by Norman Green
“I need this job,” she told him. She sat down.
“I know.”
She sat with that for a minute. “So what else do you know?”
“I know you have trouble making your rent. I know you’re better than this nickel-and-dime gig you got with Marty Stiles. I know that Marty goes out of his way to make sure nobody knows about you. And I know you’re the one who dropped a dime on Gerald Baker.”
A ghost of a smile played at her lips. “How’d you hear about that?”
“Stiles was bragging it up.”
“I didn’t do it for Stiles.”
“Tell me about it,” he said.
She watched him for a minute. “Gerald Baker pulled a home invasion on a couple who lived in my building,” she said. “Seems he didn’t terrorize them enough, and the husband went to the cops. Baker got bail—figure that one out—and as soon as he hit the street, he paid my neighbors another visit. Slit the man’s throat. The wife asked if I would look into it. Can I ask you something?”
“Sure.”
“No offense, Mr. Caughlan, but you look to me like a guy who knows how to get what he wants. Marty filled me in on the nature of your problem. I don’t know what it is you want me to do that Marty can’t handle. You need someone’s neck broken, you don’t need me to do it for you.”
“No, Miss Martillo. I could probably manage that on my own.”
“Al,” she said.
“All right, Al. Look, I was told that the cops and the skip tracers were looking for Baker for six months and they couldn’t find shit. Then he shows up at the emergency room at King’s County with a broken collarbone and a separated shoulder. The cops get an anonymous tip and they go pick his ass up. Baker is six four, about two and a half, he’s got nothing to say about how he got injured, but the word I got was that some Puerto Rican female looks a lot like you tracked him down, dragged him out of his hole in Brooklyn, kicked his ass, and then dropped him off in the ER. I get all that straight?”
“Close enough,” she said.
“So you’re right, there’s plenty of tough guys around. Not too many smart ones.”
“I’m still not sure . . .”
He looked around, eyeing the crowd with distaste. “Let’s take a walk.”
She walked next to him down West Houston, headed for the river. Caughlan was not a tall man, but thick, heavy for his size, had the Irish boxer look: deformed nose, scar tissue around his eyes, big hands, solid chin. She knew that most men, if you hit them hard enough in the soft parts, laid down on the ground and cried, but there were some that got up grinning and came after you. She made Caughlan for one of those. You couldn’t really hurt this guy, she thought. You’d have to kill him.
This one’s like your father, she thought. Watch yourself.
He wasn’t ready to talk about his problem yet. “What is it you do for Stiles?”
“The usual,” she said. “Type up reports and invoices. Same line of crap, over and over again. ‘The bartender wrote my order on a tab and ran it through the cash register. The waiter was prompt and courteous. The food was tasty and well-prepared.’ On occasion I get to follow people around. Take pictures.”
Usually people laughed when she told them that, but he did not. “How come you ain’t with the cops?”
“I tried that. Didn’t make it through the academy.”
“What happened?”
“I have problems with authority, Mr. Caughlan. When people push me, I push back.”
He nodded. They stopped at the corner of West Houston and Greenwich. “Stiles gets a buck seventy-five an hour for your time,” he said. “What’s he pay you?”
“Nothing close to that.”
“Tell me what you think of Marty Stiles.”
She made an effort to hide her distaste for the man. Stiles might be using her like a paper towel but he knew his shit. If you wanted to know how badly your bartenders were ripping you off, Marty could give you names and numbers. If you suspected your wife of infidelity, Marty could get you pictures to prove it. If you were tired of paying off a disability claim, Marty would get you a video of the claimant in the act of having too much fun. If someone was trying to shake your business down for protection money, Marty could find out whether your new friend should be paid off or frightened off, and provide you with a consultant to handle either contingency. If you were a bondsman and one of your customers jumped bail, if you needed to know where your ex-hubby hid his assets, if you wanted your warehouse torched so you could collect, if someone had something of yours and you wanted it back, Marty Stiles was your guy. “Marty’s good at what he does,” she said.
