The Good Guys Read online

  “Wow,” Eddie said aloud, impressed if not certain he understood her meaning, and wondering if they were talking about the same guy.

  Verbal ecstasy? Bobby thought. Nice try. “Lemme ask you this, Natalie,” he said. “Did you see a lot of the professor?”

  She nodded and, completely missing the intended humor in his question, replied seriously, “Oh yes, at least three or four days a week. Peter was my mentor so we worked together very closely. He was helping me write my thesis.”

  Peter? That’s pretty good, Bobby thought to himself, practically feeling the pain on his knuckles that would have resulted if he had dared refer to Sister Mary Margaret, his fifth-grade teacher, as just plain Mary. This Natalie certainly knew a lot about the professor’s life; she knew the people on the faculty he respected, she knew the places he liked to eat and what he ordered, that he was reading Gorky Park when he disappeared, even his secret strategy for finding a parking spot on campus. But she knew nothing at all about his relationship with Skinny Al or, most important, just where he might be at that very moment. “I need to talk to him,” she said. “If you find him, tell him it’s very important.” She would not confide in them, even when pushed, but emphasized, “It really is important.”

  Later, as Bobby and Eddie walked back to their car, Eddie asked, “You think he’s boffing her?”

  Bobby laughed at him. “Do I think he’s boffing her? Do I think he’s boffing her? Is the pope Catholic? Fuck yes, I think he’s boffing her. You heard her, four times a week.”

  “Man, that’s really something,” Eddie said, astonished by the thought. “What the fuck is a piece of ass like that doing with that schmuck?”

  “You heard her. He’s got verbal ecstasy.”

  “Sure he does. And I got a fifteen-inch schlong. What does that mean, verbal ecstasy?” Eddie asked.

  “It means he can talk her into giving him blow jobs,” Bobby explained.

  On the way back they stopped at Charlie DaSilva’s place on MacDougal Street in the Village for a cannoli. They sat at a table in the window. It was a gloomy day, dark and blustery, the perfect harmony for Bobby’s mood. He had read that after Mickey Mantle retired, he used to dream that he was locked outside Yankee Stadium and kept running around the place desperately trying to find an open door. That’s sort of the way he felt about this search, like he was running around in a big circle unable to find the key to get inside. He had gathered some decent information, but it didn’t lead anywhere. It was like trying to find the words in a bowl of alphabet soup: The letters were all there but they were floating around aimlessly.

  He wondered if those two FBI agents working the case were doing any better. Franzone had given him their names and home addresses, but there wasn’t too much he could do with that information. What was he going to do, bug the feds? The FBI had a lot of advantages, no question about it, but they also had one big problem: They were restricted by the law. They needed the bullshit search warrants, they weren’t allowed to use the family methods to encourage people to give up information, and they didn’t have access to the same range of people.

  His own involvement with the bureau had been sporadic. Two different times he’d been picked up by members of the joint FBI-NYPD Organized Crime Task Force and questioned about specific killings, but in both cases they had nothing more than a hunch. Those were obviously fishing expeditions and they didn’t catch anything. He’d been tailed many times, too many times to count up. Sometimes the tail was obvious, sometimes it was supposed to be covert, and he figured there were times when he had been followed without knowing it, but the only crimes he’d ever been charged with were a conspiracy rap that never even got to court and a wire fraud charge for working for a bookie during the ’78 World Series. He’d been convicted in the bookmaking case and received a six-month suspended sentence. A couple of times bureau agents had approached him on the street to feel him out about cooperating with them, just answering a few questions from time to time. “Building up some credit for when you’re gonna need it,” one of them had called it. He’d laughed them away.

  He respected the bureau. They had some smart guys working there. And they played by the rules. He was reminded of that every day by the precautions their shadows caused him to take. And those agents he’d met . . .

  “I just can’t fucking believe it,” Eddie whined, interrupting his thoughts.

  “What’s that?”

  “That fucking professor. Where’s he get off banging a cute little cunt like that? I swear to God, sometimes this world just isn’t fair.”

