Black Sheep, White Lamb

by Dorothy Salisbury Davis

  Ashes everywhere, Bassett thought, glancing down at ruin as he left the Tonelli house. His own mouth was full of them.

  He had no choice but to query the priest on his schedule of that night’s calls. But when he reached the rectory, Father Walsh had already gone out of town, probably for the day.

  23

  BY PAYING PEKARIK FOUR dollars Georgie got the loan of his car. The old crate wasn’t worth four dollars wholesale, Georgie thought. Besides, he was afraid to drive in New York City so they were going to have to park it somewhere and take a bus as well. And maybe a taxi if they got lost. And lunch. And Rosie sat there beside him wearing gloves and her Sunday coat as though he was her private chauffeur.

  “You got any money?” he asked.

  “What?”

  “Are you dreaming or something? Have you got any money with you?”

  “Fifty cents,” she said.

  “Big deal.”

  They were approaching a roadside restaurant, a sign outside it advertising curb service: frankfurters, hamburgers, ice cream. Georgie slammed on his brakes and turned sharply off the road; a trailer truck that had been trying to nudge him out of the middle of the road for the previous mile, swerved and very nearly jackknifed. Georgie grinned, thinking of what the guy driving it was saying just then.

  “What’s the matter?” Rosie said, suddenly coming to.

  “We’re going to have a hotdog. I don’t trust them city restaurants. You could get poisoned and never know it.”

  “I don’t like hotdogs,” Rosie said, pouting.

  “All right, you can have a hamburger. But no French fries. You’re getting fat.”

  Rosie giggled. “You sound like papa,” she said.

  “For Christ sake,” Georgie said, and blasted the car horn for service.

  Rosie crawled over closer to him. “Georgie, I wouldn’t really mind.”

  “Mind what?”

  “Having a baby. I was thinking all last night how nice it’d be, keeping house for you and it, making things to fit it. Papa’s got all kinds of odds and ends. When I was a little girl I used to sit in his shop and make clothes for my dolls. He’d cut them out for me and help me sew them.” She sighed. “I wish I was having a baby.”

  “Man!” Georgie cried, and gave three long blasts to the horn.

  A customer coming out of the restaurant with a toothpick between his teeth stopped at the car. “You can blow all day out here and just raise your own sweat, sonny. They only got curb service in the summertime.”

  “Why’n’t they take the sign down then?”

  The man shrugged and got into his own car.

  Georgie opened the car door. “I’ll bring us something out to the car,” he said.

  “Are you ashamed of me? I don’t look pregnant.”

  Christ! What had he got into? She’d been making believe she was going to have something. That’s how she’d still been willing to go, this morning, faking to herself it was all for real. He glanced at her before slamming the door. She was sitting spread out like a fat cat. The hell she didn’t look pregnant! He opened the car door again. “If you was, you’d be in real trouble. You ain’t married to me, you know.”

  “But you promised, Georgie.”

  He slammed the door and lumbered into the restaurant.

  Rosie didn’t eat much of her hamburger and for once, Georgie wasn’t hungry either. He wrapped what was left of the sandwiches in a napkin and put them on the back seat for later. Then he undertook to get some of the facts of their expedition across to his companion.

  “The reason we’re doing this at all, Rosie,” he said with careful logic, “supposing you were going to have a baby, and supposing you wanted it …”

  “But I do!” Rosie interrupted.

  “Will you listen to me! If that’s how it was, we wouldn’t be going to New York at all. I told you about Doctor Tag, what he does, didn’t I? That’s what we got to find out. It’s a sin! It’s a crime what he does. All I’m asking you to do, Rosie, is when he starts giving you these tests, you look up at him with those great big eyes and say to him, ‘Doctor, if I am pregnant, can you help me?’ That’s all you got to do, Rosie. And find out what he says then. Okay?”

  “Okay, Georgie.”

  He started the car. “I’ll tell you the truth, you’re making me sick to my stomach making me talk so much about it.”

  “It was your idea. It’s you got me all worked up over it.”

  “It was the only way I could think of—to get even with him,” Georgie said in a moment of unguarded truth. He started the car.

