The Good Guys Page 20

  Lenny wasn’t happy with all this conversation. It was too much talk, as far as he was concerned. “Selling gas to gas stations?” he said. “That’s bullshit. Lemme tell you this. You want gas for free, just come to my house when my wife is making her spaghetti sauce.”

  Bobby had almost no doubt the driver was telling the truth. People taking this ride rarely held back information or told lies. Their only hope was that something they said might keep them alive until they could figure out a next move. The driver didn’t have much else to offer. The truck and the cash in his pocket, that was it. He gave Bobby all the details: when and where he was supposed to pick up the truck, make his deliveries, drop the truck. This was a sweet deal, the driver swore; all they had to do was let him show up.

  He offered all the information he had, beginning with complete descriptions of the Russians. They were young guys, both of them real muscular. One of them, the taller one, had a deep ugly scar stretching from the corner of his eye right down his cheek. The shorter guy had a modified Mohawk; he’d shaved the sides of his head but left his blond hair on top. The driver had seen their car and was pretty sure it was a Chevy Camaro, a silver Z28. And then he began talking about other jobs he’d done, mentioning as many names as possible, trying desperately to catch a miracle. At one point he even offered to help Lenny with directions, explaining that he’d been driving trucks for fifteen years and knew every shortcut and back road in the region.

  Lenny paid absolutely no attention to him. But every once in a while he would suddenly drive off the parkway, just to make certain they weren’t being followed. The FBI and the NYPD just couldn’t be trusted. Fast Lenny was an experienced driver. He knew how to spot a tail and how to shake it. No one was tailing them, though, he was sure of it.

  Bobby was starting to feel sorry for the truck driver. Personally he didn’t have anything against the guy. He seemed like a decent small-time crook. His real crime was stupidity. He hadn’t set out to beat the mob; things just happened that way. The mistake he made was that when he had the opportunity to make things right simply by explaining what happened, in which case he wouldn’t have had a problem, he walked away with the load. Cheating the family out of a score was a capital offense. Maybe if he had a rabbi, a made man to speak up for him, his situation might have been mitigated. But nobody knew him, nobody would miss him, nobody cared. And if he was allowed to walk away from his situation without punishment, other people would get the wrong message.

  The guy just wouldn’t shut up. Lenny was about to bust a lung, but there wasn’t too much he could do about it. He didn’t want to slug the guy in Tony’s car. He respected Tony too much to get blood all over his new cloth seats. And given the circumstances, it would have been pretty ridiculous to threaten to kill him.

  The truck driver was also beginning to get under Bobby’s skin by the time they turned onto the road up to Swan Lake. The road weaved several miles through a heavily wooded area. There were several summer resort communities around the lake, but except for a caretaker or two, they would be deserted this time of year. Bobby had been up there two years earlier. Georgie One-Time’s brother-in-law had rented a place on the lake for a month and Georgie had thrown a party there for the entire crew.

  When Lenny made the left turn into the darkness, the truck driver knew he was a dead man. He started screaming. For the first time he started fighting to get out of the car. He clawed at Bobby, screeching like the cornered animal he was. Tony started screaming at everybody, “Watch my car! Watch my car!” Lenny had taken off his coat when it got too warm for him in the back. He picked it up and threw it over the truck driver’s head, then started bashing him in the head with his elbow.

  Finally the truck driver quieted down and started crying.

  “I knew it,” Lenny said. “Fucking wimp.” And slugged him again in the side of his head, just for the pleasure of it. The truth is that there are people who enjoy the violence, who love pulling the trigger. Bobby wasn’t like that. For him a hit was never pleasurable; it wasn’t like he really enjoyed it—although admittedly it was always thrilling. He couldn’t help feeling that way. The adrenaline just raced through his body, making him acutely aware of everything going on around him, stretching every second into forever.

  Two miles off the highway Tony stopped the car and turned out all the lights. Lenny snapped the plastic cover off the dome light and unscrewed the bulb so the light wouldn’t go on when the door was opened. Then they sat silently in the darkness and waited. They waited for their eyes to adjust to the darkness, for a car to come down the road, for a flashlight in the forest, for an unusual sound. They waited for anything unexpected. The truck driver was sobbing, mumbling something Bobby couldn’t understand, gulping air. As they sat there, Bobby looked into the woods. It was like looking into death.

