“I know who you mean,” said a voice behind her.
A Latino man in kitchen whites was puffing on a cigarette under a ventilator blowing grease and coffee smells out onto 33rd Street. Marlene slapped a buck into the filthy palm of Toga Man and turned to her new informant, who had clearly overheard her recent conversation with the nut.
“You know Shirley Waldorf?”
“Oh, yeah, I know Shirley. She come by in the mornings, and I give her a cup of coffee and a bagel. A old bagel, you know? She give me fifteen cents.” He laughed. “Old lady think a cup of coffee and a bagel still cost fifteen cents. Crazy but never give me no trouble. But I ain’t seen her, three, four days now.” He raised his eyes to the vast gray cliff of the building across the street. “She was always going on about that Empire State. She used to work there or something, I don’t know. Anyway, maybe something happen to her. You check with the cops or the hospitals, I think that would be the thing to do.”
Marlene asked a few questions, but the man knew little more than he had already offered. He accepted a five-dollar bill and a card with her number on it, and promised to call if Shirley Waldorf ever came by again for a bagel and coffee.
Back in the Volvo, Marlene drove downtown to her appointment at the courthouse. The red pickup did not show, which meant little. There could be other cars. How about that tan Mercury with the two guys in the front? Control the paranoia, Marlene. Of course, she did have more than the usual number of enemies; still she was having trouble assuring herself that she was operating at her best. It seemed to take more effort just to keep focused, and she wondered about neuron loss.
She was an hour early, on purpose. She wanted to see Judge Paine in action, and so she slipped into Part 52, where the current show was People v. Macaluso. Jilly Macaluso ran a crew for Salvatore Bollano, and his prosecution for extortion and other felonies was a part of Frank Anselmo’s crusade against that crime family. Jilly had been nailed in the hope that he would turn and implicate higher-ups, but Jilly was a stand-up guy and here they all were.
Marlene sat on the hard and shiny seat and reflected upon how dull trials were, if you were not a principal player. It was always a wonder to her why the media had seized on this slow-motion institution as the symbol of dramatic tension-the wizardry of cutting, perhaps, otherwise “legal thriller” would be another oxymoron. Batting for the People was a guy named Motile, a senior rackets ADA, and on D. was, of course, Marvin P. Kronsky. Kronsky was having a bad day, but the smile on his broad, perfectly shaved face was intact, and his voice as he objected had the even resonance of an oboe in low register. The source of the bad day was up there on top of the presidium, a lumpy, chinless, Brillo-fringed head bobbing above the expanse of black serge like the noggin of a hand puppet. Paine was batting down Kronsky’s objections to the line of questioning, which, as far as Marlene could see, were perfectly legit. The testimony was hearsay, and did not fall into any of the numerous exceptions to the hearsay rule. Of course, she had not been in a courtroom for several years. Maybe the law had changed, and the exception had broadened. In any case, the witness was more or less allowed to spin out his inculpatory tale. On cross, Kronsky brought out that the witness was as much a slimeball as his client, and then they broke for lunch.
Marlene walked down the hallway to Judge Paine’s office, identified herself to the secretary there, and shortly Judge Paine himself appeared, still robed, to greet her. He gave her a big smile and, after a glance at her face, addressed his remarks to her nipples.
How nice to see you again, we don’t get many attorneys as gorgeous as you (taking her arm, the backs of the fingers pressing against tit), sit down in that chair and I’ll sit here (unspoken: so I can look up your skirt), did you hear the one about. . (a mildly dirty joke), and the rest of the usual prelims with this kind of asshole. Marlene was used to it, knew the routine, smiled and giggled at the right times. Jesus, she thought, it was like working with a hot wire and a pithed frog, and after a good deal of this they got down to the reason she had come.
Gerald Fein? Oh, of course he remembered Gerald Fein. Marlene watched him closely as he spun what must have been a familiar tale. He really was an ugly little fuck, she thought, and this must have colored his life. People trust the handsome more than they do the ugly, she recalled, and it must have been. . what? Excruciating? To be working with a couple of slick, good-looking men like Jerry and Bernie. He told the story well, and Marlene entertained the thought that he’d been tipped to expect her.
