Damaged Goods

by Stephen Solomita

He smiled for the first time, a quick, broad flash of gleaming white teeth. Moodrow read the grin as supremely confident, the grin of a doctor treating a disease from which he, himself, was immune.

  “And the title?”

  “I’m what they call a Special Counsel.” He crossed his legs and took out a pack of Viceroys. “You smoke?” When Moodrow shook his head, he added, “Mind if I do?”

  “Knock yourself out.”

  Cooper shook out a smoke and lit it with a slender gold lighter. The lighter, Moodrow noted before it disappeared into Cooper’s trouser pocket, was neither flashy nor cheap.

  “I’m Special Counsel to the Attorney General of the United States of America.” He blew out a stream of smoke. “Has a nice ring to it, don’t you think?”

  “A wonderful ring,” Moodrow agreed. “Now why don’t you tell me what you want.”

  Cooper stared at Moodrow for a moment, then took a deep breath and smiled again. “I want to know why you’re here,” he said. “No matter how stupid that sounds.”

  A vague uneasiness flitted through Moodrow’s consciousness like a bat through an underground cave. “You saying you haven’t asked the man who brought me?”

  “And who might that be?”

  Moodrow shook his head slowly. “Don’t try to play the interrogator,” he said evenly. “You don’t have the experience to bring it off.” That brought a flush to Cooper’s tanned cheeks. “If you’re gonna answer every question by asking another one, I want my lawyer.”

  “That would be Ms. Haluka. She’s in the building even as we speak. Inflicting psychological damage on a PR person.”

  Moodrow giggled his appreciation. “One for you,” he admitted.

  “One for me, yes.” Cooper put the cigarette into his mouth, let it rest on his lips for a moment before inhaling. “Let me put it simply,” he said. “I was in Manhattan on Justice Department business when I got a call from DC asking me to check on the status of an ex-cop being detained without charge by the FBI. Just to check, mind you, not to actually do anything about it. Now I can’t find a single agent who admits to knowing anything about Stanley Moodrow beyond the bare fact that he’s actually here.”

  Moodrow leaned forward, placed his palms flat on the table. “And Karl Holtzmann?” He closed his eyes in anticipation of the blow sure to follow. “What does Karl Holtzmann say?”

  “Karl Holtzmann is missing. Along with US Attorney Abner Kirkwood and Agent Bob Ewing.” Cooper tapped his ash onto the floor. “Would you know anything about that?”

  It was the worst possible scenario. Ginny Gadd alone in that apartment; Stanley Moodrow in a cell, unable to even warn her; Jilly Sappone on the loose. Repressing a groan, Moodrow stared at his clenched fists. “You have to let me the fuck out of here.” He raised his head, glared at Buford Cooper as if contemplating an all-out attack.

  “That’s not an answer to my question.”

  Moodrow slammed his fist into the table. “Give me one good reason why I should bail you out? You arrested me without probable cause, detained me without charge, denied me the right to make a phone call or consult an attorney …”

  “I didn’t do any of that.” Cooper, who hadn’t flinched in the face of Moodrow’s tirade, dropped his cigarette on the floor and slowly ground it out with the heel of his shoe. “Until a couple of hours ago, I didn’t even know you existed.”

  “What’re you lookin’ for, Cooper, tea and sympathy?”

  “I’m looking for a little help.”

  “You still haven’t given me a reason why I should give a shit about you.” He leaned back, took a deep breath, readied himself for the actual bargaining. “Or the Justice Department or the Federal Bureau of Incompetence.”

  “Perhaps,” Cooper smiled again, “because giving a shit might go a long way toward getting you out of here.” He took a white handkerchief from the breast pocket of his jacket and gently wiped his mouth. “Within, say, the next few hours.”

  Jilly Sappone squatted, then sat on the gritty, tarred rooftop. Frowning, he leaned against the narrow ledge, took a sandwich bag from the pocket of Agent Bob’s forest green windbreaker, and stared at the small pile of dope at the bottom. For some reason, ever since his good-bye phone call to Aunt Josie, he couldn’t do anything without thinking it was the last time he was gonna do it. The last shower, the last shave, the last piss, the last bacon, eggs, toast, coffee. It was stupid, really, because he didn’t have to die. Captured, yeah; he was definitely gonna be captured. Even if he somehow got into that apartment, did the deed, got away, Jilly Sappone had nowhere to hide. But that didn’t mean he’d be killed, not unless he decided to put a round in his own head, let a big piece of lead chase the small one already down there, and he hadn’t made that decision. Not yet.

