Damaged Goods

by Stephen Solomita

  “Stand over against the wall, pop, while I finish.” Tommaso waited for his father to comply, then put the revolver on Carmine’s desk. Though he hadn’t held a gun in twenty years, Tommaso knew the report of a large-caliber pistol would bring his mother running and he didn’t want to kill his mother.

  “This okay, Tommy?” Carmine, over his initial shock, fought a rising anger. There was a time in his life when he’d have taken the pistol away from Tommy, taken it away and rammed it between his son’s narrow cheeks. Unfortunately, that time was twenty years and a hundred pounds ago. “You know you can’t get away with this. I’ve got two guys watching the house. Whatta ya think they’re gonna do if they see you walk out with that trunk? I mean it’s five o’clock in the morning, Tommy. That’s a hard time to sneak.”

  “I told them to go home.” Tommaso pulled the carrier’s straps tight around the trunk, then hooked them into the crossbar. “Last night after you went to sleep. I told them you said they should go home and get some rest before the big day.”

  Carmine’s jaw dropped. “What do you know about the big day?”

  “I know everything, pop. When, where, who, how … everything.”

  “You bugged me, you cocksucker.” Carmine, overwhelmed, took a step forward. He was ready to go to war until his son picked up the revolver. Then he stopped, began to tremble, raised a single accusing finger. “How could you do that to your father?”

  Tommaso shrugged, put the revolver back on the desk. “I just wanted to be there.” He tilted the luggage carrier back, then recentered the strap. “It was so easy, pop. I waited until you and mom were out, then wired a transmitter into the base of the chandelier.” Rising to his full height, he turned to face his father. “But I never meant to do you any harm until you kicked me out. That wasn’t right, pop. All these years you been keepin’ me in the house and now you wanna dump me.” Tommy let the carrier down and folded his arms across his chest. “It’s just not right.”

  Carmine, unable to come up with a counterargument, shifted his weight nervously and wished with all his might for an oven-warmed cheese Danish. There was no way he could let that trunk walk out the door with his son and he didn’t want to die on an empty stomach.

  “Tell me something, Tommy.” Carmine tried to keep his voice gentle, let the force of his argument drive the message home. “Where the fuck are you gonna go? You ain’t hardly been out of the house in years.”

  Tommaso shook his head. After all this time, his father still didn’t get it. Alone, locked into his little room with the door shut and the drapes pulled tight across the window, he could travel at the speed of light. Computers into computers into computers, an entire world connected by tiny fibers. He had friends everywhere.

  “I guess I’ll have to try to get along the best way I can, pop.”

  “And Mary? Your wife. What about Mary?”

  Tommaso smiled softly. Being rid of Mary was the best part. “Mary has her mom,” he said, as if the naked fact had some practical application. “Look, I gotta get goin’. I rented a car and it’s parked illegal. If I don’t get a move on, I’m definitely gonna get a ticket.”

  Carmine tried to muster a next step that wasn’t suicide and didn’t sound like begging. Unable to do so, he decided to beg.

  “Tommy, please,” he whispered, “that’s not my money.”

  “I know that,” Tommy interrupted. He tilted the carrier back and gave a little push. The wheels turned reluctantly, with the heavy trunk threatening to slide off at any moment. “Damn it,” he said, as he let the carrier drop with a little thump and began to retighten the straps.

  “But you don’t know why you can’t take it. Understand? You don’t know why.” Carmine wet his lips. His hands began to weave in front his face. “You can’t take it because I can’t pay it back and the people I got it from … Tommy, they’ll have to kill me.”

  “I don’t see it that way, pop.” Satisfied, Tommy picked up the gun and pointed it at his father. His hands were much steadier now. For the first time in his life, he wasn’t afraid. “See, all those investors want is dope. Which you can still get from On Luk. You just can’t pay for it.”

  Carmine’s hands stopped moving while he thought it over. At first glance, it sounded like a way out that wasn’t either suicide or begging. It sounded like a way to buy enough time to run down his son, exact a little cold, Sicilian revenge.

  “You sayin’ I should rip the Chink off?”

