Paradise City

by Lorenzo Carcaterra

  “You seem pretty confident I’ll find her,” Lo Manto said, turning to look at the chief inspector. “By the time I land in New York, she’ll have been gone five days. You know better than anyone how low that makes the odds.”

  “The odds are insurmountable,” Bartoni said with a knowing nod. “But that’s only if Paula was the target. And I don’t think that was the case.”

  “Then who?”

  “The Camorra has grown in number and power in New York,” Bartoni said. “They are as fully entrenched in that city as they are in ours. The two cities feed off one another, the strength of Naples reinforcing the muscle of New York. Any damage to one is seen as hurtful to both.”

  “We’ve put some dents in that,” Lo Manto said. “Not enough to stop them flat, but enough to cost them time, money, and members.”

  “And they take such matters very personally,” Bartoni said, his eyes shifting from the road to Lo Manto and then back. “And they look to rid themselves of anyone who brings harm to their business.”

  “What’s all that have to do with Paula?” Lo Manto asked. “They never lift kids. There’s too much risk and too little profit in it.”

  “That’s true,” Bartoni said. “When I worked the streets and I got information about a chicken hawk looking to make money off innocent children, I wasted no time in spreading that word to the Camorra. The hawk would be off my street in a matter of hours.”

  “But still you see a connection between them and Paula,” Lo Manto said, running a hand through his thick hair, his mind racing as he tried to recall any links between his niece and the criminals he fought.

  “If she’s not the target,” Bartoni said, “she’s the trap.”

  “You going with more than your gut on this?” Lo Manto asked.

  “You’re not the only one with friends in New York,” Bartoni said. “And mine are older, which puts them higher up the command chain. And that means faster answers to my questions.”

  “I’m listening,” Lo Manto said.

  “The family Paula’s staying with is as clean as a polished window,” Bartoni said. “So there’s no trouble there.”

  “That part I know,” Lo Manto said. “Tell me the part I don’t.”

  “Their daughter goes to a private school less than two blocks from their building,” Bartoni said, his manner calm, his voice never hovering beyond its normal docile tone. “It’s the same school where Pete Rossi sends his daughters, and she’s in the same class as one of them.”

  “Is the Rossi daughter the one Paula went on an outing with?” Lo Manto asked. “The one she’s become friendly with?”

  “I couldn’t find that out,” Bartoni said. “I doubt it, though. Rossi wouldn’t risk that close a link. But I’d bet my pension that she’s from a family he knows or one he can get near.”

  Lo Manto turned away from Bartoni, rested his head and shoulder against the side panel of the door, and focused his attention on the road ahead. Up to now, he thought he had managed his police career in a way that kept his family outside the reach of harm. He had shielded them from all knowledge of his activities, leaving them little choice but to learn about his arrests and cases from the daily newspapers and weekly magazines that devoted as much space to the Camorra as they did to the latest celebrity scandals. He had also allowed the fact that the Camorra steered clear of civilians, unless they were in debt to them, to lull him into a state of comfort. Lo Manto was a man who devoted all his energy to avoiding mistakes. Now he might have made one that placed a girl he dearly loved in the center of a minefield.

  “They can come after me in Naples just as easy as they can in New York,” Lo Manto said. “It shouldn’t make a difference to them what city I die in.”

  “It might to Pete Rossi,” Bartoni said. “It’s his crew that has felt the brunt of your hits, including your last little adventure in Herculaneum. And besides, as well as you may know New York, you don’t know it the way you know Naples. You’ll be a much weaker opponent fighting him on foreign ground.”

  “What if you’re wrong?” Lo Manto asked, sitting up, his left hand resting on the leather door handle. “What if Rossi has nothing to do with Paula going missing? What if she was lifted off the street?”

  Bartoni turned the wheel just a quarter inch, navigating a sharp curve at one hundred and ten, and then shifted into overdrive. They were now less than forty minutes from the Rome airport. He looked over at Lo Manto, a weary sadness filling his face. “The answer to that is something both of us already know,” he said. “And neither wants to hear.”

