Love or Honor (18 page)

Chris and Harry had had some loud, long discussions about money and what Chris could and couldn't do with his excess profits. Chris's view was that such money was like money you won at the track, and was more disposable than money you worked for. Chris and Gene had taken five hundred dollars from their club profits, early on, and had gone to play barbouti at the Grotto. Together they ran their thousand up to fifteen thousand. “Let's go,” Chris said then. “Let's get outta here with this win.”

Gene wanted to stay. “We can run it up to fifty thou, I'm sure, I'm positive,” Gene said.

“Then give me my half,” Chris said.

But Gene didn't want to. “I need it all, if I'm going to run it up to fifty.” Gene said.

Chris couldn't stand to watch, anymore, so he went back to the club and slept on the sofa in the office, waiting for Gene, who didn't return until ten o'clock in the morning.

“Where's the fifty?” Chris asked.

“We owe them two grand,” Gene said.

When a couple of guys came around, looking for that sum, Chris gave them two hundred dollars and told them to come back the following week for the rest. He reported all this to Harry, who didn't think much of the episode, at all. Harry didn't approve when Chris loaned money to guys both at the club and at The Daily Planet, either, but Chris felt it was a way to get in good with all these people.

In the end, Harry had told Chris that as long as he didn't tuck any away for himself—he sounded embarrassed when he said that, but Chris didn't mind, knowing that Harry had to say it for the record—and as long as he kept reasonably good track of what he spent, he could do what he felt he needed to do. Harry would fix it up with anybody downtown who might question three dozen roses or anything else. “Tell them it's an investment,” Chris said breezily.

Harry gave him a little lecture then. Chris's attitude was beginning to bother him. He felt Chris was getting too cocky and tough, running around as though he didn't have to answer to anybody for anything. “If you need a day off, you have to fill out a twenty-eight, just like anybody else,” Harry told him. “You remember what a form twenty-eight is, don't you? Maybe I better bring over your old uniform and you put it on, wear it for an hour or two. You're a cop, don't forget. Remember who you are.”

Chris thought Harry was being a prick. Chris had to act the way he did, spend the way he did, to make the right impression. Marty was used to having money, to being with people who had money. He never wanted her to think of him as being short of cash or hard up, in any way. Not that she always expected to be wined and dined lavishly, he knew; her favorite little restaurant near the bridge was a homespun bargain, and some of their happiest times cost little or nothing that summer as they began spending Saturdays at the beach.

Chris had always loved hot summer days as much as he hated winter. The only time he'd welcomed the cold was early in his career at the 4-oh when he was still in uniform. In the summertime, people swarmed through the streets all night, many of them drinking, then brawling or shooting. The neighborhood quieted down when the temperature dropped; cops always said the weather was the best policeman. Even in the bitterest cold, Chris had always done straight eights—working his full shift without hiding out in some warm space—except his first Christmas Eve. He'd been standing on Willis Avenue in what seemed like zero-degree weather, near an Irish tavern. A loudspeaker above the door was playing a record of a dog barking to the tune of “Jingle Bells.” People kept knocking on the window of the place, beckoning to him. Finally he gave in. He walked inside, said “Merry Christmas,” and when the bartender set a bottle of V.O. in front of him, Chris poured a long one. Everybody cheered.

He felt better when he was at a beach, stretched out, thinking, reading, listening to his radio. He knew guys who said if they had money, they'd buy a yacht or a fancy foreign car. All Chris would buy if he had money, he always said, was a beach house. Nothing big or elaborate, just a cabin of some kind, a little place where he could hear and see and smell the ocean. Water had a calming effect on him, and he felt wonderfully calm and relaxed when he and Marty went to the beach. Because he'd spent so many days at the beach, both as a teenager and later, when he was supposed to be selling insurance, he didn't take her to one of the busy, heavily populated Long Island beaches, where he might have been spotted, but to Gilgo, an inlet beach beyond Jones Beach.

