“The gun was wiped clean,” my mother added.
“No fingerprints?”
“No. But in their minds, possession is nine-tenths of the law.”
It seemed a little weak to me, but I could see her trying to keep her eyes open. Now wasn’t the time to get into it. My father stood up and got our coats.
“It was good seeing you, Alex,” he said when she walked us to the door. He kissed her cheek, and for a second I thought I saw her lean in toward him. But then she pulled back. “I hope we can talk before I leave,” he added.
“When will that be?” She was tired, but she was back in the game for a minute.
Dad shrugged. “I’ll let you know.”
My mother gave me a hug. “Thank you, Annie, for helping out.” I didn’t have the heart to tell her I hadn’t done a damn thing.
We stepped out into the frosty air, and if I’d been sleepy before, I was wide awake now.
“How long are you staying?” I asked my father on the sidewalk.
“As long as I have to.” He walked me to my car and made sure I got in safely. He kissed my cheek. “I’ll see you tomorrow.”
I followed him as far as downtown, when I turned off toward Wooster Square. I pulled up in front of my brownstone and parked. The streetlights played against the snow, casting weird shadows. I didn’t look toward Prego as I got out of the car and started up toward the steps.
Someone grabbed me from behind, and an arm stretched across my chest, keeping me from turning around, my arms pinned behind me.
“What?” I started to say, but a hand clasped over my mouth.
“Listen,” a voice hissed in my ear, “you better stop messing around in things that don’t concern you.”
The arm wrenched my body backward, and it felt as though I were going to snap in two. I tried to catch my breath, but the hand over my mouth was tight and sweaty.
“Hey!” The shout came somewhere from my left, and in a second the grip loosened and I fell to the ground, the slush seeping into my skirt. I heard footsteps off to my right, and with a stab of pain in my side, I looked toward them. A large shadow disappeared around the corner.
Chapter 14
I managed to get up, but it felt as if my back were still twisted, and I hobbled toward the stairs. Once inside, I made sure the front door was locked, and I climbed the stairs to my apartment. My door swung open, and I reached in and turned on all the lights before locking myself in.
What had happened really didn’t sink in until I pulled off my coat and fell onto the couch with another stab of pain. Maybe it was the brandies I’d had, but until that moment, I had experienced some sort of weird calm. Now I started to hyperventilate, and my whole body shook.
The buzzer screeched, sending me into a new panic.
My heart beating madly, I walked over to the switch and turned off the overhead light. I made my way through the dark to the window and peered down at the stoop. Vinny was standing underneath the light post outside, looking up at my window, his arms outstretched, sort of like Marlon Brando in A Streetcar Named Desire.
I buzzed him in.
His hair was mussed up, his shirt open to reveal a small tuft of dark hair, his bare hands red from the cold.
“Are you okay? I saw what happened. I shouted, but I was across the park, I couldn’t get there in time. He was gone by the time I got here.” He took me into his arms, and I drank in his spicy, sexy smell, my panic attack subsiding.
“You okay?” he asked again; I could feel his lips on my hair.
I pulled away and took a deep breath. “Yeah, I’m okay, I guess.” I told him what the guy had said to me.
“This is what happens when you follow people around, when you pretend to know more than you do.”
“Give me a break, Vinny. I didn’t ask for it, if that’s what you’re implying.” My voice was harsh, but I could feel myself on the verge of tears again, and I bit my lip to keep them at bay.
He sat down. “I didn’t mean that, but maybe you need to be a little more discreet.”
I tried to smile. “Not my strong suit.” I sat next to him.
“No kidding.” He leaned toward me, and for a second I thought he was going to kiss me, but he merely reached up and moved a curl off my forehead. His fingertips were cold against my skin, and I shifted a little.
“Tell me what’s going on at Dominic Gaudio’s,” I said.
He moved away from me a little. “Don’t you think you’ve learned enough?”
