Black Maps

Chapter Nineteen

“Christ,” Rick Pierro said hoarsely, “this just gets worse and worse.” He rubbed his face with his big hands.

It was after ten on Saturday night, and Mike Metz and I were in Pierro’s living room. Mike had been there for a while; I was fresh from St. Vincent’s. It was a large room, done in earth tones. The deep sofas and chairs were upholstered in rust and ochre and sand-colored fabrics. The sage walls were hung with abstracts that went well with the carpet.

Pierro sat hunched on a large ottoman, his elbows resting on his knees. He was dressed in olive gabardine trousers, a yellow shirt, and a blue V-neck sweater. His shirttail had come out in back, and there was a smear of something, maybe mustard, on one of his sleeves. He pinched the bridge of his nose between his thumb and forefinger, and shut his eyes tightly. But when he opened them again, the fatigue and worry and anger were still there. His meaty shoulders drooped and his heavy features sagged. His hair was glossy and neat, and somehow out of place above his wrecked face.

Helene sat beside him. She placed a hand on his shoulder and kneaded it gently. She wore a black sweater and loose camel pants, and her chestnut hair was brushed straight back from her forehead and tied in a black ribbon. She was holding up better than her husband, but her face was pale and tense. Her gaze wandered around the room, occasionally resting on me, but if there was anything to read in it, it escaped me. Maybe I was just too tired.

Mike sat on a rust-colored sofa, reading the fax, looking placid. He was dressed as I’d seen him last, in khakis and a gray sweater. It was hard to believe that was only a few hours ago. He got up and walked to the doorway, where I was leaning. I was better at leaning now than at sitting, since the body blow from Pell had displaced my already fractured rib, and my pals at St. Vincent’s had wrapped my midsection in a long elastic bandage. Mike handed me the fax. It was short and to the point:

$5 MILLION READY FOR WIRE TRANSFER BY 8AM EST THURSDAY. YOU WILL RECEIVE TRANSFER INSTRUCTIONS THEN. FUNDS MUST BE TRANSFERRED WITHIN 4 HOURS.

All in caps, all in bold type. The fax had come in on Pierro’s home machine. It was like the message Bregman had received, though he’d been given a week to get his money together. Pierro had just four days. Like the first fax, this one had a phone number at the top of the page, a 718 area code this time.

“I’ll check out this number tonight, and if I find an address for it, I’ll go there tomorrow. But I’m not expecting much.” Mike nodded and Helene looked at me. Pierro didn’t stir.

“It’s a lot of money, Rick,” Mike observed.

Pierro shrugged. “Yeah, about thirty percent of my bonus last year,” he said. “A lot” is a relative thing.

“It’s a lot to pay for silence,” I said, “especially for an innocent man.”

Pierro lifted his big head and looked at me. “What the hell is that supposed to mean?” he said in a slow rumble.

Mike glanced at me and answered. His voice was low and even. “Only that making a payment may not be the wisest course, Rick. There’s no way of knowing that this won’t be just the first installment.”

Pierro grimaced and pushed his fingertips into his temples. “Jesus

… how many times have we been through this, Mike? I told you-guilty, innocent-in this climate, it doesn’t matter a damn to my pals at French-or to anybody on the Street. I get a stink like this on me, and that’s it-I’m done. All this-it’s done.” He held his hands out, gesturing at the room around us. “Well, that’s not an option, okay? That’s not an option for my family.” He leaned forward again and let out a long breath. He rubbed the back of his neck.

“Besides, with what you tell me about this frigging prosecutor, it could be I’m hosed anyway. She can haul me in front of some frigging grand jury, drag my name through the papers…” He clenched his thick hands into fists. “How does she even know we exist, anyway? And why does she care? What the hell does she want from me?” He bounced the heel of his palm on his forehead. “How did things get so screwed up?” His voice was a harsh rasp. Mike sighed.

“This was always a risk, Rick,” he said evenly. “We knew it could happen-we talked about it from the outset. But we didn’t think we were fishing in their waters yet, so this was a surprise to us too.” Mike paused and looked at Pierro, who stared down at his own big hands.

