The air on my arms was so cold, the hairs stood up and seemed to freeze like icicles, and my skin was raw and rough as paper.
“Let’s talk about the toys you sell off the back of a truck, dolls for little girls, say.”
“You don’t got nothing, do you?” Shank was two inches from my face. “Or maybe you got some prints on some toy dollies, is that it?”
I didn’t say anything.
“Who’s going to indict me because I sold a couple hundred dolls that fell off the back of a truck, like they say, so to speak, and some of the same type ended up at a toy store off Fifth fucking Avenue and another one on Madison, and some ended up in Chinatown, you think anyone’s going to indict me for that?” Shank said. “There’s hundreds. I sold hundreds of them. A big item for little kids. So someone got hold of a few and stuck ’em on ice. Yeah yeah, I heard about it. So fucking what? Now get the fuck out of here.”
On the street, I pushed past Shank’s guys who were standing too close to my car. Sammy Britz came after me.
“You shouldn’t push Shank like that,” he said, still holding his can of Diet Coke. “He has a temper.”
“Fuck you. You told him I came to see you, you owe me now.”
“In that case, here’s something else,” said Britz flicking imaginary dust off his little lapels.
“Yeah?”
“You gonna try to pin the dolls on Shank?”
“I have to go.”
“We’re even now, right, detective?”
“No.”
I could see Britz doing his accounts in his head.
“Shank told me when he was keeping an eye on your nephew, he noticed the kid was always holding a cell phone, like he was taking pictures with it, never took his eye off it, that anything you can use? I mean tell me, ’cause I don’t like to end the week with owing people, you know? So does that make us good, detective, does that even us up?”
Britz was more anxious than I even remembered him being, and I let him hang around for a few minutes while I patted my pockets for a pack of cigarettes, fiddled with the door of my car, enjoying the pinched, scared look on his violent little face.
“So?”
“So I’m thinking, we’re even.” Britz worked on the Diet Coke he held, and even when the can was empty he sucked on it like a baby sucking on its mother’s tit, like he couldn’t get enough. “You know, Detective Cohen, Shank told you like it is.”
“Like what is?” I said.
“Whatever he does is for his brother, Heshey,” Britz said.
“He never gave a rat’s ass about Heshey, who was only his half brother, the kid from his father’s second wife, the Russian Jew he hated,” I said. “Come on, Sammy, you want your accounts evened up, don’t you?”
I opened my car door, and made to get in.
Britz leaned down, dropped the Coke can in the gutter, and stamped on it, smashing it up like the little plane on Coney Island beach.
“You really got to him when you mentioned the daughter and the grandkid.”
“So?”
“Yeah, well, the husband, Debbie’s husband, Shank’s son-in-law, it was him didn’t want their daughter anywhere near Shank or his pals. Debbie Shank didn’t say nothing about it, just went along with her husband.”
“Go on.”
“Your hand’s shaking,” Britz said. “You mentioned you went out to Staten Island recently, isn’t that right?”
Did I? I couldn’t remember. I kept my mouth shut.
“So Debbie and her family, they lived over there for a while, came back from Italy, moved into a place on Staten Island, out by the mall near Fresh Kills,” said Britz.
“Why would I care?”
“Debbie’s husband got nervous about Shank and they took the kid and moved some place upstate. Catskills, I think. Town of Accord. Cut themselves off from both families, Shank, her husband’s family, too,” said Britz. “His mother was dead, his father remarried. Another Russki, the second wife.”
“What’s the husband’s name?”
“Frank Laporello,” said Britz. “So are we even now?”
At Vera Gorbachev’s house there had been a tricyle in the yard. When I had asked if they had children, her and Al Laporello, she had said, “Not now.” Even then I had thought it was strange.
The house where May Luca had lived was shut up. There was a FOR RENT sign in the front yard, which was full of weeds. A filthy shriveled pink balloon clung to the low fence around the yard, and the remains of some rosary beads, and I remembered the night after May was murdered how people came with flowers and balloons and stuffed animals and candles, and stood for hours, praying, weeping, lighting candles, in the street. It had seemed an open and shut case: May’s body dumped at a nearby marina, a local crackhead who ran from the cops and got shot dead.
