Manotti shook his head, but he also took Willy's hand in grudging respect. "And you're an asshole. Close the door on the way out."
Chapter 20
Sammie Martens intoned, "Nancy Hidalgo," and gave an address.
Jim Berhle, Ward Ogden's young partner, typed the name into the computer and waited a few moments for it to respond. "A shoplifting rap six years ago. Otherwise clean," he read back to her.
"Anthony Mallon," Sammie said next, and followed it with another address. She was reading from a list in her hand.
Berhle repeated his part of the exercise.
"Wonder if that's one of the boyfriends," Joe Gunther said, standing by the coffee machine they'd smuggled into the room. The three of them were upstairs in the precinct house, far from the Whip's prying eyes, or anyone else from the detective squad. Ogden was where he was supposed to be, satisfying the powers by catching up on some of his other cases. He'd been taken "off the chart" for any new cases, but Mary Kunkle hadn't been declared worthy of undivided attention.
"Clean as a whistle," Berhle reported.
"Last one," Sammie announced. "Michael Annunzio."
Jim Berhle waited for the address and typed in the name. After the usual pause, he said, "Little more interesting: Mr. Annunzio's been busted for possession twice, disorderly twice, and once for domestic assault. He might stand a friendly chat."
They'd been closeted for hours, Sammie and Gunther scrounging through all the Metro cards, bills, sales receipts, and credit card slips, building what they could of a timeline and linking it to a geographical chart on one hand-where Mary had been each time she'd generated one of these mundane documents-and to a list of names and addresses of everyone she'd phoned over the past six months on the other.
Berhle shoved his chair away from the computer, pushed his glasses up high on his forehead, and rubbed his eyes vigorously. "Man, I can't imagine doing this all day, every day." He stood up and paced the floor briefly, stretching his legs, before coming to a stop behind where Sammie was sitting so he could look over her shoulder at the complicated, hand-scribbled chart.
"So, we have anything after all that?" he asked.
Joe Gunther by now understood why Ogden had chosen this particular partner for this case. Like the dinosaur, Berhle was calm, thoughtful, smart, and not driven by ego. He'd also proved to be as happy as his senior colleague to work with a couple of complete outsiders, at least when it came to pure grunt work.
Sammie tried to decipher her own handwriting, not to mention the arrows and scratch-outs that also covered her notes. "One thing's for sure," she told him. "Mary had a whole different lifestyle than we thought. I'd pictured some walking wounded dragging herself toward employment and education through guts and determination. She's a whole lot more complicated than that."
She tapped one of the sheets with her pencil eraser. "Like with these phone contacts. Besides the usual coworkers and friends is an inordinate bunch of social misfits. Michael Annunzio is the sixth man with a violent criminal record, all of which include domestic assault raps. That's either a weird coincidence or she wasn't able to break the cycle. Did you cross-check to see if any of their victims was Mary?"
"I tried," Berhle admitted. "But I only scratched the surface, and some of that information isn't in our data bank, either. We're getting better, but the idea of one computer terminal doing everything is still a ways off. Anyhow, she didn't surface in anything I checked, to answer your question. What else did you find out?"
Sammie turned to the Metro card map. "First time we saw this, the big thing that jumped out was how many times she went to Harlem, which we're now figuring was to sign up for those classes. This map shows only three Brooklyn locations, in three different neighborhoods. No big deal on the face of it. Except"-and here she pulled together several more scraps of paper-"for when you start superimposing a bunch of these."
She placed her finger on the map. "Here, for instance. We've got a subway stop one day, a thrown-out receipt for a fast-food lunch on another, and the address of one of the men she called, all happening within the same three-block area." She moved to another section. "Same thing for here. No subway stop, but another receipt, a credit card charge for some store item, and again, a nearby phone number of some creep. In fact, each of the three subway stops corresponds to one of these kinds of men. She was definitely up to something. I can feel it in my gut."
"It also brings back what Ogden said," Gunther added. "That she never surfaced where most junkies do, on the welfare rolls, or unemployment, or parole and probation. Like she had a secret nest egg."
Jim Berhle had finally worked out the kinks enough to sit down again. "I also wondered about that credit card. I know she didn't use it much, and the limit's low, but I was surprised she had one at all. Most junkies aren't that organized."
"What was the name of her primary girlfriend?" Gunther asked.
Sammie looked it up. "Louisa Obregon, nicknamed Loui."
"She said she'd seen a couple of boyfriends. Maybe we should get mug shots of these gentlemen and run them by her."
"Yeah," Sammie agreed, "add them to Bob Kunkle's picture."
The phone rang beside Berhle's elbow. He picked it up, muttered a few monosyllables, and hung up.
"That was Ogden," he told them. "Sounds like your loose cannon is at it again. Ogden told Kunkle on purpose that Ron Cashman used to work for an old hood named Manotti, but didn't tell him Manotti and Ogden are old acquaintances. Apparently Willy and another guy just finished giving Manotti the third degree, looking for Cashman. It wasn't a casual interest."
Crestfallen, Sammie stared at the floor. "Damn him." "Christ," Riley Cox murmured. "I thought I was out of this kind of thing."
Willy didn't comment, but he knew the feeling. They were in Brooklyn's Red Hook district, a thumb-shaped appendage jutting into New York Bay below Governors Island. It was late at night and they were approaching a very large, very dark warehouse that sat at the end of an enormous concrete pier surrounded by cold jet-black water. The surrounding light show of distant buildings, twinkling like Christmas lights, and the muffled, far-off rumblings of the urban sprawl around them only enhanced their isolation. Falling back on their separate memories, neither one could shake a sense of foreboding.
They had made contact with Ron Cashman-or at least someone they hoped would turn out to be he. Buying illegal guns, unlike scoring drugs, was a tangled and cautious affair. Guns were expensive, high-profile with law enforcement, and easily traceable through serial numbers and federally mandated recordkeeping. Not only that, but the gun laws in New York specifically were among the harshest in the nation. No one with any survival skills was going to do business with the first joker into a neighborhood asking to buy a gun.
So, at Willy's urging, Riley had sent inquiries through his contacts about making a buy. After a lot of talk and negotiation, he'd eventually been told to come alone to the Red Hook warehouse and to bring six hundred dollars in cash. The deal was to purchase a new Glock.40, and ammunition, with an option to buy many more if the deal proved satisfactory. From what they'd been told, and as they'd been hoping, the discussions had piqued Cashman's interest. He was going to be there himself to check out this new, potentially big buyer.
The two men stopped in the darkness several hundred yards shy of their target.
"You got everything you need?" Willy asked.
"I got everything I got," Riley answered him. "I'll only know what I need when I find out I don't have it, like a missile launcher."
Their plan wasn't very sophisticated. It hadn't been allowed to be. Cashman's people had only told them to be near a particular pay phone at a certain time in order to find out the location of the meet. That call had occurred just twenty minutes before, precluding any chance of getting to the place first to check it out.