“Jim, I know what I’m doing.”
“It’s not your choice.”
“You can put the whole surveillance squad on me.”
“DcDc—” He hadn’t called her that since the day he’d met her in Des Moines. “We had surveillance on you. And this creep walked right past them. We’re lucky he didn’t kill you. The next time they catch hold of you, it’ll be guys in ski masks thumping you all night long to find out what we’ve got.”
“Then make sure I’ve got company. Twenty-four hours. Have Shirley move in with me. And I can pack again now. I’ll be safe. Jim. I know what I’m doing.”
“No you don’t,” McManis said, but he was smiling gently again, much as before. With admiration. At moments, she was amazed to realize how much he liked her. He’d liked her from the beginning.
She begged. He had a thousand more objections. About UCORC, and the feasibility of Sennett’s plan. But she could see he was wearing down.
“Jim, we all deserve the shot at Tuohey. I do. You do. Sennett does. We can’t stop here.” She was almost desperate with that thought. How could she just go back to Des Moines? To bank thefts and church choir and thinking about getting a new cat? “I mean, Jim,” she said and spoke one of her errant pieces of humor, a joke that was not really a joke at all, “I’m Evon Miller.”
JUNE
33
IN THE GRAINY REDUCTION OF THE BLACK-AND-WHITE monitor on which we watched, His Honor Brendan Tuohey, Presiding Judge of the Kindle County Superior Court’s Common Law Claims Division, was mustached with confectioner’s sugar when he first came into view. The picture had careened as Robbie had entered the restaurant, tossing off morning greetings with characteristic brio to the owner and several members of the staff. When Feaver had reached Tuohey’s table, he had apparently set his briefcase, and the camera within it, on an extra chair, or perhaps on the next table. Whatever the perch, it afforded a well-framed picture of the three men he was joining.
Paddywacks was another venerable Kindle County institution. Its appeal was not in the overripe decor—brass fixtures and tufted benches, and floors that were mopped once a week. Rather, it was renowned for its gargantuan omelets and its early morning clientele, which included most of the county’s important insiders: officeholders, Party bigwigs—and the ward types and others who relished the opportunity to mingle with them. While Augie Bolcarro was living, he had appeared here at least once a week, and Toots Nuecio, the octogenarian fixer, had a large table in the corner where he kept court every day with his many vassals in politics and the mob. In the world of the Democratic Farmers & Union Party, where working-class values still forbade too much overt splash, one of the truest signs of stature was if the gregarious proprietor, Plato, released the red velvet rope with which he restrained the regular trade and beckoned you to a table at once upon your arrival.
From the surveillance van parked immediately across the avenue from Paddywacks’ plate glass doors, Sennett and McManis and I, like Macbeth’s witches around their cauldron, watched the black-and-white imagery froth up on the monitor. The guessing game concerning what Tuohey’s cohort knew about Evon left everyone uncertain about how they would react to Robbie. He might encounter anything—a beating, the cold shoulder, or some preconceived drama intended to portray their innocence. Amari and several local agents were circulating through the moderate early traffic, on radio silence, but tuned in for emergency direction. Depending on the turns in the conversation, Stan was prepared to respond with surveillance, or even, in his fantasy, a bust.
I had gone to see Robbie on Friday to tell him what would be required today. We sat in the perfect white living room, which had been restored to order for the days of visitation following his mother’s death. Robbie remained gripped by that retrospective mood and, with little prompting, his conversation wandered to his childhood memories of Tuohey, which remained intense.
Hungry for men, for their smell, their ways, their company and example, Robbie loved Morty’s uncle more, frankly, than Mort seemed to. He was allowed to address him as Uncle Brendan, and despite the fact that Sunday was Robbie’s only full day with his mother, he rarely missed one of the afternoon suppers when Tuohey appeared at his sister’s table. Brendan was still a cop then. With his gun and his blue patrol uniform, Brendan seemed as auraed and heroic to Robbie as Roy Rogers, and he was greeted with roisterous delight by the boys when he arrived in the entry of the Dinnersteins’ home. After supper, he’d let Mort and Robbie gallop around the house wearing his heavy cap with its strip of silver braid along the short brim. Occasionally, he would even unsnap the polished black holster on his hip. He’d empty his service revolver and allow the boys to hold the weapon and inspect the brass-jacketed dumdum rounds, which he stood on end on the dining table, a lethal hollow cut dark and deep into the leaden tip of each bullet.
