Last Chance for Glory (37 page)

“But, Marty,” he’d patiently explained, a soft smile brushing the corners of his mouth, “the thing about it is that I’m not afraid. How can you hide if you’re not afraid?”

Blake hadn’t been surprised, but his dilemma, as he understood it, was that Bell Kosinski’s willfulness didn’t get Marty Blake off the hook. If Bell Kosinski went down, Marty Blake would pay for not being there when it happened.

After all, he
had
run away from Matthew Blake; he’d allowed his father to disintegrate into a puddle of Bushmills. Certain consequences had followed, just as they’d follow from a slaughtered Bell Kosinski. It wasn’t a matter of justice; the word
rapist
had no meaning here. This sequence was purely mechanical, one thing leading to another and … well, if you didn’t, like it, you could just go fuck yourself. Couldn’t you?

Blake did have a valid excuse for leaving Bell Kosinski to his fate; he knew the only way out, for either of them, was to keep pushing. Steinberg’s withdrawal and the loss of the tapes at McGuire’s and Tillson’s weren’t fatal blows. The material already in his possession would surely interest the right reporter. The problem was that most reporters had pipelines into the NYPD—developing contacts was just part of the job—and some were bound to be more loyal than others. Avoiding a setup would take time, which was exactly what Bell Kosinski didn’t have.

In the meanwhile, there was work to be done. From Cryders, Blake drove back to Forest Hills, entering through the back of a building adjoining his own, then crossing the roof to reach his apartment. His main objective was the material stored at Sarah Tannebaum’s, but there was something he had to do first. He turned the key in the lock, eased the door open, slid inside without a sound. It was seven o’clock and nearly dark.

He tiptoed over to a window, peered at the white van across the street. Its presence energized him, as if he’d just come face to face with Samuel Harrah. As he pulled away, he suddenly realized why Kosinski had gone back to Cryders. The chess game was being played in the dark, with both sides making covert moves. Tommy Brannigan had pretended to believe that Kosinski was operating on his own while his bosses orchestrated an all-out assault on Max Steinberg. Steinberg had caved in, but Steinberg didn’t know that Blake had recorded McGuire’s confession. Kosinski had yearned for resolution, something solid, a brisk wind to blow away the smoke, reveal the mirrors.

Well, that was the difference between Marty Blake and his partner. Blake wanted to win and if winning required patience, then so be it. He knew that he wasn’t going to get resolution; he had no magic piece to leap over the defense and checkmate Samuel Harrah. There was, however, one very solid move on his immediate horizon. He opened the bottom drawer of his bureau, removed the Llama M-82 lying beneath a stack of neatly folded T-shirts and stuck it in his belt. Thinking the touch of cool metal and the smell of gun oil is about as solid as it gets.

He left as quietly as he’d entered, then made his way up the stairs to his mother’s apartment, wanting only to retrieve the tape and the paperwork and be on his way. Still, he wasn’t surprised to find Patrick Blake sitting on the couch; no, what surprised him was the sound of Judge John McGuire’s voice on a portable tape player.

“How …” He stared at Dora Blake, unable to find words to describe his sense of betrayal.

For once, Dora Blake had no answer; she stood mute, unmoving.

“Your mother’s looking for a way out,” Patrick Blake said. “You can’t blame her.”

“Wanna bet?” Blake turned to face his uncle. “I’m taking the tape.” He noted the sheaf of papers in Patrick’s lap. “And the report.”

“I won’t try to stop you.”

“Smart move.”

The cop’s face reddened as his mouth pulled down into a sharp, straight line. “Damn your arrogance,” he muttered.

Blake took the papers from his uncle’s hands, pulled the tape and tucked it into its plastic case. “What’s the next move, Uncle Pat? Now that you know what actually happened to Billy Sowell.”

“I’ve been thinking about that for the last two days.” Patrick Blake’s features finally relaxed. “And I can’t see a sure thing anywhere.”

“I’ll settle for the kind of public disclosure that’ll take the heat off Kosinski. At this point, that’s the
only
point.” He hesitated, as if resolving his intentions for the first time. “Once the evidence is out there, Harrah has nothing to gain by attacking my partner. It’s really that simple.”

Patrick Blake grunted, shifted his weight, took a sheet of paper from his jacket pocket and passed it to his nephew. “Marcus Fletcher is an Assistant DA. Those are his office and home phone numbers.”

