Red was prouder than he’d cared to admit. He liked his beer and he liked to go fishing, so when he’d retired he’d opened up a little bar by the docks down in Sheepshead Bay. Christmas and Easter, Johnny always showed up. Where else did he have to go? That little tramp Johnny had married wasn’t around anymore, thank God, but he’d known from the start that that wouldn’t work out. He hadn’t said nothing, but he’d known. She wasn’t good enough to shine Johnny’s shoes. Johnny had been so broken up at the end that Red had thought he might go under. Only he hadn’t. Not Johnny. He was pretty much over it already, from the scuttlebutt … working the graveyard shift and anything else he could get his hands on. Now that he’d made detective Johnny would be all right. Maybe. He hadn’t been around to see Red in a couple of months.
Johnny Benedetto looked over at the lowlifes at the next table and thought of Red. Shit. If it hadn’t a been for Red, that would probably be exactly where he’d be sitting. Dealing coke. Forget the mechanic idea. If it hadn’t a been for Red, he wouldn’t have even had the cars to work on, let alone persuade to performance, enjoy for a couple of months, and then sell for the next wreck to work on. If it hadn’t been for Red, he’d more likely be stealing them. After they cleaned up this case he was gonna take a ride down to Sheepshead Bay and pay him a visit. What the hell.
Claire had to buy some film. She was reluctant to go all the way into the city to the lab. It would take too much time and she wanted to be back for Michaelaen when her parents returned from their bowling at four. She liked Michaelaen. He reminded her a little bit of … oh, well, he was himself. She liked him for himself. There was a camera store up on Lefferts where she could go. Twice the price, but that couldn’t be helped. Tomorrow she’d take the train and pick up the chemicals she’d need for her lab. All morning she’d been clearing away years of junk from one corner of the cellar, unburying equipment that was dusty but almost certainly still good. This way her mother couldn’t say, “Of course you can have a corner in the basement for your lab. One day, when we get around to clearing away all that stuff.…” Now it was done and there was nothing Mom could do about it. Heh heh.
Claire helped herself to a clean, fluffy towel and went into the shower. You couldn’t beat hot- and cold-running water. Claire arched her brown back and met the needling shower spray head on. It was like music, strong, steady music, and she gave herself up to it, flooded in steam, pouring baby shampoo all over her body, turning this way and that till the stretching coiled backward and forth in some dance of her own graceful rhythm. No. Claire stopped herself from reaching. It would do no good. Not really. Tales of blindness hadn’t sprung from vision itself but from something deeper … more spiritual in its sightlessness. She’d come too far to go back to that, no matter how much it seemed to want to leap out of her. Her dreams would quake inside of her and wake her up but she wouldn’t return to that solitary loneliness she’d used to substitute for fulfillment all during her last relationship.
She left the shower dripping, wiped the fogged-up mirror with the heel of her hand, and looked into her eyes. Yes, it was true. There was a power there that came from overstepping weakness. She winked at her image and busied herself with the hair dryer, now wondering what sort of consciousness the murderer of that small boy must live in. Did he know what he had done? Did he remember? Did he justify his rage? What on earth had made him that way? She remembered the lumbering weight of that rusty gold Plymouth this morning. Could the murderer have been in there, sated and wary? Oh, for goodness sakes, no, she shuddered and laughed to herself. Life was good. She was home. And she mustn’t let her imagination run away with her.
Claire put on a pair of her gauzy white pantaloons from Jaipur and a matching long shirt. In the fall she would have to buy herself some western clothes. The Indians had the right idea about clothes in this weather, though. Too see-through for the neighborhood, she covered herself with a brocaded ivory vest from Kashmir. Claire didn’t put on any makeup, just lined her blue eyes automatically with kajal, not bothering to look in the mirror.
She put her small silk purse across her shoulder, locked the door, and walked down the steps, engulfed all at once by the hot afternoon air. Claire stopped. She had the eerie feeling of being watched. Quickly she looked toward the von Lillienfeld house but no one was there, just a heavy Siamese calmly licking his paws. The murder had her unreasonably jumpy. Halfway down the block she turned again and noticed the Mayor following her. She threw back her fine head of dark hair and laughed. “All right, your honor. I suppose you can take care of yourself in traffic if anybody can. And probably me, too, hmm? Are you coming along to look after me?”
