The Good Guys Read online

  But most troubling was the fact that the bureau was interested in this guy. Tony Cosentino, the boss who had asked this favor of him, had offered few details. A favor, that’s all. A business deal that wasn’t going too good, that was what he’d said. The implication was that the guy owed and skipped. That kind of thing happens all the time. But ordinarily the FBI didn’t get involved in those situations. Maybe they would bust a hijacking once in a while for the public relations value, but they really didn’t waste time chasing bullshit. So the presence of the bureau got Franzone real interested in learning a lot more about what was going on. Henry the Hammer was a careful man. In his career he had put away a few dollars, but those years in prison had cost him a lot of money that could never be recovered. He wasn’t that young anymore, and as you get older, you never know how much you’re going to need. You just never know.

  Bobby wasn’t particularly unhappy that he was still involved. Now that he knew that the feds were on the trail, he’d have to be a lot more careful, but if his feelings were right, if this was a serious opportunity, it could turn out to be a very good thing for him.

  When once again he took his place at the card table, the Duke put down a hot cup and smiled at him. But before he could take a sip, Fast Lenny said to him, “Take a walk with me.”

  Few people dared talk about their plans inside a social club. Those days were done. When the cops started planting electronic listening devices in social clubs, a lot of people treated it as a joke. Those were the talk-into-the-sugar-bowl years. Nobody took it very seriously until gleeful prosecutors at trial began playing the “best of ” tapes of private conversations held inside the social clubs. That was the end of the joke, and a lot of time and money was spent protecting clubs against surveillance. But due to the extremely sensitive nature of their plans, a lot of people absolutely refused to talk business indoors. Fast Lenny, for example, was convinced that the walls really did have ears. On occasion he could still get a laugh by shouting at the wall, “You hear that? You no-good fuck.”

  So when Lenny had a proposition to make, he insisted on walking with it. “That’s the way the Romans used to do it,” he’d explained. “They were always walking around making plans.”

  To that, Mickey Fists had sighed and pointed out, “Of course they were—they didn’t have no cars.”

  Lenny would walk up and down the block with the person he wanted to speak to, always walking on the outside and talking toward the buildings, so if the parking meters, pay telephones, fire hydrants, or lampposts by the curb were bugged, they wouldn’t be able to pick up his voice. There weren’t going to be any Best of Fast Lenny tapes played at some trial. “Listen up, Bobby, I got this guy, see, who’s got this electronics store in the Garment District and he ain’t doing so good. He’s got a whole fucking truckload of TVs and VCRs being delivered tonight and he don’t want ’em. You know what I’m talking, right?”

  “Yeah, sure.” Bobby seemed to be looking at something in the distance. He pointed to a building way down the block. “Hey, smile, Lenny, you’re on FBI Camera.”

  Lenny tried to spot whatever it was that Bobby had seen. “Where? Where?” All he saw was a large building with hundreds of windows. “What the fuck are you looking at?”

  Bobby checked him with his elbow and laughed. “Come on, I’m just shitting you.”

  While both Bobby and Lenny believed—correctly—that they were being watched, which was an occupational hazard, the truth was that Bobby had absolutely no idea where the camera was situated. “Don’t fuck with me like that, Bobby,” Lenny warned, “it ain’t funny.” In disgust Lenny shook his head and muttered, “I swear to God, Bobby, sometimes I wonder where your fucking head is.”

  “It’s a joke, Lenny, that’s all.”

  “No, no, it ain’t. A joke is something that’s funny, and there’s nothing funny about that, so it can’t be a joke. So from now on, when you tell a joke, make it a funny one, okay?”

  “Yeah, yeah, yeah,” Bobby agreed dismissively, coming close enough to an apology to satisfy Lenny.

  “Now, where the fuck was I?” Lenny took a few seconds to find his place. “Oh yeah. So this mook wants us to take the truck. We get the swag and he gets the insurance and everybody’s happy. You want a piece?”

