Damaged Goods

by Stephen Solomita

  But, then, he’d pulled out, too, moved on to NYU and Brooklyn Law a month or two before his parents took off for New Jersey. Nobody would believe it, now, what it had been like to grow up in the Bronx, the only white, Anglo-Saxon Protestant for miles around, everybody else Jewish or Italian or Irish. The Lithuanians up by the zoo had more identity than he did.

  Sometimes it got so bad he pretended his mother was Irish, but the sad truth was that she and dad were half-literate Alabama crackers who’d come north after the war, come to make it in the big city, only picking the wrong one, New York instead of Los Angeles, the Bronx instead of the San Fernando Valley.

  The intercom sounded, a single, civilized chirp instead of a harsh buzz. Kirkwood pressed the button, said, “Mrs. English?”

  “Agent Holtzmann to see you, Mister Kirkwood. Along with Ms. Rizzo.” She drew the Ms. out a bit. Mzzzzzz. Letting him know how she felt about Italian widows who stared at the floor.

  “Have them take a seat, Mrs. English. I’ll buzz you when I’m ready.”

  Nothing in Abner Kirkwood’s rolling tones revealed his inner state. If his colleagues wanted to see him as some kind of Bronx patrician (an oxymoron, he noted, if there ever was one) that was okay with him. The truth, on the other hand, was that Josie Rizzo was his second mistake and the thought of her in his office was enough to get him wheezing. He took an inhaler from the middle desk drawer, popped it into his mouth, then squeezed once, holding his breath momentarily.

  When Bill Clinton got himself elected President of the United States, Kirkwood had figured that his dues were finally paid. Which was only fair, considering that he’d worked on parts of every major case to hit the Southern District in the last decade, attended five thousand Democratic fund-raisers, donated ten thousand hours of free legal work to the Democratic National Committee, the NAACP, Catholic Charities, the Association of Jewish Philanthropies. Every ethnic group in New York but the Nation of Islam.

  In the end, Clinton had come through, appointed Assistant US Attorney Kirkwood to head the Southern District, his golden opportunity if he could bring the kind of cases that attracted the media. Because the bottom line was you could speak at the Elks Club, the Knights of Columbus, the Anti-Defamation League until you turned purple and it didn’t mean shit. Meanwhile, put yourself next to John Gotti, Mike Milken, Ivan Boesky, Leona Helmsley and the next day three million voters knew your name.

  So what he did was reach out, let it be known he was looking to get busy, and a couple of weeks later, Special Agent Holtzmann waltzed into his office, said, “I have something here, Abner. Don’t know if it’s worth going forward. Have to get approval from your office.”

  As if five or ten lunches scattered over half a decade gave Agent Holtzmann the right to call United States Attorney Kirkwood by his first name.

  “Carmine Stettecase, Italian mobster, mid-level.” Holtzmann had paused to run his fingertips over his lapels, a nervous tic he repeated a dozen times before he left. “An informant came forward last week. Just called the New York office and made an appointment. Claimed she had access to Stettecase’s inner sanctum. Willing to deliver him up if we help her out with a small problem.”

  “The woman’s name, Karl, if you please.” Time to take over the conversation, establish the old chain of command.

  “Josefina Rizzo.”

  “And what’s her access?”

  “She’s the mother-in-law of Carmine Stettecase’s son, Tommaso. Lives in Carmine’s house, claims that Carmine does serious business over breakfast, that the room is swept beforehand by Tommaso, but she can get a recorder in and out.” Holtzmann smiled for the first time, ticking the facts off on his fingers. “She had a serving tray with her, a bread warmer with a heating unit built into the bottom. Said if we could put a tape recorder inside, she’d see to changing the tapes, making delivery to a drop, even give us a free sample to prove their value.”

  “I assume you took advantage and the sample was satisfactory.”

  Holtzmann had straightened, done his lapels again. “It has the potential to be a major case.”

  There it was, the magic phrase. Major Case. Meanwhile, Kirkwood knew Carmine Stettecase was not the boss of all bosses, not even close. In fact the only interesting thing about Carmine was that he’d been around forever.

  “The quid pro quo, Karl. Let’s hear it.”

  “Her nephew, Gildo Sappone, been in jail for almost fifteen years. State parole board turned him down and she wants him out.”

