Rough Justice (5 page)

“See, there's one right there.”

Vicki lifted her head and shouted, “Hey, everybody. Wells has sold out.”

There was a general “Awww” from around the room. I stood up. Fran brought my coffee.

“Just leave it here,” I said.

I hurried through the maze and around the city desk. Pushed out the glass doors to the bank of elevators. Lansing leaned her head out the glass doors after me. She smiled maliciously.

“Guess you two can sit around being perky together.”

The elevator opened. “I can be perky.” I got in. The door closed. “I can be as perky as anyone.”

I took the subway to Little Italy. I walked the winding, cramped, and smelly streets, between the crumbling walls of painted brick. On Kenmare, I went in the side door to a small garage. There was a man there named Marty Rapp. He was in his fifties now, but he had the frame of a linebacker. Arm muscles stretched his shirt open at his hairy chest. Leg muscles made his jeans tight. He had a sharp-featured, bullet-shaped head and a widow's peak you could open a letter with. He was in the bay, leaning against the trunk of an old Camaro, smoking a cigarette. A man in overalls crouched down next to him. He had the car's front door open and was working on its hinge with a screwdriver.

When I walked in off the street, Marty Rapp looked at me with marbly black eyes. He kept looking until I was standing directly in front of him.

“You're not here,” he said then. “Go away.”

“Let's go in back.”

He shook his head, his pale lips parting. “What? Can I talk to you? No. Can I be seen with you? No. Go away, Wells.”

“It's old stuff, Marty. Nothing hot.”

“Nothing hot. You're hot. You're the whole reason Marino got whacked. Who is that? Is that me? No, it's you.”

“I also pegged Mulroney for that arson charge,” I said. “You'd have gone down for that. You owe me.”

He looked at the grimy ceiling. Then he leaned toward me. Then he tapped me on the chest with his finger. “Wells. Mr. Dellacroce is still talking a whack on you. Is this a safe thing for us? You tell me.”

“Tell Dellacroce I've written my obit naming him as the cause of death. He hits me, it runs. Now, come on, give me a break here, Marty. I need to know about E.J. McMahon.”

“Fuck you.”

“Was Marino in on that?”

“Fuck you.”

“Tom Watts?”

“Fuck you.”

“Okay,” I said, “we'll do it this way. If Tom Watts was in on it, just say: ‘Fuck you.'”

“Fuck you.”

“Marino?”

“Fuck you.”

“Tommy the Blond?”

Marty Rapp put a cigarette to his lips carefully. “This is a living person, Wells. Have some respect.”

“Thanks, Marty.”

“Fuck you.”

I waved as I walked out through the door.

Next, I went to see Gerard. He gave me an office and let me go through the file. I got a couple of possible witness names, a couple of cops' names. After that, I went to Bagel Nosh and got a garlic with butter and a cup of coffee.

It was past two when I got back to the city room. I started making phone calls again, trying to track down the witnesses. I actually caught up with one in Arizona, but she wasn't talking. “I didn't see nothing then,” she said, “and I didn't see nothing now.” She hung up on me.

After that, I called an attorney who used to be with the D.A.'s office. Then I started calling the cops.

That was the worst of it. The cops. I know for a fact that a lot of them would love to see Watts crucified, but they don't want to see an outsider like me drive the nails in. More than once that afternoon, the line went dead in my ear. When a cop did talk, the hostility crackled on the line like static. One old detective told me to take care of myself. He said it just before he hung up. He didn't sound very pleasant when he said it. I wasn't making any friends among New York's finest. All the same, I kept calling.

Around seven that evening, Emma Walsh came out of her office. She started walking around the city room. Hands behind her back. A proprietary look in her eye. She nodded at a couple of reporters. They nodded back and then buried their heads in their work. She wandered over toward me.

