Shamrock Alley (10 page)

“I want that witness relocation after this thing’s done. Me and my kid—we want outta here. I could never live here again.”

“We can get you a change of address …”

“Fuck that—you don’t know these animals.” Her voice rose slightly and cracked. She was conscious of this and quickly brought her voice back down to a whisper. “Change of address won’t do no good. I want out of this city altogether. I can put you right in the middle of this insanity, throw you right in with the sharks, but I want to know that you’re gonna do right by me and my kid, that you’re gonna be able to get us both out.”

“Okay, sure. We can work something out.”

“Once you meet these guys, you’ll understand.”

Some realization occurred to her then, and she turned and dug her wallet from her purse. She pulled open the snap that held it closed, shuffled through a wad of receipts, and produced a plastic accordion of small photographs. Tressa delicately laid the accordion out along the table and slid it over in front of John so he could see the photographs.

“There,” she said, “that’s Meghan.”

“She’s very cute.”

“She was born not breathing and too small. Doctors had to revive her. I thought she was going to die.” Tressa Walker smiled to herself. She ran a finger across one of the pictures. “I ain’t all bad,” she said.

T
HE NEXT MORNING
, J
OHN FOUND
B
ILL
K
ERSH
tucked away in a dark corner of the Secret Service’s library, two levels below ground. It was a small, square, catacomb-like room with poor lighting and no windows. The walls groaned with the weight of numerous leather-bound textbooks and boxes of forgotten files, their musty, ancient smells infused throughout the air. And another smell, this one more foreign and somehow more profound: the sour-sweet stench of age-old sweat, dried and clinging to the air like flapping underwear dangling from a clothesline. Water pipes ran too shallow here, forced up against the walls by incompetent design, interrupting the silence periodically with sounds of running water or toilets flushing upstairs. In the past several years, with the modernization of the government’s technology, the Secret Service’s underground library had become obsolete. Several times someone had suggested the library—dubbed “the pit” by the new wave of greenhorns—be revamped, that they should tear down the bookshelves to make room for a bank of new computer terminals, though nothing ever came from such suggestions. And although no one could ever say for certain why the library had never been done away with, most would assume it had something to do with man’s veneration of all things old and unserviceable—and, fittingly, its only occupants from time to time were those agents themselves who, on occasion, felt a certain kinship with such antiquation.

This morning, Kersh was the pit’s only patron. He sat awkwardly in his chair with his back toward the door, curled over a table with his arms folded at his chest. His head was down, his eyes shut, a book opened in front of him. To anyone who happened to glimpse him seated there, Kersh would have appeared deep in concentration. However, in truth, Kersh had been sleeping for several hours, his mind and body detached from time.

“Bill.” John came up behind him, pulled out a chair, but did not sit down. Kersh stirred but did not open his eyes. Grinning, John drummed his fists along the tabletop. Kersh jerked, blinked his eyes, and stared confusedly at both John and his surroundings until his senses returned. “You been down here all morning?”

Kersh rubbed his eyes. “Just going over some things.”

“Don’t you ever go home? It smells like a urinal down here.”

“You should smell my apartment.”

“Listen,” John said, sitting down, “I got a call from Tressa Walker last night, met her down at some bar on the West Side. I don’t know what got into her, but she said she wants to help us. She said she’s got an in with Deveneau’s suppliers, two Irish guys from Hell’s Kitchen.”

Kersh looked up. He looked very old and pale in the basement lighting. “She told us she didn’t know where Deveneau got his money …”

“She lied,” John said.

“Why the change of heart?” Kersh asked.

“Who knows? Maybe she likes my aftershave.”

“Who’re the two guys?” Kersh asked.

“Two young guys—Mickey O’Shay and Jimmy Kahn.”

“They don’t sound familiar. These guys are Deveneau’s source?”

“According to Tressa. I ran their names through our files, found nothing on them.”

“I’ll run the names with NYPD. If they’re hanging with Deveneau, they’ll have a record. What’s the situation?”

“The whole thing seems easy. She said she’d take me in, have me meet with this O’Shay guy.”

“Biddleman will be a problem,” Kersh said without expression.

“Screw Biddleman.”

“John …”

“Biddleman said stay away from Deveneau, right? We’re not going to Deveneau. We were looking for a break, and we got it. I’m not gonna flush this case twice.”

“Biddleman meant Tressa, too.”

“Well, he didn’t say that to me. Not specifically.”

“Just the same, let’s keep this quiet until we feel it out. Has the meeting been set yet?”

“Tressa’s gotta talk with O’Shay first, see if he’ll meet me.” He ran his eyes across Kersh’s book. “What are you doing?”

For what seemed like a long while, Kersh did not answer. Both his hands were pressed against the wooden tabletop, palms flat. His fingernails were thick and stained a red-yellow from tobacco. Deep bruise-colored grooves under his eyes professed the man’s lack of sleep.

He’s been up all night
, John thought.
Hell, I think he’s still wearing the same clothes from yesterday
.

“Come with me,” Kersh said finally, his voice dry. “I want to show you something.”

Kersh’s desk looked like a snow globe someone had turned upside down and shaken. Arbitrary papers littered the surface while a mob of empty and half-empty Styrofoam coffee cups had congregated at one corner of the desk like street hustlers in a bad mood. Flecks of tobacco leaves looked frozen in mid-scatter, like bugs. Numerous cards and plastic bags containing seized counterfeit bills served as the icing on this cake, and as Kersh led John to the desk, Kersh lined up these bills for John to see. John watched his hands work and thought that Bill Kersh’s hands actually looked
tired
, if such a thing were possible.

“Sometimes cases are made at the desk and not on the streets, John. Here—this is what came in all last week,” Kersh said, still busy organizing the counterfeit money. “You see anything here? Any common denominator?”

