Criminal Conversation

by Ed McBain

  “Would you tell me if there was?” she asked, and lifted the wooden spoon from the pot and brought it to her lips, tasting the sauce.

  “Sure, I would,” he said.

  “Or is there a problem?” she asked.

  “What kind of problem?”

  “I don’t know. She could be somebody’s daughter, for example …”

  “No, no.”

  “Like I heard, you know, you were dating Tony Cannieri’s daughter, which I have to tell you isn’t such a good idea, Andrew, messing with somebody’s daughter who’s respected like Tony is.”

  “I stopped seeing her, Ide.”

  “Good. That was a wise decision,” she said, and began stirring the sauce again. “I hope it’s not somebody’s wife you’re serious about.”

  “I told you I’m not serious about anyone,” he said, and grinned again.

  “Yeah, yeah, come on, this is me.”

  “I’m telling you, Ide.”

  “’Cause that could be really dangerous, somebody’s wife.”

  “It’s not anybody’s wife you would know,” Andrew said.

  “Then she’s married?” Ida asked at once, and looked up straight into his face.

  “Ida,” he said, putting on the serious little-boy look she knew so well, “I really can’t talk about this right now.”

  “She’s married, hmm?”

  “Yes.”

  “But not to anybody it would be like a problem, hmm? You wouldn’t be dishonoring anyone in the …”

  “No, Ida, how could I do that?”

  “Listen, you dated Tony’s daughter, who knows what you could do?”

  “It’s not anybody’s wife like that.”

  “Then what’s the problem?”

  “Who said there’s a problem?”

  “Well, you’re so secretive about her …”

  “I told you, Ida, she’s married. I can’t go blabbing all over town about her.”

  “Of course not,” Ida said. “But this isn’t all over town, Andrew, this is me. Ida. Remember me, honey? Your cousin Ida? Remember?”

  “No, who are you?” Andrew said, and smiled.

  Ida returned the smile.

  “Is she married to anyone else could be a problem?” she asked, still smiling.

  “I don’t know what you mean.”

  “I don’t know. Someone who could be a problem.”

  “Like what kind of problem?”

  “I don’t know. You’re the one being so secretive, I figure there’s got to be some kind of problem.”

  “She’s married to a lawyer, there’s no problem,” he said.

  “What kind of lawyer?”

  “I don’t know. He works for the city,”

  “Doing what?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “What’s his name?”

  “I don’t know his name, tell you the truth.”

  “Well, what’s her name?”

  “Come on, Ida.”

  “What’s the big secret? All I’m asking you is her name.”

  “I’m not ready to tell you that, Ida.”

  “When will you be ready?”

  “When I know.”

  “When you know what?”

  “Whether she’ll marry me.”

  “Did you ask her already?”

  “I asked her.”

  “So what’s taking her so long to decide?”

  “Well … she’s got a daughter, Ide. It isn’t easy.”

  “How old? The daughter?”

  “Twelve.”

  “You’re ready to take on a twelve-year-old kid, Andrew?”

  “Yeah. I am, Ida.”

  “And this isn’t serious, huh?”

  “It’s very serious.”

  “Then you better discuss it with some other people before you make a final decision,” Ida said.

  “Why?”

  “Bringing someone into the family? It should be discussed with Petey. And with Bobby. They should know about this. If you really decide to marry her.”

  “That’s what I’m hoping, Ida.”

  “Then you have to sit down arid talk to them about it. That’s what Bobby did when he wanted to marry me. He talked not only to my father but to your father, too. And to Petey. It isn’t as if you have no obligations, Andrew. This has to be discussed, you understand what I’m saying?”

  “Well, I’ll see.”

  “What’s the problem?” Ida said.

  “No problem.”

  “I think there’s a problem,” she said, and nodded wisely.

  “I’m telling you no.”

  “Then sit down with them.”

  “When I’m ready.”

  “I think you’d better do it now. Before she says yes and surprises you.”

  “I hope to God she does, Ida.”

  “I hope so, too,” Ida said, and lifted another spoonful of sauce from the pot, and tasted it, and said, “But talk to your people first, hmm? Get their opinions. Show them the proper respect. You’re a very important man, Andrew. This has to be dealt with in the proper manner. Sit down with them. Talk to them,” she said, and tasted the sauce again.

  “Well, I’ll see,” he said.

  “Does this need salt?” she asked, and extended the wooden spoon to him.

  In bed with her husband that same Sunday night, Ida said, “I don’t think he’s hiding anything from you.”

  “What’d he say about the husband?” Bobby asked.

  “Only that he’s a lawyer.”

  “That’s all? What kind of lawyer?”

  “He doesn’t know. All he knows is the guy works for the city.”

  “He doesn’t know the guy’s a DA?”

  “I don’t think he knows,” Ida said.

  “Is he protecting her, or what?”

  “I don’t think so. I told you a hundred times already I don’t think he knows. Now go to sleep.”

  “Because if he knows …”

  “Mm-hmm.”

  “. . . and he’s not telling anybody about it …”

  “Mm-hmm.”

  “. . . that could be serious.”

