Shoot the Moon (30 page)

“I got an invitation to a party Friday night,” Kelly announces. “Can I go?”

“Where is it?”

“Far away,” she says solemnly. “Two hundred West Tenth Street.”

“Of course you can go.” He thinks - but doesn’t say - if you’re feeling up to it. Be optimistic, he tells himself.

The good thing about pizza is that there’s not much in the way of dishes to wash afterward. Kelly is permitted half an hour of television before getting ready for bed.

“Aren’t you forgetting something?” she asks her father.

But the truth is, he hasn’t. All afternoon and evening he’s been thinking about her MRI test tomorrow afternoon, wondering if there’s any way he can use his story to help her deal with the anxiety she must be feeling over it. But nothing’s come to him, and now he’s forced to improvise.

The Ballerina Princess (Continued.)

It was the night before the very last test, the one where they were to give the Ballerina Princess the injection
and
put her into the scary machine. The Ballerina Princess was sitting around talking with her father, the Keeper of the Numbers, and with the beauteous Lady Carmen. They had just finished devouring the royal pizza.

“I don’t want any more tests after this one,” said the Ballerina Princess. “Can this
really
be the last one?”

“Yes,” replied the Keeper of the Numbers. “This shall be the last one.”

“Do you promise?” asked the Ballerina Princess. “I promise,” he said.

“Suppose they say I have to have
more
tests?” the Ballerina Princess asked. “What if they
make me?”

“Then,” said the Keeper of the Numbers, “we shall flee the kingdom. We shall go into hiding, and the Lord High Royal Doctor will never be able to find us.”

“But what of the brave and loyal Prince Larus?” the Ballerina Princess asked. “We can’t abandon him, can we?”

“Of course not,” the Keeper of the Numbers agreed. “He shall flee with us.”

“And what of our cat?”

“Ah, yes,” said the Keeper of the Numbers. “The strange and peculiar Kat Mandu. We could never abandon him, could we? He shall come, too.”

“And what of the beauteous Lady Carmen?” Kelly asks. “We can’t abandon
her,
either.” She reaches out for Carmen’s hand.

“No, I guess that wouldn’t be fair, would it?” Goodman is forced to admit.

“No way.”

“Well,” Goodman says, “if it ever comes to that, we’ll have to give Lady Carmen the choice, won’t we?”

“Yes,” Kelly says. Then, turning to Carmen, she pleads, “Will you come with us, Carmen?”

“I don’t know, sweetie” is the best Carmen can offer her. “We’ll have to see.”

“Listen to that!” Riley exclaims. “They’re planning their fucking
getaway!”

“Could be,” Abbruzzo says. They’re the only two detectives left at the plant. Weems and Sheridan had gone off duty at 1800; DeSimone and Kwon split as soon as it was evident that the bugs were working well. “Or it could just be a story” Abbruzzo offers as an afterthought.

“Bullshit it’s just a story,” Riley says. “I’m telling you, Ray. The Mole’s going to do his deal, and then he’s going to cut and run. Only thing is, we’re going to be standing smack on top of his tail.”

“Take it easy,” Abbruzzo tells him. “I don’t even know if moles
have
tails.”

Later, Goodman and Carmen sit across the card table and finish the last of the wine.

“No word from Vinnie yet?” Goodman asks.

“No,” she says. “Michael?”

“Yes.”

“Would you really leave if it happens?”

He thinks for a minute. “I guess we might have to,” he says. “I can’t imagine sitting around here, waiting for someone to come and get us.”

“And me?”

“You heard the story,” he tells her.

“That’s just a fairy tale.”

“Fairy tales can come true.” He tries to sing it, but he’s never had much of a voice, and they both end up laughing.

Getting up from his seat, Goodman - who holds his wine about as well as he carries a tune - trips over his own feet and bangs noisily into the card table.

In the plant, Abbruzzo and Riley cover their ears in pain.

Big Red picks Hammer up just after midnight. The temperature has fallen to the low thirties, and steam rises from manhole covers, joining smoke from tailpipes. But inside the Bentley, it’s warm and quiet. They head south, across the Madison Avenue Bridge into Manhattan, then head down Second Avenue. At Ninety-sixth, they cut over to Lexington and continue to Ninety-second, where they make a left turn.