“Did you speak to him about the case?”

“No, Marty, I didn’t.”

“Then what’s the point?”

“Marcus Fletcher is black, a law-and-order freak, and very, very ambitious. Robert Morgenthau, the District Attorney, is an old man. The city’s changing, Marty, and everybody with half a brain knows it. All Fletcher needs is a little publicity to light the fuse on his political rocket. The feeling, in the job, is that he likes prosecuting cops, but, me, I think he’s on some kind of a religious crusade. I sat next to him at one of the Mayor’s fund-raisers and all he talked about was moral pollution. Movies, TV, rap music, the schools, the liberals … there was no end to it.”

“Yeah, well, I’ll keep him in mind.” Blake tucked the sheet of paper in his pocket. Despite a lingering paranoia, he couldn’t bring himself to believe that Patrick Blake would set him up. Not with his mother watching. “Tell me something, Uncle Pat. Did you come in through the front door?”

“Of course.”

“Of course?”

“Get to the point, Marty.”

“The point is that you’ve been off the street too long. Harrah’s got a surveillance van parked outside. Your visit tonight will not go unnoticed.” Blake watched the blood drain from his uncle’s face. “Remember what I told you last time, Uncle Pat. You cut off the head and the body dies.”

Satisfied with his exit line, Blake pecked his mother on the cheek, then returned to his car without further comment. He drove to a drug store on Queens Boulevard, made a dozen copies of Gurp Patel’s report, stocked up on basic toiletries, manila envelopes, and yellow legal pads. From there, he made his way down the boulevard to a discount appliance store in Rego Park where he bought a dual cassette deck and ten blank tapes. His last stop, a Gap store in the Queens Mall, yielded jeans, two oversized Hawaiian shirts, underwear, and socks.

Back in his room at the Adriatic Motel, he opened the windows as if to rid the space of Bell Kosinski’s ghost, then sat down to work. He popped the tape of McGuire’s confession and a blank cassette into the recorder, set the controls for hi-speed copying, watched the reels spin for a moment before turning to the yellow legal pad on the small desk.

He wrote steadily for the next two hours, pausing only to change tapes, making draft after draft until he was satisfied that what he’d written would spur some reporter somewhere into action. If worse came to worse, he was prepared to do a mass mailing to the ten nastiest columnists in New York. His mental list included the likes of Jimmy Breslin, Jack Neufield, Sheryl McCarthy, Amy Pagnozzi, Peter Noel, and William Bastone. Others would follow. Surely one of them …

He picked up the pad and read the opening paragraph for the fiftieth time.

On November 27, 1991, Sondra Tillson, a New York City resident, was brutally murdered. Her throat was slashed and her body left in a car near Gramercy Park. On December 12, 1991, William Sowell, a retarded man with a proven IQ of 68, confessed to the crime. The enclosed material will prove that the actual killer, Edward Green, Borough President of Manhattan, conspired with Chief Samuel Harrah, head of the Intelligence Division of the New York City Police Department, and Supreme Court Judge John McGuire, now dead by his own hand, to frame William Sowell.

As a hook, he concluded, it wasn’t bad. He tried to picture Jimmy Breslin reading those words, then tossing the entire package into a wastebasket, but the image wouldn’t materialize. Breslin would act all right—out of fear that one of his competitors would beat him to the story, if for no other reason—but the process would be tedious. Every fact would have to be checked, including Blake’s later assertion that the voice on the tape belonged to John McGuire. In the meantime, there’d be less and less reason for Samuel Harrah to hold himself in check.

Blake pushed himself away from the desk and began to pack. He’d rented the room in his own name, though he’d paid for it in cash. Harrah could find him simply by assigning a dozen men to work the phone book. It was time to move.

On his way out, he grabbed the phone and dialed Rebecca Webber’s number. When she picked up on the third ring, he smiled to himself. She wasn’t due back for another three days.

“Rebecca, it’s Marty Blake.”

“Marty.” Her voice was light and sexy at the same time, a seemingly impossible combination that had Marty Blake salivating like Pavlov’s dog at the sound of a dinner bell. “I flew back early.”

“This I already figured.”

“To be with you,” she concluded, ignoring the sarcasm. “It’s been a long time.”

“Almost two weeks.” He paused. “I was expecting to speak to Sarah.” Sixty-year-old Sarah Thomas was Rebecca’s personal servant.

