Mary comes back with my shaving cream and stands next to me. She knows exactly what's going on.
"I think so, but not if I got to swear," the clerk says.
"Why do you think so?"
"You don't see the type very often these days."
"What type?"
"You know, Rudolph Valentino. I'm a movie buff. I pass the time seeing which guests look like what old-time movie actors."
"Who does he look like?" Mary says, smiling at the clerk and pointing at me.
He smiles back. "Jimmy Cagney," he says. Mary laughs like she just won a prize.
"Would you be willing to sign a paper saying this man was here at this hotel in June this year?"
"I'll sign a paper that says I think he's the man who was here in June this year, or one who looks very much like a man who was here in June this year."
"Send a typewriter to my room. I'll have the paper ready for you to sign when we come down for dinner," I says.
"This is not a deposition? This is not an affidavit to be used in a court of law? Is that our understanding?"
"Everybody's a lawyer," I says. I pick up the newspaper, leaving the fifty behind, and take Mary's arm.
"Will a paper obtained in exchange for money stand up?" Mary asks as we walk over to the elevators.
"I don't want it should stand up. All I want it to do is give certain parties reason to consider what they done."
Mary wins two hundred bucks at roulette. I lose ninety at craps. She teases me about it, but except for the ha-ha about who won what, she makes the time in Atlantic City exactly what I suppose everybody wants a honeymoon to be.
TWENTY-SIX
Back in Chicago, I scramble to catch up on my inspections and my reports.
Also I go around getting signatures on a testimonial saying what a great guy and courageous fireman Mooshie Warnowski was. Also Mrs. Cuva wants I should get her boy on the summer-job program, which there is not even going to be a list for until next March. But there's a list which gets compiled every year before the official list, and everybody knows it. So all the mothers and fathers who know somebody have been putting their bids in for their kids earlier and earlier. I figure in ten years the new summer job list will start piling up names the day after the summer program ends.
Also Mary wants to buy some decent furniture for the living room and bedroom. Since this sounds to me like she's making a nest, I willingly go along with it, though there are few things I hate more than walking around furniture stores.
I find time to go down to see Addison, the pimp, one more time.
Jessie opens the door and says, "You got the hots for me, Flannery, I can tell. You keep coming here just to see me."
"It's true," I says.
"Well, you can't have me because you're a milk faced Irishman who sunburns easy and you all look alike to me."
"Look at it this way, Jessie, you marry me, you ain't marrying a man but a whole goddamned race."
"You're tempting me," she says.
"While you're thinking over my proposition," I says, "can I see the man?"
"Addison is not around. He's down to the art museum with his brother. Believe it or not they're going to give him a room in which he can pile his junk."
"Has it got bars on the doors and windows?"
"It's a special show for six artists who got nobody but themselves to thank for the fine and original work which they do."
"What will Bo Addison's contribution be?"
"He's going to arrange piles of dog turds preserved in plastic."
"You tell him," I says, "that he stole that idea from the woman who bronzed her baby's dirty diapers and hung them on the wall of a museum over to New York."
"That goddamn town always wants to be first," Jessie says. "So, good-bye. I'll tell the boss you was here."
"Show me to the parlor."
"You don't mean it," Jessie says, showing me two silver dollars with raisins in the middle for eyes. "Are you going to be a customer?"
"And break your loving heart? Oh, no. Just show me the parlor. I'm buying new furniture for my flat and I want to see how it's decorated."
Jessie shows me into the main room. "So you don't want I should send in the lineup?" she says.
"Oh, please do," I says. "I like company while I'm picking out cushions."
Seven girls—all sizes, all shapes, all ages—come into the parlor through the beaded curtain in the doorway.
Ciccone's wife is one of them. She's wearing feathered mules and a red teddy. She looks like a chicken which got plucked.
"What are you doing here?" I says. "Has your husband sent you out to work?"
"I left him. What the hell do I need living in a steam bath?"
"You know a John by the name of Tartaglia?" She shakes her head.
"You know a John by the name of Streeter?" She shakes her head.
"I know a John by that name," Mavis Concord says. She's wearing a bra and panties and a fur jacket what is open in front.
"You're Mavis Concord," I says.
"That's right," she says.
"You're my girl," I says.
Gino's ex and the rest of the girls file out of the room.
"How come you know this Streeter's name?" I says. "Does he tell you?"
"Oh, no. He calls himself Smith."
"How do you know it ain't Smith? With so many Smiths in the world, somebody's got to be named Smith."
"When we go out to dinner, he pays with a credit card."
"And you read it?"
"I watch when he signs the receipt."
"He's not very smart."
"He's a lawyer. He thinks he's very smart, and that's not very smart."
"But you know you're very smart?"
"Smart enough to know I'm not going to stand here shooting the breeze with you on my time."
"Let's go," I says.
She crooks her finger and says, "Follow me."
I trail her down the corridor to her bedroom, which is behind one of many doors. The room isn't a sleeping bedroom but a working bedroom. She lives elsewhere. It's just large enough for the bed and a chair and a little dressing table. There's two mirrors, one on each wall, so I see myself repeated in them a thousand times into a distance that makes me a little dizzy.
