by Norman Green
“Señor,” she said. “You work for Caughlan?”
He nodded his head.
“How is he to work for?”
The kid shrugged. “You give him what he wan’,” he said, “he take care of you. You don’t give him what he wan’, he go craze.”
“What’s your name?” she asked him.
He looked at her face for the first time. “Epiphanio Neves,” he said.
“Alessandra Martillo,” she said, holding out her hand.
He shook her hand softly. “You born here,” he said.
She nodded. “Brooklyn. My parents are from Puerto Rico.”
“Lucky,” he told her. She knew what he was talking about. She didn’t have to worry about Immigration.
“Yeah,” she said. “I am. Be careful with my uncle’s van, okay, Eppi?” She handed him the key.
He bowed slightly as he accepted it from her. “Of course,” he said, and he smiled. She knew the look: he was smitten. “I take good care.”
“Thank you.”
She watched him climb into Tio Bobby’s van and drive it away, and she wondered where he was taking it. The kid is right, she told herself, you are lucky. No matter how bad you got it, there’s always someone around who has it worse. She stuck the claim ticket in her pocket and undid the top three buttons of her blouse. Loosen up, she told herself. Show ’em a little brown skin. The man asked you to come, so you got as much right to be here as anybody. You ain’t nobody’s goddamn maid, not yet.
She stepped through the front doors and looked around. My God, she thought. The place was beyond elegant, it was beyond opulent, it was beyond anything she’d ever seen. You give me a million dollars, she thought, I could never decorate a space to look like this, no matter how hard I tried.
A young woman swept into the entryway where Al stood, held out a manicured hand. Al tried not to stare at the rings on the woman’s fingers. She was a few inches shorter than Alessandra, but she was stunning, with heavy blond hair framing the sort of face guys went to war over. She wore a strapless peach gown that was suspended, contrary to the laws of physics, from the bottom half of her bosom. Creamy white skin, sparkling green eyes, and a perfect smile—the woman was flawless, she looked good enough to eat. Alessandra wanted to button up her shirt and run away, but it was too late. “I don’t believe we’ve met,” the woman said, her voice carrying a trace of a Southern accent. “I’m Helen Caughlan, Daniel’s wife. And you are?”
God, Al thought, she’s even more gorgeous than the house. She’s everything you will never be . . . Stop it, she told herself. Bitch probably can’t even do one chin-up. She took Helen’s hand. Probably break all of her fingers if you tried, she thought. “Alessandra Martillo,” she said. “Very nice to meet you, Mrs. Caughlan.”
“Alessandra Martillo.” Helen said it as though she were tasting something. There was a hint of something in the back of those green eyes, a trace of fear, maybe, or doubt. “What a beautiful name. Are you a friend of Dan’s?”
She’s wondering if I’m sleeping with him, Al thought. She’s wondering if I’m the one that will get her booted out of this house. “Business associate,” she said.
“Ah,” Helen said, and she held onto Al’s hand a second longer. “But no business today.”
“Scout’s honor,” Al said, and she tried to smile. Tried not to dislike Helen Caughlan.
“Excellent,” Helen said. “Come with me, I’ll show you around.”
Alessandra’s phone went off just as Helen ushered her across the marbled bridge that connected the two halves of the second floor. They paused while she fished it out of her camera bag. Below them on one side was the entrance she’d come through moments earlier, and on the other side they looked down on what might, in a humbler dwelling, have been called the den. Soft yellow walls, rough-hewn stone fireplace, leather couches scattered around the perimeter. A glass wall formed the fourth side of the room, and through it could be seen a sort of green house structure that housed another waterfall, some small evergreen trees, and an indoor swimming pool. A short Italian man stood in the center of a knot of people and expounded. “Excuse me,” Al said, and she turned the phone off. “I really hate telephones.”
