The Good Guys Read online

  Simon let that sink in. “So then if he’s here, he’s not missing. That’s what you’re telling me, right?”

  O’Brien agreed. “Right.” Then he looked at Russo. “Right?”

  Russo agreed.

  “Then it’s not Goodenov,” Geri said. “I saw him leaving maybe an hour ago.” She picked up a clipboard and began examining the sign-in sheet. “Oak-kay,” she said, drawing in the word and then exhaling it in a great puff of cigarette smoke. “Let’s see who we don’t have here.” She started humming a Russian dance tune as she skimmed down the roster. “No. No. Saw him. No. No. He’s dead. No. No . . .”

  “Who’s dead?” Russo wondered.

  “Professor Golotin. Harry Golotin, Russian lit. It can’t be him, he died more than a year ago. He had a sudden heart attack”—once again she lowered her voice to a near whisper—“while . . . you know, doing it with one of his students. So that’s the reason we haven’t seen him lately.” Then, once again at full blast, she continued, “They’re just using up the old forms.” She continued scrolling down the list, shaking her head as she passed each name. “I don’t know, they all seem so . . .” And suddenly she stopped. “Oh, wait. Here.” She hacked her throat clear one more time. “This could be your man.”

  “What do you got?” Russo asked, leaning over the desk.

  “Professor Gradinsky. Peter. He teaches Slavic Linguistics and Contrastive Phonics.”

  “Oh,” O’Brien said.

  “But I just can’t imagine Mr. Gradinsky . . . I mean . . . he’s always so . . .” She searched the air for the right word and found it. “. . . Dependable.”

  “What’s up with him?” O’Brien asked.

  Geri Simon expertly knocked a long ash from the end of her cigarette right into the sombrero’s brim, and still without looking at either agent exhaled a long thin line of smoke that would have made Bacall proud. Russo realized immediately that Simon had feelings for this Gradinsky a lot deeper than she would ever admit. “I know he missed a very important appointment two days ago and then, I mean, he hasn’t shown up for his classes. That’s just not like him. He’s very . . .” She hesitated.

  O’Brien finished the sentence for her: “Dependable.”

  “Exactly. Thank you.” Clearly Gradinsky was very dependable. Completely ignoring O’Brien, Simon looked directly to Russo and asked with obvious concern, “Do you think something’s happened to him?”

  O’Brien also noticed more than an administrative assistant’s apprehension in that question, and he responded with the correct answer. “I doubt it very much. Sometimes the strangest things have the simplest answers. We just need to check it out. You have his home address?”

  He handed her his pocket notebook opened to a blank page, and Simon wrote down the professor’s address and telephone number on it. “I won’t really worry about him too much. I mean, if he really was missing, Grace—his wife—she would have called here.”

  “Maybe we could take a quick look at his office?” O’Brien suggested. “You know, that might tell us something. Maybe he’s got a calendar in there or something.”

  Simon shook her head. “I can’t let you do that without his permission. Besides, he always locks up and I don’t have the key.”

  Russo asked, “Is there a picture of him around anywhere? Maybe a yearbook or something?”

  Geri Simon stood up and walked four steps across the room to a steel bookcase and pulled out a thick volume. “He’s in here somewhere.” She leafed rapidly through the pages until she found the annual photograph of the Slavic Studies Department. “This is him,” she said, pointing to a small, somewhat burly man with a stern look on his round, puffy face. His hair was thinning and he had a trim mustache.

  One other thing O’Brien noticed about this photograph. In it Peter Gradinsky was standing right next to Geri Simon. His left hand was hidden behind her back—and she was smiling innocently.

  THREE

  The late great Frank Costello often said that nobody was ever late for their own funeral. Maybe that’s true, but other than their own funeral, nobody within organized crime regularly follows any type of schedule. It just isn’t that kind of business. Things get done when they need to get done. People show up when they need to be there. The days and nights are pretty fluid. And so finding this Professor G was not exactly a priority for Bobby Blue Eyes or the Freemont Avenue crew.

