The Inside Man Page 7

The door opened, and Paulie’s six-foot-ten silhouette filled the entrance. He relieved Levi of his burden and whispered, “The safe room’s ready.”

  ###

  Levi squeezed the capsule of smelling salts under the mobster’s nose. The unconscious man lurched away from the sharp smell of ammonia, straining against the leather bindings that held him to the metal chair bolted to the floor.

  Following the man’s movements, Levi kept the capsule directly under his nose until the man’s eyes opened wide.

  “Rise and shine,” Levi said calmly as the man squinted against the bright lights aimed directly at him. In the room were three of Levi’s mob associates, including Paulie and Sonny. Men he trusted implicitly. “I have a few questions for you. You answer them, and you’re free to go.”

  The man strained against the loops of leather once more and spit at Levi. “Fuck you and your questions.”

  He spoke English like a native. Maybe he was one. Levi knew practically nothing about this guy.

  “Listen, this doesn’t have to go down hard. I have a few questions that I need answers to. The cops are looking for you. Worse yet, the feds want you real bad. Bad enough that they reached out to me.”

  “Who the fuck are you?” The man moved his head back and forth, trying to see past the glare of the lights. “I haven’t done shit.” The mobster began yelling at the top of his lungs for help.

  The men in Levi’s crew just stood back and smiled.

  Levi let the man continue for a full minute before he said, “This room is completely soundproof. Nobody will hear anything.”

  Paulie took a step closer to the captive, bringing his huge arms came into view, and clenched his fist. His knuckles popped loudly.

  The captive’s lip curled with disdain. “Go ahead, beat the shit out of me. I’ll remember you fuckers and I’ll get you back in spades.”

  Levi chuckled as he studied the scratches on the man’s face. “It looks like you got into a catfight. Tell me about it. How’d you get those scratches?”

  “Fuck you.”

  With a lightning fast movement, Levi smashed the heel of his hand against the man’s nose, resulting in a sickening crunch.

  Blood spurted down the man’s face, and for a moment, Levi thought he’d need another one of the smelling salt capsules. But the man shook his head, blood splattering everywhere, and he smiled with blood-streaked teeth.

  “Is that the best you’ve got?”

  Levi held his open hand out toward Paulie and he felt the handle of a ball-peen hammer being placed in his palm. He waved the hammer around, as if testing its heft. “Listen to me, my friend. It’s completely up to you how far this goes. Let me go ahead and explain—”

  “Or what, you’re going to brain me?” The mobster sneered, blood dripping from his chin. “You’re boring me.”

  Levi grinned at the captive and shook his head. “Oh, I wouldn’t do that. It would end the fun. Believe me, you’ll talk to me. Even if I have to give you a transfusion to keep you alive, you’ll be talking.” He waved the rounded head of the hammer in front of the man’s face. “You know, I’ve never actually hit anyone on the head with a hammer. It’s not really my thing. I’m not a violent person. In fact, I’d rather not have anything to do with violence. But here I am, looking at someone who has a story to tell, and he’s not talking to me.” He looked over his shoulder at Paulie. “Doesn’t that hurt your feelings when someone doesn’t want to tell you his story?”

  Paulie nodded and shared Levi’s smile.

  Hitching his thumb toward Paulie, Levi leaned closer to the mobster. “You’re hurting my friend’s feelings, and that’s rude.” He slammed the hammer down on the man’s pinkie, smashing the bones into tiny shards.

  The mobster screamed with pain and lurched against his bindings.

  Levi made a tsk-tsk sound. “You see that? That’s not good when the bed of your fingernail turns blue like that. That means I crushed all the blood vessels in the finger. If it isn’t treated soon it’ll turn black and you’ll probably lose it. A pity, really. All I wanted was your story.”

  The man’s breathing was ragged from the pain, but he was alert.

  Levi had seen a variety of reactions to torture. Some people caved before it ever got physical. Others needed shots of adrenaline to keep their heart pumping. Some even needed the help of so-called truth serums to relax them, to weaken their resolve. Levi didn’t know how far, this guy would go, and he didn’t care. This mobster had killed a father and husband, and he’d done it right in front of the man’s family. There were few things Levi could imagine that were worse. The Bianchi family, the particular branch of La Cosa Nostra that Levi was affiliated with, they frowned on such things.

