The Good Guys Read online

  After Laura had ordered her tuna on whole wheat hold the coleslaw, she picked up the thread. “There’s another thing I noticed,” she said. She leafed through O’Brien’s papers until she found the transcript of the interview with his graduate assistant. “See what she says about his office, that she had to take piles of papers off the chairs to sit down?” She closed her eyes and shook her head. “You saw the apartment. It looked like the soup cans were alphabetized. He’s obviously a totally different person in his office than he is at home. I have this theory that being messy is genetic. There’s no such thing as being half-neat. Either you are or you aren’t.”

  O’Brien considered that. After several years spent believing that one day he really was going to clean out his closet and all the drawers in his bureau, desk, and file cabinet, and feeling guilty every time he looked at them, he had come to the realization that that day was never going to come. He had accepted the fact that on the day he died his apartment was going to be a mess. And after that epiphany he had never felt guilty about it again. Russo was absolutely right. He is who he is. And he is messy.

  Russo reached for her conclusion. “Believe me, if Grace had followed him around with a vacuum cleaner and a hatchet, it wouldn’t have made any difference. He couldn’t help himself. But that apartment was immaculate. I mean, come on, the mail was perfectly stacked, the magazines were squared. She was putting on a show for us that everything was fine.”

  “You think she knows, then?”

  That could easily have been the beginning of a long and heartfelt discussion, in which she would have explained womankind to him. Instead, she said flatly, “Women always know.”

  To show his appreciation for her good work, he lifted the bread basket and offered, “You want another roll?”

  She pushed it away. “Okay, let’s look at this again.” She picked up the pen and got ready to take some notes. “Assuming we’re right, assuming he’s got a girlfriend, how does that help us?” She put down the pen and sighed. “This thing keeps getting more and more complicated. I mean, at this point about the only thing we know for sure is that at least he’s breathing well enough to use his credit card.”

  O’Brien cleared his throat and said softly, “There’s one more thing I have to tell you. He didn’t sign that credit card receipt.”

  “Tuna on whole wheat?” the waiter said.

  Not one thing in the Gradinskys’ apartment had been moved an inch since their last visit; including, O’Brien noted, Grace Gradinsky’s hair. It looked as if it had been frozen in place by Captain Kirk’s phaser. She had greeted them nervously, assuming they had wanted to deliver some news in person. Laura explained quickly that they just needed to ask her a few more questions. Once again they sat on the couch and she sat on the edge of the chair opposite them. O’Brien took the credit card receipt from his notebook and handed it to her. “Do you recognize this, Mrs. Gradinsky?”

  She was not wearing her glasses. She held it an arm’s length away, obviously so she could read it, but it made it appear as if she were keeping her distance from something distasteful. She shook her head emphatically. “No, no, I don’t think so.” She handed it back to him. “Why?”

  “That’s funny, that was my question to you.” There was a directness in his voice that Russo had not heard before. And all the warmth was gone.

  Grace stood up. “I don’t know what you think you’re doing . . .”

  “Mrs. Gradinsky, misleading a federal agent is a serious crime. Don’t make us do something about it.” Russo glanced at him. There was absolutely no such crime, serious or frivolous. But obviously Grace Gradinsky didn’t know that. “Remember this,” he said, laying his notebook down in front of her. It was open to the page on which she had written her husband’s medical information. Next to it he laid down the credit card slip. Even at a glance it was obvious that the handwriting in his notebook and the signature on the bottom of the slip were the same. It was quite florid; handwriting experts might describe it as “lyrical.” The bowls were unusually rounded and several letters were made with additional loops. It was unique. Clearly Grace Gradinsky had gone to the restaurant and paid the bill with her husband’s credit card, signing his name. “Now, why don’t you just sit down and tell me why you did this?”

  She sat down gracefully. Laura noticed that her lips were tensed almost white, evidence that her anger was fighting to get out. “If you’re such a good detective,” she said evenly, “then where’s my husband?”

