The Striver

by Stephen Solomita

  The woman called to a passing nurse. ‘Mira, mira.’ She didn’t protest when she was ignored, but only settled in her seat and patted the child on the back. ‘Ai, niño. Hush, hush.’

  Jill took Boots’s elbow in her hand. No matter how ugly Woodhull’s emergency room, it was far preferable to sitting on a stakeout for eight hours, or analyzing ten hours of recorded conversation, which you were somehow supposed to accomplish on a single, eight-hour shift.

  ‘The question you asked, about why the victim didn’t report the assault?’

  ‘Right, what do you make of it?’

  ‘Well, how do we know she was severely injured?’

  ‘That’s a different question, but I’ll answer it. First point, Carlo is very fit, very strong and ruthless in a fight. Second point, there was blood on Carlo’s shirtsleeves as well as on his knuckles, which could only have gotten there if he’d hit his victim multiple times. Now it’s possible the victim’s dead, that she was taken away, like you suggested, and killed somewhere else. But if she’s alive, she’s lying up somewhere. We have one advantage, Jill. Pianetta doesn’t know any of the details, which is the main reason I was so determined to keep him away from Carlo’s body.’

  Consuela chose that moment to return, already shaking her head as she approached. ‘Sorry, Boots. No such. We had two stabbings and a gunshot wound on Sunday morning. All the victims were men.’

  ‘That’s pretty much what I expected. I’ll look into that thing with your nephew and get back to you.’

  As they walked toward the door leading into the parking lot, Boots and Jill were approached by a morbidly obese patient in a hospital gown that didn’t come within a yard of covering his enormous ass.

  ‘Gimme some money,’ he said.

  ‘Fuck off,’ Jill returned.

  ‘Say what?’

  Boots resisted a powerful urge to drive his fist into the man’s gut. If he hit this jerk, he’d have to arrest him and that would mean spending hours at the house writing up arrest reports. Boots had better plans for the evening. He laid his fingers on the man’s chest and gently pushed him to the side.

  ‘Like the lady said, fuck off.’

  ‘You touchin’ me?’

  Consuela appeared at Jill’s shoulder. ‘Amos Sugarman,’ she said, ‘you don’t get your retarded ass back on the gurney, I’m gonna send you up to the rubber room.’

  The man dropped his head and muttered something unintelligible before turning to walk away, his giant cheeks alternately rising and falling with each step.

  ‘The thing about Amos,’ Consuela observed, ‘is that askin’ for money is the only trade he knows.’

  Inside the Taurus, Jill yanked a cigarette from her pack and lit up. Boots took a deep breath as he turned the key in the ignition, thinking only a few more hours before she filled his bedroom with smoke.

  ‘We need to make one more stop,’ he said.

  ‘Sorry, but you’re gonna have to make it without me.’ Jill tucked her cigarettes into her purse. ‘I need to get home. Why don’t you drive me back to the house so I can pick up my car?’

  Boots struggled to keep the disappointment out of his voice. ‘I do something to offend you?’

  ‘No, and if you want, you can stop by later, but I have to go.’

  Boots didn’t bother to respond. He would definitely stop by later. Of that, he had no doubt. He’d been dating a divorcee named Berta Blugolovic for the past two months, but the relationship was going nowhere. Just as well. Her criticism of his chosen profession, and the hours it imposed, had been unrelenting. Still, Jill’s resigned tone wasn’t lost on him.

  ‘You have trouble at home?’

  ‘Yeah, with my mother. If you remember, I told you she was a drunk.’

  ‘I remember.’

  ‘Well, her liver gave out and now she’s waiting on a transplant, which she’s not gonna get because she won’t stop drinking. We have a health aide, Simone, but she takes off at nine o’clock.’

  Boots tapped the steering wheel as the memories flooded his consciousness, memories he ordinarily kept at a distance. His own mother had died of cancer only a few years before, died slowly and painfully. Now, with Thanksgiving a few weeks away, he vividly recalled Margie Littlewood’s final Thanksgiving. That she wouldn’t see another had been obvious to all and the effort to maintain holiday cheer had taken a toll. Along with a significant chunk of his heart.