  Levi stared into the man’s face and growled, “Where did you get those scratches from?”

  The mobster closed his eyes and gritted his teeth for a second before answering. “Will you let me go if I tell you?”

  “It depends on if I believe you. Make me believe your story.”

  The man took a deep breath and let it out slowly. “Fine. My brother’s funeral was a closed casket one. We never really knew why he’d gotten so messed up in the accident. And then there was a guy. Someone gave me some photos of him and proof that he’d tortured and killed my brother.” The mobster’s voice grew thick with emotion. “I was just getting revenge on the bastard who killed my brother. He was a sick fuck too. Tortured him and practically shredded his body.”

  Levi motioned for the man to stop. “One thing at a time. Who gave you these photos?”

  Bubbles of blood dripped from the man’s nose as he screwed up his face in thought. “I don’t know. Some envelope just showed up at my place. Slid under my door.”

  “Do you still have the photos?”

  He nodded. “At my apartment.”

  Sonny had the mobster’s wallet. He read the address from the man’s driver’s license.

  “Ya, that’s my place.”

  “Is it near here?” Levi asked.

  “Ya, real close.”

  “Where do you keep the photos?” Levi asked.

  “In my sock drawer in my bedroom.”

  “You live alone?”

  The man nodded.

  Levi placed his thumb onto the man’s broken finger and spoke with a tone full of warning. “If we find out you’re not being honest with us, I’ll make sure you live, but you won’t have the use of your arms, legs, or anything else”—he glanced meaningfully at the man’s crotch—“that you hold dear. So, I’ll ask again.” He pressed on the broken remains of the man’s pinkie. “Are you telling us the truth?”

  “I am.” The man nodded vigorously and squirmed with discomfort.

  Levi turned to Sonny. He was one of the family’s best second-story men. “Sonny, go check out the man’s sock drawer and bring back whatever you find.”

  Sonny, who was a tiny guy, built like a jockey, soundlessly slipped away.

  Levi turned back to his prisoner and smiled. “Now, tell me about those scratches. Tell me about the day you got them. Don’t leave out any details.”

  ###

  Levi studied the photos Sonny had brought back from the Asian mobster’s apartment. They were taken in what looked like the remnants of a bombed-out building, and they were pretty bad.

  Two people were featured. Mendoza, whom Levi recognized from the FBI case file, and a naked Asian man with burnt skin and bloody gashes across his body. His forehead was particularly messed up, and there was a misshapen dent where his right cheekbone should have been, as if he’d been hit with something heavy.

  In one of the pictures, Mendoza was smiling for the camera as he relieved himself on the other man’s naked body.

  This must have been the Asian mobster’s brother.

  Levi held his cell phone in one hand and the pictures in the other. He was torn about what he was about to do.

  They’d already moved the unconscious mobster
to another location. The pickup spot. He had no way to explain or excuse what he saw in these photographs, and a part of him felt that Mendoza probably deserved what he got.

  He sighed as he shoved the pictures in his pocket and dialed a number.

  “O’Connor.”

  “Hey, it’s Yoder. I’ve got eyes on Mendoza’s killer.”

  ###

  The tinny sound of a bell greeted Levi as he walked into Gerard’s, a hangout of his in his old neighborhood of Little Italy. In the old days, the bar seated no more than a dozen customers and there was room for only six tables, but now the place was under expansion. The aroma of basil and garlic hit Levi as he entered, and a deep voice greeted him from the newly expanded room that would eventually be the bar’s kitchen.

  “Hey, Levi! How can you know this mameluke for so long and never teach the guy to make a proper marinara?”

  Levi smiled at Gino “Three chin” Romano, a three-hundred-pound mobster stirring a large pot on the newly-installed stovetop. Denny, the owner of the bar, was paying close attention to the ingredients Gino tossed in, but he glanced up at Levi with a look that said he needed rescuing.