  “I been thinkin’ about it for a couple of days and I don’t see what else you could do. Unless you manage to find me in the next eight hours.” Tommaso waved the revolver in a little circle. “Turn away from me, pop.”

  “Tommy …”

  “Please, I don’t wanna kill you.”

  Carmine sighed and turned. Facing the wall, he fought a nearly overwhelming desire to spin around. He could feel his son approaching and he didn’t want to know what was going to happen next. Now that he had a way out, it didn’t matter.

  Tommaso, smiling at his father’s apparent resignation, pulled a stun gun from his pocket as he walked across the room. The catalog he’d bought it from (available, of course, through CompuServe and Prodigy) had promised that its 40,000 volts would override an attacker’s nervous system, removing voluntary muscle activity for as long as fifteen minutes. Even allowing for the manufacturer’s (not to mention the retailer’s) inevitable exaggeration, that would be more than long enough.

  Though she was awake and dressed at five o’clock, Josie Rizzo was totally unaware of the quiet rip-off taking place three floors below. She did hear the front door squeak open, then clank shut, but she didn’t get up out of her chair, walk over to the window as she would have as little as twenty-four hours before. These people, she’d decided, as if they’d been reduced to the status of neighbors, the people downstairs, were no longer part of her life. And that included her daughter, Mary. Maybe, if the family could afford it, they’d continue to live together after Carmine went to jail. Maybe she’d stay here as well. But she had shed them, now and forever, and she felt as light as the dust that floated through her open window.

  That didn’t mean, however, that she was entirely at peace. There was still the matter of her nephew, Gildo. If the FBI had him, if he hadn’t managed to get loose, it would definitely cast a shadow across the festivities to come. Not much of a shadow, to be sure, but the image of Ann Kalkadonis alive and walking the same streets as Josie Rizzo didn’t sit well. Ann had been punished, no doubt about it, but Ann was the greatest of the betrayers. If she hadn’t brought those bloody clothes into the precinct, hadn’t sold out the husband she’d sworn to love, honor, and obey, the cops would’ve seen through Carmine’s bullshit and Gildo would not have gone to prison. It was really that simple.

  Meanwhile, there was nothing Josie Rizzo could do but stay in the apartment, wait for the phone to ring. By the time it did, more than two hours later, she’d gone through six cups of coffee, been to the bathroom four times, and was very, very pissed.

  “Why you take so long, huh?” All in all, she considered the greeting to be restrained.

  “How did you know it was me?” Jilly’s voice was calm, almost somber.

  “Who else gonna call me at seven-thirty?” Actually, there was nobody else to call her at any time.

  “It could have been a wrong number.”

  Josie snorted contemptuously. “Enough with the nonsense. You get out okay?”

  “Yeah, no problem.”

  “You know what you gotta do today?”

  “Let’s drop the fucking interrogation, all right? I’m not in the mood for it.” This most likely being the last day of his life, Jilly figured he was entitled to a little respect.

  “I wanna hear if you got a plan. And stop with the language.”

  “Look, Aunt Josie, I ain’t got the time for this.”

  “When your father got bumped off, who took you in?”

  “Aw, for Christ’s sake …”

  “Ma
ybe there were people lined up around the block. Huh? Begging to raise you. Maybe …”

  “I’m gonna hang up.”

  “… somebody else got you out of jail, somebody I don’t know, a stranger.” Josie listened to her nephew’s sigh. The soft hiss brought a smile to her face. Gildo was a good boy, a loyal boy. He’d do what was right; he always did.

  “All right, Aunt Josie, I got a plan. By tonight, I’ll be out of the country.” Jilly shook his head. Escape, for Jilly Sappone, was about as likely as having the angels blow their trumpets as he marched into heaven. The charade was strictly for the pigs if they happened to be listening. And for Josie Rizzo, who’d devised it, then bludgeoned him verbally until he’d agreed to play his part.

  The situation was funny enough to get him laughing into the telephone. Here he was, a man who went off at the slightest provocation, a man who went off with no provocation, a man the doctors claimed would never be able to control himself. Yet his Aunt Josie could berate him for hours at a time and all he did was hang his head, beg her forgiveness like a puppy dog after a beating. It was crazy, but it was true. It had always been true.

