Peril

by Thomas H. Cook

  He ran his fingers over the keyboard, playing the notes of “As Time Goes By,” giving it that bitter edge Mavis’ betrayal had taught him.

  Milo Barnes leaned back slightly, the scotch a little loose in his hand. “Where’s Lucille?” he asked.

  “Out sick,” Abe said. He closed the cover over the keys and glanced out over the nearly empty bar. “I should probably check on her.”

  He picked up the phone beside the register and dialed Lucille’s number. There was no answer. He’d called her a few times since early in the afternoon, attributed the fact that she hadn’t answered to a nap or a brief walk or maybe that she’d gone out for groceries, her laundry. But now he was worried.

  “I’m gonna check on Lucille,” he said to Jake as he grabbed his hat from the wooden peg near the bar. “She’s not answering the phone.”

  He knocked at her door a few minutes later, waited, knocked again, and when there was still no answer, unlocked the door.

  The apartment was pitch black, and something in the depth of the darkness told him what he’d find when he turned on the light.

  “Lucille,” he said quietly as he flipped the switch.

  She was lying on her back, eyes closed, one arm across her brow as if, in the last moments, she’d shielded her eyes against a blinding light. A bottle of Seconal rested on the table beside the bed, along with a half-empty glass of water. She’d left a piece of sheet music on the old battered spinet she’d once used to rehearse some song that had taken her fancy.

  “Lucille,” he repeated, and then stepped over to the bed and, in a distant hope he might be wrong, shook her gently. When she didn’t move, he touched her face, felt a strange slackness in her skin, as if life were little more than the force that kept things taut.

  The EMS ambulance arrived a few minutes later, then a couple of cops, one in plainclothes who introduced himself as Detective Melville.

  “I just have a few questions,” he told Abe. “You found the deceased?”

  “Yes.”

  “And you are?”

  “Abe Morgenstern.”

  “When did you get here?”

  “Just a few minutes ago,” Abe answered. “I called as soon as I found her.”

  “You’re a friend of hers?”

  “Yes. And she worked for me. McPherson’s. On Twelfth Street. She called in sick this afternoon.”

  “How did you get into her apartment?”

  “I have a key.”

  “So you’ve known her a long time?”

  “A long time, yeah,” Abe said, the years rushing by on a white-water stream.

  There were a few more questions, all of them routine, Abe guessed, though he could not be sure, since he’d never been questioned by a policeman before.

  Detective Melville closed his notebook. “Okay, thanks.” He touched his hat, then went up the stairs, leaving Abe alone on the street.

  He was still there when Lucille was brought down and loaded into the ambulance. Her body seemed infinitely small beneath the sheet, far too small to have contained the heavy life she’d lived, the huge obstacles she’d overcome just to get this far. It wasn’t that she’d killed herself that struck Abe as particularly sad, but that she’d had to fight that urge for so long, and in that protracted struggle lost what small amount of happiness she might otherwise have grasped.

  Once the ambulance pulled away, Abe walked back up the stairs and into the apartment. The super was there, looking around, as if already calculating the trouble this would cause him.

  “She have any relatives?” he asked.

  Abe shook his head.

  “So, what you want I should do? With her stuff, I mean.”

  “I’ll have it picked up.”

  The super looked relieved that clearing the apartment would fall to others’ hands. “No rush. I mean, she’s paid up through the end of the month.”

  The super left, but Abe lingered a few more minutes in her room. He was not sure why, save that some part of him simply hated letting things go. He’d hated to admit that Mavis had actually gone. Hell, he realized, he’d even felt the same about that fucking cat she’d left him with, Pookie, who’d died on him three weeks later.

  He headed down the stairs and out onto the street, where he stood absently, his eyes cast upward into the misty sky, and tried to make himself believe that there might really be someplace toward which Lucille’s unburdened soul was now ascending, its slender wings beating softly to the ballad she’d always used to close her set, “Bird Alone.”

  TONY

  “She was acting strange the last few days,” Tony said.

