Damaged Goods

by Stephen Solomita

  “The way I see it,” Gadd replied evenly, “you’re alive and Sappone is on the floor wearing handcuffs. You oughta be grateful.” She got up and closed the front door. “I’m gonna go in the kitchen, look around for some tape. You think you can keep the beast subdued?”

  “Lady, you’re crazy.”

  “That’s not an answer.”

  “The man’s in handcuffs.” Leuten felt some of the tension run out of him as he spoke the words. Yes, the man was in handcuffs, the man who wanted to kill Leuten Kitt, the man who did kill Theresa Kalkadonis. Leuten had six children and nine grandchildren and loved every one of them. His initial relief at finding himself alive began to dissipate. What rushed in to take its place was pure rage. He dropped the barrel of the gun to a spot just in front of Sappone’s left ear, his attention so focused he might have been staring through a telephoto lens.

  “Don’t do it.” Gadd’s tone was matter-of-fact, like she didn’t care all that much one way or the other.

  “Gimme a reason.”

  “Because I’ve got something better in mind. Or, at least, slower.” She touched Kitt’s arm. “You gotta trust me here.”

  “Two minutes ago you told this scumbag to blow me away. Now you want me to trust you?”

  “At least you know I’m honest.”

  She was gone before Leuten could respond, leaving him to care for Jilly, who’d begun to moan and shift his weight.

  “Just stay down there, motherfucker,” Leuten said after a moment. “Else I’ll turn that crazy bitch loose on y’all.”

  “What crazy bitch?”

  Leuten turned to find Gadd standing right behind him. She was holding a ball of twine in her hand, offering it to him like it was an apple. “You wanna stop sneakin’ up on people?”

  “I’ll give it some thought.” She pressed the twine into his hand. “Do me a favor and tie him up, starting from his ankles. For what I got planned, he can’t be moving around.”

  Leuten was about to tell her to do it herself, then changed his mind. Looking into her eyes, he could see a mix of fear and anger and, behind both, a childish pleasure. Like she and Leuten were about to play a trick on the grown-ups.

  “How tight you want the boy?” He dropped to one knee, looped a strand of twine around Sappone’s ankle, tied the loose end back onto the roll.

  “Tight enough so he shouldn’t even think about moving. I want the fucker helpless.” Gadd let the revolver drop to her side. “Yeah,” she half whispered, “completely helpless.”

  Leuten took his time about it, drawing each loop tight before starting another revolution, letting the individual loops overlap slightly. “How you come to get behind us like that?” he asked. “Seemed like you come outta nowhere.”

  “I was in the stairwell, with the door cracked open a couple of inches, when you came out of the elevator. I saw you all the way.”

  “But you not a cop?”

  “Uh-uh.” Gadd sighed impatiently. “My name is Guinevere Gadd and I’m a private investigator working for Ann Kalkadonis. I made arrangements to stay on after she left. Just in case Jilly showed up, which he did. There’s no mystery to it.” She sighed again. “Could we hurry this up?”

  “We could if you’d hold his feet off the ground so’s I could slide the cord under him without stoppin’ every time.”

  Gadd complied without hesitation, dropping to her knees. “Yeah,” she admitted, “I should’ve thought of that myself.”

  “Now, lemme see if I got this right. You been sittin’ on them stairs ever since Mrs. Kalkadonis and her daughter took off. That’d be yesterday, ’round two o’clock.” He was up to Sappone’s chest now, working quickly.

  “Actually,” Gadd confessed, “I was out there having a cigarette. After Ann took off, I went through the house looking for an ashtray and I couldn’t find one.” She shrugged and grinned. “People get nuts, you smoke in the house without permission. They buy extra life insurance, mail checks to the American Cancer Society, assault the smoker. I just had this picture of my client returning to a house filled with cigarette smoke. …” Gadd stopped abruptly. She watched Leuten Kitt tie off the twine just below the tops of Jilly’s shoulders, decided that Jilly looked like a bug trying to work its way out of a cocoon. “I wanted to get away from the apartment. I wanted to get away and I wanted to watch it at the same time. You know what I mean?”

  “What I know is I hope you cleaned up after yourself.” Leuten stood and stretched. “What y’all plan to do with him?”

