You Get What You Pay For (The Tony Cassella Mysteries)

by Beinhart, Larry

  “Valerie,” she said, to my great relief, but added, “and Jean-Claude.”

  Jean-Claude turned out to be Valerie’s. He wanted, mostly, to go to Tower Records to buy unpleasant rock ’n’ roll albums. I met them that afternoon and did the walking tour of Central Park. The next day I took them on the Staten Island ferry, the world’s cheapest sea voyage. On the ride out, they stared at Lady Liberty. On the way back, as the sun came down over Jersey, magic-hour light painted the towers of the World Trade Center low gold, and the stubby skyscrapered tip of the stockbrokers’ city looked like the closing credits for the world’s best urban love story.

  I watched her black curls dancing in the breeze and stared at her Anna Magnani face.

  We went to Little Italy for dinner. The East Village for music. Which, being young, they adored.

  She had gone to college but hadn’t finished.

  She told me about the man she had gone out with, whom she left for the man she fell in love with, who went back to the woman on whom he had fathered two children. A man, a girl, a boy, a heart or two broken. It was sad, it was amusing, and every time her eyes met mine, Edith Piaf sang “Non, Je Ne Regrette Rien.”

  So now she had no boyfriend.

  “A girl like you,” I said, “must have many boys. If I were in Paris, I would chase you.”

  “Paris is not good for a girl,” she said. “All the boys like the boys. It is terrible. … ” She stuck out her tongue, a pretty tongue. “Terrible.” New York women say the same about New York. But with the wrong accent, it just sounds like whining.

  “In New York, the boys look more at the girls, I think so,” she said. Her eyes said more. But no more than “peut-être,” not “yes,” not yet.

  She did not particularly like her job, selling cosmetics. But for her a job was a means to money. She didn’t need a Career in order to stamp the ticket that would validate her stop in the parking lot of life. Maybe it was because her English was not so good and my French was nonexistent, so we could not discuss subtleties, but I sensed a simpler version of life. A more secure sense of identity. Boys were boys, girls were girls, life was for living, it didn’t have to be measured against Cybill Shepherd’s wardrobe.

  The case went on. Slow, plodding, frustrating. But at least the search had a focus. Arson.

  Thompson was very willing to talk to me a second time. He liked to talk. I brought Miles Vandercour with me, and his maps. Which buildings did Thompson think Gunderson had owned? Which had been disposed of by fire? Miles also asked the reverend if he knew about any similar situations in the East New York section of Brooklyn. Miles had been tracking another set of probable Gunderson properties over there.

  No matter what, I would have checked Reverend Thompson’s story. But when we hit dead end after dead end, which we did, I would have dropped it and turned my attention to something else, if it had not been for the attack. Someone was trying to keep me from something. It gave the search a sense of surety.

  The fifth night, listening to blues on Second Avenue, I put my arm around her. When I pulled her to me, her mouth turned to mine.

  Then Marie-Laure came home with me.

  It was straightforward and awkward, both.

  She was twenty-two. Heavy breasts, full bottom, too much flesh for mannequin magazines. All of it firm and all of her strong. Her kisses were soft and her breath fragrant. Her pubic hair was thick and black. The taste of her was fresh and clean.

  The next night the awkward part was gone. We fell asleep entangled. There was no light from the windows, no sound from the streets, when she woke me with soft wet kisses on my back and shoulders. I turned to her, my mouth still acrid with sleep. But it didn’t matter to her. She was fresh enough for both of us. Her flesh was warm and solid. She opened to me. It was so damn simple. August city heat wrapped us, and sweated us, slick and sliding. And it was good.

  We ate breakfast at the Greek diner around the corner, and I dropped a hundred dollars buying her dinner. One was as right as the other.

  There was one small ax that was waiting to fall.

  Joey would be coming back to his apartment. It would transform this casual drift through a humid season into a real, and cold, decision.

  He called a couple of times—from Arizona, where he went to see his kids and grandkids. He liked the look of the land, he said, but he didn’t sound happy. And from Florida, where he was fishing and had said hello to his ex-wife—without any indication of when he was returning.