“Frankly, I have no idea how we came to Shelly DiPaolo’s attention,” Mike continued. “But as to why she cares-there’s no mystery about that. The MWB case is a career maker for her, if it goes well-and a career breaker otherwise. From what John has heard, she needs a big win. Nassouli is one of her high-profile targets-one of her big fish-so it’s no surprise she’d be interested in anyone even remotely connected with him. And no surprise she’d be hostile to anyone she thinks is making her job tougher. When she heard about John-snooping around the MWB offices, and asking questions about Nassouli-she probably thought he fell into both categories.”

“So, she’s interested and pissed off, and that’s that? She says ‘Drop your drawers,’ and you just drop them?” Pierro asked. There was petulance mixed in with his frustration and fear. Mike ignored it.

“If it comes to that, yes. But it’s never that simple. We don’t know exactly what she wants yet, and we don’t know how badly she wants it. It’s true, she’s got a lot of power. She can question John, and me, and make it hurt. And if Ms. DiPaolo really wants to know who we’re working for, she can subpoena us, bring us in front of a grand jury, put us under oath, and ask-and have a judge jail us for contempt if we don’t answer.” Helene’s eyes darted from Mike to me and back to her husband. Mike continued.

“But her powers aren’t limitless, and they don’t come free. She operates in a world of cost and benefit, just like everybody else. She can get us to drop our drawers, but it will cost her-in time, in money, in manpower. She’s going to weigh those costs against what she thinks she can get out of this, and against all the other things she could be doing instead. We may not be able to stop her, but we can up the price-maybe to the point where it stops making sense to her. Ideally, though, it doesn’t come to that. Ideally, we strike a bargain.”

Pierro pinched the bridge of his nose again, and shook his head. Helene moved her hand to his neck, but he shrugged her off and stood. He thrust his hands in his pockets and walked to the windows and stared out.

“And if you do manage to deal with her, then what? Whoever this is wants his money in four days, and you guys haven’t got jack for me.” He moved back and forth in front of the window like a bear in a cage.

“We don’t have hard and fast proof, it’s true, but we have a theory…” Mike said, but Pierro cut him off.

“Yeah, yeah, Trautmann-you told me. But you don’t have enough to negotiate with, so it doesn’t do squat for me.”

“We’re still working on it, Rick. We have four days. It’s not much time, but it’s something, and John has accomplished a lot in the last couple of weeks.” Pierro looked at me and gave a short, harsh laugh.

“Yeah, like getting the frigging FBI on my back,” he said. Helene sighed and turned in her seat to look at him.

“That’s enough, Rick,” she said sharply. “You’re being stupid, and you’re saying things you don’t mean. Haven’t you been listening to Mike? He and John might get called before a grand jury because of us. And look at John’s face, for Christ’s sake. Look what he’s been through for us. Now you apologize to him.” Pierro shook his head and looked sheepish.

“Jeez, John, I don’t know what I’m saying. I’m sorry-really. Helene is right, that was way out of line. It’s just… hell, I don’t know. This thing-it’s making me nuts.” I nodded at him. Mike continued.

“We have to take this one step at a time, Rick. First, we talk to the feds and see what they want and where that takes us. When we know that, we can make decisions about Thursday.” Pierro nodded and turned away from us. We watched him pace by the windows for a while, and then Helene walked us to the door.

“Please forgive him,” she said to both of us when we were in the foyer. “He’s… well, you know the pressure he’s under. It’s making him crazy. But please, hang in there with us.” She put her hand on my arm. Mike made reassuring noises. I had a question.

“That fax he got tonight-that’s the only communication he’s had since the first one? There’s been nothing else?”

Helene looked at me impassively for a moment. No surprise, no confusion, no indignation, and no answer. “Please, John,” she squeezed my arm, “just stick with us. Please.”

“What the hell is going on?” I said to Mike when we were out on the street. “Is it me, or does it seem like all of a sudden we’re just along for the ride?”

“It’s not just you,” he said, shaking his head. “The ground is definitely shifting. Yesterday, you talk to Trautmann, and then- boom — you get a visit from Pell, Pierro gets the squeeze, and on Thursday he’s supposed to pay up. It feels like someone’s nervous and in a big hurry.”

“Trautmann didn’t strike me as the nervous type. Impulsive, yes, but not the type to run scared,” I said.

“If not him, then who?” Mike asked. I shook my head and scanned the street for a taxi.

“You really think you can work a deal with DiPaolo?” I asked. Mike snorted.

