The Window Washer

by Eric Rill

  He had crossed over into Austria and bargained information to the Americans who were questioning the refugees. In exchange for a fabricated story that couldn’t be verified, he gained admission into the United States and moved to Columbus.

  He had changed his name from Zubin Goldschmidt to Lawrence Grant, a name he got from the comedy act of Grant and Lawrence while watching his first television program in an appliance store on Long Street. That’s also where he met Bernard Levin, an orthodox Jew, who had come into the store with his father to pick up a new record player.

  The Levins had fled Germany with a sizable fortune back in the late thirties. Bernard was an only child and had gone to fancy schools, but he had no taste for hard work. Many years later, when his father and mother died in a terrible car crash, he inherited several motels scattered around the city. Grant had parlayed his friendship with Levin into a minority partnership, and ran the day-to-day operations. But with the advent of Holiday Inn roadside motels in the early fifties, things began to change in the hotel business. And with new interstate highways being built, the one-story mom-and-pop motels, with fake wood-paneled walls, no air conditioning, and saggy mattresses, in now-secondary locations, were about to be pushed out of the marketplace.

  Grant had seen the handwriting on the wall and convinced Levin to sell the motels and use the proceeds to purchase land. They bought several parcels in the middle of cornfields for almost nothing, thanks to Grant’s “connections” at the highway department. When Interstates 70 and 71 were announced, they were sitting with twenty tracts of land at six different exits. Grant arranged to sell all the land and lease back four acres at each exit to build new motels. The profits from the sales paid for all of the construction and then some.

  But by the early eighties, newer high-rise hotels were popping up around the city and occupancies at Grant’s motels were heading steadily downhill. By 1990, business was a disaster. They were within days of Chapter 11 when Pascale approached them, like a shark sensing blood in the water. Grant and Levin both liked the good life, and business with their new “partners” was better than no business at all. So they started laundering money through their motels for the Pascale family. On Saturdays, Grant, now a prominent figure in the Methodist church, jiggered the books while Bernie Levin attended synagogue. Levin returned the favor on Sundays.

  “Okay, let me talk to my boss and get back to you.” Maggie stood up and looked down at Grant. “You know you’ll have to wear a wire—and we can’t guarantee your safety.”

  *

  Maggie Parks returned to her office in the Brewery District and stormed into the assistant director’s office. “Leo, I may have a break on Operation Deep Sleep,” she said, plunking herself down on his cracked leather sofa.

  Leo Rigby took off his thick glasses and looked down at the stocky woman with close-cropped blonde hair, who, he was sure, was responsible for his migraines. “No more money for Deep Sleep, Maggie. And no more dead ends, or we’ll both be out to pasture.”

  “I think this one’s real,” she said, kicking off her rubber-soled shoes. “They’ve been dry-cleaning big stuff and it’s going to get bigger—upward of two hundred big ones a day.”

  Rigby dropped his pen on the blotter and leaned back in his chair, a whoosh of stale air flying out of his mouth. “Two hundred grand a day?” he mused, his gaze fixed on a picture of him with Bob Albertson, the senior agent in charge of the Cincinnati office, at a golf tournament the year before. He should have been Albertson’s boss instead of vice versa, but Rigby wasn’t a game player and he had opted for a less stressful life than dealing with those assholes at the Hoover Building in Washington. It was bad enough he had to deal with Albertson.

  “You got it,” Maggie said, breaking out into a smile.

  “That’s bigger than anything we’ve ever seen down here,” Rigby said.

  “Would be a nice note to retire on, wouldn’t it, Chief?” Maggie said. “I need a budget and some agents, Leo. And you need to get over to the prosecutor to arrange a wiretap.”

  “Who’s working for who, here?” Rigby said, his cheeks flushing slightly.

  “Same as always.” Maggie laughed, jamming her swollen feet back into her shoes. “You’re working for me. But look on the bright side—you have less than a year left until you retire.”

