Damaged Goods (33 page)

A BBS was a bulletin board system.

“That’s true, but most of them are private. They have nothing to do with the Internet.”

“I understand that, Barry, but my problem is that I don’t have any easy way to locate the systems and I don’t have a lot of time, either. I was hoping you were …” She paused, smiled to herself. “I was hoping you were involved.”

“Ginny, I know people who are too afraid to hit the clubs. They live on those boards. The only problem, for you, is that nobody, and I mean
nobody,
gives a full name. Subscribers are known by their handles. Like truck drivers on their CB radios.”

Gadd sighed. “I was afraid of that.”

“You say this guy was busted in a New York Club?”

“Yeah, I don’t actually know which one. It didn’t seem important at the time and I forgot to ask.”

“What’s his name?”

“Tommaso. Tommaso Stettecase.”

“Tommaso the Timid? Ginny, the man is a fucking legend.”

J
OSIE RIZZO KNEW EXACTLY
why Carmine Stettecase was in such a good mood. The Chinaman, On Luk Sun, had finally set a date: May 18, exactly five days hence.

“The boat sailed yesterday, boys, and it ain’t stoppin’ nowhere till it gets to New York. Praise the fuckin’ Lord.”

There still being a number of details to work out, the celebration had been short-lived, but Carmine, the cloud above his head finally beginning to dissolve, had remained buoyant throughout the meeting. That buoyancy, apparently, had continued afterward, because Josie, as she descended the stairs after listening to the tape, found a grinning Carmine standing between herself and the front door.

“Hey, Josie, come into my office for a minute. I wanna talk to ya.”

Josie found it almost funny. When Carmine spun around, the blubber covering his body did an extra quarter turn before it settled down with a final quiver. Meanwhile, there being no way to dodge whatever Carmine had in mind, she dutifully followed him into his office.

“Whatta ya want, Carmine? I gotta make a lotta stops today.”

They were standing nearly face-to-face on the polished hardwood floor. Carmine detested wall-to-wall carpeting. The feds could put a bug underneath his carpet and Tommy might not be able to find it. At least, that’s what Tommy had told him.

“What I been thinking here, Josie, is that I gotta start bein’ more security conscious.” A wolfish smirk creased his flabby cheeks. “I mean I got people comin’ and goin’ like it was Grand Central Station. It ain’t only you, Josie. Tommy, Mary, Rosa … they could be doin’ some kinda bullshit and I wouldn’t know. The last couple of weeks, I could barely sleep for thinkin’ about it.”

Josie, though she knew Carmine’s pause was meant to give her a chance to respond, held her peace.

“Okay, so what I was figurin’ was that I’d give everybody a quick strip search. Like for my peace of mind. I mean how could anyone object, being as it’s for the good of the family?” The forefinger and pinky of his right hand, extended toward her, swung up and down like vertical metronomes. “Now, look, Josie, I don’t wan’cha to think I got no dirty thoughts in my head about lookin’ up ya pussy or nothin’. That’s why I decided we need a witness that I ain’t forcin’ ya to do somethin’ sexual. Hey, Vinnie, c’mon in here.”

Vincenzo Trentacosta, his giggling mouth hidden behind hairy knuckles, stepped into the room. Carmine, at the sight, started laughing himself. He made a gesture toward Josie’s crotch and she jumped back into Vinnie. Vinnie put his arm around her chest, squeezing her breasts beneath his forearm. Then he let go and she spun around him toward the door.

“Josie, where ya goin’?” Carmine shouted after her. “I bought a new roll of film for the Polaroid.”

Out on the street, Josie breathed a sigh of relief. Carmine had only been kidding, another grievance to be added to the years of abuse, a nourishing breakfast for the ghoul that lived inside her heart. Meanwhile, she had the tape in the pocket of her dress. If he’d found it, she’d already be dead, but that wouldn’t be the worst thing. No, the worst thing was that if she was dead, Carmine would be off the FBI’s hook.

These thoughts continued to occupy Josie Rizzo two hours later when she turned onto Grove Street, stopped in a small courtyard, deposited the tape in a locked metal box. She looked neither right nor left, though whether from habit or from a refusal to acknowledge danger, Ginny Gadd couldn’t tell. Gadd was sitting across the street and twenty yards to the west in a rented car, nodding to herself as she watched Josie stride off down the block.

