by Eric Rill
“Is he lying?” Angela asked, her eyes watching the door slam.
“What the hell happened?” Howell demanded.
“The son of a bitch tried to kill me. He just walked me over to the ravine behind the dumpsters and started beating me up. I fought him off and ran back to my apartment. This window washer guy saw what happened and followed.” She stopped for a moment and then blurted out, “Clancy, he did see me counting the money.”
“Oh shit!” Howell exclaimed.
“It’s probably okay. I calmed him down, told him he must have mistaken me for someone else. I think he bought it. But I’m not so sure what he saw with Castellano; it’s pretty secluded down there. Hopefully that line of trees was in the way of his line of sight.”
“Did you kill him?” Howell asked, not engaging Angela’s stare.
Angela’s face flushed and a vein popped out over her left temple. “How could you even ask me that?”
“Who do you think authorized Castellano to hit you?” Howell continued, scribbling on his yellow pad.
“Pascale. He must have been the one,” Angela replied, still looking over at the hole in the wall. Then she turned and faced Howell. “I need to get out.”
“I got a call from the office. They need more time. They want you to stay put.”
“That wasn’t my deal,” Angela said, her voice tightening. “Any trouble and I’d be gone—that was the deal.”
“Angela, this is the closest we’ve ever got,” Howell implored.
“Do you think they’re watching?” Angela asked, examining the hole again.
“We need you, Angela. If you bolt, we’re screwed—
finished.”
Angela stuck her finger in the hole. “I said I want out.”
“Will you stop playing around with that damn thing. There’s nothing in there!”
Angela reeled around. “You don’t care about anything but bagging Pascale,” she said. “I made a mistake taking this on.”
“We’re not talking about any more time than we agreed to when you started. And we’ve told you from the beginning, we’ll take care of you. You have my word.”
“Your word—a lot that’s going to do!” Angela buried her head in her hands.
“I’ve always been there for you, and you damn well know it.”
“I’m sorry, Clancy. You didn’t deserve that,” she said. “What do you want me to do?”
“We’re going to arrange bail through a bondsman we work with. The office has authorized up to two fifty,” he said.
“Two hundred and fifty thousand? What if they hit me with murder one?”
“They won’t. Most you’ll be charged with is second degree, and my guess is it will only be manslaughter.”
“Only?” she shouted, exploding in anger. “Christ! I’m not a damn criminal. I’m a cop!”
20
Virgil Parks left the precinct a few minutes early so he could cruise through some of the back alleys of the Bottoms before his meeting. He knew there wouldn’t be much to see with the driving rain. Any drug business today would be conducted inside abandoned buildings or the clapboard garages that lined the alleys.
He missed the action on the second shift—the kids who would wave when he passed them, thinking he would be there to save them from the bad guys. If only that were true. Addicts had been selling their shit within a few yards of the elementary schools, in plain sight of the kids, for as long as he could remember. That’s what pissed him off the most. For every asshole he busted, two more would take his place. And now members of the Skulls gang were hanging out, intimidating honest citizens, dealing crack, and acting as enforcers for the mob.
Parks turned into an alley off of Glenwood Avenue, slipping between a dilapidated clapboard house and an empty lot overgrown with weeds. A year ago, there had been a double on the lot, but as happened too often in the Bottoms, it had been wiped out by a fire. Most of the houses were between eighty and one hundred years old and the wiring was poor, so tenants often used their stoves for heat during the winter. That resulted in at least two or three fires a month.
He rounded the corner, passing a few junked cars sitting up against the long mesh fences that lined the alley, and pulled up outside the back of a white clapboard house. He glanced at the window beside the back door. He’d driven by that house hundreds of times while patrolling his turf, without incident—until one day, when just before his shift was ending, he got a priority-one call from the dispatcher: domestic violence. Two cruisers always answered a domestic. A second car was dispatched. He’d pulled up and waited. Moments later, he’d heard a scream and what sounded like gunshots. He’d radioed that he was going in alone.
