Damaged Goods (25 page)

“Look …”

“You have to.”

Moodrow, surprised by her tone, jerked his head up. Gadd’s mouth was curled into an angry, petulant circle, her eyes narrowed down to slits.

“You have to,” she repeated. “If you don’t …”

Without any warning, she drew back her fist and punched him square in the face, the force of the blow jerking the wheelchair back several inches despite his weight. After a moment, Moodrow raised his hand to his cheek.

“You wanna talk about responsibility?” Gadd’s mouth was screwed into a tight, contemptuous frown; her hands lay, unclenched, on the arms of the chair. “What about your responsibility to me?” She crossed her legs, gathered her thoughts. “You wanna believe you were fucking Superman five years ago, that’s your business. You wanna believe you fucked up, that’s okay, too. But I need some help out there and you owe me. Don’t forget, I saw it, too. I saw it and I can’t get her out of my mind. Awake or asleep. I can’t get her out.” Gadd began to cry, the tears running in nearly unbroken streaks along the sides of her nose. “It was so small, Moodrow. The coffin was so fucking small.”

I
T WASN’T FAIR, ABNER
Kirkwood decided. No way a guy makes two mistakes in his whole adult life and that’s all she wrote, the whole ball game,
finito
and good-bye. A major-league baseball player could have a bad year, collect his two million, still put it together with a good season. A surgeon could slip, butcher some old guy, let his insurance company pick up the tab. Hell, a US Senator, guy like Arlen Specter, could make every goddamned woman in Pennsylvania hate his guts and still get reelected.

But not Abner Kirkwood, right? Not United States Attorney Abner Kirkwood, now, after twenty-five years in the Department of Justice, finally head of the whole goddamned Southern District and looking to go higher yet.

The funny thing was he hadn’t seen the first one coming, the first mistake when he joined the Democratic Party, started hanging around the clubhouses. That was because it happened while he was still in college, in 1967, when it looked like the dems would stay in power forever. Like the New Deal was part of the Constitution.

Kirkwood leaned forward in his chair, picked up the framed 5x7 on his desk, and stared at the two smiling men in the color photograph. He and Rudolph Giuliani shaking hands at an office party ten years ago.

You’d think, Kirkwood thought, between the lisp and the haircut, the schmuck wouldn’t have the balls to show his face in public, but there he was, Mayor of New York City and looking for a shot at the Senate. Waiting for Al D’Amato to finally make the big mistake (Christ, the guy had more lives than Al Sharpton), or Moynihan to drink his way into a stroke.

The bitter truth—the part that made him want to spit—was that Rudolph Giuliani became a Republican right about the time Abner Kirkwood became a Democrat, that Giuliani leapfrogged from the DOJ under Nixon, to private practice, then back into the DOJ under Reagan. Working his way up to Assistant Attorney General, Chief of the Narcotics Section, Chief Special Prosecutor, his face on the news more often than the goddamned Attorney General.

Kirkwood put the photo down, thought, me and Giuliani, we’re not that different. Both grew up tough in those lily-white New York neighborhoods, the ones everybody left when the first black family moved onto the block. (Only they didn’t say “black,” his parents, the neighbors, the kids in the schoolyards, they said “nigger,” grinding the word beneath their heels.)

But, then, he’d pulled out, too, moved on to NYU and Brooklyn Law a month or two before his parents took off for New Jersey. Nobody would believe it, now, what it had been like to grow up in the Bronx, the only white, Anglo-Saxon Protestant for miles around, everybody else Jewish or Italian or Irish. The Lithuanians up by the zoo had more identity than he did.

Sometimes it got so bad he pretended his mother was Irish, but the sad truth was that she and dad were half-literate Alabama crackers who’d come north after the war, come to make it in the big city, only picking the wrong one, New York instead of Los Angeles, the Bronx instead of the San Fernando Valley.

The intercom sounded, a single, civilized chirp instead of a harsh buzz. Kirkwood pressed the button, said, “Mrs. English?”

“Agent Holtzmann to see you, Mister Kirkwood. Along with Ms. Rizzo.” She drew the Ms. out a bit.
Mzzzzzz.
Letting him know how she felt about Italian widows who stared at the floor.

“Have them take a seat, Mrs. English. I’ll buzz you when I’m ready.”

