The Good Guys Read online

  Bobby answered it. “Yeah?”

  In a thick Russian accent a voice asked, “Bobby?”

  Bobby froze. In an instant it seemed like every nerve in his body was vibrating. They knew his name. They knew his motherfucking name. “What?” he asked.

  The Russian said calmly, “So listen, we got your fucking message.”

  “So?”

  The Russian laughed. “So now we send you our message.” There was a brief pause, and then he heard a single, long, and desperately tortured scream. It seemed to last forever, and the sound ripped through his body. It was beyond a cry for help, beyond anything he’d ever heard before. This was a plea for a quick death.

  When it subsided, the Russian spoke again. “Hey, Bobby, you go fuck yourself, hokay?” And then he hung up.

  Bobby stood there holding on to the phone until Eddie took it from his hand and gently put it back on the hook. “What the fuck was that?” he asked.

  TWELVE

  Hey, hey, come on in here,” Slattery shouted to O’Brien and Russo as they walked past his office. “You guys gotta hear this.” Even before they’d settled on his couch, he hit the play button on the reel-to-reel.

  “Jesus H.,” a familiar voice said. “Please. Somebody turn that guy down.”

  Connor smiled at Laura. “Sounds like your boyfriend.” He started to ask Slattery, “How come you—”

  He was interrupted by a loud, shrill whistle, then somebody shouting, “Benny! Shut the fuck up or I swear to God I’ll leave you hanging there all day.”

  Slattery was sitting on the top of the desk, next to the recorder. “That’s Eddie LaRocca,” he said. “Sounds like they had some guy hanging up on something.”

  Then an unfamiliar voice. “Bobby, help me out here. Guy’s fucking crazy. Hey, get me down and I got a great shirt for you, no kidding.”

  “I guess that’s Benny,” Russo said.

  Two other agents passing the office heard the recorded whistle and stuck their heads in the door to listen. One of them looked questioningly at Slattery and pointed at the recorder. “Bobby Blue Eyes,” Slattery replied loudly, “over at the Freemont. Come on in here. Listen.”

  Bobby’s voice was heard again. “I don’t know, Benny. I thought you liked hanging around with all of us.” And after a brief pause, once again, “Here. Make yourself useful. And don’t go getting it dirty.” Then the social club erupted in laughter.

  Slattery guessed at the action. “He must’ve given him something.”

  To O’Brien most of this sounded more like it was taking place inside a college fraternity house than in an organized crime social club. Boys will be killers, he thought. In that ever-important category of level of maturity, it reminded him of the time they’d hidden one of his frat brothers inside a folded convertible sofa, then ordered a pledge to open it up. When that brother jumped out, they were afraid the pledge was going to die from shock. That was funny; but what these guys were doing was just cruel.

  He eased back deep into Slattery’s comfortable couch and stretched, stifling a yawn by biting down hard on the inside of his cheek. You never want the boss to see you falling asleep at the office. But he had to admit it, he was tired; tired and frustrated as hell. And his eardrums were still vibrating from the night before.

  He and Russo had spent the night at Off Limits. Ironically O’Brien had never been inside a strip club, but Russo had spent considerable time in the clubs while working undercover. Visiting them, as she had forcefully pointed out. At the time, the strip clubs in New York had not yet become socially acceptable. For the most part they were still exactly what they were intended to be: the place where money went to meet sex. O’Brien had just never felt comfortable being ripped off to watch women take off their clothes. He preferred the pleasures of his own apartment.

  But Russo knew her way around clubs in Chicago, Florida, and Vegas. Strip clubs and the mob went together like rock stars and supermodels. It was the perfect business for organized crime: mostly cash—and even better, many of the men paying that cash did not want anyone to know they had been there. So all of the rules could be relaxed a little. Actually, a lot.