“I know exactly what you mean,” Helen said. “You can never really have a moment to yourself anymore. You can’t be indisposed, you can’t be out of reach, ever. Lord, Daniel gets positively incensed if he should happen to call me and I don’t answer. It’s a small thing, I suppose, but it does wear, knowing that one can never be truly alone.”
“Who is that guy?” Al said, pointing down at the short Italian.
“Jerry Tomasino,” Helen said. “He was once the mayor of Union City. I’m not quite sure what he does these days, something in real estate, I think. Daniel seems to have dealings with him from time to time.”
“I see.”
Below them, one of the younger female guests had shed her clothes and was wading into the pool. Alessandra watched Helen watch the girl. “There,” Helen said. “Just what I was saying. We’ve lost all sense of privacy.” She looked up from the nude girl in the pool to Alessandra. “There’s your proof,” she said. “Everyone is an open book. There are no secrets anymore. I could understand if she were four or five years old, but she’s twenty if she’s a day.”
“I could never do that,” Al said. “Not that I’m ashamed of how I look or anything, but I’d be too worried about who was going through my stuff while I was in the water. I guess I still need to hang onto my secrets.”
Helen had a strange laugh—she sounded almost as though she were choking—but then she cut it off abruptly. “Well, I wish I could say that,” she said, turning her attention back to the pool, where the girl was out in deeper water, trying not to get her hair wet. “But I can never quite convince myself that it’s true. I feel eyes on me constantly, whether or not they’re really there.”
“Look at it this way,” Al said. “For the rest of the afternoon, all of the eyes in the place will be watching her, not you or me.”
“Yes,” Helen said, and she laughed that strange strangled honk again. “The men will all be hoping she’ll take her clothes off again, and their women will be trying to catch them looking.”
Alessandra caught sight of Gearoid O’Hagan, who was standing off to one side of the room below them. He was looking up at her and Helen, not at the girl, and when he caught her eyes, his somber face lit up. He’s smiling with all of himself this time, she thought, not just his teeth . . . He seemed genuinely glad to see her, even in the presence of such a compelling distraction. Al felt the impact of that smile, felt herself flush as she wondered what might be behind it. She glanced at Helen, but her escort was staring down at the girl in the swimming pool. Al turned back to O’Hagan, but Gearoid’s face had clouded over as he watched Daniel Caughlan stroll across the floor, a bath towel in his hand. The girl swam back to the shallow end and climbed out to a smattering of applause. Caughlan wrapped her in the towel and smacked her on the rear end.
“End of the show,” Al said.
Helen shook her head. “Never,” she said. “Just the end of the episode. Shall we continue?”
It was numbing after a while: media room, kitchen easily twice the size of Al’s apartment, maid’s quarters, library, game room, guest rooms, his and her master suites. Helen even took Al through the garage so they could ogle Caughlan’s new Bentley Continental GT. “He won’t even sit in it yet, let alone drive it,” Helen said. “I don’t know why he even bought it.”
“You ever think about taking it for a joyride?” Al asked.
“I’ve considered it,” Helen told her. “Not that I care anything for the car, but it would be easy enough. Daniel keeps the keys in the top drawer of the workbench over there. The gardener will get to drive it before I do—he’s supposed to take it back to the dealer in a week or so to get the alarms installed.” She shook her head. “Men,” she said. “But I suppose Daniel deserves it, if that’s what he wants.”
“Yes,” Helen said dryly. “You’re right about that.” Al followed her out of the garage, followed her past a room filled with model trains, down a hallway, and into the large central room that was dominated by a bar and a wooden dance floor. “There’ll be music down here,” Helen said. “A bit later.” There was a door on the far side of the room, diagonally opposite the bar.
“What’s over there?” Al asked.
Helen held her breath for a second before she answered. “That was Willy’s room when he stayed with us. He liked being down here in the basement, all by himself.”
“It must have been a terrible loss,” Al said. She looked at Helen when she said it, watched as the woman’s face seemed to age a dozen years.
