Red Angel pd-6

by William Heffernan

  Rossi wagged a finger. “Hey, that’s an ugly rumor. I’m seventy-three, a sick old man. The doctors say I’m dying.” A small smile toyed at the corners of his mouth. “Besides, if I wanted you dead, the worms would already be eating your eyes.” He let out a theatrical sigh. “But, instead, you’ll probably go to my funeral.”

  In spite of himself, Devlin smiled at the man’s chutzpah. He raised his eyes to the portrait of Mussolini. “They tell me that back in forty-five, when you saw the newspaper pictures of II Duce hanging by his feet, you wept.”

  Rossi nodded. “I even sent flowers to Italy.”

  Devlin stared at him, unmoved. “I’ll send flowers for you, too, Rossi. But I think I’ll skip the wake.”

  Rossi let out a low cackle. “See, that’s the difference between us. Me? I’d come to your wake. And I’d piss in your coffin.”

  Rossi’s laughter grew, then he turned to Ippolito. “This is a hard man, Mattie. Don’t let him fool you. You see that scar on his cheek?” He waited while Ippolito looked. “A crazy cop gave him that, five, maybe six years ago. And, after he did, Devlin blew that cop away.” He widened his eyes, feigning surprise. “That’s right, the man’s a cop killer, just ask him.”

  “Shut up, Rossi.” It was Pitts, and the words came with a growl.

  Rossi ignored him. “This crazy cop, he cut the inspector’s arm, too-cut it so bad Devlin retired on disability. Took a job as chief of police in some shithole town in Vermont.” He glanced back at Devlin. “You didn’t think I knew so much about you, eh?” He turned back to Ippolito and regretfully shook his head. “But then he came back. Seems one of those crazy serial killers was out to get an old girlfriend of his. So Devlin here, he comes back, and this killer ends up dead, too, and now his old girlfriend is his new girlfriend again. Just like fucking Hollywood. They live together with Devlin’s daughter in some hotsy-totsy loft down in SoHo. It’s a beautiful story.”

  Rossi’s eyes went back to Devlin and the two men glared at each other. The scar on Devlin’s cheek had turned white, a telltale sign that anger had reached the edge of control. Devlin’s lover, Adrianna, and his daughter, Phillipa, had been with him two years ago when Rossi’s killers had come. The threat that it could happen again was clear.

  Hatred fled Rossi’s eyes as quickly as it had come, and he turned back to Ippolito. “But the story’s not over, Mattie. There’s more. Devlin gets the killer, and he gets the girl. It’s all beautiful, like I said. But then the mayor comes to him”-he raised a finger-“the mayor, no less. You got that?”

  “I got it,” Ippolito said.

  “And the mayor asks him to come back to work for the city. But not just as some shitheel detective, like he was before-but to come back as inspector of detectives. And working exclusively for the mayor, himself.” He paused for effect. “You know what that means, Mattie?”

  “No. I don’t know what that means.”

  Rossi wagged another educating finger. “That, my friend, means that Devlin, here, can supersede anybody in the police department-even the chiefs.” He shook his head. “Can you imagine what it would mean if the crooks did something like that? Chaos, my friend. Chaos.” He waved his hand in a circle. “Soldiers superseding capos. Capos superseding bosses. It would be crazy. Everybody would be at everybody’s throats.”

  “Crazy,” Ippolito said.

  Rossi’s finger shot up again. “Maybe that’s why the other cop bosses don’t like Inspector Devlin.” He turned back to Devlin, his eyes brimming hatred again. “You think maybe those other bosses wouldn’t go to your funeral, Devlin?”

  Devlin returned the stare. “I’ll be happy as long as you’re there, Bathrobe. Pissing in my coffin.”

  Rossi threw back his head and laughed. “I don’t like you, Devlin. But I like you.” The hatred returned. “So why the fuck are you here? Tell me quick. I feel an attack coming on. And then I won’t be able to talk to you no more.”

  “I’m here to tell you it’s time to retire, Bathrobe. To go someplace nice and sunny, and let all the killing stop.”

  “Retire from what, Devlin? I’m already retired. I even get Social Security from the government.” He cackled again.

  “Keep laughing, Bathrobe. They got another one of your boys, today.” It was Pitts. He was grinning. “Vinnie Big Head. All that’s left is a big grease spot on Broome Street.”

