Criminal Conversation

by Ed McBain

  “Yeah?”

  “It’s Uncle Rudy.”

  “Come on up.”

  A buzzer sounded. They heard what they recognized as the door again, opening and then closing with a firm thud. Then silence. In Coulter’s report, he had mentioned a door with a deadbolt lock on it and a speaker set into the jamb beside it. They were already beginning to fear the worst.

  The next person arrived at ten past ten. He was identified by Benny as “Mr. Bardo.”

  “Good morning, Mr. Bardo.”

  “Good morning, Benny.”

  “Petey Bardo,” Regan said.

  “The consigliere,” Lowndes said, nodding.

  No, the fuckin’ Pope, Regan thought. You jackass.

  “They’re upstairs,” Benny said.

  They listened carefully. Footsteps. Silence. Then:

  “Yeah?”

  The voice on the speaker again. Sounding very much like Andrew Faviola.

  “It’s Petey.”

  “Okay.”

  And the buzzer again. And the door opening and shutting. And silence again. Upstairs was where they were going. Downstairs was where Regan and Lowndes would hear shit.

  Sal the Barber arrived next.

  “Sal,” he said into the speaker, and was immediately buzzed upstairs.

  The fifth man to arrive that morning was introduced for the record as Bobby.

  “Hey, Bobby, how you doing?” Benny said.

  “They here?”

  “Upstairs.”

  Footsteps. The speaker voice again.

  “Yeah?”

  “Triani.”

  Thank you, Lowndes thought.

  “Come up.”

  The door opening and closing. Silence again. At the pressing machine, Benny Vaccaro began singing “I Left My Heart in San Francisco.”

  The next two men arrived together. Before Benny could greet them, one of them said, “Hello, Benny.”

  “Hey,” Benny said, sounding surprised, as if he hadn’t heard them coming in. Regan and Lowndes listened to heavy footsteps pounding across the room, heard the familiar voice on the speaker again, “Yeah?” and then “Carmine and Ralph,” and then “Come on up,” and the buzzer, and the door opening and closing—welcome to the party. Ralph Carbonaio and Carmine Orafo were here, and everybody was upstairs, and nobody was going to say a fucking thing down here except Benny, who was singing again at the pressing machine.

  Regan took off his earphones.

  In the conference room upstairs, they were planning the murder of Alonso Moreno.

  “This is not to teach him a lesson,” Andrew said. “The lesson is for whoever follows him.”

  “I think we may be starting something we can’t finish,” Carbonaio said. He was called Ralphie the Red because he had red hair. He also had freckles all over his face, and years ago they used to call him Ralphie Irish till he broke a few heads. He had gained a little weight since then, and he sat now at the conference table in gray flannel slacks and a blue cashmere sports jacket with a gray V-neck sweater under it. He was due in Seattle tomorrow morning. He considered this business of having to take care of Moreno a nuisance. Better not to start something that could lead to complications. There were times when Ralphie considered himself a totally legitimate entrepreneur, all evidence to the contrary.

  “If we don’t start it, there’s no Chinese deal,” Rudy said. “The fuckin’ Chinks are tellin’ us shit or get off the pot. We gonna let this spic stand in the way of what could be billions?”

  “Rudy’s right,” Sal the Barber said in his gruff, rumbling voice. “Fuck ’em. We do our own thing, fuck ’em.”

  “Easier to pay him, though,” Triani said. “What he’s askin’.”

  Bobby Triani was married to Rudy’s daughter, Ida, and as an intimate member of the family was fourth in the hierarchy of command. He was forty-two years old, a burly, brown-eyed, dark-haired chain-smoker who did not smoke when he was here in Andrew’s apartment, office, whatever the fuck he called it. He resented not being able to smoke here. He felt he could think better when he smoked. He knew his father-in-law was dying of lung cancer, but he still thought smoking helped his thought processes. Whenever Bobby was with one of his little girlfriends, he smoked his fucking brains out. His father-in-law didn’t know about the girlfriends. Bobby hoped he would die before he ever found out.

  “We were prepared to give him forty-five as his end here in America,” Andrew said. “He held out for fifty.”

