The Informant

by Marc Olden

  The Informant

  Marc Olden

  A MysteriousPress.com

  Open Road Integrated Media

  Ebook

  Contents

  Prologue

  Part 1

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  13

  14

  Part 2

  15

  16

  17

  18

  19

  20

  21

  22

  23

  24

  25

  26

  27

  28

  29

  30

  31

  32

  33

  34

  35

  36

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgement

  Prologue

  “SUBJECT IS CUBAN, FEMALE, name Lydia Constanza, age twenty-eight, born Miami, Florida, United States citizen, unmarried with one child, daughter five. Father unknown to us. No record of marriage. Miss Constanza and daughter, currently residing here in the Washington Heights section of Manhattan. No known source of income. With the large Cuban population in Washington Heights, it’s possible subject is correct about her narcotics connections.

  “Her priors go back to age nineteen, when she and a boyfriend, one Hugo Gutierrez, then age twenty, used a straight razor on a Newark club owner, one Manny Boorstein, who they claimed owed them three days’ pay for a singing act the Cubans had at the time. Boorstein was carved pretty good, still carries the scars. Miss Constanza went down for that one. Did two years and her yellow sheet says it wasn’t her last time inside.

  “At twenty-three, she took her second fall, her and a Cuban crazy named Francisco Barker, then aged thirty-two. Miss Constanza was hustling for a Murphy game Francisco was running here in Manhattan; she lured the johns to a quiet place, where Francisco took them off with a switchblade. One night, something goes wrong and a john fights back and Francisco slices him up and the john loses one eye, plus a lot of blood. Lydia does another deuce, this one upstate, and according to her sheet, she was hospitalized in there three times for emotional disorders. Seems she can’t take being in prison.

  “Francisco Barker gets five to ten in Attica but he don’t ever come out. Gets himself stabbed to death in there over some homosexual argument about a pretty blond boy.

  “Rest of Lydia’s jacket says fifteen busts, no further convictions, but the bust which counts is the one last week, and with her record, this makes her a certain three-time loser, which ought to be worth a dime minimum for sure.”

  Walter F. X. Forster, a beefy police lieutenant with two and a half years until retirement, had been listening with his eyes closed as Fred Praether read from Lydia Constanza’s folder, but now he rubbed the heels of both hands deep in his tired bloodshot eyes and opened them wide as though he’d just sat down naked on broken glass.

  Forster’s tired voice was barely a whisper. “Steamroller flattens grass. That’s a sure thing. Nothing else is, not with the courts we got today, my friend. The record says she does a dime, ten years. I say don’t bet your pension on it. Okay, she’s got her tit caught in the wringer, she’s got to work it off. She’s talking big about who she knows, about what she can deliver. She wants to inform, which is the good news. The bad news is that the New York Police Department hasn’t got the men and money to work anybody in narcotics these days. So we can let her go down on this one, we can let her take the weight, or we do ourselves some good and pass her on.”

  At forty-six, Walter F. X. Forster’s hair was an all-white crew cut and his red face had lines so deep they appeared to have been put there with an ax. Eighteen years on the force had made him survival-conscious, particularly when it came to the dangers facing his career from within the department itself. That’s why he was interested in Lydia Constanza, a petty criminal arrested last week and now anxious to turn informant to keep herself out of jail.

  Forster said, “Let’s hear it again, about her sinful ways. Last week’s collar.”

  Detective Sergeant Fred Praether, thirty-five, a wide, muscular man of medium height and long jaw, cleared his throat and resumed clenching Lydia Constanza’s folder as though expecting it to be snatched from his grip any second. He read in the soft monotone used by people uncomfortable with long speeches.

  “Shortly before noon last Wednesday, subject, along with Joe Caracas, a Cuban male, age twenty-six, attempted an armed robbery of a check-cashing establishment on Broadway and Sixty-fourth, unaware the place was wired for silent alarm. When the perpetrators emerged with almost three thousand dollars, they were met by two squad cars. I was in one of the cars. Caracas attempted to escape, firing at police officers, who returned his fire, wounding him three times. According to statements taken from employees and customers inside, Caracas, who happens to be an illegal alien, pistol-whipped the manager when he didn’t move fast enough. The manager, Ernest Goldfarb, required hospitalization.

