Shamrock Alley

by Ronald Damien Malfi

  He found himself milling about the apartment for some time, doing nothing except thinking an occasional thought. Several times he deliberated just outside the bedroom door while his eyes moved across the tender terrain of his sleeping wife.

  In the bathroom, he stood for several long minutes naked before the mirror above the sink. His skin looked too pink in the lighting. With disinterest, he looked up at the light fixture. He thought about how his wife had joked about installing a skylight. Thinking of that now, he managed to summon a half-smile. But the smile did not last long.

  The shower water was cold, and he did not wait for it to warm up. He washed quickly and with a businesslike professionalism, hesitating only once to watch the water swirl and wash down the drain. For a few seconds he was hypnotized by it, soothed and unnerved by it at the same time. His head began to ache, and he pressed two fingers to the jutting brow bone above his right eye. It occurred to him then that he’d had the headache all morning. Only now had he really felt it.

  It had been several weeks now since Tressa Walker’s body had been discovered. Wrapped in a sheet and buried beneath busting trash bags, discarded soup cans, and folded cardboard boxes, she was found in an alley behind a barbershop in Hell’s Kitchen. She’d been beaten to death.

  Her daughter, Meghan, had been taken into the custody of child welfare and was quickly dispatched to Roosevelt Hospital to be treated for pneumonia.

  He shut off the water and dried quickly, allowing his eyes time to linger on the fogged-up mirror.

  A skylight would be nice, he thought. I don’t care what floor we’re on—a skylight would be nice.

  Before leaving for the day, he stopped again in the doorway of his bedroom.

  He felt hurt by how close she’d come to the whole thing. Yet throughout everything, she’d remained admirably strong—stronger than he had ever thought she could be—and he found that he was the one who had really been changed by the events of that night, that he was the one who had to move ahead and think past it. That night, looking out the window, she had seen everything. He hadn’t known what to expect from her afterward, but she had surprised him by remaining very calm and understanding. Oddly enough, and for whatever reason, it was her sympathy that hurt him the most. This was his fault. All of it. He’d done this to her, and it weighed heavily inside him. And although she appeared sympathetic to the situation, seemingly unchanged after witnessing her husband’s actions, he couldn’t help but wonder what she thought of him now. Sometimes, he wondered if she thought of him with that same confused anxiety with which Tressa Walker had spoken of Mickey O’Shay and Jimmy Kahn.

  He went to the hall closet. He automatically sifted through the coats for his leather jacket—then paused. There, wedged between his leather jacket and one of Katie’s jackets, was his father’s black wool coat. He pulled it out and stared at it for a moment, trying to remember how it had gotten here. He couldn’t remember, but slipped it on nonetheless. The sleeves were too long, and it felt too tight in the shoulders.

  His father had died alone in the hospital on the night he had chased Mickey O’Shay down and killed him in the street. And three days later, on a cold and overcast afternoon, the old man was buried in Greenwood Cemetery. He and Katie had remained by the grave for some time, whipped by the frozen, bitter wind, and daunted by both the simplicity and finality of life. As the wind picked up and the afternoon grew toward evening, he and Katie turned from the grave and moved back to the car. Neither of them said a word to each other.

  Outside in the cold, he pulled his father’s coat around his body, shivered against the wind, and moved down the stoop.

  A light snow began to fall.

  Agents had taken to stacking daily newspapers on Bill Kersh’s desk whenever they contained some information pertaining to the counterfeit case. This was done partly in good humor and partly in silent veneration by those agents who had never, and would never, work an undercover case. And although Kersh appreciated both the humor and the veneration, he never read the papers.

  “You’re in early,” John said, coming up behind Kersh and tapping the man lightly on the shoulder.

  “Reports,” Kersh said. “I think better in the morning, before anything important has time to happen. What are you doing here? I thought Chominsky said to take some time off.”

  “I took time off. I don’t need anymore. Anyway, I’ve got that meeting with Sullivan today.”