The first Saturday they went, he rented a speedboat and they went for a spin. Chris was hardly an expert at the wheel, but he did okay. He felt terrific, and Marty seemed to be having a good time, too. He thought she looked gorgeous, with the spray flinging up around her face, her long dark hair streaming in the wind. She looked happy and healthy, wholesome and sexy, all at once. “You look like a commercial for suntan lotion,” he said, but with the noises of the motor, she didn't hear him.

She'd brought a picnic supper: wedges of cheese, rounds of rye bread with prosciutto, grapes and nectarines and two slices of angelfood cake. Chris had brought a bottle of white wine that was warm by the time they opened it, but it tasted fine, anyway, as they spread a blanket on the sand, ate, and drank and talked.

Chris found a lot to talk about, going back to his childhood. He recalled how his family had gone to Orchard Beach, on summer Sundays when he was little. The subway trip had seemed very long, but it was exciting, too, everybody laden with bags and towels. Once they got there, they stayed all day and evening, until almost dark. His father worked on Sundays, but a couple of uncles went; his uncle Mike had taught him to swim, at Orchard Beach, when Chris was five years old. “We were doing shishkebab at our picnics twenty years before the world discovered it,” Chris said.

It occurred to Chris that one reason he could relax and talk and enjoy being with Marty so much was that he didn't have to think about any sexual involvement. He could get to know her as a person, without clouding the issue with romance, which of course was out of the question. First of all, he was a married man, even though he rarely saw his wife. Second, he was getting to know Marty for purposes of the job, not for personal reasons. The department frowned, to put it mildly, on a cop getting romantically involved in a case. If the case ever came to trial, and a witness could testify that she'd been intimate with the investigating officer, it would probably be over, both for the case and for the cop.

He didn't want Marty to think he didn't find her attractive, though. In fact, he was struck by how lovely she looked in her one-piece bathing suit, a black-and-white print, with a big white cotton shirt draped around her shoulders. She hadn't made a fuss about combing her hair or putting on lipstick or anything, which he understood women did in order to look good. Liz always spent a long time on her makeup, it seemed to him, and was forever pulling out a mirror when they were out someplace, to check and see what she looked like.

So he kissed Marty warmly but not lingeringly, and she kissed him back. He put his arm around her as they sat side by side, watching the sun begin to set. As good as it felt to have her close to him, he didn't have to think ahead, as he might otherwise have thought, about sex entering the picture. He had the luxury of just getting to know her. He had the wonderful freedom to just become her friend.

That summer, 1977, was Chris's third summer undercover and in some ways the most interesting. He'd met Marty. And in mid-July, he was at Waterside when all the lights went out. He heard news of the city-wide blackout on his battery-powered radio, and heard that all off-duty policemen were to report to work immediately.

Using his flashlight, he dialed Liz and got her answering machine. “It's me,” he said. “I just called to make sure you're all right.” He paused awkwardly. “Well, uh, since you're not home, I guess you're out with somebody, so that's good.” He paused again, not knowing what to say on the tape. “Uh, I'm working now,” he said. “Bye now.”

He called Marty. “How are you doing?”

“We're fine,” she said, laughing. “We must have about fifty candles, at least, all over the house. It's like some enormous birthday party. I wish you could see this.”

“Hey, I wish so too,” Chris said. “See you soon.”

He turned the radio back on and heard again that off-duty officers were ordered back to work. He felt a slight pang that he was missing the action; the 4-oh would be a hot spot tonight. Of course he wasn't off-duty; he was never off-duty. Still, he couldn't be sure he wouldn't hear from Harry. Sometimes Harry hung around in the upstairs apartment; he just might pop down and suggest that Chris go out and make himself useful. Of course Harry wouldn't, and even if Harry were just arriving at the building, say, he'd never make it up nearly thirty flights of stairs, not with his four-pack-a-day habit.

He called his mother, who said she was fine, the girls were with her, and the children, everybody was fine. “I'm fine too,” Chris said. He groped in the refrigerator for a beer that was still nice and cold, sat down on the sofa and called Phil.