  The city was my city again. Showing it to Marie gave it back to me. Summer heat. Languor waiting to ripen to the color of lurid. And I was seeing the women. There’s this natural urban cycle, as clear and dramatic as anything that happens to the trees in the hills of New England. But in reverse. In spring the trees put on leaves and hide their shape. The women peel their coverings and shapes emerge—breasts, buttocks, and cinched waists. As it gets warmer, while the leaves grow thicker, the shirts and skirts get thinner and shorter. Flesh appears, toes and ankles to as high as the thigh, bare midriffs, shoulders, and halves of breasts.

  I hadn’t been noticing. For years. Glenda’s commands had closed me down more than I was aware.

  Even when Marie and Valerie were off to Wyoming for a week to see cowboys and mountains, I didn’t lose that sense that this is a garden of earthly delights, lavishly flowered.

  Even when I had lunch with Glenda, the sense of pleasure remained. I could see, for the first time in a long time, how pretty she was. Her hair was as black as Marie’s, but very different. It tumbled in rich, careful curls to frame her face, accentuating the whiteness of her skin and the fine-boned Welsh witchery of her features: small, straight nose, delicate lips over small, even teeth, and startled gray eyes. I told her how lovely she looked. Which she did. She’d meant to.

  She was tentative, and angry underneath. I was at my most charming and gracious. I told her, again, that it was the shock of being a property owner that got to me. That I just needed time. Besides, I had to take care of Mario. And I swore fervently that there was no other woman. Then I swore it again. We got cozy. Over one slice of cheesecake with two forks, I suggested that we take the afternoon off.

  “Cute, very cute,” she said. “And a tiny bit tempting.”

  “Only a tiny bit?”

  “Yes. When you’re good, you’re very good. And it has been a long, long time. But I do have to be at work this afternoon.”

  “How about tonight?”

  “Tonight,” she said with great delight, “I have plans.”

  “Cut-in-stone, unbreakable plans? Something I couldn’t coax you out of?”

  “Well, if I’d known that tonight was the night that you wanted me to be at your beck and call,” she said a little bit sharply, though not nearly as acidly as I probably deserved, “I’m sure I would have kept myself free. But that’s what happens when people need their space.”

  “OK, OK,” I said.

  “You certainly didn’t expect me to sit home alone every night and wait, did you?”

  “Well … ” I said. Though the idea of her going out was not unappealing. It would clear what little conscience I had. “Seeing somebody, are you?”

  “That’s none of your business,” she said archly.

  “How about tomorrow night?” I asked, actually feeling desire.

  “Call me, in the afternoon, and we’ll see,” she said. “I have to check.”

  “I will,” I said, reaching below the table to take her hand. Labor Day was coming. When Wayne would return. I would have to find my way back home by then or find a way to tell her the break was final. If I could think of some way to explain it to Wayne, which was altogether more difficult. Her hand was trembling.

  We kept working in pairs. Me and Farrell or Mario in the Bronx. Mazzolli with DeVito in Brooklyn. They scored first.

  Mazzolli took me to see Mrs. Mary Murphy, a widow of seventy-eight. She spoke with the brogue mixed with the Brooklyn. “I seen it,” she said, “no matter how t
hey try to lie about it. I seen it. They did their dirty deed in the night. It was in the summer, like it is now. It was August,” she said.

  “When? What year?” Mazzolli prompted.

  “The dog days,” Mary Murphy said. “We didn’t have the air conditioner, the like of which I have now. My Brian, he was asleep, from working all day on the ships. Backbreaking work it was, not like being a policeman, like my uncle and my father’s cousins, and it took a real man to do it. But at least he had the sleep at night from a clear conscience. August of ’74.

  “It was terrible hot, so I went out on the fire escape, for the air. Of which there was precious little. A man come running out the back door of the building across the way.”

  “Across the street?” Mazzolli asked her.

  “No, out the back. Just across the way. In the middle of the night it was, and he was running. It was clear to anyone with half an intelligence that he was up to no good. No good at all.

  “Now it’s forgetting my manners I am. Would you like some tea?”

