“Forget it, MacAullif. We’re way beyond that. I got a lead. The guy who lives at this address could be pay dirt.”
“What makes you think so?”
“His wife doesn’t like the widow.”
“What widow?”
“Jersey Girl.”
“The one you stole the gun from?”
“Is this a secure line?”
“Yeah, right. Like the department bugs my calls. Listen, dipshit, I don’t know what you’re up to, but you’re all out of favors. You don’t want me to slam down the phone, start making sense.”
“Jersey Girl rang the front doorbell. Apparently the man of the house wasn’t home, because his wife came out and tried to rip her tits off.”
“A cat fight?”
“Not really. All talk and no action.”
“That’s disappointing.”
“Can you find out who the guy is?”
“Why?”
“I’d like to know if he killed her boyfriend because he’s hot for her bod.”
“You’ve got the guy’s address. Why don’t you look him up yourself?”
“I’d like more than his name.”
“Like what?”
“I’d like to know if he’s in the mob.”
“Oh, great.”
“One more thing.”
“One more thing? You ask me to trace a mobster, and you want one more thing?”
“You’ll like this. Jersey Girl. The naked girl. The girl with the nice tits.”
“What about her?”
“Wouldn’t you like to know who she is?”
“Don’t you know?”
“She lives over someone’s garage. It’s not that easy to trace. But I got her license plate number.” I took out my notebook, read it to him. “Could you run it?”
“Just in case I get curious,” MacAullif said sarcastically. “Thank you so much.”
“My pleasure.”
“So, what did you do with the gun?”
“I’ve still got it.”
“You hesitated before you said that. Is that because you’re lying?”
“Wanna see it?”
“I most definitely do not wanna see it. I wanna maintain plausible deniability. You remember me telling you if you had any gun I didn’t know about, it would behoove you to get rid of it?”
“Do cops actually say ‘behoove?’”
“Hey, asshole.”
“I’ll get rid of it, I’ll get rid of it.” Visions of the ballistics expert danced in my head. “What’s the extradition agreement between New York and New Jersey?”
“Extradition?”
“If I get arrested in New York, and I’m wanted in Jersey, do I have to go?”
“Doesn’t matter.”
“Why not?”
“You’ll be there before you can raise the point.”
“I have my lawyer on speed dial.”
“Ever dial a phone with your hands cuffed behind your back?”
“Can’t say as I have.”
“Better practice.”
31
“IT’S DEFINITELY FROM THE SAME GUN.”
“You’re kidding!”
The ballistics expert shook his head. “There’s no doubt about it. Here, look at these pictures from the comparison microscope. See how the striations line up? Here’s an enlargement. You see that?”
I didn’t. I had stopped looking, stopped listening. My head was coming off. All my worst dreams were coming true. Well, there weren’t cops in his office, but aside from that. I gave the guy his two hundred bucks and got the hell out of there.
I had to get rid of the gun. That was one thing MacAullif said that made sense. And he didn’t even know it was the murder weapon. As far as he was concerned, it would merely seal the deal on impersonating an officer. He didn’t know it would make me an accomplice after the fact to murder.
The charges were really piling up.
Which put me in a horrible position. I couldn’t keep it, and I couldn’t get rid of it.
By rights, I should give it back to Jersey Girl. Then the cops could catch her with it and prosecute her for it. Only they couldn’t anymore, because I’d taken it away from her. And who was to say the one I gave her back was the same one she gave me?
That was just for starters. Even if I had given her back the same one she gave me, I was still impersonating an officer when I did it. And by doing that, I had probably fucked up the evidence so badly that she could never be prosecuted, though I certainly could.
So the only way to give it back to her was to give it back to her without her knowledge. Plant it in her car, for instance. Only that wouldn’t work, because she would still tell people about the police officer who took her gun. She would claim he must have planted the gun on her. Which was what she was telling me to begin with, only this time it would be true. True, but irrelevant, since planting the gun was only to put things back the way they were to begin with, and maintain the status quo.
I wondered if I should do that.
I wondered if I should drive back to Jersey.
I wondered if I should walk back to Jersey and drop the gun in the Hudson River from the middle of the George Washington Bridge.
I stopped in at the Westside Stationery Store and bought a manila mailer, the padded kind with the bubble wrap inside. I put the gun in it, sealed it up.
I went to the post office, got a Priority Mail label, addressed it to myself, General Delivery, Westport, Connecticut. I put my real address as the return address.
I went to the Priority Mail self-service machine where you can avoid the line by dipping your credit card and weighing it yourself.
I dipped my credit card, answered some questions. I lied to the machine. It asked me if I was mailing anything dangerous and I said no.
I pulled out the postage label, slapped it on the package, and dropped it in the bin.
I immediately felt a sense of relief, and it wasn’t just that the pistol hadn’t discharged when it hit the bottom. It wasn’t loaded, but even so. Even an unloaded gun could have that one, stray shell in the chamber that blows your head off. Not this time. I walked out of the post office a free and unarmed man.
