Last Chance for Glory (31 page)

McGuire took a deep breath. His hands were folded and still in his lap. He looked at them for a moment, then made his decision. The decision Kosinski expected, that he’d seen any number of criminals make. He decided to get it over with, to put it behind him. He’d regret it later on, of course. They all did.

“My son, Bradford … he’s not a bad kid. He needed treatment, not prison. But the DA charged him with criminal sale of a controlled substance in the second degree. That’s an A2 felony, Mr. Kosinski, and it carries a mandatory minimum of four years to life. The idea of Bradford spending four years in Greenhaven or Attica or Clinton … well, it scared me half to death, because I knew if that happened, my boy would be gone forever.” He unbuttoned his cardigan, let it fall over the back of the chair. “I’ve made a lot of enemies in my life, especially among law-enforcement personnel.”

“In other words, the cops and the prosecutors hated your guts.”

“Well put, Mr. Kosinski. Technically, Bradford was guilty of an A1 felony which would have carried a minimum of fifteen years. Four years to life was the prosecutor’s idea of a plea bargain. The situation was impossible. I couldn’t communicate with the prosecutor’s office for obvious reasons and my politician friends were unwilling to help because Bradford’s arrest had been widely reported in the media.”

“In other words, you were helpless.”

“That’s right.”

“But then an angel came from heaven to make it all better. Tell me, was it Samuel Harrah himself? Or did he send his errand boy, Aloysius Grogan?”

“Harrah called me on the phone. He told me he could help Bradford, but he didn’t spell it out. Grogan showed up the next day. He was quite blunt: admit the evidence, accept Sowell’s plea bargain, and my son goes free. The prosecutor—his name was Andrew Boyd—came after Grogan. He never mentioned Grogan or Harrah by name, but his intentions were clear enough. Boyd told me that Sowell was guilty, claimed he had information that couldn’t be introduced at trial. He showed me a transcript of an alleged conversation between an undercover cop and an informant. The informant stated that Sowell had confessed to him on the day after the murder, had actually shown him the bloody knife and the bloody clothes, had asked the best way to get rid of them.”

“And you bought it?”

“Yes, I believed that Sowell was guilty.”

“But now you don’t? Now you know he was innocent?”

“Yes.”

“So the only question is what you’re gonna do about it. If anything.”

“If the man is dead, there’s nothing I
can
do about it.”

“You can put Samuel Harrah and his buddies in prison.”

Kosinski was just getting warmed up when the door to McGuire’s study flew open. The middle-aged woman who stepped into the room wore a flannel bathrobe over a blue, cotton nightgown. Her steel-gray hair stood away from her skull, a perfect complement to her blazing eyes and clenched jaw. And to the automatic she held in her hand.

“You stupid bastard.” She spat the words at her husband. “I told you to let Bradford go. I told you he was a good-for-nothing drug addict. I told you he was a loser and he wouldn’t stop being a loser until you
let
him lose. Just look what you’ve done to us. And for what? Don’t you know that Bradford’s out there smoking cocaine while our lives are burning up?” She paused briefly, stared at her cringing husband. Then she turned to Kosinski. “You’ve got sixty seconds to get out of my house. If you’re not gone in that time, I’m going to kill you, claim I thought you were a burglar, and take my chances with the local police.”

B
ELL KOSINSKI MADE IT
in thirty seconds, made it out the door, down the path, and into the U-Haul. He was about to turn the key dangling from the ignition when a familiar voice brought him to a halt.

“It’s gone far enough, Ann,” John McGuire said. His voice, strained through a tiny speaker, seemed to come from much farther away than the rear of the van. “We must allow the chips to fall where they may.”

“Spare me the dramatics, John McGuire. I swear to God I think you left your manhood with Samuel Harrah. Traded it for a boy who had no manhood to begin with. Why should you be afraid of this pissant private detective? Or his shyster client? Call Chief Harrah, give him the details and let him take care of it. You won’t be any worse off than you are now.”

Kosinski half-listened to them wrangle, thinking how right Ann McGuire was in her assessment of the situation. Calling Harrah was their only hope; they had nothing whatever to lose.

Still, McGuire continued to resist. “Ann, Billy Sowell is
dead.
And it’s my fault. Without me it couldn’t have happened.”