  Off Limits was one of the first upscale clubs in New York. The bouncers wore tuxedos. The show room itself was dark, with pin spots lighting the semicircular stage in front. There were two poles on the stage, and as O’Brien and Russo walked in, two girls were riding them to the sound track of Urban Cowboy, which was blasting out of the two huge speakers on either side of the stage. The entire room was vibrating. O’Brien knew that one of the performers was undressed as a cowgirl because she was still wearing a ten-gallon hat and a quarter-inch rhinestone G-string, while the other girl had apparently been a nurse, as she had on a white G-string and a long stethoscope which seemed to disappear between her breasts. Watching them perform, O’Brien whispered to Russo, “Wow, I think I saw them on Star Search.” And then he corrected himself. “Or maybe it was Police Search.”

  There were several doors around the room. Russo said into his ear, “They go to private rooms.”

  O’Brien was gamely trying to keep his eyes off the stage, but losing. “Who does?” he asked.

  “The doors,” she said emphatically. “Hey, stay with me, Agent O’Brien. Playtime later.”

  He heard the irritation in her voice. For one of the few times in his life he really didn’t know what to say. Connor O’Brien was not a shy man. He had dated a lot of lovely women, but in all his travels he had never encountered a woman with the mountainous, perfectly sculpted breasts of the nurse. He was in awe of her physical geography. When he finally looked at Russo, he was very careful to look directly into her eyes, never letting his gaze fall any lower than her nose.

  It suddenly occurred to him that she might be feeling somewhat intimidated by the girls on the stage. Trying to find something supportive to say to her, he whispered, in retrospect quite foolishly, “That’s a great blouse you’re wearing.”

  Another thing he had never seen in all his travels was the look she gave him in response to that, which registered somewhere between “pathetic loser” and “immature moron.” Russo just shook her head in disbelief and moved across the room. O’Brien sheepishly followed close behind.

  Off Limits was a little more than half-full, with most of the customers as close to the stage as legally permitted. As the dancers moved to the foot of the stage, these men slipped bills into the cowgirl’s hatband and the nurse’s G-string. In the dimly lit back of the room other strategically dressed women were socializing with customers and occasionally would escort one of the men through one of those doors. The bar was to the left, and it was being tended by two pneumatically breasted women wearing low-cut lacy bras. The waitresses, dressed out of the Frederick’s of Hollywood catalog, moved around the room carrying drinks and bottles on trays balanced on their bare shoulders. Properly chastened, O’Brien made a great effort to keep his eyes on the bottles, and for the first time in his life he noticed the undeniably erotic shape of a champagne bottle.

  They went through a set of black double doors under an exit sign into a corridor. The corridor was about as bright as dusk. “Boy,” Connor said softly to Russo, “they must save a bundle on their electric bill.” A door on the right was the men’s room, indicated by the silhouette of a cherub peeing, while the door facing it bore the outline of two pendulous breasts. There were four pay phones on the wall to their right. As O’Brien suspected, there were no numbers on these phones. Taped to the wall around the phones and on the privacy screens were numerous business cards, some of them featuring photographs of women in seductive poses, most of them having only one name—O’Brien counted three Monas—but all of them boasting “out calls.”

  Both agents, armed with several dollars in quarters, picked up pay phone handsets and dialed a special number at AT&T. This service was used primarily by installers and repairmen to check their work, but when necessary, law enforcement agencies also used it. After a series of clicks and switches the
ir calls were answered automatically. Within seconds a computerized voice reported the number of the phone from which they were calling. According to Bell Telephone’s records, six telephones connected to eight lines had been installed in Off Limits. One of them had been used to call the professor, causing him to leave his apartment and disappear. That call had not been made from either of the first two pay phones. O’Brien and Russo hung up and moved to the next pair of phones.

  One of those phones was in use by a large man wearing what was obviously a cheap blond wig. He was whispering into the receiver, but O’Brien could hear him negotiating. The man sensed O’Brien behind him, turned, and looked at him with real disgust. O’Brien took a few steps backward and leaned against the opposite wall, waiting while Russo finished checking the other phone.

