“That’s a lot of groceries,” Javy said.
Richie didn’t disagree.
He closed the trunk, and wandered back to their Plymouth, Javy following. They sat in the car under the buzzing street lamp in the sickly yellow light and said nothing for what seemed forever and was maybe a minute.
“This isn’t a couple of bucks we’re talking about,” Richie said.
“Sure it is.”
Richie looked at his partner; his partner looked back at him and shrugged.
“Same thing,” Javy said. “In principle.”
Richie frowned. “What kind of principle is it we’re talking about? Maybe you should spell it.”
Javy’s tone was half friendly, half conspiratorial. “Look, Richie — a cop who turns in this kind of money sends one message and one message only: that he’ll turn in other cops who do take money.”
Richie shook his head. “It just says we don’t take money.”
Javy shook his head, too, but more forcefully. “No. No. You can’t lie to me, and you can’t lie to yourself — we turn this money in, we’ll be outcasts. Fuckin’ lepers on the department.”
Richie tasted his tongue; he didn’t much like it. “Sounds like we’re fucked either way.”
Javy’s eyes glittered in the yellow light. “Not if we keep it. Only if we don’t. We turn it in, we’re fucked, you’re right, one hundred percent. But if we hang onto it? Man, no way are we fucked.”
Richie’s reply was more to himself than his partner: “Yes we are.”
Javy’s eyes and nostrils flared. “Goddamn it, Rich! Did we ask for this? Or were we just doing our damn job? Did we put a gun to some guy’s head and say, ‘Give us your money?’ No, it fell in our laps, and we can’t turn it in, Rich. Cops kill cops they can’t trust.”
The two men sat in silence, looking at each other, and into the night, and at each other.
Finally Javy said, “You’re gonna turn it in, aren’t you, Rich?”
“Yes.”
“Damn. Goddamn.”
At a police station in Newark, a police captain counted stacks of money on a desk in the bullpen while Richie and Javy sat alone in a corner like bad boys outside the principal’s office. Uniformed and plainclothes cops had gathered to watch this amazing, and soon to be legendary, inventory.
Their boss in the Prosecutor’s Office, Lou Toback — a rangy brown-haired man with icy blue eyes and a perpetually wry expression — ambled in to observe. Toback wore a nice pastel sportcoat and tie appropriate not to work but rather the night out that had just been interrupted by this emergency.
“How much?” he asked Richie without looking at him.
“Nine hundred and eighty thousand.”
Now Toback glanced toward his detectives, an eyebrow arched. “What happened to the rest?”
“Not funny,” Richie said quietly.
“I know,” Toback said.
Toback took in the glum expression of his two men, the “heroes” who had turned over almost a million dollars of unmarked bills, and then he went quietly to the side of the captain counting the bills.
Smiling, with a hand on the captain’s shoulder, almost whispering, Toback said, “Are you out of your fucking mind, counting this in front of everybody? Take this shit into a room. Now.”
Richie was close enough to hear; so was Javy.
And Richie sighed and flicked a glance at his partner, an admission that said: You are so right.
We are fucked.
3. Taster’s Choice
At ten, the morning after Bumpy’s funeral, in a little bar on Pleasant Avenue in East Harlem, uptown’s Little Italy, Frank walked in to find a middle-aged bartender mopping up the floor, chairs on tables and a single table with no chairs on it, two chairs around it and on top several fat yellow baggies.
Stocky little Rossi, in a white shirt and dark tie, emerged from the darkness, gestured to the table as if the dope were a waiting meal, and the two men sat.
“You have any idea, Frank, what we have to deal with?”
Frank wasn’t sure which sense of the word “deal” Rossi was talking about; so he just said, “No.”
“These SIU cops, these princes of the city,” Rossi said, each word a bitter seed he spat out, “they strut around in their leather jackets like movie stars. Are they cops? Are they gangsters? Who the fuck knows.”
SIU stood for Special Investigations Unit.
“They can waltz into a property room,” Rossi was saying, “and flash their gold shields and just sign out ‘evidence.’ You know what kind of evidence I’m talkin’ about.”
“This kind,” Frank said, nodding to the dope.
Rossi grunted something that was almost a laugh. “Insult to injury, this is the fuckin’ French Connection dope. The same dope Popeye Doyle and Sonny Grasso took off us!”
In his mind’s eye Frank could see it: he could see the detectives entering a warehouse with a suitcase of evidence and grocery bags of other goodies. They take the half-kilo bags of uncut heroin from the suitcase, and then from the grocery bags comes a Pyrex mixing bowl, flour sifter, boxes of milk sugar, latex kitchen gloves, a medical scale and yellow baggies.
They peel off the black-and-green evidence tape, then they transfer the heroin to numerous yellow baggies, just a smidge compared to the bigger amount of lactose that cuts the heroin to next to nothing.
“They seize it,” Ross went on, nearly raving, “arrest everybody, whack it up and sell it back to us. Our fuckin’ dope. They been living off it for years, these New York pricks.”
“Fuckin’ crooks,” Frank said blandly.
“They basically control the market with this shit. What the fuck has happened to the world, Frank?”
“Down the crapper.”
Shaking his head, Rossi rose and went over to the bar and made them two espressos. The bartender turned on the high-perched TV and a news report began playing, Walter Cronkite droning on about the heroin problem — not here in the USA, but over in Vietnam, among the GIs.
Rossi returned with the small steaming cups and both men sipped.
Finally Rossi said, “Sad about Bumpy. Took God to kill him, bullets couldn’t do it.”
Frank nodded, sipped some more. He liked the strong hot beverage; the smell of it up his nostrils was as good as the taste.
“Things are never gonna be the same in Harlem,” Rossi said, “without the Bump. Girls, clubs, music, all cheaper and louder... Before, you walk down the street, nobody bothers you, ’cause Bumpy’s making sure they don’t... How bad is it out there now?”
Frank shrugged. “Guys taking down crap games, cops rousting honest crooks, dealers shooting dealers.”
“Jesus Christ.”
“Chaos. Every asshole for himself.”
Rossi, eyes wide, shook his head. “Who can live like that? There has to be fuckin’ order, Frank. I mean no offense, but this would never happen with us Italians. More important to us wops, more than any one man’s life? Order. A semblance of goddamn fuckin’ order.”
Frank didn’t disagree.
Soon Frank and the heroin were back in Harlem, where he caught a late breakfast at his favorite diner. He ate alone, as was his custom, in a window booth, and when the attractive, middle-aged waitress, Charlene, offered a refill, he risked a second coffee despite the espresso he’d already had.
“But that’s the last one, Charlene. Thank you.”