No. Sal always has to do what Sal wants to do. Never thinks of anyone but himself. Sometimes she wondered if what they said about him might be true, a little bit.
Sal was no saint, she was well aware of that. He’d gotten into some trouble when he was younger, associated with a disreputable crowd and was dragged down by their bad influence. In her heart, she suspected that he was probably guilty of some of the things he’d been accused of, but he was certainly not the killer or the notorious hoodlum they made him out to be. No, not Sal. She knew him too well. He wasn’t capable of such sinning. Not really.
But whatever sins Sal might have committed in the past could be forgiven. It’s in God’s nature to be merciful, and that’s why she’d agreed to keep his little secret, to maintain the common belief that Sal was mentally ill. He’d told her a long time ago that it was his way of repenting for his sins, that by living this restrictive life, never acting sane and never being treated as sane, he was doing penance. His time at the state hospital was the ultimate penance, and originally she felt that it would be good for him, that it would be the same as retreating from the world and entering a monastery. But the hospital changed him, changed him in the wrong way. It did not purify his soul. It made him bitter and vengeful. It was evident in the way he’d been treating her ever since he’d been discharged to her custody.
Sister Cil’s eyes started to water as she watched her brother making a fool of himself out on the sidewalk. Maybe his penance did him no good. Maybe he was still a sinner. Maybe he was a compulsive, inveterate sinner. Maybe he’d been lying to her all this time. Maybe she didn’t really know him at all.
She was suddenly reminded of Mr. Gibbons’s allegation that Sal had a great deal of money in a Swiss bank account and something else in Panama. She took off her glasses to wipe her eyes. She didn’t know what to think about him anymore.
“Sister! Sister!”
Lucy, her helper, came running down the staircase. The poor woman was clutching her heaving chest. She could hardly breathe. She really should lose some weight.
“Calm down, Lucy. What is it?”
Lucy couldn’t get the words out. She pointed up the stairs. Her eyes were bulging out of her head.
“Is it one of the girls? Has Shavon’s water broken?” Lucy always panicked whenever one of the girls went into labor.
Lucy shook her head and kept pointing up the staircase. She finally gasped it out. “In your room! Donald! Go! Go! Hurry!”
Cil frowned. Donald? Donald was supposed to be cleaning the bathroom upstairs. Now what? She’d told Sal several times already that they were running low on Donald’s pills, but Sal just ignored her. She’d been trying to make them stretch by extending the time between dosages.
Cil held her skirt and ran upstairs. “Donald? Donald? What are you doing now, dear?”
When she turned the landing on the second floor, she could hear him crying. “Donald?”
She marched to her room at the back of the building. “Donald, I’m talking to you. Answer me.” When she reached the threshold and looked at her bed, she nearly died.
“Donald!”
He was lying on the bed, practically naked, his clothes in a heap on the floor. Her other wimple, the one that went with her long habit, was askew on his head, tears streaming down his cheeks. His naked skin was pale, almost bluish, and totally hairless. He had one hand inside his underpants; the other was brandishing a pair of scissors, the big pair they kept in the kitchen, holding them open like a straight razor. An image of Christ on the cross flashed before Cil’s eyes—bloody, emaciated, draped in a dirty loincloth. She crossed herself quickly as she rushed into the room.
“Donald, put those scissors down.” She spoke calmly but firmly, the way she’d dealt with suicidal girls in the past.
He shook his head, weeping bitterly, wetting the starched wimple with his tears.
She stepped closer. “Donald, what do you intend to do with that?”
“I’m so bad,” he wailed. “I’m very bad. I think about them, and I can’t help it. I’m bad.”
“You think about who, Donald?”
He rolled his head against the pillow in anguish. “I think about the girls.” He looked down at his underpants. “I can’t stop it. It pops up by itself. I’m so bad.”
“No, Donald, you’re not bad.” She put out her hand. “Now, give me the scissors.”
“Noooo!”
His shriek startled her. Her pulse was racing.
