Slive reached for the knife, and Taylor couldn’t help but pull his hand quickly toward his lap. Slive smiled tightly, thin lips and no teeth.
“You know, I work a lot of cases. You might think there’s just your big story. Not so. I did talk to Dodd, but not about anything at the precinct. I wanted Dodd’s help with another investigation. There’s a serious corruption ring working the Upper Eastside. This one’s committing real crimes. Running drugs. Extortion. Guess who heads it?”
“No idea.”
“Michael Callahan. I was trying to get Dodd to work Samantha Callahan for me. I’d hoped we’d get some information out of her.”
“Was he?”
“He was good. I was thinking of recruiting Dodd into IA.”
“What did you learn?”
“I can’t comment at this time.”
“Of course. What about the Oh-Nine?”
“You have some interesting information. Some. Let’s say you’re warm in places. Cold in others.”
“Give me a direction to go in.”
The waiter removed the salad and put down the chicken dish with a side of pasta.
“Not my job. Please be careful, though. This is more complex than you understand. I will clean it up. And I’ll rip through anyone who gets in my way.”
He left Marco’s. The sidewalk gave off the odor of a storm just passed. The rain had stopped. Taylor turned west toward Sheridan Square. His hope had been that Slive would confirm some important piece of the story—the Schmidt connection would have been ideal. Admitting there were open questions about Dodd’s killing would have been a start. But the IA investigator’s warm-cold crap didn’t give him any direction to go in. Worse, Slive had provided him with a completely new and totally terrible direction. He could think of two ways to proceed. Tell Samantha what he’d learned. Or find a way to interview Schmidt. Either way he’d probably get shot.
This story was like a series of math equations with no right answers. He turned them over and over in his head all the way to Sheridan Square.
“Good lunch?”
Taylor jumped sideways. Samantha laughed from under a floppy hat.
“I said wait in the coffee shop.”
“C’mon, we’re not in the Ninth now.”
“You know what I mean.”
“Get anything good?”
“You’re not going to think so.”
Chapter 21
They walked in silence to the subway. Taylor tried to think things through.
Who’m I kidding? There’s no way this plays well.
He couldn’t ignore what Slive had said. Samantha wasn’t going to like it at all.
She didn’t. On the 1 train uptown, he took her through the whole conversation.
“Dodd wasn’t pumping me for anything.” She stared at him like he was crazy. “That’s pure bullshit.”
“What about your father?”
“My father isn’t corrupt. Period. Slive is sending you down some kind of rat hole. It’s him you should worry about.”
“Okay, so maybe your father’s not—”
“Maybe? If I say he’s not, he’s not.”
“Fine. Dodd still could have been working you. Did you two talk about your father?”
“I guess. We talked about all sorts of stuff until he went quiet. You spend a lot of hours in the car together.”
“Slive said he was going to recruit Dodd into IA. We can’t simply disregard everything he said. What if there’s something there?”
“Like what?”
“If your mother says she loves you, check it out.”
“What the hell are you talking about?”
“It’s an old Chicago editor’s line. It means confirm whatever you’re told or prove it wrong.”
The train entered the 14th Street station with a whump as it left the tunnel for the open air of the platform. The brakes squealed. This station had lost only five or six percent of its passengers. Taylor remembered that from the piece he’d written in the morning.
He crossed the platform to catch the 2-3 express. Samantha didn’t. Instead, she climbed the stairs to the token booths and the exit. Taylor quickly followed.
“Wait. We can figure this out.”
He reached gently for her elbow.
She pulled away with a violent yank and turned on the stairs to face him. “You promised me the story wouldn’t come first.”
“We’ve got to know what’s fact and what’s fiction. Maybe Slive is sending me down some blind alley. Or maybe he was investigating your father,” he held up his hands, “even if he’s innocent. IA guys can do whatever the hell they want. Go wherever they want. You’ve learned that. What if he was using Dodd? What if Dodd was going into IA?”