  “Both perpetrators face armed-robbery charges, plus felonious-assault and weapons charges. Even though Miss Constanza didn’t fire at police officers, she was armed, and if the D.A. decides to hang attempted cop killing on Caracas, she’s got to take the weight on that one, too. No question we’ve got her wrapped tight.”

  Walter F. X. Forster rubbed his unshaven jaw with a thick hand that was knobby with broken knuckles and large, pale green veins. He’d gone twenty-one hours without sleep because two of his men had been killed by a Harlem drug dealer who had panicked when the cops stopped his car because of a broken taillight. According to informants, the dealer, who’d gotten away, had freaked out because he had two kilos of white heroin under the front seat, enough to get him life imprisonment if the dope was discovered in his possession. The dealer’s paranoia, typical in the dope world, had cost the lives of two cops belonging to Walter F. X. Forster. This was something Forster would not stand for.

  Lydia Constanza had nothing to do with the cop killings, but she was part of Walter F. X. Forster’s plan to do something about the epidemic of dope now flooding New York City while helping himself at the same time. She was willing to roll over, to flip, to work, to inform, and to betray in order to stay out of jail and not be separated from her five-year-old daughter.

  Forster lit his eighth cigarette of the morning. “Okay, we’ve got her. Question is, what the hell do we really have? She says she knows people in dope and she’ll give ’em up, which we hear from everybody we pop. She also says she saw the big man right here in Fun City, the champion bail jumper himself, Mr. Kelly Lorenzo. Now, ask yourself: you’re Kelly Lorenzo, biggest dope dealer in Harlem, doing maybe one hundred million dollars in business a year and you’ve just jumped four hundred thousand dollars’ bail. So why hang around New York City, where every cop and fed is looking to look good by grabbing your black ass? Why?”

  Fred Praether said nothing; he wasn’t supposed to. Walter F. X. Forster was thinking out loud.

  “You wouldn’t hang around New York, unless, unless you had a reason, a good reason. Miss Constanza claims to have seen this most-wanted fugitive in narcotics right here in our little town, and she’s either lying or she’s righteous. If she’s righteous, then we’ve got something, we have got ourselves a goodie. Now, for the bad news, which is that we ain’t got the money or the manpower to work her. The price of heroin in New York is as high as giraffe pussy, and business has never been better. Dealers are getting rich, junkies are getting well, and I lose two men.”

  Forster looked down at his desk, his bloodshot eyes not blink
ing, not moving. He wanted revenge, pure and simple. Justice belonged to a glorious-sounding, forgotten theory. Pale blue smoke floated gently from his cigarette past his red, lined face toward the peeling, cracked ceiling of his office.

  “I feel it, feel it. The governor yells, the mayor yells, the politicians, the public, they all yell, and by the time it comes down to me and you, the pressure’s hard enough to bust our skulls and send blood flowing out of our ears. Little more than two to go and I don’t want to go out with the ghosts of dead cops coming at me in the night, asking me why I didn’t give them the only justice they can understand, which is more blood. I don’t want to be a statistic in a cutback or layoff just because the mayor’s running for reelection two years ahead of time and he’s got to impress voters. The department ain’t got no narco no more. Men, money, it’s all long gone. Narcotics ain’t bleeding, it ain’t even hurting, it’s just lying cold with a tag around its toe. We got no money, no personnel, so narco’s dead. But we still got to produce, right?”

  Fred Praether nodded, wondering if a man wasn’t better off staying on the street and away from desk jobs, where you had to play politics to make your twenty. Forster looked older than water sitting there. He looked wrecked.