‘Even then,’ Robbie told me, ‘I was scared of Brendan. You had to be. There was this thing that came off of him, like a smell. You knew he didn’t completely like anybody, that he was pretending just a little bit with everyone, except his sister.’ The stories he liked to tell were of his rough encounters on the street, shellacking some mouthy blackguard he’d caught up with in a gangway.
Sometimes on Sundays, Estelle also came next door with Robbie for supper. For a period, he said, she actually seemed to have taken some kind of shine to Brendan, and Robbie could even recall a cockeyed childhood hope that Brendan would become his stepfather. But Estelle was a decade older and not really of interest to Brendan, and Robbie’s mom, for her part, would have no more considered marriage to a gentile than to an ape. She always came home talking about how much Tuohey and Sheilah drank, expressing a kind of sorrowing wonder that Mort’s dad, Arthur Dinnerstein, could put up with it. For Robbie, starstruck by Brendan, these criticisms were incomprehensible.
Eventually, Estelle stopped accompanying her son. Brendan passed the bar, joined the Prosecuting Attorney’s Office, and appeared on Sunday in the suit he’d worn to church, rather than his police regalia.
‘It was all downhill,’ Robbie told me. Something came apart. He wasn’t specific, but his eyes froze in the past, pinched for the shortest moment by obvious regret. Then they swung back to me with a lingering dark look.
‘So whatta you think, George. Is it just silly chatter when I talk about Brendan having me waxed?’
I didn’t think it was silly. There were certain practical incentives. If Robbie’s car blew up, if he were run down by a speeding auto, if his remains were found tangled in the limestone crags along the river, Tuohey’s cause would be immeasurably advanced, not so much because Robbie would no longer be available as a witness, but because anybody else with thoughts of flipping would be bound to think several times.
But in twenty-five years in practice, I’d had only a single client who’d found turning fatal. John Collegio was an oil executive who’d played ball with the wiseguys as a young man and then, after he’d risen up the phylum, went to the G to complain about the way gasoline was distributed, the mobbed-up companies getting the first supply. He’d been killed with a shotgun blast when he answered his front doorbell at dinnertime. But within the outfit, that would have gone down under the rubric of internal affairs. They seldom took aim at civilians.
All in all, killing a federal witness was recognized as a very poor idea. The FBI did not take it lightly. As a threat to the entire process, it ranked just below killing an agent or a prosecutor or a judge. For that reason, it would bring down beat that would make the effort poured into Petros look restrained. The truth was that if Robbie was going to have a problem, the most likely time was afterwards, in prison. He’d go to one of the federal prison camps—Sandstone or Oxford, or Eglin in Florida—where the inmates played golf and tennis after work. In the old days, before Reagan and Bush had federalized street crimes, that was not really a concern for someone like Robbie. The worst damage another inmate was likely to inflict was to take you badly at cards. But these days there were plen
ty of thugs in the federal prison camps, dopers who were inside for clean offenses like money-laundering, the only crime the government could prove. Wounded, braggart, futureless boys, they had killed before and gotten away with it and would do it again for a lark and the right price. Robbie would have to do his time in segregation and, even at that, watch his back. But I had always regarded as remote the chance that Brendan would actually orchestrate something on the street now.
Robbie stared out the window, toward his neighbors’ vast homes and smooth lawns, trying on my reassurance for size.
‘No matter how you slice it, the best thing for me is to bag him. Right? Go in and get him. The whole thing topples.’ He had thought this through clearly. Robbie would be safest the day Brendan was indicted and pried away from the levers of power.
Accordingly, Robbie’d had an air of resolve when we’d met today at 5 a.m. to go over the scenario. Then he’d walked by himself to Paddywacks, while we took up our station across the street. He held his shin-length Italian raincoat of a fashionable muddy shade closed at the collar, although the day was not particularly brisk.