“Judge, tell me one thing,” she interjected at a pause. “I have not been able to find anyone else besides you who recalls Jerry Fein being despondent in the days before the event. How do you explain that?”
The genial smile lost some of its temperature. “I don’t have to explain it, Marlene. This isn’t an interrogation. I’m telling you what happened as a courtesy, so that you won’t go down any wrong paths. Jerry was severely depressed about the loss of the appeal. He didn’t want to go on. I tried to cheer him up, but it was, obviously, not enough. I’ve always felt guilty about that. Maybe if I’d said something else-”
“Well, it really wouldn’t have mattered what you said, if he was killed. If the suicide was phony.”
“There’s absolutely no evidence for that,” Paine said sharply. The smile was but a ghost of its former self.
“Actually, there is, and I have some of it, and I hope to gather more,” said Marlene, lying for effect.
The smile was dead and buried, replaced by a look honed to be terrifying if one was a prisoner awaiting sentencing. “You know, Marlene, if you poke a stick into a hornet’s nest, you’re liable to get stung.”
“Oh, God, that’s good!” said Marlene brightly, flipping up a fresh page in her steno pad. “I have to write that down. To whom shall I attribute it? The Honorable H. I. Paine, distinguished jurist, or Heshy Panofsky, the payoff man for the Mob?”
Paine went white around the eyes and lips, the lips pressing into an almost invisible line. He pressed a button on his desk. Five seconds later, a side door opened and a uniformed guard appeared.
“Out,” said Judge Paine, “and remember, there are laws against spreading slander.”
The house was in Elmhurst on one of the short, anonymous streets that lie between Queens Boulevard and Corona Avenue, a two-story wooden structure painted light green, with an unkempt, slanting yard out front surrounded by a low chain-link fence. The houses on this street had been built in the twenties for big Catholic families escaping from the tenements of Manhattan, and they all had more or less the same plan: big front parlor, seldom used, big kitchen in the back, narrow hallways, lots of small bedrooms, one bath on the second floor, a toilet near the kitchen. Now the block was full of big Asian families, although a few of the houses contained truly remarkable numbers of people whose only relationship was that they all hailed from Quang Ngai province or were all semi-serfs of the same sweatshop, or had no connection at all except that they were all single men trying to make it in Meiguo, the Beautiful Country.
This was the case in the house Lucy and Tran now entered (the heavy glass-paned door opened to Tran’s knock by a surprised young Vietnamese) and moved through from warm sunlight into shadows scented with the cuisine of Southeast Asia: mint, fermented fish, chilies, coriander, the wet, heavy odor of boiling noodles.
Four men were in the front room, playing cards around a folding table, while a large television showed a silent soap opera. They looked up when they saw the two newcomers, and one of them stood to greet them. Lucy recognized him from the raid on the Vo brothers in Manhattan: Sonny Thu, the dai lo of this crew, and one of Freddie Phat’s main men. He was large for a Vietnamese and wore his hair in a rooster crest in the front and long in the back; two thin wisps of hair grew from either side of his wide mouth, lending an animal look to his hard face. They all had hard faces, thought Lucy, although none of them could have been over twenty-five. They were all people whose childhoods had been shattered by the Americ
an war, and Lucy found it hard to imagine them as cherished moon-faced little Asian babies. Being an Asian from this class is a rough lot, but Chinese and Vietnamese babies, especially male babies, live in the closest thing to paradise this earth affords. Contemplating the sort of lives that had converted those semi-divine infants into these terrible-looking men made her inexpressibly sad.
Tran was speaking to Thu in low tones over to one side of the room. Discussing what to do with me, she thought, and she found herself irritated. Once again, nothing normal for Lucy. In a loud voice she said, in Vietnamese, “I have to use the toilet. Where is it?”
One of the card players giggled humorlessly. Thu told her where it was, and she walked out of the room.
“I thought I would find you here,” she said.
Cowboy looked up from the cluttered sink, where he was scrubbing out a pan. He turned and wiped his hands on a towel. “What are you doing here?” he asked. He seemed startled to see her, and nervous.
