Little Brothers

by Dorothy Salisbury Davis

  “You come home to your own bed tonight, Angelo, or else don’t you come home at all no more. Hear me?”

  “Come to my house,” Rotelli said. “Want a key?”

  Angie did not answer. A joke. And he didn’t want any more keys. He was feeling sickish again. In the bathroom he put cold water on his face and that helped. Then he was chilled again. He went to his room and put on a sweater. He longed to crawl into his own bed and start a whole new dream … but he knew he could not do that. He heard them talking in the kitchen as he went out. He could not remember if he had thanked Mr. Rotelli. But what difference did it make, considering the other things that could happen to him?

  There was no sign of Ric on the street, only swarms of kids and women who told him his mother had been looking all day for him. He cut through a lot where the demolition ball and bulldozers had carved a canyon between buildings. A line of wash hung high overhead, all pink in the last of the sunset. A gust of wind puffed out the man’s shirts. He stood a few seconds in the middle of the lot. He heard a loud bang, a firecracker or a backfire, then a motorcycle warming up to a roar. For a minute he lost himself in a childhood game: an army of riders bore down on him and he had to find cover before they could spray him with machinegun bullets. He made for the Ukrainian church on the next corner. The fantasy faded when he saw the priest close the gates and go inside. He remembered how, when he was six or seven, he ran with the big kids while they taunted the bearded priest. He’d come out flying after them like Bat Man, his arms flailing. There was choir practice going on in the church as Angie passed under the windows, men’s voices chanting, a lisping, whispering sound mixed in with the foreign words. Angie brought the sound down in his mind to “sworry,” then, “sorry.”

  He repeated the one word over and over to himself, a prayer of sorts, until he reached the stoop under which was the entrance to the Little Brothers’ clubroom. It had once belonged to a group of men, but the sign still served: MEMBERS ONLY. His three slow raps on the door committed him to enter.

  Pete the Turk opened the door to him and went back to the table where the five members of the council sat in the same places Angie remembered them sitting the night he took the oaths. Only they looked at him differently: Angie had the feeling they were as scared of him as he was of them, and it struck him that they thought he had actually killed Grossman.

  Louis said, “Come over to the light, Angie.”

  There was only the one light in the room. It hung over the table. Angie approached. He tried to look at Louis but he had glanced at the light bulb and the glare bleared his vision.

  “On your oath, Palermo, did you kill Grossman with your own hand?”

  “I did not.”

  “When did you last see him?”

  Angie said a crazy thing: it came out of all the interrogations he had watched on television: “Alive?”

  “Did you see him dead?” Louis asked, quick as a shot.

  “No. I don’t know why I said that. I mean, I saw him about eleven o’clock. He climbed up on that platform in the window and looked back at me. I … went away then.”

  “Do you know who killed him?”

  Angie glanced at Ric. He couldn’t help it. Then he looked down. “No.”

  “What’d you look at me for?” Ric said in a high pitch.

  Angie didn’t answer.

  “Angie?” Louis demanded.

  “I was thinking about Ric calling me to come here.”

  “I didn’t call you. Tonight, you mean?”

  “Twenty minutes ago.”

  “I was here by then, wasn’t I, captain?”

  “All right, a half hour maybe,” Angie said.

  “I swear by my oath as a Little Brother …”

  Louis silenced him by a thump of his hand on the table. “Before you got the phone call, Angie, didn’t you intend to come here?”

  Angie shook his head. He tried to think what might come next.

  “Why not?”

  “I thought the police might be following me. I mean if somebody’d seen me hanging around Grossman’s so much.”

  “You are a good Brother,” Louis said. “Sit down.”

  The captain made room for him between himself and Pete. There was a backless chair a few feet away. Angie chose that rather than wrestle with one of the folding chairs that stood against the wall. He brought it. Before he sat down, Louis pulled the chair even closer to the table than Angie had placed it.

  “Do you think it could’ve been a cop who phoned you—like he wanted to see what you’d do?”

