The Good Guys Page 22

  It was the kind of place that made O’Brien decide to throw out his shoes because they touched the floor. He stayed in there just long enough to be convincing, careful not to touch anything, and returned to the office. “It’s beautiful,” he said to the older attendant, putting down the key. “Who did your decorating?”

  The man obviously didn’t have the slightest idea what O’Brien was talking about, and just as clearly did not care. He didn’t even bother putting down his newspaper. Connor continued, “Is the manager around? The temperature gauge in my car is way up, maybe somebody could take a look at it?”

  “No manager,” the man grunted. “Not here now.”

  “Well, then, you think maybe one of those mechanics might take a look at it?”

  “Busy.” He finally looked up from the newspaper. “Everybody very busy today. Tomorrow good time for you come back. Hokay? Tomorrow?”

  “How about you? Is this your place?”

  The man shrugged proudly. A good firm “maybe.” “Tomorrow, come back,” he repeated. “We take good care of you.”

  For an instant O’Brien considered identifying himself as a special agent of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. But the most this might have accomplished in this situation, he knew quite well, was that the guy would put down his newspaper to be polite. Contrary to how members of the Efrem Zimbalist Jr. fan club felt, the badge wasn’t all magic. It would not make the owner or the manager suddenly appear. And it would definitely make his interest in the gas station known to people he didn’t necessarily want to know about it. “I’m sure you will,” he said pleasantly as he left.

  The first attendant was still hanging around the car, drying his hands on a filthy rag. “Three dollars ninety-five cents,” he said. “Even.”

  “I guess I must’ve had more gas than I thought,” Connor replied, handing the guy four dollars. “Keep the change.” The man smiled good-naturedly at the joke, revealing two large gold teeth in the front of his mouth. Seeing that, O’Brien smiled broadly in return.

  There were several cars parked on the side and in the rear of the station. O’Brien drove around the side, but the charcoal Firebird was not there. “I didn’t think it’d be here,” he told Russo. “You know what this place is, right?”

  “A gas station?” she guessed.

  He nodded. “Either that or the biggest mailbox in the world. Okay, I admit it, I was wrong. Happy? So now all we gotta do is figure out the connection between a Russian-owned gas station and organized crime. It just doesn’t make sense to me.”

  “Let’s ask Slattery to put some surveillance on it,” she suggested.

  “Right.” O’Brien was one of those agents who liked to absorb the entire scene and then focus on the details later. After leaving a place he’d sit down and list in his notebook everything that caught his attention. His theory was that the things he remembered would most likely be the important things. He had the same theory about women.

  One of the things he did remember was the way Russo looked at the husky attendant. So when they stopped at a red light, he turned to her and asked, “I want you to tell me the truth. Do you think I’d look better if I had gold teeth?” He bared his teeth in the rearview mirror. “Just like a couple.”

  She laughed. “Gold teeth?” She looked at his reflection in the mirror. “Let me see.” She looked carefully and thought about it. Nodding her head, she decided, “Maybe a gold tooth.” As he eased into traffic on the Belt Parkway, she said, “Hey, O’Brien, what happened? I thought you were taking me to a Blintzie’s?”

  “Next time.” He skillfully moved into the fast lane. “Let me ask you this, Russo. What do you think? You think he’s still alive?”

  She stared straight ahead. The most significant difference between being in the middle of a real criminal investigation and the stories you see on TV is that in the stories the good guys always win at the end. Going in, you know Brad Pitt isn’t going to be killed in the last fifteen minutes. The killer is going to get caught. And all the scars are makeup. Unfortunately that’s not the way the real world works. Cops do get killed. Killers do get away with murder. Scars last a lifetime. And when you’re in the middle of a case, you never know if the next step you take will break it wide open or cost you your life.

  Speculating doesn’t do you any good. Any time I spent while working undercover trying to figure out where the operation was going proved to be a colossal waste. I never knew what was going to happen in the next five minutes, much less at some indeterminate time in the future. The only thing that really matters is facts. What happens next.