“What do you mean?”

“Look at them.”

John did. He had seen the counterfeit bills plenty of times before, had gone over and over them just as Kersh had, just as the rest of the squad had. Looking at them again, he could see nothing new.

“I don’t get it,” he said. “What is it?”

Kersh grabbed one of the bills. Carefully, he refolded it along the lines just as it had been folded in the past. He folded it lengthwise—horizontally—in an accordion-style fold: once in half, then in half again …

“What’s this look like?” Kersh asked once he’d finished folding the note.

“Huh?”

“Look at it! What’s it look like to you?”

“I don’t know. It looks like a flattened straw …”

“No, no.” To John’s surprise, Kersh chuckled under his breath and blinked his eyes twice in rapid succession. A fine dark stubble had begun to creep up his jawline.
“Look.”
He fluttered the bill in front of John’s face. “Who folds bills like this?”

“I don’t—” But then it hit him. “Wait…”

“Yes.” Kersh was smiling, nodding. “Strippers.” His smile grew wider, yet his eyes still looked dead. “This is how a guy folds his money before slipping it into a stripper’s g-string.”

John plucked the folded bill from Kersh’s hands. As if to verify what he already understood, he unfolded the bill, examined the creases, then folded it again.

“See that?” Kersh continued. “It even folds once down the middle, too. Right in half. See?”

“Yeah …”

“Smell it.”

John brought it up to his nose, inhaled. “Perfume,” he said.

“There’re five bills that came in last week, all with those same folds. See them? Here—” He pointed to another bill. “Here—” And another. “And here—here. All folded the same way, all smelling like a stripper.”

John leaned over the desk, looking more closely at the bills. “Where’d they come from?”

“Just where you’d think a stripper with a lot of money would shop—expensive boutiques, lingerie shops, a fancy restaurant or two. She passed a fake hundred in each place.” Kersh shifted through a mess of other papers, produced a folder, opened it. He fished out an index card with another phony hundred stapled to it and handed it to John. “I did some backtracking last night. This one came in this week from First National Bank.”

“It’s folded the same way.”

“Clerk at the bank said a customer named Heidi Carlson deposited it, along with other cash, into her account.”

“Let me guess …”

“Carlson works weekdays at someplace called the Black Box, near Times Square. Two of our guys rolled into the club after we got the note, asked her about the money—where she got it, could she remember, the whole nine yards. She said she gets paid in cash and assumed that’s where it came from. Her boss verified that’s how he pays the girls, said he takes in a lot of hundreds every night. Being it was one note and she was depositing it into her own account, our boys figured she got stuck.”

“Well unless her boss is slipping her pay into her pants, she’s full of shit.” He tossed the hundred onto Kersh’s desk. “Very good, Billy-boy. I’m impressed. Who were the two guys who went out on this?”

“Steve and Charlie.”

“They missed it,” John said.

“It’s all in the training,” Kersh said. His right eyelid twitched, as if wanting to wink. “After work, they hit the gym. Me? I hit the bars.”

T
HE
C
LOVERLEAF WAS A SMALL BAR ON
the corner of Tenth Avenue and West 57
^th
Street, just a few blocks south of Fordham University. It was a dark, crumbling establishment run by two middle-aged Irish brothers named McKean—one more twisted, hunched, and grotesque than the other. There was a small passageway behind the bar, just before the hallway leading to the storage room that communicated with an underground gambling facility very few people knew existed. Despite its proximity to the university, the Cloverleaf did not cater to students, and on the rare occasion some unwitting underage pupil wandered into the place to see if he could coax a bottle of bourbon from the bartender, one look at the Cloverleaf’s clientele turned him quickly around and back out into the street.

There was no sign outside the bar, but Tressa Walker knew the place. She pushed open the front door and slipped inside, thankful to be out of the cold and off the street.

A blast of warm air struck her. Without looking around, she crossed over to the bar and sat on the stool closest to the front door. She kept her eyes trained on the bar, her hands—palms down—directly in front of her. Though she hadn’t taken a good look around the place yet, she had seen a number of people stuffed in the dark crevices of the room and was confident of Mickey O’Shay’s presence.

As if I could almost smell him
. To her astonishment, the thought caused her to break a smile.

The bartender slid in front of her. He was big and muscular with a faint pink scar twisting down the left side of his face. “You need a drink?”

“Guinness.”

The bartender filled a glass halfway, waited a full minute as the foam settled, then filled the glass the rest of the way. “Anything else?” he said, resting the glass in front of her.

She touched it with two fingers. It felt warm. “No.”

“Kitchen’s closed.”

“All right.”

There was a mirror behind the bar, but it was too cluttered with stickers and decals to give good reflection. Tressa sipped her beer, swallowed mostly foam, and turned her head slightly to glimpse the other occupants scattered about the bar. Trying to seem casual, she scanned faces and finally recognized Mickey O’Shay seated with two other men at a table toward the back. They were in mid-joke, with Mickey setting up the punch line, his hands motioning in front of his face, his eyes animated. She watched the table just long enough to be certain it was him, then turned back to her beer. She was good at reading people, good at comprehending a situation. Though she didn’t know Mickey too well, she knew him well enough to know the best way to play him.

Mickey’s companions remained at the table for another twenty minutes, laughing at dirty jokes and turning their beer glasses upside down with mechanical exactitude before struggling to their feet and lurching toward the front door. They were older than Mickey and dressed in nondescript brown suits. One of the men leered at her before stumbling out into the street.

Again she turned her head back to the table. Mickey was finishing off his own beer while turning the empty glasses on their sides with his free hand. She watched as he rolled one of the empty glasses back and forth beneath his palm across the top of the table.