“When I come back,” he said, “I’ll speak to your father.”
They took an omnibus to Grand Central Depot without saying a word, Petrosino trying not to think of her. The further away from the East Side they got, the more his head cleared. He and Bimbo had already confirmed the pick-up times for the mail and scouted which sub-station to use. Trains were whistling and churning, and people were scurrying on the platform in the cool morning air. He ambled up to the postal sub-station and handed the clerk the red envelope and some silver. “Registered mail, please,” Petrosino said.
The clerk looked at the letter, handed it back. “You want a return address on it, case it comes back, Diego?”
Petrosino nodded, wrote down 226 Elizabeth Street, New York. The Star of Italy.
“Why, you can write English. Bully for you.” The clerk smirked, tossing the envelope in a mailbag marked ‘PITTSTON.’
Petrosino lingered for a moment, dreaming of knocking the clerk’s teeth out. He and Bimbo moved to the platform, next to the tracks. He heaved a great sigh while Bimbo paced nervously behind him like a hunting dog. Petrosino watched the kid’s shadow and brooded over what Adelina had said. One thing struck a chord as soon as she’d said it. He was using the kid. Their train approached on the arc of metal. It took three minutes before it finally screeched to a stop in front of them, and men unloaded and loaded baggage and parcels.
“Ain’t this the one to Pittston?” Bimbo asked.
“I don’t think so. Next one.” Petrosino pointed to a man holding a long stick stacked with bagels at the end of the platform. “Get some bagels to fill our stomachs on the train.”
Bimbo looked confused, like a child struggling over a puzzle, but he walked reluctantly toward the pushcart. Petrosino feigned indifference and looked at the ornate bustle of a beautiful woman passing by. Then he quickly looked back to see Bimbo moving far enough away. Petrosino stood at the steps of one car, watching as the mailbags from the postal sub-station were loaded on board, one-by-one. The conductor made the last call, “ALL ABOARD!” A whistle sounded, a couple ran past him onto the train, and Petrosino took a deep breath and slipped on behind them. He looked out the window, trying to find Bimbo’s face, whispering to himself, “It’s for your own good, kid.”
A shadow lurched in front of him, hanging from a leather strap, smelling of sweat and enthusiasm. Bimbo smiled and gave him a bagel. “I saw you get on. This was our train, wasn’t it? Good thing I’m fast, huh, boss? Like circling the bases at the Polo Grounds.”
“Yeah, kid, good thing.” Petrosino shook his head, tearing his warm bagel in half.
They rode on the train carrying the mailbag with the red envelope on its way to The Ox.
Chapter 40
The Laurel Line Depot sat on a hill overlooking a billboard for Franco-American Soups and Grape Nuts and an array of rooftops that eventually gave way to the Susquehanna’s grey snake of water. The mailbag was dumped on the station platform, and Petrosino stood by it, taking a deep breath of the sulphur wafting from the coal collieries. He surveyed chimneys and church spires below, the nearly empty dirt streets, the slow trolley cars, a swath of mills closer to the river, and the undulating shadows of the Poconos. It was colder than New York, and there were few people in town except what miners called “tenderfoots.”
He and Bimbo paced near the mailbag, pretending to be lost, anxiously checking a clock above the ticket office. A mail wagon clattered up next to the platform, and an adolescent kid set down his horsewhip and hopped off. As the kid chucked the mailbag into the wagon, Petrosino summoned up the thick Italian accent he once had as a child and asked for a ride into town. He flashed a piece of silver, and the kid grinned and told him and Bimbo to hop in, next to the mailbag and loose parcels.
As the wagon rumbled downhill through town, Petrosino took in Pittston with one hand on the mailbag. They rolled by telegraph poles, school buildings, a stone watchtower, and a handful of elegant Victorian homes that must have belonged to coal bosses. There were small shops and businesses and the Flatiron Building on Main Street, which was even more narrow than the Fuller Building in Manhattan, but not as tall.