  Following Jimmy Kahn’s arrest, the Secret Service had gone after as many of Kahn and Mickey’s cohorts as they could round up. In most instances, no one said a word and there was no incriminating evidence against them to force them to talk. In other instances, there was evidence: Glenn Hanratty, known to most of the lowlifes in Hell’s Kitchen as “Irish,” was arrested based on fingerprints he’d left on the silencer boxes John had bought from Mickey. Following his arrest, Biddleman wasted no time issuing a warrant for Calliope Candy. When the back room was tossed, agents uncovered several more silencers, as well as the equipment used to make them. Also, packed inside a crate of Tootsie Pops was a large collection of handguns. NYPD was still checking ballistics, and probably would continue to do so for some time.

  Sean Sullivan, the cutter who’d been paired up with John for the hit on Ricky Laughlin, was the only person they’d gotten a hold of who was half willing to cooperate. Sean was young and impressionable, and John actually felt there was a good chance the kid would go to the witness stand to testify.

  “Horace Green,” Kersh said.

  John looked up from his desk, rubbing his hands together. He couldn’t shake the numbness from them. A souvenir from his time on the frozen streets of Hell’s Kitchen. “What?”

  “Remember I said I recognized that name?” Kersh said. He tapped a finger against one of the printouts on his desk. “Telephone records from Charlie Lowenstein’s house in Queens. Lowenstein’s wife had made a few calls to a Horace Green. I’m going to pay her a visit this afternoon.” Kersh frowned. “You okay?”

  “Yeah. Sure.”

  “What about Katie?”

  “She’s doing all right,” he said, uncertain whether that was even the truth.

  Kersh’s gaze lingered. “You let me know,” he said after a moment, “if there’s anything I can do.”

  John just nodded and turned away.

  Clouds had appeared, and it started to snow lightly by midafternoon.

  “You want something to drink?” he asked Sean Sullivan, sitting across from him at a diner booth in lower Manhattan. “Some coffee?”

  Sean shook his head. The kid hadn’t been sleeping properly, and the skin around his eyes was the color of rotten gums. He’d shown up just five minutes before, wrapped in a stiff ski jacket zipped to his chin. When he took it off, John could make out fresh bandages along Sean’s arms through the sheer fabric of his shirt. He was cutting again.

  “I want you to understand how important your testimony is, Sean,” he continued. “Between you and me—we say the right things, Jimmy goes away for a very long time. And that means you don’t have nothing to worry about.”

  “Yeah,” Sean muttered, but he wasn’t in genuine agreement. He had not yet agreed to testify at Jimmy Kahn’s trial. However, John was confident the kid would do it if pushed in the right direction. Sean Sullivan just needed someone to hold his hand. Not to mention the Secret Service had a case against him, too. His refusal to testify would wind him up in prison.

  “What we’re gonna do,” he said, “is get you out of the city when the trial starts, put you in a nice hotel room somewhere. We’ll have an agent with you the whole time.”

  “This like that witness protection thing?”

  “Kind of.”

  On the tabletop, Sean’s hands shook. “Where’s Jimmy now?” the kid asked.

  “Jail,” he said.

  “I mean, like,” Sean stammered, “he ain’t gonna make bail or nothin’?”

  “Not a chance, Sean.”

  Sean chewed at his lower
lip. His eyes bounced nervously between John and the sticky tabletop. He cracked his knuckles, tapped one knee against the bottom of the table. “You think I can get one of those agents now? Like, to watch my apartment?”

  With Mickey O’Shay dead and Jimmy Kahn behind bars, he could really see no reason. But to allay the kid’s fears he said yes, that it could be done.

  “And Jimmy—he won’t know I’m doin’ this, if I’m doin’ this?”

  “Not until the trial,” he promised him.

  He chewed his lower lip some more. Something in his eyes reminded John of Tressa Walker, and how frightened she’d been that night at McGinty’s when she’d first started talking to him about Mickey O’Shay and Jimmy Kahn.

  Then, after what seemed like a lifetime, Sean Sullivan said, “Okay. Yeah, I’ll do it. I’ll testify.”