“That’s the building, right there,” Big Red says as they pull to the curb 100 feet east of Michael Goodman’s building. See if his name’s on the buzzer.

Hammer’s out of the car for less than a minute. When he returns, he’s shivering, but there’s a smile on his face. “M. Goodman,” he says. “Apartment 5F. We gonna pay him a visit?”

“Not just yet,” Big Red says, putting the car in gear and pulling away from the curb. “But soon.”

The phone rings shortly after nine Tuesday morning, while Goodman, Carmen, and Kelly are cleaning the apartment. Goodman dries his hands on his shirt and picks up.

“Hello.”

“Hey, Mikey boy.”

“Hello, Vinnie.”

“Wanna take a little walk, Mikey?”

“If it’s important.”

“It’s important,” Vinnie assures him.

“Okay.”

“Write this number down,” Vinnie tells him. He reads off a number - 555-3318 - which Goodman jots down. “Go to a pay phone and call it.”

“When?”

“
Now
when. I’m waiting at a pay phone, and it’s
cold
out here.”

As soon as he hangs up, Goodman tells Carmen and Kelly he’s got to go out to get some Clorox. Kelly takes him at his word; Carmen knows better, and catches his eye.

“Be smart, Michael,” is what she says.

“Shit!” is what Harry Weems says. He and Sheridan have been manning the plant since 0800. They heard the call come in, heard Goodman identify the caller as Vinnie, heard Vinnie assure Goodman that it’s important they speak. But next thing, they’re arranging a secure conversation - pay phone to pay phone - which means the detectives can cover it visually, but they’ll have no way of knowing what’s being said.

“Follow him,” Weems tells Sheridan. “See what phone he uses.”

“Me again?” Sheridan whines.

But Weems ignores him. He’s already on the phone, trying to reach Telephone Security. It takes him two minutes to get through to the unit he needs.

“This is Detective Weems of OCCB,” he says. “I need an address on a local number, ASAP.”

“Go ahead,” says a voice.

“It’s five-five-five-three-three-one-eight,” Weems says.

“Area code two-one-two?”

“Yeah.”

“Please hold.”

Weems drums his fingers on the phone receiver as he waits. He knows he’s got only a matter of minutes to get the address of the phone, call Communications, and have the nearest precinct send an unmarked car to respond. If he’s lucky, they’ll get there in time to get a look at this Vinnie guy. If he’s
real
lucky, they’ll be able to get a plate number, take him home, maybe even get a full ID on him.

“That’s an unlisted number,” the voice tells him. “It’ll take me a few minutes.”

“I’ll hold,” Weems says.
Shit!
is his first thought. His second is a bit more cerebral: Why should a pay phone have an unlisted number? But then he answers his own question - it must be someplace where they don’t want you calling back and bothering them, or tying up the phone without putting money in it.

“Sir, I’m unable to locate a record for that number,” the voice tells him.

“Shit!” says Harry Weems again. “Shit, shit, shit!”

“Have a nice day,” says the voice.

It’s colder than he figured outside, and Goodman uses the first pay phone he finds, one of a pair at the corner of Ninety-third and Lexington. He drops a quarter in and dials the number Vinnie gave him.

The phone is answered almost before it has time to ring.

“Mikey boy?”

“Yeah.”

“What took you so long?”

“I thought I’d put shoes on-”

“Okay, okay.”

“What’s up?” Goodman asks. It’s so cold he can see his breath.

“What’s up is, my people got their thing together. They’re ready to go.”

Goodman waits for his heart to restart itself.

“We can do it tonight if you can,” Vinnie says. “Otherwise, we gotta put it off till Friday night.”

Goodman remembers the MRI. “Tonight’s no good,” he says. “I’ve got to take care of my daughter.”

“Your
daughter?”
Vinnie sounds incredulous. “You remember how much we’re talkin’ about here, Mikey?”

“Sorry,” Goodman says. “First things first.” The truth is, all this has happened much too fast. He feels almost grateful to have the MRI as an excuse to put things off.