Of course he was coming along to look after her, the Mayor snorted to himself. Why else did she think he’d hung around the house? And this the fish store’s biggest day.
Together they made their long way up the hill. Claire grudgingly kept to the opposite side of the street on Park Lane South. She would have liked to take the woods path but she didn’t dare. She didn’t know which she feared more: the murderer (who was most likely long gone) or Zinnie’s fiery wrath, should she find out, and so she stayed on the other side which was actually very pleasant, lined with mansions from another era and walled in luxurious privet hedging, thick with the unfenceable scents of late wisteria and roses.
Claire told the Mayor all about India as she walked, her memory jogged from the broad yellow heat and the smells and the comfortable shade of the trees. Her sandals made small cushy sounds on the slate and the Mayor’s long nails scratched along. She told him things she’d never tell the others. They would just laugh or shake their heads or not believe her anyway.
The street was crowded up on Metropolitan; they pushed along past the piles of Korean vegetables, neat and brilliant in their tropical rows, then past the antique shops, up Lefferts, by the Jewish temple, and past the cluster of apartment houses until finally they came to the village, old-fashioned and European in style with Tudor walls and crockety red tile roofs. The Homestead Deli, with its good-looking wursts necklacing the lead-paned windows, might just as well have been a village shop in Munich or Zurich. And Regents Row resembled any pub in England. It was a potpourri and charming layout, Claire decided, delighted with the mixture of old world and new, the modern supermarket and the oriental music leaking from the Pakistani Spice Shop. One really could settle down here, so near and yet so far from anything-can-happen Manhattan. Why couldn’t the murder have happened there, where it would seem to belong, instead of here, so close to her family? Hadn’t they been through enough as it was? The dry dead face of Michael in his coffin came back to her in a rush and her mood was ruined. It was too hot after all, she’d just run into the camera shop and hurry back home. Now where on earth was the Mayor?
A clattering of voices and the beginnings of shouts near the corner jolted her out of her reverie.
It was … good God, it was the Mayor tug-of-warring a kosher chicken from a scull-capped, aproned shopkeeper! The Italian louts who held court in front of the pizzeria were howling with laughter and—what else?—rooting for the dog.
Claire, fleet-footed and all business, flew down to the hubbub and yanked the tooth-dented chicken from the fangs of the Mayor.
“Bravo!” the Italians whistled and applauded, “Bravo, bella signorina!”
The shopkeeper, highly offended, flailed his arms and whined and yelled a Yiddish tirade.
Truly sorry, embarrassed, and angry at the Mayor to boot, Claire reached into her purse and hauled out ten dollars.
“So eine scheisse!” the shopkeeper droned on and on, “Schauen Sie mal was der verdammte Hund mit meinem Laden gemacht hat!”
A small crowd had gathered. Claire peered into the cool darkness of the shop and saw, indeed, that the sawdust had been strewn with torn gizzards and three or four other hens, good as new.
She reached back into her purse and pulled out the last of what she had on her, a twenty dollar bill. The shopkeeper, sweat and dandruff glistenin
g from his voluminous neck folds, yammered on in his guttural tongue. “Tya!” he wailed. “What good is that little bit of geld when my entire store was kaputt?” He went on to inform his audience that Claire was a “Schikse pipi mädchen” with a “shit dog.”
That was it for Claire, who’d understood each nasty word. “Is that right?!” she threw the chicken into the street and the contents of her purse right after it.
“This is what I think of your store that has been so totally disheveled! You’re not only an exaggerator, you’re … you’re without resiliency! My dog is not a ‘shit’ as you so loudly proclaim, he happens to be the mayor of this town. And I am no Schiksa floozie but an American who finds you extremely constipated!”
Well, this was all too much for the crew of Italians. Claire’s rage was just too magnificent. They collapsed into peals of laughter and a barrage of lewd Sicilian expletives.
Infuriated, Claire whirled around and yelled, “Stati zita, imbecile!” right in Johnny Benedetto’s minding-his-own-business face.
