Night and Day (Book 3): Bandit's Moon (16 page)

“Oh, they’re all interested. Some
just take a little more convincin’, that’s all.” He smiled again. “They
don’t know what they’re missin’ till they get a taste of Terry.”

“So is that what you do for Don
Alfredo? You’re a rapist?”

“Oh, man,” he said. “Who said
anythin’ about rape? That’s like a legal word. I’m talkin’ ‘bout
love.”

“You’re going to be talking through
a mouthful of broken teeth if you don’t answer the question,” I said. “What
do you do for Don Alfredo?”

“Right now I just sit at Bedford
and look at them pictures they send over,” he said. “Before my
ese
got hosed, I was mostly a look-out guy.”

“Look out for what?”

“Heat, man,” he said. “Any kinda
trouble that would rumble Ralphie’s gig.”

“What was Ralphie’s
gig?”

Terry sneered and looked at Mario.
“Is this dude for real?”

“I’m not going to say this again,”
I said, raising my voice just a little bit. “I ask. You answer. No smart
remarks. No commentary. You’re talking to me. Only me.”

“You want to pay attention to the
man,” Mario rasped.

“Yeah, sure, I’m down,” Terry said.
He looked back at me. “Ralphie was a smash and grab dude. He’d steal
anything that was worth a buck or two, but he really liked jewelry. Had a
fence over in midtown give him top dollar for good stuff.”

A petty thief and a rapist. That
was all the background I really needed. Or wanted.

“Tell me about the day Ralphie got
killed,” I said.

“Yeah, that was a sad day, man,” he
said. “Me and Ralphie were lookin’ to make a nice score, ‘nough to take the
rest of the week off. Went to this little jeweler on Hampton.”

“In midtown?”

“Yeah, midtown,” he said. “We both
used to run in midtown for Don Carlo before Ralphie came over here. They
had nice stuff in that shop, you know, no cheap shit, which we knew ‘cause
we done hit it once a couple of years ago. Old Jew and his wife. Old man
had a beard and them dreadlocks, you know?”

Pe’ot. Side-locks. Probably Hasidic
or at least an Orthodox Jew.

“Yeah,” I said. “You do scores
outside of eastside?”

“Well, sometimes,” Terry said.
“Since the cops took Don Carlo on a ride, midtown is wide open. Nobody
gonna slap your hand if you do a job there.”

“Okay, so you hit this place on
Hampton. How did it go down?”

Terry shrugged. “Same as always. I
stayed outside, Ralphie went in and did the deed. I think the old man
recognized him or somethin’, ‘cause he started yelling in Jewish and
Ralphie had to smack him one to shut him up. Tossed the shit in a swag bag
and we split.”

“Then?”

He shrugged again. “Then we beat
feet back to eastside, whadda ya think?”

I stared at him silently. Just to
help him get his head straight. Then I said, “Tell me about The
Hole.”

“Yeah, The Hole,” he said. “See,
Ralphie didn’t like to be carryin’ a lot of worthless shit after a score.
So he had different places in the neighborhood where he could go through
what we got, keep the good stuff, toss the rest.” He paused. “Ralphie had
the eye for jewelry, learned it from his pop. He could spot the expensive
shit. Coulda been a jeweler himself.”

“The Hole,” I said
again.

“Oh, yeah. One of Ralphie’s places
was over by The Hole, by Sampson where all the bushes and shit are all
grown up. Like a fuckin’ jungle in there. Path to a little clearin’ in
there, where Ralphie could check out the score and do his
thing.”

“Did you go in there with
him?”

Terry shook his head. “Nah, it’s
all just sparkly shit to me. Ralphie looks it over and dumps the garbage
while I chill out on the street, watchin’ out for cops. If I see some, I’m
supposed to take off runnin’, make ‘em think I done somethin’, so they come
after me. Then lose ‘em and meet back up with Ralphie at
Bedford.”

“Did you see any cops that
day?”

He shook his head. “Nah, it was
dead.” He smiled. “But I did see a fine bitch walkin’ by on the other side
of the street. She was givin’ me the eye.”

“Then when happened?”