  *

  Special Agent Gary Roskind sucked the last dregs of his coffee from a Styrofoam cup and tossed it underhand, missing the garbage can by at least a foot. “Maggie, if this job doesn’t kill me, your fucking cigarettes will,” he said, battling the smoke in front of his face. “Castellano has been up there going on three hours now,” Roskind said, looking up at the fourth floor of the south tower. “Longer than any of the other times.”

  “Relax. You got a hot date or something you gotta get to?” Maggie said. She glanced over at the two men from the tech squad parked near the entrance. “We better make sure they know we have a clock ticking on this one. I don’t want him coming back while we’re in there.”

  “He’s never come back since we started staking out the place,” Roskind said. “Besides, Arnett will be tailing him.”

  “Bobby Arnett isn’t one of the Bureau’s shining lights,” Maggie said impatiently. “I’m not going to risk this blowing up because of him.”

  “Christ! He fucked up once—and that was almost ten years ago. Why don’t you cut him some slack?”

  “Once that we know about,” Maggie snorted.

  “Did Leo give you a hard time on the warrant?” Roskind asked.

  “Not after hearing me out.” Rigby had convinced Larry Bania, the federal prosecutor, to go see Judge Massy over at the Eastern Division of Southern District of Ohio on Marconi Boulevard. Massy had heard it all from Bania before, so the meeting lasted only ten minutes, at which point Bania walked out with a court order for a wiretap for thirty days and a warrant to place a video camera and listening device in Castellano’s apartment. Within an hour, Maggie had briefed the technical guys, who then went down to Ameritech and organized a wiretap for Castellano’s apartment. The deal, as always, involved “minimization”—the FBI could only record a conversation relating to a crime or potential crime. Any other conversation of a personal nature was off-limits.

  “I thought…” Special Agent Roskind started to say before Maggie squeezed his arm.

  “Here he comes. We’re off to the races!” Maggie said, reaching for the door handle.

  Tommy Castellano shoved the lobby door open and headed for his Lexus. Maggie held her breath as he unlocked the door with a remote, took a sweeping glance of the parking lot, and pushed his oversize body onto the glove-soft leather seat.

  She exhaled as he drove off. “Okay, let’s go. Now!”

  Moments later, four FBI agents entered Castellano’s apartment. There was no food except for a couple of bags of pretzels and a case of Pepsi in the refrigerator and some pizzas in the freezer. There were very few clothes, and very little furniture. That didn’t surprise either Roskind or Maggie. After her lunch with Grant, the Bureau had placed a tail on Tommy Castellano, the wiseguy tapped to head up the Columbus operation. Agents followed him to the Langham several times and were able to get someone upstairs to find out which apartment he was visiting. His visits were always short, and always during the week. The Bureau contacted American Electric Power, which advised them that very little electricity was being consumed. So they figured no one was actually living there.

  Maggie answered her cell phone on the first ring. “What do you mean, you don’t know?” she yelled into the phone before slamming it shut. “Arnett lost him. The fucking asshole lost him!” She rushed into the bedroom. “How long till you’re done?”

  “Another ten minutes,” the young agent said as he screwed on the lens cover.

  Maggie cracked her knuckles. “You’ve got less than five.”

  8

  The night air was heavy, stagnant, and crushingly hot, even for July. The thermometer outside the window of room
240 of Avondale Elementary School hovered above the ninety-degree mark. The forecast was for more of the same. The window panels that opened on to the cement playground offered little relief to the thirty or so men and women cramped behind the small desks.

  “I want to thank you all for coming out on such a miserable night,” Steve Marron, a bear-like man in his fifties, said, wiping a damp handkerchief over his brow. “Especially the new faces.” He tossed down the last of his muddy coffee and squared his shoulders. “Tonight we are going to hear from one of our members who hasn’t shared with us before. After our last meeting over at Dana Avenue Elementary, I had the opportunity to speak to him, and he has agreed to be our speaker tonight.” Marron stopped for a moment and smiled at the man on his right. “Please give him a warm welcome.”