  “Georgie …”

  “I don’t want to hear another word out of you till we get to that hospital. I got to concentrate.”

  “You’ve made me scared again,” Rosie said.

  Georgie, having got the car back on the highway, put his arm around her. “We’re partners, aren’t we?” He gave her a hug. “Aren’t we?”

  The grey stone hospital building on New York’s East Side was small, which Georgie found to be some consolation. It was not nearly as large as the county hospital where his mother had been. It smelled of medicine, but it wasn’t even clean, he thought, the green walls specked with fly dirt. Rosie was looking pale. In fact, she looked like she was going to pass out any minute. Georgie squeezed her arm. One elderly woman sat at a telephone behind a glass window. Four plain, straight chairs were the only accommodation of the waiting room, the windows of it so high he’d have had to stand on one of the chairs to look out.

  “Ask her for Dr. Tagliaferro.” Georgie indicated the woman. “Tell her he knows you’re coming.” Georgie had not intended to come into the building himself, but he knew Rosie would never have made it this for without him.

  The woman slid the panel open. “Yes?”

  “Doctor Tagliaferro,” Rosie said scarcely above a whisper.

  “What’s your name, please?”

  “Rosalie Gerosa.”

  “Does the doctor expect you?”

  The girl nodded.

  “Please have a chair in the waiting room.”

  Rosie sat down like the chair was wet. Georgie gave her a quick kiss on the cheek. “Okay?”

  She only nodded.

  “I’ll be across the street watching for you.” It took him all his will power to keep from running. He’d never seen such a creepy place. What kind of a hospital didn’t have customers rolling in and out? He didn’t dare look back at Rosie for fear she’d follow him.

  Georgie waited and waited and waited. How he hated New York! You couldn’t see any place for all the buildings. Dogs. A million dogs on leashes, and all of them with people standing around watching them crap. And all of them constipated, hunching up one place, then another, dancing around the spot like something in a circus. Man, in Hillside, a dog just dropped it when he felt like it and went about his business.

  In the street, splurge after splurge of cars went by, crowding up between traffic lights. He began to count the cars and trucks backed up every time between the change of lights. What if Rosie never came out? If that was a real hospital, he’d eat his hat. He’d heard of things like that: girls just disappearing. What a story that would make! DOCTOR CHARGED BY BOY FRIEND IN GIRL’S DISAPPEARANCE. Man, that was better than anything they were going to get on old Tag. But Georgie, the realist, began to plan what he was going to do if Der Tag did what Georgie expected, if he suggested an operation. He hadn’t told Rosie that part of it, but he had it all doped out in his own mind. He’d just go into Papa Gerosa’s shop and tell him the story: Rosie wasn’t feeling very good so Georgie advised her to go and see Dr. Tagliaferro. After all. Dr. Tag was his mother’s doctor. And what happened then … Well, Georgie Rocco felt it was his man-to-man duty to tell Rosie’s father, Dr. Tag making Rosie think she was pregnant. He was dead sure he could count on Papa Gerosa’s reaction: he wasn’t going to listen to Rosie’s story, or Der Tag’s or anybody else’s, not after hearing what Georgie had to say to him. Zoom! A bomb wouldn’
t blow any faster.

  Rosie came out the door at a gallop and, seeing Georgie, didn’t stop till he caught her in his arms. Her eyes were puffed up with crying, her whole face looked like a blob of strawberry ice cream. Georgie wondered if she had any clothes on underneath, the way she was clutching her coat around her.

  “Hey!” he said, “take it easy. People are looking at us.”

  “I don’t care … after what he did to me.”

  Georgie took her by the arms and shook her. “What’d he do? Tell me, what’d he do to you, Rosie?”

  Rosie managed to wail through her sobs, “He looked at me … there.”

  “The dirty bastard!” Georgie cried and clenched his fists.

  By then people were looking at them. Georgie took her arm. “We got to get out of here. We got to get out of this stinking town.”

  Rosie pulled away from him to blow her nose. “He said he’d take us home if we wanted to wait an hour for him.”

  “I’ll bet,” Georgie said, and pulled her along toward the opening of the cave at the end of the block. The wind was colder there. It was warm and cold by turns, the sun going in and out of the clouds. But there weren’t so many people. “Now what happened? Tell me exactly.”