  Bobby had a lot of running around to do the following morning. There was a typical breakfast meeting: A guy Bobby knew from around had asked him to meet a guy who wanted to open a vending machine business in Queens and needed permission to operate. They met at the West Side Diner on 51st Street and the highway. The person Bobby knew spoke for the other guy. That meant he was accepting responsibility for him, so if anything went wrong, it would bounce right back on him. For a small slice of the proceeds, Bobby explained, he would introduce him to the proper people from Queens. He couldn’t guarantee that anything would happen; he didn’t have the right to speak for the people who controlled that territory. The price of setting up that meeting was a thousand dollars. “That’s earnest money,” Bobby explained. “It shows you’re serious about this.”

  From the diner Bobby drove down to Canal Street. On weekends Canal Street from Sixth Avenue to the Bowery became one long flea market. Most of the normal stores that had been there for decades had been replaced by discount shops. You could buy just about anything you needed there at a good price. Bobby knew one of the people who owned several of these shops, Solomon Thomas, known to friends and associates as So Solly Tommy, because he had mostly Chinese immigrants fronting for him in these stalls. Due to Solly Thomas’s impressive rap sheet, none of the city licenses were in his name. Bobby figured that with Christmas coming he could dump the whole load of Cabbage Patch Kids on Canal Street and they’d be sold by Saturday night.

  Solly bought mostly low-end merchandise. Stuff that fell off cheap trucks. He didn’t buy expensive jewelry, and the only drugs he handled were pills and pot. Nothing hard, ever. Ever. But otherwise he handled whatever it was people needed to get rid of. It didn’t matter to him; he had the outlets and he needed the goods. Particularly just before Christmas.

  Solly’s office was in the back of a plumbing supply store, but he wasn’t there, nobody knew where he was, nobody knew how to get hold of him, and nobody knew when he might get back. Bobby shook his head. “Jesus, how the fuck you guys run a business like that?” But when Solly’s secretary asked him how her boss could contact him, Bobby admitted, “He can’t. I’ll call him.”

  It was almost noon when he finally got to Pamela Fox’s apartment on Sullivan Street. “What time did ya get in?” he asked. Pam flew international for Pan Am. She had only eight years’ seniority, but this month she’d been able to hold the very desirable twice-weekly New York-Paris line.

  “Not too bad,” she said, kissing him easily. “We landed about eight o’clock.” She was wearing the white flannel robe she’d taken from Caesar’s when they were in Vegas the previous July, loosely belted. She went into the kitchen. “Want some coffee?”

  “No,” he said, following her. He stood behind her, grasped her shoulders, and gently squeezed. In response she leaned back against him, resting her long black hair against his shoulder. His hands slid down beneath her robe until they cupped her breasts, and he began massaging her nipples with his forefingers. When they hardened, he began pinching them, until she moaned. “Welcome home, baby,” he said.

  As far as Bobby was concerned, Pamela’s relationship with him was not exclusive. They’d never discussed it, but as long as she was available whenever he wanted to see her and he knew nothing about anything else she did, she could do whatever she wanted to do. That was pretty much his philosophy: As long as he didn’t know what she was doing, there was no problem. He really believed that was true. But if he had been confronted with the reality of another man, pride and tradition would have forced him to respond.

  That was the price he pai
d for being married and having a child. And he paid it willingly. Pamela was special. After Ronnie and Angela she was the most important woman in his life, but he didn’t waste anybody’s time trying to define their relationship. They’d met when he’d flown down to Miami to check out a club someone wanted to operate. They were in bed an hour off the plane. A week later he found the apartment in the Village for her. He paid enough of the rent so that she didn’t have to share a place with other girls. He wanted to be with her when he wanted to be with her. It would last as long as it lasted. For him relationships worked best that way.

