I reached the bottom step and he came directly in front of me, his face red, his eyes in tight slits.
“Back, Jimmy,” I told him as I moved down to the ground floor.
“You gotta answer for messin’ with my old man,” he spit as he continued to grope for whatever was stuck down the back of his jeans.
“Jimmy,” I said, as I put my left hand on his chest, “fuck you and your old man.”
“You son of—”
Before he could react, I shoved him and he stumbled backward toward the door and I dove at him, driving him hard as he crashed against the corner, his right hand pinned behind him. As he grimaced, I grabbed at his left arm with my right hand, held it firmly by the wrist and threw a looping left to the side of his face that caught him high on the cheekbone. I threw a second left, this one shorter, more compact, and caught him flush on the jaw. The side and back of Mango’s head hit the wall behind him with an ugly thud and he went down, sliding in the corner until he was seated awkwardly on the hallway floor.
I looked down at him. He was out.
I reached down, pushed him over, and stepped in to get my hands behind him. The nine-millimeter pistol he had tucked away had landed beneath him, under the seat of his jeans. Which meant he’d gotten to it as I went at him.
I lifted the blue piece and put it in my jacket pocket.
Now I had a gun of my own.
The cabbie let me off on the wrong side of Greenwich and I jogged on glistening cobblestone toward my house, scooting across as cars, taxis and a red flatbed Ford moved south.
I entered to find Bella in the kitchen, sipping a Yoo-hoo, holding the $400 check I’d written.
“I’d forgotten about the bet,” she said.
“Really?” I hung my coat, with my new piece tucked snugly in an inside pocket, on the back of the laundry-room door. “Why else would you write a book?”
“Very cute,” she nodded, then added as she folded the check. “You’re good to your word, Dad.”
“You too.”
She wore an oversized blue shirt with an Esso logo and the name “Bud” in script over the breast. The frayed cuffs of her floppy blue painter’s jeans all but covered her scuffed bowling shoes.
“Well?” she asked.
“A full report. But later,” I replied. I took a bottle of cold water from the refrigerator. I wanted to seem composed, unconcerned. But I needed for her to be ready to move. “You have plans?”
“Not really. I intended to sleep until three.”
It was 2:06. “I think it’s fallen through, Bella.”
“If Julie didn’t call three times, it wouldn’t have.”
I sat on the edge of my seat and took the slip of paper she slid toward me. A 917 area code; Julie was using her cell phone.
On the other side of the table, Nursery of Crime was back in a neat pile: Bella, I’d bet, had run through it to see if I’d line-edited the thing.
“She say what she wanted?”
“No, but I know you two made peace.”
“Yep.” I drank half the bottle of carbonated water. She studied the Yoo-hoo label. “You are going to have to deal with it, Dad.”
I cut her off. “We were talking about your plans.”
“None now,” she shrugged. “Homework. Why? You want to do something?”
“Sure. But I can’t.” I dropped my elbows on the table. “Bella, I need you to go out. Now.”
She put down the Yoo-hoo bottle. “Are you in trouble?”
“No.”
“But?”
“But Tommy Mango is coming and he’s going to be angry.”
“Tommy the Cop?” she said, inching up in the seat. “I think it’s you who needs to go out.”
“Bella …”
“I don’t know where I can go.” She paused thoughtfully. “Glo-Bug’s not around—”
“Daniel Wu?”
“No. He’s doing a big family thing. Sisters, grandmother, that stuff. And Eleanor’s with her father and stepmother in Scarsdale.” She stopped suddenly. “I could call Dennis.”
“I don’t think so.” Who knows when his all-night prowl ended? He might’ve chosen to crash at the Tilt. “Hey …”
“‘Hey’ what? That’s not a good ‘hey.’”
“Let’s go see Leo.”
“Oh, no,” she said. “Dad, no. Dad, it’s demeaning.”
“No, it’s not.”
“Dad.”
“Get your coat.”
She stared at me, let her eyes drop and then lifted herself from the seat.
