Shamrock Alley (31 page)

Cheever greeted him outside the autopsy room, his portly little body cloaked in a white lab coat. A gaudy Christmas tie hung from his neck, the bottom half of the tie speckled in drying fluids Glumly did not wish to consider. Blinking his left eye as quickly as a hummingbird moves its wing, Cheever shot out his right hand and grasped Glumly’s own. The M.E. pumped hands twice, firmly, then worked a finger around the perimeter of his eyeball.

“How you been, Dennis?”

“Taking it easy. The hell’s wrong with your eye?”

“Spilled some … some powder … got some in my … eye—
damn it!”
He blinked twice, opened both eyes wide, stared directly at Glumly.

“It’s red,” Glumly said.

“Hurts, too.” The eye started to water, and Cheever blinked several more times. “Patricia’s well?”

Glumly nodded. “She keeps busy. Started some yoga class or something last week. One of our neighbors talked her into it. Half the time I see her now, she’s nothing but Lycra and headbands. I keep telling her she doesn’t need to spend money to feel healthy. She could go outside, run around the block. Exercise is free. Thanks for calling me, by the way, Mort.”

“Wait awhile,” Cheever said, turning and leading Glumly down the hall and toward the autopsy room. “You may not thank me once you see the condition this fella’s in.”

The autopsy room was small and poorly ventilated. The smell struck Glumly like a slap in the face, strong enough to add pause to his gait. Without turning toward him, Cheever grabbed ajar of Vick’s and handed it over to Glumly in one pudgy, outstretched hand.

“Thanks,” the detective muttered, quickly applying a dab of Vick’s beneath each nostril. “How can you stand it?”

“It’s probably like working cleanup at the Bronx Zoo,” Cheever said. “After a while, you get used to it.”

A number of stainless steel tables were erected in the center of the room, mostly unoccupied. The table closest to them, however, boasted a curious hump beneath a stained yellow sheet. A smaller table had been placed beside this one, on which a dizzying array of knives and scalpels and syringes lay.

“I don’t know what it is,” Cheever was saying as he pulled on a pair of green rubber gloves. “Every time it gets cold, right around lunchtime—right now—I get this tickle in the back of my throat. Like a drip, though, you know? But only when the weather’s cold and only around noon.”

“You’ve got too many allergies to be doing this job,” Glumly told him, his eyes tracing the shelves of pharmaceuticals and other implements. Cheever’s desk was shoved into the farthest corner of the room, littered with paperwork. On the wall behind the desk, a number of framed drawings hung—artwork from Cheever’s kids.

“Jillian tried getting me to do that Amish country thing once,” Cheever said. He was searching along the counter, peering beneath scattered paperwork and folded aprons for a particular item. “You know, that place up in Pennsylvania? Figured it’d be an experience, you know? See the countryside, what have you. Fifteen minutes into the country, still miles from the Amish, and my face ballooned up like I’d just gone ten rounds with Mike Tyson. I mean
bad
. Kids thought it was hysterical and I could tell Jillian was holding back a smile, too … but I swear, it was like my sinuses turned evil. Country life ain’t for me. I don’t know how the Amish do it. Give me this smoggy, congested, fluorocarbonated air any day. You can keep your countryside. Ahhh … there you are, you bastard …”

Cheever pulled a small bottle of Visine from beneath a bundle of towels and slipped it into the breast pocket of his lab coat. Pivoting on his heels, he turned to the covered lump on the table and motioned Glumly over with a wave of his hand.

“And here’s our man of the hour,” Cheever said, peeling back the yellow sheet like a magician at the climax of his greatest trick.

“Oh, goddamn,” Glumly muttered.

What sat on the stainless steel table was a partially-rotted, nude male torso. Ravaged by weather and hungry animals, the tissue had turned a sickening blue. It looked spongy, its texture like cheesecloth. Deep slashes emphasized the torso’s ribs and ran along the pelvic region. Its genitals were completely gone, leaving behind only a spongy mass of ravaged, blackened tissue. The head and limbs had been removed, the wounds themselves now congealed and black with dried blood. White nubs of bone protruded from these wounds and Glumly was immediately reminded of the time he’d seen a kid fall off the gymnasium bleachers in high school, and how his elbow had torn through the flesh of his arm.

