Damaged Goods (44 page)

The harangue went on and on. New charges were added to the old, then the old recited anew. Gadd took it as long as she could, before interrupting. She saw the sharp acid tone, as well as the actual words, as pure therapy. Louise Gadd was everything Guinevere Gadd didn’t want to be, a negative role model that could be consulted for the price of a phone call.

“Mom, I just phoned to see how you were.”

“We haven’t even talked about me yet. So how could you know?”

“Well I can see you haven’t lost your fighting spirit and that’s what I’m gonna have to settle for. I’m in the middle of a job.”

“You call what you do a
job
?”

“Bye, ma.”

Gadd hung up and smiled. She was ready now, ready for what she had to do if she was going to stay in Ann Kalkadonis’s apartment. Without hesitating, she strode across the living room and into the hallway leading to the bedrooms. The first door she opened led to the master bedroom, the second revealed walls covered with a mix of rock and movie posters, the third opened into the room of a very young child. Gadd was prepared for the stuffed animal, a lumpy, tired cat with a missing ear. The bright covers of a half dozen children’s books lying on top of the small pink dresser caused her no surprise, nor did the wallpaper with its dancing Disney characters or the Little Mermaid poster hanging by the window. She was prepared for all of that, but not for the neat white blanket covering the bed. Her eyes jammed shut and her head jerked back as if avoiding a punch.

Look, she commanded herself. For once in your life, open your chickenshit eyes and see what you have to see.

Despite the
chickenshit,
Gadd didn’t comply until a small white coffin flickered on the backs of her closed eyelids. The image jerked her to full, wide-eyed attention. Then she stood there, one hand resting lightly on the door, and let the full force of Theresa’s short life rush into her heart.

T
HE LAST THING A
near-exhausted Carmine Stettecase expected to find as he entered his darkened study at a quarter to five on the morning of his personal liberation was his nerdy son, Tommaso, pursuing a little liberation of his own. Yet there he was, a shadow within a shadow, strapping Carmine’s three-million-dollar trunk onto a chrome luggage carrier.

“Tommaso?”

“Don’t move, Pop.”

Carmine squinted, tried to peer through the darkness. He couldn’t really see the gun in Tommaso’s raised hand, but he decided to stop anyway. Carmine, having spent a good deal of his life on the right side of a weapon, had a great respect for firearms.

“Can I turn on the light, Tommy? So’s we could talk about what you’re doin’ here?”

“Okay, Pop. Just shut the door.”

At first, Carmine could do no more than blink, then his eyes adjusted to the light and he saw that Tommaso did indeed have a gun clutched in his bony hand, a big, fat revolver, probably a .44. Worse yet, Tommaso’s bony hand was shaking uncontrollably and the hammer was cocked.

“C’mon, Tommy, take it easy. You could see I’m not strapped.” Carmine’s gray silk pajamas encased his body like a sausage skin because of all the pre-deal eating. They were definitely tight enough to eliminate the possibility of any concealed weapon larger than a hat pin.

“Stand over against the wall, pop, while I finish.” Tommaso waited for his father to comply, then put the revolver on Carmine’s desk. Though he hadn’t held a gun in twenty years, Tommaso knew the report of a large-caliber pistol would bring his mother running and he didn’t want to kill his mother.

“This okay, Tommy?” Carmine, over his initial shock, fought a rising anger. There was a time in his life when he’d have taken the pistol away from Tommy, taken it away and rammed it between his son’s narrow cheeks. Unfortunately, that time was twenty years and a hundred pounds ago. “You know you can’t get away with this. I’ve got two guys watching the house. Whatta ya think they’re gonna do if they see you walk out with that trunk? I mean it’s five o’clock in the morning, Tommy. That’s a hard time to sneak.”

“I told them to go home.” Tommaso pulled the carrier’s straps tight around the trunk, then hooked them into the crossbar. “Last night after you went to sleep. I told them you said they should go home and get some rest before the big day.”

Carmine’s jaw dropped. “What do
you
know about the big day?”

“I know everything, pop. When, where, who, how … everything.”

“You bugged me, you cocksucker.” Carmine, overwhelmed, took a step forward. He was ready to go to war until his son picked up the revolver. Then he stopped, began to tremble, raised a single accusing finger. “How could you do that to your father?”