Nothing in Abner Kirkwood’s rolling tones revealed his inner state. If his colleagues wanted to see him as some kind of Bronx patrician (an oxymoron, he noted, if there ever was one) that was okay with him. The truth, on the other hand, was that Josie Rizzo was his second mistake and the thought of her in his office was enough to get him wheezing. He took an inhaler from the middle desk drawer, popped it into his mouth, then squeezed once, holding his breath momentarily.

When Bill Clinton got himself elected President of the United States, Kirkwood had figured that his dues were finally paid. Which was only fair, considering that he’d worked on parts of every major case to hit the Southern District in the last decade, attended five thousand Democratic fund-raisers, donated ten thousand hours of free legal work to the Democratic National Committee, the NAACP, Catholic Charities, the Association of Jewish Philanthropies. Every ethnic group in New York but the Nation of Islam.

In the end, Clinton had come through, appointed Assistant US Attorney Kirkwood to head the Southern District, his golden opportunity if he could bring the kind of cases that attracted the media. Because the bottom line was you could speak at the Elks Club, the Knights of Columbus, the Anti-Defamation League until you turned purple and it didn’t mean shit. Meanwhile, put yourself next to John Gotti, Mike Milken, Ivan Boesky, Leona Helmsley and the next day three million voters knew your name.

So what he did was reach out, let it be known he was looking to get busy, and a couple of weeks later, Special Agent Holtzmann waltzed into his office, said, “I have something here, Abner. Don’t know if it’s worth going forward. Have to get approval from your office.”

As if five or ten lunches scattered over half a decade gave Agent Holtzmann the right to call United States Attorney Kirkwood by his first name.

“Carmine Stettecase, Italian mobster, mid-level.” Holtzmann had paused to run his fingertips over his lapels, a nervous tic he repeated a dozen times before he left. “An informant came forward last week. Just called the New York office and made an appointment. Claimed she had access to Stettecase’s inner sanctum. Willing to deliver him up if we help her out with a small problem.”

“The woman’s name, Karl, if you please.” Time to take over the conversation, establish the old chain of command.

“Josefina Rizzo.”

“And what’s her access?”

“She’s the mother-in-law of Carmine Stettecase’s son, Tommaso. Lives in Carmine’s house, claims that Carmine does serious business over breakfast, that the room is swept beforehand by Tommaso, but she can get a recorder in and out.” Holtzmann smiled for the first time, ticking the facts off on his fingers. “She had a serving tray with her, a bread warmer with a heating unit built into the bottom. Said if we could put a tape recorder inside, she’d see to changing the tapes, making delivery to a drop, even give us a free sample to prove their value.”

“I assume you took advantage and the sample was satisfactory.”

Holtzmann had straightened, done his lapels again. “It has the potential to be a major case.”

There it was, the magic phrase. Major Case. Meanwhile, Kirkwood knew Carmine Stettecase was not the boss of all bosses, not even close. In fact the only interesting thing about Carmine was that he’d been around forever.

“The quid pro quo, Karl. Let’s hear it.”

“Her nephew, Gildo Sappone, been in jail for almost fifteen years. State parole board turned him down and she wants him out.”

“And?”

“And?”

Abner Kirkwood had tapped his desk impatiently. “Gildo Sappone, Karl. Is he, for instance, a mass murderer? Did he, perhaps, rape and dismember a dozen nuns?”

“No, no.” Holtzmann noted Kirkwood’s harsh, sarcastic tone and smiled inwardly. Like many a law-enforcement officer, he found it in his interest to encourage the macho affectations common to prosecutors. They loved to play at being tough and one of the ways they did it was by cross-examining cops. “Nothing like that. Just a run-of-the-mill homicide.”

“Then why did the parole board turn him down?”

“Bit of a bad actor. Prison scrapes, that kind of thing. High risk to reoffend.”

Kirkwood had leaned back in his chair, tried to estimate how many vicious criminals had received light sentences or been turned loose altogether in exchange for testimony against more inviting targets. It was one of the best-kept secrets in law enforcement, all those mutts in the witness protection program going off on unsuspecting neighbors.

“Rizzo swears the nephew has changed. Just wants to get out and live his life.” Holtzmann had produced a pipe, a curved meerschaum, his trademark, but didn’t have the nerve to light it. “Willing to submit to whatever supervision the parole board demands.”

“And.”

“And?”

“Did you check him out, Karl?”

