Bad Luck (10 page)

Dougherty was wearing tan PSE&G coveralls in case someone came by and wanted to know why there was a Public Service Electric and Gas van parked on this narrow, wooded road in this got-rocks section of Alpine, New
Jersey, on a Sunday afternoon. Dougherty had even hung some loose wires and rope from the nearest pole to make it look like he was fixing something. Dougherty supposedly knew what he was doing. Best surveillance man in the field office, according to Ivers. No, best
technician.
That's what they call these guys now. In the old days the street agents took care of surveillance, all part of the job. Now agents get teamed up with technicians on plants like this. Gibbons stared at the mess of electronic equipment packed in tight against one wall of the box. Just as well. Who the hell wants to learn how to use all this shit?

Dougherty swiveled around in his seat, one hand poised on his headphones, the other turning a dial on the board. Looking at him now, Gibbons finally figured out how he got that weird balding pattern, a hairless strip running from ear to ear over the crown of his head with a wispy dirty-blond patch standing on end in front. The bald strip was where the headphones rubbed. Must be a dedicated bastard.

Dougherty gazed up at the roof of the van, looking at nothing, just listening, slowly moving the dial with that perpetual open-mouthed smile on his face. Dougherty smiled at everything, no matter what. He couldn't be more than thirty-two, thirty-three, Gibbons figured, and he even smiled when he talked about losing his hair. He wasn't stupid or anything, just relentlessly pleasant. Who knows? Maybe life was a carnival for this guy. But Gibbons had
never
met an Irishman this happy. Not a sober one. Maybe Dougherty's mother was Polish or something.

All of a sudden the smile grew wider and those Irish eyes twinkled as he stopped fooling with the dial. Dougherty looked at Gibbons. “I think we're in business.” He swiveled back to the controls and threw a few switches. One of the three monitors mounted on the front wall came to life, switching from silent static to a shadowy black-and-white picture of a woman in a floral-print dress mixing salad at a long dining room table set for a big meal. Because of the camera angle a gaudy chandelier was obscuring her face.
Dougherty pointed to a second set of headphones hanging on the wall. Gibbons took them down and held one cup to his ear. He could distinctly hear the sound of the wooden utensils clacking against the wooden bowl.

“Where are the cameras?” Gibbons asked.

Dougherty slid the headphones off one ear. “I put 'em in the trees. I got five out there, but one's screwed up, the living room one. The others are working fine, though. We got the dining room, the kitchen, Sal's bedroom, and his bathroom. Nice picture for shooting through a window, huh?”

Gibbons nodded and smiled like a crocodile. If Sal Immordino knew that his million-dollar mansion set way the hell back there on twenty wooded acres was under surveillance, he'd really go nuts.

On the monitor Sal's brother Joseph entered the dining room then. He circled the table, checking out the spread before he said anything to the woman.
“Whad'ja make? Chicken again?”

“Eggplant and veal
,” the woman answered.

The sound quality was very good, as clear as anything Gibbons had ever heard on a surveillance tape. “You got rifle mikes up in the trees?”

Dougherty's Irish eyes twinkled devilishly. He just shook his head.

“You got into the house?”

Dougherty kept smiling and shook his head again.

Gibbons listened to Joseph interrogating the woman on how much the veal had cost them, asking her why the hell she spent so much money on “those guys.” Joseph was a jerk and always had been, as far as Gibbons could tell. An aging greaseball in a shiny suit and diamond cuff links, forty years behind the times. He kind of reminded Gibbons of that other greaseball, the one from the movies, Cesar Romero, but minus the Latino charm.

The woman finished with the salad and moved around the table. They could see her face now. She was as tall as Joseph with short, dark, nothing hair. A pair of impenetrable
oversized eyeglasses dominated a typically severe, middle-aged Italian female face. Gibbons knew it well. A lot of his future in-laws had that same look.

“Who's the woman?” Gibbons asked.

“That's Cecilia Immordino, their sister, the nun.”

