Son of a bitch is gonna stick to the sixty, Rudy thought. We’re gonna have to do him in his bed, too.
“I have to talk to others, you see,” Hidalgo said, trying to look put-upon, a mere salaried employee accountable to the company’s stockholders. “I have to sell this to others, you see.”
Bullshit, Andrew thought.
“Okay, what’ll they buy?” he said. “These others. Just remember what sixty bought Moreno.”
Their eyes met.
Rudy wondered if his nephew wasn’t pushing it too far too fast.
“My people are not as ridiculous as La Culebra was,” Hidalgo said at last.
“So what do you think they’ll agree to? Your people.”
His people, my ass, Rudy thought.
“Fifty, for sure,” Hidalgo said.
“No way,” Andrew said.
“Quizá forty-five. But only perhaps. I would have to talk to them very strenuously.”
Bullshit, Andrew thought.
“Then talk to them very strenuously,” he said. “We’ll agree to forty-five, but that’s as far as we’ll go.”
“Bueno, I’ll call you this evening, after I...”
“Isn’t there a fuckin’ phone on this boat?” Rudy asked. “A radio? Whatever?”
“Sí, pero...”
“Then call them now,” Andrew said. “Your people.” Stressing the word again. “Tell them you have a firm offer of forty-five, which you’d like to accept. That is, if you’d like to accept it.”
Hidalgo hesitated a moment.
A grin cracked his ugly face.
“I don’t think I will need to call them,” he said. “I think you can take my word they will accept the forty-five.”
He extended his hand.
Andrew took it, and they shook on the deal.
“I’ll take that fuckin’ drink now,” Rudy said.
“We figure he’s out of town,” Regan was saying.
The three men were eating in a diner off Canal Street. It was Michael’s contention that most cops in this city would eventually die of heart attacks caused by smoking cigarettes and/or eating junk food. Despite the abundance of good, inexpensive restaurants in Chinatown and Little Italy, all of them relatively close to the DA’s Office, Regan and Lowndes, cops to the marrow, had chosen a greasy spoon they much preferred.
Michael was eating a hamburger and french fries. He would have loved a beer, but he was drinking a Diet Pepsi instead. Regan and Lowndes were each eating hot pastrami sandwiches on rye. Lowndes kept dipping fries into the spilled mustard on the paper plate holding his sandwich. Regan kept frowning at this breach of etiquette. They were both drinking coffee.
The diner at twelve thirty that Tuesday afternoon was packed with courthouse personnel, and clerks and secretaries and assistant DAs from the big building at One Hogan Place, and uniformed cops and detectives from the First Precinct and One Police Plaza, or for that matter any precinct in the city that had lost a man to testimony today. The noise level was somewhat high. This was good because they were talking about a surveillance presently known to just a handful of people.
“He’s got maybe half a dozen girls he sees on a regular basis,” Lowndes said. “He calls them, they call him. If he’s not there, they leave messages on his machine and he calls them back.”
“Two of them he sees more than the others,” Regan said. “One of them is named Oona. The other one, we don’t know her name yet, she just says ‘Hi, it’s me.’ He knows who it is, he says ‘Hi, come blow me.’”
“He doesn’t really say that,” Lowndes said, looking embarrassed and quickly picking up a fry and dipping up mustard with it.
“Close to it,” Regan said. “This is unusual, you know, a person not identifying herself when she calls. In a room, a place that’s bugged, you don’t have people using names all the time. That’s for books. A character saying, ‘Well, Jack, I’ll tell you,’ and another character answering, ‘Yes, Frank, please do.’ So the person reading the book can tell the characters apart. But in real life, people don’t use names except for emphasis. Like, ‘I’m going to say this just once, Jimmy, so you better listen hard.’ Emphasis, huh? That’s because they know who’s talking, they can see the person talking. It gets frustrating sometimes, listening to a bug. All these people know who’s talking, but we don’t. On the phone, it’s different. A person usually says who’s calling the minute the other person picks up. Unless she thinks she’s the only broad in his life, in which case, ‘Hi, it’s me.’”
“Or unless she’s married,” Lowndes said, “and is looking over her shoulder.”
“Yeah, that’s a possibility, too.”
“Anyway, we stop listening the minute it’s any of the bimbos,” Lowndes added.
Michael immediately figured they didn’t.
He had checked their line sheets, and it showed them turning off the recording equipment the moment Faviola received any privileged calls or any calls clearly beyond the purlieus of the surveillance warrant. The times were listed for any and all to read, and Michael had no reason to doubt that they had indeed turned off the equipment at the times indicated, and then turned it on again for spot checks at the times subsequently listed. But did that mean they hadn’t already listened a bit longer than they should have? Gee, we had to keep the machine on so we could make sure, you know? Cops were cops. Overhear some cheap hood in bed with his bimbo, chances were they’d keep listening longer than required by the minimization rules. Maybe he was wrong, but he was willing to bet six to five on it.
“Especially if it’s Oona or the other one,” Lowndes said. “’Cause he’s banging them on a regular basis.”
“Oona is a broad named Oona Halligan,” Regan said. “She left her number in Brooklyn, the phone company checked it out for us. That’s also the number he calls back. We’ve also got numbers for five of the other broads, two in the Bronx, two in Manhattan, one in Great Neck, which is very nice of him, don’t you think, also shtupping a local girl? Their names are...” he said, and reached into his jacket pocket for his notebook.
“And the winners are,” Lowndes said, like a host at the Academy Awards.
“The winners are,” Regan said, reading from his notebook, “Alice Reardon, Mary Jane O’Brien... he digs Irish chicks... Blanca Rodriguez...”
“Spies, too,” Lowndes said.
“Angela Cannieri, who is the local talent from Great Neck, and another mick named Maggie Dooley. He fucks more Irish girls than I’ve ever fucked in my life, this kid.”
“How about ‘Hi, It’s Me’?”
“Never leaves a number. Never says whether she’s calling from home or from work. We can hear background traffic noises sometimes, we figure she’s using phone booths on the street.”
“Any idea where the booths are located?”
“Need a Trap-and-Trace for that,” Regan said.
A wiretap surveillance did not normally record the telephone number of any incoming caller. This information required an additional court order specifying “reasonable suspicion” and requesting specific geographical locations, an expensive procedure usually followed in kidnap cases, where investigators were waiting for a ransom demand; Regan could not remember a single instance of the DA’s Office requesting a Trap-and-Trace on a racketeering surveillance case.