Damaged Goods (15 page)

“Well, I have to admit you don’t look like a working cop.”

“What’d I tell ya.”

“No, what you look like is a
retired
cop who’s about to take his grandson to a baseball game.” Her mouth jumped into a mischievous grin. “The white socks give you away.”

Moodrow sat back down. “Damn, and I was trying for sporty sophisticate.”

The jackhammer started up again, slamming into their conversation. Moodrow sipped at his coffee, reminded himself that the city—
his
city—was literally falling apart. Construction sites were a permanent feature on every bridge and highway; water mains spouted like blowing whales. In the early 1980s, when the work had begun, orange signs at every site had announced the Koch administration’s good intentions: WE’RE REBUILDING NEW YORK. The signs were gone, now, but the work continued. The FDR Drive along the East River had been under repair for more than fifteen years.

Gadd started to speak, then shook her head and got up to shut the windows. Back in her seat, the jackhammer reduced to a muffled roar, she shuffled the paperwork on her desk for a moment, then looked up at Moodrow.

“Maybe we oughta get to work,” she said. “Being as the city isn’t gonna let us play.”

Moodrow crossed his legs, leaned slightly forward, and let his hands drop into his lap. A narrow smile pulled at the edge of his lips as he realized just how much he’d been looking forward to this next step. As if there was no possibility that Santa would leave coal instead of presents under his tree. “Your move, Gadd.”

She nodded, accepting the obvious. “Well,” she said, “it looks like we’ve got a hit. One of the credit cards was used.”

“Where?”

“Long Island.”

“That would be Carlo Sappone, right?”

“How did you know that?” Gadd waved off his response. “And how did you know they were going to use the card?”

“Carlo Sappone was a guess. He’s Jilly’s first cousin, Josephine Rizzo’s nephew. I didn’t know he was on Long Island, but I was pretty sure he was still close to the family. As for using the card …”

Moodrow jerked to a halt when the pounding outside the window stopped again. An angry voice drifted up, almost a whisper after the roar of the jackhammer.

“Ya stupid cocksucker. Ya cut the fuckin’ cable. Now we’ll be here all morning.”

Gadd scratched her chin. “I
love
New York.” She waited for Moodrow’s smile. “You were saying about the cards?”

“Right.” Moodrow tapped the bandage on the back of his head. The wound had begin to itch, but he was afraid to dig in, afraid of opening it again. “You asked me how I knew Jilly was going to use the cards, correct?”

“Correct.” Her eyes were somewhere between quizzical and amused.

“Well, ask yourself this: If Jilly wasn’t gonna use ’em, why would he steal ’em in the first place?”

The obvious struck Gadd like a fastball slamming into a catcher’s mitt. “But using them was such a risk.” It was all she could manage.

“If the criminals weren’t stupid, where would
we
be?” The cop cliché rose to Moodrow’s lips unbidden. “Besides, it wasn’t all that much of a risk. The cards were forgeries, so that leaves the cops out of it. How could Jilly Sappone know that Stanley Moodrow would get next to Buster Levy? How could he know what Ginny Gadd can do with a computer? If you look at it from Jilly’s point of view, he’s been having a run of very shitty luck.”

Gadd cocked her head to one side and shrugged. “Your reasoning,” she admitted, “is beyond dispute. As for Carlo Sappone, I have an address, a phone number, and a piece of his rap sheet.”

“His rap sheet? How’d you get that?”

“I’m tied into a system called Lexis. They’ve got conviction records for forty-seven states in their database. Convictions, mind you, not arrests. Carlo Sappone’s a coke dealer, been convicted three times, in 1982, 1986, and 1990. Altogether, he’s done six years and four months, county and state time. He’s on parole, even as we speak.”

“Are you telling me that
anybody
can get this information?”

“Don’t get pissed, Moodrow. It’s a matter of public record.”

Pissed? Moodrow’s emotion was closer to despair. He’d been going to Jim Tilley with his hat in his hand, a beggar, pure and simple, whenever he needed a rap sheet. Meanwhile, every other private investigator had the information at his fingertips. Correction:
her
fingertips. He looked over at Gadd’s computer, successfully resisted an urge to empty his .38 into the screen, then turned back.

“Last night,” he said, “we talked about a trade. Favor for favor. You put Jilly with Carlo and Carlo with an address and a phone number. That’s your favor. My favor is a mug shot of Jilly’s partner. His name, by the way, is Jackson-Davis Wescott.”

