Louis Torricelli’s office was on the sixth floor of a mud-colored hive of a building that housed a bunch of agencies no one has ever heard of.
There was no receptionist. I didn’t expect one; city agencies are not particularly user-friendly. I stopped the first person I saw, a plump woman with a bad dye job toting an armful of file folders. She had the numb look of a lifer.
“Lou Torricelli?” I said.
She took a few seconds to decide whether divulging his whereabouts was part of her job description, a really important issue for city employees. And it drove me nuts.
The look on her face reminded me of the day Dave’s wife, Franny, asked me to take her to the Department of Education to pick up her teaching license. Dave couldn’t make it. The process should have taken no more than a few minutes, but there was a snag. Two typists were assigned the task of typing the certificate number on the license. One only did certificates ending in odd numbers, the other handled even numbers. Franny’s certificate ended in an even number, and that typist had just left for lunch and wasn’t expected back for an hour. As politely as possible, I asked Miss Odd Number to bend the rules a bit. Her reaction left something to be desired. I typed it myself. There was quite the commotion. Had Dave been there, there would have been blood on the walls.
Bad Dye Job was still thinking.
I waited her out.
After a few very long moments, she jerked the file folders toward an office in the back. “Over there,” she finally said, punctuating it with a really deep sigh.
The nameplate on the glass-paned door read LOUIS TORRICELLI, DIRECTOR.
The door was closed. I knocked and walked in.
He looked up with a start.
My first impression was that this was a man who rarely smiled.
His office was quite the treat. Paint the color of day-old guacamole peeling up near the rust spots where the ceiling and wall met, a wooden desk purchased during Boss Tweed’s reign, bookshelves heavy with thick reports that no one ever read. And behind the desk a smudgy window offering a delightful view of another mud-colored building stained with pigeon droppings. No wonder the man didn’t smile.
“Whaddya want?” Torricelli said.
Perfect!
“Name’s Steeg.”
The look on his face said he was drawing a blank.
I passed him my expired NYPD photo ID and a business card.
He studied them very closely.
“You’re not with the cops anymore?”
“It’s a long story.”
“Save it,” he said, passing the photo ID back, but I noticed he kept my business card.
“Terry Sloan called?” I prompted.
That seemed to do the trick. His nose wrinkled up as if he smelled something bad.
We had something in common.
“Yeah?” he said.
Torricelli had a receding hairline and was going to fat, the ultimate destination for someone who sat on his ass all day.
“To talk about Tony Ferris,” I said.
The color drained from his face.
“It’s awful,” he said.
“You might say.”
“What happened? Who . . .?”
“He was beaten to death. The who remains to be seen.”
“I called Ginny. I . . . can’t believe it. Look, I’ll help any way I can.”
“How long has he worked here?”
“Fifteen years.”
“Any problems?”
“With Ferris?”
“Yeah,” I said.
“No. I mean . . . maybe.”
“You’re losing me.”
“Not with Ferris. No problems there. Man did his job.”
“Then with who?”
“I’ve been getting some strange calls lately. Ferris got them too. A guy with an accent. That’s why when you started calling I didn’t want any part of you. When you showed up, I figured this was not my lucky day. No offense, but you kinda look the part.”
It was less than heartening to learn that I looked like a goon.
“Even though I’m here with Terry Sloan’s blessing?”
“Are you nuts? As far as I was concerned, it cinched the deal.”
Terry’s stellar reputation had a way of preceding him.
“Ferris and his wife were getting threats too.”
“He never said anything.”
“Did you go to the cops?”
A fine sheen of sweat turned Torricelli’s forehead glassy. He rubbed his eyes with a kind of resigned weariness.
“Are you kidding? He said he knows where I live. Knew my wife’s name. Knew where she worked, even where my kids went to school. I don’t need this shit.”
Torricelli slid the desk drawer open and came out with a small brown bottle. He removed the cap, fished out a tiny white pill, and slipped it under his tongue.
“Look, I’m sorry I was short with you before. I wasn’t being rude. I was being scared.” He took a deep breath. “Here’s the situation. I got three more years until the pension hits, and the last thing I need is to stroke out here. That would be like, you know, the ultimate indignity.” His skin turned the color of the walls.
“We can do this another day.”
He waved his hand. “I’m OK now. Just fire away. Ask me anything you want.”
“What does your department actually do?”
“Do you have any idea what the capital budget for construction is in New York City?”
“Not a clue.”
“It’s big enough to make the Pharaohs, Incas, and Mayans combined look like a bunch of fucking mound builders. And that doesn’t even include the cost of renovating existing stuff. Everywhere you look in this city, somebody’s hammering, drilling, or laying fucking brick.” He looked at the rust stains on the ceiling. “Except around here.”
“The shoemaker’s children go barefoot.”
“Tell me about it. In the old days, most of the work went to outfits with sweetheart arrangements with the right guys in whatever administration was in office. See, they knew what the deal was. Administrations come and go, but these guys soldier on. Projects get proposed, bids come in, and the same construction companies usually wind up with the work.”
