by Fuzz
He was dead long before his body rolled to a stop on the wide white bottom step.
3
Concetta Esposita La Bresca had been taught only to dislike and distrust all Negroes. Her brothers, on the other hand, had been taught to dismember them if possible. They had learned their respective lessons in a sprawling slum ghetto affectionately and sarcastically dubbed Paradiso by its largely Italian population. Concetta, as a growing child in this dubious garden spot, had watched her brothers and other neighborhood boys bash in a good many Negro skulls when she was still just a piccola ragazza. The mayhem did not disturb her. Concetta figured if you were stupid enough to be born a Negro, and were further stupid enough to come wandering into Paradiso, why then you deserved to have your fool black head split wide open every now and then.
Concetta had left Paradiso at the age of nineteen, when the local iceman, a fellow Napolitano named Carmine La Bresca moved his business to Riverhead and asked the youngest of the Esposito girls to marry him. She readily accepted because he was a handsome fellow with deep brown eyes and curly black hair, and because he had a thriving business of which he was the sole owner. She also accepted because she was pregnant at the time.
Her son was born seven months later, and he was now twenty-seven years old, and living alone with Concetta in the second-floor apartment of a two-family house on Johnson Street. Carmine La Bresca had gone back to Pozzuoli, fifteen miles outside of Naples, a month after Anthony was born. The last Concetta heard of him was a rumor that he had been killed during World War II, but, knowing her husband, she suspected he was king of the icemen somewhere in Italy, still fooling around with young girls and getting them pregnant in the icehouse, as was her own cruel misfortune.
Concetta Esposita La Bresca still disliked and distrusted all Negroes, and she was rather startled—to say the least—to find one on her doorstep at 12:01 A.M. on a starless, moonless night.
“What is it?” she shouted. “Go away.”
“Police officer,” Brown said, and flashed the tin, and it was then that Concetta noticed the other man standing with the Negro, a white man, short, with a narrow face and piercing brown eyes, madonna mia, it looked as if he was giving her the malocchio.
“What do you want, go away,” she said in a rush, and lowered the shade on the glass-paneled rear door of her apartment. The door was at the top of a rickety flight of wooden steps (Willis had almost tripped and broken his neck on the third one from the top) overlooking a back yard in which there was a tar-paper-covered tree. (Doubtless a fig tree, Brown remarked on their way up the steps.) A clothesline stiff with undergarments stretched from the tiny back porch outside the glass-paneled door to a pole set diagonally at the other end of the yard. The wind whistled around the porch and did its best to blow Willis off and down into the grape arbor covering the outside patio below. He knocked on the door again, and shouted, “Police officers, you’d better open up, lady.”
“Sta zitto!” Concetta said, and unlocked the door. “You want to wake the whole neighbor? Ma che vergogna!”
“Is it all right to come in, lady?” Willis asked.
“Come in, come in,” Concetta said, and stepped back into the small kitchen, allowing Willis and then Brown to pass her.
“So what you want two o’clock in the morning?” Concetta said, and closed the door against the wind. The kitchen was narrow, the stove, sink, and refrigerator lined up against one wall, an enamel-topped table on the opposite wall. A metal cabinet, its door open to reveal an array of breakfast cereals and canned foods, was on the right-angled wall, alongside a radiator. There was a mirror over the sink and a porcelain dog on top of the refrigerator. Hanging on the wall over the radiator was a picture of Jesus Christ. A light bulb with a pull chain and a large glass globe hung in the center of the kitchen. The faucet was dripping. An electric clock over the range hummed a steady counterpoint.
“It’s only midnight,” Brown said. “Not two o’clock.”
There was an edge to his voice that had not been there on the long ride up to Riverhead, and Willis could only attribute it to the presence of Mrs. La Bresca, if indeed that was who the lady was. He wondered for perhaps the hundredth time what radar Brown possessed that enabled him to pinpoint unerringly any bigot within a radius of a thousand yards. The woman was staring at both men with equal animosity, it seemed to Willis, her long black hair pinned into a bun at the back of her head, her brown eyes slitted and defiant. She was wearing a man’s bathrobe over her nightgown, and he saw now that she was barefoot.
“Are you Mrs. La Bresca?” Willis asked.
“I am Concetta La Bresca, who wants to know?” she said.
“Detectives Willis and Brown of the 87th Squad,” Willis said. “Where’s your son?”
“He’s asleep,” Concetta said, and because she was born in Naples and raised in Paradiso, immediately assumed it was necessary to provide him with an alibi. “He was here with me all night,” she said, “you got the wrong man.”
“You want to wake him up, Mrs. La Bresca?” Brown said.
“What for?”
“We’d like to talk to him.”
“What for?”
“Ma’am, we can take him into custody, if that’s what you’d like,” Brown said, “but it might be easier all around if we just asked him a few simple questions right here and now. You want to go fetch him, ma’am?”
“I’m up,” La Bresca’s voice said from the other room.
“You want to come out here, please, Mr. La Bresca?” Willis said.
“Just a second,” La Bresca said.