  “It was all right at first,” Rosie said. “He explained to me how he wanted to examine me, and how the nurse was going to stay in the room all the time … And then she gave me a sheet and told me to lie down.”

  “Man!” Georgie cried.

  “He didn’t do anything but look, Georgie. But it was awful. I mean, it didn’t exactly hurt or anything.”

  “What’d he say? That’s the thing. What’d he say?”

  “He said …” Rosie drew in a great gulp of breath. “He said, ‘My dear, you’re still a virgin. What made you think you were pregnant?’”

  Georgie was stunned, momentarily speechless. “What’d you let him examine you for? He could’ve hurt you bad. For life, maybe.”

  “But he didn’t …”

  “How do you know? They’ve got all these anesthetics. You didn’t feel anything, did you?”

  Rosie shook her head.

  “You’re a minor,” Georgie started again. “He shouldn’t’ve examined you. I’ll bet that’s illegal. I’ll bet it is. What’d he say? Did you ask him the question I told you to? Did you, Rosie? Or did you just go in there and start bawling?”

  “I did ask him, Georgie, and all he said was, ‘We’ll talk about that after the examination.’”

  “Man, I should’ve known. Der Tag’s smarter than both of us—he thinks.”

  “I didn’t tell him anything, Georgie. Honest I didn’t.”

  “Like what didn’t you tell him?”

  “Who my boy friend was.”

  “What’s it his business? Did he ask you?”

  “I said, ‘nobody special.’ I wasn’t going steady.”

  “Good girl,” Georgie said.

  “But I think he knows. He said, ‘A nice girl like you shouldn’t go with a boy that’s got trouble at home. You should go with somebody from a good family.’”

  “So Der Tag said that, did he?” Georgie said. It hurt him so much it felt good. He tried to lay his head back against his collar, forgetting that he wasn’t wearing the orange sweater. He had on his old pea jacket that he’d been wearing the night of the fire. “Okay, Doctor Tag,” he said quietly, “der war is on.”

  Georgie flagged down a taxi and asked the driver how much it would cost to take them to the George Washington Bridge. He had enough money. It was the first time either of them had ever been in a taxi. Georgie leaned back and closed his eyes and let the hate unroll his fantasies. Rosie was fascinated with the taxi meter. She told him every time another nickel was added to their fare. When the bridge came into sight, Rosie calling his attention to it, Georgie sat up and combed his hair, trying to see himself in the driver’s rear view mirror.

  “Can I use your comb, Georgie?”

  “No. I don’t want to catch something.”

  “Look who’s talking,” Rosie cried, the nastiest retort she could think of on the spur of the moment, and for emphasis added, in Georgie’s fashion: “I mean!”

  “Yeah,” Georgie said coldly, squinting at her sidewise, “a kid with a whore for a mother, you could, couldn’t you?”

  Rosie was so shocked she couldn’t say anything.

  “Like Der Tag said, Rosie, better get yourself a new boy friend.”

  Rosie sat as deep in the corner of the cab as she could. “I don’t want to see another boy as long as I live,” she said.

  “Ditto with me for girls. I hate every mucking bitch of them.”

  When they reached Hillside late in the afternoon, Georgie let the girl out before he crossed the tracks. She could walk home from there the back way. Georgie himself went directly to Papa Gerosa’s tailor shop.

  24

  COUNTY DETECTIVE BASSETT WAITED with Mrs. Gerosa in her kitchen. He had come in with his nose ahead of him, for Mrs. Gerosa did her own baking. It was a much better way than merely trying to get his foot in the door. In any case, this plump, voluble woman was far more hospitable to a stranger than anyone else he had met in Hillside. Possibly, he thought wryly, he was becoming less of a stranger than he felt. Then, too, Mrs. Gerosa did not have a son. It was the mothers of sons that bore him the greatest suspicion. Rosalie, a late-born and unexpected child, was both the joy and the trial of her parents’ life.

  “Her father,” Mrs. Gerosa said with an ample gesture, “to him, nothing she does is wrong. Rosie, I say, has a good heart. She loves excitement. And bad company—it makes the most excitement.”