  Her little apartment was neat as a pin and very busy. Saints and doilies. Tea in a proper pot, with a creamer, and plain cookies on sale from the A&P.

  “Tell us about the man,” Mazzolli said, while he stirred in a spoon of sugar. “The man who ran out the back.”

  “He was a terrible man. I knew who he was. One of those eyetalian devils. One of those who interfered with my Brian at the docks. A terrible beating he took from them once. I’m no informer, but I went to the Brian that was my uncle and his cousins and I had a few words with them, I did, about such and like, and it never did happen again.”

  “Who was he, Mary?” Mazzolli said gently. Mazzolli was convinced that he had a special way of relating to old ladies. That was because his mother still loved him.

  “I knew him,” she said. “It was a terrible thing. All those babies. Wee little tots. The screaming and the crying, the weeping and sadness. I could feel the heat on my own face, I could. There was the O’Quinns. Her husband was a bit of a brute, when he had the drink in him, but she was all right to my way of thinking, with the baking and such for St. Mary’s. There was the Fazios; the husband, he was eyetalian, but she was Irish. Everybody said that wouldn’t work, mixing the two, but it wasn’t so bad. No worse than mixing with a Jew, certainly. They had three children. All three got out, but one had the burns all over the face. The girl, more’s the pity; on a boy, ugliness doesn’t matter so much. Lots of ugly men there are, in the Department and on the docks, making a fine living. But who wants to marry a girl that you can only look at with the lights out?”

  “There was a fire,” Mazzolli said, “after the man ran out?”

  “Oh, there most certainly was. Right after. The man came running out of the basement, I saw him, and not more than five minutes later there was flames a-roaring up from the bottom to the top. A terrible fire.

  “It was me what called the Fire Department. I had a cousin of me own over in the Fire Department. But it wasn’t him that come. He was in a station way over in Canarsie. Michael his name was. A fine big man, but lazy. A Flaherty. The Flahertys are like that.

  “I talked to him later, Michael Flaherty, about the whole affair, when I seen him at the wedding of his brother Frank and that Cavanaugh girl from over Jersey City. And Michael, he says that it must’ve been kerosene, providing it was true that I smelled what I smelled, which I thought was gasoline. It was almost an explosion like, it was that fast.”

  “Mary,” Mazzolli said, “how many died?”

  “It was three that died,” she said, and sniffed. “Little Patrick Cavanaugh, eighteen months, a lovely little lad. Reddish hair like his mother, and curly. It was because they were on the first floor. In the apartment that was directly above the fire, do you see. And two next door. I didn’t know them. They was Puerto Rican people. Garcia, maybe. All of them, they call themselves Garcia.

  “It wasn’t in the fire precisely that they had their death. It was later, in the hospital, from the terrible burns that covered all the parts of their bodies. It was from them sleeping naked. Otherwise just their faces would have burned away.”

  “Do you know who owned the building?” I asked.

  “It was the landlord owned the building. They own all the buildings,” she said.

  “It was a Gunderson building. It’s on Vandercour’s list,” Mazzolli said to me. Then very gently he spoke to Mary. “The last time I saw you, Mary, you told me you had a name for the man you saw running out of the building.”

  “Oh, I knew him, all right. I don’t know his proper Christian name, but for certain I know what it was that they called him. He was one of those wicked kind that won’t use their own name, for if they were to see themselves with their own name that their mother and their father gave to them, they would die from the shame of it.”

  “Yes, they would,” Mazzoli said. “So what was the nickname?”

  “It was ‘The Wrecker’ he called himself.”

  Suddenly the bass came in again like John Henry driving steel and the treble notes ran through the night like the patter of rain.

  CHESTER HIMES, The Heat’s On

  Santino “The Wrecker” Scorcese.

  The drinks were on me. We gathered up Miles and DeVito and Farrell and sat down to drink a few and congratulate each other. Not that we had a case. Just that at last we had something.

  DeVito kept up on mob gossip. Not as well as Joey, but OK. He pointed out that there wasn’t much to connect Scorcese and Gunderson before ’74.

