The Good Guys Page 15

  Both men were wearing reflective sunglasses. FBI putzes, Bobby thought. As he got within a couple of feet, the driver kicked over the engine, enabling the black guy in the passenger seat to roll down his window. He and Bobby locked sunglasses. Bobby wasn’t shy. Leaning into the car, he casually rested an arm on the window frame. Smiling confidently, he said, “Hey, thanks a lot, guys. I’d hate to have them bury him without me.”

  The driver leaned forward so Bobby could see him. “Professional courtesy, Bobby,” he said,

  “Listen, I’m heading downtown. Any chance you guys could pick up some doughnuts on the way and meet me there?”

  “Gee, sorry,” the passenger said, “but after this you’re on your own. You know, sometimes they give us important work to do.”

  Bobby banged his fist on the window frame. “Good for you. I like to see guys get ahead.” He stood up. “See you tomorrow?”

  “We never know, Bobby, we never know.”

  When Bobby drove out of the parking lot, they followed him to the first traffic light and, as promised, dropped him.

  Canal Street was backed up for blocks. Caught in the gridlocked traffic, Bobby was fuming. Now, this really is a fucking crime, he thought. Where the fuck are the cops when you really need them? Fucking Ed Koch. You want to help people? It doesn’t take a genius to figure out that you got to put cops at the major intersections and make them give out tickets to those bastards who block them.

  It took him forty minutes to go four blocks. He double-parked in front of a double-parked truck, put his PBA card in the windshield, and left his blinkers on. He was only going to be a few minutes. Three Guys Plumbing Supply was crowded, at least ten men standing in front of the counter talking pipes. Bobby walked right past them, right into the back room. As he did, a small black guy was coming out carrying a clipboard under his arm. The guy looked familiar, and his nose was bandaged pretty good, but Bobby couldn’t place him.

  “Jesus fucking Christ, Tommy,” Bobby said loudly as he walked into the office, “why don’t you clean this fucking place up?”

  “Hey, big guy,” So Solly Tommy said, genuinely happy to see him. “Now my fucking life is complete.” The top of his desk was buried under layers of paperwork. Tommy got up and came around the desk to greet Bobby. He gave him a big hug. “What’s a matter with you? You don’t like my filing system?”

  Bobby shook his head. “How do you keep track of shit? Boy, I don’t get it.”

  Tommy tapped the side of his head with his forefinger. “It’s all up here. You heard of Einstein, right? I’m a fucking Crimestein.” They both laughed easily. The two men had been doing business for twenty years, since Bobby was a crazy teenager, without a bad word ever passing between them. Tommy had fenced the first heist Bobby had ever planned, two dozen new tires taken from a gas station near the Lincoln Tunnel. He indicated the chair in front of his desk. “Sit. Sit. You want a cup?”

  Two sugars, Bobby told him.

  “Carol,” Tommy yelled, “get in here.”

  “What do you want from me?” Carol shouted right back at him. She was an attractive middle-aged woman who was wearing a tight black skirt, a white blouse that hugged her chest—the top two buttons were open—and a big, brassy smile. With the right casting director she could have easily played a moll.

  Tommy gave her the order for coffee and Danish, and after she had gone, he turned back to Bobby. “So what do you got for me?”

  “You ever heard about Cabbage Patch dolls?”

  “Fuck, yeah. You kidding me? Those things are tougher to get than pussy in the Vatican. Why? You got some?” Bobby smiled broadly. “No shit,” Solly Tommy said happily. “You fucking prick. Those things are fucking gold mines. You got the real thing or the fugazis?”

  “Hey, Tommy, please. What do I look like to you?”

  “It don’t matter to me, kid. As far as I’m concerned, a fucking doll is a fucking doll. But some of the crapola, they stuffed them with kerosene rags. Those fucking dolls are more dangerous than you are. So now the cops are going around collecting them.”

  “Fugetaboutit, Tommy, this is primo shit.” Actually Bobby had no idea if these dolls were real or counterfeit. But he had nothing to lose by taking a shot. Tommy was nobody’s fool. He could take care of himself. If he got jammed up, Bobby would settle with him. No problem.