  Nevertheless, as he dug his pinky into the heroin, scooped out a little heap, pushed it up into his nose, he heard himself say, the last snort. As clearly as if he’d spoken out loud.

  The day was warm and the sun, directly overhead, poured down on the rooftop. Jilly could feel hot tar beneath his buttocks, knew he’d carry some of it with him when he finally got his act in gear. He didn’t mind, didn’t think Ann would mind, either. This being the last time and all.

  He tilted his head back, closed his eyes, let the sun heat his face while the heroin worked its way through his body. Twenty minutes later, when he began to pull himself together, he was still sitting against the wall, though his chin had dropped down to his chest and he was snoring softly.

  “The last nod,” Jilly said without opening his eyes. Laughter bubbled over his tongue and lips, seemed to dribble out of his mouth, the sound wet and ugly even to himself. Christ, he thought, I gotta get moving.

  But he didn’t move, not until he heard the door to the roof squeal on its hinges. Then, as if someone had thrown a switch, his eyes were open, the automatic in his hand, his brain on full alert.

  “Don’ shoo me, bro. Don’ shoo me.”

  Jilly stared at the man in the doorway for a moment before dismissing him as a junkie looking for a place to fix or something to rip off. No surprise in a building like this. “You got business with me?” he asked.

  “No way.” The man took a step forward, his eyes riveted to the barrel of the gun. “I don’t even know nobody’s up here.” He opened his clenched fist to reveal several bags of dope. “I gotta get off, bro. I’m sick.”

  Jilly flicked the automatic in the general direction of Second Avenue, said, “Take it somewhere else,” watched the junkie half trot across the rooftops. When the man was several roofs away, Jilly dragged himself to his knees and turned around to peer over the low concrete parapet at a twenty-story apartment building across the street. The building, of white brick and studded with balconies, was solidly middle class and fronted Third Avenue at the corner of Twenty-seventh Street. Another, almost identical structure, faced it from the west side of the avenue. From each of these buildings, a string of five-story brick tenements radiated east and west along Twenty-seventh Street like the tendrils of a spreading cancer.

  There was dope in virtually every building, even in those where the landlord bothered to repair the broken locks and mailboxes. Some, like the one Jilly had used to get to the roof, were almost entirely given over to the trade. At least half the twenty apartments, though unrented, served as shooting galleries, crack dens, or both. Four or five others were occupied by prostitutes who worked the lower end of Lexington Avenue a block to the west. The remainder housed working families whose economic survival depended on low rent.

  Jilly, like every other committed druggie, had an infallible nose for dope. When he’d first smelled it out, on the day he’d been released from prison, he’d immediately filed the information away for later use. Then he’d ripped off Patsy Gullo’s heroin and almost forgotten about Twenty-seventh Street. Almost.

  As his head began to clear, Jilly focused his attention more sharply. With his eyes raised a few inches above the low wall, he could see the south side and b
ack of his ex-wife’s building, as well as two cops parked in a brown Caprice on the west side of Third Avenue. The cops were making no effort to conceal themselves, sitting there with the windows open, elbows hanging out, as if their view of the front door guaranteed Ann Kalkadonis’s safety.

  Jilly, of course, had never expected to go through the lobby. He was interested in a narrow strip of concrete running along the back of the building to a service entrance in the basement. If he approached this ramp from the north side of Twenty-seventh Street, the cops wouldn’t be able to see him or the door at the bottom. At least not the cops parked on Third Avenue. Thinking it over on the trip from his motel room, Jilly had figured that windowless steel door would be his biggest problem. If it was locked, which it usually was, he’d have to stand around, make himself a perfect target while he waited until somebody opened it from the inside.

  Jilly put his palms on the ledge, pushed himself up a little higher, and laughed out loud. “My lucky day,” he said, then quickly amended the statement. “My last lucky day.”

  Somebody had tied the wide-open basement door to a faucet on the wall of the building, that somebody undoubtedly being a representative of B&A Moving and Storage whose truck was parked at the curb. As Jilly watched, smiling to himself, two burly men came through the opening, one after the other, each pushing a dolly loaded with household furniture.

