Shamrock Alley Page 19

“I thought I saw Judy Dunbar today when I passed by the bedroom window.” Judy Dunbar was the mean-spirited woman who had lived next door to them throughout John’s childhood. A nasty, stick-thin creature with pointed features, she’d always professed a strong distrust in doctors and dentists alike and, subsequently, died roughly ten years ago from cancer of the eustachian tube. “I’d just gotten out of bed to use the bathroom,” his father continued, “and I thought I saw old Judy Dunbar standing on her back porch, just leaning with her arms folded on the railing and staring out over her yard. Caught her out of the corner of my eye. Course, when I turned back to look there was no one there. But in that split second when I passed by, I was certain it was her, that I saw her. Old Judy Dunbar. You remember her?”

  “I do,” John said.

  “What a cantankerous, bitter woman she was,” his father snarled, and coughed up a phlegm-filled chortle.

  “She stole my baseball bat off our stoop one year,” John said. “Do you remember?”

  “You’d hit her car with a baseball while playing with your friends in the street,” his father said.

  “It didn’t do any damage. Just bounced off a tire. But she came out screaming just the same—”

  “Wearing that ugly bright green housedress with those big red flowers on it,” his father added.

  “I remember the housedress. She looked like a Christmas tree.”

  “And she fired curses at you kids like arrows. You kids laughed at her.”

  “Just crept up that night while we were asleep,” John said, “and snatched my baseball bat from the back porch. She never said anything about it but always kept the bat leaning against her screen door, just where I could see it. I always thought she was tempting me to break in and steal it back. She would have had a field day if I had.”

  His father sighed and adjusted the blankets about his body. In the brief time he’d been sitting here, the room had gotten much darker.

  “It’s good we talk like this,” John said, knowing before he spoke that the words would come out awkward and stupid.

  His father shifted in bed.

  John stood, straightened his pants. “I have to get going now. Is there anything I can get you?”

  “My coat,” his father said, his voice suddenly absent of the strength used to tell the story of old Judy Dunbar.

  “Now?”

  “Just lay it on the bed.”

  “All right.” He picked up the coat and folded it along the foot of the bed. “Anything else?”

  “You’re going to work?”

  “I have to.”

  “Then be careful,” his father said.

  Downstairs, Katie was adjusting the picture on the old Zenith in the living room.

  “I’m heading out,” he told her. “You’re staying?”

  “For a while longer,” she said, “in case he needs anything. Besides, the apartment gets lonely.”

  “Stay here, I’ll pick you up when I’m done. We’ll go home together.”

  “That’s too big a gamble,” she said. “You never get home on time.”

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  THE NIGHT TREMBLED WITH SLEET.

  A dull white string of lampposts dotted the intersection of West 53rd Street and Tenth Avenue. The roadway was reasonably crowded. A wet slurry twirled beneath the street lamps’ winter glow, sluicing against the posts and puddling on the ice-slicked sidewalks. Yet despite the uncooperative weather, street corners still catered to a certain arrangement of people. A few of the apartment buildings along Tenth Avenue seemed to shudder against the sky, the dark maw of their doorways framing a peeking head or two. Here, the buildings were strung together like pearls along a length of string, each pressed up against the next … yet unlike pearls, there was nothing attractive or even adequate about them. Crumbling, twelve-story structures housing squalid little flats, they were more like blackened, rotting teeth crowded into an unaccommodating mouth.

  There were lights on inside the Calliope Candy shop, though the store had long since closed for the evening. A few dark shapes shifted in the light, silhouetted like cardboard puppets behind a cloth screen. Above the candy shop’s bank of windows, a dull green cloth awning sustained a tough pelting from the weather. The words Calliope Candy stitched across the awning in white lettering, seemed to glimmer in the light of the lampposts along the street.

  Several blocks away, John Mavio’s rust-colored Camaro sat like a predator in waiting, its headlamps and engine off. Enveloped in darkness, the car was hardly visible. There were a number of other parked cars along the street and the Camaro did not look suspicious, out of the ordinary, or unusual in any way—except for one minor detail: the Camaro’s windows, shut tight against the storm, were fogged.