  Bobby chuckled at that thought. Eddie was right about that one. “C’mon,” he said finally, “let’s go get some gas.”

  TEN

  Numbers can’t lie. Dig deep enough into the numbers and the answer is there. Most people never think about it, but almost all of their daily transactions generate numbers, and those numbers can often be attached to them and can then be used to create the legendary paper trail. Law enforcement agencies not only think about it, they rely on it. The foundation of pretty much all intelligence-gathering is built of numbers.

  The FBI’s information-gathering machine was finally operating at close to full strength, collecting those raw numbers from banks, credit card agencies, the telephone company, even the Motor Vehicle Bureau, any numbers that might be used to track the professor. But as always, it was up to the agents to turn those numbers into facts.

  O’Brien got to the office almost an hour earlier than usual the following morning. He walked into the conference room just as Russo was taking a big bite out of a lightly buttered bagel. Two empty coffee cups and an opened folder were in front of her. Another pile of reports was sitting in the middle of the conference table. “Morning,” she said midbite.

  “Don’t you ever sleep?” he asked incredulously as he hung his wet trench coat over the back of a chair.

  “Sure I do,” she said. “I think I did it last year.”

  He took his own bagel and two cups of coffee from a white paper bag. “Here you go,” he said, placing one of those cups and two packs of Sweet’n Low in front of her. “So?” He indicated the pile of reports: “What do we got?”

  “Thanks,” she said. She tore the sipping triangle off the plastic lid. “Some of this stuff is pretty interesting.” She flipped through several pages until she found what she was looking for. “Look at this. These are his phone records. Remember, his wife told us that the phone call that got him moving came in at about seven-thirty? There were only two calls to his number around that time, give or take what, fifteen minutes, say. One was from his office, the other one was”—she searched for a different sheet of paper and found it almost immediately—“from a phone in a place called Off Limits. It lasted”—she checked the first sheet—“one minute and twenty-eight seconds.”

  “What’s Off Limits?”

  She smiled. “Nothing, apparently. That’s the joke.”

  “I don’t get it.”

  “It’s a strip club. That’s their slogan, ‘Nothing is Off Limits!’”

  O’Brien squared his shoulders, stood up ramrod straight, and in the most officious tone he could muster said nobly, “Perhaps it would be better if I take this interview on my own.”

  “Down, boy,” she commanded. “Down, boy.”

  His shoulders deflated. “You never let me have any fun.”

  Ignoring him, she continued reading from her notes. “The morning after he disappeared somebody used his ATM card at three different banks for a total of $650. He still has in his possession a Visa, a MasterCard, a Macy’s charge card, a discount card from something called Diner’s Delight, a few more things like that, but except for the bank card and the Visa at the Heights restaurant, none of them have been used.”

  O’Brien confirmed the obvious. “I guess that’s the good news. If somebody else had them, you figure they would’ve used them at least once, right? Before getting rid of them?”

  She picked up the coffee cup and swiveled
to face him. “Not the mob. They don’t take those kinds of chances.”

  The bright red polish on her nails stood out against the stark white Styrofoam cup. He’d never noticed that color before and wondered if she was doing something new or whether he was simply paying closer attention. “Yeah, you’re right. Anything else?”

  “Yeah, one more thing,” she said, imitating Slattery’s understated sense of drama. “This.” She handed him two sheets of paper stapled together.

  The logo at the top of the first page identified it as an official communication from the New York State Department of Motor Vehicles. He glanced at the numbers. “Whoa,” he said, impressed, “double whoa.”

  In response to a subpoena issued by Judge Margo Sklar the DMV had provided information concerning two vehicles registered in the state of New York. Asked to identify any vehicles registered to Peter Gradinsky—both his home and his office addresses had been provided, as well as his Social Security number—the DMV reported that seven months earlier Gradinsky had registered a light brown 1981 Datsun 280Z to his office address. Motor Vehicles provided a license plate number and a copy of an unpaid ticket issued to that vehicle for parking at an expired meter six weeks earlier. “Who’da thunk it, huh?” Russo said. “New women, fast cars. Our guy’s leading a whole secret life.”