Helen glanced at her watch. “I really must be getting back upstairs,” she said.
“Thanks for the tour,” Al said.
“My pleasure. If you need anything at all,” Helen said, and she turned and walked out of the room. Alessandra stared after her, wondering if she ought to feel guilty for making Helen feel bad, bringing up the subject of Willy, if her interest in him had chased Helen off. It was possible that the woman had genuinely cared about her stepson, that she was sensitive of her memories of him, but that was a kind-hearted assumption, and therefore not the smart money bet. But Helen had looked absolutely haunted . . .
Al’s mental file on Willy Caughlan was getting fatter.
She walked across the dance floor and stepped into Willy’s room.
There didn’t seem to be much of him left there. The room was more about the parents than the kid, it was filled with the kind of stuff kids discard and bereaved parents gather up and squirrel away. There was a boom box on the desk in the far corner of the room. It had a cassette and CD player, both formats outdated. The other stuff in the room was of the same flavor: either it was out of style, too small, or too nineties to be anything Willy had cared about recently.
She walked over and sat down at Willy’s desk, leaned back in his chair. A short time later, Daniel Caughlan filled the doorway. “Thought I might find you here,” he said. He sat on the end of the bed, between her and the only exit.
Alarm bells went off in Alessandra’s head. He’s got you boxed in, she thought, and he’s a man who’s used to getting what he wants. There might not even be anyone else down on this level. She could hear her father’s voice. Men always have the same thing on their minds. He’d told her that many times. There’s only one thing they really care about. Do you hear me? I don’t give a damn what they tell you. And don’t go thinking one of them is different from the rest. Al glanced at Caughlan with as much cool as she could muster. “How much you pay her?”
“Her who?”
“The girl in the swimming pool.”
“Two large,” Caughlan said. Al could sense him reappraising her. “How did you know? Did O’Hagan tell you?”
“I haven’t talked to O’Hagan yet,” she said. “I just had a gut feeling.”
“Based on what?” he said. “I don’t know that I care to be so transparent.”
“I figure you like your parties to be memorable,” she told him. “Any woman doing that for real would probably be fat, forty, and fucked up.”
Caughlan shook his head. “Maybe,” he said. “You got one out of three, though, she’s flying on something. Her and her two friends was supposed to do it later tonight. More toward the end of everything, but she got messed up and jumped the gun. Just as well, I suppose. Fucking O’Hagan hates it when I do stuff like this.”
“Why is that?”
“He’s funny that way.”
Al kept her voice low. “How come you never told me about Willy?”
His face, human one moment, seemed set in plaster the next. Al watched him as he fought to compose himself. After a few moments he swallowed and glanced over at her. “Stiles told me you’d never leave it alone.”
“Forget Stiles,” she said. “Nobody here but you and me. Why didn’t you tell me?”
He shook his head. “Have you ever lost someone?” he asked.
“Yes.”
“Then you should know.”
“Why don’t you just tell me about your son,” she said. “Do it now, and then we can be done with it.”
Caughlan sighed. “Not a hell of a lot to tell. We didn’t talk much, he and I.” He stared down at his shoes. “My old man never talked to me, neither. I don’t know if I did the right thing by Willy. I didn’t want him in the business, I wanted him to go to school. Be a lawyer or an accountant or some damn thing. So I let him alone, you know what I mean? I let his mother do his raising. But when he bought his goddam guitar . . . It was the end. I should have taken it away from him, I should have broken it over his feckin’ head.”
“He had nothing to do with Penn Transfer.”
Caughlan shook his head. “Willy was an airhead. He didn’t have nothing to do with nothing. When he was a little kid, all he could think about was trucks. You believe that? I’m trying to get him to go to Harvard, and he wants to be a goddamned truck driver. Then he picks up a guitar, from that moment on the only thing he gives a damn for is music.” He paused, looked at the floor between his feet. “I wanted him to have everything I didn’t.”