  Since Mickey’s death and Jimmy’s arrest, Roger Biddleman was slowly becoming a prominent fixture around the New York field office. He walked the halls strapped in dark suits tight enough to work the creases out of his elbows, and moved with a lively expeditiousness that seemed more fitting for a runway model. Immediately after the case had broken, he’d commended John with a handshake and a pat on the back, saying the words prosecutors always said when they knew their number had come in—words that made them sound more like insightful modern art dealers than lawyers. He’d been a bit discontented that Mickey O’Shay had been killed, but he was not one to grieve over a loss. Instead, he focused on the path ahead. And as the days came and went, John was pleased to find that Roger Biddleman’s interest in him, now that his work had been all but completed, was rapidly diminishing.

  An interesting tidbit of information came from Bill Kersh’s meeting with Ruby Lowenstein, Charlie Lowenstein’s wife. Skinny and distressed, she had not taken long to admit to Kersh how strapped for cash she’d been ever since her husband had been locked away. Things had been too tight, she said, and she didn’t deserve to suffer because her lousy husband had been tossed in jail. Some time before she’d made it a point to visit Lowenstein in prison and pester him about her situation. Finally, tired of his wife’s badgering, he’d told her to contact a friend of his, a good Jewish guy from his old neighborhood, to pick up some old items of his and see what he could do. The items were the plates and negatives of the counterfeit hundreds. The good Jewish guy from his old neighborhood happened to be Horace Green.

  So the connection was made: Green had taken the plates and negatives to try and sell as a favor to an old friend … but before he could, he ran into a little roadblock. The roadblock was two young Irish guys from Hell’s Kitchen who would wind up hacking Green to pieces and stealing the plates and negatives.

  As he was with everything, the ever-present Roger Biddleman was quick to tune in to Kersh’s newfound information. He jotted notes and made phone calls and smiled wider and wider at the agents with each passing day. Along the way, he adopted the annoying habit of tapping a Bic pen against any available surface of the field office at any given time. He also started skipping lunch and, after just two weeks, trimmed down considerably.

  For Roger Biddleman, life had never been better.

  To appease Sean Sullivan, the Secret Service agreed to put him up in a hotel room in Jersey until after the trial. Three times a day, agents would check in on him in alternating rotations. One gray, overcast Tuesday, Dennis Glumly arrived with Tommy Veccio at the hotel, hoping to get some more information from Sullivan about any other homicides he’d gotten wind of. Outside the hotel room door, Veccio knocked twice and shouted for Sullivan. The kid didn’t answer.

  “Maybe he’s out?” Glumly suggested.

  “He’s supposed to stay here,” Veccio said. He knocked again and called Sullivan’s name. Still, no answer. He tried the knob. It was locked.

  “Don’t you have a key?” Glumly asked.

  “No … Sullivan has always opened the door.”

  Both men exchanged a subtle look of discomfort. Several minutes later, an old Hindu woman shuffled down the corridor escorted by Dennis Glumly, and paused outside Sean Sullivan’s door. She produced a ball of keys from her apron just as Glumly and Veccio unholstered their weapons. The old Hindu woman unlocked Sean Sullivan’s hotel room door. It swung open, and she backed away.

  Veccio stepped in first, followed by Glumly.

  “Sean!” Glumly called. “Hey, Sullivan!” Scowling, turning to Veccio, who had crossed the room and was moving toward the closed bathroom door, he said, “If this goddamn kid split …”

  Veccio pushed the bathroom door open. “Oh, for … Jesus Christ—”

  Glumly hustled to Veccio’s side while the old Hindu woman poked her head into the room.

  The bathroom was humid, the mirror over the sink fogged, the taste of copper in the air.

  Sean Sullivan lay naked in the bathtub, soaking in a few inches of lukewarm water stained pink. His eyes were open and glazed over, staring blindly at the tiled shower wall opposite him. His left arm lay draped over the side of the tub, split open from his wrist to the crook of his elbow. A pool of blood collected on the floor beneath his dripping fingertips. His right arm lay against his chest, also cut, bleeding against his pale flesh and into the tub.

  Caught in the nest of his pubic hair like a netted fish was a straight razor, its blade shiny with blood.

  CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE

  THE NEWS CAME JUST BEFORE THE WEEKEND.

