Last Chance for Glory (38 page)

“Chilly day, mister. Winter’s comin’. You got any spare change?”

Blake wasn’t surprised by the beggar’s ragged appearance, the two ripped trash bags he carried, or even his white skin and blond hair. What shocked him was the panhandler’s youth. The boy couldn’t have been more than a year or two out of high school, yet he looked more than beaten. He looked like he’d been hammered.

“Yeah, wait a minute.” He jammed his hand into the pocket of his new jeans, dug out a quarter, and dutifully passed it over. “Wish me luck, man,” he said. “Earn your money.”

The boy looked up at Blake for the first time. His light blue eyes, though devoid of hostility or aggression, were reproachful, announcing that citizens who could afford a roof and three squares a day didn’t need luck. They didn’t need it because they already had it.

“Good luck, sir. Thank you, sir.” He turned, dropped his eyes to the sidewalk and shuffled away.

Blake watched him for a moment, then crossed the street to a small delicatessen in the middle of the block. Inside, he ordered a regular coffee and a toasted corn muffin, stood back to wait for his order, glanced down at the headline of the
New York Post:
EX-COP WHACKED IN WHITESTONE.

Blake grabbed the paper, opened it to page three, and began to read the body of the story. The ex-cop named in the headline was not Bell Kosinski. That was the good news. The bad news was that Bell Kosinski had been charged with second-degree murder and was now in Bellevue Hospital’s prison ward. His condition was described as critical.

The dead ex-cop, whose Buick had meandered half a block before crashing into a parked car, was named Anthony Carabone. In 1989, he’d sold a gram of cocaine to an Internal Affairs precinct spy. His felony indictment had eventually been plea bargained down to a misdemeanor and he’d been sentenced to five years supervised probation, but his job, of course, had been lost forever.

“A drug deal gone bad,” was how Detective Hank Norris had described the shoot-out to the reporter covering the story. He’d gone on to say that a third, apparently wounded man, had fled the scene and was being sought.

“Hey, buddy.”

Blake looked up at the counterman. “What’d you say?”

“Your order’s ready.”

“How much?”

“A buck seventy-five. With the paper.”

Blake took the bag and the newspaper back to his car. Inside, he read the story over and over again, trying to glean some piece of information that didn’t have Bell Kosinski lying helpless in a locked prison ward. When he finally understood that he couldn’t will his partner out of harm’s way, he felt the last pieces of the puzzle click into place.

He drove into La Guardia Airport, parked by the Delta Terminal, and went in search of an indoor pay phone. The first step was to buy Kosinski a little time and the best way to do that was to offer himself. He got the phone number of the Intelligence Division from the phone book, reached the switchboard operator, and asked for Samuel Harrah. A minute later, Harrah’s secretary, a very male cop named O’Brien, fielded his request to speak directly to the Chief.

“About what?”

“About an ex-cop whacked in Whitestone.”

“I think you want Homicide.”

Blake took a deep breath, reminded himself to control his temper. “Is Chief Harrah in his office?”

“It’s Saturday.”

“That’s not what I asked you.”

It was O’Brien’s turn to hesitate. “Yeah, he’s in.” The admission was grudging.

“You tell him that Marty Blake is on the phone. Tell him if he doesn’t wanna speak to me now, I won’t be calling back. This is his first, last, and only chance.”

After several minutes of silence, Blake heard a familiar voice.

“Whatta ya want, Blake?”

“Grogan?”

“Inspector
Grogan.”

Blake smiled, thinking the great man, Samuel Harrah, remained as anonymous as ever.

“I’ll make it short and sweet, Grogan. In about two hours, you’re gonna receive a package by messenger, some written material and a tape recording. I’d advise you to read the material and listen to the tape very closely, because your fat ass depends on it. My feeling is that we can do business, but not if my partner dies. You understand what I’m saying here? Kosinski is part of the deal. If he goes, you go. I’ll be in touch.”

An hour later, the package dropped at a messenger service in Flushing, Blake parked the rented Nissan in a lot on Hillside Avenue and walked down the block to the Jamaica library. Inside, he located a copy of
Who’s Who In New York.
Chief Samuel Harrah’s profile included the names of his wife, Margaret, his two sons and a single sibling, a brother. The sons, George and Owen, were both attorneys. The brother was dead. A Manhattan telephone directory provided office addresses for the two lawyers.