“What about? You’re not having an affair, are you?”

“Would that make you jealous? Or turn you on?” Blake visualized Rebecca’s quick smile, wondered if she was actually thinking it over. “Look, Rebecca, I don’t have a lot of time. Stay away from my apartment. It’s being watched and I won’t be there anyway.”

“Are you in trouble, Marty?”

“Trouble isn’t the word for it.” He paused, tried to think of a word that actually described his situation.
Fucked
came to mind, followed by
desperate,
followed by
stupid.
“Look, I have to go.”

“If you need a place to hide, you could stay here. With me.”

“What happened to William?”

“He’s still in Germany.”

“And you’re back.”

She hesitated for a moment. “It was grubby, so grubby. Seedy aristocrats; miserable, violent workers; refugees huddled in collapsing tenements; pensioners begging in the street. I …” She stopped again, managed a short, bitter laugh. “If I have to have an ancestral home, I’ll take the Rainbow Room.”

“Good choice.”

“Does that mean you’re coming to me?”

The Last Temptation of Marty Blake: strike a deal with Harrah, then lose himself in Rebecca’s flesh. He could taste the soft hollow in her throat, the salty moisture beneath her breasts, feel the grip of her thighs, the insistent, demanding thrust of her hips. If he walked away now … If he walked away now, he’d be free of her.

“I can’t, Rebecca.” To his own disgust, he sounded like a whipped puppy instead of the free and independent man he’d just imagined. “I have to see it through.”

“I don’t understand. What does one thing have to do with the other?”

From her point of view, he supposed, the question was reasonable. Or, at least, he didn’t have a ready answer that would take less than two or three years to communicate.

“Listen, Marty, we’re not without influence in this city.” The words came quickly, smoothly. “William is very close to the Borough President, Edward Green.”

Blake choked back a laugh. “That’s good to know, Rebecca. Maybe you can pull some strings, put Humpty back together again.”

“You’re still in one piece, as far as I can tell.” Her throaty laugh poured through the receiver. “I’m cold, Marty. I just came out of the shower and I must have put on a few pounds because the towel doesn’t seem big enough to keep me warm.”

“Try turning down the air conditioner. I’ve gotta go.”

As he made his way through eastern Queens toward La Guardia Airport, Blake considered Marcus Fletcher, the Assistant DA mentioned by his uncle. Patrick Blake had described Fletcher as an ambitious law-and-order freak with a hard-on for the cops. All well and good, but, as far as Blake knew, the investigative staff assigned to the DA’s office was composed entirely of NYPD personnel, any of whom might be in Chief Harrah’s pocket. Still, as long as he didn’t put all his eggs in Fletcher’s basket, it was a shot worth taking.

Twenty minutes later, he checked into the Continental Motel on Ditmars Boulevard under the name Martin Reid. The Continental was a step above the dirty-movie motels that dotted Queens, but not such a big step that the clerk bothered to ask identification from a man checking in at three o’clock in the morning. He took Blake’s money, handed over the key, went back to the flickering black-and-white television without ever changing expression.

Inside his room, Blake quickly addressed one of the manila envelopes to his uncle, stuffed it with Gurp Patel’s report, his own letter, and a copy of McGuire’s tape, then sealed it. Tomorrow, when he put it in the mail, it would serve two purposes. If his uncle decided to take his comment about the head and the body seriously, if he decided that Samuel Harrah, defanged, could do less damage to his career than Samuel Harrah, enthroned, he might just pass the material on to Marcus Fletcher. Even if he didn’t, he’d have the evidence in hand. Maybe, if his nephew met a sad fate on the streets of New York, he’d act out of conscience. Maybe Dora Blake would make him.

B
Y NINE THE NEXT
morning, Marty Blake had showered, shaved, dressed, and was out the door. It was September 1, a Saturday, and nature, as if noting the end of the traditional summer season, had thrown a rare early fall day at the city of New York. The temperature was twenty degrees cooler than it had been on the prior morning (this without benefit of rain, a second miracle). A few thick white clouds marched briskly across a deep blue sky, the air smelled clean and crisp, even the litter on the street, polished by the sun, failed to offend.

Blake, caught off guard, paused for a moment to collect his bearings. Like every other citizen, he’d been fighting nature all through the dog days of August. Now a sharp breeze cut through his light cotton shirt, curled the hairs on his chest, puckered his nipples.