The Good Guys Page 16

  Little Eddie had been brought up properly in the mob, so he would never think about asking Bobby where he’d been that afternoon. With a broad, he hoped. He knew that fucking Ronnie was driving him nuts. Eddie’s own philosophy of life and love was pretty simple: Every guy needed somebody to love, and as long as he could keep that broad from meeting his wife, everybody would be happy. But truthfully in his own life he rarely went out on his wife, Joyce. And then usually only when he was with the other guys and the situation demanded it. Eddie always told people that there were a lot of things he loved about Joyce: her pasta, her pork ribs, her shrimp marinara, her banana cream pie. But the fact was that he loved all of her. And, as he also joked, there was more of Joyce to love every week.

  The Morningside Heights Tavern was just starting to get crowded when they walked in. The Knicks-Lakers were on the TV. The Knicks were so awful that a bar was about the only place any intelligent person could bear to watch them. At least the Lakers had Lew Alcindor, as Little Eddie insisted on referring to him. None of that African name Kareem Karoom Kaboom or whatever it was he was calling himself. The guy was an American, a New Yorker, and he should have an American name.

  Bobby and Little Eddie stood at the bar, which ran parallel to the rear wall stretching from side to side. Several coeds noticed Bobby and drifted toward him. There wasn’t another man in the place wearing a sports jacket, much less an obviously expensive tailored Italian suit. And none of the other men in the bar could match his cool. He smiled back at the girls and took the time to appreciate the flow of their tight sweaters around their taut young titties. Now, that is truly great advertising, he thought, but did nothing more than think about it. He was working.

  He and Eddie had a couple of drinks and picked up the rhythm of the place. There was a nice vibe going. There were two television sets above the bar and both of them were showing the game, although the sound was off and Bruce Springsteen was blasting out of the wall speakers. The two bartenders were working hard, so Bobby waited patiently. He noticed that the bartenders were the only people who handled the cash register, so they would have processed the professor’s credit card. When the second round was delivered, he gave one of them a twenty-dollar tip, without doubt the largest single tip he was going to get out of the crowd that night. The bartender smiled at him. “When you got a minute,” Bobby said pleasantly. The bartender nodded.

  Getting that one minute took most of the next hour. By that time the crowd noise was killing Eddie. “Why ain’t they home studying?” he yelled at Bobby, who could barely hear him.

  Finally the bartender returned, casually wiping the bar with his wet rag as he spoke. He said something about questions, but Bobby pointed to his ears and shrugged. The bartender nodded and yelled, “Give me one more minute.”

  Ten minutes later he tossed down his rag and pointed to a doorway filled with long strings of colored beads. Bobby and Eddie followed him into a corridor about thirty feet long. Small signs on two doors identified both of them as restrooms. That confused Eddie, who asked the bartender, “Which one’s the men’s room?”

  “They’re unisex,” the bartender told him. “They’re for both.”

  Eddie just shook his head sadly. He’d never heard of any such thing. Fucking Democrats, he thought.

  The bartender introduced himself as Billy Garvey, then added that everybody called him Gravy. “Good to meet you,” Bobby said, shaking his hand but not even bothering to make up some phony name. “Anyplace a little more quiet maybe?”

  The door to the rear restroom opened and a girl walked out, sniffling two or three times as she passed. “Sure,” Garvey said, a friendly smile on his face, “step into my office.” The three men went into the restroom. It was a real tight fit. Only if Eddie turned sideways could the three of them be in there without his stomach pressing against one of the other men.

  “Fuck this,” Eddie decided. He squeezed outside and stood directly in front of the door.

  Inside, Bobby suggested to Garvey, “Take a seat.” He indicated the toilet.

  “That’s okay,” Garvey said, waving his hand dismissively, “I’m on my feet all night.”

  “Hey, pal,” Bobby coldly informed him, “that wasn’t a fucking request.”

  “Now, wait a second,” Garvey said, still smiling. “I don’t know what you’re thinking, but . . .”

  “I’m thinking you better fucking sit down right now, that’s what I’m thinking. Okay, now you know.”

  Garvey sat down on the toilet seat. His smile disappeared.