  Inside, John sat in the driver’s seat, his fingers massaging the steering wheel’s rubber grip. He was dressed casually but consciously, as if he might be waiting to pick up a young woman for the evening: loose-collared shirt, jeans, Nikes, leather jacket. His hair, jet-black in the murk of the car’s interior, was wet and hung in his eyes. With the fingers of his left hand, he raked the hair back from his face. His teeth worked noiselessly on a piece of Wrigley’s.

  Shifting in his seat, John adjusted his jacket and took a deep breath. He suddenly felt warm. In the inside breast pocket of his leather jacket was a bulky yellow envelope. Inside the envelope was $20,000 in hundred-dollar bills. The bills were divided into two approximately equal stacks, each fastened with greasy rubber bands. The money itself looked worn and tattered but otherwise indistinguishable, and volunteered the faint aroma of turpentine. In the right side outer pocket of his jacket was his gun—a semiautomatic .22-caliber Walther TPH seven-shot (six in the clip, one in the chamber). Specially used by the CIA as a “hit” gun (and rather similar in design to the gun extracted from Evelyn Gethers’s Lincoln Towncar), it fired hollow-point, long rifle bullets that expanded when shot. In short, it was a kill-gun for close quarters.

  On the dashboard sat what could have been a cigarette lighter, but wasn’t.

  From the glove compartment, his cell phone tweeted. Keeping an eye on the console’s clock, John reached over and yanked the glove compartment hatch down, grappling with the cell phone. It rang a second time before he got it to his ear.

  “Yeah,” he said.

  It was Kersh. “We’re hitting the intersection now. It’s mildly crowded, but we’re gonna hang back just the same. There’s some movement in the candy store, too.”

  “Remember, Bill, I don’t want anybody up on this guy. You’ll make him hinky.”

  “Don’t worry about us. He won’t see a thing.”

  Still looking at the Camaro’s clock, he turned the cell phone’s power off and replaced it in the glove compartment. His mind slipped back to only a few days ago—Thanksgiving Day—and to the cold, smoky smell of Mickey O’Shay as he sat in the passenger seat of his car. Now John was suddenly anxious to inhale that smell again. He was an olfactory person by nature, as some people are, and the scent of the city and its occupants aroused not only the agent in him, but also the adolescent he’d once been. It was a rush, the closest thing to ambrosia he would ever encounter. Early on in the first few months of undercover work with the Secret Service, he had established a subconscious correlation between the Service—more specifically, his job—and the impoverished streets he’d spent so many dark, lonely hours working. Just as some bankers may have a Pavlovian reaction to the smell of crisp dollar bills, and just as some accountants may associate their office with the smell of wooden pencils and carbon paper and graphite, John remembered the Secret Service when he smelled the salty reek of Manhattan and its ambling destituteness. And now, sitting in wait while watching the car’s clock tick slowly through glowing green numbers, he was itchy to get things rolling.

  To pass the time, he thought of Douglas Clifton—dead Douglas Clifton—who’d been generous and careless enough to leave behind a cache of fingerprints on the .22 and the accompanying silencer. Not that su
ch leverage would prove beneficial in interrogating the dead. And that was it, wasn’t it? All dead ends? All doors flung open only to slam shut again before he was able to pass through? While John had been fighting through Thanksgiving Day traffic to meet Mickey on time and as Bill Kersh served hot plates of goulash to impoverished New Jersey families, Douglas Clifton had decided to take a flying leap out his hospital room window. The last person to see Clifton alive had been Dr. Kuhmari himself. According to the doctor, he’d gone in to check Clifton’s vitals fairly early in the morning. Everything in order, the doctor departed the room, intent on heading home to a late Thanksgiving Day breakfast with his family. He made it to the nurses’ station, where he administered a number of orders to his staff, handed in his clipboards—and that’s when one of the nurses noticed Clifton’s monitors had gone dead. Assuming Clifton had knocked the wires loose or even yanked them out in haste, as some patients will do, the nurse hurried into the room. A few seconds later she was screaming and hollering for the doctor, peering out the open window and unable to look at the messy heap that lay broken along the sidewalk several stories below. Kersh had gone to the hospital later that evening to speak with Kuhmari and the screaming nurse. From there, he’d called John and laid out the details.