“Listen, honey—” Johnny protested.
“Don’t call me ‘honey’!” hollered Claire and she snapped away, tripped, and flew over the chicken, marched past the astonished shopkeeper, and hurried down the hill, her knees still trembling with indignation and the face of that … that thoroughly obnoxious Italian. Mollified by all of this off-with-their-heads, the Mayor followed at a respectful distance, his tail muscled down between his legs in solemn retribution, his snout a neat mask of the called-for chagrin. But, by jove, he was pleased.
CHAPTER 2
Zinnie roared into the driveway. Wherever Zinnie went she was off to a fire. She screeched to a halt, bounded from the car, and stopped dead in her tracks. If there was one thing Zinnie couldn’t take, it was crawly things, and silver-dollar-sized, dark red spiders had been spinning webs from Park Lane South to Myrtle. “Oh, Christ,” she said out loud and ran into the house.
All through the woods and two blocks overflowing on the Richmond Hill side were these doilies five feet and more in diameter. It didn’t help to tear them down. The spiders had their web sites obstinately chosen and, tzaktzak, they’d only build them up again, good as new, right where you’d torn them down. No one had seen the likes of it since the caterpillar blitzkrieg back in 1957. And Zinnie, who wouldn’t bat an eye over a gun-drawn gallop through a subway station at midnight after some fleeing Rastafarians, and that without a backup anywhere in sight, would whimper at the very idea of a bug near her. Once inside, she slammed the kitchen screen door and shivered, safe.
Carmela was setting the table. She was doing it pink and green, in all seriousness, to set off the fillet of sole. Michaelaen, who’d been doing his best to irritate her by driving a matchbox truck in furrows along the tablecloth, stood up on his chair and threw his arms open in mute welcome when he saw Zinnie. She scooped him up and threw him over her head. “Rrrowwll,” she bit the tummied gap between shorts and T-shirt. “Where’s the salt and pepper? This is my dinner right here!” Michaelaen squirmed with delighted horror and rolled his truck into her mouth.
“We’re invaded,” Zinnie announced. “They’re taking over!”
Carmela made “Twilight Zone” noises and Michaelaen watched her with big eyes.
“The spider webs?” Mary didn’t look up from her mushrooms. Peeling mushrooms was one of her peculiarities. Nobody else peeled mushroom tops, but she did.
“They’re something, all right,” agreed Carmela. “Revolting.”
“Your father likes the spiders,” Mary defended them.
“Me, too,” said Michaelaen.
Stan peeked his head in (speak of the devil), wanting to know when dinner would be ready.
“Right after you go wash the sawdust off your face and hands,” Mary poked him out of the doorway. “And you stay off my clean linoleum!”
“I wish he’d go back to Vivaldi,” Carmela shook her head at the retreating mezzo staccato. “At least then we didn’t have to listen to the words.” Wherever Stan went he was locked to an opera.
“Why don’t you use the frigging air conditioner?” Zinnie demanded. They’d all chipped in and bought Mary an air conditioner, but she never used it. “I stopped at Jay Dee’s,” Zinnie changed the subject, holding up a box of coconut custard pie.
“There goes my diet,” Mary moaned.
“I get the string,” Michaelaen shouted. He collected bakery string.
“Where’s Claire?” asked Zinnie.
“Down in the cellar. Assembling her darkroom.”
“Oh.”
“Jay Dee’s?” Carmela asked shrewdly. “Isn’t that the one on Queens Boulevard?”
“Best coconut custard in Queens.” Zinnie turned her back and removed her gun.
“I don’t suppose you ran into anyone?” Carmela continued.
“As a matter of fact I did stop off at Freddy’s, nosy.”
Michaelaen’s ears perked up and he regarded his mother with serpentine quiet.
“And?”
“Sweetheart, be a good boy and go get Grandma some parsley from the garden, would you?”
Michaelaen glared at his grandmother.
“Go ahead,” Zinnie smiled and gave him a hug. “Then I’ll tell you where your dad’s taking you tomorrow. Okay?”