I stood on the sidewalk, took a deep breath. The sun was shining. It was a beautiful day.
I was totally screwed. I had taken a chance that Jersey Girl was an innocent victim of circumstance who just happened to have her boyfriend’s gun. Instead she was a lying scheming murderess, which put my actions, always questionable, in a much less legal light. I had not impersonated a police officer to prove to my satisfaction that the girlfriend of the murdered man in fact had nothing to do with his demise. No, I had impersonated a police officer in order to suppress the murder weapon, making it next to impossible to convict the woman who was almost certainly guilty. I had a feeling the police would be apt to frown on that.
My cell phone rang. I nearly peed my pants. I was that wound up. I whipped it out (my cell phone), and flipped it open.
It was MacAullif.
“Tony Gallo.”
“Huh?”
“The name you wanted. It’s Tony Gallo.”
“Oh.”
“That’s right. Runs a salvage company down by the docks. That’s ‘salvage company’ in quotes. Tony Gallo is connected. In a big way. So big I don’t even have to look him up. The guy’s a mob boss. A notorious mob boss. With a rather nasty disposition.”
“Great.”
“Isn’t it. So if that bare-titted broad you’re infatuated with is involved with Tony Gallo, she’d be a hell of a good person to stay away from.”
“I see.”
“I ran her plate, by the way. She’s Angela Russo. In case the name comes up, you’ll know to run the other direction.”
“Angela Russo.”
“Christ, he’s in love. I’m not kidding, here. The girl’s living poison, you give her a wide berth.”
“Yeah.”
“You get rid of that gun?”
“Yes, I did.”
“Good. Even if it’s not the gun that killed her boyfriend, you want nothing to do with it. You want nothing to do with her. Just pretend she doesn’t exist.”
MacAullif hung up.
I flipped my cell phone shut.
Oh boy.
Jersey Girl’s married boyfriend was Tony Gallo, and Tony Gallo was a mob boss, and not just any mob boss, but a mob boss so scary, MacAullif had not only warned me off him, but also off her. And that was without even knowing she had the gun that killed her boyfriend.
All right. This was it. I’d painted myself into a corner where I couldn’t do anything because every move was bad.
Which was actually good. It didn’t matter what I did, because any move was apt to be fatal.
So I could do anything.
32
TONY GALLO’S ‘SALVAGE COMPANY’ LISTED an address in Newark. I cruised by. It was an empty lot.
The address had a phone number. I dialed it.
A voice answered with a Jersey twang. “Speak to me.”
“Tony Gallo.”
“Who’s calling?”
“A friend.”
“Then why don’t I know you?”
“Are you Tony Gallo?”
“No.”
“That’s why.”
There was a silence on the line. Small victory. If salvage meant what I thought it did, I’d bluffed out a wiseguy.
After a moment the voice said, “What do you want with Tony?”
“It’s personal.”
“Then call him at home.”
“I can’t call him at home.”
“Why not?”
“It’s personal. I need to have a talk with him without involving his wife.”
“Hold on.”
I waited half a minute.
A voice of authority said, “Who’s this?”
“Mr. Gallo?”
“Who are you?”
“You and I should have a little talk.”
“About what?”
“Your girlfriend.”
“You son of a bitch.”
“If I were a son of a bitch, I’d be calling you at home. I’m calling you at work so as not to make trouble.”
“Listen, I don’t know who you are or what your game is, but you picked the wrong guy. You make trouble for me, you’re making trouble for yourself. That is not a smart thing to do.”
“I’m not making trouble. I’m trying to help you.”
“You got a funny way of doing it.”
“You got girl trouble. I could help you out with that.”
“I don’t have girl trouble.”
“That’s not what your wife thinks.”
“What?”
“Didn’t she tell you? How Miss Hotpants rang your doorbell and she chased her away.”
“Are you kidding me?”
“She didn’t tell you, did she? That’s kind of creepy. If she called you on the carpet, demanded to know what was going on, that’s one thing. But sitting on it, keeping quiet, gotta start you thinking. What’s her game?”
“When was this?”
“Yesterday afternoon.”
“How do you know?”
“Wanna have a little talk?”
“We’re talking now.”
“Not on the phone.”
“Why not?”
“I don’t trust your line.”
“About a family matter?”
“How do I know that’s all it is?”
“You called me.”
“So?”
“What’s your angle?”
“Not on the phone.”
There was a silence on the line. The guy was clearly not used to people standing up to him.
“All right. Where are you?”
I told him.
“Okay, there’s diner five miles south on the left hand side, just past the mall. Be there in fifteen minutes.”
I stuck the cell phone back in my pocket and pulled out. Wondered if I was heading into a trap. A diner was where The Sopranos ended, the last we ever saw of Tony Soprano and his clan. Not to say that they died there, what with the ambiguity of the ending. Still, if I walked in the door and the jukebox was playing “Don’t Stop Believing”, I was going to freak out.
