Shoot the Moon (29 page)

“There it is!” she shouts.

The good news is that there appears to be no line at the doors. The bad news becomes apparent once they get close enough to read a small sign on the center door.

“The nerve!” Carmen says.

“They could at least say,
‘Sorry,
Closed For Repairs,’” Kelly observes.

“So much for outer space, kiddo. What’s your second choice?”

“How about the museum?” Kelly suggests. “It’s right around the corner.”

“The museum it is,” Carmen says.

As they head back up the walkway, a man in a tan coat is walking toward them. Evidently, they’re not the only ones to be disappointed this day.

“Don’t bother,” Kelly tells him. “It’s
closed.”

“Oh,” says the man. “Thank you.”

The museum is open, and Kelly - who knows every square inch of it - leads Carmen around by the hand, showing her all of her favorite places.

“I wonder what the movie is?” Kelly asks.

“Movie?”

“Yup. They have this giant movie screen, and if you sit up real close, you think you’re part of the movie. Like being in a plane, or underwater. It’s so cool.”

“Then let’s check it out,” Carmen says.

“We’re at the fuckin’
museum.
” Sheridan is talking into a pay phone outside the IMAX Theater. “They’re watching a goddamn
movie.
You guys got all the time you need.”

“Which museum?” Weems asks him.

“The whatchamacallit - the National History.”

“On the West Side? The Museum of Natural History?”

“Yeah,” Sheridan says. “Cost me four-fifty for a cab, too. You shoulda seen the look on the Arab’s face when I jumped in and told him, ‘Follow that bus!’“

“Okay,” Weems says. “We’re going in. You stay with the girls. They decide to rush back home all of a sudden, you do whatever you gotta do to slow them down.”

“Sure thing. I can always throw myself in front of their bus.”

“Not a bad idea,” Weems says.

“Fuck you,” Sheridan says. “I hope the guy’s got a 500-pound pit bull and it bites your black ass off.”

The giant movie screen is featuring a film about Antarctica, and Kelly and Carmen enter a full twenty-five minutes before the three o’clock showing, just so they can race down the aisle and grab seats in the middle of the very front row.

“We’ll go blind,” Carmen complains. “That is, if we don’t die of stiff necks first.”

“This is the only place to sit,” Kelly insists. “Trust me.”

Carmen laughs. “Remind me never to go on a roller-coaster ride with you,” she says.

Gradually, the theater fills up. Almost all of the seats are taken by families or by children accompanied by adults. The one exception seems to be a man in a tan coat, who takes his place in the very last row. Quite clearly, he lacks the benefit of a child to assist him in finding the best vantage point.

At three o’clock, the soundtrack starts and the lights begin to dim. On the giant screen, the image of an emperor penguin appears. It looks startlingly human in its tuxedo feathering, and there are “Ooohs” from the audience.

“Look at the cute penguin!” Kelly whispers.

Thirty rows back, the man in the tan coat can be heard to grumble, “Fuckin’ penguin,” before he’s shushed by those sitting to either side of him.

Harry Weems checks his watch nervously outside the door to Michael Goodman’s apartment, sees it’s 1452. They were able to get into the building by slipping the downstairs lock with a credit card, but the deadbolt lock is too sophisticated for such a primitive technique. Nonetheless, it yields easily enough to David Kwon’s expertise with a set of picks.

Once inside, the three detectives remove their shoes. Though their entry is pursuant to court order and therefore perfectly legal, the last thing they want is to arouse the suspicion of some downstairs neighbor, who might hear intruders and tip off the target of their investigation.

Kwon snaps open a briefcase and begins removing small items.

“No use bugging the phone,” Weems points out. “We’ve already got a tap on it.”

Kwon carries a chair to the center of the room and places it directly underneath the ceiling light fixture. “How about a parasite right here for starters?” he asks.

“Go for it,” Weems agrees. As Kwon stands on the chair, DeSimone hands him a tiny parasite microphone, so called because it draws its power from the electricity that feeds the light. Then he replaces the lightbulb in the fixture with a brand-new long-lasting one of identical wattage. This is a precaution to make it less likely that the bulb will burn out and require changing - and result in the possible detection of the microphone - at any time in the near future.

