The Informant (6 page)

With five years in, Neil requested a transfer, and through sheer luck got one. Back in Washington, he continued to work the streets, making buys and busting his contacts when he felt he couldn’t move up any higher. Elaine was happy with Washington but not with Neil’s work.

When he’d been in Washington almost two years, he had trouble.

While Neil was in court on an arrest he’d made, a telephone call came in for him. His partner, Dean Hallis, took it. An informant confirmed a buy, and Dean ran upstairs to sign out seventeen thousand dollars in buy money. Dean’s problem was that he was young and came from a rich family. So he had to prove a point. He had to prove that prep school or no prep school, he could be a damn good agent.

Dean decided to make the buy alone.

At a rundown apartment house in a black section of Washington, Dean stood in front of a door and stared at a black hand. The door was on a chain and wouldn’t open any farther. A black hand shoved through six inches of space. That’s all Dean saw. One black hand.

“Bread,” said the voice behind the black hand. “Don’t wanna see you, ain’t no need fo’ you to see me. Gimme the bread, I give you the package.”

Dean hesitated. He wanted to make the buy, to look good. But
this?
Nothing showing but a black hand. No rings, watches, scars. Just a hand that could belong to any spade in town.

“We dealin’, or we ain’t dealin’?” said the hand.

“Deal,” said Dean. He was anxious. Wanted to look good.

The hand said, “Drop the money inside.”

Dean did.

The door closed, opened again, and the hand dropped a package outside in the hall. A half kilo of cocaine.

Dean grabbed it and ran. He could always come back and make the bust. He had the address.

He had nothing.

The package was milk sugar, nothing but.

The apartment was vacant, not even furniture.

Neil had been in court, but Dean was his partner, and they had both known the informant, so Neil had to take some of the heat. Dean wasn’t booted out of the department, but he was reassigned. He was sent to New Orleans, and Neil had his ass chewed out. Worse, Neil knew he was now being watched, and the watchers were waiting for it to happen again.

It did.

Twice.

Bill Krone, godfather to Neil’s daughter, Courtenaye, and an easygoing agent who had taken his training in Virginia with Neil, was found dead in a Miami parking lot, shot twice in the back of the head. Bill was working Cubans, trying to find if they were bringing brown heroin in from Mexico. He’d been using an informant recommended to him by an informant Neil had used in D.C.

Bill’s death haunted Neil. He felt responsible. The bureau seemed to feel he was, in a way, though no one came out and accused him. Neil was questioned again and again, by heavies in the bureau, by heavies in the Justice Department. And to make it worse, the informant Bill had been working in Miami turned up dead at a Cleveland airport.

The snitch was found in the toilet of an airplane that had flown in from Mexico. An autopsy showed that he’d swallowed twenty prophylactics filled with cocaine. Two of them had burst open in his intestines. That’s where the trail ended.

The bureau never learned who’d killed Bill Krone.

As for Neil Shire, his troubles weren’t over. After Bill’s death, Neil had been taken off the street and transferred to compliance. This was a nine-to-five job. Neil was to keep an eye on pharmaceutical houses, the distributors of drugs like Valium and other tranquilizers. He was to check for pilferage, security lapses, bookkeeping mistakes. The job bored the shit out of him.

Elaine complained less now. Neil was home more, not on the street, not getting three-
A.M.
telephone calls anymore. Not bringing informants into the house.

Then Dean Hallis entered Neil’s life again.

There had been a scandal in the New Orleans office of the bureau. Three agents had been accused of killing an informant to cover up their own theft and sale of confiscated narcotics. Dean Hallis’ name was being mentioned. No one knew for sure if the charges were true, but the bureau believed in being careful.

Again, Neil Shire was called in for questioning. He lost sleep, couldn’t eat, was rotten to Elaine, and wondered if this time he was out for sure, forced to go looking for a ninety-dollar a week job as a security guard in a supermarket.

When the questioning stopped, Neil was transferred out of Washington to New York. Some agents said they’d rather get shot in the face than be shipped there, the land of dogshit, muggers, and high rents. But Neil took the transfer and kept quiet. He was still an agent, and that’s all that mattered.

Were the charges against Dean and the other two agents in New Orleans true? No one knew, or if they did, they weren’t talking. Neil was ordered to keep quiet about the matter, to discuss it with no one. The bureau believed in being careful, and shifting bodies around at least made it look as if something was being done about these particular charges.