  Amen, Bassett thought. He had explained his call as part of interviewing all the youngsters who had been in the Crazy Cat on the night of the murder. He knew Rosie, however, to be Rocco’s girl friend. He also knew both of them to have been absent from afternoon classes at the high school.

  That the girl’s mother was not aware of it was obvious: she kept saying that her daughter would be home any minute. Bassett watched her closely for the little signs of apprehension. She was more apprehensive, when it was getting on toward five o’clock, of her husband’s calling than of her daughter’s failure to call. “He does not understand young people—and such a temper, Mr. Basso …”

  By then Bassett had decided there must be a family in the town named Basso, the mistake had become so common.

  “He always says I don’t see what he sees. But I see. Only different. You know what I mean? He sees everything from here.” She tapped her bosom. “Everything don’t go that deep.”

  At five minutes to five Rosie came into the house by the front door. Her mother cocked her head at the sound and called out, “Rosie?”

  “Yes, ma.”

  “Why you go that way? Come in here. Somebody wants to talk to you.”

  It was a deeply troubled girl who stood in the doorway: both Bassett and her mother saw it at once.

  “What’s the matter?” Her mother looked from her to Bassett, and at him for the first time with suspicion.

  “Nothing,” Rosie said. “I had to stay late.” An evasion of the truth: plainly she had had to stay somewhere late.

  “You know who this man is?” Mrs. Gerosa said.

  Rosie shook her head.

  “He is the county detective, and he wants to talk to you … about your boy friends.” The last words were said in heavy sarcasm.

  Bassett bade the girl sit opposite him at the round kitchen table. She took off her coat, her motions slow as though her arms were heavy. A pretty face—without much character, he thought, the ordinary pretty girl whose ambition it would be to, perhaps, open a beauty shop or be somebody’s secretary until marriage but above all, to marry. He would have given a great deal to know what had happened between her and Georgie Rocco that afternoon. Whatever had happened, she was not bursting with happiness over it, and for his grim purpose that was good.

  “I want to talk with you about George Rocco.”


  The girl’s mouth trembled, her eyes almost wild, rolling from him to her mother when Mrs. Gerosa said contemptuously, “Him!”

  “Don’t you approve of him, Mrs. Gerosa?” Bassett said blandly.

  “A show-off, a bag of wind.”

  If that were only all, Bassett thought.

  Mrs. Gerosa said, “I try to get her to go with some nice boy, some nice family boy.”

  Rosie said her first words in her own defense: “I don’t go with any boy. I won’t ever.”

  If he had not been there, Bassett thought, she would have let go then, throwing herself and her misery into her mother’s arms. “But that’s a fairly recent development, isn’t it, Rosie? Up until maybe this afternoon, you did go steady with him?”

  The girl did not answer.

  “After a party—or a date of any kind, he always brought you home, didn’t he?”

  “I guess so,” Rosie said.

  “Always they stand and boo and coo outside the door there.” Mrs. Gerosa gestured broadly toward the back steps. All her gestures were round, like herself.

  “Why didn’t he bring you home Friday night? You were both at the Crazy Cat, weren’t you?”

  “We didn’t really have a date,” Rosie said. “We just both were there.”

  “What time did you come home?” the detective asked, his tone still quite casual.

  Her mother answered for her: “Weekends, ten past eleven. As soon as the Crazy Cat closes. Her father sits and watches. She don’t have to come in the house, Mr. Basso, but she’s got to be where he can hear her.”

  “I’m curious why Georgie would not have brought you home. You lived only two blocks apart.”

  “He wasn’t coming home,” the girl said. “He was going to play poker.”

  “With whom?” Bassett’s voice and eyes were steady.

  The girl shrugged.

  “Tell him!” her mother commanded her.

  “Phil Daley—and that crowd, I guess.”

  Bassett had got the information he wanted, if that, too, didn’t explode in his face. Georgie’s pious protests of early homecoming did not jibe with the story he had given Rosie. The girl sat, biting a pale lower lip, and he remembered her for a moment as she was on Saturday afternoon, rosy Rosie, the noisy, cheering, pennant-waving girl friend of the football hero, riding at the head of the victory cavalcade.