  “Least we know what he’s doing with the mob’s money,” O’Brien replied, somewhat distracted. It was the second part of the report that most intrigued him. It was a copy of a report filed by two agents O’Brien did not know, Richard Soll and William Madden, “concerning the surveillance of a known member of Henry ‘the Hammer’ Franzone’s organized crime family, Robert San Filippo, a.k.a. Bobby Blue Eyes, a.k.a. Bobby Hats.” This was a bit of information that had been lying there unnoticed for a couple of days, lost in a blizzard of paper, but to Connor it stood out like an elephant in a game of musical chairs.

  As a normal part of the investigation into the murder of Alphonse “Skinny Al” D’Angelo, surveillance teams had been assigned to several different crews. There was some speculation that this killing might be the first shot in what was potentially a major family war over disputed territories. In fact, when O’Brien and Russo were working at the Country Club, they had been alerted to pay particular attention to any mention of this killing.

  Skinny Al’s funeral had been as much of an event for the bureau as it was for the mob. Strict mob protocol is observed at funerals, which allows the FBI to keep track of winners and losers in the ongoing power struggle inside organized crime. It was learned from an informant inside the Freemont Avenue Social Club that San Filippo had been asked to represent Franzone’s crew at the funeral. The morning of that funeral Special Agents Soll and Madden had been assigned to follow San Filippo. This was a “bright light” operation, meaning the bureau wanted Bobby Blue Eyes to know he was being tailed. The bureau wanted him to know that it had taken a special interest in his future. That’s standard operating procedure. It tends to make people nervous—specifically the person being followed and all the others deemed not important enough to earn a tail. It makes all those others wonder what the FBI knows that they don’t know.

  According to Soll’s report, when he and Madden arrived outside San Filippo’s home early on the morning of D’Angelo’s funeral, they discovered another vehicle already waiting there. Initially they had assumed that the two men in the car were also members of Franzone’s crew. Probably security. At first the occupants of this vehicle did not appear to be aware of the FBI’s presence, but even after they realized a second car was tailing San Filippo, they made no move to respond. In fact, they did absolutely nothing to interfere with the tail. When this three-car motorcade reached the funeral parlor, the two men in this car were welcomed inside, making it highly likely they were mobsters. Soll and Madden dutifully recorded the license plate number of this vehicle, a 1983 charcoal Pontiac Firebird, and submitted it as part of their report. Just another piece of basic information. A straw in a haystack. Nobody bothered to check the plates.

  Until Jim Slattery found it. Slattery knew that Bobby San Filippo was also searching for the missing professor, so he’d requested Bobby Blue Eyes’s file on the slight chance there might be something there that could assist the bureau’s investigation. The presence of the second car caught his attention. Years of experience had taught him that San Filippo was simply not important enough to merit an escort. He was security, he didn’t get his own security. So who were the guys in the second car? He ran the plate through the DMV.

  “You see this?” O’Brien asked. The car was registered to the G&C Corporation, 1405 Brighton Beach Boulevard, in Brooklyn. Brighton Beach. Little Odessa. The Russians were finally in play. He let out an appreciative whistle.

  It wasn’t just that two Russians were tailing San Filippo. What made it even more interesting was that the two men in the car also attended the funeral. This was mourning by invitation only. The fact that these two Russians had been invited guests at the funeral of the month raised all kinds of unpleasant possibilities.

  Russo asked, “You have any idea what G&C might be?”

  “Just some bullshit dummy corporation,” O’Brien guessed. “They use them all the time for cover. Use ’em and lose ’em. If there’s any kind of problem, they just evaporate. This is probably just a mail drop.” He picked up the phone and dialed Brooklyn information. “Let’s find out.”

  “It’s unlisted,” she told him.

  He hung up the phone. “You ever had a blintz?”

  She looked at him suspiciously. “A what?”

  “A blintz. You know.”

  “You sure you don’t mean a Blimpie?”