“And BMWs magically appeared in the driveways of certain elected officials,” I said.
“Sure, but one fine day all bets were off. In the sixties, the civil rights movement changed the equation. They pushed for federal and state legislation ensuring that minorities would have a piece of the pie, and they got it. And you know what? God bless them! Remember the riots? If I were black, I would have tossed Molotov cocktails right along with them.”
I was falling in love with Louis Torricelli. If he kept this up, I could definitely see us picking out furniture one day.
“So the Minority Opportunities Bureau was created to ensure that blacks, Hispanics, Indians, Asians, whatever, got a fair shake. And if they were going to play fuckaround like their Caucasian counterparts who held the key to the lockbox for like a million years, more power to them. It’s the American way.”
“So the bids come in,” I said. “You examine them and — given certain guidelines which I don’t have to trouble myself with — you make sure that minorities are fairly treated in the bidding and awarding process.”
“Bingo. But we also ensure that minority bidding companies are not only owned by members of minorities but also have a preponderance of minority employees in their workforce. Some of the incumbents try to get around the law by setting up subsidiaries or phantom companies. We sniff them out and basically fuck them over.”
“But you don’t completely get rid of them.”
“Right. They’re like fucking roaches. You step on one and the little fucker has already laid its eggs, waiting to be reborn as a new corporation under a different name.”
“I could see where conflict might arise,” I allowed.
“Yeah. Up to a few years ago, construction sites were turned into battle
zones. You had blacks and Hispanics, armed to the teeth, bussed into the site and looking for work, and all hell broke loose. It wasn’t pretty, and everyone concerned went about it all wrong. But at the end of the day, these guys needed jobs, and the dickhead construction companies and the unions were in cahoots to keep them out. My job is to prevent that from happening again.”
“Did Ferris work on sensitive stuff?”
He pointed to files on the bookshelves. “Everything we do is sensitive. Where big money is involved, tempers get frayed real easy.”
Torricelli’s color had returned to what I guessed was normal for him, and he was breathing easier.
“Can you get me a list of projects Ferris was working on?”
He shook his head. “It’s against the rules. But if I happen to leave a bunch of file folders on my desk and go to the john for a few minutes . . . With all the crap I got here, things sometimes go missing.”
Torricelli was definitely one of the good guys.
“Is Ferris close to anyone here?”
“Lisa Hernandez, his assistant. But she’s out today. Flu, I think.”
“Do you have her number?”
Torricelli flipped through his Rolodex and found her card. He scribbled her number on a Post-it and passed it to me.
He pulled my business card out of his pocket and held it between his thumb and forefinger. “If I get jammed up, can I call you?” he said.
“Count on it.”
He slid the card into his shirt pocket. “I appreciate it.”
“One last question. What was your take on Ferris?” I said.
“Off the record?”
“Sure.”
“Let’s just say he favors restaurants with tablecloths.”
“Hard to do on a city paycheck.”
“I wouldn’t know. I’m an Applebee’s guy myself.”
CHAPTER
11
The next day, the number-one item on my agenda was to see Lisa Hernandez. That lasted for about fifteen minutes. What I really needed was an Allie fix. I called her. She was apologetic. Her morning was jam-packed, but a quick hot dog at the Plaza Fountain was definitely in the cards for lunch.
I arrived promptly at noon and found Allie sitting at the base of General Sherman’s statue. She wore a denim vest over a Brooklyn Dodgers T-shirt. Her hair was pulled back in a bun. She looked troubled.
“You didn’t get the account,” I said.
She forced a weak smile. “No, it’s not that. We haven’t heard yet.”
“Then what is it?”
She got to her feet, took my arm, and went for a big smile.
“Nothing, just the kind of a day that forces me to reexamine what I do for a living. I’ve got art directors who can’t even draw stick figures, copywriters who think they’re Hemingway, and clients who wouldn’t know good advertising if it jumped up and bit them on the ass. My mother should have done the decent thing and drowned me at birth. Let’s eat.”
We walked over to a hot dog cart, ordered two with mustard and onions, and found a spot on the rim of the fountain.
“How’s your life going, Steeg? Made any headway with your ex-wife?”
There were two ways I could have taken that remark. One, it was Allie’s shorthand reference to the case. Or, two, the green-eyed monster had made an appearance. I went with the former. For now.
“I’m in what you might call fact-gathering mode now. Lots of people to see, places to go. That kind of thing.”
“Really!”
Although she made a big show of it, I could tell she really wasn’t listening. Instead, her eyes kept straying to Fifth Avenue.
“What’s going on, Allie?”
She set her untouched hot dog down. “Did you ever get the feeling that you’re being followed?”
“From time to time.”
“No, I mean now.”
“Care to expand on that?”
“Do you see that gray van?”
“Where?”
“Parked on Fifth Avenue. I noticed it last night when I left the office. Since then, every time I turn around it’s nearby.”
Sure enough, there was a gray van. It was a good way off, and the windows were tinted, so I couldn’t make out the occupants.
“Could be one of those stick-figure-challenged art directors. And gray is the color of choice for vans. Hides the dirt.”
