“I can see that.”
“You gonna try it?”
“What the hell for? So he can’t see me either? How far does this go?”
“All the way down,” Aaron said.
Schliester hadn’t realized until that moment how steep a grade he was on. What he did realize was that the Mercedes could be practically anywhere, off the road in the darkness, and that he was probably speeding past it at this very second. Or this one. Or this.
He knew he was licked, and so he eased his foot onto the brake and let out a long, slow breath.
“Yeah, you’re right,” Aaron said, conceding defeat with stoic maturity. “You’ll never find him.” Then he said, “Oh, shit!”
Because the road had just turned and Schliester didn’t. It was an easy enough mistake to make. This part of the road, down at the bottom of the park, looked like the end of a ski jump. All the snow that fell higher up seemed to have washed down here, piling in soft, pillowy drifts that drew no distinction between what was road and what was path and what was neither.
Okay, no harm done. The Chevy simply stopped in a snowdrift like a kid jumping off the upper bunk into his father’s arms. Schliester radioed Gogarty, and Gogarty radioed for a tow truck.
A half mile up the hill, Chet Fiore and Jimmy Angelisi weren’t quite so lucky. Jimmy had pulled the Mercedes easily and expertly into a narrow little path that led to a pond, and then they both turned around to watch through the rear window as the Chevy sped past them. They knew it wouldn’t be back. But when Jimmy tried to back out, the wheels refused to do anything but spin. They got out to look, and when they did, they could hear the G-man calling his partner on his radio. He must have gotten out, too. They heard him say, “How long?” and then “Jesus, a half hour! Well, just tell them to hurry.”
Fiore wasn’t about to call a tow truck until the police tow truck was gone. And it didn’t get there in any half hour. It got there in an hour and a half.
Three in the morning was a hell of an hour to pay a visit, but it had to be done.
Maybe bash isn’t the right word for Jessica Blaine’s long-awaited birthday party at Stasny’s Friday nite. Maybe it is. No one’s talking about it, but three teenage girls from three of N’Yawk’s best families got thoroughly bashed in three private upstairs rooms.
Oh, let’s not be so polite about it. They were raped.
Raped, you say? Why aren’t we reading about this in the front pages of the paper? Why is it back here in Yours Truly’s society column?
Because if you’re connected the way Jeffrey Blaine is connected, you know how to hush these things up.
Noel Garver read that far and didn’t read further. It was the millionth time he had read the piece since it came out of his printer and he wasn’t sure he liked the tone. In fact, he knew he didn’t like it. It was supposed to be outraged and it was snippy. Snippy was all right for last year’s party, with little kids sucking the contents out of champagne bottles all night long. This was a different matter entirely. Rape is a felony and concealing a felony is a felony. For once Mr. Perfect had gone too far.
Garver, who had been pacing with the page in his hand as though it were a speech he was trying to memorize, flopped into the canvas-backed director’s chair next to the bar and let his head roll all the way back until he was looking at the ceiling. He could hear Sharon Lamm’s voice in his ear. Why do you have such a hard-on for Jeffrey Blaine? she asked.
He knew what the rest of her question meant, the part she hadn’t bothered to say. Jeffrey Blaine was a nice guy, a regular guy. He was a decent fellow, a good chap. He was okay. Everyone said so and it might even be true. This was no Ivan Boesky, no barbarian at the gate. He didn’t lead a fast life. Even this birthday party was no big deal after all. It wasn’t like he pulled strings to close down the Lincoln Tunnel so he could hold the party there. It wasn’t like he rented Yankee Stadium or Central Park. It was a restaurant, for Christ’s sake. Just a restaurant.
Alone in his living room, Garver got to his feet and resumed his pacing as he made the effort to put his thoughts back together and figure out just exactly what the big deal was. He made himself another drink and then got back to the question at hand.
And then the answer came to him. It was one thing to be a shark if you acted like a shark. If you had long white conical teeth and a dorsal fin. Blaine was awfully fucking rich for a nice guy, a regular guy, a decent fellow, a good chap. Nobody hated Jeffrey Blaine.