  Once Jilly started moving, his body decided to wake up, get with the program. By the time he reached the second floor he was taking the steps two at a time. He paused in the hallway for a moment, inhaling the stink of piss and mold as if it was an aphrodisiac, then came out of the building, took a right without glancing at the cops, and began to walk east toward Second Avenue. Halfway down the block, he crossed the street and headed back the way he’d come. His right hand, despite the need to appear as natural as possible, remained by his waist, ready to dip beneath Agent Bob’s jacket. There was always the chance that the cops or the feds had another team out there, one he hadn’t spotted. If that was the case, he was determined to bust a few caps before he packed it in.

  As he approached the moving truck, Jilly kept his eyes focused on the fat man standing inside, half expecting him to turn, weapon in hand, shout, “Police, motherfucker. Keep your hands where I can see ’em.” But the man continued to pack a mix of furniture and taped brown boxes into the front of the truck, ignoring him altogether. The same was true of the two cursing workers struggling to pass an enormous leather couch through the basement door.

  “It don’t fuckin’ go, man,” the taller of the two said as Jilly slipped past. “We’re gonna have to take it out the fucking front.”

  “I’m not gonna put it back in that elevator,” the second man replied. “And I’m not walkin’ it up them stairs, neither.”

  They continued to argue, ignoring Jilly who stopped a few feet away to consider his next move. He was standing at one end of a wide corridor running the full length of the building. A series of doors on either side led to the boiler and compactor rooms, various storage areas, the building’s communal laundry, the super’s little office, and the elevators. Jilly had been this way on his first visit, but he’d come through fast, looking for those elevators and nothing else. Now he needed to get his bearings.

  “Could I help you?” A short, broad-shouldered man wearing a blue cotton uniform stepped out of a room twenty feet away. He was standing in the middle of the hallway, feet wide apart, a fuck-you sneer plastered to his face. “You a tenant?”

  “I’m lookin’ for the super.” Jilly forced himself to smile. He could feel the molten core at the base of his personality begin to bubble upward, knew that if he didn’t close the furnace door, it would own him.

  “Whatta ya want him for?”

  “I’m a salesman. You know, janitorial supplies, like that.”

  “We got somebody.”

  “Are you the super?” Jilly’s hand was already moving toward his waist.

  “Uh-uh.” The man held his smirk for a moment longer, then relented. “Last door on the left.”

  “Thank you.” Jilly, momentarily disappointed, consoled himself by deciding to retrace his steps when he finished with his wife, pay the man a last visit. Then, smiling, he squeezed past his interrogator and walked down the hall to the super’s office where he found an elderly black man, telephone in hand, sitting behind a battered wooden desk that seemed to fill the tiny room. The man was tall and wiry-strong, with a prominent forehead made even more prominent by a raised scar that ran over his left eye like a second eyebrow. He glanced up as Jilly entered, then returned to his conversation.

  “I’ll have someone up after lunch, Ms. Carozzo. I don’t have nobody right now. Remember, this here’s the third time you plugged that drain in the last two weeks.” He rolled his eyes, muttered an occasional “yeah” as he listened, finally said, “Ya’ll wanna blame the plumbing, that’s fine with me, but last time we took a tube of Crest outta the trap. You tole me your little boy done flushed it down there.” He paused again, listened briefly, then ran his fingers through his snow white hair. “After lunch, Ms. Carozzo. First thing.”

  Jilly, fighting an urge to lick his lips in anticipation, glanced at a nameplate lying on the super’s desk. Originally of white letters on a black background, it was now so gray and dirty that it took him a moment to read the words, Leuten Kitt.

  “You lookin’ at the name right? My mama called me Leuten because my father was in the army. Leuten is short for lieutenant.”

  “No shit?”

  “If I’m lyin’, I’m dyin’.” He flashed Jilly a friendly smile. “Now what could I do you for on this fine, fine morning?”

  “You could answer a simple question.”

  “I’m listenin’.”

  Slowly, as if reaching for his business card (which he was, in a way) Jilly slid a hand beneath his jacket, pulled Agent Bob’s automatic, pressed it against the tip of Leuten Kitt’s nose. “The question of the hour,” he said, “is do you wanna live or do you wanna die?” He cocked the hammer by way of driving his point home, then quickly added, “Don’t be shy now. Because you ain’t got the time to think it over.”