  He definitely tried it the other way. He’d been married to Veronica Buonaconte San Filippo for almost twelve years. He was twenty-two years old when they married and was as determined as every twenty-two-year-old to be faithful to her. But one morning about two months in he woke up and realized she was still lying there right next to him and would be right there every morning for at least the next forty years. He went out on her for the first time three nights later, when he met an actress-model-hooker and accepted the fact that he was not a man comfortable with commitment. It wasn’t his nature, he’d told Ronnie the first time she’d caught him, so there wasn’t anything he could do to stop it. It wasn’t his fault. He was who he was. From that point on he wouldn’t even buy multiyear magazine subscriptions.

  He had no intention of getting divorced. He treated Ronnie with respect, meaning he tried very hard to keep his other relationships secret; he spent all the holidays with her, bought her appropriate gifts on the proper occasions, and always made sure that she had enough money to keep the house nice and buy a few things for herself. After their first couple of years together he accepted the fact that she wasn’t going to have a child, so he was real pleased when she announced she was pregnant and absolutely thrilled when his daughter was born. For a time after Angela was born he’d spent more time at home. Which lasted until changing diapers lost its appeal. Ronnie turned out to be a good wife and a wonderful mother. He probably loved her in that special way men love their wives; what he didn’t like was sex with the same woman night after night. He was an excitement junkie. He loved that feeling of conquest each time he slept with a new woman. Maybe later, when he had some long-term things going, when he had enough money put away, when Angela was a little older, then he’d think about spending more time at home. Truthfully he probably wouldn’t mind having another kid. The first one was working out pretty good. And it did give him a little boost at the club.

  Pam never pressed him about his wife. She didn’t ask him a lot of questions; in fact, he wasn’t even completely positive that she knew what he did for a living. But just as important, she didn’t volunteer a lot of information about her own life either.

  Having a strong marriage when you’re already married to your family is a very difficult thing to do. The mob is the toughest extended family in existence, and some wives just never accept it.

  One thing Bobby knew for certain was that at that moment in his life Pam Fox was the perfect woman for him. She never criticized him, she never asked for too much, she was beautiful and nice and appreciative of everything he did for her, and she liked the sex as much as he did.

  Just as important, she never made him listen to that relentless relative bullshit. Bobby had serious problems that he had to deal with every single day; he didn’t want to be rude to anybody, but he couldn’t care less about some Aunt Blossom from Hicktown. Relatives weren’t his thing. He had enough to do just dealing with Ronnie’s family. After they found out he was connected, they constantly hounded him: Can you get me cartons of cigarettes, get me a good price on this watch, get me tickets to the World Series? Get me, get me, get me. The fact was that some of those things he easily could have taken care of, but he didn’t want to encourage them. Get them a VCR and next thing they wanted a cheap two-bedroom apartment on the Upper East Side to put it in. So he told them they’d been watching too many movies, life wasn’t like that in real life.

  Even if a lot of the time it was.

  He knew exactly as much as he wanted to know about Pam’s family. Nothing. There was no reason for him to know any more than that. This was only a temporary relationship. Besides everything else, she was too young for him anyway. How old could she be? Twenty-six? Maybe twenty-seven? Whatever, he figured she was easily eight or nine years younger than him. And he was already married. But when they got into the bed? Fugetaboutit. That’s how good she made him feel.

  He knew he wasn’t in love with her. At least he didn’t think so. What he felt for her was different than the love he felt for his daughter and Ronnie, the family kind of love. He’d kill anybody who hurt them without even thinking about it. But Pam? That was another kind of feeling. He wasn’t so sure how far he would go for Pam, unless respect was involved, then he would have no choice. He’d go all the way, no question. But he really missed her when she was gone. When she was away for more than a day, the thought of being with her got him all excited. And when he thought about the way she talked and laughed, the scent of her, it all made him feel really good. That had happened to him very rarely. He couldn’t remember the last time just thinking about a girl made him feel so good. Usually he tired of a woman within a few weeks and then it was “adiós, amiga,” but the truth he couldn’t get beyond was that after almost six months together her perfect body thrilled him as much as it had the day they’d met.