  “Whatever you got I’ll take.” They negotiated a fair price and made arrangements for delivery. It had been a while since they’d seen each other, so they spent some coffee time catching up, then, as Bobby was getting ready to leave, Tommy asked him, “So, Bobby, answer me this. Think any of your guys want some VCRs? I got this whole fucking truckload come in last night . . .”

  “Holy fucking shit,” Bobby said, remembering suddenly where he had seen that little black fuck with the clipboard. He started to run outside but knew it was much too late to catch him. The driver was long gone. “That guy . . .” He was so angry he couldn’t even get the words out. “That little fucking guy with the clipboard?” He pointed outside. “That’s the fucking guy who ripped us off the other night.”

  It was obvious from Tommy’s reaction that he knew nothing about it. “Whattya talking about? That little guy? No fucking way. He was scared shitless doing business with me.”

  “I don’t fucking believe it. That no-good little fucker.” Bobby told Tommy the whole story—admittedly with some appreciation for the little guy’s huge gonads. “Fucking guy ripped us off before we could heist the load. I mean, what kind of bullshit is that?” Both men were laughing by the time Bobby finished telling the story. “When I tell this to Lenny, there’s no way he’s gonna believe it. I swear to God, what he’s gonna do to him you wouldn’t wish on your first wife’s divorce lawyer. You got his name, right?”

  “Course.” The deal had been concluded no more than an hour earlier, yet in one of those mysteries of life the paperwork had already been buried on Tommy’s desk. He searched through the pile until he found it. “Here. Here it is.” He handed Bobby a Xerox copy of a standard business form. It included the man’s name and address. All the blanks had been filled in. And at the bottom of the form Tommy had made a copy of the guy’s driver’s license.

  “Fucking guy,” Bobby said, laughing at the audacity of Mr. Benjamin Franklin Washington.

  In Tommy’s business, identities were flexible. Nobody did much checking; all people cared about was the merchandise. Either you came recommended by a good person or you bought pipes at the front counter. Either you had the goods or you didn’t. Nobody ever got a dime from Tommy based on his name. Naturally Tommy had paid him in cash. The merchandise was good, it had all been checked. The guy had come to Tommy from a guy who knew a guy. Tommy agreed to make the phone calls but didn’t offer much hope in finding him. There wasn’t too much that could be done—and it was highly unlikely that, after seeing Bobby walking in, the driver would ever again avail himself of Tommy’s services.

  Bobby was laughing all the way back to the social club. Tommy had promised to spread the word, and Bobby had no doubt that if the guy stayed around New York, eventually they would catch up with him. He’d have to tell the story to Fast Lenny, which would definitely piss Lenny off even more, but he thought he’d better forget to mention the fact that he’d walked right by the guy and hadn’t recognized him.

  Mickey Fists was holding court when Bobby got there. “Hey, Bobby,” Mickey greeted him, “I got a good one for you. How do you make a hormone?”

  There were four men at the table, all looking at him expectantly. He knew he couldn’t let them down. So as he turned up the volume on the radio, he shook his head. “I don’t know, Mick. How do you make a hormone?”

  “You don’t pay her the two hundred bucks you owe her!”

  Everybody laughed, even Bobby, who’d heard the joke two hundred times. Actually it was a lot better than most of Mickey’s jokes. The kid, Vito V, handed him a message. Normally a person in Duke’s position would be the one to take messages,
but his condition made that impossible. So that job fell to the youngest person in the club. “Mrs. Grada-insky called you,” he said. “She wants you to call her soon as possible.”

  Ah shit, Bobby thought, just when I was sitting down to get comfortable. There was no possible way he would use the telephone in the club, might as well use a party line. He got up, waved off the Duke, who was carrying a hot cuppa toward him, and went to return the call.

  He walked across Canal Street into Chinatown and found one of those cute little pagoda phone booths. The cops couldn’t tap every pay phone in New York, and this one was far enough outside Little Italy to have a reasonably good chance of being secure.

  Grace Gradinsky answered on the third ring. “You called me,” he said, seeing no reason to identify himself. “What’s going on?”

  “They found him,” she said.

  A chill ran through Bobby’s body. “Dead or alive?” was the right question, but he didn’t know how to ask it. He settled for “Who found him?”