  Rossi’s jaw tightened. “Makes you happy, huh? So you come out here, and you handcuff my people to your car. Oh, yeah, I saw that shit. You’re hoping, maybe, some shooters come by and kill them, too. Well, fuck you.” Rossi jabbed a finger into his cadaverous chest. His hawklike nose and jutting chin pushed forward. “I’ll be here when all of you are fucking dead. You tell that to the fucking mayor. Tell him to fucking retire.”

  “So your doctors are wrong, huh?”

  Rossi’s head snapped back to Devlin. He was smiling again, and his eyes glittered with a touch of madness. “I got a new doctor. A kind of doctor you never heard of.” His smile widened, revealing ancient, crooked, yellow teeth. “But you will, Devlin. I promise you. And you’ll be amazed at the miracles this doctor can do.”

  “I don’t think he fucking likes you.”

  Pitts was driving toward Nathan’s, his hotdog request having been approved. Devlin stared out the passenger window, watching the neighborhood become rougher and more battered as they headed south.

  “The man’s crazy as a bedbug. I never recognized that before. Now I’m sure of it.”

  Pitts had pulled up at a stoplight. He turned in his seat. “Don’t fucking believe it for a minute. Old Bathrobe is the best fucking dago actor since Robert De Niro.”

  Devlin thought about the not-so-veiled threat Rossi had made against his family. It was stupid, and Rossi wasn’t a stupid man. Maybe it was because he was dying, and felt he had nothing to lose. If so, it would make him even more dangerous.

  “Too bad those two bodyguards had carry permits for their weapons,” Devlin said. “It would have been nice to lock their asses up, then drop a dime to the Columbo family that the Bathrobe was sitting there with only the Knife protecting him.”

  Pitts let out a little cackle. He enjoyed that idea. Then he turned serious. “Hey, that’s another thing. I wanna know the name of the judge who approved those permits, and the name of the scumbag boss on The Job who let them slip through unchallenged. We find that out, we got two probables for Rossi’s pad.”

  “It’s already on my list,” Devlin said. “I’ll have Stan Samuels digging into it before the day’s out.” He pointed a finger at Pitts. “And no cracks about Stan,” he warned.

  Pitts called Samuels “the Mole,” because of his love of burrowing into long-forgotten records, a denigration of the very talent that made him an essential part of Devlin’s five-man team. Everyone on the squad had a nickname-the more derogatory of which had been coined by Pitts. Ramon Rivera, a self-proclaimed Latin love machine and Devlin’s computer expert, was called “Boom Boom.” Red Cunningham, a three-hundred-pound, baby-faced hulk who could plant a bug anywhere Devlin wanted one, was “Elephant Ass.” And Sharon Levy, a beautiful, redheaded lesbian sergeant, who was Devlin’s second in command and who ran the squad like a marine drill instructor, had become “Sergeant Muffdiver”-although even Pitts lacked the guts to say it to her face.

  Pitts pulled up in front of the original Nathan’s Hot Dog Stand-still a Coney Island landmark-and glanced hungrily at the take-out counter. “You want something. A couple of dogs, maybe a knish?” he asked.

  He watched Devlin shake his head. The man was tense; pissed off, Pitts thought. You could always tell when the scar on his cheek-the old knife wound Rossi had ragged him about-turned that warning shade of white. Except for the scar, he was a good-looking guy in a rugged sort of way, even more so now that a touch of gray had come to the temples of his wavy dark hair. There was also an easy gentleness about the guy. Nothing prissy, or namby-pamby, but definitely a feel that you could talk to the man. Except now
it wasn’t there. Now his normally soft, blue eyes were simmering.

  “The old bastard really got to you, didn’t he?”

  Devlin continued to stare straight ahead. Then he drew a long breath and let it out slowly. “You turning into a shrink, Ollie?”

  “Yeah, that’s me.” Pitts reached out and gave Devlin’s arm a squeeze. He left his hand there. It wasn’t cop-to-boss talk now. It was friend to friend. “He ain’t gonna do nothin’ to your family, Paul. I don’t think he’d even let anybody go after you if they were around. And I don’t think he’ll even try to have you whacked again. Remember, last time he had somebody else he could lay the blame on, and the way it turned out, he gotta know even that was a mistake.” Another squeeze. “Hey, maybe he is crazy, like you said, but he’s not that crazy. He went after your lady or your kid, it would bring so much heat down on all the families, they’d never fucking forgive him. Hell, the trouble he has now would seem like a fucking picnic. The other four families, they’d get together and kill his miserable old ass, and then they’d blow up his fucking grave.”

