Criminal Conversation

by Ed McBain

“The office will be closed on Tuesday and Wednesday …”

  But this was Thursday already.

  “Please leave a message at the beep and I’ll get back to you as soon as I can. Thank you.”

  But when? she wondered.

  The beep sounded.

  She said, “Hi, it’s me. Where are you?”

  Then she put the phone back on the hook and ran across Park and past Christ Church toward the school.

  He had flown out on Wednesday night, after all of Uncle Rudy’s friends, relatives, and associates had come by Ida’s house to pay their respects following the funeral. Now, at ten o’clock on Thursday morning, he sat opposite his father in the visitors’ room at Leavenworth. A thick glass panel was between them, a two-way microphone-­speaker set into it.

  “Everybody was there to pay their respects,” Andrew said. “People from all over, Pop. Families from Chicago, Miami, St. Louis, in spite of the storm, they got there. Some of them I didn’t even know.”

  His father nodded.

  Andrew could sense the fury seething in him. Their attorney, Abraham Meyerson, had petitioned the warden to grant an overnight leave for Anthony Faviola to attend his only brother’s funeral, but the request had been denied. The indignity of being kept here in a prison deliberately far from his friends, relatives, and business associates was now compounded by the fucking warden’s refusal. Andrew’s father sat on his side of the glass partition, his hands clenched on the countertop, his mouth set, his dark eyes glowering. He had lost weight in prison, and his complexion was pale, and his sideburns were turning gray. All at once, Andrew felt the same sense of sadness he’d felt when driving to the hospital on the night of his uncle’s death.

  “There were flowers, Pop, you’d’ve thought it was summertime, we had three cars of flowers following the hearse.”

  “Did anybody from the Colotti family show up?”

  “Oh, yeah, they all came, sure, Pop. There was a tremendous snowstorm, you know, but it didn’t stop anybody, they all came anyway. Jimmy Angelli, Mike Mangioni …”

  “Mike the Jaw, huh?” his father said, and smiled. “I’m surprised. It was my brother gave him that jaw. This was when we were still kids. He was some fighter, my brother.”

  Andrew began reeling off the names of everyone he could recall who’d been at the church services or the funeral or at Ida’s house later, but his father was staring into the distance beyond his shoulder now, his eyes appearing somewhat out of focus, remembering the brother they had buried only yesterday.

  “The priest gave a nice elegy,” Andrew said. “Father Nigro, do you know him?”

  “Do I know him? He baptized you.”

  “This wasn’t the boilerplate elegy they give when they don’t know the dead person from a hole in the wall. Father Nigro knew Uncle Rudy, and he talked about him as a personal friend. It was very moving, Pop.”

  “I’m glad,” his father said, and nodded.

  There was a long silence.

  Then he said, “They should’ve let me come.”

  “They should’ve, Pop.”

  “Sfasciume,” he said bitterly.

  “Anyway,” Andrew said, “I brought you some newspapers to look at. This is the News,” he said, and held the tabloid up to the glass to show his father the front page. “And this is the Post, it’s a miracle they’re still publishing with all the trouble they’re having. Uncle Rudy got the front page there, too, and also a feature story inside. The Times had an obit and a story in the Metro Section. I’m leaving all these for you, they told me they’d send them to your cell. There’ll probably be stories on the funeral, too. I’ll send them to you when I get back. I asked Billy to hold them for me.”

  “Thanks,” his father said.

  “Who’d’ve thought a heart attack?” Andrew said. “The doctors were giving him six months, a year.”

  “Yeah.”

  “It’s, you know, one of those things you can’t figure.”

  “No, you can’t figure something like that.”

  The two men fell silent again.

  “How’s everything else going?” his father said at last.

  “Fine, Pop.”

  “The thing I was working on before I …”

  He stopped talking, his anger virtually choking him. He was thinking again of the unfairness that had caused his present intolerable situation. He took in a deep breath, let it out, closed his eyes for a moment, opened them, and in a soft, controlled voice said, “Before they sent me here. My project. How’s it coming along?”