Gadd waited another half hour before making her move, until she was certain the box wasn’t being monitored. Then she stepped out of the car, walked over to the box, glanced quickly over both shoulders. Grove Street, a mere two blocks long and completely residential, was quiet, without a pedestrian in sight.

Using her body as a shield, Gadd tied a short length of nylon stocking to the base of the padlock and pulled the stocking toward her, exerting a firm, steady pressure. Then she withdrew a small wooden mallet from her purse and struck the shackle. When the lock failed to open, she increased the pressure slightly and struck again.

“Practice makes perfect,” she muttered.

A moment later, she was back in the car, fitting the microcassette into a high-speed dubbing deck. Ten minutes later, the original back in the relocked box, she was on her way back to the car-rental agency.

Moodrow waited until after breakfast to give Betty a call. He wasn’t looking forward to relating the prior evening’s adventure, and not because he was embarrassed by the evident failure of his strategy. No, what worried him was the near certainty that Betty would ask what he and Gadd were going to do next.

The truth (which he didn’t want to admit, not out loud and not to Betty) was that Stanley Moodrow wouldn’t be making that decision. Gadd, her other significant option being withdrawal in the face of the enemy, was going to move on the FBI’s drop box. He knew it, because that’s what he’d have done. Ten years ago when he’d been a rushing fool instead of a fearful angel.

“Hello?”

“It’s me, Betty.”

“Stanley, did you have a good night?”

Moodrow shook his head. She hadn’t wasted any time. But then she probably didn’t know what had happened to Jackson-Davis.

“You read the paper this morning?” he asked.

“Not yet.”

“Yeah, well you’re most likely gonna see Wescott’s picture on the front page. They found him dead in Riverside Park.”

“Do you think Jilly killed him?”

“Yeah, killed him and took off for parts unknown.”

“Maybe it was Carmine.”

Moodrow paused to think it over. “It’s not impossible,” he admitted. “But if I had to put my money down, I’d bet that Carmine’s never heard of Jackson-Davis Wescott.” He paused again. “You off to court?”

“In a few minutes. Look, I had an idea last night, but I don’t think it’ll help. Not if Sappone’s left the Upper West Side.”

“You found a way to run him down?” Moodrow, throughout his entire NYPD career, had accepted help from any source. Had accepted it gratefully.

“Ask yourself this question, Stanley. How did Jilly Sappone, who’s been a very busy boy since the day of his release, find an apartment in Manhattan? Remember, the house on Long Island was waiting for him when he got out.”

“Somebody had to find the place,” Moodrow said promptly. “And that …”

“And that somebody,” Betty finished the sentence for him, “had to be Josie Rizzo. You remember DHCR from Jackson Heights?”

“The Department of Housing and Community Renewal. That’s a state agency.”

“True, but they’ve got computerized information on every rent-stabilized apartment in New York City, including the names of the leaseholders. Suppose Josie Rizzo had to use her own name because it was on the check she wrote. That would mean she’s in DHCR’s computer.”

“You’re forgetting one thing, Betty. Even if you’ve got it right, Josie rented the apartment less than a week ago. We’re talking about a state bureaucracy here. It’ll probably be months before they update their records.”

“Not necessarily. I called Leonora this morning, asked her to check it out. She called back a few minutes ago, told me that many of the larger management companies are linked to DHCR’s computer via modem. They enter information as they process the application.”

“That’s amazing.” He wasn’t kidding, the concept of an efficient state agency being entirely foreign to him. “I assume you told Leonora to run a search.”

“Would I do that without talking to you first?”

“In a heartbeat.”

“Bye, Stanley. Have a nice day.”

On his way out to Belmont Park, Stanley Moodrow experienced a small miracle. The temperature at one o’clock in the afternoon when he locked his apartment door and headed off to get his car was ninety-two degrees, the first real day of summer. Moodrow, from long experience behind the wheel of a patrol car, had come to call this annual event Radiator Boilover Day. Traditionally, all the jerks who’d used the cold winter as an excuse to neglect their clogged or leaking radiators would now pay the price, as would everybody else driving on the roads they used. Add to that a torturous route (the Williamsburg Bridge to the BQE to the LIE to the Cross Island Parkway), a dozen construction sites, and his own Chevrolet’s barely functioning air conditioner …

The trip, though Moodrow shouldered the burden manfully, promised to be very, very unpleasant, a two-hour, twenty-mile odyssey characterized by sweaty armpits, blaring horns, furious drivers. The reality, on the other hand, once he’d cleared the Delancey Street construction site and swept up onto the Williamsburg Bridge, was that his speedometer didn’t drop below 55 until he reached the traffic light a block from the Belmont parking lot. The reality was a New York miracle.

