“You really want to know where these booths are?” he asked Michael. “I mean, a Trap-and-Trace for some bimbo standin’ in the rain...”
“No, no,” Michael said. “You don’t have any reason to believe these women are related to the criminal activities listed in the court order, do you?”
“No, sir,” Lowndes said at once. “Which is why we turn off the machine the minute we know who it is.”
“Except this morning the one we got no name for says, ‘Hi, it’s me, I guess you’re still in Florida, I’ll try you tomorrow.’”
“Tomorrow’s what?” Michael asked.
“The tenth. We figure he must’ve left early this morning. Leastways, that’s when all the wiseguys stopped calling. They probably know he’s out of town, so why bother? Today, it’s just the bimbos been calling.”
“Not all of them,” Lowndes said. “Just Oona and the one we don’t know.”
“Oona,” Regan said, and licked his lips. “I’d love to eat her pussy, a name like that. Grrrrr,” he said, growling like a dog.
“Did she mention Florida?”
“Oona? No. I don’t think he told her he was going away. What we think, the relationship with the other one is more important to him. From what we can pick up, anyway. Before we tune out.”
“In the minute or so before we tune out,” Lowndes added, and nodded.
“Did any of them mention the Florida trip on the phone?”
“Nobody,” Regan said. “Well, Faviola told Bobby Triani he had to buy some oranges before he went up to see his mother next week, which when we tie it with what the bimbo said this morning, he had to be using a code word for Florida.”
“Not Oona, the other one. The one who calls from the street.”
“He told Petey Bardo the same thing, come to think of it.”
“Yeah, the oranges, “Lowndes said.
“He always wears brown, Petey Bardo,” Regan said.
“Yeah, he likes brown,” Lowndes said.
“Anyway, what do you want us to do about this harem he’s got? You want us to put tails on ’em?”
“How do you figure they’re important?”
“I don’t.”
“Does he talk mob shit with them?”
“Not so far.”
“Until he does, we’d be wasting time.” Michael thought for a moment, and then said, “When did she say she’d try him again?”
“Tomorrow.”
“Do you think she knows he’s coming back tomorrow? Or is she just trying him on the off chance?”
“Tomorrow’s Wednesday,” Regan said. “If he’s back, you can bet your ass they’ll be screwing their brains out again. That seems to be her regular night, Wednesday.”
“Good,” Michael said. “If he tells her why he was in Florida, and it just happens to be something criminal, stay on it. Otherwise...”
“Otherwise, we’ll tune out,” Lowndes said.
“Naturally,” Regan said.
“God, I missed you.”
“He’s back,” Regan said.
“I missed you, too,” the woman said.
“You look great.”
“You do, too.”
“Hold me.”
Silence.
“Kiss me.”
“There they go,” Lowndes said.
“God,” she said.
“Grabbing a handful of cock,” Regan said.
“God, I missed you.”
“Must be an echo in the place,” Regan said.
More silence.
Both detectives listened.
In a while, they heard the woman moaning, and they knew exactly what the pair of them were doing in that bedroom. They took off the earphones, turned off the equipment, and noted the time. Two minutes later, they listened again for some thirty seconds, ascertained that the two of them were still fucking, and tuned out again.
It wasn’t the fucking itself they particularly enjoyed listening to, it was the things the woman said to Faviola when they weren’t fucking. Or sometimes when she was coming, the things she shouted when she was coming. Compared to “Hi, It’s Me,” Oona Halligan was a novitiate nun. Oh, yes, at Faviola’s urging Oona would sometimes politely ask him to keep fucking her, Yes, please fuck me, but never once did she construct a scenario comparable to those the other broad seemingly pulled out of thin air.
Oona was a redhead. They gathered this from little tidbits Faviola dropped about how Irish she looked with those masses of red hair, probably didn’t know there were Irish girls with hair as black as his own, the dumb wop. The other one was unmistakably a blonde. This, too, they gathered from what was said in the bedroom, but mostly from her half of the conversation. She seemed to know he enjoyed her blondeness, seemed to realize it turned him on, so she kept mentioning it, Do you like my being blond down here, too?, wanting to know what effect her blondeness had on him, Does it excite you to kiss my blond pussy?, Faviola lapping it all up while simultaneously lapping her, from the sound of it. They imagined her as some kind of tall glacial beauty with blue eyes and long blond hair she tied around his cock, a fuckin’ nymphomaniac with great tits and legs, who Faviola worshipped like a naked blond goddess in a jungle movie, the dumb fuckin’ wop.
“... told me it was stolen,” she was saying.
They had just put on the earphones and turned on the machine for one of their periodic spot checks. If they heard anything related to a crime, they would continue listening and recording. If Blondie here started discussing the merits of sucking a big cock as opposed to a teeny-weeny little one, they would reluctantly turn off the machine, write down the on and off times on the line sheet, and then wait another minute or so before doing another spot check. Watching the clock was painstaking and boring. So was listening — most of the time.
“The ring,” she said. “He told me it was stolen.”
“Leave it on,” Regan said. “She’s talking about stolen goods.”
“He said it was stolen from the Boston Museum of Fine Arts,” she said.
“That’s impossible,” Faviola said. “I bought it from...”
“That’s what he told me. He has a list.”
“Did he show you this list?”
“No, but...”
“Then how do you know... Look, it’s impossible, really. I bought it from a jeweler I’ve done business with for years.”
“Maybe you ought to take it back to him.”
“Oh, you can bet on that,” he said.
“I’ll bet on that, too,” Regan said.
“I also found out how much it cost, Andrew. I couldn’t possibly...”
“He shouldn’t have told you how...”
“... keep it, now that I know...”
“... much it cost. The ring was a gift. Why’d you go to him in the first place?”
“To find out where it had come from in Rome. You told me it was Roman...”
“Yeah, that’s what I understood.”
“So I wanted to know where. The Roman Empire was huge...”
“Yeah.”
“It’s Greek, as it turns out, the ring. The point is, I had no idea it was so expensive, Andrew. Five thousand dollars? Really, Andrew.”
“Five...”
“I could never explain something that cost so much. Please return it, Andrew. Get your money back. Tell whoever you bought it from...”
“Well, sure, if the ring was stolen...”
“Yeah, yeah, tell us about the ring,” Regan prompted.
“Where’d you buy it, anyway?”
“Good,” Regan said.