Immoral Certainty (25 page)

“Yeah, it looks pretty good. The fucker said he was going to do Mullen and he did.” Balducci got up off the desk. “But it’ll look a lot better if this domestic call she talked about checks out. I’ll do that now.”

Balducci left the little cubicle and Raney turned again to the phone. In ten minutes Balducci returned and said, “It checks. Couple of guys on the swing shift out of the Ninth took the call. I also ran the phone number she gave us through the reverse directory. It’s funny, she’s the girlfriend, don’t know where he lives. Anyway, she called him there. I also checked out the number she got off the business card she found. Elegante Credit Furnishings, on Thirtieth and Second. We could go over there … what are you laughing about?”

“Nothing—” said Raney, still chuckling. “I just got off the phone with Eddie Garcia. You remember Eddie.”

“Yeah. Eddie Droop. He had that funny eye. I thought he was dead.”

“Nope. Alive and well and still pushing nickel bags to the schoolchildren of the upper West Side. A great snitch.”

“So what did Eddie say that was so funny?”

“Oh, well, you know Eddie owes me a couple of favors. So I suggested he keep an eye on that day-care center.”

“What day care—oh, shit, Jimmy! Are you still fucking with that?”

“Hey, it’s worth another look. We could get lucky and find the big guy.”

“Jimmy, it ain’t our case. You know what’ll happen if you get caught using a dope pusher to harass a citizen? What is it—you still got the hots for that D.A.?”

“Yeah, that’s still cooking. But it’s mostly that bitch in there, treating me like a turd. Nobody treats me like a turd, Pete, I don’t give a rat’s ass who the fuck they are. That fucking nun! Only she ain’t no nun. That’s the funny part. I told Eddie to follow her if she went out. I figured, if she’s connected to the big guy, there could be a meet.”

Balducci wrinkled his nose in irritation. “Jimmy, that’s the most half-assed thing I ever heard. There’s not gonna be no meet.”

“Wait—yeah, I know it’s half-assed, but it’s no big deal either. I’m just noodling around here. Anyway, he follows her to this no-tell hotel on the East Side. She checks in. Ten minutes later this real nervous-looking young dude walks in, goes into the room. Two hours later they both come out. What d’you think, Petey? Catechism class?”

“You’re crazy, Jimmy, you know that? You’re a fuckin’ disgrace. It’s a good thing I’m retired in a couple of months, I don’t want to be around when the shit comes down on you, man.” He glowered at Raney for a moment, but his partner had endured many a glower and was unimpressed. Then the older man said, “I’m wasting my breath on you, ain’t I? OK, let’s go pick up this what’s his-face, the boyfriend, Felix Tighe.”

Felix parked his company car in the lot and stepped out. He had a new leather blazer. He wore it with a white turtleneck shirt, black slacks, and white almost-Gucci loafers. He looked and felt good. Last night an irresistible opportunity had overcome his resolve to stay clear of burglary. He had made a good score, some nice gold and eight vials of miscellaneous downers and diet pills. He would move most of the latter at Larry’s this evening. In the meantime, he had tried some of the downers already and he was feeling mellow.

In that mood, he didn’t even mind coming into the office, which was what he was doing right now. He would try to get in touch with Anna again, using the office phone. She looked good and scared the last time he saw her; he figured that she’d be softened up by now. He’d put the heavy make on her, say he was sorry, and bullshit like that and she’d come around. He’d have to find out where she lived now; he already knew where she worked.

“That’s him,” said Balducci. “The dark guy in the leather jacket with the case, crossing the street. Give him a few minutes and ring the number.”

Raney nodded and got out of the unmarked Ford from which the two of them had been observing the premises of Elegante Credit Furnishings. There was a phone booth nearby. He went in and dialed.

“Mr. Tighe?”

“Yes, this is Mr. Tighe, how can I help you?”

“Well, my name’s Jim Raney. I think we have some mutual friends. I have a business proposition for you and I’d like to meet with you today—buy you a lunch.”

Felix did not get asked out to lunch all that often, and he didn’t ask what mutual friends. “Give me an hour,” he said. “There’s a chinks across the street from where I work, at Thirtieth and Second. Upstairs, the Peking Gardens. How will I know you?”

“I’ll know you,” said Raney, and hung up.

