Phoenix Noir (26 page)

I’d been at their place just once, a couple years before, taken there by a buddy of mine in traffic division. Rhonda worked the register and counter, a shy, chesty, bleached-out woman in her thirties. Mike was the talker and he came out from behind the grill to toady up, all shucks and gee-whiz.

How to say this—I don’t trust people who backslap cops. They always want something. Not that I made much headway on that point when I broke my news to the robbery roundtable.

“No way Mike’s the suspect.” This from Cavanaugh, the detective from Phoenix. “I can name fifty guys right now, this minute, who’ll vouch for him.”

“His own old lady handed him up.”

“After he batted her around, yeah. Go back, now that she’s cooled off. I’ll bet she admits it’s crap.”

He had a point, of course, domestics being what they are. But something about the way he said it made me think what he meant was:
What would your wife say about you, Boghossian, if we gave her the chance?

Thankfully, the four commanders overseeing the roundtable agreed with me and ordered surveillance. The teams worked in rotation, each department on for three days then making way for the next detail. But Mike was smart. He made our guys early and burned them in heat runs, crazy Ivans, every kind of stunt you can imagine to flush them out. Once he just stopped in traffic, walked back to the unmarked car, and said, “Why are you following me? I haven’t done anything.”

I could just picture him, over one of those free burgers or shrimp baskets he doled out, pumping guys for information on tail jobs:
C’mon, tell me, I’m just so doggone curious
. And cops—hated by damn near everybody, grateful for someone who actually gives a rat’s ass—I’ll bet they couldn’t tell him their stories fast enough.

It got to me, sure. We were the ones who’d trained this guy—inadvertently, granted, but he was smarter than he should’ve been because of us. He was pulling out our wallets, whispering our names and addresses. And yeah, like everybody else he’d chumped, I felt ashamed.

Two weeks later, I got a call from surveillance: “Boghossian, get this. Gallardi and his wife locked up their place as usual but didn’t head home. They checked into a hotel on the frontage road along I-10.”

I knew the strip, we all did: a line of restaurants flanked that part of the freeway.

As I drove on over I thought about Rhonda’s tagging along. It surprised me, I’ll be honest. Maybe Cavanaugh had been right—I should’ve gone up to her early, asked her to confirm what she’d said that night Mike trashed her. And even though I knew that would’ve tipped our hand, now she wasn’t just keeping mum, she was joining in. I felt responsible, like there’d been a point in time when I could have saved her. No surprise, I felt like that a lot back then.

I met the team at the hotel and, sure enough, after 11:00, Mike came out of the room in dark coveralls, a day pack around his waist. He walked down a side street to the parking lot of an Applebee’s, then hunkered down in a patch of oleander to watch the kitchen crew do its thing. The radios started to buzz—we had our man, no more doubts. After a half hour, Mike eased out of the bushes, retraced his steps, and slipped back into his and Rhonda’s hotel room.

The next day, when I called the robbery roundtable together to report, Cavanaugh went from looking like he’d lost his dog to acting like he meant to kill somebody.

“Okay,” he said finally, “I’m in. If Mike Gallardi’s our guy, he’ll get no favors from me.”

I volunteered for surveillance at Applebee’s, even though it meant staying alert for hours on end with the windows rolled up in hundred-degree heat, drinking warm Coke and pissing it all back into the empty cup.

At 9, our eyes at Mike’s Place reported that Rhonda had left, heading toward home. An hour later, Mike locked up and followed suit. A collective moan went out over the radio. He’d called it off. Then, not long after, we heard that Mike and Rhonda were on the move again, leaving the house together. They were on their way toward us.

The voices on the radio perked back up—this was the night, we could feel it. And we knew we’d have to watch the whole thing play out, let him go in, rob the place, or it’d come apart in court. But what if he sniffed us out? What if he took a hostage?

Rhonda drove down one of the side streets and parked, then Mike hopped out, headed for the parking lot. I slouched in my seat, a drunk snoring off a bender. Through slit eyelids I watched him saunter toward the back of Applebee’s, and for an instant he looked straight at me. It was dark, some serious distance separated us. Even so, I sat stock-still, wondering if I’d been made.

He turned away and ducked inside the concrete dumpster enclosure. Two other men with eyes on the door reported they had visual, and we had a man out front too, in case Mike tried to run that way. Surveillance units got in position to take down Rhonda when the time came.