  “What I need to know,” Moodrow said as he plucked a jelly doughnut from a greasy paper sack and bit into it, “is why, you being a politician, the FBI would give you the time of day?” He popped the lid on a container of coffee and sipped at the steaming liquid. “Any more than a New York cop would give the time of day to a deputy mayor.” A half hour had gone by since Special Counsel Cooper’s unexpected appearance and Moodrow still wasn’t sure what the man wanted to hear.

  Buford Cooper toyed with the crease on his trousers for a moment, then raised a pair of lazy blue eyes to meet Moodrow’s unwavering stare. “Well, they won’t,” he admitted. “Give me the time of day, I mean.”

  “Then how’d you get to me?”

  “I took advantage of the chaos.” Cooper stood up, pulled off his jacket, folded it carefully before laying it on the table. “With the commander in chief among the missing … Well, let’s just say none of the ranking officers wanted to tell me an outright lie. Not when I already knew you were here.” He walked to the far wall, faced it as if looking out a window. When he spoke again, his tone was almost wistful. “We’ve been under pressure since the day we took office. One scandal after another, most of them pure bullshit. I suppose we can deal with another political crisis—we’ve certainly had enough practice—but it would be nice to see it coming.”

  “Pardon me if I don’t cry in my coffee.” Moodrow had always reserved a special position on his mutt list for professional politicians. “Tell me how you plan to get me out of here. Being as you have no direct authority over the FBI.” Determined to maintain an external calm, he resisted the urge to turn and face Cooper. Instead, he finished his doughnut in a single, gargantuan bite, then, one at a time, licked his fingers clean.

  Cooper replied without hesitation. “Assuming that I’m satisfied with your story, I plan t
o simply walk you out.” He strolled back to his chair, sat down, shook a Viceroy out of a half-empty pack. “There’s no paperwork on you, none at all. Theoretically, even as we speak, you’re not here.”

  Moodrow contemplated the bag of doughnuts for a moment, wanting to reach in, mask his anxiety by stuffing his mouth. Instead, he rolled up the edges of the bag and pushed his coffee away. “You a lawyer?” he asked.

  “Of course.” Cooper followed the admission with a faint smile.

  “Then you can understand me when I say I’ve got a very circumstantial case here. One that couldn’t be proven beyond a reasonable doubt in a court of law. At least, not by me.” He waited until Cooper nodded his understanding, then continued. “You aware of the narcotics bust that’s supposed to go down today?”

  “Assume I don’t know anything,” Cooper replied. “Because I don’t.” He lit his cigarette and leaned back in the chair.

  “In that case, we’re gonna have to back up a little.” Now that he’d made the basic decision, Moodrow wanted to tell the story completely—knowing that if he didn’t, Cooper, despite the buddy-buddy manner, would have him going over the details for the next twelve hours. He began with Jilly Sappone’s father and the injury to Jilly, worked his way through Josie Rizzo and her daughter’s marriage, Carmine Stettecase’s problems with Jilly, and the frame-up that sent Jilly to prison.

  “The board turned Jilly down when he came up for parole,” he concluded, “then reversed itself when Karl Holtzmann, or maybe his boss, intervened because Josie Rizzo was supplying the FBI with information on Carmine Stettecase and a huge dope deal Carmine was setting up.”

  Cooper started to speak, then changed his mind. He signaled Moodrow to continue with a languid wave of his cigarette.

  “What I’ve told you so far, that’s the good news.” Moodrow picked up the bag of doughnuts, weighed it in his palm for a moment, then returned it to the table with a little sigh. “On the day he got out of prison, Jilly Sappone teamed up with a former cell mate, Jackson-Davis Wescott. They kidnapped a child on the first day, then committed at least three murders together, one of which I personally witnessed. A few days ago, Wescott turned up in Riverside Park with a knife in his ribs and Jilly Sappone disappeared. I’m saying that Karl Holtzmann and Robert Ewing and the US attorney you mentioned decided to protect Jilly Sappone, at least until after they took Carmine down. I’m saying something went wrong and now Jilly Sappone’s on the loose.”