Last Chance for Glory (42 page)

Blake stared after them for a moment, then strode back toward the van. On the way, he passed an outdoor pay phone, hesitated for a moment, then continued on. He was going to have to make a phone call before his first and last meeting with Samuel Harrah; he was going to have to call his mother, and even though what he had in mind wasn’t actually suicide, it carried enough risk to guarantee a grim conversation. Of course, he could always lie to her, tell her what she’d want to believe anyway, but then there’d be no point in making the call.

Who else? he thought as he pulled the van away from the curb. Who else do I have to call?

There wasn’t anybody else and he knew it even as he asked the question. There weren’t any friends in his life. The boys in the gym, his coworkers, even Rebecca Webber—they were acquaintances, one and all, objects to flesh out his existence, like his IBM, or his wardrobe. He couldn’t imagine a conversation that wouldn’t be embarrassing, a violation of some obscure set of rules that outlawed intimacy between mere acquaintances.

Christ, he thought, what I’m doing here is pure bullshit. It goes around and around in the same stupid circle. Chasing your tail is for puppies and kittens, not for men bent on murder.

Despite the bravado, Blake was seized by an emotion so strong it took him a moment to recognize it as loneliness. His mind drifted to Jeffrey Dahmer, the serial killer who couldn’t bear to part with his victims, who kept severed heads in the refrigerator, bones in the night table beside his bed. Maybe Dahmer saw each victim as the cure. Maybe he thought he could fill the empty space where his life should have been, fill it to overflowing with dead memories and the souls of his victims. He’d already eaten their hearts.

Twenty minutes later, Blake drove past the offices of South Queens Financial Consultants. He didn’t slow down, barely turned his head, circling the block four times until he was satisfied that Samuel Harrah hadn’t anticipated this particular tactic and that there was no back entrance to the consulting firm. Then he pulled to the curb, shut off the lights, and settled down for a closer look.

North and South Conduit avenues, each five lanes wide, sandwiched the Belt Parkway east and west of Kennedy Airport. Their main function, besides acting as
de facto
service roads, was to carry trucks making the run from Kennedy to Long Island or Brooklyn. The Belt Parkway itself was off-limits to commercial traffic. Blake, sitting on the southern margin of the avenue, found himself looking out over sixteen lanes of traffic. Trucks and cars passed him at speeds above fifty miles an hour, which was all to his advantage. Drivers or passengers who saw him fumbling at a locked door would be here and gone before they had a chance to confirm any suspicions.

Pedestrians would be few and far between as well. The eastern half of the block was taken up by a long, two-story commercial building cut into individual stores and businesses. A fenced lot, filled with trucks and vans bearing the inscription Ozone Park Trucking, covered the western half. Samuel Harrah’s company, South Queens Financial Consultants, occupied the upper floor at the corner of 128th Street. Below, its doors and windows covered with steel shutters, Airport Auto Supply stretched out to occupy the space beneath South Queens Financial and its second-floor neighbor, Paradise Travel, each of which had its own entrance.

Blake walked up to the metal-covered door leading to South Queens Financial, noted a sticker declaring, “Premises Protected by Allsafe Alarms, Inc.” There was no window in the door, no way to reach the system, no way to disarm it except by climbing a utility pole and cutting the electric and phone lines. Even then, the alarms within the office might well have battery-operated backup systems, systems designed to trigger the alarm if the AC current was disrupted.

It was too much protection for a business that had nothing valuable to protect. A computer? A printer? A typewriter? Similar businesses would be satisfied with an insurance policy and a good lock, which, apparently, was how the owners of Paradise Travel had seen it. The only thing between the street and its upstairs offices was a pick-proof Medeco dead bolt. Blake examined the lock closely, then retreated to the van.

Inside, he checked the kit Vinnie Cappolino had put together for him, nodded with satisfaction at a cordless drill and a set of cobalt-tipped bits, slid a quarter-inch bit into the drill and tightened down the chuck. A familiar excitement rose through his body, a sensation he instantly recognized. He’d been at this point any number of times in the past, poised between the idea and the fact, between concept and execution. The way he saw it, he was supposed to be afraid, to remind himself that he was committing a felony, that a police cruiser might come by at any moment, that undercover anticrime units patrolled neighborhoods just like this one. He was supposed to remind himself that he could still back out.

