The Window Washer Read online

  After the waiter left, Tony pushed his chair back and crossed one bulky leg over the other. “So? What do you want to talk about?”

  Rosa reached for his drink, his hand trembling. “I really don’t want to do this shit anymore,” he said.

  Tony grabbed his brother’s arm before he could pick up the glass. “I don’t even want to hear you talk like that.”

  “But Tony, enough is enough,” Jimmy said, looking away. “I paid my dues.”

  “Pascale don’t seem to think so. And he’s the man.”

  “Fuck that shit!” Rosa said, his voice ratcheting up a notch. “I paid back what I owed and I haven’t been into them for nothin’ since.”

  “Jimmy, I love you. I mean, you’re my big brother. But I ain’t risking everything because you’re getting antsy.” He tightened his grip on Jimmy’s arm and jerked on it until Rosa was just inches from his face. “They pay you big bread for a few hours a week,” he said, the veins by his temples pulsating against his thick skin. “Where you going to get bread like that anywhere else?”

  “I’m not gamblin’ no more. I don’t need extra dough.”

  “Once a gambler, always a gambler. You know that, Jimmy,” Tony said, releasing his grip. “Just a matter a time.”

  Rosa stared down at the tablecloth, massaging his arm. “I can’t do this forever, Tony. It’ll kill me.”

  “It’ll kill you if you don’t,” Tony warned.

  Rosa lowered his voice and leaned in toward his brother. “They tell you when you’re going to get made yet?”

  “Should be soon,” Tony said.

  “Maybe things will be different for me when you’re a made guy.”

  “Maybe,” Tony replied.

  6

  Virgil Parks flipped a switch and a piercing sound shot through the crisp air, as it did every afternoon just before three, when the second shift tested their sirens and readied their vehicles. His was one of five cars and a paddy wagon that would be patrolling Franklinton, referred to by Columbus residents as the Bottoms, until eleven that night. He’d worked first shift up in Clintonville as a rookie, but the only thing that had kept him awake was the free coffee at Manny’s Deli. After a year he had put in for a transfer to the second shift down in the Bottoms. The most he could hope for, even on second or third shift in Clintonville, was a busted traffic light or a false alarm. Folks didn’t do crack, beat their neighbors’ heads in with baseball bats, or commit murder up there—at least not on a regular basis.

  Parks pulled out of the police substation onto Sullivant Avenue, named after Lucas Sullivant, who founded Franklinton in 1797. They had the same problem back then that plagued the Bottoms today—floods that devastated the low-lying area, leaving thousands homeless and restricting development. So cops like Parks didn’t have much contact with the more affluent people in the city—at least not yet. He thought that maybe when they finished the new five-mile flood wall, the Bottoms would get gentrified like German Village and the Brewery District, but for the time being, he’d have to settle for a view of their world, perched on the other side of the Scioto River, less than a mile away.

  His turf was a quarter of the Bottoms, a three-square-mile area that housed fifteen thousand people. And he knew every inch of it.

  He made a right onto Broad Street, maneuvering his patrol car around a snowdrift. He hadn’t seen such snow and cold in Columbus since he was a kid. It had been falling for over a week now, and the city wasn’t equipped with enough snowplows to keep up with it. It was no surprise that the Bottoms was last on their list. They had even cleared the street in front of his small apartment in Grove City, a few miles south of I-270—and that wasn’t exactly a plush community like Worthington or New Albany, where the bigwigs lived. He knew he probably would never get to live in the really fancy suburbs, but he and his ex-wife had once had a pretty nice place over in Gahanna. That was before she dumped him. It would have hurt less if she had blown him off for another guy, but she’d left him for her career. He had a career, too, but he had plenty of time for a wife—and kids.

  The crusted windshield wipers scraped across the glass in a slow, hypnotic motion. He had turned the defroster on a few blocks back, but he still could barely see out, so he put down the front window on the driver’s side, letting a blast of frigid air inside.