  “I plan to throw him out the window. The one by the couch. I already oiled it up, just in case.”

  Gadd began to slap Sappone’s face, the slaps soft, but persistent. After a moment, Sappone’s eyes opened, then closed, then opened again. He looked directly at Gadd, who was kneeling beside him, her face only a couple of feet from his own, then twisted around to stare up at Leuten. At first, he appeared to be puzzled, as if there was something he’d forgotten, something important. Then he looked down at his body.

  “What the fuck is this?” he whispered.

  “This is hell, Jilly,” Gadd replied without hesitation. “And I wanna be the first to offer you an official welcome.”

  When Sappone responded by thrashing like a landed fish, Gadd kicked him lightly in the groin, watched him try to double over, try to bring his hands up, try and fail to protect himself in any way. “Still tender, eh? I always heard they were like that, though I wouldn’t know from actual experience.” She waited for Jilly’s eyes to come up, until she could look down into the fire, match it with her own. Then she got up and trotted off, returning a minute later with a small, white blanket.

  “You recognize this blanket, Jilly?” she asked. “You ever seen one like it before?”

  Sappone’s mouth worked silently, his eyes looking like they were about to explode. Gadd stared down at him, her expression cold and clinical, like a scientist examining a white rat in a laboratory. “I got this blanket from the Medical Examiner’s office,” she said, the lie coming easily. “It’s the one you wrapped around Theresa Kalkadonis before you threw her to her death. I think it’s only fitting that I tie it around your neck before I throw you to your own death.”

  “Who the fuck are you?”

  “Well, I’m tempted to say, Your worst nightmare. Only it’s been used too many times. So let’s try … Lorena Bobbitt on a real bad hair day.” Gadd dropped to one knee, put the center of the blanket against the top of Sappone’s head, began to work the edges around his shoulders. When he tried to bite her hand, she unholstered her .38 and tapped him lightly on the forehead. That stopped him long enough to get the blanket tied off beneath his jaw with the last piece of twine.

  “Man looks halfway between a Halloween ghost and the Mummy.” Leuten was standing with his back to the wall. He knew he was only a spectator here, that whatever he’d brought to the party had been overwhelmed by Guinevere Gadd and the baggage she carried. Not that he minded. Gadd was doing just fine without him. “Now what?” he asked.

  Gadd stood up, took a minute to admire her handiwork. “It’s like Christmas. You know, when you were a kid and you didn’t want it to be over.” She squatted down, grabbed the collar of Jilly’s shirt, and gave him an experimental tug. “I think I’m gonna need some help here.”

  “He gotta go feet first.” Leuten stepped forward and took Sappone’s left ankle in both hands. “The way you got him tied, his feet are the only things left to grab hold of.”

  Sappone didn’t really begin to struggle until his head bumped over the wooden saddle between the dining area and the living room. Then, as if someone had thrown a switch, he started to jerk uncontrollably. Gadd, though she recognized the involuntary nature of his convulsions, responded to the delay by kicking him several times.

  “The man appears like he’s speakin’ in tongues,” Leuten said. “You think he’s havin’ a blessed conversion?”

  Gadd listened for a moment, catching the nouns bitch, cunt, pig, whore surrounded
by the usual modifier, fucking. “I think he’s having something between an epileptic fit and a temper tantrum.” When he abruptly lost consciousness, she said, “Make it a fit,” then grabbed his ankle and went back to work.

  It took them another five minutes to get Jilly Sappone draped over the windowsill with his feet hanging outside. He was moaning softly and Gadd wasn’t sure he was awake. “Hey, Sappone,” she called, “you with us?” Crouching, she wrapped her arms around his shoulders, tilted him slightly, felt his torso begin to slide through. That brought a deeper moan, followed by a single word.

  “Please.” Sappone drew it out, his voice rising through the octaves like an air-raid siren in an old war movie.

  “Almost done.” Gadd let her weight settle back down. She looked at Leuten Kitt, started to smile, then saw Moodrow step into the room. “I don’t think you’re gonna need that,” she said, nodding at the gun in his hand.

  “Doesn’t look like it,” Moodrow admitted with a shrug. “Congratulations.”