  “It’s a done deal, Pop.”

  “Good.”

  There was satisfaction in his voice. Something he had conceived, something he had initiated, had come to fruition under his son’s guidance. He nodded contentedly, and a tiny pleased smile touched his lips. Andrew figured this might be a good time to bring up the little matter of succession. Or was it too soon? Uncle Rudy just dead, just buried?

  “Pop, I know this is a bad time,’ but …”

  “I know what you’re going to ask.”

  “What am I going to ask, Pop?”

  “You’re going to ask who.”

  “Yes.”

  “By rights, it should go to Petey Bardo.”

  “I know.”

  “Those brown suits,” his father said, and shook his head and began chuckling. Andrew smiled. And waited.

  “But Bobby has bigger balls,” his father said.

  “I know.”

  “So keep Petey where he is, and give Bobby the spot. Petey has a problem, tell him to talk to me about it.”

  “Okay, Pop.”

  “Don t you agree?

  “I do.”

  “Good,” his father said, and fell silent again. After a while, he said, “I miss you, Lino.”

  “I miss you, too.”

  “Tell your mother I love her.”

  “I’ll tell her.”

  “When you gonna find a nice girl, get married?”

  “I don’t know, Pop.”

  “Give me some grandchildren?”

  “You’ve got grandchildren already, Pop.”

  “Not yours. Not my son’s kids.”

  “Well, someday.”

  “You seeing somebody?”

  “Few girls.”

  “Who?”

  “Few girls, you don’t know them, Pop.”

  “Anybody serious?”

  “No,” Andrew said. “Nobody serious.”

  The assigned coordinator of the detective team on the Faviola wiretap had duplicated Wednesday’s audiotapes, line sheets, and pen register tapes, and had them delivered to Michael’s office by eleven o’clock that Thursday morning. At four that afternoon, Michael called Georgie Giardino in his office down the hall and asked him to come by. Over coffee in cardboard containers, the two men tried once again to find a pattern to the calls coming in and going out of Faviola’s office-apartment complex.

  It had not surprised Michael that most of the calls Faviola made on Tuesday, the morning after his uncle died, were to known gangsters, informing them of the untimely demise and making certain they knew where the body could be viewed and where flowers should be sent. Georgie told Michael that at an Italian wake, it was usual for friends and relatives to drop little envelopes containing money into a box with a slot on its top, this presumably to defray the cost of funeral expenses. He did not think a multimillion-dollar enterprise like the Faviola family would either seek or accept such contributions, but who the hell knew?

  “These guys are the cheapest bastards in the world,” Georgie said. “Freddie Coulter told me the lock on that door leading upstairs from the tailor shop is the crummiest piece of shit he ever saw. What these guys do, they need a lock, they need an alarm, they remember that Joey Gabagootz’s son went to a vocational high
school and learned to be a mechanic or an electrician, so they’ll call Joey and he’ll send his kid over to rig an alarm or install a lock and they’ll hand him twenty bucks, and tell him thanks, kid. What Freddie likes to do, whenever he finds one of these cheap alarms, he deliberately sets it off every time he leaves the premises. He goes in four, five times to do whatever he has to do, he sets it off as he’s leaving each and every time. The target thinks Hey, what kind of job did Joey Gabagootz’s son do here, the alarm’s broken already? So he says the hell with it, and he doesn’t turn it on anymore.”

  “Freddie does the same thing with a Medeco lock,” Michael said.

  “What do you mean? How can he set off a Medeco?”

  “No, no, he gums it up. No one on earth can pick a Medeco and anyone who tells you he can is lying. When Freddie finds one, he squirts Krazy Glue in it.”

  “Oh, Jesus,” Georgie said, and burst out laughing.

  “The wiseguy sticks his key in, the lock won’t work, he thinks it’s because some other wiseguy’s son installed it for ten bucks. So he figures the hell with it, it’s broken, and he uses the other locks on the door instead.”

