“I need me a box, man,” the do-rag declared. “Yo, white man! What you doing there?”
They spotted Tozzi coming around back from the alley side, and
they all raised their backs like cats at the sight of him. Tozzi was dressed in jeans, a black T-shirt, and a bush jacket. He didn't look like a cop to them.
Gibbons then saw the flash of blades and narrow-eyed faces. These guys felt cheated, and they were ready to take it out on someone.
Tozzi squared off. He had that look on his face that Gibbons didn't like. Gibbons looked back toward the cop on the sidewalk, but she made like she didn't hear and kept her back to the whole affair, the bitch. The feds can take care of themselves, she must've figured. Let the feds hang themselves, who cares? Feds are the PD's natural enemy. Damn cops watch too much TV.
Gibbons pulled his gun and cocked the trigger so everyone could hear it, just like they do in the movies. “Okay, boys, time to go home.”
Mean faces snapped around in his direction. “Eat it, old man,” one of them said. Two of them turned to take him on. Blades against bulletsâhardcore wasn't the word for this bunch.
Tozzi reached into his jacket, and the purple muscle shirt made a move toward him. Gibbons winced, waiting for the muzzle flash, but just the sight of Tozzi's 9mm was enough. The gang left in a cloud of mumbles and curses.
Gibbons put away Excalibur and took out his notepad. He scribbled down “
Sound King
â
169th
.”
Tozzi climbed over a charred beam. “Taking notes for your memoirs,” he asked.
“The brothers said something about another fire just like this one. No salvageable merchandise there either.”
“You think it's a bust-out scam?”
“Could be. Empty out the merchandise before the blaze, collect on the insurance, then sell the merchandise or move it to another store and have it âburn' again. They can keep moving the stuff and collecting on it until it's outdated.”
Tozzi folded his arms and looked at the ground. “It's not hard to find surplus hardware to burn. Melted plastic, pressboard cabinets, fried circuit boardsâit all looks pretty authentic.”
“So Varga's running a bust-out scam with Kinney as his foreman,” Gibbons said.
Tozzi shook his head. “Doesn't really make sense. You can burn down two, maybe three stores, but that's it. The insurance companies
must get hip to what's going on. Varga's financing a whole new family, for chrissake. Can't buy that much dope with the profits of an operation like this. How many men could he afford to keep on the payroll? I mean, how much do you think it's costing him to keep Kinney alone in his pocket?”
Gibbons looked at their long, jagged shadows on the rubble. “Varga's pretty inventive. He may have put a new wrinkle on this scam.”
“You have any ideas?”
He did, but he didn't want to tell Tozzi yet. He knew Tozzi was touchy about certain things, and there was no sense getting him all riled up if his hunch turned out to be wrong. “Nothing definite,” he said. “Tomorrow I'll see what I can dig up at the office.”
“What about Ivers? Isn't he going to want to know where you've been all week?”
“Probably.”
“What will you tell him?”
Gibbons shrugged. “If I'm lucky, he won't be in and I won't have to lie to him. I'll make sure I show up late. He's usually tied up in meetings after ten. Come on, my throat's dry. I need something to drink.”
They headed back toward the police barricades.
“Find what you were looking for?” the lady cop asked. She didn't even try to hide the sarcasm in her voice. Gibbons remembered a time when uniform cops bit their tongues in the presence of special agents, a time when the only women in uniform were crossing guards.
“Sorry, I can't talk about ongoing investigations,” he said politely. “By the way, what happened to your partner, officer?”
“He's on dinner break, I told you.”
“Oh, that's right.” Gibbons nodded and tapped his forehead. “You did say that. Well, would you like us to stay until he returns?”
“Fuck off,” she growled.
Tozzi squeezed his nose and snorted a laugh.
“Suit yourself,” Gibbons said, turning away and crossing the street.