  Angie shook his head. “It was Ric.”

  “I swear …” Ric shouted.

  “Shut up, Ric.” To Angie, Louis said: “It sounded like Ric. Okay?”

  “Okay,” he said, but he knew that voice better than any in the world.

  “Now tell us what you found out about Grossman.”

  Angie told everything he could remember: the abuse of the cat, the payoff to the policeman, the black man whom he had seen twice. “The way he came into the hall after me, it was like he knew the place inside and out. He could have been the one …”

  Louis interrupted. “Forget that. Do you know what was going on?”

  “I know what I think was going on,” Angie said. “Drugs. I think there must be heroin or something in the little statues.”

  There was silence, absolute, noncommittal silence, but every Brother’s eyes were on him.

  “Now let’s get back to the phone call tonight, the voice that sounded like Ric’s. What did he say to you?”

  “I don’t know—all he said was, you better come to the clubhouse, Angie. Something like that. And when I said Ric?, whoever it was hung up.”

  This time Ric kept his mouth shut.

  Louis did all the talking. “There was a lot of money in a safe in the back of the shop. A cop I know says eighty thousand bucks. That’s the big league. And if they thought there was any chance of little guys like us spilling anything to the cops, we’d be in real trouble. Do you know what I’m talking about, Angie?”

  “I’m not sure.”

  “It could be a mob operation. What they call the Mafia.”

  “I see,” Angie said, but he did not see at all. He did not believe there was a Mafia, not in the 1970s. Once there had been. Now there might be Families linked by blood protecting themselves, in business together, yes. And maybe there were crime syndicates, but not Italian. That was a smear, propaganda meant to disgrace the Italian-Americans and to cover up secret operations of the FBI. But Louis had just spoken of the Mafia, and Angie plainly remembered that the Little Brothers had picketed the FBI headquarters. He remembered their sign: MAFIA? PROVE IT!

  “But Grossman was a Jew,” he said.

  “And the pusher black,” Louis said.

  Angie thought he understood a little better. There was a Mafia, but it wasn’t all Italian.

  Louis said: “We’ve got to have some facts from you, Ric: what started you on Grossman?”

  Angie realized that he’d been right: Ric was at the bottom of whatever trouble he was in.

  “Just keeping my eyes open,” Ric said. “Like all of yous … we all agreed, didn’t we?”

  “Be specific. We may be up against something and we got to know.”

  “I seen this guy,” Ric said, “this black guy drop one of them little statues on the street. It broke and he went crazy trying to sweep it up. The Jew ran out with a broom and some paper, sweeping up the white stuff. And when a patrol car drove up, Grossman bowed and waved at them and the cops didn’t even stop. So I figured—who wouldn’t?”

  Angie could not tell whether the other Brothers believed Ric or not. He didn’t himself. Something was wrong, and yet …

  “Describe the black man,” Louis said.

  Angie had not described him, he realized, and Louis would call on him next. He was going to have to stand up to Ric.

  “I didn’t see him real close,” Ric started.

  But he was not going
to have to finish: someone was pounding on the door who meant it. They were coming in. The Little Brothers froze in their seats.

  “Open the door, Pete,” Louis said. Then: “No more meetings till I get in touch with you. Nobody knows anything.”

  10

  MARKS FELT THEY WERE onto something the minute he and Tomasino walked in on the Little Brothers. He could feel the tension, see the tautness in the faces that didn’t know whether to grin or grimace. They had walked in on a council of war, a trial of a member, something like it, something with discipline. He glanced around the cellar. The only light, a naked bulb, hung from the ceiling over the green poker table. A few folding chairs stood against the wall. They were courtesy of Rossi’s Funeral Parlor. On the wall itself the American flag was draped alongside the green, white, and red flag of Italy. Marks approached the youngsters, walking behind Tomasino, taking in what he could while Tomasino explained their visit: checking out all the clubs to see if anybody had seen anything unusual on the streets the night before.

  Marks tried to evaluate the difference in attitude here from that in the other two clubs they had visited so far: it was in the degree of alertness, concern. It could be fear.