  And so it was almost four o’clock by the time he picked up Little Eddie and got up to Columbia. He parked at a meter, put in four quarters, and left his PBA card on the dashboard for the brownies to see. With that police union card he didn’t really need to bother with the quarters, since when they spotted it, they’d extend him the necessary professional courtesy, but he liked to do things the easy way. Besides, the city needed the money and he was a loyal New Yorker.

  As they walked across the busy campus, Little Eddie’s head could have been on a swivel. “Fuck, look at that broad.” Or “Holy shit, check out the knockers on that one.” Or “Jesus fucking Christ, I shoulda gone to college.”

  Bobby reminded him that he’d dropped out of high school in tenth grade.

  “So? What does that have to do with the price of tomatoes?”

  Bobby stopped a heavyset coed and asked her where the Russian school was located. She didn’t know exactly but suggested he ask in the administration office, in Hamilton Hall. Eddie watched with pure joy as she walked away. That was his type of woman. “Man,” he sighed, “they even come in my size.”

  Eventually they found their way to the Slavic Studies office on the seventh floor. Sitting sternly behind the desk was an older woman with what looked a bit like a haystack of bright red hair sitting on top of her head. Bobby decided that if something died in there, it wouldn’t be found for weeks. “Excuse me, darling,” he said, politely taking off his hat, “I was wondering if you could help me out here.”

  The woman put down her cigarette. “What can I do you for?”

  “Call me Bobby. This is my friend Eddie. And your name is . . .”

  “Ms. Simon.”

  “Well, Ms. Simon, we’re looking for a guy, Professor . . .”

  She said it with them. “G.”

  “Gees,” Bobby said, surprised, “how’d you know that?”

  She snapped a phony smile at him. “Maybe I can read minds,” she said. “Or maybe the fact that two of your people were here yesterday asking exactly the same question gave it away.”

  Eddie took a step forward. “Who was here?”

  “A couple of other agents.” She paused. “You guys are FBI, right?”

  Bobby glanced at Eddie. The FBI was also looking for this Professor G? That definitely was bad news. Whatever it was that this guy had done, obviously it was important enough for the feds to be looking for him too. No wonder the bosses wanted him found so quickly. “Yeah, sure,” Bobby responded, forcing a little laugh. “That’s us, G-men. I mean, what do we look like?”

  Using his most official
FBI voice, Eddie asked Ms. Simon as casually as possible, “So, um, like what did these guys look like? I mean, you know, maybe they’re friends of ours.”

  Simon tapped her cigarette on the brim of her cheap ceramic sombrero ashtray. “It was a man and a woman. The girl was nice-looking. He looked grumpy, like Walter Matthau when he was a lot younger. Like in The Odd Couple. Did you see that one?”

  “You kidding,” Eddie said enthusiastically. “I loved that pitcher. Like when he threw that spaghetti against the wall . . .”

  Bobby shut him up with one look, then turned back to Simon. “Did you get their names?”

  “Sure.” She searched through the tray on her desk until she found the card. “Here it is. Her name was Russo. Special Agent L. Russo.” She shook her head and sniffled. “The other one’s name I can’t remember. How about you guys, you got your cards?”

  “Sounds like you got a little cold going there,” Bobby said, making an elaborate display of searching his jacket pockets for his card.

  “Sinuses,” she explained.

  “Ah, sh . . . shoot,” Bobby said, snapping his fingers. “I left them in my other jacket. But lemme ask you this, Ms. Simon. What’d you tell ’em?”

  When she hesitated, Eddie said, “We’d hate for them to find him first. That’d be bad for us.”

  “Inside the bureau, he means,” Bobby picked up quickly. “There’s a lot of competition goes on between agents.”

  “They give us big bonuses,” Eddie lied, enjoying it.

  Simon nodded, although not one hair moved. “I’m sure.” She hesitated for just a few seconds, as if trying to figure out a complex problem. Finally she looked directly at Bobby in a no-nonsense way and asked with a plea in her voice, “I want you to tell me the truth, please. Those other two, they wouldn’t tell me anything. Has he done something wrong?”