“The whole thing seems easy. She said she’d take me in, have me meet with this O’Shay guy.”
“Biddleman will be a problem,” Kersh said without expression.
“Screw Biddleman.”
“John …”
“Biddleman said stay away from Deveneau, right? We’re not going to Deveneau. We were looking for a break, and we got it. I’m not gonna flush this case twice.”
“Biddleman meant Tressa, too.”
“Well, he didn’t say that to me. Not specifically.”
“Just the same, let’s keep this quiet until we feel it out. Has the meeting been set yet?”
“Tressa’s gotta talk with O’Shay first, see if he’ll meet me.” He ran his eyes across Kersh’s book. “What are you doing?”
For what seemed like a long while, Kersh did not answer. Both his hands were pressed against the wooden tabletop, palms flat. His fingernails were thick and stained a red-yellow from tobacco. Deep bruise-colored grooves under his eyes professed the man’s lack of sleep.
He’s been up all night, John thought. Hell, I think he’s still wearing the same clothes from yesterday.
“Come with me,” Kersh said finally, his voice dry. “I want to show you something.”
Kersh’s desk looked like a snow globe someone had turned upside down and shaken. Arbitrary papers littered the surface while a mob of empty and half-empty Styrofoam coffee cups had congregated at one corner of the desk like street hustlers in a bad mood. Flecks of tobacco leaves looked frozen in mid-scatter, like bugs. Numerous cards and plastic bags containing seized counterfeit bills served as the icing on this cake, and as Kersh led John to the desk, Kersh lined up these bills for John to see. John watched his hands work and thought that Bill Kersh’s hands actually looked tired, if such a thing were possible.
“Sometimes cases are made at the desk and not on the streets, John. Here—this is what came in all last week,” Kersh said, still busy organizing the counterfeit money. “You see anything here? Any common denominator?”
“What do you mean?”
“Look at them.”
John did. He had seen the counterfeit bills plenty of times before, had gone over and over them just as Kersh had, just as the rest of the squad had. Looking at them again, he could see nothing new.
“I don’t get it,” he said. “What is it?”
Kersh grabbed one of the bills. Carefully, he refolded it along the lines just as it had been folded in the past. He folded it lengthwise—horizontally—in an accordion-style fold: once in half, then in half again …
“What’s this look like?” Kersh asked once he’d finished folding the note.
“Huh?”
“Look at it! What’s it look like to you?”
“I don’t know. It looks like a flattened straw …”
“No, no.” To John’s surprise, Kersh chuckled under his breath and blinked his eyes twice in rapid succession. A fine dark stubble had begun to creep up his jawline. “Look.” He fluttered the bill in front of John’s face. “Who folds bills like this?”
“I don’t—” But then it hit him. “Wait…”
“Yes.” Kersh was smiling, nodding. “Strippers.” His smile grew wider, yet his eyes still looked dead. “This is how a guy folds his money before slipping it into a stripper’s g-string.”
John plucked the folded bill from Kersh’s hands. As if to verify what he already understood, he unfolded the bill, examined the creases, then folded it again.
“See that?” Kersh continued. “It even folds once down the middle, too. Right in half. See?”
“Yeah …”
“Smell it.”
John brought it up to his nose, inhaled. “Perfume,” he said.
“There’re five bills that came in last week, all with those same folds. See them? Here—” He pointed to another bill. “Here—” And another. “And here—here. All folded the same way, all smelling like a stripper.”
John leaned over the desk, looking more closely at the bills. “Where’d they come from?”
“Just where you’d think a stripper with a lot of money would shop—expensive boutiques, lingerie shops, a fancy restaurant or two. She passed a fake hundred in each place.” Kersh shifted through a mess of other papers, produced a folder, opened it. He fished out an index card with another phony hundred stapled to it and handed it to John. “I did some backtracking last night. This one came in this week from First National Bank.”
“It’s folded the same way.”
“Clerk at the bank said a customer named Heidi Carlson deposited it, along with other cash, into her account.”