Now that Phil and his family were back from St. Louis, transferred to New York, Chris called him often. It was against the rules, of course, to talk to anybody about the job, but Phil was such a straight arrow, and Chris's closest friend. Chris trusted Phil beyond the point where he'd ever expected to be able to trust anyone. If Phil had ever said, “Hey Butch, I'm coming over to do a lobotomy on you,” Chris would have said, “Okay, what time are you coming?” He felt he could tell Phil anything. Yet he hadn't told him everything he was doing, just that his undercover job involved organized crime, and he was bouncing around, making good progress.

Now, sitting in the dark, with his beer, Chris told Phil how good he was feeling. He told him he'd met a girl who could be helpful in the work he was doing, and he was finding out that he actually liked her a lot, wasn't that terrific?

He was surprised that Phil didn't seem to think it was so terrific. “Be careful,” Phil said. “Watch out that you don't dig yourself a hole so deep that you won't be able to climb out.”

Chris was disappointed in Phil's reaction, and a little annoyed. “Hey, don't worry about it, Partner,” he said. “I'm doing fine.” Afterward he realized he'd used a phrase he hated, a phrase common in the mob. There were several phrases that bothered him, that they used all the time; “good people,” as in “He's good people,” usually said in a muttered growl; it was meant to be a compliment, but to Chris it always sounded like a slangy curse. “Doin' the right thing.” When somebody picked up a restaurant check quietly, without making a grandstand show, somebody would mutter approvingly, “He's doin' the right thing.” He especially hated it when they said, “Don't worry about it,” because that meant there was something to worry about.

6

“Do we know a captain in the Bronx?” Solly asked Chris one night at the Kew.

As Chris stared at him, Solly rephrased the question. “Do
you
know a captain in the Bronx?”

“Hey, who …” Chris stammered. “Hey, no, I mean, why would I know a captain in the Bronx?” It wasn't hard for him to sound astonished; the question had come out of the blue.

“Hey, Solly, why do you think I'd know a captain in the Bronx?” Chris asked again. Solly just shrugged and said nothing more. He never brought it up again, and he continued to treat Chris as he always did, in his soft-spoken, amiable, even affectionate way.

Chris worried endlessly about it. It was another example of a ball being tossed in the air, bouncing around, without knowing where or when or even if it would ever come down. Another reason to worry and wonder: What does he know? What has he found out about me since yesterday? He almost wished Solly had said something definite, accusing him of knowing a captain in the Bronx. At least that would have been something concrete to deal with, something he could pin down. Uncertainty was the worst. He was at the bar at the Kew when a woman who was sitting alone, drinking, smiled at him, then moved from her place to the barstool next to his. She was attractive—not a great beauty, but a nice-looking woman, in her late thirties. He thought she was just a lonely lady, looking for company—the Kew Motor Inn attracted an ordinary, middle-class clientele—until she spoke.

“I need a gun,” she said quietly.

“What do you need a gun for?” Chris asked, startled.

“I just need a gun to take care of things,” she said.

“Well, go on up to Harlem,” Chris advised. “You can buy a hundred guns.” She shook her head. “No, I can't go up there.”

She said her name was Darlene, and she kept pressuring. It was obvious that she had targeted him, picked him out of the crowd at the Kew. Then she got up abruptly, without finishing her drink. “I'll call you later,” she said.

Fifteen minutes later, the phone behind the bar rang. “It's for you,” the barmaid said. She knew Chris well by now, and she gave him a sly wink as she handed him the phone.

Darlene told him her room number and urged him to come up. “Bring a bottle with you,” she murmured. She kept talking vaguely about “taking care of things.” As curious as he was, Chris had no intention of going up to her room—God knows what he'd be walking into—so he said he'd call her later from another phone. When he called back, he taped the conversation, in which she said not only that she needed a gun, but she wanted to give him the contract to kill her husband. Chris stalled and said he'd be in touch. He passed the report to Harry, but as far as he knew, nobody ever solved the riddle of Darlene. He never heard from her again, and she never reappeared at the Kew. Maybe she was a mob woman, setting him up. Maybe she was legit, in the sense that she was an unhappy wife who really did want her husband removed. Maybe she was crazy. Maybe she was a federal agent, perhaps with Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms, looking for a weapons bust; he knew that at one point the Kew had been targeted by the feds.