  Leuten, hearing a voice behind him, jumped straight into the air, his body making a half turn before he touched down again. “Jesus Christ,” he shouted.

  “Stanley Moodrow, actually,” Moodrow said without looking away from Ginny Gadd. “And this is Betty Haluka. She’s an officer of the court.”

  Betty stepped out of the hallway and into the living room. She took a second to register the scene, her eyes moving from Leuten to Gadd to the open window. “I take it that’s Jilly Sappone hiding under the blanket,” she finally said. When Gadd failed to reply, she added, “Self-defense is gonna be a toughie here.”

  “How’d you get in this apartment?” Leuten demanded.

  “I used the keys somebody left in the locks.” Moodrow let his shoulders drop as he holstered his weapon. He was looking directly into Gadd’s eyes, reading the essential message. “You think we could talk this over? I mean, being as you’re gonna be the one doing the time, I wouldn’t mind seeing how far Jilly can bounce, but …”

  He took a step forward, trying to will himself into a dead run, but she was much too fast for him. Gadd came out of her crouch, heaving Sappone up and through the window before Moodrow got halfway across the room. Then the two of them, Gadd and Moodrow, their eyes still locked, shared the terror in Jilly’s scream until it was abruptly cut off when he crashed into a redwood table set out on Sid and Myra Kupferman’s balcony ten feet below.

  TWENTY-FOUR

  MOODROW AND BETTY, HAVING spent the night in Moodrow’s Lower East Side apartment after hours of questioning by city detectives, were preparing breakfast when Ginny Gadd rang the bell at nine o’clock on the following morning. Moodrow was chopping onions and peppers for an omelet while Betty flipped bacon slices in an ancient, cast-iron skillet. A thirteen-inch portable television sat on the kitchen table, tuned to CBS and a special report on what the media were alternately dubbing a tragedy or a fiasco as reporters struggled to make sense of the bloodbath that’d taken place in the north Bronx on the prior afternoon. This despite the visual aid supplied by a camera crew assigned by the networks to video the operation at the request of US Attorney Abner Kirkwood, a request made the day before he disappeared.

  “Good morning,” Gadd said when Moodrow opened the door, “I just thought I’d come over, let you know what I was doing.” She grinned. “Before I actually go ahead and do it.”

  Moodrow nodded, the wheels already beginning to turn. What she ought to be doing—and what wouldn’t be worth mentioning—was trying to ease her way out of the lunacy that’d taken place in Ann Kalkadonis’s apartment. Jilly Sappone had survived the fall, his injuries limited to a dislocated shoulder, a pair of severely swollen testicles, and an attitude that bordered on genuine psychosis. For now, the cops, happy to have him, weren’t making too much of a fuss. For now.

  “C’mon in,” he said, “have some breakfast. We’re watching the video.”

  He didn’t bother to specify which video and Gadd didn’t ask. Instead, she handed him a copy of the Daily News, said, “Check out the headline,” as she walked into the kitchen and greeted Betty.

  “‘BRONX BLOODBATH.’ ” Moodrow read the words aloud as he followed Gadd. “‘Botched bust leads to butchery.’ ” He tossed the paper on the table, went back to his vegetables. “How do you like your omelets, hard or runny?”

  Gadd was about to suggest a middle ground of some kind when the face of George Johnson appeared on the screen. Johnson, his deep, gravelly voice instantly recognizable after twenty years in the television news business, had a reputation for never smiling on the air. Today his long, bony face seemed especially grave as he informed his audience that the death toll had risen to sixteen, including four New York City cops and two innocent bystanders, one of them a child.

  “For the next half hour,” he intoned, “we will go through the videotape, a frame at a time if need be, in an effort to reconstruct the actual sequence of events.”

  Moodrow, with a sigh, picked up the cutting board and carried it to the kitchen table. Cops were dead and he was going to have to watch, feeling somehow responsible, as all cops do whenever a cop goes down. Gadd was already seated. She looked at him for a moment, then turned back to the television as the video began to run.

  On the screen, a gray van, a Ford Econoline, entered what appeared to be a deserted street. It moved slowly for a hundred yards or so, until somebody in the control room stopped the tape.