  Devlin smiled in spite of himself, the tension broken. What Pitts was talking about had actually happened. Frank Costello, one of the mob’s more notorious bosses, had died peacefully in his sleep. But the enemies Costello had left behind were still unforgiving, and almost a year after his death a dynamite charge had leveled his tomb.

  He gave Pitts an appreciative nod, his eyes softer now. “You’re not half-bad, Ollie. A pain in the ass as a cop, but not too shabby a shrink.”

  “I’ll send you a bill.”

  “Just go stuff your face so we can get back to the office sometime today.”

  Devlin’s office was on Broadway, around the corner from City Hall and two blocks from One Police Plaza, a brick-cubed headquarters building that overlooked the East River. Street cops, aware of the endless political machinations that went on inside, called the building the Puzzle Palace.

  When the mayor had cajoled him back to the department, Devlin had insisted his new squad be housed outside headquarters or any police precinct. Howie Silver had understood. Politics ruled the department, and anyone who trod on the very private fiefdom of the police brass was quickly ground underfoot. And even the mayor-though treated with greater subtlety-was not immune. During his first year in office, Silver had found himself repeatedly boxed out of high-profile cases when the police brass had felt threatened. It was the reason he had opted for a special squad-one that would handle those cases at his direction and report only to him.

  Back in his office, Devlin went through the phone messages that littered his desk. There were four from the chief of detectives and three each from the chief of organized crime and the commander of the Fifth Precinct, where the latest mob hit had taken place-all the bosses his squad had cut out of the investigation. There was also a message from the mayor. It was the only one that would get a response.

  Sharon Levy sat across from Devlin, a tall, shapely, beautiful redhead who made men’s heads turn when she entered a room, and whose sexual orientation had made her anathema to the bosses of the Puzzle Palace. She was also a gutsy, no-nonsense cop, and Devlin had made her his second in command despite howls of protest from One Police Plaza.

  “We’ve got zip,” Levy said. “Little Italy is loaded with monkeys, all doing a hear-no-evil, see-no-evil, speak-no-evil bit. This thing won’t end until the Columbo family nails Rossi, or until the price gets too high to keep trying.”

  “So let’s up the ante,” Devlin said. “Pull in a half-dozen gold shields from the Fifth, and a half dozen from the Seven-eight. Use the mayor as your authority. You know the drill. I want the Fifth Precinct guys to work Little Italy. The Seven-eight Precinct dicks will handle Brooklyn. Their only job will be to roust every Columbo and Rossi hood who sticks his nose out of his cave. I want every bookie, every numbers runner, every strong-arm punk dragged in. We find a betting slip, we bust everybody in sight. We find a weapon, we lock up every wiseguy within fifty yards of it. We find stolen furs in a back room, the whole building goes to jail. And I don’t care if every arrest we make gets thrown out of court, because as soon as they walk out the door, we’ll bust them again.”

  “Hit ‘em in their wallets.”

  “Until the pigskin squeals.”

  “I like it. It’ll get their attention.”

  “Yes, it will.”

  Devlin noted the skepticism on her face. “I see a but in your eyes.”

  “It’s more an unless.” She gave him a small shrug. “Unless they want Rossi so bad, they don’t care what it costs.”

  Devlin thought that over. It was possible. It could also explain why the Gambino family, still run from prison by Rossi’s nephew, was standing on the sidelines. He gave Sharon a quizzical look. “What the hell could that old bastard have done?”

  The telephone interrupted them before Levy could answer. Devlin expected to hear Howie Silver’s growling baritone, demanding to know why his call hadn’t been returned. Instead, the anguished voice of his lover, Adrianna Mendez, came across awash in sobs. Rossi’s threats immediately returned, pushed away only after he was certain that neither she nor his daughter, Phillipa. had been hurt.

  After five minutes of soothing assurances, he returned the phone to its cradle and stared across at Sharon Levy. “I’m going to be leaving you with this whole Rossi bag for at least a week,” he said. “Providing I can get the mayor to pull some political strings.”