The weather had been much like today, dreary and menacing. He had darted across the backyard and taken refuge under an eave by the kitchen window. He heard a second shot, followed by another shriek. Removing his gun from his holster, he moved toward the back door and identified himself. A bullet pierced the door a foot from his chest, sending him scrambling to the ground. Parks crawled over to another window and peered inside. A middle-aged woman in a torn dress that barely covered her flabby thighs had a gun trained on a man in an undershirt who was cowering by the refrigerator in a corner of the kitchen, blood seeping from his shoulder. There were two bullet holes in the wall. Parks ordered the woman to drop the gun, but she turned toward him as if she were going to shoot. His training kicked in and he fired his weapon. The bullet, which he intended for her leg, hit her square in the chest as she crouched down for some inexplicable reason. That was the only time that he had used his weapon since becoming a cop, and the only time he had killed anybody.
He had been suspended with pay while Internal Affairs investigated, and was exonerated by a panel of three police commissioners two months later. But he always wondered if there was another way he could have handled it.
Things were different being up at Homicide. Now he was the investigator. Or at least part of a team with Jimmy Rosa. Rosa liked to give him a hard time, but Parks had a soft spot for him. He promised Parks when they got a “roadkill”—a term the detectives used for drug dealer deaths—that Parks would play a more important role. But that’s not how it had turned out on the Castellano case. Rosa handled almost all of the important stuff, relegating Parks to the job of chasing down dead-end leads.
Parks eased his car into drive and accelerated down the alley toward Gaby’s, a local hangout on Sullivant, near Davis. He pushed open the double doors and made his way through the crowd toward the back bar. Maggie was sitting on the last stool, nursing a beer. He bent down and gave her a quick peck on the cheek.
“Well, aren’t we romantic today,” she said, wiping her cheek with the back of her hand. “Can I buy you a beer?”
“A Pepsi will do,” he said, motioning for the bartender. “I’m still on duty.”
“That never used to stop you,” she said.
“I have to meet Rosa downtown in less than an hour,” he said, glancing at his watch.
“That was always like you—shooting your wad and splitting.”
“As I remember it, it was you who never liked sex,” Parks retorted. “At least not with me.”
“Come on,” Maggie said, pointing at a pool table in the corner. “I’ll take a bit of your hard-earned money. Twenty bucks on eight ball. Two out of three.”
“I just told you, I’m on a tight schedule,” Parks reiterated.
“We can talk while I steal your money,” she said, chalking up her cue.
Parks shrugged his shoulders and picked up a cue. “So, why did you drag me down here, Maggie?” Maggie always seemed to get her way with him. When they got married, he wanted to stay in the Bottoms, and she wanted to move out to Gahanna. They moved a month later. She convinced him the cost of living in the suburbs was hardly an issue when it came to raising children. And it may not have been, but he would never find out. On her twenty-third birthday, two weeks after she graduated from Ohio State in criminology and had r
eached the minimum age for the FBI, she had applied without his knowledge. Three months later, she sat him down after a rare sexual encounter and told him she had been accepted and was leaving for Quantico for a sixteen-week training course the following Wednesday. After which, she would be posted in Washington, D.C. for a year before receiving a permanent posting—and although she planned on requesting Columbus, there was no guarantee she would get it. When he asked what about their relationship and their plans to have kids, she wiped a single tear from her eye and kissed him lightly on the lips. Then she walked into the bedroom, grabbed her favorite pink blanket, and went to sleep in the guest room.
The next morning, in between bites of rye toast smeared with peanut butter, she had said she thought it would be best for both of them if she filed for divorce before leaving for Quantico.
“You want to break them?” Maggie asked as she finished racking the balls.
“Ladies first,” he said, making a sweeping gesture with his arm.
“Virgil, what’s with that Ferraro woman?” Maggie asked as she broke, failing to drop even one ball. “You guys have anything on her?”
“You know I can’t discuss an ongoing murder investigation,” he said.
