The Midnight Club Read online

  The wife of the man who owned the building had suffered a stroke and now had to face life in a wheelchair herself. The tragedy had sensitized her husband to the predicament of the wheelchair-bound in the city. The two of them had personally examined every walkway and building entrance from the point of view of someone coming or going in a chair.

  Stefanovitch grabbed an hour-and-a-half nap at the apartment late that afternoon. Then he was back in the van, driving out to Coney Island, in Brooklyn.

  At around seven o’clock, he arrived at one of the amusement park’s sprawling parking lots. Several hundred people were already gathered in a blockaded area, which had been closed to regular traffic. Stefanovitch had never seen so many people in wheelchairs.

  His own speed-racing chair had been customized by his father and his brother, Nelson, in Pennsylvania. They had given him the racer that past November. It weighed only twelve pounds. Unlike old-fashioned chairs, which made people look handicapped, the sports chair was sleek and jet black. It had twenty-eight-inch-high tires.

  Stefanovitch’s brother and his father had apparently seen the van heading into the lot. They came running as Stefanovitch was pulling his racer out of the back. They’d driven all the way from Pennsylvania to see him race.

  “Look at this.” Nelson held up a wrinkled Day-Glo T-shirt, an obvious gift for the night’s big event. The shirt said “Mike’s Submarines—Eat the Big One in Minersville.”

  “What race you in, Stef?” his father asked as they started away from the van, headed toward the main-event area.

  All around the crowded parking lot, Stefanovitch observed the victims of accidents, of crippling illness, and of wars, especially Vietnam. Everybody looked so pumped up tonight, excited as hell. Stefanovitch found that he was, too.

  “I’m in the miracle mile. Maybe my stamina will make up for some technique and experience I’m missing. Some of these guys, and the women, are amazing.”

  A handsome, outdoorsy-looking man with sun-bleached blond hair and a beard suddenly came up alongside them. Stefanovitch had met Pierce Oates at his first race, about five months back. Amazingly, John Stefanovitch had come in third in a field of ten, most of them racing vets. He had caught Pierce Oates’s appraising eye right off.

  “You going to give me some competition out there tonight, man?” Pierce had a broad, charismatic grin. His racer was fire-engine red and looked fast.

  “I’ll do my best. Pierce Oates, this is my father, Charles Stefanovitch. My big brother, Nelson. They came all the way from Pennsylvania. My whole family’s nutty like that. The family is a big fan of the family. Same thing happens for a Pillsbury bake-off if my mother has her angel food cake entered.”

  “That’s terrific. I love it. Just to watch me whip your tail?” Pierce’s smile seemed carefree, even after all that had happened to him.

  “How are you, Pierce? Nice to meet you.” Charles Stefanovitch shook hands with the man in the wheelchair next to his son. “You beat Stef, you get to wear the Mike’s Subs T-shirt next race.”

  “That’s all the incentive I need.” Pierce Oates whooped loudly and laughed. The muscular, sun-bronzed man then veered off to mingle with the other racers.

  “He’s a little overexuberant, but he’s great,” Stefanovitch said to his father and brother. “Some of these guys are tremendous athletes. What they go through to be here is incomprehensible. You can’t even imagine.”

  Charles Stefanovitch leaned down close to his son and he spoke to him in confidence. Stefanovitch’s father was a quiet man who had never in his life told Stef that he loved him, never actually used the words. Physically, he was tall and lean, almost noble in his bearing. His son John had once had a similar bearing.

  “Just do the best you can, Stef. Nobody can ever ask for more than that…Win this one for Mike’s Submarines.” The old man finally cracked a wry, country smile.

  It took another twenty minutes to get the participants in the miracle mile ready at the start. Stefanovitch spotted Pierce a few places down the line. The two of them laughed and flashed victory signs. He could tell that Pierce was primed to kick his butt, ready to mop him up in the four-lap race.

  He remembered two things Pierce had told him about racing the first time they’d met. One was to watch the lead racer, no one else. Otherwise you could get lost back in a slow pack and wind up completely out of the race.

