Shoot the Moon (28 page)

First thing Monday morning - which in lawyer terms means any time after nine - Assistant District Maggie Kennedy gets a surprise visit from Detectives Ray Abbruzzo and Daniel Riley. They’ve even brought her a container of coffee.

“And what brings you gentlemen here so early?” she asks them. “Did Michael Goodman announce on his phone that he’s the Unabomber?”

“No,” Abbruzzo says. “But he’s getting ready to unload his entire stash.”

“And what might that consist of? An ounce of sinsemilla?”

“How about nineteen kilos of heroin?” Riley asks her.

“And remember,” Abbruzzo adds, “our information is that it’s
pure.”

“Right,” Kennedy says. “And that was the anonymous identified dead kid who told you that, if I remember correctly.”

Abbruzzo reaches into his jacket pocket and comes out with an audiocassette. “Listen for yourself,” he says, tossing it onto Kennedy’s desk.

Kennedy pries off the lid of her coffee container and sits down. Out of habit, she blows on the coffee to cool it before taking the first sip. It turns out to be an unnecessary precaution. “Set it up,” she says, pointing to a tape player by the window.

Soon all three of them are seated with their coffee containers, listening to the voice of Michael Goodman, aka the Mole, as he speaks with an outside caller who identifies himself as Vinnie.

“What was that last thing he said?” Riley asks.

“Nothing,” Abbruzzo says. He’s just realized for the first time why they missed the meeting Saturday, but now isn’t the time he wants to talk about it.

But Riley doesn’t get the message. “Did he say ‘together’?” he asks. “Fuckin’ guy’s always
mumbling.
Was that ‘together’ or ‘two’s better’? Play that last part again, will ya, Ray?”

“Later,” Abbruzzo says.

If Riley’s a bit slow to comprehend things this morning, Kennedy isn’t. “You missed the meet,” she says. It’s spoken somewhere between a question and a statement.

“Yup.” Abbruzzo nods.

“The guy’s so fuckin’
sneaky,
” Riley explains. “You just heard how he changed the time at the last second, just to throw us off?”

Kennedy and Abbruzzo exchange glances.

“Now what?” she asks him.

“I was hoping we could get an order to bug his place.”

“So
that
explains the coffee.” Kennedy smiles.

Michael Goodman figures the money orders he mailed out Friday morning should’ve arrived at their destinations by now, so while Kelly reads
Stuart Little
to Carmen, he calls the MRI place and schedules the new test, the one with contrast.

“How about tomorrow at three?” they ask him.

“Tomorrow at three will be good.”
Good
being a relative term, he tells himself. He decides he won’t tell Kelly until tomorrow. No reason for her to have to think about it all day and spend half the night worrying herself sick.

He looks over at her. She’s sitting in Carmen’s lap now, listening as Carmen takes her turn reading Kelly’s favorite part.

“In the loveliest town of all,” Carmen reads, “where the houses were white and high and the elm trees were green and higher than the houses, where the front yards were wide and pleasant and the back yards were busy and worth finding out about, where the streets sloped down to the stream and the stream flowed quietly under the bridge, where the lawns ended in orchards and the orchards ended in fields and the fields ended in pastures and the pastures climbed the hill and disappeared over the top toward the wonderful wide sky, in this loveliest of all towns Stuart stopped to get a drink of sarsaparilla.”

“What’s sarsaparilla?” Kelly asks, though Goodman’s told her each time they’ve come to the word.

“It’s what people used to drink long ago,” Carmen explains. “Way back, before there was Juicy Juice.”

Composing the affidavit for the bug turns out to be harder than any of them anticipated. Like the wiretap order, the bug order is an eavesdropping warrant. The first application had to establish, among other things, that conventional investigative techniques had failed and were likely to continue to fail. Now this second application must demonstrate that conventional techniques still aren’t enough,
even when coupled with the wiretap.

“How do we get over
that
hurdle?” Kennedy wonders. “Especially when you bring me a tape that proves he
talks
on the phone?”

“He’s stopped talking?” Abbruzzo tries.

“Yeah,” Riley agrees. “The Mole muted up.”

Kennedy ignores him. “How can you be so sure?” she asks Abbruzzo.

“He said so. We heard him say it on the phone. ‘No more talkin’ on the phone,’ he said.”

“Do you have that conversation on tape?”

“No,” Abbruzzo says, looking her squarely in the eye. “We were right in the middle of changing tapes when he said that. Missed it.” Ray Abbruzzo takes special pride in his ability to maintain eye contact at all times. Once he convinced a murder suspect that in addition to being a detective, he was also an ordained Catholic priest. Got the guy’s confession, too. Then, at the suppression hearing in court, he denied that he’d ever said that. Under oath. All the time, looking the defense lawyer right in the eye.

The papers are drawn up by noon, then approved and signed off on by 12:30.

“Any chance we can get some judge to do this before the one o’clock break?” Abbruzzo asks.

“If we hurry,” Kennedy says.

“Some judge” turns out to be the Honorable Leslie Crocker Snyder, who sits in part 88 and presides over some of the most serious narcotics cases - and the murders, assaults, and gun possessions that seem to accompany them - in the court system.

