CONCOURSE (Bill Smith/Lydia Chin) (13 page)

“Tell me,” she said. So I did.

I worked my way through last night, Howe’s body, Robinson, Lindfors. I told her what Ida Goldstein had told me, what Sheila Downey had said as we sat on her porch with the wind chimes tinkling in the October breeze. I told her about the money and my note that came and went in Howe’s locker. I bit an onion ring, crisp and salty, and told Lydia about getting X-rayed at Samaritan Hospital. At that part concern clouded her face.

“I didn’t realize you were that badly hurt.”

“I wasn’t. I’ve had broken ribs. These aren’t even close.”

“Then why did the doctor send you? Are you sure you’re okay?”

“I don’t know. And yes. And another thing. Have you ever been to an emergency room?”

“No. Why? Do you think it’s an experience I shouldn’t miss?”

“Definitely right up your alley. The standard thing is to wait four or five hours, unless you’re actually bleeding, sometimes even then. Where I was was the Diagnostic Clinic, not the emergency room, but it’s the same X-ray department. I was in and out in under an hour. There was an old couple waiting when I came in; they were still waiting when I left.”

“Maybe they’re not real busy at that hospital.”

“Maybe not. They’re not all that close to the Bronx Home, either. There are two bigger hospitals closer.”

“Hmmm.”

“Right.” I went on with my report, gave her a quick account of my meeting with the Cobras.

“God,” she said, when I was through. “It sounds like you’re lucky you came out in one piece.”

“In one piece,” I said, “and not a damn bit smarter than when I went in.”

“Well.” She pulled a set of files from the leather bag beside her. “I can fill you in on some of those guys, anyway. Maybe that will help.” She sorted through the folders. “We owe Mary a big one for this, by the way.”

Mary Kee was a childhood friend of Lydia’s, now a Fifth Precinct detective. I had my own sources, people I’d have gone to in the NYPD to ask a favor like this, but when Lydia and I are working different ends of a case we keep out of each other’s way.

“Tell her I appreciate it.”

“Actually, I think she did it mostly for Mr. Moran. Because he used to be a cop. They get like that, cops. Like family.”

I finished off my second beer. Lydia opened a file.

“This Anthony LeMoyne, a.k.a. Snake. He’s quite a guy.” She scanned a striped computer printout. “A sealed youth record, then robbery, robbery, assault, burglary, assault, controlled substance, grant theft auto—you get the idea. Lots of arrests, but not a lot of convictions. A few months here and there, no serious time. His friend Skeletor’s pretty much the same. I have some others here, people the Youth Gang Task Force identifies as Cobras.”

“You have a sheet on Martin Carter?”

“Your friend? The one you were with?” Her tone was surprised.

“They call him the Rev.”

“Who does?”

“The Cobras. And the cops.”

She searched my face briefly, then glanced down at her printout. “He’s here, but not current.”

“Retired?”

“Uh-huh. Former member. Someone to keep an eye on, but not active with the crew. In his case, with good reason.”

“What does that mean?”

“He’s on parole. Two years more. Being seen with some of these guys is enough to get him sent back to finish his time upstate.”

My mind went back to Carter’s jumpiness at meeting Snake in the schoolyard. He’d broken parole because I’d asked him to.

“What’d he do?”

“The conviction is second-degree manslaughter. He served
eighteen months, and he’s been out a little over a year. You want me to look into it?”

“Yes.”

“Bill, he’s a friend of yours.”

“I know.” I lit a cigarette, leaned back in the booth. A sudden exhaustion overcame me, as though a plug had been pulled and all my substance drained out, leaving me empty, and cold.

Lydia gestured at the files. “Do you want to go over the rest of this now?”

“I don’t think I can. I’m falling asleep. Leave them with me, okay?”

“Okay. You want me to just keep on with this tomorrow?”

I thought. It got me nowhere. “I’ll call you in the morning. I have a feeling I had a good idea, something for you to do, but I’ll be damned if I know what it was. Come on, I’ll take you home.”

She laughed. “You have to be kidding. You expect me to get into a car with you? I’ve been thinking
I’d
have to take
you
upstairs.”