  “What’s funny?” Josie voice was heavy with suspicion. “You got a woman there?”

  Jilly flinched. He’d sent the whore back to her dope-dealing pimp less than a minute before making the call. The whore was why he hadn’t called last night.

  “Nothin’, Aunt Josie. Nothin’s funny.”

  Now that it was time to say good-bye, Jilly could feel his heart thumping in his chest. He took a deep breath, wondering if maybe he should do exactly what he’d said, just hang the phone up and get into the wind. That wasn’t going to happen, of course, because a promise made to Josie Rizzo simply could not be broken, but he could still wonder. As long as he didn’t do it out loud.

  “I gotta go,” he finally said. “Before somebody comes lookin’ for me.

  “Yeah,” Josie answered matter-of-factly. “Okay. You go do what you gotta do. And don’t fool around.”

  Betty Haluka, as she threw a pearl gray pantsuit over a sparkling white blouse, added a pair of small turquoise earrings and a necklace of matching stones on a silver chain, told herself to please slow down. She’d been trying (and failing) to send herself the same message ever since Leonora Higgins’s second call. That had come three hours before, just after six o’clock in the morning and its essential message, that Stanley Moodrow was sitting, all by himself, in a cell on the seventh floor of the FBI headquarters building on Worth Street, should have been enough to alleviate her fears.

  Unless, she told herself immediately after hanging up, they decide to charge him, book him, and ship him over to the Metropolitan Correctional Center in the middle of the night. Unless they decide to let him spend the night with a couple of dozen cop-hating drug dealers, teach him a lesson about power relationships.

  The nature of that lesson, as drawn by her imagination, had been horrific enough to get her up and pacing. She simply couldn’t shake the urge to grab a coat, charge into FBI headquarters as if she was leading a cavalry charge, demand the immediate release of her lover and client. Joan of Arc brandishing the Constitution in lieu of a sword.

  “Don’t go down there, Betty,” Leonora had patiently advised when Betty called her back. “You’ll never get past the lobby. Remember, Stanley hasn’t been charged. That means nobody you can reach will even know he’s there. Tomorrow morning I’ll try to call Holtzmann. If he won’t speak to me, I’ll go to the US attorney. If that doesn’t work, I know a deputy attorney general in DC. …”

  “Leonora?” Betty had interrupted, her imagination already running away with itself. “What if they take him over to the MCC?”

  “That’s a definite possibility—I won’t deny it—but what I think is there’s more chance of his being charged and transferred if you try to call their bluff.”

  Leonora’s “trapped rat” scenario had been enough to keep Betty in Moodrow’s apartment until Leonora’s third call, but it hadn’t gotten her a night’s sleep. By the time the phone rang, a little after nine o’clock in the morning, she was on her fourth cup of coffee.

  “I found somebody you can talk to,” Leonora had announced. “An agent named Marsha Millstein in the Division of Public Relations.”

  Betty had failed to keep the disappointment out of her voice. “Leonora, that’s like talking to a very polite statue. Stonewalling is what they do. Hell, it’s all they do.”

  “I won’t argue the point, but it’s a place to start. Right now, I can’t reach Holtzmann or anyone close to him.” Her voice had dropped to a whisper. “Look, there’s something big happening over there and I can’t get a handle on it.”

  “Bigger than arresting Carmine Stettecase with a couple hundred kilos of heroin?”

  “Maybe that’s it, but I keep sensing fear, not anticipation. Like something’s gone wrong and they don’t know how to fix it. Anyway, I called the MCC from my office a few minutes ago and Stanley’s not there.”

  “Or so they claim.”

  Leonora had paused briefly, looking for a polite way to frame the essential message. When she couldn’t find one, she opted for frank and to the point. “Don’t go in there with an attitude. Be Stanley’s attorney, not his lover. Remember, they’ve been holding him for less than forty-eight hours. It might be irregular, but it’s not a technical violation of his rights, not in the federal system. Try to make Agent Millstein understand that releasing Stanley is in the Bureau’s best interest.”

