Keeplock: A Novel of Crime (8 page)

Eddie Conte had been the undisputed leader of our crew in Cortlandt. He had a sharp Roman nose and he kept it tuned to the prison rumor mill, avoiding trouble when he could, making alliances when he couldn’t. “Fix it before it breaks, cuz,” he’d instructed. “Sniff it out and fix it up.”

I recalled an incident in 1987 when a white prisoner named Andy Grant got into a beef with a Black Muslim. A few other Muslims had joined in to protect their brother and Andy caught a shank in the process. The entire white population took it personally, and the next day the yard was packed with armed men, blacks on one side, whites and Puerto Ricans on the other.

The administration showed good sense for a change. They could’ve waited for the show to start, then opened up from the guard towers, but instead they defused the situation. They chose one black con and one white con to talk things over. The black prisoner was the Muslim Imam, Tariq Muhammad. The white prisoner was Eddie Conte.

The further I walked, the more determined I became. I didn’t want any part of Eddie Conte and whatever he was planning to do to the world, but I wasn’t a rat. If I sold Eddie out, I wouldn’t be any better than a nurse stealing dope from a dying prisoner.

Not that I was in a good spot. Not only couldn’t I turn Eddie down, even if his plan was idiotic, even if it was guaranteed to send both of us back to Cortlandt, I was going to have to invent some kind of bullshit for the two cops. Two sets of lies to keep straight, two sets of professional paranoids to fool. A decent performance would buy me time, which was all I could hope for.

Mario’s was packed and the short, fat man who approached me was already shaking his bald head as he took in my prison haircut.

“Do you have a reservation, sir?”

“I’m supposed to meet someone here.”

His expression changed instantly, a quick professional smile erasing the frown. “Are you Mr. Conte’s guest?”

“That’s me.” I ignored the Mr. Conte bullshit. The fat proprietor was probably one of Eddie’s gombahs. Eddie had spent his whole life doing time for the mob. He didn’t have to go to a stranger for an Italian dinner.

“Please. Come.” He led me through the crowded dining room, weaving between tables with the freaky grace of a dancing bear. A door in the back, just off the kitchen, led into a small private room. Two women sat by themselves at a table in the far corner. Eddie’s table was in the center of the room. He was pulling on a Heineken.

“Hey, Mario, I see you didn’t have no trouble findin’ my cuz.” Eddie had a small, thin mouth. Set underneath that nose, it had a tendency to disappear altogether, but this time his grin was so broad that I could count his teeth.

“Naw, Eddie. He’s as good-lookin’ as ya said he was.”

I blushed. I couldn’t help it. My pretty-boy face had gotten me into more beefs than everything else put together, especially when I was young. Eventually I’d accumulated enough scars and made enough friends to be left alone, but the adolescent joints, Rikers and Spofford, had been rough. I’d also learned to use my looks to good advantage, practicing my innocent choir boy smile until I could melt a rich old lady’s heart at fifty paces.

I raised a clenched fist. “One day, Eddie. Pow! Zoom!” It was an ongoing joke between us. Eddie Conte was five inches taller than me and dead game in a fight.

“Right,” he answered, “one
day
. Only now it’s night, so ya gotta wait. Mario, see if you could get my friend a bowl of minestrone. You drinkin’ tanight, cuz?”

“Sure. Coca-Cola.”

“And a large Coke, Mario. With a cherry.” He turned back to me. “What’s doin’, cuz. Still adjustin’?”

“Not anymore.” He nodded his appreciation. “Too bad about the conditions.” He meant the conditions of my parole. “What’s it like in the shelter?”

“Actually, it’s not too bad. It’s in the old Paradise Hotel near the river.” I went on to describe Calvin’s reception and my response, omitting any reference to the cops.

“Sounds like the joint, cuz.”

“Just like the joint,” I agreed.

“Here.” He stretched across the table and put a small roll of bills in my lap. “Five hundred. For comin’ down to talk.”

“You don’t have to pay me to talk, Eddie. You’re disrespecting me here.” I started to pass the money back, but he pushed my hand away, then leaned forward and tapped his nose.

“Take it from one friend to another. For what I got planned, cuz, this five hundred ain’t toilet paper.”

I put the money in my pocket, mostly because I needed it.

“Good. Now I got somebody I want to introduce.” He turned to the two women. “Big Momma, could you come over here a minute?”