“Bullshit.” She kept going up the stairs. “Now you’re just spinning bullshit. You just want the story. Nothing else.” She clacked through the turnstiles.
He stopped on his side of the barrier. Why follow? He already knew Samantha well enough. If she wanted to get away from him, to be alone, there was little he could do. Would she calm down? See his side? No idea. She was ferociously independent. He wasn’t going to change her mind now. He’d done the right thing. He’d told her everything Slive had said.
He slumped onto a plastic seat on the next express train, miserable. The right thing sucked. The express stopped in the tunnel just short of Times Square for a good ten minutes, lights out. In the dark, he inventoried what he had. Jack shit. Samantha was gone. Slive had refused to confirm the story he thought he had and sent him off in a completely different direction.
Jersey Stein did say Slive was the guy who went in and cleaned out precincts. Was Taylor close to something on the Dodd killing that Slive didn’t have yet? Or didn’t want Taylor to have? It was possible. It was also possible Taylor had figured the shooting all wrong, and Slive really did want a story on Sergeant Mick Callahan reported.
What next?
The only thing he could think to do was confront Schmidt. He’d considered that an okay option when he had Samantha as backup. She’d been his partner in this dangerous story—a partner who could get him out of a jam.
No, Samantha wasn’t just protection. With Samantha around the past few days, he’d thought less and less about Laura. And it hurt less and less to think about her. She’d taken away the loneliness. He missed her already, here in the dark of a New York subway tunnel.
At City News, he made a few calls until he collected enough quotes from worried homeowners to write up the power-lines-rotting-brains story on autopilot. As he finished typing, Novak burst out of his tiny office.
“WWRN, WWRN, WWRN.”
“You a DJ now?” Taylor put the copy on Cramly’s desk.
“I signed them. Station number five. An FM. I got our first FM, an easy listening FM.”
“They have any living listeners?”
“Sure do.” Novak followed Taylor back to his desk. “Can you do anything with that corruption story? The bonds? Anything? We need a big one.”
“Don’t really have it all yet.” Shit, is that an understatement.
“C’mon, Taylor, give me something. The stations are looking for more. WWRN has adult listeners who love news with their Living Strings.”
That was hardly a motivator. His stories squeezed between tracks of elevator music. This wasn’t journalism. He was writing filler. How much does filler matter?
That’s it. Filler doesn’t matter. Doesn’t matter at all. But it might flush out the real story.
He looked up at Novak as his revelation turned into a plan. “Think I can pull something together with what I’ve got. Not the whole story. Might be a big sketchy.”
“That’s my man. Knew you’d come through.”
Taylor rolled another sheet into the Olivetti, flipped open his notebook and wrote the story he thought he had. Thought, but couldn’t prove, not with sources on the record, not without ignoring Slive’s warning that he was cold on some parts of it. He definitely wouldn’t
have been able to prove it to the satisfaction of any editor at the Messenger-Telegram, RIP.
He wrote it anyway, ripping through at breakneck speed. He’d been running the story through his head for days, changing it every time he learned something new. There was a cliché about stories writing themselves. This one did. That should have been his first warning.
He crammed everything into two pages. The stations demanded short stories. He didn’t want anything cut from the red flag he was sending up into the night. Dodd was set up by corrupt cops at the Ninth Precinct, lured to his death by Mortelli, who was an unwitting victim in the murder plot with his own secret. That secret: $250,000 in municipal bonds. He shook his head as he typed the last lines. The story would certainly have been thrown back in his face at the MT for being more supposition than fact. He didn’t care. This was filler, after all. He wasn’t trying to break news with this one. He was trying to break the story open—flush out someone who would give him what he needed to report what really happened to Robert Dodd. It was Taylor’s way out of the dead end.