So Noel Garver had to do it for them.
His toes still hurt from being outside so long but the whiskey was warming the rest of him. When the doorbell rang, he pressed the buzzer without asking who it was and opened the front door an inch or two.
While he waited for the elevator to come up, he gulped down the last of the whiskey in his glass and poured himself another. Noel Garver drank cheap whiskey because he didn’t believe in wasting money on things like that. He grabbed the page he had left on the bar and let his eye run over it again. He didn’t like it any better this time, but he was hoping that by leaving Fiore’s arrival out of his account of the party, Fiore wouldn’t give him any trouble about publishing it. “It’s open,” he said when he heard the knock on the door.
Chet Fiore said, “I hope you didn’t waste your time writing anything, Mr. Garver.”
Garver handed him the pages and asked if he could get him a drink. Fiore folded the pages without looking at them and slipped them into his breast pocket.
“This is on your computer, isn’t it?” he asked.
“I didn’t mention you,” Garver said.
It was late, and after the fiasco in Prospect Park, Fiore wasn’t in the mood for nice distinctions. “You’re going to delete the file,” he said. “I’m going to watch you do it.”
5
Let me get this straight,” Dennis Franciscan was saying. “You took a train to Brooklyn and you commandeered a civilian vehicle.”
“I guess you could say commandeered,” Schliester conceded.
Franciscan was standing up, Schliester and Gogarty were not.
“No,” Franciscan said, “you don’t have to fucking guess. I did say commandeered. Is this something you do a lot of in St. Louis?”
“I don’t recall having done that in St. Louis, sir.”
“Your answer interests me, Stanley,” Franciscan said, slipping into his cross-examination mode. “Are you suggesting that commandeering a civilian vehicle is the kind of thing you might do but that might subsequently slip your mind?”
The only thing Franciscan knew about St. Louis was that the Cardinals played there, and the only thing he knew about the Cardinals was that Stan Musial used to play for them. So he had started calling Schliester Stan the Man the first day Schliester was assigned to the unit, Stanley when he was angry.
“No, I would remember that, sir,” Schliester said.
“Then when you say you don’t recall having commandeered a civilian vehicle, what you’re really saying is that you never actually did anything so incredibly fucking stupid in your whole pathetic, misspent life. That’s about right, isn’t it?”
“Yes, sir.”
“It’s about right?”
“It’s exactly right, sir.”
“Don’t give me that sir shit, Stanley. This isn’t the fucking police department.”
Franciscan turned around and walked all the way to the window. The sun wasn’t even up yet. He had gotten up in the middle of the night and come into the office the minute the night desk called to tell him what happened in Prospect Park.
Schliester and Gogarty looked at each other, which they could afford to do with Franciscan’s back turned. Schliester gestured with a movement of his head for Gogarty to say something. Gogarty shook his head. Schliester tried a more emphatic version of the same gesture. Gogarty rolled his eyes, which meant he was giving in. He took a deep breath and said, “That’s not really the point, about the car.”
Franciscan turned slowly. “That’s not what po
int?” he asked. “It’s the point I was making.”
Gogarty wasn’t the most assertive guy in the world, but if you rubbed him the wrong way, he started asserting. Franciscan had just rubbed him the wrong way. “And the point I was making,” Gogarty said, getting up out of his chair so that Franciscan would have to look up at him for a change, “is that we’ve been busting our asses trying to get something on Fiore and now we’ve got it. We’ve got him socializing with a very important Wall Street figure. I would say that connection is something worth knowing about.”
“You would?” Franciscan walked over to his desk. He looked down at the report he had made Gogarty file before he would even talk to him and studied it much longer than necessary. Then he looked up. “Where do I see in this that you saw the two of them together.”
“It was a private party,” Gogarty said.
Schliester said, “Invitations only.”
“Ah,” Franciscan said, “you saw the invitation.”
