The Old Turk's Load (12 page)

he long wait at the hospital calmed Gloria down, gave her time to feel her power returning. Finally she saw her father tottering down the brightly lit hallway. His left arm sported a fresh plaster cast that ended in a pink claw and a plastic bag of meds. Julius Roth had a gentle grip on the other arm. Richard Mundi looked alarmingly frail. She’d imagined the difficulty of telling a pompous, bullying father that, thanks to her, the FBI knew about the heroin he was holding. This was worse. He looked so bad, she wondered whether the news might not kill him.

As his daughter approached, Mundi saw the worry on her face and stood straighter, then smiled. At this moment of crisis there was no one he wanted to see more than her.

Gloria felt his love. She could almost hear him telling her,
Go ahead and do what you need to do. I’d do the same if I were you.
He was receding. She was coming on. That was the natural order of things. His benediction.

“Daddy! Julie told me what happened.It must have been awful.” “Hurt like hell.” He realized, to his delight, that the storm wrought by the Street Brothers had cleared the air.All the small-time shit between his daughter and him had fallen away. He loved her, that was all.

He gave her a hug with his good arm and she gave him the air kiss she always did, then pushed away.“Daddy, we’ve got to talk. There’s more to this than you know.”

It was late.The hospital coffee shop was closed, but at least the visitors’ lounge was empty. Roth got bad coffee from the machine and Gloria told them about Gallagher. How he’d come in and hijacked everything she and Irene had been trying to establish. How she’d gone along at first, deluded. How she’d told Gallagher what she knew about the Newark find, then realized her mistake. How Kelly’s man had found out Gallagher was working for the Feds.

“You were right, Daddy. You were right about Kevin. I understand why you hired that detective.”
Richard Mundi winced, then was soothed by the thought of Kelly’s imminent death. “Fat lot of good being right is doing me.”
“Daddy, this is serious.”
“You’re telling me, sweetie.”
Gloria was happy to have energized him. Roth understood it was just the painkillers kicking in. “The sooner we get that stuff back to them, the better for everyone,” he said. “We’ve got hours, not days.”
“It’s already too late, Julie.”
“Boss—”
“Calm down. I’m not talking about selling the stuff. Though I admit, I did have someone lined up in Chicago.”
Roth grunted, shot Gloria a look.
“Then I was headed for Spain. Right out of O’Hare on a 707. But not after this.” He wagged his cast at them. It wasn’t every day you got your wrist snapped by a mushroom.“DiNoto’s not going to give us an inch. And now fucking Gallagher’s got the Feds in on the deal. Even if I get away clean, you’ll be caught up in it. We’ve got to get rid of that shit. I mean we’ve got to get ourselves way clear of it.”
“The Hudson River,” said Roth.
Mundi shook his head.
“The detective,”said Gloria, just as her father was having that same thought.
He beamed at her. “Yes, Kelly.”
“Funny thing is, I’m pretty sure his sidekick is hanging out with Irene. Right at this moment. Why don’t I call him? We’ll give him the stuff and tell him to take it to Kelly.”
“Then we’ll call the Feds and tell them Kelly’s got the drugs.”
Roth’s turn for the nugatory head shake.
“Problem, Julie?”
“Problem? The problem is being dead or in jail. I don’t have a problem with transferring that problem to the detective. The real problem is that DiNoto’s boys are watching everything we do.That’s exactly why they rousted you, boss.To scare you into something like this. We send our guy out of the office with a suitcase and they’re on him as soon as he hits the street. Then they find us and kill us.” He paused. “I see that as a problem.”
“Duly noted.”
“Why don’t we just call the Feds?”
“There’s a reason they call possession ‘possession.’”
Mundi and his daughter attempted to discuss the problem further. Then they realized Roth was working on something. They waited to see what he would say. Gloria thought she could guess. Mundi recalled the shabby treatment he’d recently accorded his right-hand man and was searching his limited emotional vocabulary for a proper expression of regret when Roth spoke up.
“Same basic plan, except that I figure a way to get the drugs over to Kelly’s without the Mob guys noticing. Then I call DiNoto instead of the Feds. I’ll tell him he put the fear in us. I’ll tell him we got the word in Newark that it was Kelly who’d found the stuff during the riots, and all we’d wanted to do was sell the information. I won’t even tell them to toss his office. That’ll be the first place they go.”
“You think they’ll buy a story like that?”
“What choice do they have? The fact that they left you guys standing means they don’t know for sure we’re holding it. If they find it on Kelly, we’ll look a lot better than we do now.”
Gloria sat quietly, taking it all in.
Roth watched her watching and wondered what she saw.“First thing to do is get that stuff planted on our stooge. I’ll take care of that. Boss, you need to go the airport right now. Buy a new ticket, then go sit with the customs people, whatever. I doubt even DiNoto’s goons would try anything in a public place crawling with cops. Anyway, it’ll be obvious you don’t have the stuff. You’re probably as safe there as you’d be anywhere.”
“Except here.”
“Well, I guess you could retire to long-term care. Hang out with Murchison.”
“I don’t think so.”
“Gloria, you want to go with him?”
“Well . . .”
“Too dangerous.” Mundi patted her knee. “You don’t need to be a part of this, honey.”
Gloria flushed with relief. Her plans for that evening did not include sitting at JFK with her father. “Daddy, are you sure you’re going to be all right by yourself ?”
“Of course I am. All I’ve got to do is get on a plane.”
Gloria said, “Okay. Take good care of yourself.” But she hesitated, did not leave.
Roth phoned Mossman and sent him over to the Tishman Building, telling him to clean out the safe at Mundi Enterprises, then wait there until Curtis arrived.
Next he called Curtis, the lobby guard. “Curtis, what time do you get off ?
“Matthews usually comes in around eleven forty-five.”
“For the twelve-to-eight shift, right?”
“Right.”
“Fine. Soon as he gets there, scoot up to Mr. Mundi’s office. Mossman’ll be waiting for you. He’ll have something to give you.”
“Oh, what?”
“Ten kilos of uncut heroin.”
“Far out.”
“They’re in baggies. Put some in your lunch pail and stuff the rest in your drawers. Then walk over to Fiftieth. I’ll be waiting on the corner of Madison in a tan Olds.”
“A tan Olds.”
“There’ll be a couple of grand waiting there with me.”
“A thousand a block. Righteous.”
Curtis was dark black and weighed two-eighty, an impressive package in his rent-a-cop uniform—and packing heat besides. Roth was certain he’d pass through the midnight streets unmolested; the Mob boys, intent on Mossman, would ignore him after his shift in the lobby was done. Curtis was from Newark, just like Smoot. Roth had gotten him the lobby job, and now he used what he knew about the man to frame the proposition appropriately. No bullshit, high risk, high reward, immediate gratification.
There was nothing to do then but walk Mundi out to the street and put him in a cab. He smiled up at his daughter as she helped him into the backseat.
“Things are going to be different now, sweetie.”
“Better, maybe.”
“Better. Yes.”

