Heavyset, with a scowling Easter Island head that even on his thick body seemed to be far too big, Winston Laidlaw wore a scowl that had nothing to do with the events of the moment. It was his perpetual look. Laidlaw was a senior partner in one of the city’s most exclusive accounting firms, a major Republican campaign contributor and fund-raiser, and the owner of an impressive string of horses, including one, Governor’s Friend, that was talked about as Triple Crown material. The people who did business with him rarely had anything positive to say about the experience. He was regarded as a force to be reckoned with, but no one ever looked forward to reckoning with it.
He saw the dark-haired man approaching him but zeroed in on Jeffrey instead. “What’s going on here, Blaine?” he demanded in a tone that conveyed accusation without anger.
“She’s in the office,” Jeffrey said. “I was just with her.”
Laidlaw’s eyes moved from Jeffrey to Fiore and then back again, where they held for a moment, as though he were calculating already what would be the simplest way to make all these extraneous people go away. Then he stepped past Jeffrey and Fiore, bulling toward the office door.
“She seems to have been raped,” Fiore said, stopping the man in his tracks.
Laidlaw turned on him. “Who are you?” he demanded.
“Chet Fiore.”
“And who seems to have raped her?” He put a sneering emphasis on the word seems.
“His name is George.”
“George what?”
“You don’t need to know that,” Fiore said.
The small dark eyes in Laidlaw’s immense face burned like embers under ashes. The identity of the boy who raped his daughter was something he did need to know, and he had no experience at all of having his will thwarted. “Where is he?” he demanded.
“I sent him home.”
Laidlaw took a step forward, but Fiore held his ground, waiting with that masterful patience he had exhibited with the daughter. There was a well-circulated and fairly well-corroborated story about a subordinate Laidlaw had thrown through a plate-glass window. There were stories about him knocking over occupied chairs and flinging tables at people who crossed him. You could practically see the waves of rage coming off him like heat off a pavement.
Fiore must have seen it, too, but everything about him said he was a match and more for this man’s wrath. It wasn’t simply a matter of confidence, although confidence had a lot to do with it. He had seen this film already, his eyes seemed to say. He knew how it ended. “She went upstairs with him,” he said. “That part was consensual. She’s going to college in the fall. Do you want a trial?”
Now it was Laidlaw’s turn to keep his own counsel.
“You don’t,” Fiore said. “Take her home.”
Laidlaw said nothing because there was nothing that could possibly be said. He stormed to the office door and pushed through.
Jeffrey followed him in.
Amy said, “Daddy please,” the moment Laidlaw entered the office, and then she said, “I asked him to call Mom.”
Laidlaw said, “Your mother’s out somewhere. Let’s go.”
Amy started crying again. “I’m staying with Mom,” she protested.
Laidlaw said, “We’ll talk about that in the car.”
When Laidlaw took the girl out, Jeffrey realized that Fiore hadn’t come back into the office when he did. He was alone with Phyllis. It seemed, in the cluttered emptiness of the office, that the episode was over. Although it hardly seemed possible it could be.
“Who the hell is that guy?” he asked.
He knew she would know whom he meant.
“I believe he’s a gangster,” Phyllis said.
PART TWO
4
Chet Fiore’s Mercedes wasn’t on the street when he came out of Stasny’s. What he saw instead was a nondescript Plymouth idling across the street a few doors down.
Fiore smiled to himself. Jimmy must have spotted the tail. He was clever, Jimmy. He spotted the tail and he drove off, giving them the choice between following an empty car or waiting here. They chose to wait. No problem. He and Jimmy had pulled this trick before.
Hunching his shoulders against the slanting sleet, Fiore headed west toward Lexington and then across to Madison, where he turned north, putting the wind at his back. The sleet that had been biting at his face now nipped at his neck, edging down under his collar. He felt reasonably certain the cops in the Plymouth were right behind him but he didn’t bother to look. One of them probably got out to follow on foot, with his partner inching along the curb behind him. It didn’t matter what they did because he had to assume they were there whether he saw them or not.