  “You telling me the guy’s got the thing set up?”

  “Pretty much. Only the driver don’t know shit. All he knows he’s gotta be at the store at like nine o’clock. By then it’s pretty quiet around there, ’specially if there’s nothing going on at the Garden. When the driver gets to the store, he’s gotta go inside and get all the forms and crap. We’re gonna be waiting right there. That shit has gotta be worth fifty, sixty grand easy. So? You in?”

  “Fuck yes, I’m in.”

  Franzone was gone by the time Bobby and Fast Lenny returned to the social club. He had gotten into his car and driven to a bank of pay phones by the basketball courts on Sixth Avenue and West 4th Street. The rumor was that every public phone in Little Italy was tapped. That was probably an exaggeration, but it was based on reality. The federal government does tap pay phones near government buildings and outside known mob hangouts. So Franzone wasn’t about to play pay phone bingo. Instead, he used one of the phones in the Village to call his old friend.

  FOUR

  I’m sorry, I love you, sweetheart, but the indisputable fact is that being an FBI agent is simply not a suitable job for a Yale graduate. There are so many other schools you could have gone to for that.”

  Jamming the phone between his shoulder and his right ear, he worked at knotting his tie. “Hello, Mrs. Vader, is little Darth home?”

  “Please, Connor, don’t make me laugh. I’ve got all my makeup on and I’ll break my face. I just want you to listen to me for one moment.” She paused, and accepted the silence as evidence he was listening to her. “You know you have responsibilities. I’m the only mother you have and you’re not treating me very nicely.”

  Someday, he swore to himself, someday when she got on this guilt roll, he was going to summon up the courage to tell her that he was a fully grown adult and she could no longer treat him like a little boy, and then slam down the phone in her ear. Someday, but not today. “Now it’s your turn to listen to me, okay? I got the official word from Dear Abby. Here, I got it right here, let me read it to you. Dear Wonderful Son Who Loves His Sainted Mother, playing golf with your mother is not considered a family responsibility. There you have it. And Dear Abby doesn’t lie.”

  LeeBeth O’Brien was not a woman who surrendered easily. “Even when that aging mother begs her only son to spend just a few small hours with her?”

  “Nice try, Mops. I like that reading.” She had become “Mops” about a year after Connor O’Brien Sr. had died at his desk at Chase Manhattan. Adding her late husband’s role to her own, she began coaching Connor’s Little League team, taking him and his friends on camping trips, and even learned how to drive a manual transmission so she could teach him. And in exchange, all she asked from him was that she be foremost in his thoughts every single minute of his life.

  Because LeeBeth was fulfilling both parental roles, mom and pop, her precocious son had created the appropriate title for her. Initially he had tried “Pom,” but they both agreed that conjured up the image of a sad cheerleader, so “Mops” she became. This particular morning she was trying to convince him to come up to Chappaqua for the weekend to play with her in the club’s annual parent and son tournament, which for years had been the father and son tournament—until she threatened a lawsuit, at which time single mothers and their sons were admitted. Thus far she remained the only woman to actually participate.

  Very few people in the bureau knew that Connor O’Brien was the son of a successful investment banker and had his own trust fund. Or that he was a Yale graduate. While once all applicants to the bureau were required to have a college degree—and preferably an advanced degree—as well as three years of law enforcement experience, that had been slightly re
laxed over the previous decade. The bureau now commonly made exceptions for individuals with desirable skills, from computer programming to the ability to translate Slavic languages. But while all agents were still required to have at least an undergraduate degree, very few of them had graduated from an Ivy League school with a major in philosophy, and even fewer of them had a trust fund fat enough to support them comfortably for the remainder of their lives.

