Love or Honor (19 page)

She might even have been another undercover cop. Between the feds and the NYPD, with its various task forces and branches and projects, sometimes the right hand didn't know, couldn't know, what the left hand was doing. Chris was with Solly and an associate of Solly's, a guy named Slater—one of the few guys known only by his last name, instead of the reverse—when a fellow whom Slater knew walked in. “Hi, how are you doin', come on over,” Slater called to the newcomer, who joined them at the table.

Chris knew him too. He didn't know the name, but he recognized the face. The guy was from Narcotics.

Slater and the nark were talking when Solly interrupted “Where you from?” he asked.

“Brooklyn,” the guy said.

“From Brooklyn,” Solly repeated. “Then you know the Nineteenth Hole?”

The guy shook his head.

“You don't know the Nineteenth Hole?” Solly repeated.

“No,” the guy said. Solly didn't say anything else. When the guy left, Slater went with him.

Solly looked at Chris. “That guy's a cop,” he said simply. “Every fucking wiseguy in Brooklyn knows the Nineteenth Hole.”

As soon as Chris left, he called Harry. “Reach out, whoever this guy is, and pull him up,” Chris said. “He's burned, and he's going to get himself hurt.” Stupid! Chris fumed. Idiot! A guy who couldn't deal with the unexpected shouldn't be in the game.

Not that you could always anticipate, Chris admitted. Things happened quickly. He was at the bar at Lucho's one night, minding his own business, when a guy sitting next to him left to go to the toilet. While he was gone, the guy's girlfriend said hello to Chris. Chris said hello, and they were chatting casually about nothing at all when the guy returned. He placed his hand heavily on Chris's shoulder. “I'm telling you, you leave my girl alone,” he growled.

Chris reached up and brushed the hand away. “You've got it all wrong, buddy,” he said in annoyance. He'd come to Lucho's just to have a drink and a good meal from the chef who catered to his whims, for no other reason. This guy didn't even look like OC; Lucho's wasn't a heavy place. Ordinary people from the neighborhood stopped in at the bar on their way home from work, and the mob guys who came were mostly low-level. The place had a gloomy feeling, though sometimes a woman played the piano that was squeezed at an angle in the narrow archway between the bar and the dining room. There was dark paneling along the walls, and plastic geraniums in hanging baskets.

But the food was first-rate, and in this low-key neighborhood spot, Chris felt he could unwind a little. At most bars and clubs, he had to be constantly on guard, so he relished a chance to be by himself and have a good dinner. And now this bum was messing up his evening.

As Chris stood up, ready to move into the dining room, the guy picked up the girl's glass and hurled it at the wall. When the glass shattered, one tiny sliver flew into Chris's eye. It hurt like hell. Muttering, holding his hand over his eye, he made his way out to Third Avenue and hailed a cab. “Take me to a hospital,” he said.

“Which hospital, mister?” the cabbie said, turning in his seat to peer curiously at Chris.

“Oh Jesus, Bellevue,” Chris said. “Hurry up.” But as the taxi headed down Second Avenue, Chris thought the Emergency Room at Bellevue—always a hotspot for accidents, stabbings, shootings—might be swarming with cops. “No, make it Beth Israel,” he said. That was the next place he could think of in the neighborhood close to Waterside.

The young doctor on duty used a machine pressed right up against Chris's forehead. “You've got a piece of glass in your eye,” the doctor said.

“I know that, Doc,” Chris said peevishly. “So what can you do about it?”

“So I can take it out,” the doctor snapped, putting Chris in his place. Chris kept quiet as the doctor worked, then. Fortunately, the cornea wasn't damaged, though Chris had to wear a bandage for a few days. He lost all visual perspective, and found himself raising a foot to take a step when he was on level ground. Stepping off a curb seemed like stepping off a cliff. He stumbled a lot. He was thoroughly aggravated at the whole stupid incident, though he took a wry interest in the knowledge that the hospital bill would be sent to the address he'd given from one of his fake IDs. The Valley Stream address was an abandoned warehouse, so the bill from Emergency was destined to float around the city forever.