The restaurant proved to be a long, narrow room with a lunch counter and a small collection of tables, at the top of a steep flight of stairs. The lunch rush was in full spate and the place was jammed. Raney and Balducci stood on the landing at the top of the stairs and looked through the glass door. They could see Felix sitting at the counter with his back to them.

“It’s too jammed,” said Raney. “Let me go in there and get him out.” Balducci nodded assent and Raney went through the crowd to where Felix was sitting. He said, “Felix Tighe? I’m Jim Raney.”

Felix stood up and the two men shook hands. Raney smiled and said, “Look, it’s too crowded in here. Can we go somewheres else?”

“Sure,” said Felix, picking up his attaché case. “So, tell me, Jim, what line of business are you in?”

“Security,” said Raney as they passed through the door. Then he added, “Actually, Felix, I’m a New York City police officer, Detective James Raney. The guy behind you is Detective Peter Balducci. We’re placing you under arrest.”

Felix’s eyes went wide and he whirled around to find himself looking into the barrel of Balducci’s .38 Chief’s Special. Raney took out his handcuffs and grabbed Felix’s left arm.

Felix uttered a shrill yell, deafening in that narrow space, threw his attaché case at Balducci’s head and grabbed the detective’s revolver.

It’s my last couple of months on the job and I’m going to kill a guy, was Balducci’s thought as he squeezed the trigger. Nothing happened. Like most policemen, Balducci kept an empty chamber under the hammer of his revolver, and Felix’s hand gripping the cylinder was preventing it from rotating. He saw Felix’s other hand flying like a knife blade toward his face and he ducked. The edge of the hand struck him across the forehead. It was like being hit with a board and it stunned him, but not enough to make him release his grip on the handle of his pistol.

At that moment, Raney leaped on Felix’s back and tried to apply a choke hold from the rear. Felix bucked forward to prevent this, seized the lapel of Balducci’s jacket and executed a leg sweep that was reasonably effective under the circumstances. Balducci felt himself going over, with the long stairway yawning below him. The pistol was wrenched from his grasp. In a last despairing effort he reached out and sank his fingers into the leather of Felix’s jacket.

The grip was strong enough to yank Felix off the landing, with Raney still clinging to his back. The three of them went down the stairs together, Felix in the middle and the two detectives on either side, a suspect sandwich on cop.

Felix was on top of Balducci when they reached the bottom. He managed to brace a leg and heave himself to his feet, with Raney still hanging on his head. Raney saw the Chief’s Special in Felix’s hand, still gripped by its barrel and cylinder. He made a wild try for its handle, which was a mistake, because Felix was then able to grab his wrist with his other hand, bend slightly, twist his body, pull on the arm, and flip Raney over his head into the street.

Raney landed with a jolt that brought blood to his mouth. He shook his head and staggered to his feet. Felix had the gun right way around now. He pointed it at Raney and squeezed the trigger. It wouldn’t pull. Felix cursed and tried to clear the jam by pulling back on the hammer. He heard it click as the cylinder finally revolved.

He pointed the cocked pistol at Raney, whose Browning was just clearing his shoulder holster. Raney could see the tiny hole in the barrel of the revolver, as large, it appeared, as the sun at noon. His own pistol was coming up like the slow motion in a nightmare and he knew it would be too late.

The Chief’s Special exploded and the bullet went whining off against the side of a building. Balducci had dragged himself off the bottom of the stairway, his twisted back shrieking agony, and had flung his arms around Felix from behind, lifting him off his feet and spoiling his shot.

“Throw him down, Pete, I got him!” Raney yelled waving his Browning. But Balducci did not release his grip, because he realized that as long as he kept the suspect’s arms pinioned, he would be unable to aim, and unable to commit homicide
with Balducci’s own gun.
This was his only thought, that and the pain. So the two of them did a little waltz on the sidewalk, with Raney as their satellite, circling around in a crouch with his gun waving, trying to avoid the sweep of the captured weapon, and trying to think of a way out of this idiotic stand-off without death intervening.

In the end, none of the heroic schemes that were running through the minds of the two detectives proved necessary. A patrolman named Donald Olson, who happened to know Raney slightly, came around the corner onto Second, on his way to the Peking Gardens for a bite to eat. He saw Raney, saw the guy with the gun, made the situation in a flash and, setting himself in his usual fast-pitch softball league stance on the side away from the waving revolver, swung from the hips with his long, black nightstick.

