90 Church Page 24

  * * *

  The Bureau of Narcotics was on the top of the building at 90 Church, on the sixth floor. Several mornings later I caught a lobby elevator with several other people on their way up to work. In the corner on the floor sat a drunk, his hat covering his face. He was out cold. My fellow passengers gave each other a little smile, trying to ignore the hopeless drunk that had been riding up and down all night. I knew it was Michael. I was alone with this pitiful heap when the door opened for me. I dragged him by the collar of his suit jacket out of the elevator, down the hall, and into the foyer of the Bureau, where he laid face down just five feet from Blanker’s desk.

  The next morning Dewey and I waited for Blanker or Pike to say something about Michael. Pike’s phone rang. He answered it, and then pointed to us. “Go see the boss now.” Michael was sitting on Blanker’s couch, tears streaming down his cheeks. The man we stared at was not Michael. It was someone else; weak, broken, disgusting, just like the hundreds of wretched addicts and drunks we saw every day in the street. Michael’s hands shook as he stared down between his legs, trying not to look at us.

  Blanker said, with the sanctimonious tone of a backwoods preacher, “Agent Giovanni here has made a commendable contribution to the Bureau’s work and we take care of our own, right?”

  Dewey and I just stared at our friend.

  Blanker started again, “Well, now it’s rehabilitation for Agent Michael Giovanni in a government asylum for rest, reflection, healing and God’s word to restore the dignity to his lost soul. We can’t have our people riding in elevators all night, can we?”

  Dewey could never be serious; he first nodded yes, then shook his head no. Blanker continued, “Michael here wants to help himself. He even chose the hospital and signed an order for forced commitment; isolation for the next six months, so there’s no backing out. He’s asked you two, and Group Leader Pike, to transport and admit him to the nut house this afternoon.”

  I drove. Dewey was in the front; Pike was in the back with Michael. We could all smell Michael’s bad body odor and liquor. Pike complained, “If it was me or you guys, they’d throw our drunken asses in the street, no fucking rehab for us.”

  Michael never stopped crying and he kept saying over and over, “I’m sorry, I’m really sorry. You guys are my best friends. I’m sorry.” I had never been to the Jonathan Wilham Rehabilitation Center, but I heard it had a hard reputation. It was a large, three-story brick building, a no-nonsense institution with bars on the windows. They lock you up until all your demons crawl out, and then you’re either cured or dead. Pike was sure Michael would never make it and he was probably right. Dewey and I were just very sad.

  I pulled into visitors’ parking; there was an awkward silence. No one wanted to be the first to open the door. Suddenly a pretty young nurse in starched whites – carrying a clipboard – came to the car. She pulled open the back door, smiled and said, “Let’s see … You are either Mr. Bernie Corman or Mr. Michael Giovanni. My guess is that you’re Michael because Bernie is sixty-five years old.”

  Michael tried to smile as she helped him with his bag. The three of us sat there watching the pretty nurse in a white uniform, wearing high heels, grab Michael by the arm and lead him away.

  AFOOT

  Of course no one had any confidence in the FBI’s ability to find Danny Cupp’s killer. Weeks, then a whole month, passed without anything. If Michael were back on the street the killers would have been dead weeks ago. I spent the time making low-level junkie heroin buys and Dewey expanded his sports-betting operation to the employees of the Post Office on the ground floor. His desk was littered with betting slips on every conceivable sport, from basketball to dog racing. Still no one had heard anything about Michael.

  Finally one morning Blanker called Dewey and me into his office. We could see Michael’s file on his desk. He looked up. “Say, do you boys know what tomorrow is?”

  Dewey answered with childish delight, “Wednesday.”

  Blanker smiled. “No. Tomorrow is Michael’s birthday. I was thinking maybe the three of you here should visit him. You know, cheer him up, that sort of thing.”

  “Is that why we’re here?” I asked. I knew from his smile he was lying.

  Dewey shook his head. “No one is supposed to have any contact with Michael for six months. He’s been in there for less than two.”