  “Yeah.”

  “That could be very serious,” Bobby said. “I wish you coulda got him to open up more.”

  “I did all I could,” Ida said, and rolled over. “Go to sleep,” she said. “Tomorrow’s another day.”

  The babysitter was in the living room at the other end of the apartment, watching the Sunday night movie on TV. Mollie and Winona were in Winona’s room, next door to her brother’s room, which he still used whenever he and his wife came home to visit. Max’s bedroom was cool, with a full-length poster of Tina Turner tacked up on the ceiling over the bed, and pennants for all the major league baseball clubs and NFL football teams on the walls, and a Mason jar full of pennies alongside a model of the Kitty Hawk on his dresser. Winona had found his marijuana stash on the top shelf of his closet, in a metal box containing fishing tackle.

  Winona was rolling a joint now.

  She kept spilling marijuana flakes all over the bed.

  “I don’t think we should be doing this,” Mollie said.

  “I think we should be doing it,” Winona said firmly. “Don’t be so chickenshit, Moll.”

  “How do you know it’s still good? How long has it been in the closet?”

  “It doesn’t go stale,” Winona said. “In fact, it gets better with age.”

  “Who told you that?”

  “It’s a known fact. Anyway, this isn’t old pot. Max smokes every time he comes home.”

  “Doesn’t it stink up the whole house?” Mollie asked.

  “He opens the windows. There,” Winona said, and triumphantly held up a mes
sily rolled but nonetheless reasonable facsimile of a cigarette.

  “Suppose what’s-her-name comes in?”

  “Fat Henrietta? She won’t come in. She never comes in. She thinks my mother pays her to come watch television.”

  Winona began rolling a second joint. Mollie watched her intently.

  “So what do you think I should do?” she asked.

  “Smoke it and shut up,” Winona said.

  “I mean about France.”

  “Did they tell you for sure the trip’s off?”

  “Yeah. He said he had too much work to do, and my mother starts going for her doctorate soon as school lets out.”

  “Which is when?”

  “The tenth. Same as us. I told them we’d been planning this whole thing about our two families being in Paris at the same time, because you’re going to the Riviera in July, which is when we were supposed to be going to St.-Jean, and you and I were so excited about being there together, the two of us, in Paris …”

  “True,” Winona said, her head bent studiously over her task.

  “. . . and now they tell me we’re not going. I told my father that was cruel and unusual punishment, and he knew it.”

  “What’d he say?”

  “He said we weren’t going away this summer, and that was that. And he threatened to send me to camp if I didn’t get off it.”

  “Camp!” Winona said. “Jesus!”

  “Yeah. So what do you think I should do?”

  “Cool it for a while. Maybe it’s a phase they’re going through.”

  “They’re going through something, all right,” Mollie said, and rolled her eyes.

  “There,” Winona said, “practice makes perfect. This one is yours, Moll.”

  Twenty minutes later, both girls were stoned out of their minds. They had smoked the joints down till they’d almost burned their fingertips, and had then opened the roaches and sprinkled the remaining pot out the window, rolling the papers into tiny balls and flicking those out, too. The windows were still wide open to the traffic below, and the girls lay side by side on Winona’s bed, wearing only panties, talking loudly and giggling every ten or twenty seconds.

  Mollie wanted to know if this was really the first time Winona had tried this. Somehow the question struck her funny, so she burst out laughing. Winona assured her that she would never do anything for the first time unless it was with her very best friend in the entire world. Both girls began giggling at this fresh witticism.

  “Except play with my buzzer,” Winona said.

  Since the word “buzzer” was in itself hysterically funny, the girls began giggling all over again. Winona said she’d done that for the first time without Mollie, played with her buzzer, that is. Mollie wanted to know what a buzzer was and how you played with it. Winona told her you had to find it first. She herself had found hers quite by accident in February, up in Vermont, while she was leaning against the washing machine downstairs off the kitchen, doing all her socks and thermal underwear and turtlenecks from the week’s skiing. The machine kept vibrating against her and all at once she realized something was, well, buzzing down there in her jeans. So she pressed a little harder against the machine to make the buzzing a little stronger. Mollie found all this hysterically funny, the idea of somebody having a buzzer in her jeans.

  Winona went on to say that in the bathtub later that night, while she was washing herself down there, she began to feel that same buzz again, though not as strong as it had been when she was doing her laundry. So she searched around with her fingers to see if she could find what was causing this very peculiar, very pleasant sensation, and she discovered this little, well, buzzer between her legs—“meine kleine friggin buzzerei,” she said in Frankendrac.

  “Sometimes I do it to music,” she said, and sat up, and climbed over Mollie, and padded to the bookcase. Mollie watched as she put a digital disc on the machine, turned the volume up loud, and then came back to the bed. She climbed over Mollie again, lay back down on her side of the bed, and slipped her hand into her panties. “Just do what I do,” she said. “It’s fun.”