A wise-guy come-on sprang to mind, the kind of thing I’d have said to Lydia any other time, had said many other times. I waved Kay over, told her to put our meal on my tab. Lydia handed me the gathered-up files and we went out together through Shorty’s etched-glass doors.

The night air was crisp, not really cold, but I shivered a little in it as Lydia and I walked silently to Hudson Street. I waited while she got a cab, kissed her before she got in, and turned away, back toward my place, before the cab drove off. The night air, I thought, smelled gently of freesia, but I knew that wasn’t true.

T
WENTY
-T
WO

I
slept until ten, awoke groggy and disoriented. Coffee helped, and so did a shower and a shave and clean clothes that were mine, not a uniform. I read through Lydia’s files, learned not much I
saw any use for, but you never know. I made a call from a number Information gave me; then I called Lydia.

“Hi,” she said. “Feeling better?”

“Much. How about you?”

“I wasn’t feeling bad.”

“Be grateful.”

“You sound like my mother.”

“Don’t tell your mother that. She’ll have a fit.”

“She wouldn’t believe me. What are you going to do?”

“About your mother not believing you? That’s your problem.”

“About the case. The homicide? Up in the Bronx?”

“Oh,” I said. “That. Don’t you think the day will come when your mother might need a nursing home?”

“Not as long as my brothers have wives. And Chinese don’t—Oh,” she said. “Oh, oh, oh. Well, I suppose it wouldn’t hurt to look into it. She doesn’t like Elliot’s wife anyway.”

“Good. I’ll call you later.”

“What are you going to do?” she asked again.

“I’m going to see a man about a truck.”

Triple-A Trucking—“Anything, Anywhere, Anytime”—was packed in behind lots of chain-link fence in the part of the Bronx where Gun Hill Road passes under the IRT. Graffiti glowed from every surface in the neighborhood: the bars, the auto-parts store, the cuchifritos place, and the steel columns holding up the subway tracks. And from Triple-A’s concrete-block garage, the razor wire topping the chain-link notwithstanding.

The gate in the fence was open wide. A yellow truck with its logo obliterated by spray paint had to stop backing out for me to drive in. Its red-faced driver leaned out his window, cursed me as I passed. He rumbled out, and so did his truck.

There was nothing organized about the Triple-A yard, cars and trucks and cargo sprawled in cramped disarray inside the chain-link borders. I settled for a place alongside the garage, about as far out of the way as I was likely to get.

Hunched next to the garage, as though it were trying to get out of the way too, was a trailer. A couple of guys in the yard watched me head toward it, but no one stopped work or showed a lot of interest.
Maybe I was boring, now that I was shaved and clean. Maybe I was always boring.

I climbed three concrete steps, pulled open the trailer door. Right inside, a thin, rouged, blond woman sat at a desk piled high with a mess of phone messages and ledger books. Behind her a jowly, balding man sat at a bigger desk piled just as high with bulging manila envelopes and yellow pads and five-part multicolor bills of lading. Every remaining inch of the trailer was stuffed with mismatched file cabinets, some with their drawers half open. Files and phone books and a brown philodendron littered the cabinets’ tops.

The clack of the woman’s typewriter, which I’d heard from the yard, stopped as I walked in. The air was scented with cigars living and dead, and with the lethally sweet output of a pink air-freshener that clung desperately to a window waiting for a chance to escape.

“Yeah?” The heavy man pushed the word out around a thick green cigar. Oh, yeah. The woman smiled a slightly mischievous smile. I liked that, so I smiled back.

“I’m Smith,” I said to the man. “I called. You’re Burcynski?”

He grunted, “Yeah.” That must have been all he could say around the cigar, because he took it out then, rolled it between fingers that looked amazingly like it. “Two-day rental, right?”

“That’s what I said,” I told him. “I lied.”

“Huh?” He stuck the cigar in his mouth again, tongued it around. The woman’s eyes twinkled. Maybe I wasn’t boring after all.