"That bother you?" she says.
"I ain't in love with my kisser," I says.
"Me either. The last trick liked to watch hisself making like an army."
She pulls a string and curtains cover one wall, which makes it a little better. I can only see us once.
She takes off the jacket and starts with the clip in front of her brassiere.
I put twenty bucks on the dressing table. "Don't bother," I says. "Stay warm."
"Are you kidding?" she says, jerking her chin at the twenty. "That's sixties' prices."
"I've been out of circulation," I says.
"Tch-tch," she makes with her tongue when I add another double sawbuck.
I add another and she stops making like a chicken. "So, what do you want if you don't want me?"
"When you went out on the town with this Streeter, did you go out alone?"
She smiles like she's way ahead of me and says, "No, we go out with Rudolph Valentino and Helen-"
"That's not his name."
"Of course not. It's who he looks like. I don't even remember what last name he gives us, but we all call him Philly."
"Like Phillip?"
"Like Philadelphia, I think. It's where Streeter and him first got to know each other."
"You don't see his signature on the credit receipt?"
"He never picks up a tab."
I show her the picture. "Sure, that's Philly."
"Tell me about Helen and Philly."
"That'll be fifty bucks. Your time's up."
"I've only been here five minutes."
"You're buying quality, not quantity."
"I'm buying a whore's time—you should excuse me for not talking nice—which I don't have t
o buy, if you want to look at it one way. You look at it another, I'm talking to Helen's friend . . ."
"We weren't special friends, Helen and . . ."
". . . or at least her working associate. What happened to her could happen to you someday. Maybe not the same thing in the same way for the same reason, but it could happen you end up on a slab with nobody to care how you got there. Wouldn't you want somebody to care how you got there?"
She's quiet a minute, her eyes going soft and afraid while she thinks about the many bad ways whores come to the end of the line.
"Okay," she says, her voice husky all of a sudden.
"Tell me about Helen and Philly. Was she playing a game on him?"
"More like the ether way around. He conned her good."
"His wife didn't understand him."
"His wife understood him too good and he wanted a divorce. But there was kids and it had to be done right, he says."
"He tells Helen he loves her?"
"That's what he says."
"He tells her he wants to marry her?"
"That, too."
"Helen told you this?"
"She also tells me she's going to give him a test."
"She'll tell him she's pregnant."
"She'll do better than that. She'll get pregnant and go kill the rabbit with the doctor of his choice."
"So she does it. And she tells him. And he sends her to a doctor for the test and it comes positive. And he drops the act."
Mavis nods her head every time I come to the end of a sentence.
"And what else does he do?" I says.
"He tells her she's on her own."
"But Helen's not rolling over for that."
"She tells him he better pay up for the abortion."
"But he tells her to go to the free clinic like she's probably done a lot of times before."
"People think women like us go get scraped out like we go to get our teeth cleaned," Mavis said, suddenly angry.
I thought about that for a minute.
"They had one hell of a fight," she says.
"How do you know?"
"The night she told him, Helen comes to my place with a black eye and a cracked tooth."
"Why'd he hit her?"
"She said she'd go to the wife. That's when he hit her, and said she'd better just get taken care of and not try to hold him up, or he'd do a lot more than crack her tooth."
"How did Helen know his real name?"
Mavis shrugs her shoulders and the strap of her bra falls down her arm. "Who knows? He got his pants off most of the time he's around her, ain't he? Where's he keep his wallet? I don't know how she finds out. She finds out."
I'm going to get what you told me typed out, and when I come back I want you to sign it."
"Don't bother," she says, and gets a portable type writer and some paper out of the top drawer of the dressing table. "I was a secretary before I became a private businesswoman." She sits down on the chair and rolls three sheets of paper with carbons into the machine. "I can type direct from dictation. Go ahead."
"Put the date at the top," I says.
Her fingers rattle on the keys. "To whom it may concern . . ."
"Hey," Mavis says, "you know stenography's fifteen dollars an hour and typing's five dollars a page with two carbons?"
"That's only for professionals," I says.
When we're done, she signs it and I fold it up and put it in my pocket.
"This Joe Asbach a customer of yours?" I says.
"Sure."
"The day Helen was killed in the explosion over to the clinic on Sperry was you with Asbach?"
"Sure. I was with him when he went over in a cab to see was his people walking in circles."
"He go inside?"
"No, he had his hand up my skirt and other things on his mind."
TWENTY-SEVEN
It's not hard to find out where Daniel Tartaglia lives. It's a big house with a fence and gates on the North Shore not very far from where his father-in-law, DiBella, has his estate. I park my coupe on the other side of the street from his driveway, in the shadows of a big shade tree, ready to wait as long as it takes for him to come home.
After half an hour, I see somebody in a jumpsuit come down the drive and through a little door in the main gate. It's a hard-looking man about fifty years old who walks up to my window and raps his knuckles on it. I roll the window down.
"You come in the house," he says with a heavy accent.
