“We insist on full immunity for Mr. Carlucci,”Rosenberg said. “As well as for the corroborating witness.”
That had been the sticking point during the weeks of negotiations. The D.A. and his subordinates loathed Nando Carlucci. The idea of letting the fat mobster off the hook for a murder was repugnant to them.
“But you still won’t tell us who this alleged witness is,” one of the A.D.A’s said.
“You don’t have to know that now,” Rosenberg said.
“You have nothing to lose,” Rosenberg said. “We’re the ones who have to produce. Mr. Carlucci wants to do his civic duty and clear his conscience, even though he was but an innocent bystander in the lamentable affair.”
In the end, the D.A. went along with it.
“We’ll get Carlucci eventually,” he said after the meeting. “One big fish at a time.”
As they drove away from the D.A.’s office, Rosenberg said, “I hope you know what you’re doing, Nando. This is a big risk. Opens up a can of worms. He’d better produce.”
“Don’t you worry, counselor. He’ll produce. He wants it bad.”
“It’s not just you, Nando. I’ve got my reputation to think of. My name will be anathema with the D.A. if we stiff him on this.”
Carlucci looked at his lawyer with ill-concealed contempt.
“Your fuckin’ name is an enema. You got no reputation to protect. Just do your job and wrap up the immunity thing tighter than a virgin’s pussy. I don’t have to remind you what happened to the last lawyer that fucked with my family, do I? That’s how we got here, ain’t it?”
CHAPTER 1 – THE RED LANTERN
Two Months Later
The workmen wheeled the last of the potted plant life into my office on hand dollies.
“You sure you don’t want us to put some out in the reception area, Mr. Rhode?”
“I haven’t finished painting it and the carpet is coming next week,” I said. “I’d only have to move them all.”
He shrugged and handed me an envelope.
“Miss Robart wrote down some instructions on how to care for them. She said if you have any questions, just call.”
I’m not a plant guy. I’d keep the hardiest. The best shot at survival for the rest was my plan to donate them to other offices in the building. I called Nancy Robart at the Staten Island Botanical Garden to thank her for the foliage. She was the Executive Director and had donated the plants to give my new digs “some much needed class.” She was at a luncheon, so I left the thank you on her voice mail.
Lunch sounded good to me. I opened a drawer in my desk, dropped Nancy’s instructions in it and pulled out the holster containing my .38 Taurus Special. A lot of people in my line of work don’t carry guns. Most of them have never been shot at, in war or peace. I have, in both, and like the comforting feel of iron on my hip. Besides, with all the hoops you have to jump through to get a permit in New York City (if you fill out the paperwork wrong they send you to Guantanamo), it seems silly not to carry. The Taurus revolver has only five chambers in its cylinder, to keep the weight down. But the bullets are big. The gun is meant for close-in work. Presumably if you need more than five shots a sixth won’t matter.
I clipped the holster on my belt and shrugged into the brown corduroy jacket that was draped on the back of my chair. The jacket felt a little tight around the shoulders. I wasn’t back to my old weight but my rehab, which included lifting iron, was redistributing muscle. I’d have to get my clothes altered soon. Or, assuming I got some clients, buy some new threads. But the jacket still fell nicely, even if it didn’t quite cover the paint smudges on my jeans, and there was no gun bulge.
I walked down the stairs to the building lobby. The docs at the V.A. hospital said it would help strengthen my leg and it seemed to be working. The limp was barely noticeable. I stopped at the security station by the elevators and told the guard that I’d left my office unlocked because the cable company was scheduled to install my high-speed Internet and phone system sometime in the afternoon.
“You’re the private eye on eight,” she said. “Rhode.” Her name tag said “H. Jones” and she was sturdily stout without being fat. Her skin color was only slightly darker than her tan uniform. “What time they give you?”
“Sometime between 1 PM and the next ice age,” I said.
“I hear you.” She wrote something in a large cloth-bound ledger, the kind that used to sit on hotel check-in counters and private eyes were able to read upside down in noir movies. I never could read upside down, so the move to hotel computers made no difference to me. “You coming back?”
