The Ninth Step (18 page)

As he came back through the alley, he took out his cell phone, looked up a number in its address book, and called Brent Charlson. He wasn’t looking forward to admitting that he had let their mutual suspect escape.

“You sure it was him?” Charlson asked after Jack explained the situation.

“Pretty sure,” Jack replied, glad the fed couldn’t see his sheepish expression.

“Did he see you?”

“I don’t think so,” Jack answered, though he had to wonder why—if not—the suspect had bothered to disappear.

“All right,” Charlson said briskly. “We’ll be right over. If you spot him again, don’t try to engage.”

Jack walked around the block, every sense alert for any sign of Hasni, and finally met up with his partner on the other side, outside the construction site.

“This looks like the only way out,” Richie said.

Jack nodded, then frowned. “I just called Charlson.”

“What’d he say?”

Jack shrugged. “He said, ‘Stay out of the way’—they’ll be right over.”

Richie’s face tightened. “Let’s go back and find this bastard first.”

Jack nodded and they set off again, returning to Seventy-fourth Street, stopping to check in every store and restaurant along the way.

THE DOORWAY ON THE
right led up a flight of stairs. Nadim jogged up them and found himself in a big showroom full of female mannequins dressed in bright saris—sky blue, magenta, yellow, bedecked with rhinestones, swirling with beadwork—arrayed around the room like a mute chorus, staring at him. A bored-looking woman stood up from behind a counter. “May I help you?”

“Just looking.” Nadim walked around for a moment, touching the sleeve of a dress now and then as if he was shopping for a present. He glanced at his watch, wondering how long he could stay up here without making the shopgirl nervous.

He looked toward the back: a mirrored alcove. He wandered over, hoping for a back exit, but there wasn’t one.

“Are you looking for anything in particular?” the woman called out. “Something for a special occasion?”

Nadim shook his head nervously. “I’m waiting for my wife.”

Indeed he was: waiting for his wife to go on her way, so he could get the hell out of here.

After another minute he could see that he was wearing out his welcome and he felt foolish. His ex had probably already waddled off down Thirty-seventh Avenue and he was just being paranoid. It was time to go back to Malik’s now, to enjoy his
rasmalai
, and to rest.

“Thank you,” he told the shopgirl, and then he descended the dim staircase, walking toward the bright rectangle of sunlight below. He came out onto the sidewalk again, only to find Ghizala walking straight toward him, just a few yards away.

He saw his own surprise mirrored on her face, which then bloomed into alarm.

The surprise he might have expected, but the alarm was something else. She glanced wildly around, as if looking for something. For someone? She seemed scared—it occurred to him that maybe someone had warned her about him. Was she hoping to spot a policeman, ready to shout
Murderer?

He spun around and noticed a small alleyway; coming the other way, he hadn’t seen it because it was partially obscured by a Dumpster. Without waiting for her to say anything, he veered into the shaded little lane and ran.

Thirty yards down, he glanced right, glanced left, and realized his mistake. Panting, he searched for a means of escape. He tried every door he could see, but every damned one was locked. He ran over to the wall of plywood. Wheezing with exertion and fear, he grabbed the edge of a sheet, felt a splinter jab into the palm of his left hand, planted a foot on a neighboring board, and yanked back with all his might. With a screech of nails pulling out of wood, the board gave way a bit, and Nadim fell back. He jumped back up, then found that he was just able to squeeze through the widened gap between the boards. He stumbled thirty yards through a rubble-filled dirt lot, found a dead-bolted door on the far side, threw the bolt back, then lurched through, out onto the other side of the block, where he almost crashed into a couple of squat little
desi
women. He straightened up, brushed at a torn spot on his jeans, then limped off down Seventy-third Street.

At the next corner, he walked into the shadows beneath the train tracks, darted through traffic to cross Roosevelt Avenue, and plunged into the subway station. Two minutes later he was sitting up in the window seat of an F train, gazing out on a jumbled panorama of Jackson Heights, leaving Little India and Ghizala and his safe hiding place all behind.

J
ACK LEIGHTNER WAS NOT
a violent man. He could hardly remember the last time he so dearly wanted to punch someone in the face.