  Praether, who talked and thought slowly, was still shrewd enough to understand that whatever Forster planned to do with Lydia Constanza had a lot to do with self-preservation. Anybody could get laid off these days. Too young, too old, or too in-between. It was crunch time in Fun City, and survival was on your mind every morning you opened your eyes. Forster was known in the department as one of the very best survivors around.

  Forster said, “Miss Constanza tells us she knows some Cuban and black dealers.”

  Praether nodded.

  Forster said, “According to her, they’re planning something real big together. First time they’ve ever teamed up on that large a scale, she says. Cubans and blacks together. Ain’t that something? As if we ain’t got enough to worry about.”

  Another nod from Praether.

  Forster said, “Miss Constanza claims to have seen Kelly Lorenzo in a Manhattan after-hours club we’re not even sure exists.”

  Nod.

  Forster said, “That all adds up to a lot, even if we heard it from ten people, let alone a lady with a yellow sheet as long as your arm. Thing is, right or wrong, we can’t do zilch with it. We’ve got the shorts in narco. Men, money, we got nada. Nothing. But it doesn’t seem right or even smart to ignore the lady, to pretend we heard nothing, does it? No, it don’t. Now, who do we know that’s got everything? The feds, that’s who. We are going to give Miss Constanza to our federal friends.”

  Forster smiled, a shark who had just outmaneuvered a few other creatures who were equally as dangerous.

  Praether frowned, unable to think as fast as Forster but somehow certain that the department was giving away too much too soon if it gave up an informant with Lydia Constanza’s potential without even attempting to roll her over.

  Forster spoke as though reading Praether’s mind. “We tie a rope to her, and we just let the rope out, is all.” The beefy, red-faced man with short white hair leaned forward, squinting with concentration, sure of himself now, because the gut feeling growing deep down inside told him that he was doing the right thing. For the department, for himself.

  “If the feds take her, they got to take one of our men.”

  Praether understood, and let a smile make its way across his wide mouth. “I see, sir. That’s why you’ve got Sergeant Kates waiting outside.”

  Forster sipped cold coffee, nodding. “That is exactly why. You helped make the collar, but Kates has the narcotics experience. He’s one of the few whites who knows anything about black traffickers. Fact is, he worked with the federal task force that busted Kelly Lorenzo. It’s gonna be Kates’s job to stay close to Lydia, and if she turns up anything, well, that’s how we’re gonna get ours. Kates. He’ll be reporting directly to me. I’ve gotten permission from upstairs, and the paperwork’s being processed right now. If it goes like I think it ought to go, Kates will be in the middle of everything. What the feds know, we’ll know. They make a case with Miss Constanza, we share the credit. If she ain’t righteous, if it’s all jive, then who’ll be wasting their time? Not us. Won’t be our time, our money, not even our manpower. We don’t get no black marks. But if she’s good, we do get to share in the gold star. You know and I know that if somebody don’t come up with some results when it comes to dope, heads are gonna be rollin’, which I don’t wanna even think about.”

  Praether closed Lydia Constanza’s folder. Jesus, he was glad he wasn’t Kates, glad he wasn’t Forster. And Lydia Constanza? Forget about her. She was in the middle, getting it from all sides. She was a hockey puck, getting batted from one end to the other, and if she got burned, tough. Nobody would cry about that, because she wasn’t worth crying over.

  Lydia Constanza was a perpetrator, and that made her nothing as far as the department was concerned. The rule was: If you can’t do the time, don’t do the crime. So Lydia had to pay, and if she got wasted, used, killed, whatever, it didn’t matter. She owed, and she had to pay. The only question was when and how.

  “Sir?” began Praether in his soft monotone. “The brass, do they really think this thing can work?”

  Forster blew smoke at the intercom on his messy desk. “What do we have to lose?”

  Both men understood that all they had to lose was Lydia Constanza, and without saying so, both men knew that that was no loss at all. She owed, and she had to pay. If things went right, Forster would be that much more secure in his chair, that much closer to making his twenty without making waves. Praether didn’t object to it; that’s how the game was played, and when time came for him to play it, he’d do the same.