“Fuck you,” Gogarty said.
Dennis Franciscan was nominally Gogarty’s boss, in the sense that he was the head of the Organized Crime Bureau of the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York and the man to whom Gogarty and Schliester reported. But he wasn’t their boss in the chain of command, in the sense that he wasn’t an agent. You could say fuck you to him in a way you couldn’t to a ranking agent.
“Funny you should put it that way,” Franciscan said without bothering to take offense. “Because it seems to me you’ve already fucked me fairly well. Getting me up at three in the morning is the least part of it. Explaining why my expense report is going to include a line about fixing a car we don’t even own ranks a little bit higher.”
There was a knock on the door and Greg Billings came in without waiting to be asked. Billings was an assistant U.S. attorney who wore the same suit to work every day for a week, Monday through Friday, then switched to another suit the next week. The agents kept track until the cycle started the second time. They concluded that he owned four suits. “We lucked out,” Billings said. “Herskowitz signed a release.”
Franciscan wanted to know who the fuck Herskowitz was.
“The kid’s father.”
“And what did this cost us?”
Billings pulled a piece of paper out of his pocket and unfolded it. “One thirty-seven eighty-eight,” he said. “That’s with tax.”
“You paid the fucking tax?”
Federal agents can have the local taxes waived on federal business.
“It didn’t seem like the kind of thing we wanted records on, Mr. Franciscan.”
“Good thinking,” Franciscan said grudgingly. He wanted Billings to leave, but the man looked down at the bill in his hands, studying it.
“They aligned the wheels,” he said, “and they tightened the front-end struts.”
“Do I look like I’m in the fucking used-car business? Why do I need to know this?”
The receipts quickly disappeared back into Billings’s pocket. “No, sir. I just wanted you to get the picture. I think most of the damage was from before but I wasn’t going to press it. We got off lucky.”
Billings was a competent man. He was a lawyer but he thought like an agent. He covered his ass. Franciscan liked that. He just didn’t want him in the room anymore. He waved Billings out and turned back to Schliester and Gogarty. “All right,” he said, “we’re going to forget this sorry little idiocy ever happened. No thanks to either of you two, it’s dead and buried. Now get the hell out of my office and find yourselves something to do.”
Gogarty and Schliester started for the door.
“And stay the fuck away from Chet Fiore,” Franciscan added.
It was Schliester who turned around. “Wait a minute,” he said. “This needs follow-up. We can’t drop the surveillance now.”
“We’re not dropping it now,” Franciscan said. “You two assholes dropped it last night. We’re letting it lie there.”
The two of them found Elaine Lester standing in the corridor when they came out of Franciscan’s office.
“What?” she said. “He’s not following up?”
She looked like someone who hadn’t been to bed. Her hair was hanging kind of loose. Which wasn’t a bad look for her.
“Do you even know what you’re talking about?” Gogarty asked. He knew Lester’s reputation in the department, but that didn’t make him like her any better. He started to walk away and Schliester followed.
Elaine fell in step beside them. She had just finished a successful prosecution of half a dozen semicompetent non-Islamic terrorists who had come surprisingly close to killing an awful lot of people in, of all places, the Port Authority bus terminal. She worked as hard after the verdict as before and ended up with maximum sentences for all of them. Now she felt restless, and she was looking for something else to get her teeth into.
“I hear you had an interesting sighting last night,” she said.
Gogarty stopped walking. “What the hell are you doing here at five o’clock in the morning?” he asked.
“I was notified,” she said. “What’s that got to do with anything?”
Notified? Elaine Lester had no business being notified. She probably bribed the night man to call her if anything happened. Give her credit. She was a go-getter. Gogarty just didn’t like being what she went and got.
“Go back to bed, Elaine,” he said. “If you’re too horny to sleep, take my partner with you.”
This time she didn’t follow when he walked away. Neither did Schliester for that matter. “Fine with me,” he said. “I’ve got nothing better to do.”