“Where do you think they talk?” Kwon wonders out loud, taking in the sofa bed, the kitchen wall, and the card table.

“The sofa’s no good,” DeSimone says. “Looks like the kind you open up and make a bed out of.”

They settle on the table. Kwon takes a fully integrated transmitter - a unit the size of a sugar cube, containing both a microphone and a battery - and attaches its adhesive side to the underside of the card table.

“Bathroom?” DeSimone asks.

“Why not?” Kwon says. He finds a magnetic Kel mini-mike and places it on the back side of the pipe leading to the toilet tank.

“This guy farts, you’re going to know it,” DeSimone tells Weems.

Back in the main room, they check to make certain that all three devices are transmitting on the same frequency and that there’s a minimum of static and no chance of feedback.

“We’re outa here,” Kwon says, packing up the briefcase. They slip their shoes back on and relock the door on the way out. Weems checks his watch: 1511. Counting the four minutes it took them to get inside, the entire operation has taken less than twenty minutes.

It’s some time after noon when Big Red wakes up. The hours of a drug dealer tend toward the nocturnal, and Big Red often sleeps until three or four in the afternoon. But something has him up earlier than usual today.

It’s nothing he’s terribly worried about. Things have been going well enough for him lately. No one’s bothered him about the unfortunate accident that took Russell Bradford’s life. His own day in “the system” following his arrest was a small price to pay for an alibi. Hammer and Tito and the rest of his people are behaving themselves. As far as he can tell, nobody’s stealing from him too blatantly.

The something that’s woken Big Red up earlier than usual this Monday comes under the heading of “business opportunity.” He’s found out over the years - and in this business, even a couple of years operating at his level is generally considered a pretty fair run - that in order to stay on top of things, you have to be constantly alert for new opportunities to develop and expand your business.

The kilo of pure he and Hammer took off the little Caucasian guy was a good example of just such an opportunity. From an investment of absolutely nothing, Big Red was able to turn a profit of nearly $140,000, virtually overnight. He now realizes - from the fact that the bags and bundles sold so quickly, and from the number of customers who’ve come back asking for more of the same product - that he probably could’ve whacked the stuff even harder. He’d had his mill workers cut it six times; now he knows it could’ve easily taken a seven, maybe even an
eight.
He tries to remember the last time he’s had his hands on something so pure. He’d have to go all the way back to the early eighties, when he was buying direct from the Italians on Pleasant Avenue. And even then, the stuff they were calling “pure,” some greaser had already stepped on it.

What bothers Big Red is that he realizes he may have been a little quick to kill off the goose that laid the golden egg. Sure, he’s got no way of knowing if the guy had any more after the kilo. And yes, he did hedge his bet by giving his DEA buddies Zelb and Farrelli the guy’s name and address from the wallet in his pants. That way, if they hit the place and came up with anything else, they’d turn in part of it and throw the rest of it his way to put out on the street for their mutual benefit.

But the thing is, it’s over two weeks now, and he hasn’t heard squat from Zelb. What Big Red’s thinking now is that maybe it’s time for him to do a little investigating of his own. He gets out of bed, walks to his closet, and starts going through the pockets of his jackets. What he’s looking for is a wallet, the same wallet he found in the pair of pants he and Hammer took off the guy who had the kilo of pure.

He finds the wallet in the inside pocket of a red suede jacket. He carries it to his bed, where he turns it upside down and spills its contents onto his satin sheets. He smiles when he spots the driver’s license with the inked-in new address. It’s landed heads-up, a good omen for sure.

He sits down on the bed and lights his first cigarette of the day, inhaling deeply. Then he reaches for the phone beside the bed and slowly punches in the number code for Hammer’s beeper.

Goodman finishes up at work and heads to the subway. He’s grateful for the job, which has at least given him a place to go two afternoons a week and supplied him with a bit of spending money. But he knows that’s all it is - spending money. Even if he saved every penny of it, he could never hope to begin to pay for Kelly’s medical expenses, let alone the pile of other bills he has.