Fiore liked the idea of making the cops work for their paychecks. He imagined they were surprised when they saw his car drive away without him, even more surprised to see the subject of their surveillance leave on foot. If they hadn’t been good enough to tail him here without being seen, how they imagined they’d manage it now on nearly deserted ice-covered streets was a mystery that couldn’t be explained except in terms of their dogged stupidity.
Here’s how stupid. He knew they were there and they knew he knew it. Yet they would follow him anyway. Apparently they worked on the assumption that other people were as lead-headed as they were. And why not? The only way anyone gets to go to jail in this country is by being dumber than the cops, and the prisons are full. Which proves something.
Despite the ice slithering down his neck onto his shoulders, Fiore was enjoying himself as his mind formed a picture of the detective who got stuck outside following on foot on a night like this. He could almost hear the man cursing into the microphone under his coat while his partner lagged back in the warmth of the car, enjoying his good fortune. Seniority, Fiore figured. The older man got to stay in the car. Someday the younger one would be older and he’d have a new partner and it would be his turn to stay inside. It all worked out in the end.
Unless of course the prick caught pneumonia and died before that. Which would be fine, too.
Fiore walked north on Madison Avenue for three blocks, and then turned right, heading back to Lexington. He had just made up his mind that the men following him were federal agents rather than cops. Cops would have packed it in and gone to bed by this point.
He had been walking for almost twenty minutes now, making slow time on the slippery sidewalks, stopping at all the corners to wait for the lights to change. Chet Fiore was a law-abiding citizen. Besides, the cold didn’t bother him. Weather never bothered him. It was a matter of principle. There were Eskimos living at the North Fucking Pole and it didn’t seem to bother them any, so what sense did it make to moan about a pathetic little New York snowstorm?
When he got back to Lexington Avenue Fiore entered the subway station, where he bought a token and went through the turnstile. He quickened his pace down the stairs to the downtown platform. Somewhere over his head, he figured, the agent on foot was frantically waving his partner over so that they could get together in the car and analyze their options. If one of them took the train he wouldn’t have any backup. If both of them took the train they wouldn’t have a car. The third option was to chuck it in, have a few drinks, get laid, and then file a report claiming that the subject went home and to bed. That’s what cops would have done, so if one or both of these slick-as-sandpaper lawmen showed up on the train, that would clinch it. Feds.
The headlight of an approaching train hung over the track, motionless in the distance. It hovered a moment and then floated through the darkness of the tunnel, pushing the clatter of steel wheels ahead of it. A pair of Puerto Rican kids laughed at something and punched each other’s shoulders, then leaned out over the edge of the platform to confirm the train. People beefed a lot about kids these days but these two looked okay. To tell the truth, most kids were okay. Chet Fiore believed that to be a fact. Hell, when Fiore was these kids’ age, he had already been in trouble half a dozen times. And everyone he knew had been in and out of trouble at
least as often. So how were things any different now?
The truth of the matter was that none of the stuff people said about the youth of today mattered. Because kids were kids. It was as simple as that. Chester Charles Fiore was thirty-five years old and he didn’t have a single conviction on his record, except for some meaningless juvenile stuff, which was all off the record by now anyway. And when he was a kid he had been as bad as they come. So you never could tell anything.
Fiore couldn’t remember the last time he had taken a subway, except for the fact it seemed to him it had only cost a buck. Which put it a long time ago. He got on a car near the middle of the train, and when he turned to look back at the platform he saw a man in a soggy black raincoat racing down the stairs and jumping into the first car just before the doors closed. One of the agents? It was possible. Give the guy credit, Fiore thought, and then put him out of his mind.
