Chapter 7 Eddie

7

Eddie

‘You've got to have some idea who wants you dead that bad,' said Jimmy.

I shook my head.

‘Look,' said Jimmy, ‘we can buy you some time. Nobody in New York is going to take that contract. Guaranteed. I heard about this last night and we put the word out. That goes for Jersey too. You still got a lot of respect on the street, Fly Man, and the old bosses remember you. If any of their crew take on this paper, I cut their balls off, and then I give the rest of them to the Lizard.'

The Lizard was another mutual friend – one of the most feared hitmen in New York. He worked for Jimmy, and anyone who needed to disappear got a visit from the Lizard and he took them home to meet his pets – twin Komodo dragons named Bert and Ernie who could dispose of a two-hundred-pound body, skeleton and all, in under an hour.

‘I talked to all the major crews. Everybody. No one is going to touch you. Not the Koreans, the Albanians, nobody. We're all making money. No one wants to start a war over fifty grand. Trouble is, that kind of dough will attract outside contractors. Guys in Miami, Chicago, even Texas. There's word that Angel is considering the job. He's a sniper. One of the top hitmen in the country. I don't think the juice is good enough for him to get on a plane, but we're keeping ears to the ground. What we need to do is figure out who put out the hit.'

‘I told you, I've no id—Wait. You said none of the crews were going to touch it.'

‘That's right. I got their word. They don't want trouble with me. Everyone's making too much money to create that kind of noise.'

Right then, I knew exactly who had put out the hit. I suspected Jimmy had a good idea too, and he was just teasing it out of me.

‘But there's one crew you didn't talk to,' I said.

He nodded.

‘Because they don't play by the rules,' I said. ‘I can't think why they'd come after me, but it seems the only logical choice, doesn't it?'

He nodded, said, ‘New York's Finest.'

Police in the city are given the moniker of New York's Finest – and you see that emblazoned on the side of their patrol cars. That name also goes with the crew of criminal police officers embedded in the NYPD who, among the city's criminal fraternity, operate under that name too.

‘You piss off any cops lately?' he asked.

‘I'm a criminal-defense attorney. If cops aren't pissed off, I'm not doing my job.'

‘You know what I mean,' he said.

That's when I remembered. Sergeant Ben Gray. The tow-truck scam.

‘There was a cop on the DA's No Fly List I came up against recently. Couple of weeks ago I got a gun possession case tossed on an illegal Terry stop. I got the cop to admit the stop was bad – otherwise I was going to interrogate him about kickbacks from towing companies. Cop was Sergeant Gray, and he was dirty, but I figured it was strictly low-level. I can't believe they would come after me for a fifty-buck tow-truck kickback? It just doesn't make any sense.'

‘Kickbacks add up. Say eight to ten tows a week. That's, what, five hundred dollars? That's twenty-six grand a year. Say you've got thirty cops on the towing scam. That's nearly eight hundred thousand, and fifty percent of that is handed in to the boss, Buchanan. That's a big operation all of a sudden, but it don't matter. What I've learned is that nothing in the PD is low level. Last year, twenty cops lost their jobs on the fines scandal . . .'

Cops were taking back-handers to lose or toss speeding and parking fines. When you're NYPD, taking a hundred bucks to look the other way is the same as taking a hundred grand of dope and selling it to kindergarten kids. It's all above the red line.

Jimmy continued: ‘Two cops died before they went on trial. They were friends of Buchanan's for thirty years. He made it look like suicide, but I know he killed them both. Buchanan is terrified of another internal-affairs investigation – and another twenty cops out of a job or on trial. One of them might know something. New York's Finest are hurting now. I heard one of their suppliers, some piece-of-shit human trafficker upstate, got arrested. They make millions from those poor kids.'

‘Jesus, I didn't know they were connected. Bloch took him down, for God's sake.'

‘Then that seals it. It's Buchanan that's coming after you. Until you know for sure, stay low. We can put somebody on the front door of your office and your apartment, if you want.'

‘Put somebody on my ex-wife, and my daughter. Not close. Within shooting distance. I don't think they would make a play for my family, but you never know. It's not like I'm in hiding. I don't need your guys at my door. I've already got Bloch.'

‘Fair enough. What are you going to do?'

‘I can't think right now. I've got other things on my mind that are more immediate. The district attorney is holding a press conference this afternoon – and he's about to ruin my client's life and I can't let that happen. Do you know Castro?'

‘Never met him. He was offered an introduction. Standard for new DAs. He declined. I got no leverage with this guy. That's not to say he's clean. Nobody is a hundred percent clean in this town. I figure he's already partnered up the ass with somebody else. And he's got an election on the way.'

Justice is a hammer. Castro had to make sure he went into this election cycle with a big juicy conviction in his back pocket. Jackson was about to become a high-profile case, and Castro would ride that victory all the way to the ballot box. He had a serious challenger for the election in Morgan Montgomery – former chair of the NAACP, gifted civil-rights lawyer and philanthropist.

‘I've got to do something to take the heat off this case. Castro is going to try and turn this trial into O. J. Simpson part two.'

‘What can you do?'

‘I'll think of something.'

‘That's what I'm afraid of. When you're using that big brain of yours, don't forget there's a price on it. Somebody, sometime, is gonna try and collect.'