  She corrected herself. “I mean, they didn’t exactly find him. They just found out he’s okay. He used a credit card the other night to get some cash. He does that sometimes. I didn’t tell them that, though.” There was a sense of urgency in her voice as she gave him the details precisely as she’d gotten them from James Slattery. “So,” she asked when she finished, “what does that mean?”

  “It means what it means. What else could it mean?” Naturally she agreed. Bobby told her he’d go to the restaurant and speak to the people. See if anybody had any information. But given his wide knowledge concerning the fraudulent use of credit cards, he wasn’t particularly optimistic. “Don’t go getting your hopes up,” he warned her. “The feds were probably there already. They’re pretty good. So if there was anything worth knowing about, they probably found it out already.”

  By the time he got back to the social club, the group at the card table was in the middle of a somewhat heated discussion about sports. Georgie One-Time had insisted that the easiest sport to fix, with the obvious exceptions of boxing and horse racing, was football. The real beauty of fixing a football game, he pointed out, was that you didn’t need to change the outcome of the game—the winning team could still win—just the point spread. “All you need’s one official. He throws two flags at the right time, fugetaboutit. It’s over. All she wrote.”

  Vito V was adamant that baseball was the easiest game to fix. “You just gotta buy the home plate umpire.” The kid’s real name was Vito Valentine, which he had changed from Valentino. When Fast Lenny wondered how Vito V could get to an umpire, the kid told him, “It’s not that hard. Umpires got human foibles too, you know.”

  The table was completely silent for several seconds, and then Georgie started laughing. “What are you, shitting me? That’s fucking bullshit. I been a baseball fan my whole life and I never heard of an umpire getting a fur ball.”

  Vito was smart enough to understand how careful he had to be with his response. He was not in a position to make fun of a wiseguy. “Oh man, I’m sorry. See, that’s not . . . Like what I meant to say was . . .” and this time he pronounced it very distinctly—“foible. You know, like a weakness. Like he likes women. Not fur ball.”

  Georgie glared at him. “Then learn to speak fucking English, why don’t you?” Georgie laughed again. “Fucking guy thinks umpires get fur balls.”

  “Hey, Vito,” Mickey Fists asked, “I don’t get one thing. Why’s it a weakness to like women? You saying it’s strong to like men?”

  Mickey had him there, everybody knew that. “No,” the kid explained. “See, what I mean is if the umpire likes the broads, you can get to him that way. A broad and a camera, that’s a combination that can get a guy rich.”

  Bobby turned up the volume on the radio and joined the card players. As he sat down, Silent Sammy Mastrianno asked his opinion. “Fuck,” Bobby shrugged, “how the hell do I know? Guarantee you I know who loses, though. The guy who collects on the bet if the thing ever gets known.”

  In reality, fixing a team sport is probably not that difficult to do. All you have to get is a couple of key players or officials. Vito V was absolutely right: Everybody does have a foible, and usually they’re not that difficult to find. Or satisfy. Think umpires don’t gamble? Think they don’t play cards for high stakes during the World Series, for example? Think football officials don’t like the ladies? But the actual fixing might well be the easiest part. To make it worthwhile, you need to lay down a lot of money, and you can’t bet a large sum on an unimportant game without somebody noticing. So it has to be a big game, the play-offs or World Series, the Super Bowl, meaning it gets a lot of attention. But in this world winning is only the beginning. You got to live to spend it. Bobby was absolutely right. If the bookies find out somebody is stealing their money, they will go after him. And they’ll keep going after him until that debt is settled. That really is the primary reason most games are legitimate.

  “Any you guys ever do business with the Russkies?” Bobby asked. Fast Eddie looked at him curiously but didn’t say anything.

  Nobody leaped to answer. Finally Fast Lenny said, examining his palm, “Yeah, I did a couple things with a Russian. He was all right, you know. Smart. Why, whattya need?”

  Bobby banged his foot on the floor three times to get the Duke’s attention. The Duke felt the vibration and turned around. Gimme one, Bobby signaled. “Nothing big,” he told Lenny. “It’s just that missing teacher thing Henry’s got me working. You know, I figure Russky teacher, I should talk to the Russkies. So I thought if you got a name, maybe I could ask him some questions.”