  Nick Grant remained seated, staring at a woman in the first row, her face drawn, her stomach so distended that she had to sit diagonally in her chair. His gaze continued up and down the aisles, briefly stopping at each person. Then he grabbed the sides of his desk, slowly stood up, and cleared his throat. “My name is Nick and I’m a cocaine addict. I’ve been clean now for sixteen days.”

  “Hi, Nick,” the heavyset woman said from the front row.

  “Hi, Nick,” the others chimed in.

  “I never touched drugs—other than grass when I was in college—until a few months ago. I went through a bad time and sort of gave up on the world—and myself.” Grant looked down at the floor for a moment, cleared his throat again, and continued. “I checked myself into Twin Valley Psychiatric Hospital for a few weeks and then moved down to the Bottoms into half of a double that I’ve owned for a few years. I started drinking quite heavily. When I’m honest with myself, I realize I always sought refuge in alcohol when things got bad. I wasn’t here more than a week when a dealer sold me my first rock. One led to another, and before long, I was strung out most of my waking hours.”

  Grant stopped and took a sip from the glass in front of him, swirling the water around his dry mouth. “Most of the time I never left the house, unless it was to buy more crack. I didn’t eat much—still don’t, I guess,” he said, tugging on his trousers, “but I drank more than my share of vodka. I figured that stuff would help me forget and make things better—it didn’t. I don’t know if I can stay clean, but I’m trying. Taking it one day at a time. I’ve got lots to get straight in my head and it’s going to be tough doing it sober.”

  “You can do it, Nick,” a voice shouted from the back.

  “You can,” another voice chimed in.

  A strained smile appeared on Grant’s weary face. “I hope you’re right,” he said in a muted voice as he sat down.

  Steve Marron gently coaxed a few of the new people to get up and share, reminding them that everyone in the room had been in the same situation at one time in their lives. Then the meeting ended.

  “Nick,” Marron said, tilting the large coffee urn and holding his cup under the spout. “Are you working now?”

  “No,” Grant replied.

  Marron took a gulp of his coffee. “My opinion, for what it’s worth, is that your being idle makes this whole process more difficult.”

  “I need more time by myself to work things out,” Grant said, looking out at the graffiti-covered school yard as he fidgeted with the collar of his shirt.

  “I’ve got a small company that has some maintenance contracts here in the Bottoms, but mostly on the other side of the river. We do everything from janitorial to garbage removal,” Marron explained. “Might be something for you to think about to keep you busy. I know it’s not career stuff, but it may be good for you for a while—help you get your head together.”

  “Thanks, but not right now,” Grant said, moving toward the door.

  “Well, if you change your mind, see me after one of our meetings,” he said. “You are planning on coming back, aren’t you?”

  “Yeah, I guess so,” Grant said before slipping through the doorway. He didn’t want to seem ungrateful for Marron’s offer. But he wasn’t about to tell him that he didn’t need a job to make ends meet. He still had some savings and part of the money he had received when he sold his house, although he had to take much less than he had put in it because it had been in the middle of a major renovation. Most of that money and the funds from Marcy’s insurance policy had been put into an endowment for a burn unit at the hospital where Billy had died. He got nothing from his job at the hotel, but he still had enough to live on. He just didn’t have a life.

  Grant left the school and walked up Campbell Avenue, slowing down in front of a crack house, its front yard overgrown with tall weeds. He rummaged for a twenty in his wallet. Then he took a few steps down a long, crumbling driveway toward a familiar metal door. He watched as a girl in her late teens, wearing a pair of tight shorts and a T-shirt that outlined her taut nipples, came out. “Hey, mister, I’ll take that twenty for some head,” she said, the three-quarter moon exposing a rough complexion and glazed eyes.

  He stared at her and then turned to leave. “Okay, I’ll do it for ten,” the girl added quickly, pointing to a clump of trees behind the back alley.

  Grant retreated back to the street and turned left on Davis. A police cruiser pulled up beside him. Grant’s eyes blinked rapidly as a vivid picture of the police car in front of his father’s house the night of the fire roared through his mind like a freight train.