“I’m not crazy, Steeg, and this isn’t a joke. I’m being stalked.”
“Well, why don’t we find out what’s going on. You wait here. I’ll be right back.”
I got to my feet and walked to Fifth. When I was about twenty yards from the van, the window slid down partway, and a hand appeared with the thumb up and the index finger pointed at me. Before the window closed, I clearly heard the word “Bang!”
With a screech of its tires the van was gone.
I walked back to Allie. She was trembling.
“I saw that,” she said. “What’s going on?”
“I don’t know.”
“Hey, man, I got something for you.”
He was a black kid, about fourteen. There was a manila envelope in his outstretched hand.
“Who gave it to you?”
“A white guy. Gave me twenty dollars to deliver it to you, personally.”
“What did he look like?”
He shrugged. “A white guy. You want it, or not?”
I took the envelope, and the kid melted into the crowd.
Ally stared at the envelope. “What do you think it is?”
I opened it. “Let’s find out.”
I pulled out a sheaf of photographs. Candid shots of Allie, DeeDee, and me.
“My God!” Allie said.
Someone had definitely upped the ante.
CHAPTER
12
Lisa Hernandez would have to wait. That evening I had an early dinner at a Hell’s Kitchen red-sauce joint with Luce Guidry. She was all decked out in a narcissus-yellow two-piece suit featuring a gigantic strawberry pinned to the lapel.
I showed her the pictures. “Think it could have anything to do with the skanks I took down at Neon the other night?”
“Could. Even morons know how to operate a camera these days. Just point and click.”
“Turn up any witnesses?”
“Not a one. Nobody saw anything, or too afraid to talk. Hard to blame them.”
“The pictures might have come from another source.”
I told her about Ferris.
“I always liked Ginny,” she said. “Too damned bad, Jackson. I gotta give her a call.”
“She’d appreciate that.”
“Who’s working the case?”
“Pete Toal and his sidekick. Guy likes to be called Swede.”
She made a face.
“Don’t expect much, Jackson. The word is, Toal is mailing it in. Just about everything he touches seems to wind up on the back burner. I guess that’s what happens when you’re nearing the end of your string . . . or running a game.”
“Pete? He cuts corners but—”
“Pension ain’t what it’s cracked up to be. Easy to wind up in someone’s pocket.”
“Anybody have Toal under a microscope?”
“Not as far as I know,” Luce said.
“Could the fact that he’s a dyed-in-the-wool homophobe be coloring your thinking?”
When Luce and Cherise got married, Toal gave them a sex toy as a wedding gift. Thought it was hilarious. Luce didn’t, and decked him.
She shrugged. “Could be.”
“He wasn’t the only one.”
“No, he wasn’t. Look, I’m just speculating here. But won’t be the first time one of our brothers in blue played fuck-around.”
On that happy note we called it a night. Luce went back to Cherise, and I went home, watched some television, and turned in early. I was awakened when my phone rang.
“Jake, it’s Dave,” he said.
I looked at the clock on my nightstand.
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br /> “What’s wrong?” I asked.
“Everything’s just ducky. Why?”
“It’s five in the morning.”
“Yeah, well, some of us work for a living. Had a situation, but now it’s fixed.”
The less I knew about Dave’s “situation” the better.
“Anyway,” he continued, “remember those two problems you laid on me?”
“Ferris and Reno.”
“The former is still up in the air, but I might be able to help you with the latter,” he said. “Meet me at Feeney’s at eight. Breakfast is on me.”
At eight on the dot I was at Feeney’s. Dave sat in his customary booth at the back, reading the newspaper. Nick was at the bar, chatting with a guy I didn’t recognize.
I slid in opposite my brother.
Feeney’s was where Dave did business, and he always dressed for it. Today he was looking particularly spiffy in a perfectly tailored pearl gray, two-button number. A pale blue shirt and red tie with tiny yellow amoebas swimming all over it completed the outfit.
He jabbed his finger at an article in the sports section. “You see this?” he said, passing it over to me.
According to the headline, after years of eligibility, a star baseball player had just made the Hall of Fame on his last try.
“Yeah, I heard about it last night on ESPN. Apparently he had the stats and they couldn’t prove he was throwing games.”
“They should have talked to me. You know that condo I bought in Bal Harbour a couple of years ago?”
“Yeah?”
“Couldn’t have done it without him. And they let him into the Hall. What kind of a message does that send to kids?” He grabbed the newspaper back and balled it up. “There’s no fucking morality anymore.”
“Do you realize how insane you sound?”
“Why? I didn’t put a gun to his head. He came to me. And he isn’t the only one. I just handle their bets. Besides, if it wasn’t me, it would be someone else.”
Illogical? Sure. Did it make sense in an inverted sort of way? Absolutely.
“You said you could help Danny.”
“I did,” Dave said. “Help’s sitting at the bar with Nick.”
I took a closer look. Nothing impressive. Baggy suit. Bad haircut. Sallow complexion.
“Who is he?”
“Kenny Apple. An accountant by training.”
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