“It wasn’t enough.”
A prowl car arrived, and then a second. I got one of the sisters to take Father Giacomo back to the rectory, and then I waited with the beat cops for the detectives. The crowd had grown larger and was still curious, but these were all my neighbors, and they knew not to interfere. I told the cops what had happened, knowing I’d have to repeat the story to Nick DeMassio and knowing he wouldn’t like it.
He arrived a half hour later, parked his car, scuffed his way through the snow, and stood grimly over the body. He didn’t even look at me when he spoke. There was no animation, no friendship, in his voice.
“You were supposed to keep in touch, Eddie.”
“I tried, Nick.”
“Not goddamn hard enough. Tell me this isn’t who I think it is.”
“It is.”
“Strike three, then.”
“Listen, Nick…”
He looked up, eyes agleam with anger. “Strike three on us, and Alberto gets to walk. What kind o’ baseball you been playin’, Eddie? And whose goddamn team are you on?”
“Nick…”
“Had to do it on your own again. Left out us boys in blue, left me out, and now fuckin’ Alberto walks.”
“I didn’t know it was Chick. I was lookin’ to roust a prowler, that’s all. He rabbited on me and somebody shot him from the alley.”
“That’s the best story you’ve got?”
“It’s the truth, Nick.”
DeMassio looked past me and called to one of the beat cops. “Find any footprints in that alley?”
“If there were any, the neighbors stepped all over ’em,” one of the cops answered.
“Sonofabitch,” snarled DeMassio, glaring at me.
“The shot came from the alley, Nick, like I told you.” The burr in my voice disturbed me almost as much as Nick’s coldness. We weren’t ourselves. We were becoming angry strangers in a hurry.
Nick turned back to me, his face like stone. “Let’s see your gun, Eddie.”
“It hasn’t been fired, Nick.”
“Don’t wanna ask you a second time.”
My stony look turner harder. “These are my neighbors, Nick. Yours, too. You ask for my gun, it tells them you don’t trust me, that we’re not friends. I’m gonna take it the same way. I’m telling you that the gun hasn’t been fired, and that’s got to be good enough for you.” He didn’t react, so I held the gun out, butt first. “You can have this if you want it, but there’d be no undoin’ the damage between us.”
His tone softened, but not enough to change the mood. “Word’s out you went to see Alberto Scarpetti.”
“That wasn’t my choice. He sent men to get me.”
“What’d he want?”
“The files, for ten grand.”
“You didn’t tell me that, either.”
“I was goin’ to, Nick.”
“When? In your friggin’ memoirs?”
“I don’t work so well at the end of a blue leash, Nick. You oughta know that. And you oughta know I wouldn’t kill for a price.”
“Not even ten grand?”
“This conversation could be endin’ our friendship, Nick.”
He didn’t respond. The forensics crew arrived with the ambulance and I went to sit in my car while they took their photographs of the body, the scene, even the chinks in the church stonework made by the two missed shots. DeMassio went to confer with the beat cops, who’d been canvassing every house on both sides of the street and the rectory. After what seemed like a couple of hours, he came back to me.
“Kid’s got a hole in his back the size of a grapefruit.”
“Look for some .45 caliber casings.”
“Found three of ’em, in the alley,” he said without an apology. “It’s time to go to Bath Avenue, Eddie.”
I got out of the car, locked it, and fell into step with DeMassio. Gino appeared suddenly at the front of the crowd, flanked by Tony and Angelo. They looked on in bewilderment as the big Sicilian escorted me to a patrol car. He opened the back door and looked at me with eyes that showed no trace of our past friendship.
“I’ll take that gun now, Eddie,” he said.
CHAPTER
35
The cops let me go around six in the morning. A prowl car took me back to my car, and I drove home. DeMassio hadn’t said good-bye at the station house, and he hadn’t apologized. He’d acted like he didn’t want to have anything more to do with me, and I felt quits with him.
Gino knocked on the door while I was making coffee. I let him in without a word, waited and watched him fidget before I broke the silence.
“Where’s Tony and Ang?” I asked.
