“Your landlord here can huff and puff all he wants,” I told her when she came back down, “but there is nothing he can legally do to kick you out as long as you pay your rent.”
“What about the cat?”
“Call the police or file for a restraining order. I could file a motion for you, but other than that I don’t know. Getting Jimmy to talk to him would be your best bet. What did Jimmy give this Giamoticos, anyway, to get you this lease?”
“A street,” she said.
“A street,” I said, shaking my head. “He gave away a public street just like that?”
“It wasn’t a big street,” she said with a shrug. “More like an alley. I needed a place, so Jimmy introduced a bill or something.” She stood before me with her arms crossed, shifting her weight from one leg to the other. She wanted something, but she didn’t know how to ask.
“Listen, Veronica,” I said. “I don’t mean to pry, but I couldn’t help noticing all your overdue bills. Are you going to be able to pay them off?”
She laughed nervously and leaned over me at the table, turning her papers facedown. She smelled terrific and fresh, like a cherry tree in full blossom. “No,” she said. “Who can pay all their bills now, really? Bad times all over, right?”
“What are you going to do?”
“I’ll do what I always do. When I get a big enough pile I give them to Jimmy who gives them to Chet who takes care of them.” That was why Concannon’s name was on her account, I figured, to make it easier for him to supply her with the councilman’s cash when her money got low.
“Don’t you work?”
“I’m thirsty,” she said, looking down at me as I sat by the dining room table. Her breath was minty, as if she had just been upstairs gargling. “Are you thirsty? Finding a dead cat in the hallway always makes me thirsty. Let’s get a drink.”
I was tired and I had work to do tomorrow and there were a lot of things I needed to be doing, but the mintyness of her breath, her long slender arms, the way she leaned over me at the table, it all sent my stomach afluttering. My throat tightened on me, so that when I said, “Sure,” it came out in a raspy whisper.
Outside her building, as she held onto my arm and led me off to a bar she knew near Independence Hall, I glanced behind us on Church Street. I caught the glint of the streetlight off the cobblestones and then, farther back, the shine of a boomerang hovering over the tail end of a black limousine. The car’s lights were off, and I couldn’t see inside, but whatever sexual charge had been within me dissipated immediately, grounded by the sight of that car. It was too dark to make out the license plate, but I had no doubt at all as to who the owner was. That was Jimmy Moore’s limousine and whoever was inside was staking out the councilman’s girlfriend. And there I was, my arm linked in hers, stepping out with her into the night. It was a warmish fall evening, the air thick and humid like in springtime, but by the time we had turned from Church Street onto 3rd I was shivering.
14
FROM THE OTHER SIDE of the door I could hear the muffled sound of a busy office, typewriters clacketing, phones ringing, voices shouting from one desk to another. Inside the small, battleship-gray room it was just me and Detective Griffin.
Detective Griffin was a pasty-faced, donut-shaped man with deep dark swaths beneath his eyes. He grunted as he paged through the Daily News, occasionally throwing out bits of gossip he seemed to take great delight in. “Hey, can you believe this stuff?” he would say before he’d read to me from the lurid middle pages of the tabloid. Then he would let out a great, noisy groan of weariness. I was in that small, stuffy room in the DA’s office to examine a stack of files and two large cardboard boxes of physical evidence, the whole of the basis for Slocum’s indictment in Commonwealth v. Moore and Concannon. The evidence had been signed out from Room 800 in the attic of City Hall by Detective Griffin, personally, and he was there to make sure I didn’t walk away with any of it.
“Hey, can you believe this stuff? Listen,” said Detective Griffin. “That guy Bobbitt, whose wife sliced off his peter, right, he’s stripping now in some gay strip joint. His new girlfriend, some Penthouse Pet, is ripping off his G-string with her teeth while the guys all cheer. He says he’s getting sensation back a millimeter a month. It’s like he’s proud it got wacked. Can you believe that guy?”
I could, yes.
The detective stretched his arms out wide and yawned. “Geez, I’m tired.”
This is what the evidence I was looking at showed. On the night of Bissonette’s final beating a young homeless man, only slightly psychotic, while digging in a dumpster for a late-night snack, had seen a black limousine pull up to the back of Bissonette’s. He didn’t see who got out of the car, but Michael Ruffing did. Ruffing and Bissonette were alone, closing the club, when, through a window, he saw the limo pull up and Concannon and Moore get out. This had all happened on Henry’s night off, and Henry’s alibi had checked out, so it was apparently Concannon who had been driving. Before the two could come in the club Ruffing left through the front door, hoping to avoid a confrontation. Inside there had been some sort of discussion, a few drinks had been poured, and then a fight broke out. Bissonette had gone behind the bar, supposedly to reach for a gun taped beneath the counter. His fingerprints were on it. One of the two visitors had grabbed a Mike Schmidt autographed bat from off the wall and knocked Bissonette down with it before Bissonette could grab the gun. He had proceeded to beat Bissonette with the bat all across his body, fracturing bones in both his arms, his fibula, his patella, his coxae, five ribs, and his skull, leaving a five-inch dent in the side of his head. The medical records were voluminous and ugly. Even through the technical jargon, the savagery of the beating was clear. When the paramedics found Bissonette he was covered with blood and vomit. They intubated him immediately and put him on a respirator the moment he arrived at the emergency room. He never regained consciousness.
A tough way to go for such a nice guy, I thought. Even if he couldn’t hit a slider.
The assailants had apparently not rushed to leave after the beating. The bat had been cleaned of fingerprints, the glasses from the drinks had been rinsed. Everything had been sanitized while Bissonette was undoubtedly moaning and breathing with difficulty through the blood and vomit. In my mind I saw Chester Concannon casually wiping the bar with a rag as Bissonette struggled to stay alive behind the bar, his breath rising and falling in a horrific slurp. That would be just like Chester, I thought, not wanting to leave a mess, such a polite young man.
The two men had left no fingerprints, not even on the doorknobs, all wiped clean, but one of them had stepped in the blood and vomit by accident and so the freshly mopped floor had revealed his stride from the bar to the back door. Forensics hadn’t been able to get a shoe size from the partial markings, but the stride was consistent with a man the height of Chester Concannon. A security guard in a nearby store had noticed a long black limousine pulling out from Bissonette’s about twenty-five minutes after Ruffing had reported Moore and Concannon arriving. It had been a brutal twenty-five minutes.