“Yeah. Just running out to pick up some lunch.”
“Where you headed?”
“Red Lantern, in Rosebank. You know it?”
“Oh, man. Best eggplant hero in the borough.”
“Can I bring one back for you?”
“Sure.”
She bent to get her purse.
“Forget it. My treat. What’s the ‘H’ stand for?”
“Habika. It means ‘sweetheart,’ in some African language I have no clue about. My folks had just seen Roots when I was born. Coulda been worse, I guess.”
“Alton,” I said, extending my hand.
“Like I said, it coulda been worse,” she said. “You can call me ‘Abby’. Everyone else does. Abby Jones.”
“Why not sweetheart, or sweetie?”
“Cause then I hit you upside your head. Listen, my brother works at the cable company. I’ll give him a call to make sure they don’t forget about you.”
A Rhode rule: It never hurts to buy an eggplant hero for a security guard.
There was a bank branch in the lobby. It had an ATM but the daily limit was $400 and I had a bar tab to square. I was working off the cash from a dwindling home equity line of credit inexplicably approved by the same bank. I wondered if I could be nailed for trading on inside information if I shorted its stock because it lent me the money.
The branch manager came out of his cubbyhole to shake my hand, smiling effusively. He led me over to a cute little redhead teller who thanked me before, during and after the transaction. If I’d wanted a toaster, she would have gone home and taken one from her own kitchen. The banks had a lot of PR ground to make up.
I now had a grand in my pocket. Flush and hungry; a combination that always works for me. I planned to walk the mile or so along Bay Street to the Red Lantern. But it was drizzling, with the imminent promise of something heavier. With a corduroy jacket I’d weigh as much as Donald Trump’s hairdo by the time I arrived. I don’t use an umbrella unless animals are lining up two-by-two on the ark ramp.
My three-year old light blue Chevy Malibu is distinguished only by several round indentations on its trunk and rear panels. I’d bought it at Honest Al Lambert’s Used Car Lot in Tottenville. Al had acquired six almost-pristine Malibus at auction from a rental fleet, but hadn’t counted on the car carrier transporting them from Denver running into a vicious hail storm in Indiana. The vehicles on top had their windshields smashed and their bodywork turned into the far side of the moon. Undaunted, Al tried to sell me one of those. But even the dimmest suspect might notice being followed by a car with more dimples than a golf ball. So I opted for one of the Malibus on the carrier’s first level, which sustained little damage but were still heavily discounted. It looked like every third car on the road. Still, I made a few modifications, including a passenger-side ejector seat activated by a red button hidden in the gear shift. I didn’t actually do that.
At the Red Lantern all the parking spots, including those next to fire hydrants, bus stops and “No Parking” signs, were filled with cars that had official stickers or emblems: police, fire, sanitation, court officers, judges, Borough Hall, Coast Guard. Coast Guard? The NFL season was in full swing. It was Friday and the regular lunchtime crowd was inflated by dozens of people dropping off betting slips for Sunday’s games in the bar’s huge football pool. My glove compartment was full of phony decals and emb
lems that I would have used in an illegal spot if one was available, but I couldn’t chance double parking and blocking in some Supreme Court judge. I settled for a spot two blocks away.
This section of Rosebank, once almost exclusively Italian, with a sprinkling of Jewish delis and bakeries, now had businesses run by more recent immigrants. I passed a Korean nail salon flanked by an Indian restaurant and a Pakistani convenience store. Across the street was something called the Somali-American Social Club, where a tall man in a white dashiki stood outside smoking. Probably didn’t want to light up inside near the explosives. Two doors down, Gottleib’s Bakery, a local institution for 80 years, still held the fort. If World War III broke out, I was pretty certain it would start here.
