Sicilian Defense (8 page)

“We got ourselves a problem downtown last night,” Tony said slowly; “some guys, colored guys—punks!” he said purposely. He wasn't afraid and he wanted them to know it. Lloyd watched him carefully. “They grabbed my boss—snatched him. They've got him somewhere.”

Big Diamond was shocked. “They grabbed Sal? I can't believe it.”

“Believe it.”

“What makes you think they were colored?” asked Lloyd. He had a deep, bass voice.

“I don't think,” said Tony. “I know. They drove down the street and threw a dead man on our doorstep. Then they called us. I spoke to the guy myself. He was a—” Tony hesitated.

“Let's not have any of this colored, black, nigger bullshit,” Big Diamond cut in. “We're talking serious business now. Any punk comes along and snatches one of the bosses—your bosses, my bosses—is a shiftless, rebel nigger.” Big Diamond poured a drink all around. “Then what?”

“They said they'd call back at eight tonight. Now Gianni's sent us out all over town to get whatever information we can.”

“Johnny who?” asked Lloyd.

“Gianni Aquilino.”

Lloyd's eyes opened wide at the name.

Big Diamond smiled. “I knew the Old Silver Eagle'd come swooping off his perch again one day. What a man he is,” he said to Lloyd. “What times we've had together. I mean real times. We used to meet at the clubs downtown. That man sure knows how to live. So Gianni sent you here?”

“Yes, to see if we can find anything—you'd have a better nose for this sort of thing than we would downtown, if you see what I mean.”

Big Diamond nodded, puffing his cigar. “What do you know about it, Lloyd? You hear anything around?”

Lloyd shook his head.

“Don't just shake your head, Lloyd,” said Big Diamond. “These are our friends and if we can help them, we're going to help them. We're all in the same game. If some white guys snatched me, you bet your ass you'd go down and ask them to help us. And they'd help us. We've been working together hand in hand for years. We get our money down there. If some punks come along and try cutting into them, they're cutting into all of us.”

Lloyd looked skeptical.

“Come on, Lloyd,” said Big Diamond. “They'll snatch the white bosses first, sure. Then you know who's next on the list?” He watched Lloyd, puffing his cigar. His pinky ring glistened momentarily.

“You got it baby. Me. Or Elmo. Or Stan. Now—you know anything about it, Lloyd?”

“I haven't heard a thing. I doubt it's our people, though.” He looked at Tony. “The cats with us, I mean.”

“Maybe not. But you can get better information on colored guys than we can,” said Tony.

“That's for sure,” said Big Diamond. “What do you think, Lloyd?”

“Maybe some of the militants—the Panthers,” said Lloyd.

“Muslims?” Tony suggested.

Big Diamond shook his head. “No, they're not into that, it's not their way. They're more religious; they don't want to snatch one guy. And if it's the militants, they've got to be tough guys too,” said Big Diamond. “I mean, you're not going to find any civil rights guys with the balls to get involved in this. They've got to be closer to us than just across the street.”

“That's what Gianni thought,” said Tony.

“Gianni's right. I'm right too,” Big Diamond laughed. He offered the bottle around. The other two shook their heads. “Now, the question is: who? Start thinking close to us, Lloyd, close to the other mobs. If we don't come up with anything, then we'll spread the circle.”

“It just can't be any of our people,” said Lloyd. “Things are going too smooth, everyone's making plenty. I'd know, anyway.”

“It's not the close men you've got to worry about,” said Tony, “but the guys who hang around with them—their runners or pushers or whatever the hell they are.”

“That's where it is,” agreed Big Diamond. “The little guys that see the action but don't get as much of it as they want—they're always hungry.”

“I'll talk around,” said Lloyd.

“There isn't much time,” Tony reminded.

“Right,” said Big Diamond. “People who can do this can kill. They already have. Lloyd, get out there and do some talking right away. It shouldn't be long before you come up with a lead, if it's from up here. You've got to think of Brooklyn and the Bronx too, Tony.”

“We know. There's a lot of ground and not too much time.”

“I'll go see Elmo and Stan,” said Lloyd.

