“Who’s Jill?”
Melinda waved at one of the waitresses across the diner. A tall, thin redhead with freckles and green eyes joined them.
“Well?” Melinda said.
“He’s handsome enough,” Jill said.
“Yeah, I know that, but what do you think?”
“You promise to treat my best friend like the princess she is?” Jill asked John.
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Watch that ma’am bit.”
“So?” Melinda said.
“Give him a shot,” Jill said. “You can always throw him back.”
“Ouch,” John said.
Melinda was looking into his eyes. He returned the stare until she pointed to her watch. “Okay, that’s it. Jill and I have a lot of gossip to catch up on.”
“Do I get a phone number?” he asked.
“Not until I get yours and I can check to make sure you’re not living with somebody like a wife you didn’t mention.”
He jotted his phone number on a piece of napkin. She gave him a wink as he pushed the napkin at her. He blushed one more time.
“Would you look at that, the way he blushes,” she said to Jill. “That the cutest thing or what?”
“Okay, then,” he said as he slid out of the booth. “It was nice meeting you, Jill.”
The two shook hands.
“Melinda,” he said, then shook her hand as well.
“Good night, John,” she said.
He went to take his wallet out, but she stopped him. “I have this,” she said.
He seemed embarrassed at the gesture and quickly left.
Chapter 10
“Where’d you get all that money?” Holly asked Louis. She noticed the twenties as soon as he paid for his espresso. “You go to the track again?”
He took a sip of the demitasse and set the cup down. They were sitting at a table in Café Reggio on MacDougal Street in Greenwich Village. They had walked there after Louis picked her up outside the acting studio further west on Bleecker Street. Holly had ordered an Italian ice but couldn’t finish it. She’d also seemed distracted and kept glancing toward the street.
“I tell you I was on the island and you assume I was at the track,” he said. “They don’t even run at Belmont now. They’re up in Saratoga.”
“And Aqueduct,” Holly said. “I know they’re there, too. I saw you circling horses in that racing paper at your apartment.”
“And Aqueduct, yeah, but not now they aren’t. Jesus, can’t a guy have a few bucks on him without a third degree?”
What had actually happened was he met a woman in a bar across the street from an OTB in the city. After getting her drunk on vodka tonics, Louis lifted her wallet from her pocketbook. He was decent enough to replace the wallet, but not until he removed five of the six twenties he’d found inside.
“So, where’d you get it, if not at the track?”
“How about what I do for a living, cleaning windows,” Louis lied. “I had a private out in Great Neck across from the train station there. Good job, too. I’m hoping it becomes a steady.”
Holly was suspicious. “Somebody paid you all that money to clean their windows?”
“It was an apartment building, Holly. I did five apartments and I spent, like, five hours there. What is this anyway, the Inquisition?”
Holly stared at him a long moment before glancing at her watch. “Oh, my God!” she said. “I can’t believe you just said that. I have a history test in two days and I haven’t studied yet. It’s on the Spanish Inquisition.”
Louis didn’t believe her. “Glad I could help,” he said with indifference.
“No, really,” Holly said. “I can’t stay. I have to get back to the dorm.”
“Meaning you can’t come home with me?”
“No, Louis, I’m sorry,” she said, her face twisted with apparent remorse. “I really can’t. I have to study for this.”
“Can we at least go for a walk or something? I want to go over a few things. You know, what we talked about.”
Holly glanced at her watch again. “Can we make it fast?”
“I guess I don’t have a choice.”
He left a dollar tip and followed her lead. They walked north along McDougal Street. Holly’s dorm was across from the northeast end of the park.
“It’s about that guy I told you about,” Louis said. “I’m pretty sure he’s making a delivery with the film again this weekend.”
“I’m not sure it’s a good idea trying to take that from him,” Holly said. “He’s probably involved with the Mafia. That’s what they’re saying at the college, that it’s the Mafia behind the movie.”
“And so what if it is?” Louis said. “All the more reason to take this guy down. He’s making dirty money from a dirty business. Who’s gonna care?”
“Unless you get caught.”
“He’s not going to catch anybody, this guy. Trust me on this. What he’ll probably have to do is run for his life for screwing up with their money. He’ll probably leave the state.”
“I don’t want to be responsible for anybody getting hurt, Louis. I mean, I don’t care if he’s a bad guy and all, if you take money from him, but I don’t want someone to get hurt because of it.”
“Yeah, well, try and remember what this guy is pushing out there,” Louis said. “The way the women are treated in those movies? He doesn’t care about that. None of those guys do. They just use those girls and probably pay them peanuts to make these movies. They make all the money, the guys do, while the women wind up turning tricks in their old age. Think of that before you worry about this guy.”
He could tell he’d gotten to her again. Just in time, too, since they were close to her dorm.
“Okay,” she said, “but I really have to get back to the dorm and study now.”
Or maybe she was preoccupied.
“Sure you’re not going to meet somebody? Some guy?”
Holly blushed. “Who? Of course not. Don’t be silly.”
