He then reassured me, over my protests, that he could manage without me for a week or two. In fact he insisted I take two weeks. “In that time, Joe, you’ll be able to convince her to come on back up here where she belongs. I can guarantee you that job we discussed, Joe. You tell Jen that. And listen, you guys could take a nice apartment up in Westchester. I got a couple of friends up there could fix Jen up with a good teaching job.” Tim’s mind was racing as he listed all the things he could do for us. He leaned right back into his good mood; after all, it’s a helluva good feeling to be able to do a favor for a friend.
I filled out my vacation request form and Tim endorsed it and sent me off to my second honeymoon. According to the time I requested, I’d be due back to work on June 16, 1975. Plea day—cutoff day—for Kitty Keeler.
D
ANNY FITZMARTIN FINISHED READING
my typed extract of George’s confession. He put two heavy fingers on the papers and shoved them across the polished bar toward me. He acknowledged an early-afternoon customer with a be-with-you-in-a-minute nod, then ducked down and became very busy arranging glasses and bottles.
Finally he called out, “Same thing to start the day, Tommy?,” which was apparently the ritual with this particular guy. Danny’s voice cracked in the middle and he tried to cover himself by coughing, like he had a dry spot in his throat. He brought the guy his drink and set the color television to a soap opera and kidded the guy because he’d missed a great hospital scene the day before.
“Tommy comes here every day to watch this crap,” Danny said, not looking at me. “His wife watches it, too, but Tommy would die before he’d let her know he keeps up with it.”
There wasn’t anything more to say about that particular subject. And there wasn’t any other trade. There was just Danny and me and he had to finally accept it. He motioned me down the far end of the bar, set up a couple of beers, glanced toward the door hoping like hell someone, anyone, would come in.
Fitzmartin has the kind of face that registers exactly what is going on behind his big honest blue eyes and he was a man who was suffering like hell and not able to handle it.
“Hey, did I tell ya that I’m thinkin’ of buying the place? Me and my brother been talking it over and Kitty said any price we think is fair. And any terms we can manage. Did I tell you that already?”
I nodded but didn’t answer. He rambled on about how he and his brother owned a place in the Bronx once and he started to describe some trouble they had with a beer distributor, but even Danny didn’t know what the hell he was talking about. He looked hopefully toward the door, but no one came to his rescue. He gulped down his beer, reached for my glass, but I didn’t need a refill. He grabbed his own glass, started to fill it, stopped abruptly and turned his back to me. His huge shoulder muscles rippled, tightened and flexed under his light-blue shirt. He held his hand up to his face and his eyes were desperate when he finally turned back to me.
“Oh Christ,” he said, “oh Jesus God.” He shook his head, but the pain wouldn’t go away.
“Tell me about the gun, Danny.”
For a split second, he was asking himself if he should lie or not. It was obvious; it was right there on his big pink baby face, which tightened, then immediately relaxed into a kind of helpless desperation. “It was maybe ten, twelve years ago. Up in George’s place in the Bronx. Webster Avenue, near Fordham Road. It wasn’t like it is now, you know, with guys gettin’ ripped off every other week and all. It was near closin’ time on a Saturday night and just George and me and another guy was there. We were countin’ the receipts and all. This guy, big nervous guy, he’d been nursing a long drink for quite a while, so you got the feelin’ he was up to somethin’, and anyway, finally, he pulls a gun, sticks it right in George’s face.” Danny shook his head. “The guy shouldn’t a done that. Like if he stuck it in
my
face, then told George, gimme the money, that woulda been different. But George, well, he been through some pretty bad times over in Korea. Not that he ever talked about it, because he didn’t. But I heard, ya know, ya talk around, and I heard from some guys that George ... that George totaled a lotta enemies over there. All he ever said about it was that he’d seen enough killing to last him a lifetime, and here was this jerk sticking a gun in his face. I’d never seen George like that.”