  “Nick, your father called. He’s looking for you,” Virgil Parks said.

  “Jesus Christ! Why can’t he leave me alone?” Grant pleaded, perspiration covering his forehead.

  “Just told him we’d keep an eye out and let him know if we saw you, is all,” the cop said, running a giant sweaty palm over his shaved head.

  “What’s the matter, junior? You lost?” a very large man in a torn undershirt yelled from his sagging wood porch. He was holding a Bud. “Virgil, why don’t you be a nice policeman and make sure this little faggot gets home to his daddy.”

  “Knock it off, Jerrold,” the cop warned. “Or…”

  “Or what, Virgil?” the man said, getting up from his worn armchair. “You gonna haul my ass down to County for talkin’ on my own property?”

  “No, but I might haul it down for threatening your neighbor last week,” Parks said, straightening up his six-foot-four frame.

  “Maybe I should come down there and show you some manners, Mr. Policeman,” the man said, gulping the last of his beer and then pounding the bottle against his open palm.

  “You’re not going to start that shit again, Jerrold, are you?” Parks said. “Last time you tried, you spent a few hours over at Mt. Carmel ogling those pretty young nurses while they stitched you up.”

  “Last time you were beating on a guy who had too much booze in him.”

  “Look’s like it wouldn’t be any different tonight,” Parks said.

  While the two men bickered, Grant crossed the street and headed west. A few minutes later, Parks caught up with him on High Street in front of Victory’s market. Grant didn’t break stride. “What should I tell him?” Parks asked.

  “Tell him I’m not ready to go back! I may never be ready to go back!” Nick Grant said, his jaw tightening. His relationship with his father was like a seesaw. Even when it seemed to be smooth, he was always waiting for the other shoe to drop. His father’s soft-spoken manner could erupt in a second, shattering the close relationship Nick yearned for. It had been that way for as long as he could remember, including the last time he had seen his father.

  Nick’s heart had beat like a jackhammer. “I have to talk to you,” he had said, knocking at the open door of his father’s office on the second floor of the Excelsior Hotel.

  Lawrence Grant had put down his coffee mug and walked around the desk. “Sure, Nick, what’s on your mind?”

  “I need to get away from this—working at the Crown, I mean,” he said, trying to control the twitch in his left eye, a twitch that started whenever he confronted his father.

  �
��It just takes time,” the elder Grant said. “I know it’s been hard, but time really does take care of a lot of things, Nick.”

  “I’m falling apart. I need some time to get back on track.”

  “Work is what you need,” Lawrence Grant said in a firm tone.

  “Maybe I should transfer over here so I could cut back on my hours, and put Hollings in as general manager.”

  Lawrence Grant stared at his son. “You will do nothing of the kind!” he said. “You’ll stay at the Crown.” He walked back around his desk and gripped the edge with both hands until his knuckles were an opaque white. “I don’t want to hear any more about it. Stay the course and everything will work out!”

  “I can’t handle it anymore,” Nick said. “I’m leaving.”

  Lawrence Grant’s face turned crimson. “You walk out on me, and we’re done. I mean it, Nick. Not one fucking cent. You won’t get jack shit from me ever again.”

  “Nothing’s changed, has it? You’ve been using money as a weapon since I was a kid. First, it was withholding my allowance whenever you were pissed; then when I grew up, it was denying me a raise or a bonus.” But, worse than that, Nick thought, was how his father withheld his love and approval. “Goodbye, Dad,” he had said, turning quickly toward the door so that his father wouldn’t see the tears welling in his eyes.

  “What is it with you?” Parks said, trying to keep up with Grant. “Christ! He’s just worried, is all. I mean, this isn’t a neighborhood for you to be hanging around in, anyway.”

  “Look, Virgil, I know you mean well,” Grant said over his shoulder. “You and the other cops looking out for me since I’ve been down here. But I’ve got shit to work out, and this crap with my father having you guys on my tail all the time isn’t helping.”

  “Nick, you’re better than this place—these people.”