  They drove the rest of the way in silence, the CD on low volume, the haunting voice of Andrea Bocelli the only company to their thoughts.

  8

  NEW YORK CITY

  Summer 2003

  DETECTIVE JENNIFER FABINI spotted the man in the leather coat on the corner of Sixteenth Street and Irving Place. He was tall, reed-thin with a short-cropped Afro, and walked with a slight limp, just as the all-points bulletin had described. The dozen other men and women making their way up and down the steamy street were all dressed in as few clothes as possible, the oppressive August heat holding the city in a death grip. Yet the man in the leather coat didn’t even seem to be breaking a sweat as he moved with decisive steps toward Third Avenue, Fabini keeping pace a few strides behind. The rule book call would be for her to radio for backup, since the man in the leather coat, Luther Slyke, was a predicate felon, known to be dangerous and more than likely heavily armed. He had no qualms about shooting a police officer and had done so twice in his thick yellow-sheet criminal career. He was listed as six-feet-two, 185 pounds after a heavy rain, with a set of false upper teeth and three puncture wounds in his chest from previous shoot-outs.

  Fabini thought about making the call, but that didn’t appeal to her as much as the idea of taking down Luther on her own. She was well aware of the danger inherent in the situation, but that only helped make it a more attractive possibility. Besides, she much preferred working alone, which was one of the factors she found most appealing in her multi-borough plainclothes unit. “Look up Jennifer’s photo in her high school yearbook,” her father, Sal, often said to his retired police buddies in the Queens bar where he spent most of his pension. “Under the photo, there’s a caption that reads ‘Does not play well with others.’ She’ll make a great cop but a shitty partner.”

  Sal Fabini was an NYPD legend, a gold-shield detective with more homicide arrests and convictions than any cop in the history of the department. He spent twenty-six years working the streets, banging heads, breaking down doors and rules, never giving in until he had a suspect in cuffs and a confession written out on a thick legal pad. He had shot and killed four men in the line of duty, wounded dozens of others, and was awarded enough citations and medals for his police work to fill two sides of his wood-paneled basement game room. In the months following his retirement, Fabini was offered several high-end and well-paying security jobs and passed on all of them. “That shit’s not for me,” he told Jennifer early one morning, the two sharing a cup of coffee. “Don’t look for me to turn into some stoop-shouldered, white-haired loser standing guard over somebody else’s money, wishing all along that I’d caught a bullet to the head while I was on the job. That’s not gonna happen.”

  “It’s not like that anymore,” Jennifer said to him. “No one’s asking you to stand in a bank lobby pointing people to the next teller. These are high-tech security firms, with offices all around the world. With the technology that’s out there, you can do a lot of good in a job like that.”

  “Security’s still security, and it’s all for shit,” Sal said with a dismissive wave. “I couldn’t wait to get out of a uniform when I was a cop, and I’m not eager to get back into one now that I’m an old man.”

  “The job comes with a suit and an expense account,” Jennifer said, trying to fight off the frustration she always felt when talking to her father. “The salary plus your pension can get you a nicer house or a better
car. You shouldn’t just blow it off the way you do everything else.”

  “I got all the house and car I’m ever gonna need,” her father said. “So let’s just close the case on this security talk. It’s a dead issue as far as I’m concerned.”

  “I’m sorry for even bringing it up,” Jennifer said, each word drenched in sarcasm. “You can do so much more with the last years of your life sitting by the wood at the Three Aces, kicking back shooters, and making sure no one runs out of the bar without buying a round for the boys.”

  “Look,” Sal said, his jaw clenched, his dark eyes hard and filled with menace. She could well imagine how many made men and career thugs had seen their bravado melt under the heat of that gaze. “I never missed a day in my twenty-six years—not one. Even when I was shot, I filled out my paperwork from the hospital bed. I’ve earned the right to spend my time how I want to spend it. And from you, I expect less lip and more respect. I raised you better than that.”