  The second thing was that the difference between first place and the middle of the pack was a matter of how you stroked your wheelchair. Stefanovitch had been working on his stroke almost every night in Gracie Square Park, even out on the streets of New York while he was working.

  The starter’s pistol suddenly exploded, and the fifteen men in wheelchairs accelerated off the line with surprising quickness and agility.

  18

  THIS WAS HIS first really top-drawer competitive race, and he wanted to do respectably. Certainly, the torture sessions at his gym had given him a body that looked as if it could compete with the others. He’d know soon enough.

  The lead racer for the first quarter-mile was a black guy in a fireplug-red T-shirt and white visor. He was burning up the track. Stefanovitch wondered if he could last at that pace. He doubted it, and he was right.

  In the second quarter, the black racer dropped back to second. Then to third. Stefanovitch stayed in his position, about halfway back in the pack.

  The new leader was in a low-slung racer that looked like a soapbox-derby special.

  Pierce Oates was in third place now, stroking beautifully. Pierce looked as if he could race at that speed all day.

  The third quarter was physically and mentally tougher, even in the middle of the cruising pack. Stefanovitch’s arms began to tense up, becoming hard as rock, petrified from the biceps down into the finger joints.

  He started to panic. He was losing steam, noticeably so. He wondered about the others. He was jerking the chair instead of stroking. The other racers all looked smooth and relaxed.

  Another racer passed him, a balding, willowy man with “Stokes-Manville Games” emblazoned in bright blue on his shirt. Stokes-Manville was the important international race held in England every year. If the willowy guy had competed there, he had to be good, and dedicated, too.

  Stefanovitch didn’t feel like he was gliding now. His arms were almost rock-hard; the pain was spreading like fire into his upper shoulders.

  If he had anything left, he had to make a serious move soon. If he had anything left.

  He went for it at the start of the fourth quarter. A strong shot of adrenaline kicked in. Second-wind time. Pride, fear, one or the other was working on him. Fingers of some powerful unseen hand were making him stroke.

  He passed Stokes-Manville.

  Then the bullet-headed black guy who had led the race in the beginning.

  Pierce Oates was moving into the lead now. Pierce looked invincible. He was stroking, really stroking!

  A fast final quarter would take about fifty-five seconds in a top wheelchair race. He’d done that well in practice. The average mile time might be anywhere from three minutes and forty-five seconds to four minutes.

  The pain in his arms was excruciating—his biceps were numb. His chest was on fire.

  The crowd was screaming at all the racers. They were really into it. That part of the feeling was great, exhilarating and completely unexpected.

  Each breath Stefanovitch took roared through his lungs. He felt as if his chest were being torn apart.

  He had to make his move. He had no idea what he had left inside, how much of the second wind remained.

  He kept his eyes on Pierce Oates’s golden yellow shirt, the sheath of his back muscles.

  The stroke is everything, he reminded himself one more time. Nothing but the stroke mattered.

  Faces flashed by, cheering wildly on either side. His eyes were glazed now, fixed on the golden shirt weaving a few yards in front of him.

  Someone threw water all over him and the wetness felt wonder
ful. The dousing relieved the fire inside. Only for a few seconds, but that was okay. He still had his wind.

  It was like he’d said to his father—he was coming back now. That was why the race was important. Stefanovitch was coming back from the dead.

  Both his arms were petrified stone, but the lightweight chair was flying. His stroke couldn’t have been better.

  His arms and his stroke were one fluid motion. All the torturous sessions at the Sports Center were finally paying a dividend.

  He had almost caught Pierce. Almost, but not quite.

  It was exactly the way he’d dreamed about this race while he trained every night in New York. Except that he couldn’t pull away from the other man.

  He and Pierce were streaking toward the winner’s line and the largest part of the cheering crowd. They were almost even. Both were yards ahead of the third and fourth racers.

  He couldn’t take Pierce, though. He couldn’t get ahead of Pierce Oates. He couldn’t do it.

  He wouldn’t let Pierce take him either. He couldn’t let that happen now.

  “Your hand… Your goddamn hand!” Pierce was suddenly screaming at him.

