by J. L. Abramo
“I would like to hire you to find the man who murdered my husband,” she said which is pretty much what she said to me when Theodore was face down on the poker table.
I say, “So you said,” and then it occurs to me—could be Kitty doesn’t need me to learn who killed Linc. I’m thinking she needs me to locate the shooter. Then perhaps I’m a bit too hung up on semantics so I take a stab at clarification.
“Hire me to find out who killed your husband?”
“I know who killed my husband, Nick,” Kitty said, “I just need your help finding the man.”
“I see,” I said not seeing at all but loving the sound of my name when she said it and knowing for a fact I would be a lot safer playing poker blindfolded.
“Will you help me?”
“Well, first,” I said, as if there was any order to my thinking, “if you know the perp, you should be talking to the personable ACPD detectives who danced me around last night. Second, don’t forget this is New Jersey and I’m not licensed to practice here in the Garden State.”
“First,” Kitty said, “with regard to Theodore’s murder the ACPD is AC/DC, they could go either way. Second, the man who shot my husband last night is likely back up in New York City by now, so your Empire State PI license should be perfectly adequate.”
“I see.”
All I could see were big green eyes and big trouble.
“Well?” she asked.
Well indeed.
There were a number of ways to go. I could sit there staring at four dry bagel halves and hem and haw. I could dive right in libido first. I could procrastinate without hesitation.
I could just say no.
“Look, Mrs. Lincoln,” I said, talk about running for cover, “you caught me at a bad time. You’re sitting here in that dress. What color is that thing anyway?”
“Jade.”
Of course it is.
“Ten-thirty in the morning you’re in a jade strapless and all I want to do is look at you sitting there but what I need to do is play poker. I came down here for a reason. Stop me if I you’ve heard this one before. I need to play every once in a while like a fix a little taste to keep me from the perpetual card game that will chew me up and spit out my heart. Tomorrow I’ll be back where I am relatively safe behind a desk in a poorly ventilated office above a pizza joint in Coney Island. I recommend you let me purge my dire need to gamble so I can think straight for another month or two. Sleep on it. I’ll sleep on it if I sleep at all tonight. Call me if you still want to talk it over—here’s my business card.”
Kitty Lincoln took the card, her body swaying inside the jade dress. She stood up from the table and said, “Okay, fair enough, good luck with your poker therapy.”
“I’ll need it,” I said. “By the way?”
“Yes?”
“If I help you find this guy,” I asked, “what do you hope to accomplish?”
“Accomplish?”
“Let me put it this way. I find the guy what then?”
“I would ask you to do whatever it took to capture his attention so I could ask him a few questions.”
“What would you ask him?”
“The man put a bullet in the back of my husband’s head right in front of my eyes, I would ask whatever I needed to ask to get the whole picture,” she said and walked off, a remarkable sight even going away.
“Mrs. Lincoln,” I called.
She stopped at the coffee shop exit and she did a one-eighty, her emerald eyes still within striking distance.
“Yes?”
“Did you love your husband?”
“What’s love got to do with it?” she asked and passed through the door to be swallowed up by Atlantic City.
5
My plan for the day had been to do breakfast, play cards, treat myself to something surfy and turfy, and head back up to Brooklyn.
Breakfast had been a total bust. I had been so distracted by the jade strapless I forgot what I was doing sitting there. And Mrs. Lincoln didn’t even mention my outfit. After watching her leave the dining room I lost a staring contest with a cup of cold coffee and strolled out onto the boardwalk.
As I may have mentioned, I often found it grounding to look out over the vast Atlantic Ocean and contemplate how small I was. The walkway was jammed with late-August crowds, as was the real estate between where I stood and where the sand gave way to the sea. It only served to make me feel pedestrian, a feeling that was a little more humbling than I was aiming for.
Before searching for a suitable card game, I decided to ditch my room at the Taj to avoid late check-out charges.
I stashed my baggage in the trunk of my 1973 Chevrolet Monte Carlo and made for the casino.
After six hours at the card table, interrupted only by a short break for a fish sandwich that tasted as if it had been shipped in from Omaha and a Mountain Dew that tasted as if it had lost its fizz around 1988, I had skillfully gambled away all but the two thousand dollar grubstake I came down with the day before.
There was no talk of the shooting, which might have surprised me but didn’t. The players drawn to these poker tables lived entirely in the moment. Yesterday forgotten, tomorrow no concern. I may have been the only one in the room giving the incident a second thought, but it wasn’t the poor bastard with his head lying in a pool of blood I was thinking about.
I politely excused myself from the contest. I could clearly read the disappointment in the faces of the other players who had taken turns relieving me of nearly seven grand. They all looked as if they had lost a rich uncle and were not named in his will.
I escorted myself to the hotel restaurant for what promised to be my first decent meal of the day.
Forty minutes later the waitress removed my two dinner plates. One held the barest remnants of a thick prime rib and half-dozen jumbo shrimp scampi. A bone and six tails. The second plate held an untouched salad. I was eagerly awaiting coffee and key lime pie when Ferdinand Pugno Jr. pulled out a chair opposite mine at the table.