“No. What’s up with that Cadillac? And why is my father meeting with strange men in diners?”
“Why don’t you ask him?”
I snorted. “Yeah, right. Like he’d tell me.”
“So you want me to tell you?” Vinny’s eyebrows arched, and he smiled. “They may have to kill me.”
“I’ll make that sacrifice,” I said, my eyes meeting his.
Suddenly the smile disappeared and his expression grew serious. “What I tell you can’t leave this apartment. You can’t put anything in the paper. This is only for your personal information, okay?”
I frowned. “What’s with the secrecy?”
Vinny shook his head. “I’m serious, Annie. I shouldn’t tell you anything.”
“But everyone seems to know everything, and I don’t know shit.”
“Because you’re not part of us.”
I knew what he was saying. My mother is Jewish, my father isn’t my biological father. So I wasn’t even Italian. I wasn’t second generation like Vinny or the kids I’d gone to school with. I wasn’t part of the inside circle, and even my father had left me out all these years. “Okay, fine,” I grumbled. “But this better be good. You just made me feel like crap.”
He chuckled. “You might change your mind when I tell you.” He paused. “The guys in the Cadillac, well, they might be the FBI, or they might be . . .” His voice trailed off.
“The Mob?” Even as I said it, I wasn’t sure I believed it. It seemed so clichéd.
“Sal’s game wasn’t his own. He paid protection.” He paused. “Okay, in a nutshell, the Mob still has gambling interests here, even though it’s not as big as it used to be. The feds took down most of the New England organization back in the late eighties after a major player was murdered, but it’s still active. And New Haven is stuck between New York and Boston, which means both organizations own a little piece here. They know about each other, they work together sometimes. Sal’s was one of those operations that was shared.”
“Did the Mob burn down the restaurant?” I asked. “My mother says Mickey Hayward was charged with arson, so the cops think he did it.”
I could see Vinny was struggling with how much more to tell me, even though a history of the Mafia in New Haven certainly wasn’t going to tell me too much about Sal Amato and his game-playing chickens.
“They wouldn’t destroy something that was making money, but they would try to recoup some cash if they thought it was owed to them,” he finally said.
I got up and took a couple of beers out of the fridge, handed one to Vinny.
My head was swirling, and I thought of something else. “LeeAnn Hayward was Dominic Gaudio’s niece. Do you think that has anything to do with what happened to her?”
“I don’t know.” Vinny got up and started pacing. “You know, Mickey hired me six months ago.”
“For what?”
“LeeAnn. He was convinced she was having an affair.”
I stared at him. “So what did you find out?”
He sat down, shifted in his seat, and took a drink before answering. “She wasn’t having an affair, at least not from what I saw. But there was something odd. Every week she would go to the farmers’ market on DePalma with a cloth bag full of something, and it would be empty when she left. I tried my damnedest to see what she left and where, but it was always too busy, and she was fast, moving around those stalls. Hardest fucking job I’ve ever had, and it should’ve been the simplest.”
He paused
, and I waited. “I didn’t tell Mickey about that, it didn’t seem relevant to what he’d hired me for, but even when I stopped working for him, I continued to follow her to the market. When the market closed for the season, I didn’t see her anymore. I did a little surveillance on my own, but she never did anything like that again.”
“The Mob deals in cash, doesn’t it?” I asked quietly. I wasn’t completely ignorant; I’d heard things through the years—rumors, innuendos—and I read wire stories about the crime families in New York and Boston. I’d known there was a history here, too, but not that it was still as active as it seemed to be if Vinny was right.
Vinny’s eyes bored into mine. “Yeah,” he said, and I knew we were on the same page with this one. Sal was paying protection, and LeeAnn Hayward was a courier.
“Why did you follow her, knowing what she was probably doing?” I asked.
He chuckled. “Curiosity. I’ve heard about this all my life, but besides the chickens, I’d never seen it in action. And it was sort of a challenge to myself. I wanted to see how good I was.” He paused. “Guess I’m not that good.”