Michaelaen raced outside, a lit-up glider plane. Tomorrow he would see his dad.
“So what did Freddy have to say?” Mary threw nutmeg into her white sauce. “He making out all right?”
Zinnie snatched a major leaf from Carmela’s strategically arranged salad and sat down. “What is this, the centerfold for Gourmet Magazine?” Carmela had bombarded the table with peony branches and distinguished pink roses. Zinnie frowned. “I so hate not being able to see my date.”
“Your date is Michaelaen,” Carmela said. “Now tell about Freddy.”
Zinnie shrugged. “I just thought I’d, you know, go see how they’re coming along with the restaurant.”
“And how’s it coming?” Mary asked.
“I’ll tell ya, it looks really nice. Fancy. You’d love it, Carmela. Veddy veddy art deco.”
“You sound disappointed.”
“Yeah. Well … he’s doing so damn well without me. I was kinda hoping … I really don’t know what I was hoping.”
“You tell him about the murder?” Carmela asked.
Zinnie looked from her to her mother and back. “Sure.”
“Don’t give us ‘sure,’” Carmela sneered. “We know all about it. The whole neighborhood knows. It’s all anybody’s talking about.”
“Oh. To tell you the truth, I did talk about the murder with Freddy. Only it was me who did the asking. I wanted to get the gay slant on it.”
“What?”
“You know what I mean. Sometimes they know about someone who’s … uh … kooky in that direction. They hear things.”
“And did he?”
“Naw. But he’ll keep his ears open. The last thing he wants is the cops cracking down on all the gays. They’ve got enough trouble with the AIDS scare.”
Mary and Carmela exchanged looks.
Zinnie screwed up her mouth. “Now what?”
“No, nothing,” Carmela busied herself with napkin folding. “Mom was just a little worried about Michaelaen …”
“What, that he’d get AIDS from Freddy?!” Zinnie’s face went red.
“Well, God, Zin. Children do get AIDS, you know. It’s not such a farfetched concern.”
“Look,” Zinnie cried then lowered her voice. “Michaelaen is my son and I’d appreciate it if you’d let me worry about it, all right?”
Claire, coming up the cellar stairs, saw Michaelaen at the back door standing still with a bouquet of parsley, waiting cautiously inside his little shroud of gloom. She slipped out the door.
“Hello,” she said.
He said nothing.
“I was just going to catch myself some lightning bugs.”
Michaelaen regarded her suspiciously thr
ough hooded eyes.
“Just to catch. I’ll let them go, of course. I like to hold them in my hand. You?”
He nodded, reluctantly, and followed her onto the darkening grass.
Johnny Benedetto tossed around in his sloppy bed. Perspiration rolled off his body and wet the sheets. He was dreaming of a little boy in holy terror. Johnny flung one fist out desperately; the woods became the streets of Brooklyn and the little boy turned into himself. He entered the crummy building with the peeling wallpaper in the hallway and took the old elevator up. It took so long, then bounced to a stop. He heard someone in the apartment. Voices. Women’s voices wailing. They were in there with his mother. He stood at the open door of the apartment and the women turned to look at him. They stopped crying. “Mom?” he called, looking past their heads. “Mom?” But nobody would let him in. They pulled him down the stairs and brought him somewhere else to wait for his aunt. He didn’t like his aunt, he told them. He wanted his mom. His mom had gone away, they told him, she had gone back to Jesus and he must be brave.… Johnny woke up with a jolt. His breath came short and fast. Trembling, he reached out and felt for the gun on the night stand. It was all right. Just a dream. He was fine.
When dinner was done, Claire hung around the kitchen and helped her mother dry the dishes. Mary was going to hymn mass with the neighbor, Mrs. Dixon. They had been walking to church together for almost twelve years now, and chatting over the hedge whenever they hung wash, and still they called each other “Mrs.”
“Good Lord, it’s muggy,” Mary wiped her brow. “I’d better change this blouse. Smells of fish. I hate that when you stand next to someone in church who’s all smelly.”
“You really like to go to church, don’t you, Mom?”
“I wouldn’t go if I didn’t like it, now, would I?”
Park Lane South, Queens Page 4
