Holy Terror (3 page)

‘Anything your side?' he asked Darrell.

‘Nothing. That gut feeling of yours was probably gas. It's all that health food that Lacey gives you.'

Conor checked the last row of boxes. They were all locked, but he still couldn't shake the feeling that something was wrong. ‘I guess I was imagining things, that's all.'

Darrell gave him a damp slap on the shoulder, like an affectionate seal. ‘That's why we took you on, Conor. You've got imagination, as well as muscle. You don't get much of that in the security business, believe me.'

Conor went back to his office and stared at his salad like a recovering alcoholic staring at a bottle of Perrier water. In his blue plastic lunchbox there was a big red apple and a muesli bar, too. Lacey was trying to give his alimentary canal a daily workout. She was twelve years younger than him and her father had died of colon cancer, and so he couldn't really blame her. But there were days when he would have traded six weeks of his life for a turkey and beef brisket sandwich from the Carnegie Deli on Seventh Avenue, six inches thick, with a pickle on the side. And gravy.

He poked at his salad and then he put it back in the box and closed the lid. He felt seriously worried. Something strange had happened, something that seemed to defy the laws of physics.
Not the end of the world, but something equally bad
. Conor had an Irish sense of reality: in other words he believed that there were always two sides to every argument, but that every side had more than one side, and even those sides had their different sides to them. But he didn't believe in anything that defied the laws of physics, or any other laws for that matter.

He didn't have many friends these days, but those that had stayed loyal to him would have described him as the most complicated of all the straight-forward men they had ever met. He believed in justice, absolutely, but he didn't necessarily believe that justice was best achieved by being either logical or ethical.

His complexity didn't show in his face. He had inherited his father's height and his broad Kerry features, with his eyes as green as the sea off Ballinskelligs Bay and the deep O'Neil cleft in his chin ‘when your great-great-great-grandfather enraged one of the Tuatha Dé Danann, the fairies, and was struck with a tiny silver ax'. However, he hadn't inherited his father's freckle-spattered Irish complexion. His gorgeous Sicilian mother had given him her thick wavy black hair and her grace of movement and her open sensuality, too. At parties, other men's wives would make a point of catching his eye, and holding it.

He had been bom 37 years ago into a celebrated dynasty of New York police officers. His older brother Gerald had become a successful bedding salesman (‘World of Throws') but there had never been any question that Conor would be one of the finest of the Finest. He had graduated with honors from the Police Academy with only one blemish on his record, a disciplinary matter involving a female fingerprint expert. At the age of 26, in an undercover operation that had nearly cost him his life, he had almost single-handedly broken the Barocci crime family. By the time he was 30 he was the youngest captain of detectives in the city's history – confident,
charismatic, with his pretty young well-connected wife Paula and their three-year-old daughter, Fay.

But a little over three years ago, John ‘Three Fingers' Negrotti had been shot nineteen times in the barber shop of Loew's New York, right opposite the 17th Precinct, and that shooting had changed Conor's life for ever. There had been lots of blood, heaps of menthol shaving foam, but no witnesses. At first it was thought that Negrotti was the victim of a classic contract hit. But Conor had unique contacts with the Mafia Commission – the unofficial association of leading Mafia families. Gradually, he had begun to uncover the existence of a secret death squad made up of New York police officers. They called themselves the Forty-Ninth Street Golf Club. For more than six years they had been forcing the Mafia in Manhattan and Brooklyn and Queens to pay them hundreds of thousands of dollars every week. If they didn't, they would be executed without warning, their wives and children, too.

As Conor's investigation plowed up more and more evidence of extortion, torture and murder, he and his family were threatened with every kind of terrible retribution. They were going to firebomb his apartment. They were going to kidnap his daughter. They were going to castrate him and mail his genitals to David Letterman. Paula and Fay had to be guarded round the clock. By the time the case of the Forty-Ninth Street Golf Club came to court, his marriage was wrecked by strain and fear. Paula had taken Fay and gone to Darien to live with her WASPish parents.