Gadd leaned back and put her feet up on the desk. “You know, Moodrow, you’ve got a way of springing nasty surprises on people. I’ve always associated that particular ability with being a prick.”

“Sticks and stones, Gadd.” He got up, crossed the room, and filled his coffee mug without asking permission. When he was seated again, he pulled a folded copy of Wescott’s photo out of his jacket pocket and laid it on the desk. “You might as well take this, being as I can get Carlo Sappone’s address on my own.”

Ginny Gadd watched Moodrow’s larynx bob as he drained the mug. Somehow, the motion was more obscene than an upraised finger. “You keep sucking on that, you’re gonna dissolve the glaze.”

Moodrow cupped the mug in his palm. “So, what’s your next move?”

“Me?” She smiled her nastiest smile. “What I’m gonna do is go directly to Carlo Sappone’s domicile and ask him if he knows where his cousin Jilly is hiding. In fact, I might not even bother driving. Maybe I’ll just give him a call the minute you walk out the goddamned door.”

Moodrow sat up straight. He was trying for righteous indignation, but an obscene giggle betrayed his true inner state. “Yeah,” he admitted, “that’s exactly what I’d do if I was in your shoes.” He took a deep breath and started over. “The problem, Gadd, is that when I put the big question to Carlo, he’s most likely gonna lie to me. Now, the way I see it, Theresa Kalkadonis doesn’t have time for bullshit; if someone doesn’t get to her soon, she’s gonna be dead. That’s if she’s not
already
dead. To be honest, I didn’t think she had much of a shot when I caught the squeal, but now that I’m close, I can’t afford to let Carlo Sappone tell me fibs.” He tapped the desktop with one finger. “It sets up like this: If you wanna come along, I could use your help. But you can’t draw any lines. I don’t know what’s gonna happen when I catch up with Jilly Sappone, but you can take one thing to the bank. If I have to shoot him down like a dog, if it comes to that, I’ll do it without thinking twice. Being as you’re still young and still ambitious, you might not wanna deal with the consequences.”

“T
HIS IS A DEFINITE
opportunity for me. I’m not trying to be dramatic here—not saying it’s my big break or anything like that—but the women who run the foundation are all corporate types and they as much as told me I’d get some work out of the deal.” Gadd smiled ruefully.
“
Assuming I’m … assuming
we’re
successful.”

Moodrow nodded thoughtfully. He could remember a time when he was ambitious, when he’d been determined to ride the tail of that particular comet. Fortunately, the price of a ticket had been too high.

They were on the FDR Drive, crawling north behind a long line of cars and taxis. (This after two hours of begging an amused lieutenant for a copy of Carlo Sappone’s mug shot.) The delay came as no surprise to either of them. As cops, they’d become hardened to frustration, only occasionally blasting holes in the traffic with the lights and the siren. But that didn’t mean the lure of Carlo Sappone wasn’t yanking at their adrenals like a milking machine at the udders of a cow. For Moodrow, the sensations, the elevated heart rate, the flushed face, were very familiar. He handled them by focusing his attention on a Suffolk County street map. Ginny Gadd, on the other hand, though she’d made the patrol officer’s jump from utter boredom to full, heart-pounding terror often enough, had no experience with the steady pace of an investigation. She was sure the prickle at the back of her neck was an allergic reaction, one she could subdue with the edges of her short fingernails.

“Plus,” Gadd tapped the wheel with the palm of her hand, “I need the exercise.”

Moodrow continued to flip the pages. Even with the aid of his drugstore reading glasses and a pocket magnifier, he was having trouble finding the location of Carlo Sappone’s home on Winston Drive in the village of Mastic. The problem was that Suffolk County, encompassing the eastern two-thirds of Long Island, was divided into a dozen large townships, each of which contained a number of smaller villages, while Moodrow’s Hagstrom map, a vintage 1980 edition, listed street names under particular townships only.

“It makes you long for Brooklyn,” he finally said. “Or for a better map.”

“What does?”

Moodrow rubbed his eyes. “Long Island, New Jersey, Westchester. It doesn’t matter. Every time I leave New York City, I feel like Dr. Livingstone.” He replaced his glasses, reopened the map. “You grow up in New York?”

“Ridgewood.”

“Then you know what I mean.”

“I know that attitude is why people hate New Yorkers.” Gadd edged the car slightly to the left and peered around the line of traffic. Several hundred yards ahead, a construction worker in a blue hard hat waved a red flag. The motion was oddly graceful, as if the worker was standing in a tank of water. “I think the traffic’s gonna break up in a minute.” When Moodrow didn’t respond, she added, “That’s in case you have any particular route in mind.”