“Nothin’, man,” he said. “I was
workin’. Couldn’t be chasin’ after the pussy when I was doing a job with
Ralphie.”

Terry Legs was both repellent and
stupid. It wasn’t a good combination.

“What happened with Ralphie?” I
asked, putting a little edge in my voice.

“Some mothafuck shot him up,” he
said. “Whadda ya think?”

“Specifics, Terry.”

“I dunno. I wasn’t there. I’m out
on the street, scopin’ out the trim, when I hear some loud talkin’, angry,
comin’ from back inside the bushes where Ralphie was. The bitch takes off
in a hurry and I go see what’s goin’ on.”

“Who was talking?
Ralphie?”

“Yeah, him and somebody else. See,
Ralphie and I had a thing. If he got in trouble, he wasn’t gonna start
hollerin’ for help or nothin’, he was just gonna talk real loud so I could
hear it and know he needed backup.”

“Go on.”

“So I sneak along the path, you
know, cause I don’t know what’s goin’ on in there and I wanna get the drop
on whoever’s back there with Ralphie. And I get to the end and take a peek
into the clearin’, and I see Ralphie standin’ with his hands in the air,
the swag bag on the ground, and some
pendejo
with an AK standin’ in
front of him. Then the fuck just opens up on Ralphie. Don’t say nothin’,
just starts shootin’. Bam bam bam! It’s like a fuckin’ movie or somethin’,
man. Ralphie was dancin’ and jerkin’ all around while the bullets are
hittin’ him, and then he just drops.”

I stared at him silently for a
moment, then said, “And what did you do?”

“What was I gonna do, man? Get all
shot up like Ralphie? If I was holdin’ I woulda shot the fuck, you know?
But I wasn’t. We went clean when we was out doin’ our thing. Ya can maybe
talk away some swag to the cops. Can’t talk away a gun.”

“So you just stood there and let
the guy kill your friend.”

“Whatever, man,” Terry said
angrily. “You wasn’t there.”

“Then what happened?”

“Dude sticks the AK under his coat.
It was one of them little ones, the portable jobs, so you couldn’t see it.
And then he walks, all casual, through the bushes on the other side of the
clearin’. So I give him a little bit of a head start, and then I go after
him.”

“Why?”

“Why do ya think? To find out where
he’s goin’, so I can tell Mario. Then we go get the fucker.”

“So then...”

“So then I sneak through the bushes
and I see him talking to somebody else, over near the fence, big
gorilla-lookin’ prick, bald dude with a beard. They talk for a couple of
minutes, then the gorilla goes through a hole in the fence and down into
The Hole and the fuck that shot Ralphie goes walkin’ in the other
direction. I give the gorilla enough time to get out of sight, then I
follow the fuck, real casual. I stop on the corner at 58th and watch him go
in the front door of the Floresta, then I beat feet back to Bedford and
call Mario, tell him what happened.”

Had Ralphie seen something he
wasn’t supposed to see, or was it just wrong place, wrong time? Schleu
almost certainly had something going on at The Hole, but I wasn’t going to
find out what it was from Terry Legs. And as much as I would have liked to
go over to Samson Street, take a look at where Ralphie had been killed, I
wasn’t looking to have the same thing happen to me.

There was one other thing,
though.

“What happened to the swag bag,
Terry?” I asked.

“The swag bag,” he repeated. I saw
his eyes dart in Mario’s direction for a split second, then back at me.
“Fucker that hosed Ralphie took it.”

“You didn’t mention that when you
described what happened,” I said. “You said when you got there, it was on
the ground and the guy had an AK on Ralphie. Then you said he shot Ralphie,
stuck the AK under his coat, and left.”

“Yeah, he picked up the bag and
stuck it in his pocket,” Terry said quickly. “Then he left.” He paused and
looked at Mario. “Remember, I told ya that when I called ya.”

Mario was silent for a moment.
“Yeah, that’s what you said.”

Terry was lying, and Mario knew it
too. But the fact that Terry had taken the bag and sold the jewelry inside,
maybe to Ralphie’s fence, without giving Don Alfredo a taste, was Mario’s
problem, not mine.

