Damaged Goods (5 page)

“Fourteen years.”

“I can’t believe they let him out.”

“That’s part of the puzzle, Stanley, because the parole board turned him down last September, then reversed itself. He was paroled directly out of the Southport Correctional Facility.”

“Southport? That’s the maxi-maxi prison, right? The new one?”

“It is.”

“I thought they only put you there if you were too crazy to be anywhere else.”

“You thought right, Stanley. According to the Department of Corrections, Jilly Sappone committed more than a hundred acts of violence before they shipped him off to Southport.”

Moodrow poured himself a second drink, took a moment to sift through his cop’s memory, to let the bits and pieces rise to the surface. “Jilly Sappone, best case, leads to Carmine Stettecase through his aunt, Josephine Rizzo. Her daughter, Mary, is married to Carmine’s son, Tommaso. Carmine is pretty big on the Lower East Side, but not big enough to fix the parole board. Maybe he reached up the ladder, called in some markers. But it still doesn’t make sense, because …”

“Look, Stanley, whatever happened up in Southport is dead and done. It’s irrelevant, because Jilly Sappone will never see the outside world again.”

“Aren’t you getting ahead of yourself? You haven’t got him yet.”

Higgins smiled, flipped her right hand, palm up, into the space between them. “Well, that’s why I’m here, isn’t it? The child, Theresa, isn’t related to Jilly Sappone. Jilly hasn’t demanded ransom, either. So, why did he take her?”

“Three reasons.” Moodrow took Leonora’s glass, refilled it from a bottle of chardonnay in the refrigerator. As he closed the refrigerator door, he recalled a time, before he met Betty, when the only thing in his refrigerator was ice. “First, he’s crazy. Second, he’s stupid. Third, he hates his wife. Jilly has what the shrinks like to call ‘poor impulse control.’ Most likely, he didn’t plan on taking the kid. It just happened.”

“And how long will he keep her?”

Moodrow shook his head. “Save the guilt for a jury, Leonora. I know what the stakes are.” He stared down into his glass, tried to reconcile the contradictions. The last really dangerous animal he’d hunted was Davis Craddock, the cult leader. How long ago had that been? Four years? Five? It seemed like a hundred.

“Jilly Sappone,” he finally said, “will try to kill you, me, or anyone else who comes after him. How can I ask Betty to carry that baggage? It’s gonna be hard enough out in Los Angeles.”

“I’m not asking you to capture Sappone. Just to help find him.”

“And suppose I get close. Suppose I get close and he’s still got the kid. You want me to drop a dime, call the cops, hope they don’t fuck it up?” He stopped abruptly, waited for some kind of a response. When he realized that Leonora had nothing to say, he continued. “A little history lesson. Carmine Stettecase went into business just about the same time I went into the cops. Which was just about the time the Italians started moving out of the city. By the time Jilly Sappone came along, Carmine and his partner, Dominick Favara, now dead, were running the rackets on the Lower East Side. I mean
all
the loan sharks, pimps, bookies, and heroin dealers paid him tribute. Jilly, meanwhile, had a rep for being the wildest kid in a very tough neighborhood. By age sixteen, he’d been up in Spofford twice, the last time for a year.”

Moodrow paused again. He was going on too long, dragging it out because he didn’t want to see her leave. Because he didn’t want his “no” to become final. “What I’m getting at is this—Dominick and Carmine were Jilly’s role models. Without them, he was just another terminal psychopath and he knew it. So when Carmine’s son married Jilly’s cousin, Jilly asked him for a job. It was only natural, right? And it was only natural that Carmine, who has a sentimental attachment to the old neighborhood, set his new relative up to collect the vig for a connected loan shark named Paulie Marrano. Now, it’s a funny thing about collecting money from deadbeats with dope or gambling habits. You gotta be strong, but you can’t forget that dead men don’t pay you back. Likewise if you get ’em so shit-scared they figure the cops are their only hope. Unfortunately, Jilly was unable to grasp the subtleties. Maybe he figured that being in the family, he was immune to discipline. Or maybe he tried, but he just couldn’t control himself. Whatever way it went down, Jilly Sappone became a royal pain in the ass. He fought with everybody, killed at least three people, though …”

Moodrow, as he picked up his glass, saw Betty out of the corner of his eye. She was standing in the doorway, her face a closed, neutral mask. He started to get up, thought better of it, suddenly realized that this is what he’d been waiting for all along. That Betty Haluka, unlike himself, wasn’t obliged to say, “No.”