  His father shrugged. “She was always a fruitcake.”

  Tony took the wedge of orange from the rim of the glass, squeezed it, then dropped it into his glass.

  “What the fuck you drinking?” his father asked.

  “Scotch sour.”

  “That’s a pussy drink, Tony,” the Old Man said. “Scotch sour. Jesus Christ. You go in a real bar and order something like that, they take you out back and stomp the shit out of you.”

  Tony shrugged. “Anyway, she just left, that’s all. Out of the blue.”

  Labriola scowled. “Out of the blue means another guy, right?”

  “I don’t think so,” Tony answered weakly.

  “You don’t think so?” the Old Man barked. “What are you, Tony? Stupid? That fucking bitch run out on you.”

  “I don’t know, Dad, Sara’s not the—”

  “Not the what?”

  “I just don’t think she would have—”

  “Would have what?”

  “Would have . . . you know . . .”

  “Fucked around on you?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Okay, Tony, so where’s her car? You said it was sitting in the driveway, right?”

  “Yeah.”

  “So, your theory is, she leaves but she don’t take the car? So what do you think, she’s on foot? Walking to where? California? Jesus, Tony, think!” The Old Man slapped him lightly on the side of the head. “Think about it! This bitch ain’t on foot or thumbing a ride. Or maybe you figure she’s in some big fucking balloon. Floating in the air.” His laugh was clanking brass. “Face it, Tony. She run off with some guy.”

  “I don’t know what to think, Dad.”

  “How about money? She take any money?”

  “I don’t know,” Tony answered weakly.

  “You don’t know? You ain’t checked the accounts?”

  “No.”

  “Jesus,” the Old Man muttered. “Your wife takes a hike and you don’t check the fucking accounts.”

  “I didn’t think of it, Dad. I been . . . you know . . . upset.”

  “She played you for a chump from the beginning, Tony. Just a little hayseed singing in some fucking club, and in you walk, a meal ticket if ever there was one.”

  “She didn’t know anything about me. I could have been—”

  “Oh yeah, take me back, Tony. To that night, I mean, when you first met this fucking broad. Was you alone?”

  “No. I was with Frankie and Angelo and—”

  “And you paid for the drinks, right, because those two assholes never sprung for a drink their whole fucking lives.”

  “Yeah, I paid for the drinks.”

  “And you think a broad don’t notice that, Tony, don’t notice who’s paying?”

  “She was way up front, Dad, she couldn’t have—”

  “Yeah, yeah, up front. But she could see you, right? She ain’t fucking blind. She could see you standing there with those two jerkoffs, and that it was you paying.”

  “Yeah, I guess she could see me.”

  “And how was you dressed, Tony? You have a hard hat on? Huh? You carrying a tub of fish out clubbing? You wearing some greasy, fucking work shirt, or was you dressed nice?”

  “Nice.”

  “So she didn’t have to be no fucking brain surgeon to figure it out, right? That you was a guy with cash.”

&n
bsp; “I guess not,” Tony admitted.

  “So there it is,” the Old Man said, satisfied that he’d made his point. “That’s the whole story with this bitch. Now some other asshole comes along, and she plays you for a chump.” His eyes squeezed together. “I never liked her, Tony. From the South. Shit. What do you know about girls from the South? You could have married your own kind. Kitty Scalli, for example, you could have married her. But, no, you see this fucking hillbilly in some goddamn cheesy bar. End of story.” He shook his head at the idiocy of it all. “You’d married Kitty Scalli, we wouldn’t be having this fucking conversation.”

  Tony took a quick sip of his drink. “Well, the thing is—”

  “The thing is, you ain’t gonna let her get away with it, Tony,” the Old Man said darkly. He took a noisy pull on his beer and set the glass down hard. “ ’Cause if she does, you’ll never live it down.”

  “Yeah, I know, but—”

  “The problem is, you don’t stand up for yourself, Tony. You ain’t never stood up for yourself. A woman runs all over you, you just sit there drinking that pussy drink you got there. Your cousin Donny would never have let his wife do something like this.”