“I told ’em not to come.”
“Wise decision. They wouldn’t understand what’s goin’ through my head right now.”
“And what’s that?”
“Don’t understand it myself, can’t expect them to.”
“Or me?”
“Or you.”
“How come DeMassio took your gun, Eddie?”
“To make me look bad. He’s peeved.”
“Oh.”
“He also thinks I’m lyin’ about the kid.”
“It’s a shameful, lousy thing to do to a friend.”
“Lyin’?”
“Not trustin’ you, and knowin’ you so long.”
“I guess. You want some coffee?” He nodded, and I poured us each a cup. We drank in silence, slowly, until the cups were empty.
“Eddie, I’m blamin’ myself. I’m sorry I got you into this.”
I didn’t speak. I didn’t have the heart to tell him that he gets me into almost everything. I poured us both another cup.
“How do you figure it, Gino?”
“Figure what?”
“The kid—Chick. He was from way over in East New York, Pitkin Avenue, for Chrissake. What the hell was he doing hiding in St. Margaret’s? Why’d he go there five nights in a row? Why’d he always break in so late at night? Where’d he stay the rest of the time?”
“I guess we’ll never know.”
“Put that on my tombstone when I’m gone, Gino. It’s startin’ to have a familiar ring to it.”
“It ain’t your fault the boy’s dead, Eddie.”
“Yeah, it is. I played it all wrong. Everything I said and did made him rabbit.”
“You thought he was the prowler. And he was.”
Gino waited for a response, but I was mulling over an earlier thought that hadn’t gone away. Only one shooter in the alley. Didn’t Alberto Scarpetti’s assassins come in pairs? Why’d he split them up? Were they hunting two people instead of one? Hunting Charlotte also, maybe? What did she know, and how would I get close enough to ask without getting my eyes clawed out?
“I gotta be goin’,” Gino said, and stood up. “Gina needs me to open the store.”
“Sure.”
“I’ll see you Sunday.”
“Sunday?”
“For lasagna.”
“Lasagna. Yeah. Sure.”
“Ease up on yourself, Eddie,” he said as he reached the door. “You did the best you could.”
“The best I could,” I parroted. I offered a limp smile and watched him go.
. . .
“’He did the best he could.’ There’s another good epitaph,” I muttered to myself. I had a bottle of liquid self-indulgence in front of me, and I was pouring double shots of self-pity into a line of waiting tumblers. I hadn’t started drinking yet. This was just a little alcoholic foreplay.
I was arranging the glasses into a figure-eight when Frankie announced himself at the door and let himself in.
“Hey, Eddie, you made the papers!” He flashed a copy of the New York Mirror at me. “’Course, it’s not page one. You must be slippin’ a little, huh?” He laughed until he saw my figure-eight. “Whoa,” he said. “What’s this?”
“What’s it look like?”
“You really gonna put that away by yourself?”
�
�One deadly little shot at a time. Should take me all of fifteen minutes.”
“You and me need to shoot some serious pool, then.”
“And what if I say no?”
“Jesus, you’re not gonna get ornery again, are you?”
“Did I apologize about that yet, Frankie?”
“Yeah. It was that ill wind, remember?”
“Well, I apologize again.”
“Sure. Now, what about some pool instead of the booze?”
“Lost my concentration lately.”
“How about a movie, then. Catch a matinee.”
“Who’s watchin’ the barbershop?”
“Nobody. It’s closed. I put out a sign: ‘Closed Today: Death in the Family.’ Hey, it’s true, you know? Somebody dies in Bensonhurst, even if he’s really from someplace else, it’s like a death in the family, right?”
“You got that right, Frankie.”
“Damn straight.”
“But, you know, you got one thing wrong. I’ve been meanin’ to tell you.”
“What’s that?”
“I’m not gettin’ married.”
We arrived at the Brooklyn Paramount just in time for the newsreels. I got a laugh out of the one about Europe. Our old bosom pals, the Russians, were now officially our mortal enemies, and our old mortal enemies, the Germans, were now officially our bosom pals. Barely four years after the war. To a retired airborne infantryman who’d lost four toes and a bunch of buddies to the Nazis, it was damn funny.