I drove south, keeping my eye on the odometer and wondering just how many diners there happened to be on the left side of the road. Not to worry. The shiny aluminum tube with the neon Diner sign had to be it.
I got out and glanced around the parking lot for any henchmen, gunmen, snipers, marksmen, saboteurs, cronies, hitmen, or thugs. I didn’t see any, but that didn’t mean they weren’t there.
I also didn’t see the man I was supposed to meet. Of course, I didn’t know what he looked like. One small flaw in the plan. But not a real problem.
I walked in the front door of the diner, struck a pose, and glanced purposefully around. I figured I didn’t have to know him, he’d spot me. I figured right. A man in a booth halfway down the row stood up, cocked an inquiring eye in my direction.
I walked over, said, “Mr. Gallo?”
“Yeah.”
I extended my hand. “Mr. Smith.”
I don’t know if he believed it or not, but he sat back down.
I slid into the booth across from him. “You want to talk here?”
“I want coffee.”
“And you waited for me? How nice.”
“Don’t be an asshole.” He waved the waitress over, said, “Coffee.”
“Two,” I said.
He was a burly man in a suit and tie with a full head of curly, black hair, despite seeming close to fifty. His face, rounded but hard, seemed vaguely familiar. Like someone I recognized from the newspapers or TV, most likely a story on some indictment or investigation.
“All right,” he said. “What’s this all about?”
“A girl with the body of a porn star came to see you last night.”
“The hell she did.”
“Your son answered the door. She asked for you, but he came back with your wife. She offered to use the girl’s body parts for origami.”
“What girl?”
“Her name’s Angela Russo. Vinnie Carbone’s girlfriend.”
His eyes flicked.
And the penny dropped.
I knew where I’d seen him before.
Going into the motel room next to the one I was staking out.
I tried not to betray my recognition and said calmly, “Mean anything to you?”
“What?”
“The girl’s name.”
“Can’t say as it does.”
“How about her boyfriend?”
He measured his answer. “I knew him. Not well, but I knew who he was. He did odd jobs for people. Sometimes he did them for me.”
“In the ‘salvage’ business?”
He looked at me sharply. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
“I looked for your company. I couldn’t find it.”
“You probably got it wrong.”
“Yeah, that’s probably it. So you don’t know Jersey Girl?”
“Who?”
“Sorry. Angela Russo. Vinnie’s girlfriend. You know, Vinnie, the guy who sometimes worked for you.”
“I don’t like your attitude. You’re here because you said you had something you didn’t want to spill in front of my wife. That sounded bad, but it turns out it isn’t. You don’t know dick.”
“You were meeting a girl at a motel.”
His eyes flicked again. “Says who?”
“It doesn’t matter.”
He stared at me. “What?”
“It doesn’t matter who’s making these charges. What matters is whether they’re making them to your wife. I’m not, so I’m your friend. But other people might. So, why don’t you and I cooperate and see that doesn’t happen.”
“That sounds very much like a threat.”
“If you listen, you’ll see it’s just the
opposite. I mean, come on, think about it. If that were a threat, I’d be asking for money. I’m not asking for money. I don’t want money. I may be able to help you. But it’s hard, with you thinking everyone’s out to get you.”
The waitress returned, slid coffee in front of us.
I dumped milk in mine, stirred it around.
He’d banged two packets of sugar against his hand, tore off the ends, dumped it in.
We stirred our coffee, sized each other up.
“What’s your angle?” he said.
I was afraid he’d ask me that. I didn’t have one. At least not one I could tell him.
“I’m sweet on the girl.”
“What?”
“That’s my angle. I like the girl.”
“You’re too old for her.”
“I thought you didn’t know her.”
“I don’t know her. I’m going by what you said. Body like a porn star.”
I shrugged. “There’s old porn stars.”
He looked at me sideways. “You’re kind of weird.”
“You don’t know the half of it. I like this girl. I don’t want her to get hurt. Someone hurt her boyfriend. I’m hoping it wasn’t you.”
“That’s silly.”
“Not at all. Her boyfriend gets killed and she comes to your house. Rings your doorbell, pisses off your wife. Hard to believe she just came to cry on your shoulder. More like why’d you kill my guy?” I stuck a finger in his face. “Unless you were having an affair with her. Unless she was the girl you were meeting at the motel.”
He scowled. “How many times do I have to tell you. I wasn’t meeting any girl at any motel.”
“Then what were you doing there?”
“What?”
“What were you doing at the motel if you weren’t meeting a girl?”
“Wait a minute, wait a minute. What are you talking about? I wasn’t at any motel.”
“Ever?”
“Huh?”
“I didn’t say when this was. You haven’t been to a motel recently, say within the last month?”
“Why should I remember that?”
“How hard can it be? You live in a nice house, why should you go to a motel unless you were shacking up. Which I would expect you to remember.”
Tony thought that over. “All right, asshole. You made your pitch. I got nothing to say. You wanna talk to my wife, talk to my wife.” He pointed his finger in my face. “But it will not be conducive to your health. You know what I mean?”
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