When the wagon stopped outside the small Post Office, Petrosino crawled out with his rucksack, and Bimbo carried the mailbag for the boy. They passed a drunk on the steps, asking for a loan to sharpen his mining tools. Inside, the boy took custody of the mailbag with an officious wave of his hand, lugging it to a thin postal clerk behind the counter. The clerk leveled his banker’s visor and sorted speedily through the letters, slotting them in different cubbyholes. He raised an eyebrow at the red envelope, then tucked it into a cubby designated, Registered. Petrosino and Bimbo sat on the waiting bench, and the clerk asked if they needed help. Petrosino said a few words in broken English about a steamship from Italy and waiting for a cousin. With a blasé nod, the clerk disregarded them.
This was always the tedious part of a shadow job. The waiting. Petrosino watched as Bimbo took out a new brown leather baseball with black stitches. He was practicing different grips. Though the kid had square features and a thick shadow of facial hair, he stilled looked green. It was in the eyes. They weren’t clouded with age and defeat yet. Crystal clear and twinkling.
“You nervous?” Petrosino said in Italian. Bimbo shook his head, trying to master a three-finger grip on the ball. “You sure you don’t wanna play for the Trolleydodgers instead?”
“Nope. But I wonder if the boys play though? Do we have a team?”
“No, but we have a marching band. Perfect for a young virgin rookie like you.”
Bimbo stopped gripping the baseball and held it in front of his heart like a tit. He grinned. “You kidding? I grew up in the Ghetto, remember?”
“When was the first time you had cunny?”
“When I was twelve. On the rooftop where my mom used to work.”
“Jesus, twelve? You’re joking. No, you’re not.” Petrosino hunched over the bench with a newfound respect for the kid. It reminded him of how he discovered the great mysteries of sex. In dark stairwells and rooftops at night. The rites of passage on the East Side. “When I was twelve, I couldn’t even talk to a girl without blushing. I was so shy, when I turned sixteen, my pop took me to a swank bordello. He must’ve saved up for it, now that I think about it.”
Bimbo looked at Petrosino. “What was it like having an old man?”
Petrosino patted the boy’s knee. “It was good when I was younger. The older you get, the more bitter things taste. But I’ll never forget the time he took me to the Tenderloin. I had read about a red-haired damsel in a book, and I kept insisting on it, even though my father said red hair was bad luck. Malpello. But he gave in and took me to the place, and there was this big woman with pretty red hair and soft skin and breasts the size of cannons.
“But the thing I remember most was this suave fellow in a White Wing suit, deciding which girl to pick, making them all giggle. I wanted to be like him. I mean, I also remember when I was alone with the redhead and having a hard time finding, you know, where to stick it. Afterwards, my father patted me on the back and asked how I liked it, and I told him I wanted to be a White Wing. He laughed his head off about that.”
“Your papa sounds like a good man.”
“He was,” Petrosino said. Bimbo looked down at the floor, his expression lost in some memory he didn’t share. “I should take you to a bordello sometime, get your little worm wet, kid. What do you say?”
Bimbo’s face tilted up, grinning. “Sure, that’d be swell. But won’t we get in hot water?”
“No, it’ll be an undercover job. So to speak.” They laughed.
“What’s it like being the first Italian dick in the Bureau?”
“Watch what you’re saying. We’re in public.” Petrosino looked around the Post Office. “I wasn’t the first. I can think of at least two Italians before Roosevelt appointed me in 1895. Ben Tessaro and Antonio Perazzo. Perazzo died with his ‘boots on,’ which means while he wa
s on the job. Both were murder men.”
Bimbo whispered, “How do you investigate a murder? Is it easy to learn?”
“Sure, it’s only two parts. First, establish a killing’s been done, then hunt the killer.”
Bimbo smiled. “You’re teasing the greenhorn.”
“The first step in solving a murder is the picture of the scene. You remember every clue and keep it in your noodle. Usually that’s the best start a dick’s got.”
“You think I could be a murder man?”
“Stick with me, kid. I’ll bring you up right. Now back to business.”
Petrosino rested on his rucksack and quietly eyed the red envelope in the cubbyhole behind the postal clerk’s counter. Petrosino pulled the slouch hat low over his forehead, just enough to shroud his vigil over the envelope, while Bimbo ate jerky and sipped from his canteen.