  Roger Biddleman, standing before a glowing landscape of lower Manhattan, turned from the window as John and Kersh entered the office and smiled. He immediately went to both men and pumped their hands in a firm shake before slipping behind his desk and beckoning his guests to sit as well. The entire office conveyed the faint aromas of cedar and pipe smoke. Stacks of computer printouts sandwiched inside manila folders leaned against the side of Biddleman’s desk.

  “To begin with,” Biddleman said as John and Kersh took their seats, “I just want to say how much I appreciate and admire the work you’ve both done on this case. Especially you, John. Mickey O’Shay was a lunatic. I can’t even begin to imagine what it was like. It’s unfortunate it ended the way it did though; I would have liked to have him stand trial. But,” and his voice dropped an octave here, “the important thing is that you got him off the street.”

  John sensed a rising disquiet on the horizon. “Well,” he said, “we have the Kahn trial.”

  Pressing his lips together, Biddleman rubbed two stiff fingers across his forehead, leaving behind white streaks in his skin. “Jimmy Kahn’s not going to trial,” Biddleman said.

  John’s eyes swung in Kersh’s direction, then back to Roger Biddleman. “What do you mean?”

  Biddleman shifted uncomfortably behind his desk. All former amiability had been stricken from his face. “Kahn’s attorney cut a deal with our office.”

  John felt like someone had just dropped a concrete block into his lap. “What are you talking about?”

  In a toneless voice, Roger Biddleman said, “Kahn has been rising in the eyes of the Italians. He’s tied in to the Gisondi crew over in Brooklyn. We’re going to use Kahn to get to them.”

  “Oh, I don’t believe this. You can’t be serious. You’re letting him walk?”

  “No, not exactly,” Biddleman said. “He’ll plea to a conspiracy charge, do about a year or so. Then he gets to work for us. The time in prison will even enhance his reputation with the Italians.”

  He stared at Biddleman in disbelief. He felt numb. It took all his effort to pry his eyes away and face Bill Kersh. “You agree with this?” And without waiting for an answer, he turned quickly back to the attorney. “Chominsky knows about this?”

  “I wanted to speak with both of you first,” Biddleman said. Then, sensing John’s rebellion, added, “But our decision is final.”

  “We have this guy nailed for over thirty years,” he said, jabbing a finger at Biddleman, “and you’re gonna let him plead to some shit-ass charge—”

  “There are a lot of things invo
lved here,” Biddleman insisted. “This decision was not made hastily—”

  “Why?” He stared at Biddleman with such intensity he could make out the fine web of veins that ran across the bulb of his nose. “What the hell’s going on? This son of a bitch was your catch of the day and now, just like that, after all I went through, he’s not important anymore? Help me make some sense of that…”

  Biddleman folded his hands on his desk. His fingers pressed hard into his skin, turning the tips white. “This is a complicated business,” Biddleman said matter-of-factly. “Targets change, priorities change. You did a great job. Without you, we would have never reached this point. It’s the next step.”

  “So you’re gonna let this animal back on the street just to catch some ninety-year-old Italian guy ten years from now? You’ve gotta be out of your mind! Our informant was killed, a witness commits suicide, I put my family in jeopardy—and for what?” He pushed himself out of his chair, his face red, his hands threatening to fist. “And you keep pushing and pushing!”

  Kersh lifted a hand. “John …”

  He spun on Kersh. “You’re gonna sit here and listen to this?”

  Kersh looked firm, impassive. “This isn’t your personal crusade. You’re wasting your time. I told you about this …”

  “I’m not going for this,” he said. “I’ll go to the papers … be on every goddamn show.” He leveled his gaze on Biddleman, who watched him from behind his desk with the eyes of someone completely detached. “You’ll have to answer for this.”

  “You do that,” Biddleman said simply, “and you’re history. I’ll have the FBI lock you up for obstruction.”

  He didn’t want to be in here with Roger Biddleman a second longer. Just looking at the man, he was reminded of the months he spent on the streets and away from his family, while his father died and his wife sat home alone. “Where’s your boss?” he barked at Biddleman. “Get him in here. I wanna talk to your goddamn boss.”