“Jesus, Vinny, you’re dealing with the Mob. They’ve been doing this a helluva lot longer than you have.”
We drank our beers without saying anything else for a few minutes. But I had a nagging thought.
“The guy who jumped me, was he going to kill me?” As I said it, I began to get a little panicky again.
Vinny smiled. “Of course not.”
“How can you be so sure?”
“The Mob doesn’t kill honest journalists or honest cops.” He said it so matter-of-factly.
“So that’s some sort of rule?”
His smile turned into a grin. “Yeah.”
That was about all I wanted to know tonight. I took Vinny’s empty bottle and put both in the sink.
“Do you want me to stay?” Vinny was right behind me, close enough so I could feel his breath on the back of my neck.
I shook my head without turning around. “No.”
“Are we ever going to talk about this?” I felt his hand snake around my waist.
I turned and pushed him an arm’s length away. “There’s nothing to talk about.”
He studied my face for a few seconds, then said, “Okay.” He walked to the door; I was right behind him.
“Thanks for telling me all that,” I said as we stood in the open doorway.
He nodded, and before I could stop him, he leaned over and kissed me, sending tingles down into my toes. When he pulled away, he smiled. “See ya,” he said casually, and went down the stairs.
I WOKE UP THE NEXT morning with more resolve. Resolve to find out what my father and Dominic Gaudio were up to, resolve to find out where Sal was, resolve to keep my head around Vinny. That kiss had made it very hard to fall asleep, and it also proved that maybe there was something to talk about after all.
I pulled myself out of bed, and the pain in my arm and back made me catch my breath, reminding me that being a pain in the ass wasn’t all it was cracked up to be. I gritted my teeth, made my way into the kitchen, and put on some coffee. As I poured the water into the machine, I thought about LeeAnn Hayward and her visits to the farmers’ market. It was time to call Paula again, try to get something official from the FBI.
But all I got was her answering machine. It was 9:00 A.M. Saturday morning. She was never up early. I tried her cell phone.
“Annie, I’m working. I can’t talk.”
“I know about Prego and the gambling operation, Paula.” Well, not everything, but she didn’t have to know that. “And someone threatened me, jumped me outside my apartment last night. So maybe I need to know more of what’s going on. It might save my ass.”
“Or it might not.” I hate it when people play devil’s advocate.
“Okay, but don’t you think I’ll find out anyway?”
“Not from me.” But she still hadn’t hung up, which made me start wondering why.
“Are you working on it?”
“Yes.”
“Does it involve only Sal or other people, too?”
“Other people.”
So playing twenty questions might actually get me somewhere, as long as I asked the right ones.
“Besides his gambling operation, is there anything else?”
“I can’t tell you.”
I reminded myself that this was her job, like mine was to annoy her enough to get her to talk to me just so I’d leave her alone.
“You know,” she said when I took too long trying to think of my next question, “you might want to talk to your father.”
“I already tried that. He won’t tell me a damn thing. You’re not after him, too, are you?”
“We’re watching him, I’ll give you that. But as of right now, no, we’re not after him.”
He wouldn’t have come back if the FBI was after him. He would’ve gone off somewhere, like Sal, maybe with Sal.
“You know Mac hired Vinny to find Sal.”
I heard her chuckle. “If he finds Sal before we do, we’re going to be really embarrassed.”
“Can you tell me anything else?”
“No. Not now. I’ll talk to you later.” The phone went dead in my hand, and I hung it up.
I pulled on my coat, stuffed an extra notebook in my purse, and went downstairs. I could smell snow in the air, like we needed more of it, and I glanced reflexively toward Prego. Someone was moving around over there. Maybe Mario had come back. I still had some questions for that guy.
Once across the square, I went around the remains of the restaurant and into the back where I’d seen Mario the last time. But there was no one there.