“Because I don’t think I could take that, losing my girl now, after I’ve given up the track and stopped gambling in general and have started to think about buying a house.”
Holly inadvertently looked at her watch one more time. “I hope that’s true, Louis. Really, I do.”
“It is.”
“Good then. Good.” She kissed him on the cheek, then hustled across the street toward her dorm.
Once she was gone it bothered Louis the way she had blushed when he asked if she was going to meet somebody. He’d never seen Holly blush before, not like that. He was wondering whether or not he should follow her to the dorm when a tall, thin girl wearing a braless halter and tight bikini bottoms roller-skated to a bench a few feet away. Louis gave her the once over as she adjusted one of her skates with a key.
“Know where I can get some weed?” he asked.
“’Scuse me?” the skater said.
“Pot,” Louis said. “Know where I might cop some?”
“Sure. Give me two minutes and I’ll take you.”
“You’re not a cop, are you?”
The skater giggled. “Do I look like one?”
“Have to ask.”
“How much you need?”
“What’ll fifty get me?”
“A lot more than you need unless you’re dealing. Maybe you want to sample it first.”
“Sounds fair.”
The skater was up off the bench. “Follow me,” she said, then stuck out her hand for him and led Louis back west across the park.
* * * *
Angela Santorra wasn’t happy about cashing in the last of their kids’ savings bonds, but what really pissed her off was having to do it alone because Nick wasn’t willing to get up and go with her. He had come home ranting the night before about killing somebody as soon as he got the chance. When she got up to tell him to be quiet already and not wake the kids up she saw the knot on his forehead above his left eye.
“The hell happene
d to you?” she had said. That was her first mistake.
Nick spent the next half hour raving about it.
“I’ll kill the cocksucker for what he did,” he’d yelled. “I’ll kill him and his ancestors. I’ll put two behind his ear and another one through his heart. I’ll cut off his balls and feed them to his mother. I’ll break every bone in his body.”
“Who?” Angela had asked, her second mistake.
“The motherfucker japped me. The guy hit me when I wasn’t looking. Took a cheap shot and then he took off before I could do anything. Ran like a rat bastard and now I got this knot on my head and tomorrow my eye’ll turn black and it’ll look like I caught a beatin’, which I didn’t, I got japped.”
Angela figured Nick had started another fight he’d lost. It had happened before when his ego was wounded and he needed to fictionalize what had happened to feel better about himself. The last time had been at the kiddie rides on Cross Bay Boulevard when he’d cursed a guy half his size and the guy told Nick to go fuck himself. The fight was over as soon as the guy hit Nick in the stomach and he couldn’t breathe. He’d dropped to his knees gasping, but Angela had known enough to look the other way and pretend she hadn’t seen what had happened. That time Nick’s excuse had been that the guy had caught him off guard and kicked him like a girl.
Last night, when he was finished making excuses and death threats, Nick mentioned he needed money for something and that she’d have to cash in the rest of the kids’ savings bonds.
“We already cashed in most of those,” she had told him. “How much do you need?”
“I don’t know. Two hundred.”
“Two hundred? Where are we gonna get two hundred dollars from? They don’t have that much in bonds. And we’ll be cashing them premature so it’ll be even less.”
“I don’t care how much there is, just go and get it tomorrow morning. I have to drop it off in the afternoon.”
“Drop what off? What’d you bet and lose now?”
“What’s the difference what I did? Just get the money.”
“Damn it, Nick. That’s all there is. How could you bet that money?”
“I didn’t bet. I fucked something up.”
“And it cost two hundred dollars?”
“Angela, I’m not in the mood for this, okay? I got a headache from where this piece of shit japped me and now you wanna break my balls about something else I caught shit for.”
“What? What was it that cost two hundred dollars?”
The third mistake was asking him what it was he needed the money for.
“You really wanna know?”
“Yes, I do. Please, tell me.”
“Those fucking posters I had to sign last night. And the panties. All that shit you couldn’t help me with because you were too fucking busy with the kids in the morning. All that crap I had to sign, I made a mistake.”
“What kind of a mistake?”
“An expensive one, alright? Just go get the money in the morning and leave me alone.”
He had started to yawn then. Angela figured it was best to leave him be and let him sleep it off. Maybe she’d find a way around cashing in the bonds the next day, but when she woke him up and couldn’t get him to go to the bank with her, she went ahead and did it herself.
And that was that, the bonds her brothers and sisters had given the kids when they were born were no more. Cashed in prematurely, they were worth one hundred fifty-six dollars. Angela didn’t know where they would get the rest of the two hundred Nick had said he needed.
He was still sleeping when she got home. She took the opportunity to go through his pants and wallet to see if he’d been out screwing around again, because if he had, she was bringing that money over to her mother’s to hide and Nick and his whores could go straight to hell. It was what her mother had suggested the last time she’d found lipstick on his collar and then smelled the perfume she knew wasn’t hers. He’d been with a few other women over the course of their marriage and even before that when she knew he was screwing one of the women at the beauty parlor where she used to get her hair done, but what was the point of complaining. She was his wife and the mother of his kids, and aside from the affairs she knew about, Nick had been an okay husband and a decent enough provider.