Caughlan nodded. “I’ll give you that,” he said. “But the man has his limitations. I’m not after finding somebody lifting ten-dollar bills out of my till. Someone is using me, and I think they’ve turned somebody close to me. Do you know what I’m saying? Someone that works for me, maybe even someone in my house. Ever since I got wind of this, I’ve wanted to kill them all.”
“I see. How would you like to work this?”
“I’m having a party tomorrow,” he told her. “Two hundred of my closest friends, at my house in Jersey. I want you there.” He took a fat envelope out of his pocket. “Only a fool hires a surgeon and then stands over his shoulder telling him how to do his job,” he said. “I’m giving you access to my business, my house, my life.” He handed her the envelope. “I’m not expecting you to do this for the lousy crumbs that Stiles throws you,” he said. “There’s ten grand in there. You can use that for expenses, or you can put it in your pocket. I don’t give a damn, I just want you to have whatever you need. When you need more, you let me know. All I care about is you find the son of a bitch that’s got his dick up my arse, and you give me his name. You come out tomorrow, have a look around, how you take it from there is your business.”
“Is this blood money you’re giving me?”
“Look at it this way: you don’t find out who it is, I’ll start burying the candidates until I think I’ve got the son of a bitch, I swear to fucking Christ.”
She was slightly ashamed of herself for being glad she’d missed Anthony. He and Tio Bobby had been together as long as she could remember, but she and Anthony had never really connected. There had always been a distance between them, a certain coldness, a mutual disapproval, something . . . She could never quite put her finger on it. But in the mad and riotous soap opera that was her family’s life, Anthony and Tio Bobby together formed the one solid and reliable constant. And when Tio Bobby is gone, she thought, that will be gone, too. All the survivors, you included, will have no more connection to one another than a bunch of stray cats who happened, once upon a time, to inhabit the same alley.
You should go home now, Alessandra told herself. It had already been a long day. She didn’t even want to think about the long train ride in front of her, from the hospital on Eastchester Avenue in the Bronx all the way back to her sanctuary on the top floor of a crumbling brownstone on Pineapple Street in Brooklyn. God, she thought, you’ll probably sit on that platform for an hour, just waiting for the train back to Manhattan, then you gotta change to the A to get back to Brooklyn. Outside Tio Bobby’s window, automotive headlights and brightly lit apartment windows speckled the Bronx night. You see? she thought. It’s not empty. Everywhere you see light, there’s life. Someone cooking dinner, someone watching television, someone waiting for someone else to come home.
She turned away from the window, looked across the room at the bed where Tio Bobby lay motionless under the sheet. His blood count is up, the nurses had been eager to tell her, his renal functions are almost back to normal . . . They had gone on and on, but she had been too tired to follow what they were saying. Is he getting better, she had asked them. Is he going to wake up? Ah, well, we don’t know that, they’d told her, caution heavy in their voices. No one knows that. But these are encouraging signs! They give us reason to hope . . .
You’ve buried him, too, she told herself. You don’t believe he
can really get better.
She wondered if he knew she was there. One of the nurses claimed that he did, that, on some level, he was conscious of everything that happened, that it was only a question of how much of that memory he could access once he made his way back to the living. Maybe so, she thought. But all you’ve done for the past two hours is sit here and stare out the window. Go, go give him something. Give him a memory. She got up, carried her chair over next to the bed. She groped for his hand under the bed linens, held it in both of hers, marveled that his skin was still so rough after all the time in the hospital.
“Hey, Bobby.”
She could think of nothing else to say. Are you this vacant, she asked herself. What would you say to him if he were awake? “Victor says hello,” she said, and then laughed ruefully. “But you know that’s a lie, don’t you. I stopped in to see him today. He lives in a room, Bobby. One room on White Plains Road. Not counting the bathroom. When he has nothing to do, I think he sits there in a chair in the dark without moving. They say reptiles are like that. You could have one for a pet for half your life, but it will never feel a thing for you.” She felt guilty for putting that thought into words, but there was nobody around to reproach her for it.