  “No, I don’t. I mean a blintz.” He tried to describe it. “It’s like a pancake, except it’s not. Put your coat on.”

  Before leaving the office they requested copies of the corporate records of the G&C Corporation, located at 1405 Brighton Beach Boulevard. O’Brien figured a dummy corporation would probably have dummy directors, but you never know. It was worth the five minutes it took. They also called Jeff McElnea, the bureau’s liaison with the NYPD, gave him the plate number of the professor’s car, and asked him to request a soft alert. If the car was spotted, they wanted to be notified immediately, but they did not want the car stopped.

  One bagel into the day, they were on their way to Brighton Beach. Even with light traffic on the Belt Parkway it took them a full hour to get there. Actually that was not a long time, Russo realized as she looked around, to get to another country. Brighton Beach could have been a small Russian village on the Black Sea. There were more signs in Russian than English. Many of the women were wearing scarves and heavy black coats. As they looked for 1405 Brighton Beach Boulevard, O’Brien gave her the two-minute tour: Brighton Beach was a small village wedged between the much more upscale Manhattan Beach and world-famous Coney Island. Historically it had been a fishing community, but eventually it had become a popular haven for mostly Eastern European immigrants. In the years following World War II, survivors of the Holocaust had settled there, and the area had become largely Jewish. A second wave of immigrants, this time from the Soviet Union, began settling there in the mid-1970s. New Yorkers knew it mostly for the large restaurants near the beach that served huge platters of every known type of fattening food. “See, you don’t even have to fool around with the meat,” he explained to Laura. “There’s no pretense here. You can just order your fat straight.” She looked extremely dubious. “Hey, I’m not kidding. It’s true. You can order it boiled, fried, well-done, however you want it. Believe me, Russo, you like fat, this is the place to get it.”

  “That’s gotta be it,” she said, ignoring him. “There’s your mail drop.”

  He followed her gaze across the street. She was looking at a large, somewhat run-down Gulf station. In front were two cement islands in parallel, with two sets of pumps on each island. Behind them was a garage with two repair bays. The door to one of the bays was raised and two men were working un
derneath a car on a lift. Above the garage doors the nearly faded remnants of the name Albie’s Service Center, which had once been spelled out in blue block letters, was barely visible. O’Brien looked around for the current name but couldn’t find it. Then, in gold letters on the inside of the glass door to the office, he saw the name G&C Corp. The owners weren’t exactly hiding the name, but they certainly weren’t advertising it either.

  He pulled up to one of the pumps and got out of the car. The attendant, a ruggedly handsome square-jawed man, approached him. “I help you,” the attendant said in a thick Russian accent.

  He’s thirty-four, O’Brien guessed, tells the girls he’s twenty-eight. “Fill it, please,” O’Brien told him, “the cheap stuff.” He glanced around the gas station. He could see a half-filled candy and gum rack and a soda machine inside the office. “Where’s your men’s room?” he asked.

  “In back,” the attendant told him, pointing with his thumb. “Key in the office.”

  “Thanks.” As Connor walked toward the office, he glanced back at the car. Russo was half-turned in the passenger seat, looking back over the seat at the attendant. Not her type, he thought. A second man, an older man, thin and dark and cold, was sitting behind an old wooden desk, reading a Russian-language newspaper. The man handed him the key, which was attached to a metal ring obviously made to fit around a wrist. A metal tag indicated it had been stolen from the Surf Motel of Brighton Beach.

  Connor’s first thought when he opened the door to the men’s room was that it had seen better times. The Civil War, for example. Filthy did not begin to describe it. The whole place stunk. The toilet seat had lost a bolt and was askew on the bowl. A corner of the porcelain lid had been broken off. The cloth towel had been ripped off the dispenser winding mechanism and hung straight down, covered with dirt and grease. In the sink a thin stream of water ran from the cold water handle, while the hot water handle was missing. There was graffiti written in black marker on the walls. On the mirror someone had scratched the words “Suck my big dike” and provided a phone number. Some of the tiles were missing from the floor, revealing the cement subfloor.