She smelled coffee. Her eyes opened a slit. Nick passed the doorway in shorts and T-shirt and sneakers. The front door opened, closed. She groped for her shorts on the floor and wriggled into them under the sheet. By the time Nick returned from his run, his body sheened with sweat and smelling of hard exercise, she was on her third cup of black coffee.
He went to the fridge, pulled out a bottle of water, drank half of it before setting it on the counter. He wiped his mouth with the back of his bare arm. Cissy purposefully concentrated on stirring her coffee and feeling like a slug.
“Sorry if I woke you,” he said.
“It wouldn’t have taken much. How far do you run?”
“Until the demons stop chasing me.” He didn’t smile when he said it. Neither did she.
“How far today?”
He looked at her long and too intently for morning and only caffeine. “Not far enough,” he said and walked to the bathroom.
She made the bed while he showered. She went into the living room, folded the sheet thrown in a heap on the couch, laid it on top the pillow and carried them into the bedroom, placed them at the foot of the bed. Her stomach rumbling, she went into the kitchen and opened the fridge, forced to test out her theory of personality on Nick. What she saw inside wasn’t encouraging—beer, a take-out fast food bag, ketchup, its cap smeared red on the outside, a half-eaten jar of homemade marinated peppers someone must have given him and a pizza box that took up the whole second shelf. The water bottles, several of which were standing on a shelf on the inside of the door were the only thing that gave her hope.
“I would have shopped if I’d known I was having a guest,” Nick said as he came into the kitchen, poured a cup of coffee.
She hadn’t heard the shower stop. She shut the refrigerator. “You would have?” she said, always the skeptic.
He smiled. He had dressed for work. His hair was damp. His gun, cell phone, pager, handcuffs, badge waited on the table. “Nah.”
She smiled back, grateful for his ability to make her smile at a time when it seemed a sacrilege.
“I’ll buy you breakfast if you want to get dressed and go out.”
She sat, unable not to look at the gun on the table. “I thought I was under house arrest.”
“We’ve got two bodies now. No need to make it three.”
Not your usual morning conversation. Then again, not your usual morning.
“I’m a big girl, Nick. I can handle myself.”
He got up, dumped the rest of his cup of coffee down the sink. He opened a drawer, put a key on the table. “Here’s an extra key to the apartment.”
“What about the rental car at Lester’s?”
“I’ll pick you up after work and take you to get it.”
“And here I thought I was a free woman.”
He strapped on his gun. He didn’t smile. Neither did she. “You have my pager number? My cell?”
“And a key.” She picked it up, waved it at him.
“Do me a favor.”
She waited.
“Trust me.”
She hadn’t trusted anyone but herself since she was seventeen. Nick had been even younger. “You know better, Fiore.”
He smiled. The attraction that was always there gained muscle.
“It was worth a shot.” He gestured toward the bathroom. “There’s towels and stuff. Help yourself.”
“Thanks.”
He walked to the fish tank, sprinkled some food into the tank, leaned down, tapped the glass. “Watch her, guys. She’s a slippery one.”
He straightened and faced her. “I gotta get to work.” He didn’t move, looked awkward for the first time Cissy could remember. She didn’t know what was the matter, but she tried to help him out. “Have a good day,” she said, Lucy to Ricky. Only after the words left her mouth did she realize how ludicrous they sounded.
“I’ve seen too many die, Cissy.”
“And if it happens to me, you’ll kill me?”
“Exactly.” He moved toward the door, dropped a kiss on her crown as he passed, causing her to go very still. He was gone several minutes before she moved again. She got up, washed out her cup and the one Nick left in the sink, emptied the coffeepot, rinsed it and set it in the drainer. She walked around the apartment, went to the fish tank, tapped on the glass as Nick had done. Several pairs of protruding eyes blinked back at her.
“I know. He’s right, isn’t he, guys? I should lie low.” That fact only made her more restless. She did some deep knee bends, jogged in place, trying to channel her nervous energy into something safe. She’d already seen one death. She didn’t want to see another—especially her own. But at the same time, sitting around, waiting, seemed just as big a crime.
No reason she couldn’t take a walk. A short one. She’d see if DiRisio’s Bakery was still open, stop in for a pastry.
As she walked into the bedroom, she saw her purse on the floor, remembered the money. She couldn’t be walking around with that kind of cash. She didn’t know who it belonged to or why it was under her mother’s front car seat, but she wanted it safe until she did. After going to the bakery, she’d find a bank nearby, rent a safety deposit box and put the money in there until she knew more about it.
She showered, was forced to dress in the same pair of shorts she’d worn yesterday, but took the tags off the other T-shirt she’d bought on sale, two for fifteen dollars. She considered skipping makeup. After yesterday, issues such as long, lustrous lashes suddenly seemed insane. But, as she’d learned last night, if anything was going to keep her from going over the edge, it was her little everyday routines. She wound her hair into a knot that stuck out every which way, a look waning in popularity now but not long ago was actually in vogue across the country. At least some reality could still make her smile. She borrowed a Yankees baseball cap for protection against the sun, threw it into her purse. She saw the fat blocks of cash. She stopped smiling.