  She was leaning forward into the booth waiting for a response from the phone company. Two men came out of the restroom and walked between O’Brien and Russo. Almost compulsively they examined Russo’s form. She’d spent enough time in these clubs to know exactly how to dress on the proper side of the line without making any kind of obvious statement. She was wearing a tastefully short skirt which showed off just enough of her well-shaped legs to be fashionable rather than provocative, ending slightly south of midcalf, sheer stockings or panty hose—O’Brien couldn’t be certain, but his bet was on stockings—and a cream satin blouse. The top three buttons of the blouse were opened to reveal the swell of her own cute breasts. She was carrying a trendy black purse, and O’Brien wondered if any of the men looking at her had any concept of the firepower inside that bag.

  O’Brien watched the men watching Russo, while trying to project an attitude of protective independence. Admittedly he found himself following their eyes to her body. Within the realm of reality, he decided, she was fine.

  The bewigged man hung up, hitched up his pants, and walked back into the club without looking at O’Brien. As Russo stepped back from the phone and shook her head, he picked up the fourth phone and dialed the service number. It took only a few seconds to confirm that the professor had not been called from this phone. So whoever had called him had not used a public phone, meaning most likely it was not a customer who had called him.

  Russo guessed the other phones were in the office—that one probably had several lines—and in the strippers’ dressing room. O’Brien raised his eyebrows playfully and smirked when she mentioned the dressing room. She dismissed him coldly: “I got it the first time.”

  The office was the more likely location, although considering how much they’d learned about the professor, it was not impossible the call had come from the dressing room. The office was behind a set of deep purple velvet curtains, which were almost hidden by a bouncer O’Brien estimated to be about the size of the New York Giants’ offensive line. As they approached him, he whispered to Russo, “Use your charm.”

  ”Excuse me,” she said pleasantly to the giant, who looked down upon her. The bouncer was a dark-skinned Asian; Korean of one of the northern Japanese islands, O’Brien guessed.

  “Can I help you?” he asked politely.

  She took her badge from her purse and showed it to him. “Yes, you can. I’m Agent Russo, this is Agent O’Brien, FBI. We’d like to speak with the manager.”

  The bouncer looked from the badge to Russo, from Russo back to the badge. “Really?” he asked, surprised and impressed. “You’re an FBI agent? Like on TV?” She nodded. “Just wait right here,” he said, and slipped through the curtains.

  O’Brien leaned forward and said quietly to Russo, “I’ll take it from here.” Even Laura couldn’t help laughing at him.

  The bouncer quickly reappeared, holding open the curtain for them and revealing the first brightly lit area they’d found in the club. “This way, please.” As O’Brien followed three steps behind Russo, the bouncer winked at him.

  It took his eyes several moments to adjust to the bright lights. At the end of another short corridor a middle-aged white man was standing in front of a half-opened gray steel door. The door had a peephole drilled into it about two inches below a store-bought Private sign and a Medeco lock. But it was the manager who caught O’Brien’s attention. The man’s thinning jet-black hair appeared to have been glued in place, and several very long strands were combed directly over the top, sort of like a thin shadow trying to cover the entire north pole. Connor guessed forty-eight, desperate for thirty-nine. He was of medium height and his upper body bore the last traces of once-serious muscles. He was wearing a black-and-white-checked sports jacket over a tightly stretched gray V-neck T-shirt. The T-shirt accentuated those muscles, while the single-button jacket was an obvious attempt to hide his paunch. The perfunctory gold chain hung loosely around his neck, matched by the equally perfunctory diamond pinkie ring. A large unlit half-chewed cigar was poked firmly into the corner of his mouth. Looking at him, O’Brien was absolutely thrilled. Thrilled! Standing before him was the living, breathing proof that clichés were indeed born of reality. He would have staked his inheritance that the man’s name was Sid. And he would have given great odds that he had at least one tattoo. “What’s the problem?” he asked.

  Russo introduced herself and O’Brien, then paused to allow him to respond. “Okay,” he said, failing to identify himself, “so what’s the problem?”

  “Are you the manager?” she asked.

  O’Brien was practically mesmerized by the chewed cigar, which bobbed with every word.