  The fat boy was trying to set a smile and it wouldn’t hold. The youngster next to him kept his eyes down. None of them looked curious, the primary characteristic of the other clubs. A handsome youngster with delicate, almost feminine features was the color of putty. The big fellow next to him got up and shook hands with Tomasino, the macher, Marks thought, and all of them straightened their backs from his example.

  Tomasino introduced him: “Lieutenant Marks, this is Louis Fortuno.”

  Marks avoided the hand offered him by scratching his neck at that point. Let Tomasino take care of the amenities. “How old are you, Louis?”

  “Eighteen.”

  “Occupation?”

  “I got a scholarship to play football. I’m a student.”

  “Congratulations,” Marks said. “Any of you know Ben Grossman, the shopkeeper knifed last night on Hester Street?”

  “It depends on what you mean by know, lieutenant,” Louis said. “We know there was a shop there run by an old man, and we heard what happened.” He nudged the boy sitting tense as a cricket beside him. “Get a couple of chairs, Angie.”

  The boy moved like a sleepwalker. Marks watched him. When he brought the chairs, he was shaking so badly he couldn’t open them. The chief was about to take over. Marks motioned him to stay where he was.

  “What do you do, Angie?” Marks asked, taking a chair from the boy, opening it for himself and putting his foot on it. Tomasino did the same thing.

  “Nothing, sir,” Angie said.

  “Nothing?”

  “Sometimes I work in a bakery.” Then, in a cry that was downright pathetic, “I’m going to be a dancer.”

  Louis picked that up like a dropkick. “Hey, brothers, did you hear the kid? A dancer, Angie, and you never told us.”

  The gang laughed too loudly. The boy returned to his place, a chair without a back.

  Marks pointed at the fat boy. “What do you do?”

  “I work on Fourteenth Street, Butchers’ Row.”

  “A butcher’s apprentice?”

  “Not till the fucking union says so.” Bravura.

  “What’s your name?”

  “Ricardo Bonelli.”

  “Bonelli?” Tomasino repeated tentatively. “Didn’t I see the name on last night’s blotter?” He had gone over the precinct record.

  “Yeah, I guess. The cops carted my old man off to Bellevue last night. He was drunk and we got in a fight. He tried to throw me out a window.”

  A piano would have been easier, Marks thought. “What time did all this happen?”

  “I guess I could figure it out,” Bonelli said, “but I wasn’t looking at my watch if that’s what you mean.”

  “Figure it out. We’re in no hurry.”

  “Look, lieutenant,” Louis put in, “this is a private club and we’re having a peaceful meeting. What I mean is, do you have a warrant?”

  “And what I mean is, wouldn’t you rather talk here than in the stationhouse?” Marks spoke amiably, something he did not feel like doing. These punks were more self-righteous than a temperance outfit.

  “Okay,” Louis said. “I just want it on the record.”

  Marks took out his notebook. “It goes in the record.” So far, he had nothing to go on in any suspicion of these youngsters except their own reactions, but in his estimate they fit Grossman’s “baby fascists.” “Now, young Mr. Bonelli, what time?”

  “I was thinking the police would know the time better than me. I mean the neighbors called the police and they called the ambulance. There’d be a record on that, wouldn’t there?”

  “Give me an approximate hour.”

  “Twelve-thirty. I got to be in bed early. I clock in on my job at four A.M. The old man was drinking. We don’t get along so good then. He fell asleep in the couch watching T.V. and I lay down on my bed with my clothes on. When he woke up like at midnight, he wanted me to go out and get more wine and when I said I wouldn’t he took a swing at me. He’s been real mean since he got hurt on the job.”

  “When was that?”

  “Five years ago maybe. I was a kid.”

  “Did you go for the wine?”

  “Yeah, and by the time I got back, he didn’t want it. I got so mad I hit him over the head with the fucking bottle and that’s when the old bitch next door called the police.”