  Blanker exploded: “Listen, Paris, Michael has sway with McDermott. The Feds owe Michael. We need some help here with this Daniel Cupp thing. Louis Turko is out of jail, out on the street, a free man. He’s well-connected, knows Aggi Angelici. They’re going to gang up on us. God knows how many other cases are going down the toilet. We’ve got to get Cupp’s killers. I know what went down with the Medalley dopers and McDermott’s kid. We need Michael to cut things short a bit. You know, just a little work, make some calls to the Feds, get things moving. He can always go back in. Hell, they’ll probably keep his padded cell warm for him. Tell ya what, why don’t you just go up and talk to him? Maybe he can just give you some inside information and not even have to leave that recreational facility.”

  That afternoon Dewey ordered a big white cake from an Italian bakery in Greenwich Village. He had them write Happy Birthday, We miss you Michael on the top in red letters. They’d have the cake ready the next afternoon.

  The next day Dewey wanted to stop at the FBI offices in Midtown before visiting Michael. He hoped there would be progress on the case that would cheer Michael up. I recognized the same wood paneling in the reception area, the backlit FBI logo and the snotty English receptionist who had greeted us for the Medalley meeting six months ago. “Can I be of service to you fine gentlemen?”

  Dewey straightened his tailored suit and imitated her, “Why yes. We would like to see Special Agent McDermott. Please be so kind as to tell him Dewey is here. Dewey is a friend of Michael.”

  “My, I’m sorry, but all our meetings are pre-registered and you’re not on the schedule today. Also we do not acknowledge the names of any of our field personnel. However, if you would like to walk down the corridor over there to our public inquiry desk, one of our specialists will be happy to help you file a complaint, or a request for information.” She smiled primly.

  I started laughing inside before Dewey answered, “Listen, you limey bitch” – Dewey leaned over the reception desk, just inches from her face – “You tell that faggot McDermott to meet me now, or I’ll come around there and suck your cunt till your head caves in.”

  She dropped her fountain pen; it rolled across the desk onto the floor. She rose slowly, staring at him, and walked through a wooden door behind her desk.

  Dewey turned to me. “I think she likes me. I’m gonna ask her out. What do you think?”

  We waited for about ten minutes until a well-dressed agent came out. “Welcome, Agent Paris. I’m Doug Campbell; it’s good to see you. John is in D.C. today. I think I know why you’re here. Come with me.”

  He led us into a small conference room. Cupp’s file was on the table. Dewey began leafing through it.

  Agent Campbell started the briefing. “Your informant was shot three times, died instantly. The weapon was a nine-millimeter. The rifling on the slugs suggests an automatic weapon, probably an Israeli Uzi, and the use of a silencer. We think the silencer is military because of the smooth metal boring, not homemade. No doubt the killer is a pro. Daniel Cupp was hit standing up while on board a forty-foot cruiser at the boat dock on West One Hundred and Thirty-eighth Street. The boat is 90 Church inventory; it was seized by your people a year ago. I assume that Agent Giovanni used the boat as a safe house for his informants. Since the killing was on federal property, we investigate, but you could give it to the cops if you want.”

  Agent Campbell handed Dewey a photo of the boat’s galley table; on the table was a pair of large binoculars and a blank yellow pad. “We think he might have been looking through the binoculars, but we don’t know why. The boat was docked, so there was nothing to see. The pad w
as blank, but there was a pen lying on the floor.”

  Dewey continued staring at the photographs and leafing through the file. “What’s this?” he asked, picking up a sheet of paper with large numbers scribbled randomly on it.

  “We don’t really know,” agent Campbell answered. “Our people lifted it from the paper tablet. The top sheet was gone, but we were able to pull the numbers from the pen’s impression.”

  Dewey stared at the sheet, mumbling, “Thirty-five, dash, six, two, one, three, nine, four.”

  Agent Campbell followed Dewey’s interest. “We studied these numbers. D.C. thinks it’s some type of code, but no one has been able to make sense of it. Even our military people couldn’t crack it.”

  There was nothing else in the file except photos of Danny’s face and dead body. Dewey couldn’t look at them. Agent Campbell had prepared a duplicate file and handed it to Dewey. We shook hands and said good-bye.