  Stefanovitch didn’t understand—then he did.

  He reached out his hand, finally touching Pierce, connecting with him.

  The two of them sailed across the finish line together, clutching each other’s hands like teammates. Christ, they were teammates. The wheelchair boys.

  Stefanovitch’s brain was screaming. He hadn’t felt anything like this since before Long Beach, before the shootings.

  He saw his brother and father in the crowd. He spotted his father, and the old man was smiling, but he was crying, too. In their thirty-five years together, he’d never once seen his father cry, not for family weddings, christenings, or funerals. Not once before right now.

  Pierce Oates was hugging him, too. Everything was going to be all right somehow. For one night, anyhow, Stefanovitch was back.

  19

  Isiah Parker; The East Side

  IT WAS A little past nine-thirty and traffic on Third Avenue was getting noticeably lighter, moving at a steady pace. Isiah Parker and Jimmy Burke waited in front of a closed, darkened Doubleday bookstore on the corner of Fiftieth Street.

  Both men were dressed in beige linen suits. They looked like any of the businessmen still slouching out of high-rise offices on the midtown avenue. Isiah Parker had often speculated that a mugger or thief who dressed like a successful businessman in Manhattan would probably never get caught, never be stopped and questioned by most street cops, anyway.

  When he finally saw the Caddie limo approaching the fancy awning in front of the Smith & Wollensky Steak House on Third, his mind went blank. He concentrated on nothing except what had to be accomplished in the next ninety seconds.

  “Let’s walk,” he whispered to Burke, standing at his side. “We’re East Side businessmen. We’ve had a nice supper for ourselves. We do this right, nobody will remember us. We’re invisible men.”

  John Traficante and the consigliére James O’Toole were feeling full of the good life after two Steak Wollenskys and several cocktails inside the East Side restaurant. Traficante, a first underboss in the New York Mafia, was also known in the underworld as Johnny Angel, the Angel of Death. This presumably had to do with the number of murders he had committed since growing up in the mob-spawning grounds of Howard Beach and later Canarsie, in Brooklyn. Traficante had been the favored hit man inside the Lucchese family. He had remained “hands-on” as he rose all the way up through the ranks. His murder victims included a federal judge, several New York policemen, a newspaper writer, and potential witnesses, including women, and two young children on Long Island.

  O’Toole, the lawyer, pushed open the glass and mahogany doors as they left the steak house. They passed a couple waiting for a cab under the forest green canopy. Caesar DeCicco, their bodyguard-driver, was opening the front door of Traficante’s limo.

  “He’s a good boy,” Traficante said of his forty-seven-year-old bodyguard. “Loyal as a pet snake.”

  Some jerk in a business suit wasn’t looking where he was going out on the Third Avenue sidewalk. He bumped into O’Toole, then brushed against Traficante’s Gucci suit.

  “Hey…hey, easy. Whutcherrush?” the gangster bristled.

  “I’m sorry. Excuse me, sir. Sorry,” Isiah Parker said.

  The Uzi appeared out of nowhere.

  A short burst followed, and the stocky bodyguard, DeCicco, was thrown bouncing up on the hood of the Cadillac.

  The couple walking toward their cab dove to the ground, the woman shrieking. Patrons inside the restaurant suddenly stared at the scene in horror. The maître d’ went down on the floor.

  A Colt Magnum flashed against Traficante’s mottled face.

  “Cop killers,” Isiah Parker hissed at him. “Scumbag.”

  The Magnum fired twice under Traficante’s chin. It lifted the mobster’s head right off his shoulders.

  Parker dropped the gun right there. He and Jimmy Burke quickly, but calmly, walked down East Fiftieth to a waiting Buick Skylark. The two N.Y.P.D. detectives disappeared inside, and the nondescript sedan drove off.

  Invisible men.

  20

  John Stefanovitch; One Police Plaza

  AT A LITTLE past eight in the morning, Stefanovitch propelled himself between the double-glazed front doors and into the main lobby of One Police Plaza. He had two newspapers, a New York Times and a Post, folded over his lap. The news was all bad. “MAFIA HEAD SHOT DOWN! MOB WAR RAGES.” His high from Coney Island was definitely over.