  “Homicide’s checking into it, although it sounds like a pretty clear case of suicide,” Kersh had said, and John agreed. With Clifton dead, it didn’t matter how many goddamn fingerprints they were able to pull from the stuff in the Lincoln’s trunk; Clifton couldn’t talk if he was dead.

  The numbers on the dashboard clock changed and John cranked the key in the ignition, turned the Camaro’s engine over, flipped on the headlights, and slowly rolled down the street. He headed east toward Eighth Avenue, having decided to swing down and around to arrive at Tenth. This would suggest the appearance of an approach from the opposite direction. Not that Mickey O’Shay would be conscious of such things, he surmised. It was just how John Mavio operated.

  After several minutes, the Camaro turned right onto 51th Street and cruised in third gear past St. Clair Hospital. He made another right onto Tenth Avenue and headed toward the intersection of Tenth and West 53rd Street. A soft drizzle heckled the windshield. Outside, the streets were pitch black and soulless, the darkness disturbed only by the constant stream of swerving headlights. More headlights appeared directly behind him as he approached the intersection, too closely, and he watched their reflection with some intensity in the Camaro’s rearview mirror. At the intersection, a horn was blasted and a black Volkswagen Jetta swooped around him and disappeared into the darkness ahead.

  Surrounding him stood a number of small, two-story shops behind which larger tenements loomed. Canvas awnings shook in the wind. A sushi restaurant’s neon lights attracted his attention, and he worked his eyes over the store’s front—the shaded plate of window in the door, the arabesque design etched onto the glass. Sodden balls of discarded newspaper were swept up in the wind and carried away like tumbleweeds along the sidewalk.

  His eyes peeled, he inched the car up to the intersection and parked across the street from Calliope Candy. Lights were on in the store, but the shades were pulled. A number of cars were parked here, leaving spaces along the curb like gaps in a smile. If he squinted and caught the cars in front of him at the right angle, John could see that no one was seated in any of them. Relaxing in his seat, he cracked the window two inches, coaxed a cigarette from his jacket. The frigid air wasted no time in violating the car’s interior. He spat his gum out the window, silently cursing the cold, and lit the cigarette with a book of matches he kept in the car’s ashtray. Took two long drags. The car filled with blue smoke. Casually, his eyes drifted again to the row of shops. Specifically the candy store.

  A block or two behind him, Kersh sat in his sedan, his eyes undoubtedly trained on John’s taillights. And somewhere up ahead, Tommy Veccio and Dick Conners sat together in another car, listening to Kersh’s occasional radio broadcasts.

  Abruptly, like a phantom passing through a wall, a figure emerged from the darkness and began shuffling across the street in John’s direction. Silhouetted against the dull lights of the candy store behind him, the figure walked with its head down, shoulders hunched, straggly hair fanned out by the wind.

  Mickey O’Shay.

  “There he is,” John intoned, directing his voice toward the dashboard and the cigarette lighter that was not a cigarette lighter. “Looks like he came out of the candy store.”

  As Mickey came within five feet of the Camaro, his stride stuttered and he appeared temporarily indecisive as to whether he should gain access to the passenger seat by going around the front of the car or the rear.

  “Fucking dope,” John muttered. In his head, he could almost hear Bill Kersh laughing.

  Finally, quick as a whip, Mickey swaggered around the front of the car and yanked the passenger side door handle so hard John though it might just break off. Mickey wasted no time occupying the passenger seat, and slammed the door like someone impressed by sharp, insolent noises.

  “You got a thing with slamming doors?” John commented.

  Mickey just grunted and adjusted himself in his seat. He looked as though he were having some difficulty getting comfortable.

  “Cigarette?” John offered.

  “No.”

  He caught a glimpse of Mickey’s face in the glow of streetlights and, through the strands of wet hair, he could see Mickey’s eyes were bloodshot and muddy, that his lips were dry and peeling. Probably just finished stuffing shit up his nose, John thought, then turned away before his lingering gaze made Mickey uncomfortable.