“You can work on your Hamlet paper,” I added, as I went to the laundry door to grab my coat. “The question of Claudius’s greed—”
“Not Claudius’s greed, Dad.” Her chair caught on the floor as she pushed it toward the table. “Hamlet’s. It’s Hamlet’s greed.”
I stopped. “What?”
“Hamlet’s the greedy one,” she said without looking at me. “It’s all me, me, me. He’s just obsessed and bitter. All that stuff about revenge. That’s greed.”
I shrugged. “I thought it had to be about money.”
“There’s lots of kinds of greed.”
She went to the stairs. Her backpack was upstairs, and her books, her music, her journal.
“You know, we used to do things every Sunday,” she muttered.
Ten minutes later, we entered the Tilt.
Leo looked up from Friday’s edition of the Times-Picayune. “Gabriella,” he said, a lilt of genuine surprise in his voice.
“Hello, Mr. Mallard,” she groaned as she shifted her gray fedora to the back of her head.
Grabbing his cane, he hoisted himself from his throne. Giraffes nibbled on leaves on the silent TV.
“You seen D?” I asked.
He said no. “He win?”
“He won,” Bella replied dryly.
“No kiddin’? Ain’t that something.”
“Leo.” I gestured for him to join me at the center of the bar. As I waited, I pointed to a booth in the rear of the room. Pouting, she grabbed her backpack and dragged it across the floor as she passed the pool table.
Wheezing from the short walk, Leo whispered, “She don’t like me.”
There was a certain imperial streak in Bella. Something about the dank, musty bar, and Leo’s aura of resignation, put her off. Marina would’ve reacted the same way.
He added, “She used to.”
“Leo, I got Tommy Mango on my ass and it’s personal now.”
“What happened?”
I told him.
“Yep,” he replied, “personal. But you know maybe he comes here you ain’t home.”
“Yeah, but he’s not looking for her.”
“I can’t see that’s his style,” Leo said in agreement.
I nodded. Not yet, anyway. What Tommy needed to do now was reach me before I could report what his old man had told me.
“How long you going to be?” he asked.
I shrugged. “I’ll get back to you. You need to go somewhere, call D.”
“Where do I need to go? Hell, I’m going to lock the front door and finish my newspaper.”
I tapped him on the arm.
“You need to carry?” he asked. His Smith & Wesson was back under the bar.
“I’m set.”
I went to Bella, who sat in a booth next to the pool table. She was wading through the contents of her handbag and thus far had removed her MP3 player, earphones, the instructions to Diddio’s portable recorder, her marble-covered journal, an ad hoc group of pens in assorted colors and a well-thumbed paperback edition of Hamlet.
“Give thy thoughts no tongue,” I said, “nor any unproportioned thought his act.”
“Yes. Thank you for that.”
Or maybe Polonius was greedy too. Maybe pragmatism is a form of greed.
“Ask Leo if you can mess around with the jukebox. D has a couple of crates of CDs in those cases for the empties back there.”
I could see she
was intrigued by the idea. Not that she would say so. “Maybe.”
“All right,” I said. “I’ll be in touch.”
As I turned to leave, she stood and said, “Dad, should I be worried?”
“No. Tommy Mango isn’t going to bother you.”
“No, I mean should I be worried about you?”
I shook my head. “I’m going to call Julie and I’ll be back as soon as I can.”
“Watch yourself,” she advised.
“Got it.” I backpedaled away from her, moving along the length of the pool table.
“Kiss?” A desolate smile crossed her pretty face.
I stopped, went to her and kissed her cheek. “Ask Leo about opera,” I whispered. “You’ll be surprised.”
I could feel her watching me as I went toward the front door and pointed at the big bartender, who shook the head of his cane at me as I moved outside.
“Terry, where are you?”
“Back in TriBeCa.”
“I’ve been trying to reach you,” she said. The connection was good, but I couldn’t tell if she was indoors or on the street.
“Yeah, I need to talk to you too.”
“I’m on my way downtown,” she said.
“What’s up?”