Here is a guy who, if he wasn’t such a colossal fuckup, could be sitting poolside at a large Long Island mansion sipping eighteen-year-old single malt scotch and wallowing in all the other perks afforded the son of royalty. Ferdinand Senior was one of those smart Italian-American criminals who got wealthy and got away clean. His oldest boy was as dumb as a rock.
As a result, instead of enjoying the high life on the Gold Coast, Junior lived in Atlantic City, if you could call it living, funding his eternal poker playing with cash his old man paid him to stay far away from the North Shore.
“So,” he said, settling into a chair.
Freddy Fingers was not known for his eloquence.
“Get to the point,” I said.
“How much is Kit Kat willing to pay you to find ‘The Stick’?” Fingers asked, as the waitress delivered my coffee and dessert.
“Could you translate that into English?”
“How much is Katherine Lincoln willing to cough up to find Charlie Mungo?” he asked. “That pie looks good.”
“Tell me what the fuck you’re babbling about, Freddy, and it’s all yours.”
“Less than a year ago a certain recently deceased lawyer was enchanted by a certain exotic dancer and quickly became her divorce attorney and her new husband in more or less that order.”
I picked up a fork and made a move toward the key lime pie.
“Okay, I’m getting to it, hold your horses,” Fingers said. “I couldn’t help overhearing Katherine’s overture to you at the card table last night, and I spotted you and the widow at breakfast this morning. I just thought if you were thinking of signing on you could use a little friendly advice.”
“Amiability has never been your strong suit, Freddy, something in this for you?”
“I’m just looking to be liked, Ventura. Everyone treats me like the plague when I buy into a card game.”
“You destroy any possibility of sensible wagering for everyone, Freddy. If you learned something
about betting a poker hand you would have more pals. And if you would just fucking say what you sat down to say.”
“I hardly know where to begin.”
“Start with the shooter,” I suggested.
Freddy Fingers scanned the dining room and gave the pie another furtive look before elucidating.
“Charlie ‘The Stick’ Mungo. Trigger man out of Brooklyn. I knew him back in the day, when I was still Dad’s number one son. Mungo ran around with a two-time loser named Vincent Corelli. A few years ago Corelli had to get out of Dodge. He landed here and scored a job dealing blackjack. He soon became infatuated with a very popular showgirl, Katherine Ann Harris affectionately known as Kit Kat, and before you could say holy matrimony five times fast Kathy Ann slid down her pole and became Kitty Corelli.”
I knew of Charlie Mungo by name, but I wouldn’t have been able to place him had I been foolish enough to sneak a peek at who popped Lincoln.
I knew Vincent Corelli. We played baseball together in high school and had run into each other occasionally since, as much as I tried to avoid it. I lost track of Vinnie when trouble with both sides of the law chased him out of New York. The fact that he had landed in Atlantic City and taken a bride was news to me.
“Is Corelli still working here?”
“After Kitty dumped him for the mouthpiece, Atlantic City lost its charm for Vinnie. And he was still persona non grata in Brooklyn. Last I heard he was dealing blackjack up in Connecticut. Mohegan Sun.”
“Happen to mention any of this to the AC police?”
“I don’t speak their language, and Atlantic City cops couldn’t find a hockey puck in a bowl of rice. On top of that, this is a Brooklyn thing.”
Katherine Ann Harris “Kit Kat” Corelli Lincoln.
Quite a girl.
I slid the pie over to Freddy’s side of the table and rose to leave.
“Knock yourself out,” I said.
“Don’t you want to hear more?”
“I’m good,” I said.
I scooped up the guest check and left Freddy sitting there wondering if he had made a friend.
6
I hopped into the Monte Carlo and took the Atlantic City Expressway to the Garden State Parkway.
Two days at the tables. Nothing lost. Nothing gained. Highlighted by a cinematic sideshow. A bedtime story for the grandchildren, if I ever found a woman who was interested in growing old with me.
I must have been in a hurry to get home because the Jersey State Trooper who pulled me over on the Turnpike claimed I was doing eighty-five. He let me go with a warning. He probably didn’t want to look at the Madras sport jacket any longer than he had to. I crossed the Goethals Bridge, cruised across Staten Island and over the Verrazano into the Borough of Churches. As I pulled into a parking spot that miraculously appeared in front of my apartment building I finally understood what Freddy was trying to tell me in his uncharacteristically friendly way.
It was a warning also.
SECOND MOVEMENT
7
At eleven the next morning I sat in my office which in turn sat above Totonno’s Pizzeria on Neptune Avenue two blocks from the beach and the ocean that separated me from a thousand places I had only read about.
My great grandfather and Antonio Pero had been childhood friends, since the days at the Little Red Schoolhouse in Greenwich Village when it was the neighborhood grade school for the children of Little Italy before it was a cost prohibitive private school for all but the new upper class. Pero bought the property on Neptune in 1924, a three story brick apartment building attached to a one story storefront, and opened a pizzeria with a coal-fired brick oven that would become legendary. It was considered by many aficionados as among the best pies in New York City, never sold by the slice and never traded for anything but cash. When my grandmother died, and my grandfather Giuseppe Ventura refused to be moved into the home of any of his children, Pero’s son offered him two small rooms above a beauty salon in the apartment building adjacent to the pizza shop. Antonio’s granddaughter, who had been like an aunt to me growing up, now ran the pizzeria and still burned coal. When Giuseppe met his maker, and I needed a place to set up my PI business, “Aunt” Carmella let me have the rooms for the same monthly rent they had charged the old man. I knew she could get a lot more for the space and I told her so.