  Laura tried to calm the situation. “Mrs. Gradinsky, we’re doing everything possible . . .”

  O’Brien was having none of it. “I asked you why you did it,” he repeated.

  She looked down at the extremely clean carpet, defeated. “I didn’t plan it,” she began. “I just . . . I was looking for him. We’ve eaten dinner there several times. I thought there was a chance he might be there.” She paused to steady herself, clinging desperately to the remains of her dignity. “I guess I stayed a little longer than I expected.” She looked at Russo. “You know how you watch the door, and you have the feeling that the next time it opens he’s going to walk in?”

  “Yeah,” Russo agreed, “yeah, I do.” And that was true, it was a feeling she knew well.

  “So while I waited I had something to eat. I really haven’t had much of an appetite lately, I’m sure you understand. Then I had a few drinks. It made the night pass. I didn’t even know I had Peter’s credit card with me until I went to pay. So I used it; they didn’t even look at it. They let me put a few dollars extra on it for cash for a cab. I forgot all about it until you . . . until you two showed up. I was so worried that you were going to forget about him. I mean, it’s not like it’s some big case, he’s just a college professor . . .” She looked away.

  Russo was sympathetic. “So you figured the receipt would keep us interested?”

  O’Brien didn’t wait for a response. “And there was no phone call from any Russian, was there?”

  “Yes,” she said, responding to Russo’s question, “because that way you’d believe he was still alive.”

  When she said that, Laura Russo literally felt a chill wash over her body.

  Grace Gradinsky’s answer was true if less than complete. She saw no reason to tell them that after Slattery had called her so excitedly, she’d contacted Bobby San Filippo for exactly the same reason: to make sure that the Mafia continued to search for her husband.

  O’Brien didn’t even change his tone. “That phone call,” he said, making what he thought was a pretty good guess, “there was no Russian, was there?”

  His question seemed to momentarily confuse her. “Yes,” she said. “No. I mean, somebody called and he went right out. But I don’t know who it was.” She sighed deeply. “It could have been anybody. I don’t know, really I don’t.”

  “All right,” O’Brien agreed. “But just one more thing.” He searched through his overstuffed notebook until he found the sloppily folded surveillance photograph of Bobby Blue Eyes and Little Eddie on the steps of the Gradinskys’ brownstone. He laid it down in front of her. “Who are these guys?”

  She shook her head. “I can’t.”

  He tapped the photo. “This is why you didn’t call the cops, right?”

  “Please.” She looked to Russo for help.

  “Hey, it’s your life,” O’Brien said almost flippantly. “Either you want to find your husband or you don’t. But I got to tell you something, Mrs. Gradinsky. I’m getting a little tired of your bullshit. Now, here’s the reality of this situation: Russo and I, we’re civil service employees. Pretty much whatever happens our jobs are protected; so are our pensions. You don’t want to help us, that’s fine, I got a big pile of cases sitting on my desk. I’ll just go back to the office and put this one on the bottom and work another one. It doesn’t make any difference to me. I’m gonna get the same paycheck.”

  Russo reached across the table and took Grace Gradinsky’s hand. She squeezed it reassuringly. Civil ser
vice? she thought. He really is out of his mind.

  Grace Gradinsky told them all she knew about her husband’s disappearance. She knew only the first names of the two men in the photograph, Bobby and Eddie—at least she believed the heavyset man’s name was Eddie. They had come to the apartment the day after Russo and O’Brien’s first visit and had asked a lot of the same questions. Several times in the past, she admitted, her husband had done some work for “the boys,” as he mysteriously referred to them. When she had asked him if he meant the Mafia, he’d smiled but did not deny it. The only person he had ever mentioned by name was a “Skinny Al,” and then only because he supposedly weighed three hundred pounds. Grace specifically remembered that this Skinny man’s name was Al because she really loved Bill Cosby’s character Fat Albert.