As they drove away in the Buick, he could see her long shadow on the pavement as she stood alone guarding nothing. The sky was hot orange behind the grim tenements. He could hear congas beating on the rooftops, rap blaring from ghetto blasters in the street. Her partner had some sense of humor. For her sake, Gibbons hoped he had a little mercy too.
She wore a black leotard and black spiked heels, that's all, and she kept running her pointy red fingernails through the mounds of white blond hair that piled on her shoulders and spilled down her back as she dug her feet in and ground her ass into the front plate-glass window of Spyro's on Eighth Avenue. Tozzi took another bite of his souvlaki and marveled at the hooker's ingenuity. She was working the street outside while coming on to him inside at the same time. And the way she was goosing that window, there'd be big kiss marks on the glass pretty soon. He had to admit it was advertising that worked. He was hard as a rock.
Tozzi sat at the window table, watching the hooker's ass, occasionally glancing around her to see the afternoon rush-hour crush, people marching down Eighth Avenue toward the Port Authority to catch a bus home, cars backed up on Forty-seventh Street inching toward the entrance to the Lincoln Tunnel at Fortieth and Ninth Avenue. The Times Square vicinity was a funny place at this time of day, like two simultaneous spirit worlds occupying the same space. The hookers and hustlers went about their business while the secretaries and businessmen floated around them, the straight people all moving in the same basic direction, eyes ahead, undistracted, like an army of zombies.
Back at the counter, Spyro was ladling fat drippings over the huge hunk of lamb turning on a towering vertical spit. The fat sizzled, caught fire, and flared dramatically as it dripped off the meat, but Tozzi had
gotten used to the sound by now and didn't even pay attention. Spyro did this every five minutes or so.
Tozzi wanted to know where the hell Gibbons was. He said he'd be here between five and six, and though it was only twenty to six, Tozzi was concerned. Gibbons was always early. He wondered if Gibbons met Kinney at the office today. Maybe Kinney had followed Gibbons from the office and now Gibbons was trying to lose him. Tozzi remembered a few years back when there was a mob hit on a big-wheel real-estate developer right in front of a fancy steak house on East Forty-fourth at rush hour. The hit man pumped three bullets into the back of the guy's head, then calmly walked around the corner and disappeared into the crowd. Rush hour was the perfect time for a hit. Where the hell was he?
He looked at the hooker again. She'd stopped rubbing her ass on the glass. She was negotiating with a beefy-looking guy in a Brooks Brothers suit whose glasses were too small for his head. Tozzi examined the line of her legs and the curve of her ass. It was a very tight little bod. When she walked off with the john in tow, Tozzi felt slightly rejected. He thought he'd at least get a friendly goodbye wink or something. Tozzi picked up his sandwich and took another bite.
A few minutes later the door opened, setting off the electric buzzer that alerted Spyro that someone was there in case he was in the back or stuck on the can. Tozzi had noticed that Spyro greeted his customers as if they were invading Turks, glaring at them with his flashing black olive eyes, his grim mouth covered by a thick handlebar mustache. When Tozzi realized that the latest arrival was Gibbons, he figured for once Spyro's suspicions were justified. Gibbons looked meaner than usual, and today that pissed-off Indian-chief face even made him uneasy.
“What happened?” Tozzi asked as Gibbons sat down at his table. “Was he there?”
“No. Heâ”
“Can I help you?” Spyro demanded belligerently.
“Yeah. Just bring me a coffee.”
“One-dollar-fifty-cent minimum.”
Gibbons glared at the Greek.
“And a baklava,” Tozzi intervened. He turned back to Gibbons, and Spyro went away. “Kinney wasn't at the office?”
“He was there this morning. He asked around if anybody had seen
me lately. One of the guys told me he left the office around eleven.”
“So what did you find out?”
Spyro returned with Gibbons's order. There was as much coffee in the saucer as there was in the cup, and the small brown honey-glazed lump looked exactly like what Gibbons thought of it. Gibbons pushed the plate to Tozzi as soon as Spyro set it down.
