by Howard Fast
“He’s following,” I said to Finelli, who then increased his speed from fifty-five to seventy miles an hour. The Buick roared ahead, sat beside us for a moment, and then the left rear window moved down. No car window moves too fast, and this gave me time to push Fran to the floor and Finelli time to shove Paula down. I was trying to drop my window—fortunately Finelli drove a button car—and clawing for my gun at the same time when the shot from the Buick passed me and smashed a hole in the left rear window. A second shot came so close that I could swear I felt the breath of the bullet across my face. Then I had my gun out and began to empty it at the Buick. The black car roared away, up the Major Deegan Expressway at an increasing speed, past eighty and touching ninety, screaming from lane to lane as it shifted to pass the other cars on the road; and meanwhile there was Fran demanding to know what was happening and Paula sobbing, and Finelli yelling into his radio-phone, “Did you hear me? This is Lieutenant Finelli, West Side Uptown, and I got a ten thirteen on the Major Deegan. Where? How the hell do I know where? I’m doing ninety miles an hour at night—somewhere between the George Washington exit and Yonkers—”
“Finelli,” I shouted, “cut your speed.”
“What in hell do you mean?”
“Finelli, we got the girls in the car! I don’t want a shoot-out!”
“A black Buick, four-door—”
He heard me and sanity penetrated, and he cut his speed back to sixty. The Buick was gone.
“What happened back there?” he wanted to know. “Anybody hurt?”
He allowed the car to drift down to fifty miles an hour, edging over to the right-hand lane, and said to his wife, “You can sit up, sweetie. I never wanted anything like this to happen with you around. I’m so sorry. Jesus, believe me, I’m so sorry.” She kept sobbing, and he put an arm around her, drawing her close to him. It was a side of Finelli I had never seen and it was very touching.
“Anybody hurt back there?” He had turned his car off the Major Deegan onto an access road, and now he was on the city streets in the North Bronx. He pulled over to the curb and stopped. His radio was squawking.
“So this is what you do for a living,” Fran said, her voice shaky.
“Are you all right?”
“Yes. In five minutes I begin to scream.”
“I gave up the chase!” Finelli was shouting into his radiophone. “I was in hot pursuit, but I gave up, and that’s why I can’t tell you where the goddamn car is. I have two women in my car, and I do not engage in hot pursuit with two women in my car.”
Later, in Mama Pasquella’s Restaurant, Finelli said, “You know, Harry, the big Jewish contribution nobody talks about? It’s the word schmuck. Without it, what do you say? Those total schmucks wanted to know why I couldn’t continue the chase, even after I tell them I got two ladies in my car. So drive carefully they tell me. At ninety miles an hour, I should drive carefully. Any wonder they got increasing crime in the city? Schmucks. The cops never got the car. Ninety miles an hour on the Major Deegan, and they never even picked up a license plate.”
Finelli had introduced Fran and myself to Mama Pasquella, a tall, stout lady in an ankle-length black dress who greeted us as if she had known us all our lives and whose warm embrace enveloped Paula, still tearful. Her information service was better than the CIA, and by the time we were seated, she knew all about the two bullet holes in the window of the car, plus the fact that we had been through a horrendous incident, horrendous to her since she knew none of the details aside from Paula’s tears. Finelli had opened the evening with an enormous platter of Italian hors d’oeuvres to buttress our drinks, and I must say that I had never eaten such food in an Italian restaurant before. I glanced at Fran reproachfully, and she shrugged her shoulders without interrupting her eating, but nodded to indicate that later there would be an apology.
“Eat,” Finelli said. “We got to be glad we’re alive. If those bums in the Buick had used shotguns, we might all be in the hospital now—or in the morgue.”
“Nice way to talk,” Fran said. “I don’t like your profession.”
“Who does? Harry, why do you suppose them bums tried to kill us?”
“You tell me. It was your car.”
“Yeah, but they must have been parked outside your house, waiting.”
“Then why did they wait until we got out on the highway?” Fran wanted to know.