Desperate as he was, he knew there was one huge hole in the story left unfilled. If Mortelli was only the lure for Dodd, then a third assailant shot them both, probably using the missing gun on Dodd. Could be Schmidt. Could be someone else. That was not an accusation he could put out there yet. He knew that would be going too far, which wasn’t saying much with this story.
Would Samantha see he’d kept his word? There was nothing about her or her father. He hoped so.
Cramly read the typescript. “The sourcing’s really weak. I mean Christ, there isn’t any.”
Novak, just returned from buying sparkling wine to celebrate WWRN, grabbed the copy. “This is the right stuff. Scandal. A case full of bonds. Hero cop. Didn’t want to tell you, Taylor, but I mentioned the briefcase to one of the station managers. He ate it right up.”
Taylor, already feeling guilty for blind-sourcing a story to flush out the real facts, was compelled to explain in detail to Novak and Cramly where all the information had come from—the anonymous phone tip on the radio call, Rayban Lincoln providing the details on the cop beating Mortelli and shooting his dog. Novak nodded the whole time. He would have nodded at anything.
Not like the story’s a fake. It all could be accurate. Shit, now you’re bullshitting yourself.
Taylor’s standards had dropped to the floor, along with the rest of his life. Samantha was gone. He was out of time. Instead of chasing sources, he was trying to get them to chase him.
“We needed this so bad,” said Novak. “The contracts are all short term. We had to give them something big.”
Novak put the story in the telecopier himself and stood by as the drum spun, sending the story to the first station on the list. The machine made a high whine, pathetic compared to the majestic thunder of a newspaper press running at full speed.
As far as Taylor was concerned, there was way too much of the suburbs in this story. But all his calls to Anthony Mortelli at the office had gone unreturned. Now it was after banker’s hours, and the only way to catch him was at home. Strike that, at the Howard Johnson in Elmsford, where he’d been since his wife threw him out. Taylor could have easily gone back to City Island, let his trial balloon rise and wait to see what happened. That wasn’t his way. He hated loose ends and unexplained details. There was guilt too. A lot of guilt. Having sent out a story that was as much smoke as fact, he was determined to do something so the next one was rock solid. He couldn’t just wait. So here he sat on the New York Central, looking out at the broad Hudson River as the old diesel groaned north to Tarrytown. At least there was some scenery on this ride. Tarrytown was a busy commuter hub, with several waiting cabs. Expensive cabs. He almost choked on the nine dollar fair to Elmsford. He was living on a pay cut and knew Novak couldn’t cover expenses.
He knocked on the orange door of room nine. Mortelli answered, his yellow polyester shirt unbuttoned near to his navel. The slicked-backed hair was sticking up.
With a look of almost happy surprise, he grabbed Taylor, pulled him into the room and slammed him into the wall. “Where are they?” Mortelli picked up a half-empty bottle of Canadian Club. The whiskey sloshed in the bottle. The ache from Taylor’s bruised ribs blossomed into sharp pain. “My wife says you’re asking about the bonds. Tell me where they are, or I’ll crack your skull open like a Christmas nut.”
“They’re yours?”
“No more interviews. Tell me.” He pulled the bottle back. His hand tightened on Taylor’s jacket so the collar cut into the skin of Taylor’s neck.
“You’re not going to get much out of me. As far as I know, the cops have them. They were recovered from your son’s building.”
“Shit.” Mortelli stumbled back onto the orange blanket of the double bed. He opened the bottle and took two big swallows.
“Then they disappeared,” Taylor said.
“Disappeared? What’s that mean?”
“I witnessed the cops taking them into their possession. I can’t get anyone at the precinct to admit to anything.”
“Not sure if that hurts me or helps me.” More whiskey.
The news had taken the fight out of Mortelli. If he kept drinking like that, he wouldn’t be able to get off the bed.
“Were they yours?”
He laughed and shook his head. “What’s it matter if the cops fucking have them? My son took them from me.”
“What was he going to do with them?”