“Let me guess …”
“Carlson works weekdays at someplace called the Black Box, near Times Square. Two of our guys rolled into the club after we got the note, asked her about the money—where she got it, could she remember, the whole nine yards. She said she gets paid in cash and assumed that’s where it came from. Her boss verified that’s how he pays the girls, said he takes in a lot of hundreds every night. Being it was one note and she was depositing it into her own account, our boys figured she got stuck.”
“Well unless her boss is slipping her pay into her pants, she’s full of shit.” He tossed the hundred onto Kersh’s desk. “Very good, Billy-boy. I’m impressed. Who were the two guys who went out on this?”
“Steve and Charlie.”
“They missed it,” John said.
“It’s all in the training,” Kersh said. His right eyelid twitched, as if wanting to wink. “After work, they hit the gym. Me? I hit the bars.”
CHAPTER NINE
THE CLOVERLEAF WAS A SMALL BAR ON the corner of Tenth Avenue and West 57th Street, just a few blocks south of Fordham University. It was a dark, crumbling establishment run by two middle-aged Irish brothers named McKean—one more twisted, hunched, and grotesque than the other. There was a small passageway behind the bar, just before the hallway leading to the storage room that communicated with an underground gambling facility very few people knew existed. Despite its proximity to the university, the Cloverleaf did not cater to students, and on the rare occasion some unwitting underage pupil wandered into the place to see if he could coax a bottle of bourbon from the bartender, one look at the Cloverleaf’s clientele turned him quickly around and back out into the street.
There was no sign outside the bar, but Tressa Walker knew the place. She pushed open the front door and slipped inside, thankful to be out of the cold and off the street.
A blast of warm air struck her. Without looking around, she crossed over to the bar and sat on the stool closest to the front door. She kept her eyes trained on the bar, her hands—palms down—directly in front of her. Though she hadn’t taken a good look around the place yet, she had seen a number of people stuffed in the dark crevices of the room and was confident of Mickey O’Shay’s presence.
As if I could almost smell him. To her astonishment, the thought caused her to break a smile.
The bartender slid in front of her. He was big and muscular with a faint pink scar twisting down the left side of his face. “You need a drink?”
“Guinness.”
The bartender filled a glass halfway, waited a full minute as the foam settled, then filled the glass the rest of the way. “Anything else?” he said, resting the glass in front of her.
She touched it with two fingers. It felt warm. “No.”
“Kitchen’s closed.”
“All right.”
There was a mirror behind the bar, but it was too cluttered with stickers and decals to give good reflection. Tressa sipped her beer, swallowed mostly foam, and turned her head slightly to glimpse the other occupants scattered about the bar. Trying to seem casual, she scanned faces and finally recognized Mickey O’Shay seated with two other men at a table toward the back. They were in mid-joke, with Mickey setting up the punch line, his hands motioning in front of his face, his eyes animated. She watched the table just long enough to be certain it was him, then turned
back to her beer. She was good at reading people, good at comprehending a situation. Though she didn’t know Mickey too well, she knew him well enough to know the best way to play him.
Mickey’s companions remained at the table for another twenty minutes, laughing at dirty jokes and turning their beer glasses upside down with mechanical exactitude before struggling to their feet and lurching toward the front door. They were older than Mickey and dressed in nondescript brown suits. One of the men leered at her before stumbling out into the street.
Again she turned her head back to the table. Mickey was finishing off his own beer while turning the empty glasses on their sides with his free hand. She watched as he rolled one of the empty glasses back and forth beneath his palm across the top of the table.
Look up, she willed him. Look at me.
Mickey emptied his last glass, set it down, and tossed his head back against the wall. He pressed his eyes shut, sucked air through his teeth, and when he opened his eyes again his gaze was leveled on her. She nodded and turned back to her beer with a look of unmistakable disinterest.
“Frankie Deveneau’s girl.” He was directly behind her a moment later, so close she could feel the warmth of his breath on her neck.