  “Donny’s an asshole,” Tony said.

  “Donny’s an asshole?” Labriola yelped. “Okay, let me ask you this. You think Carla would run off with some fucking scumbag? What that hayseed bitch done to you? Huh? You think Carla would do that to Donny? Fuck no. ’Cause Donny wouldn’t take it, that’s why. You know what would happen to Carla she done that to Donny, what your wife done to you? And there’s your fucking answer. You never taught her to respect you, Tony, and this is the price you pay.”

  “Yeah, Dad, but—”

  “No fucking buts,” the Old Man snarled. “You’re my son. You’re Leo Labriola’s son. And you know the rule I got, right? You fuck my son, you fuck me.”

  “Yeah, but the thing is—”

  “You fuck my son, you fuck me,” Labriola repeated fiercely, his eyes glowing red. “You understand?”

  Tony nodded mutely.

  “You got to find her and bring her back, Tony,” the Old Man added sternly. “Otherwise, won’t nobody ever treat you with no respect.”

  “Well, sure, but the thing is, I don’t—”

  “Don’t what?”

  “Don’t know where she is.”

  The Old Man’s eyes went cold. “There ain’t nowhere that bitch could run to she can’t be found.”

  “Yeah, but—”

  “Nowhere, you understand?”

  “Yeah, sure.”

  Labriola drained the rest of the beer. “I got to make a call.” He got to his feet. “Then me and you are gonna shoot a little pool.”

  CARUSO

  The phone shook him from his sleep, the Old Man’s voice like a fist around his throat.

  “This guy, the deadbeat, he knows people, right? People who find people.”

  “He’s connected to some guy who does that,” Caruso told him.

  “Okay, here it is. He gets this guy to do a job for me, I’ll let go what he owes me.”

  “The guy usually gets thirty,” Caruso said cautiously. “The bill to you is just fifteen.”

  “What are you saying, Vinnie?”

  “That Morty’s guy, he maybe won’t do it for fifteen.”

  “Okay, so I pay the shithead thirty, and he keeps fifteen and gives the other guy fifteen.”

  “He shorts him?” Caruso said.

  “Yeah, he fucking shorts him, Vinnie,” Labriola bawled. “Or we break his fucking thumbs.”

  “Okay,” Caruso said quickly. “Maybe he’ll do that.”

  “Like he’s got a fucking choice?” The Old Man’s laugh was brutal.

  “I mean . . . he will,” Caruso added hastily. “What’s the job?”

  “Find that bitch married my son. She took off this morning. He ain’t heard a word since then.”

  Caruso nodded briskly, as if the Old Man were in the room with him, feeling the way he’d tried to make Mortimer feel a few hours before, like a cringing worm.

  “Tony ain’t to know nothing about this, you understand?” Labriola added. “You just find that bitch and let me know.”

  “Yes, sir,” Caruso said quickly.

  “So make the deal with this little shit owes me fifteen grand,” Labriola said. “Then get back to me.”

  “Yes, sir,” Caruso repeated in what had become the litany of his life. He hung up, paused briefly, then picked up the phone and dialed one of the scores of numbers he had stored in the hard drive of his mind, this one under the heading “Deadbeats,” the mental file to which he’d but recently added Morty’s name.

  STARK

  He ate in the garden at Gascogne, surrounded on three sides by high brick walls laced with vines. Within a week the garden would be closed, and so he lingered over a final glass of brandy until nearly midnight.

  After that he walked to his apartment on West Nineteenth Street. He’d bought the first-floor apartment nearly twenty years before, and bit by bit he’d turned it into a home that suited him, the walls decorated with carefully chosen oils, the floors draped with large Oriental carpets.

  Once inside, he poured a glass of port, sat down in a high-back leather chair, and drew a book from the small mahogany table beside it. In his youth, reading had been his passion. He’d pored over the classics, devouring the Greeks, Shakespeare, scores of nineteenth-century novels, but now he read only for business—travel guides, catalogues filled with the latest high-tech surveillance equipment, computer manuals, private publications from the field, tips of the trade exchanged by the few people who’d made it to the top of his precarious profession.

