'Now 1 was on the way to the hospital. I still had the guns in the trunk of the car, and I was late for picking up my brother. I must have been doing eighty miles an hour. I looked up from the Long Island Expressway and I saw the helicopter. I couldn't believe it'd picked me up again. I was driving along and looking for the plane, and as I sailed over the rise before heading toward the Midtown Tunnel entrance I saw a pile of cars stacked up every which way on the road. It's curb to curb, and I couldn't stop. I had a helicopter on my head, a trunk full of guns, and I was sailing along into a twenty-car pileup.
'I started to stand on the brakes. I pulled the emergency. And I still wasn't stopping. I cut the wheel into the curb and began scraping my way to a halt. I could smell the burning. I began to slow down and finally stopped just inches from the pileup. I was shaking. Finally they cleared the mess away, and when I got to the hospital, my brother's doctor took one look at me and wanted me to get in bed. I explained that I had almost gotten into an accident and that I had been partying all night, and he took mercy and gave me ten milligrams of Valium. I put my brother in the car and we headed home. My plan was to drop off my brother at the house and pick up Karen. Michael was having dinner with us.
'On our way back to my house I looked out the car window, and what do I see but the red helicopter. I watched it for a while and then I asked my brother, 'Is that helicopter following us?' He looked at me as though I'm on acid. But there it was, hanging in the air. As we drove toward the house the helicopter stayed with us, but even then my brother didn't seem to think that much about it. If it's anybody, I thought, it's got to be the feds. The treasury guys must still be looking for the guns. It has to be the feds. Only the feds have money to burn on helicopters.
'I was cooking dinner that night. I had to start braising the beef, pork butt, and veal shanks for the
'Karen and I were going over to Bobby Germaine's to give him the guns Jimmy didn't want and to pick up some money he had for me. I also had to get some heroin from him so that Judy Wicks, one of my couriers, would be able to fly out to Pittsburgh later that night with a half a kilo. Judy, who was a friend of the family, was already at my house when my brother and I got there. She looked like a Kansas preacher's daughter. That, of course, was what made her such a good courier. Skinny, dirty-blond hair, dumb pink-and-blue hat and crummy Dacron clothes out of the Sears catalogue. Sometimes, with heavy loads, she'd borrow a baby for the trip. She looked so pathetic that the only people who ever stopped her were Travelers Aid social workers looking to stir up business. Judy was going to hang around the house until I got back with the stuff. Then, after we had all had dinner, I was going to drive her to the airport for her flight to Pittsburgh.
'I was home for about an hour. I braised the meat. I squeezed the tomatoes through the colander-I don't like the seeds. I kept looking out the window. The helicopter was gone. I waited a while and listened for the noise. It seemed to have stopped. I asked Michael to watch the sauce, and Karen and I started for Germaine's. We were halfway there when I noticed the red helicopter again. But now it was really close. I could almost see the guy sticking his head out the window. I didn't want to take the copter to Germaine's hideout. And I sure didn't like driving around with Jimmy's guns in the trunk of the car. Karen and I weren't very far from my mother's, so I decided to drop by for a minute. Karen didn't ask any questions. I knew there was some overhead cover in my mother's carport, so I could unload the guns without being seen from above. When we got to my mother's house I took the guns out of the trunk and put them in her garbage cans. I sent Karen inside to tell her not to touch anything outside the house or around the garbage cans, no matter what. The minute I got rid of the guns I felt better. So I decided to shake the helicopter and go over to Germaine's and get the money and dope.
'I told Karen, 'Let's go shopping.' We drove to a giant shopping mall, parked the car, and went inside.
I was ready to spend a couple of hours walking around. Also, I wanted to call Bobby Germaine and tell him about the heat. I went to a phone booth in the mall and called him. I told him I wasn't coming with the guns. I said, 'I'm being followed, for Chrissake. I've had a helicopter following me all day.' He said I was crazy, I was paranoid. By four o'clock, when we left the shopping mall, the helicopter was gone. It must have run out of gas. Karen and I got in the car and drove back to my mother's. Still no helicopter. I looked for a land tail. Nothing.
