Little Brothers

by Dorothy Salisbury Davis

  For the older one he would die, Marks thought. The younger one was something else. “I don’t intend to hurt him. All I want to know right now is what’s hurting you so much.”

  “My gall bladder.”

  “Where’s Johnny’s office?”

  “I only know in New Jersey. He works for somebody else.”

  “In Jersey City. He’s in the firm of Galli and Frascotti.”

  “Why do you ask me questions when you know?”

  “To find out how well you know your own son.”

  “I know him!” he cried and pounded on his chest.

  “Did he warn you to stay in the hospital for your own safety, Bonelli?”

  “You crazy cop! Get out of here. I’m a sick man.”

  Marks got up. “You know, I’m probably the only person in this hospital who believes it? I’m going to ask them to keep you for another twenty-four hours.”

  Marks felt a small prickle of elation as he got his car out of the hospital parking lot. He was also aware of his first personal fear during the investigation. He proposed to go no further than headquarters without a partner, and as he drove those few blocks he kept a tight vigil in the rear-view mirror.

  When he walked into the squadroom, there was Tomasino, turning the pages of the file. He was still in formal dress, but with his black tie badly askew.

  “It must have been quite a wedding,” Marks said.

  “It was, only I couldn’t get with it, you know?”

  “I know,” Marks said, and gave him an affectionate poke in the arm. “Anything new?” He pointed to the file.

  “She went out as far as the delicatessen for milk and bread. Took the baby with her. She’s back in.”

  “Find yourself some work clothes. I’m going to put the all points out on Ruggio. Then we’ve got a job to do.”

  “What?”

  “Take the fat boy apart, even if we can’t put him together again.”

  Tomasino spat on his hands. “It’ll be a pleasure.”

  Everybody’s punching bag, as the old lady said. Humpty Dumpty. Marks did not relish the job, but it had to be done.

  When Ric opened the door to the two detectives, his first words were, “What’s happened to Pa?”

  He almost had to have been expecting them, Marks thought. Was his concern for his father genuine, or a cover for his own fear? “That’s why we’re here. What did happen to him?”

  “I mean he’s all right, isn’t he?”

  “Scared half to death, but that shouldn’t surprise you.”

  The fat one sucked in his breath. “I thought he was dead or something.”

  “From what causes, Ric?”

  “Him not coming home,” the boy said. He wore a clean white shirt—dressed up even to the point of cuff-links and polished shoes.

  “Let’s go over what happened out here first,” Marks said. “Show me where he was standing when you hit him with the bottle.”

  “I didn’t. I broke the bottle just to scare him. The railing there broke when he backed into it. The wood’s rotten. The whole building’s rotten.”

  “Why the big routine at the Little Brothers then?” Marks led the way into the apartment. Ric did not try to stop them. The first thing the detective noticed was a cracked bowl on the table with fruit in it, a couple of apples and some expensive oranges.

  “I’m always complaining about how Pa treats me. Like some big cry-baby. The Brothers don’t have any respect for me. So I made it up.”

  “I see,” Marks said. He reached for one of the oranges and looked to catch the boy’s reaction.

  Ric didn’t want him to have it, but he smirked and murmured, “Pa likes oranges.”

  Marks put it back in the bowl, trying not to feel sorry for this lump of blubber. The broken window had been replaced with cardboard, probably the laundry backing for the shirt Ric now wore. The place was filthy underneath. Marks could smell it, but on the surface it wasn’t bad: he’d worked hard, trying to clean it.

  “Sit down,” Marks said, and when the boy had seated himself on a chair the springs of which dragged the floor, “Tommy, close the door.” He took a large plastic bag from his pocket, shook it out so that Ric could see its size. He put it over the back of a chair. “Before we go, I want the clothes you were wearing Thursday night—the black sweater, pants, whatever you were wearing underneath, and your shoes.”

  “They ain’t here,” Ric said. He moistened his lips. “They’re at the plant.”

