by Robin Moore
"Well, what's the matter?"
"Well, a little while ago this man came in the place, and I recognized him. He's been here a few times before, but I also know he's a friend of that fellow you've been working on — you know, Patsy?"
"Where you talking from?" Egan asked.
"It's okay. I'm on my break. Nobody can hear. This fella, an Italian type, he sits at the bar with some other man, and they have a couple of drinks, and he's laughing about how he made a monkey out of some cop tonight. And honey, it sounded like you!"
"Why me?"
"Well, he didn't give any real description or anything. But he said there were a couple of cars, and he got out and blocked off this cop — the cop was Irish, he said — and this cop was blowing his top. But the thing that really got me interested was when he mentioned Patsy."
"What did he say?"
"Well, he said something about Patsy ‘got away,' and then he said something I don't understand, but since I was interested at this point, this is what I thought might mean something to you."
"Yeah?" Egan tensed.
"He said, this is exactly what he said: ‘They're chasing him all over town, and they don't know he's clean.'"
"He's clean?"
"He thought that was a big joke too. But wait. He said something else. Something about tomorrow morning, nine o'clock, Patsy and some other people will wrap up the whole deal. Of course, I didn't know what they were talking about."
"Tomorrow at nine? But where, baby — did he say where? "
"No."
"Balls!"
"Well, thanks a lot. I try to help, and — "
"No, no, I didn't mean you. It's just that, well, never mind . . . . You are just something else! I've really got to come see you. Maybe later tonight?"
"Could be."
"Look, babe, I'd love to talk to you some more now, but you have been a great help, and I've got to go to work. See you later, huh?"
"I'd like to see you . . . "
When Egan told the others the information he'd received, there was a hubbub of speculation. "Well, I'd say this brightens the picture," Frank Waters announced.
"Patsy's got a meet tomorrow morning at nine, obviously with his French friends. So we still do have a crack!"
"Great," Egan said — "but where?"
Waters, behind his desk, looked at the detective standing before him with an expression of exaggerated pity. "Where? Where else have they always met? The Hotel Roosevelt!"
Egan frowned. "No . . . I think you're wrong."
The other officers began to press around. "Where then?" Waters challenged. The room had hushed.
"I put my money on East End Avenue," Egan stated flatly.
"East End Avenue. Why? The only time we had Patsy up there, we sat on our asses for a whole day, and then he just drove home!"
"I got a hunch."
"Look, the only consistent factor in this whole mixed-up investigation is that when Patsy meets the Frenchmen, he meets them at the Roosevelt. It's the only place we have to go on!"
"No," Egan controlled his voice with effort. "We probably burned the Roosevelt. But this number forty-five East End Avenue — we seen Patsy there, he met one of the Frogs there the other night, he's been driving cars in and out of the garage there, and my hunch is they think we don't know about it."
"You and your hunches!" Waters snapped. "Maybe I shouldn't say this, but it's your hunches that have got us up the creek right now. If you'd acted more as part of the team instead of like a private eye"
"Whose team?" Egan roared. "Yours? For Chrissake, me and Sonny had this thing in our back pockets until you Feds screwed everything up! Who the hell scared the Frenchmen away? Your hot tracking team! You guys wouldn't know surveillance from a loud cheer!"
Waters's fists were balled; but he swallowed and cleared his throat. "I say the Roosevelt."
Egan leaned on the desk, his two hands flat on the blotter. "Frank, you do just whatever you want; go when you want and take whoever wants to go with you. As for me, I feel there is only one place this meet will be and that's at East End Avenue. That's where I'm going, even if it's by myself. The way things went the other night, I would feel a lot more secure if your small army stayed home anyway."
Waters exploded out of his chair and punched Egan across the left side of his jaw. The detective staggered backwards. Waters, shorter but, for his size, almost as husky as the burly Egan, lunged around his desk. He ran into a hard chop to the mouth which stopped him. Egan levelled his right fist again for a plowing drive into Waters's midsection, but the agent recovered and whipped his left hand across the other side of Egan's face. Then the two grappled, arms flung wildly. The other officers, startled and shrinking back at first, now swarmed around them, several grasping Waters' shoulders and arms and others tugging at Egan's waist.