He wonders when he’ll hear from Vinnie about their deal. Can it really be that Vinnie’s people will be able to come up with $3.5 million? The number is so staggering that it seems totally unreal to him. So he tries to blot it out of his mind, concentrates instead on the five twenties in his back pocket. Now
that’s
real, he tells himself.

The Antarctica film is a big hit with Kelly, and she’s still talking about it as she and Carmen climb the steps back up to the apartment.

“Didn’t those bears look like they were about to jump right off the
screen?”

Carmen laughs. She finds that in spite of herself, she’s become terribly attached to this little girl. “They reminded me a little of Larus,” she says.

“After my mommy died, I carried Larus around wherever I went,” Kelly says. “He was my security blanket, if you know what I mean.”

“I know what you mean,” Carmen says, doing her best to match Kelly’s suddenly serious tone.

Carmen unlocks the door. Inside, Kelly’s first stop is the refrigerator. After a quick inventory, she reports on her findings. “We need more
kid food
in this place,” she announces.

“I’ll be sure to pass that suggestion on to the management,” Carmen says.

With the first sound of a key in the lock of Goodman’s door, the plant springs to life. Abbruzzo and Riley have joined Weems, who’s waiting for Sheridan to “bring home” Michael Goodman’s kid and girlfriend. The two technicians, DeSimone and Kwon, are hanging around to make sure the bugs are operating properly. As they listen, they hear, “Didn’t those bears look like they were about to jump right off the
screen?”
The voice comes through loud and clear, almost as if the speaker is in the same room.

“Beautiful.” Abbruzzo smiles.

“Hey,” Kwon says, “we do good work.”

The next thing they hear is, “They reminded me a little of Larus.”

“That’s the broad,” Weems said.

“No shit.”

They continue to sit around the receiver and listen to the conversation. This they do despite the fact that they’ve all been given precise typewritten instructions on what the wiretap statute calls the “minimization requirement.” By that, the law specifies which conversations they’re permitted to listen in on: those to which the person who’s the target of the investigation - or someone else reasonably believed to be involved with him in his criminal activity - is a party, and - even then - only those portions that relate to the criminal activity. At all other times, the detectives are supposed to “spot-monitor” the apartment by turning the equipment on at occasional intervals, just long enough to see if criminal conversations are taking place. If the conversation is about anything else, they must turn the equipment off immediately.

Or so the theory goes.

In actuality, the detectives pretty much leave the equipment running all the time. They justify doing so on several rationales. They start by assuming that the girlfriend must be in on this business. So whenever she and Goodman are talking, they could lapse into “relevant conversation” at any moment, without notice. And even when Goodman’s not around, and it’s just the girlfriend and the kid, one of them could drop a remark about what Daddy’s doing, which could, in turn, tip the detectives off to a deal about to go down. So everything becomes relevant.

Besides which, listening in on an eavesdropping device is pretty dreary stuff. People watch television, they read, they talk about drivel. When they’re not talking, they sing off-key, they hum, they belch, they fart. The bugs pick it all up. So you end up listening for two things: conversations about the criminal activity (because that’s your job) and about sex (because that’s the only other thing you’re ever going to hear that could be of any possible interest to you).

And while no one says anything about it now, every detective in the room could tell you that tonight, when Goodman’s back in the apartment with his girlfriend and the kid’s been put to bed, whichever team’s in the plant will somehow get a second wind - they’ll find themselves hunching over the receiver and turning the volume up a notch, desperately hoping to catch the telltale sounds of the Mole and the Molestress going at it,
doing it.
Grown, married men, somehow transformed back to the mentality of their high school teens, or the barracks behavior of their early twenties. Listening Toms.

It may sound silly, but police work tends to do have that effect.

Goodman arrives home around six, bearing the requested pizza and a six-pack of soda.

“Yea, Daddy!” Kelly cheers.

Our hero!” Carmen joins in.

Goodman can’t tell if she genuinely shares Kelly’s taste for pizza or if she’s simply being an awfully good sport about it. But then again, he reminds himself, she
is
Italian.