Angel Face (18 page)

‘I can't see another reason why he'd send four men to get it.'

Earlier in the morning, before they set up the surveillance, they'd begun to comb through the hundreds of items in OCCB's file on Roberto Benedetti. A quick review of known associates yielded immediate results. Bobby Ditto's godfather, Vincent Pugliese, rents an apartment, 5B, in the Kingsbridge section of the Bronx. In poor health at age seventy-four, Pugliese lives alone, his wife long deceased, his children scattered. He walks with the aid of a cane and is said, by an NYPD registered informant, to be uniformly polite to his neighbors.

Armed with that bit of information, all three had driven to Kingsbridge. That was four hours ago. Now they're on the road again.

‘Why would he move the money?' Angel's watching her elaborately constructed fantasy, the one that has her opening a little art gallery on Tobago just in time for the winter season, dissolve before her eyes. ‘Is he on to us?'

But there are any number of possibilities out there and Angel barely listens to Epstein as he dissects each of them. She's wondering exactly what she's going to do if there's no money to steal, no goal to achieve. A return to normalcy seems unlikely, given that Bobby Ditto now believes her partially responsible for two murders.

Angel starts to speak, but then looks over at Carter. His features are composed, his expression almost serene, this despite Bobby Ditto's knowing his name. Angel's annoyed at first, but then skips to an obvious bottom line. No matter what happens to the money, Bobby's fate has already been determined. No need to worry.

The drive to the Red Hook section of Brooklyn takes more than an hour. They're plagued by heavy traffic on FDR Drive along the East River, on the Brooklyn Bridge with its perpetual renovations, most of all on the notorious Brooklyn-Queens Expressway. The delays cost them nothing, nothing that hasn't already been lost. The SUV's sitting in front of Benedetti Wholesale Carpeting, a long, two-story building located a few blocks from the waterfront.

‘The bunker's in the basement,' Epstein explains. ‘To get there, you have to come down a narrow flight of stairs.'

‘How do you know so much about the set-up?' Angel asks.

‘An informant.' Epstein's crouched in the cargo space behind the van's rear seat. He's thinking that it's someone else's turn to bounce up and down on the plywood floor. Somebody with a bigger ass. ‘The informant's name, a major source, by the way, was Ruby Amaroso. Unfortunately, someone put a knife in Ruby's back last week. I'm not sayin' I know who that somebody was, but I got my suspicions.'

Angel laughs, but Carter's expression doesn't change. Finally, she says, ‘The good thing is that we know exactly where the money is. If we can't get to it right now, they have to bring it out, sooner or later.'

‘That won't necessarily help us, even if we happen to be watching at the time,' Carter responds. ‘The Ford's armored.'

‘Seriously?'

‘First, the vehicle didn't settle on its springs when four men got inside. Second, the guard on the front passenger's side of the SUV let the window down. It was two inches thick. Third, even though the driver turned slowly, the truck still pulled away from the turn. That's because of the weight. Armored vehicles stop bullets – some of them will stop an RPG – but they don't handle well.'

Carter doesn't wait for a response. He's not discouraged, not yet, but there's plenty of work to be done. ‘Look, I'm going to check out the warehouse for soft spots. There's no need for you to be here. I want you to take the subway back to the apartment and work your way through the files. You'll be looking for the same thing I'm looking for, a soft spot.'

Bobby Ditto holds the phone away from his ear. He never should have taken the call – he's got way too much on his mind. But Dealie told his secretary that it was an emergency, so when he tried to back off, Evangeline shook her head, folded her arms across her chest and nearly shouted, ‘No way, Bobby. The woman's nuts, as in whacked-out crazy. You handle her.'

Dealie is short for Delilah, Bobby's ex-wife, now living in depressed Las Vegas. Back when Bobby was sixteen and horny enough to hump a goat, Delilah had lived up to her name. Not so after she became pregnant, after they married, after she dropped the first and the second little rug rat. Not after she gained sixty pounds, after she developed a fondness for roulette wheels and designer wardrobes. Bobby has a girlfriend – a mistress, really – stashed in Rego Park, a half-hour from his Howard Beach home. He doesn't intend to let her get five minutes closer.

