Roosevelt Hospital, on Ninth and 59th, was only ten minutes from Manning's apartment. Fulton and Amalfi parked Amalfi's old car near the emergency entrance. Amalfi handed Fulton a brass key. "This'll open the fire door from the outside. He's in room 523."
"I gotta walk up five flights?"
"Unless you want to go up the elevator with a bunch of witnesses. The room is between the fire stairs and the nurse's station. You should be in and out in three minutes. Wrap the gun in the pillow."
"Good advice, Sid," said Fulton. "I can tell you're the brains of the outfit. You gonna stay here?"
"Yeah, it's a one-man deal."
Fulton nodded and got out of the car. He found the fire door, opened it with no problem, and walked quickly up to the fifth floor. Nicky Benning was where he was supposed to be, draped with various tubes, sleeping, unguarded.
Fulton went back to the fire stairs and waited on the landing for a few minutes. Then he went back to the hallway and took the elevator down to the ground floor. He went through the emergency room and paused in the shadows by the doorway. He could see Amalfi's car clearly. As Fulton had expected, Amalfi was no longer in it.
As he walked back to the fire door, Fulton wondered how they planned to do it. They couldn't just shoot him in the back, not a detective lieutenant. It would have to be a confrontation. They would get the drop on him and set it up. A couple in the chest and then his gun pressed into his own dead hand and a shot fired. Sorry, but I had no choice. I caught him red-handed after he killed Benning, he shot at me and I dropped him. It might have worked, Fulton thought, with a realization that chilled him. Karp would bitch, but he couldn't do much without the cooperation of the police. And of course the investigation would be handled by guess-who. Even Denton couldn't do much, without destroying himself. The other brass would go along with it, if the killings stopped and Manning and Amalfi left the country. To protect the department.
Slowly he inserted the key in the lock with his left hand. He pulled and cocked his.38 Air-weight. There were two good places for an ambush. One was up on the fifth floor, to the left of the fire door. The other was in the little blind corridor to the right of the first flight of fire stairs. Fulton didn't figure Amalfi for a man who would walk up five flights unless he absolutely had to.
He took a deep breath, snapped the lock, flung the door open, and leapt in, crouching, his pistol pointing rigidly down the little corridor. It pointed straight at Amalfi, who stood there flatfooted and amazed, with a flat pint of vodka halfway to his lips, his gun in its holster. The bottle dropped and shattered, filling the landing with an appropriately medical smell.
"Uhhh, no!" Amalfi croaked. His face sagged in terror. Fulton darted forward, spun the unresisting man around, shoved his face up against the concrete wall, and patted him down. He pulled out and placed in his own pockets Amalfi's gun, his handcuffs, and a nasty little blackjack. As his fingers searched the small of Amalfi's back, he stopped abruptly and cursed.
"You're wearing a fucking wire!" he shouted. The sound echoed like an accusation from heaven in the stone vault of the stairway. He grabbed Amalfi's jacket and whipped him around again so that they were face-to-face.
"Talk!" Fulton ordered. "What's going on?"
"Don't kill me! I got money-"
"I'm not going to kill you, asshole. Who're you working for? Internal Affairs?"
Something clicked in Amalfi's mind then. An "aha" from some hitherto untapped reserve of insight, brought forward by fear of death. For the first time in the weeks since his life had gone in the toilet, since he had heard Fulton's tape, since Hrcany and the shoofly had visited him, he was thinking clearly. He breathed deeply and relaxed. "Yeah," he said. "You too?"
"No, but close," said Fulton. "They turned you, did they?"
"Yeah."
"Who are they after? They got you and Manning already."
"They want who Manning… who we're doing it for."
"You mean Choo Willis?"
"Not just him. Fane."
"The congressman? He's in on this?"
"Yeah. He's deep in. Willis works for him. He owns the Club Mecca. There're other heavies involved but, ah, we don't have anything definite on them yet. Manning knows the whole story, but he keeps it close."
Fulton uncocked his pistol and was silent for a while. He made no move to give Amalfi back his gun. "How the fuck did this all get started?" he asked.
Amalfi shrugged. "One thing led to another. Me and Dick was chasing this skell across the roof one night. We cornered him and he shot at us and we wasted him. He had a pile of cash on him and we split it up like we always did. Dick took a little coke off him too. I never did that, but Dick always could move dope. Then we were talking about what a pain in the ass it was gonna be, shooting this shithead, and all the investigation and the fucking paperwork, and Dick said, 'You know, if we was smart, we wouldn't be chasing these assholes across the roof. We could ace them at our convenience and get paid a shitload of money for it.' That was the start. Then we started doing jobs. Dick did the actual… you know, the work. I never did any of that."
"But you took the money."
Amalfi nodded. "Yeah, I took the money. Shit, man, they're dirtballs, what the hell, right?"
"Wrong. I don't know what deal you cut with Internal Affairs, but I'm going to let that slide for now. Just do what they tell you. But whatever goes down, it's got to go down fast. Tomorrow or the next day Manning is gonna find out I didn't ace Benning and the shit's gonna hit the fan. By the way, what did you intend to do, laying for me here?"
Amalfi said, "They, ah, wanted me to bring you in. Put the squeeze on you. Get a wire on you too. They figured you took out Tecumseh."
Fulton smiled without amusement and shook his head. "Can't trust nobody nowadays. Look, tell those assholes I'm the good guys. If they don't believe you, tell them to go to Chief Denton. We were trying to keep the lid on this, but it's blown now. Asses'll be frying like bacon downtown when this gets out."
Fulton opened the door. Amalfi said, "Hey, how about giving me my stuff back?" He tried to meet Fulton's contemptuous gaze and couldn't.
Fulton said, "I'll toss them under your car," and slammed the door behind him. Marlene had put nearly fifty hours of work into answering the motions in People v. Meissner. It all went up in smoke in less than three minutes. When the case was called, Nolan shuffled the papers before him, cleared his throat, adjusted his reading glasses, and said, "On reviewing the defense motion to dismiss, I find that the presentation of five individual cases of alleged rape to the grand jury was in fact prejudicial. The alleged rapes are separate and distinct crimes and cannot be used as evidence for predisposition to this particular homicide. Thus, the People's attempt to demonstrate a common scheme, pattern, or design cannot be sustained. As there is insufficient other evidence to support the indictment for homicide, that indictment is dismissed. The People may make a separate submission to the grand jury in this case, if additional evidence sufficient to support an indictment of homicide can be obtained."
Marlene was not surprised by this judgment. Nolan had telegraphed it clearly enough by his acceptance of Polaner's initial motion. No more would she have been surprised by the death of a relative long in decline; but, like such an awaited death, the loss hurt her deeply nonetheless. The greater pain, however, was attendant on what she now had to do: call up the women involved and tell them that their tormentor really had slipped the clutches of the law.