The morning heat was young enough to feel only mildly oppressive. She started out at a brisk pace, arms swinging. Until the demons are gone.
She turned at the corner and cut through the park, quiet now except for the footfalls of joggers and the too easy, deep snores of the camped out homeless. She came out on the other side of the park and walked two blocks east to Central. At the next corner, she saw DiRisio’s Bakery still thriving, the smell of their freshly baked pastries one of her sweeter childhood memories.
She went in to the tinkle of a bell above the door and the warmth of yeast and coffee. She circled round the bakery counter and the line of workers waiting for take-out to the main room with its curved counter and booths that looked out onto the avenue’s traffic. Most of the customers were busy reading the daily edition. She sat down at the counter, ordered coffee and a nut horn in keeping with another of her life’s philosophies that a person can never have too much black coffee and white sugar. She picked up a paper abandoned on the empty stool next to her and spread it on the counter.
Body Found On Barge was on the front page of the local section.
She looked up as her coffee and pastry came, hot and sweet as life should always be. “Thank you,” she told the waitress. She took a bite and came back home to a memory of herself and her sister sent to get Sunday’s rolls, sneaking one warm on the way home after finishing the Italian cookies Marie DiRisio always gave the children for free after telling them to be good girls. Her sister had been no more than six then, fresh-faced and fragile and full of life’s possibilities. Cissy had been twelve. Jo Jo had idolized her. “Big sister” stuff. Cissy had left five years later. She swallowed hard, took a sip of coffee, didn’t flinch when it burned her mouth. Jo Jo had picked the wrong hero that time, too. Cissy turned away from her memories to the paper.
Jacques Saint-Sault.
The body found on the ship last night had been identified. It was her sister’s boyfriend.
Cissy read no further. Her mouth opened but she couldn’t breathe. She leaned her chest against the
counter, unable to look away from that name. She had known it could be him, but seeing it in black and white made it all too real. She bent closer to study the grainy picture of the port beside the article as if she looked hard enough, she would find them—her mother, her sister—peeking out from behind a corner, smiling, giving a little wave as if this were no more than the games of hide and seek she and Jo Jo used to play with the neighborhood children.
She dialed Nick.
“Fiore.”
“It’s him. Jo Jo’s boyfriend. The guy. The body, the one they found.” She was babbling. Not a good sign.
The waitress came to the counter. “Anything else, miss?”
“Where are you?” Nick demanded.
“I walked over to DiRisio’s.” She shook her head at the waitress. “I wanted a nut horn.”
She listened to Nick’s response. “Very colorful, officer.”
The waitress tallied her bill, ripped it off her pad, laid it face-down on the counter and moved on.
“Did you get the robbery report Eddie filed on the gun?”
“Yeah.”
“And?”
“You listen to me for the first time in your life, Spagnola. Your mother is missing. Your sister can’t be found. Her boyfriend ends up junk in a trunk. Another body with a plug between the eyes ends up in your motel room—”
“Don’t forget the attempt on my life yesterday.”
The silence at the other end of the line told her she’d gone too far. “Don’t you understand, Nick? If I hole up in your apartment, if I let them, whoever they may be, scare me, then I might as well put a bullet to my own brain right now, because they’ve already won. They’ll have taken something from me, but I let them take it. And if I let them take it, I might never get it back.”
She heard a long breath on the other end of the line. “Cut the crap, and get back to the apartment before you get your brains blown out.”
If it’d been a regular phone, Nick would have slammed it. Instead there was only a thin click. Cissy muttered a word that had once gotten her mouth washed out with soap by Sister Constance. She finished her coffee, forced herself to eat the pastry as one defiant act against death. She left a tip, walked to the register to pay.
“How was everything?”
Cissy didn’t recognize the woman ringing her up behind the register. The DiRisios, like most Italian families, were large and varied. Many of the older ones brought their brothers, sisters, cousins over to live in the United States, help run the family business.
“Fine, fine,” Cissy replied as if she hadn’t just read her sister’s boyfriend’s body had been found stuffed in a trunk on a barge. The woman saw her glance at the platter of Italian cookies beside the register.
“For all our customers. Take some. Take some.” The woman picked up two napkins from the pile beside the platter, set them in Cissy’s palm, patted her hand. “You enjoy them.”
“Thank you.” Cissy looked at the platter of cookies, some pink, others dipped in thin chocolate, many covered with sprinkles that changed an ordinary day into a celebration. She chose two.
“Oh no, more, more. You too skinny.” The old woman dropped four cookies onto the napkin, folded Cissy’s fingers around them, gave her hand a final pat. “You come see us again. You good girl, I can tell.”
Cissy turned away. Six and twelve they’d been, her and her sister. It could have been yesterday.
She walked toward the door. I won’t leave you this time, she promised her sister, her mother. I won’t let you down again.
Chapter Eight
Nick set the photo on the bar. The bartender angled his gaze, whistled through his teeth.
“Know him?”
The bartender leaned over the counter, licked his lips.
“That the man Jo Jo Spagnola used to meet here?”
“Looks like him, except for the hair. This guy’s bald as a hard-boiled egg.”
