Harry said, “I don’t wanna hear it.”
“Thing is, it needs perfect timing. Two brothers, Hasids, working the diamond racket. They make the same deposit out of the same satchel at the same bank every Thursday at ten o’clock. We need four guys, one van, and one car. We grab the brothers and throw ’em in the van. We ride ’em around and dump ’em in Brooklyn, where our fourth guy is waiting with the car. We switch vehicles and we’re gone.”
“This sounds real familiar.” Harry was thinking back. “Didn’t somebody try this a few years ago? Bunch of guys got dead, and it was a set-up besides. Like the Feds were in on it? Remember?”
De Steffano didn’t remember.
“Yeah, a Fed got it, a crook got it, and one of the Yids got it. They were brothers, too. Where’d you get this brainstorm? Out of a stack of old newspapers?”
“Cookie Levitas has been hot to pull it for months.”
“Cookie Levitas. Another loser primed to take another fall. Pass.”
Assuming they made it out alive, this asinine adventure was a straight ticket to Attica. Jimmy was airtight on a job, but he was no planner. And Harry was nowhere near up for this James Bond shit.
“Which alley of mine were you thinking about, Jim? Kidnapping? This is my life, it isn’t a movie. If I decide to pull anything right now, anything at all, I gotta make sure it’s fast, it’s clean, and I get away. Tell me something. What’ve you got pending?”
“They got nothing on me,” De Steffano said.
“Then they’re waiting for you to make a move. And you’re a fucking idiot. Go off half-cocked on this crazy caper. With your sheet? You’ll get life. You’ve gotta start trying to think realistically. Like consider getting a job.”
De Steffano’s eyes went blank.
“I’m serious. It’d be a lot less work than coming up with these schemes. Something soft comes up, like that warehouse thing, you move on it. You keep a finger in, but you’re basically legit. That’s my advice to you.”
“I’m asking you to grab a skinny, bearded freak and conk him on the head. That’s the extent of your involvement, for twenty-five percent of the take. Advice,” De Steffano hissed, “who the fuck are you to give anybody advice?”
They stopped walking. A bum shambled up, shaking a coffee cup, but De Steffano’s black glare sent him packing. He looked left and right, as if he were searching for a witness to Harry’s assault on his honor.
“Fine. I don’t fucking need you. Go file your W-2 forms.”
They were near the corner of Spring and Lafayette, by the entrance to the 6 train. A group of women with swollen ankles chattered in Spanish. A guy holding his briefcase between his knees was trying to get a cigarette going in the wind.
“I’m heading this way,” Harry said, meaning this was where Jimmy got off. “Good luck with everything.”
“Luck,” De Steffano said, “you need luck. I got skills.” He backpedaled north up Lafayette, and had just turned to retrace his steps when Harry made a right on Spring.
De Steffano was dead wrong. Whatever way you wanted to think about it, luck was something nobody could do without. Wasn’t that why he wore the crooked horn? To ward off the evil eye and bring good fortune? No, you needed luck, no question about it. And you needed the desire to not let things keep happening to you, to not just get done in by life.
At a lot of queasy junctions in Harry’s past, De Steffano’s ravings would’ve made perfect sense. Minus any real idea of what he was doing, he’d let himself get sucked into the whirlpool of bad planning and bad luck and wind up in the same place De Steffano was heading, the joint. The difference between then and now was this: Harry was all done letting things happen to him.
Chapter Eleven
The sun hung on the western horizon, a blood-orange ball in Martinson’s rear view mirror. He was grateful the sinus attack or migraine that might’ve been coming on in Ft. Lauderdale had reversed itself, and he was almost feeling good as he drove east over the Causeway and back to the Beach. There wasn’t enough time to stop for flowers and make the last part of visiting hours, but it’d be okay to skip them this once, go sit with Josephine for fifteen minutes before heading back to the station house.
Riding the elevator up, he intruded on some family crisis, a mother, a daughter, and two brothers, all in tears. They had the same blue eyes and the same brown hair, except the youngest, a boy, who was blond. They stopped talking when Martinson got on behind them. He looked at his shoes until he got to his floor.
Right away, he knew something was wrong. He felt that cold tingle in his fingertips, walking down the hall. The machines Josephine Simmons was hooked up to had been wheeled out of the room. Last week’s flowers were holding up pretty good, and her get-well wishes were still lined up on the nightstand, but her bed was empty and the linens had been stripped off of it. Arnie was hoping they’d transferred Josephine out of Intensive Care and into another unit, but he knew that wasn’t what had happened.
He went looking for the young doctor with the curly hair. At the nurse’s station, a heavyset woman in hospital whites was talking on the phone. Martinson rested both of his thick hands on the upper level of the desk, wanting her to hurry it up. The caller was phoning about a patient, but didn’t know the patient’s last name. This nurse was saying they weren’t going anywhere without that.
A doctor about Martinson’s age, with square shoulders and a golf-course tan, walked up to the desk. He had the same lean, in-shape look Kramer sported. Martinson was surprised to see a pack of Salems bulging out of his smock pocket.
Martinson said, “I was wondering if you could help me.”
The doctor didn’t say anything, cocking his head to one side, waiting.
“I noticed that Josephine Simmons wasn’t in her room.”
The doctor’s name was Gustavo. It said so on his nametag. He took a breath and blew out a tired sigh. His head came perpendicular again and he said, “Are you a family member?”
He asked the question out of reflex. There were no black Martinsons, at least not that Arnie was aware of.
“She doesn’t have any family members. I’m Detective Martinson, Miami Beach Police.”
It was freezing cold in this unit. And it wasn’t him. It definitely wasn’t him. That tingling in his fingers had quit. With the sun down and the humidity almost nonexistent, there was no reason for the air-conditioning to be set so high. It couldn’t be good for these sick people.
“Miss Simmons passed about an hour ago,” Dr. Gustavo said. “She was just too frail to recover from that kind of beating. It was a miracle she held on as long as she did. I’m sorry.”
Although Arnie knew this was what the doctor was going to tell him, he said, “I’m sorry, too.” He didn’t know what else to say.
Doctor Gustavo shook his head. “Outside of her age, she was perfectly healthy. There was no reason she couldn’t have gone on another ten years. Who knows? Maybe more.” He shook his head again. “It’s a hell of a thing, to get that far in life, and then have it end like this.”
Martinson had been thinking the same thing the last time he was here, but he was all done thinking about that. He was concentrating on Anton Cantor, wondering how old Anton would feel now, with a murder beef hanging over his head. As soon as Martinson had the time, he was going to re-check Anton’s alibi. Maybe there was something he missed the first time around.
But if it wasn’t Cantor, it was somebody else, and that somebody else was going to have to pay. No matter how fucked up it seemed most of the time, this world would not tolerate the murder of a spindly old lady walking home with four dollars worth of groceries. It couldn’t. Justice existed, as an independent, true objective. It made no difference how twisted the path toward it was, or how long it took, there was such a thing as justice. It was real, Martinson thought, heading back to the parking garage. Justice was real, and this wasn’t it.