“Easier getaway. They could get trapped on the city streets. You know, Harry,” he said to me, “I been nice to everybody. I don’t know why anyone should try to waste me.”
I could just visualize Finelli being nice to everyone. I suggested the mob.
“Yeah,” Finelli said. “They know how I hate them. I hate the goddamn Mafia more than the devil himself. They put a stink on every decent Italian in this country, and they know how I feel about them. They’re looking to establish more business on the West Side, and I ordered my squad to make it difficult, really difficult. But the mob don’t kill cops as a regular thing. Sometimes, but not often. They’re organized, and they know that killing a cop won’t bring them nothing, only make the other cops mad. Anyway, this don’t look like anything the mob does. It don’t smell Mafia, and I got a lot of time put into smelling Mafia. If it was the mob, we’d be dead now. No, I think it was a private job. The bums who take contract work are not much damn good. This could be private contract work.”
“On you or me?”
“For heaven’s sake,” Fran cried, “why should they want to kill either of you? This is the craziest thing I ever heard of.” And then she added, “It could be a mistake, couldn’t it? They could have mistaken this for some other car?”
I looked at Finelli and he looked at me. A long moment before he nodded and said to Fran, “Sure, it could have been a mistake.”
I felt a cold chill, because it was no mistake and they were not trying to kill Joe Finelli. They were not even trying to kill me. Finelli had said that the bums who take contract work are not very good, but sometimes they are very good indeed. Any professionals out to kill me would have used sawed-off shotguns or something like an Uzi gun and splashed the whole car full of bullets. They wouldn’t have given two damns about killing three people who were not the target, and they wouldn’t have missed. This was a warning. If they had hit me, it would not have troubled them, but they would just as soon have missed me, as they did.
Finelli changed the subject, but not by jumping to what book he had recently read or what movie he had seen. Not in Finelli’s world; his world was specific, and he said to me, “Hey, Harry, that Richard Bell guy, you still interested?”
“Absolutely.”
“Who is he?” Paula asked softly and apologetically.
“A doper got iced in a dump on Eighty-eighth Street, but you know something, Harry,” he added, turning to me, “this is a very curious doper. In the first place, he has no yellow sheet, and in the second place his name ain’t Richard Bell, which maybe you suspected because he has a spic look. We wouldn’t have never ID’d him at all, if not for a file on illegals they keep in Washington. Not much of a file, because we got maybe two million illegals entering the country every year, but I guess they had a reason for glomming on to him. He’s from Santa Marina.”
“Where’s that, sweetie pie?” Paula asked, her second remark, as apologetic as the first.
“Central America.”
“It’s one of those countries, Paula,” Fran said kindly, her conscience beginning to work, “that Reagan has gotten us involved with. We’ve sent them countless millions of dollars to resist a guerrilla movement against a clique of very rich people who control the country. We send them arms, aircraft and money, but very little food. The population exists at the edge of starvation. The rich own plantations where they grow sugar and bananas. Not a very big country, but a most unhappy one.”
Paula gazed at Fran with wide-eyed admiration.
“All out of The New York Times,” Fran said, somewhat embarrassed.
“Ex
cept you left out the commies,” Finelli reminded her. “That’s what this guerrilla movement is, what they call Marxist, but that ain’t in my precinct. In my precinct, there is something very peculiar indeed. This doper, Mr. Ricardo Sanchez, is shot in the head with a forty-five-caliber gun, shoots a bullet like this.” He demonstrated the length of the bullet with his fingers. “Following the procedure with such a homicide, we send the bullet downtown to the police lab.” He paused and grinned at me. “I got one for you, Harry.”
I nodded.
“A beauty. I been saving it.” He paused as the waiter set down an enormous platter of uccelleti scappati, a veal and prosciutto dish I had never tasted before, and with it a bowl of green noodles with chunks of sweet butter melting upon it. “I’ll save it a little longer. First mangiare.”
“It’s delicious,” Fran said. “It’s more than delicious. I’ve never tasted food like this before.”