The main feature was an Alan Ladd picture, a Western. Frankie went through two cartons of buttered popcorn watching it, but I’d switched my brain off and put all thoughts on hold.
Frankie critiqued the movie most of the way home. Usually, I debate with him, but my attention was on the hearse that had tailed us to the theater, parked a half a block away while we watched the movie, then followed an even car length behind, all the way back to Frankie’s. A ’42 Cadillac with Florida plates. I kept Frankie in the dark about the tail while I played my usual games with the two men inside. But at such close range it was no game at all. The hearse maintained the distance back to my place and parked across the street.
I observed it from the kitchen window as I made myself dinner, then snuck an occasional peek from the living room. It didn’t move. Somebody’d given orders to keep a very close watch on me, and they didn’t even care if I knew.
I waited until after seven to call Caroline, hoping to warn Charlotte about Scarpetti and maybe get some information. I wanted also to apologize for losing Chick, and to try once more to pull Caroline back into the world of the living. But nobody answered. Jimmy Hutchinson’s funeral was tomorrow, Saturday morning, at the Cemetery of the Evergreens, the same day that Carlson was being planted in Greenwood Cemetery, near Prospect Park.
After trying Caroline’s number several times more, I decided that she was with Mrs. Mitchell again, or maybe even Chick’s family, if they’d come out of hiding. She’d have two more funerals to attend in the next week, and if Arnold got the electric chair for Shork’s murder, eventually a third. I needed to be quits with all of that. If I couldn’t help her, I needed to break away.
The hearse was still at the curb when I looked out the window at ten o’clock. The weather had turned colder, too cold for snow. The hearse’s motor wasn’t running, so its two overcoated occupants were probably going numb. Caution told me to let them be, but my curiosity said otherwise. I put on a coat, walked downstairs, across the street, and right up to the driver’s side of the hearse. The driver rolled down the window before I could tap.
“Hey, how come you guys been followin’ me around?” They both grinned at the same time. Two ugly, demented bulldog faces, two mouths full of pointy teeth. The Barracuda Brothers, Jimmy Santini’s deadly spawn.
“I said, how come you guys been followin’ me?”
“’Cuz Pop says so,” they explained together.
CHAPTER
36
The Barracuda Brothers had driven three days straight from Miami to be my loyal guard dogs. Somehow, Santini figured I was his best hope for sending Alberto Scarpetti to the Great Italian Beyond through the magic of Ossining electricity, and he needed me alive and healthy to do that.
I thought it was a swell idea myself.
On Saturday morning, the Brothers followed me to the Cemetery of the Evergreens, where Jimmy Hutchinson’s mourners were burying him in a pleasant little glade. The Evergreens was all glades and gentle slopes, as good a place as any for the living to visit the dead, and better than most. A bright sun and warmer than normal temperatures had cleared about half of Thursday night’s snowfall, but the ground was still hard, and the color of the cemetery grass that shown through was a tired yellow-green.
I watched the participants from a safe distance: an elderly minister; Caroline the war widow and Charlotte the black widow, both wearing black veils, Caroline slightly hunched, diminished and defeated by death, Charlotte thriving, looking as luxuriantly debauched as the situation would allow. Mrs. Mitchell was there, too, hunched over and sobbing, consoled by a few friends and neighbors.
I didn’t see Superman or Calamari Breath lurking anywhere along the fringes, and I’d made a point of standing within sight of the Barracuda Brothers for the length of the service. They’d give Scarpetti’s hoods something extra to think about, as if there wasn’t enough already.
The puzzle still defied solution. If the Barracuda Brothers were keeping tabs on me, Santini didn’t have the Scarpetti case file, and Scarpetti didn’t have it, either. Or did he? Why was Charlotte standing unmolested among the mourners, the last possible person who could know? Nobody’d chased her into hiding. Why?