Tommaso shrugged, put the revolver back on the desk. “I just wanted to be there.” He tilted the luggage carrier back, then recentered the strap. “It was so easy, pop. I waited until you and mom were out, then wired a transmitter into the base of the chandelier.” Rising to his full height, he turned to face his father. “But I never meant to do you any harm until you kicked me out. That wasn’t right, pop. All these years you been keepin’ me in the house and now you wanna dump me.” Tommy let the carrier down and folded his arms across his chest. “It’s just not right.”

Carmine, unable to come up with a counterargument, shifted his weight nervously and wished with all his might for an oven-warmed cheese Danish. There was no way he could let that trunk walk out the door with his son and he didn’t want to die on an empty stomach.

“Tell me something, Tommy.” Carmine tried to keep his voice gentle, let the force of his argument drive the message home. “Where the fuck are you gonna go? You ain’t hardly been out of the house in years.”

Tommaso shook his head. After all this time, his father still didn’t get it. Alone, locked into his little room with the door shut and the drapes pulled tight across the window, he could travel at the speed of light. Computers into computers into computers, an entire world connected by tiny fibers. He had friends everywhere.

“I guess I’ll have to try to get along the best way I can, pop.”

“And Mary? Your
wife.
What about Mary?”

Tommaso smiled softly. Being rid of Mary was the best part. “Mary has her mom,” he said, as if the naked fact had some practical application. “Look, I gotta get goin’. I rented a car and it’s parked illegal. If I don’t get a move on, I’m definitely gonna get a ticket.”

Carmine tried to muster a next step that wasn’t suicide and didn’t sound like begging. Unable to do so, he decided to beg.

“Tommy, please,” he whispered, “that’s not my money.”

“I know that,” Tommy interrupted. He tilted the carrier back and gave a little push. The wheels turned reluctantly, with the heavy trunk threatening to slide off at any moment. “Damn it,” he said, as he let the carrier drop with a little thump and began to retighten the straps.

“But you don’t know why you can’t take it. Understand? You don’t know
why.
” Carmine wet his lips. His hands began to weave in front his face. “You can’t take it because I can’t pay it back and the people I got it from … Tommy, they’ll have to kill me.”

“I don’t see it that way, pop.” Satisfied, Tommy picked up the gun and pointed it at his father. His hands were much steadier now. For the first time in his life, he wasn’t afraid. “See, all those investors want is dope. Which you can still get from On Luk. You just can’t
pay
for it.”

Carmine’s hands stopped moving while he thought it over. At first glance, it sounded like a way out that wasn’t either suicide or begging. It sounded like a way to buy enough time to run down his son, exact a little cold, Sicilian revenge.

“You sayin’ I should rip the Chink off?”

“I been thinkin’ about it for a couple of days and I don’t see what else you could do. Unless you manage to find me in the next eight hours.” Tommaso waved the revolver in a little circle. “Turn away from me, pop.”

“Tommy …”

“Please, I don’t wanna kill you.”

Carmine sighed and turned. Facing the wall, he fought a nearly overwhelming desire to spin around. He could feel his son approaching and he didn’t want to know what was going to happen next. Now that he had a way out, it didn’t matter.

Tommaso, smiling at his father’s apparent resignation, pulled a stun gun from his pocket as he walked across the room. The catalog he’d bought it from (available, of course, through CompuServe and Prodigy) had promised that its 40,000 volts would override an attacker’s nervous system, removing voluntary muscle activity for as long as fifteen minutes. Even allowing for the manufacturer’s (not to mention the retailer’s) inevitable exaggeration, that would be more than long enough.

Though she was awake and dressed at five o’clock, Josie Rizzo was totally unaware of the quiet rip-off taking place three floors below. She did hear the front door squeak open, then clank shut, but she didn’t get up out of her chair, walk over to the window as she would have as little as twenty-four hours before. These people, she’d decided, as if they’d been reduced to the status of neighbors, the people downstairs, were no longer part of her life. And that included her daughter, Mary. Maybe, if the family could afford it, they’d continue to live together after Carmine went to jail. Maybe she’d stay here as well. But she had shed them, now and forever, and she felt as light as the dust that floated through her open window.