Sooner or later, someone in Congress, hot to make a name for himself, would turn the bureau’s troubles into publicity and self-promotion. Whether or not the accusations and rumors were true wouldn’t matter; what mattered were the headlines to be made. Congressmen loved headlines written in somebody else’s blood. So Neil Shire and others now found themselves sitting behind new desks in new cities, and the men running the bureau waited for the telephone to ring with an invitation to appear at an inquiry.

For his first five months in Manhattan, Neil Shire sat in a cubicle shifting papers. Four times he made it to the street as backup for somebody else on a buy. But that was nothing leading to nowhere. If it hadn’t been for a Manhattan cop he’d met in Washington a few years ago at federal narcotics intelligence school, Neil would still have a numb ass from sitting. The cop, Fred Praether, had telephoned and offered him Lydia Constanza.

At the federal intelligence school attended by agents and policemen from around the country to update themselves on narcotics, Neil had given a week of lectures on the increasing thefts of amphetamines, barbiturates, and methaqualones from legitimate manufacturers and distributors.

Four lectures a day, one hour each, six days a week, and when it was over, Neil felt as though he’d been hit in the throat with an ax. All that damn talking, answering questions. Fred Praether, a stubby cop with a jaw like a pelican’s and eyes that rarely blinked, took detailed notes and asked sensible questions. Neil had invited him home for a meal, so that Praether could continue telling him about the rise of Cubans in New York City dope dealing.

During that week, Elaine had found Praether a date, and the four of them had gone to the Kennedy Arts Center to see a Beckett play, which only Elaine claimed to have enjoyed. Praether had remembered Neil’s hospitality.

Ordered to turn Lydia Constanza over to federal narcotics agents, Praether had called the bureau’s Manhattan office two weeks ago and was shuffled around until he made contact with Walker Wallace’s group. Neil Shire, assigned to telephone and radio duty that day, had been the first to talk with Praether.

Walker Wallace picked his nose with his pinkie, using his other hand to wave to an agent walking past the open door of his office. “Katey. He coming in today?”

Neil, unable to get friendly with Detective Sergeant Edward Merle Kates in three weeks of knowing the cop, loosened his tie. “Said he’ll try. He’s in court this morning. Bust he made a month ago.”

A young black agent with a bushy afro, .38 in the waistband at the small of his back, strolled slowly into Walker Wallace’s office while reading a report. Without saying a word he dropped the report on Wallace’s desk, nodded to Neil, and left. The area outside the office was coming alive. Agents sat in chest-high cubicles of yellow plywood and gray plexiglass, huddled over telephones while pecking at reports. Scotch-taped to plexiglass were color snapshots of wives, girlfriends, children, dogs, along with black-and-white snapshots of narcotics informants and suspects.

In front of the cubicles, teams of secretaries typed from tapes of court-ordered wiretaps. Neil, back on the street, back hunting again, listened to the sounds of telephones and typewriters coming through Walker Wallace’s open door and felt good.

Walker Wallace wiped his pinkie with a napkin. “Katey says your girl’s a useless spic trying to walk. Says she’s giving us a first-class stroke job.”

Neil cupped his hands and blew into them. “Katey’s pissed because his people had to give us Lydia. He’s not happy about us being able to afford informants when New York cops can’t. Let’s face it: if Lydia bombs out, it means the police gave us nothing, they lost nothing.”

Walker Wallace went on as if Neil hadn’t answered. “Zilch is what we’re gonna get, according to Katey. He says Lydia’s not heavy enough to know if Cubans and blacks are bringing in a super shipment. You know he did some work on Kelly Lorenzo, that he was working on some of Kelly’s lower-level distributors.”

“He keeps telling me that. According to him, we’re wasting time, money, and manpower on Lydia. Feels she’s doing a number on us on account of her little daughter. Katey says a snitch doesn’t know the difference between tears and piss.”

Walker. Wallace gently patted his thinning red hair as though to keep the remainder firmly on top of his skull. “Got to figure Katey for two games. One: if anything good comes out of Lydia, his people will grab as much credit as they can get. They’ll look bad if it appears they turned over a righteous snitch to us and we made cases while the cops just stood around with their thumbs up their kazoos. They are gonna want as much out of Lydia for themselves as possible. Remember, the bottom line is politics. Law enforcement is politics, Neil. I’m telling you, just in case you don’t know. Guys wanna go higher and higher, and that only happens when some big cases go down.”