The woman who rose from the chair furthest away from me was well over six feet tall. Dressed in a light blue sweater and a black skirt that came to the tops of her knees, she projected a demure femininity despite her size.

“Hi, Pete,” she said, sitting next to me. Her eyes were sky-blue and lively. “I heard a lot about you. My name’s Louise.”

“And this here,” Eddie announced, “is the woman who waited for me. This here is my wife, Annie.”

The woman who sat on his lap and planted a kiss on the top of his rapidly balding head was short and wiry. In her thirties and homely to begin with, she nevertheless held on to Eddie as if she owned him. Grinning an idiot’s grin, he nipped at her arm like a playful puppy.

As for me, I was jealous. Eddie Conte was a younger, poorer Joe Terrentini. He had values. Ties to the community. For him, crime was a freely chosen career. For me, it was a sentence. Nevertheless, I managed my sweetest smile, said hello to Louise and Annie, then reminded Eddie that I was supposed to be back in the shelter by ten.

“I know,” Louise announced. “Eddie told us about your problem, but we wanted to come down and say hello anyway. Maybe we’ll see each other again.”

“I already got my fingers crossed,” I flashed her my sweetest smile.

Louise returned the smile as she got up and turned to leave. Annie jumped off Eddie’s lap and leaned over me as she passed. “Watch this fuckin’ guy,” she warned, jabbing a thumb in Eddie’s direction. “He’s dangerous.”

Eddie’s smile vanished before the door closed. He started to speak, then stopped as Mario reappeared with the soup and my Coke. Eddie looked annoyed for a moment, then asked me what else I wanted to eat.

“The soup’ll do, Eddie. I don’t have a lot of time.”

“Bring us a couple of cold antipastos, Mario. And a garlic bread. Also, bring me another beer.” He turned back to me. “Maybe we’ll pick a little while we’re talkin’. Pickin’ helps relax me.”

“I could see that, Eddie.” I nodded at his waistline. He’d put on a few pounds in the six months he’d been out.

He looked down at the small roll hanging over his belt. Touched it as if surprised to find it there. After Mario left, he started talking. “Yeah, cuz, I’m livin’ good. And I like it. You know what’s hard about this life? First ya go in the joint, then ya come out. You go in; you come out. Alla time like a fuckin’ yo-yo. It don’t make sense. I wanna do somethin’ that’ll settle the shit once and for all. Either way.”

The warmth drained from his eyes. They grew sharp and cold, as life defying as ten years of Adirondack winters. I could do the same trick, of course, go from jovial boyishness to cold killer in the blink of an eye. I used to practice the move in the mirror while I was shaving. Eddie wasn’t using it to threaten me, only to drive home the importance of his message.

“Guys like you and me,” he continued, “got no chance in the world. It’s already over as far as we’re concerned. Pete, it was over before we got started. We never had a chance.”

I nodded wisely, just as if it wasn’t total bullshit. Just as if it wasn’t the ultimate disrespect. I
know
that I’m responsible. I’m not a child or a dog. Prisoners love to blame it on the past, on hard lives and bad breaks. But what about all those kids I’d met in the course of an institutional life who’d survived the foster care system? Who’d gone out to live normal lives (relatively normal lives, anyway) in the world? I’d chosen defiance, and even if I was locked into the cops and robbers game, it was my game and nobody forced me to play it. On the other hand, blaming the past is an important part of official prison mythology and ex-cons don’t challenge that mythology. Nobody burns the flag on a battlefield.

“You know what I had to face in Cortlandt, cuz? I had to face the fact that all my life I been a complete asshole. The wise guys ain’t gonna let me inside where the money is. They was usin’ me like a baseball team uses a player off the bench. Put me at short, put me on first, let me pinch hit when there’s nobody else left. I’m shovin’ that garbage behind me, cuz. What’d I come out, six months ago? I done four jobs for the boys, but only so’s I could get the money to set up the job I wanna do.” He leaned across the table again, his voice dropping to a prison whisper. “I’m gonna do an armored car. One time, one car, and I’m outta the life forever. You, too, cuz. You, too.”

The door opened and Mario walked in with the two antipastos and the garlic bread. Eddie didn’t move, even after Mario left. He held me with his eyes and waited for a response.

“You got an inside man, Eddie?” I asked. My voice was calm, but my heart was pounding.

“Nobody.”

“Then how will you know what’s in the truck? How do you know you won’t hijack ten thousand pounds of quarters?”