  On the way out, the snotty receptionist was back at her desk. Dewey couldn’t resist. “Say, honey, we’re on our way to have a birthday party at an insane asylum. Why don’t you come with us? It would be great fun. What do you say?” She ignored us.

  With the cake in the trunk we picked up Silkey and the three of us drove north to Westchester to celebrate Michael’s birthday. We wondered what Michael would be like, and felt certain he would not be the same man who had left us.

  Silkey started it off, “You know, I’ve known Michael for eight years and I’ve never seen him sober.”

  “You know, I’ve known him about the same, but being drunk is being Michael,” Dewey added. “The trouble is that drying out takes time; it breaks you down day by day, makes you crazy. I’ve seen it before. If you live through it you’re never the same person. Michael is not going to be the Michael we knew. You saw him crying and broken; what do you think he is now? That son-of-a-bitch Blanker. We shouldn’t be doing this. We should leave him alone. He was supposed to have his full six months. This isn’t right.”

  Silkey was carrying the cake box when Dewey approached the front desk and asked to see Michael. The receptionist fumbled through some papers, then shook her head.

  “I don’t care what your papers say. See this?” Dewey pulled out his credentials. “You get Agent Michael Giovanni. Get him now and we want to see him in a private room.”

  The orderly left then returned a few minutes later to lead us into a small room with a table and chairs. We were all nervous. I unboxed the cake and laid out some plates and forks. Still no Michael. It was unbearable. After about fifteen minutes the door opened and a huge black man stepped into the room. He was dressed in a green inmate jumpsuit and extended his big black meaty hand to me and said, “Hi, I’m Michael Giovanni. How nice that someone remembered my birthday.”

  Dewey laughed so loud that he sounded like the other nut cases down the hall. Through his hysteria Dewey managed to yell, “Happy Birthday, Michael! Have some cake. How about an end piece?”

  NUMBERS

  “The shoes, the shoes, the shoes,” Dewey chanted as he banged his hands on the dashboard while Silkey drove us back to the office.

  “What did Michael always tell us over and over? The shoes, look at the shoes. You can tell a lot about people from their shoes. When we brought Michael to the hospital that tight-assed nurse was wearing three-inch spiked heels. How fucking stupid are we? Michael chose the hospital; yes, he’s as dumb as a stick, but we should have known better. Who admits a patient to a nut house in the fucking parking lot with high heels and a clipboard? Now the government is paying for rehabilitation for one of Michael’s drug-dealing nigger pimps. That’s just swell.”

  I tried to calm Dewey down. “Where do you think Michael is now?”

  “Who knows? He’s got a two-month head start and another four months to go before anyone misses him, and all paid for by Uncle Sam. You know he gets sick pay for this. Will Michael’s madness ever cease? I have no idea where to begin looking for him.”

  Silkey tried some humor, “I heard he’s been living in elevators. Maybe we should start there. You know, let’s go to Wall Street and work our way uptown.”

  Dewey pointed to a street. “Very funny, but this is serious shit. We need Michael. Turn right up there. Let’s go see the boat where they clipped Danny.”

  It was a blustery day and the docks were empty. A uniformed guard pointed to the crime scene, a boat draped with yellow tape now hanging loose and blowing in the wind.

  It was cold and clammy inside the boat. We sat at the stern around the galley table that was in the picture and stared at the binoculars and the blank tablet, still lying on the table. There were brown bloodstains on the floor, walls, everywhere, even on the ceiling. Dewey opened up the FBI file and stared at the sheet with the scribbled random numbers and dashes. He stood up and looked around. Dewey knew boats. He started in the sleeping berth, looked at the sink, opened up the cabinets, read the Captain’s log, then sat back down. “Two people were on board. See, two cups in the sink. But why the binoculars? They’re high-powered, out of their case. There’s nothing to see, no open water, nothing. Everything is so well-kept, why weren’t these glasses stored?” He put the binoculars to his eyes and looked down the length of the dock, which was the only open visual path from the stern.

  The dock ended about thirty yards away at a walkway on the shoreline. Beyond, a ten-foot wooden fence secured the boatyard. Dewey laid the binoculars down on the table and stared at the sheet of scribbled numbers. In a whisper he said, “Look at this; you see, the numbers are all over the sheet. Wouldn’t you normally write a series of numbers in a straight line?”