  He turned right on Gift Street. He’d always thought it was ironic that the street got its name from Sullivant giving away plots back in 1800 because it was so close to the river, in the epicenter of danger from the swollen banks of the Scioto. But people built houses anyway, and then rebuilt them after the flooding—at least they used to. The kind of people who first settled in the Bottoms weren’t afraid of hard work. Now there were three kinds of people here: honest and law-abiding blue-collar workers who took care of their properties the best they could with the limited resources they had—he knew most of them, and their kids, too; crack dealers, alcoholics, small-time crooks, and those on welfare—they didn’t rebuild anything; and the homeless—they couldn’t even feed themselves.

  He hoped the river would behave until the flood wall was finished. He’d be gone by then—up to Homicide by next fall, if all went according to plan—but if history was any predictor of the future, he’d still be spending lots of time down here, interrogating the misfits, dealers, and killers who made this their home or place of work.

  He turned down Chapel Street. It was deserted except for a white kid in a parka and a young black with dreadlocks, huddling next to a BMW on the far corner. He pulled up beside them. “Hey guys, what’s up?” he said through the open window.

  “Nothin’, Virgil,” the black guy said. “What are you doin’ out in this shit, man?”

  “I should probably be asking you the same thing,” Parks said over the static of his radio. “You wouldn’t be selling this guy any crack, now, would you, Darius?”

  “Shit no, man,” he smiled, showing a gap where his two front teeth had once been.

  “What’s your name?” Parks asked the kid.

  “Chuck.”

  “Chuck what?”

  The kid paused and looked down at a snowdrift. “Lloyd. Chuck Lloyd.”

  “Chuck, let me see your driver’s license.”

  The kid hesitated for a minute. “I left it at home,” he finally said.

  “That your Beamer?” Parks asked, pointing to the car.

  “Yes, sir,” he replied.

  “Here’s the deal, Chuck. You show me your license, or I’ll have to haul you down to County.”

  The skinny white kid looked apprehensively at the cop, who had a shaved scalp and a massive head glued to his shoulders by a neck the size of a tree trunk. He fumbled under his parka for his wallet and handed over his license. Parks examined it, trying to keep a smile off his face. “Okay, Chuck ‘Green,’ you get in your car and don’t stop driving until you get back to Beckley. And if I ever see your pimply puss in my part of town again, I’ll bust you. And my guess is that Daddy will take that expensive toy of yours away and probably cut off your allowance. Now get your candy ass out of here.”

  Parks looked over at the other man. “And Darius, you must be fucking desperate, standing out in this crap just to score a twenty. Get your butt home and take care of your old man,” he said as he pulled away.

  He hadn’t made it to the corner when the dispatcher radioed, “Car Eighty, priority one, a possible ten-seven at 785 Rich Street,” referring to a burglary.

  “Copy. This is Car Eighty. I’m at Gift and Culbertson.” Parks flicked the siren and light switches on the console just as the same message appeared on a computer screen mounted on the dash. He spun out at the corner and fishtailed into a snow bank. He rocked the car to free himself from the drift. The wheels spun for a few seconds and finally released. He backed up and then put the car into gear and drove slowly down Gift Street, remembering his father’s words when he was teaching him how to drive one winter in his old pickup and he had swerved out of control. His father had l
ooked over at him and said in a reassuring voice, “Virgil, easy, boy. This ain’t one of them racehorses. Don’t jam the brakes; just cut your wheels into the skid.”

  “Come in Eighty, this is Eighty-three,” a voice said over the radio. “How far away are you?”

  “Just coming up on Gift and State,” Parks said.

  “Suspect is a white male, wearing a plaid flannel jacket and jeans, and heading east on Rich toward Lucas,” the officer in Car Eighty-three said. “Dispatch has alerted the chopper. Swing down to Rich and come in from there. We’ll approach from the east.”

  As Parks reached Rich Street, he spotted a man in a plaid woolen jacket and brown boots running across the intersection. He jumped out of his vehicle. “This is Eighty,” he shouted into the microphone hanging from the radio on his heaving chest. “Suspect is on foot on Rich, near the Davis intersection. I need backup.”

  Seconds later, Dispatch affirmed, “Cars Eighty-one and Eighty-three are responding.”