  As Boots piloted the car toward Richardson Street, he tried to imagine the situation from Jill’s point of view. A Lone Ranger, suck-it-up type, Jill almost surely resented her mother’s alcoholism. Boots had been to the house Jill shared with her mother many times without ever laying eyes on the woman. Yet Jill still went home at night to care for her.

  ‘You comin’ by later?’ Jill asked when Boots pulled to a stop alongside her Chrysler.

  ‘To your house?’

  ‘My house and my bed.’

  ‘Count on it.’

  ‘Good, I’ve missed you.’ Jill stepped into the rain, started to close the door, but then suddenly leaned back inside. ‘She’s fifty-five years old, Boots. Fifty-five years old and she’s killin’ herself. I don’t get it. Really. I just don’t fucking get it.’

  THIRTEEN

  Silvio Mussa, universally called Silvy Mussa, walked into his last stop, Carney’s Pub, at nine o’clock. He had a job to do, a simple task. Collect the tax, then carry it and the rest of his collections to the Poseidon Lounge and the waiting, not to mention greedy, hands of the Rock. A younger, more ambitious man, a man eager to move up, would have completed this assignment before settling down for a few drinks. But Silvy, at age seventy-four, was neither young nor ambitious. Stabbed once and shot twice, with the scars to prove it, he’d survived enough mob wars to earn a few privileges. Johnny Piano’s father was still a bachelor when Silvy made his bones.

  Carney’s Pub was as phony as its owner, Sean Carney, a fourth-generation American who affected a slight brogue. Sean didn’t have to fear being caught out. His tavern on Grand Street was designed to attract Williamsburg’s young professionals, not native-born Irishmen. No, Sean considered the pub to be Irish-themed: leprechauns pushing gold-filled wheelbarrows, giant shamrocks, a decent collection of hand-carved shillelaghs, Kelly-green walls, the Clancy Brothers and the Wolf Tones on a battered jukebox.

  All for show.

  Well, the show must go on, Silvy mused as he dropped onto a stool at the end of the bar. His show, of course.

  ‘Chivas, neat,’ he told the bartender.

  The bar was quiet, as usual on a Monday night, with only a few patrons scattered about. The oldest among them by a good forty years, Mussa didn’t feel out of place, although his full head of silvery hair stood out like a beacon. No, not even the most obvious truth, that he’d become an errand boy, an aging house servant kept on out of kindness, was enough to knock him off his perch. In his own mind, he’d be Silvy Mussa, mob warrior, until the day he died.

  Silvy was halfway through his second Chivas when Sean Carney sat down next to him. Although the bar did well, especially on weekends, Sean derived most of his considerable income from a bookmaking operation run out of the pub’s windowless basement.

  ‘How’s the action?’ Mussa asked. Not that he really cared. The tax was the tax, through good times and bad.

  ‘I’m takin’ a lot of Jets’ money. If it keeps on this way, I’ll have to lay some of it off.’

  ‘If you don’t have a guy, I could recommend someone.’

  ‘No, I got a guy in Boston. I take his Patriots’ action, he takes my Jets’.’

  ‘What about the Giants?’ Mussa asked. The Giants were New York’s second football team.

  ‘Not this year, Silvy. This year the Giants are straight-up losers and the money splits about even, depending on the point spread.’

  Sean moved in close to Mussa, putting his back to his patrons as he slid an envelope into Mussa’s open briefcase. Silvy nodded approvingly. One thing about Sean, he knew
his place. No bullshit, no poor mouthing, no excuses of any kind.

  ‘Good man,’ Silvy muttered before returning to his drink.

  Mussa busied himself for the next half-hour with a third scotch and the reflections in the mirror over the bar. Behind him, three young girls flirted with a series of men – boys, actually – rejecting all with the sort of caustic remarks that no woman could have gotten away with back in the day. Meanwhile, after a few abortive attempts to make contact, the unattached males in the bar took the hint and busied themselves with a football game running on the flat-screen over the bar.

  Have any of these girls ever met a real man, Mussa wondered. A real man like him. Or him when he was young, anyway. These days, when Silvy Mussa needed pussy – which wasn’t all that often, truth be told – he bought it. And not girls this young. No, if he hoped to get any further than wistful desire, even with Viagra, he needed a hooker who got by on her technique, not on her looks.

  Mussa glanced at his watch. Ten thirty. He slid off the stool, pausing long enough for the crick in his back to release. In theory, he was expected in the Rock’s office by ten o’clock.