  “We’ll drive you over and get them. I understand there’s a watchman. He’ll let us in.”

  “I’ll lose my job. You can have the shoes. I’m wearing them now.”

  “And your underwear?”

  “I don’t wear any. I’ll get the pants for you …” Ric started to get up.

  “No hurry,” Marks said. He could give them any old pair hanging in the closet, Marks knew. It was the sweater he wanted and either that was clean, in his terms, or they weren’t going to get it. A psychological advantage was the best he could hope for. “Let’s go over your timetable for Thursday night.” Marks took pen and notebook from his pocket. “The argument between you and your father was going strong by eleven o’clock, according to one witness. Right?”

  “I don’t know. Me waking up all of a sudden. She always exaggerates anyway.” He jerked his head toward the Niccoli apartment.

  “You smashed the window and then it was quiet for some time. Where did you go for the wine?”

  “Mike’s place.”

  “Was that before or after you went to Grossman’s?” Marks asked without a change of inflection.

  The boy’s ruddy face went pale in blotches. Again he wet his lips. “I want to call my brother. He’s a lawyer.”

  Marks motioned toward the phone. It was on the same table as the fruit. Ric shook his head. He looked from Marks to Tomasino and back at Marks again.

  “Call him,” Marks said.

  “I guess not.”

  “Why not, Ric? It’s your right.”

  “He wouldn’t do anything for me. I don’t know. I don’t even know where to call him.”

  “I’ll give you the number.”

  “No.”

  “Ric, what were you doing outside of Grossman’s at eleven-thirty Thursday night?”

  “I was looking for Angie.”

  Tomasino scribbled his shorthand: it was their first real break. The scratch of his pen drew Ric’s attention.

  Marks said, “Were you supposed to meet him there?”

  “No. It was just …” He shrugged.

  “Why were you looking for him?”

  “Somebody I could talk to,” Ric said. “I was going to tell him about me and Pa, you know, the way I said at the club?”

  “About hitting him over the head with the bottle?”

  “Yeah.”

  “But that didn’t happen until twelve-thirty.”

  “You mixed me up. I was looking for Angie.”

  “But why there, Ric? Doesn’t Angie live down the street from here?”

  “He wasn’t home.”

  “Did you go to his house?

  “No. I just knew he wasn’t home.”

  “Where was he?”

  “He’s got a hideout someplace. I was looking for him. That’s all.”

  “A man named Ruggio—do you know him?”

  “Never heard of him.”

  “A friend of your brother Johnny’s.”

  “Huh?” That surprised him, Marks realized. It was new information to the boy and he didn’t know what to do with it in his own mind. Marks had a hunch that it pleased him.

  “Come on, Ric. You’re going to tell us sooner or later. When you and your father quarreled about money, where did Grossman come in on it?”

  Ric wiped the sweat from his face with his hand and his hand on the filthy upholstery. “I always thought Pa was going to him for money. Borrowing, I mean, and I was going to have to pay it back.”

  “You always thought …
When did you find out he wasn’t?”

  “He told me.”

  “He told you he was peddling dope for Grossman.”

  “He wasn’t,” Ric said, and repeated the words several times, half-crying.

  Marks tried another tack: “The Little Brothers were going to save him. Is that it?”

  Ric sniffed and nodded.

  “By killing Grossman?”

  “Not by killing him.”

  “By what then? Some hocus-pocus?” Marks thought of the swastikas and the clean square of window. “Am I right, Tommy? A secret society—some kind of curse was put on the man.”

  Tomasino said, “Ric, the Little Brothers or your father, who are you going to protect?”

  “Pa.”

  “Then what did the Little Brothers do to Grossman?”

  Ric told of the ritual, of Angie’s having to put the Killing Eye on Grossman.

  “How did you know he was pushing drugs?” Tomasino asked.

  “Angie got the proof, a black man, and him paying off the cops. I mean we all figured it out first which is why Angie got the Ordeal.”