“Think of it like a grandfather clause,” Carmella had said, smiling, and we shook hands on the deal.
An ancient window fan was noisily trying without success to battle the elements. The dog day temperature had already soared into the low nineties and the humidity was off the charts. I stripped down to what was referred to as a white ribbed tank top by the youngsters and a wife beater by the old-timers. I had given the widow Lincoln my business card. After Freddy’s little history lesson I was hoping she wouldn’t call. I checked the voice mail on the office answering machine. Nothing cooking. I phoned Tom Romano, an old sidekick who had connections, and asked for a favor. He said he would get right on it and we set up a lunch meet for one o’clock at Clemente’s in Sheepshead Bay. I went through the mail. All bills, no payments. I leafed through the sports section of the Post, which took up nearly the entire back half of the rag, looking for any news that might offer hope for the Mets. No luck. As it approached noon, I was so hungry I was about to run the two blocks to Nathan’s at the boardwalk for a hot dog appetizer when there was a light rap on the office door. I threw on my white button down Van Heusen and tucked it into my black Haggar pleated slacks.
She was dressed for the weather in a little blue number with small white polka dots that could be politely described as a pinafore and more accurately described as too provocative. A blue cloth handbag with wide straps hung from her right shoulder, matching the pattern of the dress dot for dot. There were three tiny beads of sweat on the left side of her neck, just below her perfect jaw line, that had me fighting to hold my tongue. I had hoped she wouldn’t call, but forgot to hope she wouldn’t drop by.
“Mrs. Lincoln.”
“Kitty,” she said.
“Right,” I said.
“Can I take you out for a bite?”
“I’ve already eaten.”
“In that case, can I come in?”
“It’s uncomfortably warm in here.”
“I can deal with that, unless you’re busy.”
“Not at all.”
She brushed past me and I closed the office door.
I offered her the client seat and retreated to my own seat on the opposite side of the cluttered table that served as my desk. The matching chairs had been part of my grandparent’s ancient oak dining room set, sporting long legs and tall straight backs. I tried but couldn’t help appreciating the fact that Kitty was built in much the same fashion.
She placed the bag at her feet. She didn’t seem exactly sure what to do about her bare legs with regard to the tall seat and short skirt. She finally crossed them, right over left. She pulled a white lace-trimmed handkerchief from a pocket in her dress and gently dabbed away the drops of perspiration on her neck. She returned the handkerchief to her pocket and placed her hands neatly in her lap. After eventually settling in she looked directly into my eyes, green crashing against blue, and I feared I didn’t have a hope.
“So,” I said, borrowing a lame conversation opener from Freddy Fingers.
“Have you given my proposition any thought?”
I decided against beating around the bush.
“You said you know the man who killed your husband.”
“I said I knew who he was, not that I know him. His name is Charlie Mungo.”
“And how did you know who he was?”
“I recognized him from a picture in a newspaper.”
I was tempted to ask what newspaper, but she wasn’t as enjoyable to look at when she lied.
“Do you have any idea why Mungo would want to kill your husband?”
“That is what I would like to ask the man if you can locate him for me.”
I hated to say it but I believed it was the truth.
“Listen, Nick. I don’t want you to think my interest in seeing you again was strictly business, but I am willing to pay you five thousand dollars if you can successfully point me to Charlie Mungo. Find him, tell me where to find him and then, if you wish, we’re done.”
Five thousand dollars—a handsome figure that bounced around inside my head like a lotto number on a ping pong ball. Before it came to rest her cell phone beckoned from the polka dot bag. She reached in, grabbed the phone, and checked the caller ID.
“I need to take this,” she said.
“Sure.”
“I didn’t expect to hear from you.”
Short pause.
“Where?”
Longer pause.
“I’m on my way.”
End of call.
Kitty picked up her bag, replaced the phone, uncrossed her long legs and stood up.
“I have to go,” she said. “Call me if you have a change of heart.”
She quickly turned and walked out of the office.
She had neglected to leave her phone number.
8
On the drive to Sheepshead Bay I kept asking myself the same question I had asked myself before calling Tom Romano.
If I was hoping Katherine Ann Harris “Kit Kat” Corelli Lincoln would forget I ever existed, why was I calling Tom?
And now I had said no to the lady. Case closed. And as far as the eleventh hour offer of five grand to come on board was concerned, I never had the chance to consider it. After receiving the phone call, Kitty’s speedy departure gave me the sneaking suspicion I was suddenly and permanently out of the picture.
If I was smart, I would tell Tom I wouldn’t need his help, apologize for the inconvenience, offer to spring for lunch, and enjoy the time catching up with an old friend.
