Condemned (34 page)

“Nobody said nothin'. I just know you.” He laughed. “Wipe the innocent look off your face. Vic will call you in a couple of days. Keep that boat running good.”

Giordano nodded and walked down the stairs.

“He's short changing the Captain?” asked Greg Diamond.

“Can a cat change his stripes?” said Charlie Lucky. He took the napkin off the two bundles of currency on the table. “I know that guy from the other side. He'd steal the collection basket in the church if he had half a chance. Here,” he pushed one of the bundles of money toward Caiafa. “This is for you and the crew. Whack it up any way you want. Just make sure everybody's happy, okay?”

“They better be happy.”

“Make sure they're happy, okay? We're doing good. Let's keep it that way,” Charlie Lucky shook his head now, smirking. “Let the two ‘Amerigons' in the kitchen come up. Tell 'em to take the back stairs.”

Caiafa went through a nearby doorway, down a back staircase which led directly to the kitchen. In a few moments, the two Agents came up to the mezzanine.

“Have a drink,” Charlie Lucky said in English. “Sit down, sit down. You guys must be tired, chasing bad guys all day long.” They all laughed. The two men sat. Diamond took the bottle and poured four pony glasses of Scotch.

“Drink hearty,” said Charlie Lucky. He and Greg Diamond raised their glasses to the Agents, but didn't drink. O'Callaghan knocked his glass back in one motion. As Perlman sipped, his face winced slightly. “You gotta knock it back in one shot. Then it don't taste so bad,” Charlie Lucky said to Perlman.

Perlman knocked it back and winced again.

“Here. This here is for you and for all the guys downtown.” Charlie Lucky pushed the last bundle of money on the table toward the two men. O'Callaghan smiled and picked up the package eagerly.

Charlie Lucky reached into his vest pocket and handed one of the fifties to Perlman, the other to O'Callaghan. “A little something extra for you two, for the tip you gave us the other night—about the raid you was going to make on Forty-Second Street. That helped a lot.
”

“Thank you, thank you.” O'Callaghan spoke with a brogue. “My mother thanks you, my father thanks you, my sister thanks you, too,” he smiled, tucking the fifty into his vest.

“Forget it. You deserve it.”

“Our pleasure, believe me, Charlie.”

“I got to get going,” said Charlie Lucky. “You guys want another for the road? Help yourself.”

“Don't mind if I do,” said O'Callaghan reaching for the bottle.

“Not me,” said Perlman.

O'Callaghan took the bottle, poured himself another, and stood, raising his glass toward Charlie Lucky, Greg Diamond, then Caiafa.

“Drink hearty.” Charlie Lucky shook hands with the two men. “Go out the back way. We'll see you next week.”

“We'll be here, don't worry about that,” said O'Callaghan. The two Agents went down the back stairs.

When the Agents were gone, Charlie Lucky reached into the sideboard and took out the four bundles of currency. He put one in each of his jacket pockets, handing the other two to Greg Diamond, who did the same. They started down the marble stairway. “You see the way I did it,” Charlie Lucky said to Greg Diamond and Caiafa in Italian as they walked to the front door of the restaurant, “you two sitting in on the payoff with those two
—”
Charlie Lucky stopped talking. An ‘El' train was just passing noisily on the steel structure over Third Avenue. A young driver, one of Greg Diamond's crew, was sitting in a car at the curb. “With all of us sitting in on the payoff, we all got the goods on the Amerigons. They feel more dirty, more obligated to us.”

Caiafa nodded, opening the car door for Charlie Lucky. “Where we headed?” asked Greg Diamond.

“Lanza's. The Boss is waiting for this.” He patted his jacket pocket.

“Lanza's,” Diamond said to the driver.

In and Around Foley Square : July 22, 1996 :10:30 A.M.

“This is a really ugly one,” said A.D.A. Quintalian. Sandro had come to the Prosecutor's office to pick up whatever Discovery material the D.A. intended to use against Hettie Rouse, and also to gauge Quintalian's view of the case. “Look at the crime scene photos for starters,” said Quintalian, “and hold on to your stomach.” He handed Sandro a manilla envelope.