  “That van, that gray van, was carrying more than two hundred kilos of pure Asian heroin.” Johnson’s voice-over carried a near perfect mix of excitement and concern. “It was registered to a company called the Ching Hua Trading Corporation. Ching Hua Trading is owned by a man named On Luk Sun who was eventually captured inside the van. Mr. Sun is a trade representative for mainland China with offices in Beijing and New York.”

  The van began to move again, proceeding another fifty feet before a second van pulled out of a parking space blocking the way. At the same time, a third van entered the street from behind and screeched to a halt a few feet from the gray van’s back door. Within seconds, men were pouring out into the streets, firing on the gray van with a mix of assault rifles and 12-gauge shotguns.

  “Okay, let’s stop it right here. These two vehicles, this red van and this blue van, held soldiers from the Carmine Stettecase crime family. This man—can we zoom in, Brian?—is Carmine Stettecase himself. He and his boys were there to steal the heroin, a fact unknown to the NYPD, the FBI, and the DEA, all of whom were represented on the scene, all of whom expected a common drug deal. Unfortunately for Mr. Stettecase, the gray van was heavily armored. The men you see falling in the street were hit by ricocheting rounds from their own weapons.”

  As the video began to roll again, Moodrow started to rise, coming halfway out of the seat before settling back down. He shook his head, muttered, “What a mess, what a fucking mess.” A dozen men and women, city cops, poured from doorways up and down the street, responding automatically to the sound of gunfire while the leaderless feds (and their team of rooftop sharpshooters) held back. At the same time, the door to a brick warehouse in the middle of the block opened and On Luk’s remaining troops charged into the street, firing as they came. Stettecase’s soldiers (Carmine was dead by this time), seeing themselves surrounded, first tried to get to their vans. When that failed, they began to shoot at the cops who were already being fired on by On Luk’s men. Then somebody opened up from the roof and, within seconds, the scene descended into utter chaos. It stayed that way for several minutes, until the video camera took a direct hit and the screen went black.

  “There are questions here.” Johnson’s face reappeared. He was hunched forward, leaning over his desk. “Questions that demand answers. Last night, the bodies of three men, FBI Special Agent in Charge Karl Holtzmann, United States Attorney Abner Kirkwood, and Special Agent Robert Ewing, were discovered near an isolated house in western New Jersey. Karl Holtzmann was supposed to command the federal team.” Johnson paused, to
ok a deep breath, turned into a camera positioned to his left. “Yesterday afternoon, a fugitive named Gildo Sappone was captured by a private investigator in Manhattan. Sappone had known connections to the Stettecase crime family.” The camera moved in until Johnson’s head filled the screen. “Did Gildo Sappone, as rumors suggest, have something to do with the New Jersey killings? What effect did Karl Holtzmann’s absence have on the Bronx disaster, and who, if anybody, was in charge? Was the FBI protecting Gildo Sappone, the man who kidnapped, then murdered, Theresa Kalkadonis? After a brief commercial break, we’ll be joined in our studios by three experts. …”

  Moodrow shut off the television. “Enough is enough,” he said. When neither Gadd nor Betty disagreed, he rose and carried the cutting board to a counter between the sink and the stove. “I think I’ve lost my appetite,” he announced.

  “You’re not blaming yourself?” Betty turned on the light under a second skillet. “You’ve got a bad habit of doing that.” She dropped a chunk of butter into the pan, watched it begin to melt.

  “No, no, it’s something else.” He began to chop at the onions and peppers on the cutting board, then stopped abruptly and looked over at Gadd. “You listen to that tape again?”

  “Of course.” A quick grin opened Gadd’s face. Moodrow had expected her to do what he would have done under the same circumstances. In a way, it was the ultimate compliment, one she’d never gotten from any of her NYPD partners. Or from her husband. “And you’re right. Not only is there no mention of a rip-off, at one point somebody—I think it was Carmine, but I’m still not sure who’s who—says they’ve got all the money together.”

  Moodrow went back to his chopping. “It had to say that,” he called over his shoulder. “Otherwise, the feds would’ve been prepared for what actually went down.” Finished, he laid the knife on the counter. Betty was stirring a bowl of scrambled eggs into the skillet and the hiss and crackle of the cool, yellow liquid hitting the hot pan held his attention for a moment. “So, who got the money?” he finally asked.