“You’re right, John. It
is
your fault. But it’s not
my
fault, understand? It’s not my fault and I don’t want to go down with the ship. Call Chief Harrah, then go to confession. Tormented as you are, I’m sure Jesus will forgive you.”

They went at it for another few minutes with Ann McGuire reminding her husband that he’d made the original decision against her advice, that Billy Sowell was dead and therefore beyond help, that by doing nothing he was merely adding another item, namely herself, to an already swollen collection of mortal sins.

McGuire’s phone began to beep a few seconds later. A man picked up on the second ring, announced, “Intelligence, Sergeant Caton.” The judge identified himself, asked for Harrah, got put on hold.

“Make it quick, McGuire. I’m in a meeting.”

It was the first time Kosinski had been able to ascribe any human quality to the man he hunted. In fact, he realized with a jolt, he didn’t even know what his enemy looked like. Whenever he closed his eyes, he saw his old partner, Tom Brannigan. Or Aloysius Grogan. It was as if Samuel Harrah was beyond his imagination.

McGuire wasted no time; he listed the information, named Kosinski, then asked Harrah to do what he could and to do it fast. His voice, to Kosinski, seemed surprisingly strong, the voice of a man firmly resolved to do his duty.

“I’ll check it out,” Harrah said when McGuire finished.

The click of the phone was followed by a dead silence. Kosinski looked into the back of the van, watched Blake work a dial on the receiver.

“… what you asked. Please, leave me alone now.”

“So you can contemplate your sins?”

“It’s really not your problem, Ann.”

“No, it’s not.”

Kosinski listened to the sound of squeaking hinges, the slam of a door, then more silence.

“Bell, take off. There’s nothing else here.”

“In a minute, Marty. I gotta see how it comes out.”

How it came out was more than evident a few seconds later when the sharp crack of an automatic echoed through the metal-sided van.

“The way I see it,” Kosinski said to his partner as they drove Blake’s recovered Taurus west on the Long Island Expressway, “is that nobody wants to be responsible. I don’t care who it is. They break a law; they get caught; they don’t wanna pay. Even if it’s the President doing it in the best interests of the country, the idea is to get off the hook. I mean did Clarence Thomas step up to the dock and say, ‘Yeah, I loved the way Anita Hill scrunched up her mouth when I described Long Dong Silver’s dick?’ How about Ronald Reagan selling those guns to Iran? Did Reagan say, ‘Fuck the Congress; fuck the Constitution. I did what I had to do and I’m ready to pay the price?’ How about Clinton and the Flowers broad? I’m tellin ya, Marty, nobody wants to be responsible, from the lowest street mutt to the President of the United States. That’s why McGuire killed himself. He didn’t wanna stand up for what he did and he knew I was gonna make him.”

Blake nodded his head in the right places, but he was thinking about McGuire. Reminding himself that the judge’s testimony was crucial to his overall strategy.

“How do you know he’s dead, Bell? How do you know he didn’t shoot his
wife?”
Blake half-turned to stare at his partner’s impassive face.

“What are you getting at, Marty? The wife wasn’t even in the room. As for McGuire surviving, I saw the piece. It was Browning nine millimeter. If the judge lives, he’s gonna be a vegetable.”

“Maybe he jerked the gun at the last second.”

Kosinski grunted, shook his head, missed his partner’s point altogether. “It’s not your fault, Marty,” he said. “You didn’t pull the trigger. In your field, I guess you never got used to dealin’ with death …”

“What the fuck are you talking about?” Traffic on the expressway was heavy, but moving. As usual, the muscleheads were cutting in and out, creating a constant hazard that demanded most of Blake’s attention. At the moment, a Bronco with oversized tires and more lights than a semitrailer was tracking within two feet of his rear bumper. Blake glanced at the driver’s reflection in the mirror, noted the furrowed brow, the narrowed eyes, the mouth contracted into a stiff snarl. He wondered if the guy was on drugs? Or drunk? Or just plain crazy? And why were there so many of them out there? Once upon a time, the parkway lunatics had been an aberration. Now they were an expected part of the New York landscape, another human hazard to be avoided whenever possible.

Blake found an opening in the traffic. He was just about to signal and move over when the Bronco jumped into the right lane and blew by. The driver, as he cut back in front of the Taurus, extended an arm, then a finger.