  “And?”

  “And?”

  Abner Kirkwood had tapped his desk impatiently. “Gildo Sappone, Karl. Is he, for instance, a mass murderer? Did he, perhaps, rape and dismember a dozen nuns?”

  “No, no.” Holtzmann noted Kirkwood’s harsh, sarcastic tone and smiled inwardly. Like many a law-enforcement officer, he found it in his interest to encourage the macho affectations common to prosecutors. They loved to play at being tough and one of the ways they did it was by cross-examining cops. “Nothing like that. Just a run-of-the-mill homicide.”

  “Then why did the parole board turn him down?”

  “Bit of a bad actor. Prison scrapes, that kind of thing. High risk to reoffend.”

  Kirkwood had leaned back in his chair, tried to estimate how many vicious criminals had received light sentences or been turned loose altogether in exchange for testimony against more inviting targets. It was one of the best-kept secrets in law enforcement, all those mutts in the witness protection program going off on unsuspecting neighbors.

  “Rizzo swears the nephew has changed. Just wants to get out and live his life.” Holtzmann had produced a pipe, a curved meerschaum, his trademark, but didn’t have the nerve to light it. “Willing to submit to whatever supervision the parole board demands.”

  “And.”

  “And?”

  “Did you check him out, Karl?”

  Holtzmann had looked down into the bowl of the pipe. He’d come to the Federal Bureau of Investigation by way of Princeton Law and knew all there was to know about Abner Kirkwood. Including what the US attorney wanted to hear.

  “Nobody can read the future,” he’d said, his voice dead even, “but Sappone’s spent the last fourteen years in prison. Hard to imagine him wanting to go right back.” He’d tapped the bowl of his pipe against his palm, then looked up at Kirkwood.

  “Thing about it, Abner, on the tapes Rizzo brought in, the samples? Appears that Stettecase is negotiating a very large heroin deal. Very large indeed.”

  Abner Kirkwood picked up the newspaper lying on his desk and stared at Jilly Sappone’s photo on the front page. The way he figured it, the child, Theresa, was a casualty of war. Yeah, if he had known, if he could read the goddamned future, Sappone would still be in prison. No way he would’ve gone ahead with the deal, no matter what he had to gain. But he hadn’t known and what happened had just happened.

  Meanwhile, how many lives would be lost if three tons of dope hit the streets instead of a DOJ evidence locker? How many people would Carmine Stettecase kill if he wasn’t stopped?

  What you did, if you’d been in law enforcement as long as Abner Kirkwood, was weigh the risk against the gain, calculate profit and loss, take the high ground whenever possible. The New York State Parole Board was stonewalling the press which was all to the good, but that wouldn’t last. No, what they’d do was leak the truth to some reporter, take the heat off, put it on the FBI.

  FBI FREES MURDERER. And what would Carmine Stettecase make of that?

  The intercom chirped once. Kirkwood allowed himself a narrow smile before responding.

  “Mrs. English?”

  “I’m sorry to disturb you, Mr. Kirkwood, but Ms. Sappone asked me to tell you that she has another appointment and is unable to wait any longer.”

  Kirkwood shuddered, feeling about the way a priest might feel before an exorcism. Ordinarily, Josie Rizzo dropped the tapes into a mailbox on Grove Street. The face-to-face was her idea.

  “You can se
nd them in, Mrs. English. Ms. Rizzo and Agent Holtzmann.” He stood up, legs apart, bracing himself against whatever gruesome detail Josie Rizzo had decided to add to the general nightmare.

  Josie Rizzo was fully aware of her effect on other people, heard it in the voices of butchers, bakers, supermarket checkout girls. They saw her as crazy, demented, a royal pain in the ass. Josie didn’t mind, didn’t let it bother her. She wanted what she wanted and they were there to serve her, not really alive at all. More like badly manufactured robots.

  Holtzmann and Kirkwood, though she definitely wanted something from them, fit into a different category. Josie Rizzo hated cops, the hatred coming to her along with her mother’s breast milk. Ordinarily, she wouldn’t stay in the same room with a cop, not even the same building. In fact, just the other day, in Joey Barabano’s deli, she was fetching a half pound of prosciutto and a wedge of sharp, crumbly provolone for Carmine’s antipasto when a uniformed cop, a sergeant, came in for his meatball hero. Tried to push ahead of her.