So many guys were coming to his Friday night poker games that Chris recruited a man from Astoria to make drinks, and a couple of pretty girls to serve sandwiches. That wasn't difficult, because the help, especially the girls, could easily pick up a couple hundred dollars a night in tips. Chris cut the games to pay his expenses, taking a percentage of the pot, usually 10 percent, and sometimes he even sat in. Guys who ran the games usually didn't do that, but he got bored, just watching, and he thought sitting in would convince anybody who needed convincing that the games weren't fixed. Experienced players didn't need convincing; most mob games weren't crooked, just cut-throat.

Often the games went on so long, with people coming and going all night, that Chris was surprised that his neighbors didn't complain. The Waterside complex seemed so wholesome and middle-class. Healthy-looking people streamed in and out of the athletic club on the balcony level, with its exercise machines and heated pool. In the outdoor plaza, spacious and agreeably arranged for people-watching, like a European plaza, he saw people strolling, old people with their faces tilted to the sunshine, their eyes closed; young people with babies in carriages, teenagers on skateboards, and he wondered: How can you not know? He couldn't figure out how he could get by with what he was doing, right under all these respectable noses.

Not that his clients came noisily. They just slipped out of the elevator and tapped on his door, almost unheard. But there were so many coming! He began to run two games simultaneously, one game around the nondescript Salvation Army table, another half-on and half-off the sofa, partly on the end table, leaving a couple of people with no place to sit—they had to kneel. Sometimes Harry stood watch in the apartment above, but more often, it was left to Chris to report on who came. It got to the point where guys Chris knew were bringing so many players he didn't know that when he met Harry, and Harry showed him pictures, Chris sometimes couldn't match any of the new ones with the faces in Harry's portfolio. Whenever he was able to identify a photo, without any doubt, he did, but when he wasn't absolutely sure, he said so, even though Harry got frustrated. Chris was bending over backward not to make a false ID, because he'd never forgotten how terrible it was to be told he'd fingered the wrong person.

He'd been sitting at the front desk at the 4-oh, because it was his turn to catch a case, when a woman came in, with a boy about eight or nine years old clutching her hand. The woman carried a black tote bag in her other hand; she wore a kerchief and a black coat. She was not so much leading the boy as dragging him, because he looked as though he just wanted to be somewhere else. Anywhere else.

“Can I speak to a detective?” the woman asked.

“You can speak to me,” Chris said. “I'm in charge here. What's the problem?”

“Well, my son tells me,” she began, then she stopped. She looked closely into Chris's face, apparently trying to decide whether she should tell him what her son had told her. Then she went on. “My name is Mrs. Lopez, and this here is my son Miguel. My son Miguel is telling me that there is a man in the projects who is doing bad things with my son. Not with my son Miguel, with my other son.”

Chris looked at the boy. “What happened?”

Miguel suddenly seemed anxious to talk. “Well, I play in the street with my brother, and this man comes down …” Miguel went on to tell about the man who came to the school playground, talked to them, then invited them up to his apartment. The man told the boys he had some new bicycles to show them, that they could use.

“What happened when you got upstairs?” Chris asked.

“Then the man, we went into the bedroom, and he stuck his dick in my brother's ass,” Miguel said.

Mrs. Lopez began to cry.

“Did he do that to you, Miguel?” Chris asked gently.

“No,” Miguel said. “Just to my brother.”

“Where is your other son, Mrs. Lopez?” Chris asked.

“I am sick at my heart,” she said. “He is at school.”

Chris went to the school, spoke to the teacher and got the thirteen-year-old boy out of class. “Your brother is telling me things that have happened to you,” Chris said. “Are they true?”

“No!” the boy said angrily. “No, they are not true!”

“You can tell me the truth,” Chris said. “I'm your friend, and you don't have to be ashamed to tell me.”

“It's not true!” the boy insisted. “Nothing happened.”

Well, maybe the little guy is making it up, Chris thought. Maybe he's trying to get attention or something, who knows? Still, he had to be sure. “Let's just go get some ice cream then, as long as we're out here,” Chris said. “I could use some ice cream.” They walked to a new place that had just opened, near the station, where the owner served homemade ice cream. Chris ordered a scoop of vanilla, and the boy got a banana split.