  “Mom raised me,” Jennifer said, standing up and staring across the table at her father. They were in the kitchen of her parents’ two-story wood-shingled Middle Village, Queens, colonial. The worn black and white tiles on the floor were the same ones that were there the morning she found her mother’s body slumped over the sink, cold water tap still running. The carving knife had been jammed into the center of her stomach and the blood had oozed down the front of the cabinet and welled by her feet, turning her blue house slippers beet red. “Mom did everything that needed to be done. She cooked, cleaned, and made sure she was there when I needed her to be. But more than anything, what Mom did was waste her life waiting for you to come through that front door. Drunk or sober, it never mattered to her. Just so long as you were home.”

  “We both had a job to do and we both did it,” her father said, his lips barely moving. “And we both did it well or else you wouldn’t be standing here, fancy college diploma hanging in your room upstairs.”

  “You can take credit for the collars,” Jennifer said. “Those belong to you and your partners. It was Mama’s work and Grandma’s money that put me through college. Nothing came out of your end.”

  Sal stood up and walked to the wood cabinets lined up next to the one-door refrigerator. He swung a door open and pulled down a half-filled bottle of Dewar’s, along with the old jelly jar he’d been using as a glass since she was in high school. He poured three fingers and downed it in one gulp. “Something must have come out,” he said, his back to her. “You went and joined the police department, looking to fill my shoes. And I don’t need to see you in uniform to tell you that is something you will never be able to do. Not in this lifetime and not on this planet.”

  “I joined the force in spite of you, not because of you,” Jennifer said. “The papers treat you like a legend. The old-timers talk about you like you were one of the Apostles. But not everybody wearing blue thinks you walked on water. There are even some who think you should be in a yellow jumpsuit doing a stretch.”

  “A cop, and I’m talking about any cop, is only as good as the information they can get,” Sal said, turning to face his daughter. “It’s the one difference between getting a medal pinned to your chest and having a bullet land in your back. And from what you just told me, a floater running facedown in the river has a better bead on what went down than you do.”

  “That’s right,” Jennifer said, choking back the urge to cry as she flashed on the image of finding her mother’s body slumped over the sink. She was fifteen years old, still dressed in her high school uniform, her legs trembling, her hands balled into tight fists. “I forgot I was talking to a Hall of Famer. You’re the cop that solved all his cases. All except one. The only one that should have mattered.”

  “Your mother was a suicide,” Sal said, slamming the jelly jar on the kitchen countertop. “You’re the only one who ever thought it was anything more than that. You were wrong then and you’re still wrong now.”

  “She wouldn’t have done something like that,” Jennifer said, “knowing I’d be the one to find her body. She wouldn’t have left me with that as a memory. Hell, I don’t think she would have even done that to you, as much as you deserved it.”

  “Let it rest, kid,” Sal said, his tone starting to soften. “Leave it the way it is and make your peace with it. You start shaking the past, you’ll only find trouble. Maybe the kind of trouble you don’t want.”

  “I’m a cop, Dad,” Jennifer said, heading out the back door. “And your daughter. I can handle trouble.”

  Luther Slyke stepped into the vestibule of a five-story brownstone just off the corner of East Twelfth Street. Jennifer stopped at the newsstand across the street, picked up a copy of the New York Post and dropped a quarter on the counter plate. She crossed against the light and walked up to the building, the stone façade just off a fresh water wash. She waited until she heard Luther get buzzed into the building, then scampered up the five steps to the double wood door, chrome handles polished and gleaming in the early morning sun. She scanned the names on the six mailboxes that were lined on one end of the concrete wall, looking for a name she could hook to Luther. She leaned over and glanced through the curtained door separating her from the first floor and caught a glimpse of Luther rounding the stairs at the top of the second landing. She turned back to the names on the mailboxes and pressed them all, then wedged her body against the door and waited to be let in. In less than thirty seconds all six residents responded and buzzed back, only one of them bothering to shout down into the intercom system, a male voice asking if it was a delivery.

