Cover Story Page 4

  He lifted the tablecloth and knocked once more.

  4

  The bar was the Bull and Thistle, one of those faux Irish places around Times Square.

  I eased my way along the aisle between the bar and the tables, squeezing by a knot of young white guys who were crowding to see the television. When I popped out on the other side of the scrum, Butch Casey looked up from a table along the wall and grinned.

  I smiled as I walked toward him, and he stood and gripped my hand, patted me on the upper arm.

  “Jackie,” Butch said, “you’re looking great.”

  “You, too, Butch,” I said.

  “Yeah, right.” Butch started looking over my shoulder for the waitress. I turned as he caught her eye and held up two fingers.

  “No, Butch. That’s okay. I’ll just—”

  “No, it’s on me, Jack. A coupla Jamesons for old times’ sake. Just like the old days, huh? After this, we’ll go up to the museum and prowl the halls. Remember that time we grabbed all those lobsters, let ’em loose in the ladies’ room? I was thinking about that the other day. Jeez, Jackie, it’s good to see you.”

  He gave my arm another tap and we sat, and he picked up his nearly empty glass. I looked at him.

  His reddish hair was streaked with gray. His forehead was flecked with brown spots. His taffy-pull features—ears that stuck out, a hook nose with a bump—had been exaggerated by age. But his arms were long and his hands were big and he still had a boyish look to him, like somebody’s big brother. He reached out and squeezed my arm again and said, “Hey, you been working out, you pencil-neck reporter.”

  And then the waitress came and banged two whiskeys on the table, like in a Western saloon, except for the gold ring through her left eyebrow. Butch picked up the fresh drink, raised it in a toast.

  “To Jack and Butch,” he said. “Back on their turf in Midtown.”

  He took a small sip, just a touch.

  “I gotta be careful now,” he said. “I got into it kinda heavy, after Leslie . . . after she died.”

  He looked away for a moment, then back at me.

  “Stuff can get hold of you, you know? Now I try to just have one or two, like my old man did. He liked his beer but he wasn’t a drunk. Funny, how you’re a grown man, you still look to your dad as some sort of model. Eighty-five, in a rocking chair, and still saying, ‘What would Dad have done?’”

  He shook his head. I smiled. A minute into the conversation and Butch already was pondering some twist of human nature.

  It was our common ground, all those years. I listened to people and wrote their stories. Butch studied their aberrations and put them in jail. We compared notes, swapped tales. Butch envied my ability to put life into words; I envied his opportunity to see so much firsthand. Neither of us lost our sense of wonder at what people did, and why.

  I sipped the whiskey and grimaced.

  “Quit drinking?” Butch asked.

  “I tend to just have a beer with dinner now, leave it at that. There’s this small brewery up in Maine and their India pale ale is pretty good.”

  “Yeah, they got ’em all over the place now, these little places,” Butch said. “I remember when you either had a Bud or a Miller. Sometimes we had a few of each, remember?”

  I nodded. He glanced toward the bar. The bartender was a thin man, with graying hair pulled back in a ponytail. He looked at Butch and their eyes met, then the man turned away.

  “Don’t tell me. You arrested him at some point.”

  Butch looked at me, startled.

  “Who? Oh, him? Nah. But I do see them sometimes, even in New York. Like being a teacher, you know what I’m saying? Everywhere you go, you see your old students. The other day, I get in a cab. The driver’s this guy I got for shooting this other guy after he found the guy in bed with his wife. Just emptied the gun into the son of a bitch. Guy lived for, like, three days with all these holes in him. But they were small holes. They thought he might make it. Anyway, there he is—the shooter, I mean. Musta done twelve out of twenty. He’s out and he’s driving the cab. I say, ‘Hey, how’s it going?’ He says, ‘Pretty good. How ’bout you?’”

  “Like soldiers meeting the enemy after the war.”

  “Right. But hey, you don’t want to hear that, buddy. Tell me, Jackie, how you been?”

  “Good. Great. But how are you doing? Really.”

  Butch paused, turned his glass around in his hand. He looked impaled by the question, but then he shook loose.