“Sure, we can deal. No problem. Something along the lines of us agreeing to answer all her questions and her agreeing not to jail us for contempt.”

“You made it sound good upstairs.”

“Rick needed something to get him through the night. After Monday we’ll know better how to set his expectations.” I spotted a cab. It cut across traffic and screeched to a halt nearby. “Call me tomorrow. Let me know how it goes,” Mike said, and turned east, toward his home.

It didn’t go well.

I traced the 718 number on Pierro’s fax to a store in Brooklyn, on Atlantic Avenue, at the fringe of Boerum Hill. It was a tiny place, wedged between a hardware store and a pizza joint, and the only spot on the grimy, tired-looking block that was opened when I got there, early Sunday morning. The closest it had to a name was a plastic sign out front that read “Papers, Smokes, Lotto.” Inside, there were a couple of inches of floor space, surrounded by high racks of periodicals in a dozen languages. Behind the counter was a dense mosaic of cigarettes, pornographic videos, and breath mints. A hand-printed sign taped to the register advertised phone cards and fax services.

The curly-haired kid who was minding the store was no help to me. He didn’t glance up from his thick textbook when he told me that no, he hadn’t worked yesterday. His cousin had been the only one there, all day long. The same cousin who’d left last night on a two-week trip to Florida. No, he didn’t know where in Florida or how to contact him, or if he’d actually be back in two weeks’ time.

I left him to his studies and rode the subway back into Manhattan, all the way to Lexington Avenue and 96th Street. Then, with photos of Trautmann in my pocket, I spent the next five hours wandering the northern reaches of Central Park, in search of Faith Herman. I worked the playgrounds and footpaths, the gardens and meadows, the rambles, the ponds, and the horse trails. I saw strollers and runners and power walkers, skaters and cyclists and horsemen-and women, too. I saw singles and couples and families, dog people, cat people, even a few ferret people. I saw winos and junkies, crazies and crooks, and lots of cops and tourists. I walked until my ribs were aching and it was time for lunch. Then I ate a hot dog and a pretzel on a bench in the sun, and when I was finished I walked some more. But I didn’t see Faith Herman or anyone who looked like her.

It was oddly restful, all that fruitless walking around. The day was cold and clear, almost painfully bright, and I achieved a solitude and a detachment that I usually find only when I run. I thought about Pierro, and how the fear and anger had eroded him, and what he might be like after he’d lived with it for a year or two, the way Lenzi and Bregman had. I was pretty sure there’d be nothing left. I thought about Helene, too, and the steel she’d shown in managing her husband. Helene could take it. She could pay up and go on with life, and to hell with the other shoe. She was tough enough.

And I thought for a long time about Jane Lu. My run-in with Pell and my conversation with Neary had left me in a foul mood and full of dark thoughts, and I’d been bad company at the hospital, but Jane hadn’t seemed to mind. The ER was busy, and we’d waited on plastic seats behind a gunshot leg, a taxi hit-and-run, and a subway stabbing. Along with the patients, doctors, nurses, and orderlies, a lot of cops, firemen, and EMS guys filtered in and out. They were heavily laden with equipment and fatigue, and Jane had watched them closely.

“Did you like being a policeman?” she’d asked.

“Most of the time.”

“You don’t seem very much like these guys.”

“Not all cops are alike.”

“Were you very much like any of them?”

“Not really.” She’d turned to look at me.

“How did you get into it? Why do you like it?” she’d asked. Those questions again-both barrels. I’d been tired and irritated, and I’d started to give her some of the same bullshit I’d given Pierro when he had asked, but Jane cut me off. Annoyance flitted across her face, and she raised her hand.

“If you don’t want to talk, just say so,” she’d said, with a small laugh. “You don’t have to placate me.” I’d looked at her, surprised, and she’d looked steadily back, and I’d thought about her questions.

How? Why? There’s no short answer to either one. How isn’t a hard question, though; how is just a story-and it starts with Anne.

We met in our senior year of college, and I fell in love with her the way that I could back then-hungrily, drunkenly, and completely. And when graduation came, my only ideas about the future were that I didn’t want to spend it at Klein amp; Sons, or apart from her. So when she went back to her hometown, to take a job on the local newspaper, I went with her.