“He wouldn’t know what to do with them. He just knew they were important to me. I was supposed to let him stay in that shithole with those strays and sub-humans. I did that, he’d tell no one about the briefcase.”
“John was twenty-four. What’d he have to worry about?”
“The last time he was at the house, I told him my brothers and I were going to grab him out of there and stick him in the psych ward. Guess he took me seriously. He stole them when he left that night.”
“He used two hundred fifty thousand of your bonds to get you to leave him alone? Novel approach.”
Mortelli drank the whiskey like water. “They weren’t mine. Took them from the bank. Easiest thing.”
Taylor remembered what Novak had told him about the audits. “Like the five million missing from the vaults.”
“They didn’t even get half of the story. It’s far worse. I took the briefcase home in February. No one was paying attention. Figured I’d unload them over a few months. My timing completely sucked. Everything started falling apart a few weeks later when the Urban Development Corporation defaulted. Spooked everyone and put the whole market into a tailspin.” Mortelli’s shoulders slumped like he was folding in on himself. He stared into the opening of the Canadian Club bottle. “The market for city bonds went straight into the shitter. By summer, everyone was calling for better accounting, even more audits. They started going over all the records. I couldn’t do anything with what I took, except maybe sneak them back in or destroy them. Before I could, John stole them.”
“What do you know about your son’s death?”
“Whaddya mean?” The anger returned. He leaned forward, but must have decided staying on the bed was the better idea. “I had nothing to do with that.”
“He took the bonds. You’re in real trouble if you can’t get them back.”
“Yeah, right. I kill him and somehow kill a cop—which is ludicrous by itself.”
“Where were you that morning?”
“In my office. Surrounded by people.”
“I’ll be in touch.”
On the train back, Taylor wondered if he could take Mortelli’s story at face value. None of the other evidence pointed to him. He was going to go back to work on finding out where the bonds ended up. Now that he’d reported about them, he needed that question answered. Were the bonds related to the double killing? Probably not. The briefcase was a family affair. A weird one at that.
Chapter 22
The next morning, Taylor found Cramly standin
g in the door to the offices of the City News Bureau.
Cramly shook his head slowly. “It’s really bad.”
“What’s going on?”
“Novak. The ambulance boys are working on him.”
Taylor pushed past Cramly into the office. Whoever turned the place over wasn’t looking for anything in particular. They were looking to destroy. Desks lay on their sides. Wooden drawers had been pulled out and smashed to kindling. Metal drawers were bent and twisted. The big Telecopier, the most expensive thing the City News Bureau owned, had received several mortal blows. The drum sat on the floor like a piece of pipe waiting for a plumbing project.
He stepped over the contacts from his two rolodexes, spread on the floor like a card trick gone wrong, and stood at the door of Novak’s little office, looking down on the scene from behind the gurney blocking the way. The two ambulance men were getting ready to lift Novak. One eye was swollen shut and the other wandered aimlessly. Blood ran from his nose and mouth. Based on the slick smears on the floor, he’d lost a lot.
One ambulance driver counted to three, and the two gently picked up Novak’s ragdoll body and lowered him to the narrow mattress. One arm was splinted. A quiet wheezing came out of his lungs, the air blowing little bubbles in the blood on his lower lip.
Taylor crouched down. “Henry, I’m so sorry.” He touched the top of Novak’s clammy hand. “Who did this?”
“Buddy, we’ve got to get him out of here. He’s bad. Already in shock.”
Taylor still leaned in. “Was it cops?”
“He can’t tell you shit.”
They wheeled the gurney through the door. Cramly looked down at Novak then up at Taylor.
“Who called it in?” Taylor asked.
“I did.” Cramly pushed his hand through his sparse hair and squeezed the back of his thin neck. “I found him that way. When I left last night, he said he was going to work late.”
“Fucking cops.”
“How can you be sure?”
“You don’t make this much noise without a call going in, even at night. Someone had to make sure that call got ignored.”
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