Townsfolk and miners came in and out all day, doing their business without so much as a blink at them. The benefit of looking like lost unkempt immigrants, Petrosino thought. He leaned back further on the bench and watched everyone. But no one claimed the red envelope. He began to wonder if his hunches were wrong, if the clues he had pieced together were for a different puzzle. Maybe Petto was nowhere near Pittston. Maybe Federica had made up the whole story about The Ox hiding out as “Luca Perrino” to throw them off the scent. The doubts gnawed at him as each hour passed, and his guilt over bringing Bimbo made it worse.
Near the end of the day, he began feeling his chin bobbing up and down, dancing with a tempting slumber. He gnawed on jerky and took small sips from Bimbo’s canteen to revive himself, convinced that he was wasting his time.
Then a boy walked in and cracked something wise to the clerk. The clerk turned and drew out the red envelope from its cubbyhole.
The boy was no more than ten, but his face held the world-weariness of a sage. His nose and mouth were blackened from breathing coal dust, and he wore a sullied pair of denim overalls, thick work gloves in his back pocket, and a cap with an unlit gas torch on the bill. He bit off a wad of tobacco, stuffed it in his shirt pocket, and snapped two fingers at the postal clerk.
The clerk said, “Got any papers to identify you, young master?”
The boy snorted contemptuously, pulled out a crumpled piece of paper, and slapped it on the counter. The clerk looked at it and held open a book. The boy momentarily looked like a real child when his tongue lingered in the corner of his mouth as he signed. The clerk handed the red envelope to the boy, who shoved it inside his overalls with a cluster of other envelopes and papers. Petrosino conjured up the image of The Ox playing marbles with boys outside of Morello’s tenement. The boy probably even wrote and decoded for him. It made sense.
Petrosino whispered in Italian to Bimbo, “This is it. You stay here.”
“Why?” Bimbo sat up on the bench.
“You’re not ready, kid. Besides, I need you to stay here to help me if and when we need to put him on the train. Don’t argue.”
Petrosino turned from Bimbo’s pout and focused only on the soot-faced boy as his little legs scissored out the door. Petrosino followed him onto a trolley car, scanning the faces on board as the car lurched off. The boy sat by himself, staring out with a detached look. Petrosino sat nearby and paid little attention to anything else for a while. The trolley rolled further along the Susquehanna and away from town, and the landscape grew barren. There were fewer buildings, and those few turned into shanties and stores that were little more than rotting piles of lumber. After a long while, the only men left on the car, laborers young and old, hopped off the trolley. Petrosino followed them.
The air was thick with smoke, and the sulphur so strong that it seemed like a fire was burning everywhere. Ash floated in the sky, and the ground under Petrosino’s feet was brown and rocky. Along the railroad tracks, the boy avoided puddles of silt and walked past a weatherbeaten building with the sign, Stonehill Iron and Coal Company. It advertised itself as a dry goods store, tool rental, sharpening shop, and bank rolled into one, but it looked deserted except for two chestnuts tied to the porch rails. Further on was a makeshift hospital and a rocky lane marked Church Street, where a whitewashed Roman Catholic church stood.
Then a sea of small shanties where the miners’ families lived amid a strong smell of shit. The boy kept walking, past a haggard man at a stable beating a bony mule with a sprag. Petrosino didn’t turn his head, eyes fixed on the boy’s jean coveralls ahead. The sickening sounds of the mule’s braying faded as they went around a bend and down into a valley streaked with large veins of coal.
There were deep holes cut into the valley with heavy wooden beams and splashes of paint denoting mine numbers and wagons pulled by goats on rail tracks. They passed several tunnels where soulless husks of men shambled about the Stygian desolation. All with the same dead eyes and black-sooted faces from scraping rock out of the earth’s womb.
None paid the boy or Petrosino any attention.
More miners emerged from the tunnels, turning over their empty canteens, and shouting, “No water!” They joined a pilgrimage heading toward a massive breaker building carved into the side of a hill. Petrosino stayed close to the boy, mixing in unnoticed. A long line of men spilled out of the building onto the railroad tracks, where their women and children waited in their “best” clothes. Pay day, Petrosino thought.
He kept following the boy’s scissoring legs, wondering where he was going with the red envelope as the sun descended in the ashen twilight. Out of the corner of his eye, Petrosino saw a trio of “coal and iron cops” on horseback. They weren’t real policemen, only ruffians hired by the coal bosses to keep order when the drinking began. They would be no help to him.