“Mama Pasquella, she was born in Tuscany, worked in restaurants in Milan and in Rome, so you got the best of everything. She teaches the cooks. Look at this place.” The restaurant was packed, every table taken. “Just like this until midnight. So now listen to me, Harry. I could ask you to guess but you’d never guess in a million years. The bullet that killed Sanchez came from the same gun that killed Judge Charles Fitzpatrick in Washington, D.C., about two years ago. I got that from the computer.”
“But how …” Fran’s question trailed off. She sat with a forkful of food halfway to her mouth.
“The FBI puts the stuff on discs,” I explained. “It’s the miracle of modern times that’s supposed to replace common sense. Down at the police lab, they have a computer that ties in.”
“You’re too cynical, Harry,” Finelli said. “Anyway, suppose you tell me why the gun that killed a federal judge should come into my precinct and kill a junkie pharmacist?”
“Did you call the Washington cops?” I asked him.
“What then?”
“What did they say?”
“They said that the murder of the judge was a hit. At least, that’s how they figured it. But the guy who runs the Appellate Division was afraid of some kind of scandal and he gives it to the media as a mugging.”
“You got that from the Washington cops?” I shook my head. “Come on, Joe. Cops don’t give out anything like that. They sit on it till death do them part.”
“Huh!” Fran said. “Death do them part.”
“I didn’t get it from the Washington cops, Harry. Of course not. I got it from Frankie Delogio, who’s Paula’s cousin and who runs a precinct down there in D.C. He’s a captain, so he hears things, and he tells me this in strict confidence, which is how I’m telling it to you. Of course, he wants to know all about our junkie, so it’s a trade. Now Frankie tells me that this judge, a very big wheel in the Appellate Division, leaves his house in Georgetown about nine o’clock in the evening. When he and his wife eat alone, he goes out after dinner and walks to a cigar stand two blocks away and buys himself a two dollar Don Diego. He smokes it as he walks back, and sometimes he sits down on the steps of the little stone house they live in and gets a few more puffs in that way, because Frankie tells me his wife won’t let him smoke a cigar in the house. Can you beat that? An appellate judge can’t smoke in his own house.” He put this last to Paula, who shook her head hopelessly. “Paula here would brain somebody says I can’t smoke a cigar in my own house. Bring us another bottle of that beautiful white Sicilian wine,” he told the waiter.
“The judge,” I reminded him.
“Oh? Yeah. So the judge is walking home, smoking his cigar, when either a car pulls up next to him or maybe somebody on foot, because there were no witnesses, and drills him through the head. It just happens that a prowl car is cruising and they find the body before anyone else, so Washington homicide has control from the word go. The judge has two hundred or so in cash, a five hundred dollar watch and a gold ring, so they know it’s no mugging.”
“I can’t believe it,” Fran said. “Even the New York Times story had Judge Fitzpatrick killed by a mugger, and I remember an editorial about no neighborhood, not even an ultra posh place like Georgetown, being safe from crime.”
“Sure The New York Times ran that story because it was the only story there was.” Finelli paused to fill our glasses with the white Sicilian wine. “They don’t do things in Washington like here. Since the Kennedy killing, they’re scared to death about terrorists and conspiracies and political hits. They got a very nervous city. You know that, Harry.”
“True. That’s true, Fran.”
“Well, right away the Washington cops know it’s a hit, so they sit on it; and I guess there wasn’t a word of it leaked out until this bullet is taken out of the doper’s head.”
I was absolutely intrigued, as if I were watching a spider spin his web, a crazy homicidal, clever spider. “Joe,” I said to him, “there’s got to be more. Did Delogio give you anything else? He must have.”
“Harry, you must be a lousy poker player. I’m telling you this, and you’re sitting there with your mouth open like you’re watching one of them dumb movies about international spies. That’s absolutely all that Frankie gave me, but you and me, we’re old buddies so I’ll call Frankie back and see what I can squeeze out of him. But it’s got to be a trade-off.”