  “I think maybe that cemented things between them,” I said. “This is the way I figured it set up. Gunderson’s got landlord-tenant problems. So he contacts someone—I don’t know who—to take care of it. At that point, Santino ‘The Wrecker’ Scorcese is just a soldier. Maybe even a free lance. I mean, I don’t think this was the first. I think maybe it goes back further.

  “But in this one, three people died. And Scorcese, who is pretty smart and ambitious, he uses that to move himself closer to Gunderson. It’s after that that he starts participating in real estate deals. Like that New Jersey Revival Corporation thing out in Jersey.

  “Even though we don’t have the death penalty in New York—”

  “You can blame that on our Italian governor, Mario Cuomo,” Farrell said. “Can’t even fry a cop-killer.”

  “It was a matter of conscience. Which I don’t agree with, but I respect,” DeVito said, “which is more than your Irish politician ever heard of.”

  “Important point, DeVito,” I said. “Anyway, Scorcese is not going to talk about a murder he committed. Unless he happened to have immunity. Which he might have had with the special prosecutor’s grand jury. Which is when the intermediary, the capo or whatever, gets nervous and wants to make sure Santino doesn’t talk. He sends Felacco and Ventana to communicate through Arthur.

  “Unless of course,” I said, “Gunderson and Scorcese were dealing direct all along, and I’m just making things too complicated.”

  “The only thing wrong with the theory,” Miles Vandercour said, “is that the record does not support it. Yes. Thompson’s house did eventually burn down. But he no longer owned it by then. And neither did Randolph Gunderson. Yes, the apartment building behind Mrs. Murphy’s building burned down. There was an investigation into each.” He had his briefcase, which would have done for someone else’s traveling bag. Thorough man that he was, he dredged out copies of the arson reports.

  “The cause of the fire in the Thompson home,” Miles said, “which had been converted to an SRO or boardinghouse, was determined to be a cigarette. One of the tenants fell asleep, smoking in bed. The autopsy indicated opiates in the body.”

  “Another fucking junkie,” Mazzolli said. “That’s such a junkie thing to do, nod out and sleep through your own death.”

  “The arson investigation of the apartment building behind Mrs. Murphy’s shows the cause of the fire to be electrical. Loose wiring, caused by a tenant tapping into a building line t
o steal electricity.”

  31.

  The Tortoise

  ANOTHER THEORY BLOWN OUT by reality. I had to tell Straightman about it. He was already tense from rerunning Ronald Reagan commercials on his VCR. He made me watch with him.

  Just about every place you look, things are looking up. Life is better—America’s back—and people have a sense of pride they never thought they’d feel again. And so it’s not surprising that just about everyone in town is thinking the same thing: Now that our country is turning around, why would we ever go back?

  Reagan campaign commercial

  Am I really that good?

  RONALD REAGAN, seeing campaign commercial

  It was driving John to drink. Not that afternoon, particularly, but at least since Mondale’s nomination, and it showed. Broken blood vessels and puffiness in his face.

  “It’s the stress,” he said. “Of telling the truth and watching nobody listen. Television and truth are so confused that dealing with facts, it’s like kicking a river of molasses. You get sticky stuff all over you, and the gunk rolls on.”

  The commercial that bothered the congressman most was “The Postman.” It was filmed in one darn cute town, and the postman, who’s a warm and friendly ol’ cuss, he’s delivering the Social Security checks, with the new increase. The one that Ronald Reagan fought tooth and nail. Then the friendly ol’ cuss of a postman, he tells all us folks that Ronnie should get the credit for the increase.

  “We’re close,” I said. “We almost had him, but it slipped away.”

  “Christ,” he said. “You been watching what they’re doing to Ferraro? This tax thing. Not her own taxes. Her husband’s taxes. And the press is crawling all over her. They won’t let up. It’s front-page. Every day. No matter what Reagan does, it doesn’t matter. Just once, just once, I’d like to read a headline, instead of ‘President Says,’ it would say ‘President Lies Today.’ That’s objective journalism.”

  “I thought I had him,” I said, “Gunderson. But it slipped away.”