“I just can’t figure guys like that,” Kosinski said. “He challenges us without knowing anything about us. I mean I’m packin’ a .38, you’re packin’ a nine millimeter, and we both have permits. We could make this jerk dead in a big hurry.”

“I think I’ve had enough ‘dead’ for one day.” Blake slapped the steering wheel with the palm of his hand. “Christ, Bell, we’ve got exactly nothing here. All Harrah said was that he’d check it out. What can we do with that? I mean someone was supposed to get back to the judge—maybe Grogan, maybe your old partner, Brannigan. They would’ve been forced to make contact, even if it was just to be sure McGuire wasn’t about to fold. We needed that, Bell, because the way it is now, there’s no point to retrieving the hardware. What are we gonna get, funeral preparations?”

Kosinski was caught off guard. “That tape’ll have the reporters coming in their pants, Marty. Which I thought was the point.”

“Yeah, maybe so, but if you remember, the press was supposed to put the heat on the cops, force the NYPD to conduct an investigation. If McGuire’s dead … I think I made a mistake, Bell. I think I should’ve tried to wire Harrah’s apartment. We had no hope of getting into his office, but I could’ve tried to get into his home.”

“How do you know he does business out of his apartment?”

“I don’t.”

“How do you know he doesn’t check his apartment for bugs?”

“I don’t.”

“Marty, lemme ask you a question?”

“Shoot.”

“Do you think we could pull off the highway, maybe find a liquor store? I’m not used to seein’ you second-guess yourself and it’s makin’ me nervous.”

A
N HOUR LATER, KOSINSKI
and Blake were parked across the street from the Oxford Arms, Johan Tillson’s apartment building, staring through double glass doors at the security guard behind the concierge’s desk in the lobby. Neither man was fooled by the rent-a-cop’s gold-braided uniform or the carefully arranged flowers on his desk. The guard was clearly a professional, acknowledging residents with a nod, challenging visitors with a sharp look. Blake had been inside less than a week before, had been carefully inspected even though he wore a phone company uniform. He’d passed over his forged identification, noted the video monitors covering the garage and side entrances, waited patiently while the information on his ID was copied into a logbook. He’d signed the logbook, then waited again while the guard compared signatures before allowing him access to the switchboard in the basement.

The security had come as no surprise to Blake. The Riverdale section of the Bronx, a narrow tongue of land extending north along the Hudson River, was among the wealthiest New York neighborhoods outside Manhattan. Like virtually all such areas, Riverdale (and its closest neighbor, middle-class Kingsbridge) was surrounded by miles of tenements and public-housing projects, desolate slums that (according to the good citizens of Riverdale, anyway) spawned the endless parade of merciless criminals. The fact that Riverdale was a low-crime neighborhood, that it was heavily patrolled by NYPD cops as well as a half-dozen private security firms, had no effect on a pervasive fear that, in many ways, circumscribes the lives of all wealthy New Yorkers. According to the standards imposed by that paranoia, the single guard at the Oxford Arms left the building’s residents seriously unprotected.

“Wait or go?” Kosinski asked.

Plan A called for Bell Kosinski to confront Johan Tillson the way he’d confronted John McGuire. To show up on Tillson’s doorstep, stick his foot in the door if he was denied admission, and hit the importer with the facts of life. But if Kosinski had to be announced by the guard, there was a decent chance that Tillson would simply refuse to speak to him, especially if Chief Harrah had decided to warn the principals.

“Wait,” Blake said. “Sooner or later, the guy’s bound to take a break. Maybe you can follow somebody in.”

Time proved Blake right. After forty very slow minutes, a middle-aged man in designer sweats came out of the elevator to man the barricades while the rent-a-cop went off in search of a bathroom and a cup of coffee.

“A goddamned citizen,” Blake observed. “Doing his civic fucking duty.”

“Take it easy, Marty. He’s makin’ the right move.”

“And what’s the right move for us, Bell?”

Kosinski took a second to consider the possibilities. He sipped at the bottle, shrugged his shoulders. “What I think I have to do is bluff the amateur before the pro comes back. If that doesn’t work—if I can’t get a face-to-face—then I’ll try calling Tillson on the phone. If I can’t get him on the phone, I guess I’ll have to mail him a letter. Figure it this way: If Tillson won’t even talk to me, it’s because Harrah’s got him scared shitless. If Harrah called him, it’s on tape which is all we were after.”