Now Sonny Lippert was working the case of another dead girl whose name I didn’t know, who lived somewhere near here, and there was evidence that the same perverted bastard who killed May had killed Jane Doe. Had killed others also, years earlier, cold cases that had been shelved.
I was already thinking about Stan Shank for the killer. His desperation to set Billy up, the fact that Billy and May Luca had been friends long ago, maybe it was Shank all along. Maybe he had wanted May Luca dead because his pal, old man Farone, had felt her up and she had talked; maybe it was Shank who killed the little girl in Jersey to set up Billy.
Vera Gorbachev had called me because her husband, Al Laporello, had disappeared, and Laporello’s son was married to Stan Shank’s daughter.
Where did I fit in? Was I in so deep I was dragging Billy down with me?
“Who is it?” Rhonda Fisher yelled through the door of Sonny’s apartment when I got there.
There was the sound of locks turning, a chain removed, the door opened, and Rhonda said, “Hi, Artie, come on in. Sonny’s asleep.” In the background John Coltrane played “My Favorite Things.” Sonny had a fancy Bose system and the sound was great.
“You don’t look so hot.” Rhonda kissed my cheek, invited me into the kitchen, and offered me a cold beer that I drank down in a couple of gulps.
Before Lippert let Rhonda into his life, there was nothing in the kitchen except a jar of stale Medaglio d’Oro instant espresso and bottles of Scotch; now there was food and some red mugs on the draining board and a bunch of yellow roses on a round table. Rhonda wasn’t living there, but she came around a lot and fixed things for Sonny.
Neatly stacked next to the roses was a pile of newspapers, copies of the New York Review of Books and the London Literary Review, which Sonny read religiously and discussed with me, or tried to. Once, during a long discourse on Charles Dickens and Darwin and if they ever met each other in London, I fell asleep over dinner.
“Sit,” said Rhonda, who had lost a few pounds – she told me she was into Pilates – and looked great. She was wearing a pair of white shorts and a red and white striped shirt, a pair of gold Italian earrings Sonny had given her, and she leaned against the stove, sipping tomato juice, glancing up once in a while at the portable TV on a shelf where a Yankees game was on.
“You look good,” I said, still standing. “The place looks good.”
“Thanks, babe, but tell me what you need,” said Rhonda. “And sit down. You’re making me twitchy.”
“He OK?”
“Sonny? He’s taking a nap, but yeah, he’s OK. I just wish he’d give it up, this thing is getting to him.”
“The dolls?”
“The dolls, the girl that got killed in Jersey, everything that goes down with children, he can’t stand it, he gets drawn back in. Should I wake him up?”
“I came to see you.”
“You want me to fix you something to eat?” Rhonda said.
“I need to know about your cousin, or whatever she is, on Staten Island. Vera Gorbachev. You asked Sonny to get me to go talk to her, what did she say exactly?”
“Didn’t she tell you?”
“You tell me.
Please.”
“She’s not my cousin,” said Rhonda. “Or maybe she’s a cousin but like really distant. Vera Gorbachev, I almost laughed out loud when I heard the name. So, anyway, I had heard way back from some of my mother’s family when they got to Brighton Beach, you know, like in the 70s or 80s when they all started coming, and I didn’t do fuck all. I wasn’t interested in a bunch of Russkis I had no relationship to, and I went once and it depressed the hell out of me, all those Russians talking about how they missed Russia, you know?”
“Do I ever.”
“So I didn’t do anything more except I sent some money and I felt kind of bad, in a not very important way. I planned on seeing them again,” Rhonda said. “You plan on seeing people, and you don’t. And then they move on, or they get old and then die.”
“No other reason?”