  “Even so,” Bobby said, and shrugged.

  He was dressed more casually than any of the others, still sporting a tan he’d acquired in Miami, and wearing Ralph Lauren slacks and a purple Tommy Hilfiger sweater.

  “Which, by the way, you agreed to,” Petey said.

  “Fuck what he agreed,” Rudy said.

  “Correct,” Sal said. “Fuck ’em.”

  “Still,” Ralphie said cautiously, “our word should mean something, no?”

  “Not in this case,” Orafo said.

  Like Carbonaio, with whom he worked most closely in the organization, he was wearing a sports jacket and slacks, no sweater, dark tie on a white shirt. He was some sixty-odd years old, and went back a long way with Rudy and also with Anthony, who was now in prison. Carmine still believed in honor. They were all supposed to believe in honor. You gave a man your word, your word was your word. But the man Andrew now wanted killed was a man totally without honor. As he saw it, the rules did not apply here, even though Andrew had given Moreno his handshake.

  “This would be a stickup in a dark alley,” he said, “fifty percent of the take. The spic’s out of his fuckin’ mind. Andrew’s right. We dust him as a lesson to whoever’s next in line. Then we go to them with the same deal, and they’ll grab it in a minute.”

  “Still,” Carbonaio said, and shrugged.

  “I want to do it where he lives,” Andrew said:

  They all looked at him.

  “Let them know they’re not safe from us wherever they are. If we want to take them out, we can do it in a minute. They agree to our deal or we bury them one by one. That’s what I want them to realize.”

  “Are you talking Colombia?” Bobby squeaked. His throat got dry whenever he went too long without a smoke. He felt like killing Andrew, not letting him smoke, never mind the fuckin spic.

  “Colombia, yes,” Andrew said. “That’s where he lives, that’s where I want it done.”

  “I think he’s still here in New York,” Petey said.

  “We could do it easier here, Lino,” Rudy said reasonably.

  “I know, Uncle Rudy, but we make a stronger point if we do it there.”

  “Do we have people there?” Carmine asked Ralphie.

  “Everywhere,” Ralphie assured him. “But I’ll tell you, Andrew, this, could backfire. We’ve got a lot of legitimate businesses in Miami, which is a stone’s throw from where this man operates. It wouldn’t be difficult for his people to find out what they are and where they are. We could be setting ourselves up for terrible trouble in the future.”

  “What kind of trouble?” Carmine asked. “What the fuck are you talkin’ about, Ralph?”

  “Murders, bombings, you name it. Moreno’s people’ve killed judges, you think they’re gonna draw the line at us?”

  “The judges didn’t go into Moreno’s house and kill him in his own bed,” Andrew said.

  The men sitting at the conference table said .nothing for several moments, each—with the exception of Rudy— wondering who would be the. first to tell Andrew that this was an impossible thing he was proposing. Rudy didn’t want to undermine his own nephew. He preferred the criticism to come from elsewhere. Besides, he wasn’t sure this couldn’t be done.

  “Ahhh … how do we get in his house, Andrew?”

  Petey Bardo. Wearing a brown
suit, naturally. Brown tie, brown shoes. Mr. Brown.

  “By offering someone a million in cash to get in there,” Andrew said.

  Which only made sense, Rudy thought, smiling.

  At six o’clock that Wednesday night, while Johnny Regan and Alex Lowndes were reporting to Michael that a heavy meeting had taken place at the tailor shop and they had nothing of consequence to show for it, Sarah Welles was buzzed through the door on Mott Street and hurried up the steps to where Andrew was waiting for her. All of this past week she’d thought of him in this place, sitting in one of the big leather chairs in the living room, wearing his silk monogrammed robe sashed at the waist, naked beneath it, waiting for her.

  She could not understand why the mere thought of him aroused erotic thoughts she’d earlier entertained rarely if ever. She knew that what she felt for him was not love—how could it be, she hardly knew anything about him?—but was instead what the Bible had called lust and what her teenage students called a plain and simple lech. She didn’t know this man, yet she longed for him virtually twenty-four hours a day. She longed for him now as she climbed the stairs to the familiar door at the top, and saw the door opening, and saw him standing in it wearing not a robe but jeans and a sweater instead, and went into his arms, and lifted her face to his, and drank from his lips and drowned in his embrace.