He waited a couple of stops and then dialed a number on his cellular phone. “Jimmy there?” he said when a man answered. In another minute Jimmy Angelisi, who had been his driver five years now and had been a friend of his ever since they were kids on City Island together, came on the line. “It’s me,” Fiore said. “I’m at Lex in the Forties. How’s twelve-thirty?”
Jimmy said, “Twelve-thirty’s fine,” and that was the end of the conversation.
Cellular phones were worse than regular phones because anyone could listen. You didn’t even need a tap. All you needed was a two-bit scanner anyone could pick up at RadioShack. But even with a regular phone you had to assume the worst. Anyone who did time because of something he said over the phone deserved every second he was in. It was the stupidity thing all over again. Fiore talked to his wife and his sister on the phone and that was it. Except once in a while for one or two sentences like this, which no one could understand.
Twelve-thirty meant wherever the train was supposed to be at twelve-thirty. Jimmy had a subway schedule and he’d know. Al Gianelli showed Fiore the trick when Fiore was just a kid. You take the train out to the end of the world and there’s a car waiting for you. There’s no car for the cops, of course, and that’s the end of the tail. You tell them to have a pleasant night and you go about your business.
Fiore checked his watch. He still had a long way to go. Twelve-thirty would bring him out somewhere near Sheepshead Bay.
Which was perfect. Noel Garver lived in Brooklyn.
Wally Schliester knew he was screwed even before the train pulled in at Grand Central, which was the first stop it made. He had moved back a few cars until he could see Fiore through the glass in the next car and then he radioed his partner. “This isn’t going to work,” he said. “We’re gonna need backup.”
Gogarty had no interest in backup, partly because he knew he wouldn’t get any and partly because he didn’t like sharing anything with anyone. Especially something like this. A mug like Chet Fiore shows up at the invites-only birthday party of the teenage daughter of one of New York City’s fanciest bankers. If you don’t find that interesting, you’re in the wrong line of work.
From his car, Gogarty radioed back, “It’s gonna fucking work, boychik. Ixnay on the ackupbay.”
Schliester was tired of being called boychik. Maybe he should have said something about it a long time ago, but Gogarty was a good partner. Schliester believed in letting things ride. Well, not all the time, but whenever you could. Besides, he was as fascinated as Gogarty with this curious development. He wanted to see what came next.
A few minutes later he radioed again to tell his partner that he was leaving Grand Central.
“See, nothing to worry about. I’m only a couple blocks behind,” Gogarty said. “Bastard thinks he’s slick. He’s not that slick.”
In fact, Gogarty was more than a couple blocks back. He was practically where he was the last time they talked. He had used the dome light and the siren to run the lights down Lexington Avenue, but he spun out still north of Grand Central when he had to jump on the brakes because a taxi ignored the siren and kept coming crosstown, cutting across the intersection right in front of him. Gogarty turned a full one-eighty on the ice and then sailed half a block down Lexington Avenue backward. No harm done. He enjoyed driving, and chasing after a subway train made him feel like Gene Hackman in The French Connection. Except that Hackman didn’t have ice to deal with. So this was better, as far as that went.
Gogarty’s theory was that Fiore was heading for Little Italy, that Schliester could follow him on foot when he got off the train and then stay with him until Gogarty made it down there to hook up with him. Then the two of them would be able to continue the surveillance while Fiore got careless because he was sure he had given them the slip. He got his car turned around even before it came to a stop, which was, it seemed to him, a totally mellow, even artistic piece of driving. In this sense, when he told Schliester he was only a few blocks back, he wasn’t so much lying as making a rhetorical flourish because that’s where he would have been if it hadn’t been for that taxi. It didn’t matter. He’d make up time the rest of the way.
Schliester, on the other hand, doubted very much that the subject was headed for Little Italy. Chet Fiore had more lackeys, servants, and lieutenants to do his bidding than the King of Mesopotamia on his best day, so he wasn’t taking the subway for want of a ride. And he wasn’t counting on outrunning anyone on the BMT local. Obviously he had a plan, and Schliester already knew it was a better plan than his because he didn’t have a plan at all, just a jerk-assed adlib adjustment with no more thought behind it than scratching an itch.