  “Hey.” More a grunt than an exclamation. She’d waited until he was looking at her. “You in a hurry?”

  The dumb pig had smirked, started to apologize. She’d responded by spitting on his shoes and walking out, taking her sweet time about it, calling back over her shoulder. “Hey, Joey, I’ll see you in an hour. Leave the door open.”

  So what was she doing, now, in this office with two of the biggest cops in New York? How could she humiliate herself in this way? The questions came to her unbidden.

  The spirit was driving her. That was the only way she could understand it. A jetatura, first described by her nonna, her grandmother, a woman with eyes the color of the unforgiving soil of rural Sicily. If this spirit was inside your heart, you could hurt other people, send disease, poverty, ill fortune, even the death of a child. You had power, in spite of being a mere woman.

  There was a price to pay, of course. A little matter Josie’s nonna had left out of her description. The spirit fed on your rage, your impotence, the unrelenting need for revenge. It grew in you, born with the death of your father, maturing the day they slaughtered your brother in front of his own child. Slaughtered him while you watched, helpless, from a tenement window.

  By the time she’d buried the last of them, her husband, some five years later, Josie Rizzo’s fate was sealed. Her grandmother’s jetatura was not to be expelled, as much a part of her as the black dress, the long determined stride, the enormous bony hands.

  Josie was living in an Elizabeth Street tenement at the time, along with her infant daughter and her poor, wounded nephew, trying to get along on handouts and home relief checks. For a while, she wondered if Dominick Favara (or his shadow, Carmine Stettecase) had had a hand in the killings. The rumor on the streets of Little Italy was that Dominick’s path to success was paved with the bodies of his childhood chums. But there’d been no way to find out, to know for sure, and she’d finally come to realize that it didn’t matter. Dominick and Carmine had survived the great mob war that swept the country after WWII. They’d come up winners and that was enough.

  Having, as she saw it, no choice in the matter, she’d cursed the both of them, only to discover that her dear, departed nonna had been wrong again. The spirit lived inside her, all right. She could feel it there, feel it feeding on her own spirit, but, unfortunately, it didn’t do a damn thing to her enemies.

  “Well, Josie, what’s the good news? Jilly get run over by a bus?”

  Josie Rizzo, her chin nearly on her chest, peered at Abner Kirkwood through bushy eyebrows. The man’s face had no character, no feature too big or too small, nothing bent or twisted. His soft, grainy skin was the color of almond paste.

  “I come about Gildo.” She ignored his tone, knowing exactly what she had to do. “You take him in the program. Today.” She spit the words out as if warding off contamination.

  Kirkwood glanced at Karl Holtzmann, exchanged a knowing look, a quick smile. “The program, Josie?”

  “The protection program.” She pulled up a chair without being asked, dropped down into it as if she never intended to leave. “Gildo’s gotta get off the street. You put him in the witness program.”

  “Tell me something, Josie.” Kirkwood pressed the tips of his steepled fingers against his chin. “Jilly murdering that child, does it bother you at all?”

  “No. Does it bother you?” She wasn’t about to make excuses to a whore like Abner Kirkwood. It was too humiliating. No, what she had to do, if she wanted to save Gildo, was stay tough, let the pig think she was crazy.

  Holtzmann jumped in before Kirkwood, his face now flushed with anger, could respond. “That’s not really the point now.” He looked from Josie to his boss. “What’s done being actually done.” He’d been playing the good cop right from the beginning.

  “What’d you tell me?” Josie Rizzo answered her own question without pausing. “After I testify against Carmine, you’re gonna put me in the program, because if I stay on the streets I’m a dead woman. You didn’t say that?” She kept her eyes glued to the edge of Kirkwood’s desk, afraid that even a quick glance would reveal the truth. Josie Rizzo did not intend to run away, hide her head in shame. Afterward, once Carmine was arrested and knew he was going to die in prison, Josie imagined herself striding through the neighborhood, her chin high in the air, letting them all have a good look at what burned in Josie Rizzo’s heart. “Gildo, he comes with me. To a new life.”

  Kirkwood started to speak, but Karl Holtzmann interrupted him again. “Are you telling us, Josie, that you’re in touch with your nephew and he’s willing to be taken into custody?”