“That's it, Lloyd. But take only Junior with you. If it gets around that we're looking, they'll go underground. Right now they must think they're safe because the white mobs can't get to them up here.”

“Good thinking,” said Tony.

“Yeah, once in a while we lift our heads out of the watermelon long enough to think a little,” said Lloyd.

Tony stared at him.

“Hush that trash, Lloyd. These guys are just like us and we're like them. We're just different colors, that's all. The one color we all agree on is green—long, Uncle Sam green.”

Tony nodded with as close to appreciation as was in him.

“Let me talk to you a minute,” said Big Diamond. He rose. He just kept rising. Big Diamond was more than six-foot-four; he towered over five-foot-five Tony as he walked off to the side with him.

“Tell that Silver Eagle I said hello. And,” Big Diamond spoke more softly now, “if he needs some bread for the ransom, tell him just to send the word to Big Diamond.” He clapped Tony on the back.

“I sure will,” said Tony, putting out his hand. His thin mouth defrosted slightly, only for an instant.

3:00 P.M.

Detective First Grade John Feigin turned from Mulberry Street and walked up the steps of P.S. 21, crossing the courtyard to the main entrance. It was one of the old style New York public schools, built like a limestone castle with turrets and gabled roof. How many thousands of kids had gone to this school, he wondered—how many thousands of hoods and punks, as well as decent people who now owned the stores on Mulberry and Mott Streets and the old buildings in Little Italy.

Feigin entered and started up the stairway. A couple of straggling kids were walking through the halls. He had just wasted an entire day in court on a collar he had made—some young punk breaking into a store and assaulting the owner, who lived in the back. All day in that lousy court, and the judge gave the lawyer a postponement on some flimsy excuse just barely veiling the fact that the lawyer hadn't yet received his fee.

Feigin was disgruntled, and a little out of wind, when he reached the third floor. He went right to the locked room where the tape recorder was set up. The tape was voice-activated, so it only recorded when someone was actually talking in the telephone booth at the Two Steps Down Inn. Feigin opened the door and saw that an inch of new tape had wound through the sound heads.

Well, maybe we got something this time, he thought as he rewound the used spool and replaced it with a fresh one. They'd had the booth wired hoping to get a lead on a recent homicide. Feigin put the used tape in a small Manila envelope in his pocket. He reset the machine to Record, locked the room and made his way downstairs and back to the station house.

“Did you get anything?” asked Quinn, Feigin's partner. He was sitting at his desk in the squad room, two-finger typing a report.

“Yeah—a sore ass sitting in court all day till the lawyer showed. Then he got an adjournment.” Feigin took various papers and the tape out of his pockets. “Papers and pigeons are going to take over the goddamn world,” he muttered. “I don't know, twenty years on this job ought to be enough for anybody, but not me,” he said, moving around to his desk. “Me, I've got perseverance—twenty-three years here already.”

“I know, I know,” said Lieutenant Schmidt, coming out of his office in shirtsleeves. “You're ready to toss in your papers, right?”

“Okay, Lou, rub it in. Just because I'd have nothing to do except drive my wife around, which is even worse than this lousy job.” Lou was police argot for lieutenant.

Schmidt laughed and walked to the file cabinets against the far wall. The squad room was painted the familiar light green with white ceiling, a color scheme chosen about fifty years earlier because it was supposed to be easy on the eyes. From the looks of it now, the paint job must have been done then too, and not touched since. The room contained six desks, old wooden jobs, each with a typewriter and a phone. In one corner was a detention cage, and in another was a wall shelf where prisoners were fingerprinted. On the other side two partitioned cubicles served as lieutenant's office and clerical office. Between them was a door with a two-way mirror used when witnesses had to view suspects.

“What have you got?” Schmidt said to Feigin.

“A new tape from the wire at the Two Steps Down Inn, on the homicide over in Crosby Alley.”

“That body we found shot in the back of the head?”

“That's the one,” said Quinn, resting his two typing fingers. He lit a cigarette, blowing out a long stream of smoke that rose to the globe hanging from a chain in the center of the room.