  He knew why this radical shift had occurred, and as he drank, he revisited the grim reason in a series of ghastly mental photographs—a body strewn in a Madrid alleyway, another floating in the shallow currents of the nearby river, and finally a dark-haired beauty tied to a chair, her body drooping forward, mercifully dead after what had been done to her.

  Marisol.

  At just past midnight, the buzzer signaled someone at the door.

  He opened it to find Mortimer swiping droplets of rain from his jacket and stamping his rubber galoshes on the mat outside the door.

  “Fucking wet,” Mortimer said morosely. He drew an envelope from his jacket pocket and handed it to Stark. “From Brandenberg. Payment in full.”

  Stark took the envelope. “Would you like a drink?”

  Mortimer nodded, then followed Stark inside and took a seat on the leather sofa.

  Stark poured Mortimer a scotch and handed it to him. “You look a little rumpled.”

  “It ain’t been a great day,” Mortimer said. He took a long pull on the scotch, wiped his mouth with the back of his hand.

  Stark watched Mortimer silently, now recalling how, after the murders, he’d had to create a new identity, find a go-between he trusted, and so had gone to Mortimer, the platoon sergeant he’d commanded through countless bloody days. Even now Stark was not exactly sure why he’d chosen Mortimer to assist him in his shadowy profession, save that there was a melancholy ponderousness to him that went well with the weighty confidences he was expected to hold. On a cold, snowy night, Stark had told Mortimer about Marisol’s murder, along with the brutal penalty he had exacted from the men who’d committed it. He’d never forgotten Mortimer’s reply, Guys like that, nobody’s gonna miss ’em. He’d known at that moment that Mortimer was a man for whom moral subtlety amounted to mindless abstraction. Only the clearest lines appeared in his field of vision. On the confidence of that insight, he’d hired him immediately.

  “Something bothering you?” Stark asked now.

  “Me?” Mortimer laughed nervously. “Nothing.”

  Stark peered at him intently. “Something’s bothering you, Mortimer.”

  Mortimer shifted uncomfortably in his seat. “Well, there is this . . . other job . . . but I don’t know if you’d want to do it.”

  S
tark eased himself into the chair opposite Mortimer. “Brandenberg again?”

  “No. He had this Arab, but I know you don’t want no foreigners.” He took a sip from the glass. “But this other thing come in.”

  “What is it?”

  Mortimer seemed hesitant to go on. “It’s kind of personal,” he said. “A friend from the old days. He called me a couple hours ago.” He took another sip. “The thing is, his wife run out on him.”

  “That’s hardly new in life,” Stark said. “I’m sure you told him that in most cases the woman returns.”

  “Yeah, I did,” Mortimer said. “But the thing is, he’s set on tracking her down. He figured I might be able to help him.”

  “Why would he figure that?”

  “He figures I know people,” Mortimer answered. “I mean, not you. Just people who . . . do things.”

  “What do you know about the woman?”

  “Nothing. And the thing is, it’s embarrassing, you know? To my friend. He don’t want nobody to know about it. The neighbors, relatives, people like that. So what information I get, it’s got to come from him. He don’t want no asking around.”

  “How much information can he give me?”

  “I don’t know. He’s getting a few things together.”

  “I can’t work on thin air,” Stark said.

  “I know,” Mortimer said. “Believe me, I know that. And there’s something else. This guy, he ain’t got much money. I mean, fifteen grand at the most. I know you don’t work for less than thirty but . . .”

  “You said he was a friend of yours.”

  “Yeah,” Mortimer answered. “But like I said, we’re talking fifteen . . .”

  “I’ll take it,” Stark said. “As a favor to you.” He waited for Mortimer to finish his drink, then escorted him to the door.

  “Good night,” Mortimer said as he stepped into the corridor.

  Stark nodded. “This friend of yours, you vouch for him, right?”