  If O’Brien’s family and friends wondered at his choice of a career, he certainly never did. When asked by people who knew his background why he’d joined the bureau, he told them seriously, “Because I couldn’t hit a good curveball.” Connor really couldn’t pinpoint the exact moment he decided to apply to the FBI. He realized it was an odd choice to make for a politically liberal Yale graduate at the height of the Vietnam War, but somehow it made perfect sense to him. “Bridging the gap,” he’d explained to his mother. Bringing America together. Healing the societal wounds. He had used every cliché to explain it, but the bottom-line truth was that it seemed like it might be important—as well as interesting and fun. His father had provided him with financial security, which he interpreted to mean that his father had not wanted him tied to a desk doing a job he hated, the position in which he had found himself. Maybe more important than anything else, each day would be different.

  So when he ended up with a high number in the draft lottery, he applied to the bureau and was accepted. LeeBeth thought it was an immature decision as well as a ridiculous thing to do. She brought in her heaviest emotional weapons to try to talk him out of it. Enlisting her late husband’s friends, she managed to get him offers to join the management training program at Chase, Xerox, and the State Department—each of which he instantly rejected.

  The night before he left for the training school at Quantico she told him honestly, “I tried very hard to raise you to be able to make your own decisions. And today I have to admit that I very much regret that.” But she was sitting in the bleachers at Quantico the day he graduated from the academy. And completely true to her nature, she’d brought with her to Virginia an attractive young woman she’d met at a Bucky Fuller lecture at the 92nd Street Y. But even a decade later she still held tight to the hope that the FBI might just be a phase he was going through. A very long phase.

  “One round of golf,” she pleaded. “Is that too much for a son to do for his widowed mother? Just play on Saturday.”

  “I love you, Mops,” he said, gently hanging up the phone. “I’ll call you later.”

  Once again Russo was waiting for him outside the building with coffee from the cart on Broadway. “You know, you could come inside,” he told her. “I had the apartment cleaned just last year. Most likely you won’t get those diseases anymore.” Then he added thoughtfully, “Just to be safe, though, you probably want to stay out of the kitchen.”

  Initially Slattery had turned down their request to spend a second day investigating the link between the missing professor and the mob. But when Russo started dropping phrases like “national security” and “communist involvement,” he got the hint. Slattery put a relief team in the overnight slot. Team II was thrilled to work days. Watching a locked door at 3 a.m. can get pretty boring.

  Conveniently O’Brien lived only a few blocks from the professor, so they took the shoe leather express. It was one of those good-to-be-alive-and-in-the-city mornings, with just enough chill in the air to snap you awake. Connor had proved to himself years earlier that he was not one of those lucky people gifted with the ability to sip coffee and move at the same time without spilling it on their shirt, no matter how small the edge they tore off the plastic lid. But he watched with admiration as Russo did exactly that and made it look easy. Show-off, he thought to himself. If it were his decision, he would have sat on his front stoop in the flush of morning and enjoyed the cup of coffee, but Russo was in a hurry. Sure, he thought, it’s easy to be in a hurry when you can sip coffee and walk at the same time. So as they walked, he held the cup far enough away from his body to avoid the inevitable coffee splash, and when they reached the corner, he dropped it into an overflowing trash basket.

  Professor Peter Gradinsky lived on the third floor of a five-story brownstone. Whoever was in his apartment buzzed O’Brien and Russo into the building without asking them to identify themselves. O’Brien guessed the intercom was broken. The turn-of-the-century building was well kept. As they climbed the stairs, O’Brien noted that someone had put flowers in vases inside each of the coffin corners—recesses in the walls on the landings to allow mourners carrying a coffin to complete the turn. There were expensively framed oil paintings—real oil paintings rather than the tacky reproductions commonly used for decoration—on the walls, so O’Brien figured the tenants probably knew and trusted each other. That meant there wasn’t a lot of turnover in the building.

  Gradinsky’s door was opened by a tall, thin woman, wearing modest glasses, whose long, narrow face was framed by sensible light brown hair. O’Brien guessed fifty-two but was pretty sure she would claim she was forty-five if anybody asked but nobody ever did. Russo noticed that her prim white cotton blouse was wrinkled and suspected she’d slept in it. “Yes?” she asked.