Inside the Red, patrons were two-deep at the rail keeping three bartenders hopping. All the tables in the front and back rooms were occupied and I pushed my way to the bar. The front room had dimpled tin ceilings that tended to amplify and redirect noise. In fact, because of an acoustic anomaly, something said at one end of the bar might be heard clearly at the other end. Of course, most conversations were lost in the mix of babble, but people still tended to be discreet. If you wanted to ask for a quick blow job in the car, or you were a city councilman asking five large in cash from a contractor who needed a zoning variance, you might as well put it on cable. The half-oval bar ran the length of the front room and had a dark green leather border matched by the upholstery of high-back swivel stools. A large silver trophy depicting a crouching man with his hand swept back occupied a place of honor next to the register. Its nameplate read “R. Kane.” Underneath that, “1973 Tri-State Handball Championships.” A third line said “Second Place.”
Roscoe Kane, 60 pounds past his handball prime, lumbered over. I reached in my pocket, counted off $500 and put it on the bar.
“Take me off the books.”
“Business picking up?”
“I’m being optimistic.”
Reaching behind the register, Roscoe pulled out a beat-up marble notebook of the type your mother bought for your first day of school. He laid it on the bar, flipped some pages, picked up a pencil and crossed something out. He took $420 from the pile and put it in the cash drawer. At the same time he reached down into a cooler, lifted out a bottle of Sam Adams Light, twisted off the cap with one hand and slid it down to me. Ex-handball champs don’t lack for manual dexterity. He put the notebook away. I knew that dozens, maybe hundreds, of similar notebooks had served the same purpose since the Red Lantern, one of the oldest taverns in the city, opened its doors back when the Kings Rifles garrisoned Staten Island.
Roscoe put some bar nuts in front of me and said, “Glass? Lunch?”
“No, and yes,” I said through a mouthful of nuts. “Two eggplant heroes to go.”
I took a long draw on my beer. It was ice cold. Not too many people drank Sam Adams in the Red, let alone Sam Adams Light, but Roscoe kept in a stash for me. It was the only light beer I’d ever had that didn’t taste light.
I said, “Is it true that the Algonquins ran a tab in here?”
“Never. Bastards stiffed us.”
“Yeah,” one of the regulars at the bar snorted, “and this place hasn’t bought back a drink since.”
As I sipped my beer, I turned to scan the opposite wall, which was covered floor to ceiling with tally sheets for the 1,400 people in the football pool. The alphabetically-listed entrants were a democratic cross section of the populace, including just about every elected and appointed official, several judges, a smattering of assistant district attorneys, college professors, scores of cops and half the hoods in the borough. The sheets were taken down after the Monday night games and updated by the three elderly Italian ladies who also ran the kitchen. No one questioned their cooking or their accuracy.
I felt a blast of chilly air. The bar’s cheerful hubbub eased a bit and one of the other bartenders said “shit” under his breath. I turned as Arman Rahm and a fire hydrant entered the bar. The fire hydrant’s name was Maks Kalugin and had more bullet holes in him than Emperor Maximilian.
***
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
At The New York Times, Lawrence De Maria covered the stock market, often from Page 1, and – depending on how long other reporters and columnists took for lunch – also wrote about the credit market, options, real estate and just about anything else financial. He believes he holds the record for most bylines in a single Times edition: four. (The unwritten rule – no pun intended – was one byline per edition.)
“I heard the Executive Editor went bananas. So what did the marketing department do? They used all those stories in an ad campaign. I had four bylines again! I think they only reason they put up with me was that the financial section was nominated for a Pulitzer while I was there. Or, perhaps, despite the fact that I was there.”
After a stint in the Marines, De Maria got his journalistic start at The Staten Island Advance, covering crime and politics in a borough where those two pursuits were often not mutually exclusive.
“It was the kind of job where you could bump into Roy Cohn in the courthouse elevator,” De Maria remembers. “I was on my way to cover the trial of some lowlife mobster accused of shooting a man seven times in a barroom full of witnesses. Cohn and I had a nice chat. He was very pleasant, not at all like the man who terrified the nation during the Red Scare years earlier. I had no idea why he was in a Staten Island courthouse, or who his client was.”
Then, after exiting the elevator, Cohn walked into the same courtroom De Maria did. The client was the young John Gotti.
“He wasn’t the ‘Dapper Don’ back then,” De Maria noted. “He was wearing a green leisure suit.”
