He had another run to LaGuardia for a pickup at four followed by a JFK run at five-thirty. He was still short his child support when it was time to check out for the day at seven o’clock, but John decided he’d pay just one week of what he owed and then catch up on Thursday. He made the trip to Queens after cashing out with just over fifty dollars in his wallet.
He didn’t see his son when his ex-wife opened the front door.
“Jack around?” he asked.
Nancy put her right hand out, palm up. John had already counted out thirty-five dollars. He placed the cash in her palm. Nancy scowled at the sight of single dollar bills.
“What’s this shit?” she said.
“One week. It’s all I have.”
Nancy rolled her eyes. “And the singles?”
“Tips, Nan. It’s what I get when I’m driving.”
“What happened to the fives?”
“You complain about those, too.”
“They’re easier to work with than singles.”
“There’s a ten and a five in there.”
She rolled her eyes. “When are you gonna get a real job?”
“You mean like yours?”
“Fuck you.”
“No thanks.”
“You wish.”
“Never.”
“Asshole.”
John took a deep breath. “Jack around or not?”
“He had a sleepover,” Nancy said. “If you really gave a shit, you’d already know that.”
“I forgot,” John said. “I’ll be back Thursday with the rest of the money. You have anything planned for then?”
“There’s a bazaar in Valley Stream next week you could take him to. Maybe he could spend the night with you for a change.”
“That so you can bang your current husband for a change?”
Nancy swung at him with her hand holding the cash. John blocked the smack and the money rained all over the front stoop.
“You fuck-face bastard,” she said.
“Nice,” John said. “Very classy.”
“Go fuck yourself, you loser. Go get in your piece-of-shit car and get lost.”
“I guess Nathan isn’t home,” John said. “You got Louis hiding in there under the kitchen table?”
John knew she’d had an affair with her first husband while John was still married to her. He assumed Louis was still in her life.
Nancy was picking the cash up off the lawn and stoop. John didn’t help her.
“You’re just jealous because he’s twice the man you are,” she said. “And he’s twice as big where it counts.”
She was leaning off the last step on the stoop. He warned her to be careful, but she lost her balance and fell. He couldn’t help laughing. Nancy’s face turned red.
“I hate you, you cocksucker!”
John motioned toward the street. “A little louder,” he said. “They didn’t hear you up the block.”
“Fuck you!” she screamed.
John held his right hand to his right ear. “What’s that?”
“I hate you!”
John spotted one of the single-dollar bills she had missed and pointed to it. “You missed one.”
“Go drive your taxi, John. And bring me the money you owe, you deadbeat fuck. He’s your son, too.”
It had been funny until she called him a deadbeat. It was something he wasn’t proud of, the fact he was behind making child support payments. It wasn’t the first time and he doubted it would be the last unless things changed soon. She was also right about his job. He hadn’t had a real one for more than a year now. The extra work he picked up here and there wasn’t cutting it. The weekend gig running a porn movie back and forth from Brooklyn to Long Island and making collections for the idiots behind it was as demeaning as it was lousy pay. The only benefit so far had been it was unreported income. At least he wasn’t paying taxes on it.
He returned to his car feeling down. Nancy wasn’t a genius but she could be mean. She had scored a blow calling him a deadbeat. He was also upset about forgetting the sleepover. His son had told him and John had forgot. He doubted Nancy would even mention to his son that he’d stopped to see him.
He started the engine and was about to pull away when he heard Nancy call to him. He glanced to his right and there she was with a big smile on her face as she gave him the finger from the top of the stoop.
The woman was comical, he thought.
* * * *
Louis knew the steady diet of five-dollar bills John Albano had been paying his ex-wife for child support was dirty money that had something to do with the recently banned porno movie Deep Throat. The other thing he knew was if the money was dirty, robbing it couldn’t be reported.
Although there was the mob to consider, Louis understood how they operated. Once the money was missing, Albano would be the one held responsible. The connected guys Louis dealt with, between gambling and borrowing money, were all consistent when it came to cash. None of them were interested in stories about why you didn’t have it when you were supposed to.
The plan was to catch Albano on a Sunday night before he delivered his weekend receipts to the Williamsburg bar. Louis had clocked him three consecutive Sundays. Except for his last three stops, the collection route had been the same. Concerned that he might take an alternative route to stop and see his kid, Louis had grilled Nancy about it the day before. It would help if he could insure her second ex-husband didn’t deviate from his routine. Louis had a few ideas about how to rob John Albano, but it would be a lot easier if he had some help.
Holly had been cool to his original plan, but Louis knew he could always depend on Nancy. His ex-wife was shrewd, though, so he would have to do more than promise her a cut of the take. Nancy had already grown bored with her third husband and was still very much in love with Louis. She had only married the geeky musician because of his money. There might even be a small score in her divorce, since the guy she’d married owned the house they lived in now.
The possibilities, when Louis was calm enough to think through his more immediate financial problems, seemed endless.