She turned, half-smiled. “I thought that was you, Mickey. Take a seat.”
Mickey climbed onto the stool next to her, ordered himself another beer. “The hell you doin’ here by yourself?”
“Nothing. Getting some fresh air.”
“Oh, yeah?”
“Baby’s sick, been keepin’ me up. Drivin’ me crazy.” She watched him rub the sides of his face with filthy hands. His skin looked pale, and his chin was unshaven. With long, flaxen hair and startling blue eyes, Mickey O’Shay was handsome in a universal sense; his features were perfectly symmetrical, his body not muscular but lean, like the body of a long-distance runner. His teeth were small, white, even, and there was something prepubescent about him as well—something Tressa had always noticed but couldn’t quite understand. It wasn’t any specific thing but, rather, the culmination of his features and mannerisms, she supposed.
“Frank still pissin’ his pants over what happened at the club?” Mickey asked, not looking at her.
“I ain’t seen him around much,” she lied, forcing herself to relax while sipping her beer. It suddenly tasted very bitter.
Mickey chuckled and ran a finger along the rim of his glass. “Frankie, Frankie, Frankie,” he mused.
“We’re just lucky the three of us got out without getting jammed up,” she added, baiting him with caution.
“That cop die?”
“Huh?”
“That cop that was shot. You heard if he died?”
“No … I don’t know. I didn’t realize it…”
“Goddamn it.” He laughed again, but there was no emotion in the sound.
If I’m going to do this, she thought, I’m doing it now.
“You still looking to move that money?”
Mickey looked at her from the corner of one eye. He was so close she could almost make out her reflection in his pupil. “What?” He said this slowly and under his breath, the way a sinner might begin a confession. “What are you talkin’ about?”
“I’m the one who brought that guy to Frankie to buy the stuff.”
“So what’s that got to do with me?”
“Mickey, Frankie told me who he’s getting the money from. I’m his girl.”
Mickey looked down at the bar. “Frankie said this guy spooked, took off, that he ain’t interested in dealing with him no more …”
“He ain’t,” she said, “so that’s why I came here to meet you. After that shit at the club, he don’t wanna touch Frank, thinks he’s bad luck. Whatever. He ain’t scared, but he ain’t stupid, either. Come on—Frank’s been dealing all kinds of shit outta that club since day one. It was only a matter of time before the place got hit.”
“So what about this guy?”
“He still wants to buy.”
“How much?”
“Same deal. Hundred grand, same as with Frank. He’s anxious. He’s got a buyer for it.”
“You know him?”
“I brought him to my boyfriend.”
Mickey’s lips tightened, and a look of distrust flickered behind his blue eyes. A long strand of hair had fallen across his face, dividing his expression. All at once, there appeared to be hundreds of tiny creases beneath Mickey’s eyes.
“This guy knows me?” he nearly whispered.
“I didn’t drop your name,” she said. “He just said he don’t want nothing to do with Frank, that he wanted to go directly to Frank’s supplier for this thing to happen.” She forced a convincing smile that did nothing to soften Mickey’s expression. “So here you are—now I’m telling you what he said. Okay?” She winced inwardly—the “okay” made her sound too unsure of herself, too apologetic.
“I don’t meet with nobody,” Mickey said, turning away from her and swallowing his beer. His boyish profile reminded Tressa of pictures of angels she’d seen in books as a child.
“Suit yourself.” For what seemed like an eternity, she watched the bartender change a keg of beer under the bar.
“What’s his name?”
“John.”
Mickey O’Shay chuckled. “Johnny-John-John.” He spoke it like a new word game. “Where’s this guy come from?”
“I went to high school with him.”
“He Irish?”
“Italian. Don’t hold it against him.”
“He just pop up outta nowhere like this?”
“Not really. I see him around from time to time.”
“Did he shoot that cop?”
“I don’t know,” she said truthfully. “There was a lot of shooting going on.”