“No. No. No. I have to get rid of it. I don’t want it. It’s bad!”
She started to move closer, but he yanked down his underpants and put the blade to his…
Cil looked away, her face flushed. She forced herself to concentrate on his face.
“Donald, please listen to me. You’re being much too hard on yourself. Sexual thoughts are sometimes normal—”
“Noooo!” The shriek made the room thrum in its wake. “I’m bad. I have to cut it off before it makes me do something bad.”
Cil swallowed on a dry throat. Donald needed his medication, full dosage. She’d warned Sal that they needed to have the prescription refilled. Why didn’t he ever listen to her? She’d never seen Donald this upset.
“Why are you doing this, Donald? You can tell me.”
He writhed and wept. “Too much sinning. Too much sinning!”
“You’re not a sinner, Donald. I’ve been with you every day since you came here. You’re not a bad person. You’re a very good person. You work very hard, you do what you’re asked to do, and you don’t complain. I think you’re a very good person, Donald.”
Cil clenched her fists. Donald hadn’t been out of the house since Sal and that Mr. Tate from the hospital first brought him here. Sal insisted that he stay inside and not leave the home. No wonder the man was going stir-crazy. He needed to get out and breathe some fresh air.
“Please, Donald, listen to me. Don’t do this to yourself. This would be a sin. Your body is the temple of God. Do you realize that mutilating yourself would be a sin against the Lord? Please, don’t.” She imagined all the blood. And in her bed.
He looked up at her. His eyes were raw and wet. “I have to.” His voice was barely a squeak.
“Why? Why do you have to?”
“Too much sinning. I told you.”
Cil glanced down at his groin. It was standing up, fully erect. He was holding the blade of the scissors right up against it as if he were going to slice a carrot. She looked away and crossed herself twice.
“I don’t understand, Donald. What do you mean ‘too much sinning’? Who’s sinning? Not you. Explain it to me.”
“Everybody!” he wailed. “Everybody’s sinning.”
“Who?”
“Me. I have bad thoughts.”
“Who else?”
“The boys.”
“Which boys?”
His expression turned furious. “The boys who get the girls pregnant.”
“Yes, you’re right about that, Donald. But is there anyone else sinning?”
“The girls.” He was still angry. He assumed she should know all this. “They make themselves look like whores. They let the boys do it to them. They’re sinners, too.”
Cil nodded to calm him. “Yes, Donald, I know. There are a lot of sinners in the world.”
“You don’t know. There are so many. You can’t know them all.” He stared into her eyes. “You can’t. You don’t know about the girl on television, the blond girl. Do you?”
“What girl on television?”
He squeezed his eyes shut and shook his head from side to side. “See? You don’t know. I hear the girls here talking about her all the time. They want to be just like her. She’s tempting them into sin. I hear them talking about her all the time. Dolores, Faith, Shavon, Roberta, Yvonne—all of them. They all want to be like her.”
Cil knit her brows. She didn’t know what he was talking about. “Who, Donald? Who
do you mean?”
“The girl on television!” he shouted. “The dirty girl! The blond whore!”
“Are you talking about someone on the soap operas?”
“Nooooo!” His wail was plaintive, annoyed that she was so ignorant.
She didn’t know what to do. “Donald, please. Shall I get Sal? Would you like to talk to Sal?”
Donald’s eyes flared. “Sal’s a sinner, too. Sal and Charles. They’re both sinners.”
Cil’s stomach sank. Dear God. She didn’t want to hear anymore. Not about Sal.
She looked at him sternly. “No one likes a tattletale, Donald.”
“But they are sinners! They killed those men!”
Cil clutched her throat. “What men?”
He squeezed his eyes shut and thrashed his head back and forth. “I don’t know, I don’t know. They just killed them. They did. Downstairs.”
“Downstairs where?”
“Here!” The shriek from hell.
Her heart was on the rack, being pulled apart. “You mean Mr. Tate killed someone. That’s what you mean, don’t you? Your friend Charles—Mr. Tate—he’s the killer. Maybe Sal was there, but Mr. Tate—”
“No! It was Sal who shot them. With a gun. Two men.”