“I think Tommy Mangionella is working his magic,” she said. “Bascomb and Villa are both on their way to Central Booking.”
“He’s trying to get them together.” I started walking south on Hudson. I’d take Chambers over to Centre. “You going there?”
“I’m in a cab right now.”
“I’ll meet you,” I said as I hustled across to the shady side. “I talked to the old man. He went to see Sonia. He wanted to apologize.”
“How did she take it?”
“Not too well, apparently,” I said. “She threatened to call the cops.”
“Which meant he had to tell his son.”
“Tommy’s up to his thick neck in this, Julie.”
“We’ll see,” she said. “If the rubber guns can keep from putting Villa and Bascomb in the same pen, we might find out.”
I was moving on West Broadway, passing the entrance to the uptown Broadway line. Our old station. A flash: Little Bella, aged four or so, holding on to the thick wooden handrail as she navigated the big steps one at a time.
Julie said, “I’ll leave word with security. Meet me in the sub-basement.”
I was moving fast along Chambers, passing under cast-iron trellises, empty-faced clocks, hand towels hung to dry, through sun and shadows, sun and shadows. If I pushed any harder, I’d be jogging. “We’d better go in together,” I said.
“Why?”
“I’m carrying,” I said.
She hesitated, then said, “Fine.”
“I may get there before you.”
“I don’t think so,” she said. “We just pulled up.”
When I arrived, she came upstairs to get me and we went to the sub-basement, where cops were going through the mind-numbing exercise of fingerprinting and photographing the accused on their way to court for arraignment.
As I sat next to her, surrounded by industrial green walls as a stream of men fresh from a precinct-house grill came into the room, Julie said she’d been told that Bascomb and Villa hadn’t seen each other, that they’d been kept in separate pens. But both were going upstairs, for interviews with someone from Morgenthau’s team. In theory, Bascomb, sulking in a pen for assaulting me, didn’t belong to Sharon, as the executive A.D.A. on Homicide, but Julie said she’d talk to him anyway. “This one isn’t likely to die,” she said. There was competition among the Bureau Chiefs and their deputies, she said, but it barely simmered on a Sunday afternoon.
“Could be interesting,” she added as we crossed under the metal detector, as I rode in on her gold badge. “Danny Villa has friends down here.”
“A political agitator who’s friendly with cops,” I mused as we went toward the elevator bank. “Surprising, no?”
“There are a lot of Hispanic cops,” Julie said. “Danny’s not necessarily a bad guy in their eyes.”
Now we watched through glass as a dough-faced sergeant named Flam rolled a man’s fingertips across black ink and onto a white form. The man had a big black eye and an ugly welt on his forehead, and he looked as compliant and regretful as a puppy who’d gotten caught staining the rug. Someone uptown had given him an orange jumpsuit, which, Julie said, meant he had been undressed when he was arrested.
“I’ll bet you he roughed up his wife,” she said.
“Think she gave him the shiner?” I asked.
She whispered, “I hope so.”
Flam, who looked like he’d retire tomorrow if someone asked, shiftlessly pushed his customer through the long room toward a lanky photographer in blue. I watched as Blackeye edged into place in front of a wall that measured his height. Another cop, a fat guy who might’ve been at the academy with Flam during the Lindsay administration, prepared the board that would hold the wife-beater’s name and docket number.
I said, “It’s a dull factory you got—”
She cut me off. “Is that him?”
I looked to my right. Bascomb, at the front of the line, filled the door frame. His nose was swollen and packed with cotton, and the front of his work shirt was splattered and streaked with dried blood.
“You did that?” Julie asked.
Bascomb had run through this routine before. He came forward, let Flam remove his handcuffs and take his big right hand to get it done. Cooperating, moving slowly, steadily, Bascomb seethed: By now, he knew his trip downtown was about something more than trying to take off my head with a wrench. I’d given him half the story as we’d wrestled in his shop out in the auto graveyard. Somewhere along the line, he’d gotten the rest of it: Hassan was dead and, in a pen down here well below street level, his old pal Luis Sixto was in custody. Bascomb had to know his old high school friend, now known as the lawyer Danilo Villa, would have the edge when it came to He Said/He Said. Bascomb had to know he’d be on the hook.