“I am hiding from the villains, like you.”
“I’m not hiding, I’m a prisoner,” he said with dignity.
“Excuse me. Are you well treated?”
He shrugged and said, “I wash pots and sweep and scrub toilets. They don’t beat me.” His eyes slid away from her. He mumbled to the laden sink.
“What did you say?”
In a louder, defiant voice he snarled, “What do you care?”
He was agitated and upset, and seeing him thus gave Lucy an odd feeling of power. It was rather like it was with Warren Wang, and very unlike how she behaved with the teenage boys who hung out with her male cousins, or most of the boys in middle school, and she wondered why. Was it that they were Asian? No, she decided; it was her, she was different, she felt different and behaved differently, and it was because of. . the situation, yeah, that, she thought, but really it was that with both boys the situation-mystery with a lurking danger-allowed her to slide out of freak hideous Lucy into being someone else, into one of those personas her reading had supplied, like crisp dresses just back from the cleaners, hanging in plastic in a closet, ready to wear. Or more than one, as now, as she added to the mix of Kim and Claudine the exquisitely sensitive and long-suffering Kieu.
“ ‘That we have met means fate binds us,’ ” Lucy quoted. “ ‘The will of man has often beaten back the whim of blue Heaven, but should the knot that ties us fail, I’ll keep to what is etched on bronze and cut in stone, and die.’ ” He gaped. Lucy placed her hand on her cocked hip, smiled, and batted her eyelashes rapidly. After a stunned moment he burst into laughter. Which she joined.
And after they stopped laughing she said, “I wasn’t really joking, Minh. I will be your friend. You’re not like the others out there, or the Vo.”
But he hung his head and looked away. “I have to get working. They want me to cook the pho for lunch, and I haven’t finished cleaning.”
“Go ahead, I’ll make the pho. Where do you keep all the stuff?”
“You can make pho?”
“Don’t be ridiculous, I was making pho before you were born.” Again, startled, he laughed, and his face was again transformed into that of a real kid, the dull mask of the hard man cast aside for an instant. She seized the moment to say, “Only trust me, Minh, you’ll see. Listen, those others, they can’t help what they are, and I don’t blame them, no, and I don’t hate them. I love Uncle Tran more than anyone besides my family, and he is a very bad man. He could eat them all. But you’re still young. .”
He looked at her now out of his real self. “You don’t know. You don’t know what I’ve done.”
“You’ve killed people, right?”
“Yes. And robberies. And worse, torture to make them tell. .”
“But you’re not going to do that anymore, are you?” God will forgive you, she thought, and almost said it, but her native good taste intervened.
He held the look for a moment longer, and then it fell away. He went back to the sink. “All the food is in the refrigerator,” he said. “We have rats.”
Marlene called Osborne on the car phone as she drove south on Second Avenue and got a woman named Meg Morrison in the research unit and asked her to generate a full history on James C. Nobile. She could’ve asked Sym, but Osborne would be quicker, and Marlene had a feeling that time was beginning to press in this case, after twenty-some years, and she had other things for Sym to do. She definitely did not like that Shirley Waldorf was missing from her accustomed streets.
“Credit and criminal only?” asked Morrison.
“And employment history, as far back as it goes.”
“By close of business all right?”
“That’ll be fine,” said Marlene. She hung up and turned east on Canal. The phone buzzed, and it was Tran. She had a short, unpleasant, and unsatisfactory conversation with him. She did not want to hear, or believe, that the NYPD was dirty with triad money. That was too much. She said so. Tran was silent, waiting. Marlene found herself thinking about how she was going to explain this to her husband. An unusual thought: Marlene in general did not much concern herself with explaining her actions, but this affair had moved beyond even her generous boundaries of what was acceptable in family life. She inquired after her daughter’s health, was told it was satisfactory, that the child had made a lunch for the gangsters. Perfect. Karp would be so pleased. She told Tran to sit tight and she’d be in touch.