Armored cars are the favored fantasy of hijackers. After all, they sometimes transport millions of dollars in old, untraceable bills. But they also sometimes carry coins and non-negotiable securities. Or brand-new, consecutively numbered bills, which is the problem with payrolls. Sometimes they’re empty because they’re on their way to make a pickup. Sometimes they’re empty because they’ve just dropped off a payroll. Schedules are deliberately juggled so that following individual trucks to determine their routes is useless.

The traditional solution, from the hijacker’s point of view, is to corrupt someone inside. But the cops are well aware of this and inevitably begin their investigation by asking all employees to take a lie detector test. The inside man is rarely a professional criminal. Faced with ten years in prison, he (or she) jumps at the chance to testify in return for a light sentence.

“Cuz,” Eddie said, finally sitting back, “you should just take my word for it. I mean it ain’t like I’m an amatcher. This part of it I got covered.”

“You’re asking me to come in blind, Eddie.”

He shook his head. “You don’t understand. The job is stone-cold done. I’m only lookin’ for one more piece and that’s you.”

“I don’t wanna disrespect you, Eddie, but when you do a job on the street, you gotta take a risk. Even if it’s only that the cops’ll stumble across you while the job’s in progress. You can’t control everything.”

He shoveled a forkful of the antipasto into his mouth. The hard look was gone now. Eddie’s grin was smug and proud, as if he was about to show me pictures of his kids.

“I got an ace in the hole,” he said.

“Which you don’t trust me enough to talk about, right?”

He looked hurt. “Lemme tell ya somethin’, cuz. You ain’t the first guy I spoke to about this job. But you’re the first one I even told about the armored car. Tell me right now that you want in, I’ll pass over every fuckin’ detail. But if you decide to stay out, it’s better ya shouldn’t know.”

“What about my end of it? What do you want from me, Eddie?”

“I need you for the job, natrally. And I need you for one other thing. Remember Tony Morasso?”

“He’s a fuckin’ bug.” I lost my composure for the first time. Tony Morasso was a certified psychotic. He never learned the hard, cold stare because he couldn’t control the fury that kept him in and out of the psych ward and the box for fifteen years. He was mean and unpredictable, a combination that spelled danger for anyone who came into contact with him. I remembered an incident when Tony went off on another con with a piece of pipe. I remembered his tongue hanging outside his mouth and his eyes rolling in their sockets.

“I need him, cuz. I gotta convince the guard
inside
the car that if he don’t open the door, the guys
outside
are gonna die a very unpleasant death. I don’t know anybody could do better convincin’ than Tony Morasso.”

“That’s real good, Eddie, but who’s gonna convince Tony?”

“Who’s gonna convince Tony about what?”

“About getting up in the morning. About eating dinner. About not going off and shooting the guard before the door’s opened. About not going off and shooting us. About not freaking out in any one of ten thousand ways. This is a guy, Eddie, who attacked a kitchen worker because the worker put too many peas on his plate. You remember that one?”

“Yeah, I remember.”

“So who’s gonna control him?”

“You.”

E
DDIE LIKED TO TALK
, and once he got going, he was hard to stop. “The big score, cuz. This is it.” He repeated the message again and again, scattering it throughout his pitch like a farmer tossing seeds onto a plowed field. “One time and we’re done with it forever.” But the amount of money he was talking about, three or four hundred thousand per man, wasn’t near a life settlement. I’d accumulated that kind of money once or twice in the course of my career. A bad coke habit can eat it up in a couple of years. Just about the time it takes the coke to eat through your nose.

I didn’t mention this to Eddie, of course. No, what I did was listen politely, then get depressed as I walked up Ninth Avenue. I’d been at this point time and time again, plotting the perfect job whose only perfection was the speed with which it led to a jail cell. Toward the end of the conversation I’d managed to wrangle one promise out of Eddie Conte. If I decided I wanted to come in, he’d explain the missing details, and if I didn’t like the deal, I could still throw in my cards and walk away.

Eddie had no problem explaining the details of my personal role. He wanted to play the leader, the calm, efficient general, always in control of himself and the situation. Unfortunately, Tony Morasso wasn’t responding to calm, rational direction. In the best prison tradition, he was asserting dominance over his co-conspirators by threatening them with violence. They were still about two weeks away from doing the job and Eddie was pretty sure that either Tony would go off and hurt one of the boys or that one of the boys would take Mr. Morasso out without benefit of a warning.