“You knew him, Bobby, didn’t you? Before he married my mother, you knew him. Was he always like this?”
Bobby didn’t answer. She watched the slow rise and fall of his chest. Two men in the world you care about, she thought, and they couldn’t be more different. Her father had joined the service, Bobby had joined a motorcycle gang. Bobby found out that he really didn’t enjoy fighting all that much, and her father had become extremely adept at the art and science of controlling human beings through the judicious application of pain. Her father found that he didn’t have the emotional vocabulary to deal with those who loved him. Bobby fell in love with Anthony. Her father, ten years retired from the military and three years out of the state pen, still wore his hair high and tight, kept his back straight and his shoes shined. Bobby still had the gang tattoo on the side of his neck, a green dagger right behind and below one ear. Why don’t you have it taken off, she’d asked him once. It’s good for me to see it, he’d told her. Reminds me how stupid I can be.
The room door, slightly ajar, swung halfway open. Someone stuck their head inside, saw her there, nodded once, and withdrew. They weren’t too bad in this place. It was staffed by working-class people who knew firsthand how hard it could be to keep up with everything life threw at you. They wouldn’t care how late she stayed.
She remembered like it was yesterday, Bobby kicking open the front door of the empty tenement building where she’d been sleeping. Nobody in the place even thought about standing up to him. You won’t have to go back to school, that’s what he’d told her. You can come stay with me and Anthony. I’ll teach you how to fix motorcycles, and Anthony will teach you how to cook. She found herself wishing that she had learned either one of those two skills.
The day he’d come for her was about two and a half years after the day she’d found her mother on the kitchen floor. She’d spent the worst year and a half of her life living in her Aunt Magdalena’s place, and then for another year she’d haunted the streets of Brownsville, working the Dumpsters, breaking into apartments when nobody was home, into shuttered businesses at night, looking for something she could turn into a few bucks, or for something to eat, or a warm place to spend a few hours. She’d been nothing memorable, not in that neighborhood, just another lost kid. Bobby had been long gone from gang life by then, but he’d had connections. Still, it had taken him months to find her. She remembered what he had looked like: shaved head, whiskered face, long thin braid hanging off his chin, tattoos, leather, black gloves with the fingers cut off, boots, thick silver jewelry, a bike that was loud enough to wake the dead. Not quite as heavy as he’d gotten, these last few years, but otherwise unchanged.
It’ll be way better than this, he’d told her. And if you don’t like it, you can leave. I promise. It was precisely because he looked so wild that she had believed him. Not long after that, he’d taken her to see the shrink. She hadn’t wanted to go, but he had persuaded her. He’s a nice man, he’d told her. I don’t care, she’d said. He can’t help me.
He’ll help me, Bobby told her. So do it for me. Okay?
She was already falling under Bobby’s spell.
Okay, she said.
Always an incurable snoop, she’d found the doctor’s report a month or so later. Personality disorder, the report said. Attachment disorder. Borderline sociopathic tendencies. Short-tempered, hostile, reflexively violent.
Sugar and spice.
What the hell did they expect from her? But she hadn’t tried to find out what an attachment disorder was, or any of the rest of it. She’d been too afraid, then. She still was.
It was just past one in the morning when she stopped in at Marty’s office on West Houston in Manhattan. She fired up his computer, pushed his chair aside, dragged hers in from the other room, and shoved it in behind his desk. I am not sitting in his chair, she thought. Damn thing smells like crack . . . She did some quick searches on Daniel “Mickey” Caughlan and Pennsylvania Transfer. She didn’t get much on him. He’d been arrested a few times back in his twenties, but then his name had faded from the newspapers. She did, however, find out that his son, Sean Caughlan, aged nineteen, had died six months ago. There wasn’t a lot about it in the Times, but the News had covered it in a bit more detail. Sean, aka “Willy C,” had been linked to Shine, the pop diva of the moment, and there were unconfirmed rumors of the existence of a sex tape featuring the two of them. Shine herself professed to be heartbroken at the loss, but refused comment otherwise. He’d been found inside his apartment in Tudor City, a small neighborhood in Manhattan. He’d been a student at Columbia and a guitar player in an up-and-coming rock band, BandX. A guitar that had once been owned by Stevie Ray Vaughn was missing from the apartment. The cause of death was an apparent overdose.