It did tell me something though.
Ralphie’s death hadn’t come from a random encounter. If Schleu’s guy was
just taking a walk, ran into Ralphie and decided to shoot him, at the very
least he would have checked what was in the swag bag. And when he got a
look, he would have taken it with him. He wouldn’t just leave a bag full of
jewelry lying there. The Resistance can always use a little extra
money.

The shooter was working perimeter
security for whatever was going on at The Hole. Spotted an intruder. Killed
the intruder. Then went back to the Floresta to report it. Whatever Ralphie
was doing there wasn’t important. Whatever he had with him wasn’t
important. He was there, so he had to die.

“You got any other questions, Mr.
Welles?” Mario asked.

I was just about to reply when an
older guy stuck his head in the open door behind Terry and said, “Hey,
Mario, we just printed the latest batch of pictures from Acorns. You want
‘em?”

“Give ‘em to Legs,” he said. “Save
us the trip to Bedford.”

The older guy passed them to Terry,
then left. There were five or six of them. Terry studied each, then shook
his head. “Nah, he ain’t here.”

He hesitated for a second, then
handed them to me. I glanced at them. Schleu, standing in front of the
door, talking to people. Sentries huddled in the cold. I was just about to
set them on top of the earlier pile when something caught my eye. Or
actually, someone.

She was in the crowd in front of
Schleu, a couple back from the front. Nancy Haynes.

Nancy was like a lot of people on
the east side before the war. Good people who’d been dealt a bad hand. In
Nancy’s case, it was a hard-drinking, hard-hitting husband who hadn’t had
steady work for years. And Nancy had a bit of an alcohol problem
herself.

The cops in the Domestic Violence
unit in Violent Crimes knew Nancy pretty well, but they could never get her
to press charges on her husband. My only encounter with her was when
somebody snatched her purse from the counter of a liquor store. She was
more upset that she couldn’t pay for her booze than anything
else.

She’d been pretty flirty with me,
but I brushed it off. Word around 83
^rd
Street was that she’d
banged half the guys in the station and was working on the other half. And
even if I’d found that more appealing than I did, I had a steady girl at
the time, a pre-school teacher who was thrilled to be dating a cop. In time
that thrill went away and she moved on.

I looked at Nancy in the picture.
She hadn’t changed all that much in the seven years or so since I’d seen
her. A little thinner, a little older, a little more used up. But she’d
looked pretty used up seven years ago, so she wasn’t doing bad.

What I didn’t understand is why was
she there. People change, and a lot of people changed in a big way when the
Vees came. But the violent, aggressive agenda of the Humans First Front
didn’t seem like a good fit for Nancy. She’d been passive, if anything too
passive, too willing to let her husband treat her like a punching bag while
she wrapped herself in cheap Scotch and meaningless one-night stands with
cops.

Nancy might be able to tell me what
the hell was going on in the Floresta. If I could find her. If she wasn’t
still inside the Floresta. If she wasn’t part of it.

I put the picture aside and looked
at Mario. “No, I’m good. If I get any more ideas, I know where to find
Terry.” I looked at him. “On Bedford, right?”

“Every day,” he said. “Waitin’ for
the next batch of pictures.”

“Get outta here, Terry,” Mario
said. “Have Filippo give ya a ride back to Bedford.”

“Right, Mario,” he said. He turned
and left without a word or look in my direction.

“He’s a real charmer,” I muttered
to nobody in particular.

Mario sighed. “Terry was tight
with Ralphie,” he said. “Grew up together. Terry’s a piece of shit, but
Ralphie looked out for him. Barozie let Ralphie take him along on jobs.
When he sent Ralphie over here with Don Alfredo, Legs was part of the
package. And Ralphie was a good boy, good earner, so the Don took the good
with the bad.”

“I guess Ralphie didn’t have any
smarts when it came to his friends.”

“Who does,” Mario said. “Right now,
Don Alfredo needs him to point out the
strunz
who whacked Ralphie.
After that...” He shook his head. “I don’t think we’re gonna be needing
Terry Legs after that.”

Poor Terry. Couldn’t happen to a
nicer piece of shit.