  The woods were a good place for this type of work. Isolated and dark. Ironically, whacking the driver wasn’t necessarily the difficult part—there were a lot of men who loved the rush that came with that—the troublesome part was getting rid of the body. The body was the strongest evidence that could be used to connect the killer to the victim. Without a body detectives had nothing to detect. But sometimes getting rid of a body turned out to be a hassle. There were a lot of different options: Saw it into pieces and drop the pieces in various sewers or other bodies of water or bury them. A lot of bodies have been buried under tons of concrete in construction sites of basements. A body can be weighed down and dropped out in the ocean as a fish gift. On occasion some people used a double coffin, a coffin with a false bottom that allowed two bodies to be buried together. And then sometimes people buried a body in a field and relied on wild animals.

  Lenny got out of the car, then leaned back in and grabbed the truck driver by the neck of his shirt and literally pulled him out of the car. The guy was much too terrified to put up any real resistance. Bobby got out the other side and quietly closed his door. It was freezing. Bobby had forgotten to bring an overcoat, so he turned up the collar of his sports jacket and pulled the lapels together. Then he reached around his back and pulled his gun out of his waistband. It was a Remington .38 Special. Bobby didn’t have a silencer with him, but with any luck it wouldn’t matter. He was working backup. Lenny was the shooter. Unless there was some kind of screwup, he would not have to fire his gun.

  A layer of decaying leaves covered the ground. Bobby felt like he was walking on a damp sponge. Lenny was carrying a throwaway, but he did have a silencer for it. Lenny, Bobby, and the driver walked into the woods, Lenny never letting go of the driver. The little guy was shivering, and whimpering, pleading, promising. And then he let loose in his pants. “Oh Christ,” Lenny said softly, “that’s fucking disgusting.”

  If the driver responded, Bobby didn’t hear him. They were moving down the side of a sloping hill. Bobby walked a few steps behind them, constantly turning and looking around. Nobody was going to make a big deal over the fact that some two-bit hustler disappeared—unless they could pin his disappearance on a made man. Doing that successfully would make some cop’s Christmas very merry. It was a trade law enforcement would make every day of the week and twice on Super Bowl Sunday.

  It was nearly pitch-black in the woods and Bobby could barely see the two men walking only a few feet in front of him. Mostly he was looking down at the ground, watching his steps. He heard Lenny order the guy, “Walk over there.” And an instant later he heard the unmistakable pop! pop! of a silenced weapon being fired twice. It sounded more like a kid stomping on an overturned paper cup than bullets being fired into a man’s head, although the gunshot probably wasn’t as loud as the pop of air. The truck driver grunted involuntarily as his life burst free of his body, and that was the last sound he made. The leaves pretty much absorbed the sound of his body hitting the ground. Then, a couple of seconds later, pop! pop! That was Lenny again, Bobby knew, putting two more slugs into the truck driver’s brain, just to make sure he was forever dead.

  “That’s it,�
� Lenny said without emotion. Lenny was holding on to the manila envelope filled with cash and the guy’s wallet when Bobby came up to him. “Watch yourself,” Lenny warned. The truck driver’s body was lying on its side, his blood pooling on the leaves, and Lenny didn’t want Bobby stepping in it.

  Lenny took the cash out of the envelope and put it in his pants pocket. He’d split it up later. He put the driver’s wallet in his jacket pocket. Without that wallet no one would be able to identify the truck driver, even if all it contained was phony IDs.

  “What do you want to do with him?” Bobby asked. It didn’t make sense to bury him. Unless they were willing to dig a really deep hole, within a few days hungry animals would dig him up. This was a feast for them. They’d carry parts of his body throughout the woods. Chances were that no matter what Lenny and Bobby did with the body, no one would find it for a long, long time. If ever. The only people wandering this deep into the woods this time of year were hunters, and most of the land around the lake was posted.