“I’m sure it wasn’t Frankie-balls,” Mickey said offhandedly. “He got away with you guys?”
“Away?”
“Through the tunnels.”
“Oh, yeah. Kept his head. I got his number, said I’d call him if I talked to you. So now I talked to you. What you want me to tell him?”
“I don’t like making deals with people, new people.”
“That’s up to you.”
“Son of a bitch,” Mickey said and finished his beer. He held the empty glass up to his face and examined the bottom. His lips were moist and reflected the neon lights over the bar. After some deliberation, he turned to face Tressa again. “Okay,” he said, “I’ll meet him. We’ll set it up.” She watched as he ran a hand along the top of the bar and pushed his finger down in the center of a pile of cocktail napkins. He did this absently and seemingly without notice, as if his hand—his entire arm—were in control of itself.
“Okay,” she said.
“What are you lookin’ for on this?”
“I guess the same as you’d give Frankie.”
“Five percent. And don’t worry—I won’t tell your old man.”
Mickey stood up, stretched, and pulled some wadded tens from his khakis. He tossed two tens on the bar.
“When?” she said.
“When,” he repeated, his eyes seemingly lost in a haze of alcohol and complex thought. For a second, Tressa thought he might just fall forward and put his face through the bar. But then something registered inside him and he suddenly looked very sober, very together and alert. “You just better hope this guy don’t bring us no problems,” he said.
Yeah, she thought, I hope.
CHAPTER TEN
THE BLACK BOX WAS JUST THAT—DARK, square, and confined. It was certainly not a tourist stop, not one of the city’s hidden dens of fornication now several blocks removed from Times Square; rather, this place was crude and unfriendly, like an injured animal curled up inside a hole in the ground, its silver eyes shining through the darkness. The surrounding streets were dark and narrow, burdened with rats. A single streetlight stood outside the club, a fine mist of water and dust swirling in its dull light. Outside stood an enormous bouncer, and when Joh
n and Kersh approached, the bouncer had some frightened street thug by the scruff of his neck.
“You feel like gettin’ handy, pal? You wanna fuckin’ dance with me? Piece of shit,” the bouncer growled. His face looked like the grille of a Mack truck. “Hit the bricks, fool!” And the bouncer delivered a swift kick to the thug’s rear, sending the smaller man staggering down the street, dazed and inebriated.
The bouncer turned his attention to John and Kersh. “Fifteen apiece.”
John was about to produce his badge, when Kersh nudged him with his elbow and shot him a wink. “It’s all right,” Kersh said, “I got it.” He pulled out two twenties and handed them to the bouncer, who made change and let them inside.
Like most strip clubs, the Black Box was dark and noisy and dense with smoke. Long runway stages stood along three of its four walls. Closest to the front doors was a narrow bar behind which a number of young women in flimsy tops served drinks. The top of the bar was all wood and brass, freshly polished with crocus and marred by countless fingerprints. Opposite the bar stood a bank of pay phones and an ATM.
“Busy night,” John mumbled, shoving past two large men in ties. Most of the people were just shapes, just caricatures floating in darkness.
John and Kersh squeezed their way around the bar, pausing before one of the runways. A young Asian girl, desperately struggling to look eighteen, gyrated her buttocks while gripping a brass pole that rose from the stage and disappeared into the rafters. The only things she wore were a pair of tall, white go-go boots and an ear-to-ear smile.
“Lord,” Kersh said, rubbing his eyes and tweaking his large nose, “the incense in this place wreaks havoc on my sinuses.”
“You mean you’re not a regular here?”
“Ha.”
“You know what this Carlson girl looks like?”
Kersh rubbed his eyes with the heel of his hand. “No.”
John scanned the crowd. The clientele was comprised mostly of middle-aged men in cheap suits showing more scalp than hair. A few younger men had gathered at the foot of one stage, hollering at one of the dancers and waving fistfuls of greasy singles. Beyond them, women in nylons and nothing else filed in and out of bathroom and dressing room doors.
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