“Down at Brill’s.”
“Good. You need to come on over here.”
“Give me fifteen minutes? I’m walking.”
“See ya.”
The caller’s name, God bless him, was Michael Behan, as Irish American as ever was, because if one thing was true about the new Mafia, Jersey version, they might be assholes, but they weren’t bigots; well, except when it came to black guys.
Cattaneo put on his sunglasses and hat and ambled back out on the sidewalk, looked both ways, as if he were undecided where to go next, then turned left and took his time walking eight blocks down A1A. Halfway to Behan’s, he stopped at an ice cream stand next to a hotel walkway to the ocean and bought a double-dip strawberry cone.
Behan lived in a two-million-dollar condo that he’d bought when the buying was good, back in 2009. The condo had two floors, the top being a living room, an entertainment area with a wet bar and a wall-sized television, and a kitchen.
The lower floor, where Cattaneo had never been, comprised bedrooms and a private office, or so he’d heard. Though Behan was an excellent criminal, he was not so good with fashion and furnishings—Cattaneo thought he might be color-blind, though he’d never asked, and worse, he wore white athletic socks with sandals. He’d equipped his two-million-dollar condo with furniture from an online furniture store, guided by two low-rent designers from Lighthouse Point. The furniture had all arrived two weeks later in a truck from North Carolina, had been installed in two hours, and had never been changed or even moved around.
Cattaneo got off the elevator on the thirty-second floor, stepped out into a hallway, where there were only two doors, and pressed the bell for the door on the right. A guy he knew opened the door and said, “C’mon in, big guy.”
“Matt, how you doin’?”
Behan was occupying a love seat in a conversation pit that looked out over the Atlantic. He called, “Jack: did you bring me a fuckin’ cone?”
“It would have dripped to death by the time I got here,” Cattaneo said, finishing the last of it.
There were three other men sitting in the conversation pit. Cattaneo said, “Marc, Jimmy, Greg, you’re all looking good. Greg: how’s the foot?”
“I can play nine out of a cart,” the man said. “Probably make it back to eighteen in a month or so. Not going to be walking for a while, though.”
The six men didn’t exactly look alike, but there was a general similarity: they were all a little heavy, with guts, but also heavy in the shoulders. Short hair, a couple of them with teeth that were too white, like implants. Red noses, from alcohol or golf. Forties and fifties. If someone were to guess their jobs, the guess would involve trucks in some way, and the things that fell off them. The guess would be correct.
Cattaneo took a chair and looked at Behan. “So.”
“We need to do something, right now,” Behan said. “These guys, these marshals, they’ll eventually trip over somebody who’ll know about us. Gonna happen soon. We can’t have someone looking at us too close while we’re trying to get that shit out of the ocean.”
“When’s that going to happen, anyway?” asked the man named Marc.
Cattaneo shook his head: “The Coast Guard is sitting on it. The good thing is, they don’t know exactly where it is. They’re too far north and too far west. I don’t think they’ll find it, but we can’t go out there and dive, either.”
“We can handle all that later,” Behan said. He heaved himself off the sofa, went to the bar, opened a bottle of lemon tonic water and poured it into a glass with a couple of ice cubes—he had a well-stocked bar but didn’t drink himself—and walked over to the windows looking out at the ocean. “What we need to do now is come up with a consensus on the marshals. I talked to Doug, and he thinks we need to . . . lose them . . . and at the same time, give the other feds a rag to chew on.”
“What are you thinking?” asked the man named Jimmy. “You thinking you might be leaning on me?”
Behan turned and pointed at the man with his drink hand. “Yeah, I am, Jimmy. We gotta be way careful. You told me once about those brothers, that you could get to with remote control.”
“Yeah. The brothers. They’re still out there. Crazier than a couple of bedbugs, but they get shit done.”
“We’d have to be completely clean . . .”
“We would be. The brothers got no idea who I am. But: we kill a couple of marshals, there’s gonna be a stink. There’re gonna be marshals and FBI on every fuckin’ block.”
“Which isn’t necessarily bad,” Behan said. “Dougie said he keeps running into the Romano people up on the Island. He’d like to be done with them. And Don Romano happens to live here, down in South Dade.”
“This is sounding more complicated now,” said the man named Jimmy.
“Complicated, but not too complicated,” Behan said. “Dougie and I were talking about it, and this is what we’re going to do. If it works, we’re in great shape. If it doesn’t, we’re no further back than we are now.”
“Tell us about it,” Cattaneo said.
Behan told them about it.
* * *
On the way back to his condo, Cattaneo found two cop cars and three cops standing on the sidewalk. As he went by, he asked one of the cops, “What happened?”
“Somebody beat up an old lady,” the cop said. “You live around here?”
“Up in the condo,” Cattaneo said, pointing. “An old lady? That’s terrible.”
“You didn’t see anything like that?”
Cattaneo shook his head. “No. I was down at Brill’s and then over at the ice cream wagon by Carmody’s. When did this happen?”
“Couple hours ago. They took her in an ambulance,” the cop said.
“She say what the guy looked like?”
“She told me it was a tall black guy,” said the cop, who was a tall black guy. “Anyway, if you hear anything . . .”
“Sure. I haven’t seen anybody like that, though. Except you.” The cop laughed and Cattaneo went on his way. At the condo door, he looked at his reflection in the glass and thought, “Tall black guy? I’m nothing but pink.”
Made himself laugh.
CHAPTER
TEN
At the team meeting the next morning, Weaver said, “We interviewed four of those girls. They’re being difficult.”
“They’re scared,” said one of the agents. “They’ve been talking to each other about the guys who might be in the Mafia, and how this Patty Pittman disappeared.”