On impulse, Blake turned to the library’s computerized periodical files and located a
Daily News
story on the NYPD’s Intelligence Division. The story, written in 1989 and stored on microfilm, included a blurred photograph of Chief Samuel Harrah standing behind Mayor Ed Koch and Commissioner Benjamin Ward. Blake stared down at the photo, looking for some sign of malevolence (horns, perhaps, or at least a wicked leer), but the carefully composed features, the small eyes, pug nose, slightly receding chin, remained unthreatening. Samuel Harrah looked like any other man approaching his senior years. Like any other man looking forward to retirement and his grandchildren.

It was only a few blocks to Gurp Patel’s headquarters on Liberty Avenue. On the way, Blake considered what he’d do if Patel wasn’t in his office. Fortunately, what he’d do if Patel had taken the weekend off was the same thing he’d do if Patel had disappeared off the face of the Earth. Eternal Memorials, in defiance of its name, was gone; nothing remained, not even the sign. A Buildings Department form, glued to the front door, announced that the very building had been condemned.

Blake turned away from the empty building, saw two boys walking along the sidewalk, stopped them on impulse.

“Do you boys live around here?” he asked.

“I ain’t no boy,” the taller of the two replied fiercely.

“Ain’t no boy,” the younger one echoed.

Blake grinned for the first time in weeks. The older boy came up to his waist, the younger seemed just out of the toddler stage.

“I stand corrected,” he said. “Do you
gentlemen
live around here?”

“You the po-lease?”

“The po-lease.”

Blake shook his head. “Not a cop, a businessman. I had an appointment with the people in this building, but they seem to have disappeared.”

“Yeah,” the younger boy exclaimed, “we seen it. A …”

“Shut up, Marcus.” The older boy, jaw set, legs apart, stared defiantly at Blake. “We ain’t the public library, mister. Public library’s free.”

Blake dug a five-dollar bill out of his pocket and held it up for inspection.

“Ain’t enough. It’s gonna cost ya twenty.”

“Yeah, twenty.”

“Forget it, kids. I’m not that curious.” He shook the bill. “Going once, going twice …”

“Okay, man, we tell ya.” The older boy snatched the bill out of Blake’s hand. “We’re unemployed,” he announced. “That’s why I’m doin’ it.”

“Unemployed from what grammar school?”

The boy ignored the question. “Yesterday morning two trucks pulled up here. Me and Marcus, we seen ’em on the way to school. One was the kinda truck that moves furniture. The other was a big motherfucker. Long, with no top on it.”

“A flatbed?” Blake asked.

“Don’t know what it’s called, but if you gon’ be interruptin’ me, I gotta get paid for my time.” The boy waited long enough to make his point, then continued. “They was still here when we come back home, so we stopped to watch. The stones went on the big truck. Had a machine to bring ’em out. The office stuff went in the van. They was still workin’ when we left.”

“Any cops around?”

“Not that I seen.”

“How about a computer?”

“Don’t know, man. A lotta that stuff was in crates. Look, me and Marcus gotta go. We ain’t home for lunch, Pop’s gonna come lookin’.”

Blake watched the boys for a minute, then went back to his car and drove to an outdoor pay phone. He dialed Patel’s number, let the phone ring thirty times, finally hung up. Patel and his computer were gone, but the legend, the mystery, was still growing. He smiled to himself, touched the automatic tucked beneath his belt, imagined putting it up against Joanna Bardo’s skull. It wasn’t the most unpleasant fantasy he’d ever had, but it wasn’t the answer, either.

As he made his way through the slums of South Jamaica, a procession of unwelcome thoughts flashed through Blake’s mind. Irrelevant and useless, from his point of view, their power was nonetheless irresistible. He should not have allowed Kosinski to expose himself, should have worked up a contingency plan (like, for instance, the one he’d come with now) to keep his partner behind locked doors. At the very least, he could have kept Max Steinberg’s defection to himself. That would have bought Kosinski an extra couple of days.

But, of course, Bell Kosinski was his partner and his friend, an adult and not a child. Lying to him for his own good was nearly as repulsive as the image of his broken body sprawled on a Whitestone sidewalk. Besides, there was no way Blake could have anticipated the lawyer’s cop-out. Hadn’t Steinberg lectured them on how careful he was to stay on the right side of the law? But, at the same time, the lawyer had also reserved the right to desert the ship, a possibility that should have been factored into the equation. Instead, Blake had just assumed that Steinberg would come through.