This, more than anything else, was what surprised Wally Schliester about the federal Task Force on Organized Crime. They worked directly under a deputy U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York and they had nice offices. Terrific offices, in fact, down on the East River waterfront practically in the middle of the South Street Seaport. But no one ever thought ahead of the game. Schliester’s whole reason for taking a leave from police work and applying for a liaison assignment with the feds was to get away from the horse-blindered police mentality. Instead, he discovered in just a few short months that the only perceptible difference between the St. Louis Police Department he had left and the federal strike force he joined was that the strike force ate Chinese food instead of doughnuts.
Twenty minutes later he radioed Gogarty that his train was leaving the Canal Street station with Chet Fiore still on it. So much for Little Italy.
“Where’s he going?” Gogarty radioed back.
“Somewhere else. Where are you?”
It took a minute for Gogarty’s transmission to come back. He had to think about what he was going to tell his partner before he said anything. “All right, stay with him,” he radioed back. “I’m right behind you.”
More than half an hour later Schliester found himself coming up out of a subway station in the Crown Heights section of Brooklyn, where the stuff falling out of the sky was more like icicles than snowflakes. For what it was worth, he might as well have been back in St. Louis, on a wide boulevard lined with old, low buildings, none of them more than three stories high, with shuttered storefronts at street level. The only difference was that half the signs in the store windows were written in Jewish letters. He couldn’t read a single one of them, but he knew perfectly well what they said.
They said, Up yours, Wally Schliester.
A message, in other words, from Mr. Fiore.
Who, the moment he came up out of the subway, stepped into a dark Mercedes that was waiting for him at the curb, idling with its lights off. Fiore looked right into Schliester’s eyes and smiled at him. The car was moving the second the sonofabitch got in.
Schliester wasn’t about to smile back. He looked around the intersection. A Chevy, five or six years old, idled at the light, waiting to take a left onto Utica Avenue. Schliester grabbed for his shield case and ran toward it. “Federal agent,” he said. “I need your car.”
This wasn’t exactly hot pursuit and Schliester kne
w it. It was a routine surveillance, and nothing in the manuals permitted commandeering civilian vehicles for routine surveillance. On the other hand, they had Chet Fiore attending a banker’s party, so maybe it wasn’t routine after all. In any case, Wally Schliester was in no mood for fine distinctions. Not after that smug, self-satisfied, so-long-asshole smile. He was wet, he was cold, he had ridden a subway practically to the end of the line, and at the moment he wanted to make sure the well-dressed prick in the Mercedes had something to think about. He wanted more than that, but he would settle for that if he had to.
The kid behind the wheel looked like he was sixteen years old but Schliester figured that couldn’t be true even though he didn’t know how old you had to be to get a license in New York. The kid yanked on the door handle and slid over to the passenger seat.
“You’re going to have to get out,” Schliester said.
The kid said, “Are you nuts?”
Schliester could see the taillights of the Mercedes. He wanted to see more than that. He wanted to pull up alongside Chet Fiore and smile back. If that meant taking the kid with him, then that’s what it meant. He got in the car and stepped on the gas.
“Are we chasing the Benz?” the kid asked.
“We’re not chasing him,” Schliester said. “We’re following him.”
“Cool.”
Schliester hadn’t been aware that kids still said cool. Maybe in Brooklyn they did. It sounded like something from the sixties, like something his parents would say. He reached for his radio and asked Gogarty where he was.
“Where am I? Where are you?” the answer came back.
Schliester turned to the kid. “Where am I?” he asked.
“Utica Avenue,” the kid said. “He just turned onto Eastern Parkway.”
“Who the fuck is that?” Gogarty wanted to know.
“Who’s who?”
“Who are you talking to? You’re talking to someone. Who is it?”
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