The Last Dance (18 page)

She still said nothing.

“Let me take this back to my lieutenant,” Kling said. “He'll want to make some calls. If we can tell Restaurant Affiliates we've actually got someone who's willing to come forward with information …”

“I am.”

“I understand that.”

“But only if they drop the conviction part of it. I want my money the minute he's charged with the crime. I mean, suppose I'd seen O.J. stabbing his wife and I gave the police information that led to
his
arrest? And then he walked. Do you see what I mean?”

“But you said you
didn't
witness the actual shooting …”

“That's right, I didn't witness the shooting itself. But I know one of the men who did it.”

“Why'd you decide to come forward at this time, Miss Young?”

“My conscience was bothering me.”

She paused a moment, and then said, “Also, I broke up with him last week.”

The deputy chief in charge of PIN was informed by Lieutenant Byrnes of the Eighty-seventh Squad somewhere away the hell uptown that one of his detectives had interviewed a young woman who claimed to know one of the shooters in the pizzeria rumble, but would not divulge any information about him until she was assured she'd get the reward money the moment criminal charges were brought—all of this in a somewhat breathless rush from Byrnes who was, to tell the truth, a bit excited by what Kling had brought home.

“The fuck she think she is?” the deputy chief asked.

“You might want to discuss this with the Guido's people,” Byrnes suggested.

“They'll say no,” the deputy chief said.

He was wrong.

The executives up at Restaurant Affiliates, recognizing another brilliant public relations coup when they saw one, immediately pounced upon it. On television that night—with commercial spots going for hundreds of thousands of dollars a minute—all five major networks and most of the cable channels gave at least two minutes of free broadcast time to the news that RA, Inc., ever mindful of the uncertainties of the criminal justice system, were revising
their reward offer. If anyone provided information leading to the arrest and
indictment
of the shooters, the $50,000 was theirs for the asking.

RA Inc.'s advertising people might have been forgiven for linking the singular “anyone” with the plural “theirs” because they were selling a product and they didn't want to offend any feminist who might object to the proper but politically incorrect “his.” Too clumsy to say “his or hers for the asking.” Much easier to say “theirs” and play it ungrammatically safe, as if anyone cared. But the journalists reporting the revised offer should have known better. Instead, they read it verbatim from the ad agency's press release, compounding the felony. Further aiding and abetting, most of them closed their reports with the slogan RA, Inc. had paid millions to popularize over the years: “So come on over to Guido's for a
nicer
pizza!”

There was enough bitterness and bile in Betty Young to corrode the hull of a battleship. Divorced at the age of thirty-two, after eleven years of seemingly blissful marriage to a stockbroker who ran off to the Pacific with a Hawaiian woman visiting the city—

“An easy lei,” Betty mentioned.

—she'd finally met the man she thought she could unreservedly love again. This happened just this past March, when Maxwell Corey Blaine, a good ole thirty-seven-year-old white boy from Grits, Georgia, walked into the accounting firm for which she worked and asked for some help filling out his income tax return. Ole Maxie, it seemed, worked for a pool hall up in Hightown, a largely Dominican section of the city, but this did not seem at all ominous to Betty at the time, she being the most tolerant of human beings except when it came to cheating sons of bitches, “May they
both
drop dead,” she also mentioned.

Maxie's title at the pool parlor was “table organizer,” an occupation he found difficult to describe to Betty with any precision, but apparently a job requiring skills enough to warrant a salary of three
thousand dollars a week. His employer, a man named Enrique Ramirez, was dutiful in supplying a W-2 as tax time rolled around, but that wasn't the problem. Apparently, the state of Georgia wanted Maxie to file a return for the
previous
year, during which time not only had he been unemployed, he had also been in jail. Maxie wondered if the meager wages he'd earned in the prison laundry washing other inmates' uniforms was taxable income. Betty passed him on to one of the firm's junior accountants, who straightened out the entire mess—but that was another story.