“Who?”
“I don’t know, I don’t know. A little man, a little grumpy man, he never smiled. And another one who came with him.”
A little grumpy man? Mr. Mistretta? And Jerry? Cil felt ill. She shut her eyes and pressed her forearm into her stomach, then sank to her knees, supporting herself on the edge of the bed. When she opened her eyes again, that fleshy thing was looking right at her. She turned away and sat back on her heels, clutching her stomach, trying to keep from throwing up.
But Donald was right. Everyone was sinning. The whole world was sinning. Mr. Tate—well, he had heathen written all over him. But Sal? Sal, too? Had he been lying to her that much all these years? Was it all true what they said about him? Was he really as bad as the government prosecutors and the FBI made him out to be? Could he have actually killed Mr. Mistretta himself? He did hate Mr. Mistretta—she knew that—and he does have a very nasty temper. But…
God in heaven, help us all.
Her eyes shot open. She crossed herself quickly, then gripped the pair of pants on the floor next to her and whipped them over the naked body on her bed. “Put your pants on, Donald. We have to pray.”
“No! I have to get rid—”
“Put those pants on right this minute, mister, and get down on your knees and pray with me”
“But—”
“NOW!” Her screech made the windows rattle.
He dropped the scissors to his side. He looked terrified.
“I said, get dressed now. And don’t make me repeat myself.”
“Yes, Sister,” he said in a little voice. He lifted one knee and started to put the pants on.
She waited for him to zip his zipper. “Now, get down here with me.”
He crawled off the bed like a bad dog and got on his knees next to her, folding his hands on top of the bed. Her wimple was still on his head, crooked.
“Pray with me, Donald. We have to pray for the souls of all these sinners.”
“Yes, Sister.” He started to mumble the Our Father very quietly, his head bowed.
She tried to join him, but she couldn’t concentrate. Her mind was on Sal. Sal and his lies. She closed her eyes and bowed her head, forcing herself to say the words of the Our Father. It was Sal’s soul they needed to pray for. He was going to be needing their prayers. A lot of prayers.
Donald’s head was bent over his trembling folded hands, eyes shut tight. “‘…and forgive us our trespasses,’” he whispered, “‘now and in the hour of our death. Amen.’”
She took the wimple off Donald’s head. “Amen,” she repeated.
Chapter 17
Tozzi sat on the edge of the couch in Gibbons’s living room, biting a hangnail, staring at the television, thinking about John. On the screen, Sal Immordino paced up and down the sidewalk, shuffling his feet, mumbling to his hands, throwing shadow punches. It was a copy of the video the state police had taken that morning outside Sister Cil’s place in Jersey City. The camera zoomed in on Sal’s face. He kept his eyes down, never looked into the camera, just paced and mumbled, sparring with his invisible partner.
Gibbons got out of the armchair and went over to the VCR. “They told me it’s all the same. Two hours of this shit.” He reached over to shut it off.
“No, wait,” Tozzi said. “I wanna see a little more.”
Tozzi watched Sal, watched his face, waiting for him to slip, waiting for him to glance at the camera, to show that he really was aware of what was going on. But he never did. He was so good at this, so well-practiced. He should be. The bastard’s been doing it long enough.
Gibbons was standing there, with his arm on the TV. “You seen enough?”
Tozzi sat back and nodded. Gibbons turned off the VCR and Sal disappeared from the screen. The green outfield of Shea Stadium under the lights took his place.
“It’s him,” Tozzi said. “I know it. Sal’s the one. Mistretta, Bartolo—it makes sense. John was a mistake. He thought it was me. But Sal’s definitely the one. It has to be.” He checked his fingers for another hangnail to bite.
Gibbons changed the channel to a basketball game. The Sixers were playing Boston for the Eastern Conference title. Philly had the ball. Their geeky-looking center, that seven-and-a-half-foot African guy, looped the ball back out to the perimeter to Charles Barkley, who wasted no time shaking Larry Bird on a pick and muscling his way straight to the hoop, scoring over the Celtic center with a finger roll.