  Sometimes during an investigation agents get to know people they will never meet. They learn secrets about them that have been carefully hidden from the world, hidden even from those people closest to them. And when an agent focuses on one person, it becomes difficult not to wonder about them. To wonder where they might be at some particular moment, to wonder about their fate. To wonder why they took a particular action or what they were thinking when they did it. Laura Russo was too good an agent to admit that she had spent considerable time wondering about the professor. “Sure, sometimes I do,” was the most she would tell O’Brien. “I don’t know. I just can’t think of any reason they’d want to get rid of him. I hope so. You?”

  “You ever see The Man Who Knew Too Much? The Hitchcock picture?”

  “No.”

  “Well, it’s about this really nice guy, that’s James Stewart, who the bad guys are after because they think he knows something, but he doesn’t know he knows it. All he knows is that to save his family he’s got to find out what it is that he doesn’t know that they think he knows. It’s a great picture.”

  She looked at him curiously, trying to decide just how serious he was. With O’Brien that was always a difficult question to answer. “All right,” she surrendered, “what happened at the end?”

  “James Stewart found out what he didn’t know that he knew. Doris Day sang ‘Que Sera, Sera, Whatever Will Be, Will Be,’ and they got their child back safely.”

  “Good. Now that that’s cleared up, I don’t have to see it. And your point is exactly . . . ?”

  “Whatever it is that the mob and the Russkies are doing together, we can assume it’s not a nice thing. And it has to be really lucrative, because it would take a small fortune to keep these guys from killing each other.” As always, he was thinking out loud, almost as curious as Russo to hear if he stumbled onto anything important. “We know for a fact that the Italians don’t know where the professor is, so obviously they didn’t take him. And I just don’t believe the commies would jeopardize this alliance by holding him. If I’m right, he’s more important to us than he is to them, because he can put the Italians and the Russians in business together.”

  She was confused. “So what is it that we know that we don’t know we know?”

  “That’s our real problem,” he said earnestly. “We don’t know.” He shrugged. “But that might be why the Italians are looking for him.”

  About a half hour later, as they approached the city, the radio staticked to life. As O’Brien preferred to use his own car, a car on which he lavished pennies, this CD radio was arguably the slum of the art. “O’Brien,” he acknowledged.

  “Hey, O’Brien, it’s Freiberg.” Agent Mickey Freiberg ran the Special Operations Group in New York. He was the go-to guy for just about all technical matters. “I got some news for you. The cops have spotted that car you were looking for, the Z.”

  Peter Gradinsky’s car. “Where is it?”

  Freiberg rustled some papers. “I got it right here . . . somewhere. Here. Like five minutes ago he was driving downtown on West End Avenue. A squad car picked up on him on 96th Street. They’re waiting to hear what you want to do.”

  He glanced at Russo. She gave him the thumbs-up, then leaned over the seat and picked up the emergency beacon he kept in the back. It attached to the dashboard with a big suction cup. O’Brien keyed the mike. “Okay, it’s gonna take u
s at least twenty minutes to get there. Tell the cops to stay with him, but lay back. Don’t lose him. Thanks.” Laying down the mike, he guessed, “Maybe he’s going home.”

  “Right,” she said doubtfully, “in a sports car his wife doesn’t know he has? I don’t think so.” Laura took the cigarette lighter out of its socket and laid it in the ashtray, then plugged the emergency beacon into the socket. “Here we go,” she said, and turned it on.

  For the most part the drivers in front of them ignored the flashing red light. Begrudgingly they would eventually move to the side so the agents could pass. O’Brien knew what they were thinking, the same thing any real New Yorker would think: I wonder where he bought that red light? Maybe I should get one.

  The beacon helped, not tremendously, but it helped. When they reached the Manhattan Bridge, a cop held up traffic for them, which enabled them to race across the bridge at speeds approaching twenty-five miles an hour. O’Brien went up the East Side. Freiberg continued to report the Z’s position. The car had not even slowed down when it passed the professor’s building. It had turned onto Broadway and was still heading downtown.