“I was busy. I was young, I was waiting for Sonny to like me,” said Rhonda. “It took me hours to get ready for work every morning so he’d notice me. I didn’t care about a bunch of immigrants, and anyhow I had already made it out of Brooklyn and into the city, what did I want to go back there for?” said Rhonda. “When this Vera Gorbachev moved over to Staten Island she called to tell me. I visited her once, I think I brought some smoked fish, chubs, I think, and I didn’t go back. I felt bad afterwards. Jesus, the Yankees really suck this season overall, in spite of the last few days,” said Rhonda, a rabid Yankees fan, as she looked up at the TV.
“So your cousin, or whatever she is, calls you out of the blue. When?”
“It must have been like, a week ago, ten days, something like that. Around then,” said Rhonda.
“Go on, so Gorbachev calls.”
“Yeah, she calls and says her husband disappeared. Someone came in the house and tried to rob them in the middle of the night, and the husband, what was his name, Al Leporello, something like that, chased the asshole down the street and then disappeared. She was a little hysterical, so I asked Sonny and he asked you.”
“Laporello,” Sonny said, wandering into the kitchen. “Laporello, honey, Leporello is a character in Don Giovanni, an opera by Mozart, libretto by Lorenzo da Ponte. Did you know da Ponte was the first professor of Italian up at Columbia University?”
“I know what that is, asshole, I know about Mozart,” Rhonda said, kissing him.
In dark green shorts and a white polo shirt, Lippert sat down, looked at the TV, then back at me.
“What’s going on?” he said.
“Artie wanted to know how come Vera Gorbachev called me,” Rhonda said.
“Yeah, go on.” Sonny took Rhonda’s hand and saw that I noticed him doing it.
“Fuck you,” he said under his breath, but he was smiling.
Rhonda shifted her chair closer to Sonny’s, and said, “So Vera calls me, and she says, I need some help. I don’t know anyone who speaks Russian out here.”
“Did Vera know that Sonny was connected to a Russian speaker?”
“Yes,” Rhonda said. “I could tell she knew about you, she didn’t say it by name, but who the hell else could it be, she said, your husband’s guy, the Russian who works for him regular.”
“Why didn’t you tell me?”
“Like I said, it didn’t seem important. I just asked Sonny if you would give her an hour, no big deal. I felt guilty. I should have called to say so. I put it off on you, Artie, and I’m sorry.”
Rhonda started taking platters of food out of the fridge and I sat on the edge of a kitchen chair. Couldn’t get comfortable. Pain from the beating I took still ran around my body.
Sonny’s new interest in food meant he practically rubbed his hands together watching Rhonda fix the food. She sliced bagels into three perfect slices – she said she had read Mel Brooks sliced his bagels in three and it was better like that – and toasted them. She fixed sandwiches from tongue, which Sonny loved, handed one to me and another to Sonny and made one for herself.
“Listen to me.” I leaned over the table towards Lippert. “Listen to me. I need help. I need to know who wanted me in the Laporello thing. Just help me, OK?”
“Yes, like I said, I’m sure they knew it was you,” Rhonda said. “There’s nobody else Sonny knows well that speaks good Russian. She must have known, but loads of people know you two are friends.”
For years Lippert told people he had invented me, that he talent-spotted me when I was a rookie and noticed I could speak some languages, and had an education. He told people and I hated it, him making out like I was his creature. Worse, he made me understand that I owed him something, some kind of fealty. I probably did, and maybe that’s what rubbed me the wrong way. I got over it, though. Everyone knew we were tied together. Even Vera Gorbachev knew.
“Vera Gorbachev needed a Russian speaker so bad that she called you, a distant relative she hardly knows at all, right, and she asks you to ask your big-deal husband to send one of his guys she knows is a Russian speaker, which means me, right?”
“Yeah, go on,” Rhonda said.
“How the hell did she tell you all this in English? You speak Russian, Rhonda?”
“I don’t speak Russian.”
“How did she talk to you?”
“She knew enough English.”
“You got the feeling she knew more than she let on?”
“Yeah, now I think of it,” Rhonda said. “Her accent was heavy but she could talk English pretty good. Jeez, you’re right, Artie. She’s been here a long time, she had a job, I mean, how the hell did she manage?”