Instead, he allowed himself to be overwhelmed for a moment, to blot out Billy Sowell and Bell Kosinski, Joanna Bardo and Max Steinberg, to enter a space where only he and Samuel Harrah existed. The rest of them, from Vinnie Cappolino and Marcus Fletcher to Aloysius Grogan and Tommy Brannigan, were no more than weapons to be placed, to be moved, to be pointed. Triggers to be pulled at the appropriate time in the appropriate place.

Suddenly, Blake realized that he’d been waiting all his life for this confrontation. He recalled his father, still in uniform, coming home to drop his blue peaked hat on his son’s head, to pin his badge on his son’s chest. “We’re the good guys,” he’d proclaimed and Blake had believed it. He’d believed it and now he was going to act on it.

Blake left the van and walked at a normal pace to the recessed metal door blocking the way into Paradise Travel. Without hesitating, he placed Vinnie’s kit on the ground, positioned the drill bit just above the lock retainer in the one-o’clock position and drilled downward at a forty-five-degree angle. The cobalt-tipped drill—sharp enough to pierce the hardened plate of a bank safe—cut through the metal outer surface into the door’s hollow core like an ice pick jammed into a tub of butter. Blake kept pushing until he was through the dead-bolt retaining clip, until he contacted the door’s inner surface. Then he withdrew the drill, laid it carefully on top of Vinnie’s kit, thrust a blunt pick through the hole on top of the lock, and manually retracted the dead bolt.

Inside, with the door closed and locked behind him, Blake granted himself a smile. A minute and fifteen seconds to beat a Medeco without destroying the lock? It might not make the
Guinness Book of Records,
but it was good enough to seal Chief Samuel Harrah’s fate. And, of course, his own fate, as well.

The windowless stairway ahead of him was pitch dark and he allowed himself the use of a small, narrow-beamed flashlight as he hustled up to the second-floor landing where he found a second door, this one secured by a push-button cylinder lock, the kind Hollywood detectives crack with an American Express gold card. Unfortunately, this particular door opened into the hallway, which rendered the credit-card ploy useful only if you were inside trying to get out. Blake took a linoleum knife, the tip of its blade angled sharply downward, pushed it between the door and the frame, then forced it down until he was behind the lock. He twisted the knife sharply into the frame, then snapped it back, retracting the bolt and opening the door.

The first thing Blake did, after his eyes adjusted to the streetlight coming through the unshaded windows, was look for a door connecting Paradise Travel to South Queens Financial. He understood it as a hundred-to-one shot and he wasn’t disappointed to find himself on the wrong end of the odds. There was another way to get through the wall, a point of vulnerability usually overlooked by landlords and renters alike. But not, of course, by thieves. Or obsessed private investigators.

He packed his equipment over to Paradise Travel’s large storage closet, found it unlocked, and stepped inside. He knew that South Queens Financial’s closet would be directly alongside, that all he had to do was kick through the layer of Sheetrock between the two closets and he’d be inside Harrah’s private kingdom. He braced himself, snapped the heel of his shoe against the partition, felt a shock run up his leg as he contacted something very, very solid.

Blake handled his first reaction—that he was dealing with a safe—by deciding that (given enough time and Vinnie’s cobalt-tipped drills) he could get into anything. Then he began to hack out the area above the object with a pry bar, ripping at the paper holding the Sheetrock together, pounding through the plaster core until, his sweat-soaked hair flecked with grains of white plaster, he literally fell into the adjoining closet, landing in a heap on a large carton of Lasergraphic printer paper. He pulled himself to a sitting position, trained his flashlight on the object that had blocked his initial attempt to kick through the wall, breathed a sigh of relief when he found it to be three separate objects placed side by side. Samuel Harrah, when he’d set up his operation, had apparently been as afraid of fire as he was of burglary. A sticker on the middle drawer of each file cabinet guaranteed protection against an external temperature of twenty-five hundred degrees.

Blake jammed the pry bar between the top drawer and the frame of the middle cabinet and snapped off the lock. He chose a file at random, opened it, trained his flashlight on an eight-by-ten glossy. At first, he didn’t recognize any of the four people—three men and a woman—in the photograph. Maybe that was because the woman’s face was partially blocked by the enormous cock she was sucking. Or maybe it was because the meticulously styled hair that had become her trademark was plastered to the side of her sweaty head. Or maybe it was because Senator Margaret Frances Murray had been thirty years younger when she’d gone before the camera.