That didn’t mean, however, that she was entirely at peace. There was still the matter of her nephew, Gildo. If the FBI had him, if he hadn’t managed to get loose, it would definitely cast a shadow across the festivities to come. Not much of a shadow, to be sure, but the image of Ann Kalkadonis alive and walking the same streets as Josie Rizzo didn’t sit well. Ann had been punished, no doubt about it, but Ann was the greatest of the betrayers. If she hadn’t brought those bloody clothes into the precinct, hadn’t sold out the husband she’d sworn to love, honor, and obey, the cops would’ve seen through Carmine’s bullshit and Gildo would not have gone to prison. It was really that simple.

Meanwhile, there was nothing Josie Rizzo could do but stay in the apartment, wait for the phone to ring. By the time it did, more than two hours later, she’d gone through six cups of coffee, been to the bathroom four times, and was very, very pissed.

“Why you take so long, huh?” All in all, she considered the greeting to be restrained.

“How did you know it was me?” Jilly’s voice was calm, almost somber.

“Who else gonna call me at seven-thirty?” Actually, there was nobody else to call her at any time.

“It could have been a wrong number.”

Josie snorted contemptuously. “Enough with the nonsense. You get out okay?”

“Yeah, no problem.”

“You know what you gotta do today?”

“Let’s drop the fucking interrogation, all right? I’m not in the mood for it.” This most likely being the last day of his life, Jilly figured he was entitled to a little respect.

“I wanna hear if you got a plan. And stop with the language.”

“Look, Aunt Josie, I ain’t got the time for this.”

“When your father got bumped off, who took you in?”

“Aw, for Christ’s sake …”

“Maybe there were people lined up around the block. Huh? Begging to raise you. Maybe …”

“I’m gonna hang up.”

“… somebody else got you out of jail, somebody I don’t know, a stranger.” Josie listened to her nephew’s sigh. The soft hiss brought a smile to her face. Gildo was a good boy, a loyal boy. He’d do what was right; he always did.

“All right, Aunt Josie, I got a plan. By tonight, I’ll be out of the country.” Jilly shook his head. Escape, for Jilly Sappone, was about as likely as having the angels blow their trumpets as he marched into heaven. The charade was strictly for the pigs if they happened to be listening. And for Josie Rizzo, who’d devised it, then bludgeoned him verbally until he’d agreed to play his part.

The situation was funny enough to get him laughing into the telephone. Here he was, a man who went off at the slightest provocation, a man who went off with
no
provocation, a man the doctors claimed would never be able to control himself. Yet his Aunt Josie could berate him for hours at a time and all he did was hang his head, beg her forgiveness like a puppy dog after a beating. It was crazy, but it was true. It had always been true.

“What’s funny?” Josie voice was heavy with suspicion. “You got a woman there?”

Jilly flinched. He’d sent the whore back to her dope-dealing pimp less than a minute before making the call. The whore was why he hadn’t called last night.

“Nothin’, Aunt Josie. Nothin’s funny.”

Now that it was time to say good-bye, Jilly could feel his heart thumping in his chest. He took a deep breath, wondering if maybe he should do exactly what he’d said, just hang the phone up and get into the wind. That wasn’t going to happen, of course, because a promise made to Josie Rizzo simply could not be broken, but he could still wonder. As long as he didn’t do it out loud.

“I gotta go,” he finally said. “Before somebody comes lookin’ for me.

“Yeah,” Josie answered matter-of-factly. “Okay. You go do what you gotta do. And don’t fool around.”

Betty Haluka, as she threw a pearl gray pantsuit over a sparkling white blouse, added a pair of small turquoise earrings and a necklace of matching stones on a silver chain, told herself to please slow down. She’d been trying (and failing) to send herself the same message ever since Leonora Higgins’s second call. That had come three hours before, just after six o’clock in the morning and its essential message, that Stanley Moodrow was sitting, all by himself, in a cell on the seventh floor of the FBI headquarters building on Worth Street, should have been enough to alleviate her fears.

Unless, she told herself immediately after hanging up, they decide to charge him, book him, and ship him over to the Metropolitan Correctional Center in the middle of the night. Unless they decide to let him spend the night with a couple of dozen cop-hating drug dealers, teach him a lesson about power relationships.

The nature of that lesson, as drawn by her imagination, had been horrific enough to get her up and pacing. She simply couldn’t shake the urge to grab a coat, charge into FBI headquarters as if she was leading a cavalry charge, demand the immediate release of her lover and client. Joan of Arc brandishing the Constitution in lieu of a sword.