“Nice lookin’ fella, huh?” Cheever said. “Decapitation was the cause of death.”

Glumly winced inwardly.

“Most of these injuries you see here were sustained postmortem,” Cheever continued, “no doubt by rats and dogs and whatever else happened to get at it while it sat in that back lot. Goddamn rats always go for the testicles. Of course, rats didn’t slice this guy’s head and limbs off.” Cheever pointed a gloved finger at the serrated skin just below the right shoulder. “These limbs were cut, were hacked off, most likely with a heavy, blunt object. I’m guessing an ax. Pretty hastily, too. Same with the head.” Then, with a slightly crooked smile, Cheever added:
“Your
head.”

“It’s a match?” Glumly said.

“Oh, yeah. The DNA from the head you found is a perfect fit. Sorry to say it’s the
only
fit,” he added. Glumly did not have to ask Cheever to elaborate—he knew exactly what the medical examiner meant. He’d been finding body parts all over Manhattan for two years now. Most were still unidentified.

“Any distinguishing marks on the body?” he asked Cheever.

“Some scar tissue. No tattoos or piercings or anything like that, though.” Cheever bent over the body, his face astonishingly close to the chest of the victim. With his gloved finger, he prodded at two tiny, circular incisions made in the upper chest cavity. The sound made by yielding flesh was enough to roll Glumly’s stomach. “See these?” Cheever said. “Bullet holes. He was shot twice in the chest.”

“I thought you said the cause of death was decapitation—”

“Oh, I did,” said Cheever. “He was shot, just not
killed
by the shots. One bruised the aortic arch, just millimeters from being fatal. The other collapsed the left lung, zipped around to bust apart a couple of ribs, and wound up lodging itself in the left kidney. Small caliber bullets, but they did a hell of a lot of damage. Zigged around, smashed through a lot of bones. I’ve opened him up in the back. Wanna see?”

“I’ll take your word for it.”

“Your loss,” Cheever said amiably enough.

“The bullets were still in the body?”

Cheever jerked a thumb back over his shoulder. “Small Tupperware container on my desk. I wrapped them in a plastic bag. Make sure you don’t take my lunch by mistake.”

Glumly scrounged around the mess on Cheever’s desk until he found the clear plastic container. He popped off the lid and pulled out a Glad zipper-lock plastic bag. Inside the bag were the two rounds. The rounds were damaged, bent out of shape from having crashed through bone. Still, looking at them, he could tell they were .22-caliber rounds.

“You’ll let me know if you come across anything else?” he said, stuffing the plastic bag into his pants pocket.

“Sure, sure,” Cheever said. Finished with the corpse, the little man straightened his back and pulled off each rubber glove with an audible
snap!
“This reminds me,” Cheever said then, “of a finger I found when I was just a kid. Was playing in some filthy back lot with some friends, sifting through crap like kids do, and wham—sure enough, I find this finger. Mean, ugly thing—all worm-eaten and stuff. But I was fascinated. I had no idea how it got there and didn’t mention it to my folks. I hid it in my room in one of those plastic globes used to display autographed baseballs. I thought it was the most amazing thing I’d ever seen. The nail fell off after about a week, and it just went downhill fast after that.” Cheever smiled in reflection, his hands on his portly hips, one cordovan shoe tapping on the tile floor. “I’m only kidding, Dennis. When I was a kid, I collected baseball cards.” He tossed his rubber gloves on the counter and sighed. “Everybody thinks you have to be weird to do this job for a living.”

“Now why would you say that?” Glumly said.

M
ICKEY DID NOT GALL UNTIL FIVE O’CLOCK
the day after the pickup at JFK, leaving John to worry most of the day whether or not he would call at all. He still didn’t have a full grasp on Mickey—not just yet—but the meeting with him the other night at the Cloverleaf offered a glimmer of hope. For the first time, he’d glimpsed Mickey O’Shay unguarded and in his own environment. He’d always been confident in his approach as an undercover agent, but sometimes—no matter how well you played the part—some people remained distrustful. It was the nature of the business. Half the time if they didn’t figure you were a cop or a snitch, they assumed that you were just as rotten as they were, and that you were only biding the time before you ripped them off. If greed was the motivation, and its result the hidden treasure, then a certain level of mutual contentment made it possible to unlock the dark chest. Gutting the deal to sell Mickey and his gang thirty cases of whiskey had rocketed him up into a whole new stratosphere.