  Bobby read people well. This Garvey had an ego; he probably spent the whole night having the girls sucking up to him, so the quicker he was reminded of his impotence in this situation, the more cooperative he would be. “Now, this isn’t going to take long, I promise you that. I just got a few questions you can answer for me. First question, how long you been working at this place?”

  “I don’t know, eighteen months, twenty months maybe.”

  “Good. See how easy this is? Next question, were you working two nights ago?”

  Garvey thought about it, then nodded. “Uh-huh, I was. Look, if you’re gonna ask me about that guy, the professor? Two people were in last night . . .”

  Bobby placed his index finger to his lips and shushed him. “Listen up. I don’t really care if the whole Royal fucking Mounted Police came in with their horses. You just answer the questions I ask you. Third question, did this Professor Gradinsky come in here?”

  With a rolling chuckle Garvey said, “Honest, I’m telling you just like I told them—”

  Bobby smacked him across the face with the back of his hand. It wouldn’t mark him, but it would communicate the proper message. Unfortunately Bobby hit him a little harder than he’d intended and Garvey’s head bounced against the tile wall.

  Bobby recognized the fear in the bartender’s eyes. And for just an instant he remembered that the fucking truck driver had reacted the very same way—while he was busy ripping them off. Garvey said emphatically, “No, I don’t—”

  Bobby lifted his foot about three inches off the ground and slammed his heel down on the tip of Garvey’s toes. Garvey screamed and involuntarily started to get up—but Bobby put his palm on the bartender’s forehead and shoved him back onto the seat. He warned him, “Don’t be an asshole, kid. Don’t fucking lie to me. I know he used his credit card in here.”

  The only person in the corridor who heard Garvey scream was Little Eddie, and he was very busy trying to deal with the fact that a boy and a girl had gone into the second bathroom together. Together! It was the first time in his life he had ever seen anything like that, and he couldn’t figure out if they were having sex or doing drugs in there. There was only one other thing they could be doing in a bathroom, and he refused to accept that possibility. Sex or drugs, those were the options. And as much as he hated everything about drugs—except for the profit margins—that’s actually what he hoped they were doing. The thought of them having sex in the bathroom was just too disgusting for him.

  He thought about the places that he and Joyce had had sex. The bed in the bedroom, that was it. The two of them have sex in a bathroom? The two of them couldn’t fit into a bathroom together.

  Bobby took out the photograph of Gradinsky and held it up. “Look here.” He pointed to the professor. “This guy. You ever see him in here?”

  “I don’t know him, I swear,” Garvey said, then covered his head with his arms. “He might have had dinner here once in a while, but I don’t know him. Please don’t hit me in my face anymore.” He looked up and said completely seriously, as if it explained everything, “I’m an actor.”

  “Yeah, right, you’re John fucking Wayne.” When Bobby again raised his hand, the bartender recoiled fearfully, lifting both feet off the ground and cowering against the wall. There was a long scrape over the guy’s left eye where Bobby’s ring had smacked him and a good-sized welt on the right side of his forehead compliments of the wall. The welt was swelling rapi
dly. Putting down his hand, Bobby said, “Okay, lemme ask you this. You ever hear of the soap One Fucking Life to Live If You Know What’s Good for You?”

  Billy Garvey closed his eyes and nodded.

  “Good. So lemme ask you one more time. Tell me about this professor.”

  “I swear I’d tell you if I knew him. I swear to God. You gotta believe me.”

  Bobby sighed. “You know what, I believe you. You ain’t that good an actor. But lemme tell you one thing. I find out you’re lying to me—and believe me, if you’re lying to me, I will find out, even a little tiny lie—I’m gonna find you and I’m gonna reach down your throat till I grab hold of your motherfucking nuts and I’m gonna turn you inside out. We understand each other?”

  “Honest, I don’t know the guy.”

  “I said, we understand each other?”

  Garvey nodded. “Yes, sir.”

  “Good.” He turned to leave the bathroom but stopped. “And good luck with the acting.”