  Lenny thought about it. The land rolled downhill into a narrow ravine. “Gimme a hand,” he said, grabbing one of the driver’s arms. Bobby grabbed the other arm and they began dragging the corpse. It slid along the slick surface a lot more easily than Bobby expected, like shit on silk, he thought, and it took only a few minutes to roll it into the ravine. Then they covered the body with leaves. In the dark it looked like it was completely covered, but it was impossible to be certain. “Fuck it,” Lenny decided, “that’s good enough. Let’s get out of here.” Bobby turned around to return to the car, but suddenly Lenny spit at the corpse. “Fuck me again, you fucking bastard,” he said, and that would be the truck driver’s epitaph.

  Bobby reached down and grabbed a handful of leaves, then began wiping the touch of death off his hands. As best as he could, he checked his pants, shoes, and socks for bloodstains. Lenny did the same thing. They were both clean, but they would get rid of the clothes they were wearing as soon as they got back to the city. That probably wasn’t really necessary, but this was a business in which the price of simple mistakes is measured in years. For Lenny that was nothing, a pair of slacks, a T-shirt, and old sneakers. For Bobby it meant throwing out a $700 suit, $175 shoes, and a $3 pair of socks. It didn’t thrill him, but he accepted it as the cost of doing business.

  By the time they climbed back up the hill and got to the car, Lenny was breathing hard. He had to pause a couple of times to catch his breath. Nobody said a word as they got into the car. Tony turned around and drove about a mile up the road. “This is good,” Lenny said. Tony stopped the car and Lenny got out. He walked a few steps into the woods and then heaved the silencer as far as he could in one direction, then he turned and threw the wallet in the opposite direction. Neither the silencer nor the wallet would ever be found.

  Nobody said a word for several minutes as they headed back to the city. Finally Little Eddie decided, “I guess that’s one way to christen this car.” Tony was the only one who didn’t laugh.

  This was an unremarkable murder, a simple hit. It was without complications or high risk. Each of the four men in the car had been involved in hits before. The complete absence of remorse was a tribute to their professionalism. This had all been done according to the rules. Anyone who felt bad about it was simply in the wrong business.

  That didn’t mean it had no impact on them. It was a solemn undertaking. Literally and figuratively. Bobby had participated in five other hits, although he’d pulled the trigger himself only twice. None of these men were afraid of death, but each of them greatly respected it. So while this job remained a monster in their minds, they didn’t say a single word about it on the drive home.

  Halfway down the Taconic, at a place where trees closely bordered the parkway, Tony slowed down. When he was certain there were no cars behind him, he pulled over to the side. “Okay,” he told Lenny, “this is good.” Lenny had unloaded the gun and wiped his fingerprints off it with a handkerchief. He got out of the car and walked several feet to the tree line. Anybody driving past would assume he was relieving himself. A car sped by, he waited. Another car. He waited. And then he heaved the gun into the woods. A minute later Tony eased back onto the parkway and kept going. The job was done.

  They were just about back in the city when Eddie asked, “Any you guys interested in that gasoline truck?”

  Bobby had been thinking about that for most of the drive, but not for the $15,000 reason. As a teenager Bobby had practically rebuilt his first car, a 1960 Plymouth Fury with a 425 Hemi. One time the car had two very distinct problems, a banging coming from the rear right side and a bad oil leak. It didn’t seem possible the two problems were related, but they were. The banging in the back was caused by a loose exhaust pipe hitting the underside of the car. Occasionally the pipe brushed against the oil line, which eventually started leaking. That experience had taught Bobby to at least consider the possibility that two seemingly unconnected events happening at the same time might have a common root.

  In his whole life the only Russian he’d ever known was a really stacked young brunette named Irena who worked for a furrier on 37th Street and loved having sex in cars with stick shifts. A lot of wonderful memories were made in that ’60 Fury. Actually she’d played an important role in his life. This was just after he’d graduated from college, before he was tied up to Ronnie, when there was still a chance he might try the straight world. He was a smart kid; he could have been successful at many different things. But Irena helped him make the decision: Not only did he get laid regularly—although somewhat uncomfortably—Irena also told him exactly where the security cameras were hidden and when the most valuable furs were left out of the vault for the night. The result had been the first substantial score of his life. The choice was made.