Holtzmann had looked down into the bowl of the pipe. He’d come to the Federal Bureau of Investigation by way of Princeton Law and knew all there was to know about Abner Kirkwood. Including what the US attorney wanted to hear.

“Nobody can read the future,” he’d said, his voice dead even, “but Sappone’s spent the last fourteen years in prison. Hard to imagine him wanting to go right back.” He’d tapped the bowl of his pipe against his palm, then looked up at Kirkwood.

“Thing about it, Abner, on the tapes Rizzo brought in, the samples? Appears that Stettecase is negotiating a very large heroin deal. Very large indeed.”

Abner Kirkwood picked up the newspaper lying on his desk and stared at Jilly Sappone’s photo on the front page. The way he figured it, the child, Theresa, was a casualty of war. Yeah, if he had
known,
if he could read the goddamned
future,
Sappone would still be in prison. No way he would’ve gone ahead with the deal, no matter what he had to gain. But he hadn’t known and what happened had just happened.

Meanwhile, how many lives would be lost if three tons of dope hit the streets instead of a DOJ evidence locker? How many people would Carmine Stettecase kill if he wasn’t stopped?

What you did, if you’d been in law enforcement as long as Abner Kirkwood, was weigh the risk against the gain, calculate profit and loss, take the high ground whenever possible. The New York State Parole Board was stonewalling the press which was all to the good, but that wouldn’t last. No, what they’d do was leak the truth to some reporter, take the heat off, put it on the FBI.

FBI FREES M
URDERER.
And what would Carmine Stettecase make of
that?

The intercom chirped once. Kirkwood allowed himself a narrow smile before responding.

“Mrs. English?”

“I’m sorry to disturb you, Mr. Kirkwood, but Ms. Sappone asked me to tell you that she has another appointment and is unable to wait any longer.”

Kirkwood shuddered, feeling about the way a priest might feel before an exorcism. Ordinarily, Josie Rizzo dropped the tapes into a mailbox on Grove Street. The face-to-face was her idea.

“You can send them in, Mrs. English. Ms. Rizzo and Agent Holtzmann.” He stood up, legs apart, bracing himself against whatever gruesome detail Josie Rizzo had decided to add to the general nightmare.

Josie Rizzo was fully aware of her effect on other people, heard it in the voices of butchers, bakers, supermarket checkout girls. They saw her as crazy, demented, a royal pain in the ass. Josie didn’t mind, didn’t let it bother her. She wanted what she wanted and they were there to serve her, not really alive at all. More like badly manufactured robots.

Holtzmann and Kirkwood, though she definitely wanted something from them, fit into a different category. Josie Rizzo hated cops, the hatred coming to her along with her mother’s breast milk. Ordinarily, she wouldn’t stay in the same room with a cop, not even the same building. In fact, just the other day, in Joey Barabano’s deli, she was fetching a half pound of prosciutto and a wedge of sharp, crumbly provolone for Carmine’s antipasto when a uniformed cop, a sergeant, came in for his meatball hero. Tried to push ahead of her.

“Hey.” More a grunt than an exclamation. She’d waited until he was looking at her. “You in a hurry?”

The dumb pig had smirked, started to apologize. She’d responded by spitting on his shoes and walking out, taking her sweet time about it, calling back over her shoulder. “Hey, Joey, I’ll see you in an hour. Leave the door open.”

So what was she doing, now, in this office with two of the biggest cops in New York? How could she humiliate herself in this way? The questions came to her unbidden.

The spirit was driving her. That was the only way she could understand it. A
jetatura,
first described by her
nonna,
her grandmother, a woman with eyes the color of the unforgiving soil of rural Sicily. If this spirit was inside your heart, you could hurt other people, send disease, poverty, ill fortune, even the death of a child. You had power, in spite of being a mere woman.

There was a price to pay, of course. A little matter Josie’s
nonna
had left out of her description. The spirit fed on your rage, your impotence, the unrelenting need for revenge. It grew in you, born with the death of your father, maturing the day they slaughtered your brother in front of his own child. Slaughtered him while you watched, helpless, from a tenement window.

By the time she’d buried the last of them, her husband, some five years later, Josie Rizzo’s fate was sealed. Her grandmother’s
jetatura
was not to be expelled, as much a part of her as the black dress, the long determined stride, the enormous bony hands.