In the witness stand, an accused detective named
William Sykes protested that the Golf Club were ‘simply doing their job, only a little more so'. He justified their extortion of Mafia profits by saying that ‘stealing money that's already stolen doesn't make it any more stolen than it was in the first place'.

But it was the
capo di capos
, Luigi ‘The Artist' Guttuso, who made the court's scalps prickle. In what was little more than a whisper, he said, ‘I was brought up never to show no fear to no man. Never. Some lowlife threatens to cut off your hands with a sausage-slicer and what do you do? You spit in his eye. But I have to impress on Your Honor that me and my family was mortally afraid of the Forty-Ninth Street Golf Club. Captain O'Neil has lifted that fear, regardless of the personal consequences. For that reason, I'm proud to call him my honorary brother.'

Nine members of the Forty-Ninth Street Golf Club were convicted on seven sample counts of extortion and five sample counts of homicide in the first degree. Between them, they were sentenced to 369 years in jail. Conor had cleaned up one of the worst scandals in the police department's history, and the
New York Post
hailed him as a hero. But Luigi Guttuso's ‘honorary brother' speech and the naked hostility of his fellow officers finished his career. He resigned the morning after the trial; but before he could write out his resignation letter, he had to remove the dead sewer rat fastened to his blotter with a six-inch nail.

Conor opened up a yellow legal pad and took a pencil out of the shamrock-decorated mug which
Lacey had given him for St Patrick's Day. Tentatively, he began to sketch the man and the woman he had encountered outside the security door. He wasn't very good at drawing. His art teacher had told him that he drew people like walking mattresses and horses like ironing boards, and it took four or five attempts before he managed to produce two reasonable likenesses. He even had to stick his tongue out, the way he used to do in grade school. But the finished result wasn't too far off. He felt that he had caught the woman's feline face and her upswept hair; and even though the man's forehead was too bulgy, he definitely had that Copacabana look. Underneath, Conor wrote
August 10, 12:27 p.m. Who??? And What??? And Why??
?

His deputy Salvatore Morales came into the office. ‘Brinks-Mat called in. They just passed 34th Street. They should be here in less than five minutes.'

Conor stood up. Even after seven and a half weeks, he still felt uncomfortable with Salvatore. Salvatore was impeccably smart and well pressed and efficient. His mustache was always clipped and his fingernails were always buffed and he always smelled (discreetly) of lavender water. In his eleven-and-a-half-year career at Spurr's Fifth Avenue he had detained more shoplifters than the rest of the security staff put together. When Bill Hardcastle the last chief security officer had retired, Salvatore had naturally expected to step straight into his shoes.

Spurr's board of directors, however, had been urged by their public-relations people to take on ‘Manhattan's Crusading Cop'. When Conor was
awarded the job, Spurr's had even taken out advertisements in the Sunday papers, with a photograph of Conor in his police dress uniform, and the headline NEW YORK'S FINEST … STORE. Conor was embarrassed. Lacey thought it was wonderful. But Salvatore must have felt like going down on his hands and knees that Sunday and eating cat litter. Conor hadn't yet found the right moment to talk to him, to straighten their relationship out, and Salvatore was always so formal that it was almost impossible to start up a casual conversation.

‘Sal – before you go – did you see anybody unusual in the store today?'

‘Unusual in what way, sir?'

‘Unusual like this.' Conor pushed his legal pad across the desk. ‘Very well dressed. She's tall, he's small.'

Salvatore picked up the pad and studied it. ‘I don't know, sir. What context?'

‘Forget about the context. Context is 90 per cent to blame for witness misidentification. They see a guy in a line-up, witnesses immediately assume that he must have done something.'

‘Sir, I was six years with Metro-Dade sheriff's department, Florida.'

‘I know that, Sal. I know your qualifications. I'm just asking you if you ever saw these people before.'

‘Respectfully, sir, maybe we could use a police artist.'

Conor looked at him steadily for a long time. ‘You're saying what?'

‘I'm saying… it's hard to make any kind of identification, that's all.'

‘In what respect?'

Salvatore laid the pad back on Conor's desk. ‘In the respect that these customers look like two chickens.'

