A Firing Offense

  “What else?”

  “Like I said, in a roundabout way you did me a favor. I’m going to get my goods back, but nobody has to know that, understand what I’m saying? Now I can turn this last batch over on pure profit. That makes me an independent. Which is what I wanted all along.”

  “Let’s go to the car.” We walked in the direction of the Cadillac. “Is the boy all right?”

  Rosen shrugged. “He’s an addict, I’m sure of that. Some associates of the ones you took down last night were keeping him busy in a crackhouse. He’ll need treatment.”

  “That kind of treatment is expensive,” I said. “And often it doesn’t take.”

  “He’s lucky to be alive.” Rosen stopped walking and narrowed his eyes. “So are you.”

  “We should get something straight before this is over. Because when I take that boy out of here, it is over. I’ve written several identical letters to my contacts at the Post, explaining in detail the history and players of your operation. These letters won’t be read, unless something happens to me, or the boy, or his grandfather, or anybody I know for that matter. That includes John McGinnes, and Joe Dane, and Dane’s family.”

  “McGinnes,” he said, “will have to be terminated. He can’t continue to be employed at Nathan’s. You can understand that.”

  “McGinnes can make a living anywhere. He’s a salesman. But he’s not to be touched.”

  “Anything else?” he asked, irritated.

  “One thing,” I said. “Where’s the girl?”

  He chuckled. “You’re so predictable.” He shook his head, but gave me the address.

  We reached the car. Rosen signaled his new ally, who got out, threw me a requisite, half-hearted, hard-guy look, and walked around to the other side of the Caddy. He opened the door and helped the boy out.

  Jimmy Broda’s color was just short of gray. His trousers were crimped at the waist by a severely tightened leather belt. His jean jacket fit his shoulders as if it were hung on a wire hanger.

  The buyer walked him towards me. Broda’s eyes widened almost imperceptively as recognition seeped in. He quickened his step and reached out in my direction. I pulled him in with one hand and put my arm around his shoulder, holding him up. He had the weight of a paper bag.

  “You’ve got him now,” Rosen said impatiently. “Where are my goods?”

  “Follow me,” I said. “The van is parked a few floors down. Your boy here knows which one it is.” I tossed the keys to the buyer.

  Rosen said, “Don’t even consider fucking me.”

  I let him have the last word and, with Broda under my arm, walked slowly across the roof. I was aware that they were still standing by the Cadillac, watching us. I instructed the boy to continue moving in the direction of my car.

  I let him into the passenger side and got behind the wheel. His hands were folded in his lap, and he was staring straight ahead. I reversed out of my spot and rolled down the ramp.

  They were tailing me slowly. Jimmy turned his head back, saw them, became startled, and looked at me.

  “Just look ahead,” I said. “We’re almost out of here.”

  We wound around the garage. Four floors down I stopped my car, rolled down the window, and pointed my arm out to the sub-roof. Then I continued down the ramp. I saw them in my rearview, veering off to the right.

  I accelerated when I reached the ground floor and blew off the stop sign at the exit. I lit a cigarette and turned down North Portal at the Sixteenth Street circle. WHFS was playing Graham Parker’s “Howling Wind,” and I kicked up the volume. An Afghan hound was running alongside our car, and Broda watched him until he broke stride. Orange leaves blew out of our path as we entered the park.

  BETWEEN THE DOUBLE GLASS doors of the apartment house on Connecticut Avenue, I dialed up Pence’s number.

  “Yes?” he said.

  “Nick Stefanos. Buzz me in, will you?”

  “Certainly. Would you like me to meet you?”

  “No,” I said. “I’ll be right up.”

  We exited the elevator at the tenth floor and followed the carpeted hallway. Pence opened the door on the second knock. His eyes widened and both hands reached out. He pulled Jimmy Broda through the door and into his arms.

  The old man shut his eyes and mumbled something as they held each other. Their faces crushed together. I stood in the hallway, my hands shoved into my pockets, and looked down at my shoes.