She fixed him for a couple seconds with those blue eyes. Nice eyes, in fact. Very intense. Then she turned a hundred eighty degrees and marched back down the corridor.
For a lawyer, she had a damned fine ass.
Chet Fiore laughed when he heard Gus Benini’s account of the goings-on in Crown Heights. Gus had a way with a story. Everyone laughed when Gus told one of his stories.
They were back in Seppi’s on Elizabeth Street. Gus Benini usually had breakfast at home before he did anything in the morning. This was early for him. It was early for all of them.
“First the U.S. attorney shows up,” Gus said, walking in front of Fiore’s table. Gus never sat down. He said it made him nervous. He weighed only a hundred and thirty pounds and he was already as jumpy as a cat, hands flying everywhere, eyes everywhere, feet always moving. So nobody was inclined to press the issue, because if anything made Gus nervous on top of what he was like already, the man would have turned into a complete mosquito. He stood up even in restaurants. He never ate anyway, except at home, so it didn’t matter.
“He says he wants to talk to the kid’s father,” Gus continued, “on account of the car’s in his name. And he’s got a ton of papers he brings with him. Which he can wipe his ass with because the Jew’s not signing nothing till he talks to his rabbi. This guy’s not a Jew for nothing, right? Okay, so the rabbi comes in, a hundred years old with a beard like fucking Castro. Now the U.S. attorney, it’s this kid, the one that gave Billy Beans that hard time over those airplane tickets.”
“Stafford.”
“Right. Stafford. He starts getting nervous, on account of no one’s signing a fucking thing and they’re just talking this Jewish shit, he doesn’t understand a word. So he calls in for help and they send him Billings. Like Billings is gonna know what they’re saying, right? I mean, how dumb can you get? They got Jews all over the place in that office, but do they send a Jew? No, they send Billings. Anyway, he gets there, now it’s two on two, two fed lawyers against the kid’s father and the kid’s father’s rabbi. Which is the same odds it was when it started, so the Jews call in another couple rabbis. And these guys are older than the first one, and he was a hundred fucking years old.”
“You said that already,” Fiore said, teasing him.
The other guys around the table poked each other and nodded their heads and grinned be
cause they knew what was coming next. Gus didn’t like being interrupted. “Do you want to hear this or don’t you?” he asked.
“Yeah, sure, sorry, Gus,” Fiore said. The guys around the table laughed into their hands. Exactly the same thing happened every time Gus told one of his stories.
“Yeah, yeah, that’s okay. I lost the train there,” Gus said, circling the table to get his thoughts straight. “Anyway,” he said when he found the train, “it’s half the fucking morning and the Jews keep bringing in more Jews until it looks like a wedding or a funeral or something. I mean, Arafat should have been there, he could have cleaned up good. And this is all over a car that’s still running.”
“But the father signed the papers?”
“Sure he signed them. How many stupid Jews do you know? He got his car fixed up and it didn’t cost him a cent, stuff that wasn’t even broken, probably put a new stereo in it.”
This wasn’t true and Gus didn’t have any reason to think it was true. It just made the story better. He smiled because he was pleased with himself. He had been asked to check into what happened last night and this was what he came up with.
“The thing is,” Fiore said, picking his way carefully because no one ever liked to hurt Gus Benini’s feelings, “what I wanted to find out was why those pricks were following me and what the hell they know.”
“They don’t know shit,” Gus said. “Why would they know anything? What the fuck’s to know?”
“I don’t know, Gus,” Fiore said. “That’s what I wanted you to find out.”
Gus shrugged his shoulders. He looked like a puppet when someone pulls all the strings at once. “They was just goofing, far as I can tell,” he said. “In fact, they got themselves in trouble over it. On account of having to pay for the Jew’s car. So it couldn’t have been anything, right?”
It sounded right to Fiore. He had no idea how Gus Benini got his information and didn’t care. That little detail about the agents getting in trouble was the kind of thing he looked for that told him whether Gus actually knew something or was making it up. Details tell the story.
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