Brendan had been easy to find. His morning rituals were unvarying. At 5 a.m., he attended Mass across the way at St. Mary’s Cathedral, one of the few men among the elderly female devotees. Then he joined Rollo Kosic and Sig Milacki here at Paddywacks, where Plato customarily opened the doors for them long before the usual gala breakfast crowd had assembled. The three sat at a small round table near the windows, where Brendan, the master of public relations, could throw off a hale salute to the many important citizens approaching the front door. When I turned on my seat in the van, I could see them clearly through the pale whorls of the one-way bubble-window. Milacki chattered. Brendan showed occasional signs of amusement, while Kosic finished his breakfast first, then stared at his cigarette as it burned.
With Robbie’s arrival, Tuohey smiled faintly at the mess he had made of himself, surrendering the Bismarck, still swollen with dark jam, to the plate in front of him. Then he tidied himself carefully with his napkin before extending a hand to Robbie. Kosic and Milacki offered greetings and Milacki drew his chair aside to allow Robbie to join them. Instead, mindful of the camera, Robbie moved to the opposite corner. It was a few minutes before six, and in the background two waitresses in their white uniforms stood in the corner of the smoking section, a few feet behind Tuohey’s table, gabbing before the morning crush. It was the Tuesday morning following Memorial Day, and despite occasional ringing china and shouts from the kitchen, the restaurant, on the FoxBIte transmission, seemed sweetly still, as the world slowly shook off the slackened tempo of the holiday.
“We were just raising good thoughts about poor Wally,” Tuohey said.
Robbie didn’t understand.
“Wunsch,” said Milacki. “You didn’t hear? The Big C.”
Walter, it developed, had been diagnosed last week with pancreatic cancer. In the van, Sennett moaned when he heard the news. It was hard to turn a man who had no hope of living.
“Doc gives him six months with the chemo and shit,” said Milacki. “Wally says his wife’s already marking off the days on the calendar. Have to hand it to him. Same brick. Guy always looks unhappy and this didn’t make it any worse.”
The thoughts of mortality turned the conversation to Robbie’s mother. Tuohey and Kosic had appeared briefly at Robbie’s home the week before last to pay their respects. It was a predictable gesture from Tuohey, who favored ceremonial occasions, but Robbie now unctuously expressed his appreciation.
“Not at all, Robbie. Lit a candle for Mom this morning. Lord’s truth. Estelle was a grand lady. I’ve been thinkin about both of you, son.” In the image on the monitor—like a sight seen through a rain-streaked glass—Brendan daintily lifted his hand in Robbie’s direction and took the occasion to dispense further advice. Along with Mort’s mother, Tuohey had been born in Ireland, emigrating by the time he was five. On occasion, when he spoke, you could still hear the piping echoes of a brogue. “You’re in a tough patch now, Robbie. We know that. With Mom, and Rainey in such a difficult way. You have to keep your faith, though. I can still remember the day I lost my Mame like it was yesterday. The best consolation is prayer.” With a long gnarly finger, Brendan pointed his way.
Milacki, voluble in his appreciation of Brendan’s many pieties, uttered Amen. Robbie in the meantime saw his opening.
“Shit, Judge, I’m praying, but not how you mean.” His chair scraped the floor as he came closer and hunkered over the table. Like a burgled tape delay, the image ran some milliseconds ahead of Robbie’s bare whisper as he told them about Evon. Sennett had wanted Feaver to try to get Tuohey alone, but Robbie said Brendan would be far more relaxed in the secure presence of his henchmen. Leaning in, Robbie had cut off a bit of the camera’s angle and I turned back to the bubble, where I found the sight through the front window of four heads gathered in such plain conspiracy almost amusing. Life, generally so subtle in its textures, is disarmingly blatant now and then. Barely a foot separated the crowns—Brendan’s tidy gray head, Milacki’s greasy do, Rollo even now touching his thinning hair to keep it in place—each trained on Robbie as the story grew more dire.