'I got the guns from my mother's garbage. I told Karen we were going to Bobby Germaine's but we were taking the long way. She started to drive and drive and drive. We went from town to town. Up streets. Into cul de sacs. We made U-turns. We speeded up and then suddenly pulled over to the curb and stopped. Went through lights. The whole bit. I was checking cars and watching license plates from the rear seat. Nothing.
'Finally we got to Germaine's. He had the garden apartment in a house in Commack. When I got there I began to feel better. 'You see? Didn't I tell you you're paranoid?' Germaine said. We all laughed. I snorted some more coke, and soon it got me back together. Then Germaine gave me the package of heroin I was going to give to Judy.
'Now I've got to get home to get the package ready to give to Judy for the trip. I also had to get over to my girl friend Robin's house and give the package a whack with some quinine. I hadn't seen Robin in a few days, and I knew she was going to want me to hang around longer than I wanted to. I had the cooking to finish, and I had to get Judy ready for her trip, and I knew Robin was going to get on my ass. It was going to be awful. The phone rang. It was Robin. Germaine gave me a signal so Karen didn't know who was calling. Robin wanted to know when I'd be getting to her place. I said in about an hour. Could I stay for dinner? We'll talk about it later, I said. Now I know it's not going to be awful, it's going to be worse than awful. Then I called Judy at my house. I wanted her to know I had the stuff and that she would be making the trip to Pittsburgh. I said, 'You know what you've got to do?' She says, 'Yeah.' Judy had to make plane reservations to go to Pittsburgh that night with the dope. I said, 'You know where to go?' 'Yeah, yeah,' she said. 'You know who to call?' I asked her. 'Yeah, yeah, yeah,' she said.
'Then I told her to leave my house and go to a phone booth and make all the calls. She made a noise like I was some kind of idiot picking on her about things she already knew. 'Just make sure you leave the house,' I said. 'Don't use the house phone,' I said. So I hung up and what did she do? She used the phone in my house. She used the phone to make the reservations for Pittsburgh and to call Paul Mazzei and tell him when she'll be arriving. Now the cops know everything. They know that a package is leaving from my house for the airport, and they even have the time and the flight number. I'm a pig on the way to slaughter and I don't know it.
'As soon as I got back home I started cooking. I had a few hours until Judy's flight, and I had told my brother to keep an eye on the
'By eight-thirty we had all finished eating. Judy had an eleven o'clock flight. At nine-thirty she said she had to go home. What for? I said. She said she wanted to go home to get her hat. I'd been carrying a pound of heroin around in my jacket all day and I wanted Judy to start taping it to her leg. No, she said, she had to go home to get her hat. I couldn't believe it. I told her to forget it. I was exhausted. I didn't need a trip to Rockaway just because she wanted her hat. She got mad. I mean, she's insisting. It's her lucky hat. She needs it. She's afraid to fly without it. She always wears it. It was a blue-and-pink thing that sat on top of her head. It was the most middle-western, rube thing you ever saw. The point is, if she insisted, I had to drive her home for her damn hat.
'When I got into the car I suddenly realized that I was still carrying half a kilo of heroin in my pocket. I remember saying to myself, 'What do I have to drive around with this stuff for?' So while the engine was still idling I got out of the car and went back inside the house and stuck the packages in a recessed light near the entry steps. I then got back in the car and started to drive Judy home. I wasn't fifty feet out of the driveway when my car was blocked. There were cars all over the place. I thought maybe there'd been an accident in front of my house. Then I thought, It's my turn to get whacked for Lufthansa. I saw this guy in a windbreaker who popped up alongside the car and jammed a gun against the side of my head. For a second I thought it was over. Then he screamed, 'Make one move, motherfucker, and I'll blow you away!' That's when I began to relax. That's when I knew they were cops. Only cops talk that way. If it had been wiseguys, I wouldn't have heard a thing. I would have been dead.'