“I’m an FBI agent, for Christsakes!”
“All the more reason,” he said as he drilled the yellow ball into the far right pocket.
“How about we exchange some information?” she said, swilling the last of her Bud. “Might be nice if we helped each other.”
Parks stayed hunched over the table. “Maybe we should have done that a long time ago, Maggie.”
“Look, if that’s what this is all about… I’ve said I’m sorry about us more than once. Why can’t you just get over it and move on?”
“What makes you think I’m not over it?” Parks said, urging the green ball toward the side pocket with his chin.
“I know you and your buddy busted her, so you must think you have some kind of case.”
“Why are you so interested?” Parks asked.
“And that guy Grant who was running around in the courtyard. Think they’re an item?”
“Maggie, for Christsakes…”
“Virgil, we’ve been staking out Castellano’s operation for more than a month,” Maggie said quickly, as if she were afraid she wouldn’t be able to get the words out.
Parks’s arm jerked to the left, and the red ball glanced off the side of the far right pocket. “That’s why you were at the Langham?” he exclaimed.
“Officially, no,” Maggie said, touching his shoulder.
“And you didn’t tell us?”
“Anything in the law that says the FBI has to tell you rodents about how we go about our business?” Maggie grinned. “We don’t even tell the attorney general’s office. But I guess that even if we did, they’re so screwed-up they wouldn’t remember.”
“Maggie, this could have a bearing on my case.”
“Maybe I can help you, Virgil. That is, if you help me,” Maggie said, putting the striped orange ball away.
“We don’t know all that much other than that the Ferraro girl was probably working for Castellano,” Parks said. He had been disappointed when Rosa interrogated Angela. He had figured out the connection from the beginning and wanted Rosa to see him in action. But Bones had been all over her, and there was no getting a word in edgewise. And now it seemed that even Maggie had known. “As far as Grant is concerned, I don’t see how he could have had anything to do with it. And frankly, I don’t see her as a murderer either.”
“I agree with you on Grant, and I doubt the girl killed him,” Maggie said. “He was her bread and butter. Now she’s out of a job—aside from being arrested for murder.”
Parks glanced down at his watch. “At first Rosa figured it was an accident, but now he thinks she’s guilty—and thinks something’s fishy with the window washer.”
“Virgil, I lived with you long enough to know when you have that smirk spread across your face, you’re hiding something.”
“How about something for me?” Parks asked.
“You son of a bitch!” Maggie said in disbelief. “You’ve turned into a scumbag!”
“You said ‘exchange information’—at least, I believe that’s what I heard.”
Maggie paused, nodded toward a waitress standing by the service station at the bar, and held up her empty bottle. Then she looked back at Parks. “What I know won’t help your investigation,” she said.
“Why don’t you leave that for me to decide?”
“Virgil, I can’t just give you gratuitous information so you can think we’re square.”
Parks rolled his eyes. “Gratuitous—still using those fancy words, huh?”
“Jesus Christ, Virgil! Do I still have to walk on eggshells with you?”
When Maggie first met Parks, she was in college and he had just joined the police force, working up in Clintonville. They had dated for six months before she finally had the guts to introduce him to her parents. He had reminded her of her father, who was also a cop—but a white one. Most white residents down in the Bottoms had moved up from Appalachia. It didn’t sit well with them to see a black man dating a white woman. And her father was no exception.
Maggie was the youngest of three children, and the third daughter. Her father had always wanted a son—someone who would toss the football around with him, roughhouse out in the yard, and eventually follow him into law enforcement. Her mother couldn’t have any more kids, so Margaret became Maggie, the son he never had. They went to baseball games at Cooper Stadium on Saturdays, played pool, and went to NASCAR races. He pushed her to get an education and accomplish all the things he hadn’t been able to do. And she tried as hard as she could to please him, finishing second only to Seymour Kolinsky, the nerd in her high school graduating class. She earned a full scholarship to Ohio State, graduated with honors, held down a part-time job to pay for her extras, and still found the time to be captain of the women’s lacrosse team. But although her father wanted her to be successful, a part of him felt threatened by her achievements. He also complained about her using those “big words.”