  “The Ordeal,” Marks repeated. He thought he was close now: the Blacks moving in on the Family. Bonelli’s money coming to an end: it coincided with Ruggio’s moving into the apartment on Hester Street. The crippled Bonelli was all right as a go-between between the Syndicate and Grossman, and Family benevolence required that he be taken care of. But when the Black takeover became a possibility, they needed a Ruggio.

  But why take out Grossman?

  “When you got to Grossman’s that night, did you see Angie?”

  “No, sir.”

  It was the first sir he had gotten throughout the interrogation.

  “And what did you do?”

  “I hung around and I saw a girl going into Grossman’s. I thought it was for stuff and Angie not even seeing her when he was supposed to be there. I was going to bring him up before the Little Brothers. You know, I was going to take over the Eye till midnight like he was supposed to, but I seen a man watching me so I beat it for home, and I got the old man his fucking wine on the way.”

  Marks thought of Angie on the backless chair. “Did you accuse Angie?”

  “That’s what I was going to do when you guys showed up. When you went out, Louis disbanded us till things cooled.”

  Marks did not think Ric could put it together that well if it was not the truth. When he glanced questioningly at Tomasino, the younger detective nodded. He was willing to buy it.

  Ric’s white shirt was wilted, the boy soaked with sweat. He complained of how he was trying to look decent in case his father came home.

  “Take another bath,” Tomasino said. “It won’t hurt you.”

  Marks left the plastic bag on the chair. “Bring us the sweater, Ric.”

  Mrs. Niccoli directed them from her sidewalk chair to where Angie Palermo lived, and this without their even asking. “She is a witch,” Marks said.

  They rang the vestibule bell which might or might not work and then went up to the third-floor apartment and at the door there rang the buzzer several times. No one came. Then, from the floor below, a woman called: “Who’s up there?”

  Marks looked down at the heavy-set woman. “We’re looking for Angie Palermo.”

  “I’m looking for him too. I’m his mother.”

  The detectives went down and exchanged a few words with her. She had been a handsome woman once, but she had let herself go and she was bitter. “Everybody says what a good boy he is, like I’ve been telling my neighbor …”

  The neighbor nodded from the doorway.

  Marks thanked them.

  “When you find him,” Mrs. Palermo called after the detectives, “tell him if he don’t come home tonight, he don’t ever need to come home. He can go to his father … He can go to hell.” Before they reached the street, she was running after them. “I don’t mean that. I’m worried out of my mind. Tell him … please, to come home.”

  The detectives went next to Angie’s hideout, and found the roof hatch padlocked.

  “It’s a fire trap,” Tomasino said. It seemed to outrage him. He put the ladder to the frame, went up it, and with several thrusts of his shoulder, opened the door. He had torn the hasp from the wood.

  They went onto the roof and found Angie’s things gone. Across the way, Julie’s lights were on, her shades up. She was sitting near the fan, a book in her hand.

  “I thought he’d come back,” Julie said. “In fact, I thought it might be him now.”

  “Where to look next,” Marks said. “Any clues, Julie?”

  “I thought he’d come here, I mean in preference to going home. But I shouldn’t judge by what I’d do.”

  You’ll go home soon, Marks thought, but he didn’t say it.

  “Is he in danger—I mean his life or something like that?”

  “Something like that. It depends on what he saw at Grossman’s. Or who he saw at Grossman’s.”

  “It’s heroin isn’t it?”

  “Did Angie tell you that?”

  “Angie told me about nothing, Lieutenant Marks, except his home life and himself personally.”

  “Then how did you know it was heroin?”

  “I guessed it. A person with an idea of what’s going on in the world would—including the local police whom you’re supposed to support—and everybody around here does.”

  “You couldn’t bring yourself to tell us that, could you, Miss Julie?”

  “I don’t support my local police.”

  “You’d better, young lady. Some day you may need them.” Marks signaled Tomasino: they were leaving.