  “I love the way Freddie jerks these cheap bastards around,” Georgie said, still laughing. “I’ll bet they did expect those little cash envelopes in the box. And I’ll bet Rudy’s daughter didn’t refuse them, either.”

  The original pen register tapes were about the same width as an adding machine tape, the printing on them a sort of violet blue. The Xerox copies were in black and white. The format was slightly different for a number dialed out of the apartment than it was for a caller dialing in. On any outgoing call, the tape showed the number of the phone being dialed, and then the time the call began, and the time the call ended, and the duration of the call. On an incoming call, the tape did not record the phone number of the caller, but in addition to the other information, it listed the number of rings before the target phone was picked up. On any wiretap surveillance, the detectives sitting the wire transferred the pen register information to their line sheets, and the phone company later supplied names and addresses for any outgoing call numbers appearing on the tape. Most of the numbers Faviola called were familiar to Michael and Georgie by now, but they spot-checked the line sheets, anyway, to make sure they agreed with the pen register tapes and then, together, they listened to the audiotapes.

  None of the wiseguys had called on Tuesday, the first day of the wake. Too busy kneeling before Rudy’s coffin, Michael guessed. There was a call that day from a man named William Isetti, who said he was calling from St. Thomas. Whoever he was, he left a number with an 809 area code and asked that he be called back. He made no mention of Rudy Faviola’s death.

  Only one of Andy Boy’s lady friends seemed to know.

  The pen register and line sheet showed a call from a woman who identified herself as “Angela in Great Neck” at four o’clock on Tuesday afternoon, long after Faviola had left his office and turned on his machine. The audiotapes had her leaving a message saying she’d just heard about his uncle and wanted to tell him how sorry she was.

  “The local talent,” Georgie said.

  “Mmm,” Michael said.

  There were several other calls from Faviola’s parade of bimbos that Tuesday afternoon, all of them from familiar voices, all of them calling just to say hello and to wonder when they could get together again.

  On Wednesday, “Hi, It’s Me” called four times, never once leaving a return number. Her voice sounded breathy on the tapes. The last time, she sounded virtually frantic. That same day, Oona Halligan called three times from her new job in the Time-Life Building on Sixth Avenue, leaving a number and asking him to call when he got back to the office. Same message each time. “It’s Oona, call me when you’re back in the office.” Oona sounded younger than “Hi, It’s Me.” Her voice was somewhat breathy, too. Maybe women automatically affected the same sexy voice when they were on the phone with Andy Boy.

  “Or maybe they’re sisters,” Georgie said.

  “Be funny if he was banging sisters and neither of them knew about it,” Michael said.

  “Brooklyn girl,” Georgie said. “Oona.”

  “I wonder where the other one lives,” Michael said.

  “Mystery woman.”

  “Calls from phone booths on the street.”

  “Never leaves a return number.”

  “Never.”

  “Got to be married.”

  “Maybe.”

  “Maybe to one of the paisans,” Georgie said: “What was the name of that broad they all wanted to bang? On the trial tapes?”

  “Teresa Danielli.”

  “Terry, yeah. Maybe it’s her.”

  “Maybe.”

  “Who do you suppose Isetti is?”

  “No idea.”

  “The Virgin Islands.”

  “Mmm.”

  “What’s down there?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Who do you think’ll fill Rudy’s spot?”

  “Triani.”

  “You think so?”

  “I feel positive.”

  “Bardo’s in line.”

  “I still think it’ll go to Triani. My guess is there’ll be another meeting in Faviola’s conference room sometime next week.”

  “Not Wednesday, though,” Georgie said. “That’s the blonde’s day.”

  “Not Wednesday, no. But whenever, we’d better be listening hard.”

  “You think these line sheets are straight?” Georgie asked suddenly.

  Michael, was silent for a moment.

  “No,” he said at last.