  “Meeting broke up at about twelve thirty,” Regan said.

  “I went down for sandwiches,” Lowndes said.

  Jackass, Regan thought.

  “All of them saying goodbye to Benny the presser,” he said. “Our guys watching the shop reported them filing out one at a time, heading off in all directions. Except our main man. He was in there all day long. Still there when we packed it in at five.”

  “That’s when the shop closes,” Lowndes said. “Five o’clock. Warrant gives us a nine-to-five. Which is when it opens. Nine.”

  “Team’s still outside watching the front door, though,” Regan said. “They’ll take Faviola home, put him to bed.”

  “What’d you mean by nothing of consequence?” Michael asked.

  “They ain’t talkin’ in that back room, Mike,” Regan said. “Oh, sure, hello, goodbye, nice day, and so on. But where they’re meeting is upstairs, wherever the fuck that may be.”

  “Freddie mentioned a door,” Michael said. “Deadbolt lock on it, speaker off to the side.”

  “Yeah,” Regan said, nodding. “Faviola buzzes them in, they go upstairs.”

  “Must be some kind of meeting room up there,” Lowndes said. “There’s windows across the front of the building, it could be a room up there.”

  “Freddie’ll have to go in again,” Michael said.

  “When?”

  “As soon as possible,” he said, and stabbed a button on his phone. “We’ll need another court order.”

  Apartment was too hot in the summer, too cold in the winter, never felt right in here. Luretta hated it here all the time. Summertime, with the windows open, you heard all the third-world noises out there, didn’t even sound like you were living in America anymore. Wintertime, you closed everything up tight, keep out the cold, you got all these exotic cooking smells coming under the door, other kinds of foreign smells, too, she sometimes thought these people never took baths. The apartment was freezing cold already. They turned off the heat at eleven every night, and it was already eleven fifteen.

  Dusty had moved in with them three days ago.

  Told Luretta’s mother he wanted to be near her while his baby formed inside her. His exact words. “I wanns a’be near you, Haze, while mah baby forms in’sahd you.” Fucking lying drug addict, all he wanted to be near was the welfare money her mother got for herself and the two children. Luretta and her younger brother had two different fathers, neither of which either of them had ever had the pleasure of meeting. Hamilton Barnes was twelve years old, the baby of the family till now. Barnes was her mother’s maiden name, which she chose to give her children ’stead of her boyfriends’ names, thank you. Now Hazel Barnes was pregnant again, and her new junkie boyfriend had moved in, hooray. Seemed to always take up with junkies, Luretta couldn’t figure why that was. Did she need needy people? Did she need men who couldn’t take care of themselves?

  “Fuck you lookin’ at?” Dusty asked.

  She was on the way to the bathroom, wearing a cotton robe over a short nightgown, crossing through the kitchen to get to the hallway beyond. She shared a bedroom with Ham, did her homework in there, tried as much as she could to stay out of any parts of the house where Mr. Dusty Rogers might be sitting around shooting up.

  “You hear me?” he asked.

  When he wasn’t doing dope, he was drinking booze. Matter of fact, he sometimes did both together. He’d cook his heroin, shoot it in his arm, then nod off for three, four hours sometimes, looking like he was dead sometimes, his chin on his chest that way, his eyes closed, sitting there in his stupor. She hated him like poison; her mother had taken him in over her protests.

  She walked on by him now without saying a word to him.

  He nodded in righteous agreement with whatever he’d been thinking about her, and poured himself another glassful of Thunderbird.

  The kitchen divided the apartment into two uneven spaces. The bedroom she shared with Ham was on one side of it, to the left as you came in from the outside hall. To the right was a small living room, the bathroom, and her mother’s bedroom. As she approached the bathroom, she could hear the television turned up loud in her mother’s room down the hall. They never used the living room, because the only window in it opened on the air shaft, with a grimy brick wall opposite. If she and Ham ever wanted to watch TV, they had to ask her mother if they could come in. More times than not, Dusty was in there with her, lying on the bed in just his undershorts and his stupor. Luretta’d just as soon read a book, anyway.