“I wanted to make sure you’d talk to me. I didn’t want to risk your being suddenly called out of town when I got here.”

He took the cigar out again, looked at me. “I got my suitcases packed.”

“You won’t need them.” I leaned against a file cabinet. “Mind if I smoke?”

The woman laughed out loud.

I lit a cigarette, dropped the match in an ashtray where it had lots of company. “I’m a private investigator. A friend of mine got himself killed and I’m working the case. I have some questions for you. Outside the answers to them I don’t care what you do, with which or to whom. I’m blind, I’m stupid, and I have a short memory.”

Burcynski poked the cigar in my direction. He and the cigar considered me. “How do I know that’s true?”

“Just look at me.”

He snorted through thick lips. “Okay. We’ll do this. You ask. Maybe I’ll answer.”

“What happened to Leon Vega?”

Burcynski picked something off his tongue. “Some punks beat the shit out of him over by the Concourse a few weeks ago. I bet you knew that.”

“Uh-huh. I hear it was because you weren’t paying the road-use tax.”

“Listen,” he said. “In the first place, it wasn’t me. Leon’s an independent operator with a long-term lease. Second, no one ever sent a bill.”

“No one told you about the Cobras?”

“No one told me it was my fucking job. ’Scuse me, Leon’s fucking job. I pay protection over here to some other bunch of limp-dicks. Leon must’ve figured the receiver was paying over there. Matter of fact, when I called up that liaison guy, that’s what he told me.”

“What liaison guy? He told you what?”

Burcynski’s cigar, sulking at the lack of attention, had gone out. He coaxed it back to life. “The Borough President’s guy. Hill, his name is.”

“What do you mean, liaison?”

“Borough President’s Community Liaison. What the hell do you think that means?”

“I don’t know.”

“He helps you do business in the Bronx.”

“Including paying off the Cobras?”

“Including whatever.”

“And he told you the receiver was already paying? The Bronx Home?”

“Nah.” The word came out around the cigar again and the cigar puffed happily. “I told him that’s how I thought it was, and he said what did he know but it sounded right to him.”

“Then what?”

“I told him the message on the bill was, ‘Night’s extra.’ He said he didn’t know they got night deliveries over there, but he’d look into it.”

“Did he?”

Shrug from Burcynski, nothing from the cigar.

“What is it they deliver over there at night?”

Burcynski contemplated the cigar as though asking its advice. “Damned if I know. Ask Leon.”

“He’s still in a coma. I can’t talk to him.”

“That’s too bad.”

“So what happened?”

“So I started paying.”

“With Vega out of commission? Business must be profitable.”

“Leon’s business. His cousin’s driving for him now. I’m floating them the money. As a favor. I got absolutely no idea what business they’re in. Now,” he knocked the ash off the cigar into a waste-basket boiling over with papers, “beat it. I got a train to catch. I been called out of town.”

“One more thing. How are the payments made?”

He looked at me in disbelief. “You write a check, with your name all over it.”

“No, I mean where? How? Directly to the Cobras?”

“Are you shitting me? I wouldn’t go near those guys. Some guy, I meet him at a greasy spoon.”

“How’d you know how to do it?”

“He called me. Said he heard I needed protection.”

“What’s his name?”

“Don’t know.”

“What’s he look like?”

Burcynski shrugged again.

Our eyes met, held each other steadily.

“Okay.” I moved a mountain of cigar butts around in the ashtray to make a place to stub out my cigarette. “Thanks.”

“Yeah,” Burcynski grunted. His cigar glowed a superior, contented red.

The woman behind the desk smiled conspiratorially and winked. I smiled back and left, ignoring the heartbreaking pleas from the air-freshener I was abandoning.

T
WENTY
-T
HREE

I
went to see Andy Hill.

The Courthouse building held the Bronx County offices. I’d been there a few times over the years, in the old paneled courtrooms, the dim and dusty records rooms in the basement. Once I’d been hauled in and chewed out by a baby-faced A.D.A. in a government-green office, but nothing came of that.

I climbed the long ceremonial steps to the bronze doors figured with eagles and hourglasses. Inside, the lobby’s marble shone and the ceiling arched high.