This week, however, his window-cleaning salary wouldn’t come anywhere near covering his gambling nut. He needed to score some grass he could sell fast and then he’d need to take another street loan to pay the two bookies he owed. Louis had no idea how much money Albano collected over the weekend, but however much it was, Louis needed it and he would have to move fast to get it by the end of the week. Otherwise, he didn’t know how he’d pay off the close to seventeen hundred dollars he owed two bookies, much less the two grand he still owed Jimmy.
He called in five bets on the trotters at Roosevelt and stood to lose another two hundred dollars he didn’t have. He’d already lost sixty dollars on two Saratoga bets earlier in the day, a straight twenty-dollar win and a ten-dollar exacta that didn’t come through. Lady Luck had been cruel lately, running ice-cold it seemed. His luck had to change fast or Louis had to rob John Albano sooner rather than later.
* * * *
Lieutenant Detective Sean Kelly, at thirty-nine years of age, was a sixteen-year veteran and the senior detective in a task force investigation into the illegal distribution of the recently banned porn film Deep Throat. Kelly wore sweatpants, a baseball cap and an oversized Led Zeppelin T-shirt as a disguise to throw off any surveillance watching the mobbed-up bar on the first floor of the apartment building he’d entered five minutes earlier. He smirked at the sounds of sex he could hear through an apartment door, then leaned against it, cupping his left ear. He smiled as the woman’s yelping grew to a crescendo.
Kelly waited until the man began to grunt before knocking on the door.
“Shit,” he heard Eddie Vento say.
Kelly gave it a moment, then knocked again.
“Fuck,” Vento said. “Get offa me.”
Kelly smiled. He heard light footsteps running away on the other side of the apartment door, then heavier footsteps approaching it. He was about t
o knock again when the door opened.
“I waited until I thought you were finished,” he said.
Eddie Vento, wearing a white wife-beater and light blue boxer underwear, stood in the doorway smirking. “You shouldn’t spend all your money on clothes like that,” he said. “I didn’t know you I might shoot you.”
“Can I come in?”
Vento stepped back to let the detective inside.
Kelly passed through the doorway. He heard a toilet flush and turned in time to see a woman pull on a pair of black bikini underwear. She was naked from the waist up. She saw Kelly looking and slammed the bathroom door shut.
Vento had just closed and locked the apartment door. He turned and saw Kelly was staring toward the bathroom. “She works downstairs weekends,” he said.
“Pretty girl.”
Vento grabbed a half-smoked cigar from an ashtray on the coffee table in front of the couch. “She’s a ballbreaker is what she is. Non-fucking-stop, sometimes.”
Kelly spotted a black bra on the couch. He picked it up.
Vento finished lighting his cigar and motioned at Kelly with it. “You enjoying yourself?”
Kelly set the bra on the coffee table as he sat on the couch. “Can we talk?”
Vento took a seat in an armchair facing the detective.
“This thing with the movie,” Kelly said. “I need to make a bust soon. Now this guy turned up in a Queens dumpster, I need something to show I’m doing my job.”
“Can’t it wait a few weeks?”
“Not anymore. It’s an issue now, this movie. City Hall expects arrests. Leaving the guy without his hands may keep other guys from stealing, but it also made it easy for reporters to learn his business. Today they know a guy was whacked, tomorrow they’ll know where he dropped his last load.”
The bathroom door opened down the hall. Both men turned toward the sound of footsteps as Bridget Malone entered the room wearing an open pajama top and panties. She stopped a moment to button the top.
“Got a better look now?” she asked Kelly.
“You wanna give us some privacy here?” Vento said. “We’re talking business.”
“Excuse me,” said Bridget with sarcasm. “Can I breathe? Is that okay?”
Vento bit his lower lip. Kelly watched Bridget head into the kitchen.
“She’s awful young,” he whispered.
“Don’t kid yourself,” Vento said, “she’s been around the block.”
“Been around what block?” Bridget said. She was standing with her back to them as she looked through a cabinet.
“Never mind,” Vento said. “Get whatever you want and go.”
“Fine,” Bridget said. “I’ll eat my chips in lockup.”
She was holding a bag of potato chips. Kelly sniggered as she fingered a chip from the bag to her mouth. She forced a smile and he watched her rump wiggle back down the hall.
“Lockup? Where’d she learn that one?” he asked Vento.
“From sitting in one,” Vento said. “She was dating some druggie when she first come to work downstairs. She was with him when he got pinched moving horse. She’s no stranger to the system. Like I said, she’s been around.”
It was uncomfortable information. Kelly turned toward the hallway again.
“She’s got a mouth on her like every other broad, but she’s alright you look past the front she puts on,” Vento said. “She keeps an eye on the old lady upstairs can’t do the stairs. Looks in on her a couple times a day, goes to the store and so on. She don’t know you is all.”
Bridget suddenly returned. “Can I get a soda so I don’t choke from thirst?” she asked.
“You could’ve got that before,” Vento said.
“Can I get it now?”
“Make it fast. Me and Mr. Horse have business.”