“Okay, I’m not going to tell you everything, but what I do tell you is between us,” she said, looking over at Virgil for his agreement. “I can get into heavy shit for giving you any of this.” She took another beer from the waitress, dropped five dollars on her tray, and waved her off. “Castellano worked for the Pascale family. They were laundering money through some supposedly legit businesses and a local bank.”
“Which bank?” Parks asked.
Maggie shook her head. “Can’t tell you. But…”
“Shit! That makes sense,” Parks said, interrupting her.
“What makes sense?” Maggie asked, arching her brow.
“We found a debit card from Columbus International Bank in her apartment,” Parks said. “That’s the bank, isn’t it?”
Maggie looked down at the floor.
Parks slammed his Pepsi down on the bar. “Thanks, Maggie. Guess, for once, I didn’t get the short end of the stick,” he said before weaving his way through the crowd and out the door.
21
Jonathan Craven parked his Aston Martin on a side street, a few blocks from the social club. The big shots in Cleveland knew about his extravagant lifestyle, but there was no sense in rubbing their noses in it.
He could never understand how these guys with money to burn could hang out in such a seedy neighborhood. It wasn’t as if the cops didn’t know where they were. The vice squad was probably watching the front entrance to the club right now from one of the run-down apartments across the street. That was why he always slipped into a doorway behind the building. No one could photograph him there—the ground dropped two hundred feet into a dry riverbed.
Craven had grown up in Scarsdale, New York. His father was an ophthalmologist, and his mother a professor of art history at Columbia. He was an only child, precocious and driven from a very early age. He graduated from Belair
Academy, a prep school for kids with average grades and rich parents, and went on to Ohio State. Bored with classes, he spent a lot of time partying, reading about finance and banking, and cozying up to students from wealthy families who he thought might help him move up the corporate ladder after he graduated. It was only in his sophomore year, at a local college hangout, that he met Salvatore Massimo, an awkward but determined student with a voracious appetite for the coeds—even greater than his own. But Craven had no idea, until a fraternity party the following week, after they both had consumed more than their share of beer, that this skinny kid from Cleveland was the nephew of a man so important that he would become the godfather of one of America’s biggest crime families.
That night Craven and Massimo decided to room together, and Craven began a courtship that would prove to be more profitable than even he could ever have imagined. After they graduated, Massimo went back to Cleveland to work for his uncle, and Craven moved to Manhattan, where he earned an M.B.A. from NYU and then went into a training program with J. P. Morgan. After two years, he moved on to a smaller bank, while continuing to cultivate his relationship with Massimo.
Craven visited Cleveland several times, but it was almost four years before he finally met Bruno Pascale at a Christmas party. A month later, the phone rang as he was making love to—a term he found ludicrous, preferring instead getting laid, and, more to the point, in his mind, fucking—a woman he had picked up at the St. Regis bar the night before. Salvatore Massimo told him to hightail it up to Cleveland by dinner.
Craven grabbed a flight from LaGuardia. Massimo picked him up and drove him over to one of his uncle’s restaurants, just east of the interstate. The dining room was a throwback to early mob movies, complete with flocked burgundy wallpaper, crystal chandeliers, and gold-plated cutlery. By the end of the evening, after a five-course dinner and several grappas, he had accepted Bruno Pascale’s offer to become president of Columbus International Bank.
Craven reached the back of the social club and exchanged nods with a muscular young man before slipping past him into the building and down a dingy corridor that opened on to a large room cluttered with Arborite tables and stacking chairs. On the left was a bar with a few bottles of liquor on the dusty shelves behind it. On the right sat a billiard table. The floor was a dull gray-colored linoleum which, together with the dark blue walls and dim lighting, swallowed the complexion of the man washing glasses behind the bar.