Criminal Conversation

by Ed McBain

  “He doesn’t really say that,” Lowndes said, looking embarrassed and quickly picking up a fry and dipping up mustard with it.

  “Close to it,” Regan said. “This is unusual, you know, a person not identifying herself when she calls. In a room, a place that’s bugged, you don’t have people using names all the time. That’s for books. A character saying, ‘Well, Jack, I’ll tell you,’ and another character answering, ‘Yes, Frank, please do.’ So the person reading the book can tell the characters apart. But in real life, people don’t use names except for emphasis. Like, ‘I’m going to say this just once, Jimmy, so you better listen hard.’ Emphasis, huh? That’s because they know who’s talking, they can see the person talking. It gets frustrating sometimes, listening to a bug. All these people know who’s talking, but we don’t. On the phone, it’s different. A person usually says who’s calling the minute the other person picks up. Unless she thinks she’s the only broad in his life, in which case, ‘Hi, it’s me.’”

  “Or unless she’s married,” Lowndes said, “and is looking over her shoulder.”

  “Yeah, that’s a possibility, too.”

  “Anyway, we stop listening the minute it’s any of the bimbos,” Lowndes added.

  Michael immediately figured they didn’t.

  He had checked their line sheets, and it showed them turning off the recording equipment the moment Faviola received any privileged calls or any calls clearly beyond the purlieus of the surveillance warrant. The times were listed for any and all to read, and Michael had no reason to doubt that they had indeed turned off the equipment at the times indicated, and then turned it on again for spot checks at the times subsequently listed. But did that mean they hadn’t already listened a bit longer than they should have? Gee, we had to keep the machine on so we could make sure, you know? Cops were cops. Overhear some cheap hood in bed with his bimbo, chances were they’d keep listening longer than required by the minimization rules. Maybe he was wrong, but he was willing to bet six to five on it.

  “Especially if it’s Oona or the other one,” Lowndes said. “’Cause he’s banging them on a regular basis.”

  “Oona is a broad named Oona Halligan,” Regan said. “She left her number in Brooklyn, the phone company checked it out for us. That’s also the number he calls back. We’ve also got numbers for five of the other broads, two in the Bronx, two in Manhattan, one in Great Neck, which is very nice of him, don’t you think, also shtupping a local girl? Their names are …” he said, and reached into his jacket pocket for his notebook.

  “And the winners are,” Lowndes said, like a host at the Academy Awards.

  “The winners are,” Regan said, reading from his notebook, “Alice Reardon, Mary Jane O’Brien … he digs Irish chicks … Blanca Rodriguez …”

  “Spies, too,” Lowndes said.

  “Angela Cannieri, who is the local talent from Great Neck, and another mick named Maggie Dooley. He fucks more Irish girls than I’ve ever fucked in my life, this kid.”

  “How about ‘Hi, It’s Me’?”

  “Never leaves a number. Never says whether she’s calling from home or from work. We can hear background traffic noises sometimes, we figure she’s using phone booths on the street.”

  “Any idea where the booths are located?”

  “Need a Trap-and-Trace for that,” Regan said.

  A wiretap surveillance did not normally record the telephone number of any incoming caller. This information required an additional court order specifying “reasonable suspicion” and requesting specific geographical locations, an expensive procedure usually followed in kidnap cases, where investigators were waiting for a ransom demand; Regan could not remember a single instance of the DA’s Office requesting a Trap-and-Trace on a racketeering surveillance case.

  “You really want to know where these booths are?” he asked Michael. “I mean, a Trap-and-Trace for some bimbo standin’ in the rain …”

  “No, no,” Michael said. “You don’t have any reason to believe these women are related to the criminal activities listed in the court order, do you?”

  “No, sir,” Lowndes said at once. “Which is why we turn off the machine the minute we know who it is.”

  “Except this morning the one we got no name for says, ‘Hi, it’s me, I guess you’re still in Florida, I’ll try you tomorrow.’”

  “Tomorrow’s what?” Michael asked.