  ‘Silvy,’ Sean Carney said as Mussa passed, ‘I’m thinkin’ ya might want me to call a cab.’

  ‘What, you sayin’ I can’t drive?’

  Carney smiled. ‘You’re wobblin’ a bit is the only point I’m makin’ here.’

  ‘Well, fuck you, too.’

  ‘Same old, same old? A couple of drinks and you’re disposed to fight the world?’

  ‘I already fought the world, ya punk. I fought the world and I won.’

  Carney gestured to the door. ‘Tell that to the police when they pull you over. See if they’re properly impressed.’

  Silvy touched his jacket, right where the bulge of the gun he once routinely carried should be. Nothing there. His coat over his arm, he stepped off, shuffling out of the bar and into a relentless downpour he’d somehow entirely forgotten.

  ‘Shit,’ he muttered. His car was around the corner and he could sprint to it faster than he could put on his bulky overcoat. If he was still able to sprint, that is, or even walk very fast, which he wasn’t, especially after a few drinks. He finally draped the coat over his head, pulling it tight around his face. Still, rain spattered against his forehead and ran down into his eyes. He wouldn’t have seen a tank coming down the street, or heard it above the pounding of the rain. He certainly failed to notice the man who trailed behind him. Or that the street ahead was deserted. Or that, on this residential block, there were no security cameras to be found.

  Still pissed, at the rain and at Sean Carney, Silvy Mussa jammed his hip against the steering wheel as he got in the car. If the flash of pain that followed was predictable – lately, his doctors has been hinting at replacement surgery – it was nonetheless searing, and it took Silvy a moment to remember that he needed to bring his left leg into the car and close the door. His soaked coat now sat on his head like a saturated sponge.

  Befuddled by age and alcohol, Mussa only managed to arrange the various pieces after a struggle. A waste of time, as it turned out. As he reached into his pocket for his keys, the window beside him exploded into a million tiny pieces. He jerked away, a matter of instinct, raising his hand to cover his face. A few seconds later, when he dropped his hand, he found himself looking into the barrel of a gun.

  ‘Gimme tha’ briefcase, man.’

  Silvy stared, not at the man’s face, which was covered in any event, but at the rosary draped around the man’s neck, a mix of black and gold beads with a small metal skull instead of a crucifix dangling from the bottom.

  ‘Whatta you …’

  The barrel of the gun inched forward until it rested between his eyes, rendering him effectively mute.

  ‘Last chance, Silvy. You don’ gimme the maricon briefcase, I’m gonna be killin’ your blanco ass and takin’ it anyway.’

  Mussa’s head jerked at the sound of his name, but he maintained his cool. The funny thing about getting old was that you only wanted to get older. Fuck the infirmities.

  ‘Awright, take it. But I’m tellin’ ya that you’re makin’ a big mistake. And it ain’t me. I’m just an old man. It’s Johnny Piano who’s gonna run you down.’

  Apparently unimpressed, the man took the briefcase with his left hand, then fired three .22 caliber rounds into Mussa’s body, the first two into his exposed shoulder and the last into his left thigh. Overwhelmed by the unrelenting downpour, the gunshots barely registered, even in his own ears.

  Teddy pulled away from curb, taking his time. Beside him, Pablo Santiago, a second-generation Dominican, stripped off the idiotic rosary and wrapped it around the barrel of the gun before jamming both under the seat. The rosary bore the colors of a tiny Salvadoran street gang centered in Greenpoint’s Cooper Park Houses.

  ‘Talk to me,’ Teddy said as Pablo wiped his face with a towel.

  ‘Piece of cake, baby.’

  ‘Silvy’s still alive?’

  ‘Was when I left, but …’

  No further explanation was necessary. Bullets did unpredictable things after they entered a human body, even small-caliber bullets. ‘Did you check in the briefcase?’

  ‘C’mon, Teddy, the briefcase he gave me was the same briefcase he was carryin’ when he left Carney’s. Plus, it was pourin’. If I would’ve opened it, we’d be dryin’ the money in an oven.’

  ‘Open it now.’