But he still was John Gotti. And Roy Cohn was still Roy Cohn.
“Not surprisingly, none of the eyewitnesses showed up to testify. I think the cops had some forensic evidence, because they did manage to convict him of attempted manslaughter, which conveniently ignored the fact that there was a dead body. He got a few years. Maybe it was the leisure suit.”
The Gotti trial wasn’t De Maria’s only brush with the “mob.” He also spent a week on the set of The Godfather, some of which was filmed on Staten Island.
“I was the only reporter on the set. Nobody could figure out how I was getting all my inside stories. I snuck in as one of the waiters for the crew catering the famous wedding scene. Marlon Brando, Diane Keaton, Al Pacino, James Caan, they couldn’t get enough of the great Italian food served every day. Neither could I, to be honest. I was surprised how nice and accessible they all were. I think they sensed they were creating a classic.”
De Maria left the Advance with an Associated Press Spot News Award under his belt and it wasn’t long before he was exposed to venality on a whole new scale.
“At both The Times and later at Forbes, and then in a brief, lamentable stint in corporate communications, I met some really serious crooks. Gotti or Madoff? You choose.”
De Maria believes that hobnobbing with Wall Street bigwigs was the perfect training ground for the fiction author he now is.
“Most of what they told you was unbelievable, as subsequent indictments proved.”
Table of Contents
Copyright
Also by Lawrence De Maria
Dedication
Introduction
SOUND OF BLOOD
CHAPTER 1 – DANGEROUS MARINE ORGANISMS
CHAPTER 2 - A PLATINUM REFERRAL
CHAPTER 3 – A BOY AT GETTYSBURG
CHAPTER 4 – JOSHUA HIDLESS
CHAPTER 5 – FIRST CONTACT
CHAPTER 6 – MARIA BRUTTI
CHAPTER 7 – THE WILD EAST
CHAPTER 8 – SEATTLE SLIME
CHAPTER 9 – PEST CONTROL
CHAPTER 10 – AN ADORING PRESS
CHAPTER 11 – EMERALD OF THE SEAS
CHAPTER 12 – BABY’S BREATH
CHAPTER 13 – A ROSE BY ANY OTHER NAME
CHAPTER 14 – MIAMI LICE
CHAPTER 15
– THE BEST MOJITOS IN TOWN
CHAPTER 16 – THE SOUTH FLORIDA TIMES
CHAPTER 17 – EXPENSIVE TASTES
CHAPTER 18 – DEATH BY MISNOMER
CHAPTER 19 – A FREUDIAN SHIP
CHAPTER 20 – ‘HE WAS LUNCH’
CHAPTER 21 – NO EXAGGERATION
CHAPTER 22 – VICTOR BALLANTRAE
CHAPTER 23 – DO YOU GOLF?
CHAPTER 24 – DEAD MAN’S LOCKER
CHAPTER 25 – THE WHEELS COME OFF
CHAPTER 26 – PUBLIC HUMILIATION
CHAPTER 27 – BOSTON AT THE BEACH
CHAPTER 28 – EVEN THE WAITERS STOPPED
CHAPTER 29 – CANAPÉS AND CALL GIRLS
CHAPTER 30 – A HELLUVA PARTY
CHAPTER 31 – A TOUGH TOWN
CHAPTER 32 – FIERCE LOVE
CHAPTER 33 – THE CROSS OF LORRAINE
CHAPTER 34 – THE MAN IN COACH
CHAPTER 35 – ROUGHING IT
CHAPTER 36 – BAD FOR THE TOURIST TRADE
CHAPTER 37 – RUSH HOUR
CHAPTER 38 – BODY COUNT
CHAPTER 39 – CANDID CAMERA
CHAPTER 40 – CELL CLONE
CHAPTER 41 – DONUTS TO THE RESCUE
CHAPTER 42 – THE BLADE
CHAPTER 43 – EPTATRETUS STOUTI
CHAPTER 44 – THE FINAL ONE KILLS
CHAPTER 45 – MACK’S RULES
CHAPTER 46 – DIRTY BUSINESS
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