  Forster dropped an unfinished cigarette into his cold coffee, listening to its brief, soft hiss. He wanted to sleep, to lie down for a long time and remember nothing, be bothered by nobody, but he also wanted to survive in the police department, so he forced himself to stay awake. There was always somebody waiting to take your place, but if you were awake, they couldn’t do it that easily.

  “Get Kates. You sit in on this. He might want to ask you questions about Constanza.” Forster rubbed his burning, aching eyes with the fingers of his right hand. Sleep. Right now, he’d kill for it.

  Praether nodded, stood up, and began his slow walk across the worn gray carpet. In front of him on the wall to his left was a cellophane-covered map of the five boroughs, the map dotted with green and red thumbtacks indicating some kind of official statistics; and in Praether’s slow mind, he saw Lydia Constanza, Kates and himself as just more thumbtacks being used to create a pattern that someone else wanted to see completed. But he didn’t think that way for very long, because he had never trained himself to, never allowed himself to.

  He’d always done what the movers and shakers had wanted done, and today and tomorrow and the next day would be no exception. Today, people would die who had never died before, die in all sorts of ways, but Fred Praether wouldn’t be one of them, because he was a man who always did what he was told to do.

  The way Detective Sergeant Edward Merle Kates would.

  The way Lydia Constanza would. None of them—Lydia, Kates, Praether—had any choice, but Praether never thought about that, and if he had, he wouldn’t consider it such a bad thing at all.

  He opened the door and let his thin mouth widen briefly, because that’s what he believed a smile was. “Kates? Praether. Lieutenant will see you now.”

  Part One

  1

  BUYING DOPE ON THE street.

  Nothing in the world like it.

  Neil Shire loved it.

  Just an ounce of white, he thought. One ounce of white heroin. A piece. That’s all I want to score. But this sucker sitting across from me is jerking me around, upping the price from what we’d agreed on last night. Last night he wanted a thousand dollars. Tonight he wants fifteen hundred.


  Can’t have that now, can we? No, we can’t.

  Time to take care of business.

  Neil Shire stood up slowly, stepping out of the booth, making sure he looked like a man with somewhere else to go.

  The Cuban, whose smile contained all the gums he owned, stopped smiling.

  “Hey, brother, hey, where you going’?”

  “Away from you, dude. You’re stroking me, and I don’t like it. Last night’s money ain’t good enough for you. So it looks like you and I won’t be doing a deal, looks like.”

  “Hey, hey, take it easy. Fifteen is cool for what I got. Good powder. I guarantee you it’s nothin’ but good powder. You like it I can get you more.”

  “You can get me nothing, friend.” Neil looked down at the Cuban. Small dude pulling a small hustle. The Cuban was a tiny little man, thin, pale, a piece of chalk in a dark blue pea coat. And Neil Shire, who had money to spend, was a lot tougher.

  Neil leaned over until he was almost nose-to-nose with the little Cuban.

  “Friend, I wish you well. Get rich, but get rich off somebody else. With me, a deal’s a deal, a price is a price. You told Lydia a thousand and that’s why I’m here. Now, if you can’t be righteous with me, that’s just fine. I’ll live. And you go connect with some other turkey. Me, I’m waiting for Lydia to come out of the john, then we quit this set.”

  Sure of himself, Neil turned his back on the tiny Cuban and took two steps toward the Mets-Pirates game on a color Zenith high in a corner behind the bar. No sound on the television. But a small radio on a shelf of liquor bottles crackled with a loud Spanish-language version of the ball game.

  Rosario’s bar. Not much, and all Cuban, smelling of stale beer and cheap overcooked meat. Located in an all-Cuban neighborhood in Manhattan’s Washington Heights, and no place for an outsider to enter without first being asked. Rosario’s bar. Small, with an all-Spanish jukebox, a drinking bar parallel to six red leather booths, and in the back two small johns behind blue wooden doors. To the left of the johns, a bearded cook made a lot of noise in a tiny kitchen. Except for Neil Shire, a federal narcotics agent, everyone in the bar was Cuban.