Walker Wallace rubbed sleep from his eyes with two thick thumbs. “Second thing you gotta figure Katey for: if anything goes wrong, his people will back away fast. Like I said, it’s all politics, and nobody wants to be tied up to some case that is gonna make them look bad. If it looks like the NYPD is going down the toilet, Katey’s gonna tell them, and they are gonna tear ass away from this case. You with me so far?”

Neil nodded.

Wallace said, “Now, that doesn’t mean Katey can’t help us. But bear in mind, he’s a cop, on the Big Apple’s payroll, and he’s got people leaning on him all the time, His people wanna look good, especially when it comes to cleaning up crime. So they are gonna squeeze Katey to see what he can get outta us and Lydia. They ain’t doin’ us no favors by giving us a snitch they ain’t got the money and manpower to work. What’s going down is, we do all the work while they finagle to get as much credit as possible.”

Neil said, “And if anything goes wrong, it’s
all
our fault.”

Walker Wallace smiled. There wasn’t an ounce of warmth in it. “You read it loud and clear, crimefighter. You can do yourself good and the bureau a lot of good, or you can fuck yourself up like it ain’t never been done before, and these here fine people you work with will drop you in a deep hole somewhere.”

“So I watch Katey.”

“Like he’s a rabbit after your lettuce, ’cause that’s what he is. Bear in mind, agent Shire, that we’re supposed to get along with the New York City police force, that if we don’t and they complain to the mayor and the mayor complains to a senator and that senator tells somebody in Washington and that somebody in Washington tells whoever at the bureau, well, let me ask you—how many balls can you afford to lose?”

Neil grinned. “I love this job. It’s heartwarming work, and the sense of trust you find wherever you go … well, what can I tell you?”

“Don’t tell me, just—”

The intercom buzzed.

Wallace jerked the receiver off the hook. “Yeah? Okay, tell ’em to come on in.” He hung up.

“Lydia and Katey. They’re here.” He stood up, eyes on Neil as though inspecting his face for pimples. “Remember what I told you about Katey.”

Neil nodded, licking his lips. He was going to watch Katey the way the watchers at the bureau were watching Neil.

S
OMETHING WAS WRONG.

Bad Red stopped smiling and began nodding his head as a stocky black man in a pale blue safari suit whispered in his left ear. Spooks got rhythm, thought Katey, getting slightly nervous, but all this head-nodding don’t have zilch to do with music.

The music around them was a roar, disco thump-thump-thump from twelve speakers in an East Fifty-fifth Street discotheque where Katey, Neil Shire, and Lydia Constanza were making a buy from Bad Red, a cocaine dealer.

Ain’t I ready, though, thought Katey. Seconds after he’d sat down, his .38 Police Special with bullets he’d loaded himself—extra powder, and the points hollowed out—had been in a white cloth napkin on his lap under the table. Neil was carrying a two-thousand-dollar flash roll. Katey gently patted the napkin as though it were a newborn kitten. You and me against the world, good buddy.

Bad Red held up a hand, signaling he’d heard enough. “Later,” he mumbled to the stocky black, who backed off, making a clenched fist over his heart, turned, and stepped onto a dance floor packed and writhing with sweating, contorted bodies. Katey held his breath, wondering if somebody had just laid the news on Bad Red that his good friend Lydia had brought the heat into his life. In dope, anything could happen.

Bad Red frowned, shaking his head. “Niggers. Man, you do business with niggers, and sometime or other, you get burned, Jim. Brothers don’t do their own right, you understand?”

Katey understood and relaxed. Bad Red was having trouble with spades, and that’s what all the whispering had been about.

Bad Red leaned across the table, confiding. “I front somethin’ to some cat, see, ’cause he
suppose
to be a friend of mine. He a gambler, always hurtin’ for bread, always with people axin’ him to pay up. He say he gon’ turn my package over, pay me, and keep a little taste for hisself. That’s cool, but …”

Bad Red took off his shiny red leather hat. He was thirty, paunchy, dressed in tomato red: suit, open-neck silk shirt, shiny leather boots to match his hat. Katey thought the black dealer had the nostrils of a gorilla.