At least, he hoped.

When Mickey finally did call, he refused to give John the details of the meeting over the phone. John immediately agreed to split for Hell’s Kitchen without a second thought. Kersh wanted to set up a full surveillance, but somehow John managed to convince him to keep it small scale. Surprisingly, Kersh offered little resistance and agreed to cover John on his own.

Outside the candy store, Mickey was hanging around by the street corner, slumped against a pay telephone, his eyes impassively scrutinizing the passing cars. Traffic already heavy along Tenth Avenue, John could find no place to park. Last night’s light snowfall hadn’t been enough to hinder the city, but it had been enough to freeze the roads. He pulled the Camaro up in front of the store and nearly hopped the curb. Pumping the brakes, he slowed to a stop and popped open the passenger door for Mickey. Behind him, a woman in a hunter-green Lexus blared her horn at him.

“Hurry up,” he told Mickey.

Mickey shuffled into the car and pulled his legs up, slammed the door.

“I can’t park here,” he said.

Mickey jabbed a finger on the dashboard. “Drive around the block.”

With the woman in the Lexus still leaning on her horn, he inched the Camaro back into traffic and hooked his first right onto 54
^th
Street. Here, traffic was just as bad, and he had to slam on the brakes immediately after making the turn to avoid smashing into the back of a city bus.

“Sometimes I hate this goddamn city,” he muttered under his breath.

“How well you know the West Side?” was Mickey’s first question. Nothing about John surprising him at the Cloverleaf, nothing about how shitfaced he’d been during their conversation. He was like a different person, an alternate Mickey O’Shay, a doppelganger.

“Depends,” he said.

“There’s a bar called Pickernell’s down West Fifty-third Street, halfway between Tenth and Eleventh avenues. You know the park down there? It’s right before the park.”

“Okay.”

“You got a truck, right?”

“A rental,” he said.

“Park it outside the bar tonight around two o’clock. I’ll be out front waiting for you. Come by yourself. I’ll get some guys to help us unload.”

“I’m getting paid on delivery,” he said. It was not a question.

“You’ll get your money,” Mickey said. “Stop the car.”

“What?”

“Stop.”

John pulled over to the curb, just barely avoiding another collision. Mickey jerked open the passenger door and swung one leg out onto the curb. “This traffic,” he muttered, and slammed the door behind him. John watched him disappear down the street back toward Tenth Avenue in his rearview mirror.

I really hate this son of a bitch
, he thought.

Back at the office, a team of three agents was assembled for the meeting later that night. They targeted the location of Pickernell’s on a map of the West Side and considered the strategic placement of their surveillance vehicles. It would be difficult—the positioning of the bar, in tandem with the lack of traffic that far west, would provide little cover for anyone within eyeshot. Finally, Kersh decided the best thing to do was to have one vehicle stowed away in a back alley along West 53
^rd
Street, opposite the bar. A second unit with two more agents could hang down by the park. John sat and listened to the plan, uncomfortable with the proximity of the surveillance vehicles. Yet Kersh was passionate about the vehicles’ locations and would not budge.

After the meeting, he noticed Kersh brooding out in the hallway, a lukewarm cup of coffee in one hand.

“What’s up?” he said, coming up behind him.

“I think you should wear a wire tonight,” Kersh said, staring down at his cup.

“No way.”

“Listen to me,” Kersh said, looking up. “You’re walking into this thing tonight expecting to leave with three thousand dollars of Mickey O’Shay’s money. Once you bring the liquor to him and his pals, what’s to stop them from keeping the three grand and blowing your head off?”

“For a lousy three grand?”

“John, man, I don’t know. I haven’t felt right about this since I pulled Mickey and Kahn’s records.”

“I’m not wearing a wire,” he said, adamant. “We got thirty cases to unload, and they sure as shit ain’t gonna let me sit there and twiddle my thumbs while they move it. I’m not gonna bounce around wearing a wire, Bill. That’s ridiculous. Anyway,” he added, “wire or not—they wanna pull their guns, they’re gonna do it.”

“Then what
do you
do?”

“If I wear a wire, you need to get closer to monitor it. We’re not blowing this.”

It was not the response Kersh was looking for. Still, it was the truth and they both knew it.