Bridget exaggerated a chuckle. “Mr. Horse?”
Vento glared at her.
“I’ll be gone in two minutes,” she said. “I have to go upstairs anyway. Mrs. G wanted me to rub her feet.”
“Wipe her ass while you’re at it. She shit herself the other day, stunk up the stairway.”
“Christ, Eddie, she’s eighty-six years old.”
“Good for her.”
“What’s your excuse?”
Vento stood up out of the chair.
“I’m going,” said Bridget as she darted into the kitchen. “I’ll be gone in two minutes.”
“You see what I gotta put up with?” Vento said to Kelly.
The detective wasn’t smiling. He watched Bridget as she moved around the kitchen.
“Not only this bullshit I gotta listen to,” Vento said, “but she wants to go in the business and do a porno.” He thumbed over his shoulder. “She thinks it’s glamorous.”
“Tell him my life story, why don’t you?” Bridget said. She pulled the tab on a can of Coke and sipped.
“She’s pretty enough,” Kelly forced himself to say.
“Thank you,” Bridget said. “Like it would make a difference to him, I did a fuck movie.”
Vento slapped his hands together in frustration.
“I thought you liked when I talked dirty, Eddie.”
Vento turned and glared at her again.
“What?” she said.
“Get lost.”
“He’s got all these connections, but he won’t do anything for me,” Bridget told Kelly.
“I said get lost,” Vento said.
“I should make my own connections,” she said. “I know at least one person who’d love to know what he likes in the sack.”
“You’re pushing your luck, cunt.”
Bridget had started toward the door, then stopped in her tracks, her face flushed red. “Cunt?” she said. “Fuck you, Eddie. Go fuck your wife. Let her talk dirty for you.”
Vento was across the room before she could get out of the apartment. The smack knocked her to the floor.
Kelly stood up from his chair. Vento cocked a fist.
“You got anything else you wanna say?” he yelled. “Get it out now so you won’t have so far to fall next time.”
Bridget was stunned from the smack and didn’t feel the tear running down one side of her face. She leaned her back against the wall alongside the door and felt her mouth for blood.
“Get out!” Vento yelled before opening the apartment door.
She flinched at the sound of his voice, then turned to her right and crawled past him to pick up the soda can.
“Leave it,” Vento said. “You can get it later.”
Bridget crawled out the door. Vento waited until she started to stand, then put his foot on her ass and shoved her out the rest of the way into the hallway. She fell forward onto the floor and lay flat on her stomach. She covered her head with both hands when Vento slammed the door shut behind her.
“I should put her in a porno,” he said to Kelly. “She has something in it, she can’t shoot off at the mouth.”
He returned to the armchair, sat and relit his cigar.
Kelly said, “That don’t make you nervous, she threatens to talk like that?”
“No,” Vento said. “She knows I’ll cut her fuckin’ throat she ever does that.”
Kelly wasn’t so sure.
“Where were we?” Vento said.
“About the investigation,” Kelly said. “Now that you’re leaving bodies to be found, can you feed me a live one?”
Chapter 6
John thought about stopping at the diner to see if Melinda was working, but he didn’t want to appear desperate. He went home instead. He’d just stepped inside the building when he was surprised by the old man standing in the hallway with a candle.
Alexis Elias saw the look on John’s face and said, “What? I frighten you?”
“Scared the shit out of me is more like it,” John said. “What’s going on?”
The seventy-year-old native Greek had moved into a first-floor studio apartment six months ago. John had looked out for him since.
&
nbsp; “Is too hot,” said Elias, his accent still thick forty years after coming to America. “I go outside.”
“You need an air conditioner.”
The old man made a face. “What good is air conditioner now, genius? No electric.”
“For when it’s working.”
“For what, to pay more bills? I am Greek, we don’t need such things. Is hot like furnace inside, we go outside.”
“You can come up to my place, you want.”
The old man waved the suggestion off. “For what? To catch pneumonia?”
“Whatever,” John said. Elias was stubborn. There was no arguing with him. “You should talk to the super,” John said. “He sells used air conditioners.”
“He doesn’t know his elbow from his ass. Move.”
John stepped aside. “You gonna be alright?”
“Why not?” Elias said. “I’m strong like bull.” He took a few more steps and stopped at the door. “You worked for criminals today?”
Elias didn’t approve of John’s weekend work and reminded him of it every chance he got.
“Well?” the old man said.
“No, not today.”
“Right, weekends you work for them. My mistake.”
John folded his arms across his chest.
“What do I care?” Elias said. “You’re young and stupid. I try to teach, but you don’t listen.”
“We done now?”
“Fine, ignore me. We change subject. How is your mother?”
“Fine, but that’s none of your business.”
“Why not? She is widow too long now. Why you don’t invite her here to dinner? I cook for her.”
“Because she’s my mother and you’re a dirty old man.”
“Pff,” said Elias as he turned to the door.
“Good night, Alex,” John said.
“Call me Zorba,” Elias said. “I am Zorba.”
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