I don't bother making a case for innocence. I look up over the tall hedges on the other side of the fence and tops of the trees between the hedge and the house and I see the window in the tower room where somebody is standing.
I follow the man through the door in the gate and up the drive. As we approach the house, I see three Dobermans mock-fighting with one another. We're twenty yards away when my escort peels off.
"You go on up to the door," he says, and walks down a side path toward the garden at the side.
His voice alerts the dogs. They stop fooling with one another and look at me. I stand there with my knees locked and they stand there stiff-legged, too. Then they start stalking me, going down low to the ground, their necks stretched and heads out, watching every move which I ain't even making.
"Jesus, Mary, and Joseph," I says to myself. There's times when, even if you don't believe, you believe.
A little girl about seven comes whipping around the corner wearing a little red shirt and blue overalls. "Get back," she says, stepping right in front of those animals, and whacks each one of them a shot in the chops. They laugh at her, forget me, and start kissing her hands and trying to kiss her face.
"It's okay," she says. "Who do you want to see?"
The front door opens up and a very attractive woman with dark hair and olive skin set off by a dark-red jumper and white blouse is standing there, looking at me.
"Mr. Flannery, is it?" she says.
I touch the brim of my hat, feeling like one of my old Irish ancestors doing honor to the lady of the manor.
"Come in. Don't mind the dogs. Angelina's made it all right." She steps aside as I walk past her into a hall with a ceiling three stories above the tiles. I smell a perfume like old roses.
She shows me into a sitting room, as big as my whole flat, off the hall on the left side of the main stairway. It's so quiet, it's like being in a convent. The air's warm and the light sunny, like it's always summer in the room because this woman wants it that way.
She's not exactly beautiful, maybe not even pretty. Words like that don't even apply.
"You shouldn't lurk," she says, and smiles at me.
"I wasn't lurking. I was waiting for Daniel Tartaglia. Am I talking to his wife?"
"You're speaking to Mrs. Tartaglia," she says, making the difference that she wants to make for reasons of her own. "Please, sit down."
The chair, made of pale wood and covered in some kind of shiny fabric with little flowers on it, looks like it'll break, but I see the one she sits in, which is just like it, holds her weight, so I take a chance.
She leans forward a little in her chair. "I'm not going to offer you a drink or . . ."
"I don't drink."
". . . a cup of tea . . ."
"I don't want nothing."
". . . because you're neither an invited nor a welcome guest in my house. You're a witness."
"This is a nice room you got here, Mrs. Tartaglia," I says. "This is a very beautiful home you got. The grounds is big enough to make a park, where maybe fifty kids could play, down in my precinct. You look like a nice woman and I got no reason to want to hurt your feelings . . ."
"Did I hurt yours?" she says, her eyes widening as though she's surprised that a dog should complain about such a thing.
". . . even though what you say to me sounds like an insult. I just want to make it plain to you that I come from a good family, just like you believe you come from a good family, but my family ain't bandits and they ain't thieves. What we got
, we didn't squeeze out of somebody's else's veins or grind out of somebody else's bones."
"You take chances. You take incredible chances," the soft voice of Carmine DiBella says from the doorway.
I didn't even hear the door open. I didn't hear his footstep on the rug. He's standing there in slacks what cost more than the clothes in my closet, wearing a silk shirt and cashmere sweater and four hundred-dollar hand-made loafers. He looks like a million bucks and is worth maybe twenty times that, but he's a water rat what comes from water rats that made the millions beating up and killing people that couldn't fight back. He knows that, and he knows what I think of him.
"You dare to scold my daughter," he says.
Faced with somebody like me, DiBella's kind got two things they can do: blow me away or act like I ain't worth a bullet or a sharp blade. Since I got him in a glass box with what I done over to Poppsie's dinner party, he has to manufacture a lot of contempt for me. Make me something he can wipe off his shoe.
I can go on with it. I can tell him that he made his daughter what she is: an insolent, spoiled woman who turns to her father to smooth every bump, sop up every puddle, sweep every leaf off the road. I can go jump under a truck, too, if I'm dumb enough. There's a point beyond which I can't push, or DiBella will have me done and worry about cleaning up the mess after.
I stand up. "I say what I say with all due respect, Mr. DiBella. I can't let anybody take my face."
"All right, all right," he says, waving his hand that I should sit down. I see a gleam of respect in his eye. He thinks I'm dumb, but also a little brave.
Theresa gets up and lets her father sit down facing me. She stands right in back of him with her hands on his shoulders, like they're having a family portrait done.
"You cause me a lot of bother, a lot of worry," DiBella says.
"I'm sorry," I says.
"I don't condone what happened to the old woman."
"She was an innocent bystander." There's a little edge to the way I say it.
DiBella's mouth twitches a little, warning me to be careful.
"I don't condone the killing of the pregnant girl, either."
I don't trust myself to reply to that. I just nod my head the way he nods his head, blessing the truth of the remark.
The Junkyard Dog (Jimmy Flannery Mysteries Book 1) Page 14