  “The tenth. We figure he must’ve left early this morning. Leastways, that’s when all the wiseguys stopped calling. They probably know he’s out of town, so why bother? Today, it’s just the bimbos been calling.”

  “Not all of them,” Lowndes said. “Just Oona and the one we don’t know.”

  “Oona,” Regan said, and licked his lips. “I’d love to eat her pussy, a name like that. Grrrrr,” he said, growling like a dog.

  “Did she mention Florida?”

  “Oona? No. I don’t think he told her he was going away. What we think, the relationship with the other one is more important to him. From what we can pick up, anyway. Before we tune out.”

  “In the minute or so before we tune out,” Lowndes added, and nodded.

  “Did any of them mention the Florida trip on the phone?”

  “Nobody,” Regan said. “Well, Faviola told Bobby Triani he had to buy some oranges before he went up to see his mother next week, which when we tie it with what the bimbo said this morning, he had to be using a code word for Florida.”

  “Not Oona, the other one. The one who calls from the street.”

  “He told Petey Bardo the same thing, come to think of it.”

  “Yeah, the oranges, “Lowndes said.

  “He always wears brown, Petey Bardo,” Regan said.

  “Yeah, he likes brown,” Lowndes said.

  “Anyway, what do you want us to do about this harem he’s got? You want us to put tails on ’em?”

  “How do you figure they’re important?”

  “I don’t.”

  “Does he talk mob shit with them?”

  “Not so far.”

  “Until he does, we’d be wasting time.” Michael thought for a moment, and then said, “When did she say she’d try him again?”

  “Tomorrow.”

  “Do you think she knows he’s coming back tomorrow? Or is she just trying him on the off chance?”

  “Tomorrow’s Wednesday,” Regan said. “If he’s back, you can bet your ass they’ll be screwing their brains out again. That seems to be her regular night, Wednesday.”

  “Good,” Michael said. “If he tells her why he was in Florida, and it just happens to be something criminal, stay on it. Otherwise …”

  “Otherwise, we’ll tune out,” Lowndes said.

  “Naturally,” Regan said.

  “God, I missed you.”

  “He’s back,” Regan said.

  “I missed you, too,” the woman said.

  “You look great.”

  “You do, too.”

  “Hold me.”

  Silence.

  “Kiss me.”

  “There they go,” Lowndes said.

  “God,” she said.

  “Grabbing a handful of cock,” Regan said.

  “God, I missed you.”

  “Must be an echo in the place,” Regan said.

  More silence.

  Both detectives listened.

  In a while, they heard the woman moaning, and they knew exactly what the pair of them were doing in that bedroom. They took off the earphones, turned off the equipment, and noted the time. Two minutes later, they listened again for some thirty seconds, ascertained that the two of them were still fucking, and tuned out again.

  It wasn’t the fucking itself they particularly enjoyed listening to, it was the things the woman said to Faviola when they weren’t fucking. Or sometimes
when she was coming, the things she shouted when she was coming. Compared to “Hi, It’s Me,” Oona Halligan was a novitiate nun. Oh, yes, at Faviola’s urging Oona would sometimes politely ask him to keep fucking her, Yes, please fuck me, but never once did she construct a scenario comparable to those the other broad seemingly pulled out of thin air.

  Oona was a redhead. They gathered this from little tidbits Faviola dropped about how Irish she looked with those masses of red hair, probably didn’t know there were Irish girls with hair as black as his own, the dumb wop. The other one was unmistakably a blonde. This, too, they gathered from what was said in the bedroom, but mostly from her half of the conversation. She seemed to know he enjoyed her blondeness, seemed to realize it turned him on, so she kept mentioning it, Do you like my being blond down here, too?, wanting to know what effect her blondeness had on him, Does it excite you to kiss my blond pussy?, Faviola lapping it all up while simultaneously lapping her, from the sound of it. They imagined her as some kind of tall glacial beauty with blue eyes and long blond hair she tied around his cock, a fuckin’ nymphomaniac with great tits and legs, who Faviola worshipped like a naked blond goddess in a jungle movie, the dumb fuckin’ wop.