  Julie said, “Try Father Phillips.”

  “We will.”

  “And if he does come back, I’ll keep him here and let you know.”

  “Thank you,” Marks said. Nevertheless, his enchantment, such as there had been of it, was ended.

  Phillips had not seen the boy since Julie and he had come to him that afternoon. At the rectory door, the priest said, “If it’s any use to you, I think I could say almost positively the fat boy in the lineup this morning was the person I saw while waiting for Miss Borghese.”

  Marks could not conceal his disgust. “What was it, Father? Didn’t you want to get involved?”

  “I don’t think it was that—but I may have been deceiving myself.”

  “He has already identified himself,” Marks said. What he did not say was that it came about because Marks had used Phillips’ reluctant testimony anyway.

  On the way uptown they stopped at Hester Street. The stakeout car was empty.

  The Ruggio apartment was in darkness, and the police seal had been removed from the door to Grossman’s shop.

  Tomasino went back to the car to make radio contact with headquarters. Marks went into the delicatessen.

  “It happened mighty fast,” Allioto said, “her and the baby getting into the car, and one of the men throwing a little suitcase in after her.”

  “Did you see the license plate on the car?”

  “It was a police plate. The guy with the suitcase was one of your own men.”

  “I wonder what language they communicated in,” Marks said, almost to himself. He had a premonition of total failure.

  “Huh?” Allioto said.

  “She couldn’t speak English, that’s all I’m saying.” Marks was on his way.

  “Hey, lieutenant,” Allioto called after him.

  Marks paused at the door.

  “She could speak English. She couldn’t speak Italian, but she could speak English.”

  “Oh, my God,” Marks said after a few seconds of thought.

  Tomasino brought the car to a screaming halt at the door. Marks got in. Tomasino said, “We’re to drop it, Dave. There’s orders from the top to come in without delay.”

  “Then let’s ride.”

  “What does it mean?”

  “I think we’ve come damn near blowing the cover on a Narcotics agent. Ruggio
was probably a Federal plant.”

  There was neither confirmation nor denial of this information waiting for them when they reached the division offices, only the cold order from Inspector Fitzgerald to suspend further investigation of Grossman’s death until instructed to proceed.

  Marks and Tomasino sat, trying to put the pieces together to their own satisfaction; this in the midst of other men responding to other violence in their part of the city.

  “Oh, man,” Tomasino said. “It’s like trying to find the bathroom in the dark.”

  “When you don’t know where it is,” Marks added. Which took him back in his mind’s eye to the lone commode in the three-story building, near which Grossman had been murdered. “Ruggio would have found the body when he came in that night, late. One A.M. or so. He had to choose between reporting to us or to the mob who thought he was their man. He called Johnny Bonelli and got their orders: find the body in the morning. Then he showed up on the loading dock … and I don’t know where Ruggio goes from there.”

  “What about Bonelli, the lawyer—which side is he on?”

  Marks thought of the father in the hospital and his fierce pride in his older son, and he thought of Gerosa’s story of his struggle as a young lawyer to stay clean of Family. “I’ve got a hunch he’s Ruggio’s partner—undercover.”

  “Family inside family,” Tomasino said. “I’m going home to mine, Dave, and glad of it.”

  A window within a window, Marks thought. Which association brought him back to Angie.

  25

  IF ANGIE HAD NOT been on the lookout for Ric, the detectives would have caught him, and with the knife in his belt. If she had wanted to, old Mrs. Niccoli could have told them that he was home. On his way home from Julie’s he had waved at her when she called out to him that Ric was looking for him. He had heard his mother’s voice in the apartment beneath theirs, and he had prayed with all his might that he could get into the house and out of it again, with the knife, without his mother’s hearing him. His footstep was softer than his heartbeat. But before leaving he had looked out to see if Ric was on the street, and he had seen Marks and Tomasino. He hid himself in his own closet and waited, unable to plan beyond the moment.