“Awright,” Vinnie says, disappointment in his voice. “I’ll call you again in a day or two. We’ll talk the same way, okay?”

“Okay.”

Goodman hangs up. He stops into the store on the corner of Ninety-Second Street to pick up a copy of the
Times.
Coming out, he almost bumps into a man in a tan coat. The man looks familiar, but Goodman’s unable to place him.

“I think he made me,” Sheridan tells Weems as soon as he gets back to the plant. “He ducked into a newsstand to see if he was being followed, and he almost got me. From now on, you better take him.”

“Where did he go?” Weems asks.

“Corner of Ninety-third.”

“What happened?”

“Whaddaya mean, ‘what happened’? He talked on the fucking phone and I froze my fucking ass off. That’s what happened.”

“We gotta get that phone,” Weems says.

When Kelly’s out of earshot for a moment, Carmen asks Goodman how it went.

“He says they’re ready,” he says. “I put him off till Friday night. He’ll call again.”

“Are you sure about all this, Michael?” she asks him.

“Of course not,” he says.

The conversation ends there. It’s been brief, and they’ve kept their voices low. But it’s taken place at the very center of the studio apartment, directly under the ceiling fixture.

“Bingo!” shouts Harry Weems. “Friday night it is. We gotta get that phone,” he says again.

By “get that phone,” Harry Weems means tapping the corner pay phone Goodman used to call Vinnie back. Weems calls Ray Abbruzzo at home and brings him up-to-date on the morning’s events.

“We gotta get that phone, Ray” is how he sums things up. “You think Maggie-O will go for it?”

“I doubt it,” Abbruzzo says. “We’ve been to the well too many times already. We got the search warrant, we got the tap, and we got the bug. And we still got diddly-squat to show for it.”

“We’re getting close.”

“This ain’t horeshoes, Harry.”

“So what do we do?” Weems asks.

“We call in the Fu Man.”

Fu Man Feldman is the closest thing the NYPD has to a black-bag-job specialist. A former detective himself, Feldman was forced into early retirement when an investigation revealed that, in addition to his official duties, Feldman had a one-third interest in a hazardous-waste-removal company. That interest probably never would have been discovered, except for the fact that two company employees accidentally started a fire while dumping flammable chemicals underneath an overpass of the New Jersey Turnpike.

Physically, Feldman has been likened to a fireplug, a bowling ball, a toad, a stump, and no doubt many other objects - most of them physically squat, more than a few of them decidedly loathsome. Squat, because at an even five feet tall, Feldman weighs in at close to 230 pounds. Loathsome, because he is rude, foul-mouthed, and generally unpleasant to be around.

That being said, Fu Man Feldman (his first name, Isadore, having been replaced long ago by the nickname that derives from his droopy mustache and goatee) has always been in great demand, both when he was on the job and since his retirement. The reason is simple: Fu Man Feldman can tap a phone, bug a room, hot-wire a car, crack a safe, or do any number of similar chores. He can do these things quickly. He can do them with his own equipment. And, best of all - unlike Detectives DeSimone and Kwon from the technical team - he’s willing to do them without a court order.

Feldman works for cash, something many detectives are happy to pay out of their own pockets in order to avoid the paperwork, legalities, and headaches that come when you go through proper channels. His rates are actually quite modest - a hundred here, a fifty there. The truth is, Feldman rather likes doing the occasional job, even aside from the pocket money it brings him. He enjoys being around cops, even though you’d never know it from the way he treats them. He likes to keep his skills sharp. And he loves to show off.

Feldman arrives at Ninety-Third and Lexington at one o’clock in the afternoon. For the occasion, he’s wearing a NYNEX hard hat and a telephone repairman’s belt, complete with an assortment of tools, wire loops, and a handset. He carries an official-looking metal box.

He spots two pay phones on the northeast corner. He has the equipment to tap both, but he knows that won’t be necessary.

To the casual observer, the two and a half minutes Feldman spends at the phone are devoted to servicing the equipment, making sure all the connections are tight, and checking to see that the wire-jacketed cord is intact.