The upper floors, though, had been renovated, in line with a new, diminished concept of public service that saw civic grandeur as a lower virtue than serviceability. Vinyl tile covered terrazzo floors; plastic lighting grids hid high coffered ceilings. Openings had been punched in limestone walls and wheezy air conditioners stuck through them. Formica replaced teak in elevator cabs. Looming over the neighborhood, the Bronx County Courthouse represented government to the governed with limestone columns and copper friezes, marble statues and vast granite staircases. Inside it looked like any cheaply made public building in any tired city in America.

At the Borough President’s suite—a formerly high-ceilinged, marble-paved area on the third floor—the receptionist asked my name and business. She was a black woman of my own age with a beauty-parlor hairdo and no smile at all.

“Is Mr. Hill expecting you?”

Interesting question, I thought. “I just took a chance that he’d be free.”

“Mr. Hill is rarely free.” She seemed to be controlling her temper with an effort, as though she’d explained all this to me before. “He keeps a very busy schedule.”

“I’m sure that’s true. But maybe you could ask him if he’ll see me, since I came all the way here?”

She didn’t ask me all the way from where, which was just as well. She waved me to a seat beneath photographs of former Borough Presidents and watched, stone-faced, until I sat. She spoke into her multigadget telephone; then, covering the mouthpiece, she said, “Mr. Hill is asking if he knows you.”

“Tell him we met yesterday morning. I used to work for Arthur Chaiken.”

She told him. And he, apparently, told her to show me in. She pointed down a corridor beyond the heavy-traffic carpet, to the private offices. “Third door on the right.”

Behind the third door on the right were high windows and a nice cream-and-tan paint job. There were plaques lauding Andy Hill’s sense of civic duty, photos of him deploying it in the company of public and community figures, including, I noticed, one with Arthur Chaiken at a ribbon-cutting. A laminated Bronx map hung above a glass-fronted bookcase full of law books and phone books. As befits a Community Liaison, a massive Rolodex squatted on the corner of Andy Hill’s desk and Andy Hill, when I walked in, was on the phone.

Smiling, he motioned me to a chair, made a deprecating face at the receiver. He mouthed “Be right with you” silently and with perfect clarity. Maybe he practiced in front of a mirror.

As I sat, he spoke into the phone. “No, I don’t think so. Well, I haven’t heard that, Mr. Molina. But I’ll look into it, just to make sure. No, that’s what I’m here for.”

His voice, contradicting the face he’d made, exuded concern over a constituent’s problems, and the dauntless ability to solve them. Don’t worry, things are under control, the BP’s man is on the case. I found myself wondering whether this was a real phone conversation or
page 168
of
Power: How to Get It, How to Use It
. Probably the real thing; if it were for my benefit, it wouldn’t be “Mr. Molina” but “Mr. Mayor.”

Hill said, “Good-bye, Mr. Molina,” grinned at me, punched the intercom button. “Betty, wait a couple of days, then send Molina a we’ve-investigated-your-complaint-and—no, wait, that’s what we sent him last time. Send the one about we’re looking into it, appreciate your concern, citizens like you, blah blah blah. Thanks.”

He hung up, came energetically around the desk, as though he’d been hoping for a break in his routine and here I was. “Mr.
Smith! How are you? I’m sorry I went blank on your name before.”

“That’s okay.” I stood to shake his hand. “People go blank on me all the time.”

His navy suit was as fine as the charcoal one he’d worn yesterday, and his red-silk tie picked up the discreet red monogram on his shirt cuff. His pale eyes were frank and smiling as he said, “Look, I don’t have much time. It’s crazy around here today. But a friend of Arthur’s …” He left the sentence unfinished. Guys like us, we know what it means to be a friend of Arthur’s. “Did he send you?”

“Mr. Chaiken? No, this was my idea.” I could have gone on, but I thought I’d toss the ball back to him and see how he played it.

He nodded, as though that was one of the standard serves. “Well, of course I’m glad you came by, but I really have nothing for you. I’m sorry.”