Gibbons lifted the lid of the stainless-steel pitcher and sniffed the milk before he poured it into his coffee. “I got some interesting information,” he said. “I was on the phone most of the afternoon. I got hold of an Inspector Langer at the fire department who was unusually cooperative. He heard FBI and I guess he was impressed. Anyway, I asked him about the fires in the Bronx, Brothers Discount Center and Sound King. He told me about another similar fire in Forest Hills. In all three cases, the fires seemed suspicious, but they couldn't prove arson. Langer was also kind enough to give me the names of the insurance companies who covered those stores.”
Tozzi grinned as he chewed another bite of his sandwich. “You love it when they spread their legs for you. Did you threaten him with prosecution for obstruction of justice? That used to be your favorite.”
Gibbons ignored the remark and continued. “I called the insurance companies and talked to people in the security and fraud departments. One guy at Praesidio Mutual had a lot to say. He was a former cop named Ramirez who was fed up with his job and needed to let off some steam. According to Mr. Ramirez, all insurance companies expect to pay out on a certain number of total- or partial-disaster fires every year. It's only after they reach their quota that they start getting sticky about paying out on fire claims. But the interesting thing is the more fires a company pays out on, the more they can up their premiums the next year. Ramirez told me the companies actually want to meet their fire quotas and even surpass them a little because what they pay out in claims is nothing compared to the higher rates they can justifiably charge. And according to Ramirez, that's standard for the industry.”
Tozzi speared a corner off the pastry and ate it. “Yeah, so what's this got to do with anything?”
Gibbons winced at the turd on the plate. “Ramirez also told me that before a company reaches its quota, whatever investigations they conduct are just for show. That's why he's so fed up with his job, he said.”
Tozzi took another piece of the turd. “So what's the point?”
“Suppose Varga knew which companies hadn't met their yearly fire quotas. He could target those companies specifically and keep the bust-out scam going, increasing his yield considerably. Before the quota is reached, payoffs are made faster and the investigations are worthless.”
Tozzi set down his fork. He could see what was coming. “And how would Varga know which companies to hit on?”
Gibbons pressed his lips together and sighed. “Aside from paying out on recent total-disaster fire claims on audio-video stores, the three insurance companies I called today had something else in common. They all have their computerized files handled by the same data-processing firmâa company in Jersey called DataReach. That's where what's-her-name is a vp, isn't it?”
Tozzi nodded. Gibbons knew what Joanne's goddamn name was and he knew she worked for DataReach. Playing dumb was his asinine way of softening the blow, making her seem less important than she actually was.
Gibbons leaned over the table and tasted his coffee. “So what do you think?”
“I think we ought to take a trip out to see what's-her-name.”
“You call the play on this one, Toz. We handle it any way you want.”
This was Gibbons's way of saying he didn't know how strong Tozzi really felt about Joanne Varga. It was his way of offering consolation for being stupid and trusting her in the first place. Tozzi appreciated Gibbons's concern for his feelings, but he was angry with himself and he felt like a fool. He didn't want anyone's understanding. He wanted to nail Kinney and Varga and bring down Joanne with them. He didn't want to dwell on his feelings. He wanted to feel smart. He wanted to win.
Tozzi stood up abruptly, took out his wallet, and left a ten on the check. “Come on,” he said to his partner. “Let's get going.”
Tozzi felt funny being in Joanne's apartment alone with Gibbons. No one had answered the doorbell so they let themselves in. Tozzi used the keys Joanne had given him, and he felt culpable for having them. The keys were just another facet of her deception, something else to win his trust. Gibbons walked in behind him, giving him a wide berth, and his solicitude was aggravating Tozzi.
Tozzi stood in the living room and looked around. The scene of the crime, he kept thinking. He'd spent a fair amount of time here, and he knew where everything was. He'd used her toilet, washed up in her shower, watched TV on her couch, cooked with her pots, slept in her bed. He knew more about this place than he should've. He kept thinking about that old saying about how a criminal always returns to the scene of the crime.