I was eating dinner and reading over some clips from the morgue. I was tilted back in my chair, my feet on the file cabinet. I was tearing into a corned beef on rye and dripping mustard on the folder that lay open on my lap. There hadn't been much in the paper fifteen years ago about E.J.'s disappearance. It seemed to have gotten lost in all the news about the Conti hit.

“How goes it?” Emma said. She glanced at my feet. I dropped them to the floor. I tossed the folder onto my desk.

Emma sat on the file cabinet, while I swallowed some corned beef. “It's good,” I said. “It's perky.”

“Careful.”

“Really. I've never felt so … so vibrant about a story before.”

She almost laughed. Almost. “Never mind that. Have you got it?”

I wagged my head, ate some corned beef. “Yeah. Yeah, I think I've got it. A lot of cops have heard the story, so it's been around. One thug sort of gave me confirmation on the names. A lawyer who used to be with the D.A. is on record saying he suspected Watts at the time. I was going to run it by Rafferty, then call Watts for his no-comment. Then we can see where we stand.”

“Okay.” She stood up. “You know, if you had a computer terminal, you could just push a button for that morgue stuff.”

I smiled at her thinly. “Yes, ma'am.”

I called Watts at his precinct. The desk said the lieutenant wouldn't be in until tomorrow. His home number was unlisted, but I dug out my Rolodex and found him. I called him at home. A machine answered. Watts had gotten divorced after the drug scandal, I remembered. He lived alone. I left a message on the machine. I said it was urgent. Then I hung up and waited.

The phone did not ring. An hour later, I made the calls again. I got the same answers. The bulldog deadline came and went. I called again, struck out again.

I gathered with Rafferty and Emma at the city desk. Rafferty swiveled in his chair. I perched on the desk, smoking. Emma stood next to me.

“Do we need him?” she asked.

Rafferty's bullet head tilted to one side. “We ought to give him a chance to respond before we accuse him of murder. We don't want it to look like a vendetta.”

“It is a vendetta,” I told him.

“Well, I know that. But we don't want it to look like a vendetta. And if we wait for tomorrow, you can track him down man-to-man.” He looked at me with his deadpan eyes. “If we leave it a day, do we get scooped?”

“No. Not a chance. D' Angelo went in for emergency radiation last night. He's not talking to anyone. Hell, he could be gone already.” I called out across the room: “Oh, Fran, dear. Would you please dial up St. Vincent's and check on the condition of Frank D' Angelo? Thank you.” I said to Emma: “She's great, that one. You gotta watch her.”

Rafferty made a noise in his throat.

“What about Watts?” said Emma. “If we let him have an extra day, it may give him time to get at us.”

I shook my head. “How? How can he get at us?”

Emma thought it over. She shrugged at Rafferty. Rafferty thought it over. He shrugged back at her.

“Okay?”

“Okay,” she said.

“Okay, that's it. We hold it for tomorrow.” Rafferty turned a stone eye on me. “It's ten-thirty, Wells, go home. We'll let you know if he calls for the late edition.”

Without thinking, I glanced at Emma. “He's the city editor,” she said.

It had been a long time since Rafferty had heard those words. For the second time that day, he almost displayed an emotion. He almost looked perky.

It was cool and pleasant when I got outside. The air practically smelled clean. The evening rush had cleared away, and only the cabs swarmed around Grand Central. Their headlights shone in the clear spring darkness. The storefront lights all up and down Forty-second Street shone. So did the streetlamps hangdog under the stately office buildings. And the office buildings pressed black against the purple surface of the sky.

I was whistling my happy tune again as I crossed the street. And as I walked briskly in the shadow of the concrete terminal. Past the bums lined up at the charity van, waiting for doughnuts and coffee. Past their bent shoulders, unshaven faces, yellow eyes staring aimlessly through the mist from the manholes. Still whistling, I went into the terminal through the corner door.

I picked up a paper at the newsstand inside then hurried into the vast main arcade. Under the constellations arching across the ceiling above, the beggars sat against the wall, their pants legs rolled up to air their sores. The cops patrolled. I rushed past, thumbing through my paper, humming my tune.