  “The owner.” He corrected himself. “Co-owner. Ike Jones. I’ll ask you again, we got a problem here?”

  Sure it is, O’Brien thought, refusing to accept the name Ike for an answer.

  “It’s really simple,” Russo explained. “I can get a warrant if I need one, but I’d rather not have to do that.”

  Ike Jones held out his hands together prayerfully. “Please, I’m not looking for trouble. Just tell me. What? What?”

  “We need to know the numbers of your telephones,” she told him.

  He squinched up his face, tilting the end of his cigar almost straight upward. “What?”

  “The phone numbers,” O’Brien repeated strongly. “Of your phone.”

  Jones was wary. “That’s it? Really?” They both nodded. “You’re the FBI and you were going to get a search warrant for that?” He laughed at the thought. “Let me ask you this. Why didn’t you call information? We’re listed.” He didn’t wait for an answer. “Sure, come on in.”

  He led them into the office and closed the door. The room was obviously soundproof, as the thunderous music was reduced to a distant thump. There was a single three-line phone sitting on a coffee-cup-stained glass-top desk. While Russo checked the phone numbers, O’Brien surveyed the room. In addition to the desk, the office contained a high-back leather executive chair, two straight-back chairs, and a black leather couch. Notebooks dated by months lined the two shelves behind the desk. Obviously ledgers. There were three photographs in cheap black plastic frames hanging on the wall, all of them picturing Sid holding large fish. That was no surprise to Connor. Unlike a deli, this was not the type of place in which celebrities wanted to have photographs of themselves with the owner—or the entertainers—on the wall. “Nice,” O’Brien said admiringly, “nice.”

  “Look,” Ike asked O’Brien, “what’s going on here?”

  Here it comes, Connor thought hopefully.

  Ike continued, “I run a clean place here . . .”

  Yessss! O’Brien thought. There is a God in cliché heaven. “Of course you do,” he agreed.

  “This is it,” Russo said, standing behind the desk and holding high the telephone receiver.

  “This what?” Ike asked. For the first time he grasped the cigar stub and took it out of his mouth. Waving it to make his point, he declared, “This is bullshit is what it is, you ask me.”

  “Why don’t you sit down, Mr. Jones?” Russo suggested, pointing to one of the straight-back chairs.

  Defiantly Ike walked around the desk, settled
into his desk chair, and leaned back. He picked up a tiger-shaped cigarette lighter and pressed down twice on the tail. The tiger’s red eyes lit up and a flame shot out of his mouth. As Ike lit the stub, he asked, “You want to tell me what’s going on?”

  “Ike? Right?” Russo replied. He nodded.

  O’Brien took out his notebook. Sid, he thought. And I’ll bet he has a whole collection of Hawaiian shirts for his trips to Florida.

  “Okay, Ike,” she continued. “Do you recognize this guy?” Like a magician reaching into his top hat, she again reached into her purse, this time pulling out the photograph of the professor.

  Ike examined it, then frowned. He shook his head slowly. “No, sorry. Doesn’t look familiar.”

  A lot of guys come in here, O’Brien guessed he would add.

  He handed back the picture and shrugged. “With all the guys who come in here . . .”

  Placing it back in her purse, Russo asked, “So then, that wouldn’t have been you who called him from this phone last Monday night about eight o’clock?”

  “From this phone? That’s interesting. Nah, wasn’t me.”

  “You have any idea who might have made that call?”

  Ike watched a single long strand of smoke spiral into the air. “Last Monday? Could’ve been anybody. Everybody uses this phone, the girls, the bouncers, friends drop by.”

  Figures, O’Brien thought, all Monas all the time.

  Ike shrugged again. “I wish I could help you, but it’s impossible.”

  Without looking up from his notebook O’Brien took a shot. “Skinny Al ever use it?”

  Ike looked at him curiously. “Skinny who?”

  “Skinny Al. Al D’Angelo. Big fat guy comes in here sometimes.”

  “Nah, I don’t know him. Skinny Mike, maybe. He’s this big fat black guy works here couple nights a week. But I don’t know any Skinny Als.”