Judge Snyder is an attractive woman with long blond hair that may or may not get occasional help from a colorist, now that she’s reached fifty. She is smart and hard-working. A former prosecutor - some of her critics would argue that the
former
could be dispensed with - she’s made no secret of her aspirations to become police commissioner or district attorney, and she will appear on just about any panel show that has a camera and a spare microphone. Off the bench, she is warm and friendly, displaying a ready sense of humor that includes the ability to laugh at herself. But as soon as she puts on her black robe, the warmth dissipates, the friendliness disappears, and the humor develops a decidedly caustic aspect to it: She becomes a defendant’s worst nightmare. Accordingly, she is a prosecutor’s best friend, and the judge to see when you need an eavesdropping order signed. Even at quarter to one.

Maggie Kennedy, being an experienced assistant district attorney in the Special Narcotics Prosecutor’s office, knows all this, so it’s no accident that she’s brought Ray Abbruzzo to part 88.

Judge Snyder reads the papers carefully. She wants to make sure that the allegations in them add up to probable cause and also demonstrate an exhaustion of conventional investigative techniques. She reads them carefully because, should the bug eventually lead to a major seizure of drugs, she doesn’t want some clever defense lawyer to get those drugs suppressed because the allegations weren’t sufficient.

What she
doesn’t
pause to worry about is whether or not the allegations themselves happen to be
true.
Now, in Judge Snyder’s defense, her particular New York City is some light-years removed from the underbelly inhabited by those who use, sell, or seize illegal drugs; and the possibility that police officers occasionally bend the truth may be truly too difficult for her to fathom. In any event, in Leslie Snyder’s rather narrow interpretation of the law, such an inquiry simply isn’t required of her. The statute permits her to assume the truth of the police officers’ allegations, and she’s delighted to cloak herself with that permission.

Now she signs the order and smiles at Abbruzzo. “Good luck, Detective,” she says.

“I can drop her off at her grandmother’s,” Goodman tells Carmen as he gets ready to leave for work.

“You just
try
it,” Carmen says.

“You just
try
it,” Kelly chimes in.

“On second thought, I don’t think I’ll try it,” Goodman decides.

“I
love
Carmen,” Kelly announces, throwing her arms around Carmen.

“I love you, too, sweetie,” Carmen says, returning the hug so hard that Kelly squeals. They both look over at Goodman.

“I just wish you two would learn to express your feelings a little,” he says. “What do you want for dinner?”

“Pizza!” Kelly shouts.

“Pizza!” Carmen echoes, laughing.

“I guess that’ll teach me to let a couple of kids be in charge,” Goodman says. Then he’s out the door and off to the Bronx.

At the plant, Weems and Sheridan have been joined by two members of the OCCB technical team, DeSimone and Kwon. They’ve been assigned at the request of Detective Abbruzzo, who called in this morning from Maggie Kennedy’s office, the moment she’d agreed to apply for permission to bug the Goodman apartment.

“There goes the Mole,” Sheridan says, lowering his binoculars.

Weems checks his watch. “It’s twelve-twenty-five,” he says. “He’s going to work, won’t be back till seventeen-forty-five. Now if only we could get the girls to leave.”

“How much time do you guys need?” Sheridan asks.

“Studio apartment?” DeSimone asks. “We can be in an’ out in thirty minutes.”

“As long as we don’t have trouble with the locks,” Kwon adds.

“I remember one time we wanted to bug some wiseguy’s home out on Staten Island,” DeSimone says. “Only his old lady would never leave the place. Seems their marriage was falling apart, and she was afraid to go out, thought he might change the locks on her and never let her back in. So finally we had to sneak into the basement, light some newspapers on fire to smoke ‘em out. Then we waited for the firemen to show up, and went in with them. Lucky thing they got there when they did, too, cause the goddamn
paneling
caught on fire. We almost burned the whole fuckin’
house
down!”

They all have a good laugh over that.

It’s business as usual at the Bronx Tire Exchange. Having just worked Friday, Goodman has less to do than he ordinarily would. He brings things up-to-date, then uses the latitude given him by Manny to set up yet another checking account. This one he calls Larus International and opens it with $25, which he draws against Bronx Tire Exchange, Special Account. Not much of a balance, but you’ve got to start somewhere. He phones the bank, and because Bronx Tire is a good customer, they promise to have checks and deposit slips printed up the next day and delivered by priority mail.

“So what’ll it be, kiddo?” Carmen asks Kelly. “The park, the zoo, the museum?”

“It’s cold out,” Kelly says. “Have you ever been to the
Planetarium?”

“Never,” Carmen admits. “You?”

“Me, too. Never.”

“Well, put on your space shoes, girl - we’re going where no woman has gone before!”

Kelly finds her sneakers and begins lacing them up. “Is it scary?” she asks.

“I don’t know,” Carmen says. “But if it is, we’ll start screaming, they’ll have to give us the heave-ho, and then we’ll be outa there. Deal?” “Deal,” Kelly agrees.

“Lookathis,” says Sheridan, holding the binoculars, so of course no one else can see.

“What?”

“The kid and the chick are outa the crib.”

“Okay,” Weems says. “You take ‘em. And if they get more than a half an hour away, call us and let us know, and we’ll go in.”

“How come I never get the fun jobs?” Sheridan whines.

“‘Cause I got six years and fifty IQ points on you, that’s why.”

“Great. You guys get to sneak into the Molehill, while I gotta spend the afternoon freezing my balls off, following the broads.”

The “broads” take the Lexington Avenue bus down to Seventy-Ninth Street, then the crosstown to Central Park West. Kelly spots the dome of the Planetarium from the bus.