“That's
Sister Cil? Dressed like that?”

Dougherty nodded. “She doesn't wear her habit when she goes home.”

“Why not?”

Dougherty glanced back at Gibbons and shrugged. “It's not that unusual. Nuns don't have to wear their habits all the time anymore. They can go human once in a while. It's not like it used to be when I went to Catholic school.”

Gibbons took his word for it. John Joseph Dougherty ought to know.

Gibbons stared up at the monitor and saw Sal Immordino coming into the dining room with a pack of his heavy hitters. He counted nine wiseguys in all and recognized most of them as captains in the Mistretta family. Two guys skulked into the room behind the pack, hugging the walls and keeping to themselves. They were too young to be
capos.
Probably Sal's gofers, his protection. Lean and hungry men.

Gibbons followed a skinny, pinkie-ringed greaseball as he moved around the table, walked right up to the nun as if they were old friends, kissed her on the cheek, and started up a conversation. She smiled and nodded as they talked—real pleasant—then she showed the guy the gold cross hanging around her neck, a big showy thing, at least four inches long. She was telling the guy that it was a gift from Sal. The guy held the cross delicately in his fingers and inspected it with great appreciation, complimenting Sal on his generosity and good taste. Gibbons couldn't believe it. This was “Juicy” Vacarini, the biggest whoremeister in north Jersey.

Gibbons noticed that most of the wiseguys tripped over themselves to get in a good word with Cecilia Immordino, while a few of them just said hello and moved on, not too
friendly. “So what's the story with Sister Cil? Is she a real nun or what?”

“Oh, yeah, she's real,” Dougherty said. “She checks out with the archdiocese and everything. She's hard to peg, though, as far as her relationship with her brother Sal goes.”

“Whattaya mean?”

“Some of these guys don't like her at all. We've got a couple of them on tape complaining that she has too much influence over Sal. But we've also got other guys on tape saying just the opposite. What we do know is that Sal likes to have her around, especially in public every once in a while. She always wears her habit when they go out together, by the way. He probably thinks it enhances the image. You know, helpless mental retard being led around by a nun. Makes him look like a victim.”

“So what do you think she's all about?”

Dougherty stared at the monitor and shook his head slowly. “I've been watching the Immordinos since last Thanksgiving, and I still can't quite figure her out. She's not stupid, she knows what's going on but only up to a point, it seems. She knows that he's into gambling and loan-sharking and racketeering and all that, but she also firmly believes that he never has and never would hurt or—God forbid—kill anyone.”

Gibbons studied her face on the monitor. “Bullshit.”

“I've got it on tape. From her and from other people. Funny thing is, she seems to approve of the criminal activities he admits to. The exorbitant profits the family makes on loan-sharking and prostitution are, in reality, the righteous punishment that sinful men must suffer for seeking out these vices. That's almost her exact words. I got it on tape. Can you believe it?”

Gibbons sipped his coffee. “Nope.”

Dougherty paused and fiddled with his dials for a moment. “My feeling is that she's deliberately put the blinders on. Sal makes big donations to the church, and she doesn't want that to dry up. She's got a real bug about
putting up a new building for the place she runs, a home or something for pregnant teenagers. She talks about it all the time. Christ, I've got hours of tape with her going on and on and on about it. My opinion is that she's willing to look the other way if it'll lead to a good donation. You know what I'm saying? Like, what's a little venial sin among friends?”

Gibbons took another sip of his coffee. Going to Confession must come in handy for this bunch.

On the monitor the men were all seated at the table now, Sister Cil standing at one end, dishing out her veal and eggplant, telling them to pass the plates. They rubbed their hands and sniffed the food, told the nun it sure smelled good, waiting for everyone to be served. It was a real homey scene, with big Sal at the head of the table at the top of the screen. A Mafia “Last Supper.”

Sal tore off a hunk of bread from a long loaf and passed it on.
“So you understand how we have to do this now, right? We use only people we know we can trust out there. None of this friends-of-friends-of-friends shit. Only people we can vouch for.”