  “What’s wrong, Paul?” There was genuine concern in Levy’s voice.

  “Adrianna’s aunt has been in a serious accident.” He shook his head and offered up a weak, uncertain smile. “Now I have to find a way to get us both into Cuba.”

  The SoHo loft that Devlin shared with Adrianna Mendez was located on Spring Street, amid a collection of iron-fronted buildings that decades earlier had been home to glove manufacturers and tanning merchants. Later, rising costs had forced those companies to flee the city, and the architecturally unique district had been abandoned to the bums and vagrants who wandered in from the Bowery. Then struggling artists in search of large and inexpensive work areas had discovered the loft-warehouses that made up a part of each building. Within a few years the artists were followed by real-estate speculators, who sniffed the aroma of financial gain. Touting the area as the “new bohemia,” they sold the battered lofts to young stockbrokers and commodity traders and other upwardly mobile denizens of fashion. Soon the artists were driven away, save the few successful enough to afford the now pricey lofts. But the artists were no longer necessary. They were replaced by a collection of galleries and restaurants and boutiques, which seemed to sprout unbidden like wildflowers in an abandoned field, and the area, which had once seen animal hides stacked on sidewalks, became the city’s newest attraction for well-heeled tourists.

  Adrianna had been one of the artists able to remain. She had moved to the area as a struggling painter, and the birth of the “new bohemia” had coincided with her sudden recognition as a major talent. The only other “old residents” were the bums and vagrants who had refused to leave. They were the city’s crabgrass, constantly reappearing despite all efforts at eradication. To Devlin they were the only mark of humanity the real-estate moguls had failed to devour, and much to the chagrin of neighboring merchants, he kept a ready supply of dollar bills stuffed in his pocket to encourage their continued presence.

  Devlin found Adrianna packing when he entered the loft. She glanced up at him over a half-filled suitcase. “I can get into Cuba from Canada, Mexico, or the Bahamas,” she said. “I have a travel agent checking flights for me.”

  “If the U.S. government finds out, it’s ten years, or up to a quarter of a million in fines.”

  “They won’t find out. The travel agent told me the Cubans don’t stamp your passport. It’s their way of helping U.S. citizens beat the embargo. So there’s no record of you ever having been there.”

  Devlin crossed the room, lifted her to him, and slipped h
is arms around her waist. “I’m sorry about your aunt,” he said. “And you don’t have to sneak in the back way. Howie Silver made some calls. Your license from the Treasury Department and your Cuban visa will be ready tomorrow morning. Mine, too.”

  “Yours?”

  “You didn’t think I was going to turn you loose in Cuba all alone, did you? The place is supposed to be overrun with sexy male salsa dancers.”

  Adrianna’s head fell against his chest. “Thank God,” she said. “I was terrified. I just didn’t want to tell you. All the stories I grew up with, the stories about Castro’s storm troopers, have been playing in my mind all day. And the phone calls to the hospital in Havana haven’t helped.”

  “What did the hospital tell you?”

  She shook her head against his chest, her long, raven-black hair swinging slightly. “When I got the first call, telling me my aunt Maria had been in a car accident, I called the hospital right away. At first they couldn’t be more helpful. Then her doctor got on the line, and suddenly everything changed. He acted like I wasn’t supposed to know. Like someone calling from the United States was somehow suspicious.”

  He stroked her head. “You told me she was a respected doctor-even worked a bit for the government. That’s probably why.” He ran his hand down her back, trying to comfort her. “You know what hospitals and doctors are like when it comes to their own. They’re like cops.”

  She shook her head again, then stepped back and looked up at him. Her light brown eyes were weary, and her normally smiling mouth was now tight and narrow. “It was more than that, Paul. The doctor was acting like I might find out something I wasn’t supposed to. I was sure he was lying to me.”

  “What did he say about her condition?”

  “He said it was grave.” She pronounced the word in Spanish-graa-VEY.

  Devlin stroked her arm. “I put in a call to the American Interests Section at the Swiss embassy in Havana. The congressman Howie got to expedite the U.S. license and the Cuban visa recommended we do that. No one was available, but I left our number here. The congressman told Howie he’d make sure someone got back to us.”