At half past 11, the kitchen crew trooped out, propped the back door open, and dragged out their slimy black mats, sudsing them up, hosing them down. I kept up my ruse, dripping with sweat but not moving, sipping air through the window crack. Mike stayed put too, even after the kitchen crew vanished again, leaving the door open as they mopped the floors. After midnight they humped on out again, collected their mats, and dragged them back inside.

A whisper crackled on the radio, “
What’s he waiting for?
” Another whisper snapped back, “
Off the air.
” We were all raw from the heat, testy from sitting still so long. Over the next hour, the employees came out in ones or twos, lingering for at most a smoke before driving away. Finally, the manager trudged out, locked up, not carrying a deposit bag—he’d left it in the safe—then got in his car and left.

Mike waited another fifteen minutes before sliding out of the dumpster enclosure. Hands in his pockets, he meandered across the parking lot, shooting one last glance in my direction. Minutes later, surveillance confirmed that he and Rhonda were headed back home.

We waited in place another two hours. Mike might come back, I thought, try to burglarize the place, clip the trunk line on the alarm, pop the safe. Finally, I called in to Rooney, the graveyard sergeant, to report. “I want everybody to stay put, Roon. The money’s all there, he’s coming back in the morning when they open up.”

“I’m calling it off,” Rooney said. “Your guys have been stuck in their cars for six hours now. It’s still what, ninety-five degrees outside? Besides, from the sound of it, you got made.”

“The sound of what? You’re not sitting here.”

“I need a team to report to the rail yards. Call just came in. Somebody made off with two dozen cases of Heineken.”

I almost spit. “You’re pulling my guys off because a pack of kids rifled a boxcar?”

“We’ve got a squeaky victim.”

“Meaning who?”

“Meaning the Westbrook family.”

The Westbrooks, wholesale distributors throughout the state, in-laws at the statehouse, a cousin in Congress. Somebody asks you what it’s like to be a cop, I thought, tell them this story.

I got home to my apartment about 3, showered the sticky grit off my skin, and crawled into bed. I still wasn’t used to sleeping by myself back then and I lay awake awhile, puzzling the whole thing through. Get a cop alone, find him on a day he wants to be honest, he’ll tell you the cases that bothered him most always involved a suspect who someway, somehow, reminded him of himself. And I knew Mike Gallardi pretty well, I thought. Down deep, where it mattered, he was weak. That’s why he liked power, not just over Rhonda but the people he robbed—gunpoint, the terror in their eyes.
Do what I tell you.
Like a cop, or his bent idea of one: a guy who gets what he wants, even hammers his wife, and never pays. I was going to change that. I’d be the one who finally made sure he suffered, if only for the chance to tell myself I was different. I was better.

Eventually, I drifted off and dreamed I stood in the doorway of a house off in the desert somewhere. A wounded dog limped toward me through the moonlit chaparral. As it drew close, I looked into its eyes, and saw my son looking back at me.

The next thing, the phone was ringing.

It was Rooney. “I don’t know what to say, Nick. Apple-bee’s got hit this morning, 8 o’clock.” Some throat-clearing. “Just like you said.”

I rubbed my face, checked my watch. 8:30. “How much?”

“Twelve grand.”

Hardly a take worth risking your freedom for, I thought. But this wasn’t just about money. I wondered if Mike had driven back alone, or if he’d dragged Rhonda along with him again. And maybe she didn’t feel bullied at all. Maybe, for the first time in a long, long while, she felt married.

“We’re never gonna catch this guy without a wire.” I was laying out my case to John Tally, the county attorney. “He’s getting cocky—cocky crooks get sloppy and that’s when people get hurt.”

Tally tented his hands, rocking in his chair, sunlight flaring in the windows behind him. An ASU man, politician to the bone, he was tan and fit, pompous, cutthroat. “I’ll approve a wire,” he said finally. “And a task force, but I want hard numbers on bodies.”

“Phoenix and Tempe’ll pony up ten men apiece,” I said, guessing. “Scottsdale and Mesa half that each, an even thirty.”

“You’re lead agent,” he said pointedly. “Team up with Tom Kolchek for the wire affidavit. And don’t be fooled by his looks. He’s the smartest guy I’ve got.”

I stood up to leave. “I want to call off the surveillance, make the target think he’s in the clear.”

Tally glanced up, like I’d already become a bother. “I told you,” he said. “You’re lead agent.”