Gibbons switched back to the Mets game. They were playing the Dodgers. Dwight Gooden was on the mound. Darryl Strawberry was at the plate.
“You’re not saying anything, Gib. You don’t think it’s Sal?”
Gibbons backed up to the armchair, his eyes on the game. “Sure, I think it’s him.”
“And?”
Gibbons looked at him sideways. “And nothing. We can’t prove it. He’s got all his bases covered. According to the hospital records, the last time he was out on the street was nineteen months ago. Until yesterday.”
“So he hired someone.”
“Who?”
“I dunno. Somebody from his old crew, maybe a free-lance contractor, I dunno.”
“I dunno either.” Gibbons glanced at him, then went back to the game. “But that’s the whole point. We don’t have a shooter we can connect to Immordino, so basically we got nothing. All we can do is what we’re doing right now. Sit tight and let him think you’re dead, so he can go his merry way. If he is making a power play for Mistretta’s old job, maybe he’ll get reckless and we can catch him doing something to implicate himself. If we’re lucky.”
“Yeah … if we’re lucky.”
On TV, Gooden threw heat. Strawberry swung and missed. Strike three. The side was retired. The crowd at Shea cheered the hometown big-money player for striking out the multimillionaire Mets defector.
Tozzi closed his eyes and rubbed his face. He couldn’t stop thinking about John. His wake was tonight. Tozzi hoped it wouldn’t be an open coffin.
Goddamn Immordino.
Immordino, Immordino. Tozzi wished he could get the bastard out of his head for a little while. The guy was gnawing at his gut, keeping him awake at night, distracting him from everything. There had to be something they could do to nail him. There had to be.
Tozzi stared at Gibbons’s profile in the armchair. “Where’s your partner today?”
“Huh?” Gibbons was wrapped up in the ball game.
“Cummings. Where is she?”
Gibbons looked over his shoulder to see if Lorraine was around. “I don’t know and I don’t care. Haven’t been able to watch a game in peace since she got here. I hope she’s lost.”
“Nice to see that yo
u’re getting along so well.”
Gibbons grunted, his eyes glued to the set. Dave Magadan was at the plate. Ojeda was pitching for LA.
“Michael?” Lorraine called from the kitchen.
“Yeah?”
“Would you come here for a minute? I want to ask you something.”
Tozzi hauled himself off the couch and flexed his knee before he headed for the kitchen. He was walking without the cane now, but the leg was still a little stiff.
Lorraine was sitting at the table in front of a steaming coffee mug. She was wearing one of those Mexican weave pullover things—orange, blue, and brown-gray stripes. The dinner dishes were stacked in the sink. “Would you like a cup?” she asked.
“No, thanks.” He had caffeine jitters as it was, he’d been drinking so much coffee. Drinking coffee and staring into space, thinking about Sal Immordino, wanting to put him away so bad, wanting to make him pay for what he did to John. Tozzi pulled out the chair opposite his cousin. “So what’s up?”
She puckered her mouth to one side for a moment. “Can I ask you something?”
“Sure.”
She puckered her lips again. She seemed uncertain about how she should begin.
“Just say it, Lorraine.”
She sighed before she started. “Michael, what are you doing with that girl?”
The blood flared in his face. He held his tongue until his temper burned back down. “By ‘that girl,’ do you mean Stacy?”
“Yes. I’m sorry. Stacy.”
“What do you mean, what’m I ‘doing’ with her?”
“Well, from what I’ve heard, Stacy is head over heels for you. Are you—how should I say this?—are you reciprocating those feelings?”
Tozzi looked up at the ceiling. He wished to God he could reciprocate those feelings.
“Who told you this? Cummings?”
Lorraine’s brows slanted back in sympathy. “Madeleine and I are concerned about you—both of you.”
5 Bad Moon Page 20