The Crime Scene Unit of the N.Y.P.D. is charged with finding, retrieving, photographing, and preserving all the forensic (physical) evidence to be found at the scene of major crimes for possible use at a future trial.

In vivid color, from every angle, Sandro viewed a limp, brutalized, undernourished, ill-kempt child who was scarred, bruised, and cigarette-burned. The child's mouth, frozen agape, had tiny, square white baby teeth. Never to be put under a pillow for the tooth fairy, Sandro thought to himself as he handed the pictures back to Quintalian.

“Ugly, right?”

“Very.”

Rob Quintalian was the quintessential Assistant. He was about six feet, two inches, thirty-five years old—ten of those years as an Assistant D.A.—pale skin, red hair, slicked down, parted almost in the middle. He was clever, unemotional, righteous, and dedicated to the conservative view of life. He tended to see things, everything and everyone, in very simple, uncomplicated, black and white terms.

“The Medical Examiner's report indicates that the little girl was sexually abused; her vagina was ruptured from the insertion of Alvarado's schlong. Worse, the M.E. suspects that some other foreign object may have been used as a dildo to sexually abuse the child as well, a Coke bottle maybe, something. They weren't a hundred percent on that one, to be perfectly honest, but they're pretty sure there's enough to hang that on. Cause of death: the child expired as a result of her entire system literally exploding with the pain from whatever object or objects were forced into her. I won't even mention the fractured sternum, the multiple cigarette burns, the bruises and contusions—which you can see in the photos—many of which were sites of previous attacks.” Quintalian was reading from a report on his desk. He looked at Sandro. “Not that it would be any kind of mitigation in front of a jury,” he said, looking up at Sandro, “but the child probably wouldn't have lived to maturity anyway. She had AIDS.”

To keep any sign of revulsion escaping, Sandro concentrated on Quintalian's eyes.

“Coupled with your client's inculpatory statements, four of them, two to the police at the scene, first the Uniforms, then the Detectives, later, a second to the Detectives at the Precinct, and the last, a video tape in the squad interview room with yours truly, the case against your client is, to say the least, formidable. If we have to get to a death penalty phase, the psych people will testify to her physical affect; her response to the horror she was confessing to was one of total passivity. She was calm and bold as a jaybird. A deliberate, cold-blooded killer, with no remorse or concern about what she had done to her own child.”

“Do I get a chance to practice my summation, too?” said Sandro.

Quintalian smirked.

“Perhaps I would say,” Sandro continued, “Hettie Rouse, a semi-retarded young woman, daughter of a prostitute, abandoned by her father, sexually abused by her step-father, who was really her mother's live-in lover, beaten by her boyfriend when she was older, forced into prostitution, who became addicted to drugs to ease the horror, surfaced one day from the midst of a deep, drug binge to find that while she was in a state of total hallucination, her child had been killed. At the time these statements were made, she was suffering from extreme shock, bordering on hysteria, which resulted from the dawning realization of the enormity of what had happened during her drug-induced state. It won't bring the child back to life, of course, but it surely will cut big time into the intentional element that you'll try to build into your death penalty spiel.”

“You think that'll fly in front of twelve working stiffs who struggle their asses off forty hours every week, and who feel guilty twinges any time they have to give a warning spank on their kid's diaper-padded ass?”

“We'll have to see,” said Sandro.

“There are also an equal number of statements from Alvarado,” said Quintalian, leafing through another file folder on his desk, “Both defendants' station house statements are in writing and signed, by the way.”

“Of course,” said Sandro.

“We have everything, including the kitchen sink on this one. You can keep these,”

Quintalian said, handing Sandro a folder that contained the Discovery materials.

“I've always said you were nothing if not a generous man,” smiled Sandro.

Quintalian flickered a momentary smile. “Not that I'm offering you any sort of disposition, because I'm not. If any case cries out for the death penalty, if there had been, in fact, any reason to reinstate the death penalty, it was for a situation like this. But I'm curious, Sandro. You haven't even asked if I'd be willing to let her cop out to life without parole. Sir Walter Cohen did for his guy. Even suggested his client would cooperate against your client in return for a plea and life without parole. With all of that on the table, you don't actually expect to go to trial on this thing, do you?”