  “. . . told me it was stolen,” she was saying.

  They had just put on the earphones and turned on the machine for one of their periodic spot checks. If they heard anything related to a crime, they would continue listening and recording. If Blondie here started discussing the merits of sucking a big cock as opposed to a teeny-weeny little one, they would reluctantly turn off the machine, write down the on and off times on the line sheet, and then wait another minute or so before doing another spot check. Watching the clock was painstaking and boring. So was listening—most of the time.

  “The ring,” she said. “He told me it was stolen.”

  “Leave it on,” Regan said. “She’s talking about stolen goods.”

  “He said it was stolen from the Boston Museum of Fine Arts,” she said.

  “That’s impossible,” Faviola said. “I bought it from …”

  “That’s what he told me. He has a list.”

  “Did he show you this list?”

  “No, but …”

  “Then how do you know … Look, it’s impossible, really. I bought it from a jeweler I’ve done business with for years.”

  “Maybe you ought to take it back to him.”

  “Oh, you can bet on that,” he said.

  “I’ll bet on that, too,” Regan said.

  “I also found out how much it cost, Andrew. I couldn’t possibly …”

  “He shouldn’t have told you how …”

  “. . . keep it, now that I know …”

  “. . . much it cost. The ring was a gift. Why’d you go to him in the first place?”

  “To find out where it had come from in Rome. You told me it was Roman …”

  “Yeah, that’s what I understood.”

  “So I wanted to know where. The Roman Empire was huge …”

  “Yeah.”

  “It’s Greek, as it turns out, the ring. The point is, I had no idea it was so expensive, Andrew. Five thousand dollars? Really, Andrew.”

  “Five …”

  “I could never explain something that cost so much. Please return it, Andrew. Get your money back. Tell whoever you bought it from …”

  “Well, sure, if the ring was stolen …”

  “Yeah, yeah, tell us about the ring,” Regan prompted.

  “Where’d you buy it, anyway?”

  “Good,” Regan said.

  “Guy on … uh … Forty-Seventh Street.”

  “You should take it right back to him.”

  “I will. Trade it for something else. I want you to have a ring from me. To wear when you’re here. So I’ll know you’re mine.”

  “You know I’m yours, anyway. When I’m here. I shouldn’t have taken the ring home with me, that was too dangerous. But I wanted to keep looking at it. Because it was from you, and because seeing it on my hand, putting it on my finger whenever no one else was there, it reminded me of you. It’s so beautiful, Andrew, it was so thoughtful of you to …”

  “I’ll get another one for you.”

  “That can’t be traced this time,” Regan said.

  “But only to wear here,” the woman said. “And nothing that expensive, please. I don’t want, you to spend that kind of …”

  “I’ll buy you some earrings, too. To wear when you’re here.”

  “And some nipple clamps,” Regan said.

  Lowndes laughed. Regan laughed with him. They almost missed what she said next.

  “. . . there in Florida?”

  “Shhhh,” Regan warned.

  “I had some business down there,” Faviola said.

  “So you told me. But how’d it go?”

  “Fine.”

  “How was the weather?”

  “Only so-so.”

  “I wish I could’ve been there with you.”

  “I didn’t have much time for anything but meetings,” he said. “Anyway, my uncle was with me.”

  “Rudy Faviola,” Lowndes whispered.

  Regan wondered why the jackass was whispering.

  “Is he with the company, too?” she asked. “Your uncle?”

  “Oh, boy is he,” Regan said.

  “Yes, he is,” Faviola said.

  “I thought … well, from what I understood, this wasn’t a family business.”

  “It isn’t.”

  “Like fun, it isn’t,” Regan said.

  “You said the men who’d started it were semiretired …”

  “That’s right.”

  “. . . and that you ran things for them.”

  “Well, I have help, you know. I mean, this isn’t a one-man operation.”

  “I didn’t think it was. The conference room downstairs …”

  “Uh-huh, for board meetings.”