She was grateful Nick was Eddie Vento’s wife’s first cousin, even though he met a lot of women around that bar in Williamsburg and sometimes came home drunk. If she had to weigh the pros and cons of that bar and what went on there, it was definitely more beneficial than not.
Eddie had arranged it so Nick was on the books as a driver in the garment district even though he didn’t have the proper license to drive a truck. Angela doubted Nick even knew where the garment district was. He had told her the paychecks were delivered to the bar, which was another reason he had to be there. It’s where he went most nights and he didn’t like it when she asked him why.
“Business,” Nick would say. “Go ask Eddie.”
It was a steady paycheck plus they were covered with family insurance that included dental. Angela didn’t know how they would afford to live without it. It was something she thought about whenever Nick did something stupid like whatever he’d done with those posters last night for it to cost them two hundred dollars.
When it was time to watch her stories, she turned on the radio in the kitchen and tuned into the Cousin Brucie show. She raised the volume enough so Nick would have to get up to turn it back down. Then she went down to the basement to iron laundry while she watched the small television Nick had brought home for her last Christmas.
She had just tuned into As The World Turns when she heard him yelling. The basement door opened and he came halfway down the stairs. His eyes were bloodshot and his hair disheveled.
“You get the money?” he wanted to know.
“There was only one-forty,” she lied.
“How much?”
“One-forty.”
“What happened to the rest?”
“That’s all there was.”
“Okay. Alright. I can give Eddie his money and still have enough left over for the gun.”
“What gun?” Angela said.
“The one I need to kill somebody.”
Angela gasped as Nick turned and walked back up the stairs.
I should’ve said one-ten, she was thinking.
* * * *
The blonde had spread her legs wide before bending at the waist to drop her head down and look at her audience upside down. Her long hair swept the stage left to right as she gyrated in the awkward position. The crowd, about fifteen men in several small groups spread around an oval stage, applauded. Two Hispanic men sitting close to the center of the stage were drinking two-dollar Budweisers. They whooped it up when the blonde blew them a kiss between her legs.
“Personally, I never understood it,” Detective Levin told Detective Steven Brice, “watching some broad shake her cans on a stage like that. I understand her motive, sure, but the guys drooling over her like that, those two there? Makes no sense.”
The barmaid, a short, stocky woman with red hair, was wearing a black one-piece jumper that exposed a lot of thigh and cleavage. She placed a fresh napkin down before setting a Heineken on top of it, scooped up the three singles Levin had set down, thanked him, then headed for the register located mid-bar on the back counter.
“I could go for that a lot sooner I could one of them up on the stage,” said Levin about the barmaid. He turned on the bar stool and extended his right hand. “Neil Levin. We’ll be working together starting tomorrow on the fuck film.”
Brice shook Levin’s hand and chuckled. “Here I thought I was gonna have to make bullshit conversation again. Happens six times a day at least, some guy picks on me to tell his life story to.”
“Don’t worry, a few weeks chasing bootlegged copies of a movie and you’ll be wishing you were back here,” Levin said. He took a sip of beer and set it down on the center of the coaster. He watched a tall man pay for a be
er a few stools away and said, “Two bucks a beer. Fuckin’ robbery. You should talk to the manager this dump.”
The blonde had dropped down to her back, then lifted herself up into a spider crawl. She made her way to the edge of the stage and turned so her crotch was facing the audience. Both Hispanic men reached up to fit dollar bills into the string of her bikini bottom.
“They’d probably go home and jump their wives, except some of these girls are working,” Brice said.
At age thirty-three, he had just become a detective with the vice squad. Although he enjoyed undercover work, Brice had been looking for something more exciting. He had hoped for Drug Enforcement and was disappointed when he was sent to Vice.
“Prostitution in a place like this?” Levin said. “I’m shocked.”
“That’s the least of it. But we’re only supposed to be interested in the hooking going on.”
“Management behind it?”
“Probably, but not the stuff goes on inside the place. No percentage for them letting girls get caught hooking in here. Could lose their liquor licenses.”
“If anybody gave a fuck.”
“It’s easy enough they take it outside. There’s a motel about two blocks from here. They go in the VIP room and angle it out from there, the girls. Nobody’s the wiser. They let a guy sample the goods here, maybe a quick hand job, blow job, whatever, they get them out to the hotel for money that goes directly south, no detours into management’s pockets.”
“At which time they probably pass a business card off with their home phone and work private ever after,” Levin said. “Except the boys behind this operation wouldn’t earn off that.”
“I’m sure they do that, some of the girls,” Brice said. “They’re gonna sell it, can’t say I blame them.”
“A cop with a heart, eh?”
“Better them than the mob.”
“Point is,” Levin said, “doing this, you’re working for the mob. Whoever the genius was put you on this detail, he’s doing the guys running this place a favor.”
“Maybe he is,” said Brice. “I’m just following orders. Hopefully, this new unit we’re on together, chasing this film, that’ll be more rewarding. In the meantime, it’s a job.”
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