Bad mistake, Blake thought. Almost
fatal
mistake.

It was the “almost” part that made it so hard. Blake had prepared himself for the worst, but not for the “almost” worst. Kosinski dead gave him all the time he needed. Time to prepare a scenario that left him unscathed, time to put it into effect, time to plan a revenge that wasn’t tantamount to suicide. Kosinski alive, on the other hand, demanded immediate action, conferred obligations that couldn’t be put off in the name of self-preservation.

Honor is what it is, he told himself. There’s no other word for it. And it has nothing to do with the penal code or the Ten Commandments. Honor is self-taught; it’s not sitting out there on a pair of stone tablets. It’s not created by politicians, either. You know it when you feel it and not before. If you ignore it … Well, my father tried that one and it didn’t really work out for him.

He stared out through the windshield, swept the sidewalk as if searching for Kosinski’s body as he made the turn from Forty-eighth Street onto Barnett Avenue. A hundred yards into the block, he pulled to the shoulder, shut down the engine, stared across the street at the new home of Joanna Bardo’s exiled bounty hunters. And at the man sitting on the motorcycle parked in front.

Woodside Investigations looked more like a hideout than a home. Stuffed into a one-story brick building between Jane and John’s Used Auto Parts and AAAAAAAAA (WE’RE FIRST IN THE PHONE BOOK) EXTERMINATORS, it was a long way from the determined ambience of Manhattan Executive’s corporate offices. The differences seemed almost deliberate.

Blake, of course, knew that the bail bondsmen who used Vinnie Cappolino and Walter Francis didn’t give a damn about abstractions like ambience. Why should they? Out anywhere between twenty and two hundred thousand dollars, what they wanted was the Terminator. Vinnie Cappolino may not have been Arnold Schwarzenegger, but you couldn’t really tell the difference by looking. The black leather vest, the military-green T-shirt, the greasy jeans, the stripped-down Harley-Davidson … as far as Vinnie was concerned, the movies were imitating
him.

“That you, Marty Blake?”

Blake stared at the figure on the motorcycle for a moment before replying. He and Cappolino had gotten into it once, both mean-drunk, both anxious to resolve months of verbal jousting. The fight had quickly degenerated into utter savagery, into kicking, biting, gouging, a contest of wills that’d ended in a thoroughly unsatisfying draw.

“Yeah,” Blake said, “it’s me.”

Cappolino got off the Harley, stretched his tall, wiry frame, then walked over to Blake’s Nissan.

“Got a phone call about you.”

“From Joanna?”

A grin split Cappolino’s narrow mouth, revealing a set of tiny, yellow teeth. “The one and only. Told me you was on the shit list. Wha’d ya do, boy? You forget to curtsy?”

“Yeah. I forgot to kiss her liposuctioned butt.” Blake stared into Cappolino’s black eyes. “I need some information, Vinnie, and I need it fast. Tax returns mostly.”

“You got money?” Vinnie Cappolino, his smile now curled into a triumphant smirk, leaned down into the window. “See, what happened is that Walter up and married an accountant name of Linda Horstmann. Linda runs a tight ship, Marty. No freebies is where she’s comin’ from. Just for the fuck of it don’t work no more.”

I
T AIN’T THE BEEPS,
Kosinski thought, or the green television with the spiked line moving across the screen. It’s not the cast across my chest, or the tube where my throat used to be, or the hiss of the respirator, or how cold it feels when they put the new blood in. The dope takes care of all that, the dope and not movin’ a muscle.

He felt like he was floating in his own personal lake, a lake with no horizons, a lake of morphine. The objects in his room—including the sharp burst of pain following any shift of his body—were little more than fellow travelers, vessels adrift in the darkness. They might disappear at any time, simply vanish, leaving him to the warm, enveloping waters.

I don’t know why I wasted my whole life on booze, he thought, when I could’ve become a degenerate junkie.

It was supposed to be funny, but his thoughts seemed as far away as the IV pole with its dangling plastic bag or the metal bedpan on the small table next to the bed.

Thank God for the snake, he said to himself, the snake in paradise. If it wasn’t for that snake, I wouldn’t have any reality at all.

The snake lived in the circular steel lock on the metal door at the other end of the room. He made a sound, the snake, whenever he was disturbed by a turning key, a sharp, metallic snap that echoed in the small space, cutting through the morphine, the pain.