“I don't know yet, Rob. I'm just here to pick this stuff up, and to listen to you tell me how bad it is,” said Sandro. “From what you're telling me, and given your present position, we're going to have a death penalty phase, for sure. All you're offering me, right now, seems to be the death penalty. You have to do something better for me than that. I'll get life without parole, hands down, if we go to a jury.”

Quintalian studied Sandro. “Are you serious or just breaking my balls to get my Irish up.”

“A little of both.”

Quintalian's smile grew warmer.

“Considering she's twenty-seven,” continued Sandro, “with a life expectancy of what, fifty, fifty-five years, life without parole would mean living in a cage about the size of my bathroom for a long, long time. Some people might prefer death, particularly lethal injection. They make you drowsy, then you go to sleep, that's it. No big deal. Life isn't all that it's cracked up to be anyway, is it?”

“Now I know you're breaking my balls.”

“No, actually, now I'm being quite serious,” said Sandro. “If someone said to me, listen, you can live fifty-some-odd years in a cage, or you can lie on a gurney and … Let me tell you a personal experience; recently, I had this examination, in the doctor's office. He had to put tubes up my keester to check something or other. He gave me some liquid Valium, says this will make the examination less uncomfortable. Hell, in seconds I was groggy. Next thing I know, while I was out, they did the whole procedure and were wheeling me out to the recovery room. So, now, coming back to lethal injection. They give you something like liquid Valium, you go into a nice peaceful snooze, they give you the lethal injection—you don't even feel it—and, it's over. You really think that fifty-five years in a cage is more attractive?”

“Isn't that up to your client?”

“I'll ask her. But, if she asks me, I'll also tell her I'll get her life without parole, hands down from the jury.”

“You did come here to break my balls.”

“No, to psych you. We both have to have some fun, don't we?”

Quintalian laughed. “Take a fucking hike, you screwball. While you're at it, check with your client, and see if she's less fatalistic than your jaded, miserable ass.”

“I'll do just that.”

* * *

“He's still Mr. Big on the outside, even though he's inside, even though the jury came down and said he was guilty. He's still Mr. Big,” Awgust Nichols said bitterly to Supervisor Michael Becker as they stood at the bar of the Sporting Club, a multi-television cocktail bar, several blocks north of 26 Federal Plaza. An array of television screens were lit up around the room, featuring several baseball games and tapes of past basketball and hockey playoff games.

Becker finished a Stolychnia on the rocks. “Look, it was you who wanted the guy off the street, I got him off the street. He's been convicted. The Judge is going to give him plenty of years when she sentences him—wow, did you see that play by Bernie Williams? Unbelievable!”

“How can I talk to you when you're watching Bernie Williams chasing a ball?”

Becker smirked. “I'm not the President of the United States. I can listen and watch a catch in center field at the same time.”

“This is serious. You know I do right by you. How about that seizure that I turned you onto in Harlem a couple of weeks ago, two hundred-fifty thousand—”

“Two hundred thirty-four thousand,” corrected Becker.

“The people who do the counting have a real good incentive to be accurate. Money Dozier'll hack them to pieces if they're wrong. There was two hundred and fifty thousand. Over the last couple of months, your guys have seized almost a million bucks that I gave you the information for. But who gives a shit if your Agents have sticky fingers. Who am I going to squeal to, anyway? You're The Man.”

“It was somewhat under a million,” said Becker, raising a finger to the bartender for another Stoli.

Nichols shook his head. “Whatever! Your Agents get a little taste, the local D.E.A. is happy, too. What do you guys get, fifteen, twenty percent, and Washington gets the rest. Everybody's happy, except me!”

“Seizures are okay,” said Becker, his eyes still on the TV screen. Andy Pettitte was pitching a shut out. “I asked you to get me close to that Russian route you keep jawing about. But I haven't seen a blessed thing yet. Red Hardie's in the slam.” Becker's eyes followed each pitch on the TV, “he's going to stay there, too, facing humongous time, but you still haven't kept your end of the bargain.”