  “In the Bureau’s best interest,” Betty repeated as she locked the door and made her way down to the street. She said it again as she walked into the Metropolitan Correctional Center and presented her credentials.

  “Pardon me?” The corrections officer seated behind the low counter, a middle-aged white man with a sagging gut and deep blue-gray pouches beneath a pair of tiny ice blue eyes, seemed utterly bored. “Were you talkin’ to me?”

  “I’m here to see my client, Stanley Moodrow.” Betty laid her identification on the counter, watched him pick it up, examine it like an entomologist trying to identify an unfamiliar insect, then pass it back. “You wanna spell out that name?”

  “The first or the last?”

  “The last.” His expression didn’t change, didn’t even flicker.

  “M-O-O-D-R-O-W” Betty glanced at the man’s nameplate. “Officer McTaggert.”

  “No such.”

  It was Betty’s turn to say, “Pardon me?”

  “No such.” McTaggert swiveled the monitor 180 degrees. “Look for yourself. He ain’t here.”

  “I spoke to him last night.” Betty wondered, briefly, if lying fit the general heading of “in the Bureau’s best interest.”

  “Maybe he got bailed out. You want me to check?”

  “I want you to be sure he’s not here right now.”

  “I’m already sure.”

  “In that case, so am I. And thank you for your cheerful assistance.”

  It took Betty less than ten minutes to walk the few blocks to FBI headquarters in the Federal Building on Worth Street. Inside, she received a visitor’s badge marked with her name and her ultimate destination, the FBI’s Public Relations Division on the thirty-fourth floor. The lobby was crowded with men and women heading off to dozens of federal bureaucracies, some as workers and some as supplicants. Betty, as she waited for an elevator, made a conscious effort to see herself as the latter. And not as an avenging angel.

  In the Bureau’s best interest, she said to herself. The Constitution will just have to fend for itself.

  Moodrow was still eating his breakfast (cold cereal, cold juice, cold coffee) when two beefy corrections officers approached his cell, ordered him out, then walked him down the hall to a tiny interview room. Without explanation, they put him inside, leaving him to sit in a chair bolted to the green tile floor while they stood guard outside. Moodrow noted the mustard yellow walls, the metal table, the dirty white ceiling, and nodded to himself. While the room
didn’t have the cachet of the Canary Cage in the old Seventh Precinct, it did reek of squirming, sweating mutts and the sharply focused men who pursued them. Apparently, interrogation was a facet of law enforcement the feds hadn’t managed to sanitize.

  Twenty minutes later, he stood and walked over to a small mirror set into the door, stared at his reflection, wondered if his guards were just outside looking back at him. When the COs ordered him out of the cell, Moodrow had anticipated only two possibilities: Holtzmann was either going to charge him or let him go. After all, what question could Holtzmann ask in an interview room that couldn’t be asked in Moodrow’s cell? And why, it being a few hours before the big bust, would Holtzmann be thinking about Stanley Moodrow at all?

  Neither question was answered by the sudden appearance of a very tall, very elegant young man. At least as tall as Moodrow and rail thin, his black, summer-weight suit draped his bony frame perfectly, dropping in an unbroken line from his shoulders to the tops of his polished wingtips. Moodrow stared at the suit for a moment, relishing his own resentment, then raised his eyes to look into the man’s face. The man’s features were uniformly strong, the bones of his face prominent. He returned Moodrow’s contemptuous gaze frankly, but without apparent aggression.

  “Cooper,” the man said. “Justice Department.” His voice carried vague traces of a southern drawl.

  Moodrow thought about it for a moment, then said, “Justice Department, huh? That’s an unusual last name, but I guess it’s not impossible. I once knew a guy named Bureau. He spelled it with two ns.

  Cooper’s expression didn’t change. “Why don’t we sit down?” he said after a long pause.

  “Why don’t you …” Moodrow bit off the rest of the message. Something was very wrong and he wasn’t going to find out what it was by playing the tough guy. “Why don’t we run through that one more time,” he said as he dropped into the chair. “Your full name and full title.”

  “My name is Cooper. Buford Cooper. From the state of Mississippi.”