  “Good. I mean, fine. Hey, I’m getting paid to sit on my duff now. And living back in the city, there’s lots to do. Things to see.”

  “Yeah?”

  “I’m doing all the things I never did in New York when I was on the job. Christ, first ten years I never went to a show or a concert. I don’t think I’d been to a museum since we were kids. I mean, Leslie dragged me a few places, but being a cop, you get so you don’t know anybody else. Just cops and bad guys. And snitches, of course.”

  He stared into his drink, then looked up again.

  “Get this. I’ve been to a poetry reading, for Christ’s sake.”

  “You’re kidding.”

  “No, really. I’m a man of letters. I read a lot. I’m doing Melville right now.”

  I smiled.

  “Hey, you laugh. But I didn’t get to do all this stuff in some fancypants college like you, Jackie. I was taking ‘Modes of Death’ while you were reading goddamn Walter Whitman. So I’m catching up.”

  “Still working on your book?”

  Butch looked away.

  “Ahh, I guess it’s on hold. Kinda lost momentum.”

  “I liked the idea, Butch. All the people you arrested in twenty years.”

  “Except I got as far as year two.”

  “It was a good title. Mug Shots: A Memoir.”

  “I thought so, too. I mean, this wasn’t gonna be just war stories. It was gonna be a study. Try to come up with some conclusions, you know? I mean, if it was just about locking up bad guys, so what? I want it to be more than that.”

  “I’d buy it,” I said.

  “Yeah, well. Maybe one of these days.”

  His smile was gone. His eyes were far away. And then he came back.

  “So, I got my routine. There’s a place down the street from me, I pop down for my drink. Lady runs the place, Linda, is a friend of mine.”

  My eyebrows twitched.

  “Nothing like that. She’s gay. Lesbian. Whatever you want to call it. I go in the place one day and it’s empty and I sit at the bar. In an hour it’s me and twenty-five women.”

  He snorted.

  “Linda still tells that story. Hey, but she’s a helluva good kid. We give it to each other, going back and forth, you know? She cracked up when I told her my name was Butch. Calls me her token Irish cop.”

  “So you’re doing okay.”

  “Oh, yeah. Fine. Now, what are you gonna do? Cover the boonies for the Times?”

  “Stringer, they call it. Paid by the story.”

  “You still live in—”

  “Prosperity.”

  “Oh, yeah.”

  “What the hell they call it that for, anyway?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “Maybe it was wishful thinking.”

  “Like Greenland,” Butch said.

  “Right. Prosperity is right alongside towns named Freedom and Liberty.”

  “Jeez. Sounds like some kind of right-wing theme park. You got cans of peas buried in the backyard? Ammo stockpiled?”

  I smiled.

  “No, but we’re well-armed.”

  “Just like here.”

  “But where I live they tend to shoot deer, not people.”

  “Well, that’s ’cause you got more deer than people. If we had deer in New York, we’d shoot ’em, too, especially if they were carrying money.”

  He caught himself and seemed to wince inwardly. I looked away this time. Mercifully, the waitress came by.

  “Oh, I g
uess we could have two more,” Butch said, looking up at her. “For old times’ sake.”

  “Is this a reunion?” the waitress said.

  “Yeah. This is my old friend Jack McMorrow. Reporter for the New York Times, so watch what you say.”

  “Hi, there,” the waitress said, and smiled and left.

  “You think she dyes her hair blonde or her eyebrows black?” Butch said.

  He grinned again, but it seemed forced.

  “So Jackie, I’ve been wanting to come visit you up there. One time I even got out the map. But you know, you draw a line, you’re north of Montreal? This was December or something and I said, ‘Jesus, Butchie. Why not just go to Siberia for vacation?’”

  “Maybe in the summer.”

  “That would have been nice.”

  “What do you mean, ‘would have been’? You still could do it, right?”

  “Sure, some summer.”

  “Anytime. I’ll introduce you to people who’ve lived on the same road for five generations.”