There were two doors in the back of the restaurant, and I recognized the one that led to the kitchen. But I’d never really noticed the other one before, because it seemed to blend in with the rest of the building and was off a bit to the side. I turned the knob and gave the door a little push. It creaked inward, and I stared down a set of stairs into darkness.
The basement was down there, where the chickens played and the gamblers made their wagers. The soundproof room that Sal kept hidden from regular customers. A dim glow emanated below.
Before I could talk myself out of it, I was moving down the stairs. The stench of smoke invaded my lungs, and I coughed. There was another door at the end of the stairs, and I opened it.
The room was about the size of a tennis court, with a large roped-off section underneath what would be the front of the restaurant. That was probably where the chickens played their game. Most of the ceiling was burned away, and I could see the gray clouds overhead. Debris surrounded me on the floor, drowning in a few inches of water, probably from the firemen’s hoses. The fire smoke smell was mixed with something else—cigars and cigarettes. But what caught my attention more than anything else were the feathers floating on the water’s surface. My eyes moved quickly around the room, and the body made me freeze.
A chicken lay about four feet from where I was standing. Two more were in the far corner, opposite the roped-off section.
Their heads were nowhere to be seen.
Someone had killed the chickens down here. But before or after the fire? Maybe someone was a sore loser.
I stiffened as the sound of voices reached me. There was ceiling just above me, but to my right, I could see straight through to a corner of the kitchen. There was an argument going on up there, but the voices were too muffled for me to hear what they were saying or to recognize any voices.
A loud crack echoed down through the hole. Even if I hadn’t ever heard a gunshot before, I would’ve recognized the sound. As if my body had a mind of its own, I found myself racing up the stairs and out the door into the back parking lot.
I almost jumped out of my boots when a figure came crashing out the kitchen door, nearly knocking me over. Whoever it was was wearing a coat puffier than mine, and a hood hid its face. It was sexless and quick. I stepped back as the figure ran past me and out of sigh
t.
It happened so fast, I didn’t realize until it was gone that it was holding a gun.
My body tensed. I peered around the open door and into the kitchen. The hole in the floor was far enough away, so I stepped inside and around the stainless-steel island in the middle of the room. The walls were charred, and debris and water were everywhere, like in the basement. A gaping hole was where the ceiling should be, and a few snowflakes had begun settling among the ruins around me. I didn’t want to go any farther, realizing now that the building could be very unsafe. I was an idiot to have gone downstairs.
“What the hell are you doing in here?” came a voice from behind me.
I spun around so quickly, I slipped and fell forward onto Vinny. He steadied me, but he was distracted; his eyes were taking in everything.
“Jesus Christ, Vinny, you scared the shit out of me,” I scolded.
“I heard something over here. Sounded like a gunshot. What’s going on?”
“You might want to ask the guy with the gun who just left.”
Vinny stared at me. “What?”
“I saw someone over here, and I figured I’d check it out. I was downstairs looking at the dead chickens when I heard the argument and then the shot and came up here. I saw someone dressed in a huge jacket, so I couldn’t see who it was, and he ran out with a gun.”
“You’re okay?” Vinny asked.
“He just ran past me, didn’t stop.” I hated to admit it, but seeing Vinny slowed my heartbeat, even though it was still pounding so hard that I was sure he could hear it.
“Dead chickens?” Vinny’s brain seemed to be catching up with what I’d said.
“Downstairs. Three of them. No heads.”
“You heard an argument?” Vinny’s eyes narrowed as he took in this information.
“I don’t know who it was or how many people there were. But then I heard the shot.”
“Have you looked around farther than this?”
I shook my head. “No. It doesn’t seem like there’s much more to look at, and I don’t think it’s safe.”
The skies had opened up again, and snow was falling about ten feet away from us into the rubble. Vinny grabbed something, a blackened table leg, I think, and started poking around.
Secondhand Smoke Page 10