In fact, Feldman does none of these things. What he does is to loosen the cover of the phone box, reach behind it, isolate the two wires that form the pair unique to the phone’s seven-digit number, and clip a tiny remote transmitter to those wires.

Then he sets the frequency of the transmitter to match that of a “middleman,” a relay unit capable of receiving the signal and forwarding it to a third unit located anywhere within a quarter-mile radius.

The only drawback to the middleman is that it needs an AC power source. This problem Feldman solves at the corner lamppost, where he unscrews the plate at the base and connects the unit to the live wires inside. A green light on the unit flashes three times, informing him that the system is in business.

Next, he goes to the second pay phone. Fishing a self-adhering sticker out of his toolbox, he pastes it onto the phone, covering the coin slot. Experience has taught Feldman that that little sticker is all it takes to ensure that any caller will now use the first phone, the one he’s tapped. The message on the sticker is short and to the point: “Sorry. Out of Order.”

By two o’clock, it’s time for Goodman and Kelly to leave for the MRI place. Kelly asks Carmen if she can come, too. When Carmen hesitates just a second before responding, Goodman answers for her.

“I’m sure Carmen’s got things she has to do.”

“No,” Carmen says. “I’d like to come.”

Kelly is so pleased, she decides to leave Larus home. “He can keep Pop-Tart company,” she explains.

Walking along, holding one of his daughter’s hands as Carmen holds the other, Goodman tries to remember the last time Kelly’s complained of a headache. He’s tempted to ask her but fears the power of suggestion. He settles for daring to hope that she might be getting better, that there may be no tumor after all.

The MRI place is busy. They repeat the registration process and the questioning regarding Goodman’s lack of medical insurance. They take his Bronx Tire Exchange, Special Account, check in the amount of $550.00. They are led to the same procedure room as last time, where Kelly trades her clothes for a gown.

“I’m afraid only one parent may remain during the actual test,” says an attendant.

Carmen makes a move toward the door, but Kelly asks her to stay. Goodman bends down to kiss his daughter goodbye. “I don’t want to hurt her feelings,” she whispers into his ear. “Okay, Daddy?”

This from a six-year-old.

He walks back to the waiting room, takes the only empty seat, across from an old Hispanic man wearing a patch over one eye. They smile at each other. He wonders what misfortune has brought the man here. Has he already lost an eye to the ravages of a malignant brain tumor?

Goodman finds an issue of
Time
magazine from last December; there doesn’t seem to be a more recent one. He skims an article about the fragile peace accord in Bosnia, ignores an analysis of what seems to be shaping up as a Clinton-Dole campaign, and glances through an editorial about Princess Diana’s bulimia. The story that begins on the next page stops him.

The article discusses how emergency-room admissions, police statistics, and prisoner interviews over the last year all point to a “disturbing trend.” The use of heroin - which had declined steadily for almost a decade - is on the rise again. Users who had been scared off by fears of getting AIDs from shared needles, or drawn to less expensive and more plentiful crack cocaine, have been returning to heroin, lured by higher quality and greater availability. A public health official is quoted as saying that the good news is that heroin users tend to be less violent than crack users. Police Commissioner Bratton warns of turf wars already beginning to break out among rival drug sellers. And Representative Guy Molinari blames needle-exchange programs, calling for their immediate curtailment and demanding the death penalty for all drug dealers.

Goodman closes the magazine. Is he about to do his part in contributing to this “disturbing trend”? How many new addicts will be created as a result of the heroin he sells to Vinnie and his people? How many overdoses will there be? How many
deaths?
In his battle to save his daughter’s life, how many other lives will be destroyed?

He shuts his eyes, pinches the bridge of his nose. Wonders if it’s too late to stop this whole business, if there isn’t some other way. . . .

“Mr. Goodman?”

He opens his eyes, realizes he’s been asleep. For a moment, he has no idea where he is or whose face it is that peers down at him.

“You’re Kelly’s father?” the face asks him. It belongs to a black woman with a pleasant smile.

“Yes,” Goodman says, embarrassed at having dozed off.

“We’re all done,” she tells him. “Your doctor will have the results tomorrow morning.”