The Ninth Step (23 page)

The old man looked anxious. He raised a remote control with effort, as if it weighed a lot, and turned down the TV’s volume. “You’re with Social Services?”

“No,” Jack said, as gently as he could. “I’m Max Leightner’s son.”

Farro tilted his head back for a better look. “Oh yeah, the cop. Did ya miss me?” His sharp laugh turned into a coughing jag.

Jack waited it out. “Would you mind if I sit down?”

The old mobster waved a hand.
Suit yourself.

Jack sat on the edge of a plastic-covered sofa; it squeaked as he adjusted his weight. “I talked to Frank Raucci,” he said.

“Oh yeah? How is the old bastard?”

“It’s been a while since you’ve seen him?”

Farro snorted. “I’m retired, kid. And I don’t hang around the Hook no more.”

“I was thinking about my father. Maybe it wasn’t any of your crew who were mad at him. Maybe he did something to piss the Russians off, down there in Philly?”

Farro shook his head. “Your old man and the Russkies got along swell. Thick as thieves—ain’t that the expression?”

“Did he get along with everybody on your crew? I mean, Frank Raucci’s crew?”

“I thought you talked to Frank. Didn’t he tell you?”

Jack kept his expression flat, as if he were about to make a poker bluff. “He told me that my father had a big problem with someone on your crew that went to Philly.” This was in direct contradiction to the speculation he had just raised about the Russians, but the old man didn’t blink or make any move to disagree. “Raucci said it wasn’t him,” Jack continued. “He said that either you were lying or that you were just a useless old geezer, gone senile.” He didn’t feel good about baiting the old man, but then, he couldn’t forget that this was a Mob thug sitting in front of him.

Farro’s face clouded up. “I never said that, that it was him that had the beef with Max.”

“That’s what you told me. Don’t you remember? Maybe Frank was right about you and your memory.”

The old man’s face contorted. “Why the hell would I say that, if Sally Ducks was—”

“Who?”

The old man had enough sense left to realize how he’d been played; he glared at Jack. “Fuck off, cop!”

“We can discuss this down at the station house, if you want.”

The old mobster didn’t fall for the idle threat. “Shirley!” he shouted. “Bring me the phone.” He glared at Jack. “You wanna talk, talk to my lawyer. But first, get the hell outta my house.”

Jack almost felt sorry for him, the old Golden Gloves champ, taken in by such a weak fake right.

 
“WELL?” LIEUTENANT CARDULLI SAID
as Jack got back in the car. “Did you find anything out?”

Jack shook his head. “Nope. Total waste of time.”

He was acutely aware of the weight of his service revolver in its shoulder holster, pressing against the side of his chest.

J
ACK PEERED PAST THE
curtains at the front of his apartment and looked to the left, at the squad car sitting a ways down the block, under a streetlamp. A couple of patrol guys from the local precinct house. Jack had tried to veto the idea, but his bosses insisted. He had asked the uniforms to at least not park right in front of the house, so as not to alarm Mr. G.

He stared down at his desk, at the unregistered snub-nose .38 Special he had just pulled out of the back of his closet, and then he picked up his phone. One of the patrol guys out front had given him his cell number; Jack dialed it now. “You guys wanna come in and use the can? I’m about to go to sleep.”

He met them at the front door. The evening outside was humid and breezy, with intimations of a coming storm; the air was cool against his bare ankles, under his bathrobe.

The uniforms both took the opportunity to relieve themselves before their long boring night ahead. Jack yawned as they trooped out again. “G’night, fellas.”

He turned off the light, then peered out the window. As soon as the young cops settled back into their car, he went into his bedroom and got dressed again, finishing with a wind-breaker to hide his shoulder holster.

Leaving the lights off, he slipped out the back door into his landlord’s little garden plot. He edged around the tiny lawn in the middle, thankful there was no moon out, and clambered over the back chain-link fence into his neighbor’s yard. As he crossed the garden there, he tripped over something—a hoe left lying in the soil—and ended up on his hands and knees. Smothering a curse, he got up, found the latch for the side gate, and came out into a driveway on the other side of the block.