M
OODROW, AS HE WAITED
for Betty to find a glass, to fill it with wine, to take a seat at the table, to absorb the story Leonora Higgins patiently repeated, cursed himself for the manipulative cop bastard he actually was. He knew that Betty, who’d risked her own life to save a child, then stayed in that child’s life through the intervening years, would, at the very least, refuse to decide for him. He knew that if he kept his own expression close to indifference, let the mask announce that it was no big deal, that he’d heard it all before, she’d eventually confuse the fate of Theresa-Marie Kalkadonis with the fate of her cousin, Marilyn. As if preserving the life of the child would save the adult.

It went exactly as Moodrow expected. Betty, confronted with the utterly irrational, asked herself an obvious question: Why had Jilly Sappone kidnapped an innocent child? That question led to a second and a third. Why did Marilyn, at age fifty-three, run head-on into a drunk speeding in the wrong direction on the Santa Monica Freeway? Marilyn who’d kept all those appointments with the gynecologist, taken the yearly mammograms, quit smoking, switched to a low-fat diet, jogged every other day through the southern California smog.

Unbidden, a line from an old Neil Young song floated up into her mind: “Helpless, helpless, helpless.” Just like a child in the hands of Jilly Sappone.

“What do
you
want to do, Stanley?”

Moodrow, already prepared, took a deep breath, then lied through his teeth. “There’s not much I
can
do.” He turned slightly, addressed himself to Leonora Higgins. “You say I know all the players and you’re right. I actually went to school with Carmine Stettecase. But the local cops know the players, too. Ditto for the feds who must’ve been called in on the kidnapping. The problem, for everybody, is that the players are bad guys. Why would they talk to me?”

Higgins toyed with a silver ring on the forefinger of her right hand. She was pretty sure that Moodrow wanted the job, that they were going through some kind of ritual. Her role, as she understood it, was to play along, make the capture of Jilly Sappone little more than handing out a traffic summons. She looked across the table at Betty, then cursed Moodrow, then cursed herself.

“The Department of Corrections was supposed to notify Ann Kalkadonis before releasing Jilly Sappone. They didn’t and now Ann doesn’t trust law enforcement. It’s really that simple.”

“Did she happen to mention why Jilly Sappone went to her apartment, what Sappone was after?”

“No.”

“Did she tell you she ratted him out fifteen years ago? That she passed over his bloodstained clothing?”

“No.”

Moodrow looked down at his empty glass, decided against a refill. “Let’s back up. Make it, say, five or six years before Sappone went up for the murder. Carmine Stettecase, who’d been protecting Jilly, finally decided that enough was enough, that Jilly Sappone was out of control, bad for business. Standard mob procedure demanded that Carmine eliminate his problem, but Jilly was half-assed related. I mean, how can Carmine live in the same house with his son’s mother-in-law if he whacks the nephew she raised from five years old? No, what Carmine did was tell Jilly to get out of New York, that he was fired. And what Jilly did was get drunk and beat the crap out of a cabdriver who wouldn’t take him to Brooklyn. The cabdriver, a Russian immigrant who didn’t know enough about the Land of Opportunity to fear Jilly Sappone, said he was willing to testify.

“Now, what I’m telling you here is a story I got in bits and pieces from my snitches, but this part of it rings true. If Carmine Stettecase wanted to save Jilly Sappone, who couldn’t make bail, he would’ve had somebody pay the cabdriver a visit. That’s what everybody in the DA’s office expected. Only Carmine never made a move and Jilly went upstate, did two years of a six-year bit, settled down in Philadelphia when he got out. The way I heard it, Carmine broke out the champagne the day of the sentencing.

“Now, move forward a few years, to maybe nine months before Jilly got popped for the murder. Suddenly, he turns up on the Lower East Side with a wife—her name, back then, was Annunziata—and a kid. Both of them, the wife and the kid, are beaten so bad they look like cockroaches just before the shoe comes down. Not that either one of them complains. No, what they do is take it, try to hide the bruises, stay inside most of the time. They give us—meaning, the cops
and
the social workers—an excuse to look the other way.

“Jilly, of course, was as crazy as ever, the kind of mutt citizens cross the street to avoid. What I figured, at the time, was that he’d self-destruct before long and that’s exactly what happened. One day, a stiff—later identified as Alfonse Chavez, convicted hijacker—turned up in an alley near Grand and Ludlow, dead from a single .22-caliber round. We naturally made it for an execution, pure and simple, the kind of homicide where you do the scutwork for a few days, then pass it off to a task force. In this case, Organized Crime.

