When Frank returned to the couch, the banker was gone, but Charlie Williams had taken his place. Charlie, an older player in the dope game, was an affable guy, stand-up all the way, and Bumpy had thought well of him.
Charlie had an almond-shaped face emphasized by a receding hairline and a mustache a shade lighter than his dark hair. “You going to be all right, Frank?”
“Yeah.”
“You don’t like havin’ all these people walkin’ around in here, do you? Sniffin’ around is more like it.”
“No I don’t.”
Charlie patted Frank’s shoulder. “Listen, knowing Bumpy, he prob’ly never told you, but he made me promise... anything ever happened to him? I’d make sure you didn’t go without.”
Frank gave Charlie a smile, his first one today. “I’ll be fine, Charlie.” Then he turned away and stared into the mourners, making them a blur in his vision. “Half the people here owed Bumpy money. If they think I’m gonna forget to collect, they’re dead wrong.”
Charlie chuckled. Patted Frank’s shoulder. “That’s the spirit. Go get ’em, son.”
Getting up with a nod and a smile, Charlie ambled off. Cattano’s man Rossi, a mustached blocky character with shark’s eyes, trundled over like a tank. His eyes asked Frank if it was okay to sit down. Frank’s eyes said yes.
Rossi said, “Unseemly to do business here, Frank.”
“Right.”
“But life goes on.”
“It does.”
“Thought you’d wanna know you can pick up the stuff at the club tomorrow.”
“Morning okay?”
Rossi nodded. “Ten?”
“Ten.”
2. Could Be Fatal
Richard “Richie” Roberts knew what fear was.
This afternoon, for example, he and his partner Javy Rivera were about to serve a subpoena on a low-level wise guy, Vinnie Campizi, and wise guys, of any level, were potentially dangerous. At this very moment, Richie was lugging a sledgehammer as he and Javy headed across a street busy enough to take some doing, but also the kind of thoroughfare where no driver paid any heed to a couple fullback-size jaywalkers in leather jackets and jeans, one of whom was hefting a sledgehammer.
The seedy hourly rate motel they were heading toward was close enough to the waterfront that you could see the jagged teeth of the Harlem skyline on the other side, just beyond the George Washington Bridge. This was the kind of fleabag where you got rolled and not just in the hay, where catching a dose of the clap was getting off easy. Bad things happened behind those closed doors, but none of it, after all these years on the force, added up to fear for Richie Roberts.
Fear for Richie Roberts was walking to the gallows that was a blackboard at the front of his night-school law class, a fluorescent-lit dungeon where he existed in cold-sweat dread of hearing his name called. “Fuck you, pig!” from a PCP-addled perp held nothing like the threat of hearing his professor say, “Mr. Roberts — give us U.S. vs. Meade... subject, issues, what the determination was, and what it means to us today.”
Fear for Richie was turning to face classmates, all of whom were at least a decade younger than him, every one of them knowing more than he did, and exposing the inadequacies of his thinking and self-expression.
Sledgehammer gripped in one hand, Richie — dark blond, boyish — was explaining to Javy: “They took surveys. It’s scientific.”
Javy, a pair of sunglasses surrounded by long hair, muttonchop sideburns and a thick mustache, said, “Yeah, right, it’s in the Enquirer, it’s gotta be true.”
“No, it is,” Richie insisted. “Number one fear of most people? Isn’t dying, dying’s easy — it’s public speaking. They get sick, physically ill — puke their guts out.”
Javy’s eyebrows rose over the sunglasses. “So, naturally, this is what you want to do for a living. Get up in front of people.”
“Naw, it’s the law I’m interested in. We’re at the bottom of the food chain, Javy — there’s more control up top.”
“More control than swinging a sledge?”
They were headed toward the motel office; seemed there was a VACANCY. There’d soon be another.
“Anyway,” Richie said, “I don’t like being that way — afraid to stand up in front of people. It’s stupid. I wanna beat it.”
They went into the office.
A portable TV on a shelf was playing another news report about that dead black gangster, Bumpy Johnson. Christ, Richie thought, the old bastard was getting more play in New York than Martin Luther King.
The clerk was in his thirties and needed a shave; his sleepy expression woke up a little at the sight of the sledgehammer. “Hey! What the fuck you guys think—”
Javy flashed his New Jersey detective’s shield; he dug the subpoena out of his pocket and flashed it, too, though the clerk was already convinced.
About to go back out, Richie caught the clerk’s eyes. He gestured with the sledgehammer. “No wake-up calls, now.”
“No! Do what you gotta do, guys. No skin off my dick.”
The two plainclothes Prosecutor’s Office cops kept on the sidewalk under the overhang, close to the doors of the motel rooms. They walked with the deliberation and lack of concern of mailmen.
Javy waved the subpoena. “So who’s gonna do this?”
Richie snatched it. “Campizi knows me; he’ll take it from me. I’ve known him since high school.”
“How the fuck many wise guys you know, anyway?”
“How many wise guys went to high school in New Jersey?”
Javy smirked. “Well, this is not your fuckin’ class reunion, Rich. Just throw the damn thing in there — he doesn’t have to take it. That’s good service.”
“You takin’ law classes, too, Jav?”
“Well, if you’re serving the moke, at least give me the sledge.”
Richie handed it off.
They stopped at Campizi’s motel room door. Their snitch said Campizi had been shacked up with a Puerto Rican hooker, and Richie and Javy, staked out across the way, had seen a female of that description exiting the motel lot in a nice new Trans Am convertible that indicated Campizi wasn’t her only well-heeled client.
Javy knocked.
The door opened slowly, just the length of the night-latch chain, revealing the balding, pot-bellied, mustached Campizi in a T-shirt, slacks and bare feet.
Richie raised the subpoena and was about to say something friendly to his old classmate when Campizi’s eyes golfballed and Javy yelled, “Throw it in!”
Richie flung the damn papers in, but his hand was in the crack of the door just as Campizi slammed the damn thing.
“Fuck!” Richie wailed, his palm wedged in there, and an ominous click told him the little bastard had thrown the dead bolt. He threw his shoulder into the wood as best he could, which trapped as he was didn’t exactly give him a running start.
Then something, other side of the door, clamped down on his captured fingers...
The prick was biting him! Fucking finger food!
“Jesus Christ,” Richie said, watching blood run down the door frame. “Do it, Javy, do it!”
“Get down, Rich!”
Richie did his best to comply, and the big iron head of the hammer flew past him and shattered the door to splinters, relieving the pressure on Richie’s hand, and then both cops were shoving through, taking what was left of the door with them, right off its damn hinges.
Campizi did a pop-eyed take and scrambled for the bathroom; it would have been funny as hell if Richie’s hand and fingers weren’t a smashed bloody mess. Slamming himself inside, Campizi said, “Fuck you, guys!”