He was thinking about a case he’d worked a short while back, a suspected double rapist and strangler who had managed to avoid a similar police stakeout, sneaking out of his own home late one night. Jack thought of what that man had done, and what Jack was about to do, and it wasn’t just the soil on his hands that left him feeling dirty.

HE GOT OUT OF
the taxi two blocks away from his destination. In case anyone might think to check the logbook, later.

Sally Ducks.
The name sounded silly, as Mob nicknames often did, but there was nothing amusing about the origin of this one: legend had it that back in the late sixties one Salvatore Buonfiglia had executed three members of a rival family in the kitchen of a Rockaway Beach summer bungalow, lining them up on their knees. “I’m putting all my ducks in a row,” he had supposedly announced before cold-bloodedly pumping a round from a .44 Magnum into each man’s forehead, denying them even the tiny mercy of a shot from behind.

So Jack had learned earlier, when he made a long-distance call to Lou Caprioni, an old friend from the Brooklyn D.A.’s office who had long since retired to San Diego. Caprioni was in his seventies now, but he had made a distinguished career out of prosecuting Mob cases.

“Why are you asking about this guy?” he’d said.

“The name just came up in a case I’m working on and I wondered who he was. Any chance there was more than one guy by that moniker?”

“Only one I ever heard of.” Caprioni snorted. “Another guy would’ve needed some pretty big balls to use the same one.”

“How come I’ve never heard of him?”

“Sally was never one of the flashy ones. After that thing in Rockaway where he made his bones, he did his best to fly under the radar. I always wished I could make a case against him, but he was shrewd. He had other people do his dirty work.”

Like Darnel Teague, Jack thought. From what Caprioni said it sounded like Buonfiglia had not really started his rise to prominence until at least the late ’60s—by which point Jack was gone from Red Hook, in the Army.

“Eventually,” the prosecutor continued, “he became one of the real bosses in South Brooklyn, only you never saw his name in the papers.”

“He still around?”

“Last I heard, but you know I retired back in ’ninety-three. He lived in Carroll Gardens. Sackett Street, if I remember right.”

“So how’s the weather where you are?” Jack said, doing his best to not sound too interested in the old mobster.

“It’s already hot as hell. It’s not really my kinda place, but my wife loves it. At least I can golf whenever I want.”

They chatted for a minute more, then Jack said good-bye.

And now here he was, walking along Sackett Street in the dark. A stormy breeze was riffling the trees, turning the leaves upside down. The air felt heavy, expectant. It was late, with only an occasional dog walker out on the street. Jack’s nerves were jangling.
Revenge,
somebody smart had once said,
is a dish best served cold.
He had had forty years to consider this wisdom.

He took out his cell phone and redialed the uniforms sitting outside his house. “Sorry to bother you guys. I thought I heard something in the back of the house. Would you mind taking a look, then calling me back?”

Setting up an alibi.

He stopped on the sidewalk, staring toward the north side of the street. Buonfiglia’s house was certainly a shrewd choice. Most of the homes around here were three-story row houses, with tiny front yards wide open to the street, but the mobster’s home could only be approached down a very narrow alley between two small apartment buildings; the house was actually in the center of the block. A twelve-foot-tall iron gate with a spiked top barred entrance to the alley from the sidewalk. The place looked damned near impregnable. There was an intercom, but how could he bluff his way in at this late hour?

As the storm came on, the treetops began bucking like the heads of wild horses. A few heavy raindrops spattered down, one of them hitting Jack’s shoulder with considerable force. And then the sky broke open with a brilliant flash of light, followed closely by a stunning thunderclap. Jack stared through the gate, wondering what to do. The rain began to sheet down. He stood there for a minute, with his windbreaker tented over his head, getting soaked, until he saw a little Honda Civic come up the street and double-park in front of a brick building several doors down. A
DOMINO’S PIZZA
sign shone on the roof. A man jumped out, holding a pizza box, dashed up to the front door, and pressed the intercom. Jack came up behind him just as the customer buzzed the front door. He pulled out his car keys, as if they were keys to the building; the delivery guy held the door for him. “Thanks,” Jack mumbled as he trotted around the man and up a staircase on the right side of the foyer, as if he knew exactly where he was going.