  “Please, come in, Nick,” Pence said finally over the boy’s shoulder.

  “I can’t right now,” I said. “But call me later at my apartment. There are some things you need to know.”

  “Your compensation. Of course.”

  “That, and other things. Good-bye.”

  Before he could object, I pulled the door shut from the outside. I stood there for quite a while and listened to the muffled cadence of their voices on the other side of the door. Then I stepped away and walked slowly down the dimly lit corridor.

  EARLY MONDAY MORNING I dialed the number for Ned’s World in South Carolina.

  “Ned’s World, how may I help you?”

  “This is Roy Lutz,” I said, “regional director for Panasonic, confirming my lunch appointment with Ned Plavin. Is he in, please?”

  “I’ll see if he’s at his desk. Hold please.” A click, some whale music, then another click. “I’ll transfer you now.”

  A gravelly voice answered after two rings. “Roy!” Plavin said with forced excitement. “I didn’t know we were on for today.”

  “This isn’t Roy,” I said.

  “Well, then, our lines must have gotten crossed—”

  “Our lines didn’t get crossed. This concerns the Kotekna VCR deal that got soured up in Washington, D.C., over the weekend.”

  “I’m not familiar with any ‘deal’ in Washington,” he said thickly. “Who is this?”

  “If you’re not interested in what I have to say, hang up now. If you are, I’ll continue.” There was a silence while he thought it over. “Can we talk on this line?”

  “Go ahead,” he said.

  “I’m not sure what you’ve been told about the events of this past weekend. I suspect you know only part of the truth. I’ll condense it for you. I was one of the group that stopped the deal in the warehouse. We took the merchandise and the money. I kept the money. I traded the merchandise back to your people in exchange for a boy they were holding.”

  Ned Plavin cleared his throat. “My people?” he said. “Who did you give my goods to?”

  “Jerry Rosen,” I said. I watched my cat chase a large bug that was crawling across the rug to the safety of the baseboards.

  “Do you have any proof of this?” Plavin asked.

  “No.”

  “What do you want?”

  “I don’t trust Rosen,” I said. “I want this all to be over with, now. I want Rosen out of Washington. And I don’t think you want a business partner who plans on going solo with goods that you bankrolled. He’s the proverbial loose cannon, Ned. Do something about it.”

  This time the silence was longer. My cat trapped the bug under its paw, examined it, then walked away. The bug continued on its path to the wall.

  “I’ll look into it,” Plavin said. “If what you say is true, I’ll act on it.”

  “Do it quickly, Ned. Good-bye.”

  I hung up the phone and lit a cigarette. I dialed the number for the Connecticut Avenue store and got McGinnes on the line.

  “What’s happening, Nick?”

  “Too early to meet me for a cocktail?”

  “Hell, no,” he said. “But things are a little hectic right now. Andre didn’t post on Saturday, or today. Louie’s ready to can his ass. I don’t think I can get out till eleven.”

  “Eleven’s fine,” I said.

  “Where?”

  “La Fortresse, in the back.”

  “La FurPiece?”

  “Yeah, Johnny. La FurPiece.”

  THIRTY-ONE

  THE BARTEN
DER WAS fanning out cocktail napkins with a tumbler when I entered La Fortresse sometime after eleven. I passed him with a nod and walked towards the back room.

  McGinnes sat at a deuce, halfway into a cold bottle of beer. He saluted mockingly and shook my hand as I sat down. I put the briefcase on the floor, between our feet.

  “What’ya got in there,” he asked, “a bomb or something?”

  “Something like a bomb,” I said cryptically.

  He waved a hand in front of his face and finished the beer left in his bottle. Our fine-skinned waitress came over to the table. Her white shirt had a start-of-shift crispness. She smiled.

  “What can I get you, Nick?”

  “A Coke,” I said. “Bottled, please, not from the gun. Thanks.”

  “One more for me, darling,” McGinnes said, pointing at his bottle. He frowned at me. “You on the wagon, man?”

  “No.”