  “Hey, in the Bronx, you had five generations in one apartment. You’d arrest three generations the same night. Junior, Dad, and Gramps, all lined up against the wall. Babies crawling around the floor. A kilo on the kitchen table.”

  I smiled.

  “So I gotta meet this buddy of yours, the one with the girl’s name,” Butch said.

  “Clair?”

  “Yeah. What’d you say he was? Some goddamn Green Beret type?”

  I sipped, put down my glass.

  “He was a Force Recon Marine.”

  “What’s he do, live in a tree house with trip wires in the bushes?”

  “No, he’s got a nice house. Big place with a barn and tractors. He lives with his wife, Mary. We cut wood together. Me and Clair, not Mary.”

  Butch sipped and swallowed. His whiskey was two-thirds gone.

  “She musta put up with shit, huh? Married to some goddamn commando. Sitting home worrying while he’s out crawling around in the jungle. Kind of like—”

  He paused, catching himself. His red face darkened as he slipped inside himself, sinking before my eyes.

  “Like my wife,” Butch said, with a rueful smile. “Except she wasn’t sitting around worrying. She was waiting for me and I was late.”

  He paused and then snapped back with a smile.

  “Never put your job first, Jackie. Remember that.”

  “Butch, that’s not why she was killed. She was killed because some psycho picked her out. Some animal.”

  “Picked her because she was alone. And she was alone ’cause I didn’t show up. And I didn’t show up ’cause . . . Did I ever tell you about that, Jackie?”

  I shook my head slowly. He gave a brief, unfunny laugh and shook his head, too.

  “Yeah, well. Maybe a few more drinks. You know, I wanted to try to make sense of it, all this killing. I don’t want to think it’s just—”

  “Chaos?”

  “Yeah. I mean, what’s wrong with these people, anyway? I mean, she gave him the car. So drive away. I mean, you don’t get in the car and then shoot the person right there on the curb. For no reason.”

  I didn’t answer.

  “And then that bastard Fiore lets the guy walk. We coached the witness. Yeah, right. Didn’t have to coach anybody. The lady saw that scuzbag there. She was scared to talk, and I told her not to be, that the other cops were good people. End of story.”

  “Butch.”

  “And you go to bat for me and that little City Hall prick Dave Conroy gets you practically canned. I’m flushed down the toilet. And now they’re talking about Fiore for Senate. Running for president, the son of a bitch. You know what I should have done? I shoulda just taken care of that mutt myself, screw Fiore. No arrest. No trial. Just give me the name. They find Ortiz in the trunk of a car down by the docks someplace. I shoulda just . . .”

  His voice trailed off. “Sorry.”

  “It’s okay,” I said, but it wasn’t really. It had been a long time. Why was this wound in him still so raw and open?

  “Jack, we gotta talk,” Butch said, leaning closer.

  “I thought we were talking.”

  “No, I mean, really talk. Jack, I’ve been looking into all of this.”

  Butch glanced down at his watch. Then looked around the room.

  “Let’s talk outside.”

  He stood, flipped a bill onto the table, and started for the door. I followed.

  Outside, the air was moist and warm and smelled of grease and garlic, smoke and exhaust. We stood on the sidewalk for a moment, and I glanced up the block, where Times Square glowed and crowds flowed. When I looked back, Butch had moved close.

  He leaned forward, and in the sidewalk light, his eyes were unblinking, afire, the look of someone obsessed.

  5

  “I’ll give you the Reader’s Digest version,” Butch said, his voice low. “You know I still got friends.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Friends on the job, I mean.”

  “Right.”

  “Well, I ran into this guy I used to work with. Young guy. I mean, he was young when I first started working with him. Whatever.”

  “Whatever,” I said.

  “We’re in the bar at this Mexican place on the Upper East Side. I mean, I like hearing what’s going on in the department. So anyway, we get talking and I’m saying, ‘Am I the only person in all of goddamn New York who hates Johnny Fiore’s guts? I mean, me and the shitbums who are in jail ’cause the mayor knows putting people away is good politics?’ And this guy says, ‘You’d be surprised, Butchie.’ I say, ‘Whaddya mean?’ He says, ‘You just don’t hear about it.’”