  “Not if you’re Michael,” Silkey replied. “Michael could never walk a straight line, so he probably couldn’t write one either.”

  “No, he was not here,” Dewey answered calmly. “If Michael came here it would expose Danny, besides there’s still plenty of booze in the cabinet. The FBI always over-thinks things. These numbers are not a code; they were scribbled on the tablet while looking through the binoculars, that’s why they’re not in a straight line.” Dewey looked through the binoculars again, then he smiled and pointed down the dock to the wooden fence.

  I saw nothing. At the end of the dock, bolted to the wooden fence was a pay phone. Then I got it. “My God, he was writing down a phone number while he watched someone dialing the pay phone. He made them. The number is for us.”

  Dewey smiled. “Eight numbers, two dashes. He couldn’t see two of the numbers so he filled in a dash. Let’s get back to the office.”

  The logs for the pay phone were in the FBI file and having eight of the ten phone numbers made it easy to complete the full sequence. It was listed to another pay phone in Green, Louisiana. Pay phone to pay phone, means guilt. Two days later Dewey had the name of Danny Cupp’s killer.

  Pike hated Dewey, so Dewey had Silkey lay out the case for him to Pike and Blanker. Silkey told them that all of the leads had come from Michael directly to me. Michael was doing well, but needed the full six months of treatment with total isolation, no outside contact. Silkey even told Blanker that before Michael ate his birthday cake he led everyone in prayer.

  The killer was Lorenzo Bonnet and he was connected to Louis Turko. The mood in the office changed instantly. Michael was back, revenge was coming, death was returning from a holiday. No one questioned how Michael got the information, but I knew how Dewey found it. He gathered all of his low-life file clerks for a special assignment. Using the location of the pay phone in Green, Louisiana, the clerks researched the home addresses of the top two hundred suspected Mafia killer leaders and then cross-referenced them with defendants in Danny’s cases. Lorenzo Bonnet lived less than a mile from the pay phone. He was part of the Magaddino family.

  A FOUL WIND

  To hell with the FBI, they didn’t care about an informant. This was our case, even though there was no record of Lorenzo Bonnet ever being connected to drugs of any kind. 90 Church was on a mission of revenge and was being guided b
y a sober Agent Michael Giovanni who had found Jesus and now prayed over his meals.

  Lorenzo Bonnet was a bad guy – murderer, smuggling, extortion – but he was smart; no drugs. In fact, Bonnet had never been arrested or charged with anything, but his name was mentioned hundreds of times in case files by informants, wire taps, confessions, and speculation. He was a Mafia political fixer well-known to the unions who had long since been infiltrated by the mob. There was also another side. He was a family man, active in Louisiana politics, a well-respected business owner and Mayor of the town of Green, Louisiana.

  Mayor or not, he was going down and a Task Force was assembled, headed by Pike. I was chosen first because Silkey told Blanker that Michael had given the information directly to me. I then chose Dewey because he helped me the first week on the job. Dewey chose Ed Silkey because Ed liked to drive, and so our revenge Task Force was complete. This absurdity made planning for any serious undercover operation a dangerous farce. Nevertheless, the four of us – Pike, Dewey, Ed Silkey and I – headed for Green, Louisiana, population 1,250.

  * * *

  Green was green. Although named after Nathan Green, a Civil War hero, the town still deserved its name because of its color. It was lush and well-manicured, flowers everywhere. There were no “other side of the track” type neighborhoods or trash along the road. The center of the town was a square park with a gazebo in the center. City Hall was a small red brick building at one end; shops and restaurants with bright colors and gingerbread trim completed the square. Four tree-lined roads forked off to accommodate Victorian-style houses and small businesses. A four-lane highway with no exits for twenty miles connected Green to Lafayette and the rest of the world. They called it “Lorenzo Way” because Bonnet had used his political influence to have it built. The people were well-dressed and radiated happiness. Posters were everywhere, proclaiming support for the local high-school football team, with pictures of the players and cheerleaders. The school colors were orange and black.