  Bobby didn’t waste his time questioning the manager on his way out. A bartender working in the same place for eighteen months gets to know his customers better than any manager. If Gradinsky was even a semiregular, Garvey, Gravy, whatever, would have known him. The professor was missing either by choice or by force, but either way it was difficult to believe he would wander into a local joint for dinner. If he wanted to stay missing, he wouldn’t risk bumping into people he knew; if he was being held by other people, they wouldn’t take him out in the old neighborhood for a nice, friendly dinner. There are no time-outs in missing.

  Bobby didn’t doubt the credit card had been used. But he was certain of one thing: It hadn’t been used by Professor G.

  As they left the tavern, Eddie glanced back at the hanging beads. The couple was still in the bathroom. Gees, he thought, they’ve been in there more than fifteen minutes. They gotta be going for the Guinness record book.

  EIGHT

  An assault on an agent, whether successful or not, automatically triggers the highest-priority investigation. Before dawn agents from the New York office were swarming over Russo’s building like ants on sugar, or better, like the mob on money. In addition, several forensic experts from the crime lab in Washington caught the 7 a.m. shuttle and by noon were scouring the building for any type of evidence. The crime lab people in particular are magicians at plucking dust from the air and somehow using it to link a specific individual to a specific event.

  But even Theo Kojak couldn’t have done much with Russo’s place. Any fingerprints or palm prints that might have been left on the doorknob were smudged beyond recognition. There were too many years of prints on her door and the hallway walls to be useful. The downstairs foyer door had been opened with the same jeweler’s pick that the intruder had used to try to jimmy the apartment door. It left a few scratches on the lock, and if the pick was ever found, the lab’s Toolmarks Unit might be able to match it. The operative word being “might.” But even that was a real long shot. A partial shoe print had been found in a small puddle of hardening pea soup that someone had dropped on one of the treads, but it had been made by a popular soft-soled shoe that could have belonged to just about anybody. A gum wrapper was found in a corner, but later that day agents confirmed it had been tossed there by Russo’s neighbor, Ginger Sanchez. Russo thought it was pretty amusing that six different agents found it necessary to interview Ms. Sanchez about her gum wrapper toss. Laura speculated it was the most thoroughly investigated littering case in bureau history. And early in the afternoon, after the NYPD had been notified, two patrolmen and a sergeant also spent the necessary time with Ginger to completely corroborate her wrapper story. Collectively they spent more time with Ms. Sanchez than with Russo. And they found it more difficult to believe that Ginger was a second-grade teacher than that Russo was an FBI agent.

  Russo did her best to stay out of their way. She answered every question but really could offer no valuable information. She had barely seen the back of the intruder’s head. And while it was impossible to identify the person who tried to break into her apartment, she was pretty certain that she knew who sent him.

  O’Brien brought it up first, suggesting, “Maybe your boyfriend’s jealous.”

  “You think it was him?”

  O’Brien looked at the impressive array of FBI agents and NYPD detectives elbowing each other for space. “Tell you what. If it was just some druggie trying to make a score, I’d say he picked the wrong place.”

  Connor had tried hard to be properly solicitous, but she made that difficult for him. Rather than being shaken by the attempt, she was actually excited. She was pumping adrenaline. “Don’t you see?” she told him when they had a few minutes by themselves. “This proves we’re bothering somebody. It’s like you say you like to do, shake the bushes and see what drops on your head. The bureau’s got to pay attention to this now.”

  Slattery was waiting expectantly for them. He was as animated as Russo had ever seen him, a big bag of nervous energy. She immediately assured him that she was perfectly all right.

  “Great,” he said distractedly, and never said another word about it. Instead, he waved a folder at them. “You two need to see this stuff right now.”

  They were seated in the conference room, at the far end of a long mahogany table. O’Brien was next to Russo, Slattery across from them. He handed them each a copy of the complete file. It contained three separate reports. “The first one’s a transcript of a conversation that took place yesterday inside the club,” he explained. “Apparently our boy San Filippo had met with Cosentino.” Slattery turned to the second page and scanned down with his index finger. “Here, go to the second page. Right in the middle.” He read aloud, “‘San Filippo: Two-Gun says we gotta find this guy by Thursday night.’ LaRocca then says . . .”

  “Who’s that?” O’Brien wondered.