  By the time O’Brien was able to intersect the Z on Park Avenue and 58th Street, rush hour had begun. Traffic was barely moving. The two cars passed heading in opposite directions, O’Brien going north, the Z moving south. The Z was in the inside lane. “There he is,” O’Brien said, but the Z’s tinted windows made it impossible to see the driver. The NYPD squad car, alerted by radio that O’Brien had finally reached the area, spotted his beacon and hit his siren very briefly to attract his attention.

  Unfortunately that siren also got the attention of the person driving the Z. The car edged over two lanes, into the turning lane. “He’s moving over,” Russo said. “I’ll bet he saw our light.”

  At the next corner O’Brien made a U-turn and began heading downtown. Slowly, very slowly. He shut off the beacon. He was a full block behind the Z. Traffic was moving forward by the inch. “You see him?” O’Brien asked.

  “He’s all the way over on the right.”

  O’Brien keyed the mike. “Okay, we see him. Looks like he knows we’re here.” The NYPD dispatched several unmarked cars to the area. They were told to block the intersections when they got to that stretch of Park Avenue. The problem was that normal rush-hour traffic was already blocking several of those intersections, making it extremely difficult for the police cars to get there.

  Like an ancient sailing ship in pursuit on a windless sea, O’Brien drifted forward inches at a time. He was using all his New York City driving skills. The instant he saw the slightest opening, he went for it. Once he sliced in front of a woman driving a station wagon, getting a blocking bumper in front of her before she could cover—and in response she flashed her middle finger at him. The car to his left switched lanes, unexpectedly vacating several valuable feet of space. A cabdriver spotted the gap at the same instant O’Brien did and challenged him to it. It was a game of hard-core bumper chicken, of who would brake first. O’Brien knew he had the edge, because he cared nothing about adding another dent or scratch to his car. He played the game with expertise, refusing to look at the cabbie, thus avoiding the often critical mistake made by amateurs in this game. The cabbie hesitated, suddenly uncertain O’Brien knew he was there, and braked at the last second—allowing O’Brien to slide in and fill the traffic vacuum. “God, I love these people,” he said.

  Block after block, irritated drivers banged on their horns, battling for every precious foot of rush-hour road. The Z was moving too, but O’Brien saw right away that its driver was considerably more cautious than him—a fatal vehicular weakness after three o’clock on a weekday afternoon. The agents moved almost a full block in less than fifteen minutes, gaining almost two full car lengths on the Z.

  Suddenly O’Brien screamed, “Hold on!” and darted forward about eight feet. He looked at Russo and took a relieved breath. “You okay?”

  She could see how much he was enjoying this. She frowned. “Not funny.”

  He knew it was funny. “Hey, partner, think of it this way. We’re making history here. This has got to be the slowest chase in history. Can’t you just feel the tension building?”

  “Oh. Oh,” she said in the monotone delivery of a really poor actor. “Be still, my heart. I can hardly bear it. This is even more exciting than bumper cars.”

  “Well, if that’s the way you feel about it,” he said, opening his door, “you drive.” O’Brien got out of the car. A pizza deliveryman was bicycling down Park, skillfully slaloming between cars. As Russo watched incredulously, O’Brien took out his badge and held it up high as a highwayman stopping a stagecoach. The pizza deliveryman walked his bike to a halt. Russo could see O’Brien say something to the teenager, who nodded and got off his bike, taking his pizza with him. O’Brien mounted the bike and began pedaling down Park Avenue.

  She sat there in stunned disbelief. But one very long threatening horn blast from the big Buick inches behind her knocked her back to reality. The car directly in front of her had moved forward almost three feet and she had remained in place. Through some osmotic process she understood that this was a grave violation of traffic jam etiquette. She scrambled into the driver’s seat and rolled forward.