To tell the truth, Betty found Maxie's imprisonment somewhat exciting. He had been sent to the state prison in Reedsville on what they called in Georgia “aggravated assault,” a felony that carried with it a sentence of one to twenty. He'd been paroled in January and had left the state to come straight north, in itself a violation, but the hell with Georgia, he'd found his own sweet little peach right here.

“He called me his sweet little peach,” Betty said.

She moved in with him on April 16 of this year, the day after the firm filed his tax returns. He told her fairly early on that the reason he'd been sent to prison was that he'd broken the back of a person who owed money to a gambler in Atlanta, for whom Maxie was working at the time. The person was now paralyzed from the waist down, but that wasn't Maxie's fault, since all he'd planned to do was encourage the man to pay up, not cripple him for life, a story the Fulton County District Attorney had not bought.

There was something frightening, Betty admitted—but also exciting—about Maxie's size. She guessed he was about six feet, four inches tall, and had to weigh something like two hundred and ten, with muscles everywhere and jail house tattoos on his shoulders and arms. It was perhaps his size that caused him to seek employment similar to what he'd had in Atlanta. “Table organizer,” it turned out, was a euphemism for “enforcer,” Maxie's job being to bring to task any miscreant drug dealer who failed to pay Ramirez
any money owed to him. Ramirez dealt cocaine—and “a lot of designer drugs,” according to Betty—and was connected to the Colombian cartel in a strutting bantam cock sort of way, several steps higher than the snotnosed sellers proliferating like cockroaches in the streets uptown, but nowhere close to the invisible, untouchable upper echelons of Dopeland.

In October sometime, it was brought to Maxie's attention that a stoolie and sometime courier named Danny Gimp had done grievous harm to Ramirez. Apparently, a dealer in Majesta had agreed to pay
El Jefe
—as Ramirez was familiarly called—$42,000 for two kilos of coke. Ramirez turned the packaged snow over to Danny for delivery, but it never found its way to Majesta. The way
El Jefe
looked at it, he was out not only the coke but also the profit he would have made on the coke. It was one thing to owe money to him but quite another to steal from him. This was an unpardonable offense. This did not call for mere physical retribution. This called for extinction.

On the morning of November 8, after a night of somewhat torrid lovemaking, Maxie showered and dressed and told Betty he was going out to meet a friend of his for pizza.

“He grinned when he said this,” Betty mentioned.

On the following Monday night, Betty saw the videotape on television and thought she recognized Maxie as the white gunman shooting up Guido's.

“They ought to get better cameras,” she said. “I have to tell you the truth, if I didn't
know
Maxie, I never would have recognized him from the tape.”

The closest she came to telling Maxie that she'd seen him on the tape, and suspected he was one of the men who'd killed the rat everyone was talking about, was at breakfast a week or so later when she casually remarked, “By the way, how did you enjoy your pizza that morning?”

“What the fuck you talkin about?” Maxie said.

Four days later he moved in with an eighteen-year-old bitch
whose sole claim to fame, according to Maxie, was that she knew how to do The Moroccan Sip. Whatever that was. As if Betty
cared
what it was.

All she wanted was for the cops to arrest him and send him to the electric chair. Was that a lot to ask for a lousy fifty thousand bucks?

She told them all this on Wednesday morning, the first day of December.

At a quarter past one the next morning, five detectives from the Eight-Seven drove all the way downtown to kick in Maxwell Corey Blaine's front door.

Only one of them got shot.

THEY WENT
in with a No-Knock arrest warrant and Kevlar vests because from what Betty Young had told them, the dude in here was no cookie-cutter.

The trouble with most tenement buildings in many parts of this city was that they hadn't been designed for close police work. Maxwell Corey Blaine did not live on a ranch in Beaucoup Acres, Louisiana, where the sheriff's folk could drive up a tree-lined, moss-covered driveway and then storm the front door with a battering ram, five cops on either side of it—my how all dee cattles was afeard. Maxwell—or Maxie, as he was familiarly called by his once and former rat fink girlfriend—lived in a six-story walkup on a narrow street in Calm's Point, part of a section that had once been beautiful and civilized, had since become ugly and barbarous, and was currently targeted for gentrification in the next ten years, a cycle that was doomed to repeat itself though no one on the city council had a clue.