The two glared at each other, breathing hard, straining against the arms which held them back. A spot of blood smudged the corner of Waters' mouth.
Egan's normal ruddy complexion was even pinker on the cheeks, where the agent had struck him. Now he shook off the arms and smoothed his rumpled clothing deliberately.
"Okay, Frank, so that's the way it is," he said through set teeth. "Tomorrow morning, my cops are going to East End Avenue, and you guys can go any damn place you please. Just stay out of our way."
Egan put on his jacket and started for the door. Then he turned. They all were watching him. "And if any cop," he looked directly at Dick Auletta, who stood bewildered among the agents, "decides to go with you, he's going to answer to Sonny and me." With that, he walked out of the Federal office.
When Patsy Fuca had arrived home, he was still shaken by his wild getaway downtown. That skoonj of a cop! What the hell had he been doing around Anthony's? Did they know about Anthony's? For the first time, he'd felt fright. Did they know about No. 45 East End Avenue, too? If they did, tomorrow he could be walking straight into a trap. But there hadn't been any sign of cops up there when he had returned the French Buick.
Everything had gone without a hitch earlier. He had made sure there was no chance of a tail when he drove into New York with Tony after having received the word from Anthony's that the traps had been closed and the Buick had been put back together again. First, he switched to Nicky's Caddy. Then, at Pike Slip, he let Tony off at Blair's, and went on to Henry Street.
At the corner of Rutgers, Solly was waiting. Patsy got out of Nicky's car and walked up to East Broadway, while Solly the Brass hopped in the Caddy and drove it back behind Blair's. There, Tony took over. He would cruise around awhile, then later, after Anthony's closed, leave it outside the garage. They didn't want to use Sol's flashy green Valiant — that probably was too well known to the fuzz, so Solly had got another friend from the Inn, Johnny Frasca, to come along in his beat-up Chevy.
Finally, Patsy drove the French Buick out of Anthony's and sailed uptown to the garage at No. 45 East End, followed by Solly and Frasca. He had walked out to Frasca's waiting car, they went and had a drink at the Inner Circle Bar at 63rd and York, then made their way easily downtown, where Patsy was to retrieve the Cadillac and return home.
But then Solly had spotted that guy down the block from Anthony's, sitting alone in a little red car.
It looked too much like a plant. Suddenly concerned, Patsy decided to test it. Sure enough, the sonofabitch came after them. That was not good. Had the guy been tailing them the whole time, uptown and everywhere? Patsy had to get out of there, get time to think. Maybe it was stupid to have let Solly pull that bit of blocking the street, but it did give him the chance to hustle back to the Caddy and beat it.
Nobody had followed him home, he was pretty sure of that. And he didn't see anybody around his house. If the fuzz did have a tail on him, that's where he would have expected to find someone. But by Anthony's?
Barbara asked him what was wrong when he came in, but he said nothing, everything went okay. She went back to the television, and he poured himself a stiff whiskey and w
ent back over the night in his mind. It could have been just a crazy accident, tripping over that cop. Maybe the cop thought Patsy and his friends were acting suspiciously. He might even have known them from Blair's. But that he had tumbled to Anthony's, or the rest of the operation, no, it really didn't figure.
Patsy relaxed with another drink, persuading himself that the scare had been groundless. And as the liquor spread its gentle euphoria over him, his mind drifted to tomorrow, and the payoff.
Late Wednesday night Jacques Angelvin returned to his new room at the Commodore Hotel. He had enjoyed a pleasant dinner with Jacques Sallibert, who had taken over as head of the New York bureau of Radio Television Française from Paul Crenesse. The small, dingy room at the Commodore Hotel depressed him, but the dinner, wine, and good masculine conversation had been warm and hearty. This was the second evening he had not seen Lilli.
Jacques was disgruntled. All his plans for exploring television in New York were to be wiped out. He couldn't even tell Lilli that their date for the next week would not happen and, worse, he had been granted an appointment with David Rockefeller's representatives at the Chase Manhattan Bank for two-thirty on the afternoon of January 22. But Wednesday morning Scaglia had ordered that following the conclusion of the transaction on Thursday, Jacques must leave with him for Montreal.