  The man turned briefly when he heard the sound of Parks’s thick black shoes crushing the snow behind him. Then he cut through an empty lot at Davis Street and disappeared into the backyard of a run-down house. The whirl of the police chopper’s blades four hundred feet overhead became louder. The pilot in the copter spotted the man behind a snow-crusted hedge and radioed the information down to Dispatch, who relayed it to the officers below. Parks flipped open his holster and drew his .38 revolver.

  “This Kevlar is really heavy, man,” the officer from Car Eighty-one said as he plodded up from Rich Street. “Where is he?”

  “Behind the hedge.” Parks wheezed as he struggled to catch his breath. He took cover behind a car in the driveway. “This is the Columbus police,” he shouted, trying to make himself heard over the din of the chopper. “You have no way out of here. Come out slowly with your hands in the air.”

  “Fuck you, asshole. I ain’t goin’ no place,” the man yelled.

  “You’re the asshole!” Parks spat. “We’ve got all day, but the longer you make me stay out in this shit, the more pissed I’m going to be when I finally nail you.”

  By now, there were four patrol cars blocking the street, and four officers crouched behind open doors with their guns drawn. Suddenly, the man shot out from behind the hedge. He vaulted over a low metal fence into the next property. A police officer lay prone in the moist snow, thirty feet in front of him, his gun trained on the man’s heart. “Drop the knife or I’ll blow your brains out!” the cop ordered.

  The man stopped on a dime and shoved both hands in the air, a knife with a seven-inch blade in one of them.

  The officer cocked the hammer. “I said drop the fucking blade!”

  The man lowered his arms, the knife still in his right hand. Sweat poured over his forehead into his glazed eyes. He started toward the officer, now crouched down on one knee.

  “Don’t be an asshole,” the cop warned, his eyes widening. “Drop it!”

  The man stopped ten feet from the officer. “I’m goin’ to slit your throat and cut your heart out, motherfucker!” he said in a flat voice. Then he charged the officer, waving his knife.

  The cop got off two rounds. The man fell in front of him, his knife slashing through the officer’s sleeve. Two cops jumped on top of the man. One of them grabbed the knife, while the other one cuffed his listless wrists. “Code Ten-three at Rich and Davis. Officer down!” one of them shouted into his microphone. “We need two ambulances!”

  *

  Virgil Parks knocked on the front door of 790 Rich Street, a few houses away from where the knife-wielding man died from his gunshot wounds. A tall man, in his late thirties, unshaven, and wearing black trousers and a stained white dress shirt, opened the door. “Are you the new tenant?” Parks asked.

  “I’m the owner,” the man replied. “What can I do for you?”

  “You were the one who rented to that Watson guy who got busted?”

  “What do you want?” the man asked again.

  “There was a robbery a few doors down,” Parks said. “Was wondering if you saw or heard anything?”

  One of the ambulances rounded the corner, its siren wailing. The man flinched and shuddered. “Nothing,” he said. “I didn’t see anything.”

  “Got a new tenant yet? I know someone who may be interested.”

  “I’m going to be here for a while,” the man said.

  “How long?” Parks asked.

  “Depends,” the man replied.

  “On what?” Parks asked.

  The man reached for the doorknob. Parks shoved his size-thirteen shoe in the gap between the door and the frame. “Wait a second. What’s your name?”

  The man stared down at the floor. “Nick Grant,” he said.

  “Lawrence Grant, the hotel guy’s son? I thought you looked familiar,” Parks said. “Great guy, your father. Comes by the station all the time with food and stuff for us to give to some of the more broke folks in the Bottoms.”

  “Please just leave me alone!” Grant said, slamming the door shut.

  7

  FBI Special Agent Maggie Parks pulled her black Crown Victoria into the underground garage at 500 Front Street, took the elevator up to her cubbyhole office beside the weapons storage room on the tenth floor, and dumped her suit jacket on the extra chair. The red light on her phone was flashing. She picked up the receiver, dialed her code, and listened to the message. Then she dialed another number. “Hello. This is Betty. I just received the tablecloth you ordered. When would you like to pick it up?”