Bad play, Smith, I told myself. Now you’re confused. “Nothing for me?”

“Well, I told Arthur, I use investigators around here once in a blue moon, but I don’t need anyone right at the moment. I could get you an intro at the Bronx D.A.’s office, if that would help.” He looked pleased with the thought and reached for his Rolodex.

“Oh.” And probably to that nice baby-faced A.D.A., too. “Thanks, but I didn’t come here looking for a job, Mr. Hill.”

“Andy. Everybody calls me Andy. Then I don’t understand. Arthur said you’d been laid off and might need work—”

“My firm’s been taken off the Bronx Home job. But that’s not why I’m here. I’ve actually just come to ask you a few questions.”

“To ask me questions? What kind of questions?” Glancing at his watch, he went back around and sat at his desk. He leaned forward, threaded his fingers, his eyes still guileless and eager. If he had had to throw me out just when the questions got interesting, his posture said, it would be with regret, and it would only be his hectic schedule that was to blame.

“Well, I’m not sure,” I began. “Your name keeps popping up in the strangest places.”

He laughed. “So do I. It’s part of my job.” He could have gone on then, too, but he tossed the ball back to me. It seemed we had the same instincts.

“Do you play handball?” I asked.

“Handball? As a matter of fact I do. Why?”

“Just wondered. It’s my game.”

“I do play. I play squash, too, with Arthur sometimes. But I prefer handball. I like as little as possible between the game and myself.”

We did have the same instincts.

“Maybe we could get together for a game sometime,” he said. “But that’s not why you came?”

“No. Is it all right if I smoke?” Time out.

“Oh, sure.” He grinned, pushed a heavy marble ashtray my way. “As long as you’re not insulted if I open a window.” No score. He opened the window. Crisp autumn air ruffled the papers on his desk.

“I was over by Gun Hill Road today,” I said, shaking out the match. “To talk to Abe Burcynski.”

“Burcynski?” His brow furrowed, but it was a feint. “Triple-A Trucking?”

“Yes.”

“How’s his driver doing? Vega?” One-nothing, Hill.

“Still in a coma. He’s why I went. What happened to him?”

“If you went to talk about him, you must know.” Two-nothing.

I took in smoke, nodded. “He was making a night delivery to the Bronx Home. The Cobras said night wasn’t in the contract and wanted to renegotiate. That’s what I heard, anyway.”

“That’s what I heard, too.”

“Burcynski says he called you and you said you’d look into it.”

He gave me a shamefaced smile, gestured at the phone. “I say that to a lot of people.”

“Well, someone got in touch with Burcynski and straightened him out. He makes his payments now and everyone’s happy.”

“Really? You know,” he mused, “sometimes I think it’s too bad we can’t focus the energy and enterprise of some of these go-getters into more productive channels.”

Three-zip.

Change your strategy, Smith. Try a straight-on offense. “What do you get out of it?”

“What do you mean?”

“The Cobras must appreciate the reference.”

“The Cobras? What, you think I—” Hill’s fair skin flushed
crimson. “You can’t be serious. If the BP ever smelled a hint of a suggestion of an idea that I might be associated with someone who could even
spell
‘Cobras,’ I’d be out on my ear. And I resent the insinuation, by the way. You’re trying—” He stopped. The color faded from his face. He leaned back in his chair, smiling. “Well. Arthur told me you could be abrasive.”

I smiled too. “Yeah. I can. Sorry.” Three-one, and we were smiling at each other.

“Listen,” I said. “There’s something else, and probably the implications are even more insulting.”

“Go ahead,” he grinned. “I’ll try to control myself. But first you have to tell me what this is about. Is someone investigating me? Is this politics?”

“No, not politics.” I told him what I was working on, but not whom I was working for. I wasn’t sure why; but something in my gut was telling me to keep Bobby out of this.

Hill frowned thoughtfully when I was through. “That’s what you said yesterday morning: that these killings might be something else, not what they looked like. You didn’t say you were investigating.”

“No.”

He waited a beat or two, but I didn’t add anything. No score, again.