“You wanted him to be different from you.”
He turned and stared at her. “Maybe. But that goddam guitar poisoned the water between the two of us, I can tell you that.”
“All right,” she said. “I have to ask this, okay? Did you know he was into dope?”
Caughlan shook his head. “No.”
“I’m sorry about Willy.”
Caughlan sat silent for a minute. “Thank you,” he finally said. “She’s twenty-four.”
“Who’s twenty-four?”
He nodded at the ceiling. “That one upstairs. In the pool.”
“Whatever,” Al said. “Not my business.”
“Oh, but it’s all right,” he said.
He doesn’t want me to think he’s a dirtbag, Al thought, surprised.
Caughlan sighed again, then stood up. “I’ll close the door behind me here. No one will bother you. I expect you’ll have to go through his things. Just put it all back when you’re done. And leave me alone about it.” He walked out, shutting her in.
She opened the top drawer of Willy’s desk.
This is supposed to be a drug case, she told herself. Why are you so interested in Caughlan’s kid? Funny, though, how Willy checked out just as his father’s problems had gotten started. Must have been a bad month, she thought. Someone uses your company to smuggle dope into the country, a grand jury starts looking into your business, and your son dies.
He’s in heaven. That’s what Alessandra’s mother would have said. In her mother’s cosmology, everyone went to heaven when they died, God being too nice to really put the screws to anybody. In the end, he forgave you and let you in. We make up these bits of hopeful dream because they make us feel better, she thought, and then we forget that we, or someone like us, invented them, and they harden into dogma, they become carved in granite, accepted as the revealed wisdom of our betters, passed down to our children as truth. And though the hopeful notions of her mother had not been enough to sustain her, they were as valid as anyone else’s opinions. They lacked only the unquestioning acceptance of a few learned-sounding adherents to let them congeal into canon. Maybe it’s better this way, Al thought. Maybe it’s better that the old ways are dying, that now everyone seems to need to make up her own mind. What else can you do? Swallowing someone else’s pre-chewed conclusions is the lazy way out.
In Al’s own mind, God was a half-mad amalgam of her mother, Tio Bobby, and Tito Puente, with lesser parts of everyone else thrown in, from Jim Morrison to Lenny Bruce. She mentally added Sean Willy Caughlan to that list. She went through the stuff he’d left behind, found nothing useful or particularly informative.
She found herself back on the second-floor wal
kway, the only part of the house she really liked. She supposed it was the voyeur in her. She leaned on the railing, looked down on the scene below. It felt like sitting in the front row of the balcony in a theater: the performers didn’t make eye contact with you, they were more conscious of the faces on their own level, but you were close enough to watch and hear everything that went on.
Helen Caughlan stood with a group of women in the foyer below. “Cars!” the woman said, her voice a little too loud. “God, could I tell you stories.” Her Southern accent was gone, now she just sounded like another chick from Jersey. Her perfection had developed a crack . . . Alessandra felt small for taking pleasure in that. “Drunk,” to Al, had always meant you were too messed up to go get yourself another one. Helen was not that far gone, but she was on the way. “Fuckin’ bastards,” Helen went on, her voice a touch lower. “If it’s something that they want, oh, sure, it’s a classic, it’s an investment, five more years and it’ll be worth whatever-the-hell. What a load of bullshit. But if I need something, you can bet he’s putting the brakes on, he’s thinking of all the reasons I can’t have it. Men.” Her hair had broken free of whatever constraints she’d had it under, but the dress maintained its grip on her bosom. “They don’t even make good house pets.”
“Jerry was a nice pet, up until last year,” one of the others chimed in. She was another one, another too-young and too-perfect blonde. Talk about house pets, Alessandra thought. “Then his doctor gave him a prescription for Cialis,” the woman went on, “and ever since then he’s been a pain in the ass. Or should I say . . .” Al wondered if the Jerry in question was Jerry Tomasino.