The cherry on top of this marvelous morning was that when she pulled into the little parking lot near her office, there was the red pickup truck with the green fender parked across the street, empty. Cursing, she got out and walked over to it. It was locked. The gun rack behind the cab was empty, but peering through the dirty window, Marlene could just make out a box of Remington double-ought twelve-gauge shells. Charming. She wrote down the number of the Jersey plates and tried to think who she had offended in that state recently, and came up blank.
In the office she lunched on cottage cheese, a chunk of pepperoni, black coffee, and a cigarette, and got Sym involved in calling the city’s homeless shelters and hospitals to inquire whether they had a Shirley Waldorf. Marlene called Jim Raney and asked him to run the plate number of the pickup. He called back twenty minutes later with the news that the registered owner of that truck was a firm called Buttzville Landscaping, of that town, and they had not reported their license stolen either. Marlene laughed, only semihysterically, and Raney said, “You’ve been sneaking off to Buttzville again, Marlene, and doing it with the sod crews and now it’s coming back to haunt you.”
“What can I say, Raney, the smell of cut grass gets me off. Or maybe I forgot to pay for a load of mulch.”
“Yeah, I always forget the mulch bill, too. You want me to drop around, have a talk with the guy when he comes back?”
“Thanks, Jim, but no. I got too many factors going on in my life, and I’m just going to forget this guy right now. Tell the truth, it could just be my imagination, or coincidence. And if not. . well, if I can’t handle a shotgun-wielding hick gardener from Jersey, it’s time to hang it up.”
The calls drew a blank on Waldorf, and at three Marlene left and went to pick up the kids and Posie at the park. The pickup truck was gone when she looked. Maybe it was my imagination, she thought, or maybe it was the Mercury, and when she reached the park twenty minutes later, and Green Fender had not appeared behind her, she had nearly bought the story.
Posie and the boys were waiting at the appointed spot on Central Park South as Marlene pulled up.
“We got kidnappered, Mommy!” Zak screamed gleefully as the twins, Posie, and the dog piled in.
“I want to tell it, Zak,” Zik complained. “It’s my tell, because, I got kidnappered, not you.”
Marlene looked at Posie, who rolled her eyes. “It was nothing, some creep. .”
“My tell! My tell!” screamed Zik.
“Okay, darling, you tell Mommy,” said Marlene, heart in throat.
Zik said, “Once upon a time, Zik was playing in
the sandbox in the park. .”
Zak said, “And Zak was playing in the sandbox, too.”
Zik shrieked out the rage of the thwarted artist and had to be calmed and Zak had to be made to promise to let Zik tell the whole thing in his way, and then Zik began with the same trope and then, “. . and I was making a duck with my red duck mold, I was making a whole long line of ducks in the sand, and this man came over and he said, hello, Zik, and he said, I know where there is some real-life ducks you can play with and you should come with me and I said could Zak and Posie come too and he said no, just you, Zik, and he came over me and held my hand and then Posie yelled and Sweety scared him away. The end.”
“Could I tell my story now, Mommy?” Zak shouted.
Marlene felt the hot, penetrating band between her eyes that signaled the start of a major, soul-threatening headache. She gripped the wheel until her knuckles glowed and said, with preternatural calm, “In a little bit, honey, but now it’s Posie’s turn to tell all about the man in the park. Posie?”
“Marlene, honest, it was no big deal. I saw this guy leaning over Zik and I watched him, and when he grabbed Zik’s hand, I yelled and he started to pull him up and I yelled again and grabbed Sweety’s lead and ran over there and Sweety was real upset and doing his Turner and Hooch thing, growling and slobbering and the guy saw it and booked. That’s it. Oh, yeah, and I caught a cop passing by and gave her a description of the guy.”
“Uh-huh. Good. Uh, Posie, this was an Asian guy, right?”
“Asian? No, he wasn’t Asian. He was, like, a regular American guy. But big, like a football player. He had wraparound shades and a suit and a shirt but not a tie kind of shirt, more of a. . what do they call those guys who hang around in Vegas? In the casinos?”
“You mean gangsters?” Marlene inquired in a weak voice.
“No, there’s another word. . oh, yeah, like a bouncer. He looked like a bouncer. He had a bunch of gold chains, I saw that, and black shoes. Marlene, are you okay? You look green.”
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