  “Shitty weather,” John said, trying to engage him. Yet Mickey O’Shay did not feel like being engaged.

  “You got your end?” Mickey said. “Let’s see it.”

  “Mickey, you got the shit or what?” He was through playing games and never showed his end first.

  Working his peeling lips together, Mickey stuffed a hand into his coat. He extracted a brown paper lunch bag, its lip folded repeatedly. Mickey unfolded it and pulled out a brick-sized package dressed in mint-colored tissue paper. He handed the package to John, who set it in his lap, unwrapped it. Inside were the counterfeit hundreds, fresh and banded just as the others had been. John plucked one of the stacks from the pile, felt it, examined it with one hand. He tossed his cigarette out the crack in the window and flexed the stack with both hands.

  “This the same stuff as before?” he asked.

  “Exact same.”

  “It’s good quality. All your shit this good?”

  “All of it. Now let’s finish the deal.”

  He reached into his jacket and pulled out the envelope containing his money. He held it out, and Mickey’s fingers were quick to snatch it, pry it open.

  “Count it if you want,” he said, “but it’s all there.”

  “I ain’t worried about it.” There was a serenity to his voice which, to John, said: It’ll be counted eventually. And if you’re short a single bill, I’ll come gunning for you personally.

  Slapping a stack of the counterfeit money against his thigh, John said, “How much of this can you get?”

  The right corner of Mickey’s mouth pulled up in a smirk. His eyes looked distant, far away. He flossed the base of his nose with one finger. “As much as you want,” he said. “You want more, bring your money. But I don’t meet nobody else. Neither do you.”

  “Fair enough.”

  “You think about rippin’ me off—”

  “I got no interest rippin’ anybody off. I’m a street guy, not a jerk.” He folded the tissue paper back over the counterfeit bills. The traffic lights at the intersection changed, and a steady stream of headlights washed past the car, distorted by the rain and sleet. “Long as there’s no bullshit.”

  “You still bitchin’ about what happened on Thanksgiving?” Mickey said suddenly, his voice raised up a notch. “Get over it.”

  John inwardly shuddered, suddenly too aware o
f the transmitter designed to look like a cigarette lighter sitting on the dashboard two feet away from Mickey O’Shay’s face.

  Christ, he thought, picturing Kersh leaning forward in his sedan, making sure he’d heard Mickey’s words correctly. I’m gonna hear it from him now.

  He was careful not to let the curve throw him. In his seat, Mickey sat like someone awaiting bad news from a doctor. His face was slack, sullen, and almost too dark.

  John quickly moved forward. “You think you could put together a smaller package for me by tomorrow night?” he said. “I got another buyer interested.”

  “How much?” Mickey turned to watch the traffic through his window.

  “Not sure yet. Maybe ten grand.” He was hoping to flush out some information on Jimmy Kahn with a second buy-through, although given Mickey’s distaste for small talk he didn’t think it would be easy. At the very least, he wanted someone eyeballing Mickey, tailing him if he left the area to pick up the counterfeit.

  “That it?” Mickey said.

  “For now,” he said. “I gotta make some calls first. Gimme a number where I can reach you. I’ll call sometime in the afternoon and let you know the deal, give you a couple hours to pick up your end. Things work good, we’ll make money together.”

  “We’ll see,” Mickey mumbled, now looking straight out the windshield. His left hand dipped into his coat, scrounged around, came out with a pencil. He tore off a section of the brown paper bag and jotted down a phone number. “Here,” he said, passing John the number. “It’s the number to the candy store. For when you need to reach me.”

  “What, you live there?” John chuckled, looking over the phone number then stuffing it into his jacket.

  “Best place to reach me,” Mickey said. “I ain’t around, you leave your name.”

  “That guy your personal answering service?” he said, jerking his head toward the candy store.

  Mickey just nodded at the slip of paper with the store’s phone number on it now in John’s pocket. “Somethin’ comes up,” he said, “call that number, let me know.”