Danny was at a loss to describe George; it had been a side of him he’d never seen, only heard about. He shrugged. “All I can say is, this guy picked the wrong ginmill. George moved so goddamn fast I don’t even know what he done and I was standin’ right there next to him. The dummy guy don’t even know what happened. Like one minute he’s standin’ with a gun to George’s head, the next minute, faster than you can blink, swear to God, the guy is on the floor, screamin’ in pain, and George is standin’ over him with the gun in his hand. Then George shoves the gun in his back pocket and pulls the guy up to his feet and I make a move to the phone, ya know, to call the cops and George says, ‘No, I’ll take care of this,’ and he shoves the guy into the back room and I don’t hear a thing, then the guy lets out a terrible yell and I hear a commotion, like the guy just went through a door, and then it’s quiet and George comes back into the bar and he just says, ‘That bum won’t be knocking off any other ginmills for a long time.’ I didn’t ask no questions.” Danny shook his head earnestly. “Not then, not ever. I never saw George like that, just that one time, but I’ll tell ya this, Detective Peters, I believed everything I ever heard about how George handled himself over in Korea.”
“And the gun?”
Danny glanced nervously toward the door, then toward his one customer, who was intently watching a doctor and a nurse, or maybe they were both doctors, I just tend to think that women in white uniforms are nurses; whatever they were, they were embracing and kissing, and Tommy, the customer, was just eating it up and wasn’t looking for another drink.
Finally Danny said, “It was a thirty-eight.” He looked down at his hands, twisted the clean damp bar cloth and said rapidly, “As far as I know, George kept it.” And then, resigned, “Oh hell, George kept it. He pulled it one time here when a coupla bad-lookin’ dudes showed up and started actin’ funny. You know, makin’ the kind of moves you just
know
are headin’ in the wrong direction.”
I nodded. Bartenders and cops can make a wrong guy pretty fast.
“Well, anyway, they was the only two left in the place, and before they can make their play George pulls the thirty-eight out and shoves it right in their faces, and they come on like George is a nut, all they’re doin’ here is drinking. And then the smaller guy, they were two Puerto Rican guys, the smaller guy got a smart mouth on him and he says to George, like, ‘Hey, man, you think we’re a coupla ripoff men, you call the cops, go on, call the cops.’ And like he’s daring George. And George just says, very quietly, moving the thirty-eight from one guy to the other, he says, ‘You see this thirty-eight? This here is all the cops I need. I handle things myself, my own way. I take care of punks like you with this gun, I don’t go botherin’ the cops.’ And George says, ‘See, this here gun isn’t registered or nothin’, no way it can be traced back to me, so when they find punks like you in some alley in Bed-Stuy there’s no way it comes home to me.’ ” Danny rubbed the back of his neck and then his damp forehead with the bar cloth. “Those guys believed him. Like they got pale under their dark skin, ya know. I frisked them and took a couple of gravity knives off them, and boy, when George told them to get lost, those guys practically disappeared in thin air they was so glad to get away from George.”
Danny had gotten caught up in the reminiscence. He smiled and shook his head, then said, “Wait a minute, let me fix this soap-opera buff up.”
Two workmen came in, settled heavily at the bar and Danny took care of them with the kind of rough good-natured byplay that goes on with guys who know each other for a long time.
Danny had replaced the bar cloth with a freshly laundered one and he rubbed and polished the already shiny surface of the bar.
“Where’d George keep the thirty-eight?” Danny shrugged and polished, then raised his head. His blue eyes were swimming and he was blinking fast. “I don’t know,” he mumbled, then looked right at me and said, “He kept it on him.”
“When’s the last time you saw the thirty-eight, Danny?”
He stood there trying to decide what to tell me, and when he finally spoke I knew it was the truth because this man was hurting like hell.
“The time I told you about, ya know, the two Puerto Ricans? Well, it was on April Fool’s Day, ya know, April first.”
“This
April first?”
He nodded. “I remember that, because George made a joke about it, like ‘Well, there goes my two April fools.’ Meaning the two P.R.’s.”
Which placed the .38 in George Keeler’s possession as late as two weeks before the murder of his sons. I think Danny knew what I was going to ask him next. He just kept staring at his hands, which were bunched together into two fists, side by side on the shiny surface of the counter.
“Danny, could George have slipped out of the pub that night the way he claimed in his letter? With all the entertainment going on and all the people moving around and singing and all, can you really swear you saw George Keeler in the pub every single minute of that night?”
Danny Fitzmartin kept his face down for a long time. When he looked up, the tears spilled from both his eyes. “I just figured,” he said in a broken voice, “that he’d gone upstairs to call Kitty.”