  Butch paused.

  “Hear about what?” I said.

  “Hear about the people who hate his guts. This cop says he was just given a case where some nut calls City Hall and starts screaming about the mayor. ‘He’s a bastard. He’ll burn in hell. He killed my brother.’”

  “So? This is New York.”

  “Hey, you’d be surprised, but New Yorkers, they like their mayors. I mean, sometimes they hate ’em, but they like hating them. It’s like the Mets in the old days. I mean, look at Fiore. He goes around the city with nobody around him. Just him and maybe a uniform cop, but no security. Not like the president or something.”

  Butch’s eyes narrowed knowingly. It gave me an odd feeling.

  “So?” I said.

  He smiled and leaned away, then back to me.

  “So he looks into it. This guy I’m talking to. He looks into this threatening thing.”

  “Yeah?”

  “For about twenty minutes. And then he gets the word, from way up high. Forget it.”

  “Guy says, ‘Why? This is a threat to the mayor. Lemme at least make some calls, stop by, maybe make this mutt piss his pants.’ Except it’s a lady.”

  “Who made the threats?”

  “Yeah. And they don’t want anything said about it. No arrest. No report. No nothing.”

  “Huh,” I said.

  “And you know what else?”

  “What?”

  “I’m not the only one,” he said.

  “Only one what?”

  “Who this guy burned. Listen to this, Jack. There’s lots of us. This Johnny-Fiore-we-love-you shit is a scam, Jack. The Hispanics love Johnny Fiore. The blacks love Johnny Fiore. The Jews and the West Side Wasps love Johnny Fiore. The East Side Yuppies love Johnny Fiore. The second coming of Jesus H. Christ.”

  He paused. I waited.

  “Bullshit,” Butch said.

  “Yeah?”

  “The cops. The press. They’re all in on it, Jack. They were all in on it when you were here. It started way back when, back when fuckhead Muriqi-Ortiz, whatever the hell he called himself, he murdered my wife. Fiore used my wife. He used these other victims, too. And when he couldn’t milk ’em anymore, he tossed ’em out.”

  I looked at Butch. The sidewalk was full of people and voices and noise, but for a mome
nt it seemed to go still. And I felt a shudder of déjà vu that brought me back to every other conspiracist nut I’d listened to over the years. Interviews where I’d suddenly stopped taking notes.

  “I got facts, Jack,” Butch said.

  “Yeah, I know, Butch, but these kinds of stories are hard to—”

  “I got names. I got dates.”

  “Okay,” I said. “We’ll talk about it.”

  “You could take the lid off this city, Jackie. There’s a pattern of abuse of the criminal justice system. Not now. Back then. I’ll get you the stuff.”

  He started to ease away.

  “Well, maybe, Butch. But I don’t really even cover New York anymore. Not for the Times.”

  “You could sell this story anywhere. The Voice. Right up their alley.”

  I didn’t answer.

  “I’ll get you those names, Jack. I got documents.”

  “Okay. We’ll talk about it some more.”

  I stepped aside as three women passed, dressed for the theater.

  Butch stepped, too, staying with me.

  “This could be the story of your career, Jackie.”

  “I suppose it could be, Butch, but it would take a lot of work.”

  “I’ll help you. I mean, you don’t have to pay me or anything. But this story is huge. Really, really huge.”

  “We’ll see.”

  “When are you going back to Maine?”

  “Tomorrow,” I said.

  “I’ll get it to you.”

  “What?”

  “The stuff.”

  “Oh,” I said. “Okay.”

  “The Meridien, right?”

  “That’s right. But I’m checking out in the morning.”

  “It’ll be at the desk. It’s a hard story to explain. You gotta see it for yourself.”

  “Okay,” I said, and I stepped off the curb and held up my arm. A taxi swerved toward me and stopped.

  “You want to take it?” I said.

  “No, you can have it,” Butch said, backing away.

  “I’m only going twelve blocks.”

  “Yeah, but that’s okay. I gotta find a men’s room,” he said.

  I looked at him. “You okay?”