  The waitress brought our order. I poured from the bottle to a glass full of ice and waited for the foam to retreat. By the time I took the first sip McGinnes had killed much of his second beer. Some of his straight black hair fell across his forehead as he set his bottle down.

  “You seen Andre?” McGinnes asked.

  “Yeah.”

  “He’d better drag his black ass back to work. The man is in some shit. And you know what it’s like to work with Void, full time? That shit-for-brains can’t close one deal—hell, he can’t even close his fly.”

  “Andre’s not coming back, Johnny,” I said. “He’s dead.”

  McGinnes’ mouth opened, then the corners of it turned down. One tear immediately fell from his left eye and rolled down and off his cheek. He swept the bottle off the table with the back of his hand, sending it to the floor. Foam poured from its neck. McGinnes made a fist and dug knuckles into his forehead.

  Our waitress came back into the room. She saw the bottle and McGinnes, then looked at me.

  “Bring him another,” I said. She nodded and left quickly. She returned just as quickly, set a fresh beer in front of McGinnes, picked the old up off the floor, and left the room. McGinnes stared straight ahead with watery eyes and slowly shook his head.

  “You stupid bastards,” he muttered. “You stupid, stupid bastards.”

  I waited until he looked at me again. “Andre and me,” I said carefully, “and a couple of guys from his old neighborhood interrupted the tail end of Rosen’s drug deal on Friday night. The idea was to heist the money and the drugs and trade the drugs back to them for the boy. Andre was to keep the money. But Rosen’s people turned out to be gunslingers. When it was over, most of them were dead. Andre died quickly.” I drank some soda. “On Saturday morning I got the boy back. He’s safe, Johnny. He’s with his grandfather.”

  “That’s it, huh?” he said emotionally. “The boy’s safe, Andre’s dead, you and me just walk away into the sunset.”

  “Nobody will touch us,” I said vaguely. “I fixed it.”

  “You fixed it,” McGinnes said, and snorted. I slid the briefcase along the floor with my foot, until it touched his own. He looked down, then back at me.

  “There’s a hundred and twenty grand in that case,” I said. “It goes to Andre’s mother. I think that’s what he was planning to do with it, regardless of the outcome. Do me a favor and see that she gets it.”

  “How much did you skim?”

  “I took ten, to keep me on my feet. Until I figure out what’s next.”

  McGinnes chugged the rest of his beer and slammed the bottle on the table, loud enough to cause the waitress to poke her head back into the room. He signaled her for another. She served it without looking at either of us.

  “So, Nicky. Was it worth it?” McGinnes squinted at me. His voice shook as he spoke.

  “I don’t know.”

  “How did it feel to deliver the kid?”

  I thought about it and said, “It felt good.”

  “You know what I mean,” he said impatiently. “Did you find your parents, too? Did you say good-bye to your grandfather?”

  I stood up and reached into my pocket. I found a five and dropped it on the table.

  “Make sure Andre’s mother gets the money,” I said.

  “To Andre,” McGinnes said, and raised his bottle in a toast. “The only hero in this whole damn thing.”

  I grabbed a handful of McGinnes’ shirt and pulled him up out of his seat. When I looked into his frightened eyes, I let him down gently but still held on. His breath was sour and sickly, like an old man’s.

  “Andre’s no hero,” I said softly. “He was, when he was alive. But he died, and then he was nothing. I dumped him in a fucking alley, like a sack of shit. So don’t romanticize it, understand?” I released my grip on his shirt.

  “Sure, Nick, I understand.” He tilted the bottle back to his lips.

  I wiped tears off my face with a shaky hand. “Try not to sit here all day,” I said.

  “The stuff tastes awful good today, Nicky.” I walked to the doorway. “So long, man,” he said behind me.

  I looked back to the table. “So long, Johnny.”

  I left him there, staring into his bottle. I crossed the dark barroom, passed through the door, and stepped out into the light.

  THE CORRIDOR I HAD entered marked the beginning of the hospital’s original wing. I followed its worn carpeting as it snaked towards the ward. Small hexagonal windows had black bars radiating spiderlike from their centers, and were spaced at intervals on the yellowing walls to my left.