  A used and battered VCR had been set up by Audio-Visual in a cozy interrogation room near his office. By eight-fifteen, he was viewing the first of the videocassettes that had been discovered at Allure.

  As he watched the tape, Stefanovitch kept thinking about St.-Germain’s words, the phrase the two call girls had heard him use. “Are you from Midnight?” For years, there had been stories about something called the Midnight Club. Supposedly, it was a small group of crime lords who controlled organized crime around the world. The precise makeup of the Club remained mysterious.

  Had the secretive Club ordered the deaths of St.-Germain and Traficante? Who inside the Midnight Club would be giving the orders? What might be on the sex tapes from Allure?

  Stefanovitch had decided to watch the videotapes alone. He couldn’t imagine what might be recorded on the tapes, but he didn’t want anyone else there when he found out. Crime figures? Powerful New York businessmen? Entertainers? Politicians? Members of the Midnight Club?

  The fewer people who knew what was on the tapes, the less complicated and political the murder investigation was going to be.

  Sarah McGinniss was hunched forward inside a Checker cab. She was trying to leaf through some of her files on Alexandre St.-Germain as the taxi sped down the West Side Highway.

  Much of the material in her St.-Germain file had been compiled by an unusual researcher, a former Organized Crime Task Force member. According to the files, many of the women involved in high-level prostitution weren’t professional hookers these days. They were more likely to be aspiring types in the glamour professions: models, actresses, women who worked at employment agencies, film-production houses.

  According to her source, the super-rich didn’t have to exert themselves much in order to obtain sex. If they were at a Mortimer’s in New York, at Chasen’s or Spago’s in L.A., the maître d’ might have the names of available women, or men. The same was true at exclusive hotels. Bordellos like Allure operated in several cities around the country: Los Angeles, Miami, San Francisco, Las Vegas, Houston, Dallas, even Cincinnati and Cleveland, and much smaller cities as well.

  Sarah finally shut the folder holding her notes. At eight-thirty, the Checker pulled up in front of its destination downtown. Sarah jumped out and hurried up the front steps, then across the pedestrian mall into Police Plaza.

  She checked the name she’d scribbled in her
notepad—Lieutenant John Stefanovitch.

  21

  “SHIT. CHRIST ALMIGHTY, what? what is it, Bear?”

  The first images had no sooner flashed onto the VCR monitor screen when Bear Kupchek entered the darkened office and interrupted the movies. Stefanovitch reached over and flicked off the set.

  “I told you I wanted to screen these by myself.”

  Kupchek’s doughy face twisted itself into a frown. “I heard you the first dozen times. I think I understand the situation. You want to be alone with the dirty movies.”

  “So what’s the problem? I have about a hundred hours of tapes to watch before lunch.”

  Kupchek was jiggling change in the pockets of baggy gray trousers that looked like the pants of an old man. A plastic protector for pens stuck out from his white shirt pocket. Kupchek was about as stylish a dresser as the guys who hung out at the OTB betting parlor near Stefanovitch’s apartment. All his clothes looked borrowed from someone who’d had his heyday in the Depression.

  “I just took a message for you from reception down in the lobby. A Ms. Sarah McGinniss is on her way up now. Ms. McGinniss has the P.C.’s permission to screen the home movies. She’s a writer of note. Apparently, she traded favors for some inside things she knows about St.-Germain. Make your day?”

  “I heard something about that. The captain mentioned her to me. Listen, there’s no way some investigative reporter, writer, whatever she claims to be—”

  Stefanovitch stopped himself in midsentence. He had no choice. Someone—presumably Sarah McGinniss—had just entered the room.

  “Good morning,” she said in a pleasant, very low-key voice. “Lieutenant Stefanovitch, I’m Sarah McGinniss. The writer you were just mentioning?”

  Somehow, Stefanovitch succeeded in masking his frustration. He managed to smile, and muttered hello to the slender, dark-haired woman at the door. She was no Kay Whitley, but she was attractive, certainly not what he’d expected when he heard a writer was coming around.