  “The company car …”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Billy’s a wonderful driver, by the way.”

  “Yeah, he’s a good man.”

  “Are you planning to invest in Sarasota?”

  “No, no. Well … uh … you remember my telling you we look for companies we can bring along till they become moneymakers?”

  “Yes?”

  “Well, this meeting was with a South American exporter who’s interested in doing business with a Chinese firm. We’re arranging a merger.”

  “Chinese?”

  “Yeah. We’re bringing them together so there can be an exchange of products.”

  “What sort of products?”

  “Rice and coffee.”

  “Ask a stupid question,” she said.

  “Rice and coffee, my ass,” Regan said.

  “How does your company fit in?”

  “Well, I told you. We arranged the merger …”

  “So?”

  “So there’s a fee for that. Naturally. Nobody does things for free, you know.”

  “A flat fee?”

  “Sometimes. It depends on the deal. Our fee on this one is a share of the profits.”

  “You get a share of the profits just for bringing these two companies together?”

  “In a manner of speaking, yes. The principals, yes.”

  “But a share of the profits?”

  “It’s not as easy as it sounds.”

  “How big a share?”

  Faviola laughed.

  “A pretty big share,” he said.

  “How big?”

  He laughed again.

  “Come on, tell me. How much?”

  “How much what? How much do I love you?”

  “That, too. But how much are you getting for a day’s work …”

&nb
sp; “I love you more than …”

  “. . . in Sara—”

  “. . . life itself.”

  There was a long silence.

  At last, she said, “You don’t.”

  “I do,” he said.

  Another silence.

  Then, from the woman, “Mmmmm, yes. God, yes.”

  “Shit,” Regan said.

  Andrew Faviola was telling Sal the Barber that he wanted to know where that fucking ring had come from. Regan and Lowndes were listening. Faviola had moved fast; this was Friday, only two days after they’d first heard about the ring being a stolen one.

  “You give nice presents, Sal,” he was saying. “Next time tell me something’s hot, and I won’t …”

  “Hey, Andrew, gimme a break, will ya?” Sal said. “I didn’t know the fuckin’ thing was hot.”

  “Hot? The fuckin’ Boston Museum!”

  “The ring came my way, how was I supposed to know somebody lifted it in a fuckin’ museum?”

  “How’d it come your way, Sal?”

  “How do things come a person’s way? I’ll tell you the truth, I thought I was doin’ you a favor, Andrew, givin’ you a beautiful ring like this one. You got to admit it’s an unusual ring, Andrew, ain’t it? I never seen a ring all black like this one, did you?”

  “Where’d you get it, Sal?”

  “There’s this shitty little crackhead named Richie Palermo used to do collections for me, this was maybe two, three years ago, before he got so hooked he don’t know his own fuckin’ name. I wouldn’t trust him to walk me across the street no more, but he gave me a fuckin’ sob story, so I lent him a grand, this was last month sometime. So naturally, the little fuck misses two payments, and when I find him he offers me the ring and a nine, I don’t know where he got them. I tell him don’t bother me with your fuckin’ problems, I’m not a fuckin’ fence. The nine …”

  “Then you knew this was stolen goods, right?”

  “No, no, did I say that? I was bargaining with him. Like makin’ him think I thought the shit was stolen. The nine was a good piece, but the ring looked rusty or something, you know what I mean, all black like that? What he owes me is still the grand, plus two weeks’ interest at fifty bucks a week compounded. In short, he owes me eleven hundred and two dollars and fifty fuckin’ cents, the shitheel, for which he’s offering me the ring and the Uzi in settlement of the whole thing. I tell him shove the ring up his ass, I’ll take the nine for the two weeks’ vig and he still owes me the grand. The ring looks like it came out of a Cracker Jack box, am I right? He tells me the ring is valuable, it’s some kind of fuckin’ Roman antique, second century, third century, just like I told you when I gave it to you. He said you could tell it was Roman because of the satyr and the bird on it, what the fuck do I know?”