The building was constructed of red brick dimmed by the soot of centuries. The stairways were steep and the hallways narrow.
There were four apartments on each floor, and at this hour of the morning—they had assembled outside at a quarter to two—the sounds of deep slumber rumbled from behind double-locked doors. They felt clumsy in the heavy-duty vests. They were dressed for winter as well, wearing layered clothing under the vests, gloveless now that they were inside the building, all of them carrying AR-15 assault rifles. No room for a battering ram in these turn-of-the-century hallways, stairs winding back on themselves until the men reached the fifth-floor landing and regrouped.

These men were colleagues and friends. There were no petty quarrels to settle here, no one was trying to trick anyone else into “taking the door,” which defined the ten most dangerous seconds in any policeman's life. Kling simply told the others
he
would take the door. It was him and Brown, he said, who'd initially caught the pizzeria squeal, so this was their case and officially their bust,
if
they made a bust here tonight, so he'd take the door, with Brown and Carella as flankers, and Willis and Meyer as backups. It was very cold on that fifth-floor landing. His breath feathered from his mouth as he whispered all this to the others.

He was holding the heavy Colt carbine in both hands. Inside the apartment here, there was a man who'd maybe committed murder, a man the judge had felt was sufficiently dangerous to merit a No-Knock. The team was a good one. These men had worked together before, and they knew exactly what was coming down here tonight, exactly what they were supposed to do. Carella and Brown would flank the door. Kling would kick it in. The moment the lock was history, all three would rush the room, with Willis and Meyer fanning in behind them. If they were lucky, it would all be over in two, three minutes.

Kling put his ear to the wood, listening.

He heard nothing.

He kept listening a moment longer, backed off the door, and ascertained with little head nods that the others were ready. He took a deep breath, brought up his right knee, the left arm extended for
balance, his right hand grasping the pistol grip of the rifle. The force of his kick, combined with his forward momentum and the weight of his body, smashed the wood gripping the lock's bolt to the striker plate and jamb. He followed the splintered door inward, Carella and Brown peeling off from either side of the doorway and rushing after him into the apartment, Meyer and Willis not a heartbeat behind.

“Police!” Kling shouted and behind him the voices of the others echoed the word, “Police! Police!” as the men fanned into the apartment, eyes darting. Willis hit a wall switch and a ceiling light snapped on. They were in a small, shabby living room crowded with overstuffed furniture. To their left was a tiny walk-in kitchen. On the right wall, there were three closed doors. They guessed the one nearest the entrance opened on a closet. The bathroom was probably behind the middle door, the bedroom behind the last door on the wall, where it would have windows facing the street. No one commented aloud on any of this. They had been in many similar apartments and they knew tenement layouts. They simply moved behind Kling toward the last door on the wall, no hinges showing on this side of the door, it would open inward. He grabbed the knob, twisted it, again shouted “Police!,” and hurled the door open, the assault rifle leading him into the room.

Kicking in the door, rushing the room, zeroing in on what they expected was the bedroom had maybe taken all of thirty seconds. In that same amount of time, the man who'd presumably been in bed when they arrived had already crossed the room to the dresser, opened the top drawer in it, yanked out what looked like a nine-millimeter pistol, and now turned to point it at Kling.

“Gun!”
Kling shouted and hurled himself flat on the floor, rolling away from the shooter as Brown and Carella started into the room. The bedroom was dark. In the faint spill of light from the living room, they didn't see the girl in bed until she screamed, and she didn't scream until the giant standing at the dresser in white
Jockey shorts and a white tank-top shirt fired two shots in rapid succession, not at Kling, but at the doorway, now filled with Brown's considerable bulk. Brown hurled himself to the left just as the shots exploded. The first slug missed him, missed Carella as well, who was coming through the door behind him. The second slug buried itself in the door jamb.