Guy like Daniel Caughlan, Al thought, he doesn’t get over this in six months. This has got to be eating him up.
Five
The whole neighborhood of Brooklyn Heights had gone upscale, all except the building Alessandra lived in, a five-story walk-up on Pineapple, which was still a dump. She was on her way back from morning practice when she saw the guy standing on her stoop. She slowed to a walk, stopped at the bottom of the steps, and looked up at him. He was tall and slender, mournful eyes that matched his curly black hair, skin a shade darker than the average white guy. He was probably in his mid to late twenties, but he wore the clothing of an older man, suit and tie, carried an old-fashioned trench coat folded over one arm. “Good morning,” he said. His lips curled into a smile, but the rest of his face kept its somber air. “You must be Miss Martillo.” He stepped down to the sidewalk with a dancer’s grace, held out his hand. “My name is Gearoid O’Hagan.” He pronounced his first name “G’road.” “I work for Dan Caughlan. I’m his personal assistant. I sort of act as his liaison in what you might call, ah, delicate issues.”
She hesitated for just a second, then she shook his hand. “Hello, Mr. O’Hagan,” she said. His grip was surprisingly gentle. “Pardon the sweat.”
“Oh, forget it,” he said. “I should be doing a little more of that myself. And don’t call me ‘Mr. O’Hagan,’ that’s me fadder’s name. Gearoid is tough for Americans, so you can call me Gerald, if that makes it easier.”
Old-country Irish, she thought. Can’t pronounce the “th” in anyt’ing. “Gearoid,” she said, pronouncing it the way he had, feeling the strangeness of the foreign word on her tongue. “I can probably handle that.” She wondered if he expected her to ask him up. She lived in a room on the top floor, and it was just as unimpressive as the building’s exterior, one small room at the end of a long corridor, a tiny bathroom, a miniscule kitchen, no closets, one cranky steam radiator. She loved it, though—it was her independence, her refuge. Yeah, it was small and it was mean, cold in
the winter and hot in the summer, but it was all she had and she fought hard to keep it. She had never once compromised it by having a stranger inside.
“I know this is a surprise, me dropping by like this,” he said. “But there are a few things we should talk about. Know what I mean? How about we meet for breakfast? My treat. Would that be okay? There’s a little joint right around the corner, on Henry Street. What do you say?”
This guy is surprising, she thought, sensitive to what I need in a situation where most guys wouldn’t have a clue. Like a tap-dancing elephant, grace was something she never expected from the men in her life. “That would be fine, Gearoid. Give me twenty minutes.”
He smiled at her. “Grand,” he said.
He got up out of his chair when he saw her standing in the doorway, stood there until she made her way over. She watched him as he sat back down. “I ordered you coffee, Al,” he said. “You do drink coffee, don’t you?”
“Yeah,” she said. “Thanks.”
“Good.” He looked around for the waitress. “Tell me, Al, do you like talking business while you eat? Because I hate it. If the food’s any good, I like to give it the time and attention it deserves. You know what I mean? I hate to just swill it down while me mind’s on something else.”
“New York,” she said. “You’re always doing a couple things at once.”
“No way to live,” he said. “You miss out on the little pleasures in life that way. You pass them by, and then wonder what the hell happened.”
“You might be right,” she said, and she wondered why it was, when his mouth smiled, the rest of his face didn’t.
She ordered an omelet, but he ordered the biggest breakfast on the menu, with a couple extra sides. “So tell me, Al,” he said. “You grow up in the city?”
Normally she was guarded and paranoid, but O’Hagan was good, he got her talking about herself, and it wasn’t until much later that she realized she had told him more than she might have, had he been less engaging. They talked about the Brownsville streets she had grown up on until the meal was done. She watched him mop his plate with his last piece of toast and stick it in his mouth.