  Louis said, absolutely straight, “We got a regulation in the Little Brothers, Bonelli, and you know it. That language don’t go in this room.”

  Marks would have laughed if the scene had not been so grotesque.

  He went round the table, leaving Angie to the last, and took names, addresses, and statements. All the other Brothers were able to account for their whereabouts from ten o’clock till dawn with remarkable recall. They had all, in effect, kissed their mothers goodnight and gone to bed long before midnight. Except for the dancer. Angelo Palermo lived at home, but he had not stayed at home last night. He had watched the making of a movie on Grand Street. About eleven o’clock he had gone to what he called his hideout on a tenement roof.

  “Were you anywhere near Grossman’s shop?”

  “It must be two or three blocks.”

  “Who are you hiding out from, son?”

  Angie shrugged. “I just call it a hideout. I look at the stars and things.”

  “What’s wrong at home?”

  “My mother’s got a man. I mean, I’m in the way.”

  “No other family?”

  “My brother’s in the marines. My father’s in California.”

  “Did you stay on the roof all night?”

  “No, sir. I got kind of scared, imagining things. What I did—I went to a restaurant where there’s a girl I know. On Houston Street. I stayed with her.”

  “All night?”

  The boy nodded. He wasn’t meeting Marks’ eyes, only skittering glances as though to see if the detective was buying his story.

  “What’s her name?”

  “Alice.”

  “Alice what?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “And the name of the restaurant?”

  “I don’t know,” he said, almost a whisper.

  Bonelli came to his rescue. “I can tell you he was there, lieutenant—till half-past three anyway. I saw them on my way to work. I got to walk, you see. Sometimes a prowl car gives me a lift, but not last night, so I seen him and the waitress. It’s a dump called Minnie’s Place.”

  To Angie, Marks said: “Did you see Bonelli?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Were these two alibiing one another? Had it all been worked out in anticipation of police questioning? Marks was not going to find out talking to them together. He took the whole group by surprise. “Okay, Brothers. That’s it for now.” Without another word he walked out. Tomasino followed.

&nb
sp; Behind the wheel of the car, Marks asked: “What makes them different from the other gangs we’ve seen tonight?”

  “Something, but they’re not bad kids. A little self-important maybe.”

  Marks started the motor. “What do you think was going on when we walked in?”

  “A ritual of some kind. The Little Brothers call themselves a secret organization. Maybe they were initiating the kid on the stool.”

  “By scaring him to death?”

  “I’ll make a guess at what was going on, Dave. They’re a pretty puritanical outfit. I’d say Bonelli had informed on the kid, him being with this chick, Alice or Minnie or whatever. That’s alien territory over there. Maybe they were putting the screws on the youngster.”

  Marks didn’t buy it, but he did not say so: he merely made a mental note that when it came to Tomasino’s old neighborhood, the young detective went on the defensive.

  As they stopped at the intersection of Mulberry Street and Broome, a police car wheeled around in front of them, its occupants caught briefly in Marks’ headlights. It was Sergeant Regan and, if Marks was not mistaken, his passenger was Julie Borghese’s roommate, Phillips. He glanced at Tomasino, about to mention it, and then decided to go it alone. Tomasino was lighting a cigarette, unaware of the car that had turned in front of them.

  Marks pulled in to the curb. “Tommy, take the car over to the stationhouse and leave the keys at the desk. I want to walk off my suspicions—or reinforce them.”

  Marks did not drag his feet as he headed toward Julie Borghese’s, but neither did he run. He did not want to draw attention. He even spoke a word along the way to one and another of the women who sat outside, fanning themselves. Some still wore black, but most of them wore bright colors and the dominant language was English. First generation American.

  The squad car was parked a few doors away from Julie’s. The two men were still in it. If it was Phillips, what did it mean? That he had remembered something concerned with the homicide and checked in locally? That he had decided he could make identification? Marks had felt from the first that there was something fishy about Phillips. It made him hesitate now, and while he hesitated, Phillips got out of the car and went into the building. Marks had a good look at him in the vestibule light.