  You turned on the bathroom light, there was always a flurry of activity around the soap dish, where the roaches broke into a mad rush for cover. She wondered why roaches seemed to enjoy eating soap so much. Actually, she didn’t mind them as much as she minded the rats. She was always afraid when she sat on the toilet bowl that a rat would come up and bite her. She always checked the water in the bowl before sitting down, making sure nothing was swimming around in there. She peed now, and then flushed the toilet and washed her hands and her face in preparation for bed.

  She didn’t bathe in the tub but every other night. Hot water ran out pretty fast in an apartment building this size, city didn’t care how many tenants called to complain long as the landlord kept paying the taxes. Yes, miss, we’ll see to it right away. Sure. Same as they saw to garbage collection, or snow removal, or electrical wires hanging from the hallway ceilings, you could get electrocuted just walking by. She brushed her teeth, rinsed, spat into the sink, put her brush back in the yellow plastic cup that was hers, alongside her mother’s red one and Ham’s blue one, dried her hands on her towel, and opened the bathroom door.

  Dusty was standing in the hallway just outside.

  “What takes you so long in there all the time?” he asked.

  “Sorry,” she said. “Didn’t know you were waiting.”

  She started moving past him in the narrow hallway. In her mother’s bedroom down the end of it, she could still hear the TV blaring. Somewhere outside the apartment, she could hear people arguing in one of the Middle Eastern languages, she didn’t know which, the words harsh, the cadences strange.

  “What’s your hurry?” he said, and grinned.

  “Out of my way,” she said calmly.

  But she was scared to death.

  “Why, certainly,” he said, and stepped aside, still grinning, and as she was starting to walk past, he grabbed a big piece of her ass and squeezed hard. She wriggled out of his grasp, scurried through the kitchen like a roach running from a suddenly blinding light, rushed into her bedroom, and closed t
he door behind her. There was no lock on the door.

  Ham hadn’t come in yet.

  Twelve years old.

  It’s ten p.m. Do you know where your children are?

  Except that it was already eleven thirty.

  She cleared the books spread on her bed, pulled back the covers, climbed in, and turned out the bedside light. The room was frigid. She pulled the blankets up under her nose and tried falling asleep, knowing there was no lock on the door, afraid Dusty would come into the room after her, afraid rats would scurry over the bed and gnaw at her face, afraid Ham wouldn’t come home at all one of these nights, and they’d find him dead in the street the next morning.

  At a little past midnight, she heard his key in the lock.

  He tiptoed through the kitchen, came into the bedroom, undressed in the dark, and climbed into the bed across from hers. She did not let him know she was still awake. She did not ask him where he’d been or why he’d stayed out so long. In seven hours, she had to get up, and get ready for school. She hoped before then Dusty would die of a self-administered overdose.

  It took exactly eleven days to get to Alonso Moreno.

  The two men who’d agreed to do the job were both imported from Sicily. They spoke only broken English, but that didn’t matter because they planned to present themselves as emissaries from Rome. To two skilled assassins like Luigi Di Bello and Giuseppe Fratangelo, Moreno meant nothing and Colombia meant less. For that matter, even Andrew Faviola was of little importance to them, even though the scheme they’d been hired to execute had been conceived by him. The only thing that had any meaning for them was the million dollars they would share when the job was done. Faviola had paid them ten percent on a pair of handshakes. Now all they had to do was earn the remaining nine hundred thousand.

  It was common knowledge that Moreno had for years courted the Catholic Church in his native country. His constant traveling companions, in fact, were two priests respectively and respectably named the Reverends Julio Ortiz and Manuel Garcia. These two clerics sat with Moreno on the board of directors of the charitable organization he’d founded for the elimination of slums in Bogota, Medellin, and Cali. They appeared with him at rallies and benefits where they praised to the heavens all the wonderful things Moreno was doing for Colombia, forgetting to mention that the millions he distributed to the poor and the needy—and the Church—had been obtained by flooding the United States of America with cocaine. Andrew had read in Time magazine that Moreno had recently petitioned the Pope for a private audience. That was all he needed to know.