  Jennifer slipped into a dark corner of the first floor, her eyes on the walnut door closest to her, the dead bolt on the other side released from its slot. The door opened halfway and a young Hispanic man stepped into the hall. He was wearing clean jeans, flip-flops, and a cowboy hat. He was shirtless, the front of his Rikers Island chest adorned with a black and red serpent tattoo, its rattle tail starting down below his navel, its open mouth, fangs dripping blood and venom, jumping out from the center of his thick breastbone. He walked out of his apartment and toward Jennifer, a curved and weird smile on his face. She could hear Latin music coming out of the rooms behind him, dishes being moved, and a woman’s voice asking him to hurry. She could also smell the acrid odor of marijuana mixed with burnt coke. “You forgot the pizza,” the Hispanic man said to Jennifer. He was standing less than three feet from her, his breath harsh enough to wilt plants. “And I called for that shit more than an hour ago. I got hungry people in there.”

  Jennifer pushed aside the right flap of her blue jeans jacket and showed the man the shield pinned to her pants. He also caught a glimpse of the butt end of her nine-millimeter, jammed into a holster against her hip. “I can also forget about the possession charge I can lay on you and your girlfriend if I walk into your apartment,” Jennifer said in a low voice. “For me to do that, all you have to do is turn around, go back inside, and shut up.”

  “What are we supposed to do for food?” he asked, taking several steps back toward his door.

  “Have a salad,” Jennifer said.

  She eased her way past him and walked up the stairs to the second floor, her left hand braced against the hard, cool wall. Above her she heard two male voices, both agitated, each a few ticks removed from danger. She turned the tight corner on the landing, crouched down and stared up, the voices coming at her from the third floor, the long shadow of Luther’s leather coat swaying in the light breeze coming through an open hall window. She pulled the nine-millimeter from her holster, checked the clip, and moved carefully up the stairs.

  Luther Slyke was towering over a chubby man in a Knicks T-shirt, black running shorts, and bare feet. The man had a lit cigarette in his mouth and was holding the round end of a miniature pool cue. He stood with his legs apart, his bald head gleaming like a waxed ball and a set of steel-gray eyes staring up at the anxious felon. Jennifer watched the chubby man through the slits in the railing. She knew from both the sound of his voice ec
hoing up and down the halls and the shifts in his body that this was not the first conversation he’d ever had that could end with the spilling of blood. He had a lion’s head tattoo on the top of his right shoulder and a tiger’s head on his left, both marking him as a gangbanger who had served some serious prison time. She had enough experience in these setups to realize she wouldn’t have to wait very long to find out if Luther Slyke was really tough or only talked that way.

  “You gotta have nuts big as wrecking balls to come walking up to my home like you been invited for lunch,” the chubby man said, angry and ready to act on it. “All the heat that’s resting on you, and you come my way. Up to this second I only thought you were a dumb ass. Now, you might as well have it spray-painted across the walls.”

  “Take a deep breath, you fat bastard,” Luther said, still with an edge to his voice, not yet ready to crumble under the verbal weight. “I ain’t an easy man to follow. Least not as easy as you think. I slip and glide my way down the streets. Came in clean, nobody on my tail.”

  “Not easy to follow?” the chubby man said, laughing out the words. “In that coat? In this weather? Are you for sane? Man, that blind bitch from Red Dragon could find your ass in a Times Square crowd. I’d lay you five hundred of my dollars against one of yours that there’s a whole gang of cops having a picnic lunch on my stoop waiting for your skinny little ass to come out this building.”

  “What I got couldn’t wait,” Luther said, sounding just shy of defensive, glancing briefly over the fat man’s shoulders at the open door behind him, a scrawny orange cat resting across the welcome mat. “I need to move it fast and nobody better than you has that kind of speed.”