Juicy Vacarini sloshed red wine into his glass.
“Don't worry about it, Sal. I got some good people out in Vegas. They know how to keep quiet.”

“Yeah, but I want a lot of good people
,” Sal said, heaping salad into a bowl.
“I don't want any one person making bets over fifty grand. That's the limit. That's why we need a lot of guys.
Capisce?”

Juicy nodded, his mouth full of eggplant.
“I gotcha.”

A fat guy at the bottom of the screen, with his back to the camera, piped up.
“But what about the money Golden Boy owes us? That's a big piece of change. We s'posed to forget about that?”
Gibbons recognized the whiny, disgusted delivery. Frank Bartolo, Mistretta's hand-picked choice to run Sal's crew while Sal was acting boss. Very heavy into the construction unions, dipping into pension funds, paying off the right people to get bids, extorting payments to make sure people show up at work, that kind of stuff.

Sal pointed with a wine bottle.
“Hey, Frank, don't you listen? I already said I'm taking care of that. We're gonna get paid. Don't worry about it.”

“Yeah, but, Sal, that's not the way Sabatini set it up.”
Bartolo was gesturing with both hands.
“This whole thing . . . I don't know. It's not the kind of thing Sabatini goes for. He likes to get his bread when it's due, cut-and-dried, none of this fancy razzle-dazzle shit.”

Sal was chewing, his mouth full, pointing two fingers at Bartolo like a cannon, about to make a point as soon as he swallowed. But then his sister suddenly chimed in.
“Ispoke to Mr. Mistretta the other day and I told him all about it, Frank. He's behind it one hundred percent. He loves the idea.”

Gibbons squinted at her face. What the hell does she have to do with it?

Bartolo held up his hands in surrender.
“That's all I want to know, Cil. If it's all right with Sabatini, fine. Because if it wasn't okay with him, I wouldn't want to know nothing about it. You know how he is—when Sabatini gets mad, he gets mad. You remember what happened to Tommy Ricks and his crew?”

No one said a thing. They all looked down at their plates and ate. No one had to be told what had happened to Tommy Ricks and his crew. Not even Gibbons. Gaetano “Tommy Ricks” Ricciardi and six of his men had been ground up like hamburger and mixed in with a load of cement, then poured into the foundation of a high-rise on the corner of Sixty-eighth and Second Avenue. The word on the street was that Mistretta went nuts when he found out Tommy Ricks was doing cocaine deals behind his back with a couple of Colombians from Queens after he had warned Tommy twice not to do business with South Americans. The police had to get an injunction to stop work on the building so they could smash up the foundation and look for the bodies. The biggest chunk they'd found was about the size of a fifty-cent piece, but they couldn't find any teeth to make a positive ID on any of them. Everybody
knew it was Mistretta who had ordered the hit, but they had nothing to take to court. The guys putting up the building threatened to sue the city so they could get back to work, so the cops had to give up. They ended up dumping fresh cement on the crime scene, put up thirty-two floors of overpriced condos, and Mistretta got away with it. Ruthless bastard.

Gibbons watched them all eating in silence. He noticed Sister Cil looking back and forth between Sal and Bartolo, nervouslike. She was the one who finally broke the silence.
“Mr. Mistretta was particularly happy that we'd finally have enough money to build the new facility for the Mary Magdalen Center. Out of Sal's cut, of course. Isn't that right, Sal?”

Sal looked up and nodded, chewing.
“Yeah, Cil, don't worry about it. You'll get your new building. Just don't say anything to the archbishop yet.”

“Oh, I know, I know.”
She nodded up and down, the chandelier lights glinting in her glasses.

Something wasn't right about her, but Gibbons couldn't put his finger on it. She was more than just peculiar.

Gibbons didn't recognize the short little guy who spoke next.
“Hey, Sal.”

“Hey, what?”

“How're you gonna get Mr. Mad to go along with this? He don't look too cooperative from what I seen on TV.”