  But until the last couple of weeks that had been his only real contact with a Russian. He knew all about the Russian mobs, he admired their success at organizing so quickly, but he didn’t know any of them. Now it seemed like they were coming out of the Kremlin in waves: The professor wasn’t technically Russian, but he taught the language. Two Russians had trailed him to Skinny Al’s funeral and had business with Cosentino. According to Grace Gradinsky, the professor had worked with Skinny Al—which made sense because Cosentino was the boss searching for the professor. And now this truck driver had been working for the Russians. Somehow the pieces fit together like a banging exhaust pipe and an oil leak. “Yeah, I’m in,” Bobby replied to Eddie’s question. He intended to learn a little more about these Russians.

  No one ever again mentioned the truck driver. From that night on, he had never existed.

  The next morning Bobby and Little Eddie planned the heist. Tony Cupcakes wanted in; so did the kid, Vito V. Joey Scars, a tough little guy who had been down in Florida meeting some people who claimed to be able to deliver as much as 140 pounds of marijuana a week, was in the club and heard about it and asked in. Legally this job belonged to Fast Lenny because the information came from his source, but he was okay with sharing equally. There really was no logical reason for Bobby to believe that this job might lead to the professor—there are thousands of Russians doing business in New York—but Bobby had a feeling he wasn’t about to ignore. Besides, the worst thing that would happen is that he would end up with a share of an oil tanker heist.

  He spent the rest of the afternoon with Little Eddie chasing the professor. To Eddie’s absolute delight, they went back up to Columbia. Bobby had no plan, but there wasn’t much else for him to do. The clock was running down and he was pretty much out of options. He needed a break, so why not just take a shot? You never know who’s waiting around the next corner, he figured, you just never know.

  Identifying themselves as private detectives hired by the professor’s relatives, they spoke with two of his colleagues and his graduate assistant. Neither of the teachers had the slightest idea what might have happened to him, but both of them acknowledged that this sort of behavior was completely out of character for
Professor Gradinsky and they were quite worried about him. “He’s a good man,” one of them said. “He’s got a fine accent.”

  The graduate student had just wandered into the administration office as Bobby and Eddie were getting ready to leave. When she overheard them asking Geri Simon more questions about Gradinsky, she introduced herself. She was a tall, attractive coed named Natalie something, who to Eddie’s disappointment was wearing very loose pants and a bulky knit sweater. She looked like she had a figure underneath all that cover.

  She was extremely concerned about the professor, she explained. She’d been coming to the office every day since he’d disappeared, desperate for any news. She’d even gone out searching for him herself, going to all the local places where previously she’d been able to find him. She was so frustrated at the fact that no one seemed to be doing very much about this—no one had even hung up a notice on the departmental bulletin board, she pointed out—that she had called the police department.

  Great, Bobby thought to himself, that’s definitely what we need. More people looking for this guy. Next thing the Coast Guard’s going to be searching for him.

  Natalie something sighed. “They weren’t any help at all. They told me they couldn’t do anything until he was reported missing by a member of his immediate family. And I don’t think she’s going to do that.” She hesitated, obviously making a decision, then decided to confide in Bobby and Eddie. “I’m assuming that Gra—his wife, she didn’t hire you, but you should know that his marriage isn’t so great. Sometimes he complained to me about her. Personally? I think she’s glad he’s gone.”

  “You know him pretty good, huh?” Eddie said in his best detective voice. Bobby couldn’t believe what he was hearing. Who would’ve guessed? That randy old professor.

  “I’ve been working with him more than a year. He is truly an enchanting man,” she said brightly. This was the first time Bobby had heard Gradinsky described as anything but plodding and ordinary. “You should hear him when he reads the great Russian poets. He’s . . .” Bobby watched as her eyes searched the air for a meaningful description. “. . . a man given to grand feats of verbal ecstasy.” She leaned back, satisfied with that tribute.