There was no real point to it, nothing to be learned from the individual lives contained within those folders, but Marty Blake spent the next half hour playing with the paperwork like a five-year-old with his birthday presents. Curiously, most of what he studied had nothing to do with sexual indiscretion. Kickbacks, outright bribery, embezzlement, arson, Medicaid fraud—New York, the city of scams and schemers, had lived up to its reputation and Samuel Harrah, one more hustler in a city of hustlers, had compiled the proof.

Inside South Queens’ one-room office, Blake wanted to turn the computer on, wanted it so bad his fingers ached, but he couldn’t risk a light, even with the windows covered. Using a flashlight inside a closed closet or on a windowless stairway might be safe enough, but if a passing cop saw a light behind the shades and decided to investigate, the game would be over. Especially if Blake made him for one of Harrah’s minions. It was too much to risk.

Instead, he took an armful of folders from the unlocked file cabinet in the far corner, carried them into the closet and compared them with the blackmail files. He wasn’t surprised when they matched up, name for name, file for file. South Queens’ customers were, without exception, its victims. Blake felt the last piece of the puzzle click into place with the mechanical finality of slot machine:
chunk, chunk, chunk—
JACKPOT!

He returned to Harrah’s office, sat on the edge of the desk, picked up the telephone. There’d be plenty of work to do when the sun came up, when he could see what he was doing, but, for tonight … He dialed the phone, took a deep breath, decided that heroes weren’t supposed to have mothers.

“Hello?”

“Mom? Were you asleep?”

“No.”

Blake ran his fingers through his hair, shook his head. She wasn’t going to make it any easier. “I won’t be calling back until it’s over, so if you want to say anything, you’re gonna have to do it now.”

“Is that an ultimatum?” She didn’t wait for an answer. “I want you to let it go, Marty. I want you to walk away.”

“Weren’t you the one who ordered me to do my duty?”

“It’s a little late for the smart remarks.”

Blake realized that she was right. And that they had no other way to communicate. “Basically, I called to say I’m still here and I’m still working.” He hesitated for an instant, then rushed on. “Bell Kosinski’s dead. I don’t know if you heard. When they couldn’t kill him on the street, they went after him in a hospital. What makes you think Harrah will let
me
walk away?”

It wasn’t what he wanted to say. Not even close. But if there was some magic phrase that would span the chasm, close all the gaps, he didn’t know what it was.

“You’re digging your own grave.”

“Wrong tense, Ma.” He instantly regretted the sarcasm. “Look, when this started out, I had no idea where it was going. I was determined to get Billy Sowell off the hook by proving he was innocent. Kosinski tried to warn me, but I wouldn’t listen. Just do the job and collect the money was what I told myself. Then, after my client was murdered in prison, I couldn’t quit. Just like I can’t quit now.”

A long silence followed. Blake listened to his mother’s breathing, waited patiently for her to get to the point.

“When I married your father, I had to give up my family.” Dora Blake’s voice was sharp and matter-of-fact, her story a recitation. “My own father actually sat
shiva
when I told him I agreed to raise my children Catholic. I thought I could live with that; I thought love conquered all, that I’d have another family, that my parents would come around. Instead, I’ve lost everything.”

“For Christ’s sake, I’m not dead.” He could almost hear his mother shrug.

“An inspector named Grogan rang my bell a couple of hours ago,” she continued. “He wanted to arrest you for assaulting a cop named Brannigan with a deadly weapon. I know what that means, what happens when they find you. What happens if you keep pushing.”

“It’s gonna happen whether I push or not. This way, I get to choose the field of battle.” Blake added burglary to the assault charge, tried to imagine spending the next five years in a New York State prison. When he realized that five years was the best he could hope for, he shuddered. “Look, Mom, I’ve gotta go.” It was time to bite the bullet, never mind the bitter taste. “It’ll be over in twenty-four hours. You can figure I’ll need a lawyer by then. Maybe you wanna work on that with Uncle Patrick.” He hesitated again, hoping she’d respond, give him an out. No such luck. Finally, after waiting long enough to justify a bad attitude, he muttered, “I love you, Mom,” and hung up.