arry Jarkey, meanwhile, was sitting in the apartment behind the legal office on 116th Street trying to recover from having just gotten his brains fucked out by Irene Kornecki. But he never fully got them back. Not that night, anyway.

After leaving the hospital they’d gone for the cup of coffee, and Jarkey, responding to Irene’s out-front energy, wound up telling her about his newspaper career and then, amazingly, about the Julie Christie look-alike and his emotional recovery under Kelly’s protection. She’d listened patiently, in a nonjudgmental way, said “Wow” a couple of times. She then explained to him how she and Gloria had met and what they were trying to accomplish relative to the inevitable changes that were about to occur in this country, and how it was just as important to have people working from inside the system as it was to have people attacking it from the outside. He’d nodded, wondering at her unusual sexiness. And of course she’d been receiving all this telepathically, so she simply smiled and said, “Let’s go to my place.”

To which Jarkey had replied, “Good idea.”
Now she was in her robe and he was in his shorts, and she was suggesting that a man with his skills could be a great help. It didn’t have to be anything full-time, just a well-placed article every now and then. There might even be the occasional scoop. After all, she
did
deal with some high-profile cases. Jarkey was wondering if they’d get another one in that evening when Gloria called, asked for him, and told him to meet her back at the hospital.

She spotted the black Fairlane before Jarkey saw her and she waved her arms semaphore style until he recognized her and pulled over. She slid in beside him, fresh and excited.

“He’s okay, but you’d better call your boss and tell him to get out of town. Daddy and Roth are setting him up to take a fall.”
“Kelly?”
“Roth is going to plant the stuff in Kelly’s office tonight, then sic the Mafia goons on him. If they find him, they’ll kill him.”
Jarkey stared at her, speechless, severely conflicted. His former lust-object had apparently been complicit in contriving the murder of his friend and protector.
Gloria read him perfectly. She extended his stunned silence and returned his questioning look with a look of her own—frank, eager, brimming with promise. She squeezed his hand.“Your friend will be safe, Harry.
We’re going to get that stash
.”
They drove down to Sammy’s, Kelly’s most likely hangout, but Kelly was gone. Norbert said he thought the detective had been headed downtown. He handed Jarkey the house phone.
“Lloyd, put Kelly on. I need to talk to him.” Even Jarkey had Lloyd’s number.
“He left a few hours ago. Where are you? We got a sort of situation here.”
“Sammy’s.”
“Well, he’ll probably be back eventually.”
“Eventually won’t do.”
Like all good reporters, Jarkey had a gift for names and contact information. Without a thought he dialed Pepsi’s number. Pepsi was a short, dark, vivacious whore of uncertain origin with whom Kelly maintained a “relationship” that baffled everyone who knew them both.
“Yah. Hoo sees?”
“Pepsi. It’s Harry. I need to find Kelly.”
“Haree! How you?”
“Fine. Fine. Kelly’s not there, is he?”
“Ah, Kellee. Dot sweet cookumber. You know he got Clareesa out on bail?”
“Tonight?”
“Oh, lass week maybee.”
“I need to talk to him. Do you know where he is?”
“Sure! He at Samee’s. So how you doeen? You got a gril yet?”
Jarkey got off as gracefully as he could and gave Gloria a shrug. “I guess we could try his office.”