“He was here all night,” Concetta said, but Brown’s hand drifted nonetheless toward the revolver holstered at his waist, just in case La Bresca had been out pumping two bullets into the commissioner’s head instead. He was a while coming. When he finally opened the door and walked into the kitchen, he was carrying nothing more lethal in his hand than the sash of his bathrobe, which he knotted about his waist. His hair was tousled, and his eyes were bleary.
“What now?” he asked.
Since this was a field investigation, and since La Bresca couldn’t conceivably be considered “in custody,” neither Willis nor Brown felt it necessary to advise him of his rights. Instead, Willis immediately said, “Where were you tonight at eleven-thirty?”
“Right here,” La Bresca said.
“Doing what?”
“Sleeping.”
“What time’d you go to bed?”
“About ten.”
“You always hit the sack so early?”
“I do when I gotta get up early.”
“You getting up early tomorrow?”
“Six A.M.,” La Bresca said.
“Why?”
“To get to work.”
“We thought you were unemployed.”
“I got a job this afternoon, right after you guys left me.”
“What kind of a job?”
“Construction work. I’m a laborer.”
“Meridian get you the job?”
“That’s right.”
“Who with?”
“Erhard Engineering.”
“In Riverhead?”
“No, Isola.”
“What time’d you get home tonight?” Brown asked.
“I left Meridian, it musta been about one o’clock, I guess. I went up the pool hall on South Leary and shot a few games with the boys. Then I came home here, it musta been about five or six o’clock.”
“What’d you do then?”
“He ate,” Concetta said.
“Then what?”
“I watched a little TV, and got into bed,” La Bresca said.
“Can anybody besides your mother verify that story?”
“Nobody was here, if that’s what you mean.”
“You get any phone calls during the night?”
“No.”
“Just your word then, right?”
“And mine,” Concetta said.
“Listen, I don’t k
now what you guys want from me,” La Bresca said, “But I’m telling you the truth, I mean it. What’s going on anyway?”
“Did you happen to catch the news on television?”
“No, I musta fell asleep before the news went on. Why? What happened?”
“I go in his room and turn off the light at ten-thirty,” Concetta said.
“I wish you guys would believe me,” La Bresca said.
“Whatever it is you’ve got in mind, I didn’t have nothing to do with it.”
“I believe you,” Willis said. “How about you, Artie?”
“I believe him, too,” Brown said.
“But we have to ask questions,” Willis said, “you understand?”
“Sure, I understand,” La Bresca said, “but I mean, it’s the middle of the night, you know? I gotta get up tomorrow morning.”
“Why don’t you tell us about the man with the hearing aid again,” Willis suggested gently.
They spent at least another fifteen minutes questioning La Bresca and at the end of that time decided they’d either have to pull him in and charge him with something, or else forget him for the time being. The man who’d called the squadroom had said, “There are more than one of us,” and this information had been passed from Kling to the other detectives on the squad, and it was only this nagging knowledge that kept them there questioning La Bresca long after they should have stopped. A cop can usually tell whether he’s onto real meat or not, and La Bresca did not seem like a thief. Willis had told the lieutenant just that only this afternoon, and his opinion hadn’t changed in the intervening hours. But if there was a gang involved in the commissioner’s murder, wasn’t it possible that La Bresca was one of them? A lowly cog in the organization, perhaps, the gopher, the slob who was sent to pick up things, the expendable man who ran the risk of being caught by the police if anything went wrong? In which case, La Bresca was lying.
Well, if he was lying, he did it like an expert, staring out of his baby blues and melting both those hardhearted cops with tales of the new job he was anxious to start tomorrow morning, which is why he’d gone to bed so early and all, got to get a full eight hours’ sleep, growing mind in a growing body, red-blooded second-generation American, and all that crap. Which raised yet another possibility. If he was lying—and so far they hadn’t been able to trip him up, hadn’t been able to budge him from his description of the mystery man he’d met outside Meridian, hadn’t been able to find a single discrepancy between the story he’d told that afternoon and the one he was telling now—but if he was lying, then wasn’t it possible the caller and La Bresca were one and the same person? Not a gang at all, that being a figment of his own imagination, a tiny falsehood designed to lead the police into believing this was a well-organized group instead of a single ambitious hood trying to make a killing. And if La Bresca and the caller were one and the same, then La Bresca and the man who’d murdered the commissioner were also one and the same. In which case it would be proper to take the little liar home and book him for murder. Sure, and then try to find something that would stick, anything that would stick, they’d be laughed out of court right at the preliminary hearing.
Some nights you can’t make a nickel.
So after fifteen minutes of some very fancy footwork designed to befuddle and unsettle La Bresca, with Brown utilizing his very special logically persistent method of questioning while Willis sniped and jabbed around the edges they knew nothing more than they had known that afternoon. The only difference was that now the commissioner was dead. So they thanked Mrs. La Bresca for the use of the hall and they shoot hands with her son and apologized for having pulled him out of bed, and they wished him luck at his new job, and then they both said good night again and went out of the house and heard Mrs. La Bresca locking the kitchen door behind them, and went down the rickety wooden steps, and down the potholed driveway, and across the street to where they had parked the police sedan.