“But then, miracle of miracle, a witness comes forward. One Harold ‘Buster’ Levy, owner of Levy Plumbing Supply, known to be a loan shark and connected to Carmine Stettecase, swears that he saw Jilly Sappone kill Alfonse Chavez. Buster claims that he was in his shop, located fifty feet from the crime scene, having sex with a housewife named Carol Pierce when he heard loud voices outside. Being that it was after hours, he naturally took a peek.

“Three hours later, Annunziata Sappone comes into the Seven with a set of bloody clothes—shirt, jacket, pants, underwear—says her husband asked her to wash the blood out, but she couldn’t do it. Plus, she’ll testify in open court.

“A gift from God, right? Up to and including Carol Pierce, who remembers the incident without any encouragement, and a third witness who wanders into the precinct two days later. Even Jilly eventually saw the light. He took a plea, fifteen to life instead of twenty-five, and justice was done.”

Moodrow stopped abruptly. His head was starting to throb again, a matter, he decided, of pure conscience. And the funny part was the guilt he felt at that moment had nothing to do with his sympathy for Betty. No, his feelings were genuine; he was determined to support her through the bad times, wanted to protect her, though he knew that was impossible. Unfortunately, another side of him needed to track Jilly Sappone, to pursue him, bring him down, hold his bloody head aloft. And that particular desire, despite his pounding head, was closer to lust than anything else he could name.

“Do you think Jilly was framed?” Not surprisingly, the question came from Betty, who’d spent most of her working life defending criminals.

“Not by us. I said it was a gift
from
God.” Moodrow, on impulse, splashed another inch of bourbon into his glass. “I didn’t say we
played
God.”

“What about Carmine Stettecase?” Leonora asked. “Could he have set it up?”

Moodrow waved the question away. “He didn’t try to stop it, which amounts to the same thing. Don’t forget, Buster Levy worked for Carmine. Still does, for that matter. Leonora, you didn’t mention any homicides. I take it Buster Levy is still among the living.”

“They worked him over, Stanley, but he’s alive.”

“Why?”

“Why?”

“Yeah, why didn’t Jilly kill Buster Levy? You think he didn’t know how? Or maybe he couldn’t bring himself to pull the trigger?” The questions were purely rhetorical and Moodrow continued without a pause. “Jilly wants Carmine to know what’s coming. He left Buster alive to spread the news. It’s that simple.”

“What about Ann?” Leonora leaned over the table. After twenty years in law enforcement, she loved to talk up a case. It was one of the few pure pleasures the job afforded. “Sappone didn’t kill her, either.”

“He did worse. He took her child.” Moodrow, tired of staring down into his glass, raised it to his mouth and drank. “Did you get anything on his partner? It has to be someone he knew in prison.”

“Not yet. But what I can do, if you want to come in on this, is have the robbery and the assaults transferred over to Jim Tilley. That would give you access.”

Moodrow stifled the urge to smile. Leonora had set it up nicely. “That brings me back to the original question. What, exactly, am I supposed to do about Jilly Sappone that the locals, the feds, and Carmine Stettecase
can’t
do?”

Betty Haluka supplied the answer Moodrow expected. Somehow, it didn’t please him all that much.

“Maybe Ann just needs to know that somebody’s on her side, committed to her and only her.”

“That’s a good part of it,” Leonora said. “But she’s also convinced that Jilly’s coming back to get her and the daughter they had together. Myself, I don’t see any way that can happen. Ann will remain under police guard while she’s in the hospital and be transferred to a safe house on Long Island when she’s discharged.”

“How many daughters are we talking about here?” Betty asked. “How can Sappone come back for a daughter he’s already kidnapped?”

“Theresa-Marie, the child Sappone took, is the daughter of Ann and her second husband, Paul Kalkadonis. Theresa, of course, was born long after Sappone went to jail. Sappone’s own child, Patricia, is eighteen years old. She was away at Boston University when Jilly showed up.”

Betty organized the information in her memory, then pushed her chair away from the table. “I’ve still got some packing to do.” She stood up, reached across the table to embrace Leonora, turned back to Moodrow. “Are you going to take the job, Stanley? It doesn’t sound like it’ll amount to much.”