Felix saw the nightstick coming and wriggled desperately. He fired off two more shots and tried to get some purchase with his feet, but Balducci’s grip held. The stick made the same sound against Felix’s skull that a bat makes when you foul one off. Balducci relaxed his arms when he felt his captive slump, and Felix hit the pavement, spraying blood.

“Shame on you!” said a middle-aged woman who had observed the whole fray from the shelter of a doorway. “Shame on you! Three against one!”

“You look like shit, Petey,” said Raney solicitously. “Why don’t you take the rest of the day off and go lie down?”

Balducci grimaced and massaged his sacroiliac region. After they had booked Felix and stashed him in the prison ward at Bellevue a friendly nurse had slipped him some Darvon. It helped the pain but not the dull exhaustion. “I’m getting too old for this shit, Jimmy,” he sighed.

“It’s only another couple a months, Petey,” said Raney with the cheerfulness of relative youth. “You can coast. I’ll pound the mutts, hey? By the way, what’s in the scumbag’s case there?”

“Well, we got a set of keys. Some pills in prescription vials, under different names. Some order books and business papers. And this.” He tossed Raney a small black book. Raney thumbed briefly through it.

“A diary and address book. Find anything interesting?”

“Yeah. For one thing, the day before Mullen and her kid were butchered there’s an entry that says, ‘take care of
Big Mouth.’”

Raney flipped to July 9, the day before the murder, nodded, and then examined the surrounding pages more closely. “Lots of appointments with Anna R. last few months. Here’s one says ‘move in with A.,’ right before that domestic call. So that checks out too. He sees a Denise about once a week too. Quite the stud, Felix.”

“Yeah. Here’s a matchbook cover with the name ‘Mimi’ and a phone number. The asshole never sleeps. I found out where he lives, too. Place down on Ludlow. Lives with a guy named Lutz. I called him, said we’d be over in about half an hour.”

“OK, let’s go,” said Raney. He looked down at his partner, who was still seated in his swivel chair. “You coming?”

“Yeah,” said Balducci, with a sad grimace. “Help me up, Jimmy. I’m like an old lady here.”

One-thirty Ludlow was a New Law tenement, which meant that every apartment had to have a toilet and every room required a window. Besides that, its amenities were few. At apartment 203 Steve Lutz answered sleepily to Raney’s knock. He was dressed in a dirty T-shirt and boxer shorts.

“Steven Lutz?” said Balducci. “I’m Detective Balducci and this is Detective Raney. I called and you said we could look around.”

“Yeah,” said Lutz backing away from the door. “Hey what’s this about?” he asked.

“Just checking up on a lead,” said Balducci aimiably. “Where does Felix sleep?”

Lutz led them into the smaller of the two bedrooms in the apartment. It had a window, as required by law, and was a lot cleaner than the rest of the apartment. The furnishings comprised a neatly made bed, a cheap pine chest of drawers, and several cardboard cartons. The walls were decorated with a pinned-up Bruce Lee poster and a framed certificate attesting that Felix Tighe had been awarded the rank of
shodan
in karate. Balducci caught sight of it, glanced at Raney and shook his head ruefully.

“Say, Steve—you mind if we look around through his stuff?” asked Raney. Lutz didn’t mind. The chest contained clothes, all clean and neatly folded. The cartons held an orderly collection of martial arts and business magazines, as well as several ninja-style instruments of destruction—nunchuks and throwing stars and oddly shaped axes in chromed metal.

There was a rack of hooks in the closet. On one of them hung a pair of black slacks. Balducci looked at them, looked again, fingered the material, and took them down.

“These Felix’s pants, Steve?” he asked.

“Yeah, they’re his.”

“What’ve you got, Pete?” asked Raney, who was reaching under the bed.

“These pants—they’re stiff with something.”

“Blood?”

“Could be.” Balducci took a laundry marker out of his pocket and marked “P.B.” and his shield number on the pocket lining of the black slacks.

Raney pulled a small brown gym bag from under the bed. Its zipper was locked with a miniature padlock. They opened it with one of the keys they had found in the attaché case.

“Well, well,” said Raney, after looking inside. He dumped the contents of the bag out on the bed. A passport made out to Felix M. Tighe. A checkbook, ditto. Three clippings from metropolitan papers describing the murder of Stephanie Mullen and her son. A small kitchen knife. And a huge bowie knife in a leather sheath.