The emergency of the week concerns Bobby's oldest, George, age thirteen. Little Georgie's been fighting in school again, been suspended again, and is again being threatened with outright expulsion. The problem's Bobby's fault, of course. If he'd been there for his family, if he'd been a real husband, a real father, little Georgie would be a candidate for Pacifist of the Year.

Bobby Ditto allows Dealie five solid minutes of abuse before he interrupts. ‘You need to get to the point,' he tells his wife. ‘I got business here, business which I need to conduct if I'm gonna keep sendin' that good old child support every month.'

Wrong tactic. Before she finally gets to the point, Dealie unloads a torrent of accusations centered on his missing a payment two years ago.

‘Georgie needs a private school, Bobby, along with serious counseling. And I'm not talkin' about some jerk from the Board of Education. I'm talkin' serious here. As in real fuckin'
serious
.'

‘When you say private school, do you mean like Catholic school?'

‘No, I'm talking like a military academy in Arizona that specializes in problem kids. They got the program and the counselors.'

At this point, Bobby's supposed to inquire into the costs, but he's not biting. Bobby's thinking maybe he'll take his kid for the summer. That would be the cheapest way out. But, no, the last time he saw his children was Thanksgiving, and he liked them about as much as they liked him, which wasn't much at all. Plus, there's always the possibility that Dealie blew the rent money in one of the casinos and her landlord's threatening to evict her. Dealie lies at the drop of a roulette ball.

A blinking red light on Bobby's desk offers the perfect excuse to end the conversation. ‘I gotta go,' he tells his ex, which is true. ‘Call me next week, give me an update.'

‘But I'm not finished,' Dealie wails.

Bobby hangs up, but not fast enough to escape a parting threat: ‘I'll call ya tonight.'

The flashing red light alerts Bobby to an incoming call on his personal phone, which he never answers. He jots down the number on the caller ID screen, picks up a throwaway cellphone that can't be traced to him and heads off. This is the bad news about the bunker. The walls are too thick for cellphones. If he wants to make or receive a call, he can try the basement outside the bunker, which sometimes works, or go to the yard where the company trucks are parked at night.

Bobby heads for the yard, passing through the outer basement where Donny Thorn greets him with an enthusiastic nod. Thorn's two companions, Albert Zeffri and Nino Ferrulo, look up, their expressions anything but happy. Ruby's death left the crew with a vacuum each had hoped to fill. Meanwhile, Zeffri has the brain of a frog and twenty-year-old Nino has yet to master his impulses. Bobby knows for a fact that the kid's been knocking over liquor stores. And not because he needs the money.

The beautiful spring day catches Bobby off-guard and he stops in his tracks, disoriented. The sky is bright blue and sprinkled with small puffy clouds. The sun is warm enough to erase all memory of a truly miserable winter. For just a second, he imagines himself on Jamaica Bay, the small lush islands covered with grass and brush, the SunDancer bobbing, a hooked bluefish fighting to the bitter end. Maybe there's a broad along, somebody new, and a cooler full of beer, and a light breeze, and a blazing sunset.

Bobby shakes his head in disgust. Given everything that's happened over the past couple of weeks – given Ruby and Ricky and Paulie and the Chink, not to mention Paulie's fucking kid whose name he can't remember – this is no time for daydreaming. He punches a number into the cellphone and raises the phone to his ear. The man who answers, Elvino Espinoza, speaks English with only a trace of a Spanish accent.

‘Good to hear your voice again,' he says.

‘You, too.'

‘We're looking at the weekend. I'll come by to say hello on Friday morning.'

And that's it, short and sweet. The deal will be consummated on the weekend, probably late at night. Exact time and place will be revealed to Bobby on Friday morning. Be ready.

Bobby folds up the cellphone and puts it in his pocket. Attracted by the scream of wood on a saw blade, he glances across the street at a custom woodworker's small factory. The owner's name is Abel Kousamanis, a Greek immigrant who styles himself a furniture artist. There's a limo parked in front of Abel's shop and Bobby can see him through an open truck bay, talking to a woman in a blue business suit.