“You know, if anything bad did happen, it's not your fault,” Chris said. He paused, but the boy said nothing. He kept his eyes on the dish. “As painful as it seems now,” Chris said, “you'll feel better if you tell me. I know that for sure. And if something happened and you don't tell me about it, it's going to bother you for the rest of your life.”

The boy jabbed at his ice cream, and began to cry. Chris handed him a napkin. “Finish your ice cream,” he said. “Then you can tell me.”

When the boy finished, he put his spoon in the dish and with his eyes down, staring at the spoon, he told Chris where they'd gone to see the bicycles, and what happened there. He looked up at Chris with such a bleak expression that Chris reached over and hugged him, almost knocking the dish off the table. “It's okay,” Chris kept telling him. “It's not your fault. It's okay.”

He took the boy to the station, to wait there with his mother, then went to the man's apartment. He was sure he had the guy cold, but when the door opened, Chris just stared. The guy was in a wheelchair.

“I'm investigating something,” Chris said. “Can I come in?”

As he walked in, Chris could see kids' drawings taped around the archway into the kitchen, and on the refrigerator door. He crossed to the window, which looked directly across the street into the schoolyard. Pictures of children were taped around the window frame. Through the open bedroom door, he saw two shiny blue bicycles. Still, the guy was in a wheelchair.

“What am I being accused of?” the man asked in a calm voice.

“We can discuss it at the precinct,” Chris told him. “I want you to come with me now.”

The man smiled slightly. “Of course I'll come with you.”

Chris wheeled him downstairs, lifted him into the car, and folded the chair into the backseat. At the precinct, he put the man into a small room. “Wait here,” Chris said. “I'll be right back.”

Chris went down the hall to the room where Mrs. Lopez was sitting with her sons. “I want you to tell me again what happened,” he said to the older boy. “And you must be very, very sure.”

The boy repeated the story in detail, with his younger brother chiming in. Mrs. Lopez twisted her hands in her lap, nervously. “It'll be all right,” Chris told the family. “You did the right thing to come here.”

Chris went back to the old man. “I'm placing you under arrest,” he told him. The old man stared at him. “What for?” he asked in a strained voice.

“For child molesting and sodomy,” Chris said.

The man clutched his chest and fell forward in his chair. “I'm getting a heart attack,” he gasped. Chris thought he was faking, but he wasn't. Chris called the Emergency squad and rode in the ambulance with the old man to the hospital.

By the time Chris got back to the station, about three hours later, a priest was talking to the captain. Chris wasn't surprised that the priest knew about the case; in that neighborhood, everybody knew everything that was going on.

“Chris, this is Father Conlin,” the captain said.

“Hello, Father Conlin,” Chris said.

“I want you to know that this man you are accusing is a pillar of society!” the priest declared. “He is a very religious man, and you are wrong to accuse him.”

“Well,” Chris said, “I have two kids saying this is what he did.”

“Kids make up stories,” the priest said.

“I know kids make up stories,” Chris said. “But I believe these boys, and based on what we know, I had to arrest him.”

When the priest had gone, the captain pointed his finger at Chris. “If you're wrong about this, you're going to be pounding a beat in the most Godforsaken part of the Bronx,” he warned.

“I'm not wrong,” Chris insisted, thinking, please God, please don't let me be wrong.

Back at the hospital, he found the man's condition had stabilized, so he took prints and sent them to Albany. At the bedside arraignment next day, Father Conlin had just arrived when the report came back. Chris showed him the yellow sheets, the guy's previous record: twenty-one counts of lascivious conduct, going back to the 1940s, from different places: Boston, Washington, Chicago.

“From now on,” Chris told the priest, “you stick to your work and I'll stick to mine.”

Father Conlin smiled sadly. “We're both doing God's work,” he said.

One Saturday in September, when Chris drove Marty home from the beach, her mother came to greet him in the front hall. “We'd like you to come for dinner tomorrow,” she said, smiling at him. “Sunday is our macaroni day.”