Ten minutes later, the blessing still fresh, Moodrow stepped off the escalator onto the third floor of Belmont Park’s long grandstand. Moodrow had never liked the track, had always considered the racetrack image promoted by the media, ten thousand screaming fans cheering on their favorites, to be so much bullshit. The truth about horse racing wasn’t to be found in the twenty seconds it took the animals to run the length of the stretch, but in the half hour between races when the excitement dropped away like a shed skin and the gamblers gathered in small packs, whispering back and forth, their gray mood exactly matching the concrete walls and naked superstructure of the surrounding architecture.

Depression, he thought, is what it’s all about. A crop of degenerate gamblers counting their losses.

Then he caught sight of Ginny Gadd standing beneath the tote board. She was wearing a red, scoop-necked top over a white T-shirt, bluejeans, and white sneakers. Her hair was swept up and back, as usual. A folded racing form dangled from one hand.

She was exchanging notes with a much older man, a man almost as old as Moodrow. The conversation was subdued, both nodding agreement from time to time. Moodrow, as he watched from a distance, was taken by Gadd’s obvious intensity, by her abundant, vibrant youth. For a moment, he felt a conscious desire to steal it from her, as if her energy was an accessory, like a purse or a necklace. Then she saw him, said good-bye to her companion, and walked over.

“We’ve got a situation here,” she announced. “Let’s get outside before the race goes off.”

Moodrow, with no choice, followed her to a pair of empty seats in the open grandstand. The outer dirt track, newly sprinkled with water, gleamed dully in the sunlight, while the grass of the inner turf tracks was intensely green. At the far end of the oval, several horses, led by handlers, pranced their way into the starting gate. Moodrow started to say something to Gadd, but she was staring out through a small pair of binoculars, oblivious to his presence.

The starting gate banged open a few minutes later and the horses burst out, a confusion of brown muscular flesh and vivid jockey silks that, for a brief moment, seemed to Moodrow like parts of a single organism. Then a jet-black horse, his jockey whipping furiously, charged to the front, establishing a four-length margin before the pack reached the quarter pole. The black held that margin into the turn, then opened up as they came through the stretch. By the time he reached the finish line, he was eight lengths in front.

Moodrow waited until Gadd put the binoculars down, then asked, “Did you bet him?”

Gadd blinked several times, as if waiting for the question to penetrate. “No, no. I didn’t bet the race.” She continued to stare up at him for a minute. “We’ve got a scraped rail here. I wasn’t expecting it, but it’s an opportunity I can’t ignore.”

“I’m gonna have to ask you a question, Gadd. If you don’t wanna answer me, it’s alright. What’s a ‘scraped rail’?”

Gadd smiled mischievously. “How much do you know about the racetrack?”

“I place bets; I watch races; I tear up tickets.”

“That’s what I figured.” She glanced down at the racing form, then placed it on the empty seat next to her. “The track down there, it looks like so much flat dirt, right?”

“Right.”

“Actually, the track is banked, from the outside to the inside, so the dirt tends to slide in toward the rail. Now, every night, after the horses go home, the groundskeepers groom the track. Mostly, they’re trying to keep it uniform, but sometimes they make it too deep or too shallow along the inside. If it’s too deep, horses that run to the front or run close to the rail almost never win. Naturally, that reverses itself when the rail is scraped.”

“And today the rail is scraped.”

Gadd nodded. “As thin as I’ve ever seen it. That pig who won the last race, the four horse? He always runs to the front, that’s his style. Meanwhile, he hasn’t held up past a half mile in his last six times out.” She fumbled in the large purse dangling from her shoulder. “Anyway, I’ve got something you don’t wanna hear.”

Moodrow stared at the small tape recorder and shook his head. “You actually went and did it,” he said.

“Relax, nobody saw me. The original’s back in the box and the box is locked. There’s no way they can know I was in there. The fibbies won’t even suspect.” She hesitated for a moment. “I listened to the tape on the way out here, but I can’t separate the voices. I think there’s some kind of a deal going down, but …” She handed Moodrow the recorder, then picked up the racing form. After a moment, she dropped the paper on her lap and gave him a searching look.