  “Today would work for me,” the voice on the other end said.

  “Fine. I’ll look forward to seeing you at the shop in about an hour,” Maggie said before replacing the receiver.

  *

  A tall silver-haired man wearing a camel-hair overcoat and a dark gray suit marched into the Claremont, at Sycamore and High Street. “I’m meeting Maggie Parks.”

  “If you’ll follow me,” the maître d’ said, turning back toward the dining area. “She’s already here.”

  He led the man to a red vinyl booth underneath a large copy of Edward Hopper’s The Diner. After the maître d’ walked away, the man asked nervously, “Can your boss deliver the deal?”

  “I can’t promise anything. In the end, it’s up to the DA. But if you give us everything, I’ll make sure the assistant director leans on him.”

  “Not good enough,” Lawrence Grant said. “I need to know for certain.”

  “The only thing that’s certain, Mr. Grant, is that if you don’t give up everything you know—and I mean everything—I’ll bust you and pile up as many indictments as I can. My guess is you won’t see this restaurant again until you get a letter from the president congratulating you on having lived to be a hundred years old.”

  “You don’t get it, do you? I’m going out on a limb here and I need to know my ass is covered.” Grant picked up a bread stick and ripped the wrapping off with his long spatulate fingers.

  “You couldn’t be in worse shit than you are already.” Maggie wasn’t about to cut him any slack. Screw him, she thought; he’s just another greedy businessman. “We’ve got a file on you as thick as a Bible,” she warned.

  “Don’t bust my chops, Agent Parks. I mean it!”

  Maggie slid out of the booth and stood up. “I guess we don’t have anything more to discuss, Mr. Grant. But I’m sure Bruno Pascale would be most interested in our conversation here today,” she said, pulling a miniature recorder out of her jacket pocket.

  Grant blanched. “Okay, okay,” he said. “Sit down.”

  “And if I do, will I get it all?” Maggie asked, not budging.

  “Christ! I said okay, didn’t I?” he said, wiping his forehead. “Just sit down, goddamn it!”

  Maggie grabbed the edge of the table as she sank back onto the banquette. She stared at Grant, taking in the sun spots splotched on his face and the crevices embedded deep in his forehead. It was hard to imagine that this respected businessman who o
wned interests in hotels, motels, and other real estate was a money launderer, working hand in hand with Bruno Pascale and Tommy Castellano, cheating the government out of millions of dollars in taxes, while legitimizing dirty money from drug deals for the mob. Maggie had placed undercover agents in three of his hotels in Operation Deep Sleep. Within a year, she had everything she was ever going to get on him, but what she really wanted was Castellano and Pascale, so she’d persuaded her boss, Leo Rigby, to cut Grant a deal.

  “I can deliver Castellano, but I don’t know about Pascale. He’s too far up the food chain,” Grant said. He paused for a moment, the amber light from the chandelier giving his face a macabre and sinister look. “It looks like they’re going to move more cash down here. Things are getting too hot up in Cleveland. They’re talking about giving me a lot more—maybe up to two hundred thousand a day, four or five days a week.”

  Maggie expelled a long breath. “Two hundred?”

  “They’re setting up shop over at the Langham apartments, down by the bridge,” Grant said. “It’s going to be big.”

  Grant knew that $200,000 was an exaggeration, but that’s what he figured it would take to get Maggie’s attention and prod her to get him a good deal. That’s how he had operated all his life, starting when he was just fifteen and had been routed out of a basement hiding place in the Jewish ghetto in Pest, Hungary. His father had owned a small shop on the Buda side of the Danube and had been at work at the time. Grant had tried to convince his parents that they should flee the country. His father believed—or wanted to believe—that the Communists weren’t going to follow the same path as the Nazis, and they, as Jews, would be safe.

  Grant had felt the cold steel of a Soviet rifle against his cheek. His knowledge of Russian was rudimentary, but he spoke some German, and with the help of sign language, he had convinced the pimply young soldier that he was doing some work for the owner of the small house on Goroz Street and was not one of “them.” That, and a few coins, had bought him his freedom.