“He must have worn a piece.”
The bartender turned and poured a glass of gin, offered it to Nick, who shook his head. The bartender toasted to both their health, then drained the glass and dropped it in the sink. “That’d explain the good hair.”
Nick took the picture. “Anyone else been in to see you, asking questions about Jo Jo Spagnola?”
“Should I be expecting someone?”
“A woman might come in here, wanting to talk to you. Blond, beautiful.”
The bartender lifted a brow, his expression one of amusement.
Gin on an empty stomach, Nick figured. “Big sister.”
“Blond, beautiful, big sister.” The bartender hissed.
Nick smiled with surprising ease, a mirthless smile. “She asks, you answer. Little as possible. Don’t get chummy.”
The bartender straightened an arm garter. “Do I look the chummy type?”
Nick walked calmly toward the exit. “The jury’s still out on that, sweet pea.”
CISSY WAS OPENING the door when she heard someone call her name. She turned and saw Tommy Marcus next to the glass bakery case.
“Let me pay, and I’ll be right with you.” He handed money to the cashier and came toward Cissy.
“What brings you out so bright and early?” He juggled his coffee and bag so he could open the door for her.
“A craving.”
“God bless them. Come, walk with me to my car.”
Outside the door, he slowed his pace. “Cissy, tell me if I’m getting too personal here—” He paused, Cissy sensed, as much for drama as to gauge her reaction. He would make a fine politician one day. “I hear you come home, and it’s not good. The family.”
She tasted the pastry, too sugary inside her mouth. “Too bad you don’t hear anything I don’t know.”
“Hey.” He held up his palms. “I don’t mean to insult.”
Neither had she. It was that boyish face—a combination of Beaver Cleaver and young Danny Kaye in Boystown—that put her on edge, made her fear she would pour out her guts to him as if he were a padre.
“I don’t mean to insult either, Tommy. It’s my—” The words stayed in her throat like the pastry’s sweetness. She didn’t want to say them one more time.
He nodded. “I hear about your mother, your sister.” He crossed himself.
Lapsed Catholic or not, she joined him and said a quick prayer.
“Last night they found a body on a ship docked in the port. This morning I read it’s a guy Jo Jo’s hung with. She’s missing and he shows up stuffed in a ceiling tile.” The frustration swelled inside her, dangerously close to spilling over in some destructive or embarrassing way. She held on tighter to her purse strap.
Tommy laid a hand on her forearm. “I know some people—”
It was the neighborhood motto.
“In the precinct. Maybe I make sure your mother and sister’s case gets top priority?”
“I appreciate the offer.” Don’t take no favors, Cissy. Her motto. “But Nick’s on the case.”
“He’s a good cop.”
She nodded.
“Who would have thought it, huh?”
She smiled.
“Any leads on your mother and sister?”
“My stepfather, Eddie, says he came home from work and my mother was gone. Nothing left but her car and some dry cleaning tickets. He says she ran out on him.”
“You believe him?”
She looked straight at Tommy. “I wish to God it were the truth.”
He didn’t fill in with the obligatory “Everything will be okay.” He, too, had grown up on the lower side.
“What about your sister?”
Cissy shrugged. “Jo Jo has been known to get lost for days, weeks on end….” She didn’t need to fill in the blanks for Tommy.
“There’s a program, you know, over off of Green. Assemblyman Brunelli got the funding doubled for it in last year’s budget. They don’t do magic but they have had some success.”
“Jo Jo’s been through a couple of programs.”
“No luck?” She heard the sympathy in his voice.
“They don’t do magic.” Her voice was not unkind. Her smile was sad. “Mama prays. Last time I talked to her, she said Jo Jo was doing better.” Her voice caught. She grew angry with herself. “Mama always had too much hope in people.”
“It’s hard on mothers.”
“Yeah.” Cissy looked the length of the street.
“It’s hard on everybody.”
She shrugged. It didn’t do any good to get sentimental on the streets.
“Cissy, you need anything, you call me.”
“Thanks, Tommy. I appreciate it.”
“Hey, what are old friends for? Where you staying?”
“Nick’s.”
He’d learned enough from dealing with politicians not to strike a sidelong glance.
“He thinks it’s the safest place for me.”
“What do you think?” Tommy of the streets smiled, not needing airs with her after all.
An image of Nick in no more than shorts and a smile came into her mind. She thought she was doomed. “What are old friends for?”
He smiled, draped his arm around her shoulders. “Under different circumstances, I’d have asked you out to dinner by now.”
With the Beaver Cleaver-Boystown gig going for him, Cissy had never thought of Tommy in that light. Even though her mother had done her damnedest.
“Maybe when everything settles down. Next week or the next, if you’re still around.”
The simple phrase, “if you’re still around,” sent a chill through her. “I appreciate the invite, but I’m not very good company lately.”
“Give me more time to brag about my accomplishments.”
She smiled. He was a sweet man. Successful, too. Just her luck she always went for sex appeal over sensible and safe. She could hear the general chorus of mothers in the neighborhood, throughout the land: “But he’s such a good boy.”
Unmarked Man Page 9