“What's on the tape?”

“I haven't listened to it yet. Probably just some more of that garbled talk they use so we don't know what the hell they're saying—‘I went to see that fellow, you know who I mean'” Quinn mimicked.

Schmidt laughed. “If there's anything on it, let me know.”

Feigin went into the clerical office. On the desk was an old tape machine. Quinn came in as he was threading the tape into it.

“You want a cup of coffee, Jack?” Quinn asked as he ran water into the pot.

“No, thanks, Quinny. I had plenty of that poison they make in the luncheonette over in court.”

Quinn set the pot on the hot plate and leaned his rump against the desk as Feigin started the tape rolling. Just as predicted, it recorded the conversations of various people who frequented the restaurant, all talking in vague terms intended to foil just such a tape. There was an occasional call from a patron to his home or a girlfriend, and from a couple of neighborhood people speaking in Italian to Con Edison or the telephone company.

“Wait a minute—what the hell is that?” said Quinn, holding up his hand.

They listened. They heard the voice of the man with the Southern accent talking to Tony, telling him they had Sal, and about a body that had been dumped.

Feigin stopped the machine abruptly and replayed the tape.

“It sounds like Mike speaking first, then Tony Mastropieri,” said Feigin.

“Yeah—talking to a jig.”

They listened intently, watching the spools wind.

“Get the Lou,” said Feigin.

They played it for Schmidt. His eyebrows raised. He motioned to hear it again. “That sounds like a snatch—as though someone's got Angeletti,” he said.

“And dumped a body,” said Quinn.

“When was this tape made?” Schmidt asked.

“Had to be last night or early this morning,” said Feigin. “I changed the spool yesterday afternoon.”

“Anybody find a body near there?”

“Fat chance,” said Quinn.

Schmidt nodded. “They'll get another phone call tonight.”

“That's right. Tonight at eight,” said Feigin. They all looked at their watches.

“A kidnaping right here in our own safe little neighborhood,” said Quinn. “That's unusual. I mean, I thought that sort of thing, with ransom calls and all, went out with the old Mustache Petes.”

“That wasn't a Mustache Pete they were talking to,” said the lieutenant. “It sounded like a colored man.”

“You figure they'll call back asking for ransom?” asked Feigin.

“If they just wanted to kill Angeletti, they wouldn't bother to call,” Schmidt replied. “They'd have dumped him by now.”

“But a colored guy!” said Quinn—“there aren't any connected with people down here.”

“There aren't any colored guys down here, period,” said Feigin. “Anyway, who the hell would want to snatch Angeletti? Who'd be crazy enough to tangle with that mob?”

“Somebody who knows something,” said the lieutenant.

“How do you mean?”

“They knew enough to snatch Sal. They know Frankie the Pig is second in command. They had to get that information from somewhere.”

“Some colored guys in the rackets maybe,” said Feigin. “They'd know the setup.”

“I can just see that wop Frankie the Pig going crazy,” Schmidt bellowed. “He's probably wrecked half the neighborhood by now. Remember how we needed five guys to hold him down last time we collared him?”

They laughed.

“He's a tough bastard,” said Feigin.

“There's one other group that would know the setup,” said the lieutenant; “it's far-fetched, but we don't have much to go on right now.”

“Who's that?” asked Quinn.

“Cops—Feds, or somebody like that.”

“Why would it be cops?”

“It doesn't have to be; it's just that they'd know the setup too.”

Feigin shrugged. “What for?”

“For money, what else?” chimed Quinn.

“It's not a bad idea, now that you mention it,” said Feigin. “I could retire with a nice little nest egg—why didn't I think of that?”

Lieutenant Schmidt grinned at him. “I think you two ought to be over at the listening post tonight to cover that eight o'clock call. Take an extra set of headphones—we've got some around here somewhere.”

“I was supposed to take my wife shopping tonight,” said Feigin.

“Well now you've got an assignment, so give her a call.”

“Yeah, yeah, and listen to her bitching for half an hour.”

“You see, that's why you don't toss your papers,” said Quinn.

3:30 P.M.