  At the end of the corridor I pushed open one of two swinging metal doors and stepped into the ward’s reception area. I signed my name and recorded the time in a notebook on the desk. Behind the desk sat a young man wearing a flannel shirt and a brush mustache. I asked him for her room number.

  “She stays in eight-oh-two,” he said. “But this time of day you might try the rec room.”

  “Thanks,” I said, and headed down the hallway.

  I had visited friends on several occasions in places such as this. The alky wards were usually populated by middle-aged individuals who drifted slowly and deliberately, like ghosts, in and out of doorways. In this place they separated the boozers from the druggies. The k-heads and cocaine kids moved about these rooms like hopped-up insects.

  I passed a large room that had a shield of gray smoke at its entrance. There were Ping-Pong tables and board games, but everyone was seated in vinyl furniture watching a television mounted high on the wall. A couple of them were laughing.

  I stopped at eight-oh-two and knocked on a partially closed door. She told me to come in. I pushed the door open.

  There were two cots in the room, with a night table and reading lamp in between. On the night table was some propaganda, and under that a notebook. Next to the notebook was a flat aluminum ashtray filled with crushed filters. She sat on the edge of the bed nearest the window, a live cigarette between her fingers.

  “Nicky,” she said, without emotion.

  “Kim. May I come in?”

  She nodded and I entered. She was wearing jeans and a T-shirt, with a sweater vest over that. Her hair had been cut short and spiky, which made her big eyes even more pronounced above her hollow cheeks. She had the pallid color of the very ill.

  “Cigarette?” she asked, rustling the pack in my direction.

  “No thanks. I won’t be staying long.”

  She took a drag and blew some my way. “I knew you’d be by, eventually. You’re not particularly bright. But you are persistent.”

  I let that go and asked, “How’s it going?”

  “I’ve been through all this before,” she said with a small sweeping gesture of her hand. “Several times. They tell you to surrender your will to a higher being. Trouble is, I don’t know if there is one.”

  “Let’s assume there is,” I said. “But then you still would have a problem. There’s certain people, even He has no interest in saving.”

  She calmly shook a cigarette out of her pack and lit it off
the one still burning. She butted the shorter one of the two and exhaled a wide cloud that spread around me.

  “How did you get on to me?” she asked.

  “Nothing set right with you from the beginning,” I said. “Like what you were doing with those kids in the first place. And the fact that you were barely hurt, much less alive, when we found you. I buried those suspicions, though, as I became more attracted to you. At that point I was letting my dick do all the thinking.” I waited for a reaction to the twisting knife. There wasn’t one. I folded my arms and leaned against the wall. “After you left me, I met a geezer in a bar who reminded me of your old man. I started to think about his unused video equipment, and the new stereo in your apartment. And how Maureen Shultz told me that you had worked in some stores in the South before coming up here. Then there was the time you asked about me and Johnny taking ‘ups.’ Only a retail salesperson would know that expression. I made the connection to Rosen and called Ned’s World in South Carolina. You had been on the payroll at one time.”

  She nodded. “I was a cashier in one of the stores down there when Jerry Rosen was sales manager. It wasn’t long before he was fucking me, and supplying me with all the coke I needed. We moved up to D.C., I got heavier into drugs, and he lost interest in me. In the end, he only kept me around to help out with his business.”

  “He had you hook into Jimmy Broda,” I said, “when he discovered the missing VCR. You were to keep an eye on him and the drugs, maybe take him out of town, someplace where Rosen’s boys could take care of things without much scrutiny, right?”

  “Yes,” she said, and looked away. “I didn’t know anybody would be hurt. It was just another free party for me. And for a change, I didn’t have to sleep with anybody to do it.”

  Tired laughter ebbed briefly from the television room down the hall. “Back to Wrightsville Beach,” I said. “Jimmy never went out for beer like you said. He was there when Rosen’s boys came in. You must have signaled them somehow. But why didn’t they kill Broda too?”