  During their career almost every agent does at least one thing that one day causes them to wonder, what the hell was I thinking? Why in the world would I do something like that? But few of them ever do anything as ridiculous as Connor O’Brien, who had appropriated a pizza delivery bicycle and was pedaling it down Park Avenue in pursuit of Professor Peter Gradinsky’s Datsun 280Z.

  Initially O’Brien had stayed as close to the curb as possible, but even that path was blocked. He had the option of dashing through the stalled traffic, but he knew there is a vast difference between exhibiting a good sense of humor and a death wish. So he made a decision, lifting the front tire over the curb and onto the sidewalk. Seconds later he was madly pedaling down the sidewalk, bending forward over the handlebars, elbows flared, yelling, “Out of the way. FBI! FBI! Coming through.”

  He could have easily walked or jogged up to the Z. It was caught in traffic, it wasn’t going anywhere, fast or slow. He would never admit his real reason for taking the bike, but at least a little part of it came from a childish urge to impress the girl. Within a minute he had caught up to the car. As he got off the bike, a fashionably dressed couple was walking past him. “Here,” he said to the man, “hold my horse.” The man reflexively accepted the bike and stood there holding it.

  As O’Brien started moving toward the car, he heard the man’s wife telling him, “Put that bike down right now, Marty. Why are you always doing things like this to me?”

  The Z’s tinted windows prevented O’Brien from seeing inside. Normally this would have made him very wary. Tinted car windows are the hallmark of drug dealers, and drug dealers often carry large guns. But this car belonged to a college professor. What could he be packing? A thesaurus? O’Brien had no idea who was behind the wheel. It was entirely possible he was about to meet the elusive Professor Gradinsky. Somehow, though, he didn’t believe that was about to happen.

  O’Brien remained cautious. You never know. In textbook fashion he approached the car on the driver’s side, cutting down the driver’s angle of sight by brushing against the car. He stopped before reaching the driver’s window. Anybody feeling the need to take a shot at him would have to twist almost completely around to get a clean shot, which was very difficult to do while sitting in the driver’s seat. He reached under his jacket and grasped the butt of his own gun. Just in case.

  Russo was five car lengths behind him. She watched him ease carefully alongside of the car—and when she saw him reach into his jacket for his weapon, she decided to move. Screw this, she said to herself, turning off the engine and dropping the keys on the floor mat. She grabbed her handbag and put it over her shoulder. And then she got out of the car and started walking rapidly toward the Z.

  There
is a story New York cops like to tell about the rookie detective who was investigating a Manhattan robbery. He asked the victim, “Have you seen anybody around here acting strange lately?” Twenty-four hours later he was still writing. So New Yorkers are used to seeing some pretty unusual things. But even the experienced New York drivers behind and next to Russo were completely shocked to see a woman get out of her car right in the middle of rush hour and simply walk away, abandoning it on Park Avenue. They responded instinctively, like great animals in distress, crying out with their horns.

  O’Brien kept his right hand on his gun. With his left hand he reached over and tried to open the car door. It was locked. He tightened his grip on his weapon and again tried to open the door, at the same time screaming loud and clear, “FBI! FBI!” The door remained locked.

  Russo was darting between cars, banging hard on their hoods as she walked in front of them to make certain the drivers saw her. She assumed most of the drivers would figure she was insane, which was not necessarily a bad thing in this situation. They weren’t going to interfere with her. Her bag was open and her hand was holding her gun, but she didn’t show it. Finally she took a position by the passenger-side window of the Z. She was blocking a white sports car, and its driver was practically apoplectic, leaning out the window to scream at her, “What the hell’s a matter with you, lady? You can’t stand there. This is Park Avenue!”

  O’Brien banged on the car window. A second later the window smoothly slid down. Again he shouted, “FBI! FBI!”

  An attractive young woman leaned out the window and turned to look at him. “I’m . . . I’m sorry,” she said, obviously confused. “I don’t know . . . Was I doing something wrong?”