  “Me, neither,” Georgie said. “I think Regan and Lowndes are listening longer than they need to.”

  “I think all three shifts are listening.”

  “Mike, that can …”

  “I know. Time for another little talk. I’ll tell you, Georgie, this better be strictly ABC, or they’re off the case.”

  “Don’t do it before the meeting, though. We can’t afford a new team if anything big’s going down.”

  “Not before the meeting,” Michael said, and looked at his watch, and immediately picked up the receiver and dialed his home number. The phone rang once, twice …

  “Hello?”

  “Sarah, it’s me. I know we’re meeting the Learys for dinner, but is it up there or down here?”

  “It’s at Rinaldi’s.”

  “Okay, I’ll come home, then.”

  “It’s for seven o’clock, Michael.”

  “Then I’d better get out of here.”

  “Don’t be late, honey, you know them.”

  “I’ll be home by six.”

  “No later. Please.”

  “I promise,” he said.

  Sarah put the receiver back on the cradle and wondered if she should try reaching Andrew again. Mollie was down the hall, watching something very noisy on television. If she used the phone in the bedroom, she felt certain she would not be overheard.

  She considered it for another moment and then decided against it.

  Richard Leary was an attorney who wrote amusing little articles about lawyers and the law for any magazine that would publish them. Michael suspected he had a closet desire to be another Turow or Grisham. Richard told them now that he was working on a piece about criminal conversation.

  “What’s that?” Sarah asked. “Talk among crooks?”

  “Nope, it’s a tort,” Richard said.

  “What’s a tort?” his wife asked. “Some kind of Danish pastry?”

  Rosie knew damn well what a tort was; she’d been married to a lawyer for twenty years.

  “A tort is, quote, any wrongful act, damage, or injury done willfully, negligently, or in circumstances involving strict liability, for which a civil suit can be brought, un
quote.”

  “Except breach of promise,” Michael said.

  “As in a contract,” Richard said, and nodded.

  “I hate lawyer talk,” Rosie said.

  “Be that as it may,” Richard said, “criminal conversation is defined as defilement of the marriage bed …”

  “Please,” Rosie said, “not while I’m eating.”

  “. . . or sexual intercourse,” Richard went on, undaunted, “or a breaking down of the covenant of fidelity.”

  “He means fucking with a stranger,” Rosie said, and then immediately covered her mouth in feigned shock.

  “I mean adultery,” Richard said, “considered in its aspect of a civil injury to the husband, entitling him to damages.”

  “How about the wife?” Rosie said. “If the husband’s playing around?”

  “The tort applied only to debauching or seducing a wife.”

  “So what else is new?” Rosie said, and shrugged.

  “That’s exactly the point of my article,” Richard said. “I think the issue still has relevance to the women’s movement, even though the tort was abolished in 1935.”

  “You mean until then … ?”

  “Until then, a husband could bring action against a man for criminal conversation, yes. For committing adultery with a man’s wife.”

  “Funny name for fucking around,” Rosie said. “Criminal conversation.”

  Sarah thought it was an entirely appropriate name.

  Looking down at her plate, hearing Richard go on about the popularity of such suits in seventeenth-century England, where the tort was familiarly called “crim con,” and where damages from £10,000 to £20,000 were not uncommon, staring at the food on her plate, not daring to look up at Michael across the table, she thought Yes, criminal conversation is what I share in that bedroom with Andrew. We’re a pair of thieves plundering a marriage, and the damage is far more severe than any court in the world can ever remedy.

  “But criminal conversation?” Rosie asked, and turned to Sarah for support.

  Yes, Sarah thought, criminal conversation.

  Aloud she said, “It does sound odd.”

  The meeting took place on Tuesday morning, the twenty-third of March. Monitoring it with Lowndes in the room on Grand Street, Regan was still pissed off because Michael Welles had seen fit to read the minimization lecture to the entire surveillance team yet another time—with what you might call a veiled warning tacked onto the end of it.