Ray Ortega is one of the best narcotics cops I’ve ever known and he owed me at least one heavy favor. A lot of guys owe me favors, which is the kind of balance I like. If you owe a guy, you never know what the hell you might get hit with; this way, it’s my ball game. It was a little hard to track Ray down, because the guys in his unit play it pretty close to the vest; no one knows who’s working where at any particular time of the day or night. I couldn’t leave a message with anyone, since I was supposed to be in Florida and you never know who the hell just might mention your name at the wrong time and place. It is surprising how small a city of some eight million people can turn out to be. So I just kept calling around, like I was an informant with something really tight.
I finally caught up with Ray in Federal Court on Foley Square. He’d spent the whole day waiting to testify, and at 5
P.M.
the judge decided to grant the defense’s request for a three-week delay.
I watched Ray’s reaction as the defendant sauntered up the aisle, grinning and whispering to his attorney.
“Son-of-a-bitch, they’re shopping for a judge,” Ray said. “He’s gonna have surgery like I’m going to have surgery. I know what I’d like to cut off this bum.”
The defense had interrupted the trial to submit a medical report just delivered from a very well-paid doctor which declared that, on the basis of just-completed medical tests, the defendant must be admitted to the hospital immediately for some minor but essential surgery and some follow-up tests.
We watched from the courthouse steps as a uniformed chauffeur helped the heavyset defendant into the back seat of a tremendous black Mercedes.
“A ‘Cuban freedom fighter,’ Joe,” Ray said bitterly. “He managed to ‘liberate’ about two million dollars from his gambling casinos and whorehouses, as a stake to start him off in his new country. Of course by now this guy handles more than twenty million untaxed dollars a year. And you know what we bagged him for, Joe? Tax violations. And he’ll probably wind up paying a fine—also in untaxed dollars. And it won’t mean a goddamn thing to him. He’ll make it up on his next big shipment. Then he’ll make a contribution to the Red Cross or the Cancer Foundation or the Heart Fund and get a lot of good publicity for the ‘Cuban exile population.’ ”
Ray Ortega was born in Cuba and came to the States when he was about ten years old. There are generally three ways cops deal with “one of their own.” You try to give the guy a break because after all he is one of your own; you treat him exactly like anyone else in the given circumstances; or you take an absolutely hard line and come down on the guy like the wrath of God because he’s giving all the rest of you a bad name. Ray Ortega was the kind of cop who was death on any Cuban, Puerto Rican or Spanish-speaking lawbreaker.
We went to a “great” health-food restaurant that Ray recommended. He had just turned forty and was on a physical-fitness kick. He gave me a rundown on calories, carbohydrates, cholesterol, protein, fiber foods. He took a two-mile jog every morning; meditated for two twenty-minute sessions every day. He also said that he had guest privileges at a midtown health club; that he was swimming ten laps twice a week and was planning on taking up tennis.
I figured he’d either outgrow the whole thing or kill himself.
The food was lousy, but I figured it was unlikely that I’d run into anyone I knew digging into a bright-orange carrot soufflé or whatever the hell it was. Aside from Ray and me at one of the two tables, there were a couple of boys or girls or maybe one of each sex at the counter exchanging gloomy information with the owner-chef, a sad-eyed kid who looked like he weighed about twelve pounds. Instead of coffee, we were served big mugs of a lukewarm herb drink. Ray gulped down a handful of vitamin pills with his drink, but shook his head when I offered him mine.
“Moderation, Joe. Moderation in everything, that’s the trick.” He blotted his mouth on a napkin, then asked if I would mind not lighting up my cigarette. He pointed to a large sign on the wall, behind the counter:
SMOKING IS DEATH. DO YOUR DYING SOMEWHERE ELSE.
“Cute.”
“Okay, Joe. Tell me, what do you need?”
“First, right up front, this is off the books. Strictly on my own.”
Ray nodded; a lot of guys moonlighted on unofficial assignments.
“In fact, I’m not even here, in the city. I’m about a thousand miles away soaking up the Florida sunshine.”
“I got the message.”
“I’m looking to talk to two guys. They deal coke in Jackson Heights, but it’s not on a drug matter. They’re potential witnesses in something not really drug-related.”