He described what Walter had said about Carmody. The girl had laughed it off and he had consequently dismissed it. But it ate at him, Robbie said, and the following week, treating it as a dare, he’d asked her to let his secretary look her over in the john for a wire. She’d refused, then agreed the next day, when the secretary, predictably, found nothing. But the paralegal was getting buggy. She’d been burglarized last week and came to the office on Friday positively frantic. She’d spent nearly an hour searching her cubicle, asking her coworkers if they’d seen some Dictaphone tapes. The problem, Feaver said, was that no one in the office had ever used a Dictaphone—their system required different cassettes. What was she doing with her own tape recorder?
“I mean, Jesus, do FBI agents look like that?” he asked. “Hell, this babe was crawling around in the sack with me.”
“That means she’s G for sure,” Milacki whispered. Everyone at the table laughed, even Kosic. It had sounded like a joke at Robbie’s expense, particularly considering the source. A robust, big-bellied man, a plainclothes copper from central casting, Milacki always had a good time. He wore an old-fashioned hairdo, with slicked-back sides in which the comb tracks were grooved precisely in the Vaseline.
Milacki had been Brendan’s partner during his brief time on the street. Tuohey had not remained a patrol officer for very long, but like all old soldiers, he maintained a permanent nostalgia for his period of fortitude and courage, and he carried Milacki with him as an enduring emblem. At this point, Robbie had said, he felt he had heard an account of virtually every day they’d had riding in Squad 4221. During Tuohey’s years in the Felony Division, Milacki had been detailed by the Force to run the Warrant Office, losing the arrest warrants that Brendan wanted destroyed, usually for the benefit of his mobbed-up pals. In one of those mysterious arrangements that no one outside the Police Force could ever be made to understand, when Tuohey had moved to Common Law Claims, Milacki had gone with him. He remained a cop so he could qualify for his pension, but he was now assigned directly to the Presiding Judge’s chambers as the police liaison to the sheriff’s deputies in the courthouse. In reality, he did Brendan’s bidding, everything from squiring him about in a black Buick owned by the Force to fielding calls like the ones Robbie made from time to time, aimed at denoting certain cases as ‘specials.’
Milacki now insisted he wasn’t kidding. He claimed to have heard lots of tales. It was a favored stunt of feds undercover, especially the females, to sleep with the suspects in order to establish themselves. Of course, they denied it on the stand. It was like the coppers who posed as johns and said they’d announced their office before the blow job instead of after. The four men laughed about that as well.
Robbie, in time, again asked what he should do.
“Fire her,”
said Milacki. Both Tuohey and Kosic sat stonily, as though Milacki hadn’t made the remark. Looking at the tape later, I had the strong impression that Milacki knew less about Evon than the other two. Robbie, as always, held to his role, and doeishly turned to Tuohey to confirm Milacki’s advice.
“If you have an employee you don’t trust, it’s probably sensible to consider firing her.” The mildest shrug elevated Brendan’s slender shoulders. The thought was hardly revolutionary.
“But does it look like I’m guilty, if I fire her? I mean, she knows I’m hinky because I talked to her after Walter. I mean, I keep wondering. Is there something I can do to throw her off the track?”
Tuohey was long and narrow, with a thin but agreeable face. With Robbie’s last remark, he retreated somewhat. The tidy gray came up and on the monitor you could see him appraising Feaver.
“These are questions, Robbie, I think you’d best ask yourself.”
“Well, I thought you’d be concerned.”
“Do I look concerned? A man shouldn’t wear his troubles on his sleeve, Robbie.”
“Well, Judge, you and I have never talked about things—”
“And we shouldn’t be starting now.” Tuohey took a measure and popped out a short exasperated laugh. “Robbie, you’re past the age where I can be looking after the two of you every moment. I can’t call the precinct house the way I did when you and Morton were fourteen and nicking lewd magazines.”
“Well, this isn’t about naked ladies, Brendan. You know that.”
“I do? No such thing. How would I know that, Robbie? I don’t keep track of your doings. I can’t. You appear in my court. You understand how I must behave. If you’ve done something that scares you”—skeers you—“then I’m sorry, Robbie, but I’m a judge, not a father confessor. You start telling me your sins, I’ve got no choice but to turn you in, and Lord knows, neither of us would care to see that.” Tuohey sat straight in his chair now, delivering his brief monologue with appropriate gravity.