Petrosino surveyed the enormous line from the paymaster’s office on the front porch to the railroad tracks while the boy made his way to the front. As each paid miner came out of the office, he bitterly gave some coins to the boy. When nearly all the men had been paid and the singing and drinking began, the boy separated from the miners and ambled across the black dustbowl to a stand of woods a quarter mile away. Petrosino waited a few seconds and watched intently to mark the exact spot where the boy entered the woods. Then he made for the spot.
When Petrosino entered the woods, he looked back to see if anyone followed him, feeling as if he heard noises. The sun was almost gone as he weaved through the tree trunks and bramble, looking for any sign of the boy. He found a small pair of fresh tracks and pursued them. For nearly half an hour, he slipped deeper into the woods and the coming night until suddenly the tracks were gone.
He said a silent prayer to St. Anthony. Then he dropped his rucksack and spun in a circle until he noticed a patch of fallen branches. He kicked them aside and found an opening to a narrow footpath. The boy’s tracks were turned over on themselves to rearrange the camouflage of branches. Petrosino crossed himself and followed the wending tracks again as crickets chirped in his ears. There was little sun left, and he realized that he had no torchlight. He plodded feverishly through the thickening bramble, sickened by the thought of losing the boy. And the red envelope. Where could he have gone? There was nothing out in these woods. The tree trunks slowly shrunk in size and number until he stood at the edge of a clearing.
A rustling in the woods, and Petrosino froze, digging in his rucksack for his .38 pistol. A rabbit darted past. He let out a relieved sigh and smelled fresh firewood burning. He quickly got off the footpath and crawled into the brush to conceal himself. The smoke came from a roof stovepipe on a small windowless cabin, like a trapper’s lodge, tucked against a knoll.
He watched the cabin door for what seemed like an eternity, feeling the ground cooling beneath his belly. The door finally opened, and the little boy appeared. A thick arm tousled the boy’s hair, then disappeared inside the cabin. The boy was counting coins as he entered the woods again. Tree branches shuffled ten yards from Petrosino. Then a short bowlegged man came out of the cabin and took a different path into the woods toward the m
ines.
Petrosino didn’t move, listening to the growing calls of animals and insects. He imagined Petto was inside that cabin, opening up the red envelope and decoding the message:
EVERYTHING IS SAFE. STAY THERE FOR NOW.
If Petto bought it, Petrosino thought, he’d be off guard.
Smoke funneled from the stovepipe into the night, and light flickered above the cabin door where it hung unevenly in the frame. When the light went out, Petrosino waited another hour. Then he looked up at the moon hanging in the sky like a yellow skull and said a prayer before he rose up, clenching the gun.
Chapter 41
His mouth was dry as he approached the cabin. It was small, maybe twenty feet square with no windows. But now that he was closer, he saw a slit next to the door. Just wide enough to point a gun out and take a shot. He crouched low and circled the cabin. The front door was the only entry, and each wall had a gun slit. Petrosino crawled on his hands and knees to the rear of the cabin, pressed his ear against the knotted logs, but heard nothing.
He crawled through dirt and fireflies to the front and reached the crooked door. There was a keyhole, but he could only see splotches of shadow and light from what must have been the stove’s fire. He put his ear against the iron keyhole and thought he heard deep breathing and a fire crackling. Curse the fishes, he said to himself. If only he had his nippers, he could pick the lock. But what if jiggling the lock woke the man inside? Or what if the occupant were a paranoid gangster and had jury-rigged a trap at the door? A hair-trigger shotgun could have been waiting on the other side.
Petrosino shook his head and crawled twenty yards away from the cabin. He considered crashing through the door with his gun drawn, but that could have gotten someone killed, including him. And there was a good chance that, if someone were inside, he might not be Petto at all. Petrosino turned toward the sound of a coyote’s howl in the distance and noticed the smoke still coiling thickly from the stovepipe into the slate sky. He moved low to the ground, back to his rucksack in the woods. He put his pistol in a pocket, then dug through the sack, finding fresh undermuslin. He stuffed the clothing into the front of his coveralls and carefully went back to the side of the cabin closest to the stovepipe.
THE BARREL MURDER - a Detective Joe Petrosino case (based on true events) Page 30