  Five minutes later, Mollie was masturbating for the first time to the stereo beat of Michael Jackson’s “Wanna Be Startin’ Somethin’,” both girls giggling at the wonder of it all. Sixteen-year-old Henrietta in the living room up the hall, watching her movie blithely unaware, thought they sounded like they always did, dumb and going on thirteen.

  “How do you know this?” Andrew said.

  “We asked around,” Petey said.

  “Who asked around?”

  “We had a detective check on her.”

  “A private eye?”

  “No, a real cop. A tin shield. Somebody we got in our pocket.”

  “You checked on her without first asking me?” Andrew said.

  “We were trying to protect you, Andrew,” he said. “If this was something you didn’t know, we had to find out. For your own protection.”

  “What’s his name? The husband?”

  “Michael Welles. He put away the Lombardi Crew five years ago.”

  “You’re positive about all this?”

  “Pos—”

  “Because if you’re making a mistake …”

  “No mistake, Andrew.”

  “Causing me trouble over a mistake …”

  “Andrew, I swear on my mother’s eyes, this is the truth. I personally phoned the DA’s Office, asked for Michael Welles, it went right through.”

  “Who answered the phone?”

  “He did himself. ‘ADA Welles’ is how he answers.”

  “Then how do you know he’s a unit chief?”

  “’Cause that’s who I asked for on the phone, Deputy Unit Chief Michael Welles. Anyway, Andrew, whether he’s a chief or just an Indian, who gives a shit? He’s a DA who works in the Organized Crime Unit. For me, that’s enough.”

  Andrew was silent for several moments.

  Then he said, “What do you expect me to do about this?”

  “That’s entirely up to you,” Petey said. “I know what I would do. Because you see, Andrew, he may be the one put in the bugs, her husband. And she may be working for him, Andrew, I hate to tell you this. She may be a snitch, Andrew. She may be a rat.”

  “So what would you do?”

  “I think you know what I would do, Andrew.”

  As the last class broke on Wednesday afternoon, Luretta came up to Sarah’s desk and handed her a long white envelope.

  “Mrs. Welles,” she said gravely, “if you get a chance, I’d appreciate it if you read this sometime.”

  “I’d be happy to,” Sarah said. “What is it?”

  “Well,” Luretta said, and ducked her head.

  She had never been a shy girl. Sarah looked at her.

  “What is it, Luretta?” she asked again.

  “Jus’ something. There’s my phone number on it, case you feel like calling me.”

  Sarah studied her, puzzled.

  “Is something wrong?” she asked.

  “No, no. Well . . . jus’ read it, okay? When you can,” she said, and ran swiftly out of the room.

  Sarah put the envelope in her attaché case.

  The sun was blinding as she walked southward on Park Avenue, wearing sunglasses, hurrying toward Dunhill’s where Andrew’s blue Acura was parked in front of the store. She said nothing as she got into the car.

  “Hi,” Andrew said, and smiled.

  “This is dangerous,” she said, and tossed the attaché case into the backseat. “Could we please get moving?”

  Andrew started the car at once, heading directly cross-town, toward the river. Billy usually began driving immediately downtown on Park, but she knew Andrew was taking her to dinner tonight. When he’d told her about it on the phone, she’d wondered immediately if he’d discove
red the still operative bugs in the Mott Street building. They were on the East River Drive now, heading uptown toward the Bruckner Expressway.

  “Where are we going?” she asked.

  Edge to her voice, still nervous.

  “I know a nice little place in Connecticut,” he said.

  “Connecticut? Andrew, I haven’t got that much time, you know I can’t …”

  “Well, I think you may have time,” he said.

  She did not take off the sunglasses, even though the sun was no longer blinding her. She sat quite still in the seat beside him, her bag in her lap, her hands over it, Andrew darkly silent behind the wheel.

  He was wondering if she was wired.

  He knew the car wasn’t bugged. He had taken it to the garage where they kept the Lincoln and had asked Billy to put it on a lift and check it top to bottom, inside and out. The car was clean. Whatever he and Sarah Welles said in this car today would not get back downtown to her husband in Organized Crime. Unless she herself was wired.

  “I know who your husband is,” he said.

  She said nothing.

  “His name is Michael Welles, he s deputy chief of the DA’s Organized Crime Unit.”

  Still, she said nothing. Her heart was pounding. He knew about Michael, it was senseless to lie. But if she told the truth …

  “Your husband who makes eighty-five a year for putting away people like me.”

  “I don’t know what you mean.”

  “I think you know what I mean,” he said.

  He did not turn to look at her. He kept his hands on the wheel and his eyes on the road. They were passing through a section of the Bronx that used to be Italian but was now Latino. The small, joined, two-family row houses reminded him of the homes his father sometimes took him to when he was small, to visit this or that soldier in the organization, “Keep up the morale,” he told Andrew. The older men would smoke their guinea stinkers and pat Andrew on the head, and tell him, “Hey, you getta so big, Lino.”

  “Was it your husband who had the place bugged?” he asked.

  Still not looking at her. Eyes on the road.

  “I told you I don’t know what you …”

  “Sarah, you’re in serious trouble. If you know who I am, you know what I can do. I suggest you start telling me the truth.”

  “All right,” she said.