François must be truly worried. Jacques was to meet him at that garage at ten tomorrow morning, and they were to drive all the way to Montreal. He had planned to visit French Canada after New York, but hardly this way. The new plan was that they would meet Scaglia's friends at the Hotel Queen Elizabeth in Montreal, then return to Paris by air the following morning. The Buick? — someone else in Montreal would dispose of that, François had said.
He looked around the cramped room to which he had moved from the Waldorf-Astoria. All this scuttling about depressed him; it was foreboding. Scaglia and his associates also had moved from their hotels, apparently. There must be great danger from the police. Jacques ached with regret over having let himself be drawn into such madness. He had kept assuring himself that there was no possibility that the police could be aware of him. But what of tomorrow?
If Scaglia were truly in a precarious position, then Jacques himself must be exposed for the first time.
He went to the dresser, took a half pint of cognac from a drawer and gulped from the bottle. The brandy stinging sweet in his throat, he looked around at his belongings; his bags were still largely unpacked.
Scaglia had insisted that they could not even take their clothing; there should be no cause for suspicion that they were actually leaving New York. They would have time in Montreal to acquire new things, François promised.
It had definitely not been a pleasant week so far for Angelvin. Lilli had been busy Tuesday evening and he had dined with his friend Pierre Olivier. During the day, Tuesday, he had visited with Mr. Deck at the Perrera foreign currency exchange to make discreet arrangements for the exchange of a large number of dollars for French francs. The rate of exchange was more favourable in New York than back in Paris.
Angelvin was also running low on money, and he had been trying — unsuccessfully — to secure a loan from Scaglia against the money he would receive when the deal with the Americans was consummated.
On Wednesday Angelvin took Lilli to lunch. Later he walked despondently back to the Waldorf in the cold, sad and frustrated that Lilli had not accepted his plea to join him in a siesta. He knew he must check out of the Waldorf that afternoon after his nap and go to a smaller room at the Commodore Hotel.
He arrived in his room tired, a little drunk, and cold. The maid was there, cleaning the bathroom. How I want to take a pipi, he thought to himself disconsolately. He also wanted a girl, and the chamber maid looked as though she were a hundred years old.
Everything was so bad. Glaring at the tiled bathroom he pulled off his pants, climbed into the bed and petulantly urinated between the sheets.
Later, after meeting with Crenesse of Télévision Française, he checked out of the Waldorf, paying his bill of $228 .71, and checked into the Commodore.
This left him with little money, although he looked forward to the ten thousand dollars promised for tomorrow.
Jacques poured down the rest of the cognac and fell on his new bed fully dressed to wait for the morning.
On Thursday, January 18, he woke up with a hangover and a general feeling of uneasiness. To cheer himself up, he sat at the table and wrote optimistic words in his diary: "Tonight I will be at the Queen Elizabeth in Montreal . . . touch wood!" Jacques couldn't know it would be the last notation ever made in this diary.
About 10 P.M., Wednesday night, Sonny Grosso had been called to the telephone at a cashier's desk in a bowling centre in the Bronx. Frank Waters was at the other end. "What's up?" Sonny asked.
"It's your buddy Egan," the agent began acidly. "He made a goddamn ass of himself here a little while ago."
"Yeah, how?" Sonny grinned.
"No, I mean it." The detective's smile faded as, in terse, bitter words, Waters described what had occurred at the Federal Bureau. "I've had it with him," the agent concluded. "He's got a lousy attitude, like he's God Almighty or something, and when he starts throwing his weight around in our office, well, that's too much!"
Sonny was thoughtful a moment, the crash of bowling pins thundering across the lanes. "Well, I'll tell you," he said at last, cupping his hand around the speaker, "you may not get along with my partner, but he happens to be one hell of a detective, and frankly I think he's right about where to go tomorrow."
"You go along with him?"
"And what's more," Sonny went on grimly, "who the hell are you to take a swing at my partner? How would you like me to come down and bust one of your people in the mouth?"
"All right, all right," Waters conceded. "But what about you?"
