Sixteen minutes later Charlie DeLuca and the two black guys and the other white guy came out of Raldo’s and walked to a green Jaguar Sovereign parked up the block. The black guy with the small eyes opened the trunk and took out two brown-paper grocery bags and gave one of the bags to Charlie and the other to the working-class white guy. Charlie’s bag was bigger and looked like it weighed more. As soon as they had the bags, the white guy went to a brown Toyota Celica and Charlie came back to his Lincoln and the two black guys got into the Jaguar. Nobody shook hands and nobody said so long, but everybody looked happy. Also, everybody went in different directions.

Portrait of the detective in crisis. Stay with Charlie or go after the black guys or the guy in the Toyota? Staying with the black guys would be hardest, and if they made me so soon after their meeting with Charlie, they’d tell him, and he might get scared and stop whatever he was doing. I went with the white guy in the Toyota.

We drove north to the Long Island Expressway, then east to 678 and then south through the heart of Queens to an exit that said Jamaica Avenue. Two blocks east of the Jamaica Avenue exit, the brown Toyota turned into a little parking lot next to a bright, modern cast-cement building with a sign that said BOROUGH OF QUEENS POLICE.

He parked in an empty spot next to a Volkswagen bug and got out with the brown-paper bag. He opened the Toyota’s trunk, tossed in the bag, then took out a cop’s blue-on-blue NYPD uniform and a gray gym bag. He closed the trunk, then carried the uniform and the gym bag into the station house.

I sat in the Taurus in the Borough of Queens Police parking lot for a very long while until a couple of cops with thirty years on the job gave me the bad eye, and only then did I drive away.

Amazing what you learn if you just wait and watch.

Chapter Twenty-nine

Twenty-nine

I called Rollie George from a pay phone outside a Korean market and gave him the license numbers off the cop’s Toyota and the Jaguar Sovereign. I told him that one of the black guys might be known as Santiago, and I asked him to get me anything on them that he could.

Rollie grunted. “I don’t like we got a cop in this. Maybe he’s undercover.”

“Maybe.”

“Yeah.” He didn’t say anything for a minute, but there was a lot of breathing. “You know, Elvis, I haven’t asked who you’re working for.”

“I know.”

After a while Rollie said, “Okay. I’ll run these and get back to you.”

“Thanks, Rollie.”

He hung up without saying good-bye.