Of course, he knew cops who liked to throw their weight around. Guys who went on the job tended to be beefy, athletic types, the kind who had learned early on to hold their own in playground fights or street brawls. But he was on the smaller side, and so he’d learned to rely on his wits. As a cop, he solved his cases through superior reasoning and solid investigation.

Which was why he was so riled up now, as he sat at the far end of the bar in dim Monsalvo’s, nursing a beer and his wounded pride. He recalled how—a couple hours before—Brent Charlson and his team had roared into Queens in their shiny goddamn van.

Jack would have loved to be able to tell the man that he had picked up Nadim Hasni’s trail again, but no such luck.

At first, the fed had been all business. “Where was he when you lost him? What was he wearing? Where was he when you first saw him?”

Jack did his best to ignore the sting of the first question. He explained how he had returned to the alley and discovered the freshly opened gap in the plywood. He watched as Charlson dispatched his team to the hunt. Without their bulky radiation suits, the men looked lean and muscled, with the intense, unnerving focus of Navy SEALs or Green Berets.

Jack crossed his arms. “No radiation gear today?”

Charlson ignored the question. “Thank you, detective. We’ll take it from here.”

Jack frowned. “Why don’t we split up the area? My partner and I can keep searching along Seventy-fourth Street.”

Charlson didn’t even acknowledge the suggestion; he just watched his men fan out down the street.

“
Look,
” Jack said. “This is our case too. Let’s work together.”

Charlson barely bothered to conceal his contempt, as if he was speaking to some rookie just out of the Academy—a rookie who had just botched his first case. “You’ve done enough, detective. Why don’t you worry about your other investigations?”

The fed walked away.

“Another Bud?”

Jack looked up at Pat Senior, who was wiping down the bar with a rag that smelled of bleach. He sighed. “I guess so.”

MEN WITHOUT WOMEN. THAT
seemed to be the theme of the bar tonight.

There was ancient Tommy McKettrie, who had practically moved into Monsalvo’s upon the death last year of his beloved wife of fifty-seven years. And there was young Mike Faurer, racked with guilt and regret, who came to Monsalvo’s to avoid his wife of only a year. “I don’t know what I was thinkin’,” he kept moaning. Jukebox songs wafted around in the dim neon light: crooned odes to perfect loves, loves sorely missed.

Four beers later, the music had picked up, something bright and feisty with an accordion in it, and Jack was transported back to Prospect Park, a warm summer night, a concert in the bandshell, an unfamiliar kind of music. “What
is
this?” he had asked. “It’s Zydeco,” Michelle Wilber answered. It was their first time together, a blind date, and he remembered watching her walk up to him, and feeling as if he’d won a jackpot. They had eaten some tasty Southern fried chicken and drunk a few beers, and she’d even got him up and dancing.

He missed her. He missed having a reason to look forward to time off; he missed brushing his teeth with her and joking around at bedtime; he missed making love to her; and he missed having something in his life besides work.

A new tune from the juke, a slow dance. A voice poured out of the dusty speakers above the bar, feisty, smoky, inimitable. Brenda Lee, “I’m Sorry.” What if Michelle could ever bring herself to say those words? What if she knocked on his door late tonight and asked him to forgive her? What then? Was there any way, after what she’d done, that he could find such mercy in his heart?

He ordered another beer and sipped it, stirred by old memories.

Finally, he got up and went over to the phone booth at the back of the room. Sat down and pulled the accordion door shut. Took out his cell phone. He snorted: he was sitting in a phone booth using a cell phone. His fingers felt clumsy on the tiny buttons, but he found the one for the address book. Sure, enough, Michelle was still in it.

He was just about to dial her number, but then—through the glass door—he heard some peppy old doo-wop song on the jukebox and he thought of Petey, singing “Help Me, Rhonda” that tragic morning so long ago. Jack had never liked the Beach Boys, himself—they were so sparkling clean, so college, so California. What did they have to do with a poor kid from Red Hook, Brooklyn? But Petey liked the blond surfers.

Jack shriveled, there in the phone booth. He remembered how popular Petey had been, good at sports, blessed with his looks, attractive to the girls. He had loved the kid, Lord knows he had, but at that moment when his brother dropped wounded to the sidewalk, there had been a tiny part of him that was glad to see his competition fall. And what kind of a person could even think such a thing? How could he ever make up for it?