  O’Brien was surprised. Grace Gradinsky was a talking avalanche: Once she started talking, pretty much nothing slowed her down. Occasionally, she continued, without any warning her husband wouldn’t come home for two or three days. The first time it happened she was frantic, but just as she was about to call the police, he came home. He told her firmly that when he was working “for the boys,” she was not, under any circumstances, to contact the police. If the police found out what he was doing, he warned her, it could put his life in jeopardy.

  No, she didn’t know what he was doing for them. He never told her. Obviously, though, it involved translating of some kind because, she explained, “There really isn’t anything else Peter could do for the Mafia.”

  When he disappeared this time, she assumed he was with them. O’Brien was correct, that’s why she didn’t file a report with the police. But when “these two,” she said, indicating the men in the photograph, told her they didn’t know where he was, she didn’t know what to do. “You see the problem that I had,” she pleaded with Connor. “I couldn’t exactly tell the police that I was worried because my husband might not be with the Mafia.”

  That photograph of the two couples had been taken on their anniversary, at a restaurant named Gino’s. They were with their friends George and Pearl Zelma. Peter had suggested the restaurant, telling them he’d met the owner, and they had a lovely evening. “You two should try it one day,” she said. Neither agent responded to that suggestion. At the beginning of the meal the waiter had delivered a bottle of champagne to their table, which he said was compliments of the owner. No one ever referred to him as “Gino,” only as “the owner,” which she thought was a little pretentious.

  That was it. She pleaded with them to continue looking for her husband, and O’Brien informed her that “the entire New York office is looking for him. But anything else you think of, you got to call us right away. And if those two schmegegis show up”—he pointed at her for emphasis—“you call us right away.”

  She agreed to do that.

  O’Brien and Russo walked up West End Avenue in contemplative silence. Russo finally said with sadness, “She doesn’t have the slightest idea, does she?”

  “No,” he agreed, and Laura heard the resignation in his voice as he finished, “she doesn’t.”

  O’Brien suggested stopping by the Heights Tavern one more time just to see how fast Gravy could run, but she told him that neither the joke nor the idea was very funny. He offered to drive her downtown but she refused, as he was certain she would. They stood on the corner of West End and 76th Street for several minutes waiting for a cab. “You don’t have to wait,” she told him. “I’m fine.”

  “It’s a habit,” he said as an empty cab stopped across the street. Connor spotted it at almost exactly the same time as a man with a briefcase who was waiting with a woman, about halfway down the block on the west side of West End Avenue. Connor and the man locked eyes for an instant, which was all it took for both of them to recognize the New Yorker in the other, and then they took off after the prize. The other man had the advantage of being on the same side of the street as the cab, but Connor didn’t even hesitate. He prided himself on being an expert at the city shuffle. He dived right into the traffic, one eye on the oncoming cars, the other on his competition. Connor figured the guy would be slowed by his briefcase, but the man was swinging it hard enough to give him some forward momentum. Connor was forced to hesitate in the middle of the street for an ambulance, and it looked certain that the cab would be lost. He considered using the going-to-the-hospital ploy, a New York gambit that carried with it absolutely no guarantee of success. Once he’d actually heard someone respond to that line, “Too bad, I’ve got tickets to Cats!”

  It turned out not to be necessary. The guy stepped out of his shoe—and actually stopped to retrieve it! Losing a cab just because a shoe came off? Out-of-towner, Connor thought smugly.

  He had his hand on the door handle seconds before his opponent limped up. Connor smiled at him. “I need this cab,” the guy said urgently. “I got to get my wife to the hospital.”

  O’Brien looked down the block. A woman was standing on the curb, holding her coat closed with her left hand, seemingly slightly bent over. It was impossible to determine anything about her from that distance. It was a cab-or-Cats moment: Connor relented. There was nothing else he could do. “Sure,” he said, opening the door and stepping aside.

  “Thanks,” the man said, slipping into the backseat. Connor closed the door and watched as the cab shot forward to the woman and stopped. The rear door was pushed open and she got in. A little too sprightly, he thought suspiciously. It was at least five minutes before another empty cab appeared. When it stopped, Laura opened the door for herself. And O’Brien realized he didn’t have the slightest idea how to say good night to her. If she were a man, he would shake her hand, but after all the time they’d spent together the past few days, he would have felt ridiculous shaking her hand. And he certainly would have felt awkward giving her a light kiss. So he ran for the high ground and did neither. “You’re all right?” he asked.