Maybe she didn’t know; maybe the documents were still in the last place Teddy and Chick had left them, buried in an old paint can or hidden under a porch. Lost treasure that wouldn’t be found for twenty years. Would that be good enough for Scarpetti, or would he keep searching, afraid some handyman or neighborhood dog would uncover the evidence tomorrow, the day after, or next week?
It was a moot question to me. Attending Jimmy’s funeral was my way of closing the door on the whole Scarpetti episode. I was back to square one with Arnold, trying to free him from a murder charge. Shork’s little blackmailing business was one possible lead to his murderer, and Jorgenson, Carlson’s effeminate pal, was another.
Carlson’s state funeral had already started across town at Greenwood Cemetery when the Barracuda Brothers and I left Jimmy Hutchinson’s modest send-off. At Greenwood, I had trouble finding a place to park. Official vehicles and police cars were everywhere. Hundreds of the New York elite crowded the perimeter of the tented gravesite as a military honor guard stood ready to fire a final salute. I watched from half a football field away with a pair of field glasses I kept in the trunk of my car, scanning a sea of blue bloods dressed in black.
It was pointless trying to see inside the tent, so I concentrated on the overflow. I soon found what I was looking for just outside the inner circle of mourners. Jorgenson was dressed in a dark blue suit under an open coat. His shock of red hair still looked unkempt and windblown even in the dead calm. He wore a grimmer version of the same pretty-eyed expression he’d worn that day at Carlson’s office.
Somebody standing just to his left was also red-haired. When I moved a few feet to my right, I saw her clearly through the glasses. She was maybe a foot shorter, but she had the same features. She was sobbing, resting her head on Jorgenson’s shoulder. It took a few minutes of remembering, but I was finally able to place her: Joe Shork’s little gallery of shame. She looked different with her clothes on.
I waited, past the lowering of the coffin, the rifle salute, the folding of the flag and its presentation to a puffy dowager I assumed was Carlson’s mother. I waited until the last official mourners had driven away, until the cemetery workers had pulled down the tent, until Jorgenson and the red-haired woman were the only two people left at the gravesite. They stayed there even afte
r the gravediggers had filled in the hole and put a temporary metal marker at its head. The woman placed a small sprig of flowers on the dirt, and then, clinging tightly to Jorgenson’s arm, she let him lead her from the grave.
Their car was parked a distance away, not far from where I’d left my own. It was a classy, high-price model, but there was no marker to distinguish it as an official vehicle in the cortege. Carlson’s two most loyal mourners, and they’d been treated as outsiders.
I followed them, and the Barracuda Brothers followed me, across the Brooklyn Bridge into Lower Manhattan. I tried to put aside my thoughts about the bridge, looking hopefully up at the wooden promenade rather than at the forbidding steel catwalk of my nightmares.
On the Manhattan side, Jorgenson and the woman stopped at Battery Park, where you can see the Statue of Liberty on a clear day. They left the car and he walked her slowly around, supporting her with his arm. She wept aloud as she clung to him, the sounds of her grief rising like swells in a storm.
They drove, finally, to a handsome brick row house on Fourth Street in Greenwich Village. I parked a couple of doors down, the Barracuda Brothers parked right behind me, and I watched and waited. It was a moneyed street: expensive automobiles along the curb, polished window glass, brass fixtures, flower arrangements on the stoops. I admired a sense of neighborhood, even among the rich and the un-Italian.
I walked to a phone booth near Washington Square to call my sister Maggie, bowing out from Saturday afternoon with the in-laws so I could watch Jorgenson and the grieving redhead a while longer.
His car was still at the curb when I got back, and the Barracuda Brothers hadn’t budged.
After dark, Jorgenson brought the still-weeping woman downstairs and drove several blocks southeast into Chinatown. They parked and entered a restaurant on Canal Street, spent almost an hour inside, then walked three blocks west to Mott, where they knocked at an herbalist’s shop. The sign on the door said CLOSED, but not for them. A weedy, balding Chinese in his mid-forties appeared and escorted them to a curtained room behind a counter. A half-hour later, they emerged with a small paper bag, walked back to the restaurant on Canal, stayed ten minutes more, and drove back to Fourth Street.
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