“If we ever bust the guy, it’s yours. It happened on your turf. I wouldn’t dream of trying to claim the collar away from you.”
“Come on, Harry, that ain’t the trade-off I’m talking about. I want to know what you’re into, what brought you to Sanchez, what have you got that makes you look like someone about to jump a beautiful broad?”
“Nothing.”
“Come on, Harry. Don’t diddle me.”
“Is that how you look when you’re about to jump a beautiful broad?” Fran asked me.
“Harry wouldn’t do anything like that,” Paula said firmly.
“I’ll tell you what I have,” I said to Finelli. “I have a case where there may or may not be a poisoning. I had to check it out in the drugstore where Sanchez worked. Sanchez was involved but off duty, so I got his home address and walked in on the body. Now you have it, Joe—all of it.”
Finelli stared at me thoughtfully for a moment or two, and then he said, “I got to visit the john, Harry. Keep me company.”
“No need,” I protested.
“Put your self in need.”
I sighed and apologized to the ladies, and as we walked away from the table, I heard Paula confiding in Fran on the strange habits of men when it came to the de-de. That’s what she called it, the de-de. In the men’s room, we waited for the lone user to depart, and then Finelli said, “What kind of shit are you giving me, Harry?”
“I didn’t give you any shit,” I replied, angrily and brilliantly. “I told you the truth.”
“Bullshit!”
“All right. If that’s the way you like it, leave it that way. I’m your guest tonight, so I can’t say what’s on my mind.” I started for the door.
“Hold on!” Finelli barked. “I don’t leave things that way. That lady out there means more to me than anything in my life, and you almost killed her tonight—and me and Fran, and you, too.”
“What do you mean, I almost killed her?”
“I’ll tell you what I mean. I may have put down the slobs who do contract work. They’re the maggots in the asshole of this city, but usually they’re good, and this guy with the thirty-two, he’s got to be an old pro. He was after you, Harry, maybe to scare you, maybe to kill you, but he was after you, not me, and you know that as well as I do.”
I nodded. “That’s right. He was after me.”
“Why?”
“Joe, I swear to God I don’t know. Maybe because I was noodling around in this Sanchez–Bronstein affair.”
“Who’s Bronstein?”
“A nice old guy who owns the drugstore where Sanchez worked.”
“Does he come into this?”
“I don’
t know that either.”
“There seems to be a hell of a lot you don’t know.”
“You can say that again.”
We were sweet-talking each other as we came back to the table. I had gathered from Finelli how excited Paula had been at the thought of dinner with us. We had little of what is special, but we were very special to Paula.
“Seminar over?” Fran asked.
“You could say that.”
“I’m so happy they get along so well,” Paula said.
When Finelli dropped us at our apartment house, Fran threw her arms around Paula and kissed her. It was real. A little danger can change people remarkably. I thanked Finelli for a good evening and the best dinner I had ever eaten. It was almost that.
An hour later, I sat in the bedroom with a shoe in my hand, watching Fran in a nightgown and combing her hair. Looking at me in the mirror, she nodded and smiled. “Just don’t say you told me so.”
“I’m not an I-told-you-so person. You know that.”
“I have everything packed. I’m so excited I won’t sleep a wink. I wouldn’t sleep anyway, thinking about that terrible shooting spree on the highway.”
“Still frightened, kid?”
“A little. I’m not sure. You’ve been a cop so many years. Nothing like this ever happened before.”
“I’ve been on the force seventeen years and tonight is the first time I fired my gun off the range. Well, you can live in New York a lifetime and never be mugged, or it can happen the day you arrive.”
“We have to be at Kennedy before eleven. When do we leave here?”
“Ten is plenty of time. Pretty sure we’re going, aren’t you?”
“When I saw that look on your face when you were listening to Joe Finelli, the look he said you have when you’re ready to jump a broad—incidentally, a very interesting observation from an old buddy—when I saw that expression on your face, I knew you’d go to Los Angeles if you had to walk.”