“Ahhh. So were you following Sam?”
So much for the truth. It was time to lie. C’mon, Nick, think fast!
Faster!
“I’m doing a story,” I answered. “It’s about bookies. Actually, it’s about New Yorkers who are ruined by their gambling habits.” That was pretty good, under the circumstances.
“You expect me to believe that total crock of shit?”
I nodded at Tagaletto. “He’s a bookie, isn’t he?”
“So what does that make me?” asked Zambratta. “Am I going to be in your story now, too?”
“Absolutely not,” I said. “In fact, I’m pretty sure this was a bad idea for a story. A really bad idea, I now realize. So I’m out of here. All right if I slowly lower my hands?”
Zambratta chuckled. I’d become his court jester and that was fine by me. Just so long as I wasn’t his next victim.
“What should we do with him, Sam?” asked Zambratta. “Any brilliant ideas?”
Tagaletto shrugged again, flicking the butt of his cigarette against the wall. “The guy obviously knows some things he shouldn’t,” he said.
“You’re saying we should kill him?”
“It’s your call. But I would.”
Zambratta nodded. “So go ahead,” he said, tossing Tagaletto his gun. “Kill him.”
I SWEAR THE gun traveled in slow motion from Zambratta to Tagaletto. That’s how it felt, at least. A stub-nose piece of metal floating through the air, and my life hanging in the balance.
I watched as the bookie fumbled, then nearly dropped the gun. He did drop his cigarette. His hands were clearly as surprised as the rest of him. Are you serious? said the look on his face.
Zambratta seemed pretty damn serious to me.
“Please,” I said. “Don’t do this!” I’m in love with a terrific woman, and I need to work it out before I die.
“Shut up!” barked Zambratta.
I stared back at Tagaletto with a whole lot of irony cruising around in my brain. He was holding a gun, but there was no longer anything menacing about him. The truth was, he looked nervous, almost as scared as I was, and he wasn’t the one with the death sentence here.
He can’t do it! He doesn’t have it in him!
“What’s the matter, Sam? What are you waiting for?” asked Zambratta. “Kill him.”
Tagaletto didn’t say a word. He couldn’t even look at Zambratta. Or me. His head was down, his eyes trained on the filthy ground of the alley.
“There’s no need to do this,” I tried again. “I’m no threat to either of you. You let me leave and it’s like this never happened.”
“I said, SHUT UP!” barked Zambratta again, the veins in his tree stump of a neck bulging above the collar of his brown leather jacket.
Then he turned back to Tagaletto. “We don’t have all day here, Sam. If you don’t have the stones for this, let me know.”
Christ! Zambratta was goading him to commit murder – my murder!
I watched in horror as Tagaletto started to look up from the ground. His eyes stared directly into mine. Next he raised his arm, the gun aimed straight for my chest.
Do something, Nick! Lunge for him! Anything!
I saw that Tagaletto’s hand was beginning to tremble. He steadied it with his other hand. He was steeling his nerve. This was his first time, wasn’t it?
“Don’t do this,” I told him.
Then he pulled the trigger.
The air exploded around me, the blistering sound of the shot piercing my ears.
But no pain right away.
I looked down at myself. There was no blood visible. No wound that I could see.
Did Tagaletto just miss me from six feet away?
That’s when I finally looked at Tagaletto. Except he was no longer standing there. He was lying on the ground in a pool of his own blood.
“Lucky for you I always carry a spare,” said Zambratta. He returned the second pistol to a holster inside his jacket.
I couldn’t move and I felt paralyzed. The question I wanted to ask was, why was Tagaletto dead and not me? But I couldn’t speak.
Zambratta answered anyway. “Sam was a careless mother-fucker, always has been,” he sneered. “Today, it’s a reporter like you. Tomorrow, it’s a Fed.”
He slid my driver’s license into his pocket and tossed my wallet to the ground. Then he really fucked with me.
“I’m not supposed to kill you yet,” he said.
Chapter 62
ALL THE WAY back to my apartment, Zambratta’s last line echoed in my head like the sound of the gunshot that had killed Sam Tagaletto. What’s more, he knew who I was even before he saw my driver’s license.
Because he worked for Joseph D’zorio.
Everything was coming together in a way I could never have imagined. And that wasn’t a good thing. People whom I didn’t know, whom I’d never even met before, knew exactly who I was and wanted me dead. Just not quite yet.
It was all the more reason for me to run – don’t walk! – straight to the police. But I didn’t. I decided not to.
Just not quite yet. I was too consumed with the chase for the truth by this point. The same kid who had stared up in awe at the screen at Woodward and Bernstein in All the President’s Men was now too preoccupied with piecing together what had really brought me and Dwayne Robinson together that bloody day at Lombardo’s. Or, rather, who had brought us together.
If I had it right so far, it had all begun when Dwayne Robinson made some bad bets and lost money he didn’t have. He owed Sam Tagaletto, but Tagaletto was just a middleman. The person Dwayne really owed was Joseph D’zorio. After Dwayne bounced two checks, D’zorio could’ve broken his arms or sunk him to the bottom of the Hudson River.
But D’zorio didn’t become a mob boss by using muscle alone. He was smart and he was cunning. Played chess, not checkers. So he came up with a better way for Dwayne to pay off his debt. All the former ace southpaw had to do was break his long-standing silence with the media and consent to an interview in a seemingly random steakhouse with a credible journalist who would eat up the potential story.
Let the tape recorder roll.
“I have a message from Eddie.”
Just like that, D’zorio had set up Eddie Pinero. He had used Dwayne and me. But most of all, he had used the fact that Pinero would have a motive to want his longtime attorney dead.
It was a pretty damn perfect plan. Right down to my coming across the Pinero reference on my recorder. Of course I would have done that. In fact, had I not left my jacket at Lombardo’s and talked to the hostess, Tiffany, I never would’ve become the least bit suspicious.
That’s when D’zorio’s plan became a little too perfect. At least for me.
The question now was whether I could prove my theory to anyone, or at least anyone who mattered in police circles. And whether I would live long enough to do it.
The second I walked into my apartment I grabbed Derrick Phalen’s business card. It was only a little past two o’clock. Odds were he was in his office. Still, he had asked that I call him only on his cell.
Phalen picked up quick, only one ring, but then said he’d have to call me back in a couple of minutes. When he did call back, I could hear street sounds in the background. He’d obviously gone outside to speak to me. Was he being extremely paranoid or just smart as hell?
“We’ve got a lot to talk about,” I told him. “This is going to blow your mind.”
“You don’t know the half of it,” he came back. “What I found out last night will blow your mind.”
PHALEN SAID HE couldn’t get into his news right now and he didn’t want to discuss it over the phone. “Nick, can you come by my apartment tonight?” he asked.
Are you kidding me? Yeah, like anything could stop me.
I called Courtney on the way over to Derrick’s that night. She was quiet and reserved, so I didn’t bring up Thomas Ferramore, and I also didn’t get into what had happened in the Bronx today. I did tell her I was seeing Phalen, and she told me, “Be careful, Nick. I don’t want to lose you.”