Then Willis started the car, and turned on the heater, and both men talked earnestly and softly for several moments and decided to ask the lieutenant for permission to bug La Bresca’s phone in the morning.
Then they went home.
It was cold and dark in the alley where Steve Carella lay on his side huddled in a tattered overcoat. The late February snow had been shoveled and banked against one brick alley wall, soiled now with the city’s grime, a thin layer of soot crusted onto its surface. Carella was wearing two pairs of thermal underwear and a quilted vest. In addition, a hand warmer was tucked into one pocket of the vest, providing a good steady heat inside the threadbare overcoat. But he was cold.
The banked snow opposite him only made him colder. He did not like snow Oh yes, he could remember owning his own sled as a boy, and he could remember belly-whopping with joyous abandon, but the memory seemed like a totally fabricated one in view of his present very real aversion to snow. Snow was cold and wet. If you were a private citizen, you had to shovel it, and if you were a Department of Sanitation worker, you had to truck it over to the River Dix to get rid of it. Snow was a pain in the ass.
This entire stakeout was a pain in the ass.
But it was also very amusing.
It was the amusing part of it that kept Carella lying in a cold dark alley on a night that wasn’t fit for man or beast. (Of course, he had also been ordered to lie in a cold dark alley by the lieutenant for whom he worked, nice fellow name of Peter Byrnes, he should come lie in a cold dark alley some night.) The amusing part of this particular stakeout was that Carella wasn’t planted in a bank hoping to prevent a multimillion dollar robbery, nor was he planted in a candy store someplace hoping to crack an international ring of narcotics peddlers, nor was he even hidden in the bathroom of a spinster lady’s apartment, hoping to catch a mad rapist. He was lying in a cold dark alley, and the amusing part was that two vagrants had been set on fire. That wasn’t so amusing, the part about being set on fire. That was pretty serious The amusing part was that the victims had been vagrants. Ever since Carella could remember, the police had been waging an unremitting war against this city’s vagrants arresting them, jailing them releasing them, arresting them again, on and on ad infinitum. So now the police had been presented with two benefactors who were generously attempting to rid the streets of any and all bums by setting them aflame, and what did the police do? The police promptly dispatched a valuable man to a cold dark alley to lie on his side facing a dirty snowbank while hoping to catch the very fellows who were in charge of incinerating bums. It did not make sense. It was amusing.
A lot of things about police work were amusing.
It was certainly funnier to be lying here freezing than to be at home in bed with a warm and loving woman; oh God, that was so amusing it made Carella want to weep. He thought of Teddy alone in bed, black hair spilling all over the pillow, half-smile on her mouths nylon gown pulled back over curving hip, God, I could freeze to death right here in this goddamn alley, he thought, and my own wife won’t learn about it till morning. My own passionate wife! She’ll read about it in the papers! She’ll see my name on page four! She’ll—
There were footsteps at the other end of the alley.
He felt himself tensing. Beneath the overcoat, his naked hand moved away from the warmer and dropped swiftly to the cold steel butt of his service revolver. He eased the gun out of its holster, lay hunched on his side with the gun ready, and waited as the footsteps came closer.
“Here’s one,” a voice said.
It was a young voice.
“Yeah,” another voice answered.
Carella waited. His eyes were closed, he lay huddled in the far corner of the alley, simulating sleep, his finger curled inside the trigger guard now, a hair’s-breadth away from the trigger itself.
Somebody kicked him.
“Wake up!” a voice said.
He moved swiftly, but not swiftly enough. He was shoving himself off the floor of the alley, yanking the revolver into firing position, when the liquid splashed
onto the front of his coat.
“Have a drink!” one of the boys shouted, and Carella saw a match flare into life, and suddenly he was in flames.
His reaction sequence was curious in that his sense of smell supplied the first signal, the unmistakable aroma of gasoline fumes rising from the front of his coat, and then the flaring match, shocking in itself, providing a brilliant tiny explosion of light in the nearly black alley, more shocking in combination with the smell of the gasoline. Warning slammed with physical force into his temples, streaked in a jagged electric path to the back of his skull, and suddenly there were flames. There was no shock coupled with the fire that leaped up toward his face from the front of his coat. There was only terror.
Steve Carella reacted in much the same way Cro-Magnon must have reacted the first time he ventured too close to a raging fire and discovered that flames can cook people as well as saber-toothed tigers. He dropped his weapon, he covered his face, he whirled abruptly, instinctively rushing for the soot-crusted snowbank across the alley, forgetting his attackers, only vaguely aware that they were running, laughing, out of the alley and into the night, thinking only in a jagged broken pattern fire run burn fire out fire fire and hurling himself full length onto the snow. His hands were cupped tightly to his face, he could feel the flames chewing angrily at the backs of them, could smell the terrifying stench of burning hair and flesh, and then heard the sizzle of fire in contact with the snow, felt the cold and comforting snow, was suddenly enveloped in a white cloud of steam that rose from the beautiful snow, rolled from shoulder to shoulder in the glorious marvelous soothing beneficial white and magnificent snow, and found tears in his eyes, and thought nothing, and lay with his face pressed to the snow for a long while, breathing heavily, and still thinking nothing.