  O’Brien had learned a lesson with Geri Simon. This time he let Russo speak first. Obviously there was some kind of woman-to-woman communication he hadn’t been aware of previously. “Mrs. Gradinsky?” Russo guessed correctly. Russo then introduced herself and O’Brien.

  Grace Gradinsky looked at her quizzically. “Yes?”

  “We’d like to speak with you about your husband,” Russo continued, “Peter Gradinsky?”

  Grace Gradinsky’s face remained impassive. Neither agent could read anything into it. “Is he all right?” she asked calmly. “Has something happened to him?”

  “No, we don’t think so,” O’Brien said. “Mind if we come in for a couple of minutes?”

  She stepped back and allowed them to come into the apartment. They stood under the graceful arch separating the entrance foyer from the living room. Russo said bluntly, “Mrs. Gradinsky, we got a report that your husband is missing. Is that true?”

  Gees Louise, Russo, O’Brien thought, take it easy there, partner. You’re using all the charm of a truck.

  But in response Grace Gradinsky showed her first trace of emotion. She closed her eyes and swallowed while pushing back a nonexistent curl. Then she caught herself. Looking directly at Russo, she demanded somewhat defensively, “Who told you that?”

  The manner in which she asked that question made it pretty clear to O’Brien that she thought she already knew the answer. The fact that she asked “who” rather than “how” or “where” told him a lot. “Let me explain something to you,” he said in the most confidential tone he could muster. “Sometimes, when we’re in the middle of one investigation, we come across information about something totally different. So, unfortunately, I can’t . . . you understand, I can’t really tell you how we found out about this. Obviously we did, though. So now what we’re trying to do is make sure everybody’s okay.”

  As most people did, she responded in a tone mirroring the tone he used when asking the question. “And then you want to ask him some questions, right?”

  He nodded. “Honestly it’s nothing that big.” Then he said it again for emphasis. “Honest.”

  “All right,” she decided. “Come in.” She led them into the living room. A plush sofa and two comfortable-looking wingback chairs were arranged around a large oak armoire, which O’Brien assumed contained the TV set. Bookshelves covered the far wall from floor to ceiling. There were two additional rooms and a bathroom beyond the living room. Their doors were closed, but, O’Brien thought, one of those rooms was probably used as an office. The apartment was tastefully immaculate. Every object seemed to be precisely where Ralph Lauren might have placed it. Even the books were perfectly aligned; not a single book was laid casually on top of other books or pushed against the wall. Nothing in the apartment looked new, but
everything appeared well cared for. This was the type of apartment, he decided, that you could just move right into and you’d know exactly where the laundered and folded towels would be found.

  The two agents sat side by side on the sofa. There was a highly polished wooden coffee table in front of them. Grace Gradinsky took the easy chair to their right, in front of the windows. She sat almost perfectly upright, as if balancing an invisible book on her head, and asked O’Brien, “Could you tell me again what is it you found out?”

  “It’s not that much,” he admitted. “Just that he was supposed to meet some people and didn’t show up. Now they can’t find him. The people up at Columbia told us he hadn’t been there the last few days.” He didn’t mind that she was questioning him. Answering questions was an effective way of establishing a relationship with a subject. Make the interview as conversational as possible. Give up a little in hopes of getting a lot.

  She closed her eyes and nodded slightly. “He hasn’t been home in three days,” she said evenly. “I don’t know what to do, Detective . . .”

  “Agent,” he corrected. “We’re FBI, not NYPD.”

  Three nights earlier, she began, Peter had been working at home early in the evening when the phone rang. It was about seven-thirty, maybe a little later. She had answered it and a man whose voice she didn’t recognize asked to speak to him. “They were only on the phone for a few seconds. Then Peter told me he had to go somewhere. He didn’t tell me where, he didn’t tell me who he was meeting. He didn’t tell me anything. He just said he’d be back in a little while, gathered up some papers, and left. That was it.” She looked away and whispered, “That was it.”