"I'm going to string along with Popeye, and so will the rest of our guys. He's been right too many times before to kiss him off now. So you and your agents go where you want."
Eddie Egan spent a restless night. He had forgotten completely about getting back to Carol, so tense was he with aggravation and uncertainty. The fight had been a bad scene. Maybe he had pushed too hard, but that wise-ass Waters! When he got home, he started to call Sonny at the bowling alley, but then decided not to ruin his night too. He would speak to him first thing in the morning. The morning — he might damn well turn out to be the Lone Ranger at that, if everybody went along with the Feds. Private eye, Waters had called him.
Thursday, January 18, Egan's alarm buzzed him awake at 6:30 A.M. He made coffee, showered and shaved and dressed warmly. By 7:05 A.M., wearing a brown porkpie hat and a bulky-knit blue and white cardigan beneath his leather car coat, he was in his Corvair, headed toward Manhattan. All night he had wrestled with the temptation to go straight to Patsy's house in the morning and put the collar on him there and then. That would eliminate all the discussion about where to play hide-and-seek with the bum and his friends. But he had discarded that idea finally. The only thing to do, really, was to head downtown to the Narcotics Bureau, round up what men he could, and get situated around No. 45 East End Avenue well in advance of Patsy's supposed meet.
He drove west on Myrtle Avenue, aiming to get onto the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway at Marcy and Kent avenues. Several mornings recently, he had arranged to pick up Agent Luis Gonzalez there and drive him into town. Luis was a nice little guy, kind of new to the job, and he didn't have his own car. Last night, before the blow-off, Luis had mentioned that he would appreciate it if Egan could pick him up again Thursday morning. After what happened, though, it was a cinch Luis wouldn't be waiting.
But as Egan swung the Corvair toward the Expressway, he spied the slim Puerto Rican standing at the entrance to the ramp. He looked like a mugger: peaked cap low over his brow, black crew sweater under a worn Army field jacket, baggy trousers, black sneakers.
Egan pulled up and the agent jumped in alongside him.
"Well,
this is a surprise —" the detective started to exclaim. Gonzalez was flashing a wide grin at him.
"What the hell is so funny?" Egan demanded.
"The luck of the Irish strikes again," the agent chuckled cryptically.
"What does that mean?"
"It means you won."
"Won? Won what?"
"Last night," Gonzalez said, "they finally decided you were right. Everybody is going to stake out East End Avenue."
C h a p t e r 1 6
On Thursday morning Eddie Egan and Sonny Grosso had exactly sixteen hours left before the case they had so painstakingly developed would have to be aborted by the Narcotics Bureau. The revised strategy for this day was simple, but it had to be handled with precision. When Patsy left his house in Brooklyn, word would be flashed; but once it could be established that he had driven onto the Gowanus Expressway, as was expected, normal visual surveillance was to be reduced to a minimum. Instead, an unmarked police car would be positioned at the side of the roadway, its hood up, at the vital junction where city-bound traffic either proceeds into the Brooklyn-Battery Tunnel or veers right and continues on what at that point becomes the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway. Should Patsy choose the tunnel, which seemed unlikely, the information would be relayed ahead, and detectives would be waiting at the tip of Manhattan to trace his route from there. If Patsy stayed on the expressway, the officer in the "stalled" car was to fall in behind and notify base wherever the subject turned off — the Brooklyn Bridge, Manhattan Bridge, or even if he were to go all the way north to Williamsburg. For maximum security, one car was staked out at Patsy's luncheonette, and another at his parents' home on 7th Street in Brooklyn.
In Manhattan, a radio car would be situated at the terminus of each of the bridges from Brooklyn. One car would patrol the Pike Slip area, specifically watching Anthony's Auto Shop. Another was to cover the Hotel Roosevelt uptown at 45th Street, on the chance that Frank Waters may have been correct after all. The rest of the investigators would blanket the area around 81st Street and East End Avenue. The observation post in the cabinetmaker's shop on the third floor of the building across East End Avenue from No. 45 had been reactivated, and stationed there would be Sonny Grosso, Lieutenant Vinnie Hawkes, Sergeant Jack Fleming, and Waters.