Back to the cave, Bobby tells himself. He looks around him, at a truck backing through the roll-up door on the front of the warehouse, at a forklift pulling an enormous roll of carpet from the back of a trailer. Bobby's workers are really hustling. That's because it's after four o'clock and they won't be going home until the trailer's unloaded.

Bobby, as he trudges off, never thinks to look up at the roof where Carter's crouching next to a ventilation pipe, only his forehead and eyes exposed. Good thing. If Bobby had looked up, if he'd spotted Carter, he'd already be dead.

TWENTY-TWO

C
arter finally makes an appearance at the East Village apartment a few minutes before midnight. He finds Angel and Solly Epstein seated at a dining room table covered with files and cartons of Chinese food. Angel's hopeful expression fascinates him, as always. She's relentlessly optimistic. But he's got little good news, though he takes her in his arms when she crosses the room in search of a hug. Epstein's grinning from ear to ear as his eyes occasionally drift to Angel's well-rounded buttocks.

Released, Carter picks up a pair of chopsticks and a microwave-safe container of beef in black bean sauce. His instructors would have called it opportunistic feeding. Take your calories and your sleep whenever and wherever you can – you might be a long time finding another chance. Carter hasn't eaten since they left the apartment in the morning.

‘Anything good?' Epstein asks. ‘You've been gone a long time.'

Carter responds by snatching a container of rice. He brings the container to his lips and shovels cold rice into his mouth with the chopsticks. The black bean sauce was highly spiced. His tongue is on fire.

‘I told them extra hot,' Angel explains.

‘Thanks for sharing.'

‘Maybe I should go first,' Epstein says. ‘What I have to say won't take that long.'

Carter accepts a glass of water and nods. ‘By all means.'

‘You said to look for a soft spot. We only found one, a kid named Levi Kupperman who sweeps the bunker for listening devices. This information comes, by the way, from Ruby Amaroso. I didn't work with Ruby, or with the joint task force investigating Benedetti, but I do know that Ruby was facing a couple of hundred years on federal narcotics charges. It seems he was dealing on the side and wasn't as careful as his boss. Bottom line, he had every reason to tell the truth.'

Epstein pauses long enough to sip at his beer. He looks from Angel to Carter, finds both attentive, then continues. ‘Kupperman's a cocaine addict. The way Ruby put it, “I'm givin' him a year, at the most, before his brain is totally fried.” Junkies can be reached by withdrawing or bribing them with their drug of choice, or with some combination of the two. That makes Kupperman a weak spot.'

‘If he can find bugs, he should be able to plant one.'

‘Planting a bug is the easy part,' Epstein explains. ‘Look, there are two general types of eavesdropping devices. The first transmits a signal in real time. You sit outside the bugged site with a receiver and you hear everything that goes on. That won't work in the bunker, which was designed to defeat transmitters. The second type records information on a chip and you have to go back to retrieve the device. Even assuming another trip is feasible, how do you know if anything significant was recorded? You could end up with a five hour conversation centered on broads and baseball. Keep in mind, you take a certain risk in approaching Kupperman. He might run back to his boss.'

Carter glances at Angel. He notes the still hopeful look in her dark blue eyes and has to resist an urge to caress her. Still, he doesn't try to sugar-coat the problems.

‘There's a yard next to the warehouse where they park company vehicles overnight, including the armored Expedition. Attaching a GPS device to the SUV will be easy. If I can defeat the alarm, we can also bug the interior.'

‘You got into the yard?' Epstein's tone is admiring. The chain-link fence surrounding the yard was topped with razor wire.

‘The warehouse isn't well-protected. There are security cameras in front of the roll-up doors and the office door, but not in the back of the building. I was able to access the roof while the warehouse was still open. It would be easier at night when the neighborhood's more or less deserted.'

Carter picks a dumpling from a container, dips it in a brown sauce that might or might not have been intended for that purpose, and slides it into his mouth. He chews slowly, his eyes on Epstein. The cop appears to be impressed, but accessing Benedetti Wholesale Carpeting was no great feat. Compared, say, to operating for a week in the hinterlands of Yemen.