abandoned tenements. That was where the dealers hung out. The twenty-story brick buildings of the Samuel Gompers Houses, on the east, not only provided the dealers’ clientele base, but also a labor pool for the replacement of busted (or murdered) dealers.
There were lots of people on the east side of the street, near the projects. Women were out with their children, heading for the laundromat or the supermarket or the playground. Knots of men, older mostly, stood around bullshitting while they sipped at cans of beer wrapped in small paper bags. The older kids were still in school. Later, when they got home, the ghetto blasters and boom boxes would echo between the buildings. The girls, Latina mainly, would sway to the music while their boyfriends’ eyes spit fire at would-be rivals.
The west side of Pitt Street was a different proposition altogether. The men huddled in doorways weren’t elderly Latinos looking for a game of dominoes. They were dealers. Their eyes swept the street like radar dishes in search of enemy aircraft. Everything about them was hard and mean. They worked the shittiest end of the drug business, making the least money, constantly subject to violent ripoffs, the first to be arrested when the NYPD decided for the ten thousandth time to sweep the streets free of drugs.
I felt completely comfortable on the west side of Pitt Street. It was like coming home after a long vacation. I joined the coke junkies with their bulging eyes, emaciated bodies, and tightly locked jaws as they trudged from dealer to dealer. The dope junkies were there, too. Many of them had open sores on their necks and faces. All of them looked sick.
Pitt Street was everything I’d wanted to avoid when I was released from Cortlandt. How long ago was that? Three weeks, a month, a year, a decade? If you think about all the plans you’ve made in your life that went wrong, you’d never do anything. Better to look at the few times you were right and pretend that you’re running the show. Better, still, to bury yourself in the details and save the rest for your memoirs.
I was looking for someone—anyone—that I knew. I wanted the word to get out that Pete Frangello was back in action, that he was working and that he was hot. Strung-out junkies, on heroin or cocaine, will give up anyone, sister, brother, wife, or child, before facing withdrawal in the holding pens beneath Central Booking. Braced by a desperate Detective Condon, they wouldn’t hesitate to point the way to little Pete Frangello.
“Pete. Yo, Pete. C’mon over here, boy. Check it out.”
The voice was coming from inside a red Lincoln parked at the curb. It belonged to a tall Dominican named Oono. That was his street name and the only name I knew him by. He’d gotten it a few weeks after losing his right eye in a street fight. We’d spent some time together, partying mostly, before I went into the Institution. Our play had included a memorable brawl, complete with knives and clubs, in a shooting gallery on Stanton Street.
I strolled over to the car, careful to keep my face hard. As I walked, I noted the eyes of the dealers, taking it all in, making me for a player.
“What’s happenin’, Oono?”
“Nothin’ to it, Pete. When you come out?”
“Last week. Been puttin’ myself together. Gatherin’ a little bank.”
“Check it out.” He nodded toward the backseat. “I wanna rap to you a minute.”
I got into the only unoccupied seat in the car. Oono’s two Latino buddies eyed me coldly, waiting for some definitive sign from Oono. They wanted to impress me with their macho cool in case I turned out to be another dealer.
“Put out your hand, bro.”
I knew what he wanted and did what he said. There was no way to get out of it. I stretched my hand, palm down, over the seat rest. A grinning Oono poured a thick line of glistening cocaine across my knuckles.
“You know how long I been looking forward to this?” I asked, pulling half the line up into my right nostril. “Ten fuckin’ years, Oono. Ten fuckin’ years.” I took the rest of it into my left nostril. It was the ritual “one and one.”
“Check it out, bro,” Oono said. “You ain’ gonna tell me they don’t have no powder upstate.”
“They got it, but when your world is concrete and steel, it ain’t the same. You wanna do dope or juice.”
The cold hands of the white lady reached out to me like the ghost that lived in my five-year-old closet, the one I knew was just waiting for me to get out of bed, to put my feet on the floor. The one that whispered, “Come to me, little Pete, I’m your sweet, lost mama. I want to take you home where it’s safe.”
You never feel b
etter than you do when your body is vibrating with cocaine. And you never feel worse than you do when you have to come down. The high is purely physical—an orgasm wrapped in a dream and prepared to go on forever. Then you run out of coke or money and the penalty phase begins.
I’d learned my coke lessons ten years ago, had stayed far away from it in Cortlandt. The most strung-out heroin addict still gets four to six hours of peace between fixes. Coke junkies are lucky to get four or five minutes.
“So, Pete, you back in action?”
“Same shit, Oono, between the Institution and the street. You gotta hustle to survive. I ain’t the type to push a broom.”
“Check it out, bro.” He stuck his pinky nail into the bag of coke and took a nonchalant sniff. “If you’re like lookin’ for a job or somethin’, I could use a bro with a brain.” He shook his head, then threw his two boys a contemptuous glance. Their faces remained cold and impassive. Apparently they were used to it.
“Gotta pass, Oono. I work alone. The last time I went partners with someone, I ended up doin’ ten years.”
He laughed appreciatively, then looked down at a huge Rolex. “Time to go back to work. If you’re on the block around midnight, we’ll go up to a club I know in the Bronx.”
I continued my stroll along Pitt Street. The dealers, having observed my conversation with Oono, besieged me as I passed them. I made sure each one looked in my face as I explained that I was looking for a gram or two, but I wasn’t interested in greasy lumps of street cocaine. I wanted something special I could flash around as I made my way through what the Puerto Ricans call Loisaida.
I found what I wanted between Rivington and Houston streets. One of the dealers took me to an empty apartment, explaining that he was Oono’s biggest dealer and he had a special cut for special customers. The only problem was that he couldn’t sell less than an eight ball—three and a half grams—because it’d been prepackaged and he didn’t have a scale. On the other hand, the eighth had been cut from a single rock and then ground into a fine powder. It was ready for use and came in a small glass vial instead of wrapped in paper. Also, the price was right, especially for a friend of Oono’s. Two hundred and fifty dollars: his cost exactly. Just try this sample line. See for yourself.
Keeplock: A Novel of Crime Page 27