“A thousand dollars an hour,” Berger says.
A thousand an hour, Malone thinks. An average patrol officer makes thirty.
“If you can let me walk out of here today,” Malone says, “I can get your first fifty hours in cash.”
“And after that?”
“I can buy another two hundred,” Malone says.
“It’s a start,” Berger says. “You have a house, a car, perhaps a story sufficiently interesting to attract a book or film purchase. All right, Sergeant Malone, you have a lawyer.”
“You want me to tell you what I did?” Malone asks.
“Oh my God, no,” Berger says. “I have no interest at all in what you did. It’s totally irrelevant. All that matters is what they can prove that you did, or think they can, anyway. What are the charges?”
Malone lays out what O’Dell told him—a slew of corruption charges, multiple counts of perjury and now grand theft and narcotics trafficking.
“This is in regard to the Diego Pena matter?”
“Is that a conflict for you?”
“Not at all,” Berger says. “Mr. Pena is no longer my client. In fact, he’s dead, as you know.”
“You think I killed him.”
“You did kill him,” Berger says. “The issue is whether you murdered him, and it doesn’t matter what I think. It doesn’t matter if you did murder him, and I’m not asking if you did, by the way, so please shut your mouth. So far, they’re not charging you with homicide. In fact, they haven’t charged you with anything, they’ve simply arrested you. So shall we invite these fellows in and see what they do have?”
O’Dell comes in with Weintraub and they sit down.
“I thought you were a decent man,” Weintraub says to Malone. “A good cop who got caught up in something and didn’t know how to get out. Now I know you’re just another drug dealer.”
“If you’ve now gotten your personal disappointments and the excoriation of my client off your chest,” Berger says, “may we proceed to substantive matters?”
“Sure,” O’Dell says. “Your client sold fifty kilos of heroin to Carlos Castillo.”
“And you know this how?”
“A confidential witness,” Weintraub says. “Louis Savino.”
“Lou Savino?” Berger says. “The convicted felon, known Mafioso, that Lou Savino?”
“We believe him,” O’Dell says.
“Who cares what you believe?” Berger asks. “It only matters what a jury will believe, and when I get Savino on the stand and cross-examine him about his past and the deal that you will have doubtless offered him to testify, I would say that it’s at least an even bet that the jury will not believe the word of a mobster against that of a hero police detective.
“If all you have is some fantastic tale spun to you by a drug dealer looking to avoid life in prison and whose multiple mug shots I will make wallpaper of in the courtroom, I suggest you release my client immediately, and with an apology.”
Weintraub leans over, presses a button on a tape player and Malone hears Savino say, “You let me worry about me. What do you want for it?”
“A hundred grand a kilo,” Malone says.
Weintraub pauses the tape and looks at Berger. “I believe that’s your client.”
He hits the tape again.
“What the fuck world you live in?” Savino asks. “I can get smack for sixty-five, seventy.”
“Not Dark Horse,” Malone says. “Not sixty percent pure. The market price is a hundred.”
“That’s if you can go straight to the retailer. Which you can’t. Which is why you called me. I can go seventy-five.”
“Let’s fast-forward, shall we?” Weintraub says.
Malone hears himself say, “We got Shark Tank going on here. Okay, Mister Wonderful, we’ll do ninety a kilo.”
“You just want me to bend over a headstone here, you can fuck me in the ass? Maybe I could go eighty.”
“Eighty-seven.”
“The fuck, are we Jews?” Savino says. “Can we do this like gentlemen, say eighty-five? Eighty-five thousand a kilo times fifty. Four million, two hundred fifty thousand dollars. That’s a lot of chocolate-glazed.”
The motherfucker was wired, laying pipe the whole time, maybe even since Christmas Eve when he was bitching about his bosses, how thin his envelope was. He was digging an escape tunnel in case he needed it.
Then he hears himself say, “Another thing, you don’t put this out in Manhattan North. Take it upstate, New England, just not here.”
Weintraub stops the tape. “Was that your attempt at civic virtue, Malone? Are we expected to be grateful?”
He hits the tape.
“You’re a piece of work. You don’t care there are addicts, just as long as they’re not your addicts.”
“Yes or no?”
“Deal.”
“It’s inadmissible,” Berger says, sounding bored.
“That’s debatable,” Weintraub says. He looks at Malone. “Do you want to bet your life on a Mapp hearing?”
“Don’t answer that,” Berger says. He smiles at Weintraub and O’Dell. “What I heard, and what I believe a jury will hear, is a police detective setting up an undercover drug sale to a mobster.”
“Really?” O’Dell asks. “If that were the case, Malone would have been wearing a wire. Where is the copy of that tape? Where is the warrant? Where is the approval from his supervisors? Will you be able to produce any of that?”
“It’s well established that Sergeant Malone is something of a maverick,” Berger says. “A jury will conclude that this was just another example of his going off on his own.”
Weintraub smirks and Malone knows why.
If Savino taped the meeting at St. John’s, he also taped the actual sale. Sure enough, Weintraub inserts another micro-disc into the machine and sits back. On the tape, Carlos Castillo says, “What, do you think we didn’t know how many kilos were in that room? How much money?”
“What do you want?”
“Diego Pena was my cousin.”
“Murder a New York Police Department detective in New York City? The world will come down on your head.”
“We’re the cartel.”
“No, we’re the cartel. I got thirty-eight thousand in my gang. How many you got?”
“How is a jury going to like a police officer bragging that the NYPD is the world’s largest cartel?” O’Dell asks.
“You can buy it,” Malone says on the tape.
“It’s generous of you, offering to sell us back our own product.”
“You’re getting a deal that this guinea motherfucker cut for you. Otherwise it would be bust-out retail.”
“You stole it.”
“I took it. There’s a difference.”
“I think we’ve heard enough,” Berger says.
“Please,” Weintraub says, “let’s don’t do the ‘This was an undercover operation’ thing. Where is the subsequent arrest of Castillo? Where is the impounded heroin? I’m sure it’s vouchered into an evidence locker. But I don’t think we have heard enough.”
“We going to do this or not?”
“It’s all there. Four million, two hundred and fifty thousand dollars.”
“You want to count it?”
“I’m good.”
Malone listens to the rest of his conversation with Castillo, then hears Savino say, “Always a pleasure doing business with you, Denny.”
The room goes silent.