Flam slapped a paper towel in front of the big guy and Bascomb took it and rubbed it crudely across his hands, smearing the black ink. He looked for a wastepaper basket under the table, then let the ball of paper drop to the floor.
Which displeased Flam. The old cop yelled at Bascomb to pick up the crumpled paper. Instead of doing what the cop told him, Bascomb looked up toward Julie and me.
And as he did, I heard a door open behind me. As Julie turned, I looked to the right, where Blackeye and Bascomb had entered.
There was Villa, and the cop who brought him into the room wasn’t the severe, gray-haired cop who had escorted the others.
It was McDowell, in his black sweatshirt and pressed jeans, his badge hanging on a lanyard around his neck.
As McDowell looked toward the glass, I heard Julie’s voice:
“Detective Mangionella,” she said as she began to stand.
I saw his reflection: the long leather coat, gray suit, white shirt and white tie. A look of cool, compressed composure.
And then it started in slow motion, misty and silver at the edges, acutely focused at the core.
Bascomb bent as if to pick up the ball of paper, but instead drove an elbow hard into Flam’s kidney, knocking him against the table. As the old cop flinched in pain, Bascomb snapped his gun from his leather side-holster.
He turned on his heel and pointed the gun at Villa, who opened his eyes wide. His hands were still cuffed and he brought them up awkwardly, covering his face as he started to crouch into a ball. He muttered in Spanish: “Ah, coño.”
McDowell shoved him and then backed away, retreating behind the door frame, bounding into the cop with the gray hair.
Bascomb did not hesitate. He squeezed off a shot, another, a third, and each caught Villa in his side, tearing through his immaculate suit into his flesh. As he tried to stand, Bascomb’s gun issued a fourth bullet and it caught Villa in the side of the face and he went down as if his legs had
been cut off suddenly at the ankles.
I dove and pulled Julie down just as Tommy the Cop fired two shots at Bascomb.
Glass shattered and fell in jagged sheets onto the dark linoleum.
With Julie under me, I turned and peered up at Mango. He had his weapon in his hand. It dangled at his side.
He stared at me.
He raised the automatic and pointed it at me.
I felt the air leave me. The Nine I’d taken from his brother was in Julie’s handbag.
Mango closed his right eye and, training the gun on me, bit on his bottom lip.
“Get up,” he said.
I put my hands in the air in front of me, palms up.
“Yeah,” he said. “Bang. Just like that.”
He put his gun back in the holster under his left arm.
“See how it goes?” he said slowly, deliberately.
He took the short flight of stairs and entered the room, nudging the photographer.
I stood and reached to lift Julie. She leaned her back and shoulders against the green wall and shimmied to stand. I retrieved her gold crucifix from among the shards of glass.
“You all right?” I asked, as I handed her the cross and its thin chain.
She closed her eyes, then nodded.
I turned toward the room, looking through the window frame. Sharp glass jutted from its corners.
Tommy stood over Bascomb. He’d caught him square in the temple and the big man’s blood spread below him.
Across the room, McDowell was kneeling next to Villa’s perforated body. As I watched, he looked over at Mango and, instead of shaking his head to indicate the lawyer was dead, he nodded.
Flam had his head down on the table where the fingerprint pads and white cards lay undisturbed. Mango put his hand on the back of the old cop’s neck and gave it a curt squeeze. When Flam stood, he was shaking.
“Mother of God, Tommy,” Flam muttered. “Mother of God.”
“It’s OK, Frankie,” Mango said.
“I let him get my piece.”
Mango looked at me out of the corner of his eye.
“Mother of God, Tommy,” Flam uttered. “Could’ve happened to anybody.”
“I said it’s all right, Frank.”
“Tommy, I know your old man,” Flam pleaded. “Me and Ernie—We go way back, Tommy.”
I felt a hand on my arm.
Julie said, “Terry, let’s get out of here.”
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