Anne’s father took me by surprise. Parents had never been my strong suit-especially not fathers-and I’d figured to do even worse with a county sheriff. But I was wrong. Donald Stennis was smart and well read, with a sneaky chess game, a dry, laconic wit, and an unsentimental but generous-and surprisingly liberal-view of life. The Adirondack Atticus Finch, Anne called him. More surprising still was Donald’s trust in his only child, and his respect for her judgment. He made me welcome.

I lived in the apartment over the garage, cooking breakfast for Anne and Donald in the mornings, cleaning up when they’d gone to work, running and reading in the afternoons, playing chess with Donald in the evenings, and making love with Anne as quietly as we could after he’d turned in. It wasn’t a bad time-it was nice-but after two months, I needed to do something with myself. I was bored, adrift, and getting antsy. Then Donald took me for a ride.

He called it the sheriff’s tour of Burr County. We rode in his battered, unmarked Crown Victoria, across the length and breadth of his jurisdiction, down county roads and Main Streets and no-name washboard trails, through towns and hamlets and places that were little more than packed earth and rusted trailers. The air conditioning was broken, and we rolled down the windows. The car filled with the smell of pines and dirt, and with heavy midsummer heat. The whole time we drove, Donald talked.

His knowledge of the county, and the people in it, was vast. He knew where they lived and where they worked, where they went to church and where they went to drink, and if they drank too much, he knew that too. He knew who had married and who had divorced, who was cheating and who’d got caught, who’d beat his wife and whose wife was never coming home again. He knew the running buddies, and the ties of blood or marriage or schoolyards or jail yards that bound them together. He knew who’d gone to prison and who’d just gotten out, who’d gotten laid off and who’d come into sudden cash, who’d left town, and who would inevitably be back. He spoke of them with something close to affection.

It was a cop’s-eye view-of greed, grievance, and rancor, of poverty, boozing, and rage, of just plain mean and just plain stupid-and how they came together and boiled over into crime and violence. It was a hard view, and often sad, he told me, but it had its humor, and, once in a while, a glimpse of redemption. It had fascinated Donald for nearly thirty years. He drove and talked for seven hours, and we were covered in sweat and dust when we pulled back into his driveway. It was there he’d made his simple pitch.

“Sometimes, you can’t do much, and sometimes you can’t do a damn thing at all. But now and then, you can make all the difference in the world. It’s not for everybody, though. You can get used up-get sick from what you see, or angry, or sad about how little you can do. You can get tired, or mean, or, worse still, bored. It’s not for everybody.

“All my guys are good guys; I get rid of the ones that aren’t. But I haven’t had a deputy with a college diploma for going on two years now. You’re smart, you’re curious, you’re not a bully, and you don’t scare easy. And I’ve got a uniform that’s about your size. Give it a try. What the hell, if it’s not for you, you got cooking to fall back on.”

But it was for me.

Why is a tougher question. Some of my reasons were not so different from Donald’s-a fascination with the whole strange pageant; a desire to help, to make a difference. I liked the chase, too, and the puzzles-the who and the how and the why, especially the why. But I also liked knowing, at the end of each day, what I’d been able to do and what I hadn’t- and knowing it more certainly, more tangibly, than a P amp;L report could ever tell.

After Anne died, I quit this work, and a lot else besides. But after a while, I came back to it-for all those reasons, I guess, and for fear of that empty time when I’d stopped.

Jane had looked steadily back at me, silent amid the ER’s buzz and hustle. I’d looked at her, and thought about the answers, and told her all of it.

It was after three when I made a last circuit of the East Meadow and the Conservatory Garden. Then I gave up on Faith Herman for the day and took a taxi home. The windows in my building were dark. It was quiet inside and empty feeling, and my apartment was filled with a cold, gray twilight. There were no messages. I sat at the kitchen counter, in my coat, in the gathering dusk.

I was tired and sore. My feeling of unassailable solitude had faded in the bleak, fading light, replaced by worries about Monday and the sense that the whole case had spun away from me. Maybe Shelly DiPaolo would take care of all that. Maybe after tomorrow there’d be no case. I shed my coat and flicked on some lights. I put a pot of coffee on and made myself a tuna sandwich. I called Mike Metz. No one was home, so I left him a message about coming up empty in Brooklyn and in the park. Then I pulled a volume of Andre Dubus stories from the shelf and read until the words stopped making sense.