I went down the stairs into the subway. Caught a Six just as I came down onto the platform. It was crowded inside the rackety train. I found a seat next to a gaunt man in a billowing black coat. His mouth hung open. His eyes were glassy.

I tried to read the paper some more. I stared at the sports section.
CLASSIC
! the back-page headline read. But I couldn't pay attention to the story. I closed the paper in my lap. I slapped my fist into my palm. The gaunt man stared at me.

“Hot damn!” I whispered.

I had him. I had him dead to rights. That son of a bitch. I don't forget. I never forget. He sucker-punched me. Now I had him.

There are some people who say I work too much. Lansing, for instance. She's always saying that. She says I drown myself in my work as if it were booze. Trying to forget things. Trying to forget my wife, who left me twenty years ago. And my kid, who hanged herself seven years ago. Lansing says I work to avoid my personal life. She says I have no personal life.

But she's wrong. She's dead wrong.

This was personal.

I could still remember how it felt. Lying on the floor of the interrogation room. Watts towering over me. Watts's shoes in front of my face. Blood dribbling out of my nose, smearing my cheek. As if I were some kid who'd been knocked over by a bully. I told him. I told him then. I'd have his badge, I said. I said it with all the helpless rage of the moment. Meaning it, but not believing it.

“Your badge is mine, Tommy,” I said. “Your fucking badge is mine.”

And Watts—Watts, dreamy-eyed and cool—he pulled his foot back to kick my head in. If Gottlieb hadn't walked in just then, I'd be selling papers instead of writing them.

I got out of the subway at Eighty-sixth. I climbed up the stairway into the sound of horns, the rush of traffic. Up here, the street was still jumping. Young couples bopped by arm in arm. Movie marquees glittered. TVs glowed in store windows. I walked through it slowly, my hands in my pockets, my newspaper under my arm. I whistled a happy tune.

My five-story concrete building stands across from a movie house. There's a low-slung shopping mall on one side of it. New high-rises all around. I pushed into the foyer. Picked up my mail. Got into the tiny elevator. Leaned back against the wall as the doors closed.

I was more tired than I thought. I shut my eyes. I smiled to myself. Tom Watts, I thought. I had him.

When the door opened, I propelled myself into the hall. Down the hall to my door. I unlocked it, pushed against it with my shoulder.

I came into the familiar semidark. The lights from the street. The red glow of the movie marquee. The cracks on the wall.

I closed the door behind me. I reached for the light switch.

And someone looped a cord around my neck and pulled it taut.

5

I opened my mouth, gagging. The cord tightened. I saw white and purple starbursts explode in front of me. My lungs pounded. No air. My face got hot. The strangler leaned back, nearly pulling me off my feet. I felt my tongue forced out between my lips, my eyes straining out of their sockets.

I reached behind me. I heard myself make a soft, choking noise. My pulsebeat filled my head. I couldn't hear anything else. I touched the strangler's leg. The white starbursts were going out, one by one. Everything was going out. The apartment was spinning away from me, getting smaller, darker. My hand fluttered over the strangler's crotch. In the darkness, I saw the pinetops of the Maine forest. I saw them reaching into the thin blue of the winter sky. I had grown up in those woods. My breath made puffs of smoke as I gazed up at the trees. My breath …

I clenched my hand into a fist.

The strangler screamed. The cord loosened. I vaulted forward. The cord flew off me. I crashed against the wall. I clutched my throat. I retched. My knees buckled and I began sliding to the floor.

In the rosy light from the movie house, I saw the shadow of the man who'd tried to kill me. He was doubled over, his arm across his midsection. His other hand had grabbed hold of a chair for support.

My knee touched the floor. I fought to draw a breath. My lungs dragged the air halfway in. I started coughing. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw the man begin to straighten.