“What I have in mind is a village called Mastic. You wouldn’t happen to know where that is?”

“Afraid not. But if it’s in Suffolk County, doesn’t it have to be on the map?”

“Yeah, unless it’s in
Nassau
County. Or fucking Iceland.” He laid the map on his knees. “Snatching Carlo isn’t the only problem. We have to find a place we can take him, a quiet place where he can be convinced that giving up cousin Jilly is in his immediate self-interest. The funny part is that I was out on Long Island last summer—me and my girlfriend, Betty Haluka—and we went to a place that’d be perfect. If I could only find it.”

Gadd slid by the flagman (who turned out to be a flag
woman),
merged into the far right lane, then accelerated along with the rest of the traffic.

“I think what I’ll do,” she announced, “is head east and hope for the best.”

One rubber duckie!

Jilly Sappone rolled onto his back and groaned softly. He was dreaming his happiest dream and did not want to awaken. Not before he finished with his wife.

Twoooooo rubber duckies!

Jilly’s dream was unfolding in the kitchen of a Lower East Side apartment he’d once shared with his wife and daughter. Little Patricia was nowhere to be seen, though her muffled sobs could definitely be heard. She was in her bedroom, hiding under the covers the way she always did when he went off. That was all right, because he had other things to consider. Ann was on the floor, crouching in a corner beneath the kitchen cabinets. The side of her face was nicely puffed and her nose was bleeding steadily.

Threeeeee rubber duckies!

The plan, now that Jilly had his wife totally cowed, was sexual humiliation. And not because Jilly had any particular interest in her body. He might or might not take her, depending on how the mood struck him, but, either way, he’d decided to leave her kneeling on the kitchen table while he watched the baseball game. Leave her kneeling there like a trussed turkey while he watched all nine innings.

Fooooooooour rubber duckies!

Slowly, with a deeply felt regret that threatened to explode into instant, uncontrollable rage, Jilly raised himself to a sitting position and rubbed at his eyes. What he saw, when he was awake enough to focus, did little to elevate his mood. Beyond the two silhouettes seated in front of the glowing television, a caped puppet sporting a monocle and a wide mustache counted a flock of rubber ducks floating in a white, claw-foot bathtub.

Fiiiiiiiiive rubber duckies!

Jilly tried to say “Jackson-Davis,” but his mouth was so dry his tongue stuck to his palette. He tried again, this time managing a hoarse croak before exhausting his patience.

Siiiiiiiix rubber duckies!

That did it, that was the final straw, the one that was going to break the back of a camel named Jackson-Davis Wescott. Jilly threw his legs over the side of the bed, leaped to his feet, and collapsed.

The television shut off with a soft pop.

“You might wanna stay off that leg, Jilly. Truth to tell, I don’t believe it’s ready to carry no real weight.”

The events of the previous night flooded Jilly Sappone’s consciousness with the force of one of his own shitstorms. He groaned softly, looked down at his leg, knew he’d been very, very lucky. The bullet had grazed the outside of his right calf. If it had gone through his foot, he’d be crippled.

But that didn’t mean it hadn’t hurt like hell. Or that he hadn’t left a trail of blood from his daughter’s apartment to the car where Jackson-Davis played patty-cake with Theresa Kalkadonis.

“Where are we, Jackson?” Try as he might, Jilly couldn’t remember.

“We’re in a motel, Jilly.”

“I know that, you fucking jerk.” Lying on the floor was making Jilly nervous. He’d spent most of his life staring down at his enemy-of-the-moment and this new position was thoroughly unfamiliar to him. “Help me up.”

“Sure, Jilly.”

Back on his feet again, Jilly fumbled in his pants for the medicine he knew he’d need if he was going to get through the day, then hobbled off to the bathroom. Ten minutes later, as he washed the shaving cream off his face, he remembered that he was in a motel room outside the city of Worcester, Massachusetts, and that he had a long way to go. His leg still hurt, but two bags of dope had driven the pain so far away that it seemed to belong to someone else.

He limped out of the bathroom and watched Jackson-Davis and the kid spoon cereal into their mouths. The scene struck him as funny. Jackson really liked the little bitch, that was obvious, but, sure as shit, the minute Theresa grew up, Jackson would kill her. He’d kill her because he needed to kill women; she was alive because he didn’t need to kill children. Figure that one out.