  Pablo did as he was told, though he couldn’t suppress a scowl. Teddy had four main men. If he’d been running an Italian mob, he supposed they be called capos, since each ran a crew of his own. He tended to view them as minority shareholders in his personal corporation. Pablo Santiago was by far the most difficult of the four, a man who’d rather eat glass than take orders. On the other hand, he was also a man who could be trusted to put three bullets in the body of a helpless senior citizen. Costs and benefits. Weighing and measuring. There was no such thing as a perfect employee, as his Business 101 instructor, Susan Underwood, had explained at length.

  ‘Here.’ Pablo yanked a handful of white envelopes from the bag and held them up. ‘Satisfied?’

  Teddy checked his mirrors, then pulled to the curb. He slid the gun and the rosary into the bag, then put the bag in the trunk. He did this himself, a small concession to Pablo’s injured feelings.

  ‘Looks like you fucked yourself,’ he observed as he made a right on Meeker Avenue, merging with the traffic headed for a Brooklyn-Queens Expressway onramp at the foot of the Kosciusko Bridge. ‘There’s gotta be twenty grand in there.’

  The remark produced another sulk. Teddy had originally offered Pablo a third of the take, but Pablo had bargained for a guarantee. He wanted three thousand dollars, succeed or fail. A poor choice, but Pablo had a history of poor choices, one of which had landed him in a medium-security prison for several years.

  Twenty minutes later, Teddy dumped the gun and the rosary in an enormous dumpster on a quiet street in College Point. He didn’t think they’d be found, but neither item could be traced to him in any event.

  Teddy’s day had begun at five o’clock in the morning, but there was still work to do. He dropped Pablo in Sunnyside, and headed for a twenty-four-hour coffee shop on Manhattan’s Lower East Side. Nose to the grindstone. Shoulder to the wheel. Still, when he discovered two lanes closed for repair on the Williamsburg Bridge and traffic backed up for a mile, he found himself dialing Sanda Dragomir’s number on his cell phone. So much for resolutions. Sanda’s husky voice had a way of rumbling up from her chest, creating an odd echo, and Teddy found himself instantly stirred when she answered on the third ring.

  ‘Hello, Teddy.’

  ‘Hey, baby, what are you doing tonight?’

  ‘Waiting for you.’

  FOURTEEN

  Teddy had a habit of making promises he wasn’t immediately prepared to meet. Shurie, for instance, had been telling low-level drug dealers in Jackson Heights that he could supply any quantity of anything th
ey wanted. Now the orders were pouring in and they had to deliver and they didn’t have enough product. Robert Lorton, the man he was to meet, worked in a pharmaceutical warehouse in Yonkers that supplied almost the whole of Westchester County. Not the big boys, not CVS or Duane Reade or Walgreens, but the many hundreds of independents.

  Lorton’s message had reached Teddy through a third party. A small quantity of various narcotics, from OxyContin to Valium to Ritalin, could be skimmed from the company’s inventory without attracting the attention of regulators. Lorton had no desire to retail these pills. He wanted a single buyer, one man to handle the entire flow.

  Teddy loved the whole scheme. Violence ruled in the drug world, actual violence or the threat of violence. You protected yourself with simple ferocity. Fuck with me and I’ll kill you. This deal was entirely different. When he finally showed, fifteen minutes late, Mr Lorton radiated paranoia, a middle-aged man so far out of his comfort zone he might have been standing in a prison yard. Once hooked, he could be held in place by fear alone.

  ‘You see that briefcase under the table?’ Teddy asked as Lorton worked on his second beer. By then, Teddy had had been maintaining a reassuring smile for so long that his lips were numb. ‘Take a look in the front compartment.’

  Closing in on fifty, Lorton was all gut and no ass. The press of his distended belly on the edge of the table when he leaned forward produced a breathless grunt, but his hand didn’t come within a foot of the briefcase.

  Teddy picked up the briefcase and laid it on the seat beside Lorton. ‘Try not to be too obvious,’ he said. ‘But take a look.’

  The envelopes Teddy emptied before entering the restaurant had contained as many five- and ten-dollar bills as they did fifties or hundreds, a deficiency Teddy had overcome by stuffing the bills into the briefcase’s smaller front pocket so that they could only be seen from the top.

  ‘If you’re the supply, I’m the demand,’ Teddy said as Bobby Lorton peered down at this display of wealth. ‘Let’s drink to a happy marriage.’