Tally was right, Kolchek looked like your Uncle Monty—thick all over with thinning hair and sad-sack eyes—but he was one of the sharpest cops I ever worked with. The affidavit came to a hundred pages and was airtight, detailing every job, how Mike came to be our suspect, the ensuing surveillance, the continuing robberies, everything. We argued that, given Rhonda’s new accomplice role, phone communications between the house and the restaurant could prove fruitful. The judge granted us thirty days for the wire, with a re-up possible for another thirty if the need arose, which would carry us through the holidays. But if we didn’t have results by then, tough. We’d have to bag up and go home.

We notified the phone company of our target lines and anticipated start date, so they could build the parallel circuits for the wiretap. Two days later, they called back to tell us Mike had disconnected his home phone. He’d done it the same day we submitted the affidavit.

Kolchek hung up and sat there, thinking it through. Finally, in an oddly sunny voice, he said, “We’ll bug his house.”

“You don’t get it,” I told him.

“I get it,” Kolchek said. “So? We tighten the circle of who knows what, rewrite the affidavit, wire up his house. Maybe we’ll get lucky. You get any better ideas, let me know.”

I didn’t get any better ideas, of course. And every time I tried to imagine who might be tipping Mike off, I could never convince myself I had the right man. Cavanaugh was the first and obvious choice, given how long he’d stuck up for Mike, but he was a hard cop and I’d seen the betrayal in his face before the Applebee’s job. Besides, like he’d said, fifty cops would vouch for Mike in a heartbeat—any one of them could be our leak.

Kolchek and I reworked the affidavit, kept the wire on the restaurant phone, and asked for three transmitters for the residence—one in the living room, one in the dining room, one in the bedroom—sensitive enough, at ten thousand dollars a pop, to catch voices throughout the house. The judge signed off and Kolchek introduced me to a tech for the county attorney’s office named Pritchard, who’d go in and actually set things up.

“I’ll go with,” I told Kolchek.

“No, I will,” he said. “I’m a pretty good lock pick and we only need two men inside.”

“What about the dog?”

Kolchek cocked his head. “Dog?”

“A white shepherd,” I said. “It’s in the surveillance reports.”

“Right. I remember. What’s your point?”

“I used to work canine. The white ones are unpredictable, you don’t want to go in there alone.” That was mostly crap, but there was no way I wasn’t going with them. I wanted a look inside that house.

The next day, when Mike and Rhonda were at the restaurant, Kolchek headed up their front walk and took a Polaroid, then went to the hardware store, bought an identical door, and set it up in his office, practicing till it took only forty-five seconds to pop both locks.

Meanwhile, I scoped the neighborhood for the best spot to place the undercover van. Mike and Rhonda lived in a mazelike community of town houses grouped in quads, and the geometry of the place was all wrong; there was nowhere within a hundred yards of their unit to park the van and not stand out. Then I saw there was a unit for rent one quad over. We could set up the wire room in there, as long as we kept a low profile.

I hit up Tally’s office for the rent and two days later, when Mike and Rhonda and most of the neighbors were off to work, we moved our guys in. Me, Kolchek, and Pritchard headed over for our entry to plant the bugs, while a ram car took up position on the street to force a fender bender, stall for time, if Mike or Rhonda came back while we were still inside the house.

When we got to the front porch, though, we found a brand-new security gate with two additional locks, barring access to the door. Kolchek just stood there, staring, holding his lockpick tools. “This isn’t happening.” He glanced at his watch and swallowed hard. Inside, the dog was barking like the place was on fire.

I started heading for the back of the house. “Bet you’re glad you brought me along now.”

There was a privacy wall around the patio in back and I scaled it, dropping down onto the pavers. A sliding Arcadia door led inside, with an insert for a doggy door. I got down on the ground, reached through, and flicked aside the dowel lodging the door in place. The dog realized what was happening then, and as I slipped inside he turned a corner and charged toward me, hackles raised, fangs bared.

I reached frantically in my pocket for the syringe of Iso-forane I’d brought along to knock him out, only to sink my thumb into the needle. “Goddamnmother
fuck
!” I played air banjo with my hand for a second, then, glancing up, saw I wasn’t the only one to miscalculate. As his paws hit linoleum, the dog lost traction, sliding toward me helplessly. Stepping forward, I caught him under the jaw with a kick so fierce he cartwheeled backwards.