He closed his phone and pressed his forehead against the cool glass door. What was he doing? His brother’s murderer was within reach, and he was worrying about a goddamn ex-girlfriend?

He opened his phone again but called Information instead. He said a name out loud, talking into a computer, into a hole. What had happened to human beings, for chrissake?

After a moment, an actual woman’s voice came on. “I have two Frank Raucci’s in Brooklyn, sir. One in Mill Basin and one in Carroll Gardens.”

“Gimme the one in Carroll Gardens.”

Now he had the number. He had told himself that he would come armed with research, that he would find out whatever he could about the man first. To hell with that—he would poke another stick into the hive. He punched in the number.

“Hello?” A crusty old man’s voice.

“Is this Frank Raucci?”

“Who wants to know?”

“Are you the Frank Raucci that used to work out of Red Hook?”

“Who the hell is this?”

That was enough. Jack clicked his phone shut, yanked open the phone booth door, and pulled out his car keys.

THE HOUSE WAS STUCK
in a time warp. Unlike many of the other homes in Carroll Gardens, brownstones that had been rehabbed and sandblasted and made fit for swanky new owners, Raucci’s place was straight out of the fifties, part of a stretch of modest row houses with striped aluminum awnings and flights of stairs rising up from the sidewalk like airplane boarding steps to the second floor, where each house had a little porch where the owners could sit in Bermuda shorts and wife beater T-shirts in the summertime, drinking beer and gazing down on the passersby.

To Jack’s surprise, a petite teenage girl answered the door. She wore a pink tank top and had braces on her teeth.

“Is Frank Raucci in?”

“Grandpa!” the girl called out over her shoulder, then disappeared inside, letting the screen door slam.

A few seconds later an old man shuffled into view behind the screen, holding something black in one hand: Jack stared to make sure it wasn’t a gun. No—just a TV remote. Raucci wore a faded plaid shirt and stared out through thick eyeglasses; beneath them, one of his eyes was clouded over, milky-white. His cheeks were gaunt and his gap-toothed mouth hung slackly open. He looked to be near ninety.

“You know who I am?” Jack said, standing on the little porch.

“If you’re selling something, I ain’t buyin’. Wait—did you just call me and hang up?”

“I’m Max Leightner’s son. And Petey Leightner’s brother.”

The old man squinted. “John, right? No:
Jackie
. You’re the cop.”

Jack ignored the comment. “You went down to Philly with my old man. And then he wouldn’t work for you anymore.”

Raucci frowned. “That’s ancient history. Why the hell are you botherin’ me now?”

“Am I?” Jack said. “Am I bothering you?” He pictured his brother Petey lying on a Red Hook sidewalk, staring at his hand covered in blood. “Why’d you do it? Why’d you have him killed?”

“What?” the old man sputtered. “Are you crazy? Have
who
killed?”

Jack’s voice rose. “You think you’re safe now? Don’t you know there’s no statute of limitations on murder?”

Raucci’s face tightened. “You better get the hell away from my house, cop.”

“What, you were afraid to go after my father? So you picked on a helpless thirteen-year-old kid? Did that make you feel like a big—”

A voice rose up from the dark sidewalk. “Is that you, Leightner? Whaddaya think you’re doin?”

Jack turned. It took him a moment to make out the face below: John Carpsio Jr., emperor of the dumpy social club on Smith Street. The mobster was standing there with a tiny sparrow of an old woman gripping his elbow. Carpsio turned to her. “Ma, go on home. I’ll be there in a minute.”

The woman’s voice was tremulous. “Is everything okay, Johnnie?”

“Sure, Ma. Everything’s fine. Now go on.”

The little woman tottered off.

Carpsio stared up out of the dark. “Are you on duty, Leightner? Is this official business? Not for nothin’, but if it isn’t, you might wanna call it a night.”

“You think I’m scared of you scum?” Jack had dealt with plenty of thugs in his day, and he wasn’t about to be intimidated now.

Raucci pushed his screen door open. “Get outta here, you punk!”

Carpsio came up the steps. He laid a hand on Jack’s shoulder, and Jack was tempted to spin around and take a swing at him, but the mobster spoke calmly, in a low voice. “
Think about this
, Leightner. Do you really want to make a scene out here, put your job on the line?”