  She solved the problem for him. “I’m fine,” she said, and then gave him a friendly kiss on his cheek as she got into the cab.

  O’Brien stood in the street watching her cab drive away.

  All the way home Laura Russo thought about the investigation. It was being run like a game of checkers, she decided. They were moving forward very slowly across the entire width of the board, taking advantage of whatever openings they spotted rather than committing to a single strategy. We’re not going to get there in time, she thought.

  Most of the time agents live surprisingly normal lives—punctuated by occasional bursts of frenzied activity. About the only personal things O’Brien had gotten done the past few days were buy fresh orange juice, replenish his supply of Mallomars, then flip through his mail, throwing away the junk and tossing the bills on his desk.

  There were twenty-six messages waiting for him on his answering machine: He had won a three-day vacation to Disneyland that entitled him to participate in “an extraordinary real estate opportunity.” He had been selected to receive a financial newsletter available to only “a few insiders.” There were three beeping attempts to send him a fax, there was a wrong number from someone speaking rapidly in Spanish, and all the rest were the bits and pieces of the life of an attractive single man with several close friends in New York City: What are you doing Friday night? Beep. Just checking in. Beep. I think I met somebody you might like. Beep. It’s Fred, what do you know about the Rappoport case? Beep. Hey, Con, you still have Nancy’s phone number, the one we met at Marty’s? Beep. Hey, pal, you’ll never guess what happened. Beep. Did I leave my compact, a little gold one with my initials on it, in your apartment? Beep. I got three tickets for the Knicks next Tuesday, you interested? Beep. You see that piece about organized crime moving down to Wall Street in the Week in Review? Beep. I got a funny story to tell you. Beep. And finally, three increasingly desperate calls from Mops, wondering where he was, asking why he hadn’t returned her phone calls, and reminding him once again that she was “the only mother you have.” As he sifted through his bills, he called her
back. She told him, “I was calling you because Belle was missing and I was frantic.”

  Belle was her Chihuahua. “She’s under your bed,” Connor told her, having had this conversation several times before. “Behind the shoe boxes.” Mops admitted she’d found her sleeping there an hour earlier, then segued into other topics, among them getting together for dinner, going to his nephew’s soccer game, and by the way, how was the rest of his life? “The rest of his life” was Mops-speak for are you dating someone I should know about and why aren’t you married yet and why do you do this to me?

  Connor marveled at her ability to so easily reduce him to his simplest parts. In a single phone call he traveled the vast distance between a well-respected FBI agent heading a significant investigation and being his mother’s son. When he finally got off the phone, it took him considerable time to bounce back. During any investigation it’s vitally important that the investigators take time away from the case just to step back and get a little perspective both on the case and on their lives. Connor’s plans to catch up with his life evaporated with that phone call. Instead, he opened his notebook and started reading through it from front to back, trying to find the connections that were always there.

  He was finishing his second cup of coffee when Diana Thomas called. “What are you doing right now?” she asked.

  He thought seriously about it. Diana was a very attractive woman who obviously had a thing for him. “You know,” he decided, “I got all this work I need to get done. Give me a few days.”

  After hanging up he stared at the telephone for a few minutes, then picked it up again and dialed Russo’s number. She answered curtly, on the first ring. “Hello?”

  “It’s me. I’m just going through my notes and there’re a couple of things I’m curious about,” he said. And then he remembered, “Hey, excuse me. Are you okay?”

  She was sitting on the floor in front of her fireplace, dressed in flannel pajamas, rereading Slattery’s documents as she enjoyed her one glass of wine. An artificial log was providing just enough light and warmth for her needs. She leaned back against the couch and picked up her wineglass. The log was made of compressed paper, but it could have been real.