He tread softly as he came up the last flight of stairs, careful not to alert the top-floor residents. On the last landing, he gazed up at an iron ladder that led to a roof hatch. He could see a padlock on the hasp but couldn’t tell, in the dim light, if it was locked. He started up the ladder but was only three rungs up when his cell phone vibrated. Impeccable timing. He held onto the ladder with one hand and pulled the phone out with the other.

“Detective? This is Tommy Searle.” One of the cops outside his house. “We didn’t see anything back there.”

“Sorry to bother ya,” Jack said softly, praying that the residents of the building’s top floor were sound asleep. “G’night.” He shoved the phone back into his pocket, then continued climbing. Thankfully, he discovered that—though the shackle was indeed looped through the hasp—the padlock was not fully closed.

The storm was still coming down heavy as he climbed up onto the tar roof. He wasn’t happy to be drenched again, but he was grateful for the covering din of the raindrops on the rooftops and the crowns of the trees. He moved toward Salvatore Buonfiglia’s house, stepping over thigh-high walls that divided the connected roofs of the intervening buildings. And then he came to a gap between two buildings, maybe four or five feet. He grimaced, then stepped up onto a parapet, took a deep breath, and jumped across the divide. He landed on the other roof and fell to his knees; the tar was sticky on his hands as he pushed off it and stood, sputtering rain away from his mouth.

He stepped carefully to the back of the roof and peered down into a little courtyard surrounding Buonfiglia’s house. He found a corroded fire escape and clambered down. As he eased past dark windows, he hoped the din of the storm would mask his progress, especially when he slipped on the wet metal passing the second floor and had to make a wild grab for the railing.

Finally, he dropped from the bottom of the fire escape. The balls of his feet stung as they hit the little concrete apron at the back of the building, which gave out onto a small yard in front of Buonfiglia’s place. A couple of security floodlights above the eaves sparkled through the rain and reminded Jack of a legendary time in Red Hook. The Gallo brothers, engaged in a fierce war with their rival Carmine “the Snake” Persico, took to the mattresses one summer in their house on President Street, holing up with a bunch of fellow gang members and a cache of guns. They set up floodlights that glared around their house all night long, but their sleepless neighbors didn’t dare complain.

Jack wondered how many
soldieri
the old mobster might have with him tonight. He drew the .38 snubbie from his holster and held it down by his leg as he darted across the yard, peered around the side of the house, and pressed up against a wall. He looked up and saw several windows on the different floors, all dark. Reconnoitering, he passed along the back of the house and came around the other side, which seemed to be some sort of enclosed sunporch. The big picture window there flickered with blue light. Jack risked a look up into the window and took in the scene: an old man, lying on a daybed, watching a massive old TV. He ducked back out of sight, then moved a few feet away from the base of the wall so he could see up the side of the house. All dark. He knelt there for a moment, considering his next move. Holding up the .38, he came back around to the rear of the house. A little porch, a back door. He glanced at his watch: almost midnight.

He took a couple of deep breaths to steady himself, then stepped up onto the porch and tried the doorknob. Miraculously, it turned freely in his hand. His heart was beating so hard that he actually worried about cardiac arrest; he couldn’t help remembering how—years ago, on a dark summer night—he had been working a case and taken a bullet in his chest.

He bit his lower lip, extended the revolver in front of him, and carefully pushed the door open. He stepped inside, then took a moment for his eyes to adjust. He was in a dark kitchen that smelled of garlic and another, incongruous note: some kind of Mexican spice?

Outside, the rain ran in rippling sheets down the kitchen windows. Shoes squishing, Jack tiptoed across the linoleum floor, through a doorway, into a dark hall. He moved through another doorway on the right: a faint light glimmered on the surface of a dining table. He stepped carefully around it, past a china cabinet, and into a front parlor, looking intently for dark shapes sitting in the big armchairs there. Nobody. Water dripped into his eyes from his wet hair; he brushed it aside and came around into a little front hall, where he saw a staircase leading up into the dark. He ignored it for the moment, stepping through another dark doorway and another dark room: more furniture, unoccupied. Ahead, blue light flickered. Having circumnavigated the entire first floor, Jack edged up to the sunporch and dared another peek in. He was behind the old man and the daybed; the TV displayed a shopping channel, a bleached blonde holding up a glittering necklace. Jack noticed a big oxygen tank standing like an old World War II bomb next to the bed.