“It didn’t bother you at the time?”
“I figured she wanted someone she could really communicate with, or maybe she was lonely for somebody from home. I don’t know, Artie. I didn’t think about it a lot.”
Sonny said, “Let’s go on the balcony for a smoke.”
“I don’t have much time.”
I followed Sonny into the other room. Rhonda stayed where she was in front of the TV set, watching the game.
We stood on Sonny’s balcony and smoked and looked at the river.
“You were making Rhonda feel pretty lousy,” Sonny said. “It was like you were interrogating her, man.”
“I had to know why Vera Gorbachev got Rhonda to get you to send me over to see her. I had to know if it was accidental or not.”
“Go on,” Sonny said.
“You still think there’s a connection between your dead girl, and those old cases? Including May Luca?”
“You want me to run the details by you? It’s DNA stuff, we got some stuff off the little girl that died in Jersey – her name is Ruthie Kelly, little Irish kid – that looks like a match for some of what we found on May Luca. I didn’t bother you with the details, shit like that, because I wasn’t asking you to work it, only to help me on the dolls thing and maybe ask Billy if he remembered May Luca.”
“I don’t need the details, I believe you.” I said. “I’ll ask Billy tonight. You remember Stan Shank?”
“Heshey Shank’s brother?”
“Half brother.”
I told Lippert what I knew about Stan Shank.
“I like that,” said Sonny. “I like that it fits. Fuck. I like Shank’s prints being on the dolls. Ruthie Kelly had her doll with her when she was murdered; I showed you that, right? I’m already checking it against the dolls in Chinatown. I’m impressed, man.”
“Thanks.”
“Maybe it’s time you came back to work for me,” he said, getting up.
“I have to go, Sonny.”
“Billy Farone still with you?”
“Why?”
“I’m just thinking, while Shank is still out there, is Billy safe?”
“It’s what I’ve been thinking.”
“Artie, man, I’m beginning to think you have to take the boy back to Florida. Keep him safe. Shank sounds like he could be some kind of serial nut.”
“Then pick him up.”
“I’m trying, man, I’m on it,” said Sonny. “But keep it in mind, what I just told you.”<
br />
“How soon you think you can pick Shank up?”
“Next forty-eight hours, I’m hoping.” Sonny already had his phone in his hand. “I want the bastard fast.”
“Shank likes big fishing knives,” I said. “That help at all?”
Sonny sat up. “Yeah, man, you fucking bet it helps. Let me get on the phone.”
I didn’t have forty-eight hours. It was Friday night. Stanley Shank was out hunting Billy, or finding new ways to set him up. Maxine was coming home Sunday. I couldn’t keep Billy locked up in my loft. Even if Johnny and Genia made it back before that, Genia was so febrile I didn’t know how she’d cope with her kid.
Billy would hate me. It would be a betrayal. I knew I might have to trick him to get him on a plane. I didn’t want him thinking about May Luca, I didn’t want him sinking into the past. Most of all, I wanted him safe and I couldn’t take care of him that way in New York now.
25
“Hold it. Hey!” A kid wearing a greasy yellow slicker held up his hand as soon as I got out of my car. He pulled at his scruffy goatee. “Just wait right there.” Behind him movie extras were attacking a table piled with food like locusts.
My block was jammed. From the number of vehicles stretching around the corner and the gangs of people, you could tell it was a big movie. Some of the crew were holding golf umbrellas. Didn’t notice they were making the street impassable. Didn’t care. Monster lights almost a story high lit up the dark night, sky the color of damp slate. Screens made of white and silver fabric reflected the light and the rain, which came down in slanted sheets, made it feel apocalyptic.
Vehicles with dressing rooms lined the side of the street opposite my building. A generator in a truck whirred noisily and it would go on all night. More trucks spilled rigging equipment. Fat teamsters sat around eating Danish and apple turnovers between meals. Thick coils of electric wire snaked along the curb. Extras crowded in doorways, trying to keep dry.
Fresh Kills Page 22