Conor had to hand it to Salvatore. His lips didn't twitch, even infinitesimally. Conor picked up the pad and stared at it for a moment, breathing noisily through both nostrils. As worried as he was, he needed a lot of extra oxygen to stop himself from laughing.

‘You don't think you might have seen them, though? These, ah, chickens?'

Salvatore was about to answer when his phone played the first four bars of ‘Swanee River', the Florida state song. ‘Excuse me, sir,' he said, and took it out of his pocket. ‘Spurr's Fifth Avenue security, Deputy Chief Security Officer Salvatore Morales speaking.' He kept looking at Conor as he said, ‘Yes. Unh-hunh. OK. I'll be right out.'

‘Listen, Sal—' Conor began, but Salvatore said, ‘Brinks-Mat have arrived, sir. I don't want to keep them waiting.'

‘All right. We'll talk about these two jokers later. But in the meantime, you can ease off on the “sir”.'

Salvatore said, ‘If I was in your position, sir, I would expect everybody to call me “sir”. To be called “sir”, that means you have earned something, that you have worked for it.'

And I haven't
? thought Conor, remembering the night beneath the Brooklyn Bridge when the Pratolini brothers had stamped on the small of his back and almost paralyzed him for life.

* * *

Salvatore went out to deal with the Brinks-Mat delivery and Conor made a call home. It took Lacey over a minute to answer.

‘I'm sorry, my darling,' she said. ‘I was right up on top of the stepladder, painting the ceiling.'

‘Well, I'm glad that one of us doesn't mind climbing stepladders, otherwise our walls would only be painted halfway up.'

‘You know, you should talk to Bryan about your vertigo. Do you know that he counseled the Great Bardini once, when he lost his nerve on the high wire?'

‘I must be the only person I know who needs a lifestyle counselor to remodel his home.'

‘Oh, no, you're not. Jennie Feinstein does Tantric meditation before she chooses her cushion covers.'

‘I thought Tantric meditation was all about sex.'

‘It is. And you should see her cushions.'

Conor pried opened the lid of his lunchbox and looked at his apple. He was starting to feel hungry again. Lacey said, ‘How did you get on in court?'

He told her. She listened, but all she said was, ‘That woman, I don't know.' She didn't give him any sympathy about Fay. She knew that it hurt too much, like poking a loose filling.

He said, ‘Listen, I'll see you at six. I thought we could eat out tonight, seeing as you've been painting all day.'

‘No, let's stay in. I'm cooking French tonight.'

‘Don't tell me. Rare
entrecôte
steak with potatoes baked in cream, and rum baba for dessert?'

‘Unh-hunh. Chard stalks in cheese sauce, followed by organic rhubarb yogurt.'

‘You're going to kill me, with all this healthy food.'

He was still talking when Salvatore reappeared in his office doorway. Salvatore's eyes were wide and his face looked sweaty and colorless and tight, like a shiny gray balloon.

‘Sal?' said Conor.

‘Um, put down the phone, sir,' said Salvatore, clearing his throat.

‘What? What are you talking about?'

‘Please put down the phone, sir. Don't say one more word.'

Conor hesitated. He could hear Lacey saying, ‘
Hello? Conor? Conor, what's happening
?' He could sense that something was badly wrong. He covered the mouthpiece with his hand and slowly returned the telephone to its cradle. Then he sat back, keeping both hands on the desk.

Salvatore stepped into the office. Right behind him came a wide-shouldered black man in a khaki Brinks-Mat uniform that barely buttoned up over his chest. He reminded Conor of Mike Tyson, but with tinier eyes and inkier skin and an ethnic haircut with swirly patterns shaved into the sides. He was holding a huge nickel-plated .44 automatic up to the back of Salvatore's head. He pushed Salvatore across to the chair in front of the TV monitor screens and said in a thick, slow, gravelly voice, ‘Sit down. Don't move. Don't say jack shit.'

Salvatore awkwardly sat down. The black man prodded his forehead with the barrel of his gun. ‘You want to stay alive, you stay right where you are. And you—' he said, turning to Conor, ‘you don't get cute with me, pushing no alarm button or nothing. We hear one siren outside, we see one single cop, this guy's brain's going to be wallpaper.'