  Levi nodded toward the fat man. “Hey, Gino, you going to make some pasta to go with that?”

  “What do you think?” The round-faced mobster looked as if he’d been insulted. “I’ve already showed my guy Denny how to roll out noodles and use a chitarra for my classic spaghetti alla chittarra.”

  It was midday, the day after Levi had given up Mendoza’s killer, and his stomach rumbled, reminding him that he hadn’t eaten since yesterday. Gino’s specialty was that damned spaghetti he handmade and cut on a traditional Italian pasta cutter that looked like a bunch of guitar strings in a wooden frame.

  “All right, but you’ll need to get on it without Denny’s help. I need him.”

  Gino wiped his hands on the towel he’d tucked into his expansive waistband and motioned Denny away. “Go on, I’ll finish this up.”

  Denny walked over to Levi and gave him a wink. “Maybe I shouldn’t have told Gino that I didn’t know much about cooking and Rosie would be doing all the cooking for the bar.”

  Gino overheard. He yelled across the bar, “The best cooks are all men, you just remember that!”

  Levi laughed, put his arm over Denny’s shoulder, and led him toward the back of the bar. “Listen, if he’s getting pushy, I’ll take care of it—”

  “No, nothing like that.” Denny waved Levi’s words away. “I actually like learning new stuff, and he’s certainly enthusiastic. It’s no problem.” He jabbed Levi playfully in the ribs. “I’ve been around you people long enough. I’m no church mouse. I’ve got a voice.”

  “Good.” Levi nodded approvingly. He’d felt a bit weird about some of his mob associates starting to hang out at Denny’s place. After all, it had been his hangout for years. But once Levi had gotten back into the business, and recruited Denny to help with some security items the family had needed, some of the guys had taken a liking to Denny.

  It was an association that amused Levi, because he couldn’t have imagined someone less Italian than Denny. Denny was a black guy, born in Queens, with an IQ that rivaled that of the smartest folks in the world. Yet he got on great with his mob associates, and in turn, Denny’s legit business was booming.

  In the back, out of sight of the front room, Denny pressed his finger against a spot on the tiled wall. Something in the wall clicked, and Denny pushed open the hidden door to his secret back room.

  ###

  Denny scanned photos from the Mendoza case into his computer, and frowned as they started to pop up, one by one, on his monitor. Damn, Levi. This stuff’s nasty. It reminds of those Abu Ghraib pictures—you know the ones, that prison in Iraq that hit all the papers.”

  “It’s bad stuff, no arguing that,” Levi said. “I just need to know what I’m dealing with. After what you’ve told me about how photos can be messed with, I wanted you to give me your opinion on these. That guy in the photos, the living one, is supposed to be a fed.”

  A new image of Mendoza flashed on the screen, and Levi winced. Mendoza was smiling for the camera, one foot planted directly on the head of the battered, naked body on the dirt floor.

  “A fed? Why the hell would he pose like … I guess it takes all types.”

  Denny picked up a photo, flipped it over in his hands, sniffed at the paper, and shook his head. “This didn’t come from any photo lab. Someone printed this on photo paper, probably from a good quality inkjet printer.” His fingers were a blur as he typed. “Let me mask off parts of the picture and see if I can do a fragmented reverse-image lookup.”

  “Denny, try speaking non-techno-geek for a moment. What did you just say?”

  The screen became a blur of images popping in and out of view. “If I had an electronic copy of the original photo, I’d be able to tear it apart and figure out if it’s a fake pretty darn quick, and maybe even where it was taken. But since I don’t, and the quality of these pictures kind of sucks, it’s hard to tell if they were digitally manipulated. Which, if I wanted to send someone a doctored-up photo, this is how I’d do it. Anyway, I’ve snipped out a piece of the background image and I’m scanning all of the images that I can find on the internet to see if there’s anything out there that looks like a partial match.”

  Levi was somewhat proud of himself for having followed all of that. He watched photos of broken buildings near war zones flip in and out of view. “Got it. And what if you—”

  “Bingo!” Denny pointed to an image. “A perfect match.”