“And why come to me? You still haven’t explained that. Unless—” his face lit up “—you think I did it? God, I’ve been called a lot of things, but this is a new one.”

I’d played opponents like this before. Sometimes they really had no strategy, just a straightforward game, all power and speed and punch. They were surprisingly effective, if they knew their own weaknesses, their vulnerable spots.

But sometimes the openness and lack of guile was the strategy: let your opponent think you have no game to dope out, while you watch his. Then come at him suddenly, tripping him into all the mistakes of temperament, false expectation, and bad habit you’ve discovered him capable of.

Usually—but not always—I could beat guys like that.

I answered Hill. “Can you tell me why you own property all over the Bronx, and why Helping Hands always buys its properties from you?”

His eyes widened, just a little. Three-two. Then he gave me a rueful smile. “Arthur was right. You are good.” Time out. He stood, walked to the window, where the tar roofs of smaller buildings soaked up the October sun, as though they could store it against the cold, dark time to come. “How did you find out about that? And why did you even look?”

“I looked because I’m looking at everything and everybody connected with the Bronx Home. I found out because I looked.” And because I have a very, very clever partner, whose name is going to stay out of this conversation too, I thought.

Hill continued to stare out the window; then, abruptly, he turned, came back to his desk and sat. Play resumes.

“I don’t suppose there’s any point in throwing you out of my office?”

“You could do that. Of course, I might wonder why. I might get so curious I’d have to ask Arthur why you’d do a thing like that. Or I could ask the BP what he knows about real estate.” Three-all, and I had two balls in play.

He went after the foul one. “You haven’t talked to Arthur yet?”

“Is there a reason why I should?”

“Oh, I don’t think so,” Hill said easily. “He’d just tell you the same things I will.”

Uh-huh, I thought. “What things are those?”

He tapped his fingers on the desk a time or two, then spoke. “It’s important for you to know that nothing I’ve done is illegal.”

Important to you, maybe. I didn’t answer.

He sighed. “Arthur and I have an arrangement. It works for both of us.”

“He’s making money on the side too?” I frowned.

“Just listen, will you?” Out-of-bounds. No score. “We consult on sites for his programs. It’s part of my job, helping businesses locate in the Bronx. You know, the Bronx Renaissance?”

“What’s that?”

“Government facilities are located in the borough as seeds to attract other development. I help smooth the way for the other development.”

“Like Helping Hands?”

Hill pursed his fleshy lips. “Arthur identifies a need, a program the foundation will sponsor. Together we look at likely sites. In fact,
that’s how I got started. There can be community opposition, as you might imagine. Misguided, but it’s there.”

“How you got started buying properties?”

“Yes. While he’s getting his financing together, I buy the property he’s going to want. Nobody worries about anything being sold to something called R&G Properties—all my holding companies have meaningless names like that. Then when Helping Hands is ready, I sell to them. They don’t have to approach local property owners, which is usually what sets off the brouhaha. We have a system down by now, Arthur and I. We can go to closing in a matter of days.”

“So this is community service? Philanthropy?”

“I’m not pretending that. I make a profit on each sale. Usually small, under five figures. Why shouldn’t I? It’s real estate. It’s legal.”

“It’s money Helping Hands could use for something else.”

“No.” He shook his head. “The foundation doesn’t supply its own capital budget, only about half its annual operating costs. The rest, and the capital funds, come from grants.”

“Oh. So it’s money New York State could use for something else.”

“Right. To pay all the lawyers and public relations people it would take to help Arthur acquire the sites he buys from me.” Four–three, but a cheap point.

“And the sites nearby?”

“Which sites?”

“In a lot of cases you own property very near the Helping Hands buildings.”

“Oh,” he said. “Sometimes it isn’t clear to Arthur at the beginning which of a number of properties he wants. I buy the likely ones.”

“And you just sit on the ones he doesn’t buy from you?”

Hill grinned. “You know someone who wants them?”

“No.”

“Neither do I. I’m hoping someday someone might. Bronx real estate is an investment that can only appreciate. Meanwhile, most of them are occupied. Rents just about offset expenses.”