  Josie Rizzo tapped the toe of her black Reeboks on the carpet beneath her chair, taking her time, as if she hadn’t been expecting the question.

  “Josie?” Kirkwood leaned forward. “Agent Holtzmann asked you something.”

  “In the program,” she repeated. “No arrest, no jail. You take him to a safe place until Carmine is finished. Then me and Gildo, we go off together.” Pausing briefly, she allowed herself a thin smile. If the New York cops found Gildo before she got him out of that Upper West Side apartment, the game was over. Let the feds take him to one of their hotel rooms, maybe a house in New Jersey, keep him sheltered until the heat died down. By that time, maybe she’d know what to do. “I gotta stay in touch while you got him, call every day on the telephone.”

  “Christ,” Kirkwood muttered, “she’s acting like it’s a done deal.”

  Josie planted her legs, pressed thighs, knees, and calves firmly together. It was time to see if the pigs could stop feeding while they were still hungry. Kirkwood knew a lot about Carmine’s impending deal, knew the size of it, for instance, and the money involved, but he didn’t have the date or the place. That was because Carmine didn’t have the information, either, which was the way his Chinese connection wanted it. On Luk Sun, trade representative for the People’s Republic of China, fronted in the USA for several dozen factories on mainland China. The processed heroin might come from any of them, go to any port on the East Coast or the Gulf of Mexico. Carmine would distribute the product within a few days, had his customers already lined up, money in hand. If Kirkwood missed by even half a day it would all be for nothing.

  Josie Rizzo, after any edge available, had reviewed every tape, holding onto them until she was alone with her little Walkman in her fifth-floor apartment. She knew their contents as well as either of the two men. “You don’t take Gildo in the program, no more tapes. I’m takin’ a big chance, here, but I’m doin’ it for Gildo. If he’s gone …” She paused to let the essential message penetrate, then continued, her eyes now locked on her folded hands. “If Gildo’s gone, then it’s fuck you to the feds.”

  FIVE

  GINNY GADD, AS SHE pushed Stanley Moodrow’s battered Chevrolet over the rolling mountains of northwestern New Jersey, tried to keep her thoughts firmly rooted in the present. It was May 10th, still early spring at this altitude, and the forest of birch and maple surrounding
I-80 was fledged with tiny, translucent leaves. A bright sun, soon to be directly overhead, poured through the ineffective canopy, speckling the forest floor with delicate gray shadows. Just below the peaks, the highway had been cut through solid rock, as if the builders, having finally grown impatient, had decided to eliminate the red tape.

  Gadd was on her way to visit Arnold Dumont at the local office of the New York State Division of Parole in the city of Binghamton. The fastest route (or so the AAA customer-service center had claimed) was west, through New Jersey and Pennsylvania to the city of Scranton, then north into New York again. Gadd considered herself a city girl, Central Park being as close as she wanted to get to the great outdoors. The spring light, the sun-washed rock, the carpet of buttery yellow dandelions at the highway’s margins would have been little more than distractions under the best of conditions. Now, haunted by images that jumped into her mind without warning, she might as well have been driving through the Holland Tunnel.

  The mile markers on the side of the road tracked her progress, diminishing, one by one, as she approached the Pennsylvania border. She’d been on the road for more than an hour, had nearly three hours to go. The drive, the time alone with her own thoughts, hadn’t entered into her calculations when she’d bullied Arnold Dumont into making the appointment by declaring herself the personal representative of the victim’s mother. No, as she’d waited for the receptionist to put her through, the idea of justice had coursed through her body, as real, as physical, as the blood pumped from her heart. And not the kind of simple justice that ended with Jilly Sappone dead or in custody.

  The simple fact was that Jilly Sappone hadn’t just appeared on the outside of the Southport Correctional Facility like he’d walked through the walls. Parole had been denied, then granted; the individuals who made the decisions had to be held responsible, even if responsibility came to no more than pulling up the bureaucratic rock under which they hid.

  Of course, she hadn’t told that to Mr. Dumont, hadn’t given him a hint of her personal rage. That would come later, when they were face-to-face and she could look into his eyes. Instead, she’d made her case in the name of the Kalkadonis family. That was a stretch, of course, because Ann Kalkadonis was still too distraught to frame any goal beyond keeping her remaining daughter alive.