  Russo told him. “Little Eddie.”

  “Oh, that’s right. You never hear him called that.”

  “‘LaRocca,’” Slattery repeated, returning to the transcript. “‘What the fuck’s so important about then? San Filippo: (Unintelligible) says that (unintelligible) doesn’t tell me anything. But he was pretty fucking serious about it. LaRocca: Yeah, well, shit.’” Slattery looked up from the transcript. “So what’s happening Thursday night?”

  O’Brien took a shot. “The Mad Mongol’s wrestling Don ‘Demon Seed’ Stevens?”

  Slattery ignored him and looked at Russo. She shook her head, then said, “Whatever it is, the professor’s part of it.” She bit down on her lower lip, a habit she’d developed many years earlier. “I just don’t get it. Where’s the connection?”

  “Here,” Slattery said, turning to the second report. “Look at this.”

  O’Brien laid his forearms on the table and began reading what appeared to be a toxicology report.

  Slattery continued, “It’s the report from the crime lab. They made it a priority.” Specifically it was from the Chemistry Unit. As O’Brien and Russo read through the technical jargon, Slattery interpreted it for them. “Before they killed Skinny Al, they burned out both his eardrums with cigarettes . . .”

  Russo winced involuntarily. It was difficult to hear that without imagining it. The pain must have been extraordinary.

  “. . . and so what happened, and this is actually pretty interesting, when they pushed the lit cigarette into his ear, they knocked off the ash, but they also knocked off a few fragments of unburned tobacco. And the ear, the ear’s sort of like a cup holder. When something that small gets inside there, it stays there. The coroner found a minuscule amount of unburned tobacco . . .” Slattery couldn’t help editorializing. “This guy did a great job. And then he sent it along to the lab.

  “It got sent to the Chem-Tox Unit. The agent there . . .” He searched the report for a name. “Martz, this Martz, he analyzed the tobacco sample. The mass spec, fluoroscope, whatever thingamajigs he had, he got a profile for the tobacco. Then he sent somebody out to buy packs of
every brand of cigarettes they could find and profiled that tobacco. First thing they discovered . . .” He paused. “Either you guys want to guess?”

  Once again O’Brien couldn’t resist a straight line. “Smoking’s bad for your health?”

  “It wasn’t an American brand. The tobacco was much too strong.”

  Russo was beginning to make the connection in her mind.

  “So they went up to the foreign tobacco and newspaper store on M Street and bought out the place. I think it was . . .” Once again he searched the report. “Yeah, here it is, seventy-two different brands from around the world. And they made a match.” He frowned. “I can’t read this name, but it’s Russian.”

  “Shit,” O’Brien said with admiration, truly impressed. The implications were enormous.

  “Are they sure?” Laura asked.

  “Positive. They ran every test they could think of. It’s one of the most popular Russian brands. Apparently it was pretty easy to make the match. We got nothing like it here. You guys understand what this means, right?”

  “It means we got trouble in River City,” O’Brien said. The evidence strongly indicated that Skinny Alphonse D’Angelo, a made member of organized crime, had been killed by a Russian. Not just killed. This wasn’t a mugging or a robbery, it wasn’t any accident, this was slow, torturous murder. There was obviously a reason he was killed, and that he was tortured, meaning that there had to have been some prior interaction between Skinny Al and the Russians that didn’t go well.

  Russo said it out loud. “So we got the Italians and the Russians in the same ballpark, don’t we?”

  “Yep,” Slattery said evenly, “that we do.”

  This was the match made in hell that law enforcement had long been dreading. The good news was that whatever happened between them, the result had been Skinny Al squashed into the trunk of a car. The bad news was that the Italians and the Russians were doing some kind of business. “Now, just wait a second,” Russo interjected. “I don’t want to burst any bubbles, but this is a pretty big leap we’re making here. We don’t have the slightest idea what this was about. There’s a pretty good chance it didn’t have anything to do with the families. Maybe it was just two guys fighting over a woman or something. Maybe it was territorial or a bad loan, maybe it was about the cold war. I mean, it could be absolutely anything. It doesn’t need to be the Apocalypse.”