  Fast Lenny took a few seconds to calculate the various ways he could profit by making this introduction. But without knowing specifically what Bobby had in mind there was no way to solve that equation. He was safe, though. Bobby was a player, and if things worked out, he would take care of Lenny. “I don’t know. Lemme put the word out for you. See what happens. How soon?”

  The much sooner, the much better, Bobby told him. Then he took a deep breath and suddenly remembered. “Hey, Lenny. You’re not gonna believe who I almost ran into this afternoon.” As Bobby suspected, Lenny couldn’t guess—but hearing how close Bobby had been to grabbing the bastard got his boiler started once again. He went through the whole story, explaining in great detail what he was going to do to the little fuck when he caught up with him.

  The rest of the afternoon went pretty quickly for Bobby. After leaving the club he went directly to Pam’s apartment. Whatever else was going on in his world, Pam made him feel good about himself. Sometimes he thought she could read his mind; or more accurately, his prick. She had even given it a name: Mr. Upright Citizen. He laughed every time she said it. Ronnie had a name for it too: She called it “that thing a yours.” He could hear her saying it. “Keep that thing a yours in your pants.”

  The truth is that in his whole life, from the time he was fourteen years old getting his first blow job on the playground, no woman had ever pleased him as Pam did. She did these things with her hands and her mouth that he had never even seen in the pornos. She touched him in places no woman had ever touched him before, and to his great surprise one of them—although he would never admit this to anyone—was his heart.

  Pamela Fox was the woman he so wished Ronnie would be. He really wanted to desire Ronnie the way he did Pam. But Ronnie wasn’t that person. He was certain Ronnie had never slept with another man. Sex with another guy? Ronnie thought Playboy was risky. The nuns would have been proud of her. Ronnie doing the things to him that Pam did? He almost laughed at that thought. He couldn’t talk to Ronnie about doing the things he did with Pam in her next lifetime. Fuck that, her next two lifetimes.

  He spent almost two hours at the apartment with Pam. It was getting dark outside when they finally got out of bed. And for the first time since they started seeing each other, she complained when he got ready to leave. “You know, baby, I hate it when you come and go.”

  He mad
e a joke out of it. “What are you talking? I came three times. I’m only going once.” But he hoped she meant it the good way. For an instant he thought about taking her uptown with him. He could go up to the Heights Tavern and take care of business, then they could have a nice, quiet dinner at Patsy’s. Oh, he’d love to walk into Patsy’s with Pam. Fucking tongues would be hanging on the floor. Then afterward they would go to bed and he would go home. But that was one fantasy that wasn’t going to come true. He didn’t kid himself. Too often men who mixed pleasure with business ended up sorry.

  Bobby was feeling so warm inside when he left the apartment that he neglected to take even the most basic precautions. He didn’t even bother checking the block up and down to see if anything unusual caught his attention. He just got in his car and drove away. If he had taken just a few extra seconds, he might have spotted the charcoal Firebird parked at a hydrant about halfway down the block. And maybe he would have seen the two men sitting in the front seat, who watched with interest as Bobby got into his car and drove away.

  Bobby picked up Little Eddie at the club. As they headed uptown, Eddie described in detail “Mount Lenny’s eruption.” He was laughing so hard as he told the story that he had difficulty catching his breath. “Oh man, you shoulda seen the fucking guy after you left. He’s screaming for had to be twenty minutes.” Eddie did a poor imitation of Lenny’s nasal voice. “‘I can’t fucking believe it. The guy peed his pants. What an actor. He should be on TV. No, better, I tell you what, he should pee on TV. I mean, the guy pees his pants, you gotta believe it when a guy does that, right? That’s fucking sick, to fake something like that.’ He goes on and on like this, then finally he sits down and shuts up. ‘I’m done,’ he said. ‘That’s it.’ And then, I swear to God, four seconds later he stands up and starts screaming again. ‘That no-good fucking this, fucking that. How can a guy pee his pants and not mean it? You gotta trust a guy who does that.’ I swear to God, Bobby, I thought I was gonna die.”