  Levi leaned in, grabbed the original photo, and compared it to what was on the screen. “Holy shit, that’s the same scene, but the fed isn’t there. And look, where the body is, they blurred it out for the paper, but whoever printed this photo had access to the original. What the hell?”

  With a few keystrokes, the picture zoomed out and a newspaper article showed the headline, “Meth Lab Explodes in Elmira Heights.”

  “Levi, the photo with that fed posing on the dead body is starting to look sketchy.”

  Shock registered as Levi processed this new information.

  Denny’s fingers became a blur again as he typed. “I just grabbed a mask of the fed with that pose. Let’s see if that shows up somewhere.”

  Almost immediately after he submitted the query, an image of Mendoza popped up on the screen. It was him with the same pose, but instead of one foot perched on a dead man’s head, it was perched on a soccer ball. The caption under the photo stated that Anthony Mendoza was the new soccer coach for the YMCA in Queens.

  “Son of a bitch.” Levi realized that the mobster he’d just handed off to the FBI had been set up. But why the hell would someone try to get some street gang hoodlum to go after an FBI agent?

  “You want me to check the rest of these?”

  Levi closed his eyes and leaned back in the metal folding chair he’d been sitting in. “Yes. I want to know if any of them are real.”

  As Denny typed away at the PC, he glanced at Levi and said, “Oh, by the way, I’m expecting something to arrive tomorrow that I want to show you. One of my other customers prepaid for a custom piece and then his situation changed, so he didn’t need it anymore. It’s just weird enough that you might find a use for it.”

  Levi waved dismissively. “I have enough guns for now.”

  “It’s not that kind of piece. Trust me, you’ve never seen one of these.”

  Levi opened his eyes and stared at the back of Denny’s head. “Oh?”

  Leaving an image of Mendoza on the screen, Denny hopped out of his chair and said, “Hold on, now that I’m thinking about it, I need to grab something to measure your eyes.”

  “My eyes?” Levi watched as Denny jogged past him and disappeared into a maze of shelves loaded with all sorts of gadgetry. He came back lugging what looked almost like a misshapen microscope with a chin rest.

  Denny motioned for Levi t
o come closer. “This is a keratometer. It’ll measure the curvature of your cornea so that I can fit another custom job to your eyes.” He adjusted the chin rest. “Okay, just put your chin here and press against the forehead rest.”

  “And you have to measure my cornea for this?” Levi frowned, but then shrugged and placed his chin on the device. “Okay, whatever.”

  “I think you’ll get a kick out of it.” Denny sat on the opposite side of the optical instrument and adjusted some knobs. “Just stare at the reflection of your eye and keep the other eye closed.” He examined the machine, adjusted more knobs, then scribbled something on a piece of paper. “Okay, all done. I’ll get something fitted for you as soon as I can, but come by tomorrow. I’ll have finished the upgrade of your hat, and I think you’ll like those changes too.”

  Levi mumbled a positive response and focused once again on the screen where Mendoza’s face stared blankly at him. Who would have set up Mendoza to be assassinated? And who would have had access to the unblurred images from a meth lab explosion?

  “Okay, picture number two is fabricated as well,” Denny said. “Moving on to the next.”

  “Figures,” Levi growled.

  His mind drifted from Mendoza to the Tanaka mob boss’s granddaughter. He really needed to get back down to the DC area to continue his investigation. Were there any other clues, any communications to the mother? He needed to interview her again. Maybe he missed something.

  And then there was O’Connor. He’d be expecting something on the Wei and Nguyen cases, and the only lead he had was a member of the Tanaka syndicate who was missing. Maybe Yoshi’s brother would be some help with that.

  Denny’s computer beeped, and he exclaimed, “Oh shit, Levi. Helen Wilson’s Gmail account just received an e-mail with a wave attachment.”

  “A wave attachment?”

  “You know, a .WAV file. A sound file.” Denny clicked on the mouse, and a little